by Larissa Ladd
Dylan smiled and took a long drink of his beer.
“The water elementals are mostly not involved at all,” he said. He’d sent out tentative feelers—to his mother, to friends he knew. “You know how we are.”
Aira nodded, smiling. “I’m still not entirely understanding why the fire elementals are getting involved—at least, apart from the situation with Oriel.”
Aiden came down the stairs, and Dylan lifted a hand to greet him. Aiden grabbed a beer from the kitchen and came into the room with them, sitting down next to Aira. “So,” Aiden said, sipping his beer. “Got some news.”
“Do tell,” Aira said, glancing from her husband to Dylan. “Dylan and I don’t really have a whole lot to go on.”
“There’s some arguing between the fire element and the earth representatives,” Aiden said. “They’re still united—those who are involved in this anyway—but they’re not exactly stable among themselves. Thomas says he’s heard some murmurs that some of the people on the periphery want to come forward and snitch, but they want some reassurances that they’ll be protected.”
“No one was really expecting a war to be this complicated, I suppose,” Aira said. Dylan chuckled.
“Battles against authority always sound good on the surface. It’s only when you start actually having to do things that people really think about it.” He chewed on his bottom lip. “I still don’t think Leigh was directly involved.” He explained what he had seen in the scrying bowl: the accusations, the fear, anxiety, and tension. “I think there’s some conflict in the inner circle. But until we can break the tracking spell they’ve got, we won’t be able to nab any of them.”
“Well how would that spell be aligned? If it’s earth, maybe you can sort it out.”
Aira picked at the label on her bottle of beer.
“I can do some research. But we need to find out what Oriel knows first.”
Dylan thought to himself that until Aira came into contention to rule her element, no one had ever given Oriel Peters very much thought at all. She was the granddaughter of the ruler of fire, but she was only of middling power—not strong enough in her elemental alignment to be capable of much more than a minor role in the politics of their kind. Certainly when the rule of the element came up—in a few decades at most—Oriel would not be in contention, even if she hadn’t been involved in underhanded dealings.
“How are we going to get in there?” Aiden asked. Aira shrugged indolently.
“First of all, she’s still under arrest because of what she did to me, and I’m an elemental ruler.” Aira, in her capacity of deciding the fates of other elementals, had the top-most access to anyone kept in the care of the elders, awaiting a verdict on their status in the community. “Second of all, we’re investigating that crime, and she might have information.” Aira smiled slowly. “Thirdly, I’d like to see anyone argue with me about it.”
Dylan and Aiden had developed a high tolerance for Aira’s ability to persuade and compel; at first it had simply been a matter of survival, with her grandmother Lorene teaching them some tricks for keeping their own will intact while Aira came into her elemental inheritance. The last thing anyone would have needed at that point was for Aira to go rogue, unstable as she was, and control everyone around her. But the majority of people—even the guards maintaining the private jail that elementals were kept in—didn’t have the same tolerance. Dylan smiled to himself as he remembered the way that, even while poisoned, Aira had managed to subvert the wills of the guards when the three of them had gone in to interrogate Alex about the poisoning.
“Oriel’s fire oriented, so it’ll have to be the two of you who get the answers out of her,” Aiden said, his lips twisting in a wry, discontented smile. While Oriel was not as strong in her elemental alignment as Aiden was, she would be too strong for any of his attacks to do much to her.
“Well, she’ll have been kept in a water-aligned cell. Between Dylan’s abilities and my own, we should be able to get everything out of her that we need.” Dylan nodded slowly. He knew very well how to use his own alignment against fire elementals—his earliest training had been sparring against his brother.
“I need to meet with one of Alex’s cousins before we go.” Aiden glanced at Aira.
“Which one of us goes with her?” he asked, looking at Dylan. “Or should we both go?” Dylan shrugged.
