The Elementalists Read online

  Chloe peered back over the headrest, searching for some indication of the distance to the cliff’s edge, but she saw nothing in the blackness.

  “Unlock the door and jump!” shouted Stan. “You have to jump!” he repeated as he unbuckled his seatbelt and managed to lift the lock on his own door.

  Chloe heard his words, but didn’t know how to make sense of them. She fumbled at the door, but couldn’t get it open, frantically clawing at the handle without any result. “It won’t open!”

  And then the van crawled to a halt on the even ground at the bottom of the slope. Chloe and Stan froze in place, too scared to breathe…

  All of a sudden, the rain’s onslaught relented and then came to a stop. In the relative silence that followed, Chloe heard again the cheesy classic rock that was still playing on the radio and let go of the breath that had lodged in her throat.

  Stan was the first to chuckle, and a moment later, they were both heaving with the outpouring of shaky relief. Chloe wasn’t sure if she was laughing, crying, or both, but she knew, without a doubt, that she’d never been so happy to be alive and would never do drugs again.

  But Stan was also the first to stop laughing, and Chloe followed his curious gaze up the path of the headlights to the large shadowy object that crested the hill and headed toward them in the rushing washout. Chloe’s laugh faded, too, as a wide, uprooted tree reached the furthest edge of the light and barreled downhill with a claw of jagged limbs. She was unable to register what she was seeing as it accelerated toward them.

  “Hold on!” screamed Stan just before a thick branch tore through the windshield with a spray of glass, and the trunk slammed into the front bumper, plowing the van back toward the cliff with violent force.

  Chloe didn’t even have time to shriek before the van tipped backward and lost contact with the ground. For a moment, she watched the tree as it snagged on the edge and wrenched free, tilting and plummeting away as the headlights passed over the rock wall of the cliff. Then there was only dark sky above. She instinctively lunged toward the shattered windshield, hoping to smash through and instantly learn to fly, only to be held helplessly in place by her seatbelt. This is it! This is how I die! How lame!

  She closed her eyes with the horrific sound of tearing metal, followed by a violent lurch as her stomach rose into her throat and the van swung in what felt like a dipping arc through the air. Her head and shoulder slammed into the door with disorienting force and then she was flung back in the other direction over the gearshift. She opened her eyes to see Stan’s unconscious form, crumpled and bleeding against the driver’s side door. Why am I still alive?

  Then the van swung back again with the screech of wrenched steel, and she looked up at the cab’s ceiling, where five giant black hooks had torn through the roof. Out of her window, she saw the dark woods of Charlottesville passing by a hundred feet below, but the van was no longer falling. Looking up, her mind took a moment to accept the sight of the wide, undulating flaps of what looked like a giant batwing.

  It was then that the long sinuous neck of the thing that carried her looped back, and its massive, shining blue eye stopped to regard her through the window. Chloe finally and blissfully slipped from consciousness.

  • • •

  Chloe lunged awake with a scream, cut short when the shoulder strap of her seat belt jerked the frantic breath out of her. Her eyes darted about the glass-covered cab of the van, taking in the long strips of gouged bark and a scattering of leaves that had been left behind from the violent run-in with the wayward tree. Stan was still crumpled against the driver’s side door with a thin trickle of blood down his temple. He was snoring loudly and drooling from his open mouth, but he wore an oddly peaceful look on his face.

  “Stan,” she whispered, gently shaking his shoulder. “Stan!” she repeated more emphatically. He smacked his lips and smiled in his sleep.

  The engine was still running, but the front headlights had been smashed beyond use. Chloe turned with a sharp jab of pain in her neck and saw that they were backed against a tree, illuminated by the red glow of the taillights. Charlottesville’s classic rock station continued to spit out a string of spacey electric riffs on the radio, but Chloe could hear the trilling song of a whippoorwill through the shattered windshield. She reached over and turned the key in the ignition until the engine and radio were stilled, and she listened for a hushed moment to the bird’s dipping melody.

