Leigh looked him up and down, and reached out to touch his arm. Dylan felt the quiet, steadying pulse of her energy flowing through him, cool and somehow reassuring.
“And sometimes you just want someone who can help you rest, right? You’ve got enough passion and devotion for both of us—but if … if things work out …” Leigh glanced around them to make sure no one was eavesdropping. “I could very easily love you, Dylan. Maybe not with all the fireworks, but with plenty of steady, restful … God I’m making it sound boring.”
Dylan laughed. “Trust me,” he told her, reaching out to brush a lock of bright red hair away from her eyes. “Living with Aiden and Aira, I can definitely use steady and restful.”
Leigh’s cream-pale cheeks lit up with a pinkish blush.
“Your brother will start worrying if we don’t hurry back,” she told him.
Dylan let his hand fall to her waist, and held her close as they walked towards the registers. He hoped at least that there would be enough time for them to get to know each other better.
CHAPTER SIX
DYLAN WATCHED AS LEIGH ASSEMBLED the components of the tracking spell she was putting together. It was entirely different magic from what he was used to—Dylan had never known any earth elementals very well, and he could tell by the murmuring of Leigh’s incantation as she poured the salt that it was based on lore; this was no simple tracking enchantment. It was something deeper, more closely aligned with the element itself. He was fascinated by the slow, graceful movements that Leigh made, the green glow that came over her as she prepared her spell. She had moved the stones into place first, arranging them in a circle with points implying a pentacle. In the center of the circle, surrounded by the jade, she began putting together the other elements—the oak branches, the lodestone, and finally the salt.
Dylan was interrupted by the sound of Aiden’s heavy, quick tread on the stairs. His older brother appeared at the landing, and Dylan met his gaze; it had been clear from the moment that he and Leigh had arrived back at the apartment that Aiden and Aira had been spending their time more on refueling their energies than they had been investigating—but since they had a solid lead on half of their targets, it wasn’t the kind of thing that Dylan would have reproached them for. For the duration of Leigh’s magical attempt, Aira would have to stay upstairs, in her room—the energies that Leigh’s spell would call in, untampered by Dylan’s or Aiden’s essences, could weaken her, and there was no justification for that when they knew they’d need to all be at the height of their power in a day or so.
“How long is this going to take?” Aiden asked, turning his gaze up the staircase for a moment. Dylan knew that above them, Aira was pacing; she was no better equipped to deal with the enforced idleness of waiting than his brother was. At least Aiden could be present and watch what Leigh was doing—get the first flush of information from her. Aira was forced to wait to find out what the earth elemental had gleaned, to turn her agile mind onto a strategy to put it to its best use.
“Once everything is set up, probably only a few minutes,” Dylan replied, keeping his voice low so as not to break Leigh’s concentration. He could feel the energy flowing through her, sense its growing potency as she brought the elements of her spell together. The kinds of magic that Aiden managed to perform so well was much more spontaneous—creating objects out of fire, igniting things; even the more involved spells were little more than manipulating fire energy, or putting fire to use. It had always been difficult for Dylan to explain to his brother that his own magic took more time—and used more accessories. The water-based spells he knew varied, but they were all very involved.
“Let’s get this show on the road,” Leigh said, looking up from the middle of her circle. She gave Dylan a quick smile and then took a deep breath. “The sooner we can figure out where they are exactly, the sooner we can take them in, right?”
Aiden nodded quickly and carefully crossed the living room, avoiding the circle.
Dylan took up his own position, stepping around the five-point circle and sitting down in his accustomed chair, watching as Leigh shifted in her spot. She began to chant slowly, in a low, near-whispering voice, words that he couldn’t hope to comprehend. Leigh’s brilliant eyes slowly fell shut, and Dylan saw the green glow radiating from her skin once more. He held himself silent, and glanced over at his older brother to make sure that Aiden was doing nothing that could possibly interfere with the spell that Leigh was casting.
