Lost Causes

by Mia Marshall

  “Someone must pay,” Deborah repeated, an inch from my ear.

  When I felt the pinch on my neck, I wasn’t even surprised. She’d fought me too long to walk away. There would be no peaceful resolution, not for her. Glorious failure was better than useless defeat.

  I yanked the syringe out of my neck before more than a drop or two could spill into my blood. It smashed on the ground, the last of the hated drug soaking into the earth.

  I hadn’t been fast enough. Those drops raced through my blood, seeking out magic that was stronger and purer than ever before, and they began to snuff it.

  I had seconds before I crumpled to the ground, and I turned to my friends. They stared back, shock and horror on their faces.

  That was no good. They needed different expressions.

  “Show these idiots who we really are.” Before I could say anything else, I slumped to the ground.

  CHAPTER 27

  It was the smallest dose of the drug I’d ever received, and I was no longer fractured. With my power at full strength, the anti-magic serum never had a chance. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been out, but it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. No one was dead yet, though it didn’t appear to be from lack of trying.

  Someone had hauled me to the side so I wasn’t in the middle of the battle. I was at least two feet away from it.

  It was a struggle to hold my eyes open. The fatigue pulled at me, and I blinked several times before I understood what I was seeing.

  The council was strong, and they’d joined hands to concentrate their power. Even the henchmen worked with them. Whatever doubts I might have stirred up about their alliance with Deborah, for now they’d chosen the devil they knew.

  My friends fought four old ones, fulls with an immense amount of power. Together, they could drown us all with a thought.

  Except for a couple small problems.

  First, my mother and Grams were also old ones. While Deborah and the others had panic on their side, my family had rage. These people had threatened their daughters.

  The council tried to force water directly into the shifters’ and Sera’s mouths and lungs. Each time, the streams redirected, falling impotently to the earth.

  Twenty-foot waves rushed toward those on our side. Before they reached my friends, my mother and Grams turned them into harmless things a child could body surf.

  The waves transformed into a flood. The water rose four feet and would have kept going if my family didn’t resist. When the council forced it up three inches, my mother and Grams lowered it one.

  Eventually, the flood would have risen above the others’ heads, except for the other problem.

  There were a lot more of us, and we weren’t playing by any rules I’d ever seen.

  Miriam swam through the flood as easily as any water elemental. Her sleek otter form slid between the council’s legs, and she sank her teeth deep into their flesh as she passed. The wounds weren’t life-threatening, but they required the elementals to divert some of their power to healing. The rising water slowed, a fraction of an inch at a time.

  Carmen wasn’t a natural swimmer, and her movements were sluggish. Even so, the younger men saw her coming, her immense paws churning through the flood, and they knew sharp claws were attached to her feet. More of their attention wavered while they kept an eye on Carmen’s progress.

  Luke stood on the edge of the clearing. He looked ragged and worn, as if he’d woken from a week-long bender, but he held his hands before him, using his dry desert heat to devour the flood.

  Vivian stood next to Luke, her face a mask of concentration. Her power was so slight she could only convince the earth to absorb a tiny fraction of the water, but every bit counted.

  Jet sat on top of the Bronco and cheered.

  A constant stream of fire poured from Sera and Allison. All they could do was slow the water, give it something to do besides drown us, but it was enough. The flood was holding steady. With a little more power, we’d be able to reverse it.

  Simon crouched in a tree in his human form. From his position, he could observe the entire battle. He yelled warnings and commands to those below, and no one hesitated to follow his instructions.

  Mac was nowhere in sight. I struggled to my elbows, terrified I’d find him lying on the ground somewhere, incapacitated or worse.

  Instead, he emerged from the trees that ringed the clearing, his arm gripped around a massive tree trunk held against his shoulder. Will ran behind him, holding the other end.

  Grams and my mother redirected their power, creating a clear path between the bear shifters and those we fought.

