The Chilling Change Of Air (Elemental Awakening, Book 3)

by Nicola Claire

  He blinked down at me. "I cannot."

  "Of course you can. You're not my Thisavros."

  In an instant he had a hand wrapped around the back of my neck and my chest pressed up to his, another hand firmly placed in the middle of my back to still me.

  "Stop fighting this," he growled.

  "I'm not fighting anything," I argued, struggling to get out of his grip. It was useless. He held fast.

  "Cassandra," Theo pleaded. "Oraia," he added. "You know as well as I that you are mine."

  I stilled, lifted my face to his, and held his intense stare. It was almost like looking at my Theo. The old Theo. The recognition I saw there.

  Was I fighting this?

  He'd proven he'd fallen for me. He'd proven he was prepared to take me as his Thisavros even if he couldn't remember having done this all before. He made me melt; desire and want and need thrumming through to my core.

  What was I afraid of?

  "Casey," he whispered. "Let... me... in."

  Chapter 16

  So, What You're Saying Is... What Exactly?

  I'm not sure why it was so difficult. Not only had Theo fallen for me all over again, but I had fallen for this Theo. But strangely, bizarrely, I felt like I was betraying the old Theo if I gave in. A notion that made absolutely no sense at all.

  With everything that was going on, it felt like one issue too many for me to cope with. I'd survived so much, but I was sure I would not survive this. This feeling of utter confusion where Theo was concerned.

  We walked silently back into the living area, Theo allowing me one last chance not to answer. I knew he'd push for more soon. He was as desperate as me, but for entirely different reasons. For now, the need to check on Isadora and see whether she actually could reach her Stoicheio was more important than dealing with this hurdle that seemed to stand between me and him.

  Even Theo knew there were more pressing matters. Or he just assumed we'd work it out in due course.

  I'm not sure his faith was big enough for the both of us, but it helped. That certainty he had that I was his, that the Thisavros connection would come back. That we would fix this.

  I think he was more certain of that than of our ability to reconnect with our Stoicheio and fix the world.

  "How are you?" Theo asked Dora, once we'd joined the others at the table. Isadora sat closest to the fire in the hearth, turned sideways to the table, staring into the flames while she ate sparingly from a plate set before her. Her eyes weren't glowing gold.

  The disappointment was numbing.

  "I am still cut-off," came her reply, as though she'd expected the question, maybe even fielded it already with the others, and was just saving time.

  "Are you still in pain?" Theo pressed, not even commenting on the fact that it had all been in vain.

  Well, for her Pyrkagia, but not for the children she'd help save.

  "No, just tired." And she sounded it. She sounded almost depressed. Which was not something I was used to seeing in Isadora.

  Theo nodded in way of acknowledgement and then said to the rest of the room, surprising me that he offered it up for discussion at all, "We need to decide if we attempt this again."

  Dora snorted, some of her old attitude returning.

  "I wouldn't recommend it," she advised.

  "You wish to give up?" Mark asked, his choice of words carefully chosen. Having only just met Isadora recently, he had her number all right.

  "It's not a matter of giving up," Theo argued for her. "It's a matter of putting our efforts where they are best served. And if trying to reconnect is harmful and produces no result to speak of, then we should try for a different goal."

  "Refuelling," Nico said. "First and foremost that is our imperative."

  "I agree," Theo added. "We concentrate on making us look as good as Casey." All eyes flicked towards me. Isadora sneered. "The rest will follow as it will," Theo concluded.

  I understood why they felt this way. And hell, one look at Dora and I wanted to cringe. But it felt like we were giving up. I hated giving up on anything.

  Which was why I was still holding out for Theo to remember me, I guess.

  I sighed and played with my food, not offering a comment or objection, letting them all turn the conversation towards more pleasant topics, like sitting in front of a fire all day.

  "You got nothing to say?" Mark whispered beside me.

  "What is there to say?" I countered, nibbling on a piece of home made bread.

  "Oh, I don't know. How about something along the lines of the speech you gave yesterday."

