Rage of Storms

by Kat Adams

  Air slammed into the back of me, sending me to my knees, I rolled and shot air right back, fully expecting Stace to be standing there. Instead, it was Brooks. How’d he break free of my trap so fast? I switched to earth and created another crater, but he’d expected as much and used his air to levitate him so when the ground gave way beneath him, he remained where he was.

  I tried stealing his call, but air never did listen to me all that well, and this time was no different. I switched back to earth and pulled roots from the ground, wrapping them around his ankles. He struggled against the bindings, knocked himself off-balance, and fell onto his side. I used the ground to push him back to the hole.

  A growl behind me caught my attention. Unibrow broke free of her ice bath and slowly rose to her feet. When she opened her hand, palm up, to conjure a fireball, the one that appeared wasn’t much bigger than a baseball. She spread her fingers, trying to expand the size, but it remained the same. Frustration twisted her expression.

  “Aw, did I wilt your call? That’s too bad. Well, hey. At least you still have your looks.” I snorted. “I mean, you aren’t going to win any beauty contests with that unibrow, but I’m sure you’ve got a great personality.”

  She bared her teeth and took off at a dead run, right at me. Not this again. Just as before, I waited until she was almost on top of me before teleporting out and popping in behind her. And, just as before, she fell forward and faceplanted in the grass. I helped her out by calling earth and feeding her a little snack, filling her mouth with dirt, gravel, and loose blades of grass. I then covered her in ice again.

  A wave of freezing water rolled over me, knocking the wind out of me. I couldn’t pull in any air before another wave crashed into me. And then another. I fell to my hands and knees as my body temp dropped enough for it to be a struggle to call fire. Well done, Stace.

  I got to my feet and faced my mentor. She might not seem intimidating as tiny as she was, but I knew better. From the day I’d first met her, she’d shown me just how fierce she could be. I knew by that look in her eyes, today would be no different.

  She switched to air, sending a surge of wind at me. I countered with enough fire to consume the air, twisting the two elements together and sending the firenado at her. It spun around her, closing in as Spencer had done to me. She didn’t fight it, and I knew she had enough power to, so I didn’t intensify the call.

  She shot water straight up out of the ground and doused the fire, turning the tornado into a waterspout and sending it right back at me. Using earth, I broke the spout apart. It came crashing down and soaked the ground.

  When she brought her hands up, I braced myself for her next attack. “I think it’s safe to say she passed. I don’t sense any misplaced element in her, nor did she display any signs of being magically enhanced. Katy Reed is not dark.”

  Oh, thank God it was over. The guys ran onto the field and congratulated me. I hugged and laughed and slapped backs right along with them. It was cause for celebration. Not once had my hand throbbed. No weird glow.

  I turned to smile my thanks to Stace. She returned the gesture. I then searched the crowd of Council members for my mom, not surprised when I didn’t see her. But definitely disappointed. Somewhere in the middle of me battling it out with three strong elementals, she’d taken off.

  Again.

  17

  By Friday, tribunals had come to an end.

  As the student levels advanced, the occurrence of magically enhanced elementals disappeared. The first and second years were the only ones that had any concentration of them in their midst.

  The Council members had taken their toys and gone home, including my mom. How’d I find out she no longer lived in the infirmary, you might ask? I’d stopped by her room to talk to her about why she’d called me out on the field like that. Only it was no longer her room. She’d found another place to live and never told me. Oh, but she did leave me a note, so…yeah.

  Thanks, Mom.

  I’d visited with Cressida every day after curfew so no one else would see me. And every day, she looked a little worse. Her eyes more sunken. Her skin ashier. Not being a part of the school was literally draining her of her life force. She was dying all over again.

  I hadn’t told anyone else about the ward I created. Not out of fear of being in trouble for creating something that potentially broke the barrier and was killing its founder, but because I couldn’t find it. I’d returned to where we’d created it and it was just gone. If it no longer existed, it couldn’t be the cause of the barrier weakening.

  Back to the drawing board.

  I sat at my desk, doodling in my sketch pad now that the latest webisode had been uploaded. Detective Nigel Brandt had a rather nasty murder to solve and called upon Amethyst to help. While they were at the crime scene, of course Onyx crashed the party and tried to take them out.

  “I knew this would draw you in, Amethyst! Now I have you!”

  “Can’t you see I’m a little busy, Onyx? Take a number. I’ll be with you shortly.”

  I smiled as I scrolled through the first panel and moved on to the next, with Onyx attacking with fire and Amethyst countering with an airfield around Nigel and herself.

  “When are you going to learn you can’t beat me, Onyx? Pick on someone your own size for a change, you bully.”

  “What a great idea. Detective Brandt, I believe it is? I am Onyx, and I’m here to kill you.”

  The final panel of this webisode had Nigel with his hands up trying to defend himself against a firenado, courtesy of Onyx, and Amethyst shielding her eyes as she tried to get to the detective before it was too late.

  “Amethyst! Help me!”

  “Nigel! Hold on! Damn you, Onyx!”

  “Good-bye, Detective Brandt. Ha ha ha!”

