Master of Elements

by Sonya Bateman

  “And two,” the sheriff went on as he thumbed the snap on the gun holster open, “that piece of shit Buick over there belongs to Neva Cormier, not you. So unless you dropped out of the sky, I’d like to know how the hell you —”

  “Relax, Asa,” a vaguely familiar voice said behind me. “I was expecting them.”

  The sheriff flinched and let out a gasp. “Sweet crispy Jesus, Nate. I wish you’d quit doing that,” he said as his hand fell away from the gun. “Expecting them for what?”

  “Never mind that.” The old man from the mirror, who’d come out of nowhere, walked around me and nodded in Ian’s direction as he moved toward the sheriff. He wore a similar blue shirt to the one I’d seen before, maybe the same one, under a thick flannel jacket, with faded jeans and dark brown work boots. “Everything’s just fine, Asa,” he said in a hollow, almost metallic voice. “Bear triggered the alarm again, that’s all. You don’t even know these men are here.”

  Holy shit. I’d heard that tone before. The old guy was doing Tory’s brainwashing-voice thing.

  Sheriff Asa blinked a few times and stared at Nate. “Damn bears,” he said eventually. “Nate, what are you doing out here so early? You didn’t try to shoot this one, did you?” As he spoke, the sheriff kept his gaze almost frantically fixed to the old man, like he didn’t dare look toward Ian and me. It was kind of creepy.

  “Nah. Old folks are just natural early risers,” Nate said in a normal, pleasant tone. “You should go on back to the station, Asa. Don’t you have Charlie in the drunk tank?”

  The sheriff gave a soupy nod. “Yeah, you’re right. I’d better go. Old Charlie,” he muttered as he moved back toward the Crown Vic. For a second he glanced in our direction, but he looked away fast and sneezed violently. “Damn. Hope I’m not coming down with a summer cold,” he said, climbing into the driver’s seat. “Took me two weeks to shake the one I got last year. See you, Nate.”

  Nate raised a hand in the air as the sheriff reversed, swung the car around, and drove out of the parking lot. When he turned toward us, he was smiling. “You got here fast, Gahiji-an,” he said. “Good thing I sensed you up here. I didn’t expect you for another few days, at least.” He looked at me. “My apologies, mud puppy. I don’t know your name.”

  “Well, it’s definitely not mud puppy,” I said with a smirk, halfway to fascinated by this guy. I could feel quite a lot of juice in him, but I hadn’t sensed him at all until he made himself visible — and I was usually pretty good at sensing invisible djinn. Or part-djinn. “The name’s Donatti. And we call him Ian, by the way.”

  “Good idea. Gahiji-an is quite the mouthful. A lot like Nohtaikhel,” he said with a crooked smile. “Well, you’d better come with me. It is something of a journey to get there.”

  “You are taking us to the Annukhai village?” Ian said.

  “Uh, yeah. The village of the ancestors,” Nate replied with a shrug. “I can’t take you all the way in, though. Once we reach the storm, you’re on your own.”

  I frowned. “What storm?”

  “You’ll see.” Nate grinned again. “Hope you brought snowshoes.”

  Terrific. Not only didn’t we have snowshoes, but one of us didn’t even have a shirt.

  We were apparently even less prepared than I thought.

  Chapter 7

  The entire town of Silvak was tucked behind the oversized bar, out of sight from the road. It was a small, forlorn-looking place, the houses scattered randomly with crooked dirt paths between them that looked just wide enough for one vehicle, maybe. Most of the structures looked to have been patched up multiple times with sheet metal, wood pallets, aluminum siding, and whatever materials might’ve been lying around.

  “I feel bad doing that to Asa,” Nate said as we followed him toward town. “He’s a good sheriff, a good man, but I think it’s better if nobody knows you’re here. They’ll ask too many questions, and they won’t like my answers.”

  “Why are we here, exactly?” I said.

  He chuckled. “I don’t know, exactly.” He glanced over his shoulder and smirked. “See, you don’t like my answers either.”

