Elemental Earth (Paranormal Public) (5 page)

Lisabelle rolled her eyes. “We
have to talk. We can’t do it on the road tomorrow, because we’re all going to
be on the lookout for demons the whole time.”

“But it’s Golden Falls,” said
Lough reverently. “What’s to worry about? The stories say that it’s set against
a backdrop of a waterfall of honey instead of water.”

“Right,” I grumbled. “Fine, if
you have something that you need to say, come to Astra.”

“Do I need to be there for this?”
Lough yawned, covering his pale face with his beefy hand. “I don’t want to be
depressed.”

“We’ll fill you in tomorrow,” Sip
promised. She obviously already knew what Lisabelle wanted to say.

Astra felt empty without a house
mother. Martha had informed me that she’d be by to use the kitchen from time to
time, and I was glad of it, but otherwise there was still no sign of Mrs. Swan,
and I’d refused all other help.

“Okay,” I said, putting my hands
on my hips as we stood in the kitchen, where I’d gone in search of cookies,
“what do you want to talk to me about?”

Lisabelle grabbed a cookie off
the plate on the table. “I think you have the best of both worlds with Martha,”
she said. “She bakes for you and then she disappears. Keller can come over
whenever he wants.”

“Yeah, like tonight,” I shot
back. “Hurry up.”

Lisabelle grinned at me. “Good to
know you like him better.”

“I like him best,” I whispered,
but neither of my friends appeared to hear me.

“Sip?” Lisabelle asked, sitting
at the large counter. “Want to do the honors?”

Sip jumped onto her own chair and
turned serious purple eyes to me.

“We are going to a foreign
school,” she began. “I know it’s supposed to be wonderful, but we are natural
skeptics. Yes, Nolan is there and yes, he helped found the Sign of Six, which
is meant to protect us and fight back against the demons when other paranormals
will not. I guess there’s a New York City campus and an upstate New York campus
and Nolan will be at the same one as us this semester,” She took a deep breath
before continuing. “But that doesn’t mean we’re safe.” She glanced at
Lisabelle, who was still eating, and rolled her eyes. “Isn’t it always drilled
into our heads that we’re never safe? So, we are never going to leave you
alone. I mean, I suppose you can go to the bathroom alone. I mean the stall,
but one of us has to go with you.”

I was dumbfounded. I looked back
and forth between my friends as if they had totally lost their minds. This was
Golden Falls; even I’d heard of it. Lough clearly wasn’t worried, and I had
spent the last two and a half years of my life in danger, so I didn’t see what
was so new about the situation we were heading for.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I
sputtered. “You can’t be serious! You want to babysit me?”

“Much like we did first semester,
yes,” said Lisabelle, grabbing a second cookie. “Only by this time we will have
perfected the art of fear and intimidation.”

“You were born a master at
those,” said Sip. “I’m surprised you’re surprised,” she said, turning to me.

“It’s ridiculous,” I sputtered
out. At this point I was tired and already nervous about the next day’s travel,
never mind about being at Golden Falls for the semester. But I was also
excited. I too had heard the stories of a honey waterfall, and I secretly held
out hope that Golden Falls would hold some of the secrets of the elementals
that I so longed to know.

“You need to be protected,” said
Lisabelle. “The best way for that to happen is for us never to leave you alone.
Do you realize that the president of Golden Falls has been asking if you’ll be
there? They want to know everything about you.”

“So do a lot of paranormals,” I
said hotly. “I’m the last elemental, so they’re curious. It’s only normal.”

“Right, well, we don’t like
curious,” said Lisabelle, “unless it’s coming from Sip.”

“Or normal,” Sip put in. “Who
wants that? Totally overrated.”

“I’m fine,” I said through
gritted teeth. “I’ve made it this far and I don’t want you to worry.”

“And we want to see that you make
it to a nice, ripe old age,” said Lisabelle. I looked at my friend. She was
totally serious, and Lisabelle was hardly ever serious. Bitter and sarcastic
often, but seriously so, no.

