The Elementalists Page 11

  “Dude, you’ve got an impressive lung capacity.”

  After a few moments, Chloe righted and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. She had no idea what to expect, but was happy enough just to have something to distract her from what was going on in the other room. “I don’t get it; nothing is happening.”

  “Yeah, I think it’ll probably kick in any moment now. That was kind of a big hit,” muttered Stan with a sympathetic wince as he took back the joint and tamped it out on the lip of an empty bottle.

  Chloe waited… “I think maybe I need more or something.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  Chloe started to feel a little strange, but it might have just been the alcohol. She noticed the way that Stan was staring at her expectantly. “Really, I’m cool. I think maybe I feel it now… I’m not sure what the big deal is, though?”

  She started to feel light-headed as a giddy wave bubbled up from her gut. She wasn’t sure why she was smiling, but Stan’s toothy expression and bloodshot eyes suddenly seemed very funny. “Honestly, the whole thing seems really overrated,” she giggled.

  Now the room seemed to vibrate, and the music sounded muffled. She wasn’t sure, but she felt like all the other kids in the basement were looking at her out of the corners of their eyes.

  She swallowed, but her mouth was extraordinarily dry, so she swigged the beer as her body began to feel oddly weightless.

  “You might want to slow down on the beer. This can be pretty surprising the first few times.”

  “Any advice?” she asked, beginning to question her decision, though she was uncertain if her words had made any sense or perhaps if she’d actually spoken at all.

  “You know, be like a bird; just go with the wind at your back, and see where it takes you,” he suggested.

  “Oh,” she whispered. Suddenly she felt like she might float away, as if the gravitational force that held her feet to the floor was beginning to weaken. She needed grounding. “I’ve got to go find Ezra,” she blurted with an inexplicable belt of a laugh. “Will you help me?” she begged, trying not to completely lose it at the sight of Stan’s horsey grin.

  He nodded and took her hand in his sweaty palm, leading her back up the stairs. “Follow me.”

  • • •

  Ezra was no longer by the pool table, where he was supposed to be. Chloe scanned the den for his commanding presence, but felt as if there were eyes following her every move. The room seemed much smaller than it had before, and the walls pressed in from all sides. She glanced to the camera in the corner and then to another blinking red light on the opposite wall. Are they pointed at me? It didn’t seem safe, as if the whole party was a trap, set up to lure her in and take her in this vulnerable state. Her mouth was so dry. She sipped at the beer again.

  She turned to Stan beside her and had trouble focusing on his face. “Ezra said he was going to hit the dance floor next.”

  Stan’s gaze had returned to where Brian and the girl had been on the sofa. They, too, were nowhere to be seen.

  Chloe was wasted, and any sense of tact or restraint was lost to her. “You like him, don’t you? As more than just a friend… I’m sorry, too.”

  Stan suddenly looked like a trapped bird. “What? No. What are you talking about? You’re totally high!” he laughed nervously.

  For a moment, Chloe tried to think how she might diffuse the awkward bomb she’d already set off between them, but the room was swimming and she couldn’t shake the image of Kirin’s heart-wrenching exploits below.

  “Whatever!” Chloe blurted, grabbing Stan’s wrist and heading toward the dance floor. “Come with me.”

  The dance floor had now spilled out of the living room and consumed much of the back patio as well. There were what seemed to Chloe like thousands of students crammed around her and gyrating to the thumping beat. She half wanted to move with them and half wanted to drop into a fetal ball and wait for it all to go away.

  Even with his size and stature, finding Ezra amid this crowd seemed like a near impossible task. But only he could anchor her now, only he could get her to truly forget the horrors she had witnessed in the basement. “Do you see him?” she shouted to an oblivious Stan, still holding on to his wrist with white-knuckled pressure in her grip.

  It was too loud to hear much of anything past the music, and Stan looked just as shell-shocked and out of place as she felt. He shook his head. “We need to get out of here,” he mouthed with a dazed look.

  “Ezra first!” she yelled, positioning herself behind Stan with an eye toward the open patio door. “Keep your shoulder down and don’t stop moving!” she bellowed before pushing Stan forward into the crowd.

