Elemental Omen (Paranormal Public Book 10) Read online

  Systematic and unknown evil lurked out there, and the Bounty Hunters were just the visible tip of something much bigger and more sinister.

  “I don’t see how I’m connected with the rest of it, though,” I said. “I feel like the Hunters chasing after me to get to Lisabelle doesn’t make any sense.”

  Beneath my resistance, though, it was all falling into place in my mind. My value to the paranormals as an elemental was immense. They were coming after me in part for the same old reason: if both my sister and I were dead, the Power of Five would once more be impossible to enact. The paranormals would then be defenseless.

  Keegan was looking at me, his face pale and his brow covered in sweat. “Who can call Lisabelle Verlans at any time of the day or night and get a response?” he whispered. I glared at him, silently trying to tell him to do as I had done and shut up. He didn’t. He asked again, and I shook my head again, and he punched my arm.

  I rolled my eyes. “Charlotte, Sip, and maybe her parents? She hid her parents away a long time ago, though. I imagine they’re in a place where they can’t be found, and where no one could possibly get to them.”

  “No other paranormals?”

  “Maybe Lough, when he isn’t busy, and I guess there’s Keller, but he’s basically one unit with Charlotte.”

  “And you? Are you one with Charlotte?”

  It sounded stupid when he put it like that, so I shook my head. “Lisabelle wouldn’t come with me if I called her.”

  “She already has,” said Keegan. “The more paranormals there are who need her help, the more danger she’s in. Whether you like it or not, you are on the highest row of most important paranormals.”

  “Because Lisabelle Verlans is supposedly at my beck and call?”

  “Because she cares about you,” Keegan said flatly. He was growing increasingly irritated by my obstinacy.

  “What? You think they’re doing all this to build some sort of paranormal net that will ensnare her and kill her?” Chills ran down my neck and shoulders just speculating about such an idea.

  “Of course they are,” said Keegan. “Now that she controls darkness, I’m sure that getting to her is just as important as getting to you. In fact, it’s probably more important. What can they do against the paranormals as long as the great darkness premier stands behind the president? There’s no way to win a war against the paranormals otherwise. Lisabelle must fall first.”

  I chewed my lip. Something about the suggestion bothered me.

  “What if the goal isn’t to win?”

  “You mean like during the Nocturn War, where the goal was just pure destruction?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, mulling it over in my mind. “I’m going to have to think about it.”

  “No, don’t think about it, let me spell it out for you,” insisted Keegan. He was attached to this idea like a barnacle to a wet rock. I was simultaneously impressed and annoyed, but he continued without regard to my reaction. “Over the years there have been several powerful and similar attacks against you and yours. Right? Right. Darkness isn’t doing it, because that’s Lisabelle, which means it’s something else. A combination of evil intent on power, sure. But who? No one knows. It’s crazy to think that President Quest hasn’t spent the last few years trying to figure out who exactly wants her and everyone she cares about dead. She must know, but she isn’t saying. OR, she doesn’t know. At this point I’d say the latter, because if she did know she’d send Lisabelle to crush them into little tiny smithereens to step on.”

  “You’re saying that there’s a powerful force organized and intent on taking down the paranormals?”

  “I’m saying they’re intent on taking down Lisabelle first, but unfortunately, Lisabelle is too powerful to be hit directly, so they’re hitting those near and dear to her. The reason she didn’t stick around at Duckleworth was that she’s spending a massive amount of her energy protecting darkness from those that want to co-opt its power.”

  “Which are who?” I said through gritted teeth. “Do you know who has the kind of power that could make such a quest even vaguely feasible? Or else, who has that kind of stupidity?”

  I thought about the type of paranormal it would take to challenge Lisabelle, the kind of crazy it would require to think that was a good idea. Even Professor Erikson hadn’t been that stupid, a fact that I remembered very well; she had forced Lisabelle to turn to darkness by simply threatening Sip’s life. No one had threatened my life, though. They had just gone ahead and tried to kill me directly. I hated to admit it, but what Keegan was saying made more sense than I liked. I mean, there had been attacks, that much was clear. The rest followed pretty logically.

  “How do we know it isn’t just random Bounty Hunters after valuable paranormals?” I demanded.

  Keegan gave me a look that would have peeled paint off of a concrete wall.

  “It is Bounty Hunters,” he said. He glared at me again, but I was just as confused and perplexed as I looked, so he wasn’t going to glean any information from reading my facial expression. Finally he shrugged and turned his attention back to his books, but my mind stayed on what he had said. “They’re just a special breed of talented and vicious.”

  To someone, Lisabelle Verlans presented a problem that had to be solved. Now we just needed to find out who that someone was. The number of options for solving such a problem was limited, and the number of paranormals with the means to execute the possible solutions was even smaller. You’d think this would have narrowed down the possibilities, but for me it only made things more confusing.

  The first step, I decided, was to figure out who we were fighting, but a quick mental review of the history made me realize that was easier said than done. The last seven years were littered with enemies.

