Elemental Darkness (Paranormal Public Series) (9 page)

Vital’s eyebrows shot up and he raised his hands as if in surrender. “Have whatever you like.” Across from him Lanca groaned, and he glanced at his queen. “What?” he demanded.

“You can’t say something like that to Sip,” said Lanca, as if it should have been obvious.

Vital shrugged. “She’s your friend.”

“Exactly,” said Lanca, looking horrified. “She’s going to eviscerate you.”

Vital turned his head slowly to look at the little werewolf, who was nonchalantly spooning up oatmeal. When she caught his eye again, she grinned.

Now he did look a tiny bit terrified. “You know,” he said, crossing his arms and leaning back against the counter, “I’m pretty sure your close friendship with Lisabelle served you very well.”

Sip took a bite of oatmeal before responding, while I sat down next to Lanca, who was still red in the face.

“Why do you say that?” Sip asked, when she’d finished chewing.

Vital grinned. “Because I’ve just realized that everyone was so busy paying attention to how scary Lisabelle was that no one paid any attention to you.”

Sip grinned. “That suited me just fine.”

“I can see that,” said Vital, nodding. “So, get it over with. The lecture about me dating your friend.”

Sip shrugged. “I have no lecture. It seems very clear to me that you are dating a powerful female, a queen in fact, and that you understand the risks. Therefore, since you’re so smart, it must be equally obvious that Queen Lanca has powerful friends.”

Sip waved her hand when Vital started to point to herself. “No, I mean, look, she’s friends with the only elemental, wh
o despite her modesty, controls
lightning
. I don’t care how fast a vampire you are, I’d love to see you outrun that, if you hurt her. Then there’s Lough. He’s a dream giver, which, granted, sounds wimpy, but in reality, it isn’t. You might be big and strong, but that doesn’t do you any good if you have so many nightmares you can’t sleep. Furthermore,” said Sip pausing for breath, “Queen Lanca is friends with Lisabelle, and I don’t know if you’ve heard, but she’s now helping run darkness.”

Vital turned to Lanca.

“I love you,” he said. “Just remember that the next time I do something wrong.”

Lanca smiled at him, then turned her attention to Sip.

“Thanks,” she said, beaming.

Sip dusted her hands off and grinned back. “Happy to help.” She glanced at me. “At least there’s a little news before the last goodbye.”

“Hey, Charlotte.”

Ricky’s voice woke me up from my reverie. I was sleeping on our couch with a book about elemental earth mages propped open on my chest. When Ricky asked me about them, I told him the book was a fantasy, and above his head. He gave me a scathing look and informed me that he could understand anything I could and more - that’s why he always had to calculate the tip when we went to restaurants, not that we did that very often.

My stepfather Carl had become, if it were possible, even more protective during the semester when I’d been stuck at Golden Falls. Ricky was nearly frantic when I got home that summer, and I realized that Dacer’s having forced me to come back for one last time had been a good thing. I had a feeling I’d end up having no chance to come home during senior year, and I also realized that I still wasn’t ready to tell Ricky who or what I was and who or what he probably was.

It was an omission that would prove very difficult, because Ricky spent the entire summer pestering me about my college and the “secrets” he thought I was keeping. When I told him I didn’t keep secrets from him, he rolled his eyes. He always knew when I was lying, which really didn’t help matters one little bit.

When I finally got around to telling him, it was going to change his entire world, and I didn’t want that for him yet. I would have to prove the existence of magic, of dream givers, and I wasn’t sure how Ricky would react. Worse, it would take him away from everything he’d ever known. I wanted to protect him for as long as possible.

The one thing I could sort of confide in him about, and did, was Keller. I had to leave out massive chunks of the story of our relationship and what had pushed us apart, and in the end Ricky just ended up thinking that Keller was some rich kid whose family didn’t approve of his dating an orphan whose stepdad didn’t make any money.

