Elemental Earth (Paranormal Public) (16 page)

Keller stood there in dark jeans
and a black hoodie. He looked like he was dressed for mischief. He also looked
really good. So good, in fact, that I almost forgot that he was mad at me. And
now I knew he had good reason not to trust Nolan. Nolan was a Golden Falls
student, after all.

Keller didn’t look at me as he
came forward. The three of us scattered.

“How’d you find us?” Lisabelle
asked, her tone more curious and impressed than annoyed.

Keller examined the door, a
single dark lock of hair falling over his forehead as he bent forward.

“I was looking for Charlotte,” he
said, his voice low. “When I went to the suite and she wasn’t there, I just
followed the path of destruction.”

“They have black ghosts,” said
Lisabelle, as if that explained everything.

Keller looked at her sharply.

“My aunt didn’t think they were
doing anything illegal here,” he said. “She’ll be surprised to learn how wrong
she was.”

Now he looked at me for the first
time. “Do you think you can get word to Dacer if you have to?”

I chewed my lower lip, surprised
that he thought it was as serious as all that. Now that he had met my eyes, I
almost wished he hadn’t. He was upset, but he was here. That had to count for
something.

“I think so,” I said softly.
“I’ll certainly try, if you want.”

“I want,” he said, nodding curtly
and looking back at the door, his blue eyes softening when they were no longer
watching me. A large ball of hurt lodged in my gut, and I wondered what, if
anything, was going to be able to dislodge it.

Keller put his hand on the
doorknob. “I thought your uncle taught you how to pick locks,” he said to
Lisabelle. She glared at him. We all knew she hated it when she couldn’t do
something.

“He did,” she said. “I guess I
just couldn’t pick this one.”

Keller nodded. “They knew that if
someone broke in here they’d be expecting something complicated, so they went
the opposite route - they did something incredibly simple. They also did it a
long time ago, before some of the newer, fancier stuff came out.”

I held my breath. All eyes were
trained on Keller and the door.

His ring pulsed and pulsed again.
One more pulse and I heard a clicking sound. The door started to swing open,
but he caught it before it could open all the way. The stench from whatever was
behind the doors hit us like a slap in the face.

Keller looked at each of us as he
held the door open. I was sure he was trying not to breathe, or maybe he was
using his fallen angel powers to heal the air around his nose, if that was
possible. The smell was so bad I wanted to lie down on the floor and crawl
away, but instead I met Keller’s eyes.

“Are you sure you want to go
though there?” he asked. “We can still turn back.”

“Why would we do back after we
came this far?” Sip demanded, bracing her fists on her hips and giving Keller
her patented glare.

“Because nothing that we find in
there will uncomplicate our fight against the Nocturns. Nothing in there will
make this easier, and nothing in there will bring Kia back.”

“We aren’t looking to bring her
back,” Lisabelle said darkly, “we’re looking to find out who really did it. Do
you forget that they have Vanni?”

Keller ran his fingers through
his hair in frustration.

Without another word he released
the door and let it creak open, and we all peered through. It was just a small
corridor, and at the end was another door. The light over the second door was
dimmer, but I could already see that it was ajar.

“What’s that noise?” Sip
whispered. The smell was so bad my eyes were watering.

“I really hope Kia isn’t here,” I
said.

Keller shook his head. “Zervos
insisted that her body be sent to Public. He knew it couldn’t stay here, and
I’m sure Oliva and the professors wanted it back with her family. I guess
Zervos has at least that much power, because she’s gone.

We moved down to the next door.
Our footsteps were the only sound on the damp stone. I scarcely dared to
breathe. Unlike with the first door, all Keller had to do was shove this one
open. I guess they didn’t expect any intruder to make it this far.

The stench hit me full in the
face. Sip covered her mouth while Keller wrinkled his nose. Only Lisabelle
looked unaffected, but her eyes had gone to a dull black as she took in what
was in front of her. The dim light seemed filtered, and trying to see anything
was almost like trying to look through a dirty window into a dark room, except
that there was no glass between me and what I was seeing.

