Elemental Fire (35 page)

Once we were in the Museum I felt
safer. The room was black, but a faint light filtered in through the windows
that faced out onto Public’s open field. I felt bad that I hadn’t spent any
time there all semester; the masks were covered in a thin layer of dust. But I
knew Dacer would understand.

In this version of the Museum,
all the masks were closer together than they had been in the old building.
There were just two rooms instead of five, so Volans masks were there right
alongside elemental masks. It made me wish the paranormal groups could mix and
cooperate as easily as the masks.

Keller wrapped his arm around my
shoulders as we huddled together. The sounds of the battle were getting louder,
and I could only imagine what was happening as lizards and hellhounds joined
the fight.

Suddenly there was a banging on
the door. I gasped, but it flew open before I could react any further. Framed
by the lights of the paranormals was Vale. With the Museum in darkness, she
couldn’t see Keller and me standing right there as she hurried forward. Her
hair was a mess and her dress was torn. I wondered what she had been doing.

“Stop her,” cried a familiar
voice from the hallway we had just come through. Lisabelle, closely followed by
Sip, Lough, and Trafton, came charging through the door. Lisabelle’s sleeves
were shoved back and her wand blazed.

Unlike Vale, she knew Keller and
I were there.

“Didn’t I yell for you to stop
her?” she panted as Vale skidded to a halt, looking wildly around.

“Don’t hurt her,” cried Dobrov,
coming through the crowd. “She hasn’t done anything wrong.”

Lisabelle looked like her head
was about to explode. She tried to speak several times, while the rest of us
just stood staring at Dobrov. Finally, Lisabelle was able to manage, “I’m
sorry. You must be mistaking me for an idiot. Or a nice person. Or some
dreadful combination of the two. Are you INSANE?”

“Most argue that he is,” said
Sip, finally in agreement with her roommate. “The whole hybrid thing.”

“Yes, I know,” cried Lisabelle.
“But I thought he knew it too. He can’t possibly expect us to - well, it’s just
too fantastical.” She was massaging her arm, and I had the horrible idea that
she was trying to keep her powers from simply shooting out of her and killing
Vale and maybe several of the rest of us as well.

Dobrov stood his ground. Given
who his sister was, I could imagine he had had some practice in standing up to
strong women. But Lisabelle wasn’t giving in easily.

“What about Betsy? She’s never
going to be the same after what happened to her in the waterways,” said
Lisabelle.

“She didn’t die,” said Dobrov.
“She’s going to be fine. My mother didn’t mean for her to die. Please give her
a chance to stand before the committee. Let them decide.”

The tension in the room was
palpable. Lisabelle looked at me and Keller. She could see how exhausted I was,
so I was glad when I didn’t even have to tell her to give Dobrov the benefit of
the doubt.

Finally, she sighed and rolled
her eyes. “You paranormals and your second chances . . . mind-boggling. Okay, I
guess we can go along with that.”

Sip crossed her arms over her
chest and looked around with a disapproving expression.

“Uh oh,” Lisabelle said. “I guess
I spoke too soon. My roommate is about to make some grand pronouncement.”

“I don’t like it,” the werewolf
muttered, her brow puckered.

“I don’t either. Why couldn’t
this be happening when we have finals to take?” Lough said with despair.

“The paranormal gods do not like
you,” said Lisabelle to the dream giver, quirking an eyebrow. “It’s almost
finals time. But I’m pretty sure that after our current president is arrested,
we won’t have to take them.”

“If they don’t like me, how do
they feel about you?” Lough said.

“But I want to have finals,” said
Sip worriedly. She turned to me. “We will, won’t we?” Over her shoulder Trafton
grinned at me.

“They respect me. You cannot be
both liked and respected. You have to choose,” said the darkness mage.

“I still don’t understand where
the Baxter brothers got lizards,” Trafton complained, trying to change the
subject. It was a question we had all wondered about at one point or another
over the semester.

