“I need a paycheck first.” Rob returned to the living room and sat next to me on the couch. “I do like what’s here.” He brushed his hand over the soft suede material covering the arm. “Stace said it all comes with the cabin, so that’s cool.”
“When did you tell them?” I asked Rob.
“Clay figured it out at the hunt and told Leo while I stayed behind to help clean the scene.” He sat back, resting his head. “Turns out the new guy gets the shit work and yelled at by the commander of the patrol unit a lot.”
“Brooks?”
“Yep. He’s not much of a people person.”
“Honey, I’m home!” Clay popped back into the kitchen, a case of beer under one arm, a paper sack in the other. He set them both on the table to free up his hands to tear into the cardboard case, freeing five cans and putting the rest in the fridge. He brought the beer and sack out to the coffee table. “I got us some munchies.”
I ignored the beer and went right for the snacks, not realizing how hungry I was until he mentioned food. I hadn’t eaten anything since nearly chipping a tooth on overdone chicken strips at lunch. I tore open the beef jerky and got to work gnawing on the processed meat.
Clay fell into the chair, cracking open a beer and guzzling a long, long drink. He released a resounding belch and smacked his lips as he wiped his mouth and beard with the back of his hand. “Ahhh.”
“You’re a pig.” Leo swiped a beer and popped it open, taking a sip.
Rob handed Bryan a beer, who accepted it without lifting his head and held it, unopened, in his hands. His shoulders rose and lowered with his breathing. No one made a sound as we all waited for him to explain. Even Clay lost his smile as he scooted forward, resting his elbows on his knees.
“He was pure evil,” Bryan started in a low, tortured voice, his attention on the floor. I rested my hand on his leg and squeezed. His shoulders dropped more, so I removed my hand. He grabbed it and brought it back to his thigh, covering it with his. “He’d use forbidden calls to torture Nelem children just for fun. The fog was his trademark. It confused adult Nelems, left them disoriented while he took their kids.” He deflated and added in a whisper, “Just for fun.”
We were all transfixed by his words as he continued trudging through this raw journey, thick with pain and despair. “He was earth and air like my dad, like me, and never stopped trying to force the other elements to answer his call. He ran the summits for several clans.”
I frowned, so Rob explained. “When dark elementals meet, it’s called a summit.”
I knew what it was, just not that Bryan’s grandfather had been the grand poohbah of dark elementals before Alec. Probably generations before Alec. “How’d the patrol beat him?”
He released a ragged sigh and brought up his head, revealing shining eyes, swollen and rimmed in red. It broke my heart. Burning tears pricked my own gaze. “He was so focused on torturing someone that he didn’t see the patrol until they were on top of him.”
“Another Nelem?”
“No. My father. He wouldn’t accept the fact my dad didn’t want that life for me and brought him in front of the summit as an example, using call after forbidden call to force him to declare his allegiance to the dark side. He never did, not even in his last breath.”
I gasped as all feeling drained from my body. I hated my mother for leaving us and hated my father for letting her. Never once would I have ever imagined her torturing my dad into pledging his allegiance. “How do you know all this?” Please don’t say…
“I was there.”
I closed my eyes against the news, holding back the tears. What kind of monster did something like that to his own kid? In front of his own grandkid? And I thought Alec was maniacal. He didn’t hold a twisted candle to Bryan’s grandfather.
“How do we beat the fog?” I didn’t want him to have to remember anything else about that man or the night his father had been murdered.
“You don’t.”
“Montana did,” Clay pointed out, crushing the can and reaching for the beer I didn’t grab. “She had the trees act like giant fans when we were up at the Point, and tonight, she created a very cool tornado to shoot the fog straight up. I tried using air, but it didn’t work. With Montana, it did.”
I stared at my palm, at where the dull throb remained even after the cut had disappeared. And it clicked. Fucking fucker fucks. It totally clicked. The freezing pain. The way the coldness continued to consume me, to control me. How the wards reacted when I slipped my hand through the protective barrier. It wasn’t dark magic that Spencer had forced into me. It was darkness itself. Darkness now coursing through my veins like a vise, squeezing me and cutting off my circulation. My elements were trying to fight the intrusion because I was trying to fight the intrusion. Fighting it did no good and only allowed the darkness to spread, overpowering my other calls just as light had when it’d first come to me.
Well, that was just goddamn craptastically peachy. As if being a quint didn’t make me enough of a freak. Why not add another element?
I thought about that. Why not add another element? They balanced each other out. Yin and yang. I needed to embrace the darkness, which was a frightening thought considering how awesome I reacted when the coldness took over. But if I learned to call it, to control it, to conceal it… I’d be a true supreme elemental.
Once I mastered the 3Cs of my latest
