Elemental Air (Paranormal Public Series)

by Edwards, Maddy

  “Because the pixies have felt marginalized and like they’re being treated as the enemy?” I asked. Dacer had talked a lot about the problems with the pixies all summer. It was no longer just a deterioration of relations between paranormals, he had said, it was an all out cold war. The pixies were barely speaking to the other types, but with Oliva as president, all of that could be improved. At least that was Dacer’s hope.

  “I guess you’re right,” I said. “Do you think he was strategically picked to improve relations?”

  Keller nodded. “It’s smart. The pixies can’t possibly be angry when their white knight was chosen over all the others, and since Oliva is on good terms with almost every pixie, his appointment will open up lines of communication. At the same time, pixies will be reluctant to put him in a bad position by openly siding with the Nocturns or coming after you.”

  The shock must have shown on my face, because Keller chuckled. “Yes, I think you were a consideration in all of this.”

  “What do you think of Oliva’s warning about Public?” Sip asked Keller. The fallen angel was well-respected on campus and among my friends, and I was glad that my two best friends got along with my boyfriend, especially Lisabelle, who was famously prickly. I would have had a hard time juggling my friends and Keller if they didn’t like each other.

  “I think it’s smart,” said Keller. “My aunt was talking about that over the summer. She said that Public had its own old magic, obviously the centuries of the Power of Five, but we’ve seen it with the Houses. Astra, like all the houses, can rise up to its own defense if necessary. Have you ever tried torching Airlee? You wouldn’t get very far, and you might get flung out a window by a stray breeze.”

  “Awesome,” said Lisabelle. “The next time I need to practice my defensive spells I’ll try that.”

  “Just use someone else’s room,” said Sip. “I like our window in one piece.”

  The dining hall was almost full when we got there. We were later than usual because I had had to be snuck out of Astra, and we were all hungry.

  “Did you check on the Mirror Arcane?” Sip asked as we got cereal and headed for a table in the corner. Unlike at dinner, there was just one long table in the middle of the room for breakfast. The different paranormals types’ taste in breakfast food was not as different as it was for the later meals of the day.

  I nodded. “First thing. If Martha touches it. . . .” I took a deep breath. Martha didn’t know the Mirror was there, and she was too busy baking to notice.

  I hoped.

  Our first class was history with Zervos. His classroom was now in the basement of Cruor, which meant that we spent a lot of time in the Vampire dorm. I was actually starting to like the blood-red and black color scheme, but I didn’t relish having class in the catacombs.

  We headed for Cruor, but didn’t make it further than the front entrance. Zervos was waiting outside for us, standing on the bridge over the moat that surrounded the house.

  “Students,” he said, nodding curtly. Since it was a required class, all the usual suspects, both good and bad, were in it. Sip, Lisabelle, Lough and I were there, along with Camilla and Kia. Also present were Rake, Trafton, Daisy, and Faci. Vanni joined us late, along with a werewolf named JJ whom I knew through Sip. He was a Starter, but since he was a friend of the Quest family I had met him before. He was tall and gangling, with dreadlocks and wide eyes. He smiled easily and had a quiet kindness that I liked. Being so tall was good for a werewolf; it meant that he had long legs for running. He gave us a nod as we came over, then returned his attention to Zervos. Since this was his first college class he wanted to start off well.

  “Ms. Verlans, still no wand, I see. Hum.”

  I never got to hear what Lisabelle might have said, because before she could respond, Zervos continued talking. “Today we go on a hunt. I want all students to go to a building on campus they haven’t been to before. I want you to return here to me before class period ends with an object from that building. Tomorrow,” he said, over the students’ mutterings, “you will tell me the history of your object and why it is where it is at Public. Your object can be anything. Public has its own history, and this project will help you better understand the campus itself.” His black eyes snapped around to every student except Sip, Lisabelle, and me, whom he ignored.

