A Taste of Ice (The Elementals)

by Hanna Martine

  Griffin slowly emerged from the garage. “What?”

  “I totally lied. You screwed the wrong woman. Your people started something here, and mine are going to finish it. We’re coming after you, and when we’re done, the Ofarians’ll no longer exist. See ya.”

  Griffin screamed something in Ofarian, a raw, anguished sound. He sprinted for the white SUV.

  Kekona drew a deep breath and blew a straight, raging shot of flame from her mouth. It struck the blue van, turned its body yellow-white-gold with intense heat. The interior ignited and melted. And then the flame must have reached the gas tank, because the whole thing exploded.

  Xavier whirled Cat in his arms, throwing his back to the explosion and pushing her into the garage. Heat scorched his legs and shoulders and spine.

  Outside, the SUV’s engine whined, the tires spinning on the ice. Xavier swiveled back around to see Kekona peeling down the driveway. Gone.

  Griffin and Gwen ran for the burning van and started chanting in Ofarian, their voices rising as one. They knelt just outside the flames’ reach and ran their fingers through the snow. They pulled the flakes to their bodies with invisible force, in a white fury. When the snow touched their hands, it instantly melted, and they flung the new stream of water outward like a hose, spraying it over the burning van, extinguishing the fire before it could lick the house.

  Cat gasped in Xavier’s arms. He understood. This was no tiny stream of liquid coiling innocently around her arm. This was her first witness of the full extent of her people’s magic. She looked equal parts fearful and fascinated.

  The van fire died out, leaving behind a charred, smoking husk, and Griffin and Gwen came back into the garage, faces grim. Reed slapped the button to close the rolling door. Gwen immediately went to Reed, and Xavier was amazed to see how the Primary had taken the whole magic show in stride. How things had changed over the years.

  Griffin walked right up to Kekona’s fireproof cage, put his hands on it. “Was she kept in here?”

  “Yes,” Cat said, pulling gently from Xavier’s arms. “I don’t know for how long. I let her out.”

  Palms still on the cage, Griffin bent his head and shook it slowly. He stayed that way for a long while, everyone in the garage watching him, wondering what the hell had exactly happened between him and Kekona Kalani.

  Then the Ofarian leader pushed off the box. When he whipped around, there was absolutely zero emotion on his face. “We need some serious cleanup and cover-up work here. Call in the standby teams.”

  “I’m on it.” Gwen pulled a phone from her pocket and punched a number. She moved away to speak in low tones, one finger in her opposite ear.

  Griffin threw open the door to the house and stomped into the great room. Xavier followed, finally starting to feel the cold, the way his blood-stiffened shirt abraded his icy skin. Griffin came to a halt just inside, taking in the three tied-up Secondaries, and Robert and Shelby, who were talking to Ofarian soldiers in the kitchen. The faint thump of footsteps trickled down from other parts of the house.

  “Great stars,” Griffin whispered, going to stand over Lea. “Delia…”

  That’s right, Xavier thought. If Griffin and Gwen had known each other since they were teenagers, he would have known Lea, too.

  Griffin turned to Xavier and Cat while gesturing to Michael and Sean. “And these two?”

  Cat was about to open her mouth when, surprisingly, Reed came forward. He nudged his chin at Michael. “That’s Tracker. Remember the guy I told you about?”

  No shit. Xavier recalled that name. Five years ago, Nora, the Tedran leader, had hired Reed to kidnap Gwen in order to force her to destroy the Plant and end the slavery. To keep Reed on a tight leash, Nora had threatened to reveal Reed’s identity to Tracker, the client whose contract Reed had skipped out on.

  Looked like they’d just been reunited. Funny—and awful? And amazing?—how the world worked out.

  Gwen came back inside. “Backup’s on its way. ETA two hours. One team to scrub this place clean, another to get us the hell out of here.”

  The Ofarians would leave. Was Xavier just supposed to go back to his life? The house he’d bought with Gwen’s money, the kitchen he’d outfitted so well to deal with all his…issues? Shed? How could he look at any of that the same way ever again?