  “How did you send that message?” Ian asked, giving the ramshackle town the hairy eyeball as we walked. “How could you have known it would come to us? We took that bracelet from a thief, a man we had no particular plans to confront. And he claims to have stolen it from a child at a museum.”

  Nate shrugged one shoulder and slowed as we approached a house that looked more like a hut, with a big, black Silverado 3500 parked beside it. “I’ll tell you what I can on the way,” he said, stopping beside the truck to slap the side of the bed. “Hop in. I just have to grab something that’s meant for you, and we can go.” He started for the hut, then turned around and said, “I would invite you inside for coffee, but I’ve only got the one chair.”

  Laughing again, he ducked inside the little house and shut the door behind him.

  Ian took the back seat of the quad cab, and I sat shotgun. “So, what do you think of this guy?” I said when I closed the door.

  “I am not certain what to make of him.” Ian shifted around, trying to find room for his long legs. “He is not djinn, but it seems that he may be a scion.”

  “Great.” Djinn weren’t supposed to be able to reproduce in the human realm. It was part of the restrictions of the tethers — they came with built-in infertility. Usually it was bad news when someone went to the trouble of finding a way around that. “Just tell me that doesn’t mean these guys are trying to conquer humanity. Seriously, how many times do we have to save the world from evil djinn?”

  Ian laughed. “Perhaps not this time,” he said. “The Annukhai vanished long before I was born, before the wars and the travel restrictions. If they are here in the human realm, they would not be bound to tethers, and therefore able to have children.”

  “Wait, you were born? I never realized you had a childhood, Ian.” I was only half joking. Ian didn’t really talk about his past much, unless I had to drag something relevant out of him in order to fight whatever we were fighting at the time. Most of the little I knew about his life before he was banished from the djinn realm came from Akila.

  I tried to picture Ian as a child, but all I could see was a little wolf puppy racing around and growling constantly, trying to savage anything that didn’t run away fast enough.

  “Yes, I was once a child. Djinn do not, in fact, spring fully formed from the brows of their fathers.” He gave me a look. “If you ask me where djinn babies come from, I will break your arms.”

  I smirked. “No need to get violent,” I said. “But speaking of your father, you really don’t know why Nate mentioned him?”

  A troubled expression eased across his face. “My father never spoke of the Annukhai,” he said. “I heard the legends from others — a few from the elders of our clan, but most from children my age. Bedtime stories told to frighten them into behaving.”

  “Hey, hold on. You never mentioned anything about scary bedtime stories,” I said. “What kind of legends are we talking about, here?”

  He laughed softly and shook his head. “They are no more frightening, or real, than your fairy tales,” he said. “The stories claimed that a monster laid waste to the village, trapped them inside, and ate the Annukhai one by one, saving the children for last. Because they tasted sweeter. Parents told their children that if they did not listen to their elders, the monster would come and eat them all up.”

  An involuntary shiver moved through me. “That doesn’t sound like any fairy tale I’ve ever heard,” I said. “Not even the Grimm Brothers are that dark.”

  Just then, the door to the house opened and Nate emerged with the rolled hide he’d been reading from in the mirror message. He came straight to the truck, climbed into the driver’s seat and tossed the hide to Ian. “You’re supposed to have that,” he said as he shut the door and started the engine. “I guess you can probably get more out of it than me.”

  I twisted ar
ound to look while Nate backed the truck away from the house and started a slow, bumpy crawl along one of the dirt paths. Ian unfolded the hide slowly, opening it on his lap to reveal symbols that were almost djinn writing, but not quite — like the last few words Nate had spoken at the end of the message. My eyes watered trying to read it.

  “This is a very ancient dialect,” Ian said, staring at the scrap of leather. “It is difficult to decipher.”

  “You too, huh?” Nate laughed under his breath. “That’s the ancestors for you. Always being cryptic.”

  Ian looked at him. “Why do you call them ancestors?”

  “I suppose for the same reason anyone else does,” he said with a strange expression. “They are the generations of my family that came before me. Does this ring a bell? Or maybe you don’t have ancestors where you come from.” He paused and flicked a glance at me. “Where do you come from, anyway?”

