The Elementals (19 page)

Taken aback, Kate nodded, but not too hard, because he already looked awfully offended. “You might have.”

“I never would,” he said.

Curling her toes in her shoes, Kate bounded over. He wasn’t going away! She still had time to unravel all his mysteries. Or some of them. As many as she could on the long trip back to The Ems.

Since he needed his hands for his crutches, she took hold of his sleeve. “What about after you walk me home? Will I see you after that?”

“Depends on what happens between here and there.”

It took her a moment to realize he was joking. Under her breath, she muttered a fond insult in his direction, then tugged his sleeve, leading him out of her little bubble of time. She didn’t know how to turn it off—it had always stopped on its own before.

“Come on. I don’t want you turning into a pumpkin on me.”

“What does that even mean?” Julian laughed, then the spark went out in his eyes.

As they stepped through the borders of Kate’s magic, cold rushed around them, and Julian fell.

No—he dropped.

Because he didn’t put out his hands or try to catch himself. Crashing into the sand, his body flopped like a doll’s. It came to rest in an awkward curve, one arm bent behind him, the other thrown over his head.

“Julian!” Kate cried, and lunged after him.

She shuddered because he felt like warm jelly under her hands. His head lolled from side to side, his eyes half-open but fixed. It was unnatural, how boneless he was. How
still
he was. The wind, newly started, swept between them. Overhead, birds shrieked once more, but Julian had stopped. Completely.

Pressing her ear to his chest, Kate heard nothing. Her panic rising, she thumped his breastbone, as if that might make his heart reply. Bodies were forever making strange noises, usually at embarrassing times. They weren’t meant to be hollow shells. They shouldn’t echo.

Even as she covered his mouth with her hand, trying to find his breath, some little proof that he lived, Kate screamed for help. But there was no one to hear it.

The beach was deserted. Even the glass bulbs on the boardwalk had gone dark. Made darker still by the strangely moonless sky. It was awful and beautiful—entirely cloudless, and pierced with a million silver stars.

Ignoring the sharp hitch in her chest, Kate stood. There had to be a police call box nearby. This was more than she could handle on her own. Jumbled, her thoughts urged her to go. At the same time, her stomach clenched at the prospect of leaving Julian alone. He looked so helpless.

His eyes opened.

In terrible succession, he drew a rattling breath and began to shake. Quivering became thrashing. Joints cracking, Julian clawed deep furrows in the sand. Twisted in an unnatural arch, he gasped and collapsed.

“Julian! Oh God, Julian.” Kate dropped to her knees be-side him. She had such stupid hands; they didn’t know what to do. Finally, she plastered one to his forehead and smoothed his hair back. “Tell me what you need. Tell me what to do.”

Eyes wild, Julian seemed to look everywhere at once. Tics and jolts pulled at his lips; one eye blinked, then the other. He was a broken china doll, and Kate had always been afraid of china dolls.

“The moon,” he whispered.

“What?” Kate tried to follow his line of sight. “What about it? Are you all right?”

The tremors ebbed away, and Julian’s gaze turned steady. Knitting his brows, he pointed to the heavens and traced an outline in the air. Then he did it again, his hand pale against the dark of the sky. “There’s no moon.”

Tipping her head back, Kate frowned at the sky. The stars flickered, silent and watching, always watching. Her head swam, but she tried to stay calm. “I know; it’s all right. Can you sit up?”

Julian pushed himself to his elbows and grabbed Kate’s lapel to get her attention. Color bled back into his skin, but his voice was still rough, his breaths uneven.

When his brow brushed her temple, a spark passed between them. He curled curious fingers in her hair, tugging the knots loose to free it. The sound he made slipped right into her, one somewhere between fear and confusion.

“It’s supposed to be full. And Kate . . .”

“What?”

“All your hair is white.”

In the middle of the night, Caleb stood at the window and watched the city go by. The traffic slowed down, but it never stopped. The sidewalks cleared, but they were never empty. Pouring himself another finger of whiskey, he let the glass warm in his hand before he took a sip.

Sleeping on land made him sick to his stomach. Six weeks onshore, he should have been steady by now. But his body still tilted when he walked, trying to make up for waves that weren’t there. During the day, he cursed it under his breath and kept moving.

