Savior (Starlight Book 4)

by D. N. Hoxa

  So instead of driving myself crazy watching a screen, I ran around the hallways of the Base and kept myself busy by focusing on my chest and whatever it was that told me who was who, or who was what. The same thing that would tell me exactly where Illyon was, if it were close.

  I ran out of breath by the time I made it to the other side of the Base and confirmed my suspicions. Illyon was nowhere down there, and a look at the screen of my phone told me only ten minutes had passed. Torn between giving Kyle a bit more time and keeping myself busy, I made my way to the closest exit. I could check the outside grounds and maybe pick up on something. Anything at all that could help. Once that was done and Kyle told me what he found, I could reach out to Arsenal and give him the new assignment. It was very optimistic of me to think that he’d go through with it without at least questioning me, but I had nothing else to hold onto. If I didn’t believe I was going to find my Illyon, I was going to break down, and judging by the last times that had happened, it wasn’t going to be pretty. I would hate to lose my mind and waste even more time. As long as I had something to do and kept myself busy, I would be fine.

  12

  ——————————

  The sun shone somewhere, but I didn’t feel it. As soon as I walked out of the tunnel that for some reason was always muddy, the large trees that seemed to keep the cold prisoner under the branches brought chills down my spine. I could’ve stayed there all day long, though my short sleeves weren’t my friend right that second. With a deep sigh, I stared forward, my senses as alert as they could possibly be, ready to feel any type of energy no matter how small. The wards put in place by the best witches and warlocks we had, according to Aaron, were strong. They held the place hidden in plain sight pretty well, though it was nothing if some of Samayan’s people got just a hint about the general area—even the state. They’d be able to find us within days. And if someone was close enough to me to take a necklace off me, what made me so sure that Samayan didn’t know where we were already?

  The thought made me shiver. Trying to take my mind off that was like trying to put a forest fire out with my breath. I closed my eyes and reached out with my senses, as far as they could reach. Nothing. Not even a weak signal from Illyon’s distinctive energy. Still, I continued walking, wherever my legs would take me, closer and closer to the edge of the wards. I still had Grandmother’s flower necklace with me. It was going to protect me from unwanted tracking spells. At least I hoped it still did.

  I walked and jogged and stopped to feel around me for what felt like hours but were only minutes. Running back to the Base and to Kyle’s office was going to take me only a few more. I should’ve just stayed with him. I already knew I wasn’t going to find anything up there. The only way I was going to find it was through Arsenal, if I was lucky, or by finding Samayan. He probably had it. It was the only thing that made sense because he was the only one who knew I had it.

  And the only thing that gave me some calmness was knowing that without me, he could never turn the sun-shaped necklace into a book again. Without me, he wouldn’t be able to read Illyon or copy any kind of spell from it. It was only a matter of time before he came back to me, be it through an illusion like the night before or through some of his supernaturals. And when he did, I was going to be ready. I wasn’t going to fall for it like the night before.

  For now, though, the best I could do was go back to the Base and speak to Arsenal. Even send word to Sam. He could have heard something. I was going to take what I could get, even bits and pieces.

  But just as I turned back where I came from, ready to run to the Base, I felt it.

  The energy was unmistakable. Not Illyon, definitely a lot weaker, but it was there. A deep breath and a second of concentration pointed me west. I ran without thought.

  It was a supernatural, one strong enough for my senses to pick up from all the way to the other side of the Base’s entrance. The closer I got, the clearer the energy became. A vampire.

  Could it be that Samayan had come to face me in person?

  No, I thought. He wouldn’t leave his hiding place when he could just as easily use the Fifth Dimension or illusions for meetings and talks. And the vampire that was barely fifty feet away from me wasn’t even half as strong as Samayan. My last hope was that this was the thief, because even though I couldn’t feel Illyon, he could have shielded it somehow. A spell, or a magical artifact—anything at all appealed to me in the seconds it took me to run as fast as my legs would carry me to him.

