The Elementals Collection

by L. B. Gilbert

  She relaxed her grip on his throat.

  “I don’t think it worked well at all. This man, Pedro, he’s. . .broken. He is functioning completely on auto-pilot. He gets up every morning, showers, and goes to work. He does his job but he can’t engage anymore. It’s like his personality was wiped away. And he’s not getting better. Even a compulsion done by an ancient one would fade, although I’ve only met a few, and they’re not exactly open about the strength of their abilities.” Alec paused and then asked politely, “Do you think you could let me up?”

  Diana looked down at him. She pursed her lips and waited a full minute before shifting off him, rising in a fluid motion. By comparison, the vampire rose awkwardly, probably a first for him.

  “I need to see him. And this Fiona, too. Where does Pedro live?” Diana would find him tomorrow after she slept.

  “I can bring Pedro to you. Fiona will have gone to ground after tonight. She was in the ballroom when you. . .dropped by.”

  “I don’t need help finding Fiona. If she was there, she can’t hide from me. And I don’t want Pedro removed from his home. I want to see him there, just tell me where it is.”

  “My man, Daniel, is still with Pedro. I really think you should let me introduce you two. Pedro isn’t reacting well to strangers right now. But he’s gotten used to having Daniel around. And well. . .you will scare the shit out of Daniel unless I’m there. Remember the whole smart people running thing?” he asked as he straightened his clothes fussily.

  Diana lifted an eyebrow before turning and headed to the stairs. “I always catch them, don’t worry your pretty little head about that,” she called behind her as she went down the stairs.

  “I can find out where Fiona is, too,” he offered a little too eagerly as he followed her. Maybe she shouldn’t have called him pretty.

  “Don’t bother. As far as I’m concerned, she trafficked with black witches. I’ll find her myself and will deal with her without your counsel.”

  Or your interference, Diana tacked on mentally.

  Alec hurried down the stairs after her. “I realize it looks bad, but my mother is most likely right on this one. Fiona probably didn’t do anything wrong intentionally. My mother likes having her around because she can basically look down on her intellectually. She is the kind of vampire who’s all glitter and pomp. Her daughter’s a little brighter, but both of them are too self-involved for anything like this.”

  “If she hasn’t done anything wrong, I’ll know, and she’ll be fine. But you have no place shielding the guilty. If you really want to help, you tell me where the trash from the basement is.”

  Alec thought for a moment. “Dietrich wouldn’t have left it in a bin nearby. It’s possible he burned it or something. He wouldn’t know to throw it in the sea to let the saltwater purify it.”

  No longer surprised that he knew so much about witch magic, Diana gave the vampire another assessing look. Doesn’t make him useful, just more suspicious. But if he was hiding some evil seed, it was buried way down deep because she couldn’t sense it.

  “Let me guess, you want to offer to check with Dietrich and get the stuff if he hasn’t gotten rid of it?”

  Alec nodded. “I can get in touch with him as soon as I leave here. I don’t get a great signal close to the house.” He fingered what was presumably a cell phone in his breast pocket.

  No, you wouldn’t. The electromagnetic nature of ley lines disrupted cell and radio signals.

  She wanted to sigh in frustration. He would think he was entitled to some quid pro quo if she took him up on his offer to act as a go-between between her and members of his coven. He would do his best to shield them from her. She didn’t need that kind of help.

  But she was technically in Boston to deal with the Denon Corporation. Now she had to set that aside because this situation was too important.

  Diana mulled it over. She knew her sisters would support any action she chose to take. One of them would even come to back her up if she asked. But all three of them were in far-flung corners of the world right now, dealing with their own investigations, and she didn’t want to bother them. If she needed backup, maybe she could do worse than Alec Broussard.

  What are you thinking? She inwardly berated herself. Diana didn’t need help from a vampire whose only concern was to cover his coven’s ass. Just get the stuff from him and let him introduce you to his man and then you can finish with him.

  “If he still has the trash, bring it to the meet with Pedro,” she said. “We’ll meet at two PM. I assume you will want to meet in daylight?”

  The better to hide your activities from your house.

  “Yes, I think that would be best,” Alec said.

  “Fine.” Diana swung around and walked to the back door. She was out of it and halfway to her bike when he called out from behind her.

  “Don’t you need the address? Should I text it to you?”

  “I don’t use phones. If you’re there, I will find you. So be there,” she ordered, climbing on her bike.

  “Well, that went well,” Alec said aloud to the trees as she drove away.

  8

  Diana returned to the safe house shortly before dawn, where she briefly lit a candle and, after confirming that her sisters weren’t communing, let it flare high and hot for several heartbeats. Then she let it burn out.

  The unnaturally high heat she’d generated would serve as a calling card for her sisters when they next checked in. It was just as well. She didn’t want to go into everything tonight.

  Her thoughts wandered to Alec. She should feel guilty for terrifying him. It shouldn’t be funny—the face he made when she had flipped him like a doll.

