Page 11 of Elemental Hall: Nautica (Elemental Hall #1)

Darius and I huddle in the dark, calling the full might of a hurricane down onto the spot where we sit atop our bedrolls.

We are opposite each other, close enough to touch, hand to hand, power flowing out from both of us as we call in the storm. Darius is doing most of the work, pulling the clouds to us, pulling in all that whirling chaos to tear at us, to try to drown us or destroy us.

I am the one who has to try to keep us from dying while he does it. I take the water and form it into a bubble around us, holding it as a shield against the wrath of the storm. I grit my teeth as the wind batters at it, as rain lashes down on it, as lightning strikes nearby.

“I can stop pulling it in,” Darius says. “I can help you to hold off the storm.”

“Don’t!” I insist. If Darius stops, then the storm will drift away from us again, endangering everyone else. We have to hold it here. “I can do this, Darius.”

I sit there, gritting my teeth, trying to control the shield of water around us, holding it against everything the storm can throw at us.

The winds tear at that shield, trying to rip it to pieces.

It’s all I can do to hold against them. The first time lightning strikes the shield, I yelp in pain and shock, but the shield grounds it. I hold, barely.

I keep holding. For minute after minute, I sit there, but it is obvious that the storm will not abate anytime soon. This was something summoned to last the night. If it does so with the fury that Ash and Sybil have managed to pour into it, I am not sure that I will be able to hold out.

Darius clearly senses that, because I feel the moment when he lets go of his control of the storm, pouring his energy into helping me hold the shield.

“Darius! You can’t!” I insist.

“The whole storm is over us now,” he says. “I’ve set the wind patterns to keep it over us. It will hold here, at least until its power abates. You need my help, Sera.”

I can only acknowledge the truth of it, especially when the next lightning bolt comes down. I brace for another shock running through me, but instead, Darius seems to take that power, pouring it back into the shield, energizing it more.

We hold there, together, and I stare into his eyes while our joined power keeps off the hurricane battering us.

His palms are pressed against mine, that simple human contact almost impossibly intimate, when I can feel the totality of what he is through that touch.

In that moment, it is as though we are not two separate people, but joined.

Darius smiles then.

“What are you smiling at?” I demand.

“Simply that I did not expect to spend this night so close to one of the most beautiful girls in the academy.”

I don’t blush, but only because I’m too busy focusing on maintaining the shield. “This is not some kind of date, Darius!”

Yet it is impossible to ignore how close he is, and how good-looking he is. Under other circumstances, if I’d been told that I would be spending the night this close to someone who looked like him, I would be… well, I’m not sure what I would feel. Or what would happen.

I’m attracted to him. It’s impossible not to admit that.

“Why haven’t you made more of an effort to fit in with the others here?” I ask.

“You want to have this conversation now?”

I nod. I need some conversation, any conversation, to distract me from the sheer effort that it’s taking to hold back the storm.

“Talk to me, Darius,” I say. “If we’re going to get through this, I can’t think about how impossible what we’re doing is. Distract me.”

“I can think of all kinds of ways to distract you,” he says, raising an eyebrow.

I laugh. “Does a line like that ever work? Besides, neither one of us can move right now.”

“A most annoying situation,” he says. “To be trapped here, like this, with you, but not to be able to do anything.”

“So talk to me instead,” I say. “Why aren’t you making an effort with the others?”

“Who says I’m not making an effort?”

“I do. You don’t talk to anyone, you haven’t tried to make friends with anyone. You’re still wearing Umbran clothes…”

“Everything about me marks me as Umbran,” Darius says. “Changing clothes would not help. As for the rest, I see the looks. I know that they don’t like me, so why should I go begging to people who hate me for friendship? Should I bow and scrape to Lumina’s nobles the way I had to back in Umbrae?”

“So you push everyone away so that no one can hurt you?” I say. “That sounds like a recipe for loneliness.”

“Why do you care?” he demands.

“Maybe I just think that no one should be alone like that.”

“I’m not alone. I’m here with you.”

That isn’t the same, and I’m sure he knows it.

“Why did you leave Umbrae?” I ask.

He tilts his head to one side. “What do you know about it as a place?”

