Elemental Earth (Paranormal Public) (17 page)

As usual the courtyard was in
full bloom and bathed in light.

Sectar looked around at us and
nodded. Appearing satisfied, he disappeared with several of the Falls teachers.
We all kept eating, and slowly many of the students trailed back inside the
castle to prepare for the day’s classes.

I squinted at the dark sky and
felt my body flex in fear. My feeling of foreboding deepened. “Vanni isn’t
capable of killing a fly, let alone a whole pixie,” said Sip desperately.

“DUCK,” Keller yelled, before
what felt like a solid rock wall slammed into me.

Public students immediately
closed ranks, everyone gathering around Keller and me, almost as if the
movement had been coordinated.

There was a stampede of footsteps
as demons swooped down on us.

Keller’s body was covering mine.
My face was pressed into the cold pavement and my arm was pinned under my body
at a weird angle.

Try as I might to shove him off,
he refused to budge. All around us I heard yelling and the bursts of spells
being cast. Lisabelle was barking orders and Zervos was doing the same.

“Keller,” I said, my face turned
sideways, “let me up. We have to fight together.”

“We have to keep you safe,” he
said in my ear. His breath was hot against my skin. I shook my head, our cheeks
accidentally rubbing against each other as he still held me protectively.

“We all have to fight, or die
together,” I insisted desperately, trying again to push upward.

For several heart beats he didn’t
move. I knew he wasn’t going to, and frustration slammed through me.

Then something changed, a shift
in the wind and a dulling of my senses. The vibration of feet around us
stopped, and for a split second there was silence. The peace didn’t last for
long, though. The whistling in the air had turned into a hum and then a
screeching. Now I could barely hear what Lough was yelling over the cries of
battle.

But I did hear and it chilled me
like nothing else had.

“Golden Falls students are gone,”
he was yelling over and over again. His voice hoarse with effort. “They went
inside and locked the door. We’re locked out here to die.”

Reluctantly, Keller pushed
himself off me. Quickly, I used my arms to flip myself over, my hands scraping
on the flagstones of the courtyard as my eyes searched frantically to take
everything in at once.

“Oh no,” I whispered. The Public
students had formed a protective ring around us. The sky was nearly completely
blotted out with the black and red bodies of angry demons. They must have been
lying in wait in the woods around Falls, just waiting for the right day to
attack. Keller was standing next to me, but I saw fear in his deep blue eyes.

We were at war. Sip kept saying
as much, even without a formal declaration from Caid, and here was more
evidence that she was right.

We had been at war all along, but
we had kept trying to call it something else. This was just the development of
hateful tensions that had turned a spark into a flame, and now I didn’t think
that even if Caid were here, he could call our battles against the demons by
any other name.

“Are you sure you want to do
this?” Keller said. He had to yell. The noise of the battle was deafening. The
pain in his voice clear.

It was a beautiful morning. The
sky was streaked with deep oranges, pinks, and blues, which the demons were
marring. How dare they turn the sky black? How dare they try to kill my
friends? How dare they make me go to school with Faci? An anger buried deep in
my gut started to flow through my body like a stream flooding. How dare they
attack us again, especially when I hadn’t gotten any sleep. Hadn’t killing Dove
been enough?

“This has to end,” I yelled.

But I was already too late. With
a victorious stream of fire, one of the demons broke free of the protective
shield the Public students had erected around us. My heart leapt into my mouth
as I watched the fire head straight for Lough. With a searing hiss and a scream
from the dream giver, the flames hit my friend full in the chest. Lough started
to crumple.

Keller raced around me to get to
Lough, and Trafton, who’d been standing next to Lough, caught his fellow dream
giver as he started to fall backward. Lough’s face was a white sheet of pain.
The smell of burning flesh hung pungent in the air like wood smoke.

I started toward Lough, desperate
to get to my friend, but he pointed away, shaking his head. “Fight,” he
mouthed. “Fight.” His eyes rolled back in his head and Trafton gently laid him
down. Keller started to work, but Lough was right, I didn’t have time to watch.
Instead, I moved to where Sip and Lisabelle stood. I forced myself not to cry.

“Between Trafton and Keller he
should be fine,” I said to Lisabelle, but I didn’t know if I was saying it more
for my own benefit or for hers.

“He should be,” she said through
clenched teeth. Her eyes were pure fire. Something shifted in Lisabelle that
day, hardening her and removing some of the last traces of child. She was now a
full-fledged darkness mage.

A funnel of dark power came
around her as she raised her arm. Swirling in circles, the funnel grew until it
ripped through the air, straight at a pile of oncoming demons. I saw a look of
satisfaction in Lisabelle’s eyes that I had never seen there before.

With powers flying and rings
raised, demons swooping down and our circle drawing even closer together, the
wind started to whip and clash around us. I let it go. I didn’t care. My body
was hot with anger and I wanted to put it to good use.

Somewhere in the distance thunder
rolled.

There!

Eight demons flying in formation,
riding those hybrids: they were coming right at us. I called to the earth. My
ring was eager and ready; all I had to do was direct the power. I pointed my
hand at the demons, but instead of a stream of power slamming into the earth,
my power backfired and I went flying. With a cry I landed on my back and ended
up staring at the black sky.

I struggled into a sitting
position. We were so close together that someone kicked me in the leg in an
effort to make a tighter circle. I gasped in pain and hurriedly got to my feet,
limping a little. I was about to reach down with my ring finger when I saw that
my ring wasn’t pulsing with its normal light. Instead, the light was zipping
and blinking all over the place.

It looked like lightning.

