Elemental Air (Paranormal Public Series) (32 page)

“I know, dear,” she said quietly.
“Public needs a fresh start.” She walked out the door, ignoring my cries
begging her to stop.

When I heard the front door slam
shut I stopped yelling. She wasn’t coming back. She knew she was about to kill
hundreds of innocent paranormals and she didn’t care.

My friends.

All my friends.

I couldn’t breathe. I felt my
chest tighten as my body stiffened.

Gasping, I again struggled
against my bonds.

I pulled and shifted until my
skin was raw and bleeding. I called to my ring, but Martha, or Public’s
self-appointed last defense mechanism, or whatever she was, must have done
something to my powers, or maybe the bonds were magicked. Whatever she had
done, my ring stayed dull and useless.

I wanted to scream in
frustration, but my jaw hurt too much.

I was just about to give up when
I heard a clattering above me. I stopped all movement. If it was a demon, I was
dead.

I listened intently.

The clattering came again and I
was sure.

Sigil!

“SIGIL,” I yelled, then stopped
and listened. I heard nothing. My heart pounding, I yelled again, “SIGIL!”

He came floating through the
wall, all wispy whiteness and tilted hat.

“Sigil,” I breathed.

“Why are you yelling?” he asked,
pushing up his glasses. “All the cookies gone?”

I laughed, then instantly stopped
when my jaw throbbed.

“We have to stop Martha,” I said.
“Now.”

“Martha’s scary,” he muttered,
shifting nervously.

“We can handle Martha,” I said
grimly, with a confidence I didn’t remotely believe in.

Judging from Sigil’s expression,
he didn’t believe in it either.

“Can you get these off?” I asked,
nodding to my handcuffs. Sigil gasped and drew himself up. “I’m a master of
pyrotechnics,” he said. “Of course.”

In seconds Sigil was at the
fireplace, lighting a long thin stick. Once it was burning he rushed back to
me.

“Hurry,” I begged.

I had no idea how long we had.
Images of my friends, all sitting in their dorms thinking they were safe,
flashed through my mind. They had no idea they were sitting on ticking time
bombs. Literally.

And their time was almost up.

I felt the heat bite into my skin
and flinched, but it was almost a relief from the pain of the bonds, and it
worked, because after a few seconds of Sigil’s treatment the ropes that had
bound me just fell away.

Once I was free I tried to stand
- and stumbled. I hadn’t realized how weak my legs would be from being tied up.
Sigil eased me back into the chair.

His trick of becoming solid
enough to touch stuff was turning out to be useful in unexpected ways.

“Rest,” he cautioned.

“I can’t,” I said, looking at him
in desperation. “My friends. I have to get to them.”

Sigil got me a glass of water and
I guzzled it. Feeling stronger, I tried to stand again, and this time my legs
held.

I took a deep breath, then
another, and moved toward the door. Sigil started to follow me and I skidded to
a halt and stopped him with a shake of my head.

“Stay here,” I said. “See if
she’s done anything to Astra. For all we know she has a bomb in the basement
where the stream flows under us, or she’s put one in the oven with her baking.

Sigil gave me a curt nod and
straightened his hat again. His eyes glinted in the firelight. “I won’t let
Astra fall,” he said seriously.

I nodded. “But Sigil, if it looks
like something bad’s going to happen here. . . .”

Sigil shook his head. “I’m a
ghost, remember?” he said. “I can’t be hurt.”

“Right,” I said, grinning.

“Go,” Sigil told me. “Just go.”

I ran into the hall.

And there was Lough, still lying
in a pool of his own blood. I knelt down next to him.

“Lough?” I whispered. “Are you
okay?”

The dream giver’s eyes fluttered,
but stayed closed. At least he was alive.

I ran back through the kitchen.
Sigil wasn’t there, but that was good. Hopefully he was looking for bombs. I
grabbed some healing salve from my room, and the Alixar mask for good measure.

Racing back to Lough, I cradled
his head in my lap and applied some salve to the cut on his head. It wasn’t a
great solution, because there could be internal damage that I wasn’t seeing.
But the fallen angel powers that flowed through him would know very well what
needed to be healed.

Accepting that the salve was all
I give Lough right now, I shifted him enough so that his head was no longer in
his own blood, and called for a pillow for him to rest on. The pillow came,
somewhat to my surprise, but I was relieved to see that whatever Martha had
done to suppress my powers was no longer operating.

Once I had finished those tasks
for my friend, I ran out the front door, tumbled down the path, and raced away
from Astra.

My eyes scanned the horizon,
trying to pick up anything whatsoever that would guide me as to what to do
next.

Where was I going? I wasn’t even
sure where to start.

Martha was long gone, and I had
friends in all the dorms except Volans. How could I choose which ones to save?
She had said there would be simultaneous detonations, so there was no use
trying to set priorities.

I knew I could never make it to
all the dorms in time, and yet I couldn’t leave any of them behind. Even the
pixies didn’t deserve to be blown to smithereens.

Already knowing it wasn’t going to
work, I tried my Contact Stone. As I feared, Martha or the demons were jamming
the lines, which meant I couldn’t tell my friends to get out. If Martha
controlled all of Public, there was a chance I wasn’t going to be able to use
any of my magic at all. The pillow in Astra might have been a fluke, or it
might have been Astra itself rising up to take a side: the last elemental
versus . . . whom? I had no idea.

