Elemental Omen (Paranormal Public Book 10) (4 page)

Goffer fixed me with dark eyes. He kept the friendly demeanor going, but what he said next took me off guard. “How do you like it here?”

I raised my eyebrows. “I like it fine,” I said. I looked around. Astra Dorm was as grand a house as I had ever been in, and I hadn’t really wrapped my mind around the fact that it was all Charlotte’s, and now mine.

Well, and kind of Keller’s, but I had already explained to Charlotte’s boyfriend shadow that I wasn’t looking to add another sibling into the mix, if he got my meaning. I took a deep breath. “It’s great here.”

Goffer nodded. “You like it so well you’d like to stay?”

“I don’t know,” I said, so caught off guard that a spike of fear shot through me. What was he getting at?

“Not all paranormals are so lucky as to get to live at Public,” said Goffer. “The rejects end up with the paranormal police.” He smiled wryly now. I did realize that I was probably supposed to say something reassuring, but I didn’t bother. He was making a joke and looking for sympathy. It wasn’t funny and I didn’t have the energy to pretend to care.

“I wouldn’t call myself lucky, necessarily,” I said, “given that my parents were murdered and I didn’t know who my dad was for years. I’m not even sure I know when I was actually born.” My mother had told confusing stories about that from what I could remember (which wasn’t much), and it wasn’t as if Carl had done anything to clear up the confusion.

General Goffer did not seem interested in offering me pity.

“There are a lot of decisions to be made, that’s for sure,” he mused.

I didn’t know where that had come from either. It was as if he wasn’t really talking to me, but having a conversation by himself.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Oh, my boy,” said Goffer, “there’s no reason for you to worry yourself with it. Leave that to the adults. Just be sure to decide what you want for yourself. Don’t let anyone tell you what you are to be and do.”

“I thought my path was pretty well decided,” I said. “We need elementals. It’s not as if there are others who can take my place.”

General Goffer leaned forward. “You’re right,” he said, his voice low and throaty as if he was sharing a deep secret with an old friend, not a teenager he had never spoken to before. “You are not replaceable. I hope you realize just how important you truly are.”

“I’m not that important,” I said. “I know Charlotte is, but I’m . . .”

Goffer shook his head. “See, that’s where you’re wrong. Don’t compare yourself to Charlotte. Sure, she’s great, and she’s been here longer, but you’re just as important. Over time, you might see that you’re more so.”

He looked at me for a split second and I couldn’t read his expression, then he shoved himself out of the chair with a quick force. Our conversation was over just as quickly as it had begun. He moved to the door, then paused with his hand on the knob to look back at me. “Part of being a man is to know when you should speak of conversations you’ve had and when you should keep quiet. I rather think you’re more of a man than I thought you were.”

