by Mia Marshall
Even the nervous one shut his mouth. It wasn’t loyalty, I realized, not for either of them. It was fear.
A shadow fell across me. The lackeys tilted their heads up, then up some more, until they saw the very black expression on Will’s face.
I crouched on my heels so I was eye level, then took a cue from Vivian and hit record on my own phone. I didn’t trust these two to tell the same story when interrogated by a bunch of old ones, and the truth was our only defense. “Let’s try this again. What did you see?”
Inspired by Will’s presence, the nervous man couldn’t talk fast enough. “They had us bomb the bar. We researched how to make it on the internet.”
My lips tightened. At least we knew who’d be paying Frank’s hospital bills.
“And?” I pushed.
“And we know about the fire in the forest. We didn’t do it, though. She did.” He pointed at Allison Ash.
“What else?” I pushed. The faster he spoke, the more I sensed he was withholding information. The quieter man had started to shake.
The twitchy one shut his mouth. “That’s it. Can we go?”
I sat back on my heels. Something was missing. There was still too much tension.
“They hired us in Hawaii.” The quiet man spoke for the first time.
“What were they doing in Hawaii three weeks ago?” I had a strong suspicion I wasn’t going to like this answer.
“Waiting.” He raised his eyes to meet mine. “Waiting to see if you got off the island.”
“And when I did?”
“They took a boat out. They returned a day later, and there was something with them.”
My stomach dropped to somewhere around my knees. Four fulls visited the island of a creature who avoided all fulls.
“May I speak now?” Michael asked.
Harriet and Ruth’s terror continued to grow.
“What did you do?” I spat out the words.
“It wasn’t me! It was Deborah! I didn’t know it could be done, but she said we control firsts. Something about children always having power over their parents. A full can bind a first.”
I’d been so wrong. Eila didn’t fear fulls because they could destroy her. She feared them because they could master her.
“Why would that ever seem like a good idea?” Luke asked. His voice remained calm while terror filled his eyes.
“She said it was the only way her power could match yours. It didn’t work. The thing was furious at being restrained and taken from its home. I haven’t seen it in days. It’s gone.” His words were a fervent hope rather than the truth.
Eila wasn’t gone. She was waiting—and with Deborah’s death, she was unbound.
I raced for the cars. “We have to go!”
I managed to reach the Bronco. A heavy wave lifted me, slamming me against the metal doors.
I knew what I’d see when I turned. What Deborah had brought.
What she’d been willing to die to unleash it upon us.
“You did not keep your side of our deal,” said Eila.
CHAPTER 28
Eila didn’t seem weak, despite the days spent away from her home. Now I understood why the council’s faces were drawn and tired. She’d been feeding.
However, she didn’t look entirely healthy, either. There was a thin and brittle quality about her that I’d never seen on the island.
This time, she didn’t float to us. She appeared in one place and then another, buzzing in and out of focus. Her eyes were a black that didn’t exist in nature, unleavened by even the hint of light. They were more void than color. Her hair rose from her scalp, twisting and curling according to the whims of a maniacal wind, though the day was quiet.
She was utterly terrifying and the most powerful creature I would ever encounter, and at that moment all I could think was I was so tired of this shit.
“Can you really not find a boyfriend of your own?” I asked. “I mean, you’re crazy, and your narcissism would require a team of shrinks to work on you for a couple centuries, but you’re not an unattractive woman. Go find someone else.”
She expanded several inches in every direction. If I was smart, I’d stop talking now.
Smart was such a subjective term.
“I’d think any self-respecting first would find a guy who would worship them as a god. Bathe your feet and offer nightly massage, that sort of thing. Instead you’re here, begging for scraps?”
“I was brought to this place. This is not-home.” Her voice was different. Sharper, but also hollow. Discordant.
“Is that the problem? Cause we can arrange for someone to return you.”
Eila gave no outward sign she heard me. She spun in a slow circle, though I never saw her feet move. She studied everyone in the clearing, registering each elemental, shifter, and human. She only glanced at the dark sedan pulling into the clearing, showing minimal interest in the FBI agents. Johnson slammed on his brakes when he saw the first, and both men stared slack-jawed through the windshield. At least they stayed inside with locked doors.
The rest of my friends were too far away. I stepped away from the Bronco, hoping to close the distance between myself and the others. I was too exposed on my own.
I was flung backwards. Once again, I crashed into metal. My breath escaped in a rush and I had trouble drawing the next breath.
Before I recovered, a lumbering beast rose before me. It had no mouth, eyes or ears, but it had arms and legs the size of tree trunks and hands as large as frying pans. Every part was formed from the earth. Eila had created a freaking golem.
I stumbled away from the vehicle. The thing grabbed my shoulders and pushed. It put forth no more effort than I’d use to flick a speck of lint from a shirt, but my body vibrated with the impact.
I called on the water surrounding me, but before it could wash away the golem, the thing wrapped an enormous hand around my wrist and shook me like a rag doll. My entire left side hit the SUV three times before it released me. I crumpled to the ground, unable to do more than whimper. My shoulder had been dislocated and several ribs were cracked.
