Lost Causes

by Mia Marshall

  For everyone fighting

  their own invisible battles

  CHAPTER 1

  I never dreamed of falling. When I slept, I didn’t imagine taking a test I hadn’t studied for or showing up in public naked. At night, I saw only flames. I smelled smoke and the sickening odor of burning flesh. I watched a man die, and I felt my mind unhinge, again and again.

  It was safe to say I wasn’t sleeping much.

  “Another nightmare?” Sera asked.

  I blinked, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness, and didn’t bother answering. I’d woken to the sound of my own screams and was covered in sweat. The answer seemed self-evident. “How long did I sleep?”

  “Two hours.” Sera stood at the window, peering through a gap in the curtains to the parking lot below. It was still night, and I could make out little more than her silhouette. She wasn’t tall, but she was strong. She had the curvy, compact muscles of a skater, plus an impressive amount of fire magic, but those weren’t her real strengths. Sera was a fighter. She never gave up, and she expected the same from everyone around her.

  I was trying. I reached for yesterday’s jeans. “Two hours more than the night before.”

  Sera glanced over her shoulder. “We’re getting you some Ambien.”

  I made a face. We both knew the problem with sleeping pills was they, well, put you to sleep. Great if you needed eight hours of uninterrupted shut-eye. Bad if you were running for your lives and the people chasing you got a little closer every day. There were already too many times I needed to be knocked out. We couldn’t risk adding to that.

  “Vivian figure out where we’re heading tomorrow?” I tried to sound optimistic. It wasn’t Vivian’s fault that our search for the other dual magic had stalled more times than a ’78 Gremlin. Not only did we know nothing about this person, but he or she would have a strong desire to remain hidden, what with the whole death penalty for duals thing.

  “She found something in New Mexico she wants to check out. Northwest, near the Four Corners.”

  Neither of us mentioned that we’d already spent weeks scouring New Mexico. We’d found several desert elementals and a few stones in the mountains, but that was it. No sign of a dual magic.

  Duals were the only elementals who could control two elements. Very few existed, because they could only be born from the union of two full elementals, each with a different magic. Fulls weren’t especially fertile—a built-in counterbalance to our longevity—and they tended to stay with their own, so such births were extremely rare. We only knew of four living duals. Trent Pond was trapped in a mental institution on the California coast. One had supposedly been spotted on the Prince’s Islands near Istanbul. Another had been tracked to the American Southwest, which explained why we’d spent the last three months looking under every rock and cactus.

  I was the fourth one.

  Though I’d have preferred to find the dual we sought months ago, in truth their rarity was a blessing. After using both elements one time too many, duals were the only elementals who could be driven mad by their magic. A “destroy cities for shits and giggles” kind of madness.

  I had yet to raze an entire town. Other than that, madness was a problem I understood a little too well.

  “Is Mac still out?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question. If Mac was there, he’d be at my side, dark brown eyes watching for any sign I was about to lose it.

  “He texted fifteen minutes ago to say they’re on their way back. He made it ten miles and at least an hour this time.”

  “Damn it.” Mac and I had been conducting small experiments over the last few months, learning how far we could separate before the bond we shared snapped, forcing him to return before he became ill. We’d hoped that, if we pushed the distance a bit further each time, the magic would adapt the way a muscle pushed to failure grew stronger. Instead, we were as tied to each other as we’d ever been. If he left me, he grew ill. If he stayed away too long, it became life-threatening.

  There was one exception. If my magic was shut down, the connection vanished. When my mind turned black and my friends chemically silenced my power, Mac could travel as far as he wanted. It was the only solution we’d found, and spending large chunks of my life comatose wasn’t much of a solution.

  “Did you shower? Your hair is looking a little more deranged than usual.”

  Sera shook her head until black curls fell in front of her eyes. “This is the freshly fucked look,” she said. “You should try it sometime.”