  “Uh, New York,” I said.

  “Ah, that explains a lot. City people.”

  I had to smirk at the assumption that anyone from New York lived in ‘the city.’ “I meant central New York,” I said. “You know, the state. Not the big, crowded island.”

  “I stand corrected. You are not city people,” Nate drawled with wry amusement. “So anyway, that scroll you’re holding comes from my ancestors. Specifically my great-great-great grandfather, Khanaq.” He paused and frowned. “There may be a few more greats I neglected to include.”

  I laughed a little, remembering a similar sentiment I’d expressed when Ian finally explained how we were related. “So you are a scion, then,” I said. “You’re descended from the djinn, like me.”

  Nate gave me a look that said I was a few marbles short of a full bag. “Khanaq was a shaman,” he said carefully, like a man breaking the news to a child that Santa doesn’t exist. “You do know that genies aren’t real, don’t you?”

  Ian and I shared a glance, and I knew what he was thinking — besides that he hated being called a genie and probably would’ve strangled Nate for that, if he thought he could get away with it. Khanaq must’ve lied to a bunch of humans about what he was, probably so his magic wouldn’t freak them out. This happened hundreds of years ago, and the lie remained intact through the generations. Which meant we’d have to go with it, too.

  “Right. I know they’re not real,” I said. “I meant, er, metaphorical genies. Like the spirits of our forefathers, or … something.”

  Nate blinked once. “Oh, boy. The ancestors sure picked a couple of bright bulbs to save them,” he said. “Are you two even shamans?”

  “Of course we are,” Ian said smoothly, sounding a lot less like a dumbass than me. “Tell me, Nate, did Khanaq come from the village?”

  “So the story goes,” Nate said as he visibly relaxed. “It’s said that Khanaq walked out of the storm, seeking warriors to help his people, but he was never able to find the way back in. Instead he became the shaman of my tribe, the Annuk. And his instructions, along with the totem bracelet, have been passed from generation to generation, waiting for the time when the blood would be offered, the words would be read, and the bracelet cast into the well of reflection to summon the great prince.” He shrugged and glanced in the rear view mirror at Ian. “Apparently that’s you,” he said. “It took me a while to figure out that the ‘well of reflection’ was supposed to be a mirror.”

  Vague as it was, I caught a lot of meaning in that story. Annuk was obviously short for Annukhai, and the whole blood-words-casting thing was a bridge spell. It didn’t explain how in the hell the bracelet got to us, apparently faster than Nate expected it to, but he didn’t seem to know anything about that.

  So maybe Khanaq had cast some kind of spell on the bracelet that would ensure it found the right person. Probably an unpleasant spell. Djinn magic was an elemental system, and besides the basic four, some of it worked with the element of blood.

  “I guess that’s about all,” Nate said. “And now, once I bring you to the storm, my task is done. You’re on your own with the Wendigo.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that word. “The what?”

  “The Wendigo,” Nate repeated. It didn’t sound any better the second time. “The monster you’re supposed to help the ancestors contain.”

  “Oh, right. That monster,” I muttered.

  I’d just have to hope that part of the story was as much of a lie as Khanaq being a shaman. Because if I ended up having to fight Ian’s children-eating fairy tale, I was going to be a very unhappy mud puppy.

  Chapter 8

  We’d been driving for a few hours, headed toward a distant range of mountains draped with heavy fog — or at least, that’s what I thought. Until we got close enough to see that the “fog” was a massive wall of moving snow that raged between and around the mountains. Thick, threatening clouds bruised the sky above, and the occasional silent flash of lightning stuttered through the storm.

  I could’ve sworn the lightning was green, but that had to be some kind of atmospheric trick. There was no such thing as green lightning.

  Nate stopped the truck in the middle of the road, still ahead of the mountains. Obviously he wasn’t worried about anyone else driving past, and it definitely looked like no one could’ve come through that storm toward us.

  But then I realized that I hadn’t seen a single other vehicle out here since we left Silvak.