  His kind weren’t used to being outmatched. And he was at the top of the heap when it came to strength and power. Few other vampires could match him, even those older than him. But he was either very brave or very stupid if he continued to insist on tagging along during her investigation.

  She lay down on the bed and punched the pillow into shape.

  Vampire chivalry. Blech.

  At noon the next day, Alec still had men scrambling to find Dietrich’s dumpsite. He hadn’t learned where Fiona was hiding, but he had gotten a hold of Dietrich before dawn.

  He’d cornered him as they are prepared for the daylight rest and learned both the approximate location of the trash as well as the state in which Dietrich found the items the witches had left behind.

  Dietrich hadn’t burned the things after all, but he’d probably done worse by tossing them in a random dumpster without noting where he was. It took a good twenty minutes for Dietrich to even pinpoint the neighborhood on a map. After that, Alec only had enough time to call his men and start the search before he pretended to prepare for slumber with the rest of his house. When Alec had finally been assured that the human servants were off on their own business, he’d hurriedly dressed and slipped back out of the house.

  After watching his men crawl through two dumpsters in Somerville with no luck, Alec accepted that Dietrich’s usual precision was absent when it came to giving directions. That or he’d been too rattled by recent events. If he’d seen Diana in action, that was probably the case. So far, all of his men had found were a lot of empty pizza boxes and other way more disgusting discards.

  I’m going to have a lot of dry cleaning bills to comp, he thought, making a mental note to look into it. His staff would never bother him with such trivial matters, but the situation with Pedro had highlighted his attitude toward the people who served him.

  A signal came from one of his men near the fourth dumpster his men had searched. One of them hustled over with partially filled black trash bag. He looked inside and saw a discarded bowl and an assortment of half burned herbs stained with a sticky brown substance on top of a lot of other more mysterious items.

  He threw the bag in the back of the car, relieved he hadn’t needed to make a trip to the city dump. A city this big probably had more than one. He’d honestly never thought
about it before.

  Diana woke near noon with a start. She was sure she’d been dreaming, but it wasn’t the typical nightmare she’d had back when she was in the juvenile ward. All she remembered was that she had been lying next to someone, deep in conversation. But it was already too faded for her to hold onto to the images.

  She never recalled her dreams unless it had been a particularly vivid nightmare. Shaking off the weird feeling, Diana showered and got in touch with her sisters.

  “A black circle, you’re sure?” Gia asked. “What did you find exactly?”

  Diana filled them in on the details, skipping over Alec’s involvement for the moment. “I believe the circle has been active for some time. They may be involving children in their rites. I don’t know if the children are being sacrificed. No one died in the basement, or any other part of the house, but they could be working up to it. Two children have gone missing in suspicious circumstances. One is a Broussard servant’s son. The other is the little girl, Katie. They’re probably moving around a lot, trying to shield themselves from detection with spells and by using houses not tied to them in some way, properties favorable to conducting magic.” Diana held her breath, waiting for the others to confirm what she suspected.

  “Something is wrong, very wrong with the Mother. . .or with us,” Serin said, her mental voice near a whisper.

  “Agreed,” Gia said slowly. “If Diana is right, and I’ve never known her to be wrong, then these witches are acting outside natural law in such a way that She must be unaware of them. While we couldn’t find a child victim of a human predator so quickly, we should have been aware of a black circle forming much earlier.”

  Worry flooded through Diana at Gia’s words. She had suspected the same thing, but acknowledging it openly made it feel real.

  “Wait,” Logan broke in anxiously. “Wouldn’t we have felt a shift in the balance ourselves even if the Mother wasn’t aware of it? Aren’t we her first line of defense? She created us as guardians and wardens. Don’t we feel the shifts in the balance without her knowledge?”

  “Sometimes,” Gia answered with an unhappy sigh. “We should feel the shift if we are near enough, but sometimes the Mother feels it first and then relays it to us. It’s actually simply based on proximity. There isn’t a great difference between the two in terms of time and our perception. But it’s clear that none of us felt the shift in the balance that should have occurred when the circle first formed.”

  “Are we broken?” Logan asked, her young voice sounding desolate.

  Diana scowled. “I don’t feel any different. I’m just frustrated that I can’t detect the circle. My gifts are working the same way they always have,” she said. “My gut says there’s something about these witches. Something different. They are somehow shielding their activities from us. Maybe they’ve found a new way to hide from the Mother as well.”

  She related what she’d learned about Pedro and the strange nature of his compulsion.

  “That might be true,” Gia said. “We don’t feel a shift until the damage has been done in the non-magic cases. It takes so much more for us to become aware of them. We’ve attributed that to the overall increase in violence in the human world. But there is another possibility. Perhaps She is going to sleep again.”

  Diana sincerely hoped not. The times in their history when the Mother slept had been troubled for all magical and non-magical beings alike.

  “Do you need help on this, Di?” Serin asked. “I can shuffle some things and be on my way there the day after tomorrow. With this and the Denon case, you might need backup.”

  “No, you have your hands full in Mexico. Besides I. . .I may already have some help.”

  There was absolute silence for a long moment.

