Flame and Fury Page 4

  The minute he was gone she retreated to her room and lay back on the bed herself. Avoid it as much as she could, she had to face the fact that she’d probably located the Fire Elemental today. And it wasn’t Michael Abramson.

  Chapter Nine

  Aedan

  Maya’s naked body moved with his beneath the sheets. Her back arched with pleasure as he kissed his way down her stomach. The sounds of her moans fed his excitement, and he slid back up to find her mouth.

  Only it wasn’t Maya. It was Megan, and her burning hair surrounded her face, flames dancing around her horror stricken face like a perverted halo. But he couldn’t stop kissing her. Touching her like they were making love.

  “Stop!” she screamed, and he tried to pull away. But he couldn’t. He was welded to her body everywhere his skin brushed hers, like plastic put in the oven.

  “No!” he screamed as he woke to the fire blasting through his skin.

  Aedan bolted from the bed, reaching for the nearest fire extinguisher. The hall alarm would start blaring soon enough. But as he reached for it, a burst of air blew across the burning sheets, sending smoke and heat into his face. It didn’t hurt, but he squeezed his eyes closed out of reflex, and when he opened them again, the bed was out. Long wisps of black coiled into the air from the charred remains of the blankets.

  Aedan blinked and looked around, barely registering that the bit of pajamas he had left on his body still smoldered.

  “I believe the words you’re looking for are ‘thank you,’” said the girl leaning against his window. She had an accent. English… no, more like Australian.

  Yes, he was confused. Shocked really. But the more important thing was that the window was open, the blinds lifted to the very top, letting the morning sun spill in the room. Aedan rushed forward, nearly shoving the girl aside in his haste to close it all up before someone was to see.

  “And then I say, ‘you’re welcome,’ but apparently no one ever taught you manners, fire boy.”

  Having closed the veil to his world again, Aedan turned to the stranger with wide eyes. She was drop dead gorgeous. Like supermodel gorgeous. With long tendrils of wild raven hair cascading down her back, and huge slate colored eyes. She wore an outfit a lot like Maya wore the day before, only she was taller, and just the way she carried herself was like she knew she didn’t have to flaunt it, men would fall at her feet without the effort.

  “I don’t know you,” he said.

  The stranger’s eyes darted downward, and Aedan became suddenly aware of his singed rags. He hastily swiped at the glowing corners of fabric putting out what was left of his outburst before there was nothing there at all.

  “I’m Kari,” she said. Then she pinched her nose and waved a hand in front of her face vigorously. “Can we please open that window again? It reeks in here like burnt flesh.”

  Aedan didn’t want to ask how she knew what burnt flesh smelled like. Instead, he rushed to open the window beneath the closed blinds. He never noticed anymore, and Sam and Edy pretty much stayed out of his room unless they couldn’t avoid it.

  “Sorry,” he said for lack of anything else. Who was this girl, and why was she in his room? How much had she seen? How much did she know? She didn’t look freaked out or scared or anything. But when he opened his mouth to ask, everything was such a jumble in his head he didn’t know what to say.

  “Hmm. Does it always work like that? I mean you smell like you’re burning, but you don’t actually burn, right?” She stepped toward him, backing him into the bed where he landed on the blackened sheets.

  “I – you must have saved me before I got burned.” It was all he could think to say, but he really hoped she’d buy it. He was still fighting the confusion of the dream itself. The broken images of Megan and Maya jumbled in his head. Was this still part of the dream?

  “You look confused,” Kari said, kneeling down in front of him like he was a child. She put a hand on his knee, and he stared at it. “Let me save you some trouble. I know what you are. In fact, I suspect I know more about you than you do.”

  “Who are you?” he asked again. “Do I know you? I’m pretty sure I would remember if I did.”

  She smiled at the compliment. “I like you, Aedan. It’s Aedan, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Aedan Sparks?” she asked with a smirk.

  Aedan’s face fell, and he fought back the embarrassment. “Yes.”

