Dark Waters (Elemental Book 1) (16 page)

I was no longer thinking at all. The only thing going
through my mind was the images of my parents dead. I would never feel my
father’s heavy hand pat my hair again, or listen to my mother fuss over my clothes
being wrinkled. The feeling of permanence at that moment was the heaviest thing
I had ever felt in my life.

I raised the gun again, slowly.

“Devon, stop.” She sat back and turned me to face
her. “You said you wanted to be with me. We couldn’t be together with them
alive.”

I nodded. “I know.” I turned the gun and shot her.

The next thing I was aware of was lying on the
kitchen floor in my mother’s arms and crying. That was how the police found me.
Apparently I had called them and told them my neighbor had killed my parents.
Officer Cody Hyatt pried me gently from my mother. I screamed and tried to bite
him to make him let me go, but he just sat down on the couch and rocked me like
a tiny child. Eventually, I relented.

I spent the next three days with Cody because I would
scream when anyone else tried to take me. All I could see in my head was Astrid
finding me and killing everyone else. Cody was the only one to show me more
kindness than my parents and Astrid. I wouldn’t let her kill him, too. I vowed
to protect him against her. That was when he took me to see my mother.

She had made it alive, barely. Cody let me sit with
her for hours. After visiting every day for a week, one of the nurses brought a
book in, which I read aloud my mother. It was the first time I spoke since I
shot Astrid.

Only Astrid was never found. Her body was gone and so
was the gun.

A month later, Cody was driving me to the hospital.
My instincts had been bugging me all night; telling me something horrible was
about to happen again. When I told Cody about it, he accepted it and didn’t
ridicule me. Instead, he suggested I was worried about my mother and drove me
to see her. We never made it.

A semi ran a red light, smashed into a pickup, and
slammed it into the driver’s side of Cody’s cruiser. My last thought as I was
dragged from the crumpled car was that if I could only touch him, I could heal
him like I had Astrid.

*          *          *

“I killed you,” I said. My voice was surprisingly
steady as I aimed the gun at Astrid’s head. She wasn’t wearing an innocent
nightgown anymore. She was fully grown and had developed into a very beautiful,
yet small woman at around five-four. Her dark brown hair fell over her
shoulders in thick waves and her eyes were lighter brown than they once were,
almost hazel with some specks of green. She wore a fitted leather jacket, tight
jeans, and high-heeled boots.

She grinned. “I was in perfect health after feeding
on your parents. No shot to the chest with a human weapon was going to hurt
me.”

“Good. I’m glad I didn’t kill you. These bullets are
silver.” I shot her in the shoulder. It wasn’t a kill shot because I wanted her
to suffer. Before she could even scream, I shot her again in the right knee.
She collapsed. I shot her in the other shoulder.

Her scream of agony was long overdue. I felt her
trying to open my mind to her, but I created a mental wall between us that
could never be broken through.

I would never invite her in again. I shot her other
knee.

“Devon!”

I barely heard Hunt’s yell. All I wanted to hear was
Astrid screaming. I vaguely felt Hunt’s power close around the gun before it
became too heavy to lift. I dropped it and instead focused on the hate inside
me. I focused on the image of blood and bodies on the kitchen floor. I focused
on the feeling of my trust being betrayed and the feeling of knowing that their
deaths were on my hands because I trusted her. Heat filled my entire body until
I couldn’t contain it any more. I reached out as if to push her back and what
burst from my hands was a sinister form of energy. It was like lighting and
struck her as such. She screamed.

“Devon, stop.”

The voice was one I never thought I would hear again
in my life and was certainly the only one in the world that could have stopped
me. I turned to see Cody standing beside Hunt. I gasped, rendered silent, which
seemed to be my normal reaction to shock. Hunt’s expression was of pity,
Stephen’s was of worry, while Cody’s was just sort of sad. Astrid stopped
screaming, but she wasn’t getting up any time soon. “How?” I finally whispered.

