The Elementalists Read online

  Audrey shot Chloe a look, and Chloe reopened the menu on the table in front of him. “What do you really want?”

  Audrey nodded, and he ordered again without needing to look at the menu. “Grilled chicken penne in vodka sauce and a large banana health shake.”

  Audrey scribbled and glanced to Chloe with a playful smile. “Enjoying freedom?”

  “I’ll have the usual,” Chloe muttered with a furrowed brow as Audrey spun away.

  “I’ll be right back with those drinks,” she sang over her shoulder.

  In the silence that followed, Chloe took the opportunity to glance again to Kirin. He was listening with rapt attention to whatever Sin Decareaux was saying. Chloe looked back to Ezra, who held his eyes on the kitchen door.

  “I think I’m in love with your mother,” he stated.

  Chloe winced. “Oh, come on, man! That’s gross, and she’s thirty-four!”

  “Well, then there ain’t nothing wrong with thirty-four, is there?”

  Chloe was not having it.

  “She’s hot!” he argued.

  Chloe crossed her arms and stared out the window. It looked like it was going to rain.

  “Don’t worry, Lightning, you’re hot, too! I mean, look at you, sitting there all hunched and pouty—you’re just about the cutest person I’ve ever seen.”

  Chloe couldn’t give him the satisfaction of a smile.

  “But you’re too young for me, and you know it.” Ezra smiled enough for both of them and glanced back to the kitchen. “But Audrey there is ALL woman… I bet she could teach me things.”

  “You’re really gonna have to shut up now, or I’ll tell her to make you pay for the penne and shake!”

  He immediately surrendered. “I’m done.” He pretended to zip his mouth shut.

  Chloe rolled her eyes as rain started pattering against the windows. She looked out, searching for something ominous in the sky. It was an unexceptional grey ceiling of clouds, but the rain started to pick up.

  “Uh-oh, here comes the rain,” taunted Ezra. “I must have made Lightning Girl mad.”

  “Trust me, you’d know it if I was mad: thunder, flooding, tornadoes, the works!” she joked just as the tinges of a migraine pulsed from the base of her skull. Not now!

  She’d hoped that maybe the routine physical exertion would cure her of the headaches, but she could already tell that the throbbing pain and waves of nausea were coming. Soon the idea of food would be repulsive. Tonight she’d be curled in the fetal position with the lights dimmed, her eyes shut, and a hot towel draped over her forehead. Tomorrow—of course, a Saturday—would be a total wash, but her real concern now was trying to get through the next hour without making a complete whimpering spectacle of herself.

  Audrey returned with a tray laden with shakes, soda, and water, expertly balancing the precarious load as she doled out drinks from memory.

  “Thank you, Audrey,” said Ezra a little too sweetly as he took his health shake.

  Audrey only needed a glance to recognize the abrupt onset of her daughter’s waxy pallor and dark rimmed eyes. Chloe managed a meek smile in response.

  “It’s almost the twenty-first, isn’t it?” Audrey realized.

  Chloe nodded. “Naturally.”

  “You want this to go?” Audrey asked, holding up the Black and White shake. “I can take a fifteen-minute break and drive you home,” she whispered.

  “No, I’ll take it. It might be my last chance to eat something for a little while,” Chloe answered as the rain started pelting the window. She closed her eyes and sucked on the straw, trying to will herself to enjoy the perfect flavors that reached her mouth before it was rejected by her stomach.

  “You feeling all right, Lightning?” asked Ezra. “Your whole cutesy-sulky thing is starting to look more sickly-pitiful.”

  “Sorry,” she muttered, squinting into the near-blinding brightness of the window despite the clouds and rain. “I get pretty bad headaches sometimes, is all.”

  “Ah, say no more,” Ezra said with a knowing wink. “I have a sister.”

  This guy is a smartass!

  “If you need to go or something, I can give you a ride home,” he offered.

  A really nice smartass, though.

  “If you want, I could even stay there for a while and make sure you’re okay… You know, until your mom gets home.” He flashed his teeth again.