  I saw him looking around and up the trees like he had no idea where he was. Good news was that he was alone. Bad news was that he was very big and very strong. Old, too. I had nothing on me but Bob, and the sun wasn’t going to be much help. The trees and the thick branches didn’t let a single ray slip through.

  Still, that didn’t stop me. I had my body with me, my strongest weapon. And I had the elements, too. I didn’t slow my pace. I jumped him just as he sensed me and turned in my direction.

  I expected him to be faster, but he didn’t move away. Instead, he just looked at me, wide eyes and all, and waited for me to knock him off his boots and on the ground. Bob was in my hand, right under his chin, while I stayed with both my knees on his gut, just like I’d landed.

  “Wow, wow, wow…” he breathed as his eyes changed color, from a deep sapphire green to silver. His fangs greeted me, too.

  “Who are you and what are you doing here?” I hissed and pushed Bob’s blade deeper into his skin. It wasn’t silver, but it was still going to hurt him. It was stupid of me to go up there unarmed. Maybe the Illyon thing had gotten to me more than I’d realized.

  “Listen, this is just a misunderstanding. I’m not here to fight. I’m all alone, okay?” His arms were still by his side, which was strange. He could’ve gotten me off him a thousand times by now. Why didn’t he?

  “Who the hell are you? I’m not going to ask you again,” I repeated with as much venom as I could muster into my voice.

  “Frosty.” He didn’t even bother to move his neck away from Bob’s blade, though I’d already drawn blood. “My name is Frosty, and I’ll tell you what I’m doing here if you get off me. I don’t want to push you because I’m not here to fight, okay?”

  When was the last time a vampire had been so…so…polite?

  Not ever, I was sure. Even Jack was…well, Jack. Maybe it was that reason that made me jump off him and to my feet. I’d sensed nothing on him so far that would mark him as a threat in my mind. He really didn’t look like he wanted to fight.

  When he was standing in front of me, his eyes had gone back to green, his fangs gone. His ash grey hair should have made him look like a corpse, but it only made him look alive and healthy. Guess I’d seen stranger things.

  “Talk,” I said, Bob still ready, as well as the air and the earth beneath our feet.

  “I’m going to warn you, if you come at me like that again, I’m going to attack, too, and it won’t be pretty,” he said, a blond brow arched.

  I reached for my connection to earth, just to shake him off his feet and tell him where he could shove his warning, but I found it…lacking.

  What the hell?

  I tried again. Earth and I formed a connection instantly. It was the most concrete element, one I had no trouble with once I learned how to call it to my aid. So why the hell was our connection now so weak?

  “Can you put that knife down now?” The vampire nodded at Bob.

  I tried air. It was the element I reached for most often, once I’d come to know it a bit more than the others, as it was always there. But the truth was, though I could push the vampire back a couple of feet, it took me a lot to do it. A whole lot, in fact, and the wind that came out of my pores wasn’t strong.

  As realization sunk in, my lungs refused to let in air. My powers were leaking off me somehow, and it was all connected to Illyon.

  “Three seconds is all you have to tell me who you are and what you’re doing here. On the fourth, your hea
d will be detached from the rest of your body,” I said, but the vampire was looking at his body now and at the ground where his feet had left marks when the air pushed him back.

  “You’re her, aren’t you?” he said instead, a dumbfounded smile on his face.

  For some reason, that told me without words that this vampire in front of me was not the thief who stole Illyon. Shit. I returned Bob to the back of my pants and waited for him to tell me what he was doing there. He didn’t look like a Council sup. Definitely not one of Vlad’s. So was he Eleanor’s?

  “My name is Frosty. I’ve come from the city to find you. I’ve been stuck in here for two days now,” he said.

  Find me?

  “You still haven’t told me who you are,” I said through gritted teeth. The half smile on his face and the way he analyzed every inch of me didn’t exactly make me feel comfortable.

  “I work with Eleanor. With the Rebels. Like I said, I’m not here to fight. I just wanted to talk to you,” Frosty said. “You’re the Elemental, right?”

