Broken Elements (6 page)

“Show off,” I muttered.

“Cheer up. You might find that our trip was not as fruitless as you imagine.” She moved to the car, unlocking my side first. “Check the back seat. We seem to have picked up a stray along the way.”

I glanced inside the car to find a very naked Simon reclining along the bench seat. On his lap, covering the one thing I probably shouldn’t examine too closely, was a manila folder with the FBI logo and a label reading “Lake Tahoe Killings.”

It was dark by the time we returned to the house. Mac had apparently decided it was safe to turn the electricity back on, and every light in the house glowed warmly, small beacons in each window welcoming us back. We were assaulted by a wave of heat the moment we opened the front door, and Sera sighed in relief. Simon promptly sat next to a radiator to warm himself, and even I had to admit it felt good.

Mac and Vivian were playing cards in the dining room. Rummy, it looked like. Vivian nodded at us as we entered, and for a moment everything felt completely normal. We were just coming home after running a few errands, about to enjoy a casual night at home with friends. Then I glanced at the living room to my right and remembered that normal was still several zip codes away.

“Would you like to join us?” asked Vivian, holding up her cards in illustration. “We decided the cleaning could wait until morning.” She had her dreads loosely tied at the nape of her neck, and she wore a beat-up pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt that read “No, I won’t fix your computer.” She looked relaxed and confident in a way she never had in a button-down shirt. It was a reminder that in the ten years I’d been gone, the world had changed and moved on while I stood still. An unexpected, desperate urge to play catch-up grabbed at me, and I spared a wasted moment to wonder who I would have been if fire and death had never touched me.

Mac turned to me, waiting for my answer. “Maybe.” For a moment, I thought longingly of my quiet room upstairs and the empty pages in my journal still waiting to be filled. It was tempting, but so was the thought of practicing my neglected rummy skills. “Where’s Brian?”

“Work.” answered Sera. “He’s still at the Rat Trap, proudly getting people drunk on a nightly basis. We might visit him later. For now, Vivian, I’m afraid you’ll have to kick Mac’s ass on your own. I need to borrow Aidan for a while.” To me, she said, “Go grab something warmer. It’s freaking cold out there.”

Curious, I did as she said without asking any questions.

Twenty minutes later, we pulled to a stop outside a tall iron fence. There were few lights, but enough to see what waited on the other side, and the lights reflected off neat rows of white marble and angelic statuary. “You feeling nimble?” she asked.

A minute later, she waited for me on the other side of the fence. She had climbed over easily. I lacked her upper body strength, but I was skinny and too stubborn to ask for help. While most of the fence reached to the ground, there were several inches of space below the locked gates. I stripped off my bulky layers and threw them to Sera, then shimmied underneath to join her.

“Why did we just break into a cemetery?” I asked through chattering teeth, quickly bundling back up.

“Because I was halfway to Oregon when they held his funeral. Come on.” I followed her through the night, ignoring the chill that nipped at both my ears and my heart. Chris was here, in this quiet and desolate place. His big, strong body and laughing face were trapped here forever, and I would never see them again.

Sera stopped by a plain headstone, engraved only with his name and the dates of his birth and death. “Shouldn’t it say he was beloved of someone?” I asked.

“They wouldn’t have enough room to write everyone who loved him. They’d need one of those.” She indicated an ostentatious tomb to our left. “It doesn’t matter. He knew.” I shook my head, remembering ten years of silence. “He knew, Aidan. I told him what we were years ago. He knew why you left and why you weren’t writing or calling. He always understood. He missed you, of course, but he understood.”

I swallowed. I thought that, after my earlier outburst, I had no tears left, but that seemed overly optimistic of me. “I should have…”

“Yes. You should have.”

“Now it’s too late.”

“Only for some things.”

I sat on the frozen ground and placed my gloved hands on his grave, as if I could suddenly channel Vivian’s power. “I’m sorry, Chris,” I whispered. “I’m sorry I left you.”

Sera knelt beside me and pressed a hand to the earth. The other she wrapped slowly around one of mine until we were all connected, Chris’s grave to Sera to me. There were still hundreds of words left to be said, words of recrimination, apology, and maybe even of forgiveness, but we said none of them.

