Elements 2 - Shifting Selves

by Mia Marshall

  It was more than I’d ever done, and I felt an exhaustion that ran bone deep, my mind and the magic and my human body all depleted. I began to convulse from the effort, and without considering the medical wisdom of my action, I looked for the safest place in the room. It was right below me, and I lowered my shaking body onto Mac’s chest. There was a haven in his warmth and solidity, and I drew it to me, letting it repair my pain and invisible wounds as I’d done for him.

  I lay for a long time, feeling the shaking slowly stop. I could hear the others moving, speaking softly and beginning the horrible process of dismantling the lab. A blanket settled over me and Mac, and I felt myself begin to drift, the warmth and absolute fatigue conspiring to draw me toward unconsciousness.

  In that last moment before sleep claimed me, I felt Mac’s arm wind around my waist, and he pulled me closer.

  He slept for days. At the end of the first day, I worried. By the third, I panicked. With Will’s help, we returned him to his trailer. Someone was with him at all times. Every night I crawled in next to him, hoping my presence would remind him there was something worth coming back for.

  I only left the cabin once, to visit my mother. Eleanor hadn’t been able to insert an implant in her arm, so once the drug wore off, she awoke and we learned the full story. My mother had been working on James, trying to discover what was interfering with the magic, and she found the blockage to his memories instead. Unfortunately, Eleanor had been in the room with her at the time, and she was disinclined to allow my mother to unblock him. One long syringe with a crippling dose of the anti-magic cocktail found its way to her neck, and she’d passed out.

  “We are magic,” she told me from Will’s guest bed. She was awake, but to say she was recovered would be optimistic. “We are never meant to exist without it. It would be like asking a human to exist without several vital organs. I shut down completely. There was nothing you could do until the drug wore off.”

  “But you’re okay now?”

  She grimaced, just a tiny bit, then allowed her face to smooth into its usual elegant mask. “I’ll be fine, darling.”

  My mother, the martyr. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  With Will’s help, I got her to the car. I headed straight for Tahoe City, at the top of the lake, and let her lean on me as we made our way to the water. It was slowly getting more crowded. Though the lake was still cold, summer was nearly upon us, and it looked like several people were determined to get a jump on the worst of the vacation crowds. They thought nothing of the two blond women that looked like sisters standing knee deep in the water, one supporting the other.

  She closed her eyes and fed hungrily on the lake’s energy. “Ah, that is nice,” she said. “Not quite the Pacific, but nice nonetheless.”

  I resisted the urge to defend Lake Tahoe. I might have grown up surrounded by the same ocean she loved, but this was my water now. My home was the lake and the river, not the island where I’d been raised.

  “Better?” I asked instead. I knew she was. After a few minutes, she didn’t need to lean on me any more.

  She nodded. We stood in silence for a long time. “You have no plans to return with me, do you?”

  “You know I don’t.”

  “Will told me I needed to let my cub go, let her form her own sleuth. I believe that’s what he said.” She spoke carefully, the idea unfamiliar.

  I smiled. “That’s what a group of bears are called. Hey, have you heard about Wikipedia yet?”

  She nodded absently. There really wasn’t anyone who shared my enthusiasm for that site. “I did the only thing I could think to do to protect you. I believed it was the right choice until I heard you say otherwise. I thought that, so long as you remained a pure water and remained on the island, I’d saved you. Of course, look at poor Celeste. She did the opposite. She attempted to set her son free of his magical heritage, to give him the world, and she destroyed one life after another. Perhaps there is no correct answer.”

  I swished my foot through the water. “You did what you thought was right. It wasn’t right—let’s be clear about that—but I know you were trying.”

  It wasn’t complete forgiveness, but it was a start.

  She paused, uncertain how to approach the next topic. “I was told you used fire, Aidan.”

  “It wasn’t planned.”

  “I’m sure not. How do you feel now? Mentally?”

