Elemental Dawn (Paranormal Public) (12 page)

Lanca stood up but continued to
organize papers while she talked.

“I can’t imagine you as nothing
more than my protector. It would be too cold,” she said. “My father was never
cold.”

“Your father knew that what was
necessary does not always feel good, “ Vital growled.

“And anyway,” Lanca continued as
if he hadn’t said anything, “how could you possibly want to sacrifice your life
for me?”

“I should get popcorn,” Lisabelle
muttered. “Never did have dinner.”

“You need a filter,” said Vital,
without looking at the darkness mage.

“I have a filter,” Lisabelle
responded coolly. “She’s about yea high” - she put her hand at around her own
hip height - “and blond. I tried to get rid of her with Drano, but she saw me
coming.”

Sip just glared.

“Who better to lead?” Vital
asked. “Who wiser, kinder, and more thoughtful? Who more deadly? You are to be
feared and respected. In the vampire world, there are no two greater
qualities.”

“Which must be why Castov wants
to marry me off and the factions want me dead?” said Lanca bitterly.

“Pretty much,” said Vital. “Well,
no, not really. They would want King Daemon’s successor out of the way no
matter who that successor was. They are probably more desperate because it’s
you, though.”

Lanca was about to say something
else when Vital interrupted her. Obviously he wasn’t entirely subservient to
her, because you didn’t interrupt a vampire princess unless you were either
very brave or very foolish.

“None of this, however, relates
to why I came down to find you.” He gave her a stern look.

“You are hopelessly nosy and your
concept of boundaries needs updating?” Lanca muttered.

“Neither of those is true,” he
growled, raking his fingers through his dark hair. “You must trust me. Your
life depends on it.”

“So does yours,” Lanca pointed
out.

“Which I have already told you
does not matter,” he said. “You are the most stubborn . . . irritable and
unreasonable charge I have ever had.”

“Oh, please,” said Lanca, tossing
a set of papers back on the desk right where she had found them. “This is the
first time you’ve agreed to babysit. I still don’t understand why.”

“Is that why you don’t trust me?”
Vital demanded, his eyes burning. “You don’t trust my motives?”

“Alright, I’ve heard about enough
of this,” said Lisabelle, rising from the corner. She looked tired and bored.
“Lanca, trust him. I do, and all the people in the world I trust are in this room,
minus two.”

“Who are the two?” Sip asked
curiously.

“My uncle and that one’s
boyfriend,” said Lisabelle pointing at me. “He’s a fallen angel, but even I
can’t hold that against him.”

“You could try,” said Lough.

Lisabelle smiled. “I did, the
first year, but he’s just so darn cute.”

“Watch it,” I muttered.

Lisabelle just laughed and shook
her head. “Yeah, like he ever looks anywhere but at you.”

I blushed and looked down. Being
reminded that I would see Keller the next day sent happy little flutters coursing
through my blood.

“Let’s get to bed,” said Lanca.
Her shoulders, normally pulled back, slumped forward. Vital looked like he
wanted to protest, but thought better of it when he saw how tired Lanca was.

“Fine,” he growled. “But I want
you to trust me.”

“Everyone wants something from me
at this point,” said Lanca tiredly. “I’m losing track.”

“Well, what I want is simple,”
said Vital as we followed Lanca toward the door. “And I am not everyone.”

“No,” said Lanca quietly. “What
you want is the most complicated thing of all.”

I didn’t look back at the door as
we left, but somehow I knew we were leaving the only safe place in this whole
mountain, which was strange, because weren’t we among friends?

Lough showed Sip, Lisabelle, and
me to our room. None of us looked around that night. We barely had the energy
to shower, let alone explore, before we all fell into deep sleep.

I woke up in the middle of the
night to find that we were all in a cavernous room, high up on a platform. All
around the cavern were more platforms, and I was amazed to see that each
platform was completely filled. On several were the green of pixies, the glow
of the white fallen angels. Below was a sea of teaming black masses. For an odd
moment I thought that the blackness was in truth a sea of water filling the
base of the hall, but I quickly realized that it was the black of the darkness
mages. They might be out of sight, but they were there.

I gulped. Sip and Lisabelle stood
on either side of me. Sip’s darted back and forth like a caged animal’s.

“This is bad,” she murmured.
“What are we doing here? Aren’t we supposed to be in bed? This is the vampire
version of a dining hall, by the way. I think they call it a breakfast room.”

“How do you know that?”

“I read,” said Sip, nose in the
air.

It was the middle of the night
and everyone was quiet. I looked around for Keller, but the crowd of
paranormals was too dense for me to be able to pick him out. I did have a
sense, though, that something was missing from the room. Frowning, I tried to
figure out what it was.

“It’s the food,” said Lisabelle,
her eyes glinting in the dark. “We’re not smelling it.”

I nodded. We were in the
breakfast room, but we weren’t there to eat. Behind me, the tables were gone.
We were in empty space, waiting.

The sea of darkness mages parted
to reveal that one whole side of the gathering consisted of vampires. Lanca’s
Rapier sect was there, trying to keep order. It was the first time I had seen
all of them since we arrived, and I kind of wished I hadn’t.

I didn’t realize how much
vampires tried to temper their ability to intimidate when they were at Public.
Here at Locke they made no effort to hide it.

The result was terrifying.

Every one of these vampires was
larger, stronger, and faster than any I had seen before. Their black clothing
billowed around them as they floated and cast their sunken eyes around the
room. They were all very pale and some looked as if they had been crying. They
were in mourning, after all, for their murdered king.

Gasps went up around the room and
my eyes strained to pick out the reason why.

