“And maybe even Typhon and the Titans themselves,” he added, his lips straightening into a grim line.
“Darius and the Head Elders better have an amazing plan.”
“They’ll come up with something,” he said. “And remember—we have the Olympian gods on our side. If it comes to it, they’ll fight with us. They’ll have to.”
I hoped more than anything that he was right.
We chatted for the rest of the ride, and it didn’t take long to reach my house. He pulled into my driveway and came to a stop.
I took my seatbelt off and faced him, not wanting to leave yet. “Thanks for taking me home,” I said, pushing my hair behind my ears. Even though I’d just told him that nothing could happen between us, my heart pounded harder than ever, and I watched him in expectation, wondering what he would do.
If he kissed me again, I wouldn’t be able to resist.
“Like I said, your house is only a block away from where I’m going.” His formal tone surprised me, and he sat so straight and rigid. It was like there was a wall between us. Which I should have been grateful for—since it was what I’d ask for—but it disappointed me anyway. “I’ll see you in school tomorrow.”
“Right.” I hopped out of the car, although I didn’t close the door. “And thanks for everything you did in the cave. If you hadn’t come up with the idea of letting me channel your energy, I wouldn’t have been able to heal Kate.”
“It wasn’t too hard to think of,” he said simply. “It’s just something that no one ever talks about because of the risks. But you were going to try healing her even though you didn’t have enough energy left to do it, and I couldn’t let you die. I would never be able to forgive myself if that had happened.”
With those words, the energy between us grew stronger, like a string pulling me towards him. I wanted to take back everything I’d said earlier, about how we couldn’t be together.
But if Blake knew what I did to the harpy—using black energy to kill it with a single touch—would he still feel the same way about me? Or would he be scared?
I couldn’t be sure.
So as hard as it was, I said goodnight and headed inside, not looking back as he drove away.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
When I got inside, I found my mom in her studio finishing up the painting I’d seen earlier that week. She didn’t question it when I told her I was going to take a nap. She probably assumed Kate and I had stayed up all night talking, like I usually did when I slept over my friends’ houses back in Georgia.
I peeked inside Becca’s room on the way to mine. She sat at her computer, either doing homework or messaging her friends—probably the latter. She’d pulled her hair back into a messy bun, and she wore a red sweatshirt from her middle school back in Georgia. Dark circles rimmed her normally bright eyes. I’d never seen her so exhausted. Even though Darius had wiped her memory, could she possibly still remember anything from yesterday?
She must have heard me approach, because she rotated her chair and smirked. “Did you have fun this weekend?” she asked, waggling her eyebrows. “Especially on Friday night, in particular?”
I almost asked her what had happened on Friday night, but then I remembered—that was the night I’d sneaked out with Blake. So much had happened since then that it didn’t feel like it had only been two days ago.
And judging by how relaxed Becca was being about it, I knew Darius’s mind trick had worked. Becca didn’t remember the harpy kidnapping her, or anything that had happened in the cave. She was safe. I had to resist the urge to run up to her and give her a big hug. However, Darius had said to act like everything was normal, and that definitely wouldn’t be a normal thing for me to do.
“Yeah, tons.” I rolled my eyes, forcing sarcasm into my tone. “Thanks for asking. I owe you one for covering for me.”
“How about you tell me who it was you met up with, and we’ll call it even?”
“It doesn’t matter who it was,” I mumbled. “Because nothing can happen between me and him. It was a one-time thing.”
“So it was a guy!” She smiled in victory. Then the sound of a message dinged on her computer, and she read it, typing up a response. Whoever she was talking to had distracted her for now.
Glad that our conversation seemed to be over, I headed back to my room and collapsed onto my bed. But the sun shining through the window kept me awake, and eventually I forced myself back up so I could close the blinds.
A small, wooden box sitting outside my window made me freeze in place. That definitely hadn’t been there yesterday. I pried the window open and pulled the box inside. It fit in the palm of my hand, and the golden latch easily popped open.
Inside sat a delicate golden charm in the shape of a sun, strung through a matching chain. It reminded me of the pendant that Blake had made for me in ceramics, except the smoothness of this one was much finer and better crafted.
I closed the window, placed the box on my bed, and took out the necklace. The sun charm hummed against my skin, glowing with a light of its own. Like magic.
I rotated it in my palm, stopping when I saw an engraving on the back—an elegant “A” carved into the metal. I traced my fingers over the letter, allowing its meaning to sink in.
Maybe Darius’s idea of Apollo being my father wasn’t so far-fetched after all.
ELEMENTALS
THE BLOOD OF THE HYDRA
Book two in the Elementals series
COMING APRIL 2016
Read on for a sneak peak!
CHAPTER ONE
I held steady onto my bow, the arrow pointed straight at the bull’s-eye. As always, my mind knew exactly what to do—the stance I should take, how to hold the weapon, and how to balance my weight. I drew the bowstring back, aimed, and let the arrow soar.
It missed the target, instead embedding itself in the wall.