“He was an idiot to let you go,” Ricky insisted for the millionth time since I had shown up at home for the summer, sad and dejected. “How’s he going to find a girl more wonderful than you?”

My little brother’s grey eyes, so like my own, were wide. I hugged him tightly around the shoulders. “Thank you,” I whispered. “I appreciate it.” He stepped back from my grip and grinned at me.

“You’re welcome,” he said, his eyes lighting mischievously. “Since I’m so right about your stupid ex-boyfriend, will you tell me whatever secret you and dad are keeping?”

“Ricky,” I groaned, picking up my book again, “go away.”

He folded his arms. “I won’t,” he said. “Sorry for bringing it up again. Keep telling me about Keller. Have you heard from him?”

My heart sank. I hadn’t. It had been a month. “No contact,” I whispered, hanging my head. “I know he expected that his internship” - that’s what I was calling the thing his parents had him doing with Malle - “would keep him really busy, though. I’m not sure he’d have time.”

Ricky looked at me skeptically. “He should have figured out a way.”

“I mean, it was as much me as it was him,” I said, defending him. “We both knew our paths were not leading to the same place.”

“Where’s yours leading again?” asked Ricky, pretending confusion and scratching his head.

I grinned. “It’s leading me to dunk my little brother in a lake if he isn’t careful.”

“Oh, threats,” said Ricky. “I’d love to see you try. You’d have to use magic.”

I don’t know what sort of face I made, but Ricky’s eyebrows shot into the air. “No need to look ill. I was only joking. Sheesh. Anyway,” he said, standing up, “I’m off to Peter’s.”

His friend lived down the street and Ricky often spent long afternoons there. Peter’s family was very welcoming, and I was sure that Peter’s mother spent a lot of time looking after my brother, since Carl missed a lot of the finer points of taking care of his child.

My stepfather and I hadn’t talked about Ricky since I had left last time, but I felt that we had arrived at an unspoken understanding. We might not get along or ever like each other, but at least Ricky was the highest priority for both of us.

This time, Carl came into the room before Ricky could get out the door. Carl wasn’t a tall or handsome man, he was more the rugged sort. For his entire adult life he had made a living working outdoors. There wasn’t anything wrong with that, but I had always wondered why my mother, who loved entertaining and preferred an active social life, had married him. I still wondered.

He eyed me as I sat on the couch with my book. “I had thought you wouldn’t be here this summer. I thought you’d have some fancy internship or something,” he said gruffly. Instantly my hackles rose.

“I just wanted to spend my last summer as a student with my little brother,” I said, ruffling Ricky, who had started to look nervous, as if he was standing near a bomb and he thought it might explode.

Carl grunted again. “If you ask me, you’d be more useful working. They’re hiring down at the grocery store if you’re looking for work.” He thumbed his hand in the direction of the nearby small town. “Or you could go back to work at the coffee shop.”

“Thanks,” I said, “but I have a lot of studying to do this summer.” The truth was that I was still searching for the Globe White, and I hoped to use these quiet weeks to figure out where it was. There had been no sign of Risper, and I could only hope that he was hot on its trail, but with Lisabelle gone we had no way of contacting him to find out.

I was also trying to practice my advanced spells, to be prepared for the time when we went to get Lisabelle back. Sip had made it clear that we weren’t leaving her with Malle or the Nocturns. Her exact words were, “Darkness may call to darkness, but they need to add an extension line for me, because Lisabelle’s MY friend, and she’s going to stay that way.”

Lough and I had chuckled until we’d seen just how serious Sip was. She had every intention of getting Lisabelle back with our help, even if it meant taking on all the demons, hellhounds, and darkness mages in the world to do it.

“You don’t look like you’re studying,” Carl grumbled, bringing me back to the present. “Looks like you’re lazing about doing not much of nothing.”

I raised my chin. “I’m working hard.”

Carl stared hard at me, his small eyes angry. I knew he wanted to say something about magic, and how in the real world it didn’t matter, but he couldn’t bring it up with Ricky there.