  “Surprisingly good.” I almost stopped there. I didn’t want to worry her with the small changes I’d felt since the lab, but keeping them to myself would be the same thing I’d accused her of doing—protecting a loved one from the truth. “Though I feel different. Sharper, somehow. Like I just got a new pair of glasses, and the blurred edges of the world are now clear and defined. I don’t feel insane, though I’m not sure any insane person would feel that way. I’m mostly worried that this morning, for almost five seconds, I considered going for a jog.”

  She forced a laugh, though I didn’t see the humor. That brief thought had horrified me.

  “No desire to kill anyone yet?”

  “Not so far, though I probably shouldn’t be left alone in a room with Eleanor or Celeste anytime soon.”

  “The shifters will take care of their own. Will is a loyal man, and he hates to deprive his sons of their mother, no matter how misguided she was. If you remain in Mac’s life, you will cross paths with Celeste.”

  “I’ll be ready.” I paused for a long time, trying to think of the best way to phrase an idea I doubted my mother wanted to hear. “In a strange way, I understand why Eleanor acted the way she did. Not the way she went about it, or the high levels of crazy she devoted to her master plan, but her reasons for hating us... she wasn’t wrong. Elementals can’t keep treating shifters the way we do and just expect them to take it.”

  She stared off into the distance, and I thought her mind was already back on the island, with its full-blooded waters who’d been determinedly set in their ways since the Renaissance. “Perhaps,” she said vaguely. “I’m certain, however, that we at least won’t need to worry about Eleanor attacking us—or anyone else—again. The shifters will see to that.”

  I nodded, unable to conjure any tears for a woman who’d had no qualms about hurting children and sought the death of all local elementals, myself and Sera included. I might understand the anger that motivated her, but I could still hate her for the way that anger had manifested.

  Once, I despised death as a solution, but I was less certain these days. I knew I would never mourn the loss of Eleanor, no more than I mourned Brian. Sometimes, the world was just better off without certain people. Maybe it was my fire side hardening me, tempering me into a lean, mean, elemental machine. Or maybe I would hurt anyone who came after my family. Not the one I’d been born to, but the one I chose. It was growing every day.

  And once again, I chose to include my mother in it. “If anything changes, if I feel myself becoming violent, I’ll call you. I’ve told Sera to call you, if she notices anything. I won’t disappear again. I promise.”

  She wasn’t a demonstrative woman, but she wrapped her arms around me in a quick, fierce hug. “Good. However, I fear you’ll be visiting the island sooner than expected.”

  That didn’t sound promising.

  “The council would like to see you. They’re convening on the island next week.” No, that wasn’t promising at all.

  “They don’t know?” I asked, feeling the panic rise. Sure, I was often a neurotic, babbling mess, but I really liked being alive. I had no desire for the council to alter that state.

  “No, they don’t,” she said firmly. “They’re more concerned about the way you shared our existence with two FBI agents and then followed up by tilting Lake Tahoe about twenty degrees toward Emerald Bay.”

  “Oh. That.” With everything that had happened, that day had somehow slipped my mind.

  “Yes, that. I expect they will vote to ostracize you from the elemental world.”

  I considered tha
t for a moment, thinking about what I could lose. The home I’d grown up on. My nutty aunts. I faced the possibility of centuries of solitude, cut off from many of my own people. But I also thought of what they couldn’t take. Sera and Mac. Simon and Vivian. My mother. No matter what the council said, they weren’t going anywhere, and they were my true people.

  “You know, I’m okay with that.” I felt a grin split my face, the same energy that was healing my mother filling me up, bringing a peace and joy I hadn’t known in weeks. “I’m really okay with that.”

  After I returned her to Will’s, I had one more stop to make. I phoned the cabin quickly, to make sure there’d been no change with Mac, and told them I’d return in a couple of hours. Then I climbed into my beat-up old Chevy and made my way toward a certain Reno suburb. There was a long overdue apology I needed to make.