  “Are there any buildings on campus you haven’t been in?” I asked Lisabelle, racking my brain for one that I hadn’t entered myself. “I think I’ve been in all of them except for a couple of the professors’ houses, and there’s no way I dare to go into those. . . .”

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Zervos nastily. “You are not to enter professors’ residences. I do not need angry colleagues calling me and asking me why I encouraged students to harass them. You may have been in all the buildings. If that’s the case, please re-enter the one that you have spent the least amount of time in.”

  My stomach churned; I knew which one that was. Glancing at Lisabelle, I could see that she was thinking the same thing. The fact that we got along the least well with the pixies was why we had barely been in Volans. It was best if you were invited to visit, and Lisabelle never was.

  “So,” said Sip carefully. “We’re going to go steal not one, but three objects from Volans? For class. Oliva is going to be assigning us detentions for decades.” She sighed heavily.

  “It’s not ‘stealing,’” Lisabelle corrected, “just borrowing.”

  Once Zervos finished explaining that after we had our artifact we could get its history any way we chose, but he recommended using magic, the entire group broke up. I wondered where the rest of the class was going and hoped they weren’t headed for Astra. For the first time I was glad Martha was there. If my own friends weren’t allowed inside, there was no way she’d let in the likes of Kia and Camilla.

  “Have you seen Dobrov?” Lisabelle asked. “I saw him coming into the dining hall this morning as we were leaving. He looks good for a hybrid who is the brother of Daisy. He was with his sister.”

  “No,” I said. “I wish I had. He needs to know that we’re on his side, even after everything.”

  “Yeah,” said Sip. “He’s been a good friend.”

  “I’m just worried about how close he is with Daisy,” said Lisabelle. “That has to have some influence.”

  “Was Faci there?” I asked.

  “He came in this morning,” said Lisabelle. “Not sure why he was late, but apparently he’s sticking pretty close to Cruor and that shed that he calls home - the one behind the castle.”

  “Good,” said Sip. “I don’t want to see his ugly face anyway.” She jutted out her chin and glared hard at the ground.

  Sip wasn’t a fan of any of the young Nocturns, but she harbored a particular dislike of Faci. She still blamed the young vampire for the death of Lanca’s beloved younger sister Dirr in an explosion at Lanca’s coronation. Faci’s father had taken responsibility for it, but we all knew it was really Faci who had pulled it off. Instead of being punished, the young vampire had been allowed to join us as a fellow student at Public, for all the world like he hadn’t done anything wrong.

  “Did you talk to Keller about when we’re going to paint?” Sip asked me. We were almost halfway across campus, the black walls of Cruor now barely visible over the hills and through the dotted trees.

  “Not yet,” I said. “I’m sure we’ll just have to do it this weekend.”

  “They had other, more important things, on their minds,” said Lisabelle as she made a sucking noise with her lips and puckered them to look like a fish.

  Sip giggled and covered her mouth while I blushed.

  “There’s Volans,” said Lisabelle, pointing ahead of us. “I so wish we didn’t have to do this.”

  Volans was also a castle, but the stones were light in color. When I looked more carefully, I could see that they had a slightly green tint. There were trees around the front courtyard shading the windows of Volans from the hot sun. The impossibly green gras
s rolled in front of us, sparkling from what looked like years of sprinkled pixie dust of any and every color.

  “Should we knock?” Sip said once we got to the front door.

  “Nope,” said Lisabelle. “If we ask permission to go in they’ll just say no.”

  “But not all students have class right now,” Sip protested as Lisabelle turned the door handle.

  Lisabelle shrugged. “There won’t be many here who are awake. They won’t bother us.”

  As it turned out, we didn’t see a pixie anywhere, so we just ignored Zervos’s instruction about getting permission.

  When we had come to Volans on a tour with Korba we had been Starters, and I had found everything impressive and overwhelming. I now saw that since that time a couple of years ago they had made some major changes in the decor. The walls were no longer yellow, but a middling green the color of a stalk of celery. The white marble was still there, but covered up with rugs, and the white furniture was gone, replaced by earthy tones.