  Will stepped forward, and the men adjusted their grip at the last moment. Together, they swung the tree trunk like an enormous baseball bat. It slammed into the elementals’ backs.

  The council flew through the air, losing their connection to each other’s magic. They landed in a broken heap. None of them moved. All their energy and magic was needed to repair their internal injuries.

  The flood dissipated instantly, though the earth remained drenched. The soil was dark, slippery mud. Fat puddles of water dotted the clearing.

  The fight was over. Our enemies lay on the ground, gasping for breath. My friends watched them with wary eyes, waiting for any sign they planned to resume the battle. The council offered none.

  I’d never considered this option. I’d expected them to leave once I surrendered. Things would return to normal.

  I hadn’t expected them to fight us, not when we were so strong, and I sure hadn’t expected them to lose and leave us to decide their fate.

  We couldn’t let them go. Deborah would return again and again, each time with more weapons. She’d build a new lab, arrange for the creation of more drugs.

  She would never accept defeat. She couldn’t. The best case scenario was she’d eventually capture me.

  The worst case scenario was all-out war.

  I rolled onto my hands and knees, fighting a wave of nausea. My head pounded, and I stretched some magic toward the nearest puddle, absorbing its power.

  I attempted to push myself upright. It didn’t work so well, so I crawled instead. My mother walked toward me now that the fight was done, and when she saw me struggle she ran. She helped pull me to my feet, and I staggered against her. She held me until I could stand on my own, then we joined the others.

  The twins rolled on the ground, groaning in pain. It would take them longer to recover. Deborah had managed to pull herself to a kneeling position, her white pantsuit covered with thick streaks of dark mud.

  Grams’ power slid past me to examine Deborah’s injuries.

  “How is she?”

  “Her internal organs are mush. That’s true for all of them. They will heal, of course, and sooner than we’d like.”

  Everyone heard the underlying warning, including Deborah. Whatever we were going to do, we needed to decide before her power returned.

  “You can’t murder us.” Deborah’s face was expressionless, but her voice wavered.

  “Can’t I? I keep hearing I’m a killer. You said so yourself.”

  “The cost will be too high. If I go, I will not go alone.”

  Ruth and Harriet huddled together, wide eyes pinging back and forth between me and Deborah.

  My body felt leaden. My heart felt pretty much the same. Even my magic was heavy and dull from the serum. “Can you let this go? If we release you, can we trust you to drop this?” I asked the other council members.

  Harriet’s head bobbed up and down. Ruth seemed less certain. “Yes, but…”

  “Yes or no?” I interrupted. I was in no mood for conditions.

  “We won’t try to hurt you,” Harriet confirmed.

  “Or shifters. They’re not your enemy unless you make them so.” I spoke to both women, daring them to reconsider an ancient prejudice.

  Carmen remained in feline form. She sniffed the women, as if searching for a lie. Whatever she found, it made her snarl.

&nbs
p; Then again, Carmen hated elementals. She wouldn’t miss an opportunity to snarl at them.

  Michael was trying to crawl his way to freedom.

  “You need some help there, Mikey?” I called.

  He turned and sat hard on the muddy ground. There was a loud squelch as he landed. “I’ll do whatever you want,” he said, without a hint of guile.

  Michael followed power. Deborah no longer had it.

  There was one thing left. I couldn’t ask the others to do it. They’d already done too much. I knew what it was to kill. It was awful, and I’d never recover from it, but it needed to be me.

  This was the last price, then. The cruelty of the moment struck me, that my sanity meant so little. One way or the other, death found me.

  I summoned two fireballs, one in each palm.

  My hands dropped. The weapons disappeared. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be that person anymore.

  “If we can contain Trent, we can contain her,” I decided. “We’ll move her to the middle of the desert. Brew up some of the drug, just in case. It doesn’t need to end in death.”

  Grams tilted her head, considering. “That’s noble, dear, and I can’t argue with you choosing your better angels, but it’s an awful lot of responsibility.”

