“She’s possessed!” I cried. “That’s the only explanation.”
“What, you don’t think I could just have come to my senses?” Lisabelle taunted.
I stared at her in shock, knowing she didn’t mean it and hurting that she had said it anyway. That’s when I looked into her eyes again and decided that possessed might not be a strong enough term for whatever was churning inside her. Her eyes were on fire, literally blazing red. In her pale face, framed by her black hair and clothes, it was almost too much to take. She might not have been a demon when she left at the beginning of the summer, but she surely was one now.
“I dream of the day you listen,” said Keller, taking a flying leap and landing next to me.
“So much for shining dawn,” I muttered, looking out at the now dark sky.
Keller’s face fell further. “Aurum House had nothing to do with this,” he said, his eyes locked on Lisabelle. “We would protect you if we knew what we were protecting you from.”
“The fallen angels have stuck their head in the sand and not helped at all,” I said. “Lisabelle is like this because she was left to transport herself, without help from the only group of paranormals who can fly.”
I gestured at Keller’s thick dark wings, spanned from his back in all their glory. I loved seeing him like that, because it reminded me what hard work could achieve, and there was no one more deserving than Keller. At the moment, though, I had a bigger problem. I was about to try and kill my best friend.
“Let’s argue about that later,” said Keller.
Knowing he was right, I asked, breathing hard, “Is she possessed?”
He shook his head. “This isn’t classic demon possession, and to be honest, Charlotte, I’m not sure a demon could possess Lisabelle. There’s so much darkness in her the demon wouldn’t have much that was good to take over—maybe just her devotion to you and Sip, which has surprised literally everyone, even her—and otherwise the demon would simply bind to her darkness. I do think that if a demon did try to take her over she would tell it to shove it where the sun don’t shine.”
Keller chuckled at his own description of Lisabelle’s less than graceful manners.
“If she isn’t possessed by a demon, then what is wrong with her?” I was screaming and shaking as I formed the question. I couldn’t help it; there was no comfort to be found here.
“I don’t know,” said Keller, his voice and eyes troubled. They had melted into a deeply piercing blue, made brighter by sadness. Our friend was killing our friends. “Just distract her while I think of something.”
I didn’t stop to think. Lisabelle was collecting herself for a fresh attack. I threw myself at her.
I had had lots of nightmares over the past year when I would wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. When I had lived with Sip she would tumble out of her own bed to come and comfort me, but now that I lived in a place by myself I simply lay awake, willing my breathing to calm. He didn’t know it, but I almost always thought of Keller. Nothing that interesting or exhilarating, just something mundane and simple; that’s what happiness was, anyway. If you couldn’t enjoy the simple things with someone, what did you have? I wasn’t an adrenalin junky; I hoped I wouldn’t always be chasing demons as my life went on. But the nightmares of the President were the worst. I could barely contain my fear even in my own bed at night. Now that I stood in front of Lisabelle’s body possessed by someone else, I realized that fighting her would have been one of my nightmares if I had ever thought it was possible.
Not only was she a dear friend.
She was lethal.
Lisabelle Verlans could kill me. If she wanted to, she would win. It isn’t cowardice to admit when someone is better than you are, and Lisabelle was better than I was . . . the best.
The only thing I had going for me was the act of surprise, and the fact that no students can practice fighting elementals, because I’m it for elementals. Ha.
I hit Lisabelle in the chest, but she still managed to cry out as I slammed the air out of her lungs. We fell heavily to the ground and I lost track of everything else. As if from a great distance I heard someone yelling, probably Lough, but I had no idea what he was saying or what he wanted. Lisabelle and I were both grabbling for her wand, because if I could just get my hands on that, maybe I could at least not lose.
“Get off me,” Lisabelle gritted, her face grim.
“Not a chance,” I rasped.
“You can’t win this,” she said, breathing harder, but I refused to let go.
“What are we fighting for?” I asked, unsure.
Lisabelle’s smile was feral, like the wild animal Keller had said was always inside her.
