The Elementalists Page 20

  “The night before school started, I caught my mom’s boyfriend in an affair with another woman,” she said, hoping to build up to the weirdness. “My mom didn’t believe me at first, and the boyfriend overheard me trying to tell her about it—so I ran away to here. You know, just until things cooled down.”

  Stan had closed his eyes, but he was still sitting up and listening. “That’s some drama,” he muttered with a sleepy drawl.

  “It was still really hot then, so I jumped in the pond for a swim, just like I had a hundred times before, but this time—” Chloe lost her words as another more forceful crack of thunder descended from the clouds. She looked up warily, suddenly feeling the autumn chill. “Do you believe in…end-of-the-world prophecies…or supernatural stuff?” she mumbled before looking back to Stan, who was snoring blissfully with his mouth ajar.

  “Stan?” she said, to no response. “Oh come on!” Chloe hollered just before a glint of movement caught her eye from down by the water’s edge. She held her breath as ripples moved across the still surface of the pond.

  A hazy figure emerged from below, climbing from the water to stand stock-still on the rocks along the bank. It looked like a man, visible only as a black silhouette against the reflection of the night sky behind him.

  Slowly his shadowed form stepped toward the hill. He had long hair and wore dark clothing.

  Chloe couldn’t look away, but her hand shot out to grab Stan’s shoulder with a forceful shake. “Stan, get up!” she commanded, though a part of her already knew that he wouldn’t answer. She shook again, rocking him violently, with nothing more than a contented little murmur in response.

  The man kept coming, steadily moving through the grass with unnaturally lithe steps. As a cold breeze whipped through the trees, he paused at the foot of the slope and cocked his head as if to listen. The sky rumbled angrily once more, and his hair reflected silvery-white through the darkness. He started up the hill toward her.

  “Who are you?” she called out with an unsteady voice.

  But he did not answer, drawing closer—now twenty feet away and closing.

  “What do you want?” she demanded just as her fight-or-flight instincts took over and she scrambled to her feet.

  Sit! His resonant voice lanced through her mind like another crack of lightning and brought her firmly back to the earth. The word hung, echoing in her temples with the same pulsing pain of the migraines. He stopped only a couple strides from Chloe, and she saw the bright flash of electricity ripple within his piercing blue gaze.

  He was shoeless and his clothes seemed as if stitched from shadows. His face was somehow young and old at the same time, with smooth, alabaster skin stretched over the sculpted bone structure of a man that looked to be little older than a teen in motion, but perhaps middle-aged when still. The yawning pits of his ice-rimmed eyes bore into her, threatening to consume her with their attention.

  The hair stood on the back of her neck, and she shuddered as his will infiltrated her mind. She felt cold and helpless as the tickle of electricity sparked through her body. She wanted to scream and run, but found herself frozen mute and unable to blink. All at once, the cascade of stolen memories flooded back into her—she felt like her mind might drown beneath the overlapping waves of understanding and horror.

  Chloe ground her teeth and fought to resist his leaching on her thoughts. “What are you?” she croaked.

  He turned his ear skyward again as if he were a dog hearing a high-pitched sound. “Your mind never stills,” he observed with cold interest. His voice was deep and perfectly clear, and his words echoed within her skull. “Remarkable. So much curiosity and hunger from one so feeble and fleeting.”

  Chloe’s eyes watered and sweat beads gathered at her brow. Her voice trembled as she fought to speak. “You’re the dragon?” she croaked.

  “Dragon,” he repeated, as if testing the sound of it. “My kind has had so many names over the millennia… I last awoke in this land before the language of that word had come to it.” He knelt before her with feline grace and froze like a statue, watching her the same way that Shipwreck might watch an injured bird before the kill.

  Chloe’s head was throbbing as she struggled to wade through her newfound memories to find the names of the five dragons of legend that had circled the Tianlong Cauldron. Her heart was pounding in her chest, though she felt cold in a way that made it seem like she wasn’t getting enough blood to her extremities. “You were called Uktena then, weren’t you…by the people who lived here before?”

