The Elementals (20 page)

“Our cousin Julian from Montana, of course.” Kate put a hand on Julian’s arm, her smile sticky-sweet. “It’s a surprise. He was always Mollie’s favorite, so he came for a birthday visit.”

Mr. Riggsby pursed his lips. “Oh really, a birthday visit?”

“Oh yes,” Kate said. “She gets very homesick, so Julian—he’s so clever—said, ‘She doesn’t even know I’m back from the war yet. She’ll jump right out of her skin.’ Isn’t that what you said?”

“You have a better memory than I do,” Julian said. Then he winced when she pinched his arm. “Yeah, it was something like that, for sure.”

“You wouldn’t put an injured veteran out in the cold, would you?”

Quick talking could only get her so far. She could hear her heart pounding in her ears, and every breath she took was a little too loud. For a moment, Kate thought Mr. Riggsby might ask for proof, and what would she do then?

Instead, he crossed his arms. “The rent’s due. Your sister’s been sneaking out so I can’t catch her for it.”

Slumping in relief, Kate said, “Tomorrow morning, first thing, Mr. Riggsby.”

The landlord shot Julian one more skeptical look before retreating to his apartment. Kate grabbed the railing and bounced up two steps. “That could have been a disaster.”

Julian turned to sit, looping both crutches over one arm. “How many flights up?”

“Just one,” she said, then watched in surprise as he lifted himself step by step, sliding on his backside the whole way. The crutches tapped against the tile, a long string of Morse code dots.

Uncertain, Kate said, “Do you want me . . .”

“Walk, Kate,” he replied. “I would if I could.”

So she did, but slowly. It was almost painful, taking measured steps when she wanted to bolt to her door. Standing ahead of Julian, she caught a glimpse of the back of his neck warmed by a blush.

Without thinking, she trailed her fingers over it, and smiled when the skin prickled. It was absolutely mad, but she felt like he belonged to her.

“Do you mind?” he asked.

“I don’t.” Kate hopped onto the landing and held her hand out to him. “Do you?”

Sliding his crutches past her, he grabbed the rail and her hand, hefting himself to his feet. “Yeah, a little bit, I do.”

Kate handed him his crutches, then hurried down the hallway. She wanted to open the door first, peek in and make sure Mollie was decent. Pressing her ear to the door, she listened but heard nothing. No wonder, considering the hour, so she slipped the key in, then caught the door before it swung open.

“Mollie?” she said, softly. All of a sudden, her throat was tight, and she couldn’t seem to get a whole breath. For her, the fight on the red car was only hours old. That realization started a waterfall of others.

For Mollie, that argument was almost a month past. From Mollie’s perspective, Kate had disappeared after the fight and never come back.

“Mollie,” Kate said, and shook the bed. No answer.

Mollie was a light sleeper. That had been her excuse, anyway, when she’d insisted that Kate needed to start sleeping on the floor. So Kate shook the bed harder, an earthquake for a light sleeper. The bed slid, then thumped against the wall. Too easily to have anyone in it: she wasn’t there. In the middle of the night, she wasn’t there.

Kate flipped on the light.

It blinded at first, but not enough to hide that the bed was empty . . . and so was the room. Dread seeped through her; it was like walking through a spider web. Curtains shivered at the breeze through the open window. It stirred empty envelopes that lay on the dresser, making them crack and whisper.

Brittle, Kate gestured at the window when Julian came in. “She let my bird out.”

“I’m sorry.” Julian leaned against the door, stepping no farther inside.

Picking up one of the envelopes, Kate felt herself fall as keenly as if she’d jumped from the window. Flapping the envelope at Julian, she said. “The movie I told you about? The film’s gone. It’s gone.”

Kate forced herself to keep looking. There was the tiniest, stupidest hope that somehow Mollie was hiding, that none of this was what it seemed.

No shoes beneath the bed, only her little velvet pillow. As she searched the room, wafts of Mollie’s perfume puffed up like ghosts. A great gust of it washed over her when she threw open the armoire.

Clapping a hand over her mouth, Kate fell to her knees.

Not only were Mollie’s few things missing, so were Kate’s. Her camera. The music box—with all the money.

But the worst was Handsome. He lay on the floor, unmoving. Torn paper surrounded him, droppings too, and orange peels starting to desiccate. His talons clutched nothing but air.

