The Elementals (17 page)

The wind picked up. It carried the coming storm, introducing it with the rough, scrubbed-fresh taste of water in the air. Plucking at her clothes, it swept across her throat, insinuated fingers into her collar. The horizon broke, one streak of amber light suddenly flooding through.

Eyes wide, Kate slowly reached for her hat. Pushing aside the clumsy touch of the wind, the familiar, velvet caress slipped over her skin. It kissed the bare back of her neck, and Kate held her breath. She had seen this before, a hundred times before. Everything—every bit of it. Destiny had finally arrived.

Electricity streaked through her, waking every numb bit of her flesh. Everything in her moved automatically; her body knew what to do. She pulled off her hat to let the wind take her hair. No matter that it was caught in pins and loose braids, she turned all the same.

He was there.

***

She wasn’t there. Before him was the sunset, all around him, the scent of honeysuckle, but she wasn’t there.

Julian had only enough time to think that before a smooth-faced boy attacked him. A blur of plum wool, he crashed into Julian, knocking them both to the sand. Tangled in his own crutches, Julian struggled to free himself and swallowed shock when the boy kissed him.

Speechless, Julian sputtered. But before he could push him off, the boy’s hair suddenly came loose. It looked almost as if it had sprouted, growing by magic in length and in color . . . and there was the silver streak. The wind played it out, tugging curls free, fingering through long waves.

“You’re real,” the boy—not a boy—breathed. His— her—eyes were dark wells, long lashes fanning against her skin. Amazement lit her from within; she glowed surely as a lantern would. Then she rolled off of him and planted her backside in the sand. “That kiss was
not
what I expected.”

Dragging himself back a few feet, Julian said, “Are you crazy?”

She took a deep breath, sinking down as it drained out of her. “Sadly, yes, I probably am. But I’m not imagining you, am I? I didn’t accidentally go and drown myself in the ocean, did I?”

Julian stared. Openly, and incredulously. This was the face he’d seen every time he died, and it belonged to a lunatic of a girl in a man’s suit. Picking his own hat out of the sand, Julian said, “Alive and well. Well, I’ll vouch for alive.”

“I’m Kate,” she said, crawling closer to him. “You recognize me, don’t you? Please say you do.”

Wary, Julian pulled his hat back on. The honeysuckle had faded, leaving the tang of a coming storm in the air. It
was
her, it had to be. He knew the shape of her face and the arch of her brows. Even her lips were familiar—

Blushing, Julian reached for his crutches. “I recognize you. There. Happy?”

Kate scrambled to her feet and offered her hand. “Incredibly. You have to tell me everything. I want to know every last detail. Where you’re from, and if you like your bacon chewy . . .”

“Crispy,” he said, but he didn’t take her hand. Raising his crutches, he planted their feet. Then he hauled himself up by them, trying to shake off as much prickling sand as possible. He already felt it in his shoe, and itching on his neck. “I . . . No offense, Kate, but I don’t know what to make of you.”

Disbelief lit her eyes, and she walked up to him. “Oh, ask me anything. I’ll tell you true. But me first again. What’s your name? Is it something mysterious like Rochester? No, no, you don’t look cruel at all. You’re a Laurie, aren’t you?”

“I’m a Julian,” he said.

She repeated the name like a fervent prayer. She even clasped her hands together and gazed at the sky. Every bit of her flickered and twitched—to be honest, it exhausted Julian to look at all that animation at once. Then, abruptly, she turned her attention to him again.

“What can you do?” she asked. She circled him, staring like she might be able to see through his skin, right down to his bones.

Trying to follow her with his gaze, Julian said, “What do you mean?”

Kate lunged again, then petted him when he flinched. “I mean, what can you do? I stop time, but only a little bit. Thirty seconds; it’s completely useless. What about you?”

Cold swept through Julian. His gift had always been his secret, a family secret. For a stranger, however familiar, to
ask
for it, unnerved him. He’d always believed himself singular. The shock of seeing his mother command water had nearly undone him.

“Can we go back to the bacon question?”

“You already answered that.”

“Well, then . . .” Julian looked away, then pointed at her. “How do I know you’re telling
me
the truth?”

She blinked at him. “Why would I lie?”

