Elemental Heir (Ridley Kayne Chronicles Book 3)

by Rachel Morgan

  “And Nathan’s probably done the recording by now,” Saoirse added. “I know we mentioned in passing that perhaps Archer should do it, but we can’t trust him with anything anymore. I’m sure Nathan’s already sent whatever he’s recorded to various news networks. He would have done that once he was close enough to the city to get signal. Hopefully someone will be brave enough to broadcast it once this is all done and everyone wants to know what’s happening. They’ll be scared at first, but Nathan’s message will help everyone understand.”

  A bolt of magic zigzagged down from the sky and struck somewhere in the distance. “And the Shadow Society?” Ridley asked. “You never came to an agreement on that particular detail, and it’s kind of a major one. We’ll never be safe as long as they’re around.”

  “We know who the director is now. We also know the mayor is one of them. Nathan can name them in his recording and the proper authorities will take care of them.”

  Ridley frowned. “The authorities that are probably under the Shadow Society’s thumb and have been stuck there ever since the Cataclysm? Have you actually spoken to Nathan about this recording? Do you know for sure what he’s telling everyone? A moment ago you said he’s probably done it already.”

  “Ridley, just—” Another tremor shook the earth, and Saoirse threw her hand out to grab Ridley’s arm. “I don’t know, okay? The only thing I know is that we all have our part to play in this. Yours is to burn through as much arxium as you possibly can. You need to leave the rest to other people. I don’t know the details, but Nathan’s been planning this for a long time. I’m sure he’ll do whatever’s necessary to make the world a safer place for all of us.”

  “So … he’s going to kill them.”

  Saoirse wiped rain from her face. She looked past Ridley toward the city. “I don’t know what Nathan’s going to do. But at some point, you have to trust everyone else involved in this.” She fixed her green gaze on Ridley once more. Firm and steady, yet still … gentle. “I know you’re used to acting on your own, relying only on yourself, but you’re not alone anymore. We’re all in this together.”

  “I—I know I’m not alone—”

  “Do you? Several days ago you took off on your own to find Archer.”

  “Because nobody else wanted to help!”

  “That’s not true. If you’d had a little more patience, you—” Saoirse cut herself off, shaking her head. “Trust, Ridley. That’s my point. The responsibility of this operation isn’t entirely on your shoulders. Yes, you can probably do all the arxium burning on your own, but there are other parts to this equation, and it’s okay for you to not be in control of all of them.”

  Ridley blinked at Saoirse through the relentless rain—which was beginning to slow from deluge level to shower proportions. She couldn’t deny that her anxiety level was pretty high not knowing exactly what Nathan had said on his recording or what the plan was for the Shadow Society or where Dad was and whether he would stay safe. But Saoirse was right. They each had their own role to play and, just like with her magic, she had to let go of the control she so badly wanted to hang onto. It’s not my plan, she reminded herself as she wiped rain from her eyes yet again. I don’t have to know everything about it.

  “Okay,” she said eventually. “I focus on my part, you focus on your part.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’ll wait for the storm to calm—which might actually be starting to happen—then head up there and burn as fast and far as possible.”

  “Yes. It would be better if you had your mother’s stone—I think magic would understand you more clearly if you did—but you still have plenty of power without it. You can fragment and send your fire self as far as possible, but it’ll be a bit wild and all over the place, and I don’t know if you’ll be able to control where all the burning arxium ends up.”

  “Which is why my dad and the others will be waiting down below.”

  “Yes. And I’ll find Maverick and tell him you’re okay before I join the others.”

  Ridley turned her gaze to the sky again, blinking through the rain that was no longer falling as fast. Magic and lightning flickered intermittently in the clouds, which were a lighter gray now and even allowed a streak of sunlight to crack through every now and then. “It’s definitely starting to quieten. Probably almost time for me to head up there.”

  “Put this on,” Saoirse said, crouching down and opening her bag. She straightened and handed Ridley a gas mask.

  “What about you?”