Never in my wildest nightmares
could I have imagined what was going on in the medical wing of Golden Falls
University. Keller’s mouth was one thin line as his face went from surprised to
revolted.

“Wow,” Sip breathed, fear clear
in every line of her body. Her eyes blinked rapidly and her hands were small
fists at her sides. “It’s not a medical wing. It’s a laboratory.”

All around us were metal tables.
Lining the walls were jugs of strange-looking fluid, from black to yellow to
blue and green. It was like a room for experiments.

We spread out throughout the
space. There was something like a very old and ratty rug covering parts of the
floor. It was so dirty it looked black, and to make matters worse it was
concentrating the stench of the room. Our footsteps were muffled as we walked
across it.

“I thought medical wings were
supposed to be clean places,” said Sip despairingly.

“It doesn’t look like they really
use this one,” Lisabelle commented.

The ceiling was low, and the
filtered light came from candles against the wall and a fireplace in the center
of the room. I didn’t really want to examine anything, I wanted to run back to
the dormitory, pack my stuff, and make a break for it.

Funny, because in semesters past
I had been held a prisoner, like with Daisy and Dobrov’s mother, whereas here,
at Golden Falls, Sectar had not given us any restrictions. He had said that having
the united goal of peace was restriction enough, whatever that meant.

Sectar had merely encouraged us
to trust each other and respect each other’s privacy - in order to avoid any
discord. I had rather liked the sound of his philosophy.

But a determination to avenge
Kia, and the memory of what Faci had done to Vanni when she tried to leave
Golden Falls and he caught her, had kept me going until I had come to this
horrible place. It had propelled me to sneak out, and now it would propel me to
find out what had happened to Kia, regardless of the horror.

“What are they doing in here?”
Sip whispered. “Paranormals don’t experiment on each other.” Horror was clear
in her voice. She had gone over to a long metal table pushed against one wall,
above which a series of candles had been lit. An array of instruments covered
the table.

I opened my mouth to answer her,
then closed it without having said a word.

“We’ll find out . . .” Keller
trailed off. He was looking at something I was sure had once been alive. It was
now preserved in a strange sort of tube.

I didn’t even go over to look.
There was something dark and cakey on the end of many of the instruments, and
it could only be one thing. Lisabelle went over to Keller and they stood there,
looking at one of the large glass cases with something floating inside it.
Ignoring them as best I could, I headed for the center of the room. The only
real light was there, coming from the fire pit. Since there was no ventilation
in the room, it dawned on me that the fire must be magic.

I watched the flames jump around,
creating pools of hazy light. How could something so untamed and powerful be
used for such evil? What burned in those flames?

“So, this place is used for
experiments,” Keller said softly at my elbow. I felt his arm brush mine and
even now a prickle of heat worked its way through my body. “Or at least it was.
I guess maybe that was a long time ago.”

“If it was so long ago, why would
Kia’s records be here?” Sip asked.

“They don’t have anywhere else to
put them?” I offered. “They don’t deal in murder, remember?” I just couldn’t
stop thinking about Vanni.

“Did it start when the old
president gave his powers to Sectar?” I asked, just as softly. Somehow,
disturbing the deadly purpose of the room felt wrong. I was afraid that if I
spoke too loudly, demons would come shooting out of the walls and hellhounds
would crash through the door. Why hadn’t I heard about any of this?

Keller shook his head. “I don’t
think so. I think it was before. Sectar isn’t a leader. He’s a follower.
They’ve been having problems for years, but they wanted to keep it quiet.
Golden Falls is world-renowned.”

I bit my lower lip as I watched
him touch one of the instruments gingerly. A frown creased his brow.

“What is it?” I asked, wondering
what else could possibly go wrong right now.

“There are traces of fallen angel
power here,” he said, touching another instrument with just his fingertips. “I
can’t imagine why.”

“Do you think they had Vanni up
here?” I asked. He shook his head again. “No, it’s not Vanni. I would recognize
that.”

I tried not to bristle at that.
It was okay for Keller to have friends. Kind of. I just wished they weren’t so
pretty. Or, you know, female.

“Can we just find Kia’s death
records and get out of here?” said Sip on my other side.

