by Larissa Ladd
“First thing.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE TRIP WEST SEEMED INTERMINABLE. Dylan hadn’t been able to get a flash—even a glimmer—of Leigh since the massive effort he had made with Aira and Aiden. He kept opening his mind, trying to home in on her subtle, faint energy, but to no avail. He was starting to become truly worried; if the people holding Leigh had caught wind that he, Aiden, and Aira were on their way, they might have decamped.
It had been relatively easy to get a flight to Nevada; now that they were in the state itself, it was a question of homing in on the location itself. Dylan and Aiden took turns driving—Aira insisted that she was more than capable, but they didn’t want to take the risk that would come up if anyone was tracking them, interested in taking Aira out. The desert was a difficult climate for Dylan to adjust to; he knew that it was easiest for Aiden—with his innate heat tolerance, he was doing the best out of the three of them. For Aira, it was easy enough though she kept steadily drinking water. The lack of water in his environment made Dylan feel more than slightly disoriented. He was so accustomed to his element being all around him that it was difficult to gain his bearings.
“Are you getting anything, Dylan?” Aira asked, glancing at him. She had volunteered to take the back seat—though Aiden had been slightly disgruntled at the fact that she wouldn’t be in easy physical contact while he drove. Aira was homing in on the location they would find Leigh at, using her air-aligned abilities for finding—it was easier, she said, without the distraction of Aiden’s energy nearby. Dylan was seeking the woman who had begun to consume his thoughts in a different way, trying to feel his way through the little bit of water energy that the desert contained, trying to seek out her ephemeral and flickering energy.
“No,” he admitted with a sigh. What was it about Leigh, he wondered? He had responded to her right away—even before they had kissed, he had been intrigued by her. Dylan knew that he was treading on dangerous ground; if Leigh had been involved in any way with the group of elemental terrorists who had decided to kill other people in order to get to Aira, she was not someone he should place any trust in. But the fact that she was bound, that she was clearly a captive, seemed to indicate that at least at the present moment, she was not on the extremists’ side. “I’m not getting even the faintest trace.” Aira smiled ruefully, running her hands through her hair and picking up her bottle of water again.
“We’re getting close,” she said, her eyes slightly unfocused. For the first time, Dylan almost envied Aira the skills and traits that came along with her alignment. He wished that he had as great a certainty that they would find the isolated house in the middle of the desert that Aira had. He wished that he knew exactly where Leigh was, how she was doing. He shook his head. He had been able to locate the earth elemental first. He had been crucial to breaking through the blocks that the group holding the younger woman had established. If the three of them hadn’t worked together, they would still be trying to find a way to locate the group.
“I think that’s it,” Aiden said, pointing to a dot on the horizon. Dylan closed his eyes and followed the direction with his mind, seeking out any sign of the woman he had started to become obsessed with.
“A surprise attack won’t work—it’s too open,” Aira was saying. Dylan opened his eyes. He could—dimly—feel the flicker of a familiar essence. Leigh at least was still there, but the faintness of the imprint on his mind troubled him. She had been in the keeping of the extremists for almost a week; if they had kept her bound the whole time, that would explain a great deal of her failing energy.
“Get ready, then,” Aiden said firmly. They were moving closer and closer to the house. Dylan could see that it was barricaded around the outside, with earthen ramparts ringing the property. Dylan bit his bottom lip; there was so little water in the air around him. There was almost nothing that he would be able to use to attack the outside of the building. As they approached, there were a few people coming out of the house—obviously alerted to the arrival of strangers. Dylan felt the crackling in the air as Aiden and Aira both focused down on their energies. The wind picked up, propelling the car forward more quickly than simple acceleration would provide, blowing sand towards the people who were standing on the other side of the ramparts.
