Broken Elements (13 page)

Chapter 12

I drove home from Nevada City slowly, uncertain whether to feel disappointed that I’d learned so little from my visit or horrified that the only knowledge I’d gained pointed toward mental instability. Granted, I had no reason to believe that her brother’s illness had anything to do with him being half-water, especially considering how relatively stable Lana seemed to be in her magic use, but it was more of a coincidence than I felt comfortable with.

I didn’t feel crazy, but I imagined few insane people would say they did, and knowing that at least one half water was nuts was more than a little disturbing. When I tried to access the magic and couldn’t, something felt… wrong. I felt the sense of wholeness I’d described to Mac abandon me, leaving me fractured and uncertain. I might not be a resident of Crazyville, but at those moments I wondered if I lived a few towns over.

I would go to Eureka, when this was all over, and speak to Trent. I’d vowed that I wouldn’t hide anymore, and I would keep that promise to myself, no matter what answers might await me in the small seaside town. Briefly, I toyed with the idea of telling the others what I’d learned but dismissed it. They would be kind and understanding—even Simon—but I didn’t think I could bear those kind expressions, loaded with pity and concern. With every passing day, I felt a bit less like the outsider, and I didn’t want to give anyone reason to view me differently.

I dug through Sera’s music, looking for some raucous country appropriate to my mood. I needed some boot-stomping, noisy, dive bar kind of twang, but of course she had nothing like that. Giving up, I decided the Ramones were better than nothing. I shoved the tape into the stereo and turned it up loud. A minute later, I was nodding my head to the frenetic beat, resolving to never admit to her that I actually kind of liked it.

Several days passed in relative peace. There were no visits from the FBI, no murders, no attacks on the fortress. Josiah was still out of town, and though Sera spoke to him often, he had no new information. Vivian and Simon checked the newly installed campsite cameras every morning, but there was never anything more serious than a raccoon or a carload of teenagers sharing a six-pack. We did what we could, compiling a list of all the earth elementals we knew. There were only eight still in the area aside from Vivian, and it was easy to have such a small number followed around the clock. We tried to track down Richard Hill, even going so far as to hire a private investigator, but he seemed to have disappeared into thin air. His condo remained empty. It was worrying, but we didn’t know what else to do. We’d run out of options until the killer made his next move.

With so little to do, we spent a fair amount of time lounging in the living room. Vivian had interrupted my awkward attempts to apologize for my earlier behavior by holding up a pack of cards and dealing two hands, and most nights now saw us engaged in epic rummy battles. We drank and chatted while we played. More than once I looked up to see Vivian gazing at me with a bland, harmless expression and suspected she was attempting a drunk therapy session.

It was rare that all six of us were together at once. Brian typically appeared after he finished his shift at the bar, and he would linger in the living room long after the rest of us were yawning and climbing to our beds. Vivian was always the first asleep and the first up, often in class long before the rest of us were stumbling to the kitchen for our first hit of morning caffeine. Mac spent his days working on the Squaw Valley ski patrol, and when he was home he moved easily between his trailer and the house, often disappearing for hours at a time only to reappear in the living room as if he’d never left, lounging across several cushions with a mystery novel firmly in hand. I spent some time alone in my room, writing or simply recharging, but I never remained there as long as I expected. I’d hear laughter from below, the unmistakable sounds of Sera teasing Simon or Brian making the cocktail shaker dance, and I’d find myself slipping a bookmark between the pages and winding my way down the spiral staircase to join them.

On days when the sun was bright and the temperature rose several degrees, we’d spend afternoons outside in the crisp air. Simon would shift and climb the trees, running from one branch to another, leaping onto the roof and jumping through the upstairs windows into the loft. Though there was no one around but the six of us, I never saw Mac shift. He would sit in a rusted metal chair on the back deck, reading a book or sculpting small pieces of wood into figures only he could see, and he’d watch the elementals play.