  She was disoriented, nauseous, and utterly confused as she tried to piece together the events that had somehow brought her…where? She rubbed the heels of her palms in her eyes, hoping that it might somehow bring greater clarity. Instead, her head still hummed from the abuse she’d inflicted at the party, though thankfully the full brunt of the disorienting chemical assault had been flushed out by the rush of adrenaline. Now she felt profoundly tired and psychically stripped bare—unsure which of the night’s hazy string of calamities had really happened.

  She undid the belt buckle and leaned forward to get a better view through the hole in the windshield. Past the dark canopy of leaves and limbs above, she could see the bright band of the Milky Way cutting across the sky. There were no other lights around to give her any sense of where she was or how much time had passed. Her phone wasn’t in her pocket as expected, but then she vaguely remembered trying to text someone before the accident. She reached back and groped around through Stan’s garbage, now sprinkled with sticks and jagged little glass cubes that cut her thumb and forefinger before she found the phone.

  Opening the screen, she was temporarily blinded by the bright blue light, but was pleased to discover that it was only 11:14 p.m.—about a half hour past her estimated arrival at the quarry and a full forty-five minutes before her curfew.

  She unlocked her door and shouldered it open with a loud creak as it wrenched away from the bent frame. Her Chucks found the firm security of pavement. Out from behind the distorted lens of the wet and cracked glass, Chloe recognized the shadowed bend in the road as a spot only a few hundred yards from her house. The Red Hill Loop trailhead began here and intersected with the white blazes of the Appalachian Trail only a few miles further down the ridge.

  She’d walked this stretch of road to the Loop a thousand times in the day, but didn’t remember this bend in the street being so dark at night. She glanced up at the nearby streetlamp, now hanging loosely by a sparking wire as it swung gently in the stilled air. A little further down the bend, the next light was torn down completely; it lay smashed by the side of the road. Her heart started thundering in her chest.

  All at once, Chloe remembered—she’d seen a monster! She could picture the way the lights from below had reflected off the sheen of its wet scales as it carried the van over Charlottesville with the heavy beats of its enormous wings. And she’d seen it before. It had been there when the lightning struck…a dragon, rising up from the water. Surely this was all some freakish imagining of her drugged state. Or perhaps her mind had finally fractured completely? Next stop: the nut house?

  But then something large moved through her peripheral vision. Her neck snapped painfully around as her eyes widened. The whippoorwill went quiet. An expectant hush fell over the woods. Chloe could hear the beating of her heart in her inner ears as the heavy shadows seemed to gather, taking shape in a colossal form. She blinked, trying to focus, and then it moved again, a long sinuous shape, sliding through the trees.

  She turned to run toward home, but in that instant, two ice-blue eyes the size of car tires flashed from the gloom as an alien will enveloped her mind to lock her feet in place. She could not budge or scream as the thing crept closer. It brushed against tree trunks with enough force to strip large chunks of bark and shake the upper canopy. Its head emerged from the shadows and approached at the end of a long, serpentine neck. It looked like a giant bearded crocodile. The overlay of its plate-sized scales reflected the silvery-blue moonlight, and a set of curving horns as long as the van sprouted from the top of its head. It hovere
d before her like a cobra, readying to strike.

  Chloe couldn’t look away, mesmerized by the electric ripples of light that swam across the blue irises before her and the vacuum draw of the black slits in the center. She felt like she might fall forward and be sucked in at any moment. Still, it kept coming with powerful, clawed arms and legs, which gouged deep grooves into the road with every clacking step. Its body stretched back into the shadows for a hundred feet or more. The hooked and membranous wings that she’d seen unfurled before were folded neatly across its ridged spine. Terror coursed through her. She started to tremble as its head shifted to examine her more closely with one giant shining eye.

  This isn’t possible! It’s not real!

  As if in reply, it huffed a jet of hot, fetid air from its nostrils, blowing Chloe’s hair back like a giant hairdryer. She winced and blinked as her hair settled and the trickle of some unfathomable liquid slid down her cheek. That felt pretty real!