If I wasn’t very much mistaken, he was telling me to keep the conversation we had just had to myself. I didn’t think that would be hard; as far as I could tell, nothing much had taken place that was worth telling. He had told me that a lot of decisions had to be made, duh, and that I was important, duh again.

~~~

A deep tiredness settled over me. The emotions of the past few hours had drained me so much I could barely lift my arms. An unbearable feeling of regret will do that to you.

I don’t know when I slept, but when I awoke it was late in the day.

The deer was gone. The setting sun was hidden by clouds, so there was hardly any light at all. Tentatively I sent my magic out, trying to sense other paranormals if there were any around. Then I remembered that I hadn’t felt the ones who’d been looking for me in the city, and I forced myself to face the fact that that was a problem. A big one. In the past I had been able to sense them coming in time to clear out. This time I had felt nothing concrete, just a vague unease that I hadn’t been able to read.

Looking straight up, I saw green leaves that would soon start to turn brown.

I had stopped Greta from being beaten up, only to get her killed.

Pain racked my body, exhaustion overtook me, and I finally let the sobs come. I curled up on my side and cried and cried. Greta wasn’t the first friend of mine to die; I’d seen many people die by this time, friends, enemies, family.

But there was something about not protecting her that I couldn’t let go of. If it hadn’t been for me she would never have been there, and for what?

Some stupid sandwich.

I tried to take deep breaths, to get myself in hand, but it was no use. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t my fault, that I hadn’t killed her, the pixie had, but that didn’t help either.

I was so busy being upset that I didn’t hear the Bounty Hunters until they had crept up from behind and were on me. With a sudden cry, the nearest hunter sprang forward. I vaguely registered that some were wet and concluded in passing that they had probably tried to attack me from the river, but the river knew me now, unlike the land, and had probably slapped them down. Beyond that I had no time for theorizing.

The nearest hunter, maybe part werewolf, gave me a feral smile. He was missing a few teeth and he looked delighted to have found me.

“What have we here?” he cried gleefully. “A paranormal sleeping alone?”

I thought about running away, but there were so many of them that I’d have to hurt a few, and I didn’t want that. I was a prisoner.

Judging by the looks on their faces, they didn’t know who I was. If they had known my true identity they would have been acting a lot happier than they were; they were clearly in for a shock when they found out. That they would find out felt inevitable, because I was too tired and beaten down to fight my way out of the trap this time. Besides, the amount of magic it would take would probably draw everyone’s attention, and then it wouldn’t matter anyway.

I sighed. There were eight of them that I could see and at least another four that I could sense.

“You don’t want to do this,” I sighed. “I promise you that you don’t want to do this.”

He gave me a toothy grin.

“Oh, but I believe that we do.”

I shook my head. Another werewolf, this one a girl who looked a lot like the first one, stormed forward.

“We have to eat too,” she said, swinging a dull and battered-looking sword at me. I gave her a bemused expression. I knew some of the best sword fighters in the paranormal world. This girl didn’t even know how to hold the thing properly.

“Fight us and die,” she hissed.

“I doubt it,” I told her. I almost felt guilty.

“What are you doing in our territory?” the guy asked.

“I got lost,” I told him. “Didn’t mean to be here.”

“How’d you come where we didn’t see you?” the girl asked. The first werewolf glared at her. Obviously he hadn’t wanted her to admit that I had snuck up on them. Well, that made two of us.

“River,” I said.

“How’d the river not swallow you whole?” asked the guy, forgetting that he didn’t want me to know he was incompetent.

“Got lucky,” I said.

The girl gave a smile and stepped forward with her sword.

“No you didn’t,” she grinned.

I sighed. This was already the longest day of my life, and it wasn’t close to over.

The others were just as happy as the clan to have finally caught a paranormal. In their excitement they hadn’t noticed me slip my ring off and put it in the secret pocket in my jacket. Just as well. They probably wouldn’t have known what it meant anyway.

We didn’t travel very far; they lived in caves overlooking the river. I cursed my own stupidity, since it was likely that they had seen me coming and had watched me all day. I had been careless and stupid. .

“What do you have in your satchel?” the girl asked, reaching out with a greedy little hand. I swung the satchel away from her, the faint clink of glass giving her a clue as to its contents. Her eyes brightened.

“You don’t want to know,” I said.

The guy swung his hand at my head, and shouted, “You heard my sister!”

