Poor girl still didn’t deserve this.
There was a step behind her. Gia appeared on her left, casually eating a hot dog.
“Aren’t they supposed to burst into flames or fall into a pile of ash?” Diana asked.
“That’s only in the sun,” her sister replied.
Diana wrinkled her nose. “Then can I just toast it now?”
Mouth full, Gia nodded.
Grateful to be rid of the body, Diana called her power, forming a fireball between her hands. She closed her fingers, pinching to divide the sphere in two, one for the torso and one for the head. Flicking her wrists, she sent them downward.
Once the flames caught, she gave herself a little fire bath. The blaze burned off the vamp’s mystery slime while leaving her leather clothes intact.
“Do I still have slime on me?” she asked.
“No, you’re all good now,” Gia said, checking her back.
Her shoes had not fared as well. Diana wrinkled her nose and kicked a little bit of burning scalp she’d missed off her boot before turning her attention to the katana.
She ran a few licks of flame over the blade until all the residue burned off, before wiping it on her sleeve.
“So tell me again why I couldn’t use my firepower to kill the revenant? Not that I don’t love Mr. Sharp and Pointy,” she added, caressing the weapon lovingly before slipping it into the scabbard strapped to her back.
Gia took a dainty last bite of her hot dog before tossing the cardboard box in a nearby recycling bin and holding out a sack to Diana. “It’s instinctive to fall back on our Elemental talent, but you have to remember you have options when fighting. Anything is a weapon. This is especially true in your case. You can superheat many things. Phones can be melted in someone’s pocket or rigged to explode in someone’s face.”
“That is an awesome idea!” Diana was going to have to try that at the earliest opportunity. Mulling the possibilities, she fell in step beside her sister, opening the bag. Inside, she found another hot dog carton and some great-smelling doughnuts in a greasy white snack.
A dessert-first kind of person, Diana picked a doughnut out of the sack and bit into it. Fruit filling escaped and hit the pavement.
“Good choice. I’ve been dreaming about apple pie for the last two nights,” she said before inhaling the hot dog. “Although I’m still surprised whenever you get junk food.”
Meals in Gia’s home and in those of her relatives had always been extensive affairs. Gia herself was a gourmet cook, which fit the image Diana had of her, unlike the hot dog.
The Earth Elemental was the picture of elegant and austere reserve. Even humans, who had no idea what she was, instinctively deferred to her in ways they found hard to explain later. Even the hot dog vendors felt a need to pay homage. This meal had been free.
“You should always try the regional dishes when you’re on the job. It keeps things interesting. Plus, you need the calories as fuel, literally.” Gia squinted at the dog in Diana’s hand. “The vendor said this had been dragged through the garden, but I don’t see any soil on this.”
Diana hid her smile. Of course the Earth Elemental wouldn’t be fazed by the thought of eating dirt. “I don’t think that’s what they mean by that. Are we done here?”
Gia glanced at the smoldering remains. No one would be able to tell that the smoking pile had once been human shaped. “Yes, we’re finished. Next stop, the Everglades. But you’ll be going alone this time.”
Diana stopped short, her heart picking up speed. “My first solo mission?”
The Earth Elemental turned and put a hand on Diana’s shoulder. “It’s time. You took out a rogue shifter last week and a revenant tonight without my help. Your spell craft is on par with the last Fire Elemental, and your ability to read auras is definitely stronger. I believe you can hold your own now. Supervision has become superfluous.”
Diana wanted to dance around, but she didn’t want to embarrass herself in front of her sister. “So what am I doing?” she asked, trying to keep her tone casual. “Taking out another vamp? Some rogue witches?”
“There’s a pack of carrion-eating fae that are behaving oddly.”
Diana’s shoulders slumped. “Carrion feeders?”
Why couldn’t her first solo case be something a little more exciting, like taking on ice goblins in Antarctica or maybe a voodoo priestess gone bad? This case was a total softball.
Gia read her expression, throwing an arm around her. “I know you’re disappointed but trust me, anything to do with the fae has to be handled with care. They can be a tricky lot.”
Diana had heard the warnings many times before. In her opinion, the truly dangerous fae were members of the court, but the “fair folk” came in all shapes and sizes. Many were deadly. Carrion eaters, however, didn’t rank on that list.
“Do you know what’s going on with them?” It wasn’t often they were drafted to intervene with lower-caste fae.
“No, I don’t have details yet. But there are consistent ripples in the balance over their territory.”
Diana nodded. Most of the time, they were flying blind on a case until they went to investigate. She and her sisters would be alerted to disturbances in the balance via ripples in the aether. Death and mayhem would shift it, alerting them that action needed to be taken. That was how the Mother had designed the system. Elementals were charged with maintaining that balance at all costs. They also enforced the Covenant, a set of rules all Supernatural species had to abide by in order to keep their power and abilities. Violations of the Covenant were usually the cause of these shifts to begin with, although human crimes were starting to give them a run for their money.
Diana wasn’t as good as her sisters at detecting shifts in the balance—not yet. Only the largest and bloodiest of tragedies made it onto her radar, but she was practicing. Her skills were improving. She was already an excellent lie detector. It helped that most species fluctuated their body temperature when lying. She was very sensitive to those minor changes.