“How could she do something like this?” Kate whispered. Picking him up carefully, she cradled him to her chest. He wasn’t as cold as she expected, but he was irrevocably still.

There was nothing pretty or delicate about the way Kate cried. Grief undid her, smearing her mouth and splotching her skin.

Everything was supposed to change when she got to Hollywood, but not like this.

It wasn’t supposed to be
hard;
Mollie wasn’t supposed to hate her. But now everything was lost. Her equipment, her money—her darling Handsome. Her life had come apart like wet tissue. Clutching Handsome, she sobbed.

Julian hesitated, then to himself muttered, “There’s still some red.”

It didn’t make sense to Kate, and it didn’t have to. Julian circled the bed, then slid his crutches beneath it. His hands were gentle, sweeping down her arms. “Bring him here.”

Trying to dry her face with her shoulder, she choked down her tears. “No. No, you said it yourself, everything’s funny when we’re together. What happened on the beach, that wasn’t a spell. You were
dead.
”

With a brash smile, he tugged on her again. “But I didn’t stay that way.”

Climbing into bed, Kate was reluctant to give Handsome over. “Is that how you do it? Die a little to bring something little back?”

“I think so.” He rubbed his arms briskly, as if he were warming himself to the task. Something flickered across his face, awareness and fear. Swallowing twice, he reached out for Handsome, then said, “Close your eyes, Kate.”

“Why?”

“Sometimes they’re too far gone. They don’t come back right.”

Clinging tighter, Kate said, “What about you? Do you come back wrong too?”

When he trailed his fingers down her arm, it felt like a promise. A reassurance. He met her eyes, his own impossibly sincere. “It’ll be all right. Trust me on this one.”

When Julian’s hands brushed hers, she made herself let go. Tenderly, he settled Handsome in his arms, smoothing the raven’s feathers. He took care with him, making it easier for Kate to close her eyes.

In her own darkness, Kate felt Julian draw a deep breath; she heard it slip from his lips. Emotions knotted in her throat, tightened by passing seconds. He’d raised the turtle almost instantly. This was taking so long; it couldn’t be good. What did he mean, sometimes they were too far gone? What would happen if Handsome was?

Anxiety stretched the knot from her throat to her belly. She couldn’t trade a boy for a bird. It was wrong; she couldn’t do it. As she opened her eyes, two things happened. Julian fell back on the bed, motionless. And Handsome flapped his wings and hopped away.

“Nevermore!” he croaked, his black eyes gleaming once again.

Clutching the steering wheel, Amelia veered around a horse cart and honked at a pair of surveyors standing in the middle of the street. A black scarf bound her hat to her head, and her kid gloves were worn to a sheen. Her grip was white knuckled, her jaw set hard.

Thirty days ago, she’d rarely
seen
the inside of an automobile, let alone piloted one. Now she careened through Los Angeles with a cool stare and an absolute disdain for anyone who got in her way.

“The sidewalks are for pedestrians, dear,” Nathaniel murmured under his breath.

Amelia cut a look at him. “Don’t tell me how to drive. You’re the one who ran the Jeffery off the road.”

Truth be told,
neither
of them was a good driver. Even when they had to make do with a victoria, they let the horses wander too far and run too fast. Spoiled by magic, they were people made for slicking across distances by will alone.

Everything else—automobiles, streetcars, trains— moved too slowly.

Hurtling around a corner, Amelia said, “What shall we raise it to?”

“A thousand. Much more than that and we’ll end up with pretenders and liars in our suite.”

Every week for the past month, they’d run ads in all the newspapers in print in Los Angeles. That hadn’t been their first choice; they’d begged for a reporter to take down a story. They’d even offered a miniature to photograph, a cameo portrait of Kate that Nathaniel had painted on her sixteenth birthday.

“I’m sorry, folks,” the editor said. “But there’s nothing to write about here. The whole city’s built on runaways. You can stand down at the train station and watch ’em roll in by the hour.”

So they’d advertised instead, at first for any information on the whereabouts of their daughter. Possibly masquerading as a boy, last seen in a plum suit. They got plenty of notes about actual boys—boys working in a hat factory, boys running packages across town. But nothing about Kate at all.

