The Elementals Collection

by L. B. Gilbert

  Alec harrumphed. After waiting for some late-night passersby to leave the park entrance clear, they jumped the fence. They slipped across the street unnoticed by others still walking about.

  “But if you were near a meteorite-based weapon, you could sense them right? I thought you could tell what wasn’t of the Mother as readily as what was?”

  “When it has a heartbeat and is making trouble yes, but when it’s inanimate, what doesn’t belong isn’t easy to find from a distance. It doesn’t vibrate on the same frequency that earthly things do—and it’s not apparent till you’re close to it. If it’s terrestrial and significant, the Earth Elemental could connect to it to track it down, provided we could narrow the search enough to differentiate it from others of its kind. But not something extraterrestrial in origin,” she said. “It’s not a viable lead. What have your men done to find the farmhouse?”

  “They are out looking at likely properties based on matching descriptions from tax records and the like. They eliminated a few possibilities, but they aren’t capable of detecting ley lines, and I haven’t found a ley line witch nearby yet. We should get out there ourselves,” he said.

  “My thoughts exactly,” Diana murmured, heading to the garage.

  She was pleased to see that their MTT turbine bikes had been delivered, along with a matching set of leathers for Alec.

  “Why are there two? I ordered a car to take us to start searching in the areas you pointed out. It’s a long ride to get out there on a bike.”

  Diana beamed. “Not at the speeds these two are capable of. The black Turbine is mine and the blue is yours. These two bikes are literally the fastest and second-fastest in the world,” she said, gesturing to each bike in turn. “They’ve been specially modded by specialists I found in Tokyo. . .and a little juice courtesy of Gia. With the mods, they leave the Dodge Tomahawk in the dust,” she said, stroking the black bike lovingly. “Technically, these two clock out at the same speed but the black one is faster on the curves.”

  “Err, I haven’t ridden one of these in a while,” he said, looking down at the leathers and helmet with less than his usual confidence.

  Diana waved off his concern. “With your supernatural reflexes, I’m sure you’ll do fine,” she said before heading for the staircase to get her pack from her room,

  She waited till he was out of sight to grin. The vampire had actually gone pale. That had to be a real achievement. When she returned with her pack, Alec tried to convince her to take the car again, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

  “These bikes are more flexible on all terrain than your stretched out sedans or SUVs. Come on, it’ll be fine. Plus this way, we can split up to cover more territory in the hot spots,” she said as she climbed onto her bike. “Oh, and Alec?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If you scratch my baby, I’ll kick your ass into next week,” she said with a sweet smile as she started the bike.

  “Right,” Alec said, looking down at the bike in a sour look of dismay as he pulled on his helmet.

  She pulled out of the garage and waited on the drive until he reluctantly mounted his. Minutes later, he was following her out of town on the world’s second-fastest bike.

  29

  They were running out of paved roads in the rural countryside surrounding Toulouse. Their bikes were pretty quiet on the road, quieter than occasional cars that passed.

  They’d hit the largest hotspots near town already, and Alec’s men had been making a sweep at the far end of the range they’d defined. They were looking to match the rough farmhouse drawing Alec had made. At the rate they were going, the two groups would meet in the middle by dawn.

  Diana stopped her bike under a tree and waited for Alec to pull up alongside her.

  “Did we miss a ley line?” he asked.

  “I think so. There used to be a major point of convergence near here at the base of these hills. It shifted away from the stream in this area,” she said, scanning the darkness, her night vision giving her a clearer view than his.

  “Wouldn’t it shift closer to the water?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so. Too many people have moved close to the stream. They build their houses near them as long as the law allows. The manipulation of energy and water to converge in one place, namely a house’s electricity and plumbing, forces ley lines farther away. The point of convergence was strong but unstable. I think we should head into the hills in the east, away from the water and the houses in this area. If there are any old homesteads in your records that wouldn’t have electricity or running water, we should start there.”

  He nodded and made the call to his staff, trying to find farmhouses in the area they were headed to.

  According to their research, there were two possibilities. He relayed GPS coordinates to Diana, and they were on their way.

  The speed at which they drove in the darkness made Alec distinctly nervous for Diana. He knew she would be all right if they crashed, but her delicate build and fragile features put his protective instincts into overdrive.

  To make things worse, she had opted to leave the lights turned off on their bikes, another detail that made him extremely anxious.

  He followed the other bike as closely as he could. His senses were also in overdrive from all of the adrenaline. He was able to smell the night air, the greenery and warmth radiating off the soil despite the speed at which they were traveling.

  Ahead of him, Diana crested a hill in the dark and paused. She waited for him to catch up and then lifted her visor. “This is the wrong way. I don’t feel any ley lines this way. Let’s turn around and head down west,” she said, gesturing to another road in the distance.

  “There won’t be any houses down that way at all according to the records,” he added.

