Elemental Fate (Paranormal Public Book 12) (3 page)

I was still in shock that the general had come, but maybe I shouldn’t have been. He liked to throw his weight around and make difficult situations worse, not exactly the best quality for a general, but who was I to say?

“Lisabelle Verlans is a danger not just to herself, but to others. We must be careful of the darkness premier. If she continues unchecked there will be nothing but disaster.”

“Lisabelle isn’t going to cause a disaster,” said Charlotte through gritted teeth. Neither General Goffer nor Cather noticed her tone.

“Oh, really?” said Cather. “I thought she specialized in disaster.”

“She specializes in stopping them, in my experience,” said Charlotte. “Like she stopped us all from dying during the Nocturn War while you were busy surfing and flirting.”

“The blood of life,” said Cather with a crooked smile.

General Goffer coughed. “She did no such thing. She made a grab for power. She saw an opportunity and she took it. Nothing more.”

“What would have happened if she hadn’t taken over darkness!” Charlotte demanded. “Someone else would have, or worse, we’d have a bunch of lawless hellhounds running around. You think just any old paranormal can handle that much power? Not just once but regularly? Is that really what you think?” Charlotte was breathing hard, and I saw Keller’s hand sneak over to hers and lace his fingers through hers under the table. He wasn’t trying to calm her, but to support her; I had never once seen him try to clip her wings, even though he was the only paranormal who had it in his power to do so.

“Look, I know she’s your friend and all,” said the general. “It just seems strange that she would amass so much power without wanting to do something with it. Rarely is someone who is all-powerful lacking in an agenda.”

“And you know this how?” my sister demanded.

“Power doesn’t just fall into someone’s lap. You choose it. Lisabelle Verlans didn’t have to take over darkness, but she did.”

“Like I said,” Charlotte said, sounding very tired, “she chose to take the power because the alternative was that we would all have died.”

“So nice of her,” I said. “I thought she was brave and awesome and we’d be lost without her.”

General Goffer was so surprised to hear me speak that his glass of wine stopped halfway to his mouth and his thick, bushy eyebrows rose. “You’re just a boy,” he said. “When darkness gets free, or worse, when she sets it on us in one fell swoop, you will think differently. The time is coming when choices will have to be made, and you may be surprised which side you choose.”

“When those things happen I might,” I said. “What you don’t realize is that they won’t.”

It occurred to me later that the general and I might have been talking about two different things. What I had been talking about was the fact that Lisabelle would never turn on her friends. I was pretty sure the general was incapable of understanding that point.

Duke Dacer jumped in at that point to turn the conversation in another direction, and the dinner party continued on to other topics. Charlotte’s veneer of calm reappeared and the evening went on as if we hadn’t spent half of it arguing for Lisabelle’s honor.

We all went to sleep on less than ideal terms, but I didn’t care. Tomorrow Keegan would arrive, we’d have the marriage celebration, and then we could return to Paranormal Public for our second semester.

I tried not to think about what had happened after I found Sip in Charlotte’s cottage, but it was hard not to. First, Lisabelle had left, but oddly enough, many of the hellhounds had stayed around for a long time. They hadn’t moved around much, they had merely appeared to be waiting for something.

Bertrum, though, had been beside himself with devastation. At first he just sat on the floor of the cottage amidst the blood. His eyes were downcast and his red-slathered hands twitched a little. But I had other things I had to do, so I walked away and left him alone for the time being.

Before leaving, Lisabelle had touched the metal circling my finger, turning it black. Once I knew I was wearing a ring of essence, I glared at the hellhounds, who glared back.

It might just have been my imagination, but I rather thought the black tower on the Astra dorm was shimmering for the first time ever. The image of Astra at that moment, with the hellhounds in front and the tower above, was breathtaking.

Eventually I made myself relax enough so that my legs worked again. When I turned around and marched back to Charlotte’s cottage, I found Eighellie walking around outside and Averett floating nearby, apparently waiting for me. Keegan was busy in the entryway, trying to convince Bertrum that he shouldn’t keep sitting there on the floor.

“But how could I be so foolish?” whispered Bertrum. “How could I?”

I walked closer and saw concern spark in Averett’s eyes. “Your hair’s on fire,” she cautioned, pointing. I reached up and felt my head, and yes indeed, there were flames rising from it. I was learning that when my own fire burned I didn’t feel it as heat, but as a sort of wave of power that surrounded me. I took several calming breaths in an attempt to convince my magic that we weren’t going to go out and level the Hunters right this instant. It took some convincing, but it finally calmed down.

