Elemental Light (Paranormal Public Book 9) (39 page)

Everything in front of us was rolling black dust. The grass was gone, burned away, and we weren’t even walking on dirt. It was as if everything had been consumed by fire, but turned black in the process instead of gray. The gentle slope of the hill led to buildings that looked
barren and clouded, overrun with darkness. I stopped right outside the door of Astra after taking only a step or two, and the hybrids slowed overhead. In front of me, hellhounds were gathering on either side of the path.

“It’s red,” said Sip, sounding ill. “The stone path’s red now.”

The world was completely silent. Dacer, staring out at the barren landscape that didn’t remotely resemble our home anymore, turned to me desperately and said, “Do you know what the first thing I thought of was when I saw you for the first time?”

I shook my head, too upset to speak.

Duchess Leonie rested one old hand on my shoulder and whispered, “He Contacted me and said he’d finally met the last elemental and he was so excited, because she was a survivor.”

The only funeral I’d ever attended was my mother’s, and that had been a quiet affair except for the crying. Only family were invited, and my stepfather tried very hard not to let my brother and me be there. It was only after I had a complete meltdown, and the couch miraculously went from one side of the room to the other, that he allowed us to go.

We stood on the
same hill that I visited later with Keller, looking down at her small grave, and said goodbye, each in our own way. Ricky’s way was total silence, mine not much different. What was strangest was the walk up the hill, because it was just the two of us out in the night, in so much silence and so much pain. Our procession out of Astra felt a lot like the one we had made up that hill when my mother died. There was a darkness that surrounded my heart and clouded my vision that had nothing to do with the demons.

Ricky hadn’t cried; I had kept waiting for him to cry. I had found comfort in gathering tissue boxes and spreading them around the house, even pulling up the first tissue. But after all that comforting preparation, I never saw either my stepfather or Ricky shed a tear. In my imaginings Ricky cried at night, alone in his room, shedding tears into his pillow so that I couldn’t hear him. But I had never been sure.

We walked alone to the small cemetery on the hill. One of our neighbors, a friend of my mother’s, had tried to walk with us, but I had been insistent that we be allowed to go alone. Ricky held my hand, something he hadn’t done for years before that day, but he didn’t speak. The woods closed in on us as we walked along together, and I pondered the piece of my heart that would always belong to my mother, then the question of how many pieces a heart could have.

Leaving Astra on that fateful night, I thought back to that earlier meditation and knew that one piece of my heart would always be with Keller, one with my family, and of course each of my friends got one. But how many more times could it be split into smaller bits? Was it like wood, with splinters of different sizes, but a seemingly limitless number, or at some point would I stop being so fragmented? Splinters were never returned perfectly to the wood they left.

My vision tunneled and blurred, as if I was looking through a tube, and the stale air made it hard to breathe. The blurring - not from crying but from anger - felt similar to what had happened the day my mother was buried. With my mom there had been a sense of extreme and irreparable loss, of breathless pain that lodged in my heart where the splinter that belonged to my mom used to be. That pain had taken residence there and never let go, no matter how hard I tried to move forward with my life after her death.

This was a fresh pain, not as personal, but tied to a life I had thought I would have.

It would end tonight.

Hellhounds were coming closer, and I could no longer live in memory. Each step on the black ash brought us closer to darkness.

We weren’t sure where we were going, but the hellhounds led us, forming solid walls of smelly darkness on either side of our path and moving ahead in a pattern that left us only one way to go. Their red eyes never left us as they stood, silent sentries to our fate.

“You know they want to rip us apart, don’t you?” Sip whispered to me.

“Yeah,” I whispered back. “Something’s stopping them, though.”

“I didn’t realize they had that much self-control,” said Lough. “I thought they’d just kill us.”

“My guess is that they’ve developed self-control,” I whispered.

It was a terrifying thought.

Chapter
Thirty-Seven

The first thing they did when we arrived at the field where the Ceremony was to be held was to separate us. Professor Dacer, Duchess Leonie, Professor Korba, Lester, Trafton, Suze, and the others were led away. We tried to follow, but Lough, Sip, and I were isolated on the grass in front of the field. Our friends were taken to a series of plain wooden chairs lined up to one side, all within perfect view of the raised platform and the dais that sat upon it.

Sip, Lough, and I exchanged looks. We had known this would happen. They couldn’t leave us together, and we were well aware that darkness had a vendetta against me personally. The Nocturns wanted to make me suffer. No longer was it enough to simply defeat the paranormals, darkness wanted to cause us maximum pain, me in particular.

Well, we’d come here ready for a fight, and we planned to give it to them. I stood quietly, taking in the horrendous scene before me and wondering how my beloved and lovely Public could have come to be used for such evil purposes.

Dacer tried to give me a reassuring look as he reached out to help his mother sit. When she shoved him away, he shrugged and took his own place on one of the wooden chairs. All the setting lacked was a gallows. Otherwise, it was as if the preparations were all in place for an execution framed as a public spectacle.

A burst of noise and a shower of flame overhead forced us all to look up, where a pattern dance of sparks and shimmering black fire was bursting around us. I inched closer to my friends until Sip and I were elbow to elbow. Lough had taken a defensive stance in front of us, his eyes blazing and his red cheeks set.

Cynthia Malle moved to the front of the platform and began to speak. “We are gathered here tonight,” she intoned, “for the
Black Ring Ceremony. Those who participate will live, those who do not will perish. You are outnumbered and outclassed. For those of you who witnessed the death of Committee Member Risper, here are more prisoners for you to contemplate.”