“Chris!” I yelled, dropping the bow to my side and spinning around. Sure enough, Chris stood behind me, his hands raised as if to protect himself from flying arrows. “Stop using your powers on me during practice. That would have been a perfect shot.”
He smirked, and a breeze blew past my face. The next thing I knew, an arrow from my quiver floated up and propelled itself straight into the bulls-eye. “There’s a perfect shot,” he said, pumping his fist up in victory.
“We’re supposed to be practicing using weapons without our powers right now,” I reminded him. “Just because Darius had to go upstairs to take a call doesn’t mean we can do whatever we want.” I took out another arrow, balanced it on the bow again, and released.
It joined the other straight on the bulls-eye.
I used to think I was a natural at tennis. But that was nothing compared to how quickly I’d picked up on archery. Which, according to Kate, made sense, since Apollo was my father. One of his talents was said to be archery.
Although of course, I’d learned this all from what Kate had told me, since I’d never actually met my father.
“Want to try?” I asked Chris, holding the bow out to him in challenge. “Without using your power?”
“You know I can’t use that.” He walked over to the selection of weapons laid out on the counter and picked up a knife, smiling as he examined it. “But this, I’ve been practicing with. Check it out.”
He geared up and threw the knife towards the target.
It landed further away than my first arrow.
“I’m getting better,” he said sheepishly. “When I first started, it kept bouncing off the wall and onto the floor.” He used his power to lift another knife from the counter and shoot it at the target. This time, it landed straight in the center. “It’s so much easier that way,” he said.
“Until you use your powers so much that you run out of energy,” I said. “You know what Darius told us. We can train and learn how to use weapons ourselves. We have to save our energy to use our powers when we really need them.”
“I know, I know.” Chris sighed, exasperated, and pushed his hai
r out of his eyes. I knew why he was frustrated—we’d been practicing every day after school since our fight with the harpy, but Chris hadn’t picked up on using weapons as fast as the rest of us.
“You just need to practice,” I said. “Your powers help you more with using weapons than any of the rest of ours do, but if you keep using them as a crutch, you’re never going to get better.”
He raised his hands up again, and both arrows and knives floated back to us. The arrows settled themselves back inside my quiver, and the knives came straight back to his hands.
“Our powers do come in handy, though,” he said with a wink. “Less clean up time.”
“Isn’t this supposed to be no power hour?” Blake asked, strolling over to join us. In his all-black training outfit, he looked like he had years of experience on Chris, who wore sweats and a t-shirt. And his warm eyes were focused straight on me, which as always, took my breath away.
But even though he’d broken up with Danielle soon after our fight with the harpy, he was still off-limits. Because the five of us—me, Blake, Danielle, Chris, and Kate—were a team. We had to learn to work together. And dating Danielle’s boyfriend right after Blake had broken up with her would put a huge rift in that team.
I picked up another arrow, strung it in the bow, and released it straight into the bulls-eye.
“No powers.” I glanced at Blake over my shoulder and smiled. “That was all natural talent.”
“Except I’m pretty sure I just saw some arrows and knives flying—towards both of you,” he said. “And as far as I’m aware, the wall doesn’t have much of an aim.”
“Guilty as charged,” Chris said, holding both knives in the air. With his bright eyes and boyish grin, he looked more like he was preparing for a cooking challenge than for battling ancient mythological monsters.
“Since you’re over here breaking the rules, I figured I would join,” Blake said, pulling his lighter out of his pocket. “Have you ever shot a flaming arrow?”
“No.” I smiled at where this was going. “But I think now would be a great time to try.”
“I thought you might say that.” He walked closer until he was standing only a foot away from me, his eyes not leaving mine the entire time. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe—all I could do was focus on him. He flicked on the lighter, picked up an arrow, and dipped it into the flame.
I worried that the flame might go out—after all, I doubted the arrows were meant to be lit on fire—but it held strong. Blake was getting better with using his power every day.
“Here.” He held the flaming arrow out to me. “Try it now.”
I reached for it, and my fingers brushed against his. Heat traveled up my arms and to my cheeks, and I moved my gaze away from his to focus on the target, hoping he hadn’t noticed the affect he had on me.
I steadied my stance, lifted the bow to eye-level, and strung the arrow as usual. But the flame danced before my eyes, reminding me that this was anything but normal. This was magic. I pulled back on the bowstring, feeling Blake’s eyes on me, and reminded myself to focus despite the distraction of the fire. I aimed and released, sending the arrow straight to the target. It wasn’t a bulls-eye, but it was close.
A few seconds passed, and the flames eventually died out.
“Let’s try again,” Blake said, taking a few steps back. “How far away is that target?”
“About sixty feet,” I answered.
“Which is much farther than I can aim with my fireballs,” he said. “My aim’s good for about ten to twenty feet, and that’s it. And I’m nowhere near as good with shooting weapons as you are. We might not always be right next to each other in a fight, but we can still work together. Are you ready?”
“For what?”
He flicked the lighter on again, balancing another ball of fire in his hand. “String the bow, and I’ll show you.”
