Elemental Fire (10 page)

“Great,” I muttered, tugging
uselessly. I squinted up at where I thought the sun should be, but I could get
no clear what time it was. I wanted to yell out but decided against it, hoping
that maybe I could figure out a way out of this mess before any of the Fire
Whips came to check on me.

I looked around and calculated
that I was about ten feet from the Astra wall, lying on the ground in the front
of the house. Between me and the house were the flower beds, now just brown
dirt, that Mrs. Swan had planted and helped grow. I followed the snaking red
chain to the house, where it was firmly attacked to a ring sticking out of the
wall. The ring was also red, which meant that it was new. There definitely had
not been anything like that when I was last here. Astra still looked inviting,
but I could easily see that Ms. Vale had placed me far enough away from the
front door that my chain would not stretch to reach it.

What am I doing here? I wondered.
Why wasn’t I just placed in one of the pens like the rest of the students? And
where were my friends? Especially Trafton, who was injured, and that first
Airlee who had come to my defense. Last night? Two nights ago? How long! In
frustration I yanked against the chain, and yanked again, then I yelped. Heat
shot through my wrists and up my arms at the same time it shot through my
ankles.

“I wouldn’t struggle if I were
you,” said a cold voice behind me. I turned my back on my home. Standing in
front of me was Professor Erikson, Keller’s aunt and one of the committee
members of Public. Originally she had come to help choose a new President when
the old one, President Malle, had turned out to be a murderer who wanted to
rule the darkness, and everything else. The committee members had very quickly
decided, however, that Public would be better served if they ran it until they
could find a truly capable replacement for Malle. I had tried to like Professor
Erikson, but she had made it impossible. She had hated the fact that Keller and
I were together from the start, and it would have been an understatement to say
that she had never made any secret of that fact.

“Clearly,” I said, holding my
wrists in front of me. “Where are my friends? Where is everyone else? What
happened? What’s happening?” I couldn’t keep the pleading from my voice.

Professor Erikson looked just
like she had the last time I saw her. She wore white robes, and her hair was
pulled back into a severe bun. She had the same gorgeous blue eyes as her
nephew, a fact I had a hard time forgiving her for at the moment, when I was
missing Keller so much it was hard to breathe. Her lips drew into a thin line
as she eyed me with distaste. Apparently my breakup with her family member had
not made her like me more.

“Your friends are safe,” she
reassured me. “We are all prisoners of the mages. They do not want too many of
us together at once, in case that might allow us to plot an escape. Of course,
that is a moot point now. But two days ago, when you were caught, that was the
idea.”

I gulped. Two days was a long
time. Anything could have happened while I was sleeping blissfully.

I wanted to know if Lough was
alright, but I didn’t dare ask; it would surely be a mistake to draw any
attention to him.

“I’m here to take you to them,”
she said simply. “We must hurry. I don’t want Ms. Vale to think you and I are
plotting your escape - as if I would ever do anything in cooperation with you.”

“I’m chained,” I said, stating
the obvious as I fought to get my desperation under control.

Professor Erikson came forward,
and with a wave of one perfectly manicured hand - her nails were painted silver
like her ring - my chains loosened from the wall. Just as if they were meant
to, they snaked over to Professor Erikson and trailed behind her as we walked.

“You should have stayed away,”
she said icily. “That was the whole point. We were trying to save you, but you
just can’t do what you’re told, can you?”

I didn’t say anything. The answer
was obvious. Her anger was perfectly justified; they had tried to protect us
and we had refused to take the hint. The consequences would be dire.

When we reached the camp at the
center of campus, the fact that it was daylight let me see the setup more
clearly. Sip and Lisabelle were being led from the direction of Airlee by Fire
Whips, and they were both also in chains. Other than that, to my great relief
my friends looked just as they had the last time I had seen them.

The pens were still filled with
students. I could see now that they each had cots and even picnic tables inside
to eat on. The students were not being mistreated as badly as I had originally
thought, but the Fire Whips still stood guard. All around the pens there was
churned earth that a great many feet had trodden into mud. At least since it
was daylight there was no sign of hellhounds. The day was briskly cold and I
shivered. There was still no sign of the sun overhead, just thick gray clouds.

Now I saw some of the professors
down on one end of the rows of pens. They didn’t look tired, but judging from
their tight and fearful faces they were certainly cowed. In front of them stood
all the committee members except Risper, who was hopefully still “missing.” I
took a bit of heart from that.

“I have good news,” Ms. Vale
announced, her voice filled with malice. “Negotiations have concluded. You are
all no longer prisoners.” A very quiet, relieved murmur went up around the
pens, but I still felt uneasy. This could not be right. If the students were no
longer prisoners, one of the guards should be moving to open the doors toward
which the students were crowding. But no Nocturn moved.

“Of course, there are some
conditions,” Ms. Vale continued. “I have spoken with the leader of the
paranormal council, a very kind old fallen angel named Saferous. Our dear
Professor Erikson knows him. Anyway . . .” Here she paused to wave her hand.
For a darkness mage she looked very delicate, but I had a feeling that in her
case looks were deceiving. She was all steel.

Eventually she continued: “He has
conferred with your president and I have agreed to let the students go on the
condition that they continue as students of Paranormal Public this semester.”
The murmurs around us grew louder. The Fire Whips didn’t move. “I am nothing if
not in favor of education. Now, of course, to make sure the negotiation was
handled properly, I had to make one condition. I couldn’t have done all this
work to keep students safe for the past few days and not had some promises that
their safety would continue on to the end of the semester.”

Not rolling my eyes became one of
the hardest things I had ever done.

