Dark Waters (Elemental Book 1) (19 page)

The door burst open to reveal a startled Mrs.
Ashcraft.

“Mr. Sanders, what is the meaning of this?”

Cliché? Sure, but why not? It’s not like she’s the
vice principal or anything… oh, wait, she is.
“Mrs. Ashcraft, when was the
last time you saw Andrew Martin?”

She blanched. “I don’t know what you’re implying, Mr.
Sanders, but you need to return to your…” she stopped at the same time I heard
heavy footsteps approach. I didn’t need to turn; I recognized Hunt’s walk.

“Mrs. Ashcraft,” I said calmly and clearly. “When was
the last time you saw Andrew Martin?”

“Thirty years ago. When he died.” She growled the
last part between clinched teeth. Zhang Wei snarled at her and she stepped
back.

“When was the last time you were in his lab?” I
asked.

“I’ve never been in his lab.” Zhang Wei snarled
again.

“He does not believe you, Rebecca,” Hunt said,
stopping beside the tiger.

“I have been working here for over fifty years,
Logan. You can’t accuse me of---” She stopped herself midsentence.

“Of what?” he asked. “I did not accuse you of
anything. I would like to know what you are afraid of being accused of. I would
also like to know why you were seen talking to an uninvited vampire in my
school.”

The sense of danger hit me hard and I reacted on
instinct. Before she could strike with the swirling white energy that formed in
her right hand, I reached out and wrapped my power around her mind. It felt
like I was trying to contain fire in my hands. I could do it, I could even
snuff it out if I pressed down on it, but it would hurt to do so. It wasn’t
hot, it was just powerful. It wasn’t even her mind but the magic inside her
that slowed me down.

Yet I could do it.

I felt her mind like a living mass of thoughts and
feelings and magic. I wrapped my will around it, visualizing it settling down.
Her thoughts and feelings were simple; she wanted more power. She was greedy,
manipulative, and hateful. I was stronger than hate. Thus, I forced my will
over her mind until her magic stopped struggling against me.

“Stop,” I said, surprised by the sharpness and depth
of my voice.

Her face fell slack and she took a step back in
retreat.

I didn’t let my own surprise distract me. When she
took another step back, out of the doorway, I entered the office. “Sit down.” I
thought I would have to send her some mental image, but she instantly responded
by sitting in one of the chairs before her desk. Something new pressed against
my mind. It wasn’t an attack… this was fear. She was afraid of me. “When was
the last time you were in Dr. Martin’s lab?”

“About an hour ago. I waited until you left his lab.”
Her voice was soft, almost vacant.

“What were you looking for?”

“Blood.”

“Why were you looking for blood?” Hunt asked. Alpha
Flagstone and Professor Nightshade entered the room, obviously having followed
the headmaster at a distance.

She didn’t react to Hunt’s question or even his
presence. She stared, not really at me but through me. It was eerie, and with
every moment, my power over her was growing. “Did you trap him with the syrus?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Blood.”

I sighed, getting frustrated with her short answers.
“Tell me what happened to Dr. Martin when he was trapped in the syrus and why.”

“Devon, maybe you should pull back on the---”

“I wanted to take the school for myself. I wanted to
be headmistress, so I knew I needed an alliance. I found some rogue vampires
who were willing to follow me in exchange for power. Andrew created a partially
synthetic blood that could sustain vampires and help them control their
unruliness. I knew this would cause the vampires to side with Logan, so I
created the syrus. It was designed to drain his energy until he died. I
destroyed the blood.”

“What about the aconite?”

“I didn’t do anything with the aconite. That wasn’t
me.”

“And the student records in Hunt’s office?”

“I broke into Logan’s office to put Clara’s profile
in the school as a throwback fae. I realized then that the records had already
been tampered with.”

“What about the murders?”

“I had nothing to do with the murders. I only wanted
to take over the school, not kill any of the students. The vampires who work
for me had nothing to do with the deaths.”

“And Remy?”

“I don’t know where she is or who took her.”

“Did you send the vampire who attacked me outside the
dorms?”

“Yes. I figured that since vampires were already
attacking the students, nobody would suspect one more death.”

“Devon, let her go.”

When I started to, I felt her powers return to her
and my own irritation. I didn’t want to let go of that power; it felt wrong.

“Devon, you can destroy her mind if you hold on too
long. Let her go.”

I didn’t want to kill her. I didn’t want to be a
killer. As quickly as I could, I released her and pulled my mind away.

She swayed, shocked and confused. “What did you do?
What happened?” she asked.

