Elemental Havoc (Paranormal Public Book 11) (10 page)

Keegan looked down, disgruntled. “Purple is so not my color.”

As I concentrated on this party trick, I started to feel the darkness rise up inside me again. I took a deep breath and ruthlessly focused on my power.

But suddenly a rushing sounded in my ears and my fire magic blazed.

Until I released the trick, I hadn’t realized just how panicked I’d been feeling. I had done something that was very basic for me, and I still had to fight the darkness at every turn.

I took several more deep breaths, trying to calm down. The touch of this darkness was strange, and it didn’t feel like the darkness that surrounded Lisabelle. There was something purer here.

That had never happened before. The fire wanted to burn free, but I had kept it in check, if just barely. Taking several deep breaths, I looked around at my classmates. My hands and arms were shaking and my jaw ached from how hard I had clenched it.

“Well, that took forever and was about as boring as the rest. When’s lunch?” one of the students grumbled.

“I had wanted to see him explode something,” another grumbled, “or do the thing that would end up getting him expelled. That’d be cool.”

Trying to ignore the taunts, I looked at Professor Penny for direction. But he might as well have been on the other side of the world; his head was tilted back and he was snoring. Ignoring him, the rest of the class was just shuffling noisily toward the door when suddenly he reared up with a look on his face as if he had experienced a great scare. “Fs for all of you!” he cried, waving his hand around.

An attack on Bright Eagle, only known of because our reporter was on the scene when it took place. Who Bright Eagle is code for is not public knowledge.

After that first group meeting, life at Paranormal Public settled into a pattern of sorts. I lived alone in Astra; Keegan lived in Airlee. Every morning we met in the breakfast hall and sat with our group. As far as campus teams went, ours was one of the better ones, with silent hostility replacing the open violence that some of the other teams were experiencing. Sometimes students would show up with black eyes or other bruises, sometimes they’d come in with limps. It wasn’t always directly attributable to group fights, but more often than not that was the best place to start trying to guess what had happened.

With the exception of Eighellie, we had all quickly come to the conclusion that putting off homework and important tasks was the way to go, so we barely discussed our year-end project. There was always next semester.

Classes were so boring I couldn’t even think of anything to say about them. It was as if the professors had created a pact in which they had agreed never to say the word magic. Since we were at a school for magic, it was hard to understand the logic behind that decision.

After my night visit to Dobrov’s office, I didn’t see the hybrid president or Lisabelle Verlans again for weeks. I would hear that Dobrov had done this or that, and the critical articles in the Tabble continued, but otherwise there were no sightings of him. His presence was divisive, or at the very least paranormals liked to used his presence as yet another thing to squabble over.

I had kept my promise to Dobrov and not told anyone about the conversation I had overheard or what had happened in Surround. If there truly were some TPs missing, then we were all in danger. I desperately wanted to go down to the TP office myself and talk to Ms. Cernal, but there was no time, and it wasn’t as if she’d tell me anything anyhow, even if I asked nicely.

By unspoken agreement, Keegan and I had decided that Eighellie was good to have around. She was smart and opinionated, but so much so that she didn’t even notice or care about the raging politics going on around her. It was actually refreshing to hang around with someone who wasn’t susceptible to all that conflict.

But it was also strange, because we didn’t see all that much of her. We met up with her at meals and classes, but she rarely hung out in the evenings. At first I thought she was spending her nights at the library doing homework, but the couple of times I ventured to the library I never saw her there.

“It’s just odd,” said Keegan. “I asked her if she wanted to come to Astra and study with us and she said she likes to study alone in her room. But that can’t be true, because she isn’t in her room right now. Girls lie, man. That’s what my dad always said. He just said it when mom wasn’t around.”

“Let’s try to find her,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I thought it was a good idea, except that I had realized that I kind of liked Eighellie and I was curious about what she was up to.

“Maybe she’s doing something she shouldn’t be,” Keegan speculated.

“Than she shouldn’t be doing it alone,” I grinned.

That night, just before the sun went down and the vampires flooded campus, we went everywhere we could think of to search for Eighellie. The evenings had become brittle and cold, and the clear sun warmed my bones only if the wind wasn’t blowing. In short, I wasn’t looking forward to a nighttime ramble.

