The Lightning Conjurer

by Rachel Rener

  Were we winning? Losing? Were they hurt? Or maybe the better question was, how badly were they hurt? Beside me, Eileen was quietly sobbing. My own tears froze against my cheeks. We had to help – but what could we do?

  When the steam finally began to clear, I could barely make out the silhouette of a man. He was standing, his sword pointed at the throat of another man who was scrambling backwards across the churned-up earth. But who was who? I craned my neck so far it hurt. As bystanders, we couldn’t approach the ring, that much had been made clear. I wanted so badly to clear the fog myself – a simple gust of Wind would have done it – but I was terrified to try it for fear that one of their Auromancers would notice and think I was trying to interfere.

  I almost had a heart attack as Kumiko’s opponent leapt through the fog, spry as a woman half her age, and hurled a molten boulder of Earth behind her. It seared through the steam, creating a hole through which I could just barely—

  “Aiden!” Eileen screamed.

  My heart sank. That could only mean that he was the one who’d been overpowered. Stomach acid filled my throat, threatening to erupt. He was going to die. He was going to die in a sacrifice that was meant to save our lives, never knowing the truth, never knowing how I—

  “You have to, Aiden!” Eileen cried out. “There’s no other way!”

  My vision finally caught up to hers – Aiden wasn’t the one on the ground. His blade, its lethal tip pointed at the other man’s throat, had erupted into vicious flames. But his arm wasn’t moving. The only thing that moved was the blood trickling across his skin and dripping onto the snow. I bit my lip, doing everything I possibly could to hold myself back. Move! I silently shouted. The Polymancer was looking up at him in awe, in fright, in disbelief – but Aiden wasn’t striking.

  “Kill him!” I shouted. “What are you waiting for?”

  Aiden’s eyes caught mine for the briefest moment. Then someone else’s scream shattered the air. In a Terramantic explosion of dirt and debris, Kumiko’s body bounced onto the ground several feet away him, her limbs splayed in every direction. The back of my neck tingled and I sensed what was going to happen next. I wanted to scream. Wanted to warn him. My mouth was frozen in open horror, my scream paralyzed in my throat.

  So, I lunged forward instead.

  My shoulder connected with his chest as the massive ball of lava whizzed past us, instantly searing through my jacket, my sweater, and the top layer of skin underneath. I cried out in pain as we crashed to the ground. The drums stopped. Deafening silence filled the square in their absence.

  I groaned as two boots appeared in front of me, and then a knee, followed by Teru’s face, creased with rage. “Because of your interference, you have forfeited your lives.”

  “No,” Aiden choked out. His eyes, streaked with sweat and blood, found mine. “Savannah, what have you done?”

  I opened my mouth, indignation and anger dancing on my tongue. After all, I’d just saved – well, added a few minutes, at least – to the man’s life. And then I closed it again. There was no use arguing. I knew what I’d done. I did what I always do: I screwed up. Tears began pouring down my face as the words slipped out on their own accord. “I just couldn’t stand there and watch you die.”

  Shock replaced the anger etched into his expression.

  A gust of Wind swept beneath us, raising us up from the ravaged ground. A yelp coming from my right let me know that Eileen had been swept up as well. Kumiko’s still body was left where it was, beside the fallen form of the old woman who’d struck her down. Was she moving? Breathing? I couldn’t tell. A sudden tightness gripped my chest. Kumiko was Emily’s age.

  The Polymancer Aiden had spared approached the chief, offering his charred and bloodied samurai sword in prostration. Teru reached for it but the man hesitated before releasing his weapon, muttering something beneath his breath as he bowed his head. A request? With so little inflection to the language, it was impossible to tell.

  For a brief moment, Teru looked shocked by whatever the man had said, then shook his head. He took the sword from the younger man, dismissed him without further preamble, and raised the weapon above his head. The metal glowed crimson and I couldn’t help but gasp in shock; it would appear Teru could wield Fire and Earth as well as Wind.

  “Speak your last words now,” he instructed. “For honorably sparing Tanaka-san’s life, your deaths will be painless and swift.”