“You look kind of like a pixie
right now,” I said, noting the greenish tint of her skin and how her hair
looked brown in the light.

Sip wrinkled her nose at me.
“Ew.”

“I’m still not sure I want to
know,” I whispered. I just hoped it was quick. I hated to think of Kia
suffering.

“They’re probably over here,”
said Lisabelle, pointing. She strode across the long room. Her black dress
billowed around her and her head was held high. If she was so confident in what
we were doing, maybe I could be as well.

Against the far wall, opposite
the door we had come through, was a set of floor-to-ceiling black cabinets made
of some sort of wood. They looked like drawers that could be pulled out, and
there were all sorts of papers stuffed inside them.

Lisabelle stood there for a long
time examining different drawers while the rest of us continued to stand in
front of the fire. Her touch was careful and she didn’t move anything unless
she had to.

“Do you think they’ll know we
were here?” I asked.

“They’ll know someone was,” said
Sip, “but they won’t know it’s us unless we do something stupid. We should be
able to cover our tracks.”

“Maybe they’ll think it was
Zervos looking for Kia’s stuff,” I said, rolling my shoulders, trying to work
out some of the tension, “so that he could report to Oliva.”

“I seriously wish we had never
agreed to come here this semester,” said Sip mournfully. “Trying to find the
objects on the Wheel was bad enough.”

“Well, I can tell you one thing,”
I said seriously, “there’s no way I’m letting Ricky apply to this place for
college.”

“Ricky would do this place some
good,” said Lisabelle, “with all that sarcasm and stubbornness.”

“Pot meet kettle,” said Sip,
rolling her eyes at me.

“Sip, in this light your hair
looks brown,” I said thoughtfully. “You ever think about dying it? There’s a
lot of potions and supplies in here.”

Sip just glared at me as
Lisabelle chuckled.

“Here it is,” she said. She
pulled out a thin black file that looked brand new and brought it over to us.
We all crowded around her to read over her shoulder. She flipped open the
folder and the rustle of paper reminded me that we were at a school, an
institute of higher academic learning. Ha.

The print was in a fine gold
cursive. They probably didn’t have ink in any other color, I decided. I read it
several times before it really sank in.

Kia had not died painfully, which
eased a bit of the tension in my chest. She had died instantly, from a fall of
three stories, but it did not say from where. Images flashed though my mind of
the pretty pixie falling through the air in a soundless scream. Had I been
there the air would have caught us, like it did during the demon attack. It had
not caught her.

“She should have been able to
save herself, though,” Sip mused, her voice tinged with sadness. “She was a
pixie, and she always carried her dust. If she fell three stories, it was
because she had already been stunned somehow.”

“Where around here is there a
place three stories off the ground anyhow?” I asked, looking at my friends.

“It could have been through a
window,” said Lisabelle, tapping her foot. “It probably doesn’t matter.”

“Can we go now?” asked Sip,
nervously looking over her shoulder at the door we’d all come through. “I don’t
know how much time has passed, but we have to be back in our suite before
Golden Falls kids are up for breakfast, and we probably don’t have very long.”

The rest of us agreed. Lisabelle
replaced the file, and we quickly made our way out of the medical wing. I tried
not to look left or right; the disturbing images already felt like they were
burned into my brain.

“Lough’s not going to like any of
this,” I said, as we all headed through the second door and then the first. The
more distance we put between us and the strange laboratory the easier I felt.

“It’s strange,” Sip mused, as we
started down the stairs, “it almost feels like it’s not for magic, you know?
Where was the magic in there?”

“Yeah, what exactly do you think
they’re experimenting on?” I asked. Despite all the stuff in the room, there
was no evidence of what they were actually doing or who or what they were doing
it to.

No one knew. I didn’t even have a
theory.

“Whatever it is, they don’t keep
it there,” said Lisabelle. “Most of the files were student health records.
There might be something else there, but it’s buried.”

Dawn was just rising through the
windows as the sun peeked over the mountain, washing the valley in yellow
light. Despite what we had just been through, I couldn’t help but notice how
stunningly peaceful the place was. The valley barely seemed to know it was
winter, unless you went up to towers you weren’t supposed to be in. The
waterfall glittered in the early morning light, almost making me smile.

