She picked up a rusty scalpel with dried plant residue caked on the blade. “But now that I think about it, you were the one who brought him to the island in the first place. You were aware of the community’s traditions, the steps they take to continue the bloodlines. Dalasini had already started quietly searching for candidates when you brought Jordan—a strong talent, fresh and young and just the right age to be bonded to Serin.”
Gia narrowed her eyes. “What was he to you? I don’t believe he was your nephew.”
“Why don’t you think we’re related?” John seemed genuinely interested in her answer.
“Perhaps I’d like to think no one would screw over their own blood so badly. You know Serin executed him for what he did, right?”
It was as if a cloud passed over the sun—a momentary aberration. John’s face cleared, and he shrugged. “A slight miscalculation. I underestimated her. I thought she’d feel too guilty for failing to return his affections.”
He shuffled a few Petri dishes around, presumably to continue counting seeds.
“You didn’t share a drop of blood.” If there had been a chance for John’s line to mingle with an Elemental one, he wouldn’t have risked everything this way.
“No, those days are long over for me,” John admitted. “Jordan was just a poor orphaned teen, very talented and personable. I took him under my wing.”
“But your mentorship only went so far. You set him up, playing on his dissatisfaction until he joined you in betraying us.”
John tsked. “Betrayal is such a strong word. I merely wanted to expand my horizons, test a few limits. But the archivists and you ladies are so protective of your powers.”
Gia felt like screaming. “We freely shared our knowledge with you. You lied and stole from us. The worst part is you didn’t have to. The archivists gave you carte blanche with our records. They would have let you borrow whatever you wanted, but that wasn’t enough for you.”
His eyes widened. “I appreciated that, but I came to the realization there was no point to it all.”
“What the hell are talking about? You had access to the most advanced magic repository in the world, yet you threw it away and for what?”
She waved to the sad basement laboratory. “So you can mix up poisons capable of killing all Supes or to continue that pathetic pursuit of all alchemists—searching for the philosopher’s stone?”
John laughed. “My dear, I don’t have to do that. I found the secret to eternal life long ago.”
Her vaunted self-control was cracking under the strain. She expelled a frustrated breath. “So, you’re just mad… Is it congenital or were you driven insane?”
“Neither, of course. But I don’t pay the skeptics any mind. Not anymore. You see, all I have to do it wait…all the naysayers eventually die off. It’s a numbers game. “
He waved dismissively, but there was an unwholesome excitement just below the surface. Joyful glee animated his features. “My child, I’m far older than you could ever imagine.”
He leaned back as if they were enjoying a coffee in the sun. “I’ve had so many names I’ve forgotten some of them. But you’ve heard of a few of my more notable ones. Children learn them in school. Newton, for one. He’s a great favorite. There are so many societies devoted to me under that name. Then there was the stint for her Highness Queen Elizabeth when I first used the name John. It was so simple and utilitarian I decided to use it again and again over the years.”
Gia resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Of course he was claiming to be John Dee. The occult astrologer was a go-to for mad megalomaniac practitioners. She couldn’t count the number of times she’d stripped or killed a John Dee. It was like an insane human claiming to be Napoleon.
“Yes, yes,” she said on a sigh. Gia had heard this kind of thing before, always from crazy, murderous practitioners just before she punished them.
“Anyone else in there?” she asked. “Archimedes, perhaps—‘give me a lever large enough and I will move the world’ and all that jazz?”
His mouth dropped open. “How astute of you to guess. You really are the brightest witch I’ve ever encountered. So noble, so gifted… Yes, Archimedes was my first name. I’ve grown quite fuzzy over the years about my own origins, but everyone remembers their first.”
Gia sniffed. “No.”
“Sorry, dear?” He leaned forward as if he’d suddenly grown hard of hearing, the weight of his many years pressing down on him.
It was a very good act. That or he really believed it.
“You are not old enough to be any of those men. You’re a hundred and forty-three years old and not a year more. Younger than Caimen. More than Dalasini. And you’re nowhere near as old as I am. Not to mention the fact I met Newton once. You’re nothing like him.”
Her heart was breaking in her chest. Part of her had hoped this was all a big mistake. But when she’d heard Jordan reading that recipe, she’d instantly known they weren’t his words or his work. He’d been relaying orders for someone else.
The bored tone alone was tipoff enough. Jordan had been reluctantly performing a chore, and there were very few people he’d do actual work for. Her sister Serin was above suspicion. Jordan might have done work for one of her parents, but they would cut their own hearts out before betraying their community.
John, on the other hand, had lived among them, a trusted and benevolent presence. But for some reason, he’d acted like a visitor the entire time.
“I trusted you.” There had been no reason not to. By the time she’d met him, he’d already been living on the island for a few years. To her, the fact he’d been embraced by that closed-off society meant he’d been thoroughly vetted. He was the only one Jordan would have done anything like this for.
Not to mention the fact Jordan would never send recordings to the gun manufacturer. He’d been a man of the modern age. He would have emailed the recipe. No, what had happened was that John had recorded him rattling off the poison’s components. It had been John who sent them to Armand. She doubted Jordan had even known.
