Elemental Fate (Paranormal Public Book 12) Read online

  Elemental Fate

  (Paranormal Public, Book XII)

  by

  Maddy Edwards

  Copyright © 2016 by Maddy Edwards

  Cover Design © K.C. Designs

  This novel is a work of fiction in which names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, places, or events is completely coincidental.

  License Notes

  Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of

  the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial

  purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own

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  My blog: http://maddyedwards.blogspot.com/

  My Goodreads page: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5288585.Maddy_Edwards

  My Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/MaddyEdwards/329001650447436

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Epilogue

  Contact Maddy Edwards

  Books by Maddy Edwards

  Chapter One

  BREAKING NEWS! DARKNESS SIGHTED!

  A vampire thought to be working with the premier of all darkness was seen at a black market near Vampire Lock. Several hours later, that black market burned to the ground!

  Below that was another headline:

  Dobrov Valedication Never Stopped Being President at Public. With the recent turmoil, his role will continue!

  The morning I read that headline, I breathed a sigh of relief. Dobrov wasn’t going anywhere any time soon, and his steadying influence on campus would still be there when we returned from break. I didn’t bother to read the article.

  “Lisabelle isn’t helping her case here,” sighed Duke Dacer. Today he wore a brown suit with an orange shirt and a red tie that said, “I am the party.” It was holiday break time, and we were all at Duckleworth, even Charlotte and Keller, and I was delighted about that. Keegan had gone to see his mother “wherever home was at the moment,” and Eighellie had joined a distant cousin “because guilt.” Even though I was glad to be at Dacer’s, I missed my friends.

  Dacer’s cousin Zellie was sitting at the table buttering a lavender scone and looking disapproving. Keller had gone out early, while Charlotte had stayed behind to wait for Rake to arrive.

  In other circumstances, Rake’s visit might have been about artifacts. He was in charge of the government’s artifact hunters, after all, and when the number of artifacts being recovered had started dropping he had gotten even busier, not to mention angrier. But I hadn’t seen much of him once I arrived at Paranormal Public, so I hadn’t seen the anger firsthand.

  When Charlotte had said that she had important business to discuss with the burly vampire, I knew that it was personal. I had heard about how Rake reacted when Keller had told him – oh, so carefully – what had happened to Sip. It broke my heart.

  So Rake was coming to Duckleworth, and Charlotte would disappear into a room with him and they would do their whispering. I knew it was about Sip, but I couldn’t eavesdrop with the vampires as witnesses. How Rake knew more than the rest of us about what was going on with Sip was beyond me.

  “She’s going to get herself attacked,” said Dacer, continuing to muse about the darkness premier. “With Sip . . . not available at the moment, all eyes are turning to and blaming Lisabelle Verlans.”

  “As they should,” said Zellie. “Isn’t she the one to blame?”

  “For what, exactly?” asked Charlotte coolly.

  “The mess we find ourselves in, where the paranormal president is nearly dead and powerful artifacts that could create a Counter Wheel are disappearing up and paranormal down. There have been enough deaths.”

  “We don’t know where any of the Counter Wheel objects are, so it’s not as if they can disappear,” said my sister.

  “Sounds serious,” murmured Dacer, fluttering his long eyelashes. “Paranormal down.”

  Zellie threw down her white linen napkin and pushed her chair back.

  “It is serious,” she explained. “Lisabelle Verlans is a menace, and it’s high time the rest of you realized it!”

  Gingerly, while the adults argued, I slipped the paper with the article about the black market closer to me and scanned the contents, looking for something I didn’t really want to find. When I did find it my breath caught.

  Morning sunlight streamed across the page, highlighting this description: “The vampire at the scene wore all black, one of the reasons he’s believed to be working with the premier of all darkness. Some also describe him as having a goatee.”

  I swallowed hard as I quickly scanned the rest of the article. It sounded an awful lot like the vampire I had seen at the Black Market where I’d been taken as a captive, but that had been far away from Vampire Locke.

  On that occasion, Lisabelle and Sip had swooped in together to save me. It didn’t sound like that would be happening again anytime soon, if ever. Panic started to well up inside me, but I pushed it down and focused again on what the others were saying.

  “What we really need is a master thief,” said Zellie. “He’d know how to find artifacts that had gone missing.”

  “My dear, whatever makes you think of such a thing?” Dacer asked.

  Zellie gave him a pointed look. “You know very well how I feel about the glorious Elam!”

  Charlotte choked on her toast, while I gave her a strange look.

  “I do,” said Dacer with a glint in his eye. “He’s the very best.”

  “Yes, and he should be working on such things. Instead, we haven’t heard of him in years. It’s as if he retired after the Nocturn War.”

  “Maybe he has more important work to do,” said Dacer.

