Elemental Havoc (Paranormal Public Book 11) (14 page)

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” I said. “Someone would have bashed that guy’s head in sooner or later.”

“Thanks, I feel infinitely better now,” she said.

“But Dobrov doesn’t know who took the TPs?” I asked.

“Didn’t whoever you listened in on tell you?” she demanded.

“Hey, Sis, remember when you said I was an adult, and you didn’t have to worry about me, and I’d be free to make my own mistakes?”

“No,” she said.

“Right, well, maybe you should remind yourself. Trust me, it’s all under control,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m worried about,” she retorted. “I’ll let you know if anything changes with Fussfus.”

“Thanks,” I said.

She sighed and stood up. “Sip’s going to be SO mad.”

After the latest round of trouble, my friends decided it was time to camp out in Astra Dorm. Not that they thought I shouldn’t be alone, but that they wanted to be as far away from as many of our fellow classmates as possible. Astra was perfect for that.

“You have all these bedrooms, I might as well take advantage of one,” said Eighellie. “Not that Airlee isn’t cool and all, but I’ll be honest, it’s not this cool.”

“If she gets to stay, so do I,” said Keegan. “You like me better anyway.”

“Of course he likes you better,” said Eighellie. “You eat and play video games, it’s not exactly a taxing friendship.”

“No need to be hostile,” Keegan muttered. “So where’s my room?”

It was oddly comforting to wake up the next morning and know that my friends were already there. I didn’t have to go to the dining hall to see them, or to Airlee, which I hardly ever did anyhow. Now they were in the next room over. Keegan’s bedroom door was closed, but the room where I had put Eighellie down the hall was open and empty.

I wondered vaguely if she had already left for the day, but I decided to check the sitting rooms just in case.

“What are you doing?” I asked. I had found her in the fire sitting room, in the exact same spot next to the fire that she had occupied the night before when she’d announced that she had decided to become an overnight guest at Astra. Only now the fire was burned out and the room felt empty and cold. Eighellie had a blanket over her thin shoulders, her blond hair scraping against it, and she held a mug in both hands. There were papers strewn all around her.

“Now, this is unorganized,” I said. I regretted the lame joke the instant she met my eyes. They were rimmed with red as if she’d been forgetting to blink, and her face was pale.

“You’re freezing aren’t you?” I asked, watching her shiver.

“N-no, is it cold in here?” she asked.

Without bothering to answer, I went to the fire and lighted it. A kettle hung over the flames, and luckily it didn’t take long to warm up.

Feeling better about myself for having warmed the place up, I turned back to my friend.

“Give me your mug,” I said. She reached it out to me and I took it, then dumped burning hot liquid into it. The table in front of her, which she had dragged over when the side table next to her chair had proven to be too small, was now totally covered in papers. I pushed them aside to make room for the mug and set it down, then fished around for tea. “It has to be here somewhere,” I muttered.

“You don’t have to do this, you know, I can take care of myself. Besides, I know I’m annoying,” said Eighellie regretfully. “I was going to go to the dining hall and grab something, but I didn’t want to leave my papers.”

I glanced over my shoulder at her. Although a bit of color had come back into her cheeks once I lit the fire, she still looked a little pathetic sitting there with her shoulders drooping and the blanket pulled tightly around her.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You’re only trying to help, and so am I.”

The next thing to take care of was breakfast. I went to the kitchen and rummaged around for some food. There was a tin of muffins in the fridge, so I grabbed a few muffins and cut up some cheese and put it on some bread. Shaking my head at how bad I was at this, I put all of it on a tray and went back to the sitting room.

Astra Dorm was cold in the mornings. Sometimes the fire power lapsed at night, and when the fires went out the cold set in. Astra had a mind of its own, that was for sure. The magic inside the elemental apex was ancient and powerful.

Now I regretted not paying any attention to the fires, especially since it didn’t look like Eighellie had gotten any sleep.

“I leave you alone for two minutes and you get working again,” I said, shaking my head at my friend once I was back in the sitting room with her. Eighellie had picked up her pen and was bent over the table, writing more notes. She glanced up at me and grinned. “I just had an important thought about the Hunters.”

