“Something happened.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I scanned the interior of the building until I found the blue sign with the lady wearing a dress on it. It made me wonder when the world was going to find another way to indicate the women’s bathroom. I never wore dresses.
“Something happened while we were in here and you were out there. Dang it,” he berated himself, “I knew I shouldn’t have come in without you.”
“When nature calls, nature calls, Scrum. I’m fine sitting in the car by myself. I’m not a little kid.”
He was still hot on my heels, and I was just five feet from the bathroom door.
“I know you’re very powerful and can hold your own in most cases, but we’re not in the Green Forest anymore and there could be other forces out here that you’re not used to…” The rest of his speech was drowned out by the flush of a powerful toilet ahead of me.
I tried not to breathe in the heavy scent of fake flowers covering very real poo.
Holy hell, that is something else. Damn.
Whoever invented a deodorizer that actually worked to ease the smell in places like this was going to be a billionaire.
Vay-poo-rise. Yeah, baby.
But that person had obviously not gotten that invention filed at the patent office yet, because this place …
whoa
.
I left Scrum to his fretting and picked a stall, squatting over the potty with my pants around my knees, letting my mind wander. According to my watch, which may or may not keep actual correct time, we were thirteen hours from our destination. Thirteen hours from the town where I had to find a house to live in. And thirteen hours from my new home base that would be the place I stayed in for a couple weeks at least twice a year, keeping the portal guardian of the Underworld company as her companion.
Ugh
. Calling myself a companion sounded way too sexy for my liking. It didn’t help that her last one was also her mate and of the male dragon persuasion.
I pictured the portal guardian who I was tied to for life, the one I was going to see in just a few days — Biad, the dragon covered in deep red scales that matched the one fused to the palm of my hand. The last time I saw her was over the winter, when I’d gone with my friends into the Underworld to recruit her to our cause. After the decision to open the portals to the Otherworlds was made by the fae council, we needed her and her counterpart in the Overworld, Heryon, to act as guardians, making sure souls didn’t leave the Otherworlds until they’d earned the right to do so.
My thumb absently rubbed the smooth, warm, red scale embedded in my palm. I hadn’t seen that one coming, the moment that Biad had taken my entire hand into her mouth and breathed a fire so hot it melded parts of our bodies together. Thank goodness it wasn’t standard issue fire, or I would have been cremated on the spot.
I glanced down at my palm, noticing it was getting warmer. The scale there seemed to be glowing. I blinked a few times, trying to get my eyes to work properly again, but they weren’t cooperating.
Someone flushed a toilet nearby, but instead of stopping after a few seconds, the sound of that water just kept coming and coming.
Quick! Overflow situation! Toilet paper! Stat!
I pulled my gaze from my hand and rushed to finish the job I’d come to do. I was just pulling my jeans up to my waist when a small wave of water rushed around my shoes. I looked down and then back at the toilet. The water levels were rising quickly in my toilet too. Way
too
quickly.
“What the hell?” It sounded like someone had unleashed Niagara Falls in there, but that didn’t make any sense. It was a bathroom for shit’s sake, not a public monument.
“Jayne?” Scrum’s voice was faint, but I could still hear the hint of alarm in it.
Great
. Just what I needed. A bathroom rescue. I hurried to button up my jeans and get the door open so I could beat feet out of there before Tim got wind of my predicament; surely he’d blame me for the system-wide overflow. I could hear him already …
Constipated? Not anymore, I guess! Heee heee heee!
He’d fly off high-fiving himself.
“On my way out!” I yelled, trying to turn the lock on the door. It was stuck, though, and wouldn’t cooperate. My hand started getting really hot, and I couldn’t decide if it was coming from my almost freak-out or the door itself. I quickly pulled my palm away to wave it in the air and cool it off, and was shocked to find a melted spot on the metal door where my hand had been. I looked down at my dragon-scaled appendage in trepidation, and my jaw dropped open at what I saw.
A giant eyeball? What’s a giant fucking eyeball doing in my hand?
I screamed and the water level in the room immediately went higher, almost as if in response to my fear.
