Broken Elements (2 page)

Sera drew me out of my reverie with a quick rap of her fingernails against the table. “Of course he didn’t deserve it. I’m here because I want to know if you’re going to keep being a stubborn asshole determined to hide away from the world, or if you’re going to help stop these killings before they get out of control again.”

An insistent and thoroughly annoying part of me whispered that she was right, but I didn’t get to be a stubborn asshole without fighting the obvious. “First of all, I am not hiding from the world. I very deliberately told the world to fuck off and decided that I needed a bit of alone time. You know, to process.” I bit out those last two words, making them an accusation. I didn’t need to say what I was processing. Sera damn well knew.

“You’ve been processing for nearly ten years now. I never realized you were so very… well, slow.” She said this solemnly, as though worried about hurting my delicate feelings.

“Do not diminish this. Do not.” I took a deep breath. I knew she was trying to bait me, and yet I was finding it very hard not to rise to her taunts. Carefully, through gritted teeth, I said, “They are dead, Sera, and we didn’t stop it. Hell, we caused it. I can’t get over that. I’ve tried.”

“I don’t believe for one moment that you have made any attempt to actually deal. You’ve had a decade for talk therapy, aversion therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, or freaking aromatherapy, and I’m certain you haven’t tried a thing.” She looked pointedly around my silent kitchen, and with a broad gesture indicated the vast emptiness of the land outside my door. “You are hiding, not processing. You’ve been hiding from the past, from me, from yourself. You’re going to stop eventually, and I think people being murdered again should be a damn good motivator.”

“And that is where you and I have always differed. There is no getting over what we did, and the fact that you can even ask shows how little you remember. I loved Chris, too, but I’m not putting myself in a situation where I could hurt people again. And last I checked, our involvement hardly indicated a safe, controlled situation. So stop asking.”

Sera shook her head. “I can’t. I remember how bad that night was, I do. But I believe that things will be different this time, because I have to believe that. Otherwise, I’d have to ignore Chris’s murder, and I know you wouldn’t ask me to do that. I don’t believe you can ignore it, either.”

It was a low blow, but she was right. I remembered his warm face, laughing, always laughing, while he poured a Manhattan or hauled me out of a snow drift I’d blundered into. The way he hugged you with his entire body, making you feel, for that moment, like the absolute center of his world. No, I couldn’t ignore this. “What makes you so sure it’s the same thing? One death—horrible, yes, but just the one—does not necessarily indicate a serial killer, even if he was found in one of the campsites. He was killed by earth, not ice.”

I closed my eyes. Unbidden, images from my nightmares projected onto my lids, the flames insistently consuming any peace I hoped to find. I snapped my eyes open. For a moment, the afterimage of the fire superimposed itself onto my vision, causing Sera to burn in my kitchen. I shook my head to clear the image. “Sera, he’s dead. I was there, remember? He can’t be back. He can’t.”

“I don’t know if he’s back or not, or if that’s even possible. I don’t know if it’s the same man, or someone new. What I do know is that Chris is not the first death. Someone else was killed and disposed of in the same way. Chris was not a random killing, either. We started dating a couple of weeks ago.” She gave me a moment to let this sink in, for the full meaning to become clear. “I don’t know if it would have become serious. It doesn’t matter. He died because the wrong person decided he was too close to me.” She stopped talking long enough to grab the bottle and dump a slug of bourbon into the inch of tea that remained in her cup. She gulped it down and met my eyes.

For once she let me see everything buried beneath the surface. It was raw and wild, anger and pain so untamed it knocked the breath from my body. When she spoke, her careful words were a sharp contrast to the chaos that danced within her eyes. “I am the reason he died, and I cannot forget that. I don’t care if you think your power is uncontrolled or dangerous. Honestly, I don’t care what you think. You left me when I needed you as much as you needed to be alone. I haven’t forgotten that, either. But you are the most powerful water I know, and I need all the help I can get to find the bastard who took Christopher from me. I need you, and I am done respecting your space and giving you alone time and hoping you just deal and forgive yourself and maybe even forgive me. This argument is over. If I have to burn this house down around your ears to get you to move, you are leaving here with me.” There was no indication she did not mean every single word.

I wanted to fight her, just on principle. I didn’t want to believe she was right. But no matter what I said, I couldn’t stay here and ignore Chris’s death. I could manage a few days in Tahoe, long enough to figure this out. Besides, if Sera was giving me a choice between being stubborn and keeping my wonderful, peaceful house, my house would win every time.