An ear-splitting howl broke the
calm as a white object went flying into the center of the room. Darkness mages
and vampires alike moved back. At first I thought it was a wet and dirty rag,
but then I saw it struggle and jerk. The thing was alive, thrashing weakly on
the ground.

My stomach rolled.

Lisabelle’s eyes flicked to Sip,
who stood nearby, her face a mask of horror.

Following the agonized white
creature into the center of the room was a vampire. He had no hair, and his
eyes were so far back in his head they looked like two black holes that had
been bored into his face. His nose was long and beaked and looked as if it had
been broken at some point, with a pronounced tilt to the left. He barely had
any lips or chin, which made it hard to tell where his voice would come from if
he spoke.

“That is Faci,” Lisabelle
murmured. “The one who is trying to marry Lanca.”

“It’s a real wonder she doesn’t
want to,” Sip murmured darkly, her eyes cold.

There was a sharp, collective
intake of breath.

Following Faci was Daisy
Validification.

The hybrid’s eyes were bright
with excitement. Her ironclad control had slipped, and she nearly skipped
behind the vampire.

The thing on the ground was
snarling as its two tormentors headed for it. All the other paranormals stood
silently.

Suddenly, a voice in my head
sounded, ringing around in my skull and sounding remarkably like Professor
Dacer’s voice, although how he had projected it into my head I had no idea. I
darted a glance at Dacer himself, who was standing across from me, down on the
ground with the other vampires, an unbridled pain etched on his face. He never
looked at me. Dacer’s voice sounded panicked as he ordered me not to intervene.

Blood gushed from sores on the
writhing white animal, which I could now see was a little dog.

A hand’s breadth away from Dacer
stood Professor Zervos. My salt-and-pepper-haired professor stood erect and
alone. I was a tiny bit relieved to see that despite his mask of calm,
underneath the surface even Zervos looked disgusted.

Lisabelle took a painful grip on
my arm and glared at me. I grabbed Sip before she could do anything either.
Maybe Dacer had spoken to them as well, but for whatever reason, none of us
moved.

I forced myself to look at the
dog. I felt wretched. The dog chomped uselessly at the legs of his captors.
Blood spit from the sides of his mouth to pool on the ground, his fruitless
thrashing covering his face in the red pools.

The dog trembled and writhed and
started to scrape feebly along the floor, trying to get away, but he didn’t
know where to go. In the center of a circle of darkness I wouldn’t have known
where to turn either.

I darted another glance at
Professor Dacer. He gave the slightest shake of his head. Fury pounded in my
temples. How could he let this go on?

This was the first time I had
been in the same place as Lisabelle’s kin, the other darkness mages. I quickly
decided it was not an experience I wanted to repeat very many times. The
figures varied in size and height, but there was a hollowness, an empty pit
about each of them that made me think we would not be friends. Every so often
one would turn his or her eyes up to me, or maybe it was to look at Lisabelle.

The looks were filled with a cold
hatred that took my breath away.

“Just ignore them,” Sip murmured.
She had seen the looks too.

The dog bucked in pain as more
blood gushed from an open wound. Daisy came close and the dog let out another
little growl, but he must have been kicked in the throat at some point, because
I could barely hear it.

The little girl whose dog it must
have been darted forward, but she was quickly grabbed and tossed backward by a
man much larger even than Risper. She screamed and thrashed, but there was
nothing she could do. Her blond head turned from side to side and tears
glistened on her face. She moaned and sank to the floor, covering her face with
her tiny trembling hands.

I wanted to reach out to her and
give her a hug, or stop the torment of her little animal, but I didn’t move.
Dacer had warned me not to, and the paleness of his face and the sweat on his
brow told me that even he was frightened.

The manic look in Faci’s eyes
scared me and I didn’t even know the man.

“Someone needs to put a stop to
this,” Sip murmured. “They cannot be allowed to torture an innocent creature.”

“They can and they will,” said
Lisabelle. “Trying to stop Faci and Daisy would be madness. That’s exactly what
they’re waiting for.”

“You think they would hurt us if
we tried?” Sip asked. “Here in Lanca’s own domain?”

“I think Lanca herself is afraid,
because she knows she doesn’t have control even in her own home,” Lisabelle
said, her voice so low I had to lean toward her to hear. “And I think they
would kill us. I think they would relish it.”

I looked at the two crumpled
shapes down below, the little girl and the dog. Apparently the girl’s behavior
from earlier was not to be forgiven. Instead of hurting her, which they could
not do without repercussions because she was a paranormal, they were hurting
her innocent pet instead.

A feral smile covered Daisy’s
face as she lifted her foot and brought it down, hard, on the dog’s paw. He let
out a howl as the little girl let out a scream.

Daisy grabbed the dog and jerked
it upward, pulling it up by the bloody hair at the back of its neck. It howled.
She smacked it. The dog went limp. The little girl tried again to get to her
beaten pet, but the burly man held her back. I couldn’t tell if it was out of
kindness. I hoped that it was.

The darkness mages around Daisy
and Faci smiled and murmured. Some pointed. Others made little cheering noises.
They wanted to see the dog hurt. They wanted Daisy and Faci to show their power
to the rest of us.

No other paranormals moved. The
pixies, whom I normally associated with horrible paranormal behavior, floated
high above the rest of us, looking solemn. Even Camilla’s mouth was drawn into
a thin, tight line.

“I had no idea Camilla had it in
her to feel bad,” I murmured to Lisabelle.

“Pretty sure she and feelings
don’t have a close relationship,” said Lisabelle dryly. “She’s like a guy that
way.”

“This is sick,” said Sip, growing
angrier. “You cannot treat animals like this.”

“Is that the werewolf in you?”
Lisabelle asked.