“When do I leave?” she asked.
Gia looked at the sky, signaling the approach of their Air Elemental sister. “Now-ish.”
Diana took a deep breath as a current surrounded her. It took an effort of will to let her physical body go, but she trusted her sisters. With a barely audible pop, her body dissolved. Her essence was pushed and picked up by the wind until she was lifted by an updraft. A heartbeat later, she was streaking across the sky.
Chapter 3
Diana picked her way through the swamp glade. She’d been in this godforsaken marsh for two days, looking for the nest of the carrion-eating fae, the Tic-Tic’s.
Fat lot of good that had done. The nest the Tic-Tic’s called home appeared to have been abandoned weeks ago. She trudged through the shallow muddy water, picking her way around tree roots and rocks not visible on the surface.
Where are those little f-ers?
To her right, a large crocodile hissed and gaped his jaws at her. “You wanna go right now?” Diana asked it testily. “Cause I’m in the mood to rumble.”
Not that the beast would charge her. Even the water snakes were giving her a wide berth. Her short temper was starting to make the water around her feet steam. The local wildlife had taken note.
The croc swung its head from side to side and backed away.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Diana grumbled as she climbed the bank to solid ground.
She needed to reassess and start over again. The freaky little fae weren’t at home, but they needed to eat. In fact, that was the whole problem.
The carrion eaters normally made do with the critters that croaked in their swampy vicinity, but the pack that lived in this part of the Everglades had stepped up their game. They had started stealing corpses from local mortuaries.
Technically, stealing corpses wasn’t a violation of the Covenant. But getting caught was. And the thefts hadn’t gone unnoticed by the human community. The story had been the top
headline of the evening news last night. The media was speculating that a series of disappearances in the vicinity were related.
They were.
That was the real reason Diana had been summoned here. At least two men and one woman had gone missing in the last week. All had been tourist types exploring the Everglades on vacation on their own. And those three were the only ones who’d made the news. Doubtless, there were more.
Disappearances in national parks were not uncommon. The stories got little press. Local state and federal agencies responsible for the public lands didn’t even keep track of who went missing. Anyone looking for hard numbers hit a wall.
Diana didn’t know if the blind spot was intentional or not. Public lands were moneymakers. Why track the missing when it would put a damper on tourism? Especially when the party in question was most likely to blame—they would say the hiker was too inexperienced for that trail or they must have been one of the unlucky few who ran into a predator.
If only they knew how often the last was true…but the predators weren’t always wolves or bears. Some were Supes.
Cities were the favored hunting ground of vampires. However, shifters and fae preferred rural or forested places to find their quarry.
While Diana normally didn’t mind the great outdoors, she’d quickly decided she wasn’t a fan of swamps. Next time, I’m going to commandeer an airboat like the ones in the Swamp Thing movie.
Cheered by the thought of racing through the marsh, she nearly tripped when the mossy soil rippled in front of her.
Oh. Apparently, Gia was coming to get a report of her progress. Diana swallowed hard, trying to mask her disappointment. She hadn’t been able to get through her first solo mission without her older sister feeling compelled to check on her.
She waited for the Earth Elemental to emerge from the ground—full of motherly advice and helpful suggestions on how to proceed. But Gia’s dark head didn’t materialize, nor did the ripple in the earth widen. It stayed small, and something yellow and shiny appeared in the center.
Diana picked up the gold nugget in awe, remembering when this had happened to Gia. Her sister’s words echoed in her ear. The Mother provides for us. How else would we be free to do our jobs?
She was very glad no one was around because the tears stinging her eyes were definitely going to escape this time.
After her mother’s death, Diana had been on her own. There had been some lean times. Even when in foster care, she hadn’t received regular meals. She’d started stealing, then. The day she had snagged her first burrito had been a turning point. Now gold and jewels literally appeared at her feet.
Diana wiped her cheeks. Tossing the nugget into the air, she caught it and put it in her pocket. She began to hum as she turned left, toward civilization.
Somewhere, there was an airboat with her name on it. She might even pay for it if the rental place accepted gold.
Chapter 4
It had taken the better part of the day, but Diana had finally found the Tic-Tic’s. A little detective work had narrowed her search to local bayou watering holes, places where humans went to get drunk and sloppy.
The three humans who had gone missing in the last week had all spent an evening drinking at The Water’s Edge, a colorful dive bar a short walk from one of the Everglade boat-touring outfits. As far as she could tell, no one had seen them after their evening here, so this must have been the place they’d been snatched from.
Diana put her bright hair under a trucker’s hat and scoped out the clientele from a corner table. The space was loud and bright for the most part, but with so much alcohol flowing, it wasn’t a mystery how the abrupt disappearance of a single patron didn’t register. Even three unremarked disappearances in a week didn’t seem out of the question now that she’d seen the place.
Due to promotions like the five-dollar catfish and the ten-dollar bucket of beer, the place was crowded. Locals and tourists mixed under the old-fashioned string of Christmas lights that were apparently kept up year-round.
