Elemental Earth (Paranormal Public)

by Edwards, Maddy

  We hadn’t taken more than two steps when something came whooshing down the stairs. I pressed to one side just as Lisabelle let out a string of curses.

  “Who said they could have a black ghost?” she yelled in frustration. I had never heard of such a thing.

  “Can I kill this one?” Sip demanded. She must have transformed back into human form behind us.

  “Yeah, sure, let me know how getting your jaws around a ghost goes,” said Lisabelle.

  “Charlotte, can you use the wind to blow it away?” Sip changed course.

  I nodded, thinking it would be nice to blow some of the stench away while I was at it. But I’d have to be careful. Massive gusts of wind coming through the stairs might tip off other guards, like Happiness Officers, and I could only easily use the wind that was already there anyway.

  “What’s a black ghost?” I asked.

  “Highly illegal,” Lisabelle said angrily, “that’s what it is. Golden Falls clearly thinks they’re above paranormal law.”

  I had never heard Lisabelle use that tone before. She might flout authority, but apparently there were some lines you did not cross.

  The black ghost was fighting both me and the air I was trying to use to get rid of it, and we had to stop on the stairs. I was trying to use the wind to pin it to the wall, but there wasn’t enough to do the job.

  Lisabelle stepped forward and jammed her ring into the center of the ill-defined blob that we knew was the ghost. It couldn’t really be called a body, it was more a collection of tattered robes. Suddenly flames shot out of Lisabelle’s hand, entirely consuming the black form. It didn’t scream, there was just a strange sucking noise as it burned to bits.

  Sip and I stared at Lisabelle, all our faces illuminated by the fire. She pulled her hand away from the barren wall. I could just see it. There were no marks.

  Lisabelle dusted her hands off.

  “You and fire are getting pretty chummy,” Sip observed. “Just keep it out of our dorm room.”

  Lisabelle rolled her eyes. “You should be happy. In the winter we have our own personal heat source.”

  “The party’s on Saturday,” said Sip sarcastically.

  “A hellhound, a black ghost, what’s next?” I asked.

  What else did Golden Falls have to hide?

  Chapter Eighteen

  As we moved further up the stairs, Sip transformed into a werewolf and went first. Lisabelle and I let her, because I was pretty sure that whatever came at us next, Sip was going to deal with it.

  “We have to stop going up eventually,” I muttered. My legs had started to burn from all the stairs, and the strange, tangy smell was getting worse. I hated being in the dark, especially when we kept getting attacked.

  I heard a step and a growl, and then there were demons. They poured out in front of us so fast that Sip didn’t even have time to lunge at them. They just kept coming, shoving us backwards down the narrow stairs. I fell awkwardly, twisting my ankle. A small cry escaped my lips.

  But in the end, the battle was over quickly. Sip, Lisabelle and I called to our rings. The bursts of power that went off around us were strong and deadly. I wondered what it meant that I was most comfortable with the killing powers, but I didn’t want to think about that when my life was at risk. There were sparks of light that illuminated dry and dirty walls, black with neglect. The demons cried out and died.

  Afterward, my legs shaky, I sat down on the cold steps. My ankle was throbbing.

  Lisabelle sighed and sagged against the wall. “Let’s hope they had three guards and not six. I don’t know if we can keep this up all night without getting caught.”

  Sip transformed back into human form. Her eyes were flinty as she said simply, “Let’s go.”

  Somewhere behind us I thought I heard footsteps, but when I paused to listen there was nothing.

  Sip marched up the stairs, with Lisabelle and I trailing behind. It was slow going for me. With each step my ankle hurt more, not less. By tomorrow I wasn’t going to be able to walk at all.

  The air was so cold I folded my arms and hugged my chest. Our breath puffed out in little dark gray clouds in front of our faces.

  The stairs ended in a small landing, after which there was a hallway with a set of black double doors. Over the doors was a single yellow light.

