Elemental Shining (Paranormal Public Series) (25 page)

Jenkins didn’t hold back. “I know a lot of you are wondering about what happened to turn such a promising mage into pure evil,” he said, in answer to Camilla’s question about President Malle running the Knights of Darkness. “Yes, she does run them,” he insisted in response to a skeptical murmur that went around the room. “They follow her. Both the demons, all kinds, and the hellhounds.”

“What about President Malle? If she was a darkness mage here, how was she turned?” Camilla asked. “She was so well respected.”

Jenkins paused in his pacing. A small frown furrowed his brow, as if he was deep in thought. “Yes,” he said at last. “She was very well respected. No one knows what set her off, except that it was something deeply personal. She was the best in her class, you know. The best in the school. She was head and shoulders above the other students.

“Part of it, at least, must be attributed to the demise of her family. Her mother, her father, and her older brother were killed by a lawless band of pixies. Her family was at home when the pixies broke in, including her brother, who had come home for the holidays. To this day no one is sure what the pixies’ goal was, only that the murders were brutal. It looked as if her brother was kept alive the longest, or maybe he just withstood the pain better because he was younger.

“She was a nineteen at the time. She was supposed to be home herself, but had delayed her return. In fact, as the story goes, she was over at Lace Erikson’s when she got the news. Those two were best friends. Something changed after that. She had completed her first year at Public and was on to her second, but after her family was murdered her interests changed.

“Her parents were tortured by burning pixie dust. The stuff can be deadly. You’d think it was mostly dangerous to the skin, but that’s only the beginning. The more creative pixies use it in the eyes and for their captives to breathe in, so you are breathing fire, only you are not a dragon, or a fire elemental. It is excruciating, or so say the few people who have lived to tell the tale. After they used pixie dust, the pixies got into their knife collection. Pixies love small weapons, especially knives. They are easy to carry and can do a lot of damage in a short period of time. Most pixies who are worth their green skin magic their knives so that they do extra damage. Unfortunately, these pixies were especially brutal. I won’t go into details, but during the knife attack portion of the evening is when Mrs. Malle died. Her husband withstood the brutality a little longer, at least until they started cutting off his fingers and toes. That only left Malle’s brother Grecko. As a young darkness mage he was especially powerful, but at that point he was no match for the pixies. They wanted to toy with him a bit, though. You know how much pixies like games. So, they let him escape. Three times. Then they chased him and brought him back to the house. By let I mean they loosed his bonds and turned their backs, giving him a head start. Each time he ran and each time they caught him and brought him back and ‘punished’ him for trying to get away.”

Jenkins was so lost in thought that Sip had to clear her throat to get him to look up and see her. She looked upset.

“Yes, Ms. Quest?” he asked.

“Why didn’t he stay and fight?” she asked. “Were there just too many?”

“He might have,” said Jenkins. “It was the Malle way to fight, and Grecko was an especially gifted darkness mage. And he was very close to his sister. He wouldn’t have wanted her to find him like that, so it’s entirely possible that he fought like a tiger and still died a horrible death.”

Sip’s face had gone white. With a trembling lip she managed to ask, “How did they kill him?”

“They made him eat the knives,” said Jenkins. “Lots of them. Since the knives were magicked and heated, they tore his insides to shreds at exactly the right places. When he was found, knives were essentially crawling out of his body.”

The entire class shuddered. I felt ill.

“And who found them?” Lisabelle asked quietly. Even she looked a little upset. They were fellow darkness mages, after all.

“It was Cynthia Malle,” Jenkins confirms. “She came home alone the next day and walked into a living room washed in her family’s blood. The neighbors came running when they heard someone tearing the place to shreds. Turns out that was Cynthia. In her rage and grief she had started to rip the very plaster off of the walls. No one ever again questioned which was the more powerful darkness mage of the Malles’ children. Everyone had always thought it was Grecko, because he had been bright and outgoing and flamboyant while his sister was more quiet and reserved.

“We don’t know when, after that, she started turning against her fellow paranormals, or when she first made contact with the demons, but it’s thought to have been soon after the slaughter of her family. In hindsight, she never should have been allowed into such a prominent leadership position at Public, but she had powerful friends. The Eriksons, for example.”

Once Jenkins finished with the history of President Malle, he moved on to other topics. He had been coming to Tactical every Friday night, and he liked to talk about how good Lanca and Keller’s team was. He tried to talk to Ulrik and Dobrov about how bad our team was, but they never said a word.

“Does he look off to you?” Sip whispered to me, nodding toward Jenkins. He did and I told my friend so. Normally vibrant and full of life, now he was walking with a slight limp and looking tired.

“Maybe he’s sick,” I whispered back.

After that class Lisabelle said, “I had no idea that President Malle was so impressive, but I guess she’d have to be, since she’s leading the Knights of Darkness against us. Jenkins also obviously knows why she’s Keller’s godmother. THAT’S interesting. I wonder how his well-to-do family feels about being associated with the most evil woman to ever grace the history pages of Public,” Lisabelle mused.

When I got back to Astra Mrs. Swan was nowhere to be found, but in the hall I found a plate of cookies, some sandwiches, and a glass of milk. I smiled. She always knew exactly what I needed. The only other thing on the table was the day’s Tabble. She must have found it in my room and brought it down to set next to my snack, knowing that I liked to find different rooms in Astra to read over the day’s news in.

