Elemental Damage: Confessions of a Summoner Book 2
Page 9
Carter sizzled. Steam streamed up from his charred body. Burn holes singed in his shoulders and collar, exposing blackened meat and a red-eyed vampire whose ferocity was at its peak. I’d seen that look before. It was the same look he’d given Marcus when Carter had found Rebekah’s body on the floor.
With a low, guttural growl, Carter bolted after Zakhar faster than I’d run in my tiger form, closing in on the blazing Zakhar who struggled to get to his feet. Carter pounced in the air, claws out, reared back and set to swipe off the Shaman’s head.
But Zakhar was ready this time. Aiming both fiery hands up, Zakhar blasted a roaring stream up at the vampire. Carter’s body burst into flames, sending the vampire spiraling off like the Tasmanian Devil when he landed, stumbling and on fire, ripping through tree trunks, crashing to the ground. Vicious grunts rumbled out of him.
“Carter…” Stephanie said. She shifted to a crow and soared to him, switching out before she landed, both hands pointing at him, ready to stream water as she’d done before.
Except this time, Zakhar wouldn’t have it. He stomped forward, thrusting both hands out at her, lighting her up with flames. Both Zakhar and Stephanie cried out, since the ankh linked them together, even though Zakhar’s body was already smoldering. But that was what Zakhar wanted. He just needed to get her away from Carter.
Stephanie staggered back into the brush as flames rushed up her body. Her tattoos flickered bright blue, as she drained power from the ground, slowly extinguishing the flames.
With the woods ablaze and Zakhar wielding fire, there was no way I would dare decant into Wraith form. Not only did I lose a part of myself every time I switched, but flames were a Wraith’s bane.
I decanted into Summoner form, and though nothing about my physical features altered, on the inside I felt…different. Like being attuned with everything. There was no way I was going to summon fire. It was far too chaotic, and I nearly died last time I tried, but earth, now that I could do.
The obelisk was already touching my skin, so I didn’t have to grab it, and since I was using the Semblance, I wasn’t truly wearing the black boots that I appeared to wearing, which meant that my bare feet were touching the ground.
With a thought, the earth trickled through my body merging with Rebekah’s soul that thundered out of the obelisk. Brown, swirling lights twisted from the gray stones underfoot, circling around on the ground. Solid legs formed, then a massive chest with powerful arms, all of which were made entirely of stone. A cubed head chiseled out of the fifteen-foot boulder. Nooks narrowed out for eyes and a mouth, though the summon did not make a sound.
I looked up at the earth summon who looked down at me, awaiting a command.
The stone rumbled towards Zakhar. Fire roared up the summon when Zakhar shot out flames from his hands. The summon shielded its face with its forearm, as flames wrapped around its body, blackening its gray stones, but nothing more.
The summon roared, but this was different. It sounded more like boulders shifting in a shout. It reared back with its fist and slammed it dead into Zakhar’s chest. The Shaman flipped backwards head over heels and crashed into a tree off the trail, splitting the tree in two.
His bones must have been broken by the way his back slanted eerily to the left, but his healing powers kicked in and he was back on his feet. “Foolish choice, Mr. Lyle!” Zakhar shouted from afar.
He dashed at the summon who swung at his head. Zakhar rolled to the right then came up and gripped the summon’s waist with both hands.
What is he doing? Was he trying to lift the summon? That creature must have weighed several tons. When Lyle tried to control the summon, he realized what had happened.
“Ho-ly crap.”
“Is right,” Umara said, coming up beside me with her green sleeveless vest and her hair tied back.
“What just happened?” I asked, stunned.
“He’s an elemental Shaman,” she said. “Summons are elements, so he can control them.”
“Oh.”
The stone summon glanced over its shoulder back at me, and though it only had holes for eyes, there was death in them. I tried to disperse it, but Rebekah’s soul was locked in place somehow. I couldn’t access her soul, and so I couldn’t release the summon. As soon as it started up the trail, I took off in the opposite direction, staggering up the next hill, and grabbing tree trunks for balance.
The summon’s strides were unnaturally long, and it was on me in seconds! Trees exploded behind me as it ran right through them. I gritted my teeth and leapt off the ground, flailing my arms, set for them to take off into eagle form. When I landed, however, I felt like my heart had been ripped out.
I’m in Summoner form. I can’t switch back without dispersing the summon.
I glanced behind me, then darted to the right. A stone fist ripped through three trees, strewing splinters like projectiles every which way. Several jammed into my back. Pain sliced up to my throat, but I kept going. I had to. One strike from that beast, and I was dead.
Another strike blew past my head, this one missing though just barely. I felt its stone knuckles cut across the top of my back, and it was all I could do not to lose my balance.
She was quiet for a second, her way of obelisk-scolding me.
The summon barged straight for me, but I found a thin birch tree, grabbed it with both hands and swung around it, changing directions. I expected for the size of the summon to slow it down, unable to compensate for momentum shifts, but I was wrong. The summon slid in the dirt, grinding out a craterous hole, smashing through trees, then charged straight after me.
