Elemental Fire (23 page)

“No one’s making a fool of you,”
said Trafton kindly. “Besides, pink is cool. No other team has ever been pink.”

“Yeah, pink is SO cool. And
there’s a reason no other team has ever been pink,” Lisabelle shot back.
“Because it’s embarrassing.”

“Here’s how this is going to
work,” said Vale, raising her hands for silence. “You’re going to have a boat
race.”

A murmur went up around the
school. There was no water nearby except for the stream that flowed into Astra
and the moat around Cruor, but neither of those would exactly accommodate a
boat race.

“The race will take place in the underground
waterways,” Vale explained.

My heart started to pound. This
was unexpected. I had heard of those; Dacer had mentioned them when he showed
me around the Long Building, but it was an “at least the catacombs are better
than the waterways” sort of thing. The waterways had been closed off and sealed
after too many students got lost and died, or “disappeared” into them.

“You have until tomorrow morning
to come out with your assigned item,” said Vale. “Should you fail to come out
with the item, we will hand you over to the lizard cage for a day. Then maybe
you will understand the value of finding what you seek. Should you fail to come
out at all. . . .” She paused and looked around, shaking her head. “We will not
search for you.”

“This is ridiculous,” Vanni
wailed. “It’s not even Tactical. What game is she playing at?”

“She’s trying to kill Charlotte,
dummy,” said Lisabelle. “Pay attention.”

“She’s not,” said Sip. “If she
finds the Mirror. Charlotte being dead is just a bonus.”

Vanni’s jaw snapped shut and she
stared wide-eyed at the darkness mage, then turned her round eyes on me.

“She can’t be,” she murmured. “No
way the other paranormals would stand for that.”

“News flash,” said Rake. “The
other paranormals left her here for the semester. With giant, crazy lizards.
I’m pretty sure it’s out of their hands.”

Vanni clutched at my arm,
protesting. “No way. Vale can’t hurt you. If she does, this place will be
overrun with senior paranormals. All of the first powers. She won’t stand a
chance.”

Vale was getting too comfortable
, I thought, disentangling myself
from Vanni. Vale didn’t really have jurisdiction here. The only way she ran
anything was through blackmail. She’d kidnapped the school. It’s not like
anyone with real authority had given her permission to run the place. Then
again, if she had two goals, kill me and find the artifacts, all while
appearing to be reforming students, she very well might reach both of them
before the next sunrise.

“So,” said Trafton, slapping his
hands together. “Who knows how to drive a boat?”

Chapter Nineteen

“Where exactly is the entrance
and exit to the waterways?” Sip asked, looking around. “I’ve never seen any
gaping tunnels.”

“The exit is behind Aurum,” said
Rake. “It’s a cave mouth that’s roped off. I imagine the students will wait for
us there.”

“I guess I’ve never been behind
Aurum,” Sip murmured. “Charlotte, have you ever seen such a thing?”

“No,” I said. “But I don’t think
Keller’s room ever faced that way.” I saw Vanni jerk a little bit at the
mention of Keller, but she didn’t say anything. I let myself feel a little bit
satisfied.

“This Tactical is called The
Roller Coaster,” intoned Vale.

Under different circumstances I
might have just collapsed onto the floor rolling around in laughter. True to
form, Lisabelle leaned over to me and whispered, “That makes me think we’re in
elementary school.”

“This is an incredibly dangerous
mission,” Vale finished.

“What does that make you think?”
I whispered back.

Lisabelle met my gray eyes with
her black ones. “That I hope our boat has a life raft.”

I started to walk toward Vale,
assuming she was ready to lead us to the starting point, but then I realized
that no one else was moving. The students all still sat in the bleachers, their
eyes locked on our teams.

I stepped back in line with my
friends just as Vale said, “Please, if all the participants will join me here
in the center?” Her cronies moved away from her, but one lizard stayed, as did
the ring of fire. Slowly, we all walked forward. Even that became a
competition. Neither team wanted to appear to be in a rush, while at the same
time neither wanted to be last.

