by Jae Vogel
The door opened to reveal a man with silver hair and an expensive suit. He was about his age. Karanzen was good about sizing up a suspect. But this was somebody he needed to show some respect. He shot up in his chair and offered a hand, which the man took.
“Lieutenant Karanzen,” he addressed the man. “I’m the security officer for the mall. Is there something I can help you with today?”
“Just the person I want to see. Seth Bach, I am the chief stockholder in the company which owns the mall.”
Karanzen was right again. This was not someone to be taken lightly. He’d heard the name bantered about and it was someone to which you paid attention.
“Sit down, sir,” Karanzen told him. “I suspect this has to do with the problems we’ve had with some of the local kids?”
Bach seated himself at the chair next to Karanzen’s desk. He picked up a service award from it, looked the award over and returned it to the desk.
“It concerns one kid in particular. Dion Bach.”
Karanzen’s eyes flared. “You have the same last name?’
“That’s right. It is because he’s family. Dion is my nephew. He lives here in the area with my brother, his other uncle.”
“Is there something I need to know about? I was told by Matt there was some concern from the office this kid was allowed into the mall. I told him I would need a reason before he could be banned from it. Are you here to give me that reason?”
“You have some idea why this mall was built,” Bach said. “I know because I was the one that sent Matthew out to find you while the mall was under construction. There are two more people he needs to reach. One today, one tomorrow. If he should reach both of them, we can just forget about this mall and everything else in the world. He needs two more elemental powers to obtain the fifth one. Right now, I’m the only fifth element worker in the world. Another fifth element worker would be one too many.”
“Isn’t there a way you could prevent him from reaching the mall?”
“There are many ways I can keep him out of here, none of which I want to employ while I still have family. If it ever became known I’d caused Dion grief to prevent him from reaching the mall, the rest of my family would hunt me down. I don’t have a desire to be a rabbit on the first day of hunting season, Officer Karanzen. Do I make myself clear?”
“Very clear, sir.”
“I’m glad to hear that, officer. Now excuse me, I have a meeting with some investors.”
He stood up and left the room.
***
Dion picked up Lilly early the next morning. She was waiting for him out front of her father’s house in the driveway. She jumped in, slammed the door and kissed him on the lips before she sat down in her seat. It was still not ten in the morning, but some of the neighbors were already out working on their yards.
Dion noticed an older neighbor lady glared at him when Lilly climbed into the van. She taught world literature at the high school and didn’t like him. He’d taken her class last year and found it to be weak in the selection. She lowered his grade because he had the audacity to ask her why an obscure Greek poet from the Middle Ages had more significance than Chaucer or Yukio Mishma.
“Everything alright with your parents?” Dion asked Lilly as he put the gear in drive.
“We had a long conversation,” she said. “I hadn’t thought about some things in a long time. Those cheerleader elementals brought them into my head. I’m not sure if it’s all resolved or not, but we’ll talk some more this evening.”
The previous days’ encounter with the cheerleader elementals, the physical representation of air sylphs, was intense, but not as bad as when they had to rescue Emily from the ghoul cleaners the day before. It didn’t matter now that Dion had two of his four elemental powers. This would allow him to pursue the rare fifth elemental power when the time came.
He was concerned about the effects it might have on his other friends who went along on his quest. Sean seemed to be in better spirits when he dropped him off last night. Now that Sean had finally opened up to Emily, she had the option to accept what he felt for her or breaking it off. If nothing else, it would allow them the opportunity to move on in life. Officer Karanzen and his goon squad hadn’t been around that much. It could change once word was passed up to the clock tower in the center, where the offices of the mall were located, that his security guards failed a second time to prevent Dion from obtaining one of his elemental powers. And they’d learned the man who created the mall was none other than Dion’s own uncle, Seth Bach. As far as Dion knew, his parents were still imprisoned in the clock tower at the center of the mall.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Dion asked Lilly as they headed over to Emily’s house to pick up her and Sean.
Both Sean and Emily insisted on returning to the mall with him and Lilly the next day. They wanted to see the quest through to the end. Dion needed two more powers from the elemental grandmasters before he had all four abilities and the strength to tackle the fifth, which no elemental worker had done in generations. His uncle claimed to possess the power of the fifth element, but had learned it by the dreaded left hand path method. His uncle had not mastered the other elements before it.
“They finally realize I’m not six years old,” Lilly explained to Dion. “Mom told me last night the hardest thing she ever did was admit my sister was a woman and could make her own decisions. I think they want to protect me from the world, but I told them the way to do it is not by locking me away.”
Dion didn’t know how to respond. He’d always had a very open relationship with his parents and never got into trouble in school. He decided years ago it had to do with the way the different element workers were placed into the world at large. You had to be careful that no one saw you create a homunculus or light a campfire with a salamander. It tended to make a kid listen to what his parents had to tell him or her. He remembered watching a nasty water nymph elemental near a group of kids swimming in a lake. Dion was able to coax them all back onto the bank until the elemental left. He was relieved he didn’t have to tell them the reason.