  Kari laughed. “I’m shocked they haven’t located you yet. I mean it was difficult for me, but with a name like that? Maybe the Circle thought it was too obvious. No Scimitar could be that stupid.”

  “I don’t understand half of what you said. But the name’s just a coincidence. The Sparks aren’t my birth parents.” Aedan snapped his mouth shut. Stupid. He had the feeling he shouldn’t have admitted that to this person. This person who was talking about weapons like Scimitars. The name made him very uncomfortable.

  Kari sighed. “I know. It’s just funny that’s all.” She rose, acted like she was going to sit next to him, then thought better of it and paced back toward the window. “Can we go somewhere else?”

  “Um, yeah. But my mom, she’ll be expecting me for breakfast, and I have an appointment at ten.” His eyes darted to the left. Why did he even say that? He shouldn’t go. Every minute he spent with her placed Maya in danger. And he certainly shouldn’t put himself in that kind of position again.

  “Well it’s only seven fifteen, so you should have plenty of time to meet your girlfriend or whatever.” Kari waved a careless hand. “And as far as Mamma Bear, just tell her you’re going to meet a friend for breakfast. From what I’ve seen she’ll be delighted you’re getting out more.”

  “So she knows you’re here?” The thought actually made Aedan feel better, though he didn’t know why.

  “Nope. I came in the window.” Her grin was almost as wicked as Maya’s.

  Aedan swallowed. How had she gotten in a second story locked window with only a prickly pear cactus below it? “So you’ve been spying on me?” he asked.

  “Just doing my homework. Now get some clothes on and tell Mummy you’re going out.”

  “And you’re-”

  “Going back out the way I came in. Meet me in your truck, fire boy.” She winked, pulled the blinds back, and slipped out the window.

  Aedan ran to the blinds, pulling them aside enough to see outside. But Kari was already on the ground striding toward the front of the house. He let the blinds fall back in place, and turned toward his ruined bed. It could have been a lot worse. She’d somehow managed to minimize the damage to the room and prevented the smoke from reaching the hallway smoke detector. The one in his room had been deactivated years ago.

  Whoever Kari was, she knew about his “special talent” and more. She might just be the godsend he’d been praying for.

  So why did he have such a bad feeling about her?

  Chapter Ten

  Aedan

  Aedan never specified whom he was meeting for breakfast though it was clear Edy thought it was Maya. He felt kind of bad about it, but it wasn’t the worst lie he’d ever told. Or rather, the worst truth he hadn’t shared. Edy made it easy to lie though. She never wanted to hear the worst because she was determined to believe the best.

  “Man it’s hot out here,” Kari said as he sped down Oracle Rd. toward the restaurant. “Even in the morning.” She flipped on the air, and the vents started to hum.

  “Sorry, the air’s been broken since I got it.”

  “And you didn’t care? Of course you didn’t care.” Kari laughed again and rolled down her window so she could lean half outside, eyes pressed closed against the breeze. Her hair whipped around her head, but it was already so wild, it didn’t seem to change in the slightest.

  “So how do you know-” Aedan began.

  “What you are?” she asked, pulling her head back inside the cab to look at him. “Because I’m the same as you. Well, not exactly the same. That would be impossible as th
ere’s only one of you and one of me.”

  Aedan cleared his throat. If all of her answers were this convoluted, he was better off refraining from asking in the first place. Still, when she said they were the same, something jumped inside his chest.

  “You start fires too?” he asked, unable to help himself.

  “Nope, I’m afraid that’s just you, fire boy.”

  “Oh.” He’d had hope for a few seconds anyhow. “I just thought maybe you could help me, you know, understand.”

  Kari regarded him with a combination of pity and annoyance, and that just frustrated him further. Who the hell did she think she was anyway? “You don’t even know what you are, do you?” she asked.

  “What? Like an alien or something?” he asked with a laugh. But he was only half joking. The thought had certainly crossed his mind.