Dylan watched as the ramparts grew in size, climbing up slowly to almost obscure the house, and certainly the people within it. There was not a lot that Aiden could do about it—not much that Aira’s wind could do either. Aira opened a window in the air-conditioned car and whistled out, trilling and letting out a few eerie calls. In a few moments, as they came to the limit of the property held by the elementals and to a stop, a flurry of activity surrounded the car. Vultures, owls, desert birds of all kinds and sizes hovered in the dusty air, calling out to Aira in response to her command.
The moment the car was turned off, Aira opened the door and unlatched her seat belt, repeating a few raucous cries to the assembled birds. The birds replied in shrieking cries and launched themselves towards the ramparts, rising up and then plunging through the air. The elementals on the other side of the barricades let out shouts of alarm. “Shit, she’s here—it has to be her. Get everyone out!” Dylan closed his eyes and pulled all of the water energy that he could towards himself. He couldn’t do much in the arid atmosphere, but he could at least try to do something.
Dylan felt the wind around him rising; he gathered the faint traces of water he could and opened his eyes to grab for Aira’s hand. “Think we can bring on a storm?” he yelled to her, shouting to be heard over the gale force winds that were beginning to howl, to batter at the tall battlements of earth that had risen up. Aira grinned at him and he felt her airy energy flowing through him, driving the little bit of moisture in the air that he could gather toward the rampart. Slowly, but with increasing speed, water began to coalesce into drops of rain, driven by the wind into the base of the dirt that guarded the house. Dylan strained, pulling at his own energy, driving all the water he could find, could produce from the reserves of energy he felt deep inside of his core, into the maelstrom.
The earth elementals were trying to build up the earth ramparts even as the wind and water began to erode them, bending the soil to their will, pushing it up out of the ground as it crumbled. Dylan felt the wind whipping around them, focusing into a vortex as intense as any tornado, and squinted against the flying debris as sand blasted around them. He glanced at Aira; she was glowing yellow, the energy radiating from her body in intense waves as she brought her element to bear. She focused down harder and Dylan felt the wind directly around him die to an eddy even as the vortex of the gale she had pulled into being closed, finding its focal point at the base of the rampart. Dylan pushed all of his energy towards the barrier, driving water to crumble and erode the faltering, crumbling wall, wearing it away.
As the barricade came down, disintegrating under the onslaught of Aira’s potent wind and Dylan’s rain, Dylan saw his brother moving to cover them, a glowing fireball beginning to form in his hand. Aira was still glowing yellow next to him, exhibiting all of the strength that made it impossible for anyone to be the ruler of her element except for her. Dylan watched as the wall fell away, blasting the people on the other side with dirt and mud as the wind tore away at it. One of the elementals dropped down to the ground and began murmuring quickly; Dylan knew what was coming.
“Earthquake!” he shouted to Aira and Aiden. Aiden pitched his fireball into the vortex and Aira drove it with the howling wind she wielded towards the man crouched on the ground. He would have to choose between completing his spell and avoiding the fireball—he chose to evade the blast. Another elemental dropped down, closing her eyes and focusing on the earth under her hands.
“Aiden!” Aira’s voice filled Dylan’s ears, somehow magnified by the wind, and he watched as Aira extended her hand to her mate. Aiden’s eyes lit up and for a moment the wind died almost completely—down to an eddy. But then Dylan felt the tingling, the crackling energ
y that surrounded Aiden and Aira as their essences merged; he smelled the unmistakable stink of ozone, the less pleasant scent of petrichor from the hot desert earth mingling with the rain he had driven at it. Aira held out one hand and Dylan had to glance away from her, towards the group of elementals who had come outside to guard their safe house; the intensity of the electricity dancing at Aira’s fingertips was too bright to look at directly.
Underfoot, the earth began to shake—at first subtly, giving Dylan the impression that he was on a boat, and then harder, sending him off balance, almost knocking him to the side as he struggled to remain upright. “Stop what you’re doing!” Aira said in a shout that carried over the wind and crackling lightning, carrying the full authority vested in her as the ruler of her element, as one of the untouchable members of elemental society. “This electricity will kill earth elementals just as well as it can anyone else on the planet.” Aira was somehow using the wind that made up her essence to hold herself up in spite of the shaking ground underfoot.