  When I pulled up outside Diane’s house, I didn’t feel apprehensive, despite our previously antagonistic relationship. An hour of country music, the kind that insisted you sing along, had me smiling, and if that wasn’t enough, there was the certainty I was doing the right thing. I’d harassed this woman time after time, and while she’d played a small role in the abductions, it had been entirely unintentional. She was innocent, and she deserved to hear me acknowledge that.

  My good feeling lasted only until I saw the black sedan, a familiar lackey waiting patiently in the driver’s seat.

  I barely remembered exiting my car and running up the walkway. Even through the thick walls of the house, I could feel waves of magic rolling toward me.

  I knew I was already too late, but I threw the door open and ran through the house in a panic, heading toward the source of the magic. It was strong, stronger than anything I’d ever felt in myself or Sera, and it left an unmistakable trail.

  Josiah stood in the living room, and the fire Sera and I had wielded in that room was child’s play compared to the blazes he controlled. One hand created fire, pushing it in nonstop streams toward its target, while the other withdrew the flames, maintaining the fire within a small radius and ensuring no neighbors saw a raging house fire and dialed 911. He’d placed her body on the hearth, and the smoke eagerly escaped up the chimney. To anyone watching, Diane had simply built herself an unseasonal fire in her living room fireplace.

  “Stop.” The word was somewhere between a scream and a plea, and I was already reaching out with my own powers, trying to quench the flames. I’d never done that before. I’d always created fire in my anger. I’d never attempted to extinguish it, and I had about as much success as one would expect of a novice pitted against a master. Josiah glanced at me once and nodded, a simple acknowledgement of my presence, then returned to his work.

  He stoked the fire hotter and hotter. I could have tried to stop him again, found some other way to distract him, but there was no point. Diane was already dead. Her much-loved shotgun lay fallen at her side, a useless threat against my father. I saw a large wound in the center of her chest. He must have borrowed her gun just long enough to kill her, so at least he hadn’t burnt her alive. It was all the mercy he was capable of showing.

  Diane’s skin was charred and black, cracking to reveal the white bones beneath. Her hair and clothes had already been incinerated, and now Josiah cremated her. He was a one man murder squad and body disposal service.

  That man was my father. The thought was nearly as nauseating as the smell of burning flesh that crept through the room.

  I wouldn’t leave to find fresher air. I owed it to Diane to watch this death I’d caused. Someone needed to bear witness. As I watched the bones crumble to dust beneath the unrelenting onslaught of Josiah’s fires, I knew, no matter how many centuries passed, that I’d remember this moment. I wouldn’t forget her death, and I’d never forget what my father truly was. I would not let myself.

  Eventually, there was nothing left to burn. I’d sunk onto a white couch at some point, though I had no memory of doing so.

  “Aidan,” he said, smiling. “I didn’t expect to see you today.” Apparently, in Josiah’s world, social calls were often accompanied by immolated bodies. Hell, maybe they were. I had no idea what the man’s hobbies were.

  “Why did you do this?” My words contained an obvious horror that Josiah completely ignored.

  He stepped out of the room, and his words floated back to me. “You know why.” He returned a minute later with a dustpan and broom and began to sweep up the mess. I felt hysteria bubble within me at the sight of my millennia-old father doing housework. Perhaps he didn’t have a specific assistant for the cleanup and removal of human remains.

  “She was innocent. She wasn’t involved with the kidnapped shifters, not really.”

  He rounded on me, his face so fierce that I found myself shrinking into the stuffed sofa. “Why would I care about some shifter cubs? She could attempt a shifter genocide, and I’d probably buy her a bottle of champagne. That means nothing to me.”

  “Then why?” I asked. I wanted to hear him speak the words aloud, though I already knew.

  “Because she saw you,” he said, confirming my worst fears. “She knew what you are, and no one can know that. No one can possess information that would cost my daughter’s life.”

  “I’m not your daughter,” I said dully, watching him push a small, unburnt chunk of bone into the dustpan. “I didn’t want to be your daughter before, and I just officially disowned you.”