  “I brought two. I was hoping to find you, remember?”

  “Right. Thanks.” Ridley pulled the mask on and secured the straps behind her head. “Okay, I think I’ve—” The earth heaved beneath her feet, throwing her entirely off balance. She tumbled backward, shoving her magic outward a second before she would have hit the ground. She splashed onto the rocky earth as water, then returned to human form and sat up. She sucked in a breath at the sight of the jagged rift racing through the ground toward Lumina City’s wall. It struck—Ridley tensed—and a crack splintered its way up the wall.

  “Crap, this is really happening.” She reached for Saoirse’s hand as they both stood. “Right now. On a random Sunday morning. We’re …” She looked at Saoirse through the mask. “We’re changing the world.”

  Saoirse held her gaze, a smile forming on her lips. “We’re changing the world.”

  Ridley looked up again as a larger gap appeared between the clouds, allowing bright sunlight to stream down. The earth shook again, and she almost lost her balance a second time. She focused forward instead, eyes pinned on Lumina City. “Time to do this,” she whispered.

  Then she started running. Her form melted into fire and she launched herself upward, shooting into the sky as a mass of flames. As she neared the city wall, she wondered vaguely if anyone was watching her fiery form hurtling across the sky. If so, were they afraid? Would they assume it was another manifestation of the wild wasteland magic? Whatever they believed it to be, they probably thought the shield of arxium panels above their city would protect them. She knew they’d be afraid once those began burning. Their fear would only increase when they realized their wall was burning too.

  Only for a short time, she assured herself. Nathan will explain everything. If no one wanted to broadcast his message, they could put it on all the social feeds instead. Soon there would be no more fear. Only a world that was free to use magic.

  She flew higher and higher. The panels grew nearer. Near enough to make out their true size. Impossibly thin, but at least the footprint of a bus, if not bigger. Squarer. Even as a magic-powered fireball, Ridley felt tiny in comparison. She imagined a deep breath, urged her magic faster, and slammed into the first panel.

  She half expected to be instantly and violently repelled by the arxium, but Nathan was right: elemental fire ate through arxium as if it were paper. Fragment, she told herself, but she was still too nervous to fully let go. Her flames leaped across the panel, then across the empty space to the next one. She urged herself further and faster—as fast as she could go without fragmenting.

  It isn’t about control, she reminded herself. It’s about trust. Trust everyone else. Trust yourself. Trust the magic around you.

  She felt her elemental form relax and begin to—

  Something hit her. Not a panel, not the gusting wind. Something … else. Something invisible. Some … one. She could sense an elemental form in the air around her, and for a second she thought of—but that definitely wasn’t possible. The someone wrapped around Ridley’s fire form, and for a moment she blazed even brighter. Then everything went instantly dark. Solid, earthy, suffocating. The flames were gone. She couldn’t move. Panic choked her.

  Then the world reappeared and she was human again, falling down, down, down, hurtling toward glinting skyscrapers and a maze of criss-crossing streets. Terror stole her breath. She pushed her magic outward—or tried to, but someone else wrapped air around her a second before she could access her
own magic. Together, they spiraled down between two buildings, the ground rushing dizzyingly toward them until—

  They halted barely an inch from the road. Whiplash probably would have killed them if they’d been in human form. Then Ridley was dropped. She landed face down, her gas mask banging on the tarred surface of the road. She groaned and rolled over, her magic already pulsing beneath her skin and rising into the air to—

  She froze at the sight of the girl standing in front of her. Yellow magic—yellow?—flickered beneath her skin. Ridley’s eyes rose, and the familiar face was as much a shock as the unnatural color of magic.

  Lilah pulled her arm back before throwing it forward, releasing a mass of sparking yellow magic. “Payback,” she said, before pain radiated across Ridley’s head and everything vanished.

  18

  Ridley blinked slowly and squinted against harsh, white light as the sound of arguing voices settled into her consciousness.

  “… what you’ve done,” the male voice said.