  “Who is it?” Serin asked.

  “The vampire leader’s son offered to make reparations for his families involvement,” Diana said flatly.

  “Alec Broussard!” Logan gushed. “Isn’t he that super hot, most eligible bachelor vamp? He’s like their equivalent of Prince William or JFK Jr. Wait…I thought he was in Europe or something?”

  Diana frowned at Logan’s reaction. Was she following gossip on Alec like some kind of fangirl?

  “He was keeping tabs on his parents,” she explained. “Apparently he doesn’t trust them to stay out of trouble. When one of their servant’s sons went missing, he came home to investigate.” She didn’t offer an opinion on how atypical that was.

  “How exactly is he helping?” Serin asked, suspicion threading her voice.

  “He brought the second missing child to my attention and is having one of his men care for the father. It sounds like this Pedro’s memory was tampered with enough to do some serious damage. The vamp is also tracking down the trash the witches left behind in the house that his mother’s servant got rid of. . .and he’s a Daywalker. Also a sensitive, it seems.”

  Someone whistled.

  “Interesting,” Logan said.

  Serin seconded the sentiment.

  “And you’re all right with this?” Gia asked, her voice doubtful.

  “After tonight, I’ll be done with him,” Diana said. “His stupid vampire honor will be satisfied, and I won’t have him underfoot.”

  “O-kay,” Serin said, drawing out the syllables. “Well, just be careful around him.”

  “Careful my bodacious booty!” Logan chimed in. “You should keep that tasty piece around for as long as possible.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Diana said, rolling her eyes. “Both of these cases are too important to bring in an outsider for long.”

  “Yeah, okay, but it would be nice for you to have some form of support. . .on this case,” Logan replied a little too enthusiastically.

  Diana sincerely hoped Logan wasn’t working up to a lecture about mixing with others again. She knew the Air Elemental loved her unreservedly, but it wasn’t the first time she’d tweaked Diana about her loner status.

  Logan was always encouraging her to blow off some steam with a guy or make friends outside their circle. It was a teensy bit hypocritical, considering she didn’t do either of those things herself. But Logan had her mother’s family to lean on. They had long ties to the various Elemental lineages, and more than one had come from their bloodline.

  As for men, Logan was a shameless flirt, but she took her legacy seriously. She pushed away the men who flocked to her when they got too close, saying she couldn’t afford a real diversion, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t have a little fun.

  “Don’t worry about me—I have all of you,” Diana said, the last bit tongue and cheek.

  They did have each other, just not in person. Not all at once anyways.

  “If you do need more help, I can be there in four days,” Gia said.

  Diana smiled, touched at their concern. “I hope this will be over by then. Don’t worry. I’m a multitasking machine,” she assured them. “I’ve got some background research to do on the Denon case, and then I’m meeting the vamp and the father of the missing boy.”

  “Okay, but if this goes south, make sure to keep us informed and one of us will be there,” Serin said.

  Logan and Gia echoed Serin’s words, and all three withdrew from the conversation.

  Diana tracked the vampire to Pedro’s building a half hour ahead of schedule.

  The apartment building in Brookline was in a nice and quiet residential neighborhood. According to her research, the Broussard’s owned hundreds of these all over the state, under different names and shell corporations. They also owned warehouses and office buildings up and down the east coast. Their nearly limitless funds were a major source of contention for her.

  Diana had money now, but she vividly remembered what it was like not to have it. Her resentment of the vampires who hoarded it was instinctive.

  Technically, plenty of rich humans did the same thing, and she felt the same things about them when she witnessed their excesses on television or saw it in person. But it was the v
ampires she remembered to hate long after she forgot about whatever rich human asshole had pissed her off. At least the humans occasionally used their obscene wealth for good.

  There were a number of good samaritan’s out there that did their best to help move humanity forward. A lot of them did good work, but there wasn’t a single vampire among them. Since their kind considered themselves not only outside, but also above humanity, it wasn’t really surprising there wasn’t a great philanthropic spirit in their ranks.

  Pedro’s building didn’t have a whole lot of security in human terms. There was a security door and bars on the first floor windows, but that was about it. In supernatural terms, however, the building was on par with a bank. It was heavily warded against anyone not in the Broussard clan and the humans who lived there.

  That level of security was unusual for a mere rental property, one far from the main coven house. Perhaps a member lived here part time.

  No. It wasn’t glamorous enough. Her senses told her a vampire had come and gone regularly in the recent past, but probably not with enough frequency to be a resident. I doubt they send one of their own kind to collect the rent.

  It was Alec’s signature, but that meant he’d been here fairly frequently in the past week. More often than she would have suspected.

  She made her way into the building, the security door and wards inconsequential. The wards didn’t even register her presence. She may as well have been a ghost. The apartment she sought was on a third floor, at one end of the hallway. After confirming that the inhabitants were well away from the door, she slipped inside.

  It was quite nice inside, light and airy with hardwood floors that were worn but well kept. The furniture was also worn, but the scarred surfaces were polished and a cushion on the couch had been carefully mended.