Hungry Earth (Elemental Book 2) (6 page)

“Let me guess; John’s mind control prevented you from
voting him out?”

“It was a little more complicated than that. Once a
wizard is in the inner circle of the wizard council, they can only be removed
by death.”

“Why did you call me in here?”

“As you know, we have recently signed a treaty with
the vampires. Therefore, the murder that took place tonight is concerning. We
want the murderer caught. To catch them, we need to find and question the
witness that Logan believes was there. I know of your reputation and want to
hire you to find the witness.”

“Hunt has already asked me to find the witness.”

“Yes, but you have no intention of telling the wizard
council. I want to hire you, at twice your normal rate, to tell us who the
witness is. You can still tell Hunt who it is, but don’t tell him that you told
us.”

“And what happens if I refuse?”

His eyes narrowed in a scowl. “Then you will be
detained until we can get the information ourselves. We would also lock up your
roommates.”

“You don’t get told no very often, do you?”

“No, we don’t.”

“Twice my normal fees. I’ll do it, but none of you
are allowed to follow or confront me or my roommates. If the other students
think I’m working for you or that you are looking over my shoulders, they’ll
clamp up.” I didn’t feel the need to mention that my classmates already thought
I was working for the council to help the vampires.

I knew I was going to regret this.

When I got back to my room,
Henry was asleep and Darwin was studying at his desk. “Did you find anything?”
I whispered.

He shook his head. “Not yet. Nobody knows about the
death except for those of us who saw the body and the witness. I figure that it
will slip out of someone within a few hours and when it does, I’ll find out who
knows something they aren’t supposed to.”

“What if someone makes something up?”

“I’m good at what I do.”

*          *          *

I was lying in the snow, but I wasn’t cold and it
didn’t feel wet. After a moment, I realized I was on the roof of the building
that Astrid and I used to visit. Suddenly, Astrid was there, sitting next to
me. I smelled her first; her wild, odd, but not unpleasant scent. Although she
wasn’t a child anymore, she wore the same old-fashioned white nightgown she had
when we were kids.

When she leaned against me and kissed me, I thought
it was going to be like the chaste kiss we shared when we were preteens.
Instead, she kissed me passionately, like a lover. I reached up and ran my
fingers through her hair until she broke the kiss and leaned back a little. She
opened her mouth to speak and I wanted to stop her. I didn’t want to hear what
I knew she was going to say.

A loud roar startled me awake. I opened my eyes and
sat up, confused and disorientated. I was in my bed at the school.

“What the hell was that?” Darwin asked Henry, having
been woken as well.

“Vampire. I smell a vampire.” He pointed to the
window, which was open. A small gust blew a little bit of snow in. “Whoever it
was is gone now.”

*          *          *

Tanaka-Sensei closed her eyes, expecting us to do the
same. I had been dreading this class; how was I supposed to be graded on
meditation? There were six of us students sitting on mats in the martial arts
room, including Becky, Amelia, and three others. We were supposed to begin
class with meditation every time.

“How did we end up in this class?” Becky asked.

“It’s random,” Tanaka-Sensei said. “There are a
number of classes like this, and which one you end up in happens by chance.”

“Can we transfer out?”

“No. You can request a class starting in your third
circle, though. In this class, you will learn to focus and visualize. What is
more powerful, a knife or a flashlight?” she asked.

Becky opened her mouth, but I put my hand on her arm
to stop her. Obediently, her mouth snapped shut, so one of the other students,
a wizard my age named Oden, stated what was apparently the obvious. “A knife
can kill someone.”

I interrupted. “Actually, if you judge its ‘power’ on
its ability to be used as a weapon, you could kill someone by beating them over
the head with a flashlight.”

“You should be the teacher, Devon; we can learn all
kinds of mundane objects with which to bludgeon people,” Becky said.

“Focus, students,” Tanaka-Sensei said. “Devon is
correct, and so is Oden. The light of a flashlight itself is not dangerous. For
the most part, people think that the most dangerous thing any light can do is
blind someone. How many of you have played with a laser before?”

“I had one of those that my cat used to chase,” Oden
said.

“A laser is an intense, concentrated beam of light
that can range from those that will blind you if you look into them to those
that can split an atom. Lasers are currently being used by humans in surgery
and even to cut metal. Because of the effect magic has on technology, we are
advised to stay away from them.