 “The lizards are demons in
disguise,” Vale sniffed. “There’s no such thing as paranormal lizards of
darkness.”

“There’s an illusion spell in the
fire,” Sip confirmed. “They’ve been drugging us all along to think they’re
lizards, which never made sense, but really they aren’t. They’re demons.”

Before Lisabelle could ask how
she had figured that out Sip shrugged. “Researched.”

“So, I was put in a glass box
filled with demons?” I sputtered. “High in the air?”

“Yup, and you’re not dead. You
might be more competent than I give you credit for,” said Lisabelle.

We could have stayed like that
all night arguing, but Dobrov seemed to want to get his mother home. She had
started to sob, and when he walked over to her she met his eyes with her own
watery ones.

“Son,” she murmured. “I’m so
sorry.”

Dobrov didn’t say a word. He just
offered her his arm. Mother and son led the way out, while Sip and Lisabelle
came to either side of Keller and me.

“You know what that is?”
Lisabelle murmured to us, pointing at the hybrid.

“Loyalty,” Sip breathed, beaming.
“It is one thing we are very good at. Now, let’s go take a shower.”

In the hallway the fighting had
stopped. Professor Korba stooped in a corner, leaning over his knees, while
many of the other paranormal professors looked exhausted. The walls were
charred and smoking. A couple of the holes were still framed in burning embers.
Through an opening in the roof I could see that it was almost daylight. I had
an almost overwhelming desire to turn my face to the sun.

When we finally got outside the
spring breeze was cool, but even that couldn’t refresh my tired body. I barely
registered details, except that there were a lot of paranormals milling around.
Some were even students. I saw Cale fade into the background after giving me a
slight nod.

I covered a big yawn with my free
hand. Keller held my other one. Not for the world would I let him go.

As we left the Long Building I
saw, standing across the open space in front of the entrance, a particularly
tall Fire Whip. Lisabelle clearly took exception to him, and by the look on her
face I figured he must be the one who had lashed her under Vale’s orders. But
when Sip put a hand on her roommate’s arm, the darkness mage changed course.
“Another time,” she muttered. I noticed that the Fire Whip sagged a little in
relief when Lisabelle’s attention was diverted.

Later, I wouldn’t remember the
rest of the walk home. My friends departed at some point, returning to rest in
Airlee. The professors wanted to talk to us, but they said it could wait until
I didn’t look like a ghost. I wanted to tell them that I knew a ghost and I
didn’t look anything like Sigil, but I decided against it. Sigil wouldn’t want
to talk to Dove or the other committee members anyway.

Everything was going to be okay.
The Baxter brothers had been defeated. All we had to do was finish the last
Tactical and be done with this terrible semester. And I understood some things
I hadn’t grasped before. I didn’t know where the Mirror Arcane was, but I was
only nineteen. Why did I have to solve every problem? It wasn’t my fault that
it had been taken, or that it wasn’t still safe in Astra. I felt like the
paranormals were finally realizing how much trouble we were in. Caid
understood, but he hadn’t seemed sure what he could do about it. It was
difficult to order paranormals who didn’t get along to act as a cohesive unit.

I climbed the stairs to Astra.
All semester it had felt like something was missing and he had been, but now
Keller was climbing the stairs behind me. As it should be. There wasn’t much
talk of destiny in the paranormal world; we didn’t really believe in it, we
believed in power and loyalty. But I had been raised as a human. Destiny was a
part of me. At least now I could go home and sleep.

I gasped and sat bolt upright in
bed, dislodging Keller’s arm. We had both slept until the next night. Keller
had worked tirelessly to find me, and he was just as exhausted as I was.
Despite the heavy velvet drapes covering my windows I knew it was night again.

Next to me Keller grumbled, but stayed
asleep. I glanced over at him to make sure I hadn’t awakened him, then shifted
carefully. I was not used to getting out of a bed that I slept in with someone
else.