  “Please, Yasutake-sama,” Eileen pleaded. “You have to believe us – there’s been a terrible mistake. If you could just listen…”

  She kept talking, but I stopped listening. I glanced over to my left, where Aiden hovered, stony-faced, his arms bound behind his back by Wind. Blood dripped from his shoulder and cut eyebrow. I’d normally feel self-conscious, knowing he would be regarding me from the left side of my scarred-up face, fairly certain that lipstick still smudged my cheek, but in that moment… it somehow didn’t matter.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered. And I was sorry. Sorry for what I’d done to him. Sorry for not being able to make it up to him. Sorry for the things I’d never said to him.

  Most of all, I was sorry that I’d never be able to make it home to Emily. I’d promised her I’d come right back. I’d given her my word. It would be the first promise to her I’d ever had to break.

  Aiden pressed his mouth into a thin line and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, I braced myself for what was coming next: anger, blame, and pointed contempt, all of which I deserved. What I didn’t expect was for him to flash me a wistful smile – one that made my heart leap. “Do you think what Teruyuki said is true? That when we die, our bodies return to their Elemental forms?”

  I tried to shrug but my Auromantic binds were too tight. “I doubt I’ll be granted such a peaceful afterlife.” I swallowed, bidding the tears gathering in my eyes to stay put. “Aiden, I’m – You know… what I did to you…”

  “You’re forgiven.”

  I stared at him, speechless, the air sucked straight from my lungs. He forgave me? Did he mean that? Could a person like me even deserve forgiveness from someone like him?

  A glint of red in my periphery snatched my attention away. Breathless, head spinning, heart threatening to burst through my ribcage, I looked around. The snow had stopped. The villagers were silent. The colorful torches of Fire had dimmed. Teru’s blade rose directly above my head, heat rolling off of it in scorching waves. At least it would be a quick death, as he promised. At least I wouldn’t have to watch Aiden die. I squeezed my eyes shut and took a deep breath, trying to recall my happiest memory. Something was roaring nearby – a deep, reverberating rumble that blew my hair in all directions as it grew louder. I tried my best to ignore it.

  As I watched Emily’s green dress disappear behind tall stalks of sunflowers waving in the breeze I’d summoned, our smiling mother standing off to the side alive and well, I felt my own lips pull into a peaceful smile.

  I vaguely registered the sound of Teru’s ragged shout signaling the imminent strike of his blade. And though I’d expected darkness to immediately follow, it was blinding white light that greeted me on the other side.

  Chapter 15

  ook, you can’t blame me for thinking I was dead, okay? A blinding white light – that’s what everyone says you see right before Saint Peter welcomes you to the Pearly Gates, right? How the heck was I supposed to know that it was a spotlight, shining down from a helicopter, in the middle of nowhere?

  Anyway.

  I’d very bravely steeled myself against what I and everyone else had assumed would be my honorable death. Until, of course, the superheated sword didn’t actually slice my head off like one of those lightsaber thingies in Star Trek or whatever. No, what did fall was a freaking Pentamancer, straight out of the sky, who landed rather deftly between Teru and myself. That was a shocker in its own right, but my eyes nearly popped out of my skull as she flung the sword straight out of Teru’s hand with a Terramantic flick of her wrist. She glanc
ed over her shoulder at me, weird flashing purple eyes and all, and released me, as well as Aiden and Eileen, from our Auromantic binds. I fell to the ground, landing far less gracefully than she had landed from fifty feet up.

  “What took you so long?” I screamed from the dirt, but my voice was lost in the roaring sound of the helicopter propellers hovering right above our heads.

  A moment later, the seventy-something-year-old prime minister herself, as well as several of her Auromantic attendants, landed softly on the ground beside us.

  Show-offs, I grimaced. I scrambled to my feet, pain shooting down my leg like a pinball, and stared up at the helicopter wondering just how many more ultra-powered Wind ninjas were going to drop out of the sky. Instead, a rope ladder was flung out of the open door and Ori awkwardly climbed down with one arm, his other arm draped in a white sling. As he neared the ground, Rowan ran over to him and helped him down, taking his unslung arm in both of hers. I glanced over at Aiden, who was watching them as closely as I’d been, but didn’t dare take my eyes off of Teru a moment longer. Were he and the other villagers gearing up to attack us again? My insides knotted at the thought.