Three hours later, we were barreling down US-97 in Sera’s ancient, rusted out Mustang with the heater cranked to somewhere between “sauna” and “fifth circle of hell.” It hadn’t taken me long to pack and close up the house. For all that I planned on living there forever, it turned out there wasn’t a lot of me there. No clutter to clear, no pets to feed, not even any plants to water. My version of peace appeared to be rather sterile. I packed a bag with a wide variety of blue jeans, cotton tops, scarves, and knit hats, knowing how erratic mountain weather can be in March. I checked the locks on the doors and windows and was done. It was a bit unsettling how easily I fit everything I needed for the foreseeable future into a small nylon duffel bag.

The car was quiet for the first hour we were on the road, the air noticeably tense. A bit of emotional blackmail between former friends will have that effect on an otherwise pleasant road trip. The only noises since we’d left my home had been the quiet whoosh of the heater, the steady drum of rain against the windshield, and the wipers rhythmically sluicing it off.

I took an undeniable pleasure in knowing that while Sera might have forced me to accompany her, the weather at least was unwilling to accommodate her warm weather-loving self. The wind whipped harder, pelting drops against the windows, and I grinned as I felt the power surge through my body, my skin tingling with contained energy.

“No way. You actually still smile.” Either Sera had some preternatural peripheral vision or she still knew me more than I was comfortable admitting, because she never shifted her vision from the wet road before her. “I figured you gave that up with everything else.”

“What, you think because I gave up our friendship when I left, I gave up enjoying life? Someone has a mighty fine opinion of herself.”

“A well-deserved one, I might add. You have seen my ass, right?”

It was a bit disconcerting how quickly we were falling into our old conversational patterns, the teasing and mock rivalry. The conversation may have lacked the lightness and affection from ten years ago, but the framework for our give-and-take, our two-woman comedy act that rarely amused anyone but us, was based on a history and mutual understanding that apparently needed more than ten years’ separation to truly disintegrate. As angry as I still was with her, I also found our reunion strangely comfortable.

Denial, however, was far simpler than the mess of emotions that Sera’s return had evoked in me, and I didn’t bother to respond. Instead, I turned on the radio. Her car stereo was so old it still had one of those dials you could gently finagle, rather than a computerized system that allowed for little finesse. I swung the dial far to the left, hunting around the lower frequencies until I found what I was looking for, the college station based in Ashland that was currently playing some fiddle-based Americana. Smiling, I closed my eyes and leaned back in my seat.

Just as the lively strings began to wend their way through my mind, filling it with optimism and even a little joy, I heard a decisive click. Sera had punched a cassette tape into the deck, causing 70s punk to replace my peaceful fiddles. As the sound of the Buzzcocks filled the car, she finally glanced over at me, grinning. “Driver chooses the music. Passenger shuts up and deals. You know the rules.”

“Yes, but my music is so much better. And really, where do you even find cassette tapes in this century? Doesn’t everyone use compact discs these days?”

Sera gaped at me.

“What?” I asked.

“Just how isolated have you been, Ade?” She shook her head in disbelief and continued driving.

I waited until she was distracted passing an eighteen-wheeler and ejected the tape. Sera smacked my hand with more force than necessary and pressed her tape back into the deck. This devolved into a hand-slapping, button-pressing cat-fight that somehow led to us landing, quite by accident, on angry white dude talk radio.

“Now see what you did?” we said at the same time, pointing accusatory fingers at the stereo. The simultaneous outburst, so unexpected and yet so familiar, served as a clear signal that the bickering was over. It was starting to feel a little too friendly for my comfort. I turned the radio off and leaned back in my seat, wondering again whether I really needed to leave my warm, safe home to follow Sera back into trouble.

After many miles had passed, Sera spoke again. Her voice was quiet, and notably lacking any humor or insincerity. “It’s okay. You don’t have to feel guilty about liking me. Most of the time I’m still mad at you, too, but not always.” I glanced over. Her eyes were still on the road, her face as unreadable as ever. Only her tautly coiled body revealed the tension beneath her words. “I know that if we tried to be friends, it would mean dealing with a whole bunch of stuff you don’t want to deal with. But maybe we could stop hating each other long enough to try. Maybe.”

Sera wouldn’t express this much vulnerability in an hour’s session on a therapist’s couch. The fact that she was willing to do so now only revealed how much she meant her words. And though I still believed that living separate lives was the best thing for both of us—or at least for me—I couldn’t help but respond to her emotional honesty. I might meet sarcasm with more and greater sarcasm, but I also met honesty with the same.