“Immortality.”
She slammed upwards with a yell. I was so surprised I couldn’t hang on and went flying backwards. I didn’t stop rushing through the air until my back slammed into the nearest tree. With a sickening thud I felt my body impact, then sag. I tried and failed to keep myself upright. Well, you wouldn’t want to stay upright either if the strongest darkness mage at Public had just attacked you.
Keller moved to help, but Lisabelle slammed him in the side of the head with her hand. He crumpled to the ground.
Lisabelle was on me before I drew a breath. She moved unbelievably fast and I felt her ironclad hands around my throat.
Okay, the time for niceness was gone. This wasn’t Lisabelle. I hadn’t hurt her yet because I didn’t want to hurt my friend, but she wasn’t my friend, she was trying to kill me. I tried to pull my arms up to get her off me, but she had pinned them with her knees. I started to choke, knowing that what came next was blacking out.
Then Lisabelle was gone. With a yell something—someone—had yanked her backwards.
I coughed and looked gratefully at Lough.
“When this is all over can we tell her that she needs to be a less good fighter?” Lough panted as he squared off in a battle to the death with the love of his life.
“Sure, Lough,” I coughed. My lungs felt like they were filled with charcoal. “You tell her whatever you want.”
“We have to get that damn wand,” he said.
“Which wand?” Lisabelle asked nastily. “This wand?” She twirled it once and then lanced it at Lough.
I had never seen my chubby friend move so fast. One instant he was standing there looking like the perfect target and the next he was ducking and rolling.
“You should forget your job as a dream giver and do spy movies,” I called out to him.
“Do you think Lisabelle would like that?” he said, grinning despite the carnage around us. Even I could tell that at this point that was a joke.
“Nice to see you haven’t lost your sense of humor,” I retorted.
“Yeah, I’m just about to lose my head.”
I had to help him. Together we might be able to beat her.
Well, no, probably not.
But maybe contain her.
Keep her alive until we could figure out what was wrong with her.
But I wasn’t fast enough.
Lisabelle still had her knife. She stepped forward, pulling her arm, elbow first, backwards, then slashing downwards. Lough couldn’t move that fast twice and she got him on the arm. He cried out and fell backwards.
“Hey Lisabelle,” I called out. “Why don’t you pick on someone else for a minute?”
When Lisabelle turned, ready to do just that, I pulled out my ring. I loved my elemental ring. It was an essential part of me, one I couldn’t imagine losing.
I drove my hands outward, staring Lisabelle down. I felt my powers flow through me and greeted them gladly. I saw the change in me mirrored in Lisabelle. She could see my power flowing and my strength growing. I tried to keep my powers hidden most of the time, my guilt at being the only elemental and that I couldn’t do more overshadowing my growing strength. When I knew my bluish magic was about to burst out of me I slammed my hands forward. The burst of power crashed into Lisabelle’s shield. Her shi
eld held. I pulled the powers back and slammed them forward again. I could feel the fragments light on my face. A bit of wind here, a dash of water there. All encompassed in fire.
I was salt of the Earth and power of the air and some darkness mage wasn’t going to kill my friends and get away with it.
I slammed my power forward again. I was more aware of my surroundings now. I knew that Keller was helping Lough stop the bleeding from the gash on his arm, instead of going for help, and I knew that Lanca, Cale, and Dirr lay prone. I wasn’t sure if they were dead or alive. At the moment I didn’t want to know. If they were dead—if even ONE of them was dead—in this moment I might kill Lisabelle. I really might.
I pulled my magic away, but I had forgotten one thing. Somehow, Lisabelle still had that damned knife. It was too late for me to go back. I had already made my mistake. Unfortunately, it was a mistake that was about to cost me my life.
In the wonderful summer night I pulled my magic back from Lisabelle, preparing to lash her with it for a third time, but what I had not anticipated was her using that force against me.
I gasped as Lisabelle let her knife go. It hurtled toward my chest, point first.