Sean and Emily were waiting for them as he drove up to her father’s house. It took him a few minutes to locate the two as they were under a weeping willow tree on the front yard in the throes of passion. Dion was a little embarrassed to watch Emily as she ran her arms up the back of Sean, and Lilly tried to restrain a smile as they saw them.
“He’ll end up with another bite mark on his neck,” Lilly snickered.
“It will match the one he came home with last night,” Dion sighed.
The two spent the drive home in the backseat last night all over each other. Dion was on the verge of letting them know about the audience in the front when he pulled up to Sean’s house. It took Sean a good minute to untangle Emily from him before he could get out of the van. Emily swooned all the way back home.
Dion waited a few minutes and beeped the horn.
Emily looked over Sean’s shoulder as he turned around with a look of embarrassment. Both of them tried to act normal as they walked up to the van. Sean had turned beet red by the time he was opening the van door.
“I hope we didn’t interrupt anything,” Lilly said to them as they climbed into the back. Dion was quiet; his attention was on the road and the quest that lay in front of them.
Dion parked the van near the third section of the mall. He starred out of the windshield and looked at the main entrance door, which marked the interior to the “water” side of the mall. He couldn’t see Karanzen or his security guards, but he knew they were inside.
The previous evening, Dion had dropped Emily off at her father’s house right after they took Sean home. Emily was quiet all the way back, until, a mile from their destination; Lilly spoke and broke the silence.
“What brought all that on?” she asked Emily. “You’ve been tolerating Sean for the past year and now you’re acting like he’s your long lost soul mate? What changed?”
“I saw a
lot of what was inside him. He saw a lot of what was inside me. Something about those cheerleaders, being in close proximity to them merged us on the inside. I don’t know how to explain it, but it brought us together. I woke up an hour after you left and realized where I was in that back room.”
After their encounter with the elementals the previous day, Dion had let them sleep in a back room at a bedding company.
“Do you know,” she continued, “Sean was sitting in a chair fast asleep because he didn’t want me to think he would take advantage of me? He’d moved the chair to the front of the door. He wanted to be there in case anyone tried to come in before I was awake. I knew what happened outside the mall when you stood down those cheerleader elementals. He remembers too. Neither of us could do anything, but we were there when it happened and saw it all. It wasn’t until we were awake that we were in full control of our own minds. In between, we blended somehow and saw a lot of the bad stuff in each other’s heads. He knows about the way my I found my dad in the backyard alone when mom left. I know the hurt his own mother caused him all the years he was growing up. I can’t be separated from him now. I don’t know how to explain it, but we know too much about each other.”
Dion knew the elementals could alter a person’s inner mind if they were too close to them for any length of time. It was one of the reasons so few people could see elementals or even know they existed. It was dangerous to work with any particular elemental for long. Humans could build an attachment to them and would lose their sense of perspective. From there it was a short trip to insanity. This, however, was the first time he’d ever heard of more than one person being around elementals as powerful as those air sylph cheerleaders were.
That night, they’d let Emily off in front of her father’s house. Dion and Lilly watched Emily bounce up to the front door. She unlocked it with her key and let herself in. The light inside stayed on as they pulled away.
“What do you think?” Lilly asked Dion. “Seems to me she’s in love.”
Emily had locked the door from the other side and turned to fix her face in the mirror. She adjusted her top and removed her shoes before turning off the living room lights. In the family room, she could hear the noise of the TV. It was late, but her father liked to stay up and watch the news and then whatever was on afterwards. These days most of the TV stations stayed on the air until the early hours of the morning. On the weekend, several of them never quit broadcasting as the late, late movie finished just in time for the daily farm report. Someday they might run nonstop.
“How was your trip to the mall?” her dad asked. He was an average-sized man who worked in a technical field where most of his colleges were other men.
“It was fine,” she told him. Emily turned to see her reflection in the window to the backyard just in time to see the bite mark on her neck.
“Sure you strictly went to the mall?” he asked her again. “You know, in my day the girls had enough sense to wear high collars.”
Emily looked to the ground in embarrassment. What was she going to say? Her dad had caught her again. When her mother was still at home, she didn’t have to worry. He was too busy staying up at night wondering if his wife would ever return home to give his daughter much concern.
“I know I haven’t been the best father you could ask for, but, Emily, I worry about you. I know your mother isn’t around to and never took much interest in you when she was at home, but I’m trying to make up for it.”
“Daddy, I’m in love,” she said.
Her father was speechless. What was he to say? He’d been there himself and vowed never to remarry after he divorced from Emily’s mother. He didn’t even date other women. His field consisted, for the most part, of men with poor social skills. He’d been alone with his daughter for the past two years, although the divorce wasn’t finalized until a year ago. Her father had the look of a man beaten down by the universe. He’d married the wild bartender girl a year after college when she came weeping to him about her pregnancy. He paid for his mistake over the years.