John had laid the trail of breadcrumbs to Jordan’s door, but it was a half-hearted effort. In the end, he’d wanted the Elementals to know he was the one ultimately responsible.
“You wanted to get caught,” Gia said, looking down her nose at him. “Like all sick criminals, you couldn’t stand the idea of not getting the credit.”
John’s lips firmed into a thin line. “That is enough of that, young lady,” he said sharply, a thread of an accent she’d never noted before rising to the forefront. “It’s very rude. And the fact I don’t resemble him is simple. It’s a spell, dearie, one undetectable to even your admirable powers of perception.”
He was so convincing she took a second gander at him. “Nice try. But of all my sisters, I’m the one you can’t fool that way. Your bones don’t lie. No spell can change them.”
John paused, his face stiffening. “My bones?”
“Almost as good as stones. They’re easier to read.”
John snorted. “So it’s like built-in carbon dating?”
She didn’t answer.
The first hint of a sneer broke through the genial facade. “Well, if you insist on living in denial, far be it from me to try to correct you. But I think you’ll agree I’ve had quite a bit of luck with getting spells past you and yours.”
Gia shifted her weight, hiding a clenched fist. The room grew colder as she thought back over recent events, connecting the dots.
“You were in touch with Stephanie Burgess, weren’t you?” she said, replaying the details of the case that brought Alec and Diana together. “The masking spell was your work.”
He affected modesty, waving his hand in a negative gesture. “Not all of it. I only made a small contribution. That Burgess girl was really quite a talent in her own right. I admired her moxy. It’s really too bad Diana caught on to her so quickly. I was very interested in watching the girl’s progress. So much potential up in flames…”
That witch had killed repeatedly to catalyze her spells. She’d broken the Covenant—had even murdered a child.
Gia refused to let her disgust and anger show. “And you were the one who gave the staff of Feng Po Po to the Colorado Basin pack traitor.” Logan’s mate had been shot by the man.
John held up his hands, flapping them like an amateur in a theater troop.
“Guilty again,” he said in a slight singsong. “I’ve known Bishop Kane for years. Mutual interests and all that. Giving him the staff was strictly an experiment, of course. I made it work straight off. Handy little thing, the way it stripped the magic from a body, living or dead. But after realizing it wouldn’t work on Elemental lines, there wasn’t much point in keeping it around. I wanted to see how far Kane could go with it, if he would have more luck in retaining the magic it removed. He had the time, you see, and I had other irons in the fire.”
“So was that your goal? To steal our power?” It was almost anti-climactic. Black magic practitioners had been trying to steal Elemental magic since the dawn of civilization—or very likely before. Even the archives didn’t record their inception. But if there had been a first Elemental, then there had been a witch trying to take their magic as sure as the sun rose every day.
But John was shaking his head. “Nothing so plebeian,” he insisted before coughing. “Well, not anymore. I’ve been studying the problem for decades. It was brutal at first. I didn’t want to admit the truth, but I had to. You are Her chosen and Her chosen are always female. There’s no changing that, believe me.”
This time, John didn’t try to hide his disdain. The choice of words and his emphasis on certain ones of them clicked.
No doubt he had hundreds of justifications for betraying them but in the end, the reason was simple misogyny. Some things never change….
“I understand now. You’re not after Elemental magic because you want it. You’re trying to take it because it lies exclusively in the hands of women.”
She passed a hand over her eyes. “When did you convince yourself that you would be one of us if only males were chosen?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, that clipped tone surfacing again.
It was British, but definitely not Newton or John Dee. The rhythm was too modern. A person’s underlying speech pattern never changed, no matter how old they were. Even she could be dated by the way she spoke, not that anyone ever took the time to notice.
“Sorry, kiddo. As usual, you’re way off.” John set the dishes aside.
Gia twitched her wrist. A small throwing knife fell from the hidden holster strapped to her forearm into her hand. “Oh, I’m certain. This is all because you feel passed over.”
There may have been more to it, but she wasn’t interested in the minutiae of his reasoning. She was going to bury him. John’s motives could rot with him.
John sprang out of his seat, striking like a cobra, faster than a man of his build should be able to move. He flung a thin-walled vial of glass at her, but her knife was already flying. She batted the container out of the air without touching it. It crashed to the floor, the noxious substance beginning to smoke on contact.
John clutched his shoulder, blood pouring from beneath his fingers. Her knife had pierced down to the hilt. “That wasn’t supposed to happen. I guess my deflection spell isn’t working.”
Gia withdrew her long blade from the holster at her back. “It’s glass, and glass is made of sand.”
“Of course,” John winced, his round face sweating. “But it doesn’t matter where the vial broke—just that it did.”
Gia spun around, prepared to blow some poisonous fumes away, but there was nothing like that. The smoke was just smoke.
She faced John again as he was scrambling up, starting to run away. She sent her hands out, knocking him back to the ground with a little telekinetic push. A silent spell and the short blade materialized in her hand.
He turned around to face her. “Finally!” he sputtered.