And then, suddenly, I was squatting over the potty again, and it was totally quiet in the bathroom. No water, no melted door, no nothing.
What. The. Fuck.
I looked down at my watch and noticed the second hand had stopped moving. Shaking my arm did nothing to re-start it.
A toilet down the line flushed and wouldn’t stop, but the floor and my feet were dry. I looked at my watch again, eyeing it with suspicion. It was a gift from Céline, the silver elf who started the giant mess I was now paying for for the rest of my life. Not that I hated her for it or anything, but still … I was pretty sure the watch was another peace offering.
The water started to gather around my feet at the same time the second hand started moving again. This time, I didn’t panic quite as much, which was probably nuts. Here I was stuck in a public restroom with toilets and God knows what else flowing toward my favorite moccasins, but my brain was telling me some witchy bitchy stuff was afoot and my only concern was getting out of that stall and out to the car so I could kick Samantha’s ass. I would have thought she’d know better than to come at me with one of her sneak attacks while we were out here in the human world with so many non-fae witnesses, but apparently not.
Not cool, Sam. Not cool at all.
The lock on the door was jammed, but a little hot-eyeball-in-the-dragon-scale action from the palm of my hand took care of that. The cheap silver-colored mechanism melted and hissed when it hit the water that was now high enough to get into my shoes through the place where the laces went in to wet my socks.
She is so going down when I get out of here
.
I slammed the door open with my shoulder and sloshed my way over to the exit.
“Jayne, are you okay?” Scrum asked, his tone louder than normal but not exactly rising to the level of worried.
Idiot.
“Yeah, sure, just let me stem the tides of eight fucking toilets and I’ll be right out.”
I turned around to face the bank of stalls and reached into The Green to pull some of its power up into me. Other than shocking Spike’s ass, this was the first time I’d done it outside of the Green Forest or Florida. I didn’t know what to expect, but this wasn’t it. Something was in my way. I could feel The Green out there, trying to answer my summons, but something was blocking it. And that just pissed me off to level nine point five, and at level ten, comas were gonna start happening. “Now she’s gone too far,” I growled out into the empty space.
Pulling up the water element wasn’t my favorite thing in the world to do, since my control over it was still a work in progress, but Sam had left me no choice. Luckily, it was more than happy to answer my call. It reminded me of Becky, the way the blue and green lights that came from it into my mind danced and sparkled, as if it were in a playful mood. Not that any of the elements can be considered playful, really. More like really friggin dangerous. But still … when they came at me in a sparkly flow like that, I seriously had to fight the urge to just go with them. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure no one was behind me watching me as I raised my arms. Today would not be the day I joined my elements and disappeared from the earth. I had business to attend to that included hanging out in Hell with a dragon.
My latest training sessions had taught me that using a little arm action and some verbal commands helped me to focus my energy and harness the elements in a cleaner way, or so Sam had labeled it. And everyone was a fan of me doing things the cleaner way. Comas tended to happen when I was free-flowing my shit.
“Away, away,” I said in a near whisper to the water gathering now around my ankles. “Water be gone, go back to the land, go back to the rivers, the oceans, the sand.” I smiled as my rhyme took hold and the level receded. I narrowed my eyes, though, when I sensed that blockage out there somewhere still keeping me cut off from The Green.
Time to bust another rhyme…
“And Water, my friend, before you go with your flow, do a sister a solid and hook her up with Earth, yo.” Sometimes my rhyming needed a little help. Pressure never helped the situation.
There was a hesitation in the water’s communication, like it was also running into some form of barricade to my other element, so I gave it a little juice, letting it know I wasn’t playing.
“Water, water, everywhere, do not piss me off, beware … if I don’t get my way right now, I’ll take you with me underground.” That was the best I could come up with, but luckily, Water knew what I was trying to say. Bringing up the pure elements of Earth and Water in the Here and Now was the most beautiful thing in the world. But in the Underworld? Not so much — not for me and not for them. This, I found out during my training as well, when Torrie the former demon explained how even the elements themselves actually felt punished having to be present in that horrible place. Not only the elements, but also the trees and the very air everyone breathed in the Underworld was poisoned to some degree, and that was not the type of pain that went by unnoticed.
