Elysian Fields

by Suzanne Johnson

  The room grew brighter and I fought for every inch of calmness I could muster. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.” My surroundings seemed to melt and run like a warped Salvador Dalí painting. “Just ask your questions, and don’t touch me. I’ll tell you the truth.”

  Suddenly, cool hands brushed my temples from behind and Lily’s soft voice whispered across my mind. “Calm down, you stupid wizard. Stop fighting.”

  I sank back to the chair with Lily’s voice in my head and her light energy flowing over my skin. Why had I been struggling? It was warm and peaceful here, and when Mace picked me up and carried me to the sofa, I looked in his brown eyes and smiled. He smiled back.

  Why had I ever thought he was scary?

  On some level, I knew there was something I should be doing, something else I should be remembering or feeling, but I couldn’t seem to focus. I hadn’t felt this relaxed and peaceful since Katrina had thrown my world into disarray.

  I felt them around me, occasionally touching me, remaining close. Then in a wash of gray, the room around me disappeared and I found myself sprawled instead on a half- rotted pier next to the river. Rene Delachaise was doing CPR and sending lances of pain through my abdomen from his compressions, but it worked. I coughed out a lungful of water and rolled to my side, where Rand stood in the semidarkness at the edge of a clearing, watching me.

  “Wait . . . interesting. There’s something recent we need to see,” a male voice said.

  A heave and sickening swirl of my surroundings jerked me to the barroom at the Green Gator, frozen in fear as Jake and I looked at the scratch on my arm, the weight of an unknown future heavy on my heart.

  I relived the scene twice—two fights with Jake, two scratches, two initial moments of terror, then finally the scene faded to the front porch of my house, where I skidded in the slippery coating of blood on my porch. Tish lay nearby, her throat cut in a perfect red line, killed because of me. Her face was so clear, so nearby, I reached out to touch her cheek, but my hand passed through it.

  The night around me grew darker, and I found myself stumbling through New Orleans’ oldest cemetery, in the Beyond. It was the night of the real full moon, the cemetery dimly lit with a stoked bonfire. The voodoo god Samedi stood before me, a giant figure with a skeleton painted on his dark skin and the glint of death in his eyes.

  On some level I knew he wasn’t real, knew this had already happened, but the fear washed over me as it had the first time I lived through it, right after Katrina. Gerry lay dying, and Jake had fallen nearby, a huge red wolf sinking white fangs into his thigh. I looked for Alex and couldn’t find him. He was hurt, out in the dark somewhere. Jean was injured too, after trying to help me. All my fault. All of it.

  I scrambled around on the dark ground, looking for the elven staff and when I got it, I pointed it at Samedi and shot red ropes of fire at him, sending him back to his corner of the Beyond, his strength destroyed.

  Another gray mist came and went, and ropes of fire flew from the staff as I wielded it in a long, candlelit room with a large wooden table down the center. I was injured, and I faced Jean and some of his men. Alex lay motionless on the floor nearby after fighting with one of the Baratarian pirates. Had he been killed? My anger fueled the fiery ropes from the staff, which wrapped themselves around another of Jean’s people. I watched him die and be absorbed back into the Beyond, and felt a sense of satisfaction as Jean’s expression changed from anger to grudging admiration.

  The mist faded, and I jolted back to reality. The room spun like a drunken top, but I remembered where I was—in Elfheim. I had to get out or I might not live through this. I struggled to sit up, but hands held me immobile. Once again, I felt Lily’s cool palms on my temples, and the world grayed.

  I stood upstairs in Gerry’s house after Katrina. Black, oily sludge oozed from the carpet on the first floor, and I stared at a voodoo symbol painted on the wall in blood. Gerry was missing, and the Elders suspected me of helping him go rogue. Alex, a stranger who worked for the wizards as an enforcer, descended the stairs from the attic, holding a box containing an old wooden staff. I didn’t know what it was. Sparks flew from its tip when I touched it, and it glowed with a golden energy. I decided to take it home.