Gia frowned as a drop hit her. The smoke bomb had drifted up and set off the sprinklers, but it wasn’t water falling from the jets.
She knew the instant it hit her she’d miscalculated. The drop disappeared into her skin, instantly absorbed.
Her head began to swim and her ears dimmed, as if the sound in the room was coming from a great distance.
“Poison,” she muttered, her stomach twisting painfully as the toxic rain saturated her hair and clothing. Gia fought to keep standing, but her legs felt like straw. She fell to her knees.
John was on his feet now. “I’m so glad that you’re here to see this,” he said, beaming. “I would have settled for Serin, too, of course, but your younger sisters wouldn’t have appreciated what I’ve created here.”
Bile rose in her throat, and she gasped aloud. Every drop that touched her sank through her skin and raced through her bloodstream, slowing it down as if were turning into tar.
“I made some refinements after the earlier version failed to kill Serin, but I think I’ve got it now. This is my pièce de resistance, my life’s work,” John exclaimed, holding his hands out like a parched man in the desert. “It is the ultimate poison and for good reason. I’ve been working on it for the last fifty years or so. It kills any Supernatural creature—every single one so far. None are immune.”
“Can’t…be…true.” Her vision was darkening now. He couldn’t have created something that worked on all of them. The species of the Otherkind were too varied and numerous. And he was standing there, hale and hearty. “It…would kill…you, too.”
She rolled over on her back. Black threads appeared up and down her arms, thickening like tree roots.
He bent over her with a smirk. “That’s right, it should kill me, too. After all, I’m a skilled practitioner of magic.”
“Witches…can’t…”
He held up his hands, rubbing the poison between his fingers. “No, they’re not exempt. And no I haven’t taken an antidote because there isn’t one. It’s a hundred-percent fatal. I’ve tested it extensively.”
This was where she was supposed to ask how he’d done it, but Gia disappointed him by being unable to speak.
She tapped the floor weakly. By rights, she should have felt the stones and soil under the linoleum, but they weren’t responding to her.
John was studying her avidly, but she gritted her teeth, refusing to writhe and show her pain when all she wanted to do was scream. It felt as if her insides were liquefying into toxic sludge.
“You really are a remarkable creature, Gia. No one else has lasted this long, and I soaked you in the stuff. The doses everyone else received were tiny by comparison. But this is very good news, very instructive. You were the strongest test case I could possibly conduct before the real thing.”
Gia didn’t answer. Her heartbeat was slowing. He’d won. She was dying.
Chingado.
She closed her eyes. Her only satisfaction was in knowing that her sisters would avenge her.
35
Was Gia still breathing? John couldn’t tell, but it didn’t matter. There was no coming back from his poison. It was only a matter of time.
I almost forgot. John picked up his video camera. Documentation was key. He needed to record every detail of this test. He wasn’t going to be able to conduct another one. There wasn’t a subject on earth that would be more informative.
He’d certainly gotten lucky. Serin and Gia, the Elementals, were the who knew him best. Both trusted and cared for him. If it had been one of the others, this would have been far more difficult. The Fire Elemental would have set him on fire straight off. That one shot first and asked questions later. Of course, her flames would have set off the sprinklers as well, so perhaps that would have worked, but he wouldn’t have been around to document the results.
He turned on the camera and grabbed a ruler, intent on capturing the thickness of the black veins running up and down Gia’s body. He’d have to un
dress her to get the most precise measurements.
A little tremor ran through him. At first, he believed it was excitement, but the rattling of his many flasks and vials let him know that wasn’t the case.
He frowned at the dust falling from the ceiling. They weren’t on any fault-lines, but the tremors kept building and building until he could feel the earth rolling under his feet.
Damn. He should have known. A creature as powerful as the Earth Elemental would have had a fail-safe. Her death must have triggered it.
He huffed in annoyance, sucking in a shallow breath. The taste of the acrid poison hit his tongue. Disgusting. He spit, searching for something clean to wipe his mouth. Even though he was immune to the cocktail of toxins, ingesting it was a bad idea.
Rushing around, he grabbed his precious notebooks and a few of the choice items he’d kept from the Elementals’ hoard. The data and those artifacts were the most important thing. He could recreate the poisons and set up a new lab elsewhere, but these were irreplaceable.
A hard jolt knocked him onto his rear end. John braced himself, using the bench to pull himself up. The entire room was rattling and shaking. A loud crack filled the room. The walls were starting to break up. He had to get out of here.
He cast a last longing glance at Gia. Unless he could carry her out, all that data would be lost.
John started for the body, determined to salvage his experiment, but the ground didn’t cooperate. The linoleum parted, ripping apart as the earth rose. It swallowed Gia whole.
John swore and grabbed his bag, running for the stairs as the walls started coming down around him.
36
Serin fell, a stabbing pain in the vicinity of her heart.
“Gia,” she cried, putting her hands on her chest instinctively to keep herself from bursting open.
“Serin!” Daniel’s arms hauled her up from the ground. Deep shudders racked her body, bone-deep jolts that made her entire body ache.
Water: The Elementals Book Three Page 26
