Elements 2 - Shifting Selves

by Mia Marshall

  I nodded. I understood what it was to have that connection to the land. “Wasn’t it worth it, though? You got to see some of the world, meet other people.” I was hardly a world traveler, but my insistence on leaving the island was the best choice I’d ever made.

  Eleanor didn’t look convinced. “I saw a world intent on destroying the nature it needs to live. The few places where nature was revered, where I might have found some peace, I was scorned by those that lived there. Some even denied my very existence.” She didn’t elaborate, but I knew she spoke of elementals. I fought the pointless desire to apologize on behalf of every narrow-minded old one in existence.

  “Celeste tried to tell me, but I didn’t listen. What younger sister wants to acknowledge the wisdom of her sibling? Long ago, she told me we had no choice. As long as we were bears, we would return to the forest, over and over again. Our human face may allow us to walk in the outside world, but it doesn’t allow us to live there. She was right, of course. It just took me a little longer to figure out.”

  And strike one more suspect from the list. This didn’t sound like a woman who would help others escape, not when she considered it a futile effort.

  I was completely out of ideas. It was, I decided, time to hit the refresh button and try to put the pieces together in a new way. Also, pancakes. It was always time for pancakes.

  My mother finally exited the cabin, followed by Mac, Will, and Josiah. Somehow, even while surrounded by shifters, my father was able to ignore them. He made eye contact with me and my mother and simply paid no attention to any of the others.

  I’d forgotten Josiah was even still there, and that concerned me. If my father was choosing to be quiet and unobtrusive, I assumed he had some ulterior motive for doing so.

  Eleanor and Will cast barely-concealed looks of loathing his way. They might slowly be accepting my presence, but it helped that I wasn’t a prejudiced asshole. My father couldn’t make the same claim. He was exactly the kind of old one the shifters resented, and with good reason.

  Even my mother received little more than civility from the two bears. They would accept her help because they had no other choice, but they would not forget she was a full-blooded elemental.

  In return, she wasn’t rude, but her bland politeness never veered into anything that could be mistaken for warmth.

  At that moment, I was certain that, had it not been for Mac vouching for me and Sera, we’d never have been invited into their home.

  I couldn’t worry about any of that now, however. My mother looked worn and thin. For once, I saw the weight of the centuries in her eyes, and the tiniest lines of stress threatened to crack her perfect skin. She’d be heading directly to a water source once she shared her news, of that I was certain. “The women are resting,” she said. “They will need peace for several days. I had to explore much deeper than I anticipated.”

  “Were you able to heal her so she could shift? What about James?” The pained silence that greeted my question was answer enough. “We need to find the person who did this, don’t we? They must know how to reverse this. What did you learn? Did Pamela remember anything about being captured?” The questions poured forth, one desperate hope piling onto another.

  I was really tired of not knowing anything.

  Sadness scored my mother’s face. “I think pure instinct brought Pamela home,” she said. “She knows nothing, Aidan. She remembers nothing.”

  “Not her attacker? Not where she stayed?”

  Will shook his head. “Pamela remembers nothing. Not even her own name.”

  I looked around the circle, the other faces reflecting the shock I knew was on my own. “Amnesia?” It didn’t even sound real. It was the sort of thing that only happened in soap operas.

  “I’m afraid so, little water.” Josiah’s face snapped toward Will when he used the diminutive term. It appeared he wasn’t comfortable with any paternal figure granting me a nickname. Because I was petty, that made me like Will even more. “She doesn’t know a thing. James knows his own family, but he remembers nothing about where he was, who took him, or what they did to him—and he’s only getting worse as the beast takes over. It’s been a full week since he shifted.” Will’s anger built steadily as he spoke. The only reason he wasn’t dismembering someone right now was he had no idea where to begin.