I felt indescribable relief when
my ring started to light up. So, the binding powers she had used on me had been
in my bonds and not in the very air of Public. I was pretty sure that the Power
of Five protections would have fought any efforts on her part to commandeer the
very air, and apparently I was right. At least about that.

Before I could take another step
I was thrown backward by an explosion, and the night sky was lit up in a
million colors.

It was good I had gotten out in
the open, because if I’d still been standing in front of Astra when the blast
went off, I would have been thrown against the walls of the building, and I’d
probably have died. As it was, I landed on my back. I could see the skid mark
I’d made as I was pushed through the grass for several feet by the force of the
explosion.

I pushed myself into a sitting
position. Now at least my entire body throbbed equally, instead of a couple of
places singling themselves out by hurting more than the rest.

Frantically I scanned the skyline
of the campus buildings. What had just blown up? What else was about to be
destroyed? Were my friends okay?

I remembered what Korba had said
in our first class that semester about blasts and using natural materials for
defense. Well, I was an elemental mage, so that shouldn’t be too difficult.

Ice closed around my heart when I
saw fire in the direction of Airlee.

No, no, no!!

I picked myself up and put Alixar
on. Instantly I felt the power of the mask flow through me, lifting me off the
ground without even having to be told. I flashed forward, the wind in my face.
Hopefully I wouldn’t run into any demons on the way, but this was probably the
one time I could handle lots of foes without a second thought. I was furious,
scared, and yes, furious. Demons would stay out of my way if they knew what was
good for them.

I could see Airlee burning on the
horizon, and I smelled smoke as I got closer. A large chunk had been blown out
of one side of the building, and I could see crying students everywhere. I
landed a few feet away and darted forward.

Nolan, who was standing off to
one side, grabbed me and held on.

“Let me go!” I screamed, fighting
him wildly. I didn’t realize that the mask was still on my face.

Nolan pulled me away.

“They aren’t there,” he said in
my ear, his arms tightening around me. “What’s going on?”

I just looked at the dreadlocked
werewolf without saying a word. Trafton was coming toward us and I shoved away
from Nolan and raced to him.

“Are you okay?” I asked. Trafton
sat down. His arm was bleeding, but he was alive. He nodded.

I turned back to Nolan. “Where
are my friends?”

“They headed for Caid,” he said.
“I don’t know why.”

“What about the other dorms?” I
asked frantically. “Are there students in the other dorms?”

Nolan nodded. “Tell me what’s
going on,” he said, his eyes glinting. “There are still demons attacking
everywhere. It’s not safe for you to be alone.”

“It’s not safe for me with other
paranormals either,” I said grimly, and with that I was flying, hoping I’d make
it in time.

No sooner was I in the air than I
went tumbling right back down again. A large gust of wind - not the black wind
I might expect from darkness, but a wind of every color - slammed into me,
forcing me to stop flying. I fought and fought, but it was useless; the wind
was too powerful. I came tumbling down only halfway to Oliva’s.

I glared upward.

Martha was attacking me on every
front. I made a mental note to ask Dacer how this was possible, someday when
peace had been restored. If it ever was.

“Fine,” I muttered, and pulled
off my mask. I didn’t want to keep going anyway. I wanted to save my friends. I
sat cross-legged on the grass, leaning my back against one of the trees I had
landed near.

My body was glad for the rest,
but it wouldn’t be once I had finished doing what I had to.

I couldn’t fight Martha, not if
she was Public itself, which was the conclusion I was coming to in the midst of
the chaos. The very ground could rise up and swallow me for all I knew, but I
could still try to find the bombs before they went off. If I was careful and good,
I should be able to get them away from the dorms, or neutralize them somehow,
before she realized what I was up to. Then would be the time to figure out what
to do next.

I called to my powers and they
flowed to me eagerly. They hadn’t liked being locked away any more than I had
liked not being able to reach them. I called to all the wind that wasn’t being
used by Martha. Luckily, there was a lot of it.

I put myself in the wind around
each dorm, searching for the bombs. They had to be large and outside. She might
have been able to get inside the dorms if she was careful, but she needed bombs
that would destroy the physical part of the dorms, like the walls and floors,
while bypassing their very old and powerful protections: spells that she
herself had probably helped create.

Destroying her own solid work, I
thought. Something had really made Martha snap.

I felt vibrations from a massive
surge in power and sent my wings rushing to find the source. At the base of a
wall next to each dorm I felt a pulsing heat, which I was sure was the bombs
about to go off. Keeping my eyes closed and focusing all the power I could
grasp, I gathered as many of the winds as possible. I felt like a conductor for
power. Magic flowed through me, to my ring and out, pulling air together.

I ordered the winds to cover the
pulses, hoping to smother the power of the bombs. But something slammed into
me, both my physical body and the winds I was controlling. Martha had realized
what I was doing and was trying to stop me.

But she was too late.

I felt the explosions detonate,
heat piling in on itself and rushing outward, upward, eating everything in its
path. Maybe if my winds had been any normal air they would have assisted the
blast instead of smothering it, but I had ordered layers of layers of wind on
each top of other, creating a thick blanket that covered everything within
reach.

The pulsing went on and on. I
felt the heat and the burning. I felt the explosions tear into the ground and
devour the earth. I felt the walls of the dorms shudder and hold. I heard
screams and yells and I knew that the students were still inside their
buildings. And I started to hope that they would survive.

I don’t know how long it went on.
I just kept calling winds. Every time it looked like a fire was about to escape
I layered more air over the blast, protecting what was most important to me.

After a long time I stopped
feeling new heat. I stopped feeling the ground shudder and cry.