Elemental Light (Paranormal Public Book 9) (14 page)

“So, you’re the last elemental? I would have thought you’d be stowed away in a tower somewhere, not wandering around the woods with no protection,” said Rose, eyeing me as if she’d lost some respect for us.

“Who are you calling no protection?” Sip demanded. “I just didn’t want to hurt you!”

Rose ignored her.

“Charlotte’s pretty good at taking care of herself,” said Lough. “She’s just nice enough to let us tag along.”

“Thank you, Lough,” I said. If he wanted to fabricate the truth, who was I to get in his way? Meanwhile, I took in the oggles’ camp. The tents were small but sturdy, and all the oggles were well-dressed, even if many were young, old, or tired-looking.

Rose looked around at her fellow oggles. Her voice reached across the entire camp and she stamped the butt of her pitchfork into the forest floor. “Any other questions?”

“Who is that one?” Callum asked, pointing to Gargoile. “He’s older than you three.”

“I’m a member of a group of paranormals who are trying to get all of us to safety,” said Gargoile. “We do work that Caid and the others are too afraid to do.”

“At least they’re thorough,” Lough muttered. I agreed, but I also felt the pull of time. We couldn’t stay here, and I really didn’t want us to have to blast our way out. I knew Lough and Sip were both thinking the same thing. Oggles were kind creatures, but they weren’t famed warriors.

“Caid’s afraid to do any work at all,” said Rose, disgruntled. She thought for a moment, then said, “Fine, I see. You came to get the elemental for your own ends, and then she had to come and rescue you, and now the four of you will continue to your destination.” She nodded as if to say that she understood it all. I thought her guesses were pretty shrewd given the few facts she had at her disposal.  Especially the bit about Gargoile’s ends.

“I wouldn’t put it exactly like that,” the older werewolf muttered.

“We have all the information we need,” said Rose, pushing herself to her feet. “Now we’ll deliberate.”

Shaking her head, she leaned over to talk to the woman who held the toddler. Many of the oggles were muttering among themselves and staring at us with looks that ranged from hostility to fear or hope.

“What’s her name?” I asked Callum, who came over to us just then. He didn’t look at all concerned about what decision they would make.

“More importantly,” said Sip, “what options are they throwing out?”

“There are only two,” said Callum, “to stay here or to go with you. We have traveled a long distance, mostly without hope. All we’ve seen is demons. They’ve left us mostly alone, I assume because they haven’t viewed us as a threat. Rose with her pitchfork is hardly fear-inspiring.”

He paused as more of the oggles stopped to listen to what he had to say.

“We are not a fighting people, but we can survive and thrive. We have our traps and we have each other. Our old way of life is gone and we must accept that, but that does not mean we will bow to darkness! We bow to no paranormal.”

Cheers went up around the camp, and I saw the other oggles nodding and smiling with relief. I wondered how much they really knew about the turmoil between darkness and light, but a fighting spirit is always to be admired.

“To what now?” Lough and I chorused. “With us?”

Rose looked over her shoulder at me. “Of course,” she said. “We don’t have a home, and we want to do something about it just as much as you do. Callum, do you have anything to add?” she asked.

“We’re going with them, aren’t we?” he asked, his eyes hopeful.

Rose glanced around, ignoring Halston’s mutterings.

“Yes,” she said, “I believe we are.”

“You didn’t ask us if we were okay with it,” Sip pointed out wryly, with an edge of bitterness in her voice.

Lough nudged her. “They’re oggles,” he said softly. “There aren’t many of them left. We should help them get to safety.”

“You protect us?” Rose sniffed.

“You should see Charlotte in action,” said Sip.

Meanwhile, a loud whinny reminded me that we had left the horses.

“Those yours?” Callum asked. “I’ll take you to them.”

“I think we should stay here tonight,” Lough countered. “We need the rest.”

“We don’t have time,” said Gargoile. “We have to get there tonight.”

Sip braced her hands on her hips and glared at her fellow werewolf.

“You know, Rose has a point, you’re just here for your own ends.”

“Maybe,” said Gargoile, “but that doesn’t change the fact that the vote’s tomorrow, and we need to be there before that. It’s only about three more hours if we ride quickly. I say we go.”

“What if the oggles can’t keep up?” I asked.

“We can keep up,” Callum assured me. “We can be very fast when necessary, but all the more reason to get the horses.”

“Yes,” I muttered, “the horses. As if there weren’t already a million reasons to win this war, my never having to ride a horse again can be added to the list.”

I took a brief moment to breathe and try to relax my muscles. I wanted nothing more than to lie down, but knew I wouldn’t have the chance.

The speed and efficiency with which the oggles packed up impressed even Sip, and far sooner than I would have thought was possible we were on our way to the Circle once again.

Chapter Twelve

Once we were on the road, I had a chance to ask Halston what he had meant about the rings changing color. I was surprised he had chosen to travel anywhere near me, and at first he just grunted, but I could tell he wanted to talk.

“Paranormals wear rings to denote their type, right?” he asked. “It’s a conduit and amplifier of power?”

“Right,” I said, feeling my own ring heavy on my finger. When I was a Starter at Public, they had thought I belonged in Airlee. Wearing the wrong ring for a semester had wrecked havoc on my powers until I had finally figured out that I was elemental.

“We’re been hearing stories, well, when we were in the village we’d hear stories from traders about the Nocturns changing the rings of paranormals from their own type’s color to black.”

I bit my lip, thinking. Had the demons really figured out a way to augment their army this way?

“Does it kill them?” I asked.

Halston shrugged, clearly reaching the limits of his gossip. “My understanding is that it doesn’t change their nature, just their power. Locks it into darkness.”