  “That’s not all,” said my mother. “Something has changed in Pamela’s nervous system. I wish I could tell you more than that, but that’s all I know. I performed a careful comparison of her and Carmen’s pathways, and I found a sort of block in Pamela’s brain. Her brain is sending her body a message to shift, but it’s not being received.”

  “Could that explain why she can’t access her memories?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. It really doesn’t make sense. If it’s as you told us, that it’s a drug that wears off, the effect should be fading, but it is not. The obstruction is consistent. I have no answers, I’m afraid.” I could count on one hand the number of times I’d heard her admit that, and her helplessness made everything so much worse. No matter how mad I was at her, I still expected my mother to have all the answers during a time of crisis. “I will try again later, after we’ve all rested a bit.”

  I looked at Josiah, standing perfectly still and taking in as much information as he possibly could. I expected he was storing it away for future use in his big, scary brain. “And our only lead,” I said pointedly, staring him down, “is you. Whatever you say, you knew about Brian’s concoction, and you don’t have a great history of being an innocent bystander. You have to know something.” I felt anger bubbling inside me, that constant reminder of what he’d done, what he’d allowed to happen. I didn’t need a mirror to know my eyes were sharpening, filling with the intensity that always accompanied the beginnings of a fire.

  Simon moved quietly to one side, offering silent support. On the other side, Mac lightly touched my hand, reminding me who I was.

  My mother saw all of this, and a quickly hidden concern flitted across her face. She didn’t want me to know how worried she was, but it was there. It was always there, I suspected, and likely had been from the day I was born. “You know that’s not what happened. Think, Aidan,” she told me.

  I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to be logical. Life would be so much easier if I could just blame Josiah for everything that went wrong, then return to my warm cabin. Except she was right. This one couldn’t be blamed on my father. He was many things, but he wasn’t stealthy. He couldn’t get close enough to a cat shifter to smack her on the head without her permission. Set her on fire, sure, but that’s not what we were dealing with.

  “Damn it,” I muttered. It was the most gracious defeat I could manage. I turned and walked far away from the circle. If I needed to, I would walk all the way to the cabin, until the rage boiling within me eased and I stopped wanting to set my entire world on fire.

  CHAPTER 15

  We weren’t able to see Vivian that night, or even the next morning. Sera spent the night at the hospital, watching over Vivian’s sedated form. She phoned the cabin in the morning to tell us there was no rush. The doctors had ordered a full series of diagnostic tests, looking for an explanation for her rapid healing. While the MRI and CT scan wouldn’t reveal the potted plant at her bedside, they would take long enough that we wouldn’t be able to see her until well past noon.

  With the Bronco firmly out of commission and Mac unwilling to ride in my tiny car, I borrowed the Mustang for the hour’s drive back to South Lake Tahoe. It was a nerve-wracking trip. This was partly because it required us to pass the scene of our accident, a feat I only managed by slowing to ten miles per hour, taking many deep breaths, and offering fervent prayers to any deity willing to hear them.

  It was also nerve-wracking because, while the Mustang was larger than my Chevy, Mac still barely fit. His knees pressed against the dash, his head brushed the roof, and his shoulder nearly brushed mine as I drove. For an entire hour, I was painfully aware of h
is body one easy touch away, and only Simon’s presence in the back seat and our concern for Vivian kept me from pulling over and embarrassing myself in some new and desperate way.

  We found Sera sitting in the waiting room, fidgeting so much I was surprised she hadn’t managed to set her chair on fire. Even from ten feet away, I felt the spark of her magic, felt the way it reached across the room, hungrily seeking an outlet. A distracted fire was worrying enough. That I was agitated enough for my own magic to wake and find hers was far worse.

  I no longer needed to be enraged to wake up my fire side. That merely fed the magic, strengthened it so that even weak, cold emotions had the same effect. At that moment, I felt no anger, but I still wanted to set something on fire.

  Simon sat quietly beside Sera and lightly rested one hand on her forearm, letting the simple touch calm her. “She will heal,” he said, with utter certainty.