“It’ll be an air elemental. If Aira can’t handle the woman, then you can. Besides, it’s probably better that you’re not separated from each other right now.” Dylan remembered—with a sense of dread—telling Leigh that as long as Aiden and Aira were together, they were unassailable. He thought to himself that anyone interested in deposing Aira would be more than happy to take the occasion to snatch her away if Aiden wasn’t around. Fire elementals were susceptible, at least a little bit, to Aira’s magical attacks—they were less susceptible to Aiden’s, but they were also less likely to do anything to try and attack him. Earth elementals were more likely to grab for Aira on their own; their elemental natures gave them advantages over her, and all it would take would be the right amount of earth magic and elementally-aligned materials to subdue her. Fortunately, Aiden’s fiery energy was all but impervious to anything other than the very strongest, most in-depth earth magic, and earth-aligned materials didn’t bother him at all. Dylan tried to remember more details of what he had seen in the scrying bowl.
“What if it turns out,” Aira said slowly, looking at him, “that Leigh actually was involved in the attack?” She hesitated a moment. “I know you don’t think she’s capable of it, but she was a spy and we have to consider that she might have been looking for an opportunity for the others.”
“She did say that her family’s not of the opinion that you need to be deposed,” Dylan pointed out. “Apart from that…if she is involved, then of course she has to be punished just like everyone else. But I don’t think she is. I think she might be a captive. I wish I had seen for sure who was in the bowl; whether it was Leigh, or she was the person they were talking to.”
“We’ll ask Oriel about the organization, we’ll figure out a way to blast their anti-tracking magic out of the water, and then we’ll get to them,” Aiden said confidently. “And then maybe sometime this decade we can finally take our honeymoon.”
“So Aiden’s coming with me to meet with Alex’s cousin. What are you going to be doing, Dylan?”
Dylan shrugged.
“I’ll be doing research. In the car. Waiting for your meeting to end. My life is so exciting.”
CHAPTER FOUR
DYLAN TRIED ONCE MORE, WHILE they were driving to the building where Oriel Peters was being held, to reach out with his mind and find Leigh. While he had been waiting for Aira and Aiden to get through with their meeting with Alex’s cousin Aurora, he had been skimming through some of the books of lore and magic that Aira’s grandmother Lorene had left behind when she passed. He wished idly that he had access to the full library, kept in the home that Lorene had bequeathed to her granddaughter. But there was no time to drive all the way up to the property; Dylan would have to make do with what he had already taken.
It seemed, at least according to the information he had at hand, that there were a few tricks that elementals could use to cover their tracks when they were on the run. For air elementals, at least those sufficiently strong in their alignment to take to the skies, it was a simple matter of covering themselves with the migratory paths of birds—easily enough done, and something that Aira could have managed if she had needed to during the contention for the rule of her element. It was trickier for fire elementals; they had no real benefits with the natural world that could cover them.
The earth elementals had a spell that could cause upheavals in the land around them, obscuring their hiding spot. Dylan, Aiden, and Aira hadn’t been called upon often to chase down earth elementals—they hadn’t been exposed to that trick as yet, because it required, according to the book, a fairly advanced knowledge of the elemen
ts. Water elementals were considered the gold standard of trackers—water was everywhere on the planet, part and parcel of the ecosystem, even in the desert. That thought led him to believe—though he hadn’t yet told Aira and Aiden—that he might be able to find the assailants hiding out in desert territory.
But to find Leigh—if she was indeed with the people who had committed the attack on the hotel—would require a lot more strength than Dylan had tapped into during his life. The desert, if the group was hiding out there, had very little water for Dylan to tap into, to trace his consciousness and push his energy through to locate anyone. If he could locate Leigh on her own—based on the fine trace that he had in mind, the brief acquaintance he had with her energy, potent though it had been—then he could at least know where she was. Even if she wasn’t with the group, Dylan wanted to find her. If she wasn’t with them—either as a prisoner or hostage or as one of the attackers—her disappearance was still jarring.
