The Elementals Collection

by L. B. Gilbert

  There were rumors that the Elementals sometimes concerned themselves with human crimes. He didn’t know why. Humans policed themselves far more effectively than the damn vamps or Fea did. As far as he was concerned, Weres were the most effective and honorable of the Supernaturals, at least when it came to taking care of their own.

  Connell had turned the corner out of the guy’s yard, rounding a tall, wooden fence to an empty alley, when the wind picked up. He was carried to the ground with a hard crash. He grunted and blinked up at Logan, who had a fist in his T-shirt.

  “How do you keep finding me?” she hissed in a quiet whisper.

  He grinned at her. She sounded pissed. “This time, it was easy. I followed him.”

  The hard set of Logan’s features eased a little, and she rolled her eyes at the sky as if she were pleading to the gods for patience. She was starting to do that a lot.

  “I have business to take care of. Why don’t you go hole up somewhere? Like a hotel, or better yet, a bar,” she said. “Maybe drunk, you will be easier to deal with.”

  “I said I wasn’t going to let you out of my sight. What part of that was confusing?” he asked, resisting the urge to grunt as she hopped off his chest.

  For such a little thing, Logan weighed a ton. Maybe four hundred pounds wasn’t far off, he thought. He wasn’t about to mention that, though. Not that it mattered. Logan was spacing out again, staring at the sky. It was obvious she wasn’t even listening. He got up, trying not to take it personally.

  “Hey,” he said, putting his hands on her shoulders, some of his fingers grazing the soft skin at her neck.

  For a second, he could hear a buzz of whispers in the air. Weird. He let go. “Are you even listening to me?” Man, this girl was putting a serious dent in his ego. He wasn’t used to being ignored. “I asked you a question,” he prompted.

  “No, I’m not listening,” she ground out through set teeth. “I told you. I’m busy. And keep your voice down.”

  She cocked her head, and the next thing he knew, she was climbing on top of him.

  “Um, Logan?” he asked in confusion. The sprite had just gotten right up on his shoulders and perched there to peer over the top of the wooden fence.

  “Shh,” she whispered, waving a hand in his face in a shut-up-or-else gesture.

  Connell was tempted to bite one of her cute little fingers, but he was distracted by the warm pressure of her legs on his shoulders as she shifted around. It didn’t last long. Before he could start to enjoy it, Logan hopped off and landed soundlessly a few feet in front of him. She rounded on him with her hands on her hips. He stopped himself from picking her up to resume the physical contact. Touching was good. The glare she was giving him was not.

  “Is there anything I can say to make you go away?” Logan asked, her eyes sweeping over him.

  “Nope. Not a thing,” he said with a cheerful smile.

  “That’s what I thought,” she replied as she grabbed him, pulling him up into the clouds.

  8

  Connell was screaming, only no sound was coming out. And it was fucking cold. He felt weightless and freakishly formless. Trying to curl into a ball with a body that wasn’t there anymore, he rolled and shifted as the air buffeted him with surprising force. The wind felt solid as it smacked him around like the ocean’s surf during a storm.

  To make matters worse, he couldn’t hear above the roaring sound of the wind. The noise filled the world, and then he was plunging down to the ground.

  The trip down was faster than a free-fall. It was more like being caught on the tailpipe of a rocket as it hurtled through space. Images of Major Kong riding the nuclear bomb flitted through his consciousness for a second before he came together with a loud pop. The sensation was something like waking up, except it hurt like hell.

  “Ow! Fucking shit,” he shouted, rubbing his head.

  “Oh, come on. That didn’t hurt,” Logan said from the other side of a chain-link fence.

  “Of course it fucking hurt. What the hell did you do to me?” he growled.

  The evil imp had the gall to smile at him. “We took a little trip. And it only hurt because you think it hurt,” Logan said nonsensically as he rubbed his aching head.

  “What the hell does that mean?” he asked. Looking around, he still felt dazed.