  The caption at the bottom: Will Amethyst save Nigel in time? Find out in next week’s exciting webisode of The Elements. I closed the browser with a satisfied sigh.

  I thought of Trevor, my number one fan. Would he still be able to follow the webcomic from his cell? Did they allow inmates at Carcerem to have computers? Did the magically enhanced elementals qualify as inmates? Or did the Council have them in some type of concentration camp away from the truly dangerous criminals there?

  I kept drawing what I recalled of the ward. I didn’t know if I had it right since I’d only seen it briefly. It looked right. I think. Maybe if I drew it enough times, it’d come back to me. It killed time until my date showed up. I glanced at the clock on my desk. Only thirty more minutes of doodling to go.

  Now that the Council had lifted the weekend suspension, this was the first weekend of freedom since returning to the academy, and here I sat. At my desk in my dorm. On a Friday night. Waiting for a date with my earth elemental so we could—what else—do homework. Our primary professor had wasted no time piling on the work to make up for the classes we’d missed.

  Clay and Rob had taken Leo out to work on his new fire element, leaving Bryan and me to deal with the mountains of homework the professor had assigned. We didn’t have any homework in primary when I went with Rob to fire or with Clay to air. I couldn’t believe I actually missed Professor Geoff Gallen’s dad jokes. Professor Groote—I can’t make this shit up—didn’t have a single funny bone in his body. The tall, skinny man never smiled. He just lectured and assigned homework.

  I glanced at the clock. Twenty-seven more minutes. God help me.

  A knock on my door rescued me from dying of boredom. I jumped out of my chair and rushed to the door, throwing it open. There stood my gorgeous earth guy, his short brown hair neatly combed as always. He’d ditched the school uniform for a pair of amazing jeans that hugged him in all the right places, a gray T-shirt straining to cover his enormous shoulders and barrel chest, and when our gazes met, his eyes danced in silent mirth.

  “Am I early?”

  “No.” I grabbed him and dragged him inside my room. “You’re just in time. Please, let’s go do something.”

  �
��You finished your homework?”

  “I haven’t even started my homework,” I countered.

  “You said you needed help.”

  “We have the entire weekend to do it.”

  He shook his head. “Sorry, Katy. Homework first, then we’ll go do something.”

  “You are such a buzzkill. Fine,” I groaned into the air. “Can we just do it somewhere other than inside my room?”

  “The dorms are practically empty. I bet there’s no one in the common room. How about we move this party downstairs? We’ll have the entire place to ourselves.”

  It was either that or the dining hall. I wasn’t hungry and had no desire to walk across campus to the small dining hall we favored. If we weren’t going to go do something fun, I’d much rather pull on my fuzzy-butt PJs and veg out binging on any number of dumb shows over doing homework.

  But Bryan was a stickler for the rules. Always had been. Work first, play later. I grabbed my bookbag and slung it over my shoulder. I’d only been a member of Terrae for a few days and already felt more at home than I’d ever felt in any of the other houses. Hanging out in the common room wouldn’t suck. “Lead the way.”

  He was right. No one else was in the common room, so we took over and spread out. Bryan wanted it quiet, but I had to have some sort of background noise when I worked or every little noise would break my concentration. Once we settled on a playlist, we got to work.

  “Done,” I declared after grueling hours of writing out an assignment I didn’t understand. Who assigned drawings of the elements as homework? Professor Groote and his propensity for assigning homework in the last sixty seconds of class, that’s who.

  I rested my hand around my neck, my elbow on the arm of the overstuffed chair, and colored in the ward I’d drawn on my folder while I waited for his assessment. The shape of the ward had come back to me while I finished the assignment. It was so beautiful and unique, it still amazed me that it came from my brain.

  Bryan checked my work. “You need to redo the graph of attracting and opposing forces. The entire section is wrong.”

  “Because I don’t need to graph it out to know what are attracting and opposing forces.”

  “And yet, you got it wrong.”

  Fair point. I groaned into the air and accepted the paper, staring at the graph. Who cared about any of this? What did it matter if I couldn’t graph it out? I’d never use it. Just like I’d never use algebra, and yet teacher after teacher had tortured me with A2 plus B2 equals C2 my entire high school career.

  “Why would a healer need this crap?” I held it up.

  “Ask Syd. He’s got a picture of it hanging in his office. Besides, you’re not a healer yet.”

  But I had every intention of becoming one. After healing Leo, and after everything else that’d happened during tribunals, I knew without a doubt what I wanted to do when I graduated from the academy. If Syd had one of these graphs hanging in his office, I’d better figure it out. That motivated me enough to get back to work.

  “There,” I said after creating a new graph, spending extra time on my penmanship. If it was right and got me an A on the homework, I’d frame the sucker.

  Bryan took the paper and examined my work, nodding before handing it back. “Looks good. Now you can go back and fix the answers you got wrong based on the graph you got wrong.”

  “I really hate you right now.”

  “You love me.” He pushed off the couch and went to the communal fridge. The academy kept all houses stocked with water to keep the students hydrated and orange juice to replenish our systems after draining our powers during trainings. Or, in my case, after every battle, since I seemed to be a magnet for dark elementals.