  “Particularly for someone who wants to see you dead,” Sera reminded me.

  “It won’t be forever,” I insisted. “It’ll end when a new council is formed and we convince them we’re not the bad guys. We’ll figure out how information about duals and firsts will be handled. Deborah’s greatest weapon has been secrecy, so we’ll take that away from her. Then we can move her to the fine accommodations my mother and Grams got to enjoy. Michael, Ruth, and Harriet agree, right?”

  They very much did. “We’ll help you,” Harriet added.

  Carmen seemed annoyed that there’d be no bloodshed that day, but I felt a tiny bit lighter.

  A coil of water snapped around Vivian’s ankle and ripped her backwards. Her fingers dug into the earth, but it was too wet for any purchase. She slid through the mud and fell across Deborah’s legs. The water’s fingers wrapped around Vivian’s throat.

  Jet screamed and ran toward us.

  Water was useless against Deborah, and I couldn’t burn her without torching Vivian as well. Other than Jet, who was beyond Deborah’s reach, Vivian had the most humanity of anyone in the clearing. She was the easiest to kill, if that was the woman’s intention.

  Deborah’s eyes weren’t on Vivian. They were locked on me as she issued a twisted challenge. Prove I was a murderer, or watch my friend die.

  I could melt Deborah’s organs without touching Vivian. The woman’s fingers squeezed while Vivian thrashed.

  My cheeks wet with tears, I called the fire.

  I never used it. Mac stepped behind Deborah with only his hand shifted. He didn’t look at me as he slashed a sharp claw across her throat, cutting deep from one end to the other. The movement wasn’t savage. It was precise and clinical, nothing more than a means to an end.

  Her skin split open, the arteries cut. Blood rushed down her neck, staining her white shirt red. She didn’t seem to notice when she released Vivian’s neck and the earth scrambled away from her.

  Deborah didn’t die immediately. She remained upright while her blood pooled on the ground below. She was as calm and poised as ever. She made no attempt to heal herself, though she could have.

  Instead, she let herself die, and when she fell over at last, she was smiling.

  Ruth and Harriet watched in utter horror. “You can’t… you didn’t.”

  “It was self defense.” The words were sharp as a blade. The last thing we needed was panicked witnesses. “Keep an eye on them?” I asked Carmen, indicating the council members and their employees.

  She bared her teeth in pleasure at the assignment.

  “Don’t eat them.” It seemed worth saying, just in case.

  If we didn’t handle this right, we’d end up with a whole other set of enemies and a brand new death sentence.

  Sera stood over Deborah’s corpse, obviously thinking the same thing. “What the hell do we do now?”

  The elementals accessed earth, water, or fire to heal their damage. The shifters resorted to more traditional methods like antiseptic and bandages. My mother and Grams offered to help them, but they all refused. They might be learning to trust some elementals, but that didn’t mean they wanted us digging around in their bodies with magic. At least their shifter blood meant a speedy recovery.

  Once no one was bleeding, it was time to deal with the hostages and Deborah’s corpse.

  Vivian hung back as far as she could and still be able to hear the conversation, wanting to keep her distance from the white-faced corpse. Simon and Jet stood next to her, offering silent comfort.

  The shifters showed no sign of discomfort. Perhaps something in their ancient DNA understood that the body was now only meat, nothing to either celebrate or fear.

  Most of the elementals, while not exactly squeamish, were still uneasy. As long-lived as we were, death was rare among our kind. We never truly became accustomed to it, even with the recent practice we’d been given, and we all knew a sense of wrongness. If different choices had been made, Deborah should have lived another thousand years.

  Flames sparked from Sera’s fingers. “Damn it. We had no choice. We weren’t all going to walk out of this clearing. I know you decided to flake on the big fight, Ade, but it wasn’t a practice match for them. Was it?” She rounded on the lackeys we’d strapped to a tree.