I did as he said, the arrow pointed straight to the target. “Now what?” I asked.
“Don’t flinch.”
He threw the fireball at the tip of the arrow, which burst into flame, and caused me to jump. “Hey!” I yelled at him. “You could have warned me.”
“I did.” He laughed. “I told you not to flinch.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I corrected my stance and pulled back on the bowstring, sending the arrow straight towards the bulls-eye.
“Again,” Blake instructed, and I drew another arrow. This time, I knew to expect the flame. Once the arrow was ablaze, I released it to the target, and grabbed another. It was like my body was working on super speed, and the rush was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I didn’t want to stop. So we kept going—Blake lighting up the arrow and me shooting—until all of the arrows were gone from the quiver and embedded in the target.
“Wow,” I said, catching my breath as I admired the arrows still on fire.
The blaze grew taller, and then it exploded, engulfing the target completely. Before I knew what was happening, a stream of water flew towards the target, extinguishing the fire.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Danielle’s voice echoed through the practice chamber. “Trying to burn down our training center?”
“We were practicing a new technique,” I said. “We must have gotten carried away.”
“You could say that.” Danielle coughed, fanning the smoke out of her face. A breeze blew through the air—courtesy of Chris—who sent the smoke out of the window near the ceiling of the basement.
“Think of it this way,” Blake said. “If that had been a monster’s head, it would be dead by now.”
Kate burst in from the shooting room, gun in hand. Strength-wise, she was the weakest of the five of us, so a gun had quickly become her weapon of choice. It had taken her a while to warm up to using such an intense weapon, but now she held onto it so naturally that it could have been an extra appendage.
“I smelled smoke,” she said, her mouth dropping open when she saw the destroyed target. “What happened in here?”
We caught her up on what we’d done, Blake and I alternating on telling different parts of the story.
“There’s no water in here,” Kate said once we were finished, turning to Danielle. “If there’s no water, how did you put out the fire?”
“There’s water in the air,” Danielle said, as if it should be obvious. “I condensed it into liquid and used it to put out the fire.” She looked over at Blake and smiled, although it seemed strained. “You aren’t the only ones who have been practicing.”
“Except this is supposed to be no power hour,” Kate said, holding up her gun. “Remember what happened with the harpy? We used all our energy killing it. We were lucky that there was that portal from the cave to the playground, but what if that hadn’t been there? We would have been stuck in that cave for who knows how long. We need to get better as using weapons, so we only use our powers when we absolutely need them.”
“They were doing it first.” Danielle huffed. “When I saw the target explode, I figured I would actually do something useful by putting out the fire.”
“And I wasn’t using my power,” I said. “I was practicing archery.”
“You weren’t using your power because your power can’t help you defend yourself,” Danielle said.
“Whoa there,” Blake said, holding his arms out. “No need to get nasty.”
“I was just saying it like it is.” Danielle shrugged, her eyes flashing with hurt. “And you have no right to tell me what to do. You lost that privilege when you dumped me.”
I looked back and forth between the two of them, reminded again about why Blake and I couldn’t be together. Danielle clearly wasn’t over him. There was also so much I wanted to say, but I kept my mouth shut. Because Danielle had no idea about what I could really do. She and the others only knew about my power to heal. (Which I actually think is quite useful in battle, seeing as it’s the power that can end up saving us all.) None of them knew about the other side of my power—the ability to kill with
a touch. It was how I’d killed the harpy. I’d called on black energy, touched the harpy, and sent the energy into its body, which killed it instantly.
They all thought that the harpy had died because I’d staked it with a stalagmite. And they could never know the truth. Because using black energy … it was illegal. If anyone found out about what I could do, I could have my powers stripped. Or worse.
I shivered at the thought, and wrapped my arms around myself. I didn’t want to know what the Head Elders might do to me if they found out about the true extent of my abilities. Which was why I had to keep them secret from everyone—even from the other Elementals.
“We should clean up,” I said, changing the subject. “And I guess we’ll be needing a new target. That one is pretty …”
“Cooked?” Blake smirked, finishing my sentence. “Fried?”
“Yeah.” I laughed. “Exactly.”
“I’ll help you clean up, but I won’t be the one telling Darius,” Kate said. “That’s up to one of you.”
We didn’t have time to debate who would be telling him that we’d destroyed yet another piece of training equipment, because he came running into the practice room, swinging the door open with so much force that it banged against the wall. His eyes were wide, his hair mussed up, and his glasses crooked on the tip of his nose.
“Gather your weapons and meet me at my van.” He looked at each of us, unfazed by the charred target. “A monster’s been spotted at the Hemlock Center.”
* * *
Make sure you get Elementals: The Blood of the Hydra on release day by pre-ordering it NOW!
And if you enjoyed this book, please remember to leave a review at your favorite retailer. Positive reviews are the best way to thank an author for writing a book you loved.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wrote Elementals when I was a senior in college, and it’s come a long way since then. I’m so happy to finally be able to share it with you!
Elementals: The Prophecy of Shadows Page 20