Instead, we knelt on the grave for a very long time, until the snow that had been threatening all day finally began to fall, and even for a long while after that.

Chapter 6

A few days later, I awoke to find a toy fireman’s hat resting on the other pillow. I looked for the outrage and fear that I would expect to find, knowing that someone had snuck quietly into my room, but all I found was a warm glow and undeniable sense of pride. It was a silly little gift, but I welcomed the light-hearted token of my mad fire-fighting skills.

I had slept for a long time the night before, my body still recovering from a couple of fast-paced, stressful days. The others were already up by the time I stumbled my way downstairs. I grabbed a cup of tea and a plate of toast and joined them. It was rare to find everyone gathered together. Most days, Vivian was at school or Mac at work, and it was rare for Brian to join us before noon. It was Saturday, I realized, and no one had anywhere else they needed to be.

Simon lounged across the living room floor, studying the FBI file closely, looking for some telling detail he had missed in his previous reviews. Vivian sat in the window with a newspaper, filling in the
New York Times
crossword puzzle with a pen. Mac was reading an Elmore Leonard novel, and Brian and Sera whispered quietly in the corner. It was a remarkably peaceful tableau, especially considering how the room had looked three days earlier.

Days of hard labor had transformed the living room from a charred ruin into a fully livable space. Vivian and I tackled the walls, washing them and putting up new wallpaper. Mac hadn’t raised a single objection about using teddy bear wallpaper in his house, which suggested he was either insane or convinced another attack was forthcoming.

Sera couldn’t safely light a fire inside, so she arranged for a desert friend to fly up and help me dry out the carpet before it mildewed. She was only in the cabin for a couple hours, but that was long enough to turn the place into our own Mojave Desert, at least temporarily. The friend left the minute the job was completed, declaring herself utterly freaked out by all the trees and water. Sera steam cleaned the carpet herself, and it actually looked better than it had before. Mac had ransacked the local shops, finding every available oversized pillow and scattering them across the floor in place of the ruined sofa and armchair, which currently sat in the back yard, enjoying their second life as a cozy hotel for various small animals. Brian had skillfully avoided manual labor by offering his bartending services, making sure we all stayed so pleasantly buzzed that we didn’t mind the work ourselves. He also supervised.

Unfortunately, he’d been liberally imbibing his own concoctions at the time and thus failed a bit in his supervisory duties. This might explain why the wallpaper hung upside down on one wall. There was now a twelve foot stretch where it appeared hundreds of teddy bears were dive bombing the floor pillows. I was fairly certain I was responsible for that stretch of wall, a fact I kept to myself.

While the rest of us tackled the living room repairs, Simon sketched designs for a home security system, and we’d spent the previous day rigging the house from top to bottom. The windows were all covered with one-way film, ensuring no watching psychopaths could track our movements. Motion sensor cameras covered the house’s entire perimeter, including Mac’s trailer, and the recordings uploaded directly to a data cloud we could access at any time. Well, the others could, at least. I’d nodded and smiled when the discussion turned to server farms.

Each room also held several large plastic bins filled with soil or water, providing me and Vivian with easy access to fire prevention. A few bins even perched on the ceiling beams, ready to be dropped down at a moment’s notice if anyone dared to start a second fire. We didn’t know if the arsonist meant to warn us, scare us, or outright kill us, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to succeed.

I stepped around one of these bins on my way to an empty cushion. “Do you think we’re covered? Are you sure you don’t want any land mines, Simon?” I asked, finally making my way to a pillow.

“Why? Elementals can’t control explosives,” he replied, his concentration on the files so great that he completely missed the sarcasm.

Vivian stretched in the window, almost as fluid and languid as Simon. It seemed like Mac noticed as well, and I fought an unexpected urge to throw a cushion at his head. “I like it. When this is all over, I’m planting in this soil. I’ll turn your house into a small jungle.” I was pleased to note that Mac looked more amused than impressed by her suggestion.