  A glimpse of surprise flashed over his features. “Uktena,” he repeated. “That is what the Cherokee people called me,” he remembered.

  “Uktena,” she echoed, still frozen in place and unable to shake the disturbing notion that he would most likely kill her as soon as they stopped talking. “I’m Chloe,” she offered, trying to keep her voice from faltering.

  He leaned closer and his nostrils inhaled her scent. “You are the queen of your people,” he said, though Chloe wasn’t sure if it had been a question or a statement.

  “Yes,” she finally said, deciding it wasn’t actually a lie, and praying that it might somehow buy her more time… “And you are one of the Five Claws?”

  Lightning flared again within his eyes, and Chloe would have doubled over with the shock of pain through her head if she’d had the ability to move. Instead, she could only whimper and tremble as Uktena stood and stepped over her.

  “You know of my name and the ways of the Old Ones—perhaps you are a witch as well as a queen,” Uktena observed.

  Chloe could feel the sweat dripping down her cheek as her stomach did somersaults. She feared her head might actually explode. “No!” she gasped. “I’m not a witch, and I won’t be a queen after tonight! I’m just a sophomore in high school!”

  The sky danced with electricity above them.

  “I don’t believe in witches,” Chloe gasped. “I don’t even believe in dragons!”

  All in one swift motion, he released his assault on her mind, stepped back, and returned to the feline crouch before her. He watched her for a long moment with an unreadable gaze. “You speak the truth.”

  She shuddered with the lingering pulse through her temples and tried to focus through the pain on what she might say next. Her body was still locked in place with her legs stretched across the cold ground and her arms braced behind her. The muscles in her shoulders were starting to scream with lactic burn, and she felt a cold dampness seeping through her dress from the earth below.

  “Then how did you summon me?” Uktena challenged with an air of threat returned.

  “I…I didn’t summon you,” she stammered.

  Uktena’s eyes narrowed, and Chloe was overcome by the disturbing sensation that a serpent had coiled around her body and was beginning to squeeze the air from her lungs. Her eyes bulged, and her breath began to draw shallow as the swell of panic threatened to consume her… But in another blink, the infiltration over mind and body left her completely, and she fell back with a yelp before scrambling against the unforgiving leg of the lightning tower.

  Uktena turned his gaze toward the sky, as if to read something in the darkness and clouds. “I was not meant to rise for another two cycles of the moon,” he observed. The press of his attention swung back to her. “Yet I heard the echo of your thoughts in my dreams, called back from a thousand years of slumber by your pondering.”

  Again Chloe glimpsed the flicker of lightning in his eyes, and her shoulders suddenly felt as if they’d been pinned back to the steel beam.

  “How can this be?” demanded the monster in man form.

  “I’m sorry! I don’t know. I didn’t mean to bother you! I didn’t know you were there,” she spluttered. “I…I don’t believe that you’re real. It defies science. I…I mean, how can you be real?”

  The press of his will lessened, and Chloe’s shoulders fell into a quivering slouch.

  He glanced back to the smooth sheen of the pond and was m
esmerized for a moment by the reflection of the clouds in its surface. “The world is far older than humankind remembers,” he finally said. “Your people forget that in your arrogance and greed.”

  She considered running, but she was too terrified to move.

  “Your kind believes that the planet needs you to survive, but you will soon find that it is the other way around.” His ancient eyes followed the lines of the metal tower up to its red-blinking tip. “The age of man will be forgotten by time like all those before it.” His gaze turned back on her.

  Chloe could feel his attention hovering in her thoughts. She had to keep him talking or risk losing herself completely to the strength of his presence. “Then why did you save me from the lightning and again at the quarry?” she asked.

  This seemed to stump Uktena for a moment. He slowly tilted his head without breaking the intensity of his gaze. “Perhaps I have absorbed a bit of your curiosity,” he speculated. “It was you that summoned me… I needed to know why before the end.”

  “The end of what?” she asked.

  The dragon watched her closely without answering, and Chloe forced herself to look back—both of them were still and silent with a building hum of energy between them. Stan broke the tension with a satisfied murmur in his sleep.