Chapter Five
I woke up with a gasp. Sweat trickled slowly down the sides of my head, tinged with panic and fear. I felt dazed, like someone had smacked me over the head with one of Ricky’s baseball bats and I was still recovering. If Ricky had been there he would have said he’d be happy to smack me over the head. I started to smile, but the movement made my head throb.
I was in bed in Astra, where I had spent every night that summer. I was safe in my own room, drenched in more sweat than I would have thought my body could hold. Vaguely, I wondered if it had been raining inside. My head felt fuzzy and there was a dull ache in my limbs. Blearily I looked around, trying to convince myself that I was really there, that what I had just dreamed was really . . . a dream.
But something was imprinted in my mind, as surely as Ricky’s face. Darkness was coming. That’s what the dream said. Why, though, did Darkness have Lisabelle’s face?
The last thing I remembered was being stuck with a knife, like a pig. . . . Frantically, I looked down and yanked the covers lower on my body, then pulled my shirt up enough to show my tummy (that’s what my mom had always called it). There was no knife sticking out of my gut, so points for me and my sanity. My mother would have said this was one of my Worry Moments. Sometimes I would go to her, back when she was still alive, because I was freaking out about something ridiculous, something that was almost impossible, but that I was sure would happen anyway. Just my luck sort of thing. My mother would talk to me until I calmed down. Even though she had been gone for years now, it was still hard for me to think about her without sadness overwhelming me. It was even hard to hear my friends talk about their own mothers. Lisabelle’s mom might drive her crazy, but at least she was there to do so. I couldn’t go to my mother to talk about my best friend trying to stab me to death in a dream, and there wasn’t anyone else I felt I could go to either. It was definitely not a normal thought for a college sophomore, but then again I was anything but a normal college sophomore.
“You okay?” a familiar voice called out to me.
Mrs. Swan was the best dorm mother ever, mostly because she left me alone, but I didn’t want her worrying about me. She and I lived alone in Astra, since the dorm was for elementals and I was the only one left. I had once made the mistake of telling her not to worry, and she had laughed so hard she had fallen out of her chair, while my face went as red as a cherry.
“I’m fine,” I croaked. My throat felt dry and brittle, like sandpaper, and I stared harder at my stomach in the layers of darkness, trying to reassure myself that it was okay. It would have been weird if Mrs. Swan had walked in and seen me doing that, but I couldn’t help myself. I often did odd things, but my stomach was not a part of my body to which I ever gave much scrutiny.
“Goodnight then, and don’t forget, your friends get here tomorrow,” she yelled through the door in a cheery tone. The door muffled her clear voice, but I could still hear the undertone of worry. She wanted to come in.
I lay back and listened to her walk away down the hall. It didn’t take long for her footsteps to recede on the plush carpet outside my room. She knew when to let me be, which was good, because now was definitely a time when I wanted to be left alone. I had to think.
Had I just dreamed what I thought I had? Lisabelle going crazy and trying to kill all of her loved ones? It was a strange irony that Sip was the one she always argued with and Sip was the one missing from the dream. Sip would probably say it was poetic justice. Not even in a wild Lisabelle dream would Sip die.
“It was just a dream,” I murmured to myself. Over and over and over again. The words echoed like drumbeats, oddly reassuring. I clutched my soft dark blue blanket closer to my body, looking for reassurance.
Tomorrow everyone—Keller, Lisabelle, Sip, and Lough—would arrive, and the semester would start. I wasn’t even going to pretend that it would be a normal semester, because I knew it wouldn’t.
As the only elemental, I was aware of pressures that I wouldn’t have thought possible a year ago. Demons were everywhere trying to kill me, and the word throughout the summer had been that instead of the unorganized mass of darkness that they had always been, they were now organizing into a cohesive unit, whose head was the former President Malle.
Fear pulled at my heart as I thought about it.
“Charlotte, get a grip,” I ordered myself. I scrubbed my hands across my face, willing my heart to slow down. Lack of sleep wasn’t going to do me any favors. Dacer could always tell when I hadn’t slept; it made me just a little slower than usual. And I hated letting him down.