  Other scenes flitted by, in and out of the gray mist, some in fast-forward, some slowing down as if I needed to relive them in slow motion, each second agonizing because I knew the punch line of each scene, and they were never funny. Using hydromancy as a teenager. Scrying in a frantic attempt to find Gerry after Katrina. Being brought into dreams by Gerry before he died, then learning how to dreamwalk myself using the staff.

  It always came back to the staff.

  I curled on my side as I was jerked back and forth in time. Lessons with Gerry. Using the staff to trace odd rifts in the Mississippi River back to the Styx. Early runs as sentinel. Every time I fought through the mist and pain, clawed my way back to consciousness, Lily’s cool hands would rest on my forehead, and my ability to fight evaporated.

  But unlike the first flashbacks, the more recent events that seemed to transport me away to relive them, older memories razored through my mind at random, as if etching themselves into my aura. Or maybe the cuts were already there, and now they were exposed and raw.

  Oh, God, I hated these creatures. I tried to pull away from them and wrap my hands around my head as if I could physically keep them out. My face was wet and I tasted blood. Had they hit me? Was an aneurysm like the one that took my mother also ready to take me?

  And behind it all, a plea: God, don’t let them go all the way back.

  Another cooling touch, and the gray fog settled over me again. I was seven years old and sat in the backseat of the old Plymouth as my grandfather parked in front of Gerry’s house. My grandparents were getting rid of me, foisting me off on a stranger I’d never seen, and I was petrified.

  The drive had gone on for hours, and I’d cried most of the way, bunching my hands up in my stiff pink Sunday School dress, begging them to turn around so often that my gran yelled at me to hush. Why did they want to get rid of me? I’d tried to be good, to do what they wanted. I’d tried to make them love me but I always knew how they felt, that Gran was afraid of me, that Grandpa stayed away from home so he wouldn’t be ashamed of what I was.

  Today, in the car, driving over long bridges and past towns with funny names, they were relieved someone was going to take me off their hands.

  Blinded, I struck out at the hands touching me, and realized on some level that the voice crying in long, ragged sobs was mine. But the disconnect was too great, like my brain and my body were separate now, and I didn’t have control over either one.

  I was five, and heard a sound in my parents’ room. I couldn’t sleep, so I padded down the hall and pushed open the door. Mommy lay on the floor, clutching her head, and Daddy (only he wasn’t really my daddy, was he?) leaned over her, his face white as the paper in my kindergarten notebook. He cried and called her name. Carrie. Her name was Carrie.

  I cried out, and when he saw me, he sat heavily on the bed, like a balloon whose air had been released. I tried to run to Mommy but he reached out and pulled me away. She was dead and, without her, he was afraid of me too. My magic grew out of control. I broke the vase. I broke Mommy’s mirror. I broke and broke and broke.

  The gray screen that was my mind went blank, and I knew on some level that I’d returned to a place more than twenty years later and a world away. There was shouting and movement around me, but nobody touched me. Maybe if I curled up tighter, they’d forget about me, leave me alone.

  I remembered nothing more. Just darkness, and blessed silence.

  CHAPTER 23

  The soothing, steady noise of a ceiling fan droned above my bed. I burrowed deeper into the pillow, wondering why my muscles ached. Faint voices drifted from downstairs. Had I left the television on?

  Someone shifted next to me and whispered, “Dru? Wake up. We have to talk.”

  I frowne
d and slit my eyes open to see Rand sitting on the bed next to me, his white sweater smeared with blood. Why he was here, in my house, in my room? Had something happened to Eugenie?

  It all came back then, and I scrambled away from him, looking around for some sign of the Synod members. Snatching the staff from its holder and pointing it at Rand, I eased off the bed and edged toward the door.

  “Where are they?” The end of the staff wavered with the shaking of my arm, so I grasped it two-handed, sending sparks out the tip.

  “They’re not here—Mace doesn’t like to leave Elf heim. Don’t shoot that thing at me.” Rand eased off the bed with his hands up and sat in a chair in the far corner of the room. “Just listen to me a minute before you leave.”