  “What’s more important than keeping the Counter Wheel from becoming a reality?” Zellie demanded. “Really, cousin, sometimes I wonder about you!”

  “Sometimes I wonder about me too,” Dacer agreed. “Then I usually go get a facial. There’s a decent chance we’re not wondering for the same reasons, however.”

  “And thank the paranormal gods for that,” scoffed the other vampire.

  Zellie pushed her chair back, scraping it over the thick carpet, and stomped out of the room. She was clearly frustrated by the lack of support for her beliefs, both in Lisabelle’s entrance into the realm of true, evil darkness and in the master thief Elam’s usefulness in the crusade against the Hunters.

  Once Zellie was gone I turned to my sister.

  “What was so funny before?” I asked Charlotte, who was dabbing at the side of her mouth with her own linen na
pkin.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked, her eyes wide.

  “Your eyes are too big,” I said. “That means you’re lying.”

  She looked down, and before she would have had to respond, Dacer saved her.

  “Ricky, did you have plans for today, or could you assist in some of the party preparations?”

  I tried to keep my sigh from being too audible.

  This was how our breakfast conversations had gone every day this week. Before I had left campus, I had met with Dobrov to talk about Paranormal Public’s protections. We had discussed strengthening the Power of Five on campus, just to make it clear how difficult it really would be to create a Counter Wheel. But in the end the president of Public had encouraged me to use my powers to strengthen the Power of Five at Duckleworth instead, since many important paranormal figures were coming for Charlotte and Keller’s wedding celebration. I could therefore understand Dacer’s trepidation, but it didn’t mean I wanted to spend all my time getting the place ready for the party.

  “What’s on the docket for today?” I asked.

  “Strengthen the Power of Five,” he explained. “You can do that, right?”

  I put my silverware down and shrugged. “Only one way to find out.” Ever since Lisabelle had turned my ring a molten black – something I still needed to ask her about if she ever showed up again – I had been wary of using my power. Sure, I could attack as well as defend, but I preferred to defend, because part of me was afraid of killing any paranormal I might get into a fight with. I was quite sure that the paranormal police wouldn’t buy that the essence had done it.

  I glanced back at the article in the Tabble one more time and read, “A burned-out black market dissolved in black flames, and the Appraiser for the market was strung up.”

  I flinched. Dacer saw my reaction and said gently, “Don’t let it get to you. It’s the world we live in now.”

  I looked up at Charlotte’s mentor, a paranormal who had seen more in a lifetime than I imagined I ever would.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Now, are you going to tell me why you protected Charlotte when I asked her about her reaction to Zellie’s mentioning Elam?”

  I wasn't sure why it mattered to me, but it did.

  “Ricky, I haven’t the foggiest faintest notion what you’re talking about,” he said, “and I’ll kindly thank you not to question me.” Dacer stuck his chin in the air and marched resolutely out of the room. I caught my sister’s eye at the very moment when she stuck her tongue out at me.

  In the end, as on most days over this break, I spent the morning and afternoon helping to prepare Duckleworth for Charlotte’s party. I was glad to do it, mostly because the list of alternatives wasn’t long. In fact, it contained only one item: read alone. Besides, I was the soon-to-be-uncle, and I could be useful. Not that I didn’t want to learn more about essence, but at the same time it scared me, so I was just as glad to have an excuse to postpone that task. There was something inside my own self that was terrifying, and I didn’t know what to make of it. A soon as Charlotte had found out – which was about when she saw my ring finger and then touched my shoulder, crying out in shock at the power coursing through me – she had said that she was going to sit me down to discuss it.

  Instead, she and Sigil, the Astra ghost, had sat me down to discuss it. He was the librarian; since he was also a ghost, he was endlessly bored.

  “I don’t sleep, I don’t eat, I might as well be dead,” he had lamented, to which Charlotte had pointed out that technically he was.

  Still, in response to our questions he had read every book he could find, keeping a special lookout for any that mentioned essence.

  There had been only one, but it was known as a classic text, one of the first of its kind, and it had subsequently been revised and revisited and supposedly improved upon.

  “The fifth tower of Paranormal Public, the Black Tower, is the tower for essence. This is a little known fact described on the tablet scribe,” said Sigil, summarizing his research.

  “That’s it?” both Charlotte and I chorused. Sigil, whose big eyes and batty nature grated on my nerves in a way that they didn’t seem to for Charlotte, looked at us both in bewilderment.

  “Isn’t that enough?” he asked. “It’s rather a lot of helpful information.”

  “What’s a tablet scribe?”

  “Oh, that would be a Public inscription,” he said gleefully. “Somewhere on the grounds.”

