Lost Causes (8 page)

I stepped around the pit, putting at least ten feet between me and its edge.

About five hundred feet in the distance, the hill sloped upward again, but until then it was a perfectly flat surface. The grave only took up about ten feet of that area. The rest was hard red rock. Luke said the first magic kept people, but there was nothing to support his story. There were no buildings, no structures of any kind where these people would have lived.

I walked across the flat surface, then returned in widening circles that allowed me to explore every foot of the space.

“Mac,” I pointed at a square of charred ground, about fifteen feet long on each side.

“A building?” He knelt and ran his hand along the ground, then sniffed his fingers. “Burned.”

My fire already knew that. Perhaps Luke had told us the truth, or at least some version of it.

Mac walked ahead of me, staring at the ground. “There was another here, also burned. The marks are about the same age.”

“You picking up any scents?” My senses were as limited as any human’s. With the stench of decaying flesh filling my nostrils, I was doing my best not to inhale at all.

Mac lifted his head and took a long breath, pulling air deeply into his lungs. His tanned skin paled. He wasn’t immune to the smell of death. “Ashes. Small animals. And ozone.” He glanced up at the clear sky and shivered. “Is there supposed to be a storm?”

I felt it then. Icy fingers trailing along my arm, cold breath against my neck.

Mac lurched forwards, pulled by invisible puppet strings.

No one spoke, and no words reached my ears, and still I heard the voice, high and clear and pure, a sound free of the limitations of humanity’s vocal chords. A voice that didn’t require lips and teeth and tongue, that had never been restrained by such earthly concerns.

It spoke a single word that rang inside my skull, and when Mac’s head jerked up, I knew he heard it, too.

“Mine,” it said.

CHAPTER 9

T
he cold claimed me. It touched every cell in my body. It slid from my throat to my shoulders and arms, traveling through me in seconds.

I’d felt something similar before, when an ice elemental used his power to subdue me. I’d never have expected to find an ice in the desert.

Something reached for my magic with grasping fingers, its touch greedy and demanding. It gripped the strong threads of both fire and water and tugged, its hold merciless. I resisted, but between the ongoing side effects from the drug and the icy touch slithering through me, I was too weak. Bit by bit, my magic was torn from me.

Luke said it played with magic. I should have insisted on more information. This thing didn’t want to toy with me. It wanted to devour me.

I saw nothing. I only sensed a hunger, a gaping, cavernous hunger that could never be satisfied.

Panic swelled as my fire and water were inexorably drawn from me.

Mac stood next to me. Whatever had controlled him a moment ago now seemed focused on me.

“Aidan!” His nostrils flared, shifter senses working overtime to find anything he could fight.

I tried speaking, but my tongue was frozen.

Mac roared, the beast replacing the man. His human side might be capable of logic and cunning, but the bear possessed a feral instinct for survival that trumped anything the man could offer.

The cold vanished, and while my magic wasn’t released, it was no longer drawn from my body. I still felt the voracious hunger, but it wasn’t directed at me.

Mac’s face slid between bear and man over and over, but the transformation was wrong. During a normal shift, each feature would reform as the lines of his face built themselves into the desired shape.

Now the bear slid from his face like a mask being removed to reveal the human underneath. Mac reclaimed it each time, and his teeth would sharpen and fur would darken his skin, but the attacker was insistent.

I couldn’t see anything, but I sensed its emotions. Not just hunger, but frustration when Mac resisted. A determination to triumph.

I narrowed my entire focus onto my fire half and wrenched that thread from the distracted being that held it. The fire recoiled, slamming into my core.

My bid for freedom didn’t go unnoticed. It resumed its assault on me, twice as strong as before, but the thing released Mac. I thought it could only manage a direct attack on one of us at a time.

I crumpled to my knees, holding on to my power with all my remaining strength. There was nothing I could battle, no countermeasures either of us could take. I could only play defense, and I was losing.

Once again, it tried to rip my fire loose. Though the threads remained anchored within me, my opponent held the other ends of both fire and water. The magic was strung between us. Fingers caressed my power, the touch covetous and eager. When I continued to fight for my fire magic, the creature dropped that thread entirely, doubling its assault on my water side.

I rocked back and forth, unable to do anything more than whimper.

