Elemental Fire (17 page)

“It’s bad,” he said, sitting back
in his heels and lacing his fingers in front of him. “Darkness calls to darkness
and Lisabelle has a lot of it. She probably doesn’t even realize how much
energy she spends fighting it off, but she spends a lot.”

“Darkness calls to darkness,” I
murmured. “It’s calling to Lisabelle?”

Trafton nodded. “She doesn’t have
to give in. Some darkness mages don’t. Risper, for example.”

“But Risper . . .” I was about to
say that Risper didn’t exactly live within the law. He was a great bounty
hunter, which probably required him to do a lot of unsavory things and
associate with a lot of unsavory paranormals. He was also Elam, a famed thief.
Lisabelle did not have either of those outlets yet. But Trafton shushed me
before I even got going on this thought train. It was a good thing, because I
was too tired for this conversation right now anyway.

I spent the rest of the weekend
sleeping. I wanted to read, but I didn’t even have the energy to hold the book,
let alone read it. Trafton fixed it so that I would have no more dreams, and on
Sunday night, as I was preparing to climb the stairs to my own bed for the
first time since I had dreamed of Malle, Trafton sat down to talk to me.

“I think your mother was a dream
giver,” he said. “Normal paranormals do not dream like this.”

Shocked, I tried to stammer out
several replies, eventually landing on the oh so eloquent, “Huh?”

Trafton shrugged. “You don’t
know, right? You know she was Airlee? Not Aurum, or Volans. Airlee, but that’s
it. Yeah, maybe she was also Astra and you just don’t realize it. You never got
to talk to her about it. I’m sure she wanted to tell you more, but the thing
is. . .” - he scooted his chair forward, his eyes intense and his voice urgent
- “the thing is, you shouldn’t be dreaming like you do. Sip and Lisabelle say
you dream of Keller.” I blushed, but he was so intent on what he was saying
that he didn’t appear to notice. “And of course you also dream of Malle. I
can’t dream of Malle, not that I want to,” he said, grinning at my horrified
expression. “And I’m a full-blooded dream giver.”

I sat there deep in thought. “It
might fit,” I said eventually. “Dream givers were rare. She probably didn’t
have much family, and part of the reason there aren’t many dream givers is that
they get overwhelmed by most other powers. So, I might have some latent dream
giver abilities. But fundamentally, I’m elemental.”

Was I really starting to find out
who my mother was?

Trafton nodded enthusiastically.
“You need to know more, of course. Maybe Sigil can help you with that.”

When I raised my eyebrows he
shrugged. “Sip and Lisabelle told me you have a ghost. I can’t wait to meet
him. Seriously, it’s the most exciting thing I’ve heard in weeks. They are so
unusual!”

“He’s stuck in the attic,” I said
indignantly. “Poor ghost. He’s been there for years.”

Trafton pooh-poohed that. “He’s a
ghost. What more do you need in life?”

I showed Trafton out and then
slowly climbed the stairs to my room. He had given me a lot to think about.

Chapter Fifteen

Monday morning dawned gray and
snowing. It hadn’t snowed since we got back to Public, and I’d been dreading
it. I bundled up warmly, with the added benefit of covering my shoulder. It was
still stiff, but it was healing. I would have a nasty scar, mostly down my
back. I would just have to be careful of the t-shirts I wore in the future
unless I wanted to give a long explanation of why it looked like my shoulder
had been dipped in acid.

My stiff arms and aching legs
meant that it took me longer than usual to get ready. I didn’t realize how late
I was to my first class of the week, How to Spot a Traitor Paranormal, until I
was trudging through the white snow on campus and there were no other students
in view.

I looked around worriedly. Vale’s
lizards, the great black giants she had with her at all times, were said to
patrol campus to make sure that no students skipped class. Since I was the only
student out walking now, I sincerely hoped that was not true.

There was a prickling at the back
of my neck, but everywhere I looked I saw nothing but the empty campus. If I
hadn’t been walking in other students’ footprints, I’d have thought the place
was deserted.