  Was Cat included in that “us”? Now that she’d met her people, would she leave with them? Leave him? She was standing just two feet away and already it felt like two miles.

  Griffin started to pace, and Xavier couldn’t help but notice how Robert and Shelby watched him with respectful fear.

  Gwen said, “We need to find the Chimerans. Appeal to them directly. Grovel, if we have to. Kekona just declared war on false pretenses. We have to try for peace before the shit hits the fan. E-mails aren’t going to do it. Phone calls aren’t going to do it.”

  Griffin stopped pacing and every eye turned to him. The sarcastic edge to his voice sliced through the air. “Sure. Yeah. Find them for me and I’ll take care of it personally.”

  “I thought,” Reed said, glancing between Gwen and Griffin, “their stronghold has never been located.”

  “It hasn’t,” Griffin snapped.

  Gwen took a deep breath and Xavier knew she was preparing to say something big. “But there may be someone who can help us find it.”

  “Who?” Griffin demanded.

  Gwen, strangely, looked to Cat. “Heath Colfax. Cat’s father.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  “You know my father?”

  They were sitting in the formal front living room, Cat and Xavier on a striped loveseat, Gwen and Reed on the longer couch opposite, Griffin pacing again under the arch to the foyer. Cat tightly gripped Xavier’s hand, and he let her.

  Gwen shifted to the very edge of the couch. The big, bald man named Reed sat close enough to her to say he was hers, but far enough away to declare him not the possessive type. He sighed deep into the cushions, unzipped his coat, and stretched his thick arms across the back of the couch.

  “I don’t know him,” Gwen said carefully. Xavier had been right; there was a magnetism to her. A confidence. “I know of him.”

  “Yeah, but you found him?” Her birth father. Just thinking that was strange. And stirring.

  “I did.” Gwen glanced at Xavier. “I used the information about where you grew up, Cat, your birthday and such. The former Ofarian Board kept a lot of information covered, tried to keep certain situations under wraps. They wanted to twist what the general Ofarian population knew about their own people. They wanted to ensure there were no uprisings, no dustups. And if there was any sort of behavioral problem or a lesson to be learned”—her eyes flicked toward the great room where her own sister was restrained—“then they trotted out the rule book and made a public spectacle of someone to keep us all in line.”

  Gently, reassuringly, Xavier placed a hand on the small of Cat’s back and just held it there.

  “So I dug into the hidden records,” Gwen went on, “from around the time of your birth. There was this account of a couple who were deeply in love, Heath and Jessica, but who the Board didn’t match in marriage. The family lines weren’t compatible or some director owed another one a favor, or other such bullshit. Anyway, the couple was devastated to say the least. Jessica was already pregnant, you see, and even though she hadn’t told Heath about the pregnancy, she couldn’t bear the thought of raising the baby with another man. Jessica told the Board she wanted to travel before marrying—which wasn’t that uncommon of an occurrence—and ran off before she started showing. She had the baby in some other part of the country. When she came back to San Francisco, no one was the wiser.”

  “How’d she get away with that, if the Board kept such tabs on their people?” Cat asked.

  “There was a note attached to the back of the file, filling in pieces of information years after all this had happened. The Board searched, but the kid was never found. They thought you had been born in Alabama.”
<
br />   Xavier began to rub little circles on Cat’s back. “So she had me in Indiana and returned to San Francisco. Did she marry the man the Board wanted her to?”

  Gwen nodded tightly. “Yes. That’s what you did back then. And if you didn’t…” Another glance at the great room. “Things are different now, thank the stars.”

  One of Reed’s hands left the back of the couch and stroked down Gwen’s ponytail.

  Cat was almost afraid to ask. “Is Jessica still alive?”

  “Yes. We haven’t contacted her about you. I thought that should be left up to you.”

  Cat exhaled. Her birth mother. Alive. “Okay. Thank you. And my…father?”

  “Years after Jessica married the other guy, Heath was still distraught, became a completely different person—withdrawn, depressed, alcoholic—by all accounts. He refused all other marriage matches and instead applied for work in the Plant.”

  The circles on Cat’s back stopped. She reached around and pulled Xavier’s hand to her lap.