I took a deep breath. “Does
Keller count as a babysitter, too?”

“Do I count as a babysitter?” My
boyfriend strode through the doors into the kitchen. He looked tense, but I saw
his shoulders relax as he looked at us.

I just shrugged and waved at Sip.
“You tell him. I’m going to get ready for bed.” I pushed away from the counter,
and before any of my friends could argue, I retreated upstairs.

I heard their voices long after I
had crawled under the covers, but I couldn’t sleep. Part of me was waiting for
Keller while another part was trying to calm down. My mind was racing, and I
couldn’t get it to stop. I was excited about the semester and I was hoping for
a fresh start. I knew my friends would be there, except for Dacer, who was
staying behind to “take care of the little ducklings at Public,” as he put it.
Having my friends at Golden Falls too should only have made it better. Now I
wondered a bit. But I knew that in the end it was just annoyance and stress.

When Keller finally came to bed I
felt the mattress sag. I was relieved that he was there, but I didn’t turn
around. Then a strong arm snaked around my middle and he pulled me close.

I snuggled next to him, anxious
to soak up every second I could in his presence, but there was a pit in my
stomach that overshadowed the excitement, because I could tell there was
trouble with his parents. Something told me we didn’t have much time left
together.

“Everyone ready?” a gruff voice
called out. I kept my head down. All the students who were going to Golden
Falls had shuffled out at dawn to stand shivering and barely awake in front of
the library. The voice wasn’t addressing us, but one of the professors helping
us get ready to leave. We were all waiting for our ride.

“I miss that place as a dining hall,”
said Lough forlornly. All around us was an expanse of snow, and Lough looked
like he had gotten up about five minutes ago, which he probably had. “Was it
really necessary for us to get up this early?”

“It’s just because you woke up
hungry and want to pop in for a muffin,” said Sip, yawning. “And no. It never
is. I dream of the day real adults will understand that.”

“Nope, it’s not about muffins”
said Lough, pulling a dinner roll from the night before out of his jacket
pocket. “I’m always prepared.” He took a massive bite.

“This is unnecessarily early,”
Lisabelle agreed for once. She didn’t look tired. In fact, I wondered if she
had slept at all. It was hard to tell, because she basically wore the same
black clothing every day, so there was no way to distinguish one day from
another by what she had on. But unlike the rest of us, she had no dark circles
under her eyes or pillow lines on her face.

“Let’s get this show on the
road,” said Sip, rubbing her mitten-covered hands together.

“Oh, we will,” said Dove, who
happened to be standing right in front of us. “And then you’ll regret wishing
for such a thing.” He had been speaking quietly with Dacer, but when my mentor
went off to check with one of the other professors, the vampire sidled closer.

“Why?” Sip asked. She never
missed the opportunity to ask a question.

“Because,” said Dove, grinning,
“we’re going into demon territory. There’s no way we’ll make it to Golden Falls
without at least one battle.”

Sip shrugged. “I like beating the
pulp out of demons, and so does Lisabelle.”

Dove shrugged. “Big words for a
little werewolf.”

“She’s small, but you don’t want
to mess with her,” said Lisabelle. “I’d pick her in a fight every time. Little
thing has a temper.”

“I do not,” said Sip hotly.

“See what I mean?” said
Lisabelle.

“Do you think she’d beat you?”
Dove asked, his eyes boring into the darkness mage. Lisabelle looked taken
aback by the question, but she recovered quickly.

“Yes,” she said finally, “if she
was angry enough I bet she could.”

“How are we traveling?” Sip
asked. “No way we go by foot.”

“We go by flying carriage,” said
Dove, but he didn’t look happy about it. “That’s how Golden Falls travels, and
they have sent some of theirs. It’s an antiquated form of travel, but safer for
our purposes than using cars, and we must be respectful to our hosts.”

