Elemental Omen (Paranormal Public Book 10) (15 page)

The witch turned her eyes on me and I flinched: contrary to my first impression, her eye sockets were empty. Somehow I had called this creature, somehow I had set her free; I had no idea what to do next.

“Who are you?” she asked, her voice crackling throughout the cave. “Where did you come from and why the dickens did you bother me?”

“I’m, I’m sorry,” I stammered, feeling heat rise in my face.

The witch rose higher until her slipper-covered feet gently graced the rock. She continued to stare at me through what should have been sightless holes.

“Ah, I know who you are, like to cause a ruckus do you? I’ll give you a ruckus,” she said. She shook her angry little fist at me, but to my immense relief she didn’t come any closer. I couldn’t help but stare at her. I had no idea what to do.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “it wasn’t my intention to disturb you.”

“You can disturb without intending to. I am no more asleep than I would have been had you done it intentionally, although I am less asleep than I would be had you not done it at all.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, “I don’t really follow.”

“I am the Lady Witch,” she hissed. “I’ve been imprisoned here for a very long time, mostly without visitors except for those stupid fish. Tell me, how did the vampires let you down here?” She leaned forward a little as she said it, and I flinched at the motion but couldn’t really get away because my hand was still stuck. Her face was hard to read given that a good portion of it was missing, but I had the distinct impression that she looked eager. I leaned away a little more, feeling like I had really put my foot in a mess this time.

“I didn’t ask permission,” I said.

The Lady Witch leaned back as though I had confirmed something for her. “As I said, ruckus,” she muttered, and then she threw back her head and cackled. Despite the desperate angle, her hat didn’t topple off of her head, but I didn’t dare ask her why.

“Well, thank you for visiting an old bird,” she said. “Sometimes old birds need company.”

“Why were you imprisoned?” I said.

“I forget,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, looking down at the flaming rock. “Is it uncomfortable in there?”

“Oh, no,” she said, “I love the heat of the fire. It’s the silence that gets me.” She grimaced a little and I almost felt sorry for her. The clothes wrapped around her thin body billowed constantly, but without ever seeming to land on actual flesh or bone. It was as if she didn’t even really have a body, just clothes that covered . . . nothing?

A noise made me look down again. It was as if the fire was whispering, but I couldn’t make out the words. The witch was staring at me, and I suddenly had a very bad feeling.

“Can I let you free?” I asked. I wasn’t sure why I was asking, but I was.

The witch threw her head forward again. Why not, it wasn’t as if she really had a neck.

“No,” she said, pointing to the other fingerprints. “You need others. But that’s alright. I like visitors. I am impressed that your fingers fit, though.” A catch in her voice made me look at her and forget the whispering fire. She was more impressed than she wanted to let on. I gave her an unsure smile.

“So, you came here because you had a question,” said the witch, getting down to business. “I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you the answer to your question if you give me something in return.”

“How could I have come here to ask a question when I don’t have a question and I didn’t know that you were here?” I asked.

“I do not deal in the mundane,” she said, “but if that’s what you want to waste your question on, I will allow it this once.”

“Uh um, no,” I said, backpedaling. She was right, I did have a question, and maybe I had gone swimming in this underground water world in the hopes that an answer would suddenly present itself. She was wrong to assume that she was the one I had wanted to ask; I hadn’t even known she existed. But she was right that there were things I needed to know.

“What do you want in return?” I asked, and in response to her quirking eyebrow I added, “That's not my question either.”

“I want something that is important to you,” she whispered. “I want something very dear and vital. To. Your. Heart.”

“You want me to name my firstborn after you? I don’t plan on having kids,” I said. Charlotte would have to be the one who carried on the elementals. I just didn’t want to subject my kids to that sort of frenzy and fury. It would be too hurtful to bear.

She tsk-ed. “A name is meaningless without the weight of action behind it. Your child that you will not have could grow up to come perfectly dull and ordinary, and then where would my legacy be? No, I want something else. I want the Golden Rod. I want you to bring it to me.”

Not having stuck around to work on my paranormal education, I had no idea what she was talking about, so I told her as much. I couldn’t promise to deliver something that I couldn’t identify, that was just crazy.

“At least you’re honest,” she said. “I was worried that you would try to lie to me, and then where would you be?”

“Upstairs, dry,” I told her. She laughed again, but not because she was amused.

“How about I go ask Dacer what the rod is, and then come back here?”

“They will not let you return once you have left,” she said. “They are busy, but not foolish.” She tapped her hand against her mouth, deep in thought for a moment, then smiled.

“I will give the answer to your question for free so that you know I am in acting good faith. In return, you will not tell them that you were here. Also in return, know that should you ever require an answer to another question, I will expect the Golden Rod. Do not show up without it.”

As she talked, her clothing continued to billow, and at one point when she raised her arms and her flowing sleeves blew aside, I could see that she was chained at the wrists. The binding was thin and fine, but it was clearly secure.

“Thank you,” I said. I was getting free advice, which she seemed to think was a great thing. I had no idea why I should consider her advice more valuable than anyone else’s, but if it was free, why not at least listen to what it was?

It didn’t matter. She was now preparing to answer my deepest, darkest question, and if nothing else, we had agreed that this visit was a secret, so I didn’t have to worry about my nosy sister or her nosy friends finding out. After watching me for a few silent moments, the witch inclined her head. “Ask away,” she said.

I thought for a whole minute about how best to phrase what I wanted to know. I thought for so long that the Witch cracked her non-existent eye open wider and gave me a questioning look. I shrugged, knowing that I was taking a long time but still having trouble formulating my question.