  “What did you do to my friend?” she asked, with a hand checking for a heartbeat on Stan’s chest. She felt it thumping contentedly beneath her fingers.

  “He will wake soon and remember nothing,” the dragon answered. “Though I am not sure yet what I will do with you.”

  Chloe started to shiver with a combination of rattled nerves and the cold.

  Uktena studied her closely. “I wonder—which of the three males will you choose as mate?”

  “What?”

  “The dark-skinned king who smells of the earth, the sad boy who longs for the ocean, or this one,” he turned his eyes on Stan, “who breathes smoke and dreams of flying?”

  “Have you been following me?” Chloe asked.

  “I have been watching and listening,” he answered without hesitation. “I heard you as you came to this place throughout the last turning of the world.”

  He looked with disdain at the torn earth and waiting machines before his eyes turned back to the looming tower. The words “DAEDALUS GROUP” and the angel’s wing logo of the company were stamped into the steel just above Chloe’s head.

  His eyes flashed again with latent threat, but in that moment, Uktena seemed sad to Chloe—lonely and lost beneath the veneer of strength. “They destroyed your home; I’m sorry,” she offered. “I loved this place.”

  Uktena’s gaze ticked back toward her with a terse little head movement that looked like that of a bird. “They will pay, like all the rest.”

  “What’s going to happen in another two cycles of the moon?” she asked.

  But before he had a chance to answer, headlights burned through the trees on the road below. Chloe could hear the crunch and roll of tires and the grumble of an engine.

  “The inevitable,” Uktena finally answered as a black SUV pulled up on the grass beside the station wagon.

  “You better go,” she warned just as she turned back to see a dark mass launch upward, accompanied by a blinding electrical flash and an earsplitting clap. She fell back against the ground beside Stan with what felt like a live current passing through her body as a buffeting rush of air came down over the hill around her. Her hair stood on end, and she squinted into the darkness. A terrible scream of wrenching metal sounded above.

  Her vision cleared in time to see the blinking red lights snuffed out, and she watched in disbelief as the upper reach of the tower was carried away, dangling and sparking into the clouds. An abrupt wind brushed across the tops of the trees before the night returned to relative silence. Only then did she remember to breathe again.

  Beside her, Stan began to stir with a wet snuffle and a little cough. He sat up and opened his heavy lids just as a powerful spotlight switched on at the side of the SUV below and swiveled its blinding beam toward the tower.

  “Oh, crap,” said Stan as the beam climbed the steel girders from the tower’s base to the missing cap. He tilted his head back and followed the path of the light to the jagged and twisted spikes of metal high above. “What the…?”

  Chloe was still dazed and tingling. Her breath locked in her throat again as the beam swung back down to blaze across the place where they sat on the hill. She winced and shielded her eyes with her arm, but not before streaks of light had burned across her retinas once more, pulsing in her head along with a quickly growing migraine. The last image she’d seen of the dragon-gouged earth remained pulsing on the inside of her lids.

  A car door opened and then slammed shut, but when she tried to squint to see what was coming, she was forced to retreat again from the stab of brightness.

  “Uh, Chloe, what’s happening?” asked Stan, groggy and frightened beside her.

  “I don’t know. Just let me do the talking,” Chloe whispered as she blindly scooted forward in the hope of filling the most prominent claw marks in the ground with her skirt. A dark figure climbed the hill, surrounded by light, with a long, gangly shadow stretching all the way up the slope toward her.

  “Stay where you are,” commanded a familiar male voice that Chloe couldn’t quite place.

  She heard the static and button press of a walkie-talkie before the man spoke again. “This is Car 4—checking in at Tower 1,” a burst of static again, and then the button punch to silence it. “Repeat—Car 4 at Tower 1—I have a problem.”

  Another voice cut through the static in response. “Car 4—go for report.”

  “Uh—I’ve got two kids trespassing at Tower 1,” static, “And the top of the tower seems to be—missing—over,” he said.