  The problem with sisters is they know all your weak spots, including how long you’ve been celibate. “It’s complicated,” I muttered. It always was with me and Mac. “Go. I’ll take over guard duty. The only reason we’re in a motel tonight is Simon insisted on hot showers for everyone. Might as well take advantage.”

  She hesitated.

  “Get Miriam over here and give her a syringe if you’re scared to leave me alone.” I couldn’t be angry. After all, I’d given them plenty of reason to believe I couldn’t control myself.

  Sera wanted to trust me. I knew she did. But she’d witnessed what happened when I used both sides of my magic. When I called fire and water, when I let their power consume me, people got hurt. Sometimes people died.

  The door shook with three heavy knocks. Sera opened it a crack, and Miriam shoved it open until it smacked against the wall.

  “We gotta go.”

  We gaped at her, hoping she didn’t mean what we thought she did. She exploded that hope right away.

  “They found us.” When we still didn’t move, she barged into the room and picked up the bags we never bothered to unpack. “The goddamn council finally caught up. The blond bastards are downstairs, so stop catching flies and move your asses.”

  We didn’t argue. I shoved my feet into my blue Converse, grabbed my bag from Miriam, and began running.

  “This way.” Simon appeared before us. Unlike Miriam, the cat shifter knew how to be stealthy. “Take the eastern stairs to the ground floor, then walk south two hundred feet.”

  Sera and I waited. Simon rolled his eyes.

  “Turn left, go down, then turn right. Stop when you see the vehicles. Someday, you must learn to navigate without the sun’s guidance. Please bring my clothes with you.”

  One moment, a good-looking man in his early twenties with black hair and startling green eyes stood next to us. The next, a small black cat with green eyes leapt onto the railing, and from there to the roof, where his black coat vanished against the night sky.

  We followed his instructions, meeting Vivian on the stairs. Despite getting no more sleep than the rest of us, she was alert.

  “Do you know what’s happening?” I asked.

  “Simon saw visitors in the motel office,” Vivian said. “Tall, skinny blonds in designer clothes. He’s getting a closer look now, but he thought it was Deborah and Michael.”

  I feared he was right. The description sounded like either the water council or wealthy Scandinavian tourists exploring the finest truck stops of the American Southwest. The first option was the more probable one, in many ways.

  “How the hell did they find us? Viv, weren’t you keeping an eye on the satellite images of the hotel?” Sera demanded.

  Vivian reached up to tug on one of her dreads. She avoided our eyes. “There was a glitch. I’m doing what I can out here, but it’s not always a strong connection.”

  Sera grumbled, but I said nothing. Knowing Vivian, she was madder at herself than we could ever be.

  At the bottom of the stairs, I peered around the corner. No light came from any of the rooms. Sera moved in the darkest shadows of the hallway. Vivian and I followed. Miriam brought up the rear.

  The path took us off the motel property. Simon failed to mention we wo
uld climb through a broken chain link fence to reach the closed car wash behind the motel. As soon as the Airstream was in sight, we sprinted. Mac was already at the Bronco’s wheel. His locked jaw relaxed when I came into view. Carmichael flung the trailer door open and we leapt inside. We’d barely closed it behind us before we began moving. The Bronco swung into the empty street, pulling the Airstream behind it. We headed in the opposite direction of the motel.

  “Johnson already took the camper?” I asked Carmichael. The two FBI agents were traveling with us. They said it was their duty as the official paranormal liaisons of Lake Tahoe. Neither seemed to consider it relevant that they hadn’t seen Tahoe in months.

  “He left about thirty seconds before we did. We’ll catch up with him soon.”

  There was a heavy thump above us. I slid the sunroof open, letting Simon in. He shifted back to human. As usual, Simon was unconcerned about his lack of clothes. “They were still in the office. We were lucky to find an especially stupid and greedy clerk at this motel. He cannot quite remember us, but he wants more money for the little he knows.”

  I dropped onto the Airstream’s small couch, my breath coming a bit easier.

