Dark Waters (Elemental Book 1) (4 page)

Apparently, we would have to worry about rabies,
though, as I came face-to-face with the biggest damn bat I had ever seen. After
a moment of hovering in front of me with its wings flapping, it dived to its
right and hung on a stick protruding from the wall. I realized then that there
were other sticks placed randomly around the room.

The bat was a pet.

Two women stood at the teacher’s desk, clearly trying
to flirt their way into his good graces. The women, both in tank-tops and short
skirts, were receiving more attention from three guys standing in the back of
the room than the teacher. One of the guys stepped forward, his brown eyes
glowed, and a gust of wind swept through the room until it lifted both women’s
skirts. The guys laughed and high-fived each other like teenagers until one of
the women turned with a ball of flame forming in her hand and threw it at the
offender. Then his buddies laughed at him as he rolled around on the ground
screaming.

Nobody else paid them any attention.

I took the seat closest to the door as students
filled the room and found seats by their friends. A young, dark haired girl
with thin, silver glasses sat next to me and immediately pulled out a reading
book.

The teacher hadn’t been one of those on the school
board. He was in his late forties with short, medium brown hair and green/blue
hazel eyes. Instead of the wizard robes that other professors wore, he was
dressed in a scholarly, cream-colored business shirt with black pants and dress
shoes.

When it was time for class, the teacher held a stack
of papers out in midair and let them go. The papers then began to pass
themselves out. “Welcome to
Metals
for Circle One wizards. I am
Professor Roswell. If you ask me about aliens, I will flunk you.” One of the
papers landed delicately in front of me and I saw that it was a syllabus. “This
class is all about metals, if you haven’t guessed. Specifically, the Seven
Noble Metals of the Ancients. Who knows what they are?”

Everyone but me raised their hands.

Unfortunately, Professor Roswell wasn’t looking for
actual volunteers. “You in the corner by the door… I hate anyone feeling left
out. Name one of the seven metals.” Everyone put their hands down and several
students looked offended.

I knew that guessing and being wrong was no worse
than saying that I didn’t know, so I made a guess. “Silver.”

“Very good. Another,” he asked of a different
student. The remaining metals were copper, electrum, gold, iron, lead, and tin.
“This class is also a requisite for many of your Circle Two classes.”

Class went by quickly. We merely went over rules of
the class, what we would need for class, and how to contact him outside of
class if we needed help. I thought he was joking at first when he suggested we
bring bat food. When one of the students asked why we had a bat as a classroom
pet, the professor explained that “Howler” wasn’t a pet, but was actually his
familiar. He then explained that if a student forgot his homework, his
punishment was to spend ten minutes in the closet with Howler. After taking a
longer look at the bat, I knew he was likely a fruit bat, but no one was
willing to ask.

After that, he let us go a few minutes early and I
had a fifteen minute break before my next class. Not wanting to waste any time,
I followed my map and found the classroom. The room was almost exactly the same
as the previous except that there were six tables instead of desks. In the
front of the room was no teacher’s desk, only a huge blackboard. The teacher
stood at a podium, organizing papers, while another student busied herself
cleaning the chalkboard.

I sat in the seat closest to the door as the room
filled quickly. The professor never introduced himself or handed out the
syllabus. Every student had a book, a notebook, and a pencil. I felt awkwardly
out of place.

A few minutes before it was time for class, the
teacher went to the board and started writing down formulas and talking about
math. I was comfortable with my intelligence; I knew how to do my job well
without being a fanatic about knowing everything. I passed my math classes in
college with a “B” and that was just great with me, whereas other students were
screaming about not having an “A” or thrilled to death with a “D.”

I was not the only one staring at the board, slack
jawed. I knew enough to know this was way beyond a college-level calculus
class. Finally, when there was no room on the board to write another symbol,
letter, or number, the professor turned and faced the class.

“Are there any questions?” Other than the harsh
wheezing of a student a few seats down the row from me, the room was in a
collective state of silent panic. “Good. I’ll be back in a minute. Marcus,
bring your inhaler tomorrow or I will flunk you again. Addie, do you want some
coffee?”