  But no, he and his people were simply staring in awe like the rest of us. The moment Ori’s feet touched the ground, the helicopter turned off its high beam, hovered up into the sky, and within seconds it was gone. Leaving, I quickly counted, eleven of us – Ugh, ten of us, I amended as I glanced down at Kumiko’s unmoving form – against a village of superpowered Ancients. Sure, we had a Pentamancer on our team, but she wasn’t exactly on my team.

  She and Ori jogged over to stand with me, Aiden, and Eileen, but apart from the two lovebirds sharing a quick embrace, the five of us didn’t exactly have a heartfelt reunion. Prime Minister Mei and three of her four attendants were faced off against Teru and the other Elders, with a literal village behind them, and things had grown deathly silent. Except for the small moan that barely registered in my ears. A quick glance over my shoulder confirmed my tiny hope to be true: the feeble sound belonged to Kumiko, who was being tended to by Mei’s fourth attendant. He was even nice – or maybe stupid – enough to check on Kumiko’s attacker, who also hadn’t moved from her spot in the dirt after being hit with what was apparently a ferocious Hydromantic attack. I for one hoped that the freakish old lava lady would just stay down for a while, if she wasn’t already dead.

  The minister’s voice snapped me back to the matter at hand – our imminent deaths. And – surprise, surprise – she was speaking in Japanese, so I couldn’t understand a word. Great. Luckily, after giving Rowan and Ori a massive hug, Eileen planted herself in the middle of our huddled group to translate.

  “Mei’s asking what’s happened and Chief Yasutake, of course, is saying that we – the Asterians, that is – killed one of their family members in Tokyo.”

  “Seriously, what in the hell happened out there?” I interjected.

  “Later,” Ori muttered, clutching his slung arm. He was wearing an oversized jacket so I couldn’t tell what exactly had happened to him, apart from the sling he wore over his coat. Rowan sure seemed to be hovering awfully close to him though, which was a clear shift from her standoffishness earlier in the trip. But why was she being so clingy with him and not Aiden? Did his injury have something to do with her?

  Eileen started chattering again. “Mei is explaining – really quickly, gah, I can only make out every other word – that it wasn’t us… well, it was us, but a… a rogue group of us, that attacked a bar of…” she let out a small gasp. “Yakuza?”

  At that, Teru got visibly upset.

  “What are ‘yak-oo-zuh’?” I asked, trying to pronounce the word like she did.

  “Gangsters.”

  Ah. No wonder he bristled. Mei had basically called his niece or granddaughter or whatever she was a mobster.

  “Um, I guess his great-granddaughter was working there as a waitress,” Eileen translated.

  “Oh, no,” Rowan whispered to Ori. “I bet she was the girl we saw by the bar.” He was uncharacteristically quiet in response, but he did look pretty broken up over whatever they’d seen. She took his hand in hers and squeezed it.

  Hmm, I thought, raising an eyebrow. Aiden seemed to notice Rowan’s “friendly” gesture as well. And judging by that fresh line between his brows, he didn’t seem to like it very much.

  Eileen’s voice brought my attention back to Mei and Teru. “Okay, honestly, I can’t really follow very well because the minister is using ultra polite Japanese and Yasutake-sama is talking super fast, but she’s basically just laying down the facts and apologizing profusely.”

  “Apologizing?” I hissed. “They tried to kill us!”

  “Aiden, what exactly happened here?” Rowan asked, letting go of Ori’s hand to face him. “I don’t understand – what does that bar have to do with—” As she turned to face him, she finally took a second to notice the fresh blood splattered all over his sweater and dripping down his arm. “Oh my God!” she cried, at long last displaying an appropriate emotion. “You’re hurt! Are you still bleeding?” She took his arm in her hands and started fretting all over it.