We checked her dorm, or rather Keegan knocked on her door and she didn’t answer, we checked the dining hall and the library and we checked the archives. Once we had searched all of those places, only one thing was clear: Eighellie wasn’t in any of them.

“Any idea where else we can look?” Keegan asked.

I shook my head. “I think we’ll just have to follow her tomorrow night.”

“She should just tell us what she’s doing,” said Keegan. “Then we wouldn’t have to resort to drastic measures. It’s eating into my dinnertime.”

The next night after dinner Keegan and I pretended to go to Astra as usual. Why not take advantage of having an entire dorm to myself instead of fighting for seats in the library?

Okay, so the library wasn’t that full unless a big test was scheduled for the next day, but Astra was still more comfortable and significantly less hostile.

Eighellie said she was heading back to Airlee to study. But she had been asked about an important theoretical problem by one of the other Airlee students, so she didn’t leave the dining hall right away. That gave Keegan and me a chance to hide in an alcove near the door until she finally came out by herself.

“She looks so innocent, there
must
be something going on,” Keegan hissed. Eighellie had her backpack over her shoulder and gazed straight ahead as she started on a path that led away from the rest of campus.

It didn’t take long for me to realize where she was headed.

“She’s going to the Long Building!” I said. The Museum of Masks, where my sister had served as Dacer’s apprentice, had been housed in the Long Building until Public closed down. Most of the masks, the ones Dacer said were not the most important ones, were still there, but the Museum was usually locked. Dacer had been forced to take a break from his work with the masks due to his ducal commitments, but he still consulted about the Museum whenever he was asked.

What I had been told was that the current curator was worried about Hunters, so he had laid several choice traps to deter them as well as, for good measure, any nosy students. It seemed to have worked, because the Museum had never been broken into. There had been a lot of structural damage done to the building since the days when Charlotte was spending a lot of time there, and the repair crews hadn’t gotten around to fixing it yet, so it wasn’t in use this semester.

“Why didn’t we check there before?” Keegan demanded.

“Um, because it’s not in use, so what reason could she possibly have for going all that way?” I said.

“Right,” said Keegan. “Well, we’re about to find out.”

After we had all started hanging out, Eighellie had given us a brief history of what had happened to her family. In short, they had all died, and despite the fact that she was on a campus with hundreds of other paranormals, I often wondered if she was lonely. She was certainly angry, but that was a cold sort of comfort.

Now that we knew where Eighellie was going, we kept our distance so she wouldn’t discover us following her.

We let her get far ahead of us until she was just a small dark shape moving in the distance and all I could see was her blond head. Once I saw her disappear into the Long Building, I waited for a light to come on. When no light appeared, Keegan and I exchanged glances.

“I bet she put stuff over the windows,” he mused. “Let’s go.”

We made our way forward slowly, even though I was anxious to get inside before there were vampires everywhere asking me what I thought I was doing outdoors at night. That wouldn’t be a pleasant conversation.

“This way,” Keegan said, pointing to the door through which Eighellie had disappeared.

“It’s not locked,” he said with wonder. “She’s so confident that no one else is going to come in here, she doesn’t even bother to lock it.” He pulled the door open and walked inside.

The Long Building was in disarray, and the damage was not only structural. Furniture had been overturned and broken, and the walls were moldy from having been partially exposed to the weather for several years. It was a depressing sight.

“She wouldn’t want to go far in this mess,” Keegan mused.

I grabbed his arm. “Did you heard that?” I whispered. From somewhere ahead of us came a hammering sound. We looked at each other in silent agreement, then crept forward, being as quiet as we could.

“OUCH!” Keegan cried as he sent something clattering along the floor in front of us. As he grabbed his ankle and started hopping around wildly on one foot, the hammering stopped.

I had been looking around, wondering if any of the valuable artifacts on the list were hidden here, when my friend cried out.

After that, it didn’t take long to hear a door slam.

Keegan and I exchanged looks, but we knew the jig was up. Eighellie came marching down the dimly lit hall. She looked angry until she saw it was us, and then she looked even angrier.