I was still bone tired, and I
wondered how much sleep it would take before I was fully recovered. My head
felt foggy and my eyes just wanted to close. My ring felt heavy on my finger,
the metal cold. It would be a long time before I felt like I was at full
strength again to use it. I sat up and let my body adjust to the fact that it
now had to hold me upright. Like my sleeping boyfriend next to me, it grumbled.

But I couldn’t stay asleep. I had
realized something vital. I had given up hope of finding the Mirror Arcane, but
Sip and Lisabelle were adamant that it must still be on campus. I had thought
that was because Vale had it, but she had obviously been nothing but a pawn.
The Baxter brothers were the next most obvious culprits, but that had also
turned out to be a blind alley.

What had been clear all along was
that it had been taken by someone who knew where it was and had access to
Astra. Well, with Mrs. Swan “missing,” that just left me with access to my
dorm. True, my friends came over from Airlee, or snuck in through the basement
- I was really getting tired of the role basements played in my life - but that
was when I was there to let them in. Lough would never steal from me. There was
a small chance another paranormal, like Caid, had snuck in, but I didn’t think
that was the explanation either.

I took a deep breath, preparing
for what I had to do, where I had to go, and who I had to confront to get my
ancestors’ Mirror back.

In the dead of night, I finally
knew who had the Mirror Arcane, but as it turned out I didn’t even have to go
looking for him. Sigil was floating at the end of my bed when I struggled up,
and he held the Mirror in his hands.

“Hi,” he murmured. “I have
something for you.”

I gave him my best ferocious
glare.

“Sigil,” I hissed. “How could
you! I asked you to protect it.”

“I did,” he argued. “But I did.”

Our argument had awakened the
sleeping fallen angel next to me. He sat up and looked at me questioningly,
then at Sigil.

“Is that a ghost?” he asked in
wonder. “Cool.”

Sigil pushed at his hat
nervously. “Is that a fallen angel?” he said. “Haven’t seen one of those in a
long time.”

“Why did you take the Mirror?” I
demanded, my eyes locked on it, checking for damage. It looked well enough, but
who knows what he’d been doing to it.

“You told me to keep it safe,”
Sigil pointed out. “This is me keeping it safe.”

“This is you stealing what
doesn’t belong to you,” I shot back.

Sigil shook his head sadly,
coming only slightly closer.

“No,” he said. “You told me to
keep it safe. I tried to keep you away from Public, but you were determined.
How could I know that you were such a powerful elemental?”

I exchanged looks with Keller.

“What do you mean ‘tried to keep
me away?’”

Sigil sighed and handed me the
Mirror. It was cold and solid in my hands. I grasped it tightly. I would not be
letting it out of my sight again any time soon.

“The fire when you and your
friends snuck in was me,” Sigil explained. “I wanted to discourage you from
coming for the semester.”

My mind worked frantically. I had
thought it was a defense built into Public, but Sigil was saying that it hadn’t
been. Sigil had known all along that I would come.

“But why?” I whispered. “I can
protect the Mirror.”

“I know that now,” said Sigil. “I
know that now, but I didn’t then. I thought you would take it and ruin it. You
are friends with a darkness mage, for paranormal’s sake.”

“Lisabelle?” I gasped.

“See here,” said Keller coldly.
“Lisabelle would never.”

“As I said,” Sigil answered, “I
know that now.”

“What was the point of taking
it?” I asked tiredly.

“I knew I could keep it as safe
as anyone, any
trustworthy
elemental.”

“You didn’t think I was
trustworthy?”

“No,” said Sigil. “Elementals can
be bad. Your mother was killed by elementals, your own kin killed her, because
she wouldn’t do it their way. They thought she was endangering you, and with
your father no longer there to protect you. . . .”

I felt like a very big paranormal
had come and punched me in the gut. I had lifted my eyes off the Mirror now and
was staring wide-eyed at Sigil. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Keller
looking at me sympathetically, but I had no words.