  “They’re just spread farther apart, which is what we’re looking for. And there is a greater likelihood of finding their hiding place near a convergence point,” she said, dropping her visor and heading off to find the start of the road in the distance.

  It took another half hour before they found the leyline and the abandoned farmhouse Diana had seen in the Mother’s memory. Wordlessly, they stopped some distance away, parking the bikes behind a stand of trees. They were too far away to see if the house was occupied or not.

  Diana took off her helmet and paused in a break in the trees. Taking his own helmet off, he moved to stand next to her. Unsure what to do, he studied her taught profile. Tension was coming off her in waves.

  “Whatever we find, we are here to make this right,” he said firmly.

  “Yeah,” Diana said, sucking in a deep breath before starting toward the house.

  As they crept closer to the structure, they could see the old place looked better from a distance. Up close, the house was a ramshackle. The left side of the roof was missing, as well as part of the wall closest to them. A crumbling barn was moldering on their right.

  Diana paused catty-corner from the house, looking for signs of other people in the vicinity. “No heat signatures that aren’t animal-sized. No child-sized ones either,” she finally said, her voice heavy.

  “Let’s take a closer look. They might have left something behind.”

  “Like a body under a concealment spell,” she muttered, running over the elephant in the room with a truck.

  “Yeah, something like that,” he said softly before subsiding as they approached the house.

  Diana didn’t bother with the door; using instead a gap in the wall into what ended up being a ruined kitchen. Moonlight filtered through the holes in the ceiling, revealing a wooden table on its side. All the chairs were gone, but in the corner, a broken down china cabinet with no glass still stood. A lone stirring spoon was its only occupant.

  Turning in a slow circle, she examined the residual heat signatures in the room. People had passed through it in the last week, but the forms were too degraded to see clearly. The ambient heat in the room contributed to the weakness of the signal.

  She m
otioned to Alec who was waiting outside the hole in the wall.

  “There are no clear signatures. Only adult-sized people were in this room. No one appears to have been here recently,” she said.

  As Diana made her way through the empty front rooms, Alec ducked inside through the gap, letting her look for signs of the children without adding his own slight heat to the mix.

  The living room was completely devoid of furniture. “It looks like this room was cleared out recently. Some adult-sized signatures are present. If children had passed through the front door, it was way before these adults. Unlike the cooler environment of the basement in Dover, the ambient temperature of these rooms is significantly higher. It’s swamping out all but the most recent movements,” she said.

  “It will be worse upstairs,” Alec warned, gesturing for her to precede him up the mostly intact stairs.

  The second story was in far better shape than the first. The floors were complete and relatively clean, as if someone had swept them recently. The upper story was divided into more rooms than the first, as if it had been added decades later for a larger family.

  Diana nodded at Alec, and they took opposite sides of the hallway, opening the closed doors and checking the rooms inside. She turned away from one bare room to look into the one Alec had opened last. This one had a bed and couch, both new, although there were no linens on the bed.

  Walking closer, she said, “Someone stayed here a while, an adult. Nothing else is clear.” She gestured to the last room on the right. “That one should match the vantage point I saw.”

  When she didn’t move, Alec put his hand on her back and gently pushed her toward it.

  The view from the window confirmed that this was the room from the Mother’s memory. The children had spent a lot of time here, enough to leave faint echoes in a few places. She nodded, knowing Alec would understand.

  Unlike the room in Dover, the circle took everything this time. The room was completely bare.

  Then she looked out the window into the wood surrounding the farmhouse and saw it.

  Alec let out a frustrated breath “We’re too late,” he said from behind her.

  “Yeah. We are,” she whispered, staring at the newly overturned earth at the tree line.

  30

  The grave was small, the warmth from the decomposing body close to the surface.

  Alec had called in his men to remove the body. He hadn’t wanted her to dig it up herself. She’d seen worse, a lot worse, but when she pointed that out, he only seemed to get more upset. He was determined to shield her as best he could, and in the end it was easier to let him have his way. And though she didn’t say so, she was grateful.

  It was always different when little kids were involved.

  “Can you tell which child it is?” Alec asked, his voice distant and flat.

  He seemed to be taking it better than she was, but she knew better. Alec was as crushed as she was.

  “No,” she said, leaning on a tree while they waited. “From here I can tell that there is only one body, not two. And I think the kids were roughly the same height as far as I know.”

  The last was said in an absent, far-away voice. If Alec hadn’t been here—hadn’t insisted on calling his men—she would be digging up that grave alone right now. She’d had to deal with the bodies of innocents before, but not children this small. She was glad he was there with her.

  Diana was past anger. Her grimness was edged in despair, the kind that sneaks in between disasters. She remembered the bitter feeling well from back when her mom had died. You could put away the emotions when the next hurdle loomed, but they always snuck back in when things went quiet again.

  “You know,” he said suddenly. “I thought we would make it. I thought together we would stop them.”

