The Chilling Change Of Air (Elemental Awakening, Book 3) (30 page)

"Yes," he said simply. "Aktor had some stored down here as it's cooler, but the rest was destroyed in the tornado that hit."

"Then save it for Sonya," I said, turning my head away and looking back down at my friend.

"Cassandra," Theo called. My eyes came reluctantly up to his. I knew he would argue. I didn't want to waste energy fighting him. I needed to stay strong for Sonya. "We have enough supplies stored," Theo advised. "Aktor moved the bulk of our provisions here yesterday. Parts of the cellar had been unstable after the earthquake, but Mark and Nico helped him shore them up, so things were moved down here to keep them safe."

"I saw the earthquake proofing," I replied. "They couldn't have done that yesterday."

Theo smiled. It looked so damn tired. "No, that had been the work of the previous owners, who are probably wishing they hadn't sold now. But only the wine storage area had been modified in case of earthquakes, the rest of the cellar was left to chance."

I glanced back towards where the shelving units were and then looked at the floor where the blankets and cushions and mattresses lay scattered about. In amongst the mayhem were gouges in the stone floor, where something heavy had been pushed out of the way. I'd assumed it had been the large table in the corner, but on closer inspection it appeared the shelves of wine were the ones moved.

"So it's safest here, under the arches, but not down by the only way out?" I queried.

Theo's face didn't shift expression in the slightest, but I felt his anxiety as though it was real.

"Yes," he said in agreement, but didn't seem to want to elaborate.

"That seems like a major oversight," I remarked.

"It does, doesn't it," he agreed. "Will you eat now?"

"Sonya will need it..."

"Casey," Theo said, his voice hardening. "Sonya may not wake up for some time and the cheese will have spoiled. Don't waste it. And no," he started, when it was clear I was thinking up another argument, "none of us want it."

I doubted that. It was more likely, no one else was offered it. Theo taking what he wanted and damning the rest.

"
Oraia
," he whispered. "You need your strength. Out of all us, you are the one who has any chance of stopping this. You. Not me. Not the elders. Not an
Aeras
shaman. Not the Alchemists and their knowledge of our history. Not even
Aetheros
himself. But you."

He sighed, closed his eyes and when they reopened, hazel stared back at me. But it was steady, determined. Strong. As strong as the gold used to be.

"I know it is a lot to be placed on your shoulders," he added. "I know you don't have an answer to how it will be done. I
know
you feel alone in this. But you are not. We are here. And of all the
Pyrkagia
to have on your side I could not think of better than us. Nico is as well trained as me. Isadora has skills even we don't have. Aktor is twenty-five thousand years old."

My eyes darted over to where the butler sat elegantly on a cushion, drinking his tea and nibbling on a biscuit, as though he was in a beautiful parlour entertaining guests and not on the floor of a stone basement.

I glanced down at Sonya, my hand cupping her pale cheek, unaware I was touching her, even now. When she recovered, and I chose that word purposefully, she needed a world to come back to. She needed a best friend who would take better care of her. She needed to know there was a future and not be brought down like I was feeling now.

"You're not alone," Theo repeated gently. "But we need you to stay strong."

I looked at the cracker and cheese he held out, noted the four more he had on the plate and the little dish of tinned fruit to the side. A glass of water sat on the ground next to him. I licked my lips, suddenly thirsty.

"Drink?" Theo asked, handing the glass to me.

I downed it before I could stop.

"Eat," he pressed, replacing the glass with the food. I hesitated. He growled, which seemed to reverberate around the arched ceilings.

I placed the entire cracker in my mouth, barely able to close my lips and said, "What?" Cheeks puffed out like a squirrel.

"
Aetheros
, I love you," he blurted, in a very un-Theo-like fashion.

Nico snorted. Aktor laughed. Isadora probably scowled, but I wasn't looking at her.

And Sonya remained unconscious.

But she wouldn't forever, so I took the next cracker and cheese offered, holding Theo's eyes and letting him know through my look and the fact that I was eating the very last cheese we would probably ever have, denying everyone else because he'd demanded it, that I loved him too.

By the time I'd finished the carbohydrates and was just downing the last of the tinned fruit, Mark staggered around the corner of a set of shelves, banging into them and making me wince, but nothing fell or rattled; too well protected.

"Did the wine come with the house?" I asked.

"Yes," Aktor replied from his spot by the fire. "The former owner was an entrepreneur or some such thing. Extradited to America to face a criminal lawsuit. His assets were frozen, but this property was held under a trust, and before the authorities could claim it too, he sold it lock, stock and barrel. To us. Rather nice find, I must say."

"You did well, Aktor," I agreed.

"Even if it no longer stands except for the booze," my brother said, slurring his words slightly.

He threw himself down on some pillows closer to us than Isadora, who was looking at him as though he was a bug. A very smelly bug, I had no trouble identifying the whiff as alcohol from here.

"What's wrong with you?" I demanded, feeling much more able to quarrel and my brother was the perfect target right now.

I couldn't start anything with Theo. He loved me. He'd just blurted that out for everyone to hear.

Mark snorted. Loudly. Then took a swig from his half empty bottle of wine. It would not have been his first, from the look of him.

"What's not wrong, sister?"

"Yeah, well, we're all in the same boat, so why the wine?" I shot back.

"I'm not whining. I'm drowning my sorrows. There's a difference," he pointed out.

"Not whine, you imbecile. But wine. W-I-N-E."

He sniggered. He'd known, he was just being a prick.