  “You’re an Elemental.” She waited.

  “Well thanks for clearing that up,” he said. “Seriously. If you don’t start speaking English, I’m going home for Edy’s pancakes.” He swung the wheel around and pulled into a spot in front of the Waffle House.

  Kari wrinkled her nose again. “That’s breakfast?” she asked. “It looks like a truck stop.”

  “Great grits,” he said.

  “Grits? What’s that? Like gravel? You Americans are so odd.”

  “You from Australia?” Aedan finally found an opportunity to ask about her accent. He’d been curious before, but other things kind of took precedence.

  “Hell no. New Zealand. We’re spread all over the world you know. Oh, wait. You don’t know, do you?” She shifted to the side and stared hard at him. “An Elemental is a powerful creature, bound with magic in its very soul. There are only four in existence at any one time, and they – we – are born only once every 200 years. Does that answer your question?”

  One word resonated in Aedan’s head. Creature. “You mean I’m not human?” he asked. He’d suspected, but now that it was facing him, he was having trouble digesting it.

  Kari laughed yet again. “Human? Well, sort of. We have ancient magic bound to our souls. So we’re more than just human.”

  “What kind of magic?” he asked. He’d label her a lunatic, except that she’d witnessed his explosion – something no one else had ever lived to tell about – and acted like it was a normal everyday occurrence.

  “Dark magic,” she said, and her eyes lit with excitement.

  It was Aedan’s worst fear come true. He felt sick, and yet oddly relieved at the same time. “So I’m like, a demon?” he whispered.

  “Ew, no. We are not demons. We’re people born of dark magic.”

  “So why are we called, Elementals?” he asked.

  “We represent each of the Earth’s four major elements. Wind, water, earth, and-” she nodded at him.

  “Fire.”

  “These are good,” Kari said, spooning the last of her grits into her mouth. “Why didn’t you just say hot cereal?”

  “Because they’re grits.” Aedan shrugged and gulped down some coffee. The waitress kept coming back over, and he was desperate to continue their conversation without prying ears. “So you said we’re born every 200 years.” He whispered the question, unable to hold back a moment longer. “Why?”

  “That’s part of the rules of the game,” she said with a shrug and slumped back in the shiny red booth. “You know who Morgana La Fey was?”

  Aedan shook his head.

  “Merlin?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I’ve heard of him.”

  “Morgana was basically the non-goody-two-shoes version of Merlin. She wanted to use her powers to take over the world. The idea was to combine our powers in order to control nature itself. She used all her power to create the four Elementals all bound to serve her will, and as insurance made it so that if one of us was destroyed, they’d be reborn again.

  “But Merlin caught wind of her plan, and though he couldn’t stop her, he was able to use his last bit of strength to curse our kind. He made it so that we wouldn’t be reborn for 200 years. Too long for Morgana to still be around to use us.” Kari paused to take a bite of toast.

  “So, we were meant to be servants of this Morgana person?”

  “Yeah. But see, when Merlin died, he left instructions with Arthur and the knights of the roundtable to destroy the Elementals so that she couldn’t take over. And Morgana didn’t like that.”

  “What’d she do?” Aedan asked, completely drawn into the story.

  “When Arthur himself slew the Fire Elemental and ruined the balance in her quartet, she used the last of her own magic to alter the curse once again.” Kari stared at Aedan while chewing on her toast.

  “Well?” he insisted, reaching for his coffee.

  “Well, unless she herself is present to take control, on the nineteenth birthday of the Elementals, every 200 years, if we come together, it will mean the end of life as we know it.”

  Aedan’s coffee sprayed from his mouth. “Excuse me?”

  “We’re destined to destroy the world,” she said, leaning across the table, eyes sparkling with excitement. Now Aedan really did think she was a lunatic.

  “I’m not sure-” he started, looking around to be sure the waitress was nowhere to be seen.