“Astrid saved me. They took you away and then focused
on saving those they thought had a chance. They thought I was dead on impact,
but I wasn’t. There was just enough life in me to be changed. Astrid had
followed and tried to take care of you from a distance. She figured out that I
was important to you. She saved me to help you.”

“Why didn’t you find me then? I thought you were dead
all these years.” I was more shocked than upset or angry.

“I was… too confused at first. I wasn’t in control of
myself. Stephen found us, took us in, and helped us both.” He stepped towards
me, I glanced down at the gun, and he froze. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“You’re a vampire.”

“I’m still the one who soothed you every night for
more than a month when you had nightmares. I am the same person who sat with
you for hours-on-end while you read to your mother. I may need blood to survive
now, but my heart still beats. I’m still alive. Vampires aren’t the undead like
in the movies. I remember everything, I feel the same way. I still crave
yogurt.”

“In twenty years, you never thought to tell me you
were alive?” My voice chose that damn minute to crack.

“You hate vampires. I knew you wouldn’t be able to
accept this until you realized what you are.”

“What am I?”

“A wizard. I knew it even when I was human that you
could become one of the most powerful wizards that ever existed. You could
naturally do what took a normal wizard many years to learn. That’s why I
pointed you out to Vincent.”

Hunt sighed as if he just realized that life was a
tangled mess. Only this couldn’t be my life. In my life, everyone who was
important to me was dead except my mother, who could barely function. “What’s
with Vincent Knight? Why does he keep popping up? Who is he?”

Cody blanched and looked away. “I think you’re in
shock. You don’t need anything else to think about today.”

“What are you talking about? You can’t just drop his
name and then not tell me!”

“I didn’t say his name,” he said quietly. I fell
silent. “I
thought
that last part; I hadn’t said it aloud.”

He ran his fingers through his hair like he used to
when his work was getting stressful. Cody worked so hard every single day of
his life to help every person he could. I had told him once, close to the end,
that I wanted to be a cop like him when I grew up. He sat me down and told me
the bad side of his job. There were many things he had to do, bad guys he had
to let go, because of technicalities. It wore on him and he said that he didn’t
want that tainting me. He said that as long as I never let hate into my heart,
I would help people every day.

I later decided to become a private investigator only
to realize I wasn’t helping anyone. I became an investigator to keep people
safe from those like Astrid, but then I stubbornly refused to work on anything
paranormal. When Cody died, I wrote off everyone who wasn’t human as a villain.

Only Cody wasn’t dead.

“How did you know I was a wizard?”

“You must not remember it. You were always doing
magic. Once, I had gotten cut when a knock on the door distracted me from
slicing apples. You came right up to me and healed it without a word. And there
was a dog next door that would bark all night long. You talked to that dog and
found out that his master’s wife was cheating. I had some friends in the
paranormal world and tried to get you somewhere that would help… but we never
made it that far.”

“I have to go.” I had to get away from Cody and
Astrid before I threw up. Astrid tried to reach for my ankle, as she was still
bleeding out on the floor. I knew she would survive; that was what she did.

Avoiding looking at her, I picked up my gun and I
stepped around her, not letting her touch me. She may have stopped Cody from
dying, but she didn’t save him. He would turn on me like she had. I made it
back to the car without a single wrong turn and locked all the doors once I was
inside.

About an hour later, I had cooled off enough to let
Hunt, Alpha Flagstone, and Professor Nightshade in when they approached the
SUV. Both professors had some colorful bruises and tears in their clothes, but
they seemed almost giddy.

*          *          *

It was a long drive, which gave me ample time to
rethink my life. I didn’t know what to think of Astrid, because all I could see
was her face when I healed her as a child. I didn’t want to still love her, but
I needed to know that I was still capable of love.
Can I accept Cody knowing
what he is?
Astrid betrayed me because she was a vampire. She saved Cody’s
life after killing my father and trying to kill my mother.