I ducked, narrowly missing the blow. I had been taught to fight by another adopted relative, this one an uncle, and he was rather good at it. The guy’s eyes bulged.

I felt hands wrap around my arms from behind, pinning me in place.

“She said hand it over,” the guy said, then slapped me for good measure. I licked my lower lip, but really, the blow hadn’t even hurt. The guy’s eyes turned to angry chips as the girl waited and pouted.

“Look, you don’t want to handle it,” I said. I didn’t go so far as to tell him that it was magicked for me, but I tried to spell it out without actually, you know, spelling it out. Of course, that didn’t work well with these knuckleheads.

I had to go carefully regardless, because I was still reeling from Greta’s death and I wasn’t in the mood to have any others on my conscience tonight.

“I promise you, I swear on the paranormal gods and the black holes that if you open that satchel, if anyone but me opens it, you will die.

The girl, her barely suppressed excitement showing through her eyes, had already removed the bag from my shoulder. She had it halfway open when my words stopped her.

“Those swears aren’t worth anything,” the boy spat.

“Spark, they’re worth something,” said the girl.

“No they aren’t, Sparell,” Spark glared.

The girl glanced at me. “Swear to it on something that means something. Swear to it on Lisabelle Verlans’s name.” Her eyes lighted up at her own words and she looked around. Some of the others shivered. My eyebrows raised involuntarily.

“I swear on Lisabelle Verlans’s name,” I said. Privately, I thought, “How fitting.”

The girl closed the pouch as Spark nodded approval. “Very well,” he said.

“Shall we continue?” He motioned for me to take the satchel back, which I did, replacing it on my shoulder with relief.

We trudged away from my refuge in the trees as night closed in. The mood had changed. I had gone from some hapless paranormal to something strange and dangerous. The average paranormal did not carry a murderous exploding satchel around wherever he went; I was a first among these paranormals.

“Some paranormals don’t really believe she exists,” I said. “What if you’re having me swear on a ghost?”

“I don’t like this kid,” said Sparell. “Can we just toss him back in the river?”

“No, we can’t,” said Spark quickly. “We’re going to take him to the Black Market and he’s going to fetch a pretty penny for us, or I’m not a hunter.”

“You don’t know the first thing about being a real hunter,” declared one of the women behind me, who until that moment had kept her silence. She was older, with salt and pepper hair. She had that hard, lean look of someone who had been hungry for years.

“Shut up,” Spark hissed.

“Don’t talk to your mother that way,” another of the hunters said. “She’s been around a lot longer than you.”

“And look what she’s got us. We have a paranormal now. We’re going to be rich.” Spark’s voice drifted off as if he was dreaming.

“Hey, did we check his ring?” Sparell asked. They had not, as a matter of fact, just threatened me, they had also bound my hands. To their credit, the ties were strong. It wouldn’t be easy to break free, and the fact that I had removed my ring would make it more difficult, since the basis of my power was gone. I hadn’t planned on trying to escape just yet, not until I heard of the Black Market. There was no way I was going there.

“He wasn’t wearing one,” said Spark.

“So how do we even know he’s paranormal?” someone asked. It took a great deal of effort, but I didn’t roll my eyes. Much.

By that time we had reached solider ground and my feet weren’t sinking into mud every time I took a step. The grove where they had found me must have been touched by the same storm that touched the city, while we had now made our way out of that mess. In the distance I could see cliffs reaching into the sky, and the river was still snaking along a little way away. I figured we must be heading to the place where they had seen me in the first place, some distance from the clump of trees where I had tried to take shelter.

“Because he knows who Lisabelle Verlans is,” said Spark.

“Everyone knows who she is,” said his mother.

“Yeah, everyone in the paranormal world,” said Spark.

“What if he’s a dud, just a servant with no real magic?”

“Then we can kill him,” said Spark. There were ways to discover whether a paranormal had magic and what kind, but they were hard to come by, all the more so since the Nocturn war.

“We could always try asking him,” said Sparell. “He might just tell us.”

Spark scoffed at the notion. “We can’t talk to the likes of him. He’s property, he can’t be attacked. Besides, he’d probably lie just to say something, then get us killed.”

“Like what would he say, do you think?” Sparell asked.

“I dunno, something crazy,” said Spark. “He’d say he was Lisabelle Verlans’s brother or something.”

“She doesn’t have a brother,” said Sparell.

“Okay, he’d say he was someone else’s brother,” said Spark, growing exasperated.

“You’re right,” I said. “Can’t trust me. I’d be lying.”

They all bobbed their heads in agreement, as if I’d finally said something halfway smart.