  “Wait! What?” he yelped as his gangly elbow clipped the ribs of a flailing rave kid. Chloe kept her head down and kept pushing, enveloped on all sides by the sea of movement, and laughing uncontrollably as she powered through. Stan, true to his own advice, stopped fighting against the wind at his back and went with it, ducking and weaving his way through the throng until they stumbled over the threshold and breathed the fresh air of the night. By then Stan was laughing too.

  Outside, the crowd thinned out, though there were still too many people to see far, and Chloe was too short to see over any of them. “Do you see him?” she repeated, now approaching the onset of her first bout of chemically induced spins.

  “Nope,” answered Stan, balanced on his tippie-toes. “There are people going all the way back to the fire pit.”

  “Fire pit!” barked Chloe, starting to push Stan again as the press of faceless bodies moved past in streaks of muted color.

  After tripping a few more times and a lot more unhinged laughter, Chloe stopped pushing as the hot glow of a raging fire caught her eye through the maze of torsos and arms. “Come on!” she shouted as she weaseled her way through the last line of people. She finally stopped to catch her breath with the surprisingly intense heat of the open flame on her face.

  The bonfire was taller than she was, with a pyramid inferno of stacked logs ringed by a stone ledge. A bulk supply of largely untouched fixings for s’mores lay on the patio beside it. Chloe eyed the faces around her, searching hopefully for Ezra’s reassuring smile… Instead, she glimpsed electric-blue eyes in the crowd, and a tingle of recognition traveled across her scalp. She craned her neck and took a step forward just as the flaring heat of the fire drove everyone else back in a reverential circle—everyone except Kendra, who pranced around the stone ledge with a graham cracker and chocolate wedge in one hand and a long stick with a skewered, burning marshmallow in the other.

  With her flame-red hair, burning torch, and form-hugging clothing, she looked like some sort of elemental creature that had crawled from the fiery pit to tempt men to their destruction. Nearby, Liz nuzzled contentedly against Paul Markson’s chest, though he continued to watch Kendra’s added heat with a casual eye.

  Chloe grimaced and tried to back away into the obscurity of the crowd, but Stan pushed her forward with the stale breath of his Cheshire grin in her face.

  “No way, dude! You forced me here; I’m getting a damn s’more for the trouble!” he declared, pressing her toward the heat.

  “Abort! Retreat! Let go!” Chloe stammered, but it was too late.

  “You’ve got to be kidding! What is SHE doing here?” Kendra screeched.

  Chloe shrank as her paranoia of being the center of attention came to fruition. The eyes of the crowd turned to her with a sudden flaring of tension in the air. She stopped struggling and faced Kendra, but couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Stan munched on a piece of swiped chocolate and stood obliviously to the side.

  “You really must be crazy, showing up at my party!” Kendra spat with the dance of the fire reflected in her pupils.

  Kendra was clearly buzzing and fired up, but for the first time in her life, so was Chloe. She sipped her beer and tried to contain the destructive acid rage that gurgled up from her belly. She glanced to Liz’s horror-stricken fac
e and then back to Kendra. “I came with friends,” Chloe said through clenched teeth. “Didn’t mean to disturb your show.”

  Kendra’s eyes flared as she stepped closer. “What did you say, bitch?”

  That does it! “I said this isn’t your party—and you might want to step away from the fire before you overheat again.” Chloe locked her gaze on Kendra like a hunting animal sizing up its prey. “I wouldn’t want you to have to go back to the hospital covered in your own filth in front of all these people… What would Daddy say then?”

  Now it was Kendra who was rendered speechless. Her face turned red as her eyes widened. She started to shake oddly as a feral shriek climbed from her gaping mouth. Time seemed to stand still…and then she charged, raising the burning marshmallow stick over her head to strike.

  Chloe stood dumbfounded, unable to believe the words that had just come out of her. Everything seemed to slow as Paul’s hand reached out to catch Kendra’s attack and Stan’s patchouli-smelling arms enveloped Chloe.