Surprising himself, Julian laughed. It wasn’t a mirthful sound by any stretch of the imagination. Pulling out his pocket watch, he pressed the button to open it. The hands ticked along regularly, something solid and real to judge her by. “If you can’t do it . . .”

“A little ‘you show me yours, I’ll show you mine’? All right.” Taking his hand, Kate tugged on him, then glanced down. That was the first time she’d really considered the crutches or his leg. Raising her gaze to his face again, she said, “Come on. I don’t want to drag you.”

Julian had little doubt she’d do it. So he followed her to the edge of the water. Since she’d wondered aloud whether she might have drowned herself, he worried when she closed her eyes.

But instead of pitching into the waves, she exhaled. It wasn’t half a breath; she spilled out all the air inside her, it seemed. Toward the end, a faint wheeze rattled in her throat. He moved to shake her, but her eyes snapped open, and she marveled up at him.

“I didn’t see you this time because you’re here.”

“Nothing happened,” he said. He turned the watch to her, its slender arms still ticking along.

Scoffing, Kate said, “Well, I didn’t stop
us
. That would be useless! Come on, open your eyes, Julian. Put down your stupid watch and look.”

It wasn’t a stupid watch, and he was about to tell her that. But the protest died on his lips, because he
looked
. In spite of the clockwork still running in his hand, the world stood absolutely still.

A single sea bird hung above them, as if dangling on a line. The ocean rushed neither in nor out. It stood in tiny, chopped peaks, stiff like meringue. Surrounded by an unnatural quiet, they heard no waves, nor wind—nothing but their own breaths. Kate had closed them in a snow globe; the world beyond their orb was a still, empty canvas.

Julian was glad for his crutches; they kept him from falling when his knee went weak. This was an impossible thing. An extraordinary thing. And he could feel it reacting to him. For his entire life, he’d summoned his gift deliberately. It didn’t linger or beckon or call.

But at that moment, standing there with her, there was too much inside him. He felt the weight of the world shift; he thought he might split with it. Scarlet lights danced in the dark, some beneath the water, some on the sand.

Even without testing it, somehow he knew that those weren’t faerie lights. They were bodies: of fish, and flies, and all the little things on the beach that he could raise with a breath—if he wanted to.

“Well?” Kate asked. “It’s something, isn’t it?”

Julian could barely feel his own lips when he murmured back. “And how.”

***

In San Diego, Amelia dropped her mirror.

She hadn’t spoken a word since locking herself up with the sunset the night before. There were no words, not for the things she’d seen. Hollowed by fire, she’d haunted the house with Nathaniel at her side, comforted when he whispered into her. When he touched her face with rough fingers and kissed her until her breath faltered.

Nathaniel waited; she felt him waiting. Since their first meeting so many years ago, he’d been there. Insubstantial as mist sometimes, nothing more than a kiss of the wind, but he’d been there all along. Every day, she felt his shadow, she knew his presence.

But suddenly, he was gone.

It felt like death, a sudden severing marked only by silence. A dull ache started in her temple when she tried to speak into him. Nothing happened; the words wouldn’t form. It was like remembering a melody but forgetting the lyrics. It wasn’t a song anymore. It was something incomplete and ephemeral.

Panic sharpened her voice. “Nate?”

No answer came. Knocking over her chair, Amelia knotted her robe and started down the hall. White silk swirled around her; her hair fell in a veil around her shoulders. She could have been a ghost; anyone peeking through the windows would have believed it completely.

A door swung open at the other end of the hall, and Nathaniel stepped into it. He’d never been ungainly; his hips had always rolled with smooth assurance. But now he stumbled as he held out a hand to her. The velvet certainty when he murmured had faded. He sounded as strained as she.

“Amelia?”

Rushing into his arms, Amelia pressed her ear against his chest. His heart beat like the thrum of hummingbird wings, but she still whispered desperately, “I can’t hear you anymore. I can’t hear you.”

“It’s all right,” Nathaniel lied. He crushed her close and kissed her hair. His hands strayed down the curve of her back. It was almost like he had to reassure himself that she was there.

Because she was speaking again, aloud anyway, he dared a question. “What did you see last night, Amelia?”

She looked up at him. Her lips were pale, bluish in the dark, and bruised shadows filled the hollows of her cheeks. Shaking her head, she stilled when he brushed a thumb along her face.