  My heart palpitated at his words. We hadn’t dropped the L word yet. Rob had been the first to declare it, followed by Clay. Leo would probably never say it, and that was fine. I knew how he felt. Bryan, however, had always been a wild card on whether he’d admit he loved me or keep it to himself like Leo.

  He returned with two waters and handed one to me. “You about done?”

  “Just finished,” I lied and closed the book, no longer interested in homework. I needed to let loose. Having my mom back and at odds with Stace stressed the bejebus out of me. I wanted the two most important females in my life to get along, dammit. God forbid they grow the hell up and act like civilized adults.

  Leo had insisted on completing his final tribunal despite him being a new trio. That was why Clay and Rob had taken him to practice calling his new element, leaving Bryan and me alone to do exciting things like homework. I wondered what it’d take for me to pass my final tribunal. What it’d take for any of us to pass. My most recent test hadn’t been all that grueling, but since I’d been through a hell of a lot worse just about every time Alec and I went toe to toe, I figured I had a pretty good head start on what to expect.

  “Have you thought about when you want to do your final tribunal?”

  He took a swig of water, his hazel eyes now dancing with curiosity. “I need to get through a year of alchemy first.”

  With all the mamma drama and stopping the Council from killing young elementals during tribunals, I’d completely forgotten about him passing his exam. “That’s right. Congrats are in order. When do you start your internship?”

  “Monday, officially. I stopped by the lab and met Merle today. He’s the head alchemist. He’s a little weird and looks like a wizard from medieval times with his long white beard and square glasses. But he seems cool. Why’d you ask about my final tribunal?”

  “His name is Merle?” I snorted. “You do realize you just described Merlin from King Arthur, right?”

  “And every other story with a wise old wizard,” he replied, sarcasm thick in his tone. “Back to my question. Why are you interested in my final tribunal?”

  I shrugged, playing down my curiosity. “Does every student pass?”

  “Not on their first try.” He laughed and fell into the chair with me. “In fact, most don’t their first time. Rob, he was lucky the Council wanted him. If Layden had failed him in front of the academy, he would have probably set her on fire. That boy’s got a temper.”

  We sat there staring straight ahead as I picked at the paper label on my water bottle, avoiding the topic that kept circling in my brain. Finally, when I could no longer stand the silence, I turned to him. “What happened in the void?”

  He stood and moved away, keeping his back to me. With his hands on his hips, he shook his head. “I don’t know if I can talk about it.”

  “Because you don’t remember?”

  “I remember bits and pieces,” he corrected and glanced over his shoulder. “Like Spencer suddenly appearing next to me in that warehouse. Like us suddenly teleporting out. And then…nothing. I don’t remember popping out of the teleport. It was as if part of me stayed behind.”

  “How’d my mom get you back out?”

  “It was like a teleport, but in reverse. She suddenly appeared in the void, and then we were in a different warehouse. Just like that.”

  “Just like that?”

  He turned, facing me. “Just like that.”

  “And, uh… You don’t remember her saying anything?” I remembered back to her story, the one where just the mention of my name had snapped him from purgatory.

  “No. I don’t think there’s sound in the void. I remember trying to yell for you guys, but nothing came out. Eventually, I lost the will to fight it and just sort of gave in to the nothing.”

  Well, at least his memory was coming back, as terrible a memory as it was. Silver lining, even though my mom had lied about how he’d returned just to win brownie points. I stood and went to him, resting my hand on his arm. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

  “I’m just glad your mom pulled me out before I wound up like Leo’s parents.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “I remember the story now. I also remember what happened back in the ruins with Alec, then aga
in with you.”

  “Sounds like your memories are coming back, and not all at once, which is good.”

  “Oh, they were pretty much all at once. I woke up sweating and shaking as all these memories came flooding back. All except how I got to the void and how I got back out. I don’t know if I’ll ever really remember that.”

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.” I rested my head against his chest and breathed in his musky scent. I’d nearly lost my earth elemental to the void, nearly lost my water elemental to a new element after calling fire while touching him, nearly lost my air elemental at the hands of my own mother, and nearly lost my fire elemental when Alec had tossed him off a cliff. Being linked to me was hazardous to one’s health. Instead of moping about it or doing something stupid like running away—although the thought had occurred to me a time or ten since the dark elementals were after me, not my guys—I stuck it out like a trooper.

  I just hoped it was an act of resilience and not one of stupidity. Something told me I’d figure out that one soon enough.

  I really hoped it wasn’t the latter.

  18

  The next few weeks at the academy weren’t much different from the first few, sans the additional tribunals. Well, and trying to move on without all the magically enhanced elementals. That and the weather shifting into fall overnight.

  I’d tried to get a meeting with Albert Stephens, but the head of the Council wanted nothing to do with me. If I couldn’t reach him, couldn’t convince him to release the MEs, I’d have to come up with a plan B.

  Against my better judgment, and despite the guys protesting my decision, I’d told Stace about the counter ward. She’d been upset, and rightfully so, but said from the way I’d described it, it was nothing more than a weak water ward and wouldn’t do any damage, that the stronger wards would eliminate it. That must have been why Clay and I couldn’t find it.