  “Whoever they had decorate the nice part of Golden Falls they should bring up here,” Sip commented. “It could use sprucing.”

  “Maybe they’ll hire you and you can do it in neon,” said Lisabelle.

  “That would be too good to be true,” said Sip sadly.

  As we walked up to it I read, above the door, “Return to the silence of the earth, the only place where there is truly a natural peace.” Just above that in larger letters was a sign that said, “Medical Wing.”

  “Ew,” said Sip, shuddering.

  Lisabelle moved past both of us and braced her hand on the door. I watched her fingers curl around the metal and her arm strain from pulling. The door didn’t budge.

  Sip and I moved to either side of her, adding our strength to hers. I started to pull and felt my muscles strain from the effort.

  “It won’t budge,” said Lisabelle through gritted teeth.

  “Let me try,” said Keller’s voice from behind us. I let out a startled cry and nearly toppled over. I only managed not to fall by hanging onto the door. I guess the footsteps I had heard behind us hadn’t been my imagination.

  Keller stood there in dark jeans and a black hoodie. He looked like he was dressed for mischief. He also looked really good. So good, in fact, that I almost forgot that he was mad at me. And now I knew he had good reason not to trust Nolan. Nolan was a Golden Falls student, after all.

  Keller didn’t look at me as he came forward. The three of us scattered.

  “How’d you find us?” Lisabelle asked, her tone more curious and impressed than annoyed.

  Keller examined the door, a single dark lock of hair falling over his forehead as he bent forward.

  “I was looking for Charlotte,” he said, his voice low. “When I went to the suite and she wasn’t there, I just followed the path of destruction.”

  “They have black ghosts,” said Lisabelle, as if that explained everything.

  Keller looked at her sharply.

  “My aunt didn’t think they were doing anything illegal here,” he said. “She’ll be surprised to learn how wrong she was.”

  Now he looked at me for the first time. “Do you think you can get word to Dacer if you have to?”

  I chewed my lower lip, surprised that he thought it was as serious as all that. Now that he had met my eyes, I almost wished he hadn’t. He was upset, but he was here. That had to count for something.

  “I think so,” I said softly. “I’ll certainly try, if you want.”

  “I want,” he said, nodding curtly and looking back at the door, his blue eyes softening when they were no longer watching me. A large ball of hurt lodged in my gut, and I wondered what, if anything, was going to be able to dislodge it.

  Keller put his hand on the doorknob. “I thought your uncle taught you how to pick locks,” he said to Lisabelle. She glared at him. We all knew she hated it when she couldn’t do something.

  “He did,” she said. “I guess I just couldn’t pick this one.”

  Keller nodded. “They knew that if someone broke in here they’d be expecting something complicated, so they went the opposite route - they did something incredibly simple. They also did it a long time ago, before some of the newer, fancier stuff came out.”

  I held my breath. All eyes were trained on Keller and the door.

  His ring pulsed and pulsed again. One more pulse and I heard a clicking sound. The door started to swing open, but he caught it before it could open all the way. The stench from whatever was behind the doors hit us like a slap in the face.

  Keller looked at each of us as he held the door open. I was sure he was trying not to breathe, or maybe he was using his fallen
angel powers to heal the air around his nose, if that was possible. The smell was so bad I wanted to lie down on the floor and crawl away, but instead I met Keller’s eyes.

  “Are you sure you want to go though there?” he asked. “We can still turn back.”

  “Why would we do back after we came this far?” Sip demanded, bracing her fists on her hips and giving Keller her patented glare.

  “Because nothing that we find in there will uncomplicate our fight against the Nocturns. Nothing in there will make this easier, and nothing in there will bring Kia back.”

  “We aren’t looking to bring her back,” Lisabelle said darkly, “we’re looking to find out who really did it. Do you forget that they have Vanni?”

  Keller ran his fingers through his hair in frustration.

