Lost Causes (22 page)

CHAPTER 23

A
s much as I wished to lock our bedroom door and emerge a year or two later, there were several things we needed to take care of first.

We arranged transport for the camp residents. Tricia and Ani handled most of this. Ani had once been mistress of the compound, under another name and in another life, and she still knew her way around. Various boats sailed at regular intervals. There were never so many they would draw the attention of outsiders, but every few hours a former camp member was sent back to their old life—or given a chance to create a new one.

Some had people who missed them, who’d searched for them for years and had clung to hope when there was no reason for it. Others had lost all their loved ones during the centuries spent on the island. Some never had any family, which might explain why they found their way to Eila in the first place.

More than a few learned that those they left behind weren’t ready to forgive. Those elementals clung to each other, the only family they now had. Ani was in the final group, though she didn’t seek to bond with anyone.

Despite our talk, Sera was determined to ignore her mother for a while longer, and Ani gave no sign she planned to initiate that thorny conversation. But I caught Ani staring at Sera often, and while the woman’s expression was as hard as it had ever been, it also contained no small measure of determination.

Two stubborn fires, each ready to burst with unspoken words. I hoped the rest of us were outside the blast range when they finally collided.

Even those with forgiving families were in for a shock. I’d felt lost when I came out of hiding and discovered the internet had rewritten our world. Many of these people had never seen electricity. They wasted hours flicking light switches off and on. One spent all day in the kitchen, blending things. The existence of rock music, space shuttles, and birthday cake-flavored M&Ms was going to blow their minds.

Tricia took on the responsibility of helping them acclimate, though she was as lost as the others. She met with either Vivian or Simon in the mornings, learning everything she could. In the afternoons, she taught those who didn’t have a family to do it for them. The desert and her daughter attended those sessions, though they glared at Tricia the entire time.

It was the blind leading the blind, but Tricia didn’t hesitate to offer her help. She had a long path before her, and she would find her own way to travel it. Despite all she’d done, I hoped she’d make it.

“Make sure to show them Wikipedia,” I said. “It’s amazing.”

Tricia jotted that down.

We’d been at the compound a week, and by now most of the guests had been settled elsewhere. Only a few stragglers remained. Our new challenge was finding a place where they could remain together.

We sat in a large multipurpose room in the guest wing. It was furnished with comfortable reading chairs, tables of varying sizes, and a pool table no one was using. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases lined the walls. They were stuffed with paperbacks in every genre along with several board games, most of which had all their pieces.

My friends were gathered on the other side of the guest wing, where they debated the latest information and tried to devise a plan that didn’t involve remaining under the volcano for the next several decades. I should be part of that discussion, but instead I’d slipped away while mumbling flimsy excuses.

I couldn’t bear the thought of hopping back into constant fear and turmoil, not when I’d finally been given a moment of peace. The outside world would be there when I was ready to face it again. Until then, I was going to hang out with my Grams.

I snuggled deeper into my armchair and set aside the book I’d been reading. “Did you know the firsts existed?” I asked.

Grams drew a needle through her cross stitch project. “I had no idea. Perhaps we are too isolated up north.”

I took a sip of tea. I was glad to hear this wasn’t another secret they’d kept from me. My ignorance was shared, at least.

“What about the stories, the myths? It’s obvious they held more than a little truth. You told me the firsts who chose not to remain with humans vanished into the world and were never seen again. Same with the ones who chose not to stay with animals.” I made sure to add the second part. Elementals needed to stop forgetting these stories also featured shifters.

Another stitch, then she changed thread colors. “That’s what your great-grandma taught me, dear. I’ve had no reason to doubt it.”

“They did vanish.” Tricia looked surprised, as if she hadn’t quite expected to say that.

She sat at a square table with three of the remaining waters. They’d been working on a five thousand piece jigsaw puzzle of a sunset, but the other three stopped trying to solve it when Tricia spoke. She hadn’t talked about Eila since we arrived at the compound.