  “Oh, it’s all true. One of those if-I-can’t-have-it-then-no-one-will moments. Humans.” She rolled her eyes. “Anyhow, Arthur created a society known as the Circle. The sole purpose of which was to train, track, then destroy the Elementals every 200 years before the nineteenth equinox.”

  “So what you’re saying, is that in three months, you, me, and two other people are going to get together and unleash Armageddon? Either that or some descendant of King Arthur is going to try and kill me?”

  “Well yeah, that pretty much sums it all up. Oh and there’s one more thing you should know. There’s a society built from Morgana’s descendants as well. The Scimitar. The Elementals are always born of their blood. And they also train with the sole purpose of bringing Morgana’s curse to fruition.”

  “They want us to get together to destroy the world?” Aedan asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Well, that’s just stupid. I mean, why would anyone want the world to be destroyed? Let alone waste their whole lives trying to make that happen?” Aedan snorted and leaned back in his seat. This whole thing was ridiculous. He knew he wasn’t normal, but destroy the world?

  “Because, Aedan, The Scimitar have held onto Morgana’s essence, and they will resurrect her at the right moment so that she can take control of the Elementals, and then the world.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Maya

  I can’t believe I scared him off. Maya waited at the library for an entire, miserable hour. The way she saw it there were two possibilities. Aedan Sparks either found out what she was and ran, or he wasn’t the Fire Elemental and for the first time in her life she’d come on too strong. Which was a shame because she’d been really looking forward to testing him out.

  Because the more she thought about it – and an hour was a long time for Maya to be alone with her thoughts – the more she felt the Target wouldn’t have run from a fight. Especially having been trained to go up against the Circle. He would have welcomed it. So that left only the other possibility. But she’d be damned if she was going to check a guy off her list without seeing it all the way through. Three months meant no room for mistakes.

  She’d just have to adjust her approach. He owed her tutoring. She was paying for the damn tutoring. Her “parent” Toby had set it all up with sweet Mrs. Sparks, who Toby assured her, was no more a Scimitar than she was. God, she felt like an idiot. Just because he got all hot she was going to ignore all the other signs?

  By the time Maya left the library, she was fuming. She was halfway to Aedan’s house by the time she realized she ought to go home and change if she was going to play this differently. So she yanked on the steering wheel, spun a U turn and flew back to their little apartment.

  “Back so soon?”
Toby’s voice greeted her the second she rushed through the door. He looked up from the little two-person table that served as their dining room, his cat seated in the opposite chair. Toby’s eyes were covered in these ridiculous square goggle things that magnified beyond any typical microscope. His own ginger hair was sticking straight up from sliding the thick plastic band up and down his head so many times. Tiny bits of wire and metal were scattered about the surface of the table, and his long, nimble fingers, decorated with only his thick, bronze ring, held a set of minuscule pliers and the edge of some copper wiring that had been split into fragments as fine as human hair.

  Typical.

  “Hey, Tob. Just had a slight change of plans,” she said, already stripping on her way to the bedroom. She knew he wouldn’t notice. Not when he was wrapped up in his experiments. He ought to have been an engineer, except that would have meant no magic, and that was the secret ingredient in everything Toby put together.

  “Hmm,” was his only response.

  Maya pulled on some tight jeans (mostly because she didn’t own any other kind) and a relatively decent looking white blouse with a lacy collar that still dipped into a V, but on the outside appeared innocent enough. Then she examined herself in the mirror. Not bad. She quickly braided her hair and stuck on a pair of old black Keds. Sufficiently presentable for meeting and impressing parents. Perfect.

  “See ya,” she called as she ran back toward the door.

  “Nice look, May. Here, try this out.” Toby looked up, blinking his ridiculously magnified eyes at her, and tossed something through the air.

  Maya reached up instinctively and caught it in her fist. It looked like a tiny blue cube the size of a game die. She turned it over gingerly in her hand. Things were never as innocent as they appeared. Just like her.