Elemental Light (Paranormal Public Book 9) (17 page)

“You know when people yell and you flinch?” Lough asked, staring at the girl as if she’d slapped him.

“Yeah?” Sip asked. “Now’s not really the time.”

“I know,” he said, “that was all.”

“Let me out, now,” the girl demanded, her voice rising.

“First of all,” said Sip, “we can’t. Not until Faci’s further away. Second of all, don’t you want to know who we are?”

“No,” said the girl, “I want my grandfather and I want to get out of here.”

“What about your friends?” Lough demanded.

“I’ve never seen either of them before in my life,” said the girl. She was looking around, wide-eyed, and even from where I was standing I could see her whole body shaking.

“I just want to go home,” she whispered. “Why can’t I just see Gramp and go home?”

Sip, finally grasping that the girl’s anger was really a mask for distress, gentled. “Look,” she said, “we are here to help. We can try to help you, but you have to tell us who your gramp is.”

The girl looked around her in despair before hitting the bars again one last time. Finally, with her head hanging, she said, “My gramp, he’s who I grew up with. My parents didn’t want me. He’s all I have left in the world and they took him.” She looked up again, her anger still showing through her fear and despair.

“Who are ‘they’?” Sip asked, trying to coax the story out of her as if we had all the time in the world to get to the Circle.

“I don’t know, do I!” the girl yelled again. “I have no idea. I just knew I wasn’t going to let it happen, so when I saw him being dragged to a waiting carriage I jumped on the back of it.” She paused, and I saw her hand go reflexively to her stomach.

“Are you hungry?” I asked, stepping forward for the first time. The girl looked at me with silent question in her eyes.

“Yes,” she whispered, “but I didn’t want to eat any of his food, not until I saw my gramp.”

“We will try to get you out,” I said. Already I could feel more power flowing away from the cage. If I touched it now I might have the power to break the metal. “You can tell us the rest after.”

“I can’t see my gramp, can I?” the girl asked softly, as if the fight was going out of her in her despair.

“We will try and get you to your gramp, but we don’t know where she is right now,” said Sip soothingly. “We need to get you out of there and fed first.”

The girl nodded, still hanging her head.

“I’m Sip Quest,” said the werewolf. “What’s your name?”

“Lacy,” she said, “Lacy Evans.”

“Nice to meet you,” said Sip. “These are my best friends, Lough Loughphton and Charlotte Rollins.”

The girl’s eyes gave no spark of recognition at my name. Not to brag, but I was famous. As the last elemental I tended to be either held up on a pedestal or reviled, with the latter reaction being the most common. The fact that this girl seemed never to have heard of me certainly seemed to support her assertion that she hadn’t known she was paranormal until very recently.

Sip must have noticed the lack of recognition too, because she glanced at me over her shoulder. There was a chance that this girl had spent her life as a human and that she truly had had no idea that her grandfather was a paranormal, and so was she. Her presence here must then be all the more overwhelming for her.

“I’m sorry you had to meet Faci,” said Sip. “No one should ever have to come into contact with him.”

“Is that the evil little man with the flat face?” the girl asked. She twisted her hands together as if she was strangling something.

“Bloodthirsty savage, that one,” said Lough, eyeing her.

“You’re in love with Lisabelle,” said Sip. “You should feel right at home.”

The girl stepped away from the outside edge of the cage, but she didn’t loosen her hold on the bars. She glanced down at the two sleeping forms imprisoned with her and gave them a look that I thought might be disgust.

“When will these two wake up?” she asked. “The pale one was crying when they threw me in here, and the other one was already asleep. I thought they should have fought harder to get away, but then we all went to sleep.”

All the oggles had made themselves busy elsewhere, giving us space to work. I liked that I could still see them down the road, while I knew that Rose would keep them busy with a snack and a conversation about our best next move. If this went, badly I wanted as few of us in harm’s way as possible.