  The fear dissipated, replaced by its bully classmate, anger. “Go to hell. This is all your fault.” My voice was hoarse, and I vaguely remembered screaming as I saw my mother die again and my grandparents give me away. Tish dying. Gerry dying. Rene’s brother dying. Jake’s life destroyed. So much death. So much loss. I couldn’t stop shivering.

  “Let me help you.” Rand stood up and started toward me, but I held the staff up again and its sparks sent him back to his chair.

  “I swear to God if you come anywhere near me, I will fry you.” I hadn’t been sure the elven staff would work against an elf, but he seemed to respect it.

  “They were just supposed to ask you questions, I swear. I would never have taken you to Mace if I’d had any idea he’d try something like a regression. I fought them to get you out of there.”

  I’d never felt so violated. They’d stripped away my will, torn my memories from me, made me relive things I’d spent years putting behind me, seen private things no one else had any right to. “I’m never going to forgive you for this. Never.”

  My head pounded, and the room spun in a way that made me queasy. “What are you doing here? Who’s downstairs?”

  “Sit on the bed before you fall. I promise I won’t come near you.” Rand gripped the chair arms as if to convince me he wasn’t moving. “It’s important that we talk and there isn’t much time.”

  “Who’s downstairs?” I asked again.

  “Alex and one of your Elders. Why do you think my face looks like this?”

  I opened my mouth to scream for Alex, but closed it again after taking a closer look at Rand. His lower lip was cut and swollen, a bruise was already purpling on his jaw, and he’d have a black eye within the hour.

  “Alex did that?” Good for Alex.

  Rand touched a finger to his lip and winced. “He was tearing up my store when I brought you back.”

  A new panic arose. “Did you hurt him?”

  “No, I didn’t fight him.” Rand started to rise, then thought better of it and settled back in the chair. “Look, we don’t have long. If he catches me up here, he’ll try to kill me and I’ll be forced to defend myself this time. None of us wants that.”

  I stared at him, wondering what he could do that I hadn’t seen. Whatever it was, I didn’t want him doing it to Alex. “What do you want?”

  “I want us to be bonded to each other. It’s a short ritual, a blood exchange.”

  Was he flipping insane? “If I do anything with you involving blood, it will be because you’re injured.” My voice got louder as I talked, despite Rand’s gesturing for me to talk softly. “I want you out of my house. Out of my life. Out of Eugenie’s life. If you or any of your Synod members come near me again, I will kill you with your clan’s sacred staff.”

  Rand’s gaze on me was steady and intense. “Do you know yet if you’ll shift to loup-garou at the full moon?”

  The question surprised me and dampened my anger. “What?”

  Then the enormity of the question slammed into me. The whole Synod knew I’d been exposed to the loup-garou virus. They’d watched the scene with Jake over and over like a viral Internet video. It was ammunition, and I had no doubt they’d use it. The elves could have me destroyed without Mace Banyon breaking a fingernail.

  I shuffled to the bed and sat heavily, leaning against the headboard and closing my eyes. What a disaster. If Mace Banyan did nothing until the full moon, I had one week of my life left. Or he could already have gone to the Elders, in which case Willem Zrakovi was downstairs deciding my fate.

  “Answer me, DJ. It’s important for us to talk about this before Alex comes up and finds me here.” Rand leaned forward in his chair but didn’t make a move to come closer.

  No point in pretending now. “I don’t know for sure, but a blood test has shown the virus is active in my system. I’m already healing fast, which means it isn’t dormant. It’s virtually assured that I’ll shift. The Synod knows I’ve been exposed, so what are they going to do about it?”

  Rand nodded. “Mace will use it to destroy you; he’s furious that our staff claimed you, and you have a lot more of our magic at your disposal than we realized. You haven’t begun to even discover it yet. This whole thing was set up to see if you were powerful enough with the staff to pose a threat to us, and he’s convinced you are.”

  I shook my head, not understanding. “How can I be a threat to him? To any of you?”

  Rand fidgeted in the chair, and I got the impression he’d be pacing the floor if I hadn’t been clutching Charlie. “Think about it. If the elves and wizards ever break their truce, the wizards would be at a huge advantage if one of their own could do elven magic.”