  “Yeah. We had a bit of a… samurai scuffle.” He glanced back at Kumiko, who was straining to sit up with the help of Mei’s attendant/doctor guy. He was holding a hand to her forehead and concentrating with his eyes closed. Hydromancer? Electromancer? Always hard to guess without a visible tattoo.

  “Oh, thank God she’s okay,” Eileen breathed as she turned to follow Aiden’s gaze. Kumiko moving around was definitely a good sign. I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of painkillers the guy may have given her.

  “I’m so sorry, Aiden, I didn’t realize,” Rowan whispered, still messing with his arm. I assumed she was trying to staunch the bleeding with Hydromancy. Good to see her finally putting herself to good use.

  Apart from saving your life, a chagrined voice whispered in the back of my mind. I quickly stifled it. I just happened to be the one she landed in front of. Maybe.

  A couple of yards away, Mei was motioning for one of us to come over. I took a step forward but Eileen rushed ahead. Typical.

  “Eileen-san, can you help me understand, from your perspective, what exactly happened here?” the minister asked.

  Blondie launched into some rushed explanation, leaving out the most important bits, belaboring a bunch of trivial details, but she more or less gave the gist of our experience. Of course, she conveniently left out the part about me trying to save Aiden’s life by simply saying, “In the end, we broke the rules and ended up on the wrong end of the chief’s katana.”

  Again, typical.

  Before Mei could reply, Aiden cleared his throat. “To be clear, Minister, Savannah tried to protect me despite knowing the risk it posed to herself. I’d probably be dead if it weren’t for her.”

  Rowan and I both turned to gape at him at the same time. And frankly, we were both probably thinking the same thing: Did he really say that? Was he actually standing up for me? My cheeks warmed as though all the blood in my cold body had rushed to fill those capillaries alone. Using my jacket sleeve, I finally rubbed away the lipstick that I was pretty sure was still smeared across my cheek. The motion also helped to conceal the idiotic grin that was spreading across my face.

  “She… did?” Rowan asked, turning her stare on me.

  I shrugged nonchalantly. Damn right I did, bitch!

  Mei, Eileen, and Teru continued talking for a few more minutes. Kumiko even hobbled over to join with the doctor guy’s help. I couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying but with every passing minute, Teru and the other elders appeared to relax a little more. It would seem, for the moment at least, that we weren’t going to die.

  Probably.

  ***

  After what felt like hours, Mei had finally convinced Teru to let everyone inside so they could continue their chat. So, she, Ori, Kumiko, Rowan, Teru, and the rest of the elders and attendants headed into the large farmhouse where we’d been
talking before the whole “mix-up” occurred, if you can use such a word to describe them almost decapitating me. According to Eileen, Teru had promised that Kumiko would receive healing alongside the old woman she’d pretty much annihilated in the ring. I couldn’t help but grin at that. The little girl had spunk, and while I hadn’t been able to make out what she was doing for most of the match, the consensus appeared to be that she was the best single-Element swordsman the village had seen in some time. Even if she did end up looking like she’d been tossed around a blender by the end of it.

  I would normally be irritated at being excluded from the conference, but the elders agreed to let the three of us use their hot springs to heal and warm up after they, you know, almost killed us. It was just a short walk through the town square (the charred site of said attempted murder), between a cluster of thatch-roof cottages, and through some sort of zen garden where curls of steam beckoned my battered body to plunge into their warm, therapeutic waters.

  Nevertheless, as I stood butt-naked in the changing room, I chewed on the inside of my lip to keep myself from bursting into tears. My hip was throbbing. I hadn’t reapplied my foundation in hours. My blood sugar had completely tanked and all they’d fed us for dinner was some disgusting dried fish – whole, with eyeballs! – and rice. Worst of all was this tiny white towel hanging from the hook in front of me. Did they really expect me to be able to wrap that around myself? It was practically a hand towel! What kind of barbarians were these villagers, anyway? Sure, I’d initially been excited at the prospect of soaking my aching body in a hot spring, but I didn’t realize that the spring was going to be outside in the frozen tundra. Or that I’d be completely nude. Or that the “fresh, healing waters” would smell like rotten scrambled eggs.