They knew who was calling to them, knew that I had brought a present as payment, and yet, they still did not want to come. I tried again, begging for their presence, hoping a little humility would speak to them, and yet, nothing. After what I thought must have been at least an hour had passed and not even an inkling of an answer, I let my shoulders fall and slumped forward, hanging my head, feeling the first pangs of a headache coming on.
“Seriously?” I looked up, asking the emptiness around me, feeling my growing frustration, trying to keep it in check, knowing how fickle the fae folk were and would only delight in my baser human reaction. “Okay, fine,” I said, rolling my shoulders to release the tension I was building there. “I’m good enough to warn, but not good enough to help? Is that it? Just not good enough, just too human.”
“Do you really think that’ll help?” Tegan appeared before me, hovering in the air just in front of my face, so close I almost had to cross my eyes to see him.
“Well, asking and begging didn’t,” I said, not bothering to hide my frustration.
“The queens of the court deign themselves when they see fit. You can’t expect Iris to come at your beck and call.”
“Deign? So it is that I’m not good enough to help, very nice.” I let Tegan feel my frustration, hoping it would bite along his skin as it would humans, and was satisfied to see him flinch a little under the weight of my power.
“Now, none of that, I did come to help you,” Tegan said, fluttering a few feet farther away from me, his hands out as if trying to ward off my ability. I reigned in my emotions, pulling back my power.
“You did?” I asked, a little skeptically. “Can you help us?”
“Oh, very nice!” he said, letting me hear his offense, stamping a small foot in the air. “I answer your call and this is how you thank me? And you wonder why the greater powers are not answering you.”
“I’m sorry, Tegan, I didn’t mean it that way. I just…” I fumbled for the right explanation, coming up very short. I sighed and shook my head before saying again, “Tegan, I’m sorry.”
“That’s alright, luv,” he said with a smile, drifting closer to me.
“I… Well, we do need help,” I took a deep breath, feeling a tightness in my chest I hadn’t realized was there. “We’ve been trying to stop Jeremy, but every time I think we gain a few feet of ground, something happens and we slide back even farther than where we started.” I looked up to him and realized he was no longer floating in front of my face, but had drifted to the ground, near the bowl of milk, watching my face expectantly. I laughed a surprisingly loud and happy sound. “Oh, I am sorry. Please, help yourself,” I said, waving my hand towards him and the bowl. He granted me a big, toothy smile and dunked his head over the edge of the bowl and took a long drink of the milk.
“Ah,” Tegan sighed, still hanging over the edge of the bowl, his breath making ripples on the surface of the milk. “You added honey, quite a delicious surprise.” He pulled himself back, tipping back over the edge of the bowl, his feet landing on the ground.
“I remembered when I was a child, the faeries always asked Jodi and me for milk and honey. It took a few tries to realize this is what they meant.” I nodded towards the bowl with a smile. Tegan stepped away from the bowl, stumbling a little as if he’d imbibed in something stronger than just milk and honey. I reached out a hand to steady him, but he just fluttered the autumn leaf wings. “Next time I won’t bring as large an offering.”
“Well now, I wouldn’t be jumping to any rash decisions,” he said quickly, waving his hands in the air in front of him. I laughed, feeling a weight lift from my shoulders as I relaxed for the first time all weekend.
“Oh, wow,” I said between breaths, wiping a tear away from my eye. “Thank you, Tegan, I needed that.” I took in one more deep breath to fill my lungs.
“My pleasure,” he said with a smile, dipping forward again in the air. “Now, on to business I’m afraid. How is it that I can help you?”
“We have no idea what we’re doing any more,” I said quickly, hearing my voice crack, catching myself before I burst into frustrated tears.
“I wouldn’t agree with that.”
“What are you talking about?” I stopped myself, hearing my voice raise almost of it own accord. I took a moment to reign in my emotions before continuing. “Jeremy is out there, wreaking havoc on my city, and I can’t find him, can’t stop him, have no idea what he’s going to do next.”
“Now, none of that is true and you know it,” Tegan said, his voice more stern that I had ever heard it before. He fluttered over to me, hovering just a few inches in front of my face again. “You can find him, if you know how to look for him. You will stop him; you are much more powerful than he is with his borrowed powers. And you have already figured out what he’s going to do next.”
“What?” I blinked my confusion at him, at a complete loss for what else to say.
“Where are your counterparts right now?”
“Jodi’s trying to contact her faeries from her childhood to see if they can’t tell her what these things that are helping Jeremy are and Steven’s watching Jeremy’s house to make sure he doesn’t come for his father.”
“Exactly,” he said calmly with a nod of his head. “You knew that he was going to go after his father, so you are doing something about that. And you knew that you were dealing with Miss Jodi’s core power and have set her on course.”
“Wait, what do you mean?” I asked, my eyebrows drawing together as I eyed him. “Jodi’s core power? Faeries are just a familiar of the Air Element…”
“Ah, but you have said it yourself, these are not faeries that you are dealing with, are they?”