  The imp didn’t answer him. Awareness of his surroundings came. He was on his ass, sitting inside a pen in a row of pens. There was a wall of cages opposite. Blinking to clear his vision, he checked out his neighbor in the next pen.

  It was a very surprised-looking Chihuahua. “A kennel? Seriously?” he snarled, getting to his feet.

  “Well, it seemed appropriate,” Logan replied with a shit-eating grin.

  Incensed, he grabbed the mesh door between them, intending to tear it away, but the door didn’t give. The cage must have been used to house bears that wandered into suburbia.

  “Look,” Logan said. “I’m sorry, but I need to take care of our friend from the airport. I don’t need a massive wall of beefcake getting in my way. I’ll meet up with you later.”

  She gave him an almost apologetic smile before vanishing with a rush of wind, her scent washing over him as she left.

  “Damn it,” he swore, kicking the steel door.

  He was getting tired of her disappearing on him. Images of him physically restraining her flitted through his head, and he lost some of his anger.

  The fact she was tied to his bed in his fantasy certainly helped…

  It was going to be full dark by the time he got back to Logan and the beige house, Connell realized with gritted teeth.

  In the end, getting out of the pen had been no problem. Once Logan left, he’d stopped being gentle. A few hard kicks had done the trick. The door had broken apart at the joint, wide enough for him to step through. But afterward, he’d felt bad about the destruction.

  He didn’t know where the staff of the shelter was, but the fact that he had busted out of one of their pens and no one had come running meant the place was understaffed. The only witnesses were four-legged.

  All the cats and dogs were strangely quiet as he did his best to put the door back into some semblance of working order. It wasn’t a great fix, but it would do temporarily. He dropped several hundred-dollar bills on a crowded desk on his way out to pay for a permanent repair.

  The animals remained eerily quiet as he left, their silence grating on his nerves. If he’d still had his wolf, they would have howled and screeched the walls down. As it was, they seemed confused, like they couldn’t decide if he was friend or predator.

  Connell was surprised as hell when he exited the kennel and discovered how far they’d traveled. In what had seemed like only minutes, he’d been dropped more than a hundred miles away, in the tiny town of Cañon City. Stunned and a little dizzy, he realized how far he’d been flung through the sky without the protection of an airplane.

  The imp had chosen well. She’d dropped him in the middle of nowhere, in a town without a cell phone tower. He couldn’t get a signal to call a cab, no matter how high he held his phone above his head. Disgusted, he dropped his phone back into his pocket and walked to a gas station. There, he was able to call for a car.

  After a further delay, the rental agency dropped off a truck. The four-wheel drive came in handy. There was some pretty tough terrain between him and his goal. He spent the drive back plotting and planning exactly how he was going to punish his imp.

  Dusk had fallen when Connell finally pulled into the right street. He was greeted by blue and red flashing lights. For a moment, panic seized him before he realized the lights were cop cars. There were no ambulances out in front of the beige house.

  Relaxing, he got out of his truck to join the shifting crowd that had gathered to watch the spectacle. It was unlikely that Logan had gotten hurt. The guy she was after was fully human, after all. But the instinct to protect her was very strong, the way it would be if she were his mate.

  He told his ins
tinct to shut the hell up, but his eyes still darted over the crowd looking for her crown of black-and-blue silk hair.

  He spotted her with a group of nosy neighbors behind a string of yellow police tape. Logan masked her expression well, but he could feel the satisfaction that was rolling off her as he approached. She didn’t turn around when he came up behind her.

  “What did you do?” he asked quietly, resisting the urge to grab her and put her over his knee. Instead, he settled for putting his hands on her shoulders to pull her close. To the rest of the crowd, they would look like a concerned couple conversing.

  Logan tensed under his hands. “He’s not dead,” she said. “I took some of the nasty things he was hiding and made them a little more visible. Then I called the cops. Anonymously, of course…”

  Connell huffed. “No wrath of the gods this time? You’re just going to let the human cops have him?”