I spoke as quietly as she did, my eyes equally fixed on the road. “It’s not that I don’t want to. Sometimes I miss you, or miss what we had. Of course I do. But we can’t be friends. I can’t go through that again, and I don’t believe you could either.”

“That’s fair, except for one thing. We have never talked about what actually happened, and I’m not like you. I don’t run away from shit, and that night has been festering inside me since you left. So I’ll make you a deal, Ade. I’ll stop harassing you about the past when you finally have a long and honest talk with me about what happened that night. Do that, and I’ll call us done.”

I turned to study her. Her face, with its perfect bronze skin, might have been a statue for all the feeling it revealed. More than anything, that lack of emotional affect told me how much she meant this, how important my response was to her. Silently, I nodded. Without turning her head, her mouth twitched a tiny bit, a fraction of a smile, and she nodded in turn.

I stared out the passenger side window, watching the rivulets of water pour down the glass. The tiny streams slid along, pulled inexorably toward each other with the force of the wind, unable to resist merging and joining into single strands. I watched the water join and tried my best not to think about a single damn thing.

Chapter 2

It took us just under three hours to drive from my home to Ashland, a small town near the California border. It probably should have taken us longer, but Sera was on a mission, noting every mile marker we passed with laser focus. Someone so obsessed with reaching our destination wasn’t going to be bothered with such pesky details as speed limits and passing laws. Ashland took us toward the coast and added an hour to the trip, but Sera was insistent that she needed to pick something up in the southern Oregon town.

I kept quiet for the last hour or so of the drive, trying not to remember our final day together and failing utterly. The silence provided a fertile ground for my memories of that last night, and my thoughts rioted with horrific images of fire and smoke and empty eyes that would never see again. I dodged each memory as it appeared, only to find another thrown into my path, and there was no exit from my own mind. Again and again, I reached out to the rain, trying to find reassurance and strength in the water as it poured down.

It pained me to admit it, but I knew Sera wasn’t entirely wrong. I’d made a tremendous effort to forget about that night and to deny the corrosive memories a stronger grip on my conscious mind than they already possessed. As it was, the damage they did to my subconscious was unavoidable, and it was crippling at times.

It had taken two years before I stopped having nightmares every night, stopped waking to the sound of my own screams, my throat hoarse from shouting and my body drenched in sweat. My subconscious was never going to forget the broken bodies, the crackling sound as flesh caught fire and burned. It was never going to forget the thick columns of smoke that flooded the dawn sky as we made our escape, keeping our presence at the fire a secret from anyone who might have held us accountable for our actions.

These days, I might make it several weeks between nightmares, but each morning that I awoke well-rested was still a welcome gift. I saw no reason to stir things up, now that I had finally found some semblance of peace. No, I decided, Sera was wrong. I didn’t need to discuss what happened that night. The memories were a part of me, and no amount of discussion would change that fact.

“Chow time,” Sera announced, pulling into a gas station and interrupting my reverie. She handed me a twenty and pointed to the taco stand across the road. “Grab a roasted veggie burrito, five
carne asada
tacos and whatever you want.” I raised an eyebrow at her order, but she was busy swiping her credit card at the gas pump and missed my surprised face.

Very few elementals eat meat, at least not those with at least one full-blooded grandparent. It’s not necessarily a big moral or health choice. It’s just that our connection to the natural world causes us to be a little too aware that, before it was dinner, the meat was a living creature. Being three-quarter and half-blooded, respectively, Sera and I never ate anything that had once been conscious. A few elementals were carnivores and even enjoyed reliving their prey’s life, but I secretly thought they had to be a bit psychotic. Perhaps Sera really had changed more than I thought.

When I returned to the car, I handed the bag to her, schooling my face into a neutral, thoroughly non-judgmental expression. Apparently, I needed to practice that expression, because Sera took one look at my face and snorted. “It’s not for me, you idiot.” I glanced pointedly around the car, looking for any imaginary carnivores that might be hiding behind the seats. “It’s for Simon.”

“Simon?”

“Yep. You thought it was just going to be the two of us? Look, I don’t understand what happened that night any more than you do. It freaked me the fuck out, too, even if I did handle it with far more emotional maturity. But I don’t want a repeat. So we’re handling things a bit differently this time, just to be on the safe side. I’m calling in some reinforcements.” She put the car into drive and headed toward a residential section of town, turning from one tree-lined street onto another.