When I had myself settled, Averett explained that she was heading off to Contact Vital, and that she might even blow off studying for finals to return to Vampire Locke and tell them what she had seen in person. I nodded, not really listening. The air was still cold and the ground still wore a rough blanket of snow. I kept imagining pools of blood scattered over the white and fluffy clumps.

Averett, her face a mask of worry, floated forward and snapped her fingers in front of my nose. “Get it together,” she said. “Now is not the time to fall apart.”

I gave a shaky cough and nodded. “Fine,” I said. “Now is not the time to fall apart.”

Taking Averett’s caution to heart, I marched forward and grabbed Bertrum’s arm. He was still sniveling, and though I didn’t want to belittle his tears, he needed to stop blaming himself. My touch sparked something in him, and he looked up at me as if he were just waking from a trance. Keegan, who had been trying to comfort him, took a couple of steps back and waited to see what he’d do next. Since he did nothing right away, I prodded him.

“Tell me what happened,” I said. Bertrum nodded dumbly, but he still didn’t speak. When I realized I’d get nothing more out of him this way, I decided to take more drastic measure. “Come on,” I said, tugging him away and leading him out of the cottage and over toward Astra. Keegan followed quietly.

But I had forgotten what was waiting for us outside. At the sight of the hellhounds, Bertrum engaged in a fresh round of hysterics. It took several more minutes to calm him down enough so that we could resume our slow plow toward my dorm.

“What do we need to be guarded for?” Keegan demanded. “We can fight.”

I gave a start at his words. It hadn’t occurred to me that they were there to guard, but now that Keegan had said it, I knew he was right. Lisabelle had left an army of hellhounds at Astra to send a message. I could only wonder how the recipient felt about that.

“We’re scaring our fellow paranormals,” said Eighellie, striding up. She looked different: purposeful, and not the least bit off in an academic dream world as she sometimes was. I had a glimpse of what she was fixing to become. “I like it.”

“Huh?” I said, and glanced over my shoulder. Other students were fleeing the scene in droves. They would walk up the path, see the blanket of black hellhounds, and run away screaming and yelling. Some of the hellhounds would sniff after them, seemingly for their own amusement. They had probably picked that habit up from Lisabelle, because during the Nocturn War I didn’t remember the hellhounds liking jokes.

“Let’s get inside. I’m sure we’ll have company soon enough,” I said. If Fallgrabber showed up in the next few minutes and tried to speak to me, I wasn’t sure what I would do. Hopefully at least Dobrov would be with him to calm him down and keep him in line. I very much hoped that Dobrov would come soon, if he was still on campus. And Charlotte. And Keller. I wasn’t used to dealing with a crisis alone.

In fact, my sister and her friends had done everything in their considerable power to make sure I never had to come face to face with a crisis on my own.

We had just made it into the fire sitting lounge when Dobrov did arrive; he brought along a cold evening and thick darkness, which cast funny shadows all around the room. Fallgrabber wasn’t even with him, so I had worried about the protocols officer’s arrival needlessly.

Dobrov had first gone to my sister’s cottage, taken one look at the spreading bloodstains on Charlotte’s floor, and headed to Astra. As he entered the lounge he said, “Who?” I wasn’t sure if he was talking about who had committed the act or who was injured, but Bertrum informed him that it was the paranormal president who had been hurt.

Dobrov, pale at the best of times, went a shade whiter, and Bertrum was still barely coherent. He tried very hard to accept that Lisabelle had taken Sip away and that Lisabelle’s quick action would give the werewolf her best chance at survival. Despite his efforts, he barely managed it. He just kept wondering over and over to himself what had happened. I wondered the same thing, but my main concern at the moment was Charlotte. Lisabelle had taken Sip, and there was nothing more I could do for the werewolf until it was time for vengeance.

My chest kept ached and I felt hollow. The darkness premier had told me that my sister was fine, but until I laid eyes on her there would be a part of me that felt uneasy. There were events on my mind that I just couldn’t put together in a coherent pattern. Yet. Events had unfolded while I had been away at the Compound, a.k.a. Neon Mountain, that had proved that Charlotte’s assistant, Luther, was working with the Hunters, but for a very personal reason. My friends had filled me in on the story when I got back to Public.