At night, all he could do was keep his own company and keep drinking until he passed out. His skin felt oily slick, and his mouth tasted like burnt popcorn. But unconscious was unconscious, and when he got there by way of bourbon, he didn’t dream.

He leaned his brow against the glass. His breath fogged it, and something about that circle of white drew people’s attention. A pair of women hustling down the street looked up at the same time. One of them jumped. The other grabbed her friend’s arm and dragged her quickly away.

Rolling his eyes at them, he took another sip. Did they think he could grab them from two stories up? Even if he could, he sure as hell didn’t care to. Maybe they were a couple of dumb broads, didn’t know the difference between a man and a ghost. Vaguely amused, Caleb finished his drink and put the glass aside.

When he looked out again,
he
saw a ghost. Long white hair swirled in the wind, and the face beneath it . . . Cold shock gripped him, and Caleb looked away. He hadn’t had that much; he wasn’t that far gone.

But he was a sailor, and those that made their living on the sea believed in signs and omens. If he turned around and she was still down there, he wasn’t seeing things. She had to be real.

Digging his fingers into his own wrists, he pivoted. And there, beneath a streetlight, she stood. Amelia van den Broek, come back from the dead. She dared to stare at him. Her gaze bored into him, a diamond-tipped burr that ground through flesh and bone alike.

Pushing her hands into her hair, she sectioned it with brutal efficiency. As she braided it, the silver disappeared into dark. Her lips moved. No matter she was too far away to hear, Caleb heard her. That ghost whispered, and it drifted into his ears. It was a bead of black ink dropped into a bowl of water.

If you tremble, I would fear not. If you tremble, I would fear not.
If you tremble, I would fear not.

She taunted him! She taunted him with her old lies, with false prophecies that promised he would have a life and a future distant from all this. A perfect life, with his Sarah at his right hand, perhaps their children at the left. All of it stolen, all of it destroyed by her lies. That ghost glowed beneath the lamplight and
laughed
at him.

Throwing himself at the door, Caleb forgot he wasn’t supposed to be in the theatre at night. If the night watchman saw him descend from his secret apartment, he didn’t care. His blood boiled, and his teeth were sharp for revenge. Burning and sweating, he crashed into the lobby doors.

Locked, they refused to give way to him, so he pounded the glass instead. It shook as he screamed. He screamed for Sarah, for an escape. He screamed Amelia’s name in a curse. And he was screaming still when the police came round.

They stared at him, shaking their heads as the night watch appeared from the side door with his ring of keys.

“All right, pal,” one said, closing steel cuffs on Caleb’s wrists. “Settle down.”

“Been drinking?” the other asked. He sounded friendly enough and didn’t twist Caleb’s arm as he led him out of the theatre. But he did cuss when Caleb struggled and pulled him to the ground.

“Come back here, Amelia,” Caleb roared.

Dragging the cops behind him, he managed a few steps. Muscles stood out, tight and hard in his throat, and he lunged once more toward a ghost that had faded away. “Come back and get what you deserve!”

He was so blind with rage, he didn’t see the nightstick coming. And then, all was dark.

Unconscious was unconscious, however he got there.

***

“There was a Help Wanted sign in that window this morning,” Julian said.

“Maybe they filled it this afternoon?” Kate said. The moon couldn’t be full and new in the same night. The unbearable heat had dissipated in an instant . . . time had passed. A lot of it.

Kate sounded like a liar, and worse, the lying she did was to herself. Julian stole looks at her every so often, concerned. She kept braiding and unbraiding her hair.

He’d been wrong. It hadn’t
all
turned white. But instead of one bright tuft, the whole crown was silver. Most of its length was still brown, so when Kate twisted it the right way, the braids alternated colors. White, then dark, white, then dark.

A Packard whipped around the corner, kicking up a mechanical wind. Julian put out a crutch to stay Kate before she walked out in front of it.

Kate smeared a hand across her eyes, then looked up at him. Perhaps it was the white hair, but she seemed
older.
Her features sharper, somehow, the planes of her face more refined. Even her voice sounded richer.

“Okay, explain it again.”