  “Regardless,” he said, the fierceness vanishing easily into sardonic amusement, seemingly at my expense. “I am still your father, and I will not allow such threats to your life to exist.”

  At that moment, breathing felt like an unfamiliar exercise. “How did you know?”

  “They filed an insurance claim for fire damage. I knew you had visited her that day.”

  “You’re stalking me.” Outrage, yes. That was better than numb.

  He waved his hand, as unconcerned as ever about privacy concerns. “Always so dramatic. I can’t believe you still think you don’t act like a fire. I’m simply concerned, Aidan, as I ought to be.”

  “It could have been Sera,” I protested. “You didn’t know it was my fire.”

  He laughed outright. How nice that I amused him so. “Sera is my daughter, Aidan. She knows how to control her powers. The only time she’s been unable to do so is in your presence.” He waved at the ragged burn marks that scored the furniture. “This is not Sera’s work.”

  “You can’t just kill anyone who knows what I am.”

  “Of course I can. I know you told your sister, and I understand that, but you know how important it is to keep your dual nature secret, to tell no one else.” His gaze focused on my horrified face. “You haven’t told anyone else, correct?”

  I begged my emotions to numb and found the part of myself that felt nothing, wanted nothing. I shook my head, willing the riot of emotions that still swirled beneath the surface to stay hidden for another minute, just long enough to fool Josiah. He nodded, satisfied, and I had to believe I’d managed to hide the truth from him. For now.

  I was some alternate universe version of King Midas, except everything I touched turned to dead. I was already surrounded by enough ghosts to haunt me for the rest of my days. I couldn’t bear any more. Simon, Mac, and Vivian had been risky enough, but they knew the stakes. They knew to remain quiet. Now I’d drawn Will, Carmen, Miriam, even Johnson and Carmichael into my secret. All it would take was a small slip, a casual comment, an indiscreet report, and they’d be dead. One after another, I could lose the world I’d built for myself.

  I stood unsteadily and met my father’s eyes. His were the black of the fire elementals, the black of charcoal and ash. They were the same color as Sera’s, but where hers offered comfort and humor, his were barely connected to this world. He did not see what the rest of us saw. He was one of the most powerful beings in existence, and I no longer cared. He would not take my world from me. It was mine, and I would fight for it.

  I walked slowly over to the sho
tgun and hefted it onto my shoulder. I’d never fired one before, and it took me a minute to figure out the safety. Josiah patiently watched my movements, only vaguely curious. He didn’t expect me to pull the trigger and send a blast directly into his right shoulder, and the pure shock that crossed his face when I did made me smile. He thought he knew me. He was wrong.

  I didn’t hit the heart. He would live. For several long seconds, I considered firing again. I couldn’t imagine the world would be a worse place without Josiah Blais.

  But I wasn’t ready to be that person, not yet. One shot was enough to deliver the message.

  “I am not your daughter.” I repeated my earlier words, this time holding his gaze, and whatever he saw there caused him to waver. For just a moment, Josiah Blais looked uncertain. “Do not follow me, do not track me, and do not contact me again. I am done with you.” Before he could recover, I walked from the room, leaving him with only ashes for company.

  CHAPTER 25

  Days passed, and while my shock and grief didn’t fade, I found my recent habit of compartmentalizing my anger was useful. It turned out I had a special compartment reserved just for my father, and I placed everything inside it. He was out of my life.

  It was time to move on with the people still in it.

  Unfortunately, some of them were also moving on.

  I stood on the ladder, watching Simon putter around in the loft space. “Sera just called. They’ll be here any minute.” He nodded, letting me know he’d heard, and continued to move around the loft, gathering a few final items.

  I watched him and thought of at least twenty different arguments for why he couldn’t leave. Carmen would be a terrible roommate. Living with two teenage girls would be hell. The corgi would chase him. Each thought crossed my mind, and each one I dismissed. Simon deserved better than my selfish desire to keep my friends close.