It turned out that Luther’s only daughter had died during the Nocturn War, and he wanted someone to blame. He had landed on Charlotte based on the notion that if she hadn’t wasted so much time, many paranormals’ lives would have been spared. I thought that view was spectacularly unfair and so did everyone else, but Luther was so lost in grief he didn’t care. I was starting to realize that much of the damage being done had started with an ideology, like that of the Hunters, but was being finished by a quest for revenge.

I wondered if the cycle would ever cease. All I knew was that it wasn’t going to stop with me after what had happened to Sip.

Anyhow, Luther had been taken into custody for questioning, but I didn’t know whether he was still being held.

“Was it Luther who hurt Sip?” I asked Bertrum quietly. I was trying hard not to imply that Bertrum had done anything wrong, especially because I knew how stubborn the werewolf was. But what she had been doing at Public on her own, with no guards, I couldn’t imagine.

Bertrum continued to gaze off into the distance, not saying a word. Grief did not fix problems, and it did not kill Hunters, and I was getting frustrated with Bertrum’s inability to pull himself together. After a while I got tired of his mopey stare, stood up, and walked away. But before I was out of earshot he answered grudgingly, “He’s still in custody, so it couldn’t have been him.”

A long silence fell, then Dobrov disappeared into the Astra kitchen. Eighellie, Keegan, and I followed him, leaving Bertrum sitting silent with his grief. I found myself wishing Averett had stayed, but I knew that Queen Lanca needed to know what had happened as quickly as possible, and Averett’s connection with Vital made her the logical choice for letting them know.

When we got to the kitchen, Dobrov spoke to the three of us. “I’m sorry we’re meeting under such difficult circumstances,” he said. “But in light of what has happened, some changes will be coming. Don’t ever repeat that I said this to you, but under the circumstances, I’ll make sure all of you pass your tests this semester.”

“You’re going to make us study?” Eighellie was confused. Not because she thought she would get out of doing work after what she had seen, but because she had planned on doing it anyway.

“No. I’m going to insist that the teachers pass you,” said Dobrov quietly.

“Averett too,” I said. “She was there, and now she’s left for Vampire Locke to inform Queen Lanca in person.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Dobrov. “Now, let’s see if we can get anything out of Bertrum before the authorities arrive to question him.” I didn’t know what that meant, but we all returned to the fire lounge. Bertrum was still sitting there where we had left him, and he didn’t look up as we entered.

Dobrov pulled a chair over so that he was sitting right next to Sip’s assistant. Until this moment I hadn’t really thought that Dobrov looked very presidential, but he did now. His shoulders were back and his eyes looked like they could see into Bertram’s soul. He looked at the panicking paranormal and said quietly, “Did you come here with Sip?”

When Bertrum didn’t reply right away, Dobrov reached forward and guided the tea to his lips. Bertrum took a great gulp and then another. “Did you come here with President Quest?”

Bertrum looked up and around as if he was surprised to find himself in the fire sitting room. “No,” he said. “No. she left me a message to say I should come. So I came.”

“Ah, so you came,” said Dobrov. “What did the message say?”

Bertrum closed his eyes, as if he was feeling an intense pain. “It said that Charlotte was in danger and that Sip was on her way to Public. We’ve begged her, Lisabelle and I, not to go off on her own, but she gets these ideas and then . . .” Bertrum gave a shuddering sigh.

“She came here by herself?” Dobrov asked gently.

Bertrum nodded. “I don’t know what happened. I had just gotten there when Ricky showed up. I didn’t know where Charlotte was, either.”

“Look, Bertrum, we don’t have a lot of time,” I said, crouching down. His eyes were unfocused and sort of glazing over again. I tried to force myself to relax, but I couldn’t. Bertrum was shutting down and this was urgent. “Is there anything else you can tell us?”

“Sip’s powerful,” said Bertrum. “So whatever attacked her . . . I mean, there are spells to protect her, but they didn’t work or they broke through them. There isn’t a lot of magic out there that can do that. Do you think it was the TPs? I just can’t think of what else would have been powerful enough. It’s not like she’s some defenseless paranormal.”

“I think that if someone wanted to attack Sip, they were going to do it sooner or later, especially if she was off by herself,” said Dobrov, trying to be soothing. “Not to say it’s her own fault, but she knew the risks. She’s fought in wars before. She thought Charlotte was worth it.”

Something had stuck in my mind that the mention of Charlotte brought into focus. Lisabelle had indicated that Charlotte had been taken to safety, yet Sip had come anyway. At that point, had she known that Charlotte wouldn’t be at the cottage, or had she thought that she would?

I rather thought it was the latter.