“I am Ricky Rollins,” I said at last. “I’m being more dramatic than necessary, but I had thought that, as the second to last elemental, I would know what I’m supposed to do. But I have no idea. There are all these expectations of me and all these judgements, and I have no idea how to respond to them or choose among them. There’s all this pressure to be something that I’m not. No one really knows me, which isn’t surprising, since I don’t feel like I know myself.”

“I said you could ask me a question,” she muttered, “not that you could talk to me. There’s a difference.”

“Oh, right,” I said, “sorry. I was just sort of working up to it. Okay then. Sometimes when I close my eyes I still see the explosions,” I whispered into the dark. I had told no one this, not even Lisabelle and definitely not Charlotte. She had enough to worry about without my being dramatic. There was an issue, something driving me, the crux of my panic. To fear the future was seared into my brain by the fear of the past. “I see the bodies . . .” It had been a long time since I had slept well. I didn’t even remember what that felt like.

I swallowed hard. I had stopped confiding in anyone that day, the day of the battle, but the sea of bodies stuck in my mind. And now I’d gotten Greta killed, another thing that would stick in my throat, not releasing but staying as a painful ache in my chest. I had tried not to be friends with her. I had known that her proximity to me was dangerous for her. I was selfish and lonely, though, so I’d let her stay near me.

Then she was dead. So not even traveling to get away was a perfect solution - far from it, especially with so many bounty hunters after me.

Now, in the cave above the submerged pool, a bluish light filtered from the water, shedding a little light on the flaming table of stone. The witch still waited, looking at me intently. Or at least that’s the impression I kept getting, even though she seemed to have no eyes.

“What should I do?”

The open-endedness of the question didn’t seem to faze her a bit; she answered without hesitating. “There are lots of things you COULD do,” she said, “all these options. You could go dance in the ballet and never tell anyone who you are.”

Okay, she was mocking me, not really answering me. I should have been upset that this imprisoned witch mocked my pain, but I wasn’t.

“But there are a few things that you must do,” she said. “When you return to your sister and your sister’s friends, I do believe you will know what those are. Then do those. Also, do not let fear rule you. If fear rules, fear wins, and in matters of life and death there is no room for losing. You walk on a cliff’s edge. Fear will make you slip.”

I nodded. She sounded cryptic, but I figured that maybe the swim back through the pool would give me some clarity about what she had said. It almost sounded like she was telling me to stay, which under the circumstances felt insane and wasn’t likely to clear anything up at all. In fact, her advice might just have generated new unanswerable questions, because until that moment I had been perfectly happy to let fear guide me.

“Don't forget, Golden. Rod. Now go!” And with those parting words, a shooting flame, and one last cackle, the witch disappeared back into the rock. My hand suddenly felt cool and came unstuck without any effort on my part. My skin having been released from the molds, I could move away from the witch’s prison, so I did. But before I went back into the water, I stared at the dull stone for a long time, wondering if what I thought had just happened had really happened.

All signs pointed to yes.

I rubbed my fingers together as I walked back to the pool. Everything looked a little duller, and I wondered how long I had been down there. I jumped back into the water without hesitating, and the return trip felt much faster because I had a clear sense of how far I had to go.

When I reached the far end of the pool, I surfaced, took a deep breath, and climbed out. Then I kicked myself: I had forgotten that I had jumped into a deep crater to get to the water, and that I couldn’t fly.

Wondering how I was ever going to get out of my predicament, I stared up at the dark ceiling. I couldn’t see the space I had jumped from at all in the dim light, but luckily the movement of the air gave me a hint about where to look. It turned out that I had taken the hard way down; there turned out to be a dim, winding stairway that I could follow to get back up.

As I climbed I thought about my meeting with the witch. I also thought about the fact that there was much more to Professor Dacer’s place than there had appeared to be. The witch had not told me her real name, so I had no way of discovering why she was at the bottom of a well, imprisoned in a rock. She didn’t look kind, and it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that at some point she had done something awful. Still, in the end she had offered me some good, impartial advice, and I had thought paranormals were the forgiving kind, so it was surprising to come upon someone whose punishment seemed so dire.

When I was well along the dark passageway leading upward, my stomach started to rumble, and soon I couldn’t think about anything else. When I emerged from the cellar, I realized I must have been down there for a very long time. Beyond the trapdoor was the full dark of nighttime.

I trudged around the house looking for signs of life and, hopefully, food. A light was burning in the library, so I headed that way. As I came around the corner to the front door, a frustrated voice came out of the dark asking, “Where have you been?”

Charlotte was sitting with Sip and Lisabelle on the stone patio to the left of the front entrance. They appeared to be talking quietly, but all talk ceased when I arrived. I could see that Charlotte was impatient, even worried, and I knew they must have been sitting there for a long time hoping I would reappear unharmed.

“I went for a long walk,” I said.

“That isn’t a long walk, that’s an expedition,” said Lisabelle. “I thought you might have run away again.”

“Sorry if you worried,” I said. “I hadn’t meant to be gone that long. Did you really?”

Lisabelle snorted. “No, I know where you were.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that I can sense both of the elementals who are currently alive. I would give you privacy, but I’m more the take what I want kind of girl. I don’t really give.”

“You should tell all your dates that,” said Sip. “The ones you want to get rid of, anyway.”

Lisabelle gave her a confused look, while Charlotte shook her head and rolled her eyes. Lisabelle hadn’t so much as hinted before that she kept tabs on me, but it didn’t surprise me, and I couldn’t very well get mad at her for it. If Charlotte had done it I would have been angry, but not Lisabelle.