  "Which one?"

  "Well, yeah, you did go off on a rant a couple of times," Mark agreed. "But I meant the one about not giving up."

  "I haven't given up."

  "So, does that mean you're going to try to reconnect behind lover-boy's back?"

  I glanced sideways to determine that "lover-boy" wasn't listening in. He was deep in conversation with Nico.

  "I promised I wouldn't," I said quietly back to Mark.

  "No, sister," he argued. "You promised you wouldn't try until Isadora was conscious again. Am I right?"

  "What are you?" I demanded. "A mole sent to rile everyone up? Is that how the Alchemists fight their battles now?"

  He barked out a laugh, which garnered a little too much attention in the form of Isadora watching silently from the other side of the table. I willed her to go back to the fire, but she didn't. My mental powers of persuasion were clearly not up to scratch.

  "Good call. A joker spy. I could so carry that off," he exclaimed.

  I smiled despite myself.

  "Listen," he said leaning in. "I'm going to give it a try, even if you guys aren't. But I'm also not fucking mental. I need someone to spot me. You in?"

  Guilty by association, that's what it would make me.

  But not guilty of doing anything to make Theo as scared as he was this morning.

  "OK," I said, swallowing my bite of buttered bread. "I'm in."

  "Now that's the Casey Eden I know," my brother remarked. "Meet me by the Moreton Bay in fifteen. I'm going to work on Water for now."

  He finished his coffee and got up from the table, taking his empty dishes to the bucket Aktor had been using as a sink. The fact he'd done it at all was a dead giveaway something was up. But only Isadora noticed and she was still too weak to do anything about it.

  I slowly finished my meal, aware her eyes were pinning me to my chair. When I was done I repeated Mark's actions, taking my dishes to the sink, but whereas he looked out of place doing that, I didn't.

  "I'm using the wash house," I announced, something we'd had to establish to make sure we weren't disturbed while we cleaned ourselves up. Theo's eyes came to my face and I knew what he was thinking, but as the process required buckets of cold water, unless you bothered to heat them over the fire, it was hardly the fantasy of a shared shower I saw in his eyes.

  I smirked, nonetheless. He rolled his eyes, but let me leave unmolested.

  I did clean up, inordinately relieved that Aktor had dug out my clothing for me to wear and I could slip into clean jeans and a t-shirt with actual fitting underwear. I felt almost normal again. If it wasn't for the fact the toilet was one of those camping ones and the water wasn't running through a tap.

  By the time I was finished fifteen minutes had passed since Mark had left. I slipped out of the makeshift bathroom and walked around the front of the house outside, finding him waiting under the Moreton Bay Fig Tree as planned.

  "Still raining," he commented, not looking down from the drops falling off the leaves over his head. "I really want to be able to avoid this shit again. I miss it."

  "How do you walk through rain and not get wet?" I asked.

  "Easy. Just think dry thoughts."

  "Yeah, that explains it."

  "Well, how do you make tree roots rise up from the ground?"

  "I ask the Earth."

  "Huh. What about Air? For me I just picture what I wa
nt it to do."

  "Same."

  "And Fire?"

  "You gonna write this all down and take it back to CERN?"

  It had just slipped out. I hadn't really been thinking that. Had I?

  "Sorry," I muttered.

  "Nah, I understand," he said, shuffling on his feet. "And I've never been to CERN."

  My eyes flicked up to his face. He was looking down at the ground where he kicked at a root of the tree, hands deep inside his pockets.

  "Stop hurting it," I instructed, absently. My attention too focused on his despondent look.

  "How do you know it hurts?"

  "I can feel it." His head snapped up at that.

  "Really. Like I'm kicking you?"

  "Kind of," I said with a shrug.

  "Is that normal? For all Ekmetalleftis?"

  "I have no idea, actually," I admitted.

  "Huh," he said, looking out into the rain.

  "What did you mean you've never been to CERN?" I asked, putting us back on track.