  “You’re sure it was the council?”

  He confirmed this, and I bit back a curse. Simon knew their faces. He wouldn’t confuse them for anyone else.

  Deborah Rivers and Michael Bay were all that remained of the water council, but they were more than strong enough to hurt us. I could match their power—if I was willing to tap into both sides of my magic and slide further into the darkest part of my mind. I didn’t have much further to go before I could no longer see the way out.

  Our best option was to keep running, and we were getting pretty good at it.

  Five minutes later, we were speeding down the freeway. Well, speeding as fast as a camper van and an old Bronco pulling an Airstream trailer could go—which is to say, moving at a pace some turtles might call sedate.

  The busy interstate was too exposed and we took the first exit off the freeway. The offramp dropped us onto a narrow two-lane road that didn’t seem to lead anywhere in particular.

  Agent Carmichael poked at the keyboard on his clunky government-issued laptop, deep lines forming around his mouth. He was a handsome man, all chiseled jaw and high cheekbones, but the last month had taken its toll. The circles beneath his eyes were nearly purple and his jaw was covered in dark blond stubble. It was a shocking look for such a meticulous man.

  “I don’t understand how they found you. Johnson and I asked the Bureau to lock down any information that might appear in a database. Your IDs and vehicle info should be covered by the highest security protocols.”

  Sera stood on the bed, watching the road through the rear window. Her voice carried through the trailer. “It shouldn’t matter. We change plates and IDs every few days. We paid cash at the motel. I didn’t master this shit as a teenage delinquent to get caught now by a bunch of watery technophobes.”

  Vivian worked next to Carmichael, her fingers flying over two separate keyboards. Unlike his government issued computer, her laptops were the latest model, and then she’d upgraded them until they had the power to launch missile strikes in foreign countries. She’d already worn the letters off most of the keys from constant use.

  “I wrote a script that deleted us entirely,” she said. “According to the federal government, we don’t even exist.”

  Carmichael scrubbed his hand over his face. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t just hear you admit to hacking FBI computers.”

  Vivian didn’t even attempt to look contrite. “If I could break through your security, theoretically they also could. It made sense to remove it altogether. High security doesn’t mean much.” Vivian was a weak earth elemental, with far more human blood than magic. As a computer mastermind, she was the scariest thing I’d ever seen. “Though that is very theoretical. They are old ones, after all.”

  Elementals lived a long time, and the more magic they possessed, the longer they lived. A few chose to adapt as they moved through the centuries or even millennia, but most couldn’t be bothered to do more than the minimum. The world changed too fast to keep up with every passing fad, and few saw any reason to master a skill they believed would soon become obsolete—“soon,” to an elemental, being a subjective term. Many of our race were unconvinced computers were here to stay.

  By elemental standards, I was young at sixty-five years old, but even I could barely work my smart phone. The decade I spent hiding from the outside world hadn’t helped. Sera was about ten years younger than me, and she had no difficulty functioning in a technology-obsessed world.

  My sister joined us in the main room. “What about ISP tracking? That’s a thing, right?”

  Without lifting her eyes from the screens, Vivian pointed to a small metal box on the table. It was black and sleek, one of those mysterious technical things I knew as a doodad or a thingamajig.

  “Mobile wi-fi, run through multiple VPNs.” She must have known we had no idea what she was talking about, because she elaborated. “Virtual private networks. One should be enough to hide our ISP and, therefore, our location. I’m running our data through several different ones, each set to ping me if there are any disruptions. There haven’t been. Plus, yesterday I used our credit card at the Four Seasons in Boston, so if they were looking anywhere, it should have been New England.”

  “Then how…” Sera began.

  “I don’t know!”

  Seeing Vivian flustered was almost as unsettling as having the council on our tail. Earths were calm and stable. They didn’t panic.

  “I don’t know how they keep finding us.” Vivian aimed for a calmer tone and mostly succeeded. “I’m pulling up real-time satellite maps of the area.”