  Gwen looked pointedly at their entwined fingers, her eyes soft. “He’s told you?”

  Cat squeezed Xavier’s hand. “Yes.”

  “I don’t think you knew, Xavier, that many Ofarians who applied for work in the Plant—not doctors or scientists or those who we thought were creating Mendacia—were oftentimes people who felt they had nowhere else to go. You had to give up your connection to the greater Ofarian world when you went to work there, and Heath wanted that more than anything.”

  Oh, God, this wasn’t happening. Her own father…part of the machine that had made Xavier. “Where is he now?”

  “Still at the Plant. It’s a prison.”

  Inside her hand, Xavier’s fingers went slack. Then he pulled them away entirely. She turned to him and he was looking down at her with a face like granite. It was one thing for her to be Ofarian, another for her birth father to have been somehow involved in his imprisonment.

  He ripped his gaze from Cat and looked to Gwen. “Why do you think this Heath guy would know anything about the…what did you call them? The Chimerans?”

  All that terror, all those nightmares Xavier had bled out to Cat that night in Shed—he was pushing them aside. For her. She didn’t know if she wanted to take him in her arms and thank him, or send him from the room. He didn’t have to be here for this. He didn’t have to know this.

  But he chose to stay.

  Gwen drew a breath and stood. “Because after Jessica came back, married the other man, and then finally told Heath about the child they’d made but could not have, Heath went AWOL. Completely off the radar. He reemerged years later and the Board had to consider his punishment for desertion. He bargained for mercy by trading information.”

  “The Chimerans,” Griffin said from beneath the arch.

  Gwen nodded. “Heath claimed that while he was away, he’d discovered another Secondary race. Said that he found the stronghold of the fire elementals, but refused to say where it was or to give the Board more information. I think, because the Board didn’t allow him to love whom he wanted, he liked withholding information from them, and they couldn’t touch him because they wanted what was in his head. The Board sealed the scant bit of intel in a classified folder called ‘Others.’” She turned to her leader. “Heath’s story started the hunt for the other Secondaries, Griffin, but they never found the Senatus until you came along.”

  Griffin pressed his lips together. Perhaps he didn’t claim that as such a great achievement, given all that had happened. “No travel records?” he asked. “Plane or train tickets? Anything?”

  “Nope,” Gwen said. “Which means he drove…or traveled by water.”

  By the grave look Gwen and Griffin exchanged, Cat realized they weren’t talking about a boat ride.

  “I’m thinking,” Gwen said, “that maybe he might finally be willing to talk for the chance to meet his long-lost daughter.”

  “He’s not going free.” Griffin put his hands on his hips. “No exceptions. We make one, we have to make others. The lines are too blurry.”

  Gwen held up a placating hand. “I know, Griffin.”

  “Yes.” Cat jumped to her feet. “Yes, I want to meet him. And if it can help you guys, who helped me, then that’s all the better.” Beside her, Xavier rose, too. But much, much slower.

  “Thank you. I’ll make the call with the offer,” Gwen said, turning away.

  They waited for interminably long minutes, at least a thousand of them, as Gwen moved into the game room and spoke into her phone in a voice too low to overhear. Cat hovered in the doorway, wondering if by meeting her father she’d actually be able to prevent a war.

  When Gwen came back in, all eyes snapped to her. No one moved. She gave Cat a small smile. “He cried, Cat, when I told him we’d found you. And he agreed to the exchange. Meeting you for the Chimerans’ last known whereabouts.”

  Cat clasped her hands together. The room went blurry beyond the sheen of her tears. She tried to dab them away but they kept coming. And she kept smiling.

  “Done.” Griffin removed his phone from a pocket in his vest, clicked a single button. “David, hey. Need a change in travel plans. Yeah, we’re headed to the Plant instead.”

  The Plant.

  Cat turned to Xavier. He lowered his eyes to the carpet, but not before she saw his beautiful face twist with anguish. Asking him days ago to go to Chicago with her was one thing. Asking him to go back to the Plant was entirely another, and she would never do it.