“The Hunters?” With my sister so upset and Fussfus fighting for his life, I had sort of forgotten about them, and I hadn’t thought Eighellie would have paid any attention to them in any case.

“Yeah, I’ve been tracking them,” she said proudly. “When I have time. I thought it would be a useful mental exercise.” She paused, then took a big bite of cheese and sighed with pleasure. “When Keegan gets his butt out of bed I’ll be sure to tell you both all about it!” She grinned and got back to writing.

To while the time away until Keegan woke up, I grabbed a book from one of the shelves and started to read. It was pretty boring, a tome about colonial plant farming, but I didn’t have to read it for long, because Keegan wandered in not ten minutes after I sat down. He was wearing brown slippers, baggy cotton pants, and a hooded sweatshirt.

“Yikes, it’s hot in here,” he cried, unzipping the sweatshirt. Underneath it he had on a white t-shirt.

Eighellie gave him a quizzical look. “You didn’t want to bother to get dressed?”

“What would I do that for? I’m not going anywhere this morning,” Keegan said, shaking his head. “I like the simple pleasures, and not having to put on cold, stiff jeans before it’s absolutely necessary is one of them.” Eighellie couldn’t seem to find anything to argue with there, so she just nodded.

“Yum! Breakfast!” Keegan was eyeing the crumbs of her muffin. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and hurried away toward the kitchen.

“If you’re going to the kitchen, I want another muffin,” she cried after him.

Keegan returned with the whole tin of muffins and a platter of butter. He tossed a muffin to me and I caught it, with only a few crumbs flying around and landing on the rug.

“Thanks,” I said.

Keegan sat down, then looked sadly at the solid butter he had in his hand.

Eighellie suddenly threw off her blanket, strode over to Keegan, seized the butter out of his hand, walked over to the fire, and held it there for a second while Keegan’s mouth hung open. Then she returned it to him, slightly melted.

“Problem solved,” she said. Then she sat back down, taking her slow sweet time arranging the blanket over her shoulders again.

“Thanks,” said Keegan, clearly taken aback by Eighellie’s brusque efficiency in the face of silly banter.

“Eat so I can start talking,” said the girl, pointing a pen menacingly at him. Keegan got to work buttering the muffin.

“What are you going to be talking about?” Keegan asked as he slathered butter on one half of his breakfast. “There’s been a lot going on recently.”

“Hunters,” said Eighellie grimly. “All roads lead to Hunters.”

“So, you aren’t in the camp of paranormals who think everything is Lisabelle Verlans’s fault?” I asked, feeling relieved. Sometimes Eighellie was hard to read, and whenever Keegan went on a rant about Lisabelle and how she wasn’t the problem, I mean, she was a problem but just not the one we had been discussing, Eighellie didn’t say anything. It was clear that there was a whole lot that some paranormals believed to be Sipythia Quest’s fault, but what wasn’t her fault was definitely Lisabelle’s.

Still, Eighellie’s obsession with her parents’ death and with the question of whether the deaths had been linked to artifacts, and therefore Hunters, meant that she had now discovered something interesting. There was a good chance that her curiosity about the Hunters was turning out to be more than a mental exercise.

“I’m not,” she said. “In fact, I think it’s pretty idiotic. Let me outline my points. I wrote them down somewhere.” She started fishing through the scattered papers until she found what she was looking for.

“So, Hunters, you want to tell us about them, but we already know,” said Keegan when he had finished his first muffin. He sat up straighter in his chair, looking at Eighellie’s plate, where there was one piece of cheese left. Slowly and deliberately she picked it up, smiled at him, and popped it into her mouth. He sank back in disappointment while I chuckled to myself. Eighellie, for all she was clearly a nerd, didn’t know how to take anything lying down, while Keegan had probably never seen a real girl up this close before. To be fair, I barely had either, my sister’s older and powerful friends not counting.

“What do you know about them?” she asked.

“I know that they like death and destruction. They have no purpose other than to inspire fear.”

“I suppose some of that is true,” she conceded, “but they certainly do have a purpose. I believe they have a clear purpose. They aren’t just running around willy-nilly - to borrow Ricky’s words.”

