by Mia Marshall
To the man who gave me his name.
It took a bit longer than we discussed, but it finally happened.
I only wish you were here to see it.
Chapter 1
Sometimes, it’s the small things that matter, and when I first saw my house, the only thing that mattered was the front porch. It was warped in places, with peeling gray paint, slightly askew support beams, and a floor so tilted that a marble placed at one end would happily roll its way to the other end before making a final leap for freedom off the side.
In truth, the porch was one step away from a starring role in a Dali painting, but it was perfect for me. It held a solid bench, with strong wood slats and iron curlicues. If you sat on the bench you could gaze out over the open country, without a single neighbor in sight, and see the small watering hole slightly to the right of the house. It was the sort of porch that would inspire you to learn how to make a proper mint julep, just so you could sit on the porch and drink it. It wouldn’t have mattered if a home inspection revealed the place had termites. I’d still have bought it.
I spent many days sitting just so, one hand holding a glass, feet propped against the railing and eyes fixed on the pond. I watched the water lap against the soil, the soft ripples showing that no matter how still and peaceful it appeared, underneath it teemed with life and power. I sat and soaked it all in, every last bit of that power, its essence more intoxicating than the most potent alcohol and far more sustaining.
The water calmed me and evened out my rough patches, and for a long time I’d felt rougher than a strip of sandpaper. These days, I needed to be around water constantly. It had become the equivalent of a Prozac and energy drink cocktail, if the cocktail held primordial magics.
I liked my solitude. No, that’s not right. I treasured it. People can be extremely difficult creatures, what with their desire to talk to me, shake my hand, or swap life stories. These aren’t things I do, not anymore. Talking might lead to emotions, and since I never knew what direction mine would take or the effect they’d have, it was really best just to avoid them altogether. Besides, when you’re a woman whose life story was the stuff of creation mythology, it was best to keep it to yourself. People were, quite simply, bad news.
All things considered then, I should have been happy that it wasn’t entirely a person standing on my porch. Perhaps I wasn’t considering enough things.
“What, no hello? Aidan, I’m hurt,” she said, with all the sincerity of a pit viper trying to convince you it’s not hungry. “I thought you’d be pleased to see me again.”
The last time I’d seen my former best friend, I’d been cramming all my worldly goods into a suitcase while sobbing hysterically—the big gulping kind of sobs that make everyone look like an oversized child—that I never wanted to see her again. Apparently, I’d been too subtle.
“Not quite sure where you got that idea,” I said. I kept my eyes fixed on her, but I refused to move an inch from my spot on the bench. I was scared she might take the smallest twitch as a sign of welcome. Sera never did have any problem stretching an inch into a mile long enough to double as a runway for a 767.
She didn’t seem too bothered. She slid her jean-covered bottom down the railing until it was perched on one of the steps, then drew an aluminum water bottle from her backpack. The smart bet would be on that bottle holding something other than water. She seemed, worryingly, to be planning on staying for at least several minutes.
“Dramatic as always, I see,” she said, taking a swig.
I snorted. “Dramatic? Me? A fire calling a water dramatic? If that isn’t the pot calling the banana black.”
She shrugged. “Well, when the particular banana is rotten...”
I was not going to rise to the bait. I was not going to... “I’ve just been sitting here. Quietly minding my own business, in my little house that none of you are supposed to know about. You’re the one who shows up without any warning, sits on my porch and starts annoying me. I would have accepted a letter, phone call, or even a smoke signal as a less dramatic option.”
She said nothing, just stared at me with those eyes so dark they were almost black. While my gray eyes traitorously revealed every thought I ever had, hers were nearly impenetrable. That had always driven me crazy. “What?” I finally asked.
“I’m just waiting for you to stand and demand that I leave immediately, so I can win this ridiculous argument.” One side of her mouth quirked. Just that small quirk, and I gave up. There’s no fighting with someone who thinks everything is a joke. I used to laugh at everything with her, and it seemed that a part of me still wanted to. Granted, that part was buried deep under a whole mess of cranky, but to my surprise it was still there, and she knew the instant it came to life. “Lemonade?” she offered.
It was, of course, the Lynchburg variety, but I couldn’t say it wasn’t welcome. Apparently, when a key figure from a past you’re desperate to forget charges back into your life, booze is an excellent place to start. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m getting the band back together. It’s a mission from God.” She quoted The Blues Brothers, a movie we used to watch over and over during late nights in our dorm room.
I had no reply, so I just raised an eyebrow and took another swig. A longer one this time. I could play the wait-and-stare game, too. I made it at least five seconds. “No, seriously, of all the places you could be sitting, why are you on my front porch? There are hundreds of thousands of porches in this country. Maybe even millions. Most of them are located in far hotter climates than central freaking Oregon, and you can sit and roast your fiery ass for hours on end. All you can do here is freeze and wonder if the rain is going to stop sometime before July. This is not the place for you. It can never be the place for you. And that is why I live here.”
