Elemental Air (Paranormal Public Series) (16 page)

The dining hall was almost full
when we got there. We were later than usual because I had had to be snuck out
of Astra, and we were all hungry.

“Did you check on the Mirror
Arcane?” Sip asked as we got cereal and headed for a table in the corner.
Unlike at dinner, there was just one long table in the middle of the room for
breakfast. The different paranormals types’ taste in breakfast food was not as
different as it was for the later meals of the day.

I nodded. “First thing. If Martha
touches it. . . .” I took a deep breath. Martha didn’t know the Mirror was
there, and she was too busy baking to notice.

I hoped.

Our first class was history with
Zervos. His classroom was now in the basement of Cruor, which meant that we
spent a lot of time in the Vampire dorm. I was actually starting to like the
blood-red and black color scheme, but I didn’t relish having class in the catacombs.

We headed for Cruor, but didn’t
make it further than the front entrance. Zervos was waiting outside for us,
standing on the bridge over the moat that surrounded the house.

“Students,” he said, nodding
curtly. Since it was a required class, all the usual suspects, both good and
bad, were in it. Sip, Lisabelle, Lough and I were there, along with Camilla and
Kia. Also present were Rake, Trafton, Daisy, and Faci. Vanni joined us late,
along with a werewolf named JJ whom I knew through Sip. He was a Starter, but
since he was a friend of the Quest family I had met him before. He was tall and
gangling, with dreadlocks and wide eyes. He smiled easily and had a quiet
kindness that I liked. Being so tall was good for a werewolf; it meant that he
had long legs for running. He gave us a nod as we came over, then returned his
attention to Zervos. Since this was his first college class he wanted to start
off well.

“Ms. Verlans, still no wand, I
see. Hum.”

I never got to hear what
Lisabelle might have said, because before she could respond, Zervos continued
talking. “Today we go on a hunt. I want all students to go to a building on
campus they haven’t been to before. I want you to return here to me before
class period ends with an object from that building. Tomorrow,” he said, over
the students’ mutterings, “you will tell me the history of your object and why
it is where it is at Public. Your object can be anything. Public has its own
history, and this project will help you better understand the campus itself.” His
black eyes snapped around to every student except Sip, Lisabelle, and me, whom
he ignored.

“Are there any buildings on
campus you haven’t been in?” I asked Lisabelle, racking my brain for one that I
hadn’t entered myself. “I think I’ve been in all of them except for a couple of
the professors’ houses, and there’s no way I dare to go into those. . . .”

“Yes, that’s right,” said Zervos
nastily. “You are not to enter professors’ residences. I do not need angry
colleagues calling me and asking me why I encouraged students to harass them.
You may have been in all the buildings. If that’s the case, please re-enter the
one that you have spent the least amount of time in.”

My stomach churned; I knew which
one that was. Glancing at Lisabelle, I could see that she was thinking the same
thing. The fact that we got along the least well with the pixies was why we had
barely been in Volans. It was best if you were invited to visit, and Lisabelle
never was.

“So,” said Sip carefully. “We’re
going to go steal not one, but three objects from Volans? For class. Oliva is
going to be assigning us detentions for decades.” She sighed heavily.

“It’s not ‘stealing,’” Lisabelle
corrected, “just borrowing.”

Once Zervos finished explaining
that after we had our artifact we could get its history any way we chose, but
he recommended using magic, the entire group broke up. I wondered where the
rest of the class was going and hoped they weren’t headed for Astra. For the
first time I was glad Martha was there. If my own friends weren’t allowed
inside, there was no way she’d let in the likes of Kia and Camilla.

“Have you seen Dobrov?” Lisabelle
asked. “I saw him coming into the dining hall this morning as we were leaving.
He looks good for a hybrid who is the brother of Daisy. He was with his
sister.”

“No,” I said. “I wish I had. He
needs to know that we’re on his side, even after everything.”

“Yeah,” said Sip. “He’s been a
good friend.”

“I’m just worried about how close
he is with Daisy,” said Lisabelle. “That has to have some influence.”

“Was Faci there?” I asked.

“He came in this morning,” said
Lisabelle. “Not sure why he was late, but apparently he’s sticking pretty close
to Cruor and that shed that he calls home - the one behind the castle.”

“Good,” said Sip. “I don’t want
to see his ugly face anyway.” She jutted out her chin and glared hard at the
ground.

Sip wasn’t a fan of any of the
young Nocturns, but she harbored a particular dislike of Faci. She still blamed
the young vampire for the death of Lanca’s beloved younger sister Dirr in an
explosion at Lanca’s coronation. Faci’s father had taken responsibility for it,
but we all knew it was really Faci who had pulled it off. Instead of being
punished, the young vampire had been allowed to join us as a fellow student at
Public, for all the world like he hadn’t done anything wrong.

“Did you talk to Keller about
when we’re going to paint?” Sip asked me. We were almost halfway across campus,
the black walls of Cruor now barely visible over the hills and through the
dotted trees.

“Not yet,” I said. “I’m sure
we’ll just have to do it this weekend.”

“They had other, more important
things, on their minds,” said Lisabelle as she made a sucking noise with her
lips and puckered them to look like a fish.

Sip giggled and covered her mouth
while I blushed.

“There’s Volans,” said Lisabelle,
pointing ahead of us. “I so wish we didn’t have to do this.”

Volans was also a castle, but the
stones were light in color. When I looked more carefully, I could see that they
had a slightly green tint. There were trees around the front courtyard shading
the windows of Volans from the hot sun. The impossibly green grass rolled in
front of us, sparkling from what looked like years of sprinkled pixie dust of
any and every color.

“Should we knock?” Sip said once
we got to the front door.

“Nope,” said Lisabelle. “If we
ask permission to go in they’ll just say no.”