“You got your fortress, Sera. A fortress of… well, it’s definitely not a fortress of solitude,” I said, looking around the crowded room.

“A fortress of the screwed and pursued?” suggested Brian.

“Too negative. It’s the fortress of the renewed,” countered Sera.

“Fortress of the slightly skewed,” said Mac.

“You’re all wrong. We’re living in the fortress of he who mewed,” I stated, nodding at Simon. “Live with it.”

“I need to shower and be shampooed,” said Vivian, her mock serious tone the perfect counterpoint to her Dr. Seuss-inspired words. She stood and moved toward the stairs.

“You hear that, Ade? She’s going to denude.”

“How very lewd.”

By now, we were all grinning. Even Simon allowed a small smile to escape. In the back of our minds, we were all aware of the events that had drawn us together, but it’s hard to maintain a sense of despair and helplessness when forming really bad rhymes.

The laughter faded. No one said anything for several long moments, preferring to enjoy the cheerful quiet that filled the room. The last few days had been strangely light-hearted, the cleanup a welcome respite from the investigation, and no one wanted to return to discussions of homicidal elementals.

Mac walked to the kitchen, where he prepared cups of tea and coffee. Several more moments were taken up by the disbursement of the drinks, the pouring of milk or sugar. Simon shuffled the papers, moving items from one pile to another for no clear reason. Even Brian, always so outspoken and charming, seemed disinclined to interrupt the quiet moment. We worked quietly, reading or writing or just relaxing on the pillows. No one spoke until Vivian rejoined us, dressed in a clean pair of sweats and towel drying her wet hair.

As usual, Sera was the one to start. “We’ve avoided it long enough. We have no more interior design left to do. We need to talk about the next step.”

There was a long moment of silence. I knew how to fill it: with the one subject that would destroy any residual good mood. “So, if you’re going to understand what’s happening now, you need to know what happened ten years ago.” Sera shifted places, moving several cushions to her left until she was sitting closer to me. I crawled through my memories, looking for the one I needed. It was well buried, held with iron chains deep in my subconscious. Reluctantly, I ripped it free, and it flew toward me as eagerly as a drowning swimmer desperate for air. It was creaky and disused but as powerful as it had ever been. It wanted to be heard. I began to speak.

It was late February, and we’d been looking for the killer for months. The bodies had started appearing in October, but it took a while for us to recognize the pattern. The first death slid completely under our radar. It wasn’t considered a murder by the local authorities, and who could blame them? There were no clear signs of foul play, just a dead body in a campsite. Someone who had apparently died from a heart attack at a freakishly young age. We did not live in an especially high crime area, but it was still like any other place: people died, and died often.

The second death was the boyfriend of someone we knew, an earth elemental in several of my classes. This time, the autopsy determined how he’d died: his heart had been completely frozen. The cops still assumed natural causes, but we knew what we were dealing with. With the third death, we saw the pattern fully. We knew we were facing an ice that killed the human partners of other elementals. This time, we couldn’t fail to notice: it was Brian’s girlfriend who died.

Brian was destroyed. He left town completely, unable to stay when he saw memories of her wherever he looked. He simply packed up his car and left, and the only thing he said to me before he drove out of town was, “Find this bastard.”

We did our best. Though we had many friends, Sera and I discovered that most were leaving town. Vivian was one of them, packing soon after the first murders. For whatever reason, that instinct for selfishness—or possibly self-preservation—had completely bypassed the two of us. We were brash, relatively young, and highly motivated. Plus, we both came from old families, and we had the power that only comes from the sort of lineage and upbringing we were given. Between the two of us, we had little doubt that we could handle one ice elemental, no matter how dangerous. As a team, we thought we were invincible. The only problem was that we had to find him first.

It took us months. We tried to identify the elementals’ partners, figuring they were potential victims, but that proved little more than an exercise in frustration. After all, it was still a college town, and many people swapped partners more often than they changed classes. When we did find a probable victim, we could only follow him or her, hoping to catch the killer if he struck. It was a far from ideal plan, and after an afternoon spent sitting in a car, waiting for an earth’s girlfriend to finish getting her highlights done, we scrapped that plan entirely. She died a month later.