  Two hours later, Xavier stood on the front steps of the house with Reed and Griffin. He watched Cat talk with Gwen next to one of the newly arrived trucks that would bear the prisoners and the handful of Ofarians to the local airport, where private transport would take them to Nevada. A flatbed was loading up the vehicle Kekona had burned to a crisp.

  Swarms of Ofarians covered the house and grounds, turning everything that had happened here invisible. They were really good at that.

  Xavier had exchanged his blood-soaked shirt for a clean extra one of Reed’s. Cat now wore an Ofarian uniform. They’d discovered her suitcase and personal belongings—taken by Lea from her hotel room after she’d “checked out”—but she’d chosen to wear the offered black.

  She was leaving, going back to the place of his birth.

  “I’ll be here when you get back,” he’d told her, but he was keenly aware that neither of them had any idea when that would be. If at all.

  She’d never belonged here in Colorado. The only place he belonged was with her, but he couldn’t go where she was headed.

  He would return to the sanctuary he’d constructed here over the past three years. The sanctuary he was now loath to return to. Couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back. Stuck in limbo and hating himself. All that “healing” Cat had given him? Down the shitter.

  The front door opened behind Xavier, and a soldier ushered Michael out. He was walking now—like a man who’d done a whole bottle of whiskey with a beer bong, but walking. Still no speech, but plenty of coherent looks and a messy flapping of the lips. He was covered in blood. He ignored Xavier as the guard helped him down the steps, but as he passed Cat, he stared at her good and long. Cat faced him without fear, and Xavier’s heart swelled with pride.

  The soldier stuffed Michael into the truck holding Sean and Lea.

  “I want to learn about him,” Griffin said, almost to himself. “And the kid. What’s his name again? Sean?”

  Reed had pulled the skullcap over his head again and watched the scene with arms crossed. “Are you taking them to the Plant?”

  When Griffin nodded, Xavier shuddered. “Experiments, Griffin?”

  The Ofarian leader moved to stand right in front of Xavier. “Those days are over. Just discussions, I promise you. You told me what Michael and Sean can do. I haven’t heard of anything like it. I may be wrong, but I don’t even think the Senatus knows. Maybe if we find out something new, we can present it to the Senatus and be granted a seat—”

 
“You mean the Senatus that’s about to declare war on you?” Reed scoffed.

  “You mean you’ll use them?” Xavier added, disbelieving.

  “Fuck.” Griffin’s troubled eyes swept over the line of vehicles surrounding the fountain and landed squarely on Lea, who was barely visible through the tinted truck windows. “When did this become such a mess?”

  Xavier had an answer to that. When Nora had hired Reed to kidnap Gwen five years ago, that’s when the Secondary world had shifted.

  “I won’t use them,” Griffin said. “Who knows what the hell’s going to happen to Michael, what sort of state he’ll end up in, but Sean is alert and young. Maybe he’ll be willing to partner with us, if he’s no longer under Michael’s thumb.”

  “Sean used to be in a federal hospital,” Reed added, “under government surveillance. They knew about his powers, or at least, they thought they knew. If Adine’s willing, maybe she can patch in, try to gain access to his old files. Maybe Sean’s looking for a little bit of extra protection. Keep that in mind.”

  Ofarian orchestration, Ofarian manipulation. Xavier looked to the snow-filled sky.

  “So what about Michael?” Griffin asked. “He can’t just disappear. That’s when Primaries start asking questions. He lived in their world, not ours.”

  Xavier took a deep breath and told them how Jase had returned Michael’s rental car. “But that’s not enough,” he added, and he couldn’t believe what he was about to say. “The Primaries need to think he’s dead.”

  Griffin’s thick eyebrows drew together. “Go on.”

  Xavier looked to Cat. He’d do this for her—to protect her and the bond she’d just formed with the Ofarians. “Michael’s a high-profile guy. You’re right; he can’t just disappear. He needs to die. In the Primary world, at least.”

  “Wait.” Reed pushed past Griffin and came right up to Xavier. “You’re talking about what you did with Gwen five years ago. How you made that dead homeless guy look like her.”

  Xavier shivered with the memory, but nodded.