I was suspicious of her logic. “More people can cause more things to go wrong. I don’t see how inviting some meat-eating sociopath along is going to make things safer.”

“He’s not an elemental, so lay off the assumptions, Captain Judgypants. Simon might be odd on occasion, but he’s not a sociopath. We can use his help. He’s kind of a badass.”

“Seriously? No one named Simon is a badass. Simons might be quality waiters or artists or coffee house denizens, but they are not badasses. Nominative determinism, I’m telling you. It works against the whole idea of Simonic badassery.” I nodded firmly, quite certain of the scientific merit behind my argument and pleased to have any excuse to argue with Sera.

“I said ‘kind of.’ Also, you’re insane.”

“Really? Name a single Simon who possesses an above average level of testosterone.”

“I got two.
Simon & Simon
. Two crime-solving brothers so badass they got to follow
Magnum P.I
. in the 1980s primetime lineup. Gerald McRaney even wore a cowboy hat, so you know he was tough.”

“First, they are fictional, and Simon is their last name. Your argument is invalid. Second, we’re not supposed to be old enough to remember the 80s in any form, and definitely not supposed to know or care who the hell Gerald McRaney is. If he heard you, your father would totally have words with you about your inability to blend effectively.”

She shrugged, unconcerned. “He’d be too busy being horrified at my extensive knowledge of human television to worry about my lack of blending. And
Simon & Simon
totally counts. People believed in their badassery, and therefore Simon is a believable name for a badass. It’s a fact.” Before I had a chance to respond to her almost certainly flawed logic, Sera pulled into the driveway of a small single story house and beeped the horn. “We can’t go in,” she explained. “He still lives with his parents, so there’s a good chance we’d be stuck there for an hour.”

I didn’t even need to crow about this obvious evidence against her argument. Simon himself appeared a minute later and made the argument for me. He was, at best, of average height, with a build that might have been called lithe by a generous person. Though it was hard to tell underneath his baggy striped sweater, I suspected thin was a more accurate descriptor. He wore grey skinny jeans and black Chuck Taylors and held a beat-up old messenger bag over one arm. With his pale skin, dark hair, and admittedly startling green eyes, he looked like nothing so much as a hipster Harry Potter. I glanced at Sera, unable to hide the smile pulling at my lips. “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch what you were saying. I’m fairly certain I need you to repeat it.”

Sera rolled her eyes and grabbed the food bag from my hand. While Simon loaded his bag in the trunk, she opened up all five tacos and dumped the meat onto a paper plate. She placed the food on the back seat as Simon crawled into the back. “I knew you’d be hungry, so I brought dinner from the taqueria. They’re still your fave, right? Have at it.”

I twisted around to introduce myself, only to find the back seat missing one Oregon hipster. In Simon’s place, head and body half out of his striped sweater, stood a sleek black cat with startling green eyes, busily devouring a plateful of Mexican steak. I turned back to Sera, who was blinking innocently at me. “I hope you don’t mind. His parents insist on feeding him nothing but free-range organic meat, and Simon does like his junk food. I thought he might appreciate this. But he claims the meat tastes better in animal form, so he shifted.”

“He’s a cat.” I have never had a problem stating the obvious.

“He’s a shifter. I know you’ve heard of them.”

“He’s a freaking housecat.”

“Ade, the term is shifter.”

“Sera, there is a were-housecat sitting in your back seat, and you know him well enough to be familiar with his eating habits. Are there some things you haven’t told me?”

She started the car and headed back to the highway. Behind

us, Simon finished eating and began washing his muzzle, his little pink tongue darting out and swiping across his whiskers in a distinctly feline manner. “I told you he was kind of a badass. I know your fangs and claws aren’t nearly as impressive as his. Plus, wait until you see him jump.” Grinning, she pushed a new tape into the player. As the sounds of The Clash filled the car, I wondered how my world had changed quite so dramatically in a single day.

“Okay, if you don’t want me to call you a were-housecat again, it would help to have a bit more information about what you actually are.” Simon was once again in humanoid form. We’d tactfully averted our eyes when he shifted back and slid into his jeans, and he was currently reclining shirtless in the back seat. Considering the temperature at which Sera kept the car interior, I couldn’t fault him for that. I wished I could remove a few articles of clothing, myself.