  She nodded. “She will. She was in surgery longer than expected, but the doctor is astounded by her progress.” She allowed a small smile. I wondered how many bags of soil she’d snuck into the room. “She had some internal bleeding, and her left leg and right arm are broken. The arm was fractured in three places, he said.” The words were spoken with a careful distance I knew she didn’t feel. “Olivia, her ex—or maybe not so ex, considering—is in there.”

  I attempted a weak smile. “She tried to work things out, and all she had to do was throw herself over the side of the mountain and nearly die. We could turn that into the latest relationship self-help book.” I carefully avoided looking at Mac, not wanting him to think I was talking about anything other than Vivian and her ex-girlfriend.

  “Crash Into Love?” suggested Sera.

  “I was thinking more along the lines of I Love You, You’re a Selfish Cow Who Ignored Me Until I Nearly Died. Yours is probably more marketable, though.” It was possible I felt some animosity toward this unknown woman who’d caused one of my good friends pain.

  “You must be Aidan. Vivian told me I’d recognize you by the completely inappropriate words coming out of your mouth.” I froze at the words spoken directly behind me. Apparently, the ex wasn’t going to remain an unknown woman for any longer than it took for me to turn around.

  “You couldn’t have warned me?” I muttered.

  Sera shrugged, unconcerned. Simon fixed his sharp green gaze just over my shoulder and said, quite clearly, “Why would we stop you from speaking the truth?”

  Hey, if it was going to be awkward, at least I had company. I turned to catch my first look at the woman I’d been freely insulting a moment ago and almost wanted to apologize. Everything about this woman suggested she was sweet and harmless. Everything except her eyes, that is.

  She wasn’t especially tall, and she had the body of someone who regularly walked but couldn’t be bothered to restrain her diet, muscled and soft at the same time. Her hair was a yellow blond, and her pale skin was dotted with freckles unobscured by any makeup. A pair of cat’s eye glasses rested atop a button nose and magnified her pale blue eyes. She wore cotton pants and a striped button-down shirt, and a messenger bag was slung across her body. Inside the bag, I could see several skeins of yarn and a pair of knitting needles loaded up with stitches.

  In short, she looked like a cross between a graduate student, a librarian, and someone’s grandmother. The effect was only marred by her eyes, sharp and angry. In her version of reality, Vivian had broken up with her to be with us, and she showed no signs of forgetting that fact.

  “You do know she dumped me, right?” Olivia pointed out. Her tone was dry and irritated, and far more superior than I would have liked. I felt my earlier urge to apologize shrivel up.

  I had many retorts to her comment, the most dominant one being the need to defend Vivian, who’d only broken up with Olivia to save her life. There are many reasons I tire of the secrecy that surrounds what we are, but at that moment, my inability to have the last word and put this woman in her place were at the top of the list.

  “She’s our friend,” I said instead, and really, that was all that mattered.

  She looked unimpressed. “She’s awake now. I’m getting a coffee.”

  She pointed us down the sterile white hall toward the recovery rooms, then moved in the opposite direction. I’d never visited anyone in the hospital before. The strong elementals with whom I’d been raised had no need of human medicine, and during my relatively brief time in the human world, I’d been lucky enough to have no need for such a visit.

  My only reference for such visits were images from movies and television shows, in which a carefully made-up patient smiled wanly, bravely facing her fate from a clean and tidy bed.

  The reality wasn’t so neat. Vivian’s face was swollen and purpling from the multiple contusions she’d suffered in the fall, and her arm and leg were both held from her body at an awkward angle. The bed sheets were already wet with sweat and wrapped around her in odd ways to accommodate the broken limbs. Plastic tubes poked out everywhere, IVs and catheters and breathing tubes, a sickening roadmap of bodily fluids and medicines. It was the sort of thing that would normally cause my squeamish friend to grimace and avert her eyes. Now, she barely seemed to notice it.

