Elemental Fire (5 page)

“No,” said Sip. “Wind should pass
through the force field like it isn’t there, unless the wind carries some ill
intent. We shouldn’t be able to pass through it at all without using our
powers.”

Idly Sip twisted her finger,
looking down at her dull ring. “Be ready,” she murmured. “We won’t have much
time.”

Slowly and in unison the three of
us moved forward. My stomach twisted and my heart pounded so fast I was sure it
would bring Dove. The hair stood out on the back of my neck. There was
something very wrong. How could something I loved so well strike such fear in
me?

“Do you hear that?”

“Sounds like rain,” I said,
frowning. There hadn’t been a cloud in the sky when we set out. I looked up,
and at first I didn’t know what I was looking at, but Sip did. My friend let
out a scream before Lisabelle clamped a hand over her mouth. The whole sky
blazed a startling white.

Like frozen falling stars pelting
down, hundreds of white burning shards sped toward our heads.

“What th-” I started to say.

“If those things hit us they’ll
kill,” Lisabelle yelled. “Run.”

“Where?” Sip cried frantically.

“The Long Building,” Lisabelle
commanded. The three of us forgot all pretense of secrecy and ran. When my legs
protested the sudden increase in speed, I just pushed them harder. But before
we got very far, I made the mistake of looking up. We were about to be gutted
and speared, like some feral animal, by a million ivory daggers.

“We aren’t going to make it,”
Lisabelle cried, her words laced was fear. “What kind of magic is this?”

I halted, letting my friends pass
me. My neck throbbed as I bent it backward, never taking my eyes off the sky.

“Go,” I yelled. “I can handle
this.”

“You keep moving with us or none
of us moves at all,” said Sip, roughly grabbing my arm.

“Fine,” I said. “Don’t let me
trip. I need to keep my eyes on them.”

I called to my magic, but it was
already there, sensing I needed protection. Deep inside me, where the inner
light burned that no one else ever saw, were the resources that would save us.
Ah,
the wind
, I thought. Here was something that was all mine.

Meanwhile, the onslaught from
above came on, as if someone had dumped a massive box of painted knives down on
our heads. They shimmered and blazed and singed the air, and the noise was
growing louder, drowning out the normal sounds of night. I called to the wind.
It was the part of my elemental magic I was least comfortable with, because
wind was unruly and unpredictable. When given the option, I always gravitated
to water.

But water wouldn’t protect me
against being cut, only the wind could do that now.

I felt Sip drawing closer.

“Sip,” Lisabelle yelled over the
whistling of the knives. “I would tell you to duck, but you’re already so close
to the ground there’d be no point.”

I felt Sip shake a bit next to me
and wondered if it was from fear or amusement. Magic poured out of me and
enveloped us with wind. I slammed it upward, trying to knock the thousands of
knives off course.

“It isn’t working,” Lisabelle
observed as the knives whistled through the wind and kept right on coming.

“It slowed them down a little,” I
yelled back, watching the progress of the blades anxiously.

“When something cuts you,” said
Lisabelle, “you’d rather have it done fast than slow.”

“In other words, I made it
worse,” I yelled back. The whistling was now so loud that I could barely hear
Lisabelle.

“Yes, in those words,” said
Lisabelle, nodding. “Try one of your other branches of power.”

Earth. Air. Fire. Water.

“Fine,” I said through gritted
teeth. “For something new and different. I hope this works.”

“Brace yourselves,” I ordered.
Again I called to the wind. I heard Lisabelle protest, but when she realized
what I was doing she stopped. Instead of sending the wind to meet the blades, I
slammed it into the ground. At the same time I ordered the frozen dirt to rise.
In great chunks right in front of us the brown dirt came free from the earth.
In another whirl of speeding air it started to swirl, higher and higher in a
circular motion, until two branches of my magic had combined to create a
powerful funnel.

“Now what?” Sip demanded. “Those
things aren’t going to throw all the knives off.”

“They’ll keep them from hitting
us while we run,” I observed. “Let’s move.”

And again we started to run. I
had never done magic on the move before. Not only was my body in motion, but
the circular funnel over our heads, acting as a glorified roof, had to come
along with us. If it was off by only a few inches, then -

SLAM.

The first of the knives struck
our canopy and I cried out. My ring shot out a burst of light and then faded to
dimness.

The canopy faltered.

“Damnit, keep that above our
heads,” Lisabelle roared. She was leading the way - the cool head in a crisis.
I nodded, though no one was looking, and forced my mind back to my task. My
magic was still there, just startled and momentarily hesitant. The knives were
obviously laced with magic, and my own power was having trouble absorbing the
tiny stab wounds. Every time a blade struck it felt like a tiny pinprick in my
body.

It hit me then: our protections
would fail.

In a matter of seconds the
combination of earth and air that was the only thing keeping us from being
stabbed to death by thousands of what looked like tiny avenging angels would
disappear and we would die. In the morning Dove would find our mutilated
corpses.

“Stop thinking gross thoughts,”
Sip cried over her shoulder. “I can tell, because you’re gripping my arm so
tightly you’ve cut off the circulation. Don’t worry about it. I’m right-handed.
But we’re going to be fine.” I loosened my grip.

I didn’t dare look up until
Lisabelle flung open the doors of the Long Building. Our canopy was still
protecting us, but even so I heard a hiss every time a knife landed with
another attempt to kill us. Every so often tiny sparks would shoot down and hit
me in the shoulders or forehead. I winced, but the pain was bearable. I hardly
noticed.

Once the three of us were safely
inside I let go of my canopy - or it let go of me. I barely had the power to
hold it anymore.

I put my fists on my knees and
panted. Next to me Sip sat down hard and stared straight ahead. Lisabelle stood
in one of the open doorways, watching the silver rain come down hard.