A crack sounded overhead just as
a flash of light brightened the sky, turning it from black to silver and back
again in a split second. I blinked, trying to clear the spots from my eyes.

“Well, there you go,” a voice
cried gleefully.

There was another crack. My hand
was stinging, my finger felt like it was burning off, and I couldn’t see. Pain
like I didn’t know existed tore through me and I let out a whimper.

My body felt like it was coming
apart, and all my knees wanted to do was sag to the ground. Instead, I clenched
my hands so hard that the nails dug little bleeding half moons into the flesh
of my palms.

I glared up at the bright spot
where the lightning had struck, daring my powers to strike again. The air
rippled with heat and I noticed that the formation of eight demons was gone.

A sort of twisted satisfaction
lodged in my throat. The demons hadn’t gotten away.

Sip stumbled over to me and
placed a trembling hand on my arm, her eyes going wide with shock.

“You’re skin is so warm!” she
said with wonder. I glanced down at my arm. It didn’t look any different,
except that every muscle in my body was screaming, and it took all my energy to
continue to stand.

“So, you can control lightning,”
said Lisabelle. “Nifty.”

“Isn’t it?” I said dryly. My eyes
still searched the sky. There were a few demons left, and they were still
fighting, but the lightning had destroyed many of them. The ones that remained
were no match for us, and they were scared. I glanced back at Golden Falls. The
doors stood closed.

“They just left us out here!” I
said incredulously.

“Yup,” said Sip.

I started to sag. I couldn’t help
it, so I didn’t. I sat down heavily on the cold stones. I desperately wanted to
lie down and lay my cheek against the cold ground, but with a struggle I made
myself stay sitting up, because I didn’t want to embarrass myself.

A crackling of heat over my skin
made me look at my hand.

“Lightning dancing,” Lisabelle
murmured. “It’s rare, even for elementals like you.”

“I’m just a ball of coolness,” I
said. My mouth was parched. I was likely to eat the dirty snow if I didn’t get
water soon.

“Charlotte,” said Sip, “Can you
control lightning?”

“Of course she can,” Zervos
wheezed, pressing his fingers to his bleeding side. “Earth, Air, Fire, Water.”

Zervos looked pale, and his eyes
were bloodshot. He clutched his wound, trying to stop the bleeding, but when
Keller made a move to help him instead of Lough, Zervos waved him off. Another
point for Zervos. The professor was a contradiction if ever there was one.

Sip grinned. “Well, that’s one
bright spot, anyhow.”

“A bright spot in the sky,”
Lisabelle mused, “written in lightning.”

I looked around at my friends. It
was the first time I’d been frightened of my own power.

“I’ve never read anything about
elementals controlling lightning,” I said.

“If you control all four
varieties of elemental power, there’s a good chance you have some affinity with
lightning,” said Zervos, his breathing labored. “It’s called lightning dancing,
because the ancient paranormals used to think that lightning danced through the
sky.

“Never mind that,” I said,
“where’s Marcus?” I wanted to see Zervos attended to as quickly as possible,
and Keller and Trafton weren’t ready to leave Lough yet.

Sip’s face fell. Her lip started
to tremble and I could see that she was about to cry. With a shaking hand she
pointed to the entrance of Golden Falls University.

I could see a body lying there, a
lone demon circling far overhead.

“He tried to run,” said Lisabelle
tiredly. “I guess Vanni got off easy. At least she’s still alive.”

The demons had started to gather
again. Zervos, injury and all, strode up to the double doors and hammered on
them. While he did that, Rake went to retrieve Marcus’s prone body. We weren’t
going to leave one of our own out in the open regardless of the fact that the
battle was still going on.

Sip let tears spill silently down
her cheeks as Rake returned. Lisabelle stood impassive. I imagined that Keller
would grieve when he wasn’t so busy trying to save Lough.

Zervos slammed his bloody hand
against the door again and again, but we heard no sound from inside. Finally,
Keller came over to him.

“Stop it,” he ordered the
professor. “Let me heal you.”

Keller looked tired and his brow
was streaked with sweat. I wanted to hug him, but I didn’t dare.

“They can’t leave us out here,”
said Sip, her voice shaking. “We’ll die.”

“They’re afraid of violence,” I
muttered. “I mean, they have Happiness Enforcement Officers, not police
officers.”

“We’ll be alright if we can get
inside,” said Lisabelle, her brow knitting together as she watched the
gathering demons. She turned to Zervos. Now, instead of Sip, my other friend
was yelling at him.

“We can’t stay here,” she said.
“We’re dropping like flies.” She waved her hand at Marcus.

“A demon kill is not something we
can predict,” said Zervos through gritted teeth, his face having gone a pure,
sickly white. Whatever Keller was doing, it must have been hurting a lot. “We
have to respect our hosts. They aren’t used to battles.”

Lisabelle shook her head. “A
demon didn’t kill Marcus.”

“Of course a demon did,” chorused
several voices, including Sip’s. Lisabelle shook her head again and pointed at
the body. Rake was kneeling over the dead fallen angel, but as silence fell he
looked up.

“Lisabelle is right,” he said.
“Someone stabbed him in the heart. Not a demon’s style.”

Sectar flung the door open, his
eyes fiery. The tall man looked half crazy, his whole body shaking.

“What is the meaning of this?” he
demanded. “How could you bring a battle to our very home?”

Zervos hobbled forward, his face
ashen. “My apologies,” he said. “It is not as if we called the demons.”

Sectar pointed a shaking hand at
us. “Yes, you did. You have darkness mages and the only elemental. I was
assured we’d have no problems this semester, and we’ve already had battles and
murders. I had no idea what savages Public students are.” He glared around at
all of us with huge eyes.