  Chloe had to laugh, even though it hurt like hell. She glanced over to the stoner table and noticed Kirin looking back at her during one of the brief lulls in his fervent exchange with Sin D. Chloe quickly looked to Ezra. “No, I think I’ll stick around.”

  But now Ezra was looking out the window.

  At first, it sounded like someone was throwing acorns at the glass, and then it started to sound more like golf balls. One of the girls across from Chloe yelped. From a few tables away, Stan shouted the obvious. “Dude! Hail!”

  Quarter-sized chunks began to fall across the parking lot, clanging off street signs and trash cans and shattering against cars. Outside, traffic stopped as pedestrians screamed and ran for cover, shielding their heads with whatever they could find. Everything from trees to stoplights swayed and jostled violently. The windshield on Ezra’s already battered Ford Focus took a particularly large smack that left a spiderweb crack around the impact. Everyone backed away from the windows.

  Ezra leaned closer to Chloe. “Is this what you mean by the works?”

  “Yeah, something like this,” Chloe whispered as her gaze picked out a figure standing at the edge of the woods across the street.

  It was a man, partially hidden by the trunk of a tree, unmoving, and making no effort to protect himself. It was hard to see through the cascade of ice, but he seemed to wear nondescript clothes that matched the shadows of the woods. His hair was long and silvery white, his face chiseled and pale. Despite the distance and obscurity, his crystal blue eyes bore into Chloe with alarming intensity.

  Immediately the migraine reached up from her spine and slammed against her skull as if with an echo of the lightning strike. Her senses caved in and faded to black, save for the bone-quivering sound of a bestial roar that rose out of her memory along with a spike of terror. She tasted the coppery tang of blood in her mouth, unaware that she’d bit her tongue until the sting of it registered.

  She clenched her eyes so tightly that her lids shook as the initial wave crested. Then, as quickly as they had come, the headache and violent weather subsided. Breathing slowly, she opened her eyes again and looked for the figure across the street. He was gone.

  Positive Pete’s Diner was completely silent. Ezra turned to her with a quizzical look. He opened his mouth as if he wanted to ask a question, but didn’t. Chloe held her pale and sweaty head in her hands, barely able to keep her eyes open.

  “How ’bout we get the food to go and I give you that ride home,” he suggested.

  Chloe glanced at Kirin once more, but this time he was staring out the window as Cynthia clung to his shoulder for protection. She turned back to Ezra as the next ripple of migraine swelled on the horizon. “Yeah, thank you, Ezra. That’d be good.”

  • • •

  Chloe lay on her back in the dark with clenched lids. She couldn’t sleep, wracked with tides of nausea and pain. Occasionally the onslaught ebbed into five- to twenty-minute windows of respite, but even then she could not distract herself with books, television, or music. Eye strain, bright lights, and noises were crippling, and the idea of food was abhorrent. For now, all she could do was press the hot cloth to her forehead, breathe deeply, and hold on for the latest wave to break.

  Shipwreck leaned against her hip and purred gently, his contented presence both comforting and goading.

  Chloe moaned and pressed the cloth down harder over her eyes with a tickle of warm water dripping past her ear. The hot stabs through her skull had unearthed hazy images buried in her subconscious: the bone-shuddering roar and then a glimpse of an impossible creature rising from th
e water…

  She tried to think of something else, anything, but could not escape the nightmarish picture of a blue, reptilian gaze or the sense of utter helplessness as its dinosaur-like claws shook the earth.

  A tremble of cold passed through her, and the throbbing in her temples began to abate. Slowly, Chloe opened her strained eyes to the dark ceiling. She took a series of long breaths while charting the familiar patterns of cracked paint and mildew stains above. A tiny moth hung beside the light, as if waiting hopefully for someone to turn it on.

  Chloe sat up and glanced to her computer, asleep on the desk at the other side of the room. With a slow exhale, she swiveled to the edge of the bed and placed her sweaty feet on the floor. It made no sense. This memory from the pond couldn’t be real. But it seemed as true an experience as any other from her first two freakishly unpredictable weeks of high school. Maybe I really am going crazy!