  “Is it possible they are using the same footage?” Simon had found pants at some point. He sat on the Airstream’s small couch, and for once he hadn’t folded his legs beneath him. His feet remained planted on the floor, and his fingers curled around the edge of the sofa.

  Vivian punched keys until she accessed a clear image of the desert. “Consumer satellite images aren’t available in real time. For that, they’d need to access government equipment, and we’re talking about a group of people who don’t even use email.”

  Carmichael gave up on his own search and peered at Vivian’s screen. “I am using a government account and your image is three times as clear.”

  “Okay, I think we’re…” Vivian didn’t finish the sentence.

  Carmichael swore and returned to his computer. “Can you see the license plate?”

  Dread pooled in my stomach.

  There we were, clear as day on the map—a beat-up camper van a hundred feet ahead of a Bronco pulling an Airstream.

  Two miles behind us was a black luxury sedan we couldn’t seem to escape.

  Sera grabbed the walkie-talkie we’d been using in isolated areas and hit the button. It crackled for a moment, then went dead, its batteries exhausted. She hurled it against a wall and yanked her phone from her pocket. “Damn it. No bars. We’ve got to let them know.”

  Simon returned to his feline form. Using Sera’s shoulder as a springboard, he leapt through the open sunroof. Light footsteps above us, then the cat landed on the Bronco’s roof. He slithered through the open passenger window with some contortionist ninja moves the rest of us had no hope of replicating.

  The Bronco took a hard right, and we lurched against the trailer’s wall as the Airstream left the road. The camper followed suit. Several times, Mac swerved to avoid the piles of rocks decorating the landscape, and the trailer would tilt onto two wheels for several heart-stopping seconds. The huge vehicles aimed for a stretch of red rocks in the distance. They were tall enough to hide us, if we made it in time.

  Their sedan could hit ninety without breaking a sweat. The council was closing the gap.

  Carmichael’s eyes were glued to Vivian’s screen. “We should get to the rocks, but they’ll see where we turned
off.” The desert was dry and still, with no rain or wind to cover up the tell-tale tire tracks.

  I swallowed. “No, they won’t.”

  I’d barely tapped into my magic the last couple weeks, only using enough to recharge and heal myself. Recharging through my element was so instinctive that most of the time I wasn’t even aware I was doing it.

  The water magic I’d known all my life, the power that once comforted and fueled me, wasn’t the same. It was sharper now, covered in edges that would slice at my mind if I let my guard down for even a moment.

  And I always let my guard down.

  I’d tried after we escaped my family’s island. I tried to use my water magic as I had for decades. It wasn’t meant to be a passive power, and it chafed against the restraints. I thought I’d be safe, so long as I felt none of the rage that pushed me toward darkness.

  But every time I reached for it, I found the rage already waiting and the monster that lived inside me eager to escape. I only needed to lose focus for a fraction of a second for the madness to dig its claws deeper into my mind.

  Too many times over the last few months, I’d forced my friends to inject me with the drug that was both my bane and my savior.

  Created by another dual and refined by many others with their own agendas, the serum suppressed magic. Neither elementals nor shifters were meant to live without their magic. Our bodies’ natural defense was to fall into a coma until the drug worked its way out of our system. At best, the drug was a delay, not a cure.

  We didn’t know anything about the long-term effects, and our supply was rapidly dwindling. It was irresponsible to put myself in a position where we had to use more.

  But those following us didn’t only threaten my life. Our laws promised a century of incarceration to any elemental who helped conceal a dual magic. My mother and Grams were already enjoying the hospitality of the elemental penal system. They’d been sentenced a month after I escaped my family’s island. They were in prison because of me, and I was too busy running for my life to help.

  With three-quarters elemental blood in her veins, Sera would live for at least a thousand years. She would consider the punishment worth it. Vivian was another story. She had so little earth blood that she’d die in captivity.