  Without another word he released the door and let it creak open, and we all peered through. It was just a small corridor, and at the end was another door. The light over the second door was dimmer, but I could already see that it was ajar.

  “What’s that noise?” Sip whispered. The smell was so bad my eyes were watering.

  “I really hope Kia isn’t here,” I said.

  Keller shook his head. “Zervos insisted that her body be sent to Public. He knew it couldn’t stay here, and I’m sure Oliva and the professors wanted it back with her family. I guess Zervos has at least that much power, because she’s gone.

  We moved down to the next door. Our footsteps were the only sound on the damp stone. I scarcely dared to breathe. Unlike with the first door, all Keller had to do was shove this one open. I guess they didn’t expect any intruder to make it this far.

  The stench hit me full in the face. Sip covered her mouth while Keller wrinkled his nose. Only Lisabelle looked unaffected, but her eyes had gone to a dull black as she took in what was in front of her. The dim light seemed filtered, and trying to see anything was almost like trying to look through a dirty window into a dark room, except that there was no glass between me and what I was seeing.

  Never in my wildest nightmares could I have imagined what was going on in the medical wing of Golden Falls University. Keller’s mouth was one thin line as his face went from surprised to revolted.

  “Wow,” Sip breathed, fear clear in every line of her body. Her eyes blinked rapidly and her hands were small fists at her sides. “It’s not a medical wing. It’s a laboratory.”

  All around us were metal tables. Lining the walls were jugs of strange-looking fluid, from black to yellow to blue and green. It was like a room for experiments.

  We spread out throughout the space. There was something like a very old and ratty rug covering parts of the floor. It was so dirty it looked black, and to make matters worse it was concentrating the stench of the room. Our footsteps were muffled as we walked across it.

  “I thought medical wings were supposed to be clean places,” said Sip despairingly.

  “It doesn’t look like they really use this one,” Lisabelle commented.

  The ceiling was low, and the filtered light came from candles against the wall and a fireplace in the center of the room. I didn’t really want to examine anything, I wanted to run back to the dormitory, pack my stuff, and make a break for it.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Funny, because in semesters past I had been held a prisoner, like with Daisy and Dobrov’s mother, whereas here, at Golden Falls, Sectar had not given us any restrictions. He had said that having the united goal of peace was restriction enough, whatever that meant.

  Sectar had merely encouraged us to trust each other and respect each other’s privacy - in order to avoid any discord. I had rather liked the sound of his philosophy.

  But a determination to avenge Kia, and the memory of what Faci had done to Vanni when she tried to leave Golden Falls and he caught her, had kept me going until I had come to this horrible place. It had propelled me to sneak out, and now it would propel me to find out what had happened to Kia, regardless of the horror.

  “What are they doing in here?” Sip whispered. “Paranormals don’t experiment on each other.” Horror was clear in her voice. She had gone over to a long metal table pushed against one wall, above which a series of candles had been lit. An array of instruments covered the table.

  I opened my mouth to answer her, then closed it without having said a word.

  “We’ll find out . . .” Keller trailed off. He was looking at something I was sure had once been alive. It was now preserved in a strange sort of tube.

  I didn’t even go over to look. There was something dark and cakey on the end of many of the instruments, and it could only be one thing. Lisabelle went over to Keller and they stood there, looking at one of the large glass cases with something floating inside it. Ignoring them as best I could, I headed for the center of the room. The only real light was there, coming from the fire pit. Since there was no ventilation in the room, it dawned on me that the fire must be magic.

  I watched the flames jump around, creating pools of hazy light. How could something so untamed and powerful be used for such evil? What burned in those flames?

  “So, this place is used for experiments,” Keller said softly at my elbow. I felt his arm brush mine and even now a prickle of heat worked its way through my body. “Or at least it was. I guess maybe that was a long time ago.”

  “If it was so long ago, why would Kia’s records be here?” Sip asked.

  “They don’t have anywhere else to put them?” I offered. “They don’t deal in murder, remember?” I just couldn’t stop thinking about Vanni.