“By focusing light into a laser, you can turn
something virtually harmless into something extremely dangerous. You can do the
same thing with magic through visualization. Maybe you can’t cut metal, but you
would be surprised what you can do with the proper focus. In this class, we are
going to work on your visualization. I bet none of you can hold out your hand
and visualize an apple in your palm until you can feel it, smell it, and taste
it. When you can focus your thoughts, visualize
that
hard, you will
surprise yourself with what you can do.”

*          *          *

In
Alchemy & Potions
, I had professor
Langril again, which I figured was to be expected since he was my elemental
mentor. We were in the same classroom, with the same five classmates I had the
previous semester.

“Mack, your scars are healing up well,” I said.

He grinned widely and gently stroked the white scars
on his right cheek. “My girlfriend has been putting medicine on it. Oh, and I
brought gloves this time. I’m not going to get cut, burned, bitten, or–” He
screamed and we both looked down.

There was a large black scorpion crawling up his leg.
Becky rushed forth and took the scorpion from his black pant-leg. “Sorry, Mack!
This is Katie.”

“You have a pet scorpion? Are you insane?”

“Oh, don’t worry. Her stinger was removed. I normally
keep her in her cage, but she keeps escaping and crawling into warm, dark
spaces. She must have been trying to get into your pants.”

“Let’s get started,” Professor Langril said, moving
to the front of the room. “Now, this year, Professor Barton has decided his
class is the best in potions and he wants to challenge you all. Alpha
Flagstone, acting second to the headmaster, personally believes that
competition is good between classes, so he has offered a reward for the
winner.”

“Money?” Tali asked.

“Better! We get better ingredients for our class.
With that, we can make better healing potions for Mack.”

“I’m in!” Mack volunteered. After that, we spent the
class reviewing ingredients.

My last class of the day was
Magic in Everyday
Life
, which was taught by Remington. Once again, I shared the class with
Darwin. This time, however, there was only one other fae; Amelia. I sat at the
end of the row, Darwin sat next to me, and Amelia sat on the other side of him.

“Where is the rest of the class?” one of the students
asked. There were only ten of us when it was time for class to start.

“This is a second circle class and the majority of
students who dropped out after the introduction of vampires were entering this
circle. Now, I’m not going to teach you the way Mr. Hans had planned to.
Instead, you will have two major writing assignments and five application
tests.”

“What is an application test?” Darwin asked.

“You must use something you learned in class.”

“We didn’t learn much magic before Professor Hans
died,” Amelia said. “None of my classes used much magic.”

“Professor Hans was an excellent teacher who knew you
needed a strong foundation in knowledge and the inner workings of magic. If you
jump in headfirst, you’re probably going to fail, in which case you will doubt
your own power. There is also the possibility that you could succeed, but
things would go terribly wrong because you don’t know what you’re doing.

“Magic is a battle of will over reality. Even potions
are ninety percent mental. Magic is primarily a sequence of mental exercises;
focus, imagine, visualize, project, and will. Balance is necessary, especially
in elemental magic, which is the force of nature in magic and people. Every
wizard is driven by the essence of elemental magic.

“Someone could levitate a book across the room driven
by wisdom, and that would be air elemental magic, whereas someone who was doing
the exact same thing in self-defense, with passion and fear, would be using
fire magic.”

“What about fae? Some of us use elemental magic, but
some of us use psychic magic,” Darwin said.

“And we will work on both in this class,” Remy
assured him. “Because you missed a lot of Professor Hans’s background
information, this class will move slower than I would like, but we will
definitely cover more magic.”

“Did you graduate from this school?” a wizard in the
front row asked.

“Yes, I did. I also failed my first semester. I
believed that I could blow off my elemental training and my father would make
sure I passed. It didn’t work well for me. I got the air element and my mentor,
Professor Mura, was not a forgiving woman. When she told my father I hadn’t
passed, he told her I would retake the semester, since I passed all my classes,
and asked her to be harder on me.”

“Is it true you’re dating Alpha Flagstone?” the same
wizard asked.

She didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

“I thought you were dating Devon Sanders,” the witch
next to him said.

Half the class turned to look at me. Darwin started
laughing.

“No, Devon has a childhood sweetheart he’s saving
himself for,” Remy said, grinning. “Wasn’t that what you said, Darwin?”