Mac wrapped his left arm around my waist. He hauled me against his left side, my legs dangling. It was a rough hold that would leave bruises, but it kept his right half free to battle—though there was nothing for him to hit.

The first released me.

I allowed myself a second to go limp.

“Aidan!” Though his face was mostly human, hard claws dug into my skin.

“Still here.” My power had been returned, though I didn’t understand why.

“It’s here, too,” Mac confirmed. “I can smell the ozone.” He spun in a slow circle, following the thing as it moved. “You ready to run?”

Desert sand spun around us, an impromptu tornado summoned from the ground.

I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my lips together in a tight seal, then pinched my nostrils closed with the hand that wasn’t trapped against Mac. The sand still found me. It climbed into my ears until I heard only a dull echo of the outside world. It slid under my fingernails, pushing with unnatural force against my skin.

I clutched Mac, desperate to keep our connection as my senses were stolen and my nerve endings howled in pain.

I’d never battled a desert. Hell, before this summer I hadn’t even visited one.

Sometimes, you have to learn on the job.

I grasped my water magic and sent it from me in a rush, hoping to find anything to wash away the sand. There was only the gallon of water I’d brought with me. I gathered it in a large ball and waited. I couldn’t smell the creature like Mac could, but the thing emitted an emotional signature I could follow. Greed and determination and, underlying it all, a desperation so acute it brushed against fear. When all that need settled in a single spot, I flung the water at it.

The hot sand fell to the ground, abandoned by the first.

The second we were clear, Mac slung me across his shoulder and began running.

The landscape reformed, the flat surface rising and falling in an ever-changing obstacle course. Mac leapt across three new mounds of earth. The fourth rose as he flew over it, knocking his legs from under him.

He rolled as we landed, but my right side landed wrong. I heard the sickening snap of my arm breaking.

The thing was right above me. I felt its pleasure. Its satisfaction.

I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know if such a being could be defeated. I only knew I wasn’t going to die without using every weapon I possessed.

When I reached for the magic, I didn’t use one to boost the other as I had in the past. I was too exhausted for such finesse. I could only slam them together and hope they found a way to strengthen the other.

They collided in a crash that resonated throughout my body.

I slid across the ground, the impact knocking me backwards. The blast rocketed toward the first above me.

I laughed, loud and wild.

As the explosion spread across the hilltop, the first magic appeared.

As Luke said, it took the form of a woman, perhaps a leftover from the days when the firsts mated with human men, but it looked like no elemental I’d ever seen.

It looked like every elemental I’d ever seen.

Its eyes were a golden brown until it blinked, when they became the arctic blue of an ice, then the near black of a true fire. Its skin changed colors as it moved and the light hit the bones in new ways, turning it from bronze to gold to a pale white in the space of a heartbeat. The wild hair was black and brown and the lightest blond, all threaded together. It was like staring at a hologram, where multiple images existed simultaneously, and what you saw depended entirely on where you stood.

She was horrible, and she was also magnificent, and it was beyond me to look away.

“Mine.” This time the word was audible, her lips curving awkwardly around the single syllable.

The magic blast I created was already settling, and with it the flesh and blood creature began to fade.

Mac didn’t give her a chance to vanish. From his hands and knees, he launched himself at her. Though he wore skin, there was nothing human about the movement. A foot from the first, his hand sprouted rich black hair and the claws sharpened. He pulled back his right arm and swung.

The claws scraped across her chest, splitting the flesh wide open. Within the wounds I saw flashes of light, a tiny glimpse of the pure magic from which she was formed. More unexpected was the very mortal blood dripping from the cuts.

She paused, transfixed by the red stream sliding down her stomach.

“Time to go,” Mac said. He pulled me up by my good arm. I stumbled for several steps, but he didn’t slow down, and he didn’t let go.

The ledge approached. Two hundred feet, then one hundred. With only fifty feet to go, we dug deeper, finding reserves of speed to push us forward.

We needed only three more steps to launch ourselves over the ridge and begin the downhill sprint when we slammed to a stop.

A slab of ice stood between us and escape. I’d witnessed a similar trick before, but that had been in rainy Oregon. Not even a full ice could find enough moisture in the middle of a desert to build such a barrier.

It didn’t matter how she’d done it. I wrapped flames around it.

I blinked, and it melted. I wasn’t strong enough to do that on my own.

The wall vanished, revealing Sera.