I remembered Sip asking why Vale
couldn’t have just used hellhounds, but of course the answer was obvious.
Hellhounds had trouble in daylight, as did demons and Fire Whips. The lizards
were the product of the Baxter brothers, and they seemed to be trained
specifically to terrify students. Sometimes I wondered who exactly was running
this school, Vale or the Baxters. Just thinking about them made me walk faster.
I was almost to Cruor, whose door was hanging open even in this weather because
the vampires, except for Zervos, were safely sleeping, when I heard a loping
gait behind me. It was all the warning I had.

The great shadow loomed behind
me, covering the sun. I threw myself forward. I thought dully that if I kept
getting attacked at this rate I would become great at rolling out of the way,
if nothing else.

The lizard barely touched the
snow as it landed and sprang again. I rolled over, trying to go to my left to
protect my injured arm, then I kicked my feet out just as the lizard struck
down. I couldn’t help it, I used a bit of magic to ward the thing off. I was
lying on very cold water, after all, and I threw just enough of it in the
thing’s great red eyes so that it faltered.

My red and chapped hands
scrambled on the snow.

The lizard’s giant red tongue
flicked out, looking a lot like a Fire Whip. Keller, who loved battle theory,
had explained that to be precise with a whip was one of the most difficult
feats a paranormal could master. The Fire Whips and the tongues of the lizards
always hit their marks.

“How many lizards are there?” I’d
asked Lisabelle when we first saw them. We both tried to count, but it was
impossible. Somehow the lizards kept rotating, coming together and breaking
apart until we were so confused we lost track. I had thought there were six,
while Lisabelle had seen ten. Sip said she only saw two. Whatever the number,
if you were walking around campus you could assume they weren’t far off.

Without thinking, I closed my
hand around a stick that was lying in the snow and slashed it in front of my
face just as the lizard’s giant tongue flicked out. Wrapping around the flimsy
wood, the tongue pulled the stick out of my hand easily. I was trying really
hard not to think how gross it was.

The lizard pulled the stick into
its mouth, flexed its haunches, and taunted me with its giant eyes. I gulped,
unsure where to go from there.

“What is the meaning of this?” a
voice hissed behind me. Never in my life had I expected to be glad to see
Zervos, but there he was, striding in my direction. He swished around me as I
sat on the snow, my butt soaked through, and came to stand between me and the
Baxters’ pet. His ring blazed as he stared the reptile down.

“Leave,” he ordered it. “Now.”
The lizard cocked its head to one side, eyeing the professor. Its tail swished
once, then again, as if it was sizing the vampire up. But eventually it turned
around and glided away, keeping its eyes on Zervos until it turned the corner
of the nearest building and disappeared.

Zervos, for his part, continued
to stare the thing down until it was out of sight. Once I realized that the
staring contest was about to end I wished it wouldn’t. I didn’t want to deal
with Zervos’s wrath.

Sure enough, the moment the
lizard’s tail disappeared around the corner my professor rounded on me.

His black eyes blazed, his
nostrils were flared, and his jaw worked, but no sound came out.

“Just get to class,” he said
through gritted teeth. “You’ll be lucky if you don’t get in trouble for using
your powers for something that was not ‘the greater good,’ or some such
nonsense.”

“I rather think it was my good,”
I said.

Zervos paused mid-turn. His eyes
narrowed, he said, “Yes, well, you do spend a remarkable about of time thinking
about yourself, don’t you?”

I was so flabbergasted I didn’t
respond. I merely pushed myself to my knees, then to my feet. If Zervos noticed
how slowly I was moving he didn’t feel the need to comment. I dusted the snow
off my backside with as much dignity as I could muster and stomped into Cruor.

I hadn’t realized that we had an
audience. All my classmates were standing inside the doorway staring at Zervos
and me as I brushed past them. Sip and Lisabelle were in their normal seats, as
was Dobrov, who hadn’t said a word to us since his sister and he had appeared
on campus.