  The ropes were a token gesture, as it did nothing to limit the men’s magic, but it made us feel better. Besides, all their power was focused on repairing the damage caused by the tree trunk.

  The scowling one stared at his toes with great interest. The other shook his head so fast his cheeks wobbled.

  Michael cleared his throat. “May I say something?”

  “No.” Miriam’s expression was black. For once, she didn’t appear even a little cute. She spat, just missing Deborah’s corpse. “I second Sera’s opinion. Fuck ’em. That bitch was going to kill Vivian. If Mac hadn’t finished it, I would have.”

  I watched for Mac’s reaction. His face was stoic, but it wasn’t frozen. He understood exactly what he’d done, and why, and I saw no sign of regret.

  I considered the corpse and the five waters that had tried to kill us only minutes before. “The way I see it, we have a few options. Burning is the best way to dispose of the corpse. We can get it hot enough to leave no trace, but someone will come looking for Deborah, particularly if this lot decides to talk once they aren’t scared for their lives.”

  They still acted pretty damn scared. Their eyes darted around the clearing, seeing threats in every tree.

  “We could try to frame the rest of the council, but then they’ll be executed under elemental law. That wouldn’t be good for our karma.”

  Grams tapped her chin. “Those aren’t great choices, dear.”

  “There’s another option.” Carmen bared her teeth. “We can tear her flesh into tiny pieces and spread it through elemental homes up and down the coast as a warning of what happens when they attack shifters.”

  The shifters didn’t look as appalled by that suggestion as they should have.

  “No.” I managed not to shout. “We don’t want a war, remember?”

  “What’s left then?” Mac watched me. “Don’t you dare say you’re going to turn yourself in for this, too.”

  “I’m over that particular impulse,” I assured him. “There’s another choice.”

  I inhaled, preparing to say what no one expected to hear.

  “We tell the truth,” said a voice behind me. Well, no one except Simon.

  I spun to face him. “How did you…?”

  He lifted his shoulders in a delicate shrug. “It was the only option that remained. It is not a bad idea, either.”

  The others disagreed. I was assaulted by a cacophony of voices, each wanting to tell
me, in great detail, why I’d clearly gone insane after all.

  I tried waiting them out until it became obvious that several would grow hoarse before they stopped arguing.

  Instead, I found my phone and dialed. Everyone quieted enough to hear the conversation.

  “Carmichael? We’ve got a dead elemental here. One of theirs, don’t worry. Can you guys get here right away with whatever forensics tools you have? I know that’s not your specialty, but you’re all we’ve got, and we need you to read a crime scene.” I gave him directions and hung up.

  The others waited for my explanation.

  “We need to prove we acted in self-defense. The waters might be witnesses, but I wouldn’t count on them. Maybe, if we have enough facts and graphs and charts, someone will listen to us. We’ll need evidence that Deborah knew about the cure. That part won’t be easy. I mean, even Josiah didn’t know about it.” I paused, considering our options and finding few. Deborah was a technophobe. She wouldn’t have kept an online diary with all her secret thoughts.

  “Would this help?” Vivian raised her cell phone, the speaker turned to maximum volume. From several feet away, I could make out Deborah’s voice informing me that she’d seen cured duals before.

  My mouth opened, and I didn’t close it right away.

  “When Deborah started making promises she might not keep, I thought it would be good to have a record.”

  With great effort, I didn’t run to her, tackle her to the ground, and shower her with kisses.

  “I’d really like to speak,” Michael called. Somehow, he’d managed to place himself thirty feet away from the group while we were distracted.

  “In a minute.” I turned to the henchmen. They’d healed enough that their breathing was stable, and I wanted to hear what they had to say.

  “How long have you been with Deborah?” I asked.

  “Not long,” said the nervous man. “Um. About three weeks?”

  The other kept staring at his toes.

  “Tell me what you saw or heard. Anything about us or her plans.”