I’d seen her angry, and I’d seen her use her power, but I’d never seen this avenging goddess. Fire didn’t spark from her fingers, and she didn’t hold fireballs in her palms.

Sera was made of fire as she stepped toward us, every inch of her skin alight.

The first magic appeared between us, still visible. Sera pushed all her flames toward it. The thing absorbed the warmth, and for a moment her eyes and hair stopped shifting with each movement and became the black of a fire elemental. That was its only reaction.

Sera had thrown all her power at the creature, and it reacted with less interest than most people showed at a mosquito bite.

The first magic studied the newcomer, her expression more curious than threatened. Her mouth moved. Seconds later, the words reached us. “I do not need you.”

A flick of her hand, and Sera flew beyond the ridge. I screamed, and in my fear and rage I found my strength.

This time, when my magics collided, I knew what to expect. I tried to ignore the maniacal glee that poured through me, how parts of myself shifted like tectonic plates. The explosion hit the creature square in the chest. More cracks appeared in her skin, more flashes of light.

She touched her wounds, the movement uncertain. We didn’t wait to see what happened when the effect wore off. Mac and I stumbled over the edge and let gravity propel us forward. Sera was already rising to meet us, her face bloody.

“Go, go!” I shouted.

She glanced past me. Whatever she saw convinced her. She raced ahead of us.

Sera leapt onto the bus, skipping two steps. Mac and I followed. Miriam was already at the wheel, the engine running. Before the door closed, the bus pulled into the road.

We didn’t make it ten feet before Miriam swerved to avoid the crackling wall of flames. She evaded that, only to spin the wheel away from the sheet of ice improbably rising from the scorching ground. Next, she slammed on the brakes before we crashed into a pile of red rocks.

The first was turning us in a circle, forcing us back to her.

I raced down the aisle, peering through the front window. The thing stood atop the hill, arms wide in a cruel parody of a welcoming gesture.

“I’ll help.” Luke’s voice shook. His bike was parked on the side of the road, but he’d been waiting on the bus with the others. “I can neutralize the desert, at least.”

I didn’t trust him, but I could accuse him of half-truths and treachery later—say, when we weren’t escaping a creature that made me feel downright sane by comparison.

When the desert sands started to spin again, Luke pulled them to the ground, clearing our vision. With hundreds of feet between us, I felt the thing’s anger rise.

My magic felt wrong. It struggled to rebuild itself as it was before I created the explosions, but it was too sluggish to make any progress.

I knew how to recharge it. “Miriam, get us on the road. Sera, get a needle ready. Don’t even fucking argue.” I gave into the pure calm I found in both my magics.

The first had desert, fire, and ice, but I’d found no evidence she controlled water.

The bottles in the bus exploded, the liquid rushing toward me and through an open window. I added my fire side to the mix, using it to boost my power. The two threads intertwined and flew toward the creature. The water spun in a circle around her.

I felt her grasping, trying to claim my water half once more, but the magic moved too fast. Fueled by the fire, it spun around her. I increased my attack until the water was nothing but a blur.

Already, she was turning it to ice and melting it. I wrenched my power to me before she could grab hold again.

Miriam made the old bus fly.

Soon a thousand feet separated us from the hill, then fifteen hundred. No further barriers stood in our way.

An enraged scream echoed through my head. We all cringed and covered our ears, though the voice was inescapable.

With another thousand feet, the sound faded.

“Will she follow?” Vivian whispered, but her voice rang through the quiet and nervous bus.

Luke dropped into a seat, his face ashen. He looked like a man who’d woken from a nightmare and was trying to convince himself it wasn’t real. “She can’t. The firsts are trapped on the land where they were born. It’s the only reason I could escape before. She wouldn’t have let me go. If I’d gone up with you…” He didn’t finish, but the utter terror in his voice filled in the blanks.

Mac walked to Luke and picked him up by his throat until his head was pressed against the roof. Luke didn’t struggle. “Give me one reason we don’t throw you off the bus right now.”

Luke twisted his head toward me, and the others followed.

I held a ball of water in one hand, a ball of flames in the other, and with calm detachment debated the best method to kill this man.

“Because I’m the guy who knows how her power works.”

The needle slid into my neck, and I didn’t fight it. I’d be awake soon enough, and the magic would be waiting.