Sera looked at me, and all the walls I’d built between us meant nothing. She’d been my best friend once, my ultimate partner in crime, and years ago there’d been no one who knew me better. Her gaze told me that she still knew me, and she believed I meant everything I said, and it didn’t matter to her one bit. She was about to upend my world entirely, because that’s what Sera did. I moved to the railing and stared at my pond, drawing on its energy for comfort. “Tell me what it is.”
She waited to speak until I turned to face her. She leveled that direct stare at me, any hint of levity completely gone. “It’s Christopher,” she said. “He was murdered last week.” Her voice offered no softness or pity for being the bearer of this news, though she knew exactly what he’d meant to me. The words were angry and pointed, wielded like a weapon.
The bottle slipped from my fingers, landing with a clatter I barely heard. I felt my porch, the only safe place I’d known for the last decade, buckle beneath me. Sera watched me with those impossible eyes, and even as I knew what she would say next, I dreaded it. “It’s happening again, Aidan. We didn’t stop it, after all.”
Yeah, there it was.
We moved inside the house. It no longer felt right to sit on the porch, pretending I could still find tranquility in my former haven. Sera had just made it abundantly clear that my feeling of safety was never more than an illusion. Plus, outside felt too exposed right now. What I really wanted was to find a dark corner, plant my back against it and hiss at anything that came too close. Instead, I angled one of my rickety kitchen chairs into one corner of the breakfast nook.
I noticed Sera had done the same on the other side. Logically, we knew we were probably safe, but if we’d learned one thing ten years ago, it was that logic played a very small role in your life when your friends started dying.
Sera filled her mug with hot tea and took a sip, having apparently dec
ided to cut back on alcohol once it became clear we were in for a long night. I had not yet come around to her way of thinking, and a bottle of bourbon sat between us. I figured that as long as I was still bothering to pour it into a glass with ice rather than tipping directly from the bottle, I wasn’t drinking too much.
Sera looked around, silently appraising the modest room and its tidy, worn belongings. “Considering the age of your family, I assumed you’d have a bigger trust fund than this house would indicate.”
I promptly topped up my glass. If I didn’t try to drown my liver, I might soon be drowning her. “I paid cash, everything I could withdraw quickly. I didn’t want a record of the transaction.”
“I know. False name on the deed, no cars registered in your name, even though I saw one outside.” I shrugged. When you’re brought up by people who live ten times longer than the average human, you learn a thing or two about falsifying paperwork. “Every few years, you would pop up, take out a decent amount of money, each time from a different branch—the furthest one was in Missoula, right?—and then you would disappear again.”
“How long have you been tracking me?”
Her mouth twisted, a quick grimace of distaste. “I didn’t want to, but I found I actually cared whether you were alive or dead. I needed to know that you were still alive—though not, apparently, doing a lot of living. Have you been a fucking hermit all this time?”
“My life is fine, and none of your business. And I love this house.”
“This is a building, not a life. And you’ve turned it into a prison. You need people to have a life, Ade. Otherwise, you’re just killing time and waiting for death. Are you even in contact with your family? Your mother or any of the aunts?”
The conversation was taking an undesirable turn, and I abruptly changed the subject. “Tell me what happened.”
She stirred her tea, watching me the entire time. “He was found in a campsite by the lake. He was lying on his back, with his mouth and lungs stuffed full of dirt. Suffocated.”
I looked up in surprise. “It was an earth?” Sera nodded. It was unexpected. Earths, like waters, were supposed to be slow to anger. With magic rooting them to the land, they were literally too grounded to get worked up about most things. As for waters, we were supposed to go with the flow and simply move past things. No one knew why I’d gone so wrong in that particular regard. I always had been a contrary bastard.
“Poor Christopher. He didn’t deserve that.” The words were flat and weak. I might as well have been complaining that a customer left him a shoddy tip. But the words to express the rage, fear, and sorrow coursing through me didn’t exist. Christopher had once been my closest friend next to Sera, before everything changed. He’d also been human.
Many elementals live their entire lives as humans, never knowing another way. Sera and I were different. We were both children of the old ones, able to trace our family trees back to the dawn of creation. To be fair, the old ones live a really long time, so that wasn’t as difficult as it might sound. While many had chosen to mate with humans in those long ago days, my family was a bit pickier. Or they were bigger snobs, depending on your perspective. Water bred to water ten times before my mother came along and broke the chain by dallying with a human.
My entire family bore the stamp of that history, every last one of us tall and slight, with blond hair and grey eyes. Basically, we looked like really delicate Scandinavians. We even held one of the old surnames, Brook. Elementals do have a tendency to be ridiculously literal at times. Case in point: Sera’s last name was Blais. She was the child of a full-blooded father and half-fire mother, making her one of the strongest elementals I’d ever known outside of my own family. She had the pure look of her people about her, as well, with her black eyes and dark, wild hair, and that muscled, compact body that always seemed ready to spring into action.
No one ever expected two elementals from such different old families to become friends, but it happened almost the minute we met. I was on my own for the first time, free from the burden of an overprotective mother who had reluctantly agreed that I could attend university and interact with the human world.
