Windburn (The Elemental Series #4) (2 page)

I didn’t want her to be smart. I wanted her to tell them they were horrible and that she trusted me even though I had to make tough choices. She of all the people in my life knew the truth of what happened to Keeda in the Pit.

Thinking she was about to become the new queen of the Pit, Keeda had attacked me. Wearing a disguise, I’d thought her to be my stepmother, Cassava. I’d used everything at my disposal to stop her, including my untrained, and wildly unpredictable, ability with Spirit.

In doing so, I’d burned out my sister’s mind, taking away her personality and memories, along with most of her ability to speak—everything that made her an Elemental. The grief and horror of my actions were raw, oozing like an infection I couldn’t heal.

Anger cut through the weaker emotions. Belladonna knew I had had no choice but to stop Keeda the way I had. Damn her for turning on me.

Peta dug into my bare shoulder, jabbing me with her tiny—yet ridiculously sharp—claws. “Don’t be a fool. They are wary with reason.”

The anger slid out of me with a slow exhale. She was right, as was so often the case. “Please don’t be afraid of me. Please. I promise I would never hurt you. You’re my favorite brother.”

A tentative smile crept over his lips, curling up more on one side than the other. “I believe you. I’ll try to sway Vetch and Briar, but they are scared. Terrified, actually, if I am honest.”

“Fear makes people do stupid things,” I said, repeating his words. “What do you think they are planning?”

He shrugged. “Nothing yet. A lot of talk about how horrible you are. How much Vetch hates you and wishes you’d died along with your mom and brother.”

“Right. So nothing new there.”

“Nope, sorry, sis. You still suck rotten apples even though you’ve saved the Deep and the Pit. In the Rim, you’re still nothing but a dirty little Planter.” He winked to soften the words, but there was for the first time a feeling of discord in him I’d never sensed before.

Almost like he believed what he was saying. The urge to use Spirit to discern how truthful he was snaked through me. I tamped it down. Every time I used Spirit, I lost a part of myself.

Eventually, if I kept using it, I would end up like Cassava. A twisted, cruel version of the person I’d once been. Besides, this was Raven. Like Bella, I knew he had my back. Wasn’t he proving it by giving me the heads-up on my siblings? Yes and yes.

“Raven, stay out of trouble while I’m gone, will you?” I stepped away from the table. A part of me wanted to hug him goodbye, but after our conversation, I wasn’t sure he’d let me touch him. Better to not reach for him and be rejected.

He stood. “What, no hug?”

So I wrapped my arms around him, gratitude flowing down my cheeks. I brushed the tears away with one hand. “Thanks.”

He rubbed my back in a slow circle with one hand as he squeezed me tightly. “Nothing to it. Figured if you were going to do me in, it would have been when I filched the cheese from your plate.”

Do him in . . . was that how my siblings thought of me? As a rampant killer out to annihilate my own family? I didn’t realize I was out of the kitchen until I was on the stairs that led up and out of the Spiral, my emotions and Raven’s words chasing me like hounds on a fox.

Peta swayed on my shoulder. “Where are we going? To see Bella?”

Much as I wanted to see my sister and have her reassure me, I needed to be strong.

“To the Enders Barracks. You’re right about Bella. She’s doing her job and I have to do mine; I don’t need to bother her with silly insecurities.” I stepped out of the Spiral and looked into the swaying branches of the redwoods around us. Filtering between the trees, the morning fog rolled in as if a living entity. This was home, and no matter how far I went, no matter how long I was forced away, my heart belonged here. Hopefully the search for Father would be the last excursion I had for a long while.

“Did you mean what you said to Raven about finding your father?” she asked.

“I promised Bella I would go after him,” I said as I trotted down the steps, “and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

gaggle of children ran by me, laughing and squealing as they chased one another. Peta’s eyes followed them. “What I would give to be oblivious to the responsibilities of the world and be a kitten once more.”

Her words triggered a thought that had been burrowing for some time in my brain. I had responsibilities I needed to check in on.

I was in the possession of not one, but two precious stone rings. Long before I’d ever been born, the Elementals had been a bit naughty. To remind them of their place, the m
other goddess went to the five nations of man. For each, she fashioned a powerful stone to be held in times of need to help rule a portion of the elemental world and keep humans safe. The humans with the stones helped keep the world in balance.

Those stones were supposed to be legend, yet I’d found four of the five. They weren’t all rings, but they were all powerful. The two I still had in my possession controlled Spirit and Air. I’d hidden them away so those who would abuse their power would not get their hands on them. And I needed to make sure both stones were hidden still.

I couldn’t allow that much power to fall into the wrong hands.

Twisting on my heel, I changed direction and headed out to the Planters’ fields. As early as it was, the Planters were already doing their job, tending to the seedlings, bringing water from the ravine and working the soil for late fall planting.