  But then she remembered the strange man who was watching from beneath the trees outside the diner. Something about his piercing gaze reminded her of…the other. Was he the one who carried me into the hospital? The hospital staff had seen the man that had brought her in; if he was the same man from the hail storm…then I’m not crazy?

  Chloe stood on wobbly feet and shut her eyes again until the dizziness settled. Shipwreck let out a little yowl of protest from the bed, but she glanced past him to the alarm clock on her nightstand: 12:21 a.m.

  The first step toward the computer sent an unpleasant shock to her temples, magnified into a pounding drum inside her head. But she forced her feet forward with the knowledge that she had only about five or ten minutes left of this comparatively manageable state. She slumped into the desk chair with a whimper and let another stirring of dizziness settle before bringing her hand to the mouse.

  She closed her eyes again before her fingers moved to wake the screen, but even through clenched lids, she was assaulted by the bright glow. She squinted into the LCD onslaught and sent a hand fumbling for the brightness button on the monitor, only to be attacked by a series of grating beeps instead.

  Her fingers hovered over the keys. She was a devoted student of evolution and biology, unable to bring herself to type the word that haunted her addled mind. The little black cursor blinked expectantly.

  Slowly her fingers pushed the keys: “D, R, A, G, O, N, S,” and with a resolute sigh, she pushed “ENTER.” In less than a second, more than 35,000,000 distinct results were listed before her, topped by a collage of colorful, artistic renderings of the giant winged lizards of myth, often shown dueling in the air, leering over a corny depiction of a wizard, or readying for takeoff with some half-clad woman mounted on its back. Without thinking, Chloe rolled her eyes with another jolt of pain that brought her palm to her head.

  In that instant, she saw again the beast from the pond staring back at her. She peered at the screen from between her fingers. She had to admit that some of the pictures did look pretty close. At her bidding, the cursor drifted down and clicked on the Wikipedia entry below. Pages and pages of text about the etymology, history, and many faceted myths of dragons appeared, all discussing legendary creatures of abnormal size and power with serpentine and/or otherwise reptilian features. The dragon myth, it seemed, had been prevalent in every ancient culture across the globe, some seeing them as horrible monsters and others regarding them with reverence and great honor.

  Her weary eyes skipped through comparisons of the European and Asian dragon and passed over the Greek roots of the word, settling finally on the section concerning the still culturally significant Chinese dragon. The ancient Chinese had viewed dragons as symbols of great wisdom and importance, linking the image of the five-clawed dragon with the position of the Emperor himself. They viewed dragons as the physical and spiritual incarnations of natural elements, the guardians of Earth, both capable and responsible for bringing great advancements to humanity and causing vast natural disasters that had erased entire cities from history.

  Chloe was a little embarrassed that her heart had started beating faster, but she couldn’t help it. She scanned on.

  According to the nameless “experts” of the Wikipedia dragon page, a bronze cauldron that dated back almost three thousand years to the early Zhou Dynasty was said to contain the earliest engraved scripture detailing the Tipping Point Prophecy, which concerned the preordained return of the dragons.

  There was nothing more on the subject there, and no further reference to it in the bibliography listed below. She clicked back to the Google homepage and searched for “Tipping Point Prophecy,” but the results were underwhelming at best. She scanned down a list of sites with close matches, all discussing outdated Mayan doomsday scenarios, new age conferences, and other assorted scientifically unsupported alarmist hokum. But halfway down, she spotted a long-since-updated mention of the Chinese Tipping Point Prophecy at: www.ancientchinese-legends.blogspot.com.

  She opened the site to a splash page ringed by a poorly drawn cartoon dragon, and she raised a skeptical eyebrow. At the bottom of a list of page titles she saw “Tipping Point Prophecy” and clicked on it with the sound of a synthesized gong.

  She raised the other eyebrow too and started reading the oversized aqua green letters on a background of star-speckled black:

  The Tipping Point Prophecy was inscribed in bronze on the Tianlong Cauldron, dating back to the ancient Zhou Dynasty of Western China. The prophecy states that when the rule of man reaches its zenith and the world begins its decline at the hands of human arrogance and neglect, the elemental powers of the earth will rise from their prisons, deep beneath the water and rock, and wipe clean the pestilence of mankind.