Rather than walk on, Julian nudged her closer. “Time outside your . . . your circle, the parts you stopped . . . it must have gone faster the longer we were in there. There was a storm coming, and now the skies are clear. It was due to be a full moon tonight, but look up. There isn’t any moon at all.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Kate said. “What would you know about the sky anyway? Do you follow astrology?”

Seeing him die must have addled her brains. It hadn’t done much for him, either. His head split with a headache, and every inch of him burned. But he wasn’t wrong; everything had a natural course. He saw it on the farm every day, every month, every year.

Kate had stopped time for two hours, according to his watch. But according to the celestial clock, they’d been gone three weeks.

“There’s a difference,” Julian said, “Between astrology and astronomy. Look.”

Julian rested on his crutches and caught her hand. The constellations weren’t so visible in the heart of the city. Too many lights burned through the dark, they swallowed faint stars and fine details alike. He had to guide Kate’s hand carefully.

Their arms twined like ribbons around a Maypole. The fit was easy, and Julian curled his fingers into her palm. Raising her index finger to point, he traced her hand across the heavens.

His voice was little more than a murmur when he named the stars for her. “Altair, Deneb, Vega.”

“Abracadabra,” she replied. “Ish ka bibble. Kalamazoo.”

He couldn’t help it. He rolled his eyes and released her. Making his way into the street, he informed no one in particular, “If anybody ought to be wound up about this, it should be me.”

Kate dashed after him. “How do you figure?”

“My whole life, I thought I was the only one.” Swinging onto the curb, Julian moved acrobatically. He raised his feet into his crutches as if they were stilts and turned to face her on them. “Then today, I find you. And you say you know a whole gaggle of witchy people.”

“Because I do!”

“Then you should be used to it! I should be the one blibbering my lips and braiding my hair.”

Narrowing her eyes, Kate said, “You don’t have enough hair to braid.”

“I’d grow some, to make my point.”

Snapped out of her haze, Kate fell into step beside him. “I bet you would.”

They fell silent, trudging along in the dark. Unsettled, Julian kept scouring the street for signs. Maybe he wasn’t used to the California sky yet. Maybe storms really did pass that quickly on the ocean. But for all of his maybes, his heart jolted when he saw a newspaper abandoned in the trash.

Hurrying over to it, he picked it up and flipped it over. Even though he’d suspected the truth, it was still a shock. His mouth went dry, and he was suddenly much too hot. Holding it up to Kate, he pointed at the date.

“July fifth,” Kate murmured.

With a grim nod, Julian tossed the paper. “It was June seventeenth this morning. Says so on my pay envelope.”

“Julian, no. It can’t be, it really can’t be.” Hands flapping like wounded birds, Kate plunged forward. “A month?!”

“More like twenty days,” he said, but she ignored him.

“Oh, God, Mollie’s going to be steamed.”

So far, every conversation he’d had with Kate was like an experiment. It was like she wanted to see how little information she could impart and still be understandable. At the moment, she made no sense whatsoever. Following her slowly, Julian asked, “Who’s Mollie?”

“She hates Handsome. Oh no. Oh no, Julian, she hates him so much! How fast can you go? Come on!”

Utterly confounded, Julian sped up a little. Her mental state couldn’t possibly shift that fast, but as he disclaimed it to himself, he changed his mind. Of course it could. She kissed total strangers on whim. She wore men’s clothes and took pleasure in gruesome things.

He couldn’t tell if he liked her or feared her, but he found himself following her all the same.

***

Shoving her hair into her hat, Kate slipped into the apartment lobby as quietly as possible. There were rules for tenants of The Ems, a long list of them. And if she remembered correctly from signing the lease, she was breaking most of them.

It was after ten p.m. and she had a guest. Of the opposite sex even, though she was the only one who knew that.

They were halfway up the stairs when the landlord flew at them.

“He must sleep with one eye open,” Kate whispered to Julian. Then she tugged her hat down, almost to her eyes. “Sorry, Mr. Riggsby. I know it’s past curfew. I missed the last red car, but I promise it won’t happen again.”

“Your sister said you went back to Montana.” Mr. Riggsby’s gaze raked over her, then darted to Julian. “Who’s this?”