  She had the sense, through the link in her thoughts, that it was toying with her, testing her response to its presence and studying her reactions. In that instant, it let go of its hold, and she stumbled. She was immediately aware again of her own two feet and the overwhelming urge to run. But somehow, either through disbelief or perhaps the lingering sway of the drugs and alcohol, she stood her ground.

  The thing bristled with a deep whistling inhale as the terrible jaws creaked open before her, revealing long rows of dagger-like teeth and the threatening flit of a forked tongue. What looked like sparks gathered in the back of its throat, and Chloe became keenly aware that another, even more potent threat of attack loomed from deeper down its savage maw. But her gaze was directed instead to the diamond-shaped plate between the thick, bony ridges that framed its watching eyes. There, a faint glow began to pulse from within.

  Chloe was drawn toward it, inexplicably wanting to reach out, almost like a child’s urge to touch the hot stove, despite her mother’s warnings. Her blood fired through her veins with an overload of adrenaline, but she did not budge from that spot.

  She exhaled slowly and reached up with a shaking hand. The tingle and spark of static electricity passed between them just as she touched the bony jut of its snout. Its scales were warm and smooth and surprisingly supple to the touch, like the surface of a snake. Her fingers buzzed as the tickle of the charge climbed down her arm to her elbow and the diamond in its forehead started to grow brighter.

  This is nothing but a drug-induced hallucination, she reminded herself, though she couldn’t help but admire the raw power and beauty of the creature before her. It seemed like she should probably bow, or at least show some respect. “Thank you for saving me,” she croaked with a quivering voice.

  It shut its jaws with a loud snap and reared up, its head suddenly high among the branches of the trees. The shadowed canopy was bathed in light as the diamond plate burned hotter still, now almost too bright to look at, though Chloe couldn’t turn her head away. Through the residual presence of its will in her mind, she could sense its curiosity and confusion.

  Then Stan let loose with a wet cough in the van, and instantly the link was broken. The beast hunched low to the street and launched straight up through the air with a force that shook the ground and whipped the overhanging trees into a frenzy. Chloe fell back against the van as a rain of leaves, branches, and acorns fell around her. She looked up to see the huge, silvery wings unfurl in the moonlight before the thing soared away into the dark.

  From inside the van, Stan snuffled and opened his eyes with a pained groan.

  “Did you see that?” asked Chloe in shell-shocked awe.

  “Holy crap, dude,” mumbled Stan, with his hand coming away from his scalp with a smear of blood. “My van!” He scanned the damage, taking in the liberal clutter of foliage left behind. “What happened?”

  He didn’t see it! Chloe tried to think of some way to explain, but she couldn’t find her way to the truth… “You saved us; it was amazing,” she blurted. “When the tree hit us, you smashed your head against the window, but somehow you managed to steer us clear and drive back up the hill.” She glanced to the holes in the roof, trying to figure if her story made any sense. “I was totally freaking out, and I think I passed out at some point… We were just so lucky those branches didn’t get us when they came through the roof and windshield,” she offered.

  Stan looked confused. “I think I remember flying over the cliff, or something?”

  Chloe reached over and hugged him in an effort to hide her unconvincing expression. “Thank God, no! But it was so close!” He smelled like patchouli and sweat. “You’re a hero! You even tried to drive me home, but I guess you passed out before we could get there. You probably have a concussion.” She brought her hand to his head tenderly. “Does it hurt?”

  “Yeah,” he admitted, clearly liking the heroic story he’d been given. “But how am I gonna explain this to my parents?”

  “Tell them the truth,” Chloe counseled. “You were hanging out with a girl by the quarry, and a freak storm would have killed us both if not for your quick action and levelheaded thinking.”

  Stan grinned. “Yeah, that’s good. I like that.” He turned the key in the ignition, and the van sputtered to life along with the return of the classic rock. “It still runs.”

  “Are you okay to drive?” she asked skeptically.