The ground was taking the beating
that had been meant for us. There were splinters and shards everywhere, as if
very clean snow was blanketing the dark and tangled grass. Some of the knives
even hit the roof of the Long Building, and I heard them bounce off with a clang.
The slivers didn’t stay on the ground for long. Instead, they disintegrated
with a hiss into nothing at all.

“Makes it kind of hard to examine
them,” Lisabelle said thoughtfully. Her eyes continued to scan around us. “I
wonder if that was the intention.”

“Who cares what the intention
was,” Sip said, her breathing slowly returning to normal.

I stood up straight and walked
over to Lisabelle. My legs felt like Jell-o and my back throbbed from tension.
“It must be,” I said. “And I think I know what they were from.”

Both my friends looked at me in
surprise. “Fallen Angels?” Sip asked. “They have the right coloring.”

I shrugged. “Sort of. They were
from the force field. When we went through we must have tripped an invisible
mechanism that alerts the field to intruders. That attack” - I pointed to where
the last of the knives were dissolving - “was the result.”

“Now even the fallen angels are
tired of you,” said Lisabelle, as Sip looked around. “Shocking.”

Chapter Four

“It’s ridiculous that we have to
sneak around,” Sip complained, picking bits of dirt out of her hair and
ignoring Lisabelle. “What sort of student has to break into school?”

“Deviants? Miscreants?” Lisabelle
offered. “Take your pick.”

“You mean the sort of people you
would feel at home with?” Sip asked, coming to stand between us and looking out
on the now-dark lawn of Public.

“What now?” I asked.

“Now we head into the catacombs,”
said Sip. “We need to get to Airlee and Astra. According to my research, the
catacombs should get us close to Airlee. Getting to Astra will be significantly
more difficult.”

“Are we going to look for other
students?” I said, still wondering where they were. It was strange to be
returning to campus in such a dramatic fashion.

“Hopefully we’ll find out what’s
going on when we get to Airlee,” said Sip, her voice uneasy and her eyes
troubled.

“Yes, I do hope to run into other
students. It’s my greatest joy - socializing,” said Lisabelle.

“Yes, crazy that more than three
paranormals attend a college. Imagine,” said Sip, just as dryly.

“Let’s go,” I said, turning my
back on the place of our attack.

We padded along silently. I
wished we had time to visit the Museum - at least to make sure everything was
alright - but after we dashed across the open field, who knew how long we had
before someone came looking. At least we were now practiced at moving silently.

I knew exactly where to go: to an
old door in the back of a room filled with junk. Dacer had warned me to stay
away from it, because the Slime Dwellers - and other things in the catacombs -
had decided that the room was theirs.

Unlike the spacious and beautiful
Museum itself, this was just a storage space, a neglected room where everything
was old and falling apart. At the far end of the space was the entrance to the
catacombs. I knew, because I had come up that way once, in what I had hoped
would be my only venture into the ground below the Long Building.

My hands felt tired and stiff as
I reached for the old door handle. Rust and cold metal greeted my touch and my
ring made a tiny scraping sound as I turned my wrist.

The door creaked as I pulled it
up. It didn’t feel entirely attached to its hinges anymore. The smell of dust
that hadn’t moved in years hit my nostrils and I coughed.

Behind me, Lisabelle stepped
forward, brushing so close to me that our shoulders touched. She pushed her
sleeve up, revealing the snaking wand tattoo she had inscribed onto her arm
last semester, much to Sip’s anger and dismay.

A black light flickered and
snaked out of her arm, illuminating the old and broken furniture surrounding
us.

Sip, who had wanted to follow
behind and watch our backs, let Lisabelle guide her through the door, and once
she had slipped through, Lisabelle closed it. The old wood ground and scraped
closed again, blocking out the small amount of light that had shone through it
from the storage room. Now the only illumination was a black glow coming from
Lisabelle.

“Let’s go,” she murmured, now
leading us through the back door, which was even more rickety than the one we
had just come through. Lisabelle moved carefully. The stairway that it led to
was made of thin and steep stone steps, leading down and down. I tried to take
comfort in the fact that I wasn’t tripping and falling down like I had the
other time I had entered the catacombs, but the cold air and the smell of wet
dirt blasting into my face was hardly reassuring. We descended a dizzying
number of stairs, until I was sure we had missed the catacombs entirely.

Lisabelle reached the base of the
stairs with a splash.

“Oh no,” Sip groaned. “I will
not
walk in water. Gross.”

“I’ve always thought of you as
walking
on
water,” said Lisabelle with
amusement. I snorted. “Don’t worry, it’s just a puddle. Step around.” Lisabelle
increased her dark light and helped us move to the side.

We walked and walked. The
catacombs were large, but we followed an old passageway, with the rock
foundation of the Long Building on either side of us. Every so often we passed
more black pools of water or old, broken-down crates. The constant sound of dripping
water followed us as we went carefully forward. Lisabelle’s light flickered,
creating rushing and distorted shadows on the rock walls.

“What was this used for?”
Lisabelle wondered.

“Storage mostly,” said Sip
knowledgeably. “I can give you a couple of books about it that you won’t bother
to read.”

“Thanks,” said Lisabelle. “I’d
appreciate that.”

“How do you know we’re going in
the right direction?” I asked. Sip then launched into a complicated explanation
about directions and how she, as a werewolf, always knew where she was going.
By the time she was done I was sorry I had asked.

“What are you trying to get out
of Astra?” Lisabelle asked me. “The Mirror Arcane?”

“I’m not sure I should move it,”
I said, voicing a fear that had been bothering me all day. “I feel like the
only place it’s truly safe is Astra.”