  “I like this better,” said Sip. “It’s more real and more lived in.”

  “The pixies’ specialty,” said Lisabelle sarcastically. “Come on.”

  “Can’t we just grab one of the paintings and go?” Sip asked, gesturing to the walls. Lisabelle glanced where she was pointing.

  “Don’t you want to do some exploring first? Isn’t your academic curiosity just begging you to learn?”

  “I’m all set with learning,” said Sip. “If we stay here much longer we’ll be learning the art of how to keep pixies from killing us and handing Charlotte over to the Nocturns.”

  When Sip and I saw that Lisabelle was seriously excited by the prospect of fighting pixies, we agreed without saying a word that we had to get ourselves out of there without any further ado. We pulled Lisabelle into the unoccupied living room, where I grabbed a book, Sip grabbed a tiny pixie figurine, and Lisabelle grabbed a pillow. Then, before Lisabelle could get us into any trouble, we dragged her away.

  We headed out the way we had come. The door stuck, so that it required all three of us to pull it open.

  “Strange,” said Sip. “I don’t remember it sticking on the way in.”

  As we left I thought I felt all of Volans shudder angrily. I walked a little faster.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Once again outside in the warm sunlight, walking across the grassy lawn, I examined the book I had taken, which turned out to be a Volans code of ethics. When I opened it to see what it said about handing fellow paranormals over to darkness, I saw that it wasn’t written in any language I could read. Walking next to me, Sip glanced at the pages. “Ah, that’s an old pixie dialect,” she said. “Very hard to read. Korba could probably translate it, though.”

  “What do you have?” I asked, thinking that the pixie professor would probably raise his eyebrows at Zervos’s assignment.

  She held up the tiny butterfly. It was made of white glass, with flecks of purple in its depths.

  “It’s the sign of the pixie summer,” she said. “Pixies believe that if they see a white and purple butterfly, the summer will be plentiful, so every year in the spring they look for them.”

  “And every year they’re disappointed,” said Lisabelle. She held her pillow in one hand as we walked, not concerned with examining it.

  “Says the girl who thinks a pillow will pass,” I said.

  “Actually,” said Sip. “The pixies are excellent craftspeople. The detail” - she pointed to the intricate embroidery on the pillow - “is unmatched. Lisabelle should be fine. At least in relation to this assignment. Maybe not so much in relation to life.”

  We walked in silence for a time, while I debated with myself whether I was going to go in search of Korba after class ended. Suddenly, before we reached Cruor again, a depressing thought struck me.

  “What if this whole time we’ve been trying to defend ourselves from Malle and she’s not really the one pulling the strings?” I asked worriedly. “What if it’s Caid, and Malle is merely a distraction? The darkness is becoming suffocating.”

  “Then we’re in real trouble,” said Sip. “But I’m okay with it either way, because we’ve been in real trouble one way or another since we were Starters. So long as we deal with one threat at a time we’ll be fine.”

  “Actually, in every long range scenario I can think of, we’re more likely to be dead than fine,” said Lisabelle matter of factly.

  “Thanks for the cheer, Belle,” said Sip.

  My mind raced back to my dream from second semester, when Lisabelle had killed our friends. What Camilla had said on the bus was fresh in my mind, that darkness calls to darkness, which meant that Lisabelle’s darkness worked both ways. Could it possibly be that one reason the demons kept hanging around was Lisabelle?

  I shook my head, angry at myself. Loyalty was all we had against the demons. I could never question Lisabelle, yet for the rest of the day the question nagged at me.

  Zervos glanced at all our objects, but strangely enough he didn’t seem all that interested. It looked like many of the students had headed for the Long Building. I just hoped that Dacer had been there. He would have fits if any paranormal went into the Museum without his permission.

