Authors: Lindsay Payton
“How long have you been like this?” I asked, wringing out the cloth.
Even through her pain, Alysana managed a guilty expression. “The burns were there the morning you came here, I just didn’t want to say anything. Everything else came after that.”
I ground my teeth, remembering the long sleeves and pants she’d been wearing, despite the relatively warm weather. “You should have told me.”
“I didn’t want everyone getting upset about it. I thought they might go away,” she said.
“What’s your temperature?” Linden asked. I looked at him in surprise, wondering if he was curious or if he somehow knew how to help.
“Um—” She paused and closed her eyes, trying to concentrate. “104 the last time they checked.”
I tried to keep down my shock. Why weren’t they using ice? I voiced my question, and Alysana bleakly replied that it hadn’t helped at all.
“That doesn’t make sense,” I muttered. I grasped Linden’s arm. “Do you think Omar could have done this?”
“No,” he replied instantly. “I think I might have seen something like this before.”
“You have? What is it?” I asked quickly.
He didn’t reply, but leaned in closer to Alysana, gingerly taking her arm. He turned it over as she tensed, struggling for air. Linden closely examined the burns, then looked at Alysana for a long moment.
“Who’ve you been hanging out with?” he asked.
She didn’t reply for a long time, fighting down pain. “I—just people at home and . . . and Aidan.”
Linden’s expression cleared as he gently released her arm. He was quiet for a long time, and then he looked around the room.
“Blow out the candles,” he said urgently. “Hurry, put them all out!”
I didn’t understand, but I did what he said. I started blowing out each flame, noticing how Alysana began to hyperventilate.
The last candle extinguished, Alysana’s body went still and her head lolled to the side. I was about to panic, but Linden grabbed me before I could start shaking her.
“She’s fine, she just passed out,” he said.
“Linden, what’s going on?” I demanded.
“Hang on, I need to think a second,” he said, slowly letting me go as he looked down at Alysana. He kneeled next to her and carefully touched her shoulder, turning her over to expose her back. I grimaced at the lines of burns all across her skin.
Linden lowered her again. “This doesn’t make sense.”
“What?”
“This looks like something an . . . an Elemental would do,” he mumbled. “But not an undine. This is vulcani.”
“English, Linden!” I cried.
“Fire Elemental,” he replied, standing. He asked for my phone, and I handed it over, still confused. He dialed quickly, and when someone picked up he asked for Rhys.
I sat on the bed beside Alysana, touching the back of my hand to her cheek. I couldn’t believe she could handle being so hot. I started with the cloth again as Linden spoke rapidly.
“Remember a uh—
couple
years ago, the incident with the vulcani? Yeah, there’s another one.” He went silent and listened hard. “No, there’s nothing left in here to keep it grounded. We blew out the candles.”
I wasn’t sure what any of this meant. I understood that vulcani was a fire Elemental, but what did that have to do with Aly? I thought Elementals had a vow to never hurt witches, and here Alysana seemed very close to the end. I bit my lip at the thought and checked her pulse. Her heart was racing.
“Got it. And that’s it? That’s all it takes?” Linden was asking. He got his answer and hung up quickly. “I know what to do.”
“I thought you said Elementals took a vow to never hurt witches,” I said.
“I said
some,
” he replied, taking off his jacket. “Now I need you to just stay in here and keep people out, all right? The last thing I need is Rene trying to butt in.”
I nodded and stood out of his way. He looked confident, and I hoped he could help. He kneeled next to the bed and watched Alysana while her chest heaved in an effort to breathe.
I took my station outside the door, making it very clear to anyone who passed that they could not come in. No one questioned me, not even Rene when she made her way up the stairs. No noise came from the room besides Alysana’s breathing, and I anxiously waited, hoping to kill off all my thinking until I had answers.
It seemed like a long time as I stood waiting. I couldn’t ask how everything was going in fear of interrupting Linden. The only change came when I heard Alysana’s breathing stop, at which point I whirled around and hurried into the room. When I stood at the bedside, she was breathing again, and normally this time. Linden slowly raised his head and blinked hard, standing on sore knees.
“There. I think she’ll be okay,” he said, bracing a hand against the wall. Even though she still didn’t look any less flushed, just her normal breathing and the relaxed look on her face was enough for me. I smiled and hugged Linden.
“I don’t know what you did, but thank you,” I said.
“Don’t mention it,” he replied, sounding distant. I looked up at him and asked who the vulcani was. “I don’t know,” he admitted, frustrated. “I would know if one of them was around, you can tell. Unless he pulled some weird trick like you with hiding his aura.”
I was going to ask who it could be, but I already knew the answer. There was only one other person Alysana was ever with. I just couldn’t imagine Aidan being an Elemental or why he would even do this.
“Remember when we saw the woman with the crystals?” Linden asked me, shaking his head slightly as if to forget the vulcani.
“Yeah.”
“Well we actually need some of those. Anyone in this house know about them?”
Rene had the most extensive knowledge, so it was her turn to try something more. When I called her in, she was amazed at Alysana’s progress. She gazed at Linden for a moment before thanking him. He hardly noticed and asked her for healing crystals.
She rushed out and returned with two small wooden boxes. Putting them on the desk, she opened the first one. It was filled with crystals and other minerals of all sorts; a colorful spectrum of things I was not used to.
“She just needs some defenses, you know? To get her back on her feet,” Linden said, just as clueless as me.
“This didn’t work before,” Rene said cautiously. “Are you sure it will work now?”
Linden nodded. “Trust me, it will.”
She hesitated, but finally started looking through both boxes. As she collected some in her hand, she turned to me. “Listen closely to what these can do, all right?”