  “Do you know where?” I asked through gritted teeth. While Sigil pondered the question, Charlotte glared at me, silently ordering me not to rush the ghost, trying with her eyes to get me to understand that he didn’t have to help us and was really doing us a favor. Her eyes could speak volumes.

  “Just somewhere on the grounds,” said Sigil, shrugging. “I’m sure Ricky here can find it.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, then lapsed again into silence. While Charlotte was busy thanking the ghost for his help, I was deep in thought.

  “Do you know who Elam is?” I blurted out. Somehow the idea of the master thief had lodged in my mind and wouldn’t let go. Maybe it had something to do with how worried I was about Dobrov having to protect all the Public artifacts. For some reason, I kept thinking that maybe Elam could help, if we only knew who he was.

  Sigil did that blinking thing at me that I didn’t like, while Charlotte turned slightly pink.

  “Why ever would you want to know who he is?” Sigil asked, bewilderment again dripping from his words.

  As he spoke, Charlotte blinked at me. She didn’t say anything, she just kept looking, and I read between the lines of her expression: I was supposed to stop asking Sigil questions.

  I complied, but now, at Duckleworth over break, I decided to try again with my sister instead of the ghost. “So you know who Elam is, but you don’t want to tell me. Of course, you promised you’d never lie to me, because you lied a whole lot a couple of years ago. Is that about right?”

  I didn’t relish reminding my sister of the years when she persisted in not telling me that she was an elemental at a paranormal university, but this situation called for an explanation, so I gave her one.

  Charlotte nodded her head.

  “Why won’t you tell me who it is?” I asked.

  “He wouldn’t appreciate it,” she said.

  “Ah ha!” I cried. “So it’s a male?”

  Charlotte stopped talking again and her expression soured. “Go away and pester someone else, Ricky,” she said.

  “Who am I supposed to pester?” I complained. “Keegan isn’t coming until tomorrow night.”

  “I’m sure Dacer has something for you to clean,” she said evilly.

  I rolled my eyes; anything but that.

  Despite my boredom, I did what was expected of me for a lot of the morning: I cleaned. Mostly this involved using a dark cloth to polish silverware that looked like it had already been polished to within an inch of its life. Then I put all the silver back into an ornate case for Dacer to examine later. When I was finished with all that, I decided to do something that I knew was foolish but was going to do anyway.

  “I’ll see you later,” I said, passing Charlotte again with a little wave, but without stopping to talk.

  Once clear of my sister’s prying eyes, I hurried up into the sparse second floor room that Dacer let me stay in when I visited him. I quickly changed into old clothes, meaning jeans with holes in the knees and a hoodie I’d had for years.

  Crumple was glaring at me. Somehow he knew I was about to do something foolish.

  “Sorry, boy,” I muttered. “I just have to.”

  Once I was dressed I crept to my door and eased it open. I needed to make sure there were no paranormals in the hallways, which there usually were. Dacer seemed to have invited every paranormal he knew to this celebration, and it will surprise no one to hear that he knew rather a lot of them.

  The coast was clear.

  Quickly I crept out and down to the
other end of the hall. I had discovered a back staircase that was rarely used, which I was able to slip down undetected. This led to a room at the back of the Castle that was reserved for the study of plants. It was used a lot by the gardener because of all the colorful shrubbery Dacer had acquired, but I knew the gardener had the day off to take his mother to the doctor. The study had a door to the outside to make it easy for the gardener to go back and forth to the grounds. It was out this door that I slipped.

  The trapdoor to the basement was locked, but I smashed the lock with a rock and it came undone. Opening the trap door, I disappeared into the gloom beneath Duckleworth Castle.

  Chapter Two

  After everything that had happened during my first semester at Public, there was one thing I had promised myself I would try to do when I got back to Duckleworth. It had to do with the Golden Rod.

  For the first few days of my visit I was kept busy, but as the party neared and Dacer asked me more and more often to clean by myself, or didn’t ask me to do anything at all, I started to plot my return to the depths of the castle.

  The Lady Witch had some questions to answer about the Golden Rod. To get to her I followed the same protocol I had the last time, diving deep down into an abyss, then swimming through stunningly beautiful water until I got to where the witch was imprisoned.

  The water felt colder and the trip longer than it had the last time, maybe because the journey was no longer wonderful and new. This time I had a purpose, and I knew where I was going. I didn’t have time to waste admiring the pretty scenery.

  The sand and the beach were just as I remembered them, but now I remembered to check for other footprints in the cold grains, just in case I wasn’t the only one who had found this place and come to see the witch.

  The sparkling sand was smooth. The stone was also smooth, and very black-looking. As I walked up to the prison stone my apprehension grew. I hadn’t come here since the first time I had stumbled below ground and found the place, and now I had a new sort of ring to use as I saw fit.