“How do you know?” I asked.

Her expression turned wry. “Three centuries with a creature who styles herself a god? You pick up a few things.”

Grams set down her cross stitch. It was an inspirational sampler that sought to inspire with foul language. “Tell us, dear.”

The former island residents watched Tricia nervously, unsure if this was wise. They’d been Eila’s pets for too long to lose their fear of her in a single week.

“Most of the first magics went one of three ways. They bonded with humanity and created elementals, or they embraced their wild side and sired shifters. Those that didn’t choose either path simply became one with the land again.”

“Like Eila,” I said.

Tricia was appalled. “Eila is nothing like them. She despised them, said they were weak. They weren’t weak. They just didn’t fight when it was their time to move on. Nothing is supposed to be eternal. Even the original magic is meant to fade. They once existed all across the planet. If they hadn’t died, we’d constantly meet them. Most understood that their magic came from the earth, and it would always belong to the earth. They returned willingly. You can sometimes find those spots, I think. More of the magical races live in those places, and even the humans carry a bit of their own magic. They’re the dreamers and artists.”

“The creators.” A wave of homesickness hit me. Some places in Tahoe were like that. I wondered how many firsts had blessed it with their power over the years.

“Exactly. Nothing really dies. It’s just reborn as something else.”

“Why didn’t Eila return to the land?” The island would have worked much better as an artist commune than as the elemental version of a cult.

Tricia’s jaw set. “She refused. Maybe she had an ego the other ones lacked, but she saw it as a return to nothing. That horrified her.”

“That’s all it took? Refusing? Oh. The food.” Remembering the abused elementals made me wish all over again I’d found a way to destroy her.

Tricia winced at the memory. “Exactly. If she keeps her power high, she can prevent what she sees as death. It may be against all the laws of nature, but if she feeds, she lives. And because the firsts are connected to the land of their birth, she can’t leave. The food needs to come to her.”

I shivered, the memory of the grasping first in Utah still fresh. That creature hadn’t just been hungry. It had been feral, in the grip of a desperate need. Without any food sources, it was dying.

Tricia’s explanation made sense, though it didn’t answer everything. “What was her thing with fulls? It was almost like she was scared of them. I thought it meant they could damage her, but my attempt to test that theory went a bit wrong.”

Tricia shook her head. “All I know is they weren’t allowed on the island. She never explained why.”

I was still curious, but it didn’t really matter. Not all questions have an answer, and I was more interested in a particular part of the story. “If no one else visits her, she has no food. She’ll have no choice but to return to the land.”

Tricia nodded, a small smile pulling at her lips.

With all Josiah’s surveillance equipment and Vivian’s access to satellite footage, it wouldn’t be too hard to make sure no boats full of curious elementals landed on the island ever again. “We can do that. We’ll need to make sure her myth doesn’t spread further than it already has.”

Eila’s former pets exchanged long looks with each other. “Trust us,” one said, “we won’t be telling anyone.”

Another week passed. We couldn’t wait forever, but we didn’t know what else to do. For now, Tahoe and the council seemed to be in a holding pattern. There were tiny signs that all wasn’t as it should be—Miriam’s otter home had been burned, forcing her to fight for new territory—but there was no proof the council was responsible. It was now early October and the winter rains had yet to come. Forest fires weren’t uncommon, even if a fire right next to the Truckee River was a bit odd.

Mac’s uncle reported that a dark sedan frequently parked within sight of his house. The council hadn’t forgotten about him.

The threat would have been more effective if Will didn’t scoff at their puny efforts. “A tiny blond woman who doesn’t seem to have any idea what she’s doing. I think I can handle myself.”

Reminding him that the tiny blond woman might be a powerful old one only made Will laugh. After all, this was the same man who patted my head and called me “little water.”

Carmen sent her younger daughter, who’d been born without the shifter gene, to stay with her father until things calmed. Neither she nor Will needed to worry about their older children—Pamela and James had run off to Los Angeles the day they graduated high school.