Sweat poured down my head, and my chest was about to explode, I was breathing so hard. My legs were building up lactic acid by the truck load and were burning worse than Carter was. Too soon, I know, but still, they were burning pretty bad.
I just gritted my teeth harder.
Fortunately, she ignored my sarcasm, because with the summon closing in on me, I didn’t have any more time left.
Rebekah replied by saying,
Against every ounce of wisdom and sound judgment and intelligence I had in me, I stutter-stepped back onto the path, dodged to the side, and let the summon barrel past me. When its back was to me, I reached both hands forward and grabbed its left leg.
The answer I got was not what I expected. One mule kick to the chest that sent me soaring backwards, wind whistling by my ears. The kick hit me so hard, I couldn’t breathe, and by the time I landed, I was holding my gut, gasping for breath that I just couldn’t catch.
My sternum throbbed, and all Rebekah had to say about it was,
Eyes closed, wincing, I rolled to my side, irate.
The summon was nothing more than brown specks of light hanging
in the darkness of the woods, wafting in the air as the breeze passed until finally all the lights had vanished.
I was on my feet in no time, decanting into a cheetah midstride, racing right towards the flames.
Zakhar, still a ball fire, strode towards the burning vampire, hands scorching with black smoke rolling up his body. “What you have discovered is that a vampire is no match for a Shaman.” He half-smiled dark and sinister.
I wouldn’t let him finish off Carter, no matter what. Feral adrenaline tsunamied through my body. My claws threw clods of dirt behind me in clumps, and right when I was about to pounce, a terrifying, amplified shrill like swords scraping along the edges screamed from behind me. Zakhar’s inflamed body flickered, almost extinguishing the fires, but then they came back in full blaze.
A whoosh of wind ripped past my pointy ears, following a clear sphere, similar to a bubble the size of my head. The bubble struck Zakhar in the chest, forcing him back. His flames sizzled out instantly. Another scream screeched from behind, and another orb crashed into him. I could see him trying to reignite his fires, but he couldn’t.
“Lyle, maul him!” Umara ordered from behind.
That was when I realized that she was the one firing the orbs at Zakhar. I pounced at Zakhar, who had apparently been rendered useless by the orbs Umara shot at him. My front claws sank into both of his shoulders, while my bottom claws jammed into his thighs, scraping open wounds as I scrambled for purchase.
Teeth glaring, I bit into this his neck. Zakhar screamed! But when I went to pull away a chunk of meat, he was gone. Vanished. To the point where I collapsed to the ground, kicking at the dirt to get to my feet, sniffing the air to find him. Still nothing.
Umara approached me, wielding a deep green weapon similar to a rocket launcher with two barrels. “He’s gone. Decant back to human.”
My whiskers and claws retracted, as my spine straightened until finally I had spilled back into my human form. “Where’d he go?”
“Shamans.” Umara just shook her head. “You never know what their strengths are. Apparently, this one can resurrect. And now we know that he can merge with the wind.”
“We had him!” I gritted my teeth, hands on my hips.
“Well, we need to regroup and figure out a plan.” She kneeled down beside Carter who was holding his stomach, slowly rolling side to the side in pain, groaning and drenched in water from where Stephanie had extinguished the fires again. “We need to get him somewhere safe.”
“Can’t Stephanie just heal him?” I asked.
“Not a vampire, I can’t.” Stephanie was sitting cross-legged against a tree, absorbing energy from the earth, tattoos beaming blue brilliance while fires crackled nearby. “My heals are for new flesh, not flesh that’s near death, like his.”
“Right.” Umara stood up. “He’ll have to heal on his own. But with wounds this bad, it may take him a full night to recover. I’ll have to get him some blood to drink. And I think it might help to get him a Faux Soul. Putting him on the Summoner’s wavelength will let him communicate with Rebekah. That might end up being a good connection for all of us.”
Confused, I said, “Carter already has a Faux Soul. You gave him one a few nights ago.”
“I did?” Umara said, scratching her head. “Oh yeah…I did.”
She didn’t sound convinced, but I didn’t push it more than that. Instead, I looked down at the vampire, my roommate. He looked so pitiful, so…worn. As fierce as bears can be when they’re at full health, seeing one ruined and near death always had a tendency to pull at me. The way he wheezed, the way his head lazed from side to side, the unfocused glimmer in his eyes. This wasn’t Carter, not the one I’d grown to fear. And somehow, I liked him better when I was afraid.
“We’ll take him back to our apartment,” I said.
“No.” Umara was firm about that. “We can’t. We don’t know how much information Zakhar was able to glean from you when you spoke to him earlier. We can’t take the chance that he knows where you live, especially since we know that the lasers won’t work against him.”
“Why didn’t they work?” Stephanie asked. “They were supposed to work. You assured us that they would. But they didn’t.”