  My meditation let to no conclusion, but by the time I finished I had at least made myself do a systematic review of where the Quest government stood. Sip and her people were opposed from many directions. Because many paranormal families were fragmented and broken, much of the support that the government should have had - their base, in effect - was missing. There were also “hot spots” of open resistance. For example, Sip had ordered paranormals to go to Golden Falls University and abolish it, but they had been successfully rebuffed. Despite Sip’s efforts, the school was still there, and none of the paranormals Sip had commissioned to get through to the actual building had succeeded. It was on her list of things to look into, but the list was long and Golden Falls was far from the top of it.

  Raor and Radvarious were also problems. Raor Rock was a stronghold of opposition, crawling with bounty hunters. I had given the place the widest possible berth in my travels. Lisabelle had hinted that something awful had happened there before she had come to save me, but she wouldn’t say what it was.

  Another problem was that Lisabelle, in order to deal with all the darkness, had stuffed many of the hellhounds into what paranormals were now calling darkness holes. Undead and Hybrids survived in places like Golden Falls, and hostile Raor had stuck their heads up in clear opposition to Queen Lanca and the Blood Throne. Radvarious was another problem, one that no one said anything about. Lanca was supposedly dealing with it, but no one was sure what that amounted to. The proliferation of rare Hybrid types, as well as problems with the paranormal rings, had made us all vulnerable. To make matters worse, Lisabelle was still hated and blamed for nearly everything, even though at this point very little of it was her fault. Though the paranormal police gave lip service to Sip’s government, they had never come around to truly supporting her. Sip, meanwhile, had her hands full just keeping the surviving paranormals alive.

  I met Keegan’s eyes. He had been watching me closely as I mulled over the recent history of paranormal evil.

  “Oh, boy,” I said.

  The tree sprite nodded. “My thoughts exactly.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t stop thinking about Keegan and his mother. They were used to being a
ttacked and having to move, then being tracked down and attacked again. The Quest government was so weak that there wasn’t much anyone could do about it except what we had done with Rake’s help the night before.

  I nearly went to visit the Lady Witch, but I didn’t have the Golden Rod to take to her, and anyhow, I wanted to save her counsel for something truly threatening. Instead, I just thought of the pool under the castle and wondered if she slumbered.

  When I wandered outside later that morning I found Zellie sitting on the patio puffing on a cigarette, with a plate of biscuits on a nearby table. Paranormals did not do well with stimulants, but some indulged in cigarettes now and then without much consequence. Zellie was one of those.

  I scrubbed at my face as I looked around for the tree sprites, but so far the only one I had seen was Keegan. They had been shocked and honored that Duke Dacer had invited them to stay on his property, and in return they had offered to help keep the grounds. Dacer usually used magic for mundane chores like choosing which blue and pink trees to plant, but all the foliage fared better if it was cared for by hand.

  The morning mist was so heavy that the air around Zellie mixed with the cigarette smoke to make a floating gray cloud around her head. Her black eyes were like lights shining through a fog, and I realized that until this moment I had not seen her look content.

  “What’s happening today?” said a voice behind me.

  I spun to find Keegan. Unlike the other tree sprites, Keegan wanted to throw himself into everything the castle had to offer. Without hesitation I told him about the trial. “I don’t think you can go, though,” I said. “You’re probably needed here.” Slash he isn’t an important enough paranormal to be allowed into the Citadel.

  His eyes glowed in annoyance as he looked at me. “Right,” he said. “We aren’t high enough in the ranks of any paranormal type to be considered worthy to partake in government. We’re just worthy of being killed.”

  “Oh shut up, both of you. Really, it’s like you’re children,” Zellie said. We had shattered her calm and she waved us over, looking irritated. As we exchanged glances and walked over to her she said, “Then again you are children, aren’t you?” After another pause she shrugged as if to say, “Oh well,” and ordered us to sit down and talk to her.

  Keegan, his eyes wide, watched her stub out her cigarette. “Those things are bad for you,” he said, rather bravely in my opinion.

  She gave him a trollish look as if she expected him to read her mind. When he didn’t, she sighed and said, “I’m a vampire.”

  “Cigarettes can’t kill her,” I supplied when it looked like he still didn’t get it. “We have the list of what can kill vampires, and the government hasn’t added cigarettes.”

  “My theory is that they left cigarettes off the list so they could weaken a couple of us and get at us that way,” said Zellie.

  “That’s a pretty depressing theory,” Keegan said.

  “These are depressing times,” said Dacer’s cousin. She leaned back in her chair and folded her fingers over her middle, looking out at the expansive grounds. “If they weren’t, you wouldn’t all have come here bedraggled and . . . wet.” She wrinkled her nose as if the wetness was the really offensive part.

  Keegan sat up. “We were doing just fine. It’s not our fault we didn’t know how to fight those things.” He turned to me, looking desperate. “How did you know how to deal with them? You weren’t even surprised.”

  “I’ve seen them before,” I said. “My sister and her friends were attacked just like you were last night, and I was there.” I told Keegan and Zellie the story of how the attackers had gotten within reach of a gathering of the most powerful paranormals in the country, then just tried to go after me. They both gave me dumbfounded expressions.