  She nodded. “I wouldn’t have thought so before. This job teaches you not to expect a happy ending. But somehow having a partner made it seem possible,” she said, giving him a ghost of a smile. “But this is what it’s like, you know. . .this job. Sometimes. Too often.”

  “Which is why the thought of you having to do this by yourself drives me fucking crazy,” he returned hoarsely.

  No other words were spoken as two cars drove up the lane, bringing Alec’s men and their shovels.

  Diana decided to wait by her bike during the exhumation. Alec had ex-Sûreté on his European staff as well as former Interpol. Proper forensic technique would be observed. Diana doubted it would make any difference. The body had been hidden, but not that well. The chances anything would be found were slim.

  A warm wind whipped around them, and Diana heard the wind whisper something to her. She normally didn’t hear it unless it was something Logan had passed on, but there were always exceptions. Turning to look into the wooded area behind them, she scanned the area with her extra sense. Without a word, she walked into the woods and towards one of those tiny heat sources, which was surrounded by the faint and fading signature of a slightly larger one.

  It was smaller than an adult’s. Alec followed silently behind her.

  Crouching near a tree, Diana brushed leaves and dirt away, uncovering a small item that had been buried. It was one of those novelty rubber duckies, the kind with the little devil horns. When squeezed, it lit up. The faint light inside accounted for the faint heat source she had seen.

  “This was Katie’s. She buried it here. She remembered.”

  “Remembered what?” Alec frowned. “And how do you know it’s hers?”

  She looked up at him before straightening up. “Because I gave it to her.”

  Diana only had her bike when she’d rescued Katie from her captor’s hideaway. She’d carried the pale and silent little girl in front of her till they’d reached the nearest town where she’d rented a car.

  The little shop next to the car rental place had had the novelty duck display. Diana hadn’t seen them around in years, but Katie had stopped to look at them. It was the first thing she’d reacted to with any interest, and Diana had immediately bought her one.

  The first words Katie had spoken were after she’d received the duck. The little girl hadn’t looked directly at her when she’d said in a matter-of-fact tone, “You killed him.”

  Diana had contemplated lying, but she’d said Yes before she could stop herself.

  “That’s good,” Katie had said quietly, looking her in the face for the first time.

  Diana hadn’t known what to say, so she’d settled for the truth, “It’s what I do. Come on. Let’s get you back to your mom.”

  Using a pristine white handkerchief Alec took the duck and brushed the dirt off, careful not to touch it, before handing it back to her. Putting it in her pocket, Diana inhaled deeply and walked back to the burial site. She had to know if it was Katie’s body they had found.

  Alec’s men had set up a perimeter around the now empty grave. The body had been moved; it was covered in white sheets on a gurney that had already been loaded onto the back of a van. It looked very small on the adult-sized gurney.

  Alec’s men whispered to him, telling him what, or who, it was that they’d found, but she didn’t hear a thing. Her ears were filled with the sound of a roaring fire as she pulled down the sheet.

  She had never seen the little boy, but he’d been small for his age. His clothes were simple but of good quality, and his shoes were new. Scanning the body carefully with all her senses, she searched for clues, but there were none to find. Her enemy was too careful.

  “Nothing?” Alec asked, coming up to the open end of the van.

  “No,” she said, turning to him.

  He was stiff and ice-cold, the area around him cooler by at least ten degrees.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  In a way, Elias and his father were his people. At least that’s the way he saw it, and she had grown to respect him for it.

  “The little girl isn’t near here, is she?” he said, scanning the dark woods for another small grave.

  Diana
thought back to the child-size form she saw in the heat signature around where they found the duck. “I think she’s still alive. I think she’s hoping to be rescued.” She held up the duck. “By me.”

  He nodded, his eyes glowing with anger. “Then let’s find her. Can you track her with that? It must be a prized possession.”

  Diana took a moment before she answered, “I don’t know. It’s not the same for children. You know that.”

  “You have to try,” he said.

  “I’ve been trying,” she said, rubbing her temple with her palm. “The connection is tenuous at best. It flickers in and out. I’m not getting a direction like I would if she was an adult who’d shifted the balance. And probably the only reason I can feel it at all is because I gave this to her.”

  “Well, don’t let go,” he said, taking her elbow and practically dragging her back to their bikes.

  Diana looked up at his face and decided not to blast him with a little fireball for manhandling her. It didn’t seem wise to argue with him when he had that expression. This was worse for him. The little boy had been his responsibility.

  “Are we heading back to town?” she asked.

  “I don’t think they would be hiding here in the middle of nowhere. This guy, the leader, he wants luxury and convenience. Even if they did have the kids here, I would bet money that the leader never stayed here. He’ll be in town, if he’s still here at all.”

  She hoped he was right.

  31

  As soon as she and Alec had gotten back to their safe house, shortly before dawn, he had mobilized his men to search for the rest of the circle in town. It wasn’t as large as most American cities, and they had a good chance of finding them the old-fashioned way as long as their quarry hadn’t moved on to a bigger place like Paris or London.