I redirected the water to healing. The golem gripped my thighs and lifted me as easily as it would a pillow. It heaved me onto the Bronco’s roof. My spine struck the edge and shattered. I slithered to the ground, my legs useless.
The golem disintegrated and returned to the earth.
“Be quiet,” Eila said. My mouth filled with earth. I retched, thick clods landing on the ground as I cleared my lungs.
I pulled water from the puddles in the clearing, urging it toward my broken spine.
“No.” Eila wrenched it from me and sent it shooting over the trees, an enormous wave flying beyond my reach.
Mac roared and Will joined in. Sera screamed my name.
I caught Grams’ eye. “You’re a full,” I mouthed.
She understood right away. Grams turned to Eila, already sending thick streams of magic toward the creature.
Eila swatted it away like an annoying bug. “I have been unbound and brought to not-home.”
Apparently, controlling Eila was a first come, first served kind of thing.
I stretched my power outwards, searching for nearby streams. There was always water in Tahoe.
But the winter rains hadn’t begun yet. The creek beds were dry, and we were too far from the lakes and rivers. All the strength in the world meant nothing without my element. I grasped at the tiny drops clinging to the air or buried in exposed tree roots. They only healed a few scratches.
“There are more of you.” Eila glided toward Mac, hands outstretched. He wasn’t a man anymore, not entirely. His shoulders hunched and his shirt split open as his torso and arms morphed into a bear. One huge paw swatted Eila.
Her midsection disappeared. Mac’s paw swung through empty space, but a single claw made contact. It tore into her flesh. Then she was whole again, the wound already healed.
It wasn’t much, but it was more than we’d seen on the island. Away from her
home, Eila could bleed.
A surge of water punched Mac in the chest, lifting him off the ground. His head smacked against a tree and he dropped to the ground, unconscious.
“He is unhurt,” she said, using a different definition of the word than the one I knew.
I moaned, both at his pain and my own. As quickly as she called the water, it disappeared. I had no more than a second to grab its power. My ribs knit together, but the rest remained broken.
Eila seemed to have forgotten me. She moved down the line of shifters, examining them as she had the rest of us when we arrived on her island.
“You are as he is.” She lifted her hand from Will’s chest and slid to Carmen and Simon next, touching each of them for only a moment. “You are different.” Her eyes grew unfocused as she recalled mental images she’d stolen from the islanders. “Cats,” she announced. Normally, Carmen would be livid at being lumped in with a small house cat, but all I saw in her face was confusion and fear.
Miriam shrank back when Eila approached. It took her longer this time to find the appropriate name. “Otter,” she said at last, with a hint of relief. “River otter.”
With each shifter she discovered, Eila’s expression grew more and more pleased.
Sera lunged toward Eila, stumbling to the ground when she tripped over the mound of earth that appeared from nowhere.
There was a small nudge against my skin, then a familiar touch slid into my body.
While Eila examined the shifters, my mother had taken five steps toward me. She sent her healing abilities to my shoulder. It popped into the socket, and I couldn’t hold in the yelp of pain.
Eila found my mother’s magic immediately. She removed it, then, for good measure, she used the ground to push my mother twenty feet away.
“I have been given a gift,” murmured Eila. Nothing would distract her for long from her true obsession. “I needed to come to not-home to find so many of the lost children.”
Lost children. Shifters.
Perhaps too late, it occurred to me that she hadn’t desired Mac because he was a towering bundle of manly perfection. She hadn’t tried to sleep with a shifter because she was bored of elementals.
She wanted shifters. Any shifter.
I rushed to put the pieces together, knowing their lives depended on the answer to this puzzle.
Like elementals, shifters were born from the firsts. While we’d remained in communities, both human and elemental, shifters functioned much like the animals whose skin they shared. They could be social or loners, but their community rarely extended far beyond their own families.
They never would have chosen Eila’s camp, and if they’d found themselves in such a place, nothing would have convinced them to stay.
Now Eila had a veritable buffet of the animals she’d long been denied, and she was thrilled at the prospect. There was no way this ended well.
Simon screamed, wrenching my attention back to the present. Eila stood before him. Though she didn’t touch his body, her hands moved in the air, conducting his magic as she once had mine.
Simon fell to the ground, face pale and green eyes devoid of life. The features I knew so well blurred, unfamiliar shadows filling the hollows and lines. It was still his face, but I was reminded of children around a campfire, holding flashlights beneath their chins. The slightly tilted eyes drooped and his cheekbones grew less pronounced.
For an instant, Eila took the form of a small, black cat.
“No!” I pulled myself forward, crawling on my forearms and gasping with each movement.
For the first time, Eila seemed truly happy. “Desire. Fight. More.” she whispered to herself. Eila tilted her head, studying Carmen. “Not yet. Not strong enough yet.” She moved to Miriam.
Miriam screamed. She fell, her face as dull and unknown as Simon’s. An otter appeared where Eila stood, then vanished.
Eila disappeared. A ring of fire surrounded her, hiding her from view.
Eila stepped through the flames, and Sera and Luke rebuilt the circle again and again. It made no sense. They could never harm her that way.