  There was a long moment of silence as Chloe tried to make out the features of the square-headed man before her.

  “Repeat that, Car 4—did you say the top of the tower is missing?” the voice asked over the walkie-talkie.

  “Affirmative,” answered Car 4. “It looks like the top section has been ripped off or something—there’s no sign of it in the immediate vicinity.”

  Another long pause as Chloe fought to swallow. “Stay put, Car 4, and keep them there.” Static. “We’re sending a team out to meet you—over.”

  “Copy that,” said Car 4 as his hand and the walkie-talkie lowered to his side… “Chloe, is that you?”

  Chloe eyes bulged as Brent Meeks stepped closer, sporting a freshly trimmed crew cut and a hard scowl. He’d traded in the crisp police department uniform for a black tactical outfit, complete with a many-pocketed vest and what looked like a submachine gun slung across his chest.

  “Officer Meeks,” Chloe stammered.

  “I’m not a police officer anymore, Chloe,” he answered stonily. “It’s just Brent.”

  Chloe saw the name “B. Meeks” printed across the breast pocket of his vest. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I work security for the Daedalus Group now,” he answered with officious pride. “The question is what are you doing here? And what happened to the tower?”

  Chloe wasn’t sure why, but she felt like she had to protect the dragon. She owed him her life, and she tried not to shake as she forced herself to shrug. “What do you mean? We’ve just been hanging out… I didn’t know anything was wrong with the tower.”

  Brent removed a little LED flashlight from his belt, and with a click of a button sent a brilliant blue beam up the side of the steel girders. Chloe and Stan both followed his gaze to the torn claws of metal that jutted from the structure some twenty feet below where the tower had previously ended.

  Chloe fought against the brewing headache as her mind raced. “Wow, what happened there?” she asked with a bit of forced awe in her voice. “Is that not what it’s supposed to look like?”

  Brent turned the harsh beam on her without warning, sending another streak of wincing pain through her head. “I’
m pretty sure I saw red blinking lights when I came down the road. Are you telling me you didn’t see any blinking lights up there?”

  “Uh, I saw a pretty close lightning flash just now,” Chloe offered. “Is that what you mean?”

  Brent clicked off the flashlight, and though Chloe could barely make out his face amid the glare, she could feel his stare boring into her. “Why don’t you two come with me down to the car and get warm,” he suggested. “This is going to take a while.”

  Chapter 16

  The Daedalus Group

  Chloe and Stan huddled in the center of the expansive back seat of the black Chevy Suburban that was known as Car 4 to the Daedalus Group security team. Brent Meeks paced back and forth in front of the windshield, occasionally responding to brief bursts of information over the walkie-talkie. The side-mounted spotlight had been retrained on the jagged end of Tower 1, and Chloe’s gaze returned often to the brightly lit destruction highlighted there.

  Stan’s leg had started shaking as soon as Brent had left them alone, and it continued to bounce at a rapid clip with no sign of stopping. “Are we under arrest?”

  “I don’t think so,” Chloe answered. “Brent isn’t a cop anymore.” She still felt the remnants of the surge that had gone through her throbbing in her temples and tingling in her fingers and toes. She tried to focus on the immediate predicament.

  “But you know him?” Stan asked hopefully.

  “Yeah, he’s the guy I busted for cheating on my mom.”

  “Huh,” said Stan with wild eyes and a slightly crazed smirk. “That’s probably not ideal, is it?” He, too, looked back toward the newly missing section of tower. “What happened, Chloe?” asked Stan with an uncharacteristically serious expression. “And don’t bullshit me; I’m high, not stupid. I saw the blinking red lights when we got here. I remember sitting beside you on the hill and looking up. Then…”

  “I don’t know what happened,” Chloe started before stopping herself. She didn’t know how to explain the dragon in human form, but there was no refuting the destroyed tower. I’m not crazy! She took a deep breath. “Okay, something came out of the pond. Like a giant snake…with horns…and legs…and wings.” She forced herself to meet Stan’s bloodshot gaze. “It came out of the water and took the top of the tower and flew into the clouds.”