“They want what the Nocturns wanted before Premier Verlans got hold of them,” said Keegan. He held up his hand as if to inspire anticipation and added, “Death and destruction and artifacts.”

Eighellie’s right hand flexed over the papers she was looking at. “Okay, I get it,” she said. “You lack imagination. Fine. I’m still going to continue. It’s the part about the artifacts that’s interesting.”

She picked up a sheet of paper from near the bottom of the pile, then rooted around for two others that seemed to go along with it, at least in Eighellie’s mind. We had learned a lot about the Hunters and artifacts from the two lectures my sister had hosted, but Eighellie seemed to think she had more to add.

“I’ve been looking at articles about black markets,” she said. “There isn’t much, but a couple of reporters have managed to sneak into them. Ricky, it would help if at some point you could tell me exactly what happened at yours, but meanwhile, I’m noticing a pattern.”

“I can tell you,” I said, “but I don’t know much. Lisabelle took a music box from the market when she rescued me. That’s about it.”

Eighellie nodded. “That makes sense. Instrument-related objects appear to be a target of theirs. Does she still have it?”

“You don’t really ask Lisabelle questions about her behavior and expect to live,” I said. When Eighellie kept looking at me I said, “I don’t know if she does or not.”

Eighellie looked back at the paper and said, “There are four major black markets every year, and then a bunch of smaller ones. At least, I’m pretty sure there are four, because the that’s how many the reports consistently list. What I think is that there is one more besides the ones that are being reported on. I think there is a super-secret black market.”

“What gets sold there?” I asked. “Counter Wheel?”

“Look,” said Eighellie. “There are a lot of artifacts, a lot of objects with power and historical meaning. The objects on the Wheel, which is so important to the paranormals, are a good example. Those objects are rare and important, yes, of course, but there are many others besides those. Some are well-known and others less so. I think what’s relevant is that the Hunters are trying to control shifts in power by controlling objects like those on the Counter Wheel. If paranormal power alone isn’t enough, using ancient artifacts to amplify power, either to gain an advantage or to destroy an opponent, is the way to go. Just for the record, I don’t know where any of the Counter Wheel objects are or if they’ve been sold at black markets.”

“Eighellie, why are you going on about this now?” said Keegan. “Did the lectures get you started on this? Does it have something to do with President Valedication? Or anything else besides shoring up the tracks for your pink crazy train.”

“Well, I
do
think Dobrov is protecting artifacts. I think that’s why he’s here. He’s a hybrid and he’s Daisy’s brother. He’s not a wuss. President Quest assigned him here to protect artifacts. That’s what he was doing in the Museum of Masks that night we ran into him. Charlotte probably knows all of this already.” Eighellie looked at me when she said the last bit.

“No, no way,” I interrupted immediately. “I’m not taking any of this to Charlotte like some kid who doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

“Fine, I wasn’t ready for the information to be presented anyway,” she said.

“Fine,” I echoed, shaking a little. The idea of bothering Charlotte with theories about the Hunters at a time like this bothered me, not that Eighellie knew what she was suggesting. If Dobrov really was the only thing standing between the artifacts at Public and the Hunters, my concern about Dobrov’s precarious tenure as president of Public was only intensified.

“Can you get back to answering my question?” Keegan asked. “I don’t know if any of this information matters, or if it’s even accurate.”

“Yeah, sure, hate to keep you waiting,” she muttered. “Dobrov may be protecting artifacts, and if the Hunters get their hands on some of these objects, like the Golden Rod, who knows what could happen.”

“Do you have any theories about where the authentic Golden Rod might be?” I asked.

The girl shook her head. “No idea, but I’m not alone. I don’t think anyone knows, just as Judge Yeast said; I think she was telling the truth. But that’s the big ticket,” she said. “It’s always mentioned in the articles as the get of all gets, but no one really knows anything about it. Paranormals have built entire careers around trying to find it.”

“I suppose it’s easy to become legend if no one actually knows what you do,” Keegan mused. “Anyway, I’m going to my room to listen to music.”

“Wait!” she said, getting excited. “There’s more!”

“There’s more,” Keegan mouthed to me before he rolled his eyes. I tried to hide my amusement. I knew he was more interested than he wanted Eighellie to believe.