Hunt frowned. “You do not remember sitting down or
telling us about how you tried to take over the school?”

“Logan, I would never try to take over---”

Hunt cut her off by waving his hand over her face.
She instantly passed out and fell back in the chair. “Take her to the dungeon,”
he said. Flagstone picked her up as easily as if she was a ragdoll.

“You have a dungeon in the school?”

“Of course. It is typically used for detention when
students neglect their homework.”

“Is it safe to come out now?” Dr. Martin asked,
appearing in the doorway.

I jumped and Zhang Wei snarled, obviously startled as
well. “Where have you been?” I asked.

“Here.”

“Welcome back, Andrew,” Logan said easily. He showed
no sign of surprise in seeing the man after a thirty-plus year absence. “Good
to see you again.”

“Okay, I need an explanation.”

“Well, it was kind of my own fault for getting
tricked in the first place,” Dr. Martin said. “I knew one of Logan’s staff was
up to no good… but I thought it was Rosin. I tried to do a protection spell,
but it went wrong and then Rebecca tricked me. The syrus was meant to hide me
from anyone who was less powerful than her and suck my energy until my icky,
sticky death. My spell protected my energy, but because it was aimed at the
staff of the school, the only person who was able to remove the syrus was
someone who was more powerful than Rebecca and did not work at the school. On
top of that, only you could find me until the truth of Rebecca’s betrayal was
revealed.”

“That is one convoluted mess.”

“Welcome to the wizard world, Devon Sanders. And here
you go.” He handed me a vial of dark maroon liquid. “The blood you asked me to
test for you was positive for aconite.”

The victims were poisoned with aconite, which meant a
vampire couldn’t have bitten them. I had proof for the wizard council.

Damn
.

I was a wizard. For the first
time in my life, I knew I wasn’t just a weird guy with a bad past. I mean, I
was a weird guy with a bad past, but that wasn’t all. This was my chance to
really make my future what I wanted it to be.

And I was sitting in class learning about the atomic
properties of iron.

I stared at the chalkboard blankly, daydreaming that
a vampire would attack so we would have an excuse to get out of class. Professor
Roswell wasn’t a boring man, I just wasn’t interested in metals. He set his
chalk down and turned to explain something. When he turned back to his board,
he froze.

“Where did the chalk go?” he asked. He scanned his
half-sleeping audience suspiciously. “Who took the chalk?”

Several students looked around the floor, but a woman
up front raised her hand. “If the chalk is gone, can we all go now?”

He scoffed, went to his desk, and retrieved a box of
chalk from the middle drawer. “I never run out of chalk,” he said proudly, set
the box on the desk, and returned to his board. There were several groans in
the back, but I was watching the box on his desk.

A gray cat paw reached up from behind the desk and
fished the box away. A few minutes later, the professor started cursing. I
would have thought it was funny if it wasn’t so ridiculous.
At least the cat
got me out of class
, I thought when the professor decided to let us go
after all.

In potions, Professor Langril was missing and there
was a note on the door telling us to sit in the classroom and write letters to
the wizard council requesting more funding. Trying to focus was hopeless. I
daydreamed about saving Remy from a cold, dark dungeon with some extravagant
magic by defeating the bad guys… only I didn’t know who the bad guys were.

Who the hell would want to frame vampires?
A
thought occurred to me like a jolt. I didn’t know who my enemy was, but I had
an idea. I stood from my seat in the middle of class and walked out, ignoring
the protests of my classmates.

I strolled aimlessly, wondering if my idea was more
dangerous or brilliant. I didn’t even know if Hunt would agree to it, but I
found myself walking into his office without knocking. Once again, he was
speaking into an iron bowl in his library. When he turned to me, the bowl
hovered in midair and the contents lit with blue fire.

“What you plan to do is very dangerous,” he warned
me.

I gaped. “How do you know what I planned to do?”

“I know that look on your face.”

“How? You haven’t known me that long.”

“You want to use your powers to see into Remy’s mind.
That is incredibly dangerous and you do not know how to control yourself very
well yet.”

“And if I don’t, we may not find your daughter until
it’s too late.”

“I know. That is why you are going to practice on
me.”

“No,” I answered immediately. “I had enough trouble
letting go of Mrs. Ashcraft’s power, and I know you’re a lot stronger than her.
I need to practice on someone with a strong mind and no power.”

“I take it you have a person in mind?”

“I do. I just hope he trusts me enough.”

*          *          *

Four hours later, Darwin was sitting across from me
on the floor. “Just be careful,” he said. “My mind is all I have.”