When we arrived at the school, Hunt ordered the other
two to go to bed and for me to follow him. I did, kind of numb, and found
myself sitting in the chair in his office. He handed me a glass of the same
amber liquid he gave me during our first chat.

“I don’t think this is the right time for---”

“Shut up and drink it. You had a long day…” he drank
from his own glass, “… and my daughter is missing. She could be dying right
now.” He shuddered and swallowed down the rest of his glass.

“Isn’t there a locating spell or something?”

“There is, but whoever has her is using counter
spells. Or she is already…” He trailed off, unable to finish his sentence, and
I drank my drink down in one gulp. It burned fast, but the distraction was
nice.

“What Cody said about me being so powerful…? Was that
true?”

“Yes. You have never had formal training, obviously,
but your natural talent is exceptional. Like he said, you can do things
naturally that must be learned for others. Your psychic skills are particularly
advanced, probably because you didn’t spend much time with humans growing up.
Tell me about her,” he said.

I shook my head. “It’s not a night for a sob story.”

“No, but it is a very good night for getting
something off your chest.” He sat in the chair across from me. “You just found
out you are not just a wizard, but an extremely powerful one, yet I see in your
eyes that the only thing you want to do is go back to that coven and shoot that
woman some more.”

“That wasn’t a woman; that was a living nightmare.”

“Well, either way, I need to take your gun. Alcohol
is one thing, but it would not be right to let you have a gun on campus.”

I scoffed. “Have you seen the shifters around here?”
I asked as I took off the gun and holster.

“Tell me about her.”

So I told him the story from the moment I moved into
the brownstone to the details of the blood dripping down Cody’s face as the first
responders dragged me away from him. When I was done, the silence was deafening
and I felt raw, but I also felt slightly better.

There was silence for a few minutes before Hunt
spoke. “I told you when I first accepted you into the school that we normally
place our students in the element they are best at in their first circle. I
lied. I have placed you in the element I believe you need the most. Whether you
decide to forgive Astrid or kill her, that is up to you. You could even keep
her alive in order to have someone to channel your hate and anger into. Maybe
that would be healthy, maybe not.”

“I thought you were supposed to be super wise.” I
tried to glare at him, but the alcohol was making me lightheaded.

He shrugged. “I am a wizard, not an oracle. My point
is, you trusted me enough to tell me. You never told Cody, did you?”

I shook my head, slightly ashamed.

“When you healed Astrid, you used your love and
desire for healing. You trusted me with this, so I know you still have that in
you. You cannot talk about it like that and not still feel it. Love your
mother, love your friends, love someone romantically if you can. Just find a
way to keep more positive emotion in you than negative, or you are going to end
up like Astrid.”

That hit me in the gut.

When I got to my room, I stayed awake for hours. I
thought about the hate and fear that drove her to cling to me. It wasn’t my
love that caused her to do what she did but the fact that she had spent her
entire life bathing in hate before she met me. I didn’t want to hate anyone,
and the fury I felt for vampires was irrational.

Astrid didn’t kill because she was a vampire; she
killed because she was an abused little girl who knew nothing else.

That was what she had tried to tell me at the coven.

*          *          *

“We’re skipping our first classes this morning,” I
said.

Henry and Darwin both stared at me wide-eyed. Then
Darwin smiled brightly. “Awesome! I knew you were cool, bro. I know this really
great strip---”

“Absolutely not,” Henry barked, offended. “I will not
skip class to watch naked ladies dance for…” He stopped with a shudder.

Darwin snickered. “I forgot. It’s not your time of
the month.”

Personally, I felt sorry for Henry. Apparently, he
had no interest at all in anyone except for three days, during which he had
enough hormones to last anyone a month. Of course, during the rest of the
month, he spoke and acted with the utmost sophistication, enough so to make
Darwin gag.

Henry huffed and thanked one of the teacher’s
assistants when she handed him a letter. “If you have a legitimate reason to
skip class, then of course, I will help you with your… you-know-what.”