My internal thermometer was plummeting into the freezing zone, a welcome alternative to the blistering heat.
If I was dead, then my spirit was hovering directly over top of my body. I was still seeing the peculiar scene unfolding from my unfortunate perch at the stake.
Chaos was pin-balling off every corner of the woods. Shrieks and cries echoed through the trees. Some people ran in haphazard circles, like chickens with their heads chopped off. Others stood frozen, gaping at me in sheer, wide-eyed horror. It must’ve been an impressive lesson, indeed, never to be forgotten.
I, however, couldn’t bring myself to feel anything but relief. I knew it was causing them all pain to see me this way, but there was clearly nothing I could do about it, not before and certainly not now.
The ground started rippling ominously as the vegetation grew and spread out into snake-like aliveness. Tree branches lashed out like angry whips, latching on to whoever they could find, yanking them through the air; the ground opened up like quicksand and swallowed people whole; bushes and saplings rose from the dirt, their roots spun into arrowheads, and darted dangerously through the air, spearing unknowing victims. Elementals of every sort suddenly found themselves prisoners and prey to the Earth—even the Earths.
There was blood, too. More blood than I’d ever seen. Considering I’d never witnessed any deaths, let alone particularly violent ones, that wasn’t a huge surprise, but still, it was abhorrent to behold. For every five or six Elementals stumbling through the forest, tripping over rocks or their own feet, at least one of them ended up dead and dripping red.
A woman appeared from the woodwork, beautiful and electrifying in her crazed rage. Her hair was long and flowing, her pale green eyes wide and alight. Her presence was the origin of the Earthly chaos, and could be felt by every cell of every being nearby. A fantastical glow radiated off her skin, a side effect, I assumed, from the sheer amount of Elemental magic pouring out of her.
“Where is she?” the woman asked, almost too quietly for me to hear. No one answered, but they didn’t exactly have time. “Where is she!?” she screamed violently as terror swam through the remaining crowd. Chunks of rock and dirt and debris shot through the air. The Earth was clearly fine-tuned to her emotions.
All hands, heads, and eyes pointed to me. She followed them with her own eyes until they finally rested on mine. A gasp, and then her hand flew up to her throat. “No…”
The air grew heavy and thick as everyone waited on thorns for her reaction. She took a few steps toward me, her footfalls the only rustle of sound in the silence, but then she stopped and looked around. Her chest was heaving with each labored breath she took. Holding back her grief, she instead unleashed the full extent of her wrath.
She screamed from the pits of her soul as every inch of the forest began shredding apart. “What did you do to her!?” she cried. “She was just an innocent girl!”
Bark peeled from the trunks, leaves dropped from the branches, limbs broke off and piled on the ground, grass withered and flattened. The scene was sort of like a confetti cannon: one second there’s this crazy-beautiful chaos in the air, the next, it’s all falling to the ground like ashes.
As the forest deteriorated, the Elementals were inadvertently freed of their bonds and began running like madmen through the wreckage. It was like she didn’t even care anymore. She dropped to her knees and looked up at me with tear-swamped eyes, and I finally recognized her: Aunt Marge. She’d always been so carefully contained that I barely identified this wild hurricane of a woman as her.
Oh, Aunt Marge. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry it came to this…
Her features shook, her lips quivered, and her brows furrowed as rage built back up inside. Her fists clenched, nails digging well past the first layer of skin, and she slammed them into the ground. Immediately, jagged rocks jolted up at breakneck speeds, stabbing some, but mostly just trapping those who remained.
I didn’t have to guess what might happen next. Marge would avenge me. She would kill them all. I’d already witnessed the demise of a quarter of them at her command, but this would be complete. I hadn’t seen Cade, Holden, or Chase since they had been struggling to somehow save me, but I hoped beyond hope they’d somehow managed to escape. Charlene, Jay, Sienna, Bear, Emilie—I hoped they all escaped. This wasn’t their fault. Hell, I even hoped Loren had made it out alive.
I just didn’t have the faith to believe any of my hopes held weight.
But then something even stranger happened.