As we walked Sip murmured, “This
is a strange mix of Dash and Tactical.”

“How is this anything like Dash?”
Rake asked. He walked behind us, his burly presence comforting even if we
weren’t expecting any attacks from the rear. No one bothered to answer.

We reached the ring of fire and
stopped, but the other team didn’t. Instead, Faci walked right through. I
crinkled my nose at the smell of burning hair and smoke, then, taking a deep
breath, I stepped into the fire. A sigh of relief escaped me as I felt nothing
more than a tingling sensation instead of being burned to a crisp.

“Students,” Vale said, once we
all stood in two rows behind her. “Today marks the true beginning of your
transformation. There is only one path as paranormals. You must be independent
and strong. You must stand up for yourselves, not for others. You cannot rely
on the goodness of fallen angels forever. You see what consorting with the
enemy does to you.”

I was stunned to see that she was
pointing to her own daughter, the hybrid, the combination that had gone so
badly. “I will have no more of that. You fight darkness, but darkness is not
your enemy. Camaraderie is your enemy. You must see clearly to persevere.”

I fidgeted, feeling more and more
uneasy with each word. Vale made no sense whatsoever. The scariest sorts of
paranormals were the ones who acted like they were making sense when they were
really speaking gibberish.

“By tomorrow morning we will have
our first Tactical winner. You must use tricks and cunning. At some point this
semester you will be offered a choice. You must choose to turn against your
friends or not. That choice will impact your life exponentially. For most of
you today, you get to watch while others fight, but it will not always be so.
Soon, you will all be forced to fight and choose. I can only hope that this
semester gives you the tools to choose the right side.”

It occurred to me at that moment
that Vale was trying to indoctrinate the entire campus of Paranormal Public,
all the future paranormals who were to fight against darkness, into a mindset
that would bring them over to the side of the Nocturns. Her arguments were
subtle, but her approach was not. One of the best lessons Zervos had ever
taught was about the use of the elimination of hope in breaking down your
opponents: eliminate their hopes, what they use to cloak and defend themselves,
and you eventually break down their strengths until you’ve neutralized them and
eliminated the threat. A very good way for Vale to eliminate hope from the
paranormals would be to destroy all hope they had of defending themselves.

Our best defense was already
obvious. It was the Power of Five and the artifacts Vale was after. We just had
to make sure she didn’t get them.

Bringing myself back to the
present, I took comfort in the fact that on my right and left were Sip and
Lisabelle. Sip looked at me, meeting my eyes with her serious purple ones, then
past me to Lisabelle. We didn’t have to say a word.

“Let the Ultimate Tactical
Begin,” Vale cried. She raised her arms up just as I felt a tremor shoot
through the ground. I stumbled backward, grasping onto Sip and Lisabelle for
balance, but the tremors didn’t stop. Instead they grew stronger. Like a train
running over uneven tracks, the earth shook beneath my feet. I gasped, as right
in front of Vale a hole was opening up. The earth was coming apart at the
seams. Some students in the bleachers were screaming, while I could see others
grabbing onto each other as the ground was rent in two. Above us, the sky had
suddenly turned from sunny, to gray, to black. Night had come early.

“Students do not understand the
importance of their decisions,” Vale was screaming now as the winds whipped
around her, yanking at her hair and pulling at her clothes. I felt the force of
the winds, but somehow my pink clothing was spelled to protect me. I should
have felt cold, but I didn’t. Instead, a tremor shook my entire body. Vale was
using powerful magic to open a passage to the waterway, an opening she would
have no problem shoving me and my friends down into.

“One last thing,” she said,
holding up her hand. The winds died down a little at her gesture. “All magic is
fair game. Go.”

That was bad for us, because Camilla,
Faci, and Daisy especially knew tricks that we didn’t. But it also meant that
Lisabelle could do whatever she wanted and Sip could transform. Lisabelle often
spent her free time locked away studying advanced darkness magic, and when her
uncle was there she’d study with him. I hadn’t seen her use much of what she
had learned, but the fact that she could use it now gave me a little more hope.