Today I decided to settle in one of the back studies, a room I hadn’t even known was there at first. You had to go through the ballroom to get to it, and Mrs. Swan had told me that it was the former elemental king’s private study. He would sit there before big events in the ballroom, collecting his thoughts and any information he would need. Now I used it as a refuge in which to get away from the worries of sophomore year.

The door was made of a heavy wood and I had to put my shoulder into it to push it open. The long black hinges swung soundlessly inward and I breathed a sigh of relief, drinking in the room’s aroma of old leather and old books. Now that I had started to have fires in the fireplace (practicing my fire magic), there was also a hint of smoke. From the furniture to the rugs to the wall hangings, everything in the study was dark and earthy, but not in an intimidating way. I felt instantly comforted when I walked in, with the room sending the tacit message that someone who had really loved the place had used it.

I hurried to my usual spot, the big arm chair next to the fireplace, where I had left the book I was reading,
A History of Elemental Dreams
. I picked up the book and put it on the side table next to a dark blue lamp with a white shade and the glass of water I always kept nearby, so that I wouldn’t have to go all the way back to the kitchen for a drink.

Sighing, I sank happily into the chair, pulling the blanket that was draped over its back around my knees for the sake of some extra warmth. This corner of Astra was drafty, and the fire needed a long time to heat the room, so I liked having the blanket at hand along with my glass of water. Once I was settled, I hurried to scan the Tabble.

There was the usual drivel, from minutes on local council meetings I knew nothing about to major headlines about decisions the paranormal government was making—like whether to allow pixies to use their stardust outside regulated times. Stardust made it a lot easier for pixies to manipulate other paranormals and cause trouble, so of course they were advocating its use all the time, while other paranormals were wary. Another headline discussed how well the vampires were doing after last semester’s attack on Public. There was even a quote from Dacer, saying that all the vampires needed was a little time in the Museum of Masks and everything would be fine.

At the bottom of today’s Tabble was a blaring headline. As my eyes scanned down toward it, the last article I read was headlined, “Fallen angels’ healing properties now sought far and wide.” Of course that was true, but it had always been that way, because fallen angels had always been well versed in the arts of medicine. Keller spent most of his time learning how to heal. It was a good way to fight the demons with something tangible and real.

The last headline, the large one that my eyes kept trying to skip ahead toward, was more fascinating than scary. It was all about Risper and what an amazing bounty hunter he was. It started by explaining that Risper was simply known as The Hunter and went on to say that he was so famous and so highly thought of that that nickname was all anyone needed to say to identify who they were talking about.

The article then detailed Risper’s one great failure, which was that for years he had tracked the ghost known as Elam, the paranormal world’s most famous thief, without success. Because Elam was thought to have stolen more artifacts than all other paranormals combined, the pressure to find him had been increasing for years. But no one—not even Risper—had managed it.

Risper had been set on his trail after Elam’s greatest heist to date, the theft of a unique mirror. The Silver Mirror was a fallen angel heirloom, owned by the most powerful fallen angel clan in the world, the Marks. They had hired Risper to get it back, but after six months of chasing Elam tirelessly he had been forced to give up the quest to recover the mirror. Ever since, though, he had followed Elam’s trail, and he was thought to have come closer than anyone else to finding the master thief. It was believed by many that Risper’s failure proved that Elam was a ghost, because that was the only way—it was thought—to explain how Elam had eluded Risper’s legendary magic and training. Risper’s record of successful quests, other than the one in which he sought Elam, was spotless.

Risper, in other words, had caught every criminal he had ever chased. There was the Great Goat Theft
of 2007, in which goats had been fitted with special collars that were built to transport precious magical stones. The goats had been left on a farm, hidden in order to protect the stones, and Risper had been charged with protecting the goats. He foiled six different theft attempts and was able to protect the collars. Then there was the Red Gold Rose loss of 2003. The Rose had been at the Paranormal Museum in New York City; Dacer had talked about it often, because that Museum was his standard for perfection. He wanted The Museum of Masks to mirror the Museum in the city, except that the Museum in New York didn’t have him working at it, which instantly made it lesser. In fact, Dacer was immensely proud that there was only one paranormal museum that Elam hadn’t stolen from: the Museum of Masks.

I was still reading the Tabble in the study when I heard it. Faint at first, the scraping noise quickly grew louder. Knowing that I was home alone, I decided I had better investigate. I set the Tabble down, prepared to check out the ballroom, but as I started to leverage myself out of my chair the scraping stopped. Breathing hard, my heart pounding, I paused. When the noise didn’t continue I allowed myself to sink back into my chair, pick up the Tabble again, and continue to read. After a few more minutes of reading about how wonderful Risper was, I heard the noise start up again. This time it was louder, as if whoever was doing it wasn’t even trying to be quiet, as if whoever it was must have thought Astra was empty.

Again I pushed myself out of the armchair. I hated to leave the warmth of the dying fire, but I had to see what was going on. It was pitch black outside, and I could see the branches of the trees scratching past the windows and creating shadows. But the lack of light wasn’t going to keep me from seeing who was in Astra.

Once I was away from the crackling fire, I realized how dark and cold the rest of the building was. But I was still determined to figure out what was going on. Taking a deep breath, I tiptoed toward the door of the study, trying to make as little noise as possible. Remembering that the hinges on the door creaked, I tried to ease it open slowly. My heart was pounding again, and I felt sure that whoever was in the ballroom could hear it.