“I won’t hurt you.” That sounded so familiar.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Henry asked. He
sat next to us, ready to do whatever he could to help if something went wrong.
“You just discovered you could control people.”

“I’m not trying to control him, only practice
communicating.”

When Henry got up, went to his desk, pulled his
student handbook from his shelf, and started swatting at something on the desk,
Darwin and I stared at him. Then he set down the booklet and returned to his
seat. “Sorry. It was a spider.”

“At least we found a good use for the handbook,”
Darwin said.

He closed his eyes, his face tight with worry. I
closed my eyes and opened my mind. Like I had done hundreds of times in my
life, I searched for the nearest minds. 

I felt two of them, as I expected. One person was
full of loneliness. He would take the pain in exchange for another person’s
touch, but he couldn’t stand seeing their death. The other person was full of
shame and frustration. He had a purpose that he was good at and hated, a
different purpose that he was terrible at and loved, and his family was proud
of him for all the wrong reasons.

“I can feel you,” Henry said.

I could feel him, too; my presence in his mind wasn’t
welcome. “Sorry. I haven’t got the steering right.”

I focused on the welcoming mind. Darwin wasn’t
ashamed of his thoughts or actions. His family loved him for who he was and he
never tried to be anything different. Unfortunately, that was just the very
surface of my young roommate. The isolation forced an already brilliant mind
into a state of perpetual analyzing. Every word anyone ever said in his life,
everything he saw, every note he read was carefully considered, catalogued, and
filed away in his mind. This was more than just a photographic memory; Darwin’s
brain was like a supercomputer.

Even as I was peering into the very edge of his
consciousness, he was taking in every single sensation and breaking it down.
Most of his thoughts were too fast for me, like a code. His thoughts were like
shorthand. He could also fluently read and speak over thirty languages, and
many of his thoughts were not in English.

I thought of Henry telling me what a throwback was
and Darwin’s mind reacted instantaneously. I was bombarded with numbers,
genetic formulas, photographic memories of newspaper clippings, words people
have called him, more code, more foreign language… it hurt.

It always hurt.

Darwin understood the way people acted, but he
couldn’t make himself think like them. Everything a person did was broken down
and considered from a biological standpoint. He accepted that people didn’t
always do what was rational, and that was his way of fitting in. Darwin acted
with humor he artificially constructed based on observation because he
knew
it was a defense mechanism.

He wanted people to know he was there. He wanted his
parents to know it hurt. It wasn’t just the fact that nobody could touch him;
he was alone in the world. Nobody had a mind like his. There were super
geniuses that were probably as brilliant as him, but they couldn’t think like
him. We were all alone in our own way, only he was aware of it.

He could never stop thinking. Not for one second of
his entire life had he ever stopped thinking. It hurt and it was exhausting.

“Can you make it stop?”
he whispered in my
mind.

It wasn’t his magic that allowed him to talk to me
but the understanding of how magic worked. He was using my magic to his will.
It was a friendly exchange, and I knew I had to be very careful to keep it that
way, because Darwin was suddenly the last person in the universe that I wanted
as an enemy.

“I don’t know. Maybe I can narrow your focus.
Think of your mother’s face.”

“You are supposed to be practicing.”
Suddenly,
my senses vanished. I literally felt nothing, heard nothing, and saw nothing. I
was in absolute darkness and silence.
“Now force my mind to bend to your
will.”

It wasn’t inviting anymore. I had been lured in by
the easy control, but that was gone now. I couldn’t pull away. The only option
was to force my way in control… without hurting him.

Fear.
Fear could make people either retreat or
fight back. Having seen Darwin’s reaction to death in the morgue, I bet on him
retreating. I pulled up the image of Heather. I focused on the blood all over
her chest and her neck twisted at a horrible angle.

Except he didn’t retreat. Instead, another image
forced its way into my mind; my parents on the floor of the kitchen.
There
was so much blood.
It had been a trap. Darwin had fooled me the way he was
constantly fooling everyone. His smile was a lie, but so was that shudder of
fear in the morgue. Normal people feared death.

But not Darwin. Death was a way to cull the weak,
sick, and old from this world so the strong could thrive. Yes, the smell was
irritating, but the idea of death was accepted as a necessary factor of life.
He was fascinated by it. He had considered if his pain would end with death.

“You’re not trying,”
he told me tauntingly.
That was fake as well; he felt no joy in this. Darwin only felt joy in absolute
understanding.