  "Gramps made sure I was trained off site. He has this irrational fear that if you enter CERN they can track you anywhere in the world. Something to do with particles and atoms and God, I don't know what."

  "Like a tracer?"

  "No, I think it's more ethereal than that."

  "What the freaking hell does that mean?"

  "Not of this world."

  I didn't know what to say about that.

  "O...K," I managed.

  "Anyway, Gramps didn't want that for me. He trained me mainly himself, when he could get away, and when that became impossible, he did it remotely."

  "Why did it become impossible for him to get away?"

  Mark looked at me for the first time in a long while. "Because they suspected him of espionage."

  "Spying?"

  "That's what espionage means, Case."

  "Smart-arse," I accused, good naturedly. Somehow it was getting easier to talk to Mark again. Almost, but not quite, like old times. "But why did they think he was spying?"

  "Because he was."

  I let out a short, sharp breath of air and sank to the ground, resting on an exposed root.

  "Start from the beginning," I demanded.

  "OK," he offered with a sigh as he too sank down onto a root. "He started to question their objectives when it became apparent you were going to be the next Aether."

  "When did they find that out?"

  "About the time Gramps faked his death. One of the seers, the star gazers," he explained at my confused look, "told Gramps. The scroll was on its way to the leaders and Gramps intercepted it. He knew they'd want to bring you to CERN straight away."

  "Why didn't that happen?"

  "Because Gramps led them on a merry chase. Gave them another name and killed the seer."

  There have been moments when my life has taken a completely different turn, jumped tracks, crashed through stop signs and sped uncontrollably down an on-ramp. None of them felt as bad as this.

  "Holy freaking hell," I whispered.

  "Gramps didn't want you to know," Mark whispered back.

  "Why ever not? This paints him in a trustworthy light."

  Mark snorted. "Well, that was before we knew you'd grown a backbone and taken on more Athanatos character traits than we'd realised."

  I blinked slowly at the look of amusement on his face.

  "The old you would have baulked at him killing someone," he explained. "The new you just sees it as a means to confirm his reliability."

  "Oh."

  "Don't knock it, sister," he quipped. "You're going to need that backbone in the times to come."

  I shook my head, trying to work through it all.

  "Hold on," I started, snagging on a little interesting detail. "You said the Alchemists were the good guys. That doesn't fit with this scenario." Or the one where the Fire talking Alchemist back in the Amazon forest told Noah the doctor harming me was for the greater good.

  Mark scratched at the back of his head.

  "Yeah, well, it's complicated."

  "I'm a smart girl, I'm sure I can follow," I pointed out.

  He huffed a laugh and leaned back against the tree trunk, getting comfortable.

  "Ah, hell," he burst out softly. "I'm flying blind here as it is. Why not?" I waited. "What have the Athanatos told you of Aether?"

  "We're all pretty much in the dark. We just know an Aether comes along at a time of great need. We've figured out that it's in a time of Elemental imbalance."

  Mark looked at the destruction evident just in our little piece of the world. "You could say that," he agreed. "Have they told you about any Aether from the past?"

  "No. Just that there had been. One chosen from an Ekmetalleftis already born."

  Mark nodded, but I don't think it was in agreement. It just didn't have that type of conviction to it. Seemed more a movement for the sake of moving and nothing else.

  "What do you know?" I asked, when he didn't say anything.

  "Well," he said, lifting his face to the raindrops again, as though he couldn't help himself. "I know that an Alchemist has been one before."

  My mouth fell open.

  "No way!" I breathed out.

  "Yes way," came his typical reply. "A very long time ago when Alchemists and Athanatos worked together."

  "They didn't work with the Athanatos, they took whatever knowledge they could get and then abused it."

  "Some did, yeah," Mark conceded. "And then things kind of went downhill. But at one stage the Alchemists worshipped Aetheros."

  "That's bullshit," I exclaimed. "They worshipped the power they could get from the Elements. Furthering their own kind at the detriment of the Ekmetalleftis."