After that we rode mostly in silence. I didn’t want to admit it, because traveling with a large party made us more of a target, but I was glad of the company. The little girl, who Callum said was named Nence, wanted me to hold her, but her mother talked her out of it by telling her a story of three friends fighting a desperate evil. The little girl was lulled to sleep, but as she dropped off, she muttered the word hero over and over again until her eyes closed.

Callum was right, oggles were very fast when they wanted to be. They kept their attention on the task at hand, which was to get where we were going. When one of the oggles tripped, his walking companion literally grabbed his arm and marched him forward as he regained his footing.

We had been riding in silence for a while when Rose joined us up front, clearly wanting to talk.

But Sip and Gargoile were up front too, which was too bad. I thought Sip and Rose needed some time together to work through the whole strung up by feet and kidnapping start to their relationship, but Rose had her own agenda, and that was that.

“It was three months ago,” said Rose, her voice low. “We weren’t expecting it. We thought the Power of Five protections would hold.”

I flinched. Rose, seeing my distress, shook her head. “It’s not you, my dear,” she said. “You’ve done more for paranormal hope since you arrived at Public than anyone else has in a long time. It’s a true wonder you’re still alive, and from afar we appreciate your fight.

I felt Nence’s bracelet warm against my skin. I was reasonably sure that the bracelet, drenched in the little girls’ saliva two hours ago, was now dry.

“Anyway, I want you to know what happened to us,” said Rose, her eyes looking off into the distance. “It was night. I had felt funny all day. In fact, some of the women had been talking about it. Some of our warriors had gone out on patrol and not returned. They were three hours late. They were
never
late. We were going to send another search party out for them when that became unnecessary. One of the watches came running, said he saw flickers of fire. We didn’t believe him, just thought the patrol was having a good time, so a handful of us went to yell at them. They were all young kids who had thought patrolling would be fun.

“Six older fighters went this time, all men who’d seen battle,” she continued, her eyes looking haunted. “They were gone for a just few minutes, but about the time we thought they should be coming back, that’s when we heard screaming. Then, after that, the very air smelled like blood.”

Rose took a shaky breath. “After that we closed the gates. There was a quick argument about whether or not we’d try to save the men who’d just gone out. By then we assumed that the men from the original patrol were already dead, and no one except the families of the later group thought it was a good idea to try to rescue them. So we closed the gates, but of course, we had exit strategies in place. We were a peaceful people, but we were also a prepared people after everything that had happened with darkness. It was clear that the demons had already gotten past the Power of Five protections, so we hurried everyone toward the tunnel we had prepared, and it was just a race to see who could get there first. Women and children, of course, but none of us were expecting the attack. It happened so fast.”

Rose sighed. “We lost a fourth of the village that night, all the men outside the wall and a lot more who decided to buy their families time by trying to fight off the demons. The thing is, you can’t fight them off. They had a Demon of Knight, they had hellhounds. There were hours of screaming.” Rose shivered.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m really sorry the Power of Five didn’t work.”

She sighed. “Like I said, we should have known it was coming. We shouldn’t have been surprised.”

The sun had begun to drift lower as if it was on a puppet string being slowly lowered to the ground, and the shadows had started to reach across the path in front of us and behind. A slight cold wafted into my face with the breeze.

Sip, Lough, Gargoile, the oggles, and I were on a barren stretch of road. The trees were close to the edges, but they were scrabbly and they looked like they’d happily go up in flames if given the slightest provocation. The ground felt hard and packed, and with each step Razor took I heard the scrape of his hoof on rock. The road kept twisting, which gave us an added bit of cover but also did the same for our enemies. All the turns made for very close traveling with so many of us moving together.

Next to me Rose trundled along, surprisingly graceful for a paranormal with such large feet. She used her pitchfork for balance as well as threats.

There was a strange sense of calm running through me. Lough and Sip were there, and I knew Ricky was safe. Maybe that was all I could ask for anymore. My mind kept wandering to the task in front of me, but I kept forcing it away. No part of me wanted to consider what it meant to challenge all the senior paranormals left alive after the demon wars without so much as a crown.

I heard the danger before I saw it, a whizzing through the air as the black arrow buried itself in the chest of one of Rose’s friends. The calm was instantly split apart, as if a bucket of ice water had been thrown over the entire group. So went my confidence that everything would be alright; there wasn’t even time to yell a warning. Noises rang out as the battle crashed around us.

Razor stayed calm, and I had the distinct impression from the horse that he was more worried about me doing something foolish than he was concerned for himself. He and Ricky should talk, I thought wryly. I had a feeling they’d form a fast friendship based on their shared belief in my stupidity.

Lough and I knew this dance. The hellhounds came first, following whatever Nocturns had shot the arrows. After that came the demons, and lastly the Demons of Knight. Fighting darkness parties roamed everywhere now, according to Queen Lanca. I was just surprised we’d managed to avoid them all day as we traveled.

We were avoiding them no more.

Taking a deep breath, I released Razor’s reigns. Trusting that he would know what to do, I guided the warhorse with my knees only.

Rose drew a sword from the folds of her garments, although it wasn’t the sword of knights’ stories. Each side of her weapon had jagged teeth and the handle was made of a strangely twisted metal: a pitchfork for peacetime and a sword for war.

She gave me a crooked smile. “What? You thought I just used the pitchfork?”

“CLOSE RANKS,” Gargoile bellowed. He’d come bounding through the horses’ feet, transformed into a powerful-looking werewolf. Sip, had been bringing up the rear, appeared at my side. She ignored Gargoile and looked at Lough, who had raced back to me.

“What now?” she asked. “How many are there?”

“There are at least fifty,” said Rose grimly, without looking at us. She had shifted into a fighting stance. “Do you know how to fight them off with your witchcraft? Because I don’t think we’re well enough trained.”