  She shrugged “Sometimes, it works better that way.”

  “And an anonymous call was all it took? The humans believed some random tip?”

  “Well, they may have been under the impression that Mr. Whelan had a woman chained up in his basement at the time of the call. I gave them enough details to make it necessary for them to check it out,” she said, tilting her head back far enough for her hair to brush his chest.

  “Whelan is our blond friend?” he asked. Logan nodded. “Was there a woman in his basement?”

  “No damsels in distress were harmed in the making of this little scene. In fact, when they got here, the cops realized Mr. Whelan liked pretty young men instead. Parts of them anyway. They found some of those parts in his freezer.”

  Connell made a face. Humans were a lot more twisted than he’d realized. Some of them were getting as bad as rogue wolves. But that still wasn’t sufficient reason for Logan to shut him out of her plans.

  “You could have told me what you had planned,” he said from between his teeth. “I could have helped.”

  Logan twisted to meet his eyes, her expression thoughtful. He should have been angry with her, but he couldn’t work up the energy. Not to fight with her anyway.

  She turned away, and he gave up on getting a response. Not even an apology. “So are you done here?” he asked.

  “Not quite yet,” she murmured, keeping her eyes on the police officers going in and out of the house.

  After a moment, there was an increase in movement at the door. Whelan was brought out with his hands cuffed behind his back. A grizzled-looking detective led him to a squad car with a rough hand. When he was putting the smaller man into the backseat, he shoved Whelan’s head against the hood. Connell could hear the thud from across the street.

  Logan grinned a little wickedly. “I may have added some naked pictures of the head detective to the pile of evidence.”

  Connell resisted the urge to laugh aloud. “And just where did you get naked pictures of the detective?” he asked, deciding to go with amused instead of jealous since the detective in question was an overweight bald man pushing fifty.

  “Oh, I have my ways,” Logan said, turning on her heel and walking away from the crowd.

  “Over here,” Connell said taking her arm and leading her to his rental truck.

  The car he’d boosted was near enough the front of the beige house to be discovered and returned to its rightful owner. They would take the rental from now on.

  The imp frowned at the truck. “You know my ride is quicker.”

  A breeze ruffled his hair. “Yeah, right,” Connell huffed, opening the door for her. “I’m not doing that again in this lifetime so don’t get ideas. It’s too bloody painful.”

  Not to mention how utterly terrifying it was being formless. No mouth to scream or even breathe. The utter lack of control he felt as the wind carried them. Wolves weren’t meant to travel like that.

  “Fine,” Logan said, rolling her eyes as she climbed into the passenger seat. “You can drive this time. But you should reconsider. Air travel is much faster and safer. It only hurt because you thought it should. It’s a mind-over-matter kind of thing,” she said, buckling her seatbelt and putting her feet up on the dash.

  “Sure it is,” Connell muttered as he got in the driver’s seat.

  He pulled away from the curb, leaving the police to finish what Logan had started.

  The imp had fallen asleep again. She’d dropped off ten minutes into the car ride, like a little kid. He’d woken her when he’d pulled into a burger place for some fast food around half an hour ago. She had eaten an impressive amount of food—three double cheeseburgers and a large order of waffle-cut fries. He didn’t know where she put it all.

  After eating, Logan fell asleep again, curled into the bucket seat of the truck like a cat. He kept one eye on her as he drove, marveling at her ability to get comfortable anywhere. Even though he wanted her awake and talking to him, he took comfort in the fact that she at least trusted him enough to go to sleep around him. Connell found that strangely satisfying.

  The detour to stop a murderer had taken a lot longer than he’d realized. Not that he begrudged Logan for the time spent. If he’d known what she was up to, he would have helped. Next time, he would make that clear.

  And there would be a next time.