  “Riiiiight,” Chloe chuckled with a buzzing reverb in her head.

  Then the screen and timer went blank, and she heard her mom swear from downstairs. Thunder rolled gently in the distance. “Are you kidding me?” Chloe whispered to the darkness.

  Slowly her ears adjusted to the complete lack of electrical hum. The symphony of crickets through the open window seemed louder against the hushed quiet of the house. Shipwreck mewed plaintively as if in an attempt to add to their song. Chloe swiveled to find him perched on the windowsill between the green drapes that had been part of the summer redecoration project. He stared into the woods with rigid intensity.

  She stood, instinctively glancing back to the dead clock before stepping to the window. The streetlights were out down the road in both directions, and the cloud-covered moon offered no light to cut though the layers of shadow at the edge of the yard. Chloe leaned down with her hands on the sill beside the cat and followed Shipwreck’s gaze to the trees. She held her breath, half expecting to see the blue eyes emerge from the gloom, but there was nothing but the darker outline of the branches.

  She watched and listened, feeling the heavy pulse of her blood in her temples. The crickets raged, and she heard the faint hoot of an owl… When she’d been a little girl, the now-silent call of the tree frogs had blanketed all the other night sounds through the warm months. Like with the bees, Mrs. Greenwald had talked of how the death of the frogs was a sign of widespread ecological decay.

  She rubbed Shipwreck’s head, and he added a purr to their somber vigil. “Any dragons out there, buddy?” Chloe asked as they peered into the woods across the road. She heard her mother’s footsteps creaking up the stairs behind her. Moments later, her mom knocked softly and peered in with a flashlight.

  “You okay, honey?” Audrey asked, spotting Chloe at the window.

  “Yeah, I’m in a lull,” she answered as the sky flashed again, with another unhurried rumble to follow.

  Audrey stepped in and put a fresh bowl of steaming water beside Chloe’s bed. “You need anything else? A candle or flashlight?”

  “No, I’m covered. I’ll be lying down with my eyes shut again soon.”

  “You going to be able to sleep?”

  Chloe shrugged.

  “Well, I’m going to bed, but if you need anything at all…” Audrey was upset as
always that she couldn’t somehow fix Chloe’s pain.

  “I’ll be all right,” Chloe reassured, though she felt the familiar ripples of unease traveling up her spine, which always preceded the next wave of migraine. “Mom, do you remember the sound of the tree frogs when I was little?”

  “Of course, but that was nothing. When I was your age, the frogs were so loud that I had trouble sleeping at night.” Even through the darkness Chloe could see the smile that bloomed across her mother’s face. “Every year, when you first heard them, you knew that summer was coming. Cicadas all day and the tree frogs all night; it was great.”

  Chloe started to feel dizzy again. With a last look to the dark trees beyond, she turned back toward the bed. “Do you think it means something that they’re gone?” She sat on the edge of the mattress and closed her eyes as the next wave came on. “Do you think it could be a sign that something…bad is coming?”

  Chloe felt her mom’s hands helping her to ease back into the pillow and then heard her mom dip and wring out the washcloth in the bowl.

  “Things change, honey. The world goes through cycles, just like we do. Maybe right now Earth is getting her migraine, only it takes a lot longer to pass.”

  Chloe felt the hot, damp cloth pressed across her brow and the pressure of her mom’s hand, as if holding back the throbbing torment. “It’s just, all the famine and flooding and earthquakes and war—it seems like it’s all going downhill fast, like we’re headed for a tipping point or something,” said Chloe.

  “I know things were bad for us in the past, but I’m better now, we’re better. We’re going to be fine—I need you to know that, Chloe.” Audrey lifted the washcloth and planted a gentle kiss on Chloe’s forehead. “A lot of people have it pretty hard right now, a whole lot harder than we can imagine. But it’s just like it was with me, and is with you now; the pain recedes and the world keeps on going. That’s what humans do; we adapt and keep going—it’s just a part of life.”

  “I just wish I could do something,” Chloe mumbled.