The jagged rocks sunk back into the earth. The trees reassembled themselves. Sapling arrows re-rooted in the soil. It was like watching the past ten minutes or so in reverse. No bodies righted themselves, but other than that, it was like nothing had ever happened.
The maddened crowd was paralyzed, eerily so, as if not of their own terrified accord, but of some sort of forced incapacitation. Slowly, their heads all turned toward a single man emerging from the shadows. Even Aunt Marge lit up at the sensation of power and hesitantly turned her gaze.
He was handsome. Even by the strangely discolored light of now blue-tinted fire, I could see that. His pale blue eyes glowed brilliantly, his soft blond hair shined like liquid silk, his angular features lazed in an all-too-natural smirk. He was maybe in his thirties, but he had the physique and demeanor of a serious athlete. Not lean like tennis or soccer, but burly like football or hockey. Not quite terrifying, but definitely brooding.
When he spoke, his voice cut smoothly, like a knife dipped in golden honey. “What sort of repugnant display of ignominy is this?” Either they didn’t understand what the hell he’d just said, or they were now completely paralyzed, even unable to speak. “Burning an innocent at the stake…” He moved gracefully through the frozen garden of Elementals, hands clasped behind his back. “Have we stooped so low? Are we so beyond common decency that we’ve reverted back to boorish barbarianism?”
He raised an eyebrow and looked around, waiting for someone to speak, but nobody did.
“Where are the righteous bureaucrats responsible for this heinous indecency?” Still no one spoke, but it didn’t matter. He put his finger on the top of a random person’s head and spun it around. “Do you know where they are?”
The man stuttered and tried to shake his head, but like stone, he was petrified, so that obviously didn’t work. “N-no, sir. I-I-I don’t know w-where—”
Snap.
No Elemental violence. Just regular, gut-wrenching cruelty. He’d snapped the guy’s neck easier than snapping his fingers. Somehow it seemed to speak volumes of this man’s power that he could so easily manipulate the earth—even override Aunt Marge’s commands—and yet, he chose to do it himself, with his own hands.
He sighed and walked directly up to the bodies of Henrie and Delaney, frozen mid-run. I didn’t doubt that he’d known where they were the whole time. He’d killed the other man as an example.
“Tsk tsk tsk,” he tutted as he maneuvered their heads so they were facing him. “Martyrdom doesn’t fancy you? You would slaughter a young girl for your most righteous cause, but would not give yourselves up to save one of your own kind? Hypocrisy at its finest.”
The blond-haired stranger circled the two of them, then pulled Delaney maybe five feet away. He eyed the distance with a casual finger on his chin, then nodded and clapped his hands. Henrie was suddenly freed from his paralysis, save for his feet, which were still rooted to the ground.
“I’ll tell you what…” the stranger said smoothly. “Someone must pay for what has occurred here today. I’ve chosen to punish your Water-wielding wife. But, if you can get to her or stop me from killing her, then I will graciously kill you in her stead.”
There was no ‘ready, set, go’, no fast-paced duel. Just the slow rise of a thick black vine out of the center of his hand. It curled toward Delaney with a sluggishness that grated even my nerves. I could only imagine how Henrie must’ve been feeling.
Henrie was an Earth. It should have been easy
for him to uproot his feet, or to will the vine to stop its assault on his wife. But this stranger was an Earth, too, and it was so sickeningly obvious how mismatched the strength of their power was.
Henrie leaned forward and pulled his feet against his Earthly bonds until the veins in his neck and forehead bulged dangerously, and his skin drifted from a deep magenta to a stormy purple. But the Earth wouldn’t release him.
“No!” he cried. “Let me go! Let her go!”
The man merely blinked. “You heard the rules.”
The vine tip touched Delaney’s back. Henrie couldn’t see it from his vantage point, but I could; I saw it from the side. I wished I couldn’t. It crept ever forward, puncturing her skin and pressing inside with torturous slowness. She couldn’t even scream because her mouth was frozen shut. The only indication that something had changed, that something was wrong, was the sudden pain that cut through the terror in her eyes.