The earthquake didn’t cease but instead intensified; Dylan tried to steady himself and looked at the collected elementals on the other side of the crumbled wall. Two of them were now manipulating the earth, making it pitch and twist deep down underneath them. Aira shook her head and Dylan knew that she regretted the necessity for what she was about to do. “I will give you one last chance,” she shouted, looking from one elemental to another. “Stop the earthquake right now.”
“We don’t recognize your authority, Aira!” one of the elementals—Dylan saw fire flickering at the woman’s fingertips—called out.
“Recognize this, then,” Aira shouted back, and Dylan fell back, tumbling from a mixture of the shuddering ground and his own sense of self-preservation. Aira pitched a crackling bolt of pure electricity towards the two earth elementals manipulating the earthquake. For an instant, time seemed to almost freeze—the bright explosion of electric fury almost blinded Dylan and almost definitely blinded the elementals in its path—and everything was still. The ground underneath them ceased shaking and pitching, and Dylan struggled up onto his feet.
Those who hadn’t been in the direct line of fire for the bolt of artificial lightning were staggering to their feet in the aftermath of the shock wave. The two Aira had fired at were shuddering on the ground, faces contorting from the effects of the electricity on their bodies. Aira’s hand sparked and crackled with more lightning to come, and Dylan glanced at her, seeing the stern set of her face. “You have a choice,” Aira called out to those still struggling to stand. “You can continue this stupid fight, or you can decide to stop right now.”
“Are you going to let her win?” Dylan recognized the voice as that of Seraphina Williams—one of the most unstable fire elementals on the planet, who had barely managed to avoid coming under judgment for her inability to actually control her element. “We came together to overthrow her, you idiots!” A fireball shot from Seraphina’s fingertips; but before it could even get close to them, Aira had deflected it and Aiden had taken over control of it, bringing it to his own hand.
“Fina,” Aiden said, shaking his head. “You’re against three of the four elements here. You should know better than to throw fire at a fellow fire elemental.”
“Fine! Earth elementals—you can take them! You know you can!” one of the other elementals raged.
Staggering against the ramparts, he shook himself and dropped to the ground. He began speaking to his element, and Dylan moved back once more. Aira clenched her hand into a fist and he saw the shower of glowing, cracking sparks that fell from her fingers. In the next instant, the ramparts were beginning to form into something like a wave of earth—growing, accumulating, a landslide’s worth of dirt that would come thundering at them. Aira opened her hand and threw another bolt of electricity at the man, catching him just before the wave of earth obscured him from view—sending him in spasms onto his back. Dylan’s ears were ringing from the sound of the sonic crack that filled the air, the close-proximity thunder from the electricity shooting out over the landscape mercifully away from him.
The rest of the elementals were caught in the shock wave and knocked down, and Dylan saw that in spite of Seraphina’s words, they were ready to give up; they hadn’t bargained on a close quarters battle so soon, he thought. They thought they would be protected by their spell to block anyone from tracking them, by the elements surrounding them. Counting the number of people outside of the house, Dylan knew that it was not by any means the whole group—Oriel’s report had been that there were a dozen people in charge, working through disaffected elementals. There were maybe seven or eight people arrayed in front of the small safe house, and they were clearly not all in any position of authority. There might be two or three more inside—not enough to have been everyone involved in the conspiracy by any stretch.
In the silent aftermath of Aira’s second electrical attack, another shot of fire flew through the air. Aiden took control of it and extinguished it, and Aira turned her attention from the quarter it had come from: Seraphina.
“We have to disable her,” Aira said lowly. “She’s clearly the one in charge here.” She glanced at Aiden. After only a moment’s hesitation—Dylan remembered that Aiden had known Seraphina when they were both children—he nodded. Aira called up the electricity into the palm of her hand once more, a smaller bolt than she had used on the other three elementals; before Seraphina could make another attempt, Aira had shot the bolt at the woman, striking her in the chest and knocking her to the ground.