“We need help,” Sip mused. “I
have an idea.”

Lisabelle raised her eyebrows.
Sip said nothing, she just smiled a little.

We were careful to make as little
sound as possible as we walked, afraid of who might hear us and come looking.

I desperately wished the
corridors were carpeted. We were nearly to the girls’ suite, which was on the
way to the guys’, when we heard footsteps.

My heart sank.

“We made it so far,” said Sip
mournfully, as Zervos came around the corner.

We didn’t have time to hide. We
were caught.

Zervos’s footsteps barely
faltered. He blinked once, and then again, the only sign that he even saw us.
His back was razor straight and his eyes were sharp. The four of us stood there
like statues as Zervos simply breezed past us without even making eye contact.

The blood pulsed in my temples. I
gulped and turned my head just enough to watch him continue to stride down the
hall. None of us moved, even after we no longer heard the sound of his
footsteps. Unlike us, he was not trying to be quiet.

“Did that just happen or was it
an apparition I was seeing, caused by lack of sleep?” Lisabelle asked, a frown
creasing her brow.

“Did we suddenly turn invisible,”
said Sip, “or did Zervos just choose not to yell at us for clearly breaking
rules, because I’m pretty sure he chose not to yell at us, but that just sounds
so crazy and out there . . . like Lisabelle wearing pink. . . .”

“May the darkness take me if I
ever do,” Lisabelle muttered.

“He just walked away,” said
Keller in shock. “He definitely just breezed past us.”

I found myself reaching for
Keller’s hand. When my fingers brushed his he stuffed his hands into his
pockets, never looking at me. I saw Lisabelle’s eyes flick to us. She had seen.
My heart felt like stone.

“Maybe he wanted us to be doing
what we were doing?” Sip said. “The evil professor paranormal wanted us to be
sneaking around? Wow.”

“Let’s figure it out after we get
back to our rooms,” I said, and we hurried into the suite. I turned around to
say goodbye to Keller, but he was already striding down the hall. My heart
clenched.

I watched him walk away until Sip
grabbed my arm and pulled me inside.

“No moping,” she said, waggling a
finger at me. “We have to get in bed.”

Feeling bone tired, I climbed
into my own bed, but I didn’t close my eyes. Instead I stared at the ceiling
for a long time, afraid that if I let myself fall asleep I would dream of a
falling pixie I just couldn’t save.

After three weeks, nothing much
had changed. Golden Falls classes were hard and we all felt constantly behind.
Every free second was spent doing schoolwork. We studied runes and veneers. We
learned about concealment. Golden Falls students were clearly used to the
workload, and unlike the Public students they rarely looked like they were
sagging under the weight.

Sip continued to write about
paranormal union and freedom. She published to the Tabble regularly and was
developing a large following. Every so often Mount would publish a response.
The two had started something like a respectful rivalry.

I still hadn’t worked out the
problem of getting in touch with Dacer. I knew Zervos would be of no help,
although he had never mentioned our little morning run-in.

Keller and I were barely
speaking, and I had no idea how to fix it. I wanted to ask him, but part of the
problem was that we were hardly ever alone.

But the quiet was about to be
shattered, just not in the way I expected.

One morning Sectar, whom I rarely
saw, joined us for courtyard breakfast.

“‘Presenting’ spells are actually
quite complicated,” Sip was saying between mouthfuls of brown sugar-covered
porridge.

I shielded my eyes. “Do you think
the waterfall is an illusion?”

Sip snorted. “Not likely.”

We were in the middle of the meal
- I had two pancakes covered in strawberries - when Sectar raised his hands for
silence.

“It has come to my attention,”
said the tall man, “that some of the Public students are worried about the
fallen angel Vanni, who has been in our prisons since she murdered her Public
classmate in cold blood. I want to set your minds at ease,” he explained. “I do
not want you to worry about a traitor. You have enough to worry about, for
example your schoolwork, so that you do not need to concern yourselves with the
affairs of your elders.”