  “Yeah, dude, I actually feel kinda good,” admitted Stan, sitting up straighter in the seat.

  “Well, you really might have a concussion, so you should check your pupils for irregular dilation and you might not want to go to sleep tonight.”

  Stan chuckled, “Thanks, Doc. At least I won’t have to use Visine to hide the red-eye, right?”

  Chloe leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks for one of the weirdest nights of my life.”

  “Yeah, well, thanks for being so cool, Cool Chloe,” he returned as Chloe got out of the van and stood beside the door. “Wait, don’t you want a ride the rest of the way home?”

  “No, I’m just around the bend, and I could use the walk to clear my head… No more drugs for me, thanks.”

  Stan chuckled guiltily.

  “Your headlights are smashed, so you need to throw out the pot, put on your hazards, and drive straight home,” she added with a quick glance to the suspicious holes in the pavement.

  “Smart,” Stan said as he put on his blinkers without any indication that he’d heard the rest. “Wanna have lunch on Monday?”

  “I’ll see you there.” She smiled and shut the door with a wave.

  Stan gave her a thumbs-up and rolled away slowly. The tires bumped over the gouges in the street before he picked up a little speed and honked the nasally horn.

  Chloe watched the red, blinking taillights as they receded around the bend before exhaling. I think that actually worked. She checked the time on her cell phone—thirty minutes left until her curfew—and then scanned the skies for movement.

  A moment later, she was sprinting toward home.

  • • •

  Chloe shut the back door as quietly as she could before locking it and throwing the deadbolt for the first time in years. She stood on her tippy-toes and scanned the yard through the little oval window, half expecting to see a hundred-foot-long mythological creature lurking beside the untended barn. Her heart was still going a mile a minute as she turned away, trying to reconcile the seeming absurdity of her fears with the inconceivable interaction she’d just had with…either a very convincing figment of her imagination or the unknown super species that would call into question the entire timetable of evolutionary biology. What if I really am going crazy, like Dad?

  Shipwreck sat at the foot of the stairs, watching her intently. It was uncharacteristic of him not to have come immediately to mark his territory by rubbing his face along her shins. Chloe knelt down and made the clicking sound with her tongue that she used to call him. “Here, buddy,” she whispered, brushing her wild hair from her cheek. “Ooh,” she blurte
d, looking down at the gooey strand of mucous that had smeared on her fingers.

  Shipwreck’s ears pinned back as he produced a feral hiss and bolted up the stairs.

  Chloe raised an eyebrow and wiped the slime on her jeans with a shudder. Okay, that’s kind of freaky!

  She emerged from the foyer to see her mom splayed out on the sofa with a now-cold cup of hot chocolate resting precariously on her stomach between her hands. Audrey was asleep, breathing heavily with a little sigh at every exhale. Chloe crept closer, not wanting to wake her. The television news was still on in hushed tones, with the seemingly perpetual “BREAKING NEWS” logo highlighted across the screen—this time, accompanying shaky-cam footage of a picturesque, snowcapped, conical mountain spitting a heavy plume of smoke and ash into a blue sky.

  Chloe stepped closer and rescued the tilting cup from her mother’s grasp before draping a blanket over her. She took the remote from the coffee table and turned off the latest disaster in progress, not having the energy for yet another indication of the impending end of days.

  “Mount Kilimanjaro is erupting,” mumbled Audrey with her eyes half open. “They think it might really blow for the first time in like 350,000 years or something.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t want to wake you,” whispered Chloe, hoping her lack of interest wouldn’t be a telltale indication that something was up.

  “Did you have fun with Ezra?” Audrey asked with a tired smile.

  “Yeah, I suppose,” answered Chloe unconvincingly. “I’m not sure parties are really my thing.”

  “Did you see that other boy you like?” Audrey prodded.

  Chloe could instantly feel the flush of emotion in her cheeks, and was horrified that just thinking about Kirin could make her feel this way, despite everything else that had happened that night. “Yeah, but I kind of want to try to forget the whole thing right now.”