Dylan closed his eyes, opening up his awareness, pushing his energy out of the car and projecting it gradually through the world around him. As he approached the point when he would come fully into his abilities—when he reached his next birthday—Dylan was finding it easier and easier to tap into the energy that was welling up inside of him. He knew that the most difficult phases were still to come; after watching Aira and Aiden separately going through the power surges that came before the apex, Dylan was wary. But as the energy built up inside of him, suffusing his body, it was becoming easier to do the things he needed to do. Dylan felt his way through the world, seeking Leigh’s energy, focusing on the tiny fragment that he knew belonged to her. He called the imprint of her energy to mind, the feeling of her essence that he had gotten when they had kissed at the wedding.
Dylan breathed in slowly and deeply, and the atmosphere in the car fell away. Leigh’s energy had been so familiar to him even when they had just started kissing—an odd kind of echo, hot and cold all at once. He remembered the taste of her lips, the way she smelled like apples and honey. He had looked into her mind only briefly, but the feeling of something solid, something deep and rich, had stood out to him even before the disaster that had happened. Dylan sought out the imprint, the impression he had had of her mind, her energy. He couldn’t project his thoughts to her unless they were close to each other, let them flow through her mind; but at a distance he couldn’t project them. He was a passive receptor, directing his focus so that he could filter through the flotsam.
Dylan almost started in his seat as he felt the ripple of energy wash through him. It was Leigh. Dylan focused down again, not wanting to lose the faint trace. He breathed in. She was in distress, he could tell; she was anxious. He tasted the emotions flowing through her—feeling them filtering through his mind inconsistently. She was anxious, and in a little bit of pain. Dylan almost smiled to himself as he felt her flare up in anger. As the connection wavered and strengthened, waxing and waning between them, Dylan tried to get a sense of the distance. She wasn’t outside of the US—that much Dylan could tell. It wasn’t so far away that he could lose her at any instant just from distance; the tenuousness of their connection was due only to the fact that they didn’t know each other well, and the fact that something seemed to be sapping Leigh’s strength. Dylan tried to feel for the presence of water around the woman, tried to get a feeling, anything—any hint that could open up a place to search.
“Dylan!”
He opened his eyes, called out of the trance by the sound of Aiden’s voice. He blinked and heat flooded him; elemental heat, burning away the chill that had come over him in the depths of his searching. Dylan was disoriented for a moment—he had been so far away from himself, completely focused on the search.
“Dylan did you find her?”
Aira’s hands were on his and Dylan almost pulled away; her energy blew through him, bolstering Aiden’s fiery essence.
“Almost,” Dylan said, groaning. He had been so close—so close to finding a way to pinpoint where Leigh was. “She’s being held somewhere,” he told them, the impression still vivid in his mind. “They have her bound in something—I couldn’t sense what. But they wouldn’t have her bound up like that if she was part of the group.”
Aira grimaced.
“Unless she was going rogue on them,” Aira suggested, frowning slightly. “We’re at the building. We need to question Oriel. Are you okay?” Dylan pushed Aiden’s hands off of his shoulders. He didn’t need any more of his brother’s hot energy flowing through him, roiling up the icy stillness his energy had become.
“Yeah,” he said, taking a deep, shuddering breath. “I’m okay. Let’s get to Oriel.”
