Dark Waters (Elemental Book 1)

by Rain Oxford

  When the woman beside me finished copying the information, I lightly tapped her arm. She had long, straight, gold hair and big, light brown eyes. “Is this ‘Fundamentals of Potions?’” I whispered, praying it wasn’t.

  She smiled kindly. She was very pretty. “No, this is advanced alchemy for C-Five students only. This is Room F3. You want Room 3F,” she whispered. “Come on; I’ll take you there.” She gathered her stuff into her bag.

  “Don’t you have to listen to this?”

  She rolled her eyes. “This is review from last year. Professor Mali does review every year on the first day of class.”

  I followed her out into the hall and shut the door quietly behind me. “Thank you for showing me the way.”

  “No problem.” She slung her blue bag over her shoulder and held out her hand for me to shake. “I’m Heather Anne. You can call me Heather or Anne, just don’t call me Annie. I am C-Five Spirit.”

  “So you mastered the other four elements?”

  “Yep.”

  “I’m Devon Sanders. C-One Water, I guess.”

  She laughed. “You guess? Water was my first element, too. Just in case you don’t know, all C-Five students are on the spirit element. We have our own dorm floor, we get to choose our roommates, our classes are apart from yours, and we are all required to be assistants for our mentors.”

  Since there were other students in the hallways, I knew we weren’t all on the same class schedule. We went up several floors and down many hallways until I was thoroughly lost. There were random windows into classrooms, the floor, or the ceiling. If that wasn’t weird enough, I also saw doors with no knobs, stairways that led to the ceiling, paintings of empty walls or hallways, and the floor was dangerously slanted in some areas. When we finally reached the classroom, we stopped.

  “I suggest you explore the school until you get familiar with it, but don’t do it alone.”

  Yeah, like I’m going anywhere alone in this death trap. “Thank you again for helping me find this place,” I said.

  Instead of walking away, she opened the door, grabbed my arm and pulled me close to her. “Good morning, Professor Langril,” she said brightly. “Devon is in your class this year, but please don’t count him late because he was helping me run some errands.”

  “That isn’t a problem, Heather. You know you can borrow my students at any time.”

  She smiled and turned so only I can see her. “Be careful. He’s insane,” she whispered, then left before I could say a word.

  “Devon Sanders, correct?” he asked kindly.

  I nodded and set my bag in the nearest seat to the door. I was instantly on alert when I saw that there were only five other students in class. Had the rest been flunked? Or maybe they got lost… In those halls of horror, I doubted any student who got lost would ever be seen again.

  “I heard you were able to fight off a tiger shifter this morning.”

  At least he didn’t assume it was with magic.

  “That must have taken some strong magic. You should be the first to give this a go,” he said enthusiastically.

  I sighed. The man was the last person I expected to be a lunatic. He had medium brown hair cut short in a decent style with dark blue eyes. From the ease with which he looked me in the eye, I knew he wasn’t any kind of shifter. “I’m really not very good,” I said. The fewer demonstrations I had to give of my lacking magical talents, the better off I was.

  “That’s okay! A trained fish could do this. Come on now!”

  The room was slightly smaller than the previous two. The back half of the room sloped downwards towards the middle. There were five two-person desks. The teacher stood at the front of the room before a long table that was piled high with odd ingredients, vials, tweezers, candles, and oddities. Instead of big windows providing light, there were torches floating randomly around the room… just floating.

  A large, cast iron cauldron, about five gallons, sat on the floor beside a door… which was in the floor. “Everyone already put their ingredients in. The only way to be sure if it worked, since I didn’t see what they put in, is to light it.”

  “Why can’t you light it?” I asked. That sounded like something covered under the teacher’s duties.

  “Because if they did it wrong, it’s going to explode, and I don’t want it all over me.”

  I sighed, pulled the spare jacket out of my bag, and draped it over the cauldron. I liked the jacket, but I didn’t want to end up with a tail or a bird’s foot or something by getting splashed. The cauldron had three sturdy legs that held it over a silver pan full of sticks and what looked like hay. I crouched behind the cauldron, discreetly pulled my lighter out of my pocket, and lit the hay under it. I expected to have to work at getting the flames going, but it was like the thin sticks were made of paper; they immediately lit.

  I slipped my lighter back into my jeans, stepped back, and waited. After a few minutes, I cautiously removed my jacket and everyone backed up. Nothing happened.

  “Good. Moving on,” the professor said. He put on some heavy gloves. “You need to get to know your ingredients.”

  Seeing how this could go terribly wrong, I dug around in my bag until I found my leather work gloves. Four of the other students also put gloves on as they came to the front of the room. The fifth student was a young, thin guy who eyed the door in the floor with fear.

  The professor handed one of the two women in class a vial of sticks. “That’s sandalwood. On its own, that is harmless.” He handed the guy next to me a bottle of a metallic liquid. “That’s mercury. It’s poisonous, so don’t drink it.”

  “I wasn’t going to!” the guy said, offended.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I didn’t know what it was.”