I wanted to go to him and see how
he was doing, but given the purple and yellow bruise that was forming on his
face I didn’t.

“Did the lizard almost kill you?”
Lisabelle asked casually as she sharpened a pencil against the rough floor.

“Yes,” I fumed. “The nerve.”

“You’re late,” said Lisabelle,
shaking her pencil at me. “You are the scourge of society, you awful
paranormal, you.”

Sip giggled, covering her mouth
with her hand as her purple eyes sparkled, and suddenly, with my friends there,
the dungeon didn’t feel so dark. Trafton sidled in after most of the rest of
the class had returned to their seats and mouthed, “How are you?” to me. I
nodded, letting him know I was fine.

Zervos stomped into the room
last, adjusting his robes.

“If we’re done with all the
ridiculousness?” he said menacingly. “Let us begin.”

The next couple of weeks passed
slowly. Whenever I saw my friends alone, which was when they snuck into Astra
late at night to meet Lough, we discussed the artifacts on the Wheel. We all
knew what was at stake. If the artifacts fell into the hands of the demons, the
paranormals would be wiped out, and with the elementals all dead the only hope
of enacting the Power of Five without me was with the artifacts. I told them what
Malle had said, that she had two, and that the Globe White was the only one
unaccounted for. I told Lough to ask Keller about it, but when he mentioned it
Keller told him it was a myth and to stop being ridiculous. President Caid
would arrive the day after the first Ultimate Tactical. Lisabelle made fun of
the fact that it was called the Ultimate Tactical. She was confident there
would be another Tactical next semester and that this was nonsense. I was not
so sure. Vale wanted everyone on my team dead, that much was obvious, and
Tactical was a perfect cover for the process of killing us off and getting the
artifacts.

As the days went on I read my
books and visited Sigil whenever I could, but if I asked about my parents, my
history, he deferred, saying he would check for next time and that he had never
really learned how to use the catalog anyway.

“This is too much homework,” said
Sip, her shoulders slouching forward. We were at breakfast in the dining hall
on a gray and bleak Friday morning. Even at this time of day the torches were
burning, giving the room a flickering, smoky feel.

“Tell me about it,” said
Lisabelle, bracing her chin on her hand.

“I am,” said Sip tartly, “because
I know you don’t do your own homework.”

“I do most of it,” Lisabelle
replied indignantly.

Trafton was sitting across from
us. He had checked on my shoulder again, until Lisabelle made fun of him for
being more of a healer than a dream giver. He blushed, but otherwise he ignored
her teasing.

“I can’t believe your mother was
part dream giver,” said Sip, buttering her toast. “That explains a lot.”

“Like what?” I said.

“Well,” said Sip, “why you don’t
know a lot about her. Lough and Trafton are the only dream givers at Public,
because there just aren’t that many. It probably means that she doesn’t have
any family left.”

“Besides me and Ricky,” I said.

“Right,” said Sip, nodding.
“Speaking of Ricky, how’s he doing?”

“Good,” I said. “He wants me to
come home this summer or visit soon.”

Lisabelle snorted. “He has no
idea.”

Just then there was a banging and
a scream from the front of the room. One of the lizards had jumped up on the
table and one of the Baxters was shooing it off as a couple of nearby students
screamed.

“Have you ever heard of those
lizards?’ I asked my friends quietly. “I’d prefer hellhounds.”

Lisabelle didn’t bother to look
as she shrugged. “Nope, but there are all sorts of paranormals that are rare
and nearly extinct. That’s why it’s called the sixth dorm, because not all
paranormals fit into the neat designation of vampire, pixie, Airlee, elemental,
and fallen angel.”

“I thought that’s what Airlee was
for. I mean, it’s not just one paranormal type.”

“Yes, but there are lots of each,
except for dream givers,” said Lisabelle. “The Airlees that started the dorm
refused to live in the same building as lizards.”