“This is why we can’t have nice things. Damn you, Onyx! I didn’t even get to finish my first piece.”
“You won’t need it where you’re going. Prepare to die, Amethyst.”
“You’re trying to kill me again. Must be a Tuesday.”
“This time, I’ll succeed. This time, I brought my very own insurance policy.”
I added a caption to the bottom of the last panel. What did Onyx bring to the party? Is it enough to defeat Amethyst? Find out in the next exciting webisode of The Elements.
After uploading it and thinking it had to be the most boring webisode I’d ever written, I closed the laptop, stood, and stretched. If I didn’t have a test today in primary, I would crawl back under the covers and not come out until spring. February on the island brought gray, clouds, and more gray. Oh, and rain. Lots and lots of rain.
Instead of building a fort out of blankets to stay inside and color in my sketches, I grabbed my coat to brave the elements. If I hurried, I’d have just enough time for a cup of glorious coffee from the dining hall before 3C started.
It was, of course, pouring, so I pulled the hood over my head and hunkered down, hurrying out into the glorious and constant rain that was winter on the island.
I wasn’t even halfway across the round of grass connecting the dorms, the ten-foot bronze statue of the academy’s founder dead center, moving a click every hour on the hour, when my least favorite person called my name.
“Hey, new girl!”
Well, at least her loving nickname for me.
She’d never grasped the concept of my name, for whatever reason. Katy Reed. Three syllables. It wasn’t that hard. I moved to the shelter of the closest building and pressed against the cool side before removing my hood.
“Hiya, Ness. How’s the weather up there?” In your high tower. I smiled sweetly when she glanced around, lifting her gaze to the gray clouds and frowning.
“Up where?”
“Never mind.”
“You’re still weird.”
Yes, I was. I knew it. She clearly knew it. I didn’t need to be reminded of it every time I did something out of the norm—which was pretty much whenever I opened my mouth.
I’d come to the conclusion Vanessa Graves would never get my sense of humor, but that wouldn’t stop me from delivering backhanded zingers that would have her looking at me exactly the way she glared at me right now, her pretty blue eyes narrowed in on me as she thinned her lips.
“To what do I owe the honor of this pleasantry?” I asked when she continued to stare at me like I had two heads. And where was her coat? It was forty degrees, raining, and she had nothing more than her school uniform covering her curves. I was born and raised in Montana, where it snowed nine months out of the year and the temps in the winter gave new meaning to freezing your nips off, so me being cold in forty degrees and rain said something.
“My dad wants me to give you a message.” She crossed her arms and jutted out a hip, her normal stance. “Like I’m some sort of messenger service or something.”
Definitely something. I continued holding the forced smile plastered to my face as I waited. As I studied her creamy complexion, observing how not a single dark hair dared step out of line from those long waves, maintaining my expression grew even harder. How did she do it? How did she make everything look as if it’d been custom created for her, from the uniform we were all forced to wear, to the weather that seemed to cater to her? Here I was shivering to stay warm, and the bitch didn’t even have the chills. I hated her, hated everything about her, from her flawless appearance in the creepy dude’s schoolgirl-fantasy uniform that made the rest of us look like we tried too hard, to her piercing blue eyes that matched her blazer, to the fact she didn’t so much as have a goose bump while I struggled to keep my teeth from chattering.
“And that message would be?” I prodded when she didn’t offer it up. It had to be her water element keeping her from turning blue. Water elementals ran cool. That had to be it. It was either that or my original assumption that her heart was made of ice. It could go either way.
“He wants you to meet him at DB on Friday.” She sighed and rolled her eyes as she added, “He wants us both there.”
Why would Virgil Graves want to see me? And why at Deception Brewery? DB was one of the least popular among the plethora of microbreweries that’d popped up here on the island the past decade. It was a total dive. The owner happened to be an air elemental with the power to throw airfields up without effort and keep them in place while he tended to the Nelem patrons, giving elementals a place to convene in private. Non-elementals had no idea groups of elementals were among them as the airfield was the perfect shield. It was very cool.
That wasn’t what made it a dive. DB was also a known hangout for dark elementals and was raided weekly to sweep out the riffraff. As of late, however, the Council—under the new and wildly different direction of Virgil Graves, the man who’d inherited the role after the head of the Council died during the attack at the school last fall—hadn’t raided DB once since he’d taken the reins.
And now he wanted to meet there. Interesting.
I whipped out my phone and texted the guys. They’d want to know this latest development. We’d all kept tabs on the random act of mindlessness since Graves had taken over the Council.
“What are you doing?” Vanessa’s shrill voice pulled my