“Step back,” I said. No matter how desperately I wanted an explanation for what was happening, I was unwilling to look at this girl in a cage for another second. I used my ring hand and wrapped my fingers around the bars. The closer my hand got to the metal the colder it was, the harder to move, but I pushed through what was left of Faci’s protection and called my power. It came eagerly, flowing through my ring until it was so bright that even I had to close my eyes. Behind the magic I saw the captive staring at me wide-eyed, like I was the sun and the moon and something else amazing all rolled into one. All around us the oggles, and even Sip and Lough, covered their faces. The girl never looked away. Filing that in the back of my mind as a mental note, I burst the bars, careful to keep any of the shards away from the prisoners as the metal bent and shattered like black glass.

Unlike most humans who might have seen magic, Lacy hadn’t started to scream or pressed her body against the other side of the cage to get as far away from me as possible. She was fascinated. Her blue eyes looked like two crystals floating in an otherwise black ocean. The darkness around us exploded.

“Wow,” she breathed, rocking forward and taking the blast full in the face and arms. She continued to look me over as she regained her balance. “You can do magic.”

Her eyes fluttered several times as she watched me stagger a little when my hand released the bars. Then without so much as a by your leave, she darted past me. Her legs wobbled at first, weak from lack of use and cramped from being stuck in one position. She reached out a pale hand to touch my shoulder and steady herself as she hopped over the sleeping boy and down from the cage. She landed on the ground, staggered a bit, and then, before any of us realized what she was about, she darted into the woods and was gone.

Chapter
Fifteen

Lough took off after her before either Sip or I could yell.

“What’s he doing?” Sip demanded.

But before she could pursue either Lough or the question, she was interrupted by a groan from one of the other prisoners. The dark-haired boy rolled over and sat up, blinking eyes that were silver with flecks of pearl. He looked to be a little older than Lacy, and he was incredibly good looking, even to someone like me, who had only ever had eyes for one fallen angel.

He raised dark eyebrows at us, but he still didn’t speak. The other boy was the one who had groaned, and Sip turned her attention to him.

“What’s your name?” I asked the first boy. He continued to look at me curiously, and I took another step closer.

The pale-haired boy snuffled and sat up. His face was streaked with dirt and his lip was bloody, as if he’d been so upset that he’d bit clear through it. His blond hair was mussed and his brown eyes, the color of cashews, sparked out at us.

“Where are we, Peds?” he asked the other boy. “What happened?”

Peds, as he’d been called, gave a grumble deep in his throat. The pale boy looked at each of us. “At least they aren’t those bad ones from before.”

“Are you human?” Sip asked him, her voice as gentle as I’d ever heard it.

The boy, who was probably the same age as Peds, gave a little yelp.

“As opposed to what?”

“Stop pretending, Jett. They know.”

“Oh, alright,” said the boy, rolling his eyes.

Then his whole demeanor changed completely. He went from what could only have been described as a sniveling teenager to something quite different. I saw Sip’s purple eyes go wide as she realized that the boy had been deliberately deceiving her from the moment he stirred.

“So, you’re Jett and you’re Peds?” I asked, looking from one to the other.

“Something like that,” said Peds. “It’s a nickname.”

“What’s your real name?”

“What’s it to you? What’s your real name?”

“Charlotte Rollins,” I said. This time his eyes sparked with recognition, and something I was pretty sure was measured respect. But he quickly fell back into his old defensive anger.

“Why do you have us in this cage?” Jett asked.

“We don’t,” I said. “If you’ll notice, we just broke you out of it. Your friend ran off.”

Jett gave an unconcerned shrug. “The girl? She wasn’t a friend of ours. She kept yelling. Women can be so loud and difficult.”

Peds snorted and crossed his arms over his chest, watching the fun.

“Why were you two in the cage?” I asked.

“Why did the last elemental lock us up, you mean?” Peds challenged.

I gave him a look that said be careful, but he ignored it.