Neither Vivian nor Brian was very strong, but they joined in the fun. Vivian would raise and lower the earth, creating happy faces or three-dimensional hopscotch squares that we would happily jump through, utterly ignoring the fact that some of us were at least fifty years too old for such games. Sometimes, she would shape the earth into carefully lined rows, and Brian would, with tremendous concentration, pull icicles from the eaves and place them, point down, into the ground. He would shape them, slowly and carefully, into lines of flowers, ice roses and tulips and sunflowers. It took him a long time, but it was worth it to see the enchanting garden sparkling in the afternoon sun, and to see his grin at each completed piece. When they did this, Sera kept her fires far from their work. These March days were never very warm, and the ice garden could remain for several days if left on its own. Sera would rather wear extra layers and two scarves than hasten the destruction of Brian and Vivian’s beauty.

Sera and I continued to practice my control. We moved the fire pit off the deck, placing it well away from the house—keeping both the house safe and sparing Mac any third degree burns he might acquire by sitting in the wrong place. I would attempt to douse every flame she created, and then Vivian would get to work. And so I began an unorthodox and very public counseling session. Everyone learned about my mother and my ancestors, on the elemental side at least, and how I’d grown up with the constant insistence that my humanity was negligible. My mother had always assured me that my affinity for water was the only thing I needed to define me. Vivian asked question after question about my life. I couldn’t answer most of them, but I felt them circle my subconscious, whispering and repeating the most essential questions anyone can ask themselves. Who was I? Who did I want to be?

After days of exhausting practice, I was no closer to control. It didn’t matter how many childhood issues I faced or how determinedly I confronted my memories of the warehouse. We’d spent enough hours on those topics that, if she was actually my therapist, I would have owed her a small car in compensation for all her work. No matter what we did, I could not reconcile my two halves. I was a powerful water, but only until I became emotional. Then, my abilities seemed to vanish altogether. I was beginning to fear my success with the house fire had been a fluke.

It was so easy to forget why I was there. These people had found their way into my life, slipping into the cracks that first appeared when Sera held my hand on Chris’s grave. I had forgotten the way Brian could remove every fear and doubt with a quick hug, a wink, and a splash of whiskey. I had forgotten the extent to which I was defined by Sera, the way our senses of humor had developed to better play off each other or the way we knew exactly whose turn it was to talk and whose to listen. I hadn’t foreseen the extent to which I’d learn to appreciate Simon’s focused and contradictory nature, or the quiet competence and compassion Vivian brought to her every action. And I found myself waiting for the next time Mac’s gaze would fall on me, with its heart-stopping mix of sly humor and quiet strength, so that I never knew whether I wanted to tease him or curl up next to him, and I wasn’t sure which prospect was more appealing—or more terrifying.

Quite simply, in the midst of a manhunt for a killer that had confounded us at every turn, and who had a disconcerting interest in me personally, I was truly happy for the first time since the night at the warehouse. Of course, it couldn’t last.

With so little new information, Josiah stayed away for a full two weeks. There was nothing for him to do here, and he despised being away from the Hawaiian compound if it wasn’t altogether necessary. I had never fully understood how Sera was able to live in the Sierra Nevadas. No matter how many sweaters she wore or fires she huddled next to, it could never be the same as living near an active volcano in a tropical climate. Quite often, Tahoe was too cold even for me.

That was Sera, though. She was a bundle of pure will, and if she had a reason to stay in a chilly mountain climate, then by god she would stay and be perfectly happy, thank you very much. Though Josiah was every bit as stubborn as his daughter, he rarely had to do things he didn’t want to do, including living for an extended period of time away from his home.

This explains why, when we received a call at eight in the morning summoning us to Josiah’s hotel room, we were immediately concerned. He wouldn’t be back here if he didn’t need to be. None of us had gone to bed before one the previous night, but we were instantly awake. No one said much. We simply filled several travel mugs with coffee or tea and piled into the Bronco.

The hotel lobby was full of people bustling around and setting it up for the day. Old flowers were replaced with fresh blooms, newspapers neatly arranged on tables, and the cafe was full of people eating breakfast. We were surrounded by the mundane and normal, a marked contrast to our anxiety. We all knew something had gone terribly wrong. While we’d spent the last week relaxing and having fun, the killer had been working. Somehow, we’d forgotten that.