  “Then why are you telling me? If I’m a threat to the Synod, I’m a threat to you.”

  Rand studied me a moment before answering. “You’re not a threat unless the elves and wizards end up in a war, and I don’t want that. I actually don’t think Mace does either, but he still finds you a threat and your loup-garou exposure makes it easy for him to get rid of you. If the Elders don’t lock you away or kill you themselves, he’ll find a way to goad you into losing control so the Elders will be forced to act.”

  Damn. I couldn’t wait until next week to move to Old Barataria. I needed to go tonight. I got to my feet and opened the top drawer of my dresser, pulling out clothes and throwing them on the bed. “Get out of here. I have to pack.”

  Rand was across the room and grasping my wrist before I realized he’d moved. “If you bond with me, you won’t shift.”

  I wrenched my arm away from him and backed up a step. “What kind of crap are you trying to pull on me? Why would I believe anything you say?” I might be impulsive, maybe even naïve at times. But I wasn’t stupid.

  Rand’s blue eyes were almost glowing. “Elves can’t become loup-garou. If we bond with a blood exchange, it will counteract the virus. You won’t shift, DJ. Mace’s threat will be neutralized.”

  I shoved the pile of clothes out of the way and sat on the bed again. I’d only thought things couldn’t get worse. There had to be an angle. “So Mace wants you to bond with me so he can blackmail me into siding with the elves?”

  Rand’s chuckle held no trace of humor. “Mace would kill me if he found out I’m trying to bond with you.”

  I looked at the elf, hate and despair and hope mingling in an ugly stew. Elves apparently didn’t heal quickly like shapeshifters or weres. If anything, his blackening eye looked worse. I, on the other hand, was feeling stronger by the second. Can’t keep a good loup-garou down. “What’s in it for you?”

  He sat beside me on the bed, shifting farther away when I waggled the staff at him. “Political leverage. My mother is dying, and I will ascend to chief of the Tân, a full member of the Synod. Our clan is the smallest and therefore has the least power. Mace wants to reduce our Synod vote by half. But if I have a connection to the wizards, he won’t dare move against me or my clan.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “I don’t want any part of your political crap, and bonding yourself to me doesn’t mean the Elders would back you in a Synod power struggle. Forget it.”

  Rand inched closer. “It will work, and it’s good for both of us. You’ll be in a stronger position with your Elders as a l
iaison with the Synod. I’ll secure my clan’s position in the elven hierarchy and have an alliance with the wizards that would make Mace think twice about ever breaking the truce between our people. And you won’t turn loup-garou and either be killed or spend the rest of your life in hiding.”

  I sighed and closed my eyes. Crap on a freakin’ stick. I couldn’t even think about the political fallout right now. “Well, doesn’t that sound like candy and unicorns? Look, I don’t trust you. I’m not agreeing to anything without finding out exactly what this bonding entails, so I need time to think about it. I need to do some research.”

  Rand gave an impatient growl. “We don’t have time. The closer you get to the full moon, the more the virus takes over your system and it will be harder to counteract.” He touched tentative fingers to his eye, which had almost swollen shut. Alex’s knuckles were probably bruised. “Not to mention the wizards won’t let me anywhere near you again, not in time to make this work. It has to be now. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

  Yeah, and I might believe him. Or not. “Okay, what does the bonding mean? You say it gives you political clout, but how?”

  He hesitated, which ratcheted up my suspicion level. “It’s a sacred union among my people. You’d be given the rights of any full-blooded member of my clan, plus a high standing from being bonded to a member of the Synod once I ascend.”

  The last elf lesson with Adrian seemed like a month ago instead of a day, but I remembered him saying the elven clans had remained pure. “Tell me this isn’t like a marriage because if it is, the answer’s not only no, but hell no.”

  Rand studied the hem of his sweater and didn’t meet my eye. God, I’d nailed it. “We’d be mates. But it’s not a marriage like you’re thinking about.”

  Right. “Does it involve an exchange of vows?”

  He shrugged. “It does.”

  Uh-huh. “Does it involve a physical consummation?” Because I would never have sex with Quince Randolph. Not. Ever. Happening.