Dylan kept back, still composing his thoughts and pulling himself together as they went into the building together. It was a different holding building from the one the elders had kept Alex in—but it was similar in its nondescript splendor. As they walked through the doors, Dylan felt the tingle of the security features; the “cells” in the holding building were all selectively barricaded by different elementally-aligned materials. Fire elementals being held were kept in check by water-aligned materials: silver and copper on the walls, doors inlaid with lapis or quartz, and willow on the floors. Air-aligned elementals were kept trapped by earth-aligned items: iron in the walls, emeralds, jade, or jet inlaid in the door, and floors covered in ash, elm, or hawthorn. It was more difficult to barricade earth and water elementals, Dylan knew; fire did nothing to earth and it required a very large dose of air to weaken the element—and then, due to the characteristics of the fickle, flighty element, it tended to drive the elementals exposed to it into madness. Earth elementals were bound by the strongest water-aligned elements available, along with spells to bind the cells: not only were the walls ringed with both copper and silver, but the doors were ornately covered in rough pearls and aquamarine, the floors and inner walls covered with willow and hazel. The inverse was true for water elementals like Dylan; the cells to hold them had to be very strongly earth-aligned in order to curb the abilities of anyone with a water alignment. Dylan shuddered, imagining the cells: iron and lead cladding the walls, floors made of ash or elm, doors studded with emeralds and hematite.
The whole building was ringed, surrounded, choked with a variety of spells that would make it more difficult for an incapacitated elemental to escape—the elders had been thorough, guarding against each possibility that they could think up. If someone went into a cell in one of the holding facilities that the elemental elders had designed, they were not getting out on their own power. Dylan found himself on one level almost disagreeing with the elders; while those who were being held for judgment to discover if they were a threat to the elemental race certainly couldn’t be given any opportunities to escape, there was no such thing as the Geneva Convention for elemental prisoners. There were no real rules against what could be considered cruel and unusual punishment; though torture itself was frowned upon by the community, Dylan thought that just being in the cells alone, exposed to the vibrations of such powerful magic, was torture on its own.
The three of them approached the front desk, where a water elemental was seated, watching the door and the security feeds with equal attention. He looked up at the three of them with only the slightest of surprise on his face. “Aira,” he said, his eyes widening. “I wasn’t told to expect you.” The man frowned slightly, looking down at the papers on his desk. Aira smiled and Dylan could sense—indirectly—the force of her charm, her persuasive ability radiating out of her and towards the man in front of them. She wouldn’t resort to subverting his will right away, but Dylan had noticed that as Aira matured in her fully-fledged powers, the persuasion tended to flow from her whenever she spoke to anyone she wasn’t already connected with.
“It’s a sort of last-minute thing,” she explained. “I need to question one of the prisoners here about an ongoing case.” The man briefly hesitated.
“Which prisoner do you need access to, Aira?” It still hadn’t ceased to amuse
Dylan that upon ascending to her rule of her element, Aira had gone from being a notorious figure to a celebrity of sorts—of course, everyone in the elemental community knew the three rulers. He remembered Leigh’s remarks about his brother and his new sister-in-law being the “royal couple.” He wondered—he would have to ask Aiden later—whether the notoriety had extended to him, and how Aiden felt about it.
“I need to speak with Oriel Peters,” Aira said firmly, and Dylan felt her reaching out with the first tendrils of her active persuasive ability. The man’s dark eyes went dreamy for a moment.
“Oriel Peters is not to be disturbed,” he said, though his voice was full of doubt. “By order of her grandfather, she’s supposed to be left in her cell.”
Aira shrugged.
“I mean, I suppose we can pit two rulers against each other, but the elders have put me on the trail of a group of earth and fire elementals who were responsible for killing five air elementals and injuring many more.” Dylan glanced away from a moment as he felt Aira’s persuasive ability intensifying, her energy cracking in the air around them, reaching out to push at the other man’s mind. “Let me speak with Oriel Peters.” The man hesitated only a moment longer as the compulsion came over him.
“She’s in Room 548,” the man said almost absently. Dylan suppressed the snort that threatened to disturb the subtle spell that Aira had woven around the man in an instant. Dylan wondered just how the process would go; Aiden would be just as incapacitated as Oriel was by the water energy vibrating around them in the cell. Aira and he would be capable of still exercising their abilities—Dylan even more so than Aira, with the strengthening influence of the water-aligned materials.
They strode quickly through the halls of the holding facility. “What are we going to do about Aiden?” Dylan asked quietly as they made their way to Oriel’s cell. Aira paused—but only for a moment.