I awkwardly turned in my seat to face him and was immediately caught by his eyes. They really were stunning, with the slightest hint of a slit pupil. Now that I had seen him in his alternate form, it was hard to believe I’d ever thought the eyes belonged to a human. It just proved that everyone, even water elementals raised far from any humans, only saw what they expected to see. His eyes were a pure and intense bright green, without a single discoloration or other flaw. I imagined people constantly thought he wore colored contacts. I had a hard time looking away, which was actually for the best. It kept my eyes from straying downward to his naked torso. It turned out that lithe was a pretty good description, after all.

Simon smiled at me, a slightly sardonic grin that would do the Cheshire Cat proud. “I thought you old ones claimed to know everything. Are you saying you actually aren’t familiar with shifters?” His voice was unexpectedly deep and lovely, with just a hint of gravel roughing up the top layer.

“I’m not an old one, I’m…” the granddaughter of an incredibly old one and the daughter of a very old one. “Half-human,” I muttered. Simon didn’t seem too interested in that distinction. “Hey, I grew up in a small island community. We didn’t get a lot of outsiders. Or any outsiders, ever. I was taught that shifters were the stuff of myths,” I said, hoping I wasn’t causing offense. I’d also been told shifters could not possibly exist, because they’d be dreadful perversions of nature, but I decided Simon didn’t need to hear great-grandma’s opinions on that topic.

He raised one single delicate eyebrow. “And you are not?” I opened my mouth to protest and found that I really had no comeback. “Indeed. You are a direct descendant of the earth’s primordial magic. So am I. It just took a slightly different path to arrive at me.” With one hand, he gracefully indicated his own magical body.

“But I can trace my lineage back, literally, to the dawn of time. I know exactly where I came from. I even know where Sera came from. I’m sorry, but I have no idea where you came from.”

He pulled a notebook from his messenger bag and began to flip through it. “One moment, please. I’m looking for my family tree... no, that’s right. Cats don’t keep detailed written records.” He tossed the book on the seat beside him. “I cannot tell you which of my relatives mated with which of my other relatives for the past 30,000 years. That sounds rather tedious, honestly, and quite unnecessary. I turn into a cat. I consider that sufficient proof of my magical heritage.”

“Yes, but how did you end up so different from us?” I wasn’t quite ready to let him get away with claiming that we originated from the same source. As much as I loathed for my opinions to mirror those of the relatives who turned up their noses at my human paternity, I had difficulty believing I shared ancestors with a man who used his own tongue to bathe.

“Tell me the history of your people. I will stop you when our stories diverge and the story of my people begins.”

This was familiar ground. I had heard these stories nearly every night as I grew up. I was not raised with
Green Eggs and Ham
or
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
. I was raised with the oral history of the elementals, the waters in particular. I could trace my entire family line, tell you when and where they were born. No elemental child raised by the old ones was brought up otherwise. We were born from the original life form, and none of the old ones wished to forget that truth.

I turned off the music and began to tell the story. I could almost hear my great-grandmother speaking through my voice. “Magic existed at the dawn of time, and it manifested as life. This life formed alongside the lands as they shifted and the waters as they rose and fell. The first creatures were a part of the land and the water, and they came to know the earth’s ways, to understand them to the very root of their being. They learned how to make the tides ebb and flow, to cause the desert sands to billow across the dry earth, to make lava spew from mountains and reshape the land.”

I paused, checking to see if my audience was still with me. No one interrupted, so I continued. “The land and water sustained life for the first creatures by offering a continual source of magic, the same magic that first created this world and everything in it. The creatures in turn cared for the land and water. They helped the trees grow lush and tall and let the waters flow from mountain to stream to ocean. They brought rain to parched fields and burned forests whose time had passed, letting new life blossom in their place. In this way, our world grew rich. The earth and water, so healthy and satisfied, became complacent and found themselves desiring something new, something different. From this desire was born humans and animals.”

I glanced at Sera. She smiled at me, and I knew she felt it, too. We loved living as humans, eating and drinking and reveling as only those with short lifespans can. We sought that life out at every opportunity, but we also knew it was only part of who we were. We were elementals and raised by the old ones. We breathed the natural world with our every inhalation. Even now, I could feel the droplets gathering in the air for another rainstorm, feel the magnetic pull of Lake Shasta growing stronger with each mile we drove south. I knew Sera would light a fire when we stopped for the night and would warm herself by it body and soul, finding more strength and renewal in the flames than eight hours sleep could ever provide. She would juggle small flames through the air, making them pop and sizzle in the wet air.