Elemental Light (Paranormal Public Book 9) (42 page)

Premier Erikson moved away from Korba, turning her back on the Objects. She was coming right for me, and when Daisy realized it the hybrid girl straightened up and got out of her way. The Premier stopped in front of me and I slowly got to my feet.

“The Mirror Arcane, if you please,” she said, still with that vast, sickly smile on her face.

I shook my head. Daisy, standing just over Premier Erikson’s left shoulder, grinned at me and then placed my crown on her head. She jolted, her whole body spasming as if she had been struck by lightning. Her grin got wider even as her face got paler.

Keller’s aunt took another step toward me. She was just reaching out to do who knows what when Keller’s voice rang out in the silence.

“Aunt,” he said. He couldn’t step forward because of Lisabelle’s chains, but Premier Erikson stopped and looked at him over her shoulder.

“Please don’t do this,” he said. “You have everything that you want. You don’t have to hurt Charlotte.”

Premier Erikson sighed, her thin shoulders lifting up beneath her ornate black robes. Then her smile returned.

“Of course not, dear,” she said, and turned back to me. “I just want to.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

With the return of the vicious smile, her ring started to blaze. There was nowhere for me to go, but I wasn’t about to stand by passively and let her destroy me. I called to my magic, but she reached out and took my ring hand. With a gasp I felt pain like I’d never known or imagined it before. It shot through my fingers and up my arm, spreading through my entire body. Breathing was impossible. Even my vision was fading, but before it was entirely gone I saw Lisabelle take her moment and throw her hands into the air. The next second the black fire holding the paranormals disappeared, leaving them free to enact the Power of the Wheel.

I wanted to rejoice, but there was just one problem. The Darkness Premier had me in her clutches and she wasn’t going to let go until I was dead.

Lisabelle’s plan was to come for me, to help me if I needed it after she released our friends. But something must have been preventing her, because all I saw was Premier Erikson’s sickly smile.

I gasped and my eyes went wide, then my knees buckled. She continued to hold my hand as wave after wave of pain raced through me. Every
time I thought I’d felt the worst, it doubled. There had never been anything like it, there was no beginning to it and no end. My whole body was consumed in a fire so hot I wanted to curl up and never open my eyes again. A male voice, or maybe several, screamed from somewhere close by, but my eyes no longer worked, and my hearing was failing. I would have been happy to die in that moment if it would have stopped the pain. I wanted nothing but for Erikson to let go of my hand. I was blind and falling, and I knew that my mother, my father, they all died this way, all the elementals. As the last one, lost in my pain, I felt that it was only fitting that I do the same.

Finally she let me fall, releasing my arm as I went down. Dimly, I knew that the pain should have stopped, but it just kept going. I writhed on the ground, knowing that I was likely to pass out at any moment, and that it was entirely possible that I would never open my eyes again.

I knew dimly that she was heading toward the other Objects on the Wheel with the Mirror, which she had taken from me in my agony. With so much of our own power to turn on us, it wouldn’t matter where we were or what we did to fight, all the paranormals she wanted to destroy would be dead.

In my mind I argued with her. I jumped to my feet and opened my mouth to tell her to stop. In my mind I wasn’t weak and dying, and in my mind darkness never won.

If I wanted something hard enough, what I imagined would come true.

Isn’t that the point of dreaming?

Out of the din, someone – something - moved, a figure, followed by a smaller figure.

The first figure looked familiar. He was solidly built; if not a large man, he was certainly a man I’d never want to cross. Lisabelle’s uncle was thinner than I remembered, but the figure was most certainly Risper. 

So, hallucinations were what this had come to.

In real life, as I knew because I had witnessed his demise,
Committee Member Risper was dead. He had died at the hands of his niece without any chance of putting up a fight. He had died to save the paranormals after he went looking for the Globe White. Why he was in my dreams now, I had no idea.