“Son,” Carl growled, “I thought you were going to Peter’s.”

Ricky looked between us and sighed; he hated it when we fought. “Then you came home. I thought we could all have dinner together,” he said hopefully.

Carl didn’t even look at him. Instead he said, “I’m just going to watch some TV.” The TV was in the living room, where I was reading, but Carl turned it on anyway. He ignored both of us as he started to flip through channels.

“I want you to work at the coffee shop,” he said to me. “No child of mine is going to laze around.”

I slammed my book shut. He just wouldn’t leave it alone, so fine, I thought. Before I stomped out of the living room I said over my shoulder, “Neither of those things are true.”

Ricky watched me slam out of the house and walk away in the bright summer sunshine, but I couldn’t bring myself to comfort him.

I would never understand Carl or why he hated me so much.

The coffee shop was under new ownership; a young couple from Alaska who wanted to make a go of it in Maine had bought it. I guess they were struggling a bit, because when they heard I had worked there years ago and already knew my way around, their faces lit up like it was Christmas.

“We’d love to have you,” said the open and smiling Nick. He was pale and thin, with a sprinkling of freckles over his nose and a wide smile.

“Yes,” gushed Nicole, his wife. She was short, with choppy blond hair and large brown eyes.

“When can you start?” Nicole asked.

I shrugged. “Any time.”

She smiled brightly. “How about now?”

I smiled back. I came to like Nick and Nicole a lot, and I was glad to be back with Ricky, so much so that I could almost ignore Carl’s surliness, and I almost forgot all the trouble in the paranormal world.

Almost.

And so the summer dragged on. I had gotten home at the end of May and it was now mid-July. Dacer had encouraged Sip and me to limit our correspondence, in case it was being intercepted. Contact Stones were not a terribly safe form of communication, so Sip started writing to me in code, as she’d been doing with the articles she was still publishing in Tabble, contrary to Oliva’s orders. Apparently Caid wasn’t pleased, and was starting to view Sip as something of a rival. I learned as much from Sip’s brief messages.

Given that my friend was still in college, we both found it kind of funny that the president of all the paranormals, who had sat down for a casual chat with Malle not that long ago, thought of Sip as competition.

Lough also wrote, but his letters were entirely different. Never once did he mention Lisabelle’s name, but I knew better than to think it was because he didn’t miss her.

He mostly wrote about Bartholem and how he had thought pets were wonderful until he’d met that cat. To make matters worse, his parents loved “the white fur ball of death,” as Lough dubbed him. At least the dream giver had been upfront with his parents, explaining that Bartholem was his friend’s cat, and he was merely taking care of him.

“Bartholem sleeps in my room, which boggles my mind, because all he does is meow the whole time I’m asleep. I tried explaining to him that it was just rude, and how would he like it, but he just blinked his purple eyes at me and played dumb. We both know he knew what I was talking about. At first I thought it was because he was in a new place, but now he’s made himself right at home and he still does it. Why couldn’t we have gotten a dog?”

Being in contact with my friends, even if somewhat irregularly, was the only thing that kept me sane that summer. I couldn’t risk looking at Tabble much, in case Ricky found it, and I could only practice magic at night when I snuck into the woods to do it. Even then I was always afraid of being caught.

The other thing I spent a lot of time doing was writing letters to Keller, even though I knew he’d never see them. It calmed me. They often went something like this
:

Dear Keller

I miss you. Simple words I know, but it feels like you died. I know that’s dramatic and I know it’s not true. I’m just not sure it’s possible for me to be any sadder.

I would stare at the words for a long time. Somehow I felt closer to him for having written them
, so I kept on writing all the while I was at home that summer. I told him how home was day to day and I always told him that I missed him. Once I was finished I burned the letters, because I didn’t want them to fall into the wrong hands and be used against me, or worse, against him. Dear Keller, I miss you.