“That we must be,” said Zervos in
a clipped voice, striding up to us. I tried and failed not to flinch. He was
the professor who would be chaperoning us, and I couldn’t think of a worse combination
than Zervos and Dove. I desperately wished Dacer were going, but he had
outright refused to leave his beloved museum, or to visit Golden Falls, and he
wouldn’t say why. As it was I would spend the entire semester missing my
mentor, though I knew I would see him via Contact Stone.

Keller slipped his hand into mine
and squeezed gently. He was wearing a black jacket and jeans, and his wings
poked out from the back of his jacket. As usual, my full attention turned to
focus on the hand holding mine and its pressure against my skin.

There were several students
milling around campus, and I saw a couple of the girls give Keller appreciative
looks. Lisabelle saw them too and smirked at me.

After a while I glanced around at
my fellow travelers. They were all familiar, but some I knew better than
others. Faci and Daisy, Dobrov and Camilla - they stood in a little group.
Dobrov wasn’t wearing a coat, and he shivered a little in the wind. Faci and
Daisy had their heads bent together, deep in conversation. Camilla was
examining her blood-red nails. I had tried for the past twenty-four hours to
catch Dobrov’s eye, but he had never once looked up.

Faci was the strangest looking
paranormal I had ever seen. He didn’t have hair, and his eyes were so deeply
set in his head that it looked like there were two black holes in his face. To
make his appearing more damning, he had a beaked nose that tilted to the left,
and his cheeks had a sucked-in look that meant he hardly had lips or a chin.

“He gets creepier every time I
see him,” said Lisabelle, wrinkling her nose.

Sip shot her a warning look.
“Then don’t look at him.”

Vanni, Trafton, Evan, and Rake
were there, along with Sip, Lisabelle, Lough, and me. There were several other
students I didn’t know well, but they seemed just as excited as the rest of us
to visit Golden Falls. The other chaperone, Keller’s friend Marcus, stood a bit
to the side. Despite my relationship with Keller, I had never spent much time
with Marcus. He was the most studious and hard-working fallen angel I’d ever
seen. Keller said that Marcus’s older sister had died young, and Marcus felt
that he needed to make his parents proud for both of them, which he had done.
Once he graduated he would go to work for President Caid, a very high honor.

“There they are,” Vanni cried,
pointing upward. Following Vanni’s finger I craned my neck backward. As it
always was in the morning at that time of year, the sun was trying desperately
to poke through a gray haze.

Through the mist came the
carriages, and I watched them, black dots in the sky, growing larger.

Where, oh where, were we going?

“What’s pulling them?” I asked
softly, dreading the answer.

“Demons,” said Keller grimly, as
he too looked upward. “Golden Falls keeps demons as prisoners and brings them
out when they need cheap labor. They are only let out to run errands. They’ve
been captives for as long as I can remember. They say it reminds them of the
differences between paranormals and darkness.”

I made a face. It was the first
thing I had heard about Golden Falls that was overtly jarring.

“Don’t you mean free labor?”
Lisabelle asked, brow furrowed.

Keller nodded. “That’s basically
what it is, but I think they trade with the demons for hellfire coals. Anyway,
they justify the imprisonment somehow.”

“Hellfire coals are illegal, of
course,” said Lisabelle dryly. “Charming.”

“Golden Falls has its own ways of
doing things,” said Zervos coldly. He was standing at the front of our little
group, but his eyes were on the carriages. “I’m sure that’s something that you
can relate to, Ms. Verlans. We do not question such a staunch supporter of
paranormals.”

The wind got gustier as the
carriages drew closer.

“Tell me he’s our other
chaperone. Go on, ruin my day before it’s even begun,” said Lough.

“He’s our other chaperone,” said
Sip. “There, see? Not so bad. It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid. Just do it in
one go.”

Lough frowned at the small
werewolf. “It was an awfully big Band-Aid.”

“Are these things safe?” I asked,
pointing at the first black carriage. It looked old, and I wondered if it was
sturdy enough to pull us through the air. “Especially with the demons pulling
them?” I added, more or less redundantly.