  “Get me out of here,” she croaked as she let herself be hustled away through the crowd.

  Chapter 10

  Over the Edge

  Chloe wanted to die. She was curled on the filthy floor of Stan’s stoner van as he lurched down the winding streets of Charlottesville. She had already thrown up twice in Paul’s front yard, and she was pretty sure that she would do it again if either the van or her spinning mind kept moving for long.

  Her pocket had vibrated twice with incoming text messages since she’d fled the party, but she hadn’t yet found the strength or courage to see who it was. It took great effort to fumble the phone from her jeans before she tried to focus on the spinning glow of the little screen.

  The first text was from Ezra: Lightning! Where the hell R U?

  The second was a follow-up: U better not have left this party!

  She was only vaguely aware of the gentle patter of rain on the roof of the car and the ominous rumble of thunder in the distance.

  “Where do you live?” asked Stan over his shoulder as the van careened around another twisting bend in the road.

  “I can’t go home like this,” mumbled Chloe as she held her temples in a feeble attempt to steady the violent movement in her mind. “This is awful.”

  “Sorry, I tried to warn you,” Stan defended guiltily. “It might help if you sit up and try to focus on the road or something.”

  But Chloe was too scared to open her eyes and face reality. She could only focus on that last image of the crowd of faces around the fire—now twisted and distorted as they laughed and pointed while the final nail was driven into the coffin of her social life.

  There was something else there, too—blue eyes that burned through her… But then she pictured Kirin and Cynthia in the basement and could almost hear their awkward, horny moans. She let out a pathetic groan and tried to block out the relentless, haunting imagery. Chloe was done at Charlottesville High School; there was no going back now.

  “Where should I go?” asked Stan as the rain picked up and the streets started to get slick.

  “Someplace without people,” Chloe whimpered as she tried to respond to Ezra’s messages but found that she couldn’t figure out how to work the keypad. “Ezta I’m sppery. I left with Stern. Geeeling very sic!” She tried to read it back and gave up, dropping the phone amid the fast food containers and dirty laundry.

  Soon enough, she felt the bump of the tires as Stan turned off the street and continued with a rumbling clatter down an unpaved road. She groaned again with the additional vibration, vaguely aware that they were headed downhill and that the vehicle had no shocks to speak of. Just as she was about to protest, the van came to a slanted stop, and an empty soda can and some discarded AA batteries rolled past her head. The engine finally came to a heaving rest and Stan yanked on the emergency break. Chloe was left to wallow in the loud silence that followed as a steadier rain began to clatter against the roof.

  “Where are we?” she mumbled as she sat up with her arms braced against the seat, as if she might float away at any moment.

  “The old quarry,” Stan answered as a match flared up in his hand and he relit the joint with a plume of the noxious smoke.

  “Please, no more of that poison!” implored Chloe as the queasy roll in her gut threatened again.

  “Sorry,” coughed Stan as he rolled down his window and tamped the joint out on the side of the van.

  “How long is this gonna last?”

  “I don’t know, a few hours.”

  Chloe choked back a sob before climbing slowly up to the passenger seat and hunkering against the door. She hugged her knees to her chest as the wind blew cold through the open window and the rain came down a little harder. The van was angled, facing the fifty-foot drop into the quarry, but it was too dark to see the wide hole beyond the rocky lip. She shivered and shut her eyes again.

  “So I guess you and Kendra Roberts have some sort of history,” observed Stan as he rolled his window back up.

  “Not much of one, but what we’ve had wasn’t any good,” Chloe mumbled. “I’m sorry I dragged you into it.” She wiped a tear on the jeans over her bony knee.

  “It’s cool, dude. Sorry I brought you down to where Cynthia and Kirin were…you know.” He clicked the keys in the ignition partway and turned on some classic rock. “You really like him, huh?”

  Chloe sniffled. “What was I expecting? I’m such a moron.”

  “Hey,” Stan cut in with a sad chuckle. “At least you’re not gay and in love with your best friend,” he blurted.