  “If you’re Eleanor’s, how come you’re out here for two days? How come I haven’t heard of your arrival?”

  “No, no, I’m not Eleanor’s. I just work with her occasionally,” he said, that goofy smile still on his face.

  “You’ve officially lost me.” In the world I knew, if you were a supernatural, you were either with the Council or with the Red Rebels. There was no in between.

  “We like to call ourselves independent,” Frosty said. “We’re a group of about two hundred living across the country, mostly in New York. We’ve helped Eleanor for some time now—she sired me. We help in any way we can, but we like to keep ourselves out of the big picture. We want no trouble so we stay away from the Council, and they keep out of our way, too.”

  Now, that smelled real bad right there. I crossed my arms in front of my chest, half annoyed and half thankful for the distraction this strange vampire brought me.

  “The Council keeps out of your way, why?” I’d worked with those people for far too long, and I knew for a fact that they didn’t just keep out of someone’s way.

  “It’s the arrangement we made,” said the vampire, brows raised and all.

  “You’re going to have to do better than that.” He was obviously not telling me something. Something pretty important—otherwise, why try to hide it? He told me everything else I asked.

  “Listen, I’ve been out here for two days without blood, completely disoriented. The spells at work around here have messed up my mind, and I’d like to just rest for a few. After, I’ll tell you everything, I promise.”

  Wasn’t that a nice joke?

  I laughed and the expression on the vampire’s face turned from tired to completely confused. He kept analyzing me, but now, he looked more uncomfortable than ever.

  “Here’s the thing, Frosty—no.” It was the simplest way I could put it for him. “The only way you’re moving from this place still alive is if you tell me everything I want to know.”

  “If you speak to Eleanor, she’ll—”

  “I’m not going to speak to anyone about you, except you. Now, my patience wears thin extremely fast. Not one of my best traits, but the process has already begun. So if you want your head to stick to the rest of your body, just tell me why the Council lets you be independent.”

  A second later, our friend Frosty there lost all of his charm and good spirits. His eyes began to turn to silver slowly, and he became even paler than normal. He obviously didn’t like to be spoken to in that manner. Maybe I’d been a bit of a bitch, but I had a shitload of stuff to go through and wasting time going in rounds with him just didn’t make my list of things to do for the day. Besides, even though he looked and sounded sincere, I still hadn’t completely ruled out that he was, in fact, the thief.

  “A bet,” he said, then spit right in front of his feet. Ugh. Whatever happened to manners? “I bet against Vladimir about an impossible job, and I completed it. As a reward, I and my subjects got to keep our independence, so long as we didn’t cause any trouble.”

  Oh, wow. Fucking hell, that’s rich! I almost wanted to run and find Vlad, just so I could rub this in his face. A two-hundred-year-old vamp who beat the almighty Vlad? Fucking priceless.

  “And whenever I have the time and the patience to listen, I’m going to love hearing that story,” I said, a huge grin on my face. “Say I believe you.” I was going to have to check with Eleanor, and that didn’t sit too well with me. I didn’t exactly look forward to seeing her, or any of the Elders, any time soon. “What did you want to talk to me about? And how did you get Eleanor to tell you where we were?”

  Could have been wrong but Frosty’s fangs told just how much he liked to be questioned the way I was questioning him. To his credit, he didn’t hold back.

  “She owed me a favor. And I wanted to talk to you about a situation back in the city. I’m hoping I can get you to help me.”

  “What situation?” Things were tense all over the country, I guessed, but the way he said it, it didn’t sound like he meant anything to do with the potion and the upcoming war.

  “Vampires have been disappearing for several months now. Female vampires. More than thirty are missing last time I checked.”

  Huh. Vampires were not exactly easy to kidnap, rape, or kill. They didn’t just go missing, especially females. They were a lot more powerful than the males. My curiosity burned a hole in my brain for a long second. It would have been something I would have wanted to investigate had it been any other time. Unfortunately, now was not it.