“Oh my god…” I whispered. A chill ran up my back, raising the skin on my arms and under my hair. “They’re… Air Elementals?” Tegan only smiled at me. “But that would mean that Jeremy is an Air Elemental like Jodi. Are you telling me that Jeremy is an Elemental?”
“How else would he command these things?” he asked me, cocking his head to the side.
“But why didn’t we recognize him?” When we were young, Jodi and I had always known we had some special connection to one another; feeling something stronger than friendship pulling us together, as if we saw a shadow of ourselves in the other. It wasn’t until we found Steven and felt the same connection, the same pull that let us know we were kindred spirits, able to recognize each other on a much different level. Recognize was the word we had used and it had always seemed like the exact, perfect word. It was how I knew that Jensen, although gifted, was not one of us because none of us had recognized him.
“I do not know the answer to that. If I did, I would gladly give it to you.” I could feel Tegan’s sincerity, mixed with regret; he truly wished he had all the answers. I knew exactly how he felt.
“I just don’t understand,” I said, shaking my head. “I know that I am mostly an Earth Elemental, but I have strong enough powers in the other elements to recognize what I’m dealing with and these are not air elementals I’ve ever seen. And more than that, since this is Jodi’s core power, as you said, she doesn’t recognize them either.”
“Again, that is an answer I do not have to give, luv,” Tegan fluttered a few feet away from me and I could suddenly feel a change in the air and I knew he was preparing to leave again. “But you know the answers to all of these things, Terra, Earth Mother. You just haven’t understood them yet.” And with that, he was gone.
I sat there in the thick quiet of the orchard, breathing in the citrus and waxy sap of the trees around me. I needed to go see Jodi, check on her and see if she’d found out anything. Although Tegan had been vague, I knew he was right, that the answers had been in front of us this entire time. I knew quite a bit about the different familiars of the four elements, but Jodi had always connected the most with faeries as a child so we didn’t pay much attention to the alternative creatures that were air elementals. That had been our undoing with dealing with Jeremy. J
odi had been right about faeries; they were fickle, they only helped when they wanted to, and if it benefited them more to be disruptive or chaotic, then that’s the way they behaved. It was that reasoning that had made Jodi and Steven insist that we consider that these things were still faeries, but something in my gut had told me they just weren’t. Now I knew I had been right.
I picked up the half empty bowl and laughed quietly, “Wow, have a drink, Tegan,” I whispered to the air with a shake of my head. I could have sworn I heard the answer of tinkling bells echoing in the distance. I walked over to one of the trees and poured out the rest of the milk and honey at its roots and whispered a blessing before making my way back out of the orchard towards my backyard fence. I was up and over the fence and in my backyard, making my way back to my window, when I saw movement on the other side of the back door and realized my parents were moving around. I ran the last few feet to my window before jumping up on the sill and tumbling over into my room. I scrambled up and rearranged the curtains back over the window to cover the fact that the screen was missing and stashed the bowl in a drawer in my desk before I heard my mom knock lightly on my door.
“Honey?” she asked through the door.
“Come in, mom,” I said back, falling into my desk chair, feigning a relaxing atmosphere.
“Hey, sweetie, how are you feeling?” my mom asked, leaning into my room, holding on to the doorknob for balance.
“Oh, better than yesterday,” I said with a small smile.
“Good, you hungry? Your dad and I are thinking of going out for dinner.”
“Oh, I’m good. Actually Jodi called a little while ago, I was thinking of heading over there?” I made sure to sound like I was asking so it didn’t sound like I was just telling my mom what I was doing.
“On a school night? It’s getting a little late to be going out,” she said.
“But mom, it’s the last week of school. We aren’t doing anything in any of our classes besides talking or pretending to watch movies.” I watched as she searched for a better argument in her mind. “I don’t even have any homework anymore. Besides, I’m just going to her house, we’re not going out out.”
“Well, alright, I guess, but not too late, okay?” I agreed and we said our good byes. I waited until I heard them drive away before I left so that I could always claim that I had waited a while until I had left if they tried to say I was staying out too long. Once I was sure they were well away from the house, I grabbed my purse and a sweatshirt and was out the door and on my way to Jodi’s.
Chapter 15
“They’re air elementals?” Jodi asked skeptically as we sat in her bedroom, playing the stereo loud enough to make sure her nosy sisters didn’t try to eavesdrop on our conversation.
“That’s what Tegan said,” I said with a nod.
“But I thought he didn’t know what they were when he first came to you? Neither did the faerie queen,” Jodi asked.
“I guess things changed.” I pushed myself up from her bed and sat up straight, turning to look at Jodi. “Okay, however they knew and however long they may have taken to tell us, we know now. Now we need to figure out what kind of creature they are so we know what we’re dealing with.”
“Right,” Jodi said, sitting up straighter too. “So they’ve been making us think they’re faeries, even though we didn’t fully believe that in the first place, they can fly, which confirms they really are some sort of air elemental…” I chose not to point out that she was the one pushing to get us to just call them faeries this whole time. Jodi was bright and had a lot of potential, but in many ways she was very young. I may be stubborn a lot of the time, but Jodi had a habit of jumping to a conclusion and wanting to stick to it, not willing to say she could be wrong. Then when proved wrong, she just ignored her previous errors as if she hadn’t made them.