She stepped back to reveal a large wooden dais. It stretched along the platform, reaching halfway down the side of the field. But the size of it wasn’t what took my breath away. The dais
needed to be that large to fit all the paranormals it held. Feeling ill, I saw that President Oliva of Public, Paranormal President Caid, all the High Council members, and several other paranormals I didn’t recognize were already on the platform. Standing in one corner of the raised space was Professor Zervos, looking murderous. In the warm night air, as fire wheeled overhead, I saw very clearly that the night was intended to be a surrender. All the paranormal leaders were captured, turned, dead, or about to be one of the three. Malle’s gloating face signaled that she knew she had won. Her eyes were bright with triumph even as her gnarled hands waved ominously in the air.

Thousands of demons crowded closer, a throng that stretched in all directions as far as my eyes could see in the flickering light of the flames overhead. Several Demons of Knight stood out, their large frames and their swords making them distinctive. T
here were Nocturns everywhere, so many, in fact, that I could barely pick out individual faces. I wondered if Ms. Vale was there, reunited with darkness, or if they’d killed her off when she failed to deliver me to them.

I smelled fire nearby, mingled with something else I couldn’t identify. I sniffed just as Sip gave a whimper.

“It’s burning flesh,” she said, her eyes bright with sadness. “They thrashed them. Look, they’ve been tortured.” She was right. On the dais were several senior paranormals who were bloodied and bruised from the beatings they had suffered. My heart quailed at the idea that our small band was about to fight this much darkness.

I had yet to see any sign of Lisabelle, but Keller was standing off to the side. I could tell that he was trying to hide his feelings behind a mask of indifference, but even he looked grim.

Our eyes locked for a single second, then swung away. I couldn’t bear to look at him, not across this distance.

“Darkness calls to darkness,” Malle cried out. “Tonight is the first night of a new era for the paranormal community. We have struggled long and hard to rid ourselves of the discord that has infected our world. Now we shall unite under one ring and one loyalty, and the pain shall stop.”

Malle turned to gaze in all the four directions as the wind started to pick up and a howling rose up from the masses of inky black evil that spun around us.

“Charlotte,” Sip whispered, “are you sure about this?”

“Now more than ever,” I muttered back. “What about you?”

“Same,” said Sip.

Lough turned his head around and nodded. I glanced at Professor Korba, whom we desperately needed. If we didn’t have a pixie, we couldn’t enact the Power of Five, and all would be lost. There were several other pixies present, but they were in chains.

At least, that’s what I thought at first.
But then I saw a blond head picking her way through the crowd, flanked by two shorter vampires. Well, one of her companions at least was a vampire; Faci’s flat face could never be mistaken. But the other was a hybrid.

The three of them stood off to one side of Malle, who had yet to finish speaking, but all their eyes were on me. Camilla’s were bloodshot and crazed, while Daisy looked almost amused. Faci’s expression was like an even uglier imitation of Malle’s: triumphant.

“Bring him out,” cried Malle, suddenly turning. I exchanged looks with Dacer. Who else did she have?

I didn’t recognize the old man they dragged forward. He had short black hair shot with gray, a strong jaw, and blue eyes that sparkled even amidst the darkness.
His hands and his feet were shackled.

As I watched, I had the vague feeling that there was something familiar about him. “Who is that?” I asked
quietly.

A
s if answering my question, even though she couldn’t possibly have heard me, Malle said, “This is Larry Greer. He’s a Power Shifter, half fallen angel, half mage. He’s ordained to defend the paranormal realm, or at least that’s what his kind used to be ordained to do.” Malle gave the older man a malevolent smile. “Now he’s about to die.”

“That must be Lacy’s grandfather!” said Sip. “He’s the one they took and the one Lacy was trying to save.”

Now I understood. Faci hadn’t wanted Lacy, he had just wanted leverage; our speculations had been on the mark. Taking the granddaughter had ensured the grandfather’s cooperation.

“He looks awful,” said Sip sadly.

The older man looked worn down, with a cut across his cheek and tattered clothing, but he was still defiant.

“Just try!
” he cried. “Try to defeat us. We will rise again. You cannot cross the sea with this power.”

Malle pointed to Faci, who nodded. His
Black Ring blazed as he stuck it into the man’s side. The man screamed and tried to move away, but Daisy, who held the man’s chains, yanked on them, keeping him in place while Faci tortured him. Maybe if the man could have used his magic, or had not already been weak from captivity, he could have fought, but as it was he was helpless against the vampire’s attack.

Sip raced forward and skidded to a halt. “Stop this!” she yelled. “Stop this now! He’s not strong enough.”

The man gave Sip one pained look as Faci met my friend’s eyes, then he stuck the Black Ring into Lacy’s grandfather’s side again.

The man’s mouth opened in a soundless scream and he fell to his knees. His eyes popped wide open and he toppled forward, now on all fours, and shuddered. Faci’s arm followed him down, maintaining the pressure of the
Black Ring right above his heart.

This time there was no going back. He lay face down, first twitching, then still.

We all stared in stunned silence for several seconds.

“What did Faci do?” I whispered.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Lough’s jaw was set in a tight line and I’d never seen such rage on his face. “He accosted and killed a defenseless man . . . there’s nothing . . .” Lough took a deep breath, but he couldn’t continue.

“This is what happens,” said Malle, “when you refuse to join our order. This is what happens when you do not see the right in what we are doing. You must understand that this is the only way. My master” - she paused and looked at Faci, then around at the crowd again - “my master wishes for you to understand.”

I looked at Keller again. Over the course of the last two days I had gotten a pretty good idea of who the Darkness Premier was. For a long time I had thought it wouldn’t turn out to matter; darkness was darkness. But as I gradually realized who it had to be, and understood that such implacable evil could overtake so much light, I knew we all had something to fear.