We entered the room quietly and sat in the same seats as before. We clung to the simplest routines, the repetition providing a tiny bit of order. Josiah watched us sit, his fingers steepled beneath his chin, face grave. His clothes were rumpled, and there were dark circles beneath his eyes. I had never seen this man look anything other than pristine and healthy, and his appearance was as worrying as the hour of our summons. His laptop was connected to the television, and we were all looking at the first frame of video taken from the campsite. The date and time were clearly indicated. The film was from two o’clock last night, or this morning. It was only about seven hours old.

“I take it you have not yet watched last night’s surveillance footage,” he said.

We shook our heads. Simon or Vivian usually checked the footage first thing in the morning, but today we’d come straight here.

Josiah sat perfectly still, all his energy focused inward, as if seeking strength for his next words. “I keep the feed running on my office monitors. Last night, around eleven my time, the cameras began recording. I assumed it was just another animal. When I saw what was happening, I attempted to phone Sera, but she did not answer.” This was no surprise. When Sera slept, nothing less than a sonic boom could wake her. “I ordered my jet and flew most of the night to be here.”

He pressed a button on the computer’s remote, and the film began. Because it was a motion sensor camera, there was no buildup, no wasted frames. As soon as he pressed play, a man appeared on camera. I felt my breath hitch. I was seated, and yet I felt myself falling, felt the world shift as an impossible sense of deja vu crept over me. For the second time in my life, I watched a grinning, masked figure stand before the camera. He wagged one finger at us, scolding us for even daring to try to catch him, then immediately covered the camera in ice. The lens cracked, and the screen went dark.

“What the hell?” While I sat frozen on the sofa, trying to comprehend what I just saw, Sera felt no such inhibition. She instantly stood and paced the room. Her quick, staccato movements revealed her anger more clearly than shouted words ever could. Small flames burst from each finger. She wanted to destroy something, I knew. I felt the same way. “He’s dead. You confirmed it. Four bodies in the warehouse. The guard, Amanda, the man who lived there, and him. How the hell was he there last night? How is he even breathing?”

Brian moved to the window. He kept his back to the room and said nothing, but tension radiated from every muscle. The man who had killed his girlfriend was still alive.

No one had an explanation. Everyone looked shocked and slightly ill. I remembered the first time I’d seen the man, I’d felt the same. It had been my first glimpse of pure evil. Sure, I’d seen documentaries and news stories featuring killers, people who did unthinkable things, but there was always a distance. I could say, “Oh, that’s horrible,” and mean it, but it never truly affected my life. This man brought evil directly into my world and laughed while he did so, and somehow, impossibly, he was doing it again.

Mac slowly looked up. “Does this mean there’s another body?” he asked reluctantly. It wasn’t an answer he really wanted to hear.

“I’m afraid so. A human this time,” I saw Mac’s shoulder’s relax, just a little. I knew he had human friends and cared about them, but the shifter deaths were personal. “His name was Jeff Brown, and though this video indicates an ice was at the kill site, the man was suffocated by earth.”

Sera and I immediately looked to the other, twin expressions of horror and fear on our faces. Jeff Brown. The video game enthusiast Sera had briefly dated. “This killer has multiple targets, doesn’t he? His victims, but also Sera and me.”

Josiah nodded. “We now have five bodies, and every one of them is a human or shifter that one of you dated. I cannot imagine that being a coincidence.” He rubbed his hands roughly through his hair, causing several sections to stand up. “This would be a lot easier if you two hadn’t been quite so cavalier in your dating attitudes. I was under the impression that you had protected these men as best you could?” This last question was directed toward Sera, a father disappointed in his daughter’s behavior.

“We did,” she insisted. “We checked on every guy we ever dated. They were all gone. The student population around here is so transient, it’s not a surprise. The only two unaccounted for were Richard Hill and Jeff, and we assumed Jeff had just wandered off a while ago. He wasn’t the sort of guy to leave a forwarding address. Damn it!”