The rest of the elementals threw up their arms. “We surrender! We surrender!” they shouted—taking on the language of fire and earth elementals. Aira stood firm for a long moment before relinquishing Aiden’s hand. She stepped forward and looked at each of the remaining elementals.
“I am the Regina Sylphaea,” she said in a hard, carrying voice that Dylan had to admire. “As long as I live, I will not let any of you overthrow me.” She continued moving forward and Dylan fell in behind her, watching as Aiden, a faint smile curving his lips, took the third point of the triangle. “On your knees, right now!” A heady gust of wind reinforced the command and the four elementals who hadn’t been incapacitated by electric blasts fell onto their knees, looking at the ground. Dylan identified three fire elementals and one earth elemental, tasting their essences cautiously with his perception. Aira came to a stop at the disintegrated rampart, looking at the elementals on the ground and on their knees. She glanced at Dylan. “There are too many of them to fit in the car,” she said quietly.
“I’ll call for backup,” Aiden said quickly. “I’ll also grab the bindings we’ve got.” The ones who had been taken down by the combined force of Aiden and Aira’s energies would be incapacitated for hours—those who were on their knees now might not remain that way if they weren’t bound.
“Go inside and see if you can find Leigh,” Aira told Dylan. “I’ll stay out here while Aiden calls in the cavalry.” Dylan felt relief wash through him for just an instant; Aira could handle the situation for a few moments at least. But then he felt the snap back of new tension. Leigh was inside.
CHAPTER EIGHT
DYLAN WENT INTO THE HOUSE with his guard up; he knew that there was likely to be at least one other person beyond Leigh hidden inside. The building was insulated against the heat—but the electrical blasts that Aira had aimed at the elementals outside had caused a power surge, and the air was still, not even the faintest hum of an electrical appliance of any kind. “Anyone who is part of the extremist group responsible for attacking a hotel earlier this week, make your presence known,” Dylan called out, looking around, opening his mind as he went deeper into the house. He could feel the faint flicker of Leigh’s energy—diminished, muted, but there—and then, a moment later he felt another impression. Outside, there was the sound of a scuffle, and Dylan almost turned to look—but he knew that Aiden and Aira had it well in hand. He smiled faintly to himself, remembering his admonition to Leigh the night
she had admitted that she was a spy: that as long as Aiden and Aira were together, they were unbeatable opponents for almost any elemental on the planet. It would take separating them completely to entirely weaken them.
Dylan looked around. “I know there’s someone else here,” he called out. “Come out from hiding, surrender, and I will not harm you.” Dylan heard the sound of something rustling several feet away. He turned and looked in that direction and a hauntingly familiar face appeared around the corner. The man was frowning, scowling almost; he was tall and muscular, with the green eyes that were so common to earth elementals.
“You’re never going to get everyone,” the man said, shaking his head. “There are too many of us.” Dylan shrugged.
“Right now it looks like we have all of you who were gathered for this particular party.” He was starting to feel the fatigue setting in from the battle—but he wouldn’t let this particular enemy see it. “Where is Leigh?” The man raised an eyebrow.
“You know Leigh? How did you know she was here?” the man’s dark brows furrowed in confusion and alarm.
“I’m familiar with her—we found the lot of you thanks to the fact that she introduced herself to me at my brother’s wedding.”
The man’s eyes widened.
“You’re—”
Dylan nodded.
“Dylan. Brother-in-law of the Regina Sylphaea and water elemental, at your service.” He paused a moment and smiled slightly. “Well not exactly at your service. I will watch you leave this house and go outside to join your comrades. I don’t trust you to lead me to Leigh and I can find her on my own.” Dylan called on the untapped reserves of his energy, preparing for a fight. The man hadn’t been involved in the battle outside; he may still have tricks up his sleeve. But if he had seen the fate that his comrades had endured, and if he was smart, he would take Dylan’s instructions.