“You can tell me,” he said.

Amelia rose up to whisper to him—into his ears now that she could slip in no deeper. And she spoke with a sibyl’s voice, breath crackling as she encompassed the whole of the vision into a single prophecy.

“Last night in the vespers,” she said, “I saw the end of the world.”

Pulling up her knees, Kate wrapped her arms around them and drank in the stillness. Julian’s watch ticked away, and she turned to peer at its face again.

She laughed—delighted, dumbstruck—then told him, “I’ve never kept it up this long before.”

Julian sprawled as comfortably as he could on sand and stone, and watched Kate as if she were an exhibit. The crested Californian girl-monkey—constantly in motion, entirely distractible.

“Is it everything?” he asked. “The whole world?”

Shaking her head, Kate closed his watch. Her hair rolled in long, graceful waves, at odds with the broad shoulders of her suit. “Hardly. It’s like a bubble. I can make it as small as myself, but so far, no bigger than a house.”

“Then what would happen if someone walked by? Do we look like statues to them?”

“No.” Kate slid the watch chain between her fingers, passing the watch from hand to hand. “Daddy says I disappear. There one minute, then gone. That’s what it looks like when he goes on the wind, too.”

“I still can’t fathom that.”

“Why not? Don’t you have an imagination?” Quickly, Kate added, “Don’t take that the wrong way.”

“How should I take it?” Julian asked with a frown. “It’s not a compliment.”

“It’s not an insult either.”

“Maybe not where you’re from!”

Kate sighed at him. “You’re changing the subject. Do you want to know how it works or not?”

Exasperated, Julian said, “Dying to. Enlighten me.”

“Well, Julian Sarcastic, all you have to do is hold on. He calls the wind, and it swirls all around. It gets dark, and there are stars everywhere, gold ones. You know you’re moving, but it’s more a sen- sation. And then it stops, and you’re somewhere else completely.”

“Like that, huh?” Julian asked, and this time, he restrained the sarcasm.

“Yes! Well, sometimes we crash into rivers. Daddy can’t cross water,
we don’t know why. Mimi fell in one once. It was hilarious!”

It was too fantastic by half, but Julian was too polite to call her a liar. Still, he knew for an absolute truth what he could do. He’d seen what his mother managed with a cup of water. The endless fields of grain at home testified to his father’s gift. He replied as diplomatically as possible. “Sounds like a pain.”

“It is.” Kate opened his watch again, gazing down at its face. Fifteen minutes had already passed. “We have to walk around lakes and rivers and creeks. Or through them. Or find a boat? In any case, forget going long distances. I’ve spent half my life on the White Star line.”

That watch was the one fine thing he owned, and Julian didn’t want to gum it up with sand or too much jostling. Gently, he reclaimed it and threw in a question to distract her. “So why you? Why do you get to beat Father Time?”

Kate crawled to him and dropped her head in his lap. “I told you, the elements favor us. Fire for Mimi, air for Daddy.”

Her hair spread in a wide fan, flowing over his legs and across the ground. The silver strands twined together. Swirling and sweeping toward him, they looked like a horn. Warmth radiated from her; she felt vital, substantial.

Strange currents warred within Julian. She was too familiar; she touched him too easily and confessed too much. At the same time, he wanted to pull her ears and measure her feet against his own.

Since he couldn’t decide where to put his hands, Julian finally tucked them under his arms. “Time isn’t an element.”

“Aether is,” she replied. She pressed a fingertip to his nose. “That’s what you get when you mix all the elements together. The heavens. The breath of gods.”

Staring at her openly, Julian couldn’t think of a thing to say at first. The only ether he’d ever heard of was the kind Doc Smith used to knock his patients out. It burned to breathe, and when you woke up, whatever tooth had bothered you was pulled clean out.

Finally, Julian said, “God breath.”

“Not ‘I’ll huff and I’ll puff’ breath, Julian. Honestly.” Kate rolled her eyes. “I mean the breath that creates everything.
Quintessence.
And you’re changing the subject. Again.”

True, he was. Mostly because the subject was absolutely mad. Trying reason with her, he said, “But you’re not all four mixed up. Fire and air, one plus one equals you.”