Real or not,
Lisabelle’s uncle was now fighting his way onto the platform. He moved with a grace and speed I had never before seen from a paranormal, even Vital. Because he had been the world-renowned thief Elam, it didn’t surprise me that Risper was agile, but as Nocturns moved to attack him he knocked them out of the way so easily that I was all the more certain I was dreaming. He was so quick that most of the Nocturns didn’t even have time to use their powers.

As he made his way forward, my vision cleared enough so that I caught sight of Malle and Erikson, and my despair gave way to the first whisper of an immeasurable joy.
Erikson had set the Mirror onto the tray with the other Objects, but she hadn’t gotten further than that before Risper appeared. Now she and Malle were looking on in horror, because Risper’s appearance had been the final turning point, the moment when the battle was over, when the Darkness Premier and her lifelong friend knew they’d been double-crossed. Something inside my tortured brain woke up and told me that this was not a hallucination after all, and I knew through my pain that Risper was real. Lisabelle couldn’t have risked telling us, but her loyalties had never been divided for a moment.

Risper was alive, and he was fighting to get to his niece, or to the Objects, or both.

I saw Malle and Erikson turn toward my friend, but a second later I didn’t even care about that. My cheek was pressed against the wood of the platform, which was hot, and I knew I could try to pick myself up, but I felt as if I were tied with bonds made of hot cords that would never cool, and moving seemed unfathomable.

Then I saw Mrs. Swan dart up onto the platform. Her left arm hung at a funny angle and she limped a bit, but she too was still alive. She was looking at me and pointing at the Objects, but her yells didn’t penetrate my haze.

Meanwhile, there was someone with Risper as he fought his way forward; he was protecting the much smaller figure trailing him toward the platform. I squinted, but all I could see was a pile of brown hair.

I tried to call my power to help me stand, but it was as if my power was gone. Slowly, I moved my hand out from under my hip where it had been imprisoned when I collapsed. My ring, the center of my elemental power, was shattered and molten, melted from the heat coursing through me. Even without my ring I should still have had some powers, except that Erikson had sapped them all in her attack on me. An extreme sense of surprise that I wasn’t dead overtook me, followed
quickly by abject panic. If I couldn’t use my powers, we couldn’t invoke the Power of Five. Even with the power of the Objects augmenting it, our united power wasn’t anywhere near strong enough to defeat the demon hordes without an elemental. As the last elemental, I was the only hope. As the last elemental . . .

Risper
. . .

I glanced at Dacer, and there came an echo in my head of some words he had once said when we were in the Museum. “I used to do costuming; sometimes it even looked real. Even demons believe what they see if they see what they want. Few are capable of seeing what is really in front of them. Sometimes our imagination does simplify the truth, because that’s the only way we can understand it, but there is no shame in complication. There is freedom only in honesty.” I remembered telling Duchess Leonie that Risper was Elam and her not looking the faintest bit surprised.

I looked back at Lisabelle’s uncle. In my mind I couldn’t get past the fact that I’d watched Lisabelle kill him. In my heart of hearts I had always known that she couldn’t have done it, but it had been much harder to believe that at the time, in contradiction to the evidence of my own eyes. I had let myself think that Risper was resigned to dying, that he had told his niece he was ready.

I flushed at the memory of how angry Sip had been at Lisabelle. I knew she had kept searching for a cure, but I had started to wonder if she really cared about finding one.

“Charlotte!” The voice that yelled my name stopped my heart.

My eyes flew back to Risper and the small figure behind him. He was too far away for me to make out clearly, but it didn’t matter. The voice yelling to me was one I had grown up with. I had walked away from its owner at Dunne ai Dorn, and he had watched me go with fury in his eyes.

My little brother Ricky walked right up to the Darkness Premier. His face looked much older than his fourteen years. I had no idea what he said, but I saw Erikson blink in surprise and open her mouth as if she was about to respond.

Lisabelle moved over to Ricky, and I wondered what on earth she thought she was doing. The demons all around us pressed forward and stared at their mistress being challenged. The Nocturns stood, confused and lost, waiting for orders. No one knew who Ricky was or why Malle looked so afraid.

