The Prophecy of Shadows (27 page)

“Yeah, tons.” I rolled my eyes, forcing sarcasm into my tone. “Thanks for asking. I owe you one for covering for me.”

“How about you tell me who it was you met up with, and we’ll call it even?”

“It doesn’t matter who it was,” I mumbled. “Because nothing can happen between me and him. It was a one-time thing.”

“So it
was
a guy!” She smiled in victory. Then the sound of a message dinged on her computer, and she read it, typing up a response. Whoever she was talking to had distracted her for now.

Glad that our conversation seemed to be over, I headed back to my room and collapsed onto my bed. But the sun shining through the window kept me awake, and eventually I forced myself back up so I could close the blinds.

A small, wooden box sitting outside my window made me freeze in place. That definitely hadn’t been there yesterday. I pried the window open and pulled the box inside. It fit in the palm of my hand, and the golden latch easily popped open.

Inside sat a delicate golden charm in the shape of a sun, strung through a matching chain. It reminded me of the pendant that Blake had made for me in ceramics, except the smoothness of this one was much finer and better crafted.

I closed the window, placed the box on my bed, and took out the necklace. The sun charm hummed against my skin, glowing with a light of its own. Like magic.

I rotated it in my palm, stopping when I saw an engraving on the back—an elegant “A” carved into the metal. I traced my fingers over the letter, allowing its meaning to sink in.

Maybe Darius’s idea of Apollo being my father wasn’t so far-fetched after all.

* * *

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Elementals: The Prophecy of Shadows
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Elementals 2: The Blood of the Hydra
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Book two in the Elementals series

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I held steady onto my bow, the arrow pointed straight at the bulls-eye. As always, my mind knew exactly what to do—the stance I should take, how to hold the weapon, and how to balance my weight. I drew the bowstring back, aimed, and let the arrow soar.

It missed the target, instead embedding itself in the wall.

“Chris!” I yelled, dropping the bow to my side and spinning around. Sure enough, Chris stood behind me, his hands raised as if to protect himself from flying arrows. “Stop using your powers on me during practice. That would have been a perfect shot.”

He smirked, and a breeze blew past my face. The next thing I knew, an arrow from my quiver floated up and propelled itself straight into the bulls-eye. “
There’s
a perfect shot,” he said, pumping his fist up in victory.

“We’re supposed to be practicing using weapons
without
our powers right now,” I reminded him. “Just because Darius had to go upstairs to take a call doesn’t mean we can do whatever we want.” I took out another arrow, balanced it on the bow again, and released.

It joined the other straight on the bulls-eye.

I used to think I was a natural at tennis. But that was nothing compared to how quickly I’d picked up on archery. Which, according to Kate, made sense, since Apollo was my father. One of his talents was said to be archery.

Although of course, I’d learned this all from what Kate had told me, since I’d never actually met my father.

“Want to try?” I asked Chris, holding the bow out to him in challenge. “
Without
using your power?”

“You know I can’t use that.” He walked over to the selection of weapons laid out on the counter and picked up a knife, smiling as he examined it. “But this, I’ve been practicing with. Check it out.”

He geared up and threw the knife towards the target.

It landed further away than my first arrow.

“I’m getting better,” he said sheepishly. “When I first started, it kept bouncing off the wall and onto the floor.” He used his power to lift another knife from the counter and shoot it at the target. This time, it landed straight in the center. “It’s so much easier that way,” he said.

“Until you use your powers so much that you run out of energy,” I said. “You know what Darius told us. We can train and learn how to use weapons ourselves. We have to save our energy to use our powers when we really need them.”

“I know, I know.” Chris sighed, exasperated, and pushed his hair out of his eyes. I knew why he was frustrated—we’d been practicing every day after school since our fight with the harpy, but Chris hadn’t picked up on using weapons as fast as the rest of us.

“You just need to practice,” I said. “Your powers help you more with using weapons than any of the rest of ours do, but if you keep using them as a crutch, you’re never going to get better.”

He raised his hands up again, and both arrows and knives floated back to us. The arrows settled themselves back inside my quiver, and the knives came straight back to his hands.

“Our powers do come in handy, though,” he said with a wink. “Less clean up time.”

“Isn’t this supposed to be no power hour?” Blake asked, strolling over to join us. In his all-black training outfit, he looked like he had years of experience on Chris, who wore sweats and a t-shirt. And his warm eyes were focused straight on me, which as always, took my breath away.

But even though he’d broken up with Danielle soon after our fight with the harpy, he was still off-limits. Because the five of us—me, Blake, Danielle, Chris, and Kate—were a team. We had to learn to work together. And dating Danielle’s boyfriend right after Blake had broken up with her would put a huge rift in that team.

I picked up another arrow, strung it in the bow, and released it straight into the bulls-eye.

“No powers.” I glanced at Blake over my shoulder and smiled. “That was all natural talent.”

“Except I’m pretty sure I just saw some arrows and knives flying—
towards
both of you,” he said. “And as far as I’m aware, the wall doesn’t have much of an aim.”

“Guilty as charged,” Chris said, holding both knives in the air. With his bright eyes and boyish grin, he looked more like he was preparing for a cooking challenge than for battling ancient mythological monsters.