  "Look," Mark said, breaking into my tirade. "There are two sides to every story, right? Mistakes were made by everyone concerned, but what I do know, is that at some time in the past we were all one happy family. The Athanatos: The children of Aetheros. The Alchemists: The followers of Aetheros' religion."

  "How do you know it's true? It could all be Alchemist propaganda."

  "How do you know what the Athanatos think is not a form of brainwashing by their elders?" he shot back.

  And oh, there was a ring of truth to those words. Hadn't Aktor said, when we first learned that I was an Aether, that their education was incomplete? Potentially done on purpose by the council members.

  I stared out into the rain and let that thought sink in. I didn't like the feel of it.

  "So, what you're saying is... what exactly?" I finally asked.

  Mark held his hand out and started catching raindrops in his cupped palm.

  "What I'm saying, Case, is there was a time when Alchemists served the Athanatos because they believed them to be the children of a god."

  "They are the children of a god," I whispered, as the water started to dance in his hand. I couldn't tell if that was just the force with which it fell, or if he was attempting to reach the Stoicheio he normally could tap into.

  "Yes," he replied steadily. "Just like the Alchemists were once followers of Aetheros. And part of their role was to record history, preserve it, and when it repeated itself be there to guide the Athanatos to the other side."

  "Alchemists are some sort of religious guides?" I asked, dumbfounded.

  "Without which the Ekmetalleftis will not be able to ride out this storm, this new Genesis and whatever else comes," Mark concluded.

  Then his eyes flashed briefly ice blue, immediately paling, as he collapsed to the ground, frothing at the mouth and gurgling through a torrent of water as it poured out between his bluing lips.

  Chapter 17

  I Don't Suppose You Can Pretend We're On A Desert Island And It's Just The Two Of Us, Could You?

  I screamed. It was instinctive. A loud, high-pitched, frightened call for help. And then my body kicked into gear. Turning Mark onto his side, slapping his back in an effort to get the water that was drowning him out of his lungs. It poured out over the dirt between th
e raised roots, pooling in an ominous puddle before his slack mouth.

  "What happened?" Theo shouted as he ran from the new front door towards where I worked on Mark. Nico hot on his trail.

  My eyes flicked back to the limp form before me, not bothering to waste time answering Theo. The water had stopped flowing, but my brother wasn't breathing.

  Unlike an Athanatos an Alchemist is still human, just a little hardier, a little longer lived, and able to steal Elements from time to time. I was sure without breathing, though, he would die.

  I checked for a pulse, thankfully finding a thready one in his neck, and leaned down to offer mouth-to-mouth.

  "Bloody hell," Theo exclaimed when he saw what I was doing and realised what exactly was going on. He fell to his knees opposite as Nico stood above us and watched on.

  "Check his chest," Nico suggested after several fraught moments.

  I pulled back and waited to see if Mark's chest inflated. It took only a second, but it felt like a lifetime. A shallow indrawn breath.

  "Thank God," I said, falling back on my butt utterly shaken.

  "Let's get him inside," Theo suggested, moving to take his shoulders as Nico gripped Mark's legs. "And you had better be ready to explain yourselves," he shot at me over Mark's still unconscious body, determination and anger mixing with disappointment and concern.

  It was a strange combination of emotions to see across his handsome face, because although the anger should have been the one I most hated, it was the disappointment that really made me feel like crap.

  I followed behind them, past a frantic Sonya and worried looking Aktor, towards the room Isadora had just vacated. I watched from the far side of the space as Theo and Nico placed my brother down on the mattress, and then Nico escaped out of the door without making any eye contact.

  Leaving me alone with an irate Athanatos.

  "OK," Theo said softly, deadly softly. "Explain."

  My eyes stayed glued to Mark's chest, watching it rise and fall rhythmically, deeper now than before. I couldn't look Theo in the face. I hadn't broken my promise. I hadn't. But somehow I'd scared him half to death anyway.

  "Mark wanted to reach Water," I said in a whisper, my voice cracking slightly at the thought of my brother drowning.