  Scanning the road ahead, he came to a decision. They weren’t going to reach the pack’s compound tonight. On impulse, he pulled onto the highway. With luck, his buddy, Jack, was off on assignment, and his cabin would be empty. They could spend the night there and be on their way to the compound early in the morning without going too far out of their way.

  The fact that there was only one bed in the cabin might be a problem…but not for him. And really, if Logan had wanted to have some input on their accommodations, she should have stayed awake.

  9

  Logan woke up when he slammed the truck door shut behind him. She sat up and peered out the cab window.

  Connell had stopped the truck in front of a small, rustic cabin halfway up a mountain. The passenger door opened, and he gestured for her to get out.

  “The pack’s house is much smaller than I imagined,” she said with a little yawn, staying put.

  “This isn’t pack property,” he said, the corner of his mouth quirked up. “I need to get some sleep, and the compound is still three hours away. I don’t want to get there in the middle of the night. I want the pack alert when we arrive, or someone might do something stupid. And something tells me you don’t drive much.”

  Frowning, Logan hopped out of the truck. He didn’t blame her for her obvious skepticism. The cabin did look pretty rundown from the outside.

  “Your summer home is…charming, but we have a pretty big place a little ways from here. One that’s habitable.” She gestured to the cabin walls. “Those gaps in the wood mean this pile is drafty, to say the least. That doesn’t bother me that much, but those openings are large enough for some of the local wildlife to join us. And I don’t want to bunk down with a raccoon tonight.”

  Connell pulled his bag out of the truck with a smirk. She was exaggerating the size of the holes. He continued up the stairs. “This is my friend, Jack’s, place. We served together. And it’s tight inside. The outside is just camouflage to discourage thieves,” he called back as he stepped onto the porch.

  “Still looks a little small. Sure you don’t want to come to our place? It would be a quick trip.”

  Despite his reluctance to make another voyage in the clouds, her offer was tempting. Connell was intensely curious about Logan. Seeing her in her space would give him a lot more information about her. And he wouldn’t mind getting a closer look at the types of weapons Elementals kept around.

  But a bigger place meant more than one bed. And if all went well, Logan would be bunking down with an animal tonight. Him.

  The interior of the cabin was much nicer than the exterior. Snug and well made, it had all the amenities—along with reinforced bulletproof windows and walls. Logan studied the security enhancements before letting o
ut an impressed whistle.

  “Jack built this place himself,” Connell informed her as he punched in a security code in the high-tech panel next to the door.

  “Jack takes his security very seriously,” she observed, completing the small circuit around the cabin.

  It was pretty small, but it had been designed for maximum efficiency. Shelves lined the walls on two sides. On the third side, a nook had been carved out for a small kitchen.

  “And apparently, he never sleeps,” Logan added.

  There was no bed.

  “Over here,” Connell said, going to the wall.

  He pulled on a cleverly concealed handle disguised as a log in the wall. A sturdy-looking Murphy bed appeared.

  “There’s only one?” Logan asked, eyeing the bed as if it had sprouted tentacles.

  “Yeah, you don’t mind right?” Connell asked lightly.

  He didn’t give her any time to answer before stripping off his shirt. Dropping it on the floor, he took a sneak peek at Logan’s wide eyes before walking into the bathroom.

  “Well…” she started, but he ignored her and closed the door behind him.

  Breaking out into a huge grin, he stripped off his pants and got into the shower. It was going to be a very good night—if she was still there when he got out of the shower.

  Just in case she wasn’t, he turned the water to cold.

  Logan was in the clouds, trying to get a grip. Connell hadn’t propositioned her, she reminded herself. The fact that he oozed pheromones and charm was simply a side effect of whom and what he was.

  Weres had the reputation of being the most carnal of all the Supes for a good reason, and Connell was a prime example of their kind. He probably couldn’t stop from flirting with every woman he met.

  She kept telling herself that rather sternly, but her anxiety didn’t lessen. And her worry was transmitting out into the aether.