“That would be lovely, thank you, Professor Mali,”
the assistant said with a beaming smile. The man left the room through a side
door that seemed to appear. Or maybe I hadn’t noticed it before, but I found
that unlikely.

The moment he shut the door, the assistant took the
eraser and chalk and started fixing pieces of the formulas and changing numbers
around. As soon as she was done and stepped back, there were sighs of relief
and I heard “oh, I get it” from several students. Everyone started copying down
the information into their journals, while I was still baffled.

When the woman beside me finished copying the information,
I lightly tapped her arm. She had long, straight, gold hair and big, light
brown eyes. “Is this ‘Fundamentals of Potions?’” I whispered, praying it
wasn’t.

She smiled kindly. She was very pretty. “No, this is
advanced alchemy for C-Five students only. This is Room F3. You want Room 3F,”
she whispered. “Come on; I’ll take you there.” She gathered her stuff into her
bag.

“Don’t you have to listen to this?”

She rolled her eyes. “This is review from last year.
Professor Mali does review every year on the first day of class.”

I followed her out into the hall and shut the door
quietly behind me. “Thank you for showing me the way.”

“No problem.” She slung her blue bag over her
shoulder and held out her hand for me to shake. “I’m Heather Anne. You can call
me Heather or Anne, just don’t call me Annie. I am C-Five Spirit.”

“So you mastered the other four elements?”

“Yep.”

“I’m Devon Sanders. C-One Water, I guess.”

She laughed. “You guess? Water was my first element,
too. Just in case you don’t know, all C-Five students are on the spirit
element. We have our own dorm floor, we get to choose our roommates, our
classes are apart from yours, and we are all required to be assistants for our
mentors.”

Since there were other students in the hallways, I
knew we weren’t all on the same class schedule. We went up several floors and
down many hallways until I was thoroughly lost. There were random windows into
classrooms, the floor, or the ceiling. If that wasn’t weird enough, I also saw
doors with no knobs, stairways that led to the ceiling, paintings of empty
walls or hallways, and the floor was dangerously slanted in some areas. When we
finally reached the classroom, we stopped.

“I suggest you explore the school until you get
familiar with it, but don’t do it alone.”

Yeah, like I’m going anywhere alone in this death
trap.
“Thank you again for helping me find this place,” I said.

Instead of walking away, she opened the door, grabbed
my arm and pulled me close to her. “Good morning, Professor Langril,” she said
brightly. “Devon is in your class this year, but please don’t count him late
because he was helping me run some errands.”

“That isn’t a problem, Heather. You know you can
borrow my students at any time.”

She smiled and turned so only I can see her. “Be
careful. He’s insane,” she whispered, then left before I could say a word.

“Devon Sanders, correct?” he asked kindly.

I nodded and set my bag in the nearest seat to the
door. I was instantly on alert when I saw that there were only five other
students in class.
Had the rest been flunked? Or maybe they got lost…
In
those halls of horror, I doubted any student who got lost would ever be seen
again.

“I heard you were able to fight off a tiger shifter
this morning.”

At least he didn’t assume it was with magic.

“That must have taken some strong magic. You should
be the first to give this a go,” he said enthusiastically.

I sighed. The man was the last person I expected to
be a lunatic. He had medium brown hair cut short in a decent style with dark
blue eyes. From the ease with which he looked me in the eye, I knew he wasn’t
any kind of shifter. “I’m really not very good,” I said. The fewer
demonstrations I had to give of my lacking magical talents, the better off I
was.

“That’s okay! A trained fish could do this. Come on
now!”

The room was slightly smaller than the previous two.
The back half of the room sloped downwards towards the middle. There were five
two-person desks. The teacher stood at the front of the room before a long
table that was piled high with odd ingredients, vials, tweezers, candles, and
oddities. Instead of big windows providing light, there were torches floating
randomly around the room… just floating.