She went silent after a long time, and Dylan wondered—how would any of them really know what she was actually doing? He shook his head; it wasn’t the time to doubt the woman he was falling in love with. He had to trust her—he had to believe that she was doing what she said she was doing. He had all but decided to bond with her, to make Leigh his mate. If he couldn’t put his faith in her ability to track, and her willingness to find Hestia and Aidan along with their underlings, then it didn’t make sense to continue working towards the bond. Dylan took a deep breath and forced himself to relax. After a few more moments, Leigh began to speak.
“Mountains—deep mountains, Aidan isn’t happy about it, but it’s at least secluded. Somewhere in the Appalachians. North … not quite the top end of the range, but isolated. Safe house is small, but well-equipped. Painted blue.”
Aiden was writing down the details as Leigh spoke, watching intently for the next bout of words as she sorted through the impressions.
Dylan felt the energy intensifying and knew that Leigh was battling—that she was working against a charm meant to repel any attempt to track down the members of the group. There was a minute shaking of the building—Dylan glanced around to make sure it wasn’t just him. Leigh’s green glow turned darker; it was almost a forest green, enveloping her as she pushed past the barriers.
Her words came to a stop and Dylan watched as Leigh brought the spell down gradually, murmuring foreign whispers that weren’t quite words but something more basic. He and Aiden both waited until the glow dispersed, until she opened her eyes and looked at them.
“Was that enough?” Leigh asked.
Dylan couldn’t judge—he would refine any plan his brother and sister-in-law came up with, but the first impetus had to be theirs. He glanced at Aiden.
“That’s enough, for sure. Clear it all out, put it in Dylan’s room where it won’t do a job on Aira.”
“I have to scatter the salt,” Leigh said, gathering up what she had poured. “Return it back to the earth.”
“Whatever you need to do.” Aiden stood and stepped around the circle once more, nimbly leaping onto the stairs to go back up to his wife. Leigh finished gathering up the salt and shot Dylan a smile.
“You know,” she said, beginning to pull apart the oak branches, the stones that had amplified her power, “salt is an interesting ingredient.”
“Is it?” Dylan knew some of the lore surrounding salt as a magical component; but being more closely aligned with earth spells than any other kind, he had never made as much use of it as he perhaps should have.
“It’s where earth and water meet, magically speaking,” Leigh said. She gathered her materials except for the salt in a thick bag. “Earth absorbs the moisture and leaves the crystals. It’s …” she licked her lips. “If we ever do get to the point of becoming mate s… it would be useful.”
Dylan smiled slowly.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Aiden carried a tray of coffees into the living room where Dylan, Leigh, and Aira sat; he sank down onto the couch next to Aira. “So we know where they are and how we’re going to find them,” he said.
“Looks like Leigh got plenty of details,” Aira added approvingly. “We get through this, as far as I’m concerned she’s already one of us.”
Dylan felt a rush of warm comforting contentment as Leigh smiled.
“So how do we pull this off?” Dylan picked up one of the coffees and took a sip. Aira was silent for a long moment in contemplation.
“We ta
ke them by surprise,” she said, reaching for her own cup. “Leave first thing in the morning, get there before noon, take them out. Aiden can call on Thomas and a couple of other folks to provide us with backup, people with transportation to cart them into custody.”
“They’ve got wards, and good chains, right?” Leigh had yet to meet Thomas or any of the other bounty hunters that worked among the elementals. As she had been casting the used salt carefully back to the earth, she’d told Dylan that she was gaining quite the education in the “law enforcement” end of the elemental world.
“Everything they’d need to keep them subdued. I recommended to the elders that they use pairs or teams—the fire elementals are going to have to be held with water-aligned materials, and someone like Thomas can’t handle those. With a few air elementals added in, a few loyal earth elementals … they’ll be fine.”