  “Sorry to disappoint ya, Frosty, but I’m busy preparing for war against the Council, in case you haven’t heard. Don’t have the time to track missing independent vamps. I’m afraid you’ve wasted your time.”

  I turned around to walk back to the Base entrance. Meeting the vampire had been fun, a much needed distraction from my real problems. Like Illyon. Instinctively, my hand went to my chest, but all my fingers found was Grandmother’s necklace. Nothing else. And to top it all off, it had just become alarmingly more difficult to connect to the elements.

  “A favor for a favor,” the vampire said. He appeared right next to me and walked by my side. “If you help me, I’ll help you in return. I have more than two hundred vampires you can use.”

  I gave him my sorry smile. “Two hundred isn’t exactly an impressive number right now.”

  “I have all kinds of people, people you won’t necessarily use in a war. I have some of the best mercenaries out there. I’ve trained them myself. I have guys that can kill for you and keep under the radar, guys that can gather information faster than you’ve ever seen.”

  I did admire the way he spoke about his people. I understood he was desperate, but we were at war. He didn’t seem to realize just what that meant.

  “They can find people for you. They can find anything you’re looking for.”

  For a whole second, my body froze and my heart raced. I grabbed him by the throat before I realized what I was doing. “What do you know about what I’m looking for?” Was it possible that he was so good an actor that he fooled all of my senses? Could he really be the thief?

  Just to make sure, I rushed my senses down the length of him, focusing as hard as I could without losing consciousness, but there was nothing on him that would come even close to Illyon’s energy. Shit.

  “Everybody’s always looking for something. Not a hard guess.” He tried to smile, but my fingers tightened around his neck and it must’ve hurt. “Can you just put me down? I really don’t want to fight.”

  I let him go before he could finish the sentence. It looked like I was going to need Aaron to tell me if this guy was really who he said he was.

  “Listen, there are a lot of benefits to having me for a friend. I’ll offer you everything I have. At your disposal. My people are going nuts. There’s no way I haven’t tried to find or even track the missing vampires. I’m desperate here, in case you couldn’t tell,” Frosty said, his gre
en eyes wide and annoyingly sincere.

  “I’m an assassin. I’m good at killing, not finding people. You’re barking up the wrong tree here,” I said, the words tasting terrible on my tongue.

  “You’re the Elemental. You’re my only hope here.”

  I shook my head. “Do you even know what an Elemental is? I don’t have tracking powers. None. Not sure how you think I could help, assuming I’d be willing or even had the time.” I couldn’t even track Illyon, for fuck’s sake! And the thing was tied to me.

  “Not according to Eleanor. If nothing else, people fear you. They tell you stuff. And I’m sure you have people you work with.”

  Hold your horses. Eleanor had actually said a good thing about me? Well, would you look at that…

  “Sorry, Frosty. It’s not going to happen. I’m sorry your vampires are missing, but there’s nothing I can do to help. Perhaps when all this is over and we win…”

  Though now that I didn’t have Illyon and my powers were acting strange, the word “win” seemed more a fantasy than a possible reality.

  I walked ahead again, and this time, he didn’t follow. Relieved, I turned my thoughts onto the elements and reached for earth again. Maybe I had just been distracted. Maybe the lack of strength in the connection had nothing to do with Illyon. I had manipulated the elements even before I’d had the necklace on my neck. Not as well, but it wasn’t bad. Maybe…

  “What are you looking for?”

  Frosty’s dead serious voice reached my ears and made me pause once again.

  “None of your business,” I whispered, sure he’d hear it.

  “It is if it involves people running out of here in a hurry last night.”

  The freezing-in-place thing was getting old that morning, but my whole body stopped working as I listened to his footsteps while Frosty caught up to me again, taking his sweet time.

  “Excuse me?”

  He had his huge arms crossed in front of his chest, making his perfectly defined muscles stand out even more. I could say he wasn’t hot as fuck, but I would be lying.