Henrie was maddened. He dropped to the ground and raked his fingers desperately through the earth, but the unfavorable angle due to his feet being cemented to the floor caused something in each leg to snap as he fell. The sickening sound echoed through the trees almost tangibly, but he didn’t seem to feel it, at least not over the other emotions currently flooding his system. He was beyond desperate. I’d never seen that look in anyone’s eye before. Maybe that was what I’d looked like when they were interrogating me with bullets and scorching me alive?
Tears streamed silently from Delaney’s eyes as blood began leaking from her lips. The vine was probably breaking her ribs and piercing her organs in its slow-motion quest for impalement.
My stomach twisted, threatening to rebel, so I quickly averted my eyes. Deep breaths…push the nausea down. There was nothing I could do, nothing except not watch. Some Elementals were frozen with their eyes away from the scene, but some were stuck with their eyes glued to it, physically unable to turn away like I had.
It was horrible. It was repulsive. It was wrong that anyone should die in such a gruesome and desperate way. And yet…I couldn’t bring myself to feel sympathy, guilt, or injustice. I didn’t hate the stranger punishing them, either. He didn’t seem to enjoy it, didn’t thrill at the pain like a sadist, though he apparently assumed it was necessary in order to achieve control in the midst of the anarchy.
It worked. He’d effectively taken control of every Elemental still alive in those woods. He’d silenced the chaos, tilted the scales of injustice, and probably saved the very lives of those presently breathing.
I tried not to flinch when I heard her body drop to the forest floor, heard Henrie’s incoherent sobs of mourning.
“Take her and go,” the man said to Henrie in a low voice. His attention then reverted back to my body at the stake. Somehow, I felt terrified.
He stepped lightly for one so strapping, making his way with silent ease until he stood at the foot of my pyre. With a wave of his hand, the earth rose up like a wave and smothered the remaining orange flames still licking at the charcoaled logs. Then his eyes met mine, and they were like a mirror within mirror, echoing the sadness within me for an eternity. A faint smile touched his lips. “Are you all right, my darling?”
Excuse me? He had spoken directly to me. I couldn’t have missed that. So either he was in serious connection with the spirit world, or…or I wasn’t actually dead. But then…
At my confusion, a full-fledged smile lit his mouth up to his eyes. “It’s all right, darling. You’re safe now.”
I swallowed nervously as he carefully reached for my fireproof restraints. I almost didn’t want to be untied. I knew the moment I was free I would fall into a weeping puddle of useless flesh and broken spirit. They had tried to kill me. They cared so little about my life that they were willing to take it away—had tried to take it away.
But I had survived. What did that mean?
I looked down at his fingers as they hesitated near my feet. There were no burns. Instead, my skin was a glittering snow-white, and was emanating a gentle blue flame. I looked to my bare stomach and breasts, which were naked, yet covered in the same almost frostlike coating. They too put off that odd, leisurely blue glow.
He raised an eyebrow at me. “Can you not see what you are, my darling? A beautiful paradox. A descendant of Ida who possesses the Gift. Fire, like your mother. Water, like your father. A blessing to our family and to the world.”
Our family?
“Who are you?” I asked timidly. I was still getting used to the idea that I maybe wasn’t dead after all. Hearing my own voice was startling, so calm and unwavering.
He merely gestured to the flames at my feet. “Can you put them out?”
Ha! Could I put them out? I had no idea how they’d gotten there in the first place!
His smile grew. “Just imagine them shrinking away…”
His voice was calming, like a guided meditation, still just as smooth as honey. He made me feel calm and confident, competent. I did as he directed and simply imagined the flames lowering. They wavered as I pulled at them, resisting like two north ends of a magnet. I closed my eyes and pulled harder, drawing them closer to my frosted flesh. It became more and more difficult with each tiny gain of ground.
And then I remembered The Elemental Basics. Something about the concentration of energy into the palm being the easiest way for an Elemental to first gain control.
An Elemental. Is that what I was? Could it be possible?