I’d spent most of my life here, struggling to make a plant even sprout. For so long I’d been blocked from my connection to the earth, but the Planters, for the most part, had accepted me as one of their own. Yet as I walked past them, not one lifted their eyes to me. I looked for Simmy, my old friend, and saw her one daughter. Waving, I caught her attention.

“Petal, where is your mother?”

“She died when the lung burrowers spread,” she said, her tone more than a little frosty.

I closed my eyes and whispered a prayer to the mother goddess for Simmy’s soul. “I’m sorry.”

“You should be.”

I was more than a little dumbfounded. “Excuse me?”

“I said you
should
be.” She poked at my chest with her hard, soil-blackened finger. “Cassava wouldn’t have done that with them burrowers if there was no interference. She would have been a strong queen. And now what do we have? A king who’s gone on a walkabout with no one to rule but his useless wife, or worse, his untested, pregnant daughter. Pregnant with an
Undine’s
baby. Yet another half-breed to pollute our world.”

I took a step back. Not out of fear. At least not in the conventional sense. I was afraid I’d wrap my hands around her neck and squeeze until either she retracted her venomous words or she stopped speaking altogether. “That is your soon to be queen. I’d watch your tongue if I were you.”

“I doubt it, half-breed.” She spat at my feet.

Peta’s tail flicked around my neck and her cold, damp nose shoved into my ear, hiding the fact she spoke. “You can do nothing right now, and fighting would only prove them right. Ignore them and keep walking, Dirt Girl.”

Forcing my feet to move, I walked toward Petal, forcing her either to step out of my way or get trampled.

She moved at the last second, so I ended up thumping my shoulder into hers.

“Half-breed freak,” Petal said before she spat at my feet a second time. The two pieces of my spear hanging at my side beckoned me with a deadly whisper. One quick twist and the weapon would be whole. I could hold the blade to her throat and force her to apologize.

Before Peta could say anything, I’d already tamped the anger down. We were clear of the planting fields now. “Peta, how can they be so blind? Cassava was the one who brought the lung burrowers, then held our family hostage with the cure.”

Peta was quiet for a moment. “The humans have a funny saying I heard once, and I didn’t understand it at the time as I was very young. But more and more I see it to be true. ‘The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.’ They knew Cassava, knew she was horrible and out of her mind.”

Slowly I nodded, understanding what she was getting at. “And so they would rather deal with Cassava than an unknown factor. Even if it’s Bella.”

“Or your father.” She shook her head. “From what I’ve gleaned in the last few days, he didn’t rule much. Cassava ruled through him. In his own way, he is an unknown factor to his own people.”

“Damn.” I breathed the word out. She was right.

“So bringing him back doesn’t really give them a measure of peace, because in their minds, you are bringing back a puppet.”

Her words didn’t have long to echo in my ears before a new problem arose, one I’d been dreading. The blasted field section of the Rim was where the earth had died. A plague long before I’d been born had eaten away at the dirt and now nothing was left. No power to draw, no nutrients for plants and animals. And it was where I had hidden the two gemstones.

The gray earth had footprints all around, crisscrossing back and forth.

“Oh, this is bad, Peta,” I whispered. “How in the seven hells did anyone figure out where I’d hidden them?”

“Hidden what?” She leapt from my shoulder and sniffed the ground. “I smell nothing. I see footprints but there is no scent. There is only one Elemental I know who can do that.”

“Blackbird.”

Him wanting the two gemstones didn’t make sense. Blackbird was the only elemental who carried all five elements. He was the child Requiem had been trying to breed in the Deep. A monstrosity of power and destruction.

“Explain what is hidden and why Blackbird wants it.” Peta trotted in front of me, her gray fur blending with the ashen earth, creating a strange camouflage where moment to moment she almost disappeared.

“I have two of the stones from the legend of the five.”

She stopped with her paw mid-air, and her head swivelled to look at me. “Come again.”

“I have the pink diamond and the smoky diamond. Spirit and Air.”

Carefully she lowered her paw and sat. “And someone knows where they are hidden besides you?”

“I told no one.” I headed for the boulder I’d buried them under, far deeper than I needed to, probably. At least that was what I thought when I’d done it. Now I wasn’t so sure.

I dropped to my knees and buried my hands into the loose, dead soil. I dug down through the layers of the blasted earth with my power. Peta stood beside me with her front paws on my thighs. “You know, you should not be able to do that.”

“What do you mean?”

“The soil is dead, Lark. Nothing can grow here. There is nothing left to be manipulated. There is no power in it.”

It took a full minute for the bag I’d buried to be pulled up through the ground. “Must be another quirk of mine.” I gave her a grin and she shook her head.

“Quirk? You’re just plain weird, Dirt Girl. You do supposedly impossible things without any problem.”