They could only distract her.
Power slammed into me, my mother and Grams working as one. They didn’t bother to be gentle, choosing speed over finesse. Bones and nerves healed beneath their touch. It was surgery without anesthesia. I shoved my fist into my mouth to stifle the screams and bit down hard enough to cut skin.
Then it was done, and I was whole. I reached for Sera and Luke’s flames, recharging my fire side, then pulled myself to my feet.
“Why?” I called.
Eila faced me, giving no indication she was surprised to see me standing.
“Why?” she repeated, as confused as if I’d asked her to recite prime numbers in order.
“Why are you taking them? You’re pure magic. Why can’t that be enough?” I was angry, but I was also terrified, and my voice revealed both.
Something flashed across her black eyes. It might have been pain. “There is no pure. Pure is unchanging. It is frozen. Magic is not that. Magic is life. It grows. It moves. It returns. I will not return.”
I turned her vague sentences over in my mind, trying to find sense in her riddles.
“What are elementals?” I asked.
“They are life.”
“And what are shifters?”
She sighed, like a contented human after a large meal. “They are desire.”
Eila didn’t speak of passion. I’d leapt to that conclusion, so blind with lust for Mac that I believed even an ancient being would feel the same. She’d never craved his body. She’d wanted his bear, but she was too weak to take it on the island, the same way she’d been too weak to take Carmen. Mac needed to give his power willingly.
She was building up her strength. Simon and Miriam were such little animals.
I dragged my mind back. If I thought of Simon and Miriam, I’d go catatonic.
There had to be a reason. I recalled everything I knew about shifters, settling at last on the most basic detail. Shifter magic was animal magic.
Animals spent their lives with a single goal: to continue living. Every instinct guided them toward survival. It moved them toward food and protection, and it told them whether they were the hunter or the hunted.
Within each shifter was a beast, and that beast held a feral magic that would fight to stay alive at all costs. A desire to live at all costs.
That was what Eila sought.
Elementals were power. Shifters were wild, untamed life. One kept her going. The other made her want to keep going. Without that desire, she would return to the earth.
“You want their life force.”
“I will live,” she answered.
All the people on the island, all the losses, because this damned creature was afraid to die.
One way or another, I would help her get over that fear.
I gave her no warning. I grabbed every drop of power I possessed and threw it at her. Both fire and water rammed into her core. Her stomach clenched at the impact, but that was her only outward response.
“I know your magic,” she said, calm as ever. “You cannot use it to hurt me.”
Eila considered Will and Carmen. Their chins were lifted, their spines straight.
She walked toward Mac, unconscious and unable to defend himself.
Once again, I formed creatures of fire and water and surrounded her with the small army. They attacked, and she absorbed them.
The magic didn’t return to me.
Panic scratched at my chest. My assault strengthened her and weakened me, but if I didn’t fight, she would devour Mac. She’d take them all, every shifter in the clearing, before claiming the rest of us as her new pets.
I wasn’t strong enough to stop her. Not even cured. The effects of the drug gnawed at me, weakening power that should have been absolute.
The others still fought. Fire and water and hot desert air rushed at Eila. She didn’t seem to notice.
I felt along the cord of my magic, admiring the perfect fusion of the two threads. It was a work of art, even if it was Eila’s work. That thread had given me hope, and it had given me time. It had given me long nights with Mac.
Now it would save him.
Magic could create. Water and fire, beauty and life.
It could also destroy. Ruin, desolation, and a madness that tried to claim me.
I took one last look at my mother and Grams, at Sera. “Don’t hate me,” I told her. Maybe she heard.
Eila placed her palms on Mac’s shoulders, and I made the only choice I could. I claimed the madness.
I grabbed that loose thread and ripped the fire and water apart in a single, desperate motion. I let it all go. My mind and my heart, and everything I’d ever loved or trusted. The years I planned to wake at Mac’s side. The comfort of knowing I was loved. The forgiveness I’d promised myself at last. The hopes I’d clung to during the darkest days when my control hung by a thread, when my friends believed in me though I no longer believed in myself. All that I’d ever wanted, I gave it to the magic, and I let it be destroyed.
I destroyed it all, knowing it was the last thing I’d ever do. There was power in grief and in the rage of loss.
I pushed past the encroaching madness, seeking memories instead. I recalled a childhood with a mother who loved me, the wild university years spent with Sera, and the quiet nights in the cabin with my family of choice. I’d helped people. I’d saved a few, and I’d loved so many of them, one so much I would rewrite the rules of magic itself to save him.
I claimed everything that made me good, all the best parts of me, and I let them explode.
I annihilated myself, and I sent the atoms of power created by my obliteration toward Eila.
She was in her solid form, and I wrapped the wreckage around her, grabbing onto her flesh and slicing into the skin. Blood welled to the surface and slid down her arms and neck and face, and still I cut, burrowing into her, seeking whatever organs lived within and crushing them.
Eila gasped and faced me, her movements sluggish. She was covered in a thick veil of my ruined magic. It slowed her, as water would a human, and I dug in deeper. I coated her in my destruction and waited for her to be destroyed in turn.