I imagined the blue flames as Elemental power, then pulled the energy into my palms like a whirlpool, snapping past that previous band of resistance. The flames died down, and the longer I drained at them, the easier it was to do. They soon disappeared completely inside of me, the power flowing victoriously just under my skin.
I almost couldn’t believe it.
“Very good, my darling!” he praised as he began working at the bonds near my feet. “Exceptional discipline for your very first try. Wonderful, wonderful work.”
I smiled despite the confusion swirling within me. His acceptance seemed to warm me. It was as if I liked making him happy for some reason.
The bonds at my feet weren’t giving. They were frozen solid. I knew what he would ask of me next, but the frost was the only thing protecting my naked body from the eyes of the masses. I couldn’t, wouldn’t retract the Water side of me like I’d just done with Fire. It would be far too humiliating.
He seemed to understand, and immediately leaves came rushing to cover me. They layered in such a way that created a sort of dress, extremely primitive in concept, yet exceptionally beautiful in design.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
Then I pooled all of my concentration into imagining the ice slipping from the outside of me, to the inside. Down my arms like millions of tiny frozen dominoes, tumbling into my palm like a black hole. It was neither harder nor easier than the first time, but it was still just as weird.
When I was no longer a flaming ice-ball, he untied my bonds and caught me when I fell. A strand of blond hair fell across his forehead, and for whatever reason, that tipped me off. I suddenly knew exactly who he was—or at least I knew his name. I was more confused than ever about who he was on the inside.
“You’re Nicholai,” I whispered as he sat me down on my feet. It was supposed to be a declaration, but the awe in my voice forced the words out rather breathlessly. “My…my grandfather.”
It felt so misplaced to call him that, not only because I’d never met him before then, but because this man looked barely old enough to be my father. In fact, my dad’s hair was already slightly graying, though he was one of those guys who looked better as they aged, so it suited him well. But no gray hair for Nicholai. No wrinkles, no loose skin, no sunspots, no telltale signs of old age.
“I don’t know what Margerie may have told you about me, darling,” he said with a small smile, “but I can assure you she’s got it all wrong. She’s my eldest daughter, and my most cynical and dogmatic. I’d like the opportunity to explain mysel
f to you, personally, before any of your preconceived notions sink in too deeply.”
I snorted. “Aunt Marge hasn’t told me anything about you. She refused.”
He chuckled. “Of course she did…” His grin widened and he shook his head. “Nevertheless, I’d love to have even an hour of your time to talk. Tomorrow over breakfast?”
I didn’t care if I owed it to him or not for what he’d done, I was simply too curious to say no. Even if Marge had spouted off a slew of information regarding Nicholai, I would have wanted to hear it from the source, anyway.
“Tomorrow’s my birthday,” I said, as if that was somehow an answer. Whether that was a yes or a no, who knew; it had just popped into my head out of nowhere.
He held up his pointer finger. “Technically, your birthday has already begun. It’s past midnight, after all. The first gift, of course, was receiving your Elemental powers.”
“I guess you’re right…” I hadn’t really contemplated that; there hadn’t been time. But now, I couldn’t stop the realization. I thought it, as if each word held the importance of its own sentence: I. Am. An. Elemental. Oh my god!
“So, birthday breakfast?” he asked hopefully.
I smiled, equally as hopeful. “Okay. Billy’s Bar & Burgers at eight? I hear they serve a wicked country breakfast platter.”
He smirked agreeably. “Billy’s for a wicked birthday breakfast, it is. I’ll pick you up at ten till eight, sharp.” He nodded as a parting gesture, then turned his attention back to the real world.
Paralyzed Elementals stood frozen about the forest, just as Nicholai had left them. I didn’t know how, but I’d sort of forgotten about them for a few minutes. There was just so much strange shit going on that none of it felt real, and therefore, none of it felt pertinent.
I was scared of how hard reality might hit me in the morning.
“Go,” he commanded as he maneuvered the earth into a rolling wave. “All of you.” Whether or not they wanted to obey, the Earth carried them away—except for one. Nicholai grasped her hand as he unfroze her from the earth’s hold. “How have you been, my darling Margerie?”
The Essential Elements: Boxed Set Page 24