As I lay trying to sleep again I thought over every element of the dream. It had felt so real, I could feel the early evening sun on my skin at the beginning and Lisabelle’s eyes burning into me at the end. I shivered. Even the thought of those red eyes gave me chills. I couldn’t imagine anything so crazy.
I tried to sleep again, but I didn’t manage it. Normally I would have been upset that I wasn’t getting enough sleep, but tonight I wasn’t. At least I wasn’t dreaming.
Chapter Six
I woke the next morning to my bed bouncing violently. Beds didn’t bounce. They weren’t supposed to bounce unless stuff was going on in said bed that had certainly never gone on in mine. I opened one eye a crack. I must have fallen asleep at some point, because there in the bright shining sunlight of my room was a tiny blond head, and staring back at me were two huge purple eyes. Despite a vision blurred from sleep I knew exactly who had come to visit. Sip sat on my blue coverlet and I didn’t think I had ever been so happy to see someone sitting next to me.
I grinned. Sip lunged for me and we met somewhere in a tangle of blankets and laughter.
“Hey,” I said, pulling away. “Are you really here?”
I examined her face as she raised her eyebrows at me and said, “Yeah, I said I’d be here, so I’m here. Go figure.”
I must not have hid the worry on my face well, because she frowned and said, “What’s up?” Instead of answering her, I pushed my warm covers away and hauled myself out of bed. It felt strange to move. I must have been lying rigid from fear all night, because my muscles protested my efforts to get out of bed.
I dressed and motioned for Sip to follow me downstairs. Glancing in my mirror, which I had decorated myself with blue sea glass, I shrugged. Since I didn’t have class today, I just threw on a hoodie and jeans. Tomorrow, for the first day of classes, I’d make more of an effort. Probably. Sip was still confused, but she followed me anyway.
I was relieved that Mrs. Swan was nowhere to be seen. I loved that woman more every day, but if she had been there she would have seen the tiredness in my face, the dark circles under my wide, haunted gray eyes. I led Sip into the kitchen and rummaged around in the fridge until I had enough stuff for breakfast: wheat toast with homemad
e blueberry jelly, plus freshly squeezed orange juice (a reminder from Mrs. Swan that she wasn’t far away). Then I headed back upstairs. Sip followed me silently, looking more and more worried with each step.
When we got back to my room Sip couldn’t take it anymore.
“What is going on with you?” she demanded, crossing her arms over her chest and almost growling it out like only a tiny werewolf could. “Spill.”
Looking at my friend, I instantly felt better. I wanted to tell her, I needed to tell her everything. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so worried, because for all I knew Lisabelle was playing an elaborate practical joke, although that wasn’t Lisabelle’s style. Funny wasn’t her forte; she didn’t joke. So there was either something terribly wrong or she did intend to kill all of us. I just hoped it was the former. Didn’t I?
“Wow,” said Sip, sitting down after I had finished telling her everything about my dream. “That’s creepy and freakish. I’m surprised you dream about Lisabelle so accurately.”
“Yeah, you have no idea,” I said, taking another bite out of my breakfast.
“Have you ever dreamed of something like that before?”
“Nope,” I said, though it wasn’t technically true. My dreams had been getting darker over the summer months and had started to circle more around my friends, but I had assumed I was dreaming about them because I missed them, and that the content of the dreams was darker because there was a demon world that wanted to swallow me whole.
“I don’t think you should worry about it too much,” said Sip. “I have weird dreams all the time. The other day I dreamed I was a pixie. It was awful.”
I laughed. “When is everyone getting here?”
“They’re all coming together,” said Sip. “Lough, Lisabelle, and Keller will be here before dinner. They want us to meet them at the tree line.”
Relief washed over me. I didn’t want to go into the woods to meet them. It would be too similar to my dream.
Elemental Shining (Paranormal Public Series) Page 3