“What are we each going to be responsible for?” Dylan had been trying to decide just how Leigh’s presence would affect their strategies. She was an unknown quantity. Aira had more or less fallen into his and his brother’s usual strategies without having to plan—but to have each element represented made for a big advantage, if they could balance and coordinate their attacks properly.
“We take them all at once,” Aiden suggested. “If we split up, it’ll only make it harder to combine attacks.”
“But if we’re all in one place, they can just shift to the other side of us, flank us.” Aira picked at imaginary lint on her jeans.
“Since when has anyone successfully flanked you or me?” Aiden asked, raising an eyebrow.
“These guys are entrenched. They know the land better than we do. We need to split up—two and two. Dylan and Leigh can take any ramparts they have set up, you and I can press the attack.”
“I can tear down anything they put up,” Leigh said. Dylan looked at the woman, only slightly surprised by her confident words. “The defenses they set up are all earth-bound. With Dylan’s help we can either wash them away or I can break it apart.”
“Fire doesn’t work so well against rock,” Dylan pointed out. “You and Aira are more suited to attacking people than things anyway.”
“I don’t like it,” Aiden said, reaching out and resting his hand on Aira’s knee. “But if you’re all agreed, we’ll do it that way.”
“We should eat something, rest up,” Aira suggested. “We’ll need all of our strength tomorrow. Dylan, can you whip us up some potions to take as soon as we get there? I spent the time that Leigh was conjuring up their location casting the cards. I have a feeling we’re going to need every bit of help we can get.”
“I’ll get to work on it after dinner,” Dylan replied; he would also, he told himself firmly, check the scrying bowl. There had to be something that he could learn before the battle—something that would tip the balance in their favor.
It was while Aira was working on dinner that Dylan felt the power surge begin. It washed through him in waves; cold, rushing energy, cascading through his nervous system, obliterating thought. He heard the pat-pat-pat of starting rain and turned to tell Leigh—to tell everyone—what was happening. But he couldn’t make his mouth work. He couldn’t summon words. Feelings flooded through him: anger, grief, desire, fear, each warring for prominence as the spatter of raindrops outside speeded up.
Dylan groaned, closing his eyes as the waves built up inside of him. One moment he was keenly aware of his heart’s steady thrumming beat; the next he was submerged, tumbling through depths that were at once impenetrable and perfectly clear. Energy surged, gurgled, rushed through every nerve in his body, caressing so constantly that he almost felt the sensation as pain instead of pleasure. It was too much—he couldn’t take it. Dylan groaned again, turning around, trying to swim through the currents, trying to move himself out of the way so that he could float instead of foundering.
He was completely unaware of the world around him, lost in the depths of an ocean so deep that he could no longer be certain which way was up and which was down. No light penetrated, but there was a glowing phosphorescence surrounding him, flashing in unearthly glimmers that he couldn’t quite follow with his mental vision, only see like the flickers of cars passing by on a rainy day—there and gone, there and gone. He gasped, feeling water enter his lungs—and yet he didn’t drown. He couldn’t drown. Dylan dimly heard the pat-pat-pat of rain turning into a torrential downpour, but it wasn’t important; all that was important was navigating the water that surrounded him, that slid against every inch of his skin. He felt invincible—he felt, briefly, the way he imagined Aira felt when she used her extreme power—as though nothing could stop the forward rush that used him as a conduit to the real world.
Locked in the power surge, Dylan caught images—thoughts, feelings, and dreams. The voice of Aira’s grandmother filled his mind with sound that beat out even the gushing flood of tidal waves. “You will find depths you never knew existed. You will see things that are heartbreakingly sad—but you will remain.”
His own mother replaced Lorene in his mind, whispering the way she had when he had first shown signs of inheriting her abilities. “Your brother’s strength is in his power—in his will, his tremendous ability to burn anything in his path. Your strength is your ability to care, your heart. You will never have the brute force Aiden enjoys so much, but you will have something different; you’ll have feelings he will never be able to express, a sense of how people really are.”