I focused on the memory of him telling me about his
girlfriend in high school. My mind was at least connected to his enough to
spark his own memories. Her face appeared.
Pain
. It hurt him to remember
her.

This wasn’t working. I didn’t want to hurt my friend.
Instead, I thought of anything I could that was joyful. The one Christmas that
both my parents were home and we were snowed in without any alcohol in the
house. I remembered the colorful wrapping paper on the presents. I remembered
the soft glow of lights on the tree next to the crackling fire, how cold it
looked outside while it was so warm inside. I smelled the pine of the natural cut
tree and the apple pie my mother made. Christmas music played on the radio, low
enough to be cheery without being annoying.

“Stop.”

But he didn’t really want me to. It wasn’t his joy,
but he could feel it as strongly as I did. I thought of sitting on the roof of
the abandoned building with Astrid. That was when I still loved her. More
memories of Astrid came to mind; all of the times we were happy. After that
horrible night, there were very few happy moments in my life.

Because I didn’t love anyone.

I was afraid to love anyone.

“Stop.”
It was me this time. I stopped
everything. I inhaled slowly and exhaled even slower. For a few peaceful
moments, maybe seconds, maybe minutes, not a single thought came to mind for me
or Darwin.

And then it was over. I opened my eyes, my mind my
own again. Darwin didn’t open his eyes, he just cried. Henry looked worried,
afraid I had hurt our friend.

“How?” Darwin whispered.

“I wanted to heal you like I did Astrid, if only for
a second.” Although his pain had returned instantly afterward, he had peace for
once. It was enough, and his tears were happy.

*          *          *

I sat on the black leather couch in Hunt’s office, he
sat in one of the two matching chairs, and Darwin sat beside me. He had gloves
on, but he still sat as far away as the couch would let him. Although he was
prepared to help me in this, neither of us wanted him to accidentally see my
death… especially if it was coming anytime soon.

“What is Vincent’s part in this?” I asked.

“He is spying on the wizard council to make sure they
do not make any moves against the school. He is also trying to find Remy, but
with any luck, you can shine some light on her location.”

I nodded and took the hint.
Back to work.

I closed my eyes and remembered what Remy’s mind felt
like. With a better understanding of how my power worked, I knew what I had
overlooked the first time. I thought Remy was simple, but nobody was simple.
Instead of opinionated, I thought of her strong determination to make people do
what she thought was best for them. Instead of impatient, I thought of her
frustration in herself for being unable to convey her desires calmly and
rationally.

It was only because of the fact that I knew her mind
and I practiced this magic that I even had a chance. Normally, my power was
short-ranged. I didn’t search for minds around me this time; I looked for her
mind. She wasn’t close, so I widened the search.

It felt like hours before I finally sensed her unique
mind. I knew it was her instantly and I felt her recognition as well. Although
she hated it when she first felt my invasion of her consciousness in the
castle, she welcomed my presence in her isolation.

No. She wasn’t alone. Her abductor was there with
her. He taunted her for hours on end. It was dark where she was, so I could see
very little. The abductor stood in front of her, but I could only make out a
vague shape. What I felt, however, was horrifying.

It wasn’t my fear but hers. Remington felt soft,
light creatures crawling all over her body. She was strapped to a bed. While I
would never have been able to identify distinct bugs crawling over my skin, the
man had taken great pleasure in telling her exactly what they were.

Brown recluse.

There were hundreds of brown recluse spiders crawling
all over her. He reached for her face and I realized there was a gag in her
mouth. I could taste salt in the cloth, either from sweat or tears. The man
didn’t remove it, only adjusted the tape holding it in. As his hand passed
through a beam of light from the partially open door, I saw his ring, which was
simple but distinctive. The piece of jewelry was more a symbol of dark power
than a decorative item; it was a brown recluse spider trapped in amber.

Familiar.
Out of all her thoughts, jumbled by
fear and dehydration, that one word appeared clearly.

“He’s familiar or his ring is familiar?”
I
asked.

He put his hand over her eyes and my instincts warned
of danger. I let go of her mind instantly and opened my eyes.

I was dizzy for a few minutes, so Hunt and Darwin let
me get myself together. “She’s alive,” I said. “She’s tied up and there are
spiders, but she’s alive. I didn’t see the man who kept her because it was too
dark, but he had---”

The door burst open and Professor Nightshade stood
there on the verge of panic. “Sorry, Logan, but Rebecca has been killed. Rosin
caught a scent and tracked it to one of the students. We put him in a cell, but
he swears he didn’t do.”