My first thought was to ignore her, but then thought better of it. If I could learn how to use these for healing, it definitely might benefit me in the future, especially if anything like this ever happened again.
Rene held up an opaque, golden stone and told me it was amber. She placed it on Alysana’s forehead and explained it would help her connect with the earth energies again to promote healing. On her neck she put down black tourmaline to repel negative energy. I took that one to heart, thinking it could be used over and over again these days. She put down purple fluorite and moonstone for any physical pain, and finally red sardonyx for the lungs. I didn’t know what it would take for the things to start working, but Alysana was lying still and breathing easy, so I hoped something would improve soon.
Still somewhat stunned at Linden’s presence in her house, Rene excused herself saying she had to tell everyone the good news. That left Linden and I alone, and I quickly pulled him into the hall and into my bedroom. It felt like we might have more privacy there.
“I hope she’ll be okay,” I said as I shut the door.
“She will be,” he replied, leaning heavily against my bed. “With all that we did, everything should be reversed. Just don’t light any candles around her.”
“Why not? Does that attract the vulcani or something?” I asked, still hesitant to pin Aidan as the blame.
“No, but it’s part of him. It can only increase the potency of anything he’s affected,” he replied.
“I’m confused.” I sat down on the bed next to him as he stood up.
“So am I, but I’m going to figure things out,” he said. “I need to find that guy Aidan.”
“But you can’t feel his aura, right?”
“Not the Elemental part—if he is one—but he does have some kind of aura. It can’t be that hard,” he said, though he sounded doubtful.
“I’ll go with you,” I said as I got up. “I can help you find him.”
“No, you need to stay here. Stay with Alysana, she’ll want you to be there when she wakes up,” he replied. “I’ll come back here as soon as I’m done, okay?”
I bit my lip and entwined my fingers with his. “Okay. Be careful, I mean if he can do this—”
“We don’t even know if it’s him yet,” he pointed out, “and if he is, he can’t do anything to me. That’s law.”
I smiled ruefully. How could we be sure he—or whoever it was—would be so good as to follow the rules after this? “Will you explain everything to me when you get back?”
“I’ll explain everything I know,” he promised. So I took his word for it and kissed him once before he left. I stood alone in my room for a minute, visualizing Aidan’s friendly smile, his civil manner inside a house full of witches, and the way he had looked at Alysana. It just didn’t seem probable.
I finally returned to Alysana’s room where she still slept, no crystal out of place. Looking at the burns, a fury began to build up inside of me for whoever had done this. If I could, I would try to take revenge.
VULCANI
I just sat in Alysana’s room all day until she came to. Rene was ready with tea and weak soup for her in case she could eat anything. She left it on the bedside table after cupping Alysana’s face and kissing her cheeks, relieved she was okay. She still wouldn’t say anything about Linden.
The crystals removed, Alysana was able to prop herself up with a few pillows. I insisted on helping, watching her slowly drink her tea. She was able to keep it down, and she was just happy to be able to stay awake.
“I don’t know what Linden did—but he’s
good
; why isn’t he a healer or something?” she asked while I chose a movie to watch.
“Who knows, maybe it’s just part of the Elemental thing,” I said, slipping in a video.
“Rene’s got to let up after this. She’ll get over it, you can live here again, and Linden can come by whenever he wants.”
I laughed as I sat next to her. “Yeah,
ideally.
”
She searched my face for a second. “You don’t want to come back, do you?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted, tucking my hair behind my ear. “You have to see this town where his uncle lives, it’s so beautiful. The ocean is
right there
and it’s just huge. Everything just seems better than this.”
She nodded, resting her head on the pillow. “I bet. I could use a break after all of this . . .”
Her voice trailed off and her eyes seemed out of focus for a second. I gently shook her arm. “Aly? What happened anyway? Did—did Aidan do this?”
She snapped out of it and met my worried gaze. “Sorry, zoning out. I’m not even sure what happened. I can’t remember much.”
“What
do
you remember?” I asked, trying not to be too pushy.
She stared at the TV screen for a minute, biting her lip in thought. “I remember most of the day before. Just hanging out with Aidan and stuff. We went back to the bed and breakfast after dinner and . . . I don’t know, that’s where everything gets hazy.”
“Did he hurt you?” I asked.
She laughed. “No, no the opposite. From what I remember, at least. There are little snippets of memory there, but mostly feeling. I woke up here so I must have gone home at some point, and then there were the burns all over.”
That was a large gap for memory loss, and I speculated what could have happened. I still wondered if Omar had something to do with it. Had he somehow done something to her while she walked home? Was she his target? As much as I wanted to believe this, something else was nagging at my mind, an idea that went with the speculation of Aidan being a vulcani.
“Aly, did you . . .” I wasn’t sure how to form the words without causing extreme embarrassment for the both of us. “Did you Aidan um—sleep together?”
“What?” She blushed even under her ashy complexion. “No! I think I would have remembered that, Riley.”
“Are you sure?” I pressed. I didn’t know if this mattered, but how could she not remember so much for such a long period of time? And the areas her burns covered seemed specific.
“I’m pretty sure,” she said firmly. “I may like him, okay, but I’m not one to jump the gun like that.
“Okay,” I replied. “I just wanted to . . . make sure.”
“You don’t like him that much? I thought you did,” she said, smiling slightly.
“It’s not that, I thought he was fine,” I replied, now unable to look at her.
“Thought?”
I wasn’t sure how to begin, but I took Linden’s approach. “Linden thinks Aidan could be an Elemental. A vulcani.”