“Since you’re over here breaking the rules, I figured I would join,” Blake said, pulling his lighter out of his pocket. “Have you ever shot a flaming arrow?”

“No.” I smiled at where this was going. “But I think now would be a great time to try.”

“I thought you might say that.” He walked closer until he was standing only a foot away from me, his eyes not leaving mine the entire time. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe—all I could do was focus on him. He flicked on the lighter, picked up an arrow, and dipped it into the flame.

I worried that the flame might go out—after all, I doubted the arrows were meant to be lit on fire—but it held strong. Blake was getting better with using his power every day.

“Here.” He held the flaming arrow out to me. “Try it now.”

I reached for it, and my fingers brushed against his. Heat traveled up my arms and to my cheeks, and I moved my gaze away from his to focus on the target, hoping he hadn’t noticed the affect he had on me.

I steadied my stance, lifted the bow to eye-level, and strung the arrow as usual. But the flame danced before my eyes, reminding me that this was anything
but
normal. This was magic. I pulled back on the bowstring, feeling Blake’s eyes on me, and reminded myself to focus despite the distraction of the fire. I aimed and released, sending the arrow straight to the target. It wasn’t a bulls-eye, but it was close.

A few seconds passed, and the flames eventually died out.

“Let’s try again,” Blake said, taking a few steps back. “How far away is that target?”

“About sixty feet,” I answered.

“Which is much farther than I can aim with my fireballs,” he said. “My aim’s good for about ten to twenty feet, and that’s it. And I’m nowhere near as good with shooting weapons as you are. We might not always be right next to each other in a fight, but we can still work together. Are you ready?”

“For what?”

He flicked the lighter on again, balancing another ball of fire in his hand. “String the bow, and I’ll show you.”

I did as he said, the arrow pointed straight to the target. “Now what?” I asked.

“Don’t flinch.”

He threw the fireball at the tip of the arrow, which burst into flame, and caused me to jump. “Hey!” I yelled at him. “You could have warned me.”

“I did.” He laughed. “I told you not to flinch.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I corrected my stance and pulled back on the bowstring, sending the arrow straight towards the bulls-eye.

“Again,” Blake instructed, and I drew another arrow. This time, I knew to expect the flame. Once the arrow was ablaze, I released it to the target, and grabbed another. It was like my body was working on super speed, and the rush was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I didn’t want to stop. So we kept going—Blake lighting up the arrow and me shooting—until all of the arrows were gone from the quiver and embedded in the target.

“Wow,” I said, catching my breath as I admired the arrows still on fire.

The blaze grew taller, and then it exploded, engulfing the target completely. Before I knew what was happening, a stream of water flew towards the target, extinguishing the fire.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Danielle’s voice echoed through the practice chamber. “Trying to burn down our training center?”

“We were practicing a new technique,” I said. “We must have gotten carried away.”

“You could say that.” Danielle coughed, fanning the smoke out of her face. A breeze blew through the air—courtesy of Chris—who sent the smoke out of the window near the ceiling of the basement.

“Think of it this way,” Blake said. “If that had been a monster’s head, it would be dead by now.”

Kate burst in from the shooting room, gun in hand. Strength-wise, she was the weakest of the five of us, so a gun had quickly become her weapon of choice. It had taken her a while to warm up to using such an intense weapon, but now she held onto it so naturally that it could have been an extra appendage.

“I smelled smoke,” she said, her mouth dropping open when she saw the destroyed target. “What happened in here?”

We caught her up on what we’d done, Blake and I alternating on telling different parts of the story.

“There’s no water in here,” Kate said once we were finished, turning to Danielle. “If there’s no water, how did you put out the fire?”

“There’s water in the air,” Danielle said, as if it should be obvious. “I condensed it into liquid and used it to put out the fire.” She looked over at Blake and smiled, although it seemed strained. “You aren’t the only ones who have been practicing.”

“Except this is supposed to be no power hour,” Kate said, holding up her gun. “Remember what happened with the harpy? We used all our energy killing it. We were lucky that there was that portal from the cave to the playground, but what if that hadn’t been there? We would have been stuck in that cave for who knows how long. We need to get better as using weapons, so we only use our powers when we absolutely need them.”

“They were doing it first.” Danielle huffed. “When I saw the target explode, I figured I would actually do something useful by putting out the fire.”

“And I wasn’t using my power,” I said. “I was practicing archery.”

“You weren’t using your power because your power can’t help you defend yourself,” Danielle said.

“Whoa there,” Blake said, holding his arms out. “No need to get nasty.”

“I was just saying it like it is.” Danielle shrugged, her eyes flashing with hurt. “And you have no right to tell me what to do. You lost that privilege when you dumped me.”

I looked back and forth between the two of them, reminded again about why Blake and I couldn’t be together. Danielle clearly wasn’t over him. There was also so much I wanted to say, but I kept my mouth shut. Because Danielle had no idea about what I could really do. She and the others only knew about my power to heal. (Which I actually think is quite useful in battle, seeing as it’s the power that can end up saving us all.) None of them knew about the other side of my power—the ability to kill with a touch. It was how I’d killed the harpy. I’d called on black energy, touched the harpy, and sent the energy into its body, which killed it instantly.