  “I know exactly what I’ve done,” a female voice snapped in return. “I made the rest of your man-made superheroes look like idiots hunting down regular old elementals while I found the one you really want. I found the heir. Now you can stop treating me like a child and consider taking me seriously.”

  “I’m talking about the serum!” the male voice yelled, and though Ridley’s muddled, throbbing head couldn’t quite place it yet, the instinctive chill it sent down her spine was familiar. She blinked again, trying to bring the blurred shapes above her into focus. “What possessed you to use it on yourself?” the man demanded.

  “Oh, jeez, I don’t know, Dad. Maybe so you’ll finally—”

  “You don’t know what it does to people, Lilah!”

  Lilah. Of course. Ridley knew she recognized the female voice as well. And Lilah was the last person she saw before … before …

  Holy crap.

  Yellow magic. Beneath Lilah’s skin. It was all rushing back to the surface of Ridley’s thoughts now.

  “I would if you’d just tell me,” Lilah said. “Instead I have to snoop around and discover all your secrets and experiments for myself. I have to make friends with your precious Doc. You’ve left me out of things long enough, Dad, so I used his access card to get the serum and—”

  “It kills people, Lilah!”

  Silence.

  Ridley blinked again.

  Lilah’s voice was small when she asked, “What?”

  “Everyone who’s taken it has died within a day. Our human bodies can’t handle the magic.”

  “But … I … this is the latest version. The one with her blood.” Lilah’s voice was shaking now. “I heard Doc saying it was different. And it’s—it’s been over a day since I took it. I feel fine.”

  “This one hasn’t been tested yet. Maybe it takes two days, three days, to kill someone. Or maybe—hopefully—we’ve finally got it right and you won’t have to die for your stupidity.”

  “My stupidity?” Lilah’s voice was hard again, all emotion gone. “Because it never crossed my mind that you were killing your own friends in this crazy pursuit of yours to become the very thing you hate?”

  “And this, Lilah, is why snooping around is so dangerous. You don’t get all the facts, you draw the wrong conclusions, and you end up sentencing yourself to death. I don’t want to become an elemental, the thing I hate. I want to use their own power against them to finally get rid of them all. And all my ‘friends,’ as you call them, are willing volunteers. They know we haven’t perfected this serum yet. But they want to keep our city, our world, safe. They’re willing to be the test subjects in order to achieve that end.”

  Ridley’s fuzzy brain followed the conversation as closely as possible, horror growing alongside the nausea as her eyes slowly grew accustomed to the harsh light. She could make out ceiling panels, a fluorescent tube light, and—in her peripheral vision—a narrow piece of something curved and metallic.

  “Well,” she heard Lilah say, “then I guess I’m willing too.”

  “You were never supposed to have the option to be willing!” her father fumed.

  “And that’s exactly the problem, Dad. You don’t want me to make my own choices. You don’t want to tell me what’s really going on.”

  Ridley turned her head to the side. She looked past the metal contraption—a stand from which a bag of IV fluid hung—and saw Lilah and her father on the other side of an open door way.

  “I do not have time for your teenage drama,” Alastair Davenport snapped. “The city wall is barely standing, I need to make sure an appropriate story is fed to the media, I need to find out how many of my people I’ve lost today, and I cannot put off that meeting with the president of the Arxium Mining Association any longer. Now, in addition to everything else, I have to worry about the possibility of my daughter dying in the next few days.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” Lilah said drily. “I’m going to tell myself that your anger is a sign of how much you care about me.”

  “Of course I care. I love you, Lilah. Which is why I’ve always tried to keep you out of this. Magic and everything that goes along with it is dangerous. You think I’m trying to control you, but I’m only trying to—”

  “Tell me about the Cataclysm, Dad.”

  Alastair barely missed a beat before replying. “The Cataclysm? What could I possibly have to tell you about that?”

  “I don’t know. Apparently it’s another one of your secrets.”