Inside his mind, he was worried Emily spent too many nights out. She returned home with boys of which he didn’t approve. What could he do now? Her grades were good and she would start college in the fall. He should have cracked down years ago, but now it was too late.
Love? Emily was in love? Kids still used that word after everything they saw? It was almost a relief to hear it from her.
“Anyone I know?” he asked her. It was time to find out. Just in case.
“A boy named Sean. You’ve met him. He’s been over with Lilly a few times?”
“The tall kid who drives the van?”
“No, you have him confused with Dion. Sean is the chunky boy. I need to work with him. He has a good heart and his mother has messed him up.”
Sean had walked slowly up to his parent’s house after Dion dropped him off. He leaned against the car in the driveway before he walked up to the house. There were only two trees in the front yard and he considered going out into the back yard to calm down before he dealt with his mother. His dad was working the second shift this month because it paid better. Although Sean suspected there was another reason.
Both of his sisters were gone. One worked the evenings at a restaurant, the other was over at a friend’s house. Sean noted they spent less time at home the older they got. He was told they were working and preparing for college, but Sean thought they just wanted an excuse to get away from their mother. The woman acted stranger the older she became and Sean wondered if there might be a medical reason. Of course, she would never admit it. The only person who was ever subjected to a medical examination was Sean when he became sullen three years ago.
He knew his mother would either be on the phone in conversation with one of her sisters or watching TV. He betted on the latter, which meant he would be subject to interrogation the moment he stepped through the door. She would stare at him until he told her what she wanted to know. He ran through a list of stories he’d prepared for her in order to get some peace.
There was no way he was going to tell her about Emily. She would immediately want to know everything about her. Over the next hour, she would demand to know where her family lived, what her parents’ names were and the location of her church. If he didn’t know these things, she would find a way to discover them.
Sean closed his eyes and thought about the back of Dion’s van. He’d never been that close to a girl before. What was wrong with him that he felt guilty about being in love? He’s seen the inside of Emily’s mind when they were both trapped by those demon cheerleaders. She had just as much pain in her life as he did. Perhaps more. Her mom was out of the picture and was a continual source of embarrassment to Emily when she would visit. They had this to bond over mothers who were problematic. What was it about this part of Ohio that created such things? He knew too many kids with similar family problems.
Sean had never felt so close to anyone in his entire life. He was already trying to figure out a way to attend college on the same campus where Emily had applied. She wanted to attend school at Cincinnati that fall; he was supposed to go to a local college. He knew why his parents wanted him to stay close, they claimed it was to save money, but his mother didn’t want to let him out of her sight.
Once upon a time, he’d tried to initiate a relationship with another girl in school and it turned into a disaster. Sean never told anyone how depressed he was after she spurned him. He thought about arranging for a disappearance at the time. It used to happen. Guys could run off and join the military or even sign up with an ocean vessel. A quick trip to the library squashed these ideas. The American military was in the middle of major cutbacks after the Vietnam fiasco and it was impossible to get a position on a ship without your merchant marine papers. At least any decent ship and he had no desire to end up missing at sea. Sean swallowed his pride and returned to school that weekend with a better sense of his own place in the great scheme of things. At least only a few people taunte
d him.
No, the time had come to face up to his mother. He was older now, and if she couldn’t deal with him as a legal adult, it was her problem, not his. He walked to the door and found it open. Yep, she was waiting up for him.
Sean stepped inside and saw his mother at the kitchen table. For some reason, the house was built on one level and the kitchen was visible from the main entrance. His dad talked about doing something so there would be a direct entrance to the back porch. However, he needed to find the time to make the modifications to the house. Right now, he worked too many hours to even think about it. His father didn’t believe in hiring people to work on the house as he felt it was his job.
“Hello, Sean,” his mother said from the coffee table. “Is everything alright? I was worried when it turned nine and you weren’t home.”
“I’m fine, mom. Tired and I need to go to bed. I’m supposed to meet up with Dion and Lilly tomorrow at the mall. I might look for a job while I’m down there.”
His mother had continued to stare at him in the eyes as he walked into the house. He looked away instinctively. It was something he needed to stop doing: assume the submissive tone of a whipped dog. He knew what she was doing, but right now, he just wanted to get to bed and away from her. The last thing he needed was a confrontation.
“Are you sure?” she told him.
Sean kept walking. She would probably leave him alone this evening. At least she hadn’t said anything about the bruise on his color bone. He’s made certain to cover it up before going in the house. Almost to his bedroom, had to be careful not to arouse any suspicion.
“Never felt better,” he told her when he closed the door behind him. There, he’d made it. Now all he needed to do was get in bed and dream nice things about a girl named Emily.
Chapter 2
It was a short hike to Emily’s house the next day and Sean left a note for his mother. He claimed he was headed to the mall with some friends to find a job. Walking anywhere in their neighborhood was a challenge as the subdivisions weren’t built with foot traffic in mind and there were no sidewalks. Anyone walking down the road was seen as a potential troublemaker. He managed to get up early enough to avoid the looks of people leaving for work.