“The condition,” she said
dramatically, “is that I be allowed to run Paranormal Public as its new
President.”

A massive outcry went up from all
the students and the Fire Whips broke into action. They stung paranormals
indiscriminately as my classmates flung themselves against the bars. The only
ones spared were the pixies, who sat placidly eating a breakfast that looked a
lot better than the one the rest of us were going to get. The cries of rebellion
soon turned into screams of pain as the whips hit their targets. All the while
Ms. Vale stood there and smiled.

“We will be rolling out a new set
of classes,” Ms. Vale explained. “I hope you will all enjoy them. Thoroughly.”

That was the beginning of a very
long semester. After one week I was ready to mutiny, and so was everyone else.

The entire school had the same
class schedule. The professors’ usual topics were disregarded in favor of the
topics assigned by Ms. Vale. The classes were on topics like “Inter-demon
cooperation” and “How to spot a traitor paranormal” and “Magical murders that
go undetected but should not” and “Paranormal decorating 101.”

Lisabelle was so incensed when
she heard the class list that she had to be restrained. “They’re stripping of
us all our power,” she gritted out, furious. “They don’t want us to learn
anything useful.”

“You usually complain about all
the homework,” Sip pointed out reasonably.

“Now’s not the time for logic,”
Lisabelle sputtered. “They’re weakening the youngest and brightest paranormals.
How could the government agree to this?”

“They don’t really have a
choice,” Trafton pointed out. It was late afternoon, and we were all in the
basement of the library, where the dining hall still was. It was the only place
outside our classrooms where we were allowed to be together. Meals lasted for
fifteen minutes. It was a feast I had not yet mastered to scarf down all my
food in that small amount of time and still catch up with my friends. The rest
of the time we were forced to be in our bedrooms, which was worse for me than
for everyone else because I lived alone. There was no sign of Mrs. Swan. I had
tried to ask, but all it had earned me was a cuff over the ear. For all I knew
she was dead.

Every evening when I returned to my
quiet dorm I felt sick, but there was nothing I could do. I just had to hope
that Astra’s caretaker would reappear in one piece.

“They must be fighting this, for
us,” Trafton said. Classes started the next day and I was dreading it. “They
don’t even have the proper professors with the proper training to teach stuff
like Decorating 101. And there are still students who aren’t here, and whom
Vale isn’t allowing onto the campus. What about their education?”

“There’s Dacer,” I said, trying
to lighten the mood a little. “I’m sure he knows all about magical decorating.”

“He’s still outside,” said Sip.
“If he has any sense at all he’ll stay there until they can sort this mess
out.”

“They better get us out of here,”
said Lisabelle. “A hostage education is not an education at all.”

“Why don’t they just kill us?” I
asked. “What are they doing pretending that this is anything other than a
hostage situation?”

“Two reasons,” said Sip. “One,
they’re not sure they can win an out and out war, yet. Two, they need time to find
the objects on the Wheel. Jenkins tried to do it last semester by sneaking
around, and as you know he failed miserably. Now Ms. Vale is not going to
bother trying to cover her tracks. She is causing this massive distraction of
holding the school hostage, so she has all the time and free rein she needs to
find the objects. At least, that’s my theory.”

“You know what else?” said
Lisabelle thoughtfully. “Your perfect plan was not so perfect after all, was
it, Sip? That’s my fact.”

The werewolf glared at her
roommate. “Don’t you dare insult my plan. It was perfect. There were just too
many unaccountable variables.”

“Uh huh,” said Lisabelle,
stretching her arms over her head. “Next time we need to break into somewhere,
I’ll do the planning.”

“Sure thing, then we won’t just
be kidnapped, we’ll be killed,” Sip fumed.

“So, you’re both in agreement
that there will be a next time?” Trafton asked softly. All the cuts were closed
on his arms, but some were still red and painful-looking. He also tried very
hard not to laugh at anything, and that didn’t turn out to be hard.

“Of course,” my friends chorused.
I admired their confidence.

“We’ve been through so much at
this point,” said Sip, waving her fork, “what’s a little old siege?”

Unfortunately, none of us really
realized what being held captive by a power-hungry darkness mage would mean.
First, the food served in the dining hall changed. None of us knew if it was
because it was rationed or they were trying to starve us, but we were given
nothing but grits and rice and porridge. Every meal. Every day. It only took a
week for me to be dizzy from hunger. Sip reached that threshold in a day.

“What about Lough and Keller?” I
asked. “They didn’t find Lough? No demons got him?”

“There are no demons anywhere
near here,” said Trafton wearily. He looked pale and drawn, not like his usual
self at all. “That was one of the conditions the government set. They claimed
it was a show of good faith to call off the demons, then their children would
not be in danger.”

I looked around the basement of
the library. Most tables at in silence. The only animation came from the
pixies, who were obviously set apart in all of this. They laughed and talked.
They also were not eating only white rice for dinner.

Stationed at every corner and at
the base of the stairs were Fire Whips. At the head table Ms. Vale sat with two
more Fire Whips. One was a man, short and balding, with a black mustache. He
looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. The other was a pixie I had never
seen before.

Anyway, siege was the wrong term,
despite what Sip had said. Since the paranormals had technically agreed to this
situation, there was no battle. Yes, there were some paranormals waiting
outside the gates, but it was unofficial. Officially, everything was fine. Officially,
I had been born with three heads.

The one bright spot in those days
was a correspondence that sprung up between Lisabelle, me, and Ricky. We
managed correspondence, I was pretty sure, because it was with a human, or at
least a paranormal whose powers had yet to manifest, and if Nocturns were
reading the messages they found nothing amiss in any of them.