"It occurs to me," he started, sounding a little bit more focused all of a sudden. "That we still have two Genesis destructive episodes to survive."

"So you thought you'd get drunk?" I asked, eyebrows arched.

"Don't look at me like that," he snapped. Then realised there was still wine in his bottle and took another swig with much enthusiasm.

His eyes landed on Sonya.

"The next could be Water," he commented, in a subdued voice. And then more flippantly added, swinging the now near empty bottle out in an arc to make his point, "And all this could be drowned. I just thought enjoying it beforehand made sense."

No. Mark might have been a bit of a knuckle-head sometimes, but there was more.

"Where were you when Air hit?" I asked, as Theo reached out and rubbed my thigh, just above my knee. His timing was not by accident. "Where were you?" I asked again, voice soft.

Mark's eyes didn't leave Sonya.

Then he said, in a guilt laden voice, "I wasn't with Marin. That's where."

Silence filled the room. Even Isadora had her head turned towards my brother.

"And you should have been?" I queried. Had he been instructed to look after Sonya and been goofing off?

Finally he lifted wretched eyes to me.

"She's human, Case. She's fragile."

"I know," I said, my throat constricting familiarly on words I'd said to myself before.

"I should have been looking out for her. I should have been close enough to protect her. She's been in our lives for so long, she's part of the family and I wasn't there."

He sounded distraught. Not making any sense. Because I hadn't been there either.

"Mark, you weren't to know that Air would hit. Theo and I didn't sense it until it had already begun and we were outside."

"So was I," Mark mumbled, and I noticed Isadora begin to shift a little restlessly as though bored with the drama and just wanting to have some peace and quiet.

I frowned at her, but turned my attention back to my incomprehensible big brother.

"This is not your fault, Marcus," I pushed, going for the big guns, like Mum used to do.

"Why do you think the Alchemists are so hell bent on reuniting with the
Ekmetalleftis
?" he asked out of nowhere.

I felt Theo stiffen, but he managed to hide it by continuing to stroke my thigh. Nico glared outright at Mark, and Isadora had stopped squirming completely.

"Why?" I asked slowly, not sure I wanted to hear this.

"Because they knew Genesis was coming," Mark said with no small amount of passion.

Was this the side of my brother that made him a zealot similar to the Alchemists he was trained to be like?

"And they knew," Mark added, "that humans would be almost wiped out."

"How could they know that?" I asked, feeling numb. "Has this happened before?"

Mark shook his head and spun the empty wine bottle in his hands, between his legs.

"Not to this scale, but they have ways of reading these things. I don't know how, it's specialised training, and Gramps never thought I needed to know. But we were all taught, even secret Alchemists like me, that humans were the most important factor. Save the humans. Protect the humans. Advance the humans."

That last one sounded very much like the Alchemists I'd grown to hate.

"So, you feel responsible for Sonya because you weren't there to protect her, right when an Element spat the dummy and killed, I'm thinking, millions of humans all across the globe? Is that right?"

He nodded.

"I don't know how to tell you this, Mark. But you are not the only one capable of protecting Sonya. Even the big bad
Ekmetalleftis
would do it. Take one look at Aktor and Nico and tell me that isn't true."

"You don't get it. I've been trained..."

"To protect humanity. OK, I understand, but you can't take it all on yourself."

He made a low growling sound, unlike the sounds
Athanatos
make, but equally as angry.

Or guilty.

His eyes lifted to mine and he held my firm gaze determinedly, as though he wanted me to be looking at him when he spoke his next words.

"I know I'm not the only one, Case," he said softly. But it was a lethal kind of soft. Vibrating with what I think was self-hatred. "I know others would have tried to save her if they could."

He spoke as though she was already dead. I opened my mouth to refute it, but he rushed to talk over me.

"As the only Alchemist here she was
my
responsibility," he insisted and I threw up my hands in defeat.

Because he wasn't listening, he was determined to take the blame, and nothing I said would make a difference now.

Whatever. I was too tired for this. I hurt all over and Sonya had still not moved an inch. I brushed her hair aside and refused to look at Mark. When he got like this, it was just a waste of time. Time I didn't have to entertain his self-absorption anymore.

"Casey," he said, a snap of command that had me lifting my eyes even though I'd decided enough was enough. "I wasn't anywhere near her, I wasn't paying attention to what was happening and therefore didn't rush to protect her, because I was ignoring everything Gramps taught me. Everything he told me we stood for."

"Mark," I cried, just wanting him to calm the freaking hell down. "Chill, OK. It's not your fault."

He stood up abruptly, wine still in hand, which quickly left it as he hurled the bottle at the far wall making it shatter into a thousand tiny pieces of glass.

Theo had stood. Aktor and Isadora had as well. The latter actually walking over to my clearly enraged and out of his ever loving mind brother. I wanted to warn her to stay out of it, but the closer she got, the calmer he became. His breathing slowing, his fists unclenching, his face losing that desperate hatred he'd suddenly started displaying.

A hatred that was clearly for himself.

And as Dora placed a hand on his upper arm, and his shoulders eventually gave up the rigidity that had held them, I thought I might just have finally comprehended what he had been trying to tell me all along.

Mark's eyes came up to Isadora's; she held his gaze with a steady look. He shook his head, reminded of who she was by the Peters colourings. Brown hair, hazel eyes, golden tanned skin.

Then he wrenched his arm from her hold, took one last look at Sonya, and flicking his eyes to mine he quickly turned away.

"Run, then," Dora spat. "You're just a coward!"

"Isadora," Theo said. Clipped. Hard. Brooking no argument.