Yay me, getting to live there twice a year! Three cheers for personal sacrifice!
My plan after that particular lesson was to never use my elemental badassery while doing my duty as a portal guardian’s companion, but Water didn’t know that, and so my threat worked.
I sensed The Green coming as it approached from a distance that seemed way too great. When it finally arrived, it hit me like a long lost child greeting a parent and happy to be home. It was the first time I ever imagined this element being almost human-like.
“Okee dokee, Earth and Water, let’s put this spell to bed.” I swirled my arms around my head and raised my voice, hoping this would be all I needed to finish the job. “Out you go, back into the world, leave the potty place dry and same with the girl!” One last flourish from my hands and that was all it took. The water flew back to the toilets from whence it came, and the humidity in the room was sucked down to nothing as Water claimed all its parts as instructed. I felt the skin of my legs going dry, and only then realized my mistake.
Chapter Three
MY SHOES MADE SQUISHY, FARTY noises as I left the now dry public restroom, every footstep leaving a wet print behind. I had asked Water to leave the girl dry, but had failed to mention the need to take the water from her clothing.
Dammit. Foiled again
. I comforted myself with the idea of how I would soon be torturing Sam.
“Are you okay?” Scrum asked, looking at me funny.
I looked down at my watch. The friggin thing was working again. I shook my head in frustration. “I will be in just a minute or two.”
“Are you sure you’re okay? Because I got this weird feeling for like a second and then it went away.” He paused as I walked by him. “Why are your shoes wet? Did you put them in the sink? They don’t look that dirty to me.”
I stopped short, causing him to almost crash into me. He danced off to the side to avoid taking me down. “Scrum, what on earth makes you think I’d walk into a public restroom and fully submerge my shoes and socks into a sink full of water?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe you really like clean shoes. But you’re right, the sink would have been hard being so high up. Did you use the toilet?”
I couldn’t just walk away. Sometimes I felt like I had to make an investment in him growing some common sense somewhere in that brain of his. Not that it ever worked, but I still felt like I should try.
“So, if I liked clean shoes, wouldn’t I wait until we arrived at our destination before cleaning them? Or wait until I had a second pair handy to put on, so my feet wouldn’t get wet?”
He blinked several times in quick succession. “I don’t know.”
I shook my head and continued on my way. “Hopeless.”
“I washed my shoes with my feet in them once,” he said, jogging to catch up to me and walk by my side.
“Oh yeah? Sounds like a poorly executed plan to me.”
“I was young. At the time it made sense. My shoes were muddy, and I knew my grandma would get really mad at me, and there was this lake near my house, so I just went in.”
“So, I’m like a young Scrum to you, is that it? That’s the brain power I’m functioning with these days?” And I thought my day couldn’t get any worse.
“No, it’s just that…”
I paused my journey back to the car, but he expected it this time, stopping right along with me. “It’s just that
what
?” I narrowed my eyes at him.
He glanced nervously over at the car. “Everyone’s waiting for us.”
“Let ‘em wait. You were saying…?”
He shrugged and looked at the ground. “It’s just that, you know … you sometimes do stuff that doesn’t make sense to me.”
I crossed my arms over my chest, getting cranky and maybe a little bit defensive. Scrum was a great guy, don’t get me wrong, but no one would ever accuse him of being the brightest star in the sky.
So why was he able to make me feel like an idiot so easily?
“Oh, yeah? Like what?”
“Well, like when you tell Samantha to drop spells on you, when you know she could really mess you up. And when you, you know, sleep with Spike even when he’s ready to eat you alive. And stuff like that. You take risks that seem like … not good ideas to me.”
I slapped him on the shoulder, glad to know that was all that was bothering him. “That’s your daemon brain talking, Scrum. You know I work with Samantha to get better at fighting off the bad guys. And Spike is my boyfriend. What do you expect me to do? Kick him out of my room every time his eyes go goofy red? He’d spend six out of seven days out in the forest if I did that.”