  “What?” I hunched one shoulder, not feeling comfortable with their eyes on me.

  “You are also one of the most powerful paranormals in the country,” said Keegan. “The fact that you’re doing everything you can to pretend it isn’t true doesn’t change it. Your eyes are gray. It’s a fact.”

  Zellie nodded. “Dacer was always hoping you would come home and help your sister.”

  “Everyone wants me to help Charlotte,” I said, “but I just want to be my own paranormal. I don’t want to live in Charlotte’s shadow.”

  “So, you just want to be famous,” said Keegan.

  “Have I acted like I just want to be famous?” I cried. “I ran away and hid. It’s not like I took a world tour and asked to be showered with praise and gifts.”

  “Good point,” said Zellie. “You’re planning on doing that instead of going to Public, though, aren’t you?”

  Zellie’s accusation left me speechless. But before I could figure out how to react, Keegan looked at me with an inscrutable expression of his own. His desire to attend Public was as low as it had ever been, because now his mother was homeless again and he didn’t want to leave her.

  He sat forward, his eyes bright and feverish. “You listen here,” he said, “You have a chance to make a real difference. You’re an elemental! You can do anything! You are still everything to the paranormals. You think that ended with the end of the war? I know everyone wanted sunshine and roses, but that’s not what happened! War and death and sadness came, and our generation is always going to live with those repercussions. You want to run away and hide? Go ahead, but don’t sit there and not acknowledge that of all the paranormals in the world, you aren’t just as important as the likes of Lisabelle Verlans. It’s you and her and no one else. And you ran away.”

  Keegan threw down his napkin and shoved his chair back. For a second I thought he might hit me, but instead he just stomped away. From underneath my lashes I snuck a glance at Zellie, but all she did was pick up a biscuit and take a thoughtful bite.

  “My sister is more important than I am,” I said defensively. “No one has ever needed me around, because they have Charlotte. Besides, the elementals aren’t so very important any more, not like we were when we were shoring up defenses.”

  Zellie shook her head. “Your sister has made her choices. They were good ones. She is starting a family with that man of hers and she is a sorely needed professor at Public. She’ll work with my cousin to help restore vital artifacts, a job that is absolutely necessary. However,” she added, putting her biscuit down as if she was actually considering her words carefully, “your sister cannot fight. She has something to lose.”

  I stared at her, shocked. Was Zellie telling me that even Charlotte had a secret from me? I had always thought I had something to lose too.

  Later, Zellie went inside while I stayed where I was, enjoying the quiet morning. I had a feeling there wouldn’t be too many more of them.

  The quiet ended when Dacer and Sip came out to the patio. “Today is the start Camilla Van Rothson’s trial,” Dacer announced, looking at me thoughtfully. “Would it make you more or less likely to attend Paranormal Public if you went and viewed the trial? Keegan’s going to tag along.” Somehow I had felt like it was an inevitability that I’d go to her trial, so I was a little surprised that Dacer was treating it as optional. I wanted to be there, and not just to support my sister and friends.

  As to his other question, in my own mind I reassured myself yet again: I’m not attending Paranormal Public, not this fall, not ever. Out loud I just said, with a cough and a shrug, “I’d like to go to the trial.”

  It didn’t surprise me that Keegan had wormed his way in. He thought the world existed for revolution, which was easy for him to think since he didn’t have to be the tip of the spear in any battles. That role he apparently reserved for me, and what bothered me most was that I was no longer entirely certain he was wrong.

  As for the trial, there were paranormal friends I wouldn’t mind seeing, and besides, I had never been to the Citadel Circle of Six, or as Sip liked to call it, her office. I once heard her describing it as “That pile of rubble filled with bits of leaves that pass for papers from which I
’m expected to run the world.” Lisabelle had accused her of being bitter, and the werewolf had stoutly denied it.

  The security at the paranormal government’s seat of power, wherever it was at any given moment, went far beyond the protections most places enjoyed. Sometimes they had used a ship and sometimes they had used Public, but neither of those places, though powerfully protected, was ideal for governing. The werewolf president had said that governing at Public was problematic because if a diplomat was misbehaving and she wanted to throw him out a window, she couldn’t do it if she was at Public lest she set a bad example for the kiddos. She had turned to me and explained, “My violence surprises Lisabelle and Charlotte, but if they had to listen to the mumbo jumbo those politicians call informative speech, they’d do the same.”

  Sip had insisted that all government employees work from the Circle of Six whenever it was feasible, so as to centralize an institution that had not proven itself very effective in recent years. She thought that if one official couldn’t fix a problem you should be able to walk down the hall and find another who could. What Sip hadn’t realized was that in that mode of governing there would be a lot more pressure on her to manage things she had no interest in and didn’t view as a priority.

  As it turned out, for serious crimes the Circle of Six was also where the trials took place.

  Sip was looking at me, but I couldn’t read her expression. Finally, when I didn’t elaborate, she said, “I’m glad you’ll be coming. It will be nice to have you there.”