Still holding my hand, Sip
clenched her jaw. She didn’t look afraid, she looked determined. Her expression
was set and her eyes were hard. I didn’t have to look at Lisabelle to know that
she looked the same.

“This is wrong,” Trafton said,
glancing sharply at Vale.

“Glad you noticed,” I said dryly,
as the wind whipped hair into my eyes.

Trafton shook his head. “No, I
mean, she shouldn’t be able to do this sort of magic.” He pointed to Vale, who
still appeared to be controlling the gaping hole that had appeared in the
center of the Dash field at her command. I hadn’t even thought of it, but he
had a point. Ripping apart the world was elemental magic, and Vale certainly
wasn’t an elemental.

“Let’s worry about it when we
finish Tactical and aren’t dead,” Sip advised fearfully.

“We have to jump first,”
Lisabelle yelled, after the wind kept howling, the ground gaped in front of us,
and the sky blackened another shade. But no one moved.

“Jump?” Vanni cried. “No way. Nu
ah, I’m not crazy. I refuse to jump down there and break my neck. If Vale
really is trying to kill us, we have to make her try harder than voluntarily
jumping to our deaths.”

Lisabelle rounded on the fallen
angel, who recoiled in fear. “Let me be clear. When I tell you something, you
do it. I understand your pathetic fear of dying, but you have to understand,
yes, you MIGHT die if you jump, but-you-WILL-die-if-you-disobey-me.”

Lisabelle’s furious eyes met
Vanni’s frightened ones. It didn’t take Vanni long to blink, silent tears
streaming down her face. “Why do I always get paired with the elemental?” she
wailed. “What did I ever do wrong?”

“You are going to jump and you
are going to like it,” said Lisabelle menacingly, but then she paused.
“Actually, I don’t really care if you like it.”

We were so busy dealing with
Vanni that we didn’t see Faci pick Betsy up until it was too late. Her screams
of fear drew our attention. Without warning he flung her over the cliff and
into the abyss. My last image of the kind fallen angel was of her falling
sideways, her innocent eyes wide and her mouth open in a scream.

Lisabelle swiveled around and
glared at Faci, realizing that they had struck first. She then let loose such a
string of colorful swear words that even the Baxter brothers looked impressed.
Almost for no other reason than to get Lisabelle to stop swearing I raced
forward, and before my friends could stop me I flung myself after Betsy. The
Glories stood by, opened-mouthed at my temerity.

I closed my eyes as I jumped,
taking comfort from knowing that at least Lisabelle would follow me down. At
first panic overwhelmed my senses. I fought to draw breath as I fell faster and
faster. The first hint of water didn’t come until it splashed against my back
and legs, sending a rolling cold down my neck and spine.

I made the mistake of opening my
eyes as I plunged into the churning black water. For the first time in a long
time I was glad that my mom had insisted I learned how to swim.

I pushed myself to the surface,
needing to get out of the way, needing to find the boat Vale had said would be
there, and needing to find air and prove that I wouldn’t drown, alone in the
frigid water.

The thought that I was a water
elemental, and therefore should be capable of saving myself, was nearly frozen
out of my mind. I gasped for air and ordered my arms to paddle, first rubbing
the water out of my eyes and pushing my soggy hair back from my forehead. I
hadn’t gotten far before I heard a splash and felt water slop over my head, but
I didn’t turn around. I just pushed faster. Now that I was looking around, I
realized that I could see a dim light glowing in the distance, a fire
flickering ahead. I could just make out the outline of a boat, but before I
started toward it I heard a scream. Looking around in a panic, I saw Betsy
trying desperately to keep her head above water. She was flailing like a cat
thrown in a bath, only a cat’s will to live would have been stronger than
Betsy’s. She just kept screaming, as if she expected Camilla or Daisy to help
her.