  “Did it start when the old president gave his powers to Sectar?” I asked, just as softly. Somehow, disturbing the deadly purpose of the room felt wrong. I was afraid that if I spoke too loudly, demons would come shooting out of the walls and hellhounds would crash through the door. Why hadn’t I heard about any of this?

  Keller shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think it was before. Sectar isn’t a leader. He’s a follower. They’ve been having problems for years, but they wanted to keep it quiet. Golden Falls is world-renowned.”

  I bit my lower lip as I watched him touch one of the instruments gingerly. A frown creased his brow.

  “What is it?” I asked, wondering what else could possibly go wrong right now.

  “There are traces of fallen angel power here,” he said, touching another instrument with just his fingertips. “I can’t imagine why.”

  “Do you think they had Vanni up here?” I asked. He shook his head again. “No, it’s not Vanni. I would recognize that.”

  I tried not to bristle at that. It was okay for Keller to have friends. Kind of. I just wished they weren’t so pretty. Or, you know, female.

  “Can we just find Kia’s death records and get out of here?” said Sip on my other side.

  “You look kind of like a pixie right now,” I said, noting the greenish tint of her skin and how her hair looked brown in the light.

  Sip wrinkled her nose at me. “Ew.”

  “I’m still not sure I want to know,” I whispered. I just hoped it was quick. I hated to think of Kia suffering.

  “They’re probably over here,” said Lisabelle, pointing. She strode across the long room. Her black dress billowed around her and her head was held high. If she was so confident in what we were doing, maybe I could be as well.

  Against the far wall, opposite the door we had come through, was a set of floor-to-ceiling black cabinets made of some sort of wood. They looked like drawers that could be pulled out, and there were all sorts of papers stuffed inside them.

  Lisabelle stood there for a long time examining different drawers while the rest of us continued to stand in front of the fire. Her touch was careful and she didn’t move anything unless she had to.

  “Do you think they’ll know we were here?” I asked.

  “They’ll know someone was,” said Sip, “but they won’t know it’s us unless we do something stupid. We should be able to cover our tracks.”

  “Maybe they’ll t
hink it was Zervos looking for Kia’s stuff,” I said, rolling my shoulders, trying to work out some of the tension, “so that he could report to Oliva.”

  “I seriously wish we had never agreed to come here this semester,” said Sip mournfully. “Trying to find the objects on the Wheel was bad enough.”

  “Well, I can tell you one thing,” I said seriously, “there’s no way I’m letting Ricky apply to this place for college.”

  “Ricky would do this place some good,” said Lisabelle, “with all that sarcasm and stubbornness.”

  “Pot meet kettle,” said Sip, rolling her eyes at me.

  “Sip, in this light your hair looks brown,” I said thoughtfully. “You ever think about dying it? There’s a lot of potions and supplies in here.”

  Sip just glared at me as Lisabelle chuckled.

  “Here it is,” she said. She pulled out a thin black file that looked brand new and brought it over to us. We all crowded around her to read over her shoulder. She flipped open the folder and the rustle of paper reminded me that we were at a school, an institute of higher academic learning. Ha.

  The print was in a fine gold cursive. They probably didn’t have ink in any other color, I decided. I read it several times before it really sank in.

  Kia had not died painfully, which eased a bit of the tension in my chest. She had died instantly, from a fall of three stories, but it did not say from where. Images flashed though my mind of the pretty pixie falling through the air in a soundless scream. Had I been there the air would have caught us, like it did during the demon attack. It had not caught her.

  “She should have been able to save herself, though,” Sip mused, her voice tinged with sadness. “She was a pixie, and she always carried her dust. If she fell three stories, it was because she had already been stunned somehow.”

  “Where around here is there a place three stories off the ground anyhow?” I asked, looking at my friends.

  “It could have been through a window,” said Lisabelle, tapping her foot. “It probably doesn’t matter.”