“But not all students have class
right now,” Sip protested as Lisabelle turned the door handle.

Lisabelle shrugged. “There won’t
be many here who are awake. They won’t bother us.”

As it turned out, we didn’t see a
pixie anywhere, so we just ignored Zervos’s instruction about getting
permission.

When we had come to Volans on a
tour with Korba we had been Starters, and I had found everything impressive and
overwhelming. I now saw that since that time a couple of years ago they had
made some major changes in the decor. The walls were no longer yellow, but a
middling green the color of a stalk of celery. The white marble was still
there, but covered up with rugs, and the white furniture was gone, replaced by
earthy tones.

“I like this better,” said Sip.
“It’s more real and more lived in.”

“The pixies’ specialty,” said
Lisabelle sarcastically. “Come on.”

“Can’t we just grab one of the
paintings and go?” Sip asked, gesturing to the walls. Lisabelle glanced where
she was pointing.

“Don’t you want to do some
exploring first? Isn’t your academic curiosity just begging you to learn?”

“I’m all set with learning,” said
Sip. “If we stay here much longer we’ll be learning the art of how to keep
pixies from killing us and handing Charlotte over to the Nocturns.”

When Sip and I saw that Lisabelle
was seriously excited by the prospect of fighting pixies, we agreed without
saying a word that we had to get ourselves out of there without any further
ado. We pulled Lisabelle into the unoccupied living room, where I grabbed a
book, Sip grabbed a tiny pixie figurine, and Lisabelle grabbed a pillow. Then,
before Lisabelle could get us into any trouble, we dragged her away.

We headed out the way we had
come. The door stuck, so that it required all three of us to pull it open.

“Strange,” said Sip. “I don’t
remember it sticking on the way in.”

As we left I thought I felt all
of Volans shudder angrily. I walked a little faster.

Once again outside in the warm
sunlight, walking across the grassy lawn, I examined the book I had taken,
which turned out to be a Volans code of ethics. When I opened it to see what it
said about handing fellow paranormals over to darkness, I saw that it wasn’t
written in any language I could read. Walking next to me, Sip glanced at the
pages. “Ah, that’s an old pixie dialect,” she said. “Very hard to read. Korba
could probably translate it, though.”

“What do you have?” I asked,
thinking that the pixie professor would probably raise his eyebrows at Zervos’s
assignment.

She held up the tiny butterfly.
It was made of white glass, with flecks of purple in its depths.

“It’s the sign of the pixie
summer,” she said. “Pixies believe that if they see a white and purple
butterfly, the summer will be plentiful, so every year in the spring they look
for them.”

“And every year they’re
disappointed,” said Lisabelle. She held her pillow in one hand as we walked,
not concerned with examining it.

“Says the girl who thinks a
pillow will pass,” I said.

“Actually,” said Sip. “The pixies
are excellent craftspeople. The detail” - she pointed to the intricate
embroidery on the pillow - “is unmatched. Lisabelle should be fine. At least in
relation to this assignment. Maybe not so much in relation to life.”

We walked in silence for a time,
while I debated with myself whether I was going to go in search of Korba after
class ended. Suddenly, before we reached Cruor again, a depressing thought
struck me.

“What if this whole time we’ve
been trying to defend ourselves from Malle and she’s not really the one pulling
the strings?” I asked worriedly. “What if it’s Caid, and Malle is merely a
distraction? The darkness is becoming suffocating.”

“Then we’re in real trouble,”
said Sip. “But I’m okay with it either way, because we’ve been in real trouble
one way or another since we were Starters. So long as we deal with one threat
at a time we’ll be fine.”

“Actually, in every long range
scenario I can think of, we’re more likely to be dead than fine,” said
Lisabelle matter of factly.

“Thanks for the cheer, Belle,”
said Sip.

My mind raced back to my dream
from second semester, when Lisabelle had killed our friends. What Camilla had
said on the bus was fresh in my mind, that darkness calls to darkness, which
meant that Lisabelle’s darkness worked both ways. Could it possibly be that one
reason the demons kept hanging around was Lisabelle?

I shook my head, angry at myself.
Loyalty was all we had against the demons. I could never question Lisabelle,
yet for the rest of the day the question nagged at me.

Zervos glanced at all our
objects, but strangely enough he didn’t seem all that interested. It looked
like many of the students had headed for the Long Building. I just hoped that
Dacer had been there. He would have fits if any paranormal went into the Museum
without his permission.

After lunch and a chat with
Keller about painting that weekend, I went in search of Korba. The pixie
professor had class in one of the houses near Volans, where I had had a couple
of classes over the years, so I found him easily. To my dismay, he wasn’t
alone. Oliva was with him.

They had their heads bent over a
parchment and were examining it.

“Um, excuse me,” I said, clearing
my throat. They both looked at me.

“Yes, Charlotte?” said Oliva.
“Who are you looking for?” His voice was distant, as if he was distracted.

“Professor Korba, actually,” I
said.

“Yes?”

I hurriedly explained Zervos’s
assignment. Oliva sighed. “He mentioned he was going to try something like that.
So you’re fine?” I thought that was an odd question to ask unless he really
thought the pixies had it in for me, but I brushed it aside.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I was
wondering if you could translate some of this for me?” I asked Korba. “Just so
that I have something to tell Professor Zervos tomorrow.”

Korba nodded. “I would be
delighted,” he said, taking the old book from my hand. He flipped through the
pages with a slight smile on his face.

“Ah, yes, the pixie code of
ethics,” he murmured. “How about this? No pixie or pixie dwelling may turn away
another paranormal in need of shelter.”

Korba must have read the surprise
in my face, because he chuckled. “Pixies, many of us, do in fact have warm
hearts.”