I sensed the tremor in her voice, saw the tears shimmering in her eyes, reflecting the flames.
Umara didn’t give her a response. It made me wonder if Umara didn’t even know herself. I didn’t ask though. We were all pretty shocked by what had happened, how one man—one Shaman—had single-handedly kept a Druid, a Decanter, a fairy, and a vampire at bay.
We had the advantage. We lured him to us, and we almost died. We can’t let him get that ankh. “If we can’t go to my apartment, then where should we go?”
Umara looked around, frowning. “Zakhar has spoken to both of you, and so we can’t chance any connections he might have made. I’ll have some of my goblins bring Carter to us.”
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
I had no idea where Umara was taking us. All I knew was that roughly a half hour had passed with the four us rumbling around in the back of a box truck. When we got to our destination, we found ourselves in an apartment with a plush cream sofa against the wall and a Tiffany lamp on the polished wooden coffee table.
When I looked around, I nearly lost my spirit. Six…“creatures” worked tirelessly, hauling in weapons and computer equipment from the box truck. The creatures were about three feet tall with green reptilian skin that sagged at the jaws. Teeth…or tusks rather…hung from their upper jaw down past their chins, and their scarlet eyes were as wide as my fists.
Leather felt hats sat on their heads, and they wore little striped doublets with violets and oranges and saffrons that puffed out at the hems, complete with elf shoes that curled up at the toes. I was a little stunned that these creatures—what I now realized were Umara’s goblins—were going in and out of the apartment without the fear of alerting the neighborhood of their existence. After all, who could miss a three-foot tall reptile with tusks and felt hats?
But what I realized was that every time they stepped out of the apartment, their form altered so that they appeared to look like regular men or women—nothing too suspicious, besides hauling in computer equipment and weapons in the middle of the night, but who was up this late anyway?
Umara must have some kind of Semblance on them that turns off whenever they walk inside this apartment. I took comfort in that, because that meant that Umara had probably already rigged this entire place with trap upon trap, and even though Zakhar could make it through the lasers that were supposed to have worked, at least I didn’t have to worry about some other paranormal rolling up on us out here in no man’s land.
“Where are we?” I asked Umara who was helping stack the boxes in the corner that the goblins brought in.
“Need to know basis,” she said, slamming down a box and dusting off her hands. “The less you know, the safer we are.”
When Umara brushed off her hands, I didn’t see any fairy dust sparkle from them, which I immediately noted as odd.
Stephanie found a seat on the couch, leaning forward, elbows on her bare knees. “I take it we’re not in Raleigh anymore.”
Umara left it at that, then opened one of the boxes pulling out a plastic canteen that had clearly been set on ice. From one of the pockets in her vest, she dug out a pill, snapped it in half with her thumb, then slipped off the pill into the canteen. The frost around the base of the canteen began to melt, slowly dripping down the side and wetting the brown carpet.
Carter lay in the middle of the floor, dragged in by the goblins. His condition hadn’t gotten much better with the wheezing and the agonizing cough that he’d developed ever since they’d left the woods.
Umara kneeled next to him, lift
ing his head a little. Carter growled, but it was weak—the kind of growl you’d expect to hear from a lion who was a few breaths from death. Umara didn’t even flinch, and proceeded to pour the liquid into his mouth.
I expected it to be red, but it wasn’t. It was green. “What’s in the canteen?”
Umara poured a little more into Carter’s mouth, dabbing the dribbles up with a knuckle and running them over his lip. Some of the liquid dripped from his nose from where he wasn’t swallowing, and some of it he coughed up onto the carpet and his shirt.
But Umara was patient, slowly trickling more into him when his body had settled. “Chlorophyll.” She wiped her nose with her wrist, still sitting on one knee. “People tend to think that vampires can’t go out in sunlight. Not sure who sent out that memo. The vampires maybe? Probably hoping people would feel safe during the day.” She chuckled at that. “It’s the opposite really. Light gives vampires strength. Keeps them healthy and alive and active. Not just sunlight, really any kind of light, though sunlight’s the best. Ever seen a vampire who’s been inside for a week or so?”
I shook my head.
“You don’t want to.” She shuddered, then offered Carter some more of the chlorophyll. “But the smart vampires, they’ll recharge whenever they get a chance. Not sure about Carter, but some will pretend to be homeless and just lay out under the streetlights all night.”
That just made me look at Carter and smile. Sonuva gun, as he would say. So that’s why he stands in front of the TV all day and night. You think you know a guy. “What does the chlorophyll do for him?”
“Light pretty much goes right through him, which is why he doesn’t have a shadow. See.” She traced a finger under his body where it looked like the light from the lamp touched the ground unimpeded. “Sunlight’s the same way. A lot of vampires don’t know this, but eating plants is actually better for them. Gives them more energy than meat. Once the sunlight hits the chlorophyll, it releases energy that his body captures and uses.”