“Oh, she’s the last elemental? Interesting,” said Jett. I could tell he was trying for sarcasm, but something like hope showed through in his pale eyes.

“Do you have anything to eat?” Peds asked. Of course that was the next thing out of his mouth.

“Yup,” said Callum, striding toward us with a plate of chicken and bread. “It’s all we have.” He said it more to me than to them and sounded regretful.

Both boys tried to restrain themselves, but they quickly lost out to growling stomachs. They dug in as if they hadn’t eaten in days as Sip and I looked on in shock. After four chicken legs and several slices of bread had disappeared, Jett looked up at us, and with a full mouth he said, “Why’d the girl run off?” He jerked his chin at the woods.

“She was saying something about her grandfather,” I said, quickly deciding that not sharing information was not going to get any of us anywhere.

Jett appeared to mull that over.

“We made a stop in rural Connecticut,” he said. “Right before they put us to sleep. They went into this tiny house on a back road’s back road and pulled out this old man. He came quietly. I was impressed with how stoic he was. I thought he’d be screaming and crying. The pale-faced guy, definitely a Rapier vampire, had him by the hair, but I don’t think he was tugging. Anyway, he wasn’t upset.

“They threw him in a carriage, and then this little wisp of a girl came out all piss and vinegar and furious. She was yelling threats and talking about magic. That’s when the grandfather got upset and started to fight. He must have been a mage, because he called powers. He tried to defend the girl, but it was already too late.

“He must have been a powerful mage, that’s the only thing I could reckon, because this vampire character . . .”

“Faci,” I supplied helpfully.

“Paranormals defend us even his name’s stupid,” said Peds.

Jett smirked.

“Faci could see that her grandfather really cared,” said Jett. “He went after the little girl, or rather he sent demons after her while he shackled the grandfather, which kept him from exercising his powers very effectively. The grandfather was screaming and crazy, and I don’t think this girl . . .”

“Lacy,” I supplied again.

Jett made a face but said, “Lacy. I don’t think she realized what she was running out into until she’d already done it. She was pretty shaken up. Faci gave this man a choice, go with him quietly or watch the girl die. The fact that he’d been going with him quietly until this silly girl showed up was forgotten. Then the girl got thrown in here with us and started yelling and hollering. We both tried to get her to stop, because we were afraid of what she’d do, but she was off her head upset. Finally this Faci fellow came over and laughed. She tried to kill him, not seeming to remember that she’s not even as big as that one . . .” He pointed at Sip, who, despite being used to insults about her height, still didn’t take them well. She glared, but he ignored her and said, “Then Faci put us all to sleep.”

“We thought you knew each other,” said Sip. “The way she was curled into you.”

For the first time since he’d woken up Jett looked a little surprised. “Err, um, no, I mean, I didn’t even realize.”

Now Peds was smirking. “Someone’s got a crush on the famous Jett Shackles. Not surprising, girls love him.” Peds looked unconcerned by the revelation.

“Girls, not children,” Jett grumbled. “She’s a child.”

“She’s not that much younger than we are,” said Peds.

I had a feeling that these two were the very best of friends, the kind who enjoyed bickering with each other. That was all well and good, but they’d have to do it on their own time.

“And you two?” Sip asked. “Why did he have you two? We know Faci. He doesn’t take prisoners, he kills them. Yet there you were, awake to see all this drama.”

“Oh,” said Jett looking both bemused and sad, “that’s a much longer story.”

“We have time,” said Sip, even though we didn’t, really.

We had left the cage behind and moved further down the road. The oggles were busy preparing a quick meal while the four of us talked. We had offered to let Rose sit in with us, but she’d refused, saying it wasn’t her place. In turn, she’d asked if we wanted to send Callum after Lough and Lacy, but we didn’t think it was time yet. If Lough wasn’t back soon we’d send someone to search for him, but how hard could it be to handle a teenage girl?