Another dark sedan stood watch over Carmen’s enormous house. Each morning, she brought the driver a cup of coffee the woman was scared to drink after the first time, likely because it was laced with sedatives. Afterwards, Carmen shifted into her mountain lion form and spent the entire day in the forest, well hidden and beyond the reach of any elemental.

They were all okay—and none of them were safe.

The descriptions of the women outside the shifters’ houses matched the photo Deborah had given me of two waters holding a gas can. I had yet to meet the women, but already I’d learned to hate them.

There was no sign of Deborah or Michael.

It was a stalemate. We couldn’t come out of hiding until we were certain Deborah would agree to leave me alone. The council wasn’t ready to abandon its position of power. And the shifters—well, they were waiting for any excuse to fuck with the elementals who insisted on harassing them.

It was a powder keg, and it was only a matter of time before it exploded.

Passivity didn’t suit us.

Mac prowled the halls with no direction in mind. Vivian refreshed her email every five minutes, hoping there’d be some news we could act on. Grams and I tried turning our excess time toward freeing my mother, but her seduction skills weren’t as effective on guards who worked thousands of miles away. When we hit one brick wall after another, I gave up and tried to read. I scanned the same passage over and over before closing the book in defeat. We played sloppy games of pool, not even bothering to line up our shots. Hours passed in which we didn’t accomplish a thing.

Simon… well, Simon mostly napped, but even his naps were interrupted by unpleasant dreams.

The volcano might be Sera’s home, but after two weeks underground, she was ready to crawl out of her skin. “What the fuck are we waiting for?” she asked.

No one had a good answer. What had begun as a welcome reprieve from nonstop chaos had turned into a prison.

After too many days of this, we at last gathered around an enormous wooden table in the conference room off Josiah’s office. It was time to decide on a course of action. Even a flawed course of action was better than whatever the hell we were doing now.

The office was on the family side of the compound, which meant the room held the kind of heat that usually indicated a hell dimension or an excellent spot to destroy a magic ring. We’d brought in as many fans as we could find, and several people sat with their feet in bowls of ice.

Despite the heat, it was the best spot for this meeting. Depending on how generous one felt like being, Josiah was either a cautious, paranoid, or sociopathic man with a fondness for intrusive levels of surveillance, particularly where his daughters were concerned. In his smaller office, four television screens displayed rotating images. In the conference room, at least twenty screens lined an entire wall. They featured familiar locations.

On one screen, I saw the house where I’d been raised, on another island far to the north. In his own way, Josiah had watched me grow up. It was creepy as hell, but it was also Josiah’s inappropriate manner of expressing love. I hadn’t really known the man, and I couldn’t say I would have learned to like him, but now I’d never have that chance. The pulsing anger I’d once felt had passed. These days, there was just a small, constant sadness I expected to live with for a long time.

Several other screens focused on locations around the world. Two scanned the Princes’ Islands in Turkey, where he’d believed another dual hid.

Josiah had also set up a camera inside Allison Ash’s house. She was the current leader of the fire council, so of course he would spy on her. We turned that off in a hurry. There was information, and then there was voyeurism.

On the top row, one camera after another showed Tahoe, including the shifters’ homes and multiple angles of the cabin. The Airstream was in one shot, and Mac’s shoulders sagged in relief to see it. We already knew the agents had arrived safely with the Bronco and trailer intact, but it was comforting to see our home waiting for us.

Another screen revealed the Rat Trap, once again open for business thanks to Johnson and Carmichael. I wondered how long that camera had been in place. I rather hoped Josiah hadn’t installed it ten years ago, when Sera and I found a new kind of trouble every weekend in that bar.

It was a gross invasion of privacy, but I had no energy left for indignation, and it would have made no difference if I had. At the very least, it explained why Josiah seemed to know everything.

“I guess we should start with what we’ve already got,” I said.