  Chloe looked up at him, noticing the look of shock on his face. Despite her own internal torture, she reached out and took his sweaty hand in hers with a tight grip.

  “I can’t believe I just said that,” he confessed.

  “I guess we’re both hopeless,” she offered with a weak smile.

  The rain started pouring so hard against the windshield that they couldn’t see much beyond it. Stan raised Chloe’s hand and kissed the back of her knuckles with chapped, scratchy lips. “I know this night wasn’t quite what you expected and isn’t ending how you would like, but I’m really glad I ran into you, Cool Chloe.”

  “Yeah, it’s kind of been one big disaster after another since I saw you, but I know what you mean.” Lightning flashed across the sky, illuminating the quarry and surrounding woods for a brief moment. She felt the press of paranoia closing in again, and the pull of the incline they were on suddenly seemed precarious.

  “If it’s cool with you, I’d really appreciate it if you kept what I said to yourself, you know?” Stan stated nervously.

  “Of course,” Chloe answered without hesitation. “Though in truth, after tonight, I wouldn’t have anyone to tell anyway,” she admitted. “Don’t tell anyone about the whole Kirin thing either,” she added. “We can be secret collaborators in unrequited romance.”

  “Deal,” said Stan with his signature grin, just as lightning fell again in the woods across the quarry. They both jumped, and in the instant of the flash, Chloe thought she saw silvery movement disappear behind the edge of the cliff.

  “Maybe we should get out of here,” she suggested. “Not sure if you’ve heard, but me and bad weather seem to have a way of finding each other.”

  “Yeah,” said Stan, turning the ignition, “I have heard that.” The engine shook to life, and he switched the ineffective windshield wipers to high speed. As the headlights turned on, they could see the fast-moving rivulets of muddy water that rushed down the hill around them to cascade over the cliff.

  Stan furrowed his brow. “You might want to put on your seatbelt,” he suggested.

  “Why, is something wrong?” Chloe asked as she fumbled with the strap.

  “No, it’s just a lot of rain is all,” he said, buckling up himself. “This van isn’t exactly great for off-roading.” He put it in reverse and pressed the accelerator with a grinding screech before breaking again abruptly.

  “What was that?” blu
rted Chloe just as Stan reached over and undid the emergency brake.

  “Whoops,” he said with a sheepish chuckle.

  “You sure you’re okay to drive?” Chloe asked.

  “Do you have a better idea?” he challenged as the van started to back up again, this time without the grinding of metal on metal. “Just hang on.”

  In that moment, it started to rain even harder. Chloe cringed in her seat as she watched the fast growing river of runoff shoot out into the empty space before them. She gripped the handrest tightly enough to leave a permanent mark as the van backed slowly up the hill.

  “See, nice and steady… No problem,” announced Stan just before the front tires spun in the mud and the van drifted a little to the side. He braked fast and exhaled slowly.

  “What was that?” Chloe said again with a wide-eyed look out the back windshield that showed nothing but wet darkness.

  “Chill out, dude. It’s a little slippery; nothing to worry about,” Stan reassured. He took his foot off the break and accelerated gently as the van started to back up the steepest section of the little hill.

  The rain pummeled the roof so hard that Chloe was worried it might actually cave in. She cringed into an even tighter ball on the seat and buried her face in her knees. But with her eyes closed, she saw again the mocking faces of her peers and began to hear Kirin’s passionate moans hidden amid the falling water. She told herself that this was all just some horrible drug-induced nightmare that would soon pass… But instead, she remembered the image of enormous, unfurling wings of an impossible beast and then the skewering look of its reptilian eyes.

  The wheels slipped again, and as they spun uselessly with a high-pitched whirring, the van turned to the side and began to lose ground.

  “Stan!” Chloe looked up to see the river that rushed around them and the alarm on Stan’s face.

  He tried to brake, but it didn’t slow them at all as the growing mud current swung them around and pushed them back down the hill. For a moment, the van was sideways, and it felt like they might tip over as both Stan and Chloe started screaming in earnest. Then the rear tires swung around and the headlights were facing uphill as they continued to slide backward.