I groaned. In the four years I spent at a local,
mundane university, I had been pretty much ignored, which was exactly how I
liked it. While there was gossiping and students goofing off, few people even knew
my name. I went into my undergraduate program right after graduating high
school, so I was no older than my classmates, but I took my studies very
seriously.

At that time in my life, my priorities consisted of
building a safe foundation under me. I wanted independence, routine, and a
hefty income so I could leave everything Astrid did to me behind me. It had
been my intention to take care of my mother, but then I graduated and began
working as a private investigator, and I soon realized I couldn’t give her the
constant care she needed.

When my reputation was solid and I started earning an
income greater than I had dared to hope, I got my mother the best apartment
available with a full time live-in nurse. Unfortunately, I met Regina right
afterwards.

Apparently, paranormal schools were very different.
From what I had learned in my first semester here, power was a constant
struggle. The immensely powerful paranormals wanted more power, the moderately
powerful acted like it was a game, and the weak were used as stepping stools.

There were slow days, where nobody died and battles
were kept to the practice field, but there were also days where I just had to
stop and gawk. There was no such thing as routine at Quintessence.

*          *          *

Henry, Darwin, and I were eating dinner in the dining
room a few hours later. “Any word on the witness?” I asked quietly.

“Yeah; word has gotten out that they’re looking for a
witness, which means he or she is going to shut up. Nobody knows about the
death yet, so they don’t know what the witness was supposed to have seen.”

“Can you track him by smell?”

“No. If I could, Alpha Flagstone already would have.
Don’t worry; I’ll get it.”

“I’m wondering if the cases are connected. The
council said they’re here because they want to make sure the vampires are
integrating well, but Vincent thinks something else is going on.” I stood. “I’m
going to see if Becky knows anything.”

“I can do that, bro,” Darwin said.

“Wouldn’t the students get suspicious if you ask too
many questions?” I asked. He shrugged. “I can do this. Just worry about finding
that witness.” I took my tray over to Becky, who was sitting a few tables away
with her friends. The two women I often saw her hanging out with sat across
from her, so I sat in the empty spot beside her. Her friends gaped at me, but I
ignored them.

“Hi, Devon,” Becky said. “I can’t get you out of
detention for Kale Lucos.”

“I know. I was actually hoping you could tell me why
the council is here.”

“To make sure the vampires are being treated fairly
and that they’re working well as students here.”

“Uh-huh. And why are they really here?”

She smirked. “Have you asked my father?”

“No.”

“Neither have I. He’s not a particularly friendly
man.”

“So you don’t know anything?”

She shrugged. “All I know is that about two weeks
ago, they all had a fit over something. Women are not allowed in the council,
so we’re not even allowed to overhear anything. I could be arrested for knowing
they were upset about something.”

“In that case, we’re just discussing our classes. But
I can see you’re busy, so I’ll leave you alone.”

“See you later,” she said.

*          *          *

When my roommates and I returned to the room, Ghost
was sitting on my desk.

“What’s wrong, cat?” I asked. He leapt off my desk, hit
the floor, and ran out the door. I sighed. “I’ll see you two later.” I chased
the cat through the hallways, into the castle, and up several flights of
stairs. By the time I caught up to Ghost in a hallway on the third floor, he
was rubbing pointedly against a spot on the wall to the left between two doors.
“That’s a wall, idiot,” I explained.

The cat glared at me and looked up at the gas light
scone.

I sighed again. “Why not?” I approached it and turned
the knob to shut the gas off. Since nothing happened, I pressed it in and was
rewarded with the soft yet distinct sound of metal sliding against metal. The
cat pushed against the drywall again and a two-foot wide section gave, forming
a narrow doorway into a dark passage. He gave me a glare and then disappeared
into the dark.

I followed him in, hesitantly, as the route was
rather cramped, and the door closed behind me so it was completely black. After
about twenty minutes, I ran into the cat and stumbled. I reaching out to stop
my fall, I felt brick, and ran my hand down the wall instinctively. There was a
flexible panel and what was obviously a handle, so I knelt and pulled it open.
Dim light spilled in.

Dark glass separated me from the room in front of me,
but I knew it was hiding me from anyone in the other room. From the angle, it
took me a moment to realize I was looking into the one of the offices from a
fireplace. Professor Langril was standing over Dr. Martin, who was sitting in a
chair.