  Her eyes were heavy and glazed, holding little of the intelligence I associated with Vivian. Her skin, normally a rich cocoa tone, looked sallow and thin. More than anything, she looked tired, the sort of exhaustion that went well beyond the physical body.

  And this was after a night of exposure to her element. While I’d been flirting with Mac and resenting my father and feeling guilty about not helping enough on the case, she’d been here, fighting against a small world of pain.

  For the second time in minutes, that spark deep within flared to life, along with a voice insisting this was no accident. The Bronco had been sabotaged, and while I was damn certain Vivian hadn’t been the target, here she was, suffering because of us.

  I distantly heard a low growl and was only moderately surprised to discover it came from my throat. I looked down at my fingers and noticed, curiously, that they were beginning to spark.

  A sharp pain snapped me back into my body. “Ow,” I said, rubbing my upper arm and looking toward Sera, who was more than ready to deliver a second blow. “Thanks.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  “Hold it together, Ade. I can only worry about one of you at a time, and it’s Vivian’s turn.”

  She was right, of course. I gave a short, terse nod.

  Sera pushed the sliding glass door open and walked softly into the room, followed by Mac. I knew there was no way he could have prevented the accident, but watching his guilt-torn face when he saw Vivian, I wondered if he knew that.

  These days, it seemed there was plenty of guilt to go around. We were all getting our share.

  Simon and I followed, and Simon moved directly to the room’s chair and curled up in it, making it clear he had no plans to go anywhere until Vivian was healthy again.

  I tentatively held her hand, or at least the part of the hand sticking out of her cast. “You know we’re going to figure out what happened, right?”

  She turned to face me, and the look on her face broke my heart. She looked like she’d given up. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

  “I’m just going to assume that’s the drugs talking, Vivian,” Sera said.

  I forced a weak smile. “You know we won’t let this go. Sera will get all determined, and Mac will intimidate someone, and I’ll annoy the villain so much they’ll announce themselves just to shut me up. We still need to work out the kinks, obviously, but on the whole I think it’s a solid plan.”

  Vivian winced, unamused. “It doesn’t matter,” she repeated. “So you find this guy. There will be another. And another. There’s always another.” She attempted to turn to face the other wall, but Simon was in her line of sight. Sighing, she closed her eyes, blocking us all out. “This shit never happened in Connecticut, you know.”

  “If you’re thinking about moving
back to Connecticut, we need to lower your dose.” Sera’s words were light, but her face was hard as stone.

  Vivian opened her eyes once more, taking in each of us in turn. It seemed she was committing us to memory. “I can’t do it anymore. Give me a boring life with my computers and girlfriend and the occasional Buffy marathon. If I stay with you guys, it will be my death. It’s over for me.” She sounded regretful, but not at all uncertain of her choice.

  And there was nothing we could say to argue. Four helpless faces watched as she closed her eyes and drifted away. Her breathing slowed and deepened, and we knew she was asleep. I hoped her dreams were better than her reality had become.

  The door behind me slid open, and Olivia stepped into the room. “I’m staying with her,” she announced.

  Simon studied her curiously, as if she were an especially large mouse. “No,” he finally said. He proceeded to ignore her completely.

  “She’s my girlfriend,” Olivia told him. He offered no response.

  “Ex-girlfriend,” I pointed out. “She’s our friend. No prefix required.”

  “It’s just a word. It means nothing.” She grabbed another chair from the corner and placed it on the side of the bed opposite Simon, pushing me firmly out of the way. She sat down and cast a look his way that clearly said, “So there.”

  “Are we having a competition to see who loves her more?” I asked. “Considering that you ignored her for the last month, I’d put long odds on you if we’re betting.”

  She said nothing, and Simon was working hard to pretend she wasn’t there. I knew it wouldn’t be long before a nurse urged several of us out of the crowded room, and I moved toward the door, leaving the two of them to duke it out.