Then they added Julian to the listing. After a flurry of letters and telegrams, Zora and Amelia discovered that their children had run to the same city and that all four parents had lost their gifts at the same time. Perhaps it was coincidence, but it certainly seemed more.

Armed with an address and a directive from Zora to check on Julian, Amelia and Nathaniel presented themselves at Bartow’s Ordinary.

“Haven’t seen the poor mite in a while,” Mrs. Bartow told them. “I thought he might be keeping odd hours, but when he didn’t pick up his laundry . . .”

Plenty of people had seen Julian. They followed his trail through the neighborhood but always came back to the Ordinary. Since he’d paid rent for a month, they decided to check back for a month. Either he was truly gone or just . . . away. On a jaunt. Or an adventure.

Or so they hoped.

“I’ve got a good feeling,” Amelia said abruptly.

Nathaniel combed his fingers through his hair. A few threads of silver shot through the dark waves. Enough to make him distinguished, which was far too close to respectable for his taste. Stretching out to pet the back of Amelia’s neck, he nodded agreeably, even though he didn’t agree.

People who disappeared usually did so for a reason: either they were dead or they didn’t wish to be found. There was no pleasure in admitting that, even to himself. No pleasure in hoping that his only child had taken after her parents and fled in the night.

The newspaper building loomed. With car horn blaring, Amelia cut across traffic to claim one of the few open parking spots along the sidewalk. Bouncing off the steering wheel, Amelia jerked the car out of gear and cut the power.

Since that was always how she parked, it never occurred to her that there might be a less emphatic way of doing it. Plucking her handbag off the floor, she shook it at Nathaniel. “I’ve got a good feeling about today, monster.”

Nathaniel caught her chin and tipped her head back for a rough kiss. Her mouth tasted ever the same, and he soothed himself on the part of her lips.

Lingering a moment, he stroked her jaw with his thumb, then murmured, “I hope it comes to something.”

***

Curled against Julian’s body, Kate kept an arm thrown over him. She splayed her fingers over his heart, waiting for its first beat.

He hadn’t come back yet, not after a minute, not after an hour. She’d fed and watered Handsome, let him outside to stretch his wings, then returned to her vigil at Julian’s side.

Sharing a bed with a boy should have been a monumental occasion, and in a way, it was. The first night she’d slept with the dead. She studied his profile and slipped her hand into his.

As sentinel, it was her sacred duty to keep him safe through the night. Though sleep tried to tempt her, she kept herself awake with pinches and long drinks of water. And then, when he grew cold and stiff, fear made for excellent waking company.

Morning dawned, and he still lay there—too peaceful. His golden hair fell in waves from his brow. His lashes were dark fans on his skin. His lips, drawn with an ornate line, were gray, nearly blue.

He’d told her to trust him, and she did, truly she did. She was starting to think he had trusted himself too much.

“I’m the worst person in the world,” she said, pressing her face to his cold shoulder.

In reply, Julian sat up. Heaving, his shoulders flexed and his joints cracked. He sounded like dry kindling. An awful, rattling sound filled the room. He clawed for breath, wheezing and choking. He left dark streaks on his own throat, clutching at it with bloodless fingers.

Terror shot through Kate. She clambered up after him, trying to catch him and hold him. Her thoughts raced— would she know if he was too far gone? How long would he have to lie dead before she could truly judge him finished? And what would she do if he was? What if she made a mistake and accidentally had him buried alive?

As he quaked against her, she held her breath. It kept her from tearing up again, but nothing kept her from hating herself. She loved Handsome with all her heart, but it had been wrong to let Julian die for him.

“It’s all right,” she said, unconvinced herself. She rubbed him briskly; she kept her brow pressed against his temple. He still felt stiff. It was terrible, like holding a cold, leather doll. “Julian, you’re all right. I’m here.”

Julian clutched at her, contorting himself to look at her. An eerie film clung to his eyes. He opened his mouth, but instead of words, an awful sound came out. Like the settling of a house or the moan of a tree about to break, it shuddered through him and raised the hair on the back of her neck.

“It’s okay,” Kate said, but it came out as barely a squeak. Stroking his hair, his face, she willed him better. She demanded it, from the universe, or the sky, or the elements.

Why not the elements? If they were born of aether, and aether was breath, then he should breathe! He should be well!