The surge ended almost as abruptly as it came upon him, eddying back from whence it came, leaving Dylan shivering with cold and gasping for breath. He opened his eyes as he heard the downpour outside beginning to abate, softening once more into the pat-pat-pat-pat-pat and dying down to a drizzle before it stopped altogether. Taking a deep breath, Dylan realized that he was soaking wet, and looked around; the entire living room was drenched. He groaned in frustration. He saw that somehow, before whatever magic that had surged through him had flooded the room, the apartment itself, Aiden, Leigh, and Aira had managed to move the most important items out of the way of the torrent.
There was an inch of water on the floor, and Dylan knew that the couch was all but ruined. It was just as well that they were making such good money off of their bounty hunting, he thought wryly. Dylan sighed; but the first person to speak was Aiden.
“Dude,” Aiden said, chuckling as he sat down on the only dry chair in the room—somehow preserved against the downpour that had started outside and then came into the apartment itself. “You just totally wet yourself.” Dylan rolled his eyes and glanced at Aira. His sense of humor finally came around to assert itself.
“Well,” he said, smiling wryly as he took in the sight of Aira drenched from head to toe. “You can’t say Aira and I have no chemistry anymore, Aiden. I totally just got her wet.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
AIRA STARED THROUGH THE WINDOW as the car sped down the road, lost in thought. She took a deep breath and exhaled, forcing herself to relax. She was more than a little concerned about the battle coming up—in spite of doing their due diligence on gathering information about Hestia and Aidan’s safe house operation, she couldn’t help but feel like they were missing a key component. There was also the added complication of Leigh in their midst. For all that the earth elemental had been forthcoming, honest—even helpful in their investigations, Aira was still trying to decide just how she felt about the woman, and how she would fit into their merry band of bounty hunters.
She had consulted her cards the day before, while Leigh had been working to track the renegade elementals in their mountain fortress; without any design, without any particular aim, Aira had laid the cards out, a dozen questions swirling around in her head. Of course, she thought wryly, it always worked better when she had a specific question in mind, somewhere to direct the air-based intuition she had inherited. The results had been predictably jumbled.
When the first card she pulled and placed was the Wheel of Fortune, Aira had nearly called it a wash. Of course
things are changing, she had thought angrily in the cards’ direction. You’re supposed to be telling me something I don’t know. The queen of pentacles pointed to Leigh—with several cards surrounding it indicating danger, though whether to or from the elemental was unclear. The Moon card represented Dylan, coming into his abilities, reinforced by the King of Cups; he was surrounded by choices—and Aira hadn’t been able to quite suppress the grin that twitched at her lips at the presence of the Lovers card appearing in his end of the spread.
Overall, things were—not bleak, but uncertain. The cards told her that hidden forces were at work, hidden plans brewing; where she looked to find out more about the situation with the earth and fire elementals working against them, she saw The Chariot—indicating the intent direction of their plans, along with Death, Judgment, and The Tower. There were things she couldn’t see, things she couldn’t make plans around. Something about that—her failure to perfectly read the situation, and Dylan’s later failure to glean anything from his scrying bowl—made her edgy. She didn’t want to run up against any surprises, but she knew there was no way around it. No matter how many times she cast the cards, there was never a hint at what she should expect, only danger, coming judgment, the potential—but not the promise—of justice. Everything hinged on what happened next.
“Okay, we’re almost to the mountain,” Aiden announced next to her. Aira stretched and took another deep breath, tearing her gaze away from the flowing scenery to look back at the two other members of their team. She would have preferred for them to all go in together; their alignments combined, they would be formidable. Aira could understand Aiden’s thought process—Leigh and Dylan were both better-suited to breaking down the fortifications that the earth and fire elementals they were up against would have established, while she and Aiden were better for aggressive counter-action. “We’ll stop a couple of miles short of the safe house.”
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