But now I knew that there was only one thing I could do. When they stopped paying so much attention to me, I’d have to blast my way out. It would be crude and it would draw attention, but there was nothing else for it. The Bounty Hunters already knew where I was, and this ragtag team of hill dwellers had no idea what they had just stepped into the middle of.

No way was I going to the Black Market.

My view changed when we reached the cave. First, about twenty children, all scrawny and looking as if they’d been rolling in dirt before we got there, came streaming out of the cave’s dark mouth, clamoring to see what the search party had brought home. Try as they might, their mothers could not get them to go back to sleep.

“It’s the middle of the night,” said Spew, who was Spark and Sparell’s mother. “These children should be sleeping!” She sounded incredibly irritable.

“Do you want to try and put them to bed?” one of the younger mothers demanded. “All you’ve had to be doing recently is taking a nice evening stroll, while we’ve been here managing the fort.”

“You forget I had to take my nice evening stroll with Spark,” said Spew tiredly.

The younger woman laughed, then grabbed a child by his collar and spun him around, keeping him from tormenting his little brother any further as they dashed around. The child came to a screeching halt and looked up at his mother with wide eyes.

The children swirled around us as we moved further into the cave. None of them got very close to me, but many of them gave me curious looks. I didn’t look much different from the outcasts who had taken me prisoner, except that despite many months of living in hiding, I still had more meat on my bones. But my hair was long and scraggly; I had let it get that way in hopes that it would keep me from notice a little longer. My eyes were really the problem, my eyes and my ring, but I had been able to deal easily enough with both of them in most of the situations I had run into so far. I had my family’s eyes. We were famous for our large gray eyes and it was the one physical characteristic that could easily be used to identify me.

Not this one. I looked around the cave and something inside me twisted. This place was home to paranormals who were just scraping by. There were children. Blasting my way out was not an option.

Spark hit the back of my legs and my knees buckled. I fought to keep my balance and turned around to glare at him. He shrugged. “Sit,” he commanded. “We can’t very well have our meal ticket getting tired.”

“Can you imagine how much money we’re going to fetch from that one?” Sparell asked. “We’ve only ever been able to sell turnips at the Black Market before,” she explained, looking at me as if I would find all of this just as fascinating as she did. I nodded, hoping she’d say more, because the more I knew the more likely it was that I’d be able to save myself. But before either of us could settle into a conversation, Spark interrupted.

“Tell me,” he said, sitting across from me on the floor of the cave, “who are you?”

I eyed him, debating what to say, then chose to say nothing. Spark started toward me, but his mother ordered him to leave me alone. Instead of sitting back down, he disappeared for several moments, and when he came back he was holding a large knife. I eyed the thing with distaste and caution. I couldn’t use much magic, but I was pretty sure I could use enough so that Spark would get a very unpleasant surprise if he came near me with that thing.

“Don’t like what this looks like, do you?” Spark eyed the knife, trying to be intimidating. If Spark had known who I was, if he had known the true evil, or the truly scary things I had seen, he might have realized that he didn’t have a hope or a prayer of frightening me

But he didn’t.

“Your ring,” he said, “is it on you somewhere?”

I remained impassive, meeting him stare for stare.

“Fine,” said Spark, “just fine, but you better hope I don’t find out who you are, because if I do,” - here he smiled, for once looking both a little deranged and a little intimidating - “you’ll regret it.”

“Actually, I think it’s you who will regret holding me here,” I said. I couldn’t help it. I was tired and still devastated from Greta, though being kidnapped had kind of taken my mind off what had happened that morning.

Then Spark surprised me. He turned serious, and not all threatening serious but more like the kid that he really was. “We’re hungry,” he said. “If selling you feeds my family, then it will be worth it.”

“It won’t be worth it if you get killed,” I said.

Spark shrugged. “How could anyone you know possibly find you here?”

I had a feeling that some of the paranormals, if they wanted to badly enough, could find me anywhere. I had been banking on their not wanting to badly enough, but I knew that wouldn’t last. From the start I had planned on going home eventually, even if I wasn’t really sure what that would look like. Spark and his clan getting in the way wasn’t making the process any easier, nor did having the real Bounty Hunters chasing me help. .

If only I could wear my ring.

“Get some rest,” said Spark, pointing to the ground. “We’ll take you to the Appraiser in the morning.” With that he braced his hands on his knees, pushed up, and walked away.