  “All right, this is the end of the line for me,” Nate said as he put the truck in park. “Good luck to you both.”

  I frowned and glanced back at Ian, who also looked unhappy. “Uh, how far is it from here?” I said.

  “Are you kidding? Look.” Nate popped the door open, slid out of the truck and walked past the hood a few feet. He stuck an arm out. And it vanished.

  When he pulled it back a few seconds later, his arm was completely covered with snow.

  He came back to the truck, brushing the thick snow from his jacket sleeve as he walked. “Can’t bring you any closer than that,” he said. “All I know is that you just go straight ahead from here, between those two mountains, and what you’re looking for will be on the other side of the mountain pass.”

  “Very well, then. Thank you for your assistance,” Ian said suddenly as he opened the back door. “Come, Donatti. We should not waste any time.”

  “Um, okay.” Ian seemed strangely eager to plunge into an impossible freak snowstorm, but maybe he knew something I didn’t. He’d been poring over that scroll for most of the ride, presumably trying to read it. I hoped he’d figured something out. “Thanks for the ride, and the information,” I said to Nate. “Maybe we’ll see you around.”

  “Stranger things have happened,” the old man said.

  On that ominous note, I got out and hauled my bag with me, then stood with Ian while Nate backed up, swerved into a three-point turn, and drove away.

  “What was all that about?” I said as we watched the truck vanish into the distance. “You seemed in a hurry to get rid of him.”

  Ian shrugged. “He knew nothing useful. His people were not even aware that their ancestor was a djinn,” he said. “We are better off figuring the rest out on our own.”

  “Right.” I should’ve known it was mostly because Ian didn’t put much stock in humans. Not that I could really blame him, after everything he’d been through. “So, did you get through any of the ancient texts, there?” I said, trying not to be freaked out that we were standing in a normal, sunny, sixty-degree day, five feet from a raging snowstorm that cut across the world like a curtain. I could feel the frigid cold radiating out from it, but there wasn’t even a single flake on the road here, and not a cloud in the blue sky above.

  Ian rolled the hide carefully and stuck it inside his vest, his gaze on the storm. “Some of it,” he said slowly. “The writing does mention me by name, and my father. It also mentions the Wihtiko, which is what I believe Nate meant by Wendigo.”

  I decided I liked that word even less than the first one. “And that would be …?”r />
  He smirked. “The monster that devoured the Annukhai.”

  “Seriously? Okay, this mission is off,” I said. “Evil djinn are one thing, but we’re not going to fight a people-eating monster. Or a djinn-eating one.”

  “Really, Donatti. If this so-called monster wiped out the entire clan, how could anyone have asked for our help?” he said. “According to the scroll, they are not looking to defeat the Wihtiko. Whatever this creature is, they have contained it centuries ago, and now they merely seek help in re-casting the containment spell.”

  I managed to relax, a little. “So we go in there, cast a spell, and go home,” I said. “That’s all they want?”

  “It seems to be.”

  “All right. I can probably manage that.” I moved slowly toward the wall of white and stuck my arm in, the way Nate had done. “Jesus!” I yelped, drawing back instantly as the brutal cold took my breath away. It felt like needles stabbing through my jacket. I shook my arm and brushed the snow off as fast as I could. “Please tell me that scroll said something about a warm, dry secret passageway through this stuff.”

  He shook his head. “It said nothing of the sort. Only to walk straight through, as Nate instructed,” he said. “But the storm cannot be that bad.”

  “Oh, really. Why don’t you see for yourself?”

  Ian stared at me for a second, and then turned and walked straight into the white wall of doom.

  “Hey, don’t do that!” I shouted. “You have no idea what’s over there—”

  Before I could finish the sentence, Ian staggered back out and stumbled a few steps, shivering and gasping, completely coated in snow. He started swiping it off frantically, like it was a swarm of fire ants. “Dear gods, that is unpleasant,” he said hoarsely.

  I folded my arms. “Told you.”

  “I am concerned that you may have difficulty navigating such an environment,” Ian said with a deep frown.