“You’re following me,” she ranted. “How dare you invade my privacy!”

“We have just as much right to be here as you do,” said Keegan, his chin jutting out.

“But you’re only here because you’re following me!” Eighellie repeated, stamping her foot.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “We only wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“You aren’t supposed to be here!” she sputtered.

“It’s times like these I wish I had a mirror,” said Keegan.

For a split second that thought softened the darkness mage, but she got right back on her high horse and snapped, “Fine! You want to know what I’m working on? Fine! Follow me.”

She spun on her heel and marched away with her arms swinging ridiculously in the air. We trailed after her as she ranted on about privacy and nosy boys.

“This way,” she said, leading us to a small room in the middle of the Long Building. It looked like a storage room, except that Eighellie had shoved all the furniture to one side.

I saw immediately why she had chosen the room. It had no windows, so she could hope to avoid being snuck up on – or so she thought, she muttered – and there were some enormous work tables that she would have needed a small army, or magic she shouldn’t be using out here, to move.

“Wow,” Keegan breathed. I saw it too. The walls were covered in papers, what looked like lists, torn papers from books, and so many newspaper clippings it made me dizzy.

Eighellie stood back to let us look. She didn’t seem nervous, more like irritated that she had finally been forced to share.

Keegan leaned over to look at one of the bulletin boards. “This is all stuff about darkness mages during the Nocturn War,” he said. “Why?”

“To find out what happened to your parents?” I knew immediately what Eighellie was doing, and now I knew why she worked so hard. She was driven by an anger so deep it felt all-consuming. I could relate, in a way.

“This is insane,” said Keegan. “Is he right?”

Eighellie nodded. “I have to find out what happened, what really happened. And I will, even if it’s the last thing I do.”

“Is it worth everything you’re going to have to go through?” Keegan looked skeptical, but I knew immediately that was going to be no changing Eighellie’s mind.

“I have to be perfect,” she cried. “I have to be because then I can do everything I want to do! I can do everything that my family didn’t get to! They died to protect me, and now here I am, and how dare I waste it!”

Eighellie’s family, it turned out, had been staunch supporters of light, despite the fact that they were darkness mages. With the exception of Lisabelle, that was unheard of. They had tried to act as double agents and had spent an entire year alerting the Paranormal Police when attacks on paranormal towns by darkness were imminent. Eventually they were discovered, and then they were brutally killed. Eighellie had been taken away by her grandmother when her parents had sensed that they didn’t have much time, but then darkness had come for her grandmother too.

“She fought off so many hellhounds,” said Eighellie sadly. “She told me to go, and then she shut the door. She wanted to give me enough time to get away, and she did.”

“How does that relate to everything that’s going on here?” Keegan asked gently.

“I know it was other darkness mages who killed her,” she explained. “And my parents. I mean, there were hellhounds, they had those with them, but it was the darkness mages who turned against my parents. I want to know who, and I want to know why. That’s why I came to Public. If I do everything perfectly, maybe I’ll be able to find out what happened. As much information as possible with meticulous notes is the answer.”

“So, you want to be perfect for your parents, and also to kill whoever killed them?” I asked.

She sniffled and nodded. “I mean, it’s more important to kill them than to lead a healthy, happy life, obviously, but in my ideal world I can do both.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Keegan asked. “We could have helped.”

“I know, I mean, I know Ricky knows Lisabelle,” she looked at me hopefully.

“Ah, and?” I asked.

“She must know something about what happened,” said Eighellie. “If I could just talk to her, maybe I’d have a better idea of what happened to my parents.”

“Lisabelle isn’t exactly known for being helpful,” I said cautiously. “In fact, she’s kind of known for the opposite.”

“I know,” said Eighellie, “but I’m sure she knows something. I’m not afraid of her.”

I shook my head. “You should be.”

Eighellie was about to say something further when I heard what sounded like a crate accidentally getting kicked into a wall. All three of us froze, then Eighellie burst into motion and shut off the light. We stood in the darkness, listening.

“Someone going to the Museum?” I wondered.

“Probably,” said Eighellie. “Should we take a look?”