After realizing this was her best chance to track the Tic-Tics, Diana had parked her airboat around the river’s bend. The fae were sure to take their victims back to the swamp. They’d probably established a new nest deeper in the Everglades. The high concentration of wildlife had thrown off Diana’s tracking abilities.
She had been staking out this place since dusk. So far, she hadn’t noticed anything suspicious, but the steady string of sweaty men trying to hit on her had periodically distracted her.
Diana had been unaware of the unspoken rule that a woman in a bar alone meant she wanted company. It was a new experience for her. Uncertain on how to handle it, she tried to call on her magic. A little obfuscation spell would be helpful. Unfortunately, she couldn’t remember the last refrain of the verse before another, and by far the largest, man came up to her.
He handed her a beer and sat down in the empty chair next to her. “Hi, sugar. My name’s Leon. Wanna dance?”
Diana set the beer on the table. Pulling her sweet tea closer, she pushed the bottle back at him and narrowed her eyes, scanning him. He was a shifter. No murders stained his aura, but he was still trouble. That much was obvious.
She leaned forward, putting her elbows on the table. When she called the fire, she only let the flames light her eyes from within. “I’m waiting for someone,” she told him as she settled back and picked up her drink.
Behind her cup, Diana had to bite her lip to keep from laughing aloud at the look of horror that crossed his face.
Leon knew what she was. Most shifters did. In fact, all the non-human species were aware of her kind. Elementals were the bogeymen of the preternatural world. He was gone before she finished swallowing her tea. Smiling, she rose to pick up the chair he’d knocked over in his rush to leave, tucking it tight under the table so no other man would decide to take his place.
It’s a facie celare, not a celo. That was how the last verse of the obfuscation spell went. Feeling downright cheerful, she ordered a second tea and waited for her fish and chips to arrive before repeating the incantation in its entirety.
The spell wouldn’t make her invisible, but people would just sort of not notice her. The waiter would know she was there, but his eyes would skip over her—which would have made getting her meal considerably more difficult had she done it beforehand.
After another hour, Diana decided stakeouts were the most boring part of missions. She was starting to regret the obfuscation spell, too. Her iced tea could have used a refill. She was debating sneaking behind the bar to fetch it herself when a skeletal-looking woman walked in the door.
The newcomer looked about fifty. A lot of leathery tight skin was on display under a skimpy yellow dress. The bright color contrasted with her darkly tanned skin, and not in a good way.
The tinkle of too many gold bracelets filled the air as the woman waved to the bartender. Everything about her screamed cougar on the prowl, but Diana could see deeper. It was a fae in disguise.
The woman was greeted warmly by the staff behind the bar and a few of the regulars who seemed stapled to their stools. No one else seemed to notice the abnormally tight facial expression or too-wide mouth. If they did, they probably wrote it off as a case of too much Botox or a bad facelift.
The plastic surgery boom, and subsequent fails, had been a godsend to the lower fae. People still reacted when they saw an oddly proportioned man or woman, but they no longer chased them out of town with torches. They didn’t realize it was a failed glamour.
This disguise was so bad it was making Diana sad. She finished her meal with one eye on the wannabe cougar. The female fae wasn’t even hiding her interest in the exceptionally drunk frat boys who’d arrived shortly before her. The drunker and louder the group got, the closer the cougar scooted her chair to them, making sure to display her long, lean legs in the process.
Diana shuddered, the resemblance to a spider too strong for her to ignore. But the bartenders and staff just seemed amus
ed by the woman’s interest. The cougar costume was genius camouflage in this respect.
I bet they wouldn’t smile at her like that if they knew she was eating their patrons…
A few minutes later, the crone rose from her seat, her eyes hungrily tracking a well-built young man from the frat-boy group. Diana dropped the obfuscation spell and grabbed her leather jacket, hurrying to follow the crone out to the row of outdoor sheds that housed the portable toilets The Water’s Edge used as bathrooms.
When the drunk frat boy exited, the cougar stopped him. Diana heard the high, cracked voice asking for help with a stuck car door.
In this selfish age, Diana half expected the request to be rudely spurned. But unfortunately for him, the frat boy had been raised right. He dutifully went with the woman to a big Cadillac, kneeling to examine the lock.
It only took a few seconds for the crone to open the door with enough force to knock the boy out. Diana winced, feeling the reverberation of the metal panel meeting the guy’s head in her teeth. That is going to hurt in the morning.
Despite the loudness of the bang, she doubted anyone in the bar could hear it over the music. The crone was struggling to fit the large boy in the backseat when Diana belatedly recognized the flaw in her plan.
The Tic-Tic wasn’t dragging her victim to the swamp. Damn. It was going to drive away.
Wait. Didn’t the fae have an aversion to iron? They couldn’t bear to touch it—and steel was made of iron. Didn’t that make cars literal death traps for them? By that logic, how could one of them drive?
The Cadillac engine started. It began to pull away from the spot. Shit. Apparently, Tic-Tic’s were an exception to the iron rule.
Her airboat was not going to work for this chase. Hurrying over to the other side of the parking lot, she hopped onto a motorcycle parked behind the trash bins.
Discordia: An Elemental’s Prequel Page 2