Over time, Sierra University had become an open secret amongst elemental families. It was located mere feet from Lake Tahoe, protected by the jagged mountains of the Sierra Nevadas and far from any major cities. It appealed to earth, water, and ice equally. I’d never understood how Sera had ended up there. She’d muttered something about her father wanting her to broaden her horizons, then huddled around the fire pit on the deck. In the end, she spent a lot of time in the sauna, signed up for every summer class she could manage, and often disappeared from January through March. It seemed to work for her.
On our own for the first time, after years of being closely watched by the old ones, we delighted in our newfound freedom. We kept up with our schoolwork, but only enough that our parents would continue to fund four years of drunken carousing. We spent nights hitting the various dive bars, exploring the novelty of human boys and liquor. During the day we sat on the deck overlooking the lake. I’d recharge from the water while Sera soaked up energy from the fire pit. Friends would stop by without invitation and were always welcome. The days were as close to perfect as any I’ve ever known—at least they were, before people started dying.
Our independence offered an additional, unexpected perk. We learned to love the humans that surrounded us and learned to love the humanity within ourselves. Raised amongst the old ones, we’d been taught that humans were impetuous, argumentative, ruled by their emotions. They were all those things, and more, and we loved them for it.
For the first time, my human half was allowed free rein. I didn’t need to hide my emotional core or disguise intense feelings under the gentle exterior that was the defining trait of waters. I laughed rather than smiled, fought rather than disagreed, and fucked rather than mated. For a few years, I was nearly human, and I loved it. It broke my heart when I could no longer be a part of that world. Even if it had been her only crime, for that alone, I could not forgive Sera.
Christopher had been a bartender at one of our regular haunts, and we decided to adopt him. In the early days of our friendship, we both attempted to draw his attention with our newly discovered feminine wiles, but he remained unmoved. He became our friend instead, teaching Sera how to grill and me how to drive. In hindsight, he was too smart to have any interest in two determined party girls whose primary objective in life was the search for more trouble than they’d found the night before, but we were really the ones who came out ahead in that deal. He was our big brother, and while he may never have known what we truly were, that never stopped us from loving him. He’d always been so full of life, so exuberant, that it was impossible to imagine him gone.
Sera drew me out of my reverie with a quick rap of her fingernails against the table. “Of course he didn’t deserve it. I’m here because I want to know if you’re going to keep being a stubborn asshole determined to hide away from the world, or if you’re going to help stop these killings before they get out of control again.”
An insistent and thoroughly annoying part of me whispered that she was right, but I didn’t get to be a stubborn asshole without fighting the obvious. “First of all, I am not hiding from the world. I very deliberately told the world to fuck off and decided that I needed a bit of alone time. You know, to process.” I bit out those last two words, making them an accusation. I didn’t need to say what I was processing. Sera damn well knew.
“You’ve been processing for nearly ten years now. I never realized you were so very… well, slow.” She said this solemnly, as though worried about hurting my delicate feelings.
“Do not diminish this. Do not.” I took a deep breath. I knew she was trying to bait me, and yet I was finding it very hard not to rise to her taunts. Carefully, through gritted teeth, I said, “They are dead, Sera, and we didn’t stop it. Hell, we caused it. I can’t get over that. I’ve tried.”
“I don�
�t believe for one moment that you have made any attempt to actually deal. You’ve had a decade for talk therapy, aversion therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, or freaking aromatherapy, and I’m certain you haven’t tried a thing.” She looked pointedly around my silent kitchen, and with a broad gesture indicated the vast emptiness of the land outside my door. “You are hiding, not processing. You’ve been hiding from the past, from me, from yourself. You’re going to stop eventually, and I think people being murdered again should be a damn good motivator.”
“And that is where you and I have always differed. There is no getting over what we did, and the fact that you can even ask shows how little you remember. I loved Chris, too, but I’m not putting myself in a situation where I could hurt people again. And last I checked, our involvement hardly indicated a safe, controlled situation. So stop asking.”
Sera shook her head. “I can’t. I remember how bad that night was, I do. But I believe that things will be different this time, because I have to believe that. Otherwise, I’d have to ignore Chris’s murder, and I know you wouldn’t ask me to do that. I don’t believe you can ignore it, either.”
It was a low blow, but she was right. I remembered his warm face, laughing, always laughing, while he poured a Manhattan or hauled me out of a snow drift I’d blundered into. The way he hugged you with his entire body, making you feel, for that moment, like the absolute center of his world. No, I couldn’t ignore this. “What makes you so sure it’s the same thing? One death—horrible, yes, but just the one—does not necessarily indicate a serial killer, even if he was found in one of the campsites. He was killed by earth, not ice.”
I closed my eyes. Unbidden, images from my nightmares projected onto my lids, the flames insistently consuming any peace I hoped to find. I snapped my eyes open. For a moment, the afterimage of the fire superimposed itself onto my vision, causing Sera to burn in my kitchen. I shook my head to clear the image. “Sera, he’s dead. I was there, remember? He can’t be back. He can’t.”