  “Well, now you do know what it is. Don’t drink it. Now, this is a scream-worm,” he said, pulling a big, fat worm out of a box. It was about six inches long, an inch in diameter, and white, almost pearlescent. He handed it to the skinny guy who finally looked up from the door in the floor.

  He grimaced as the worm writhed in his hand. “Why is it called a scream-worm?” he asked. Then, in the blink of an eye, the worm spit out some kind of slimy, white feelers that looked like the tentacles of a jellyfish. The feelers wrapped all around his hands and up his arms. He screamed.

  “First rule in my class; if I wear gloves, you probably should, too.”

  The rest of the class consisted of us going over ingredients. Some of them were normal, like lavender, while some of them were more bizarre than the scream-worm. When he handed me a frog’s tongue, I asked where the rest of the frog was and he responded that he had a French lunch.

  I knew three things as I walked out of the classroom: Professor Langril was insane, not all five of my fellow classmates would make it out uninjured, and this was going to be fun.

  I had an hour before my last class of the day began. I knew there were books and supplies I needed to get, but I planned to acquire those later. Oddly, there was hardly anyone out of class, as it seemed like this was a very busy time of day. I decided to try to find Hunt in order to ask him for more details of the assignment.

  Unfortunately, my map didn’t show me where Hunt’s office was. None of the students I asked could tell me either. One C-Four was particularly unhelpful. “You won’t find the headmaster on a map. You can only find him by looking for him.”

  “Okay, then which way do I go?”

  “Any way is fine. It doesn’t make any difference which direction you go.”

  I decided that up was as good a direction as any, so I made my way up every stairway I could find. One stairway had every other step missing, but I made it fine. This led to a circular, three-level library that could impress the hell out of any bibliophile.

  I didn’t find anyone in the library and there was no door to any other rooms or hallways, so I went back down the stairs. I tried the next set of steps I came to, but it stopped right in the middle of the air, about twenty feet high.


  Eventually, I found myself alone in a much more sinister part of the building. Worse, I was completely lost. The hallway was dark with a doorway on each end as well as to either side of me. No matter which door I took, it was to a hallway that was exactly the same. I picked one end of the hallway and went through the door. I didn’t stop and went straight through to the next door… and the next. There was no end.

  I wouldn’t panic. Nothing ever came from panicking. This was a school; someone had to find me eventually. Maybe after I was dead, but someone would eventually find me… unless I got eaten.

  Shit. Five thousand a week isn’t enough.

  Then I smelled something odd, which I instantly recognized as seaweed. It wasn’t a bad scent, just unexpected, so I followed it to one of the side doors. I opened it and found an office. The fragrance of seaweed was gone and although I saw nobody in the room, I heard something.

  This was what I thought an alchemist’s study would look like. Every inch of every wall was taken up by bookshelves, which contained not only thick volumes of heavy, old books, but also beakers, vials, and cases. There were three solid tables, all piled high with similar items. In one table was a built-in sink. It looked like a mad scientist’s secret lair.

  The noise I heard was made by a small glass ball, only about six inches wide, filled with what appeared to be dirt, ash, and herbs. That in itself wouldn’t have caused me to look twice at it, except the damn thing was rolling around on the ground in a perfect circle with a diameter of about five feet.

  After a few minutes of gawking at it, my instincts told me to stop it. Cautiously, as if it would explode, I reached out my foot and stepped lightly on it, forcing it to halt. In that instant, a man appeared in front of me, which startled me into stepping back. The ball resumed its path and the man vanished.

  I circled around it, looking for mirrors or strings, but never stepped inside the ring. This is what I get for dealing with magic. I stopped the ball with my foot again, and again, the man appeared.

  “Please don’t let it go!” the man rushed to say. He had a slight German accent.

  He was a scruffy looking man; six-foot, thin, ginger, with too much facial hair. His hair was unkempt, but his facial hair was somewhere between, “haven’t been out of the house for a month,” and “lost in the forest for who knows how long.” He wore a robe, like the other teachers, but his was steel-gray and thicker. Beneath it, he had on a black sweater and pants.

  “Where did you just appear from?”

  “I’ve been right here since I was trapped. I don’t know when, I don’t know by who. Please, just don’t let it go.”

  “I have class in less than five minutes and I can’t show up kicking a ball around.”

  He breathed heavily with desperation. “Pick it up and set it somewhere.”

  Although I had absolutely no reason to trust him, I picked up the sphere. It was very light. When I set it in the sink so that it couldn’t roll out, the man rushed forward and hugged me. I tried not to gag at the cloud of odor around him that was a strange mixture of cat and vinegar. Once he let me go, he dashed around the room and fussed over the clutter. He wasn’t cleaning anything; he would just pick something up and set it back down.

  “How long have you been trapped in here?”

  “Oh… um… what day is it?”

  “September first.”

  “Then… three days.”

  “September first, 2014.”

  “Oh… then more than three days.”

  “Do you need me to call someone for you? A therapist maybe?” He wasn’t listening anymore, so I opened the door to leave.