I lifted my face towards the ceiling, tracing patterns in the glow-in-the-dark sticky stars her father had put up there so many years ago, trying to rack my brain for any ideas. I let my gaze drift down from the ceiling to the tiny figurines suspended by nearly invisible wires. The porcelain faeries looked less like real faeries and more like tiny women with beautiful, iridescent wings sprouting out of their backs, dressed in angelic, gauzy gowns, and barefoot with five perfect little toes. Suddenly I felt a cold lump form in my stomach and my mouth fell open while I blinked stupidly at the little figurines.
“Terra?” I both heard and felt Jodi speak my elemental name as I always did when she chose to use it, but I didn’t turn to look at her. She followed my gaze up to the ceiling and to the little dolls hanging from the ceiling and I knew she realized the same thing I did. We turned and looked at each other and after another moment of stunned silence, we whispered together, “Sylphs.”
***
One of the most difficult things about magical and mythological creatures is finding hard core facts about them. Go to any major book store and you’ll find a whole section devoted to the Occult with a dozen books on all the different magical things therein, but the trouble is we have to rely mostly on people’s interpretations of things. It’s not like history books or scientific books where you can fact check one author against ten others; in the magical world there is a lot more leeway on being allowed to just write whatever you want, whether or not you’re making it up. So it goes with the different elemental creatures.
Sylphs have been commonly mistaken for faeries for a very long time. It wasn’t until Paracelsus, a German alchemist, back in the 1500s first classified four different creatures for the four different elements that anyone knew what a Sylph was. Sylphs are creatures of pure air, which is why people think they can fly and therefore oftentimes confuse them with faeries. It is believed the Sylphs can shape change if they wish, but most who have documented seeing a Sylph generally describe them the same way; tiny, beautiful women, when they aren’t choosing to be invisible. Personally, I have no idea if we’ve ever encountered a Sylph, mainly because of their ability to shape change. Like so many of the other air creatures, they enjoy a little chaos and would find it funny not to reveal their true self to us. I explained all of this to Steven as we hid in the darkened interior of my car across the street from the McCormacks’ house.
“Why didn’t you think of that before?” Steven asked.
“Honestly,” I said glancing to look at Jodi, who nodded at me to continue. “We just forgot about them,” I said with a shrug. “The problem with Air Elementals is that so many of them can change shape to hide their true identity and really we never had much luck with Sylphs when we were kids so we gave up on them. Jodi works well with faeries so that’s her creature to call.”
“So then how do you know we’re dealing with Sylphs now?” Steven asked.
“Because,” Jodi jumped in before I could. “Jeremy said whatever these things are told him they were faeries, but none of us can see them and Shay and I have second sight, so we know that’s a lie and they work with air currents, lifting Shay and Jeremy those times. It just fits.”
“Is it okay that I’m a little skeptical?” Steven asked as he looked from me to Jodi and back again.
“Of course it is,” I said. “Like I said, no one knows enough about Sylphs to be an expert on them.”
“But the same could be said about all the other elemental creatures. Most of what we work with comes from pure belief in them.”
“That’s true. You tell the average person that faeries and gnomes and salamanders are real and they’ll think you’re crazy,” I said with a smile. “But we know different. I’ve explained this to you before: if it’s real for you, then it’s real and that’s all that matters. Trying to convince the world that magic is real will drive yourself crazy. And the same goes for this situation right now.” I glanced over to Jodi and she nodded again, encouraging me. “I’ll grant you that we can’t be totally sure these are Sylphs, but it’s the first real lead we’ve had, so we’re going to follow it.”
“Yeah, okay, I guess you’ve go
t a point there,” Steven said with a nod of his head. He turned and looked out the window towards Jeremy’s house. “So what do we do now?”
***
What do we do now, that was the question I had been asking myself all weekend. Magical creatures are not immune to attack, but it is incredibly difficult to harm them and, with little to no real documentation on Sylph lore, it was going to be even more difficult for us. With Earth or Fire elements, you can usually combat them with Water, but with Air, the only real way you can combat them is with fire and that didn’t always work out the way you wanted it to. Fire was one of the most dangerous elements to control. That was why Steven’s abilities were not as strong as Jodi’s and mine. I could spend days working with him on a new skill, but because Fire was so volatile, we might not even make a dent by the end of the week.
Last fall we had learned that Steven could raise the core temperature of a person, which led me to believe that he would eventually be able to call fire into his hands one day. Steven could also anchor into Jodi’s Air Element and use her as fuel when dealing with fire. I was able to anchor into both of them and use them as ammunition, but that little trick took a lot out of me and could be detrimental to the environment around us if it got out of control. But I believed that Fire and Air were going to be the keys to combating the Sylphs, if we could catch them.
I’d called Jensen and asked him to play lookout at the McCormacks house so that the three of us could try to get some research done and work on locating Jeremy.
“Are you sure this is safe?” Jensen asked after I brought him up to speed on our theories.
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