At this point, Sera phoned her father. We were clearly in over our heads and wanted his help. Josiah Blais had little interaction with humans, but he did have a vested interest in making sure no unstable elemental was risking our exposure.

He provided motion sensor cameras, similar to the ones currently in the fortress. He hired a man to install them throughout all the parks, and each morning we scrolled through the footage from the night before, simultaneously hoping and fearing that we’d catch the killer on film. This continued for weeks. Then, one morning, there was finally some movement on one of the tapes.

A figure, clearly male, stood in front of the camera. He wore a thick winter coat, the sort you would see on half the locals. He appeared to be of average height and build, and his face and hair were covered by a skier’s balaclava. It was difficult to tell beneath the mask, but he appeared to be smiling. A moment later, ice started to form over the lens, thickening into a layer at least an inch thick. The frame was completely obscured.

Sera and I drove immediately to the park, but we already knew it was too late. The body of Steve Marconi, the longtime partner of a water we sometimes met for drinks, lay frozen on the ground. The camera was still covered with a thick layer of ice. We phoned the police, telling them we’d happened upon the body while out for a morning jog. They asked us a few perfunctory questions we could easily answer, and then we watched from outside the yellow tape as the forensics team appeared. They found nothing. There were no bootprints in the ice, no marks or fingerprints on the body. As before, it appeared Steve had died suddenly from a freak heart attack.

I watched the cops stand at the edges of the crime scene, whispering and shaking their heads. Their faces revealed their complete bewilderment and no small amount of fear. They might not want to articulate it, but they knew what they were seeing was not natural. They had no idea how a human could commit these murders, and the only thing stopping them from looking for non-humans was their stubborn belief that we didn’t exist. I wondered how long that belief could hold in the face of more impossible murders.

That night, over dinner, we quietly told Josiah about the crime scene and the cops’ reactions. The next day he made a phone call, and within hours a personal security detail appeared at his door. They all wore matching uniforms, head-to-toe black relieved only by the red collars on their motorcycle-style jackets. He assigned one bodyguard to each potential target, with the strict instructions to call us the moment anything suspicious happened. The guards were humans, and therefore told not to interfere directly. It really is amazing what can be organized with a large enough bankroll.

It took another three weeks before anything happened, during which time Sera and I let down our guard a little. With Josiah assuming responsibility, we could almost pretend things were normal again. We starting hanging out at the bar like we did before, but it was different. Now, the elementals stuck together, avoiding any human contact. We never flirted or exchanged numbers anymore. We were too afraid to turn someone into a target. The only human we dared talk to was Christopher. The bar between us felt like a natural barrier, one that kept him safe. Besides, it was Chris. We didn’t know how not to be his friend.

When the call finally came in the small hours of the morning, we had nearly forgotten we were waiting for it. Josiah had returned to Hawaii. It was only the two us. The bodyguard informed us that an unfamiliar man had visited the human to whom he was assigned. Her name was Amanda Wilson. Neither of us knew her, but she had just climbed into her own car with the unknown visitor and been driven to an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Truckee. They were both inside the building now, but the guard did not think she had entered the building willingly. He asked permission to enter himself, clearly thinking himself a better offensive unit than two college girls. We refused and told him to wait where he was. To do otherwise would have been the same as signing his death certificate. He hung up, unhappy, and we drove as quickly as we could to the warehouse.

When we arrived, the guard was nowhere to be seen. I don’t know why that didn’t worry us more than it did. Maybe we assumed that he didn’t want to be our lapdog and had left. More likely, we didn’t want to consider anything that would interfere with our long-awaited chance to be heroes. We ignored that warning sign, a mistake we had cause to rue every day since.

There were no houses nearby, and the warehouse stood on several acres of its own land. There was one car in front of the building, but otherwise the entire place appeared abandoned. Clouds covered the moon and the thousands of stars that normally lit up the Tahoe sky. Dawn was only an hour away, but at that moment it still felt like the deepest part of night. It was cold and windy, the trees rattling in the breeze. A storm was clearly on the way.