  “Is that what Archer told you? Another one of your brother’s lies? Of course he wants you to believe Cataclysm conspiracies. Like I said, I don’t have time for any of this. You need to see Doc. Urgently. Tell him to do anything and everything possible to make sure you don’t—Oh, wonderful.” Alastair’s dark eyes landed on Ridley’s, sending another shiver coursing through her. “She’s awake. Can someone please sedate this girl again!” he shouted.

  Ridley moved to sit—and realized then what she’d missed while listening so intently to Lilah and her father’s conversation: her arms were strapped to the bed. She tried to move her legs, but her ankles were secured too. She also appeared to be dressed in one of those attractive hospital gowns.

  Though she knew it was probably useless, she pushed her magic to the surface of her skin. It glowed weakly, but wouldn’t rise any further than that. She was too weak, too sick. Her stomach threatened to turn itself inside out, and the room seemed to spin around her.

  A woman was in the room now, injecting something into the IV bag. Ridley struggled and screamed, but it was pointless. Her surroundings began to blur as her head became unbearably heavy, until slowly, slowly everything … was … gone.

  19

  The next time Ridley woke, the harsh lighting was gone. The fluorescent bulb above her head was off, and dim light illuminated the room from somewhere behind her head. No one was arguing nearby. There wasn’t much sound at all except for her breathing and something that may have been the faint whirring of machinery.

  Trying not to move too much—she didn’t want to alert anyone that she was awake—she shifted her fingers. Then her feet. Yep, still strapped down. Still attached to an IV bag. That sucked. Aside from it being a violation of her freedom, she also badly wanted to stretch out her stiff, aching body.

  She breathed through the urge to vomit—a feeling that was almost a constant state of being for her these days—as everything she’d overheard earlier spun repeatedly through her mind, shocking her again and again.

  Alastair Davenport had manufactured his own elementals. This was the experimentation he was doing. Well, among other unpleasant things, no doubt. But this—this was insane. Never in her wildest imaginings would Ridley have come up with this. He was giving people magic—and they were dying because of it. Lilah was going to die because of it, she remembered with an icy jolt.

  Lilah was the one who’d found Ridley burning the panels. It was Lilah’s face that had come to mind when Ridley tried to figure out who wa
s attacking her. She’d dismissed it instantly, and yet she’d been right. Lilah had elemental magic. And now she was going to die.

  With a confusing mix of emotions jostling for her attention, Ridley couldn’t figure out how she felt about that. It certainly wasn’t a good feeling. The other feeling that wasn’t a particularly good one was the feeling that surfaced when she realized that Lilah, who’d been in possession of elemental magic for little more than a day, had overpowered her, a supposedly super powerful elemental heir. How had that happened? Had Saoirse and Nathan been wrong about her?

  She cast her mind back to exactly what had happened above the city’s arxium panels. No … It probably wasn’t that they were wrong. It was Ridley’s fear of earth—the element Lilah had wrapped around her to snuff out Ridley’s flames—plus pure surprise that had given Lilah an advantage. Of all the threats Ridley might have expected to face above Lumina City, another elemental was not one of them. Lilah was not one of them. Perhaps if Ridley had had another few moments to get over her shock—and to get over her suffocating fear of being momentarily trapped inside a piece of earth—she could have thrown off Lilah’s magic and escaped.

  Or perhaps Lilah was also super powerful because her man-made magic came from Ridley. If that were so, maybe it would keep her alive. Unlike everyone else who’d gone after Ridley’s elemental friends. By now they were probably either dead or about to die.

  As for those elemental friends … how many had survived? It seemed silly to think that people who were as invisible as air couldn’t whisk themselves away to safety. They had magic and gas masks. They were all but invincible. But if they were taken by surprise as Ridley was … if they ended up in human form, even if only for a few moments … they could be shot or knocked unconscious or hurt.

  And what about Dad? He was inside the city walls, nowhere near any of the elementals. And there had barely been any falling arxium to worry about, so there was no reason for him to have used a conjuration in public and landed himself in jail. He’s fine, Ridley told herself. I’m sure he’s fine.