  I was now in a crowded hall. I closed the door cautiously behind me, pulled the map out of my bag, and asked the nearest student where we were. “Right here,” he said, pointing out a hallway very close to my next class. I looked behind me…

  The door was gone.

  * * *

  I checked my watch and rolled my eyes. History of North American Magic was a two-hour class and forty-five minutes into it, there was no teacher in sight. Unlike in my last class, I had thirty-seven classmates, all of who made idle chitchat, drew, or read to pass the time. I was growing increasingly impatient, as it irritated me when people were not where they said they would be when they said they would be there. Furthermore, I was not here to attend classes but to do my job.

  Just as I stood to leave, April Nightshade entered. “Why are you late?” I asked as she went to the front of the room. Whereas the other professors all wore dress clothes under their wizard robes, she had on a bright blue button-up blouse over a black leather, pleated skirt.

  “To see who would put up with it.” She looked around the room in obvious disbelief of having any students left.

  “You were going to flunk anyone who left?” one student asked.

  “No. I was going to flunk anyone who stuck around, but since you all stayed, I’ll have to settle for calling you all morons.”

  Class dragged on slowly. Professor Nightshade reluctantly explained every detail of the syllabus and what we would need for class. Our required textbook was written in a foreign language and in her words, ridiculously boring, so she said not to get it. When it was finally over, most of my classmates looked as drained as I felt.

  At dusk, I made my way to the lake, because I knew Remington wasn’t going to give me a break. I could see the scowl on her face from the castle. She was still beautiful, even seething, which made no sense to me. If a woman’s scowl was meant to display her displeasure, it should have made her hideous enough to scare any man away.

  At least Regina’s scowl could. Of course, Regina’s smile would scare any sane man away. Not me, though; I married her.

  “Are you always late?” Remington asked.

  I looked pointedly at the sun peeking over the horizon. “Define ‘dusk’ for me.”

  “You realize I can flunk you, right?”

  “I do.”

  “What is your job, Devon Sanders? I have not seen a single sign of any kind of talent out of you that would have called for my father letting you in this school.”

  “I guess I’m just lucky. Speaking of your father, I need to know where his office is.”

  “It doesn’t matter where his office is; you will find him if he wants you to find him. Now, you will spend every spare moment of your time outside of class to study the correspondence of water. I will check the libraries randomly and I had better see you there. We will meet back here this time next week.”

  * * *

  I made it to the dining room just in time to grab a tray of food before they shut down for the night. The only students left were four young women who were studying over their food. I ate quickly and put up my tray.

  Work was my job; I did it because I was good at it and I was paid well. Being an investigator wasn’t my life, but I really didn’t have a life outside of work. After divorcing Regina, I had little choice but to cut out everyone as well as most of my preferred hangout spots. My close friends had all been chased away by Regina when I married her and all I had left were “our” friends, who demanded I forgive her for cheating on me.

  Even if the magic was fascinating and the teachers were insane, I had a job to do. I wandered the halls and concentrated on finding Hunt. Really? I’m hunting for Hunt. Distracted by the interesting structure of the building, I almost missed the soft sound of talking. I opened the heavy door to my right and found myself in an office.

  I called it an office because there was a large desk with a few chairs and a black leather couch. To the right of the desk was a huge fireplace. Across from the fireplace were two bookshelves that were split by a doorway. This was where the sound was coming from, so I went to the doorway.

  It was a smaller, private library, with wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a single table in the center. Logan Hunt stood at the table, facing away from me, and was talking into a large iron bowl. He wasn’t speaking English, but exactly what it was or what
he said, I had no idea. After a moment, the headmaster stopped his foreign speech and set the bowl down.

  “Come on in, Devon,” he said, not looking at me. He waved his hand slowly over the bowl and the contents were engulfed in a strange blue fire.

  Even without consulting my Deciphering Creepy Wizard Magic for Dummies handbook, I knew blue fire wasn’t a good thing. Maybe he is just burning ethanol.

  With a gesture of one arm, he indicated the books surrounding us. “What do you think of my little collection?”

  I took a moment to study the books as he left the room. Next to massive volumes of physics and mathematics were occult classics and ancient, leather bound grimoires. He was gone only a couple of minutes before returning with a decanter and two glasses on a tray. The stuff he poured into my glass was quite close to scotch, but wasn’t; though it was strong and good.

  “You have alcohol on school premises, Headmaster Hunt?”

  “This is a university, not a preschool. Any books you recognize?”

  “Only a few names. It’s a bibliophile’s dream,” I said. “Quite a range of topics, too; works on mathematics and physics next to a book on how to hex your enemies with a dead chicken. With a little bit of everything else in between.”

  “Ah. Then you put your faith in the arms of science, not in the arts of magic?”

  “Of course. I mean, I’ve picked up enough about religion and magic to be able to appreciate the philosophical and psychological meaning behind it, but physical reality relates to what is physically real. That’s where science comes in.”

  The headmaster smiled. “The difference between the objective and the subjective? Which is reality?”

  He sat his half empty glass aside. Not on anything. Just aside. In the air. About four inches above the surface of the table. Four inches. Above.