“Ricky,” I tried to whisper, but my throat still burned hot coals. I wanted to tell him not to, I wanted him to know that I was supposed to protect him, silly little brother that he was, and that this was backwards. I wasn’t sure he could hold that much power, although he looked pretty damn certain that he was, in fact, an elemental.

My little brother locked eyes with me. He smiled reassuringly and mouthed something, but I didn’t catch it. Seeing my confusion, he mouthed it again.

“I want to. I love you. Goodbye.”

Chapter Forty

My mother’s favorite saying was, “The sweetest smell’s when you walk into the room.” I would come around in the summer and she’d always be smelling something, the food she was preparing for our dinner or the fragrance from the garden. I’d ask her what she was smelling, because she looked so delighted, and she would always give me a brilliant smile, as bright as the sun. She’d tell me that she was smelling the warm earth, the life around us, and the presence of loved ones. I was little and I told her she was mostly probably just smelling sweat. She would throw back her head and laugh and tell me that I never had to miss her, she’d always be there, in the warm earth, in the life around us, in family. I smelled that sweet smell now and I knew everything would be alright.

Just as Ricky was reaching for the Mirror Arcane, Daisy spun around, her eyes bleeding hate. She pulled a small knife from the folds of her robes and swung it toward me. Defenseless, too destroyed to move, I watched it flash through the air, knowing in my heart that I was about to die.

I
tried to flinch away, but all my muscles and tissues right through to my bones were fried from Premier Erikson’s attack, so my movement was only mental, not physical. Then, before I could even take in just how helpless I was, I saw Daisy’s eyes go wide.

Someone had come up behind her and run a sword right through her body, so that it pierced her chest from behind. Too shocked to react even if I could have, I simply watched the hybrid die.

Standing behind her, Cale tossed her lifeless body aside.

Our eyes met for the briefest second before I saw something flash behind him. I moved to point, but he already knew the danger. His sword was still buried in Daisy’s body, so he let it go and turned to fight his ex-girlfriend, leaving me completely forgotten.

No sooner had Cale spun around to face Camilla than time stopped. It was as if an invisible bomb had gone off, splashing the air backward away from the Power of Five as the paranormals finally enacted it with the Objects on the Wheel. The hundreds of demons and hellhounds that surrounded as all froze in place as the world split and shattered. The power swept through the fighters and the assembled armies and smashed away over the fields of Public, around the buildings, and away up to the top of a hill.

In the end, loyalty won out. We had trusted Lisabelle with our last chance, an idea suggested by my mother,  hinted at even by Zervos, and solidified by Sigil. The darkness mage must have told my little brother what to do, although under Keller’s guidance, simply adding his power would have been enough.

We used the Power of Five to wake the elemental ghosts. If Sigil was as real and powerful as he was as a ghost, then the elemental ghosts should be able to work with the other paranormal types to create countless
manifestations of the Power of Five. Along the way, they could – or so we hoped, and so it turned out to be - destroy piles upon piles of demons.

Finding the last of my determination, and inventing the strength, I pushed myself off the ground. I wanted to see the sparkling light that surrounded the Objects on the Wheel as they blazed in rainbow colors. Tears of pride streamed down my face as Ricky stood in the center of it all. Premier Erikson was blown backward, landing somewhere amidst all her demons. Lisabelle stood in the center of the light, because after all, not every paranormal is all one thing, and no matter what she did along the way, her loyalty to us was always anchored her in goodness.

As soon as the Wheel blazed, floods of ghosts raced toward us. At the same moment, I saw a rolling black cloud in the distance. Gasping, I pointed it out, although I wasn’t sure anyone was paying attention to me by then. But it turned out that the cloud was nothing to worry about; rather, it was cause for rejoicing, because it was composed not of demon reinforcements, but of Rapier vampires with Queen Lanca at their head.