A large, cast iron cauldron, about five gallons, sat
on the floor beside a door… which was in the floor. “Everyone already put their
ingredients in. The only way to be sure if it worked, since I didn’t see what
they put in, is to light it.”

“Why can’t you light it?” I asked. That sounded like
something covered under the teacher’s duties.

“Because if they did it wrong, it’s going to explode,
and I don’t want it all over me.”

I sighed, pulled the spare jacket out of my bag, and
draped it over the cauldron. I liked the jacket, but I didn’t want to end up
with a tail or a bird’s foot or something by getting splashed. The cauldron had
three sturdy legs that held it over a silver pan full of sticks and what looked
like hay. I crouched behind the cauldron, discreetly pulled my lighter out of
my pocket, and lit the hay under it. I expected to have to work at getting the
flames going, but it was like the thin sticks were made of paper; they
immediately lit.

I slipped my lighter back into my jeans, stepped
back, and waited. After a few minutes, I cautiously removed my jacket and
everyone backed up. Nothing happened.

“Good. Moving on,” the professor said. He put on some
heavy gloves. “You need to get to know your ingredients.”

Seeing how this could go terribly wrong, I dug around
in my bag until I found my leather work gloves. Four of the other students also
put gloves on as they came to the front of the room. The fifth student was a
young, thin guy who eyed the door in the floor with fear.

The professor handed one of the two women in class a
vial of sticks. “That’s sandalwood. On its own, that is harmless.” He handed
the guy next to me a bottle of a metallic liquid. “That’s mercury. It’s
poisonous, so don’t drink it.”

“I wasn’t going to!” the guy said, offended.

“Why not?”

“Because I didn’t know what it was.”

“Well, now you do know what it is. Don’t drink it.
Now, this is a scream-worm,” he said, pulling a big, fat worm out of a box. It
was about six inches long, an inch in diameter, and white, almost pearlescent.
He handed it to the skinny guy who finally looked up from the door in the
floor.

He grimaced as the worm writhed in his hand. “Why is
it called a scream-worm?” he asked. Then, in the blink of an eye, the worm spit
out some kind of slimy, white feelers that looked like the tentacles of a
jellyfish. The feelers wrapped all around his hands and up his arms. He screamed.

“First rule in my class; if I wear gloves, you
probably should, too.”

The rest of the class consisted of us going over
ingredients. Some of them were normal, like lavender, while some of them were
more bizarre than the scream-worm. When he handed me a frog’s tongue, I asked
where the rest of the frog was and he responded that he had a French lunch.

I knew three things as I walked out of the classroom:
Professor Langril was insane, not all five of my fellow classmates would make
it out uninjured, and this was going to be fun.

I had an hour before my last class of the day began.
I knew there were books and supplies I needed to get, but I planned to acquire
those later. Oddly, there was hardly anyone out of class, as it seemed like
this was a very busy time of day. I decided to try to find Hunt in order to ask
him for more details of the assignment.

Unfortunately, my map didn’t show me where Hunt’s
office was. None of the students I asked could tell me either. One C-Four was
particularly unhelpful. “You won’t find the headmaster on a map. You can only
find him by looking for him.”

“Okay, then which way do I go?”

“Any way is fine. It doesn’t make any difference
which direction you go.”

I decided that up was as good a direction as any, so
I made my way up every stairway I could find. One stairway had every other step
missing, but I made it fine. This led to a circular, three-level library that
could impress the hell out of any bibliophile.

I didn’t find anyone in the library and there was no
door to any other rooms or hallways, so I went back down the stairs. I tried
the next set of steps I came to, but it stopped right in the middle of the air,
about twenty feet high.

Eventually, I found myself alone in a much more
sinister part of the building. Worse, I was completely lost. The hallway was
dark with a doorway on each end as well as to either side of me. No matter
which door I took, it was to a hallway that was exactly the same. I picked one
end of the hallway and went through the door. I didn’t stop and went straight
through to the next door… and the next. There was no end.