  After lunch and a chat with Keller about painting that weekend, I went in search of Korba. The pixie professor had class in one of the houses near Volans, where I had had a couple of classes over the years, so I found him easily. To my dismay, he wasn’t alone. Oliva was with him.

  They had their heads bent over a parchment and were examining it.

  “Um, excuse me,” I said, clearing my throat. They both looked at me.

  “Yes, Charlotte?” said Oliva. “Who are you looking for?” His voice was distant, as if he was distracted.

  “Professor Korba, actually,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  I hurriedly explained Zervos’s assignment. Oliva sighed. “He mentioned he was going to try something like that. So you’re fine?” I thought that was an odd question to ask unless he really thought the pixies had it in for me, but I brushed it aside.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I was wondering if you could translate some of this for me?” I asked Korba. “Just so that I have something to tell Professor Zervos tomorrow.”

  Korba nodded. “I would be delighted,” he said, taking the old book from my hand. He flipped through the pages with a slight smile on his face.

  “Ah, yes, the pixie code of ethics,” he murmured. “How about this? No pixie or pixie dwelling may turn away another paranormal in need of shelter.”

  Korba must have read the surprise in my face, because he chuckled. “Pixies, many of us, do in fact have warm hearts.”

  Next to him, Oliva nodded. “If you can get past the trickery and our untrusting natures, sure.”

  We talked for a little longer about the book. Korba said that it was old, but not rare, which was why it simply sat in the living room at Volans instead of being locked up.

  “Charlotte, do you have a class with Professor Dacer this semester?” Oliva asked.

  I nodded. “We’re calling it Advanced Masks. I have it next.”

  Oliva nodded. “Good, the more you can work with real magical objects the better off we’ll be.”

  With that he seemed to forget I was there, and turned his attention back to the parchment he and Korba had been working on before I came in. The signs and letters looked similar to those of the book I had just had Korba translate for me, which meant that I had no idea what the parchment said. It didn’t matter, my head was already spinning a little. It was clear that Oliva had worries that he had not shared with the students of Public. What he said was cryptic and strange, but I didn’t have time to worry about it just now. I had my next class to get to.

  From Korba’s classroom I headed straight for the Long Building, where Dacer and I had agreed to meet so that I could practice with the masks. I had become pretty good with the elemental masks, and now Dacer wanted me to start practicing using the other masks
. My class with him would meet at random, whenever we wanted to schedule it. Today we had decided to have it right before dinner.

  When I got to the Long Building I called out to Dacer, expecting that he’d already be there. He had made sure I had a key to the Museum, so I let myself in and wandered around. But there was no sign of my mentor.

  “Dacer?” I called, over and over again, but he was nowhere to be found. I frowned. He hadn’t mentioned that he wasn’t going to be there for our meeting. On his desk in the back room I saw a stack of papers and went over to look through them. He had obviously been there recently, because today’s Tabble was in the pile.

  I glanced at it, then quickly looked away. Mound had written another article, but at least this time it wasn’t about me. Instead, it was about Caid and the attack.

  I sat down in Dacer’s chair to read.

  I had the great pleasure, at least that’s what I thought it would be, to spend a weekend at President Caid’s summer residence not too long ago. Yes, I mean the president of the Paranormals, our most important and revered elected official. He is the man we look to for guidance, for leadership, to always make the right decision. To stand in the face of hardship and say not today. When all else fails, President Caid is the backbone of the paranormals.

  I am deeply saddened to say that I have never been so disappointed in my life.

  First, President Caid is a very personable and jovial man. I have a feeling that this quality was more important in his election than any faultless record of leadership. President Caid gathers powerful paranormals around him, whose accomplishments are beyond reproach. He therefore gives the appearance of competence, without actually possessing any competence himself.

  If he had not allowed the election of the pixie Oliva to go through, I would have lost all hope.

  As it happened, there was a demon attack while I was at dinner at President Caid’s; it occurred in front of all of his guests. I can only surmise that his lack of any real response has to do with his fear of standing up for the paranormals, as there can be no other explanation.