“Only what’s in books.” Even then, the history of the conflict between the two great lands has not been my main focus in the library. I’ve been busy trying to find things that will let me catch up with the training of the other students.

“Books won’t tell you what Umbrae is really like,” Darius says.

“It won’t tell you the way life barely clings to the soil, how every day there is a battle to survive.

It won’t tell you that it is a land without mercy, where if you are weak for a moment, you might find yourself killed or enslaved.

My family was poor. When it was found that I had a talent to connect to the elements, the emperor’s men came and took me to one of the schools.

When my mother dared to protest…” He shakes his head.

“I have not seen my family since that day. I do not know if they are alive or dead. I was trained to fight, trained to obey, and they didn’t care if I hated them, because they knew I would not escape. ”

“Until you did,” I say.

“I was on a scout ship. Umbrae is always looking for weak points in the veil of storms. I saw my chance to steal a small boat. I piloted it into the storms, not caring if I lived or died. The last I remember is going into the water… then you found me.”

I can’t imagine what he went through. Darius falls silent, his eyes heavy-lidded with a pain that has nothing to do with the storm all around us. I want to know more, but I also don’t want to hurt him by asking.

Instead, I sit there in silence, holding the shield around us with him.

I can feel my body aching from being still for so long.

I can feel tiredness seeping into my bones, but somehow I keep going.

We both do. The storm shuts out the rest of the world so completely that Darius and I might as well be the only two people in existence.

We sit there, staring into each other’s eyes, each other’s souls, holding our shield against everything the sky can throw at us.

I lose track of time. I feel myself starting to fall asleep, but Darius shakes me awake.

I feel myself growing thirsty and hungry, but I ignore it.

I have to. It is just the two of us here, far too close together, close enough that it would be easy to lean in and kiss him if that wouldn’t make the whole situation still more complicated.

Not that I want to. At least I don’t think so. Do I?

The storm seems to go on forever. Locked into the magic with Darius, I have no sense of how much time is passing, only that eventually, the fury of the storm seems to have lessened against the shield.

Even then, we keep holding it. We keep up the shield until the storm fades, its power finally spent.

I feel the rain go from all consuming to heavy, to almost nothing.

The wind stops howling, drifting down to a mere breeze.

Finally, it seems that the storm is over.

Even then, it takes minutes longer for us to risk lowering the shield, losing contact with each other’s hands, the dark of the night sky still around us. Exhaustion hits me in that moment, utter and total, impossible to ignore. I see Darius all but collapse opposite me.

“We did it,” I say. “We actually did it.”

“Did you doubt that we would?” Darius asks, with a trace of an arrogant smile that would work better if he didn’t look so utterly wiped out.

The truth is that I had no idea if we would make it through this storm or not. I want to tell Darius that, want to thank him for what he has just done, but I’m too tired even for that. I lie down without even realizing that I’m doing it, and in mere seconds, exhausted sleep claims me.

I dream of things in the depths of the ocean, of the seraphin and the leviathans, of kraken stalking the dark places, huge and deadly. I do not fear them because I am not a creature for them to prey upon. I am the water itself, and the water is even more powerful than they could ever be.

It is light when I wake. There is a blanket over me and I realize that Darius must have put it there, not that he is ever likely to admit to such a kindness.

He is standing a little way away, looking out from the edge of the rise we are on.

I stand and walk toward him. My body still feels tired, aching with the aftereffects of our ordeal, but I also feel refreshed.

We survived, and that counts for something.

When I reach Darius, I see what he’s looking at.

The island around us is devastated, utterly ruined.

Fallen trees litter the ground. There are rocks at the base of the slope showing where a whole section of it has fallen away.

There are scorched areas where the lightning burned trees and plants.

I don’t know if there were other students on this small island last night.

I hope not. Anything living here is unlikely to have survived.

But we survived, and so, I hope, did everyone else. All my friends assigned to other spots, other islands. All the students who might have died otherwise.

“We should head back to the main island,” Darius says.

I nod. I want to head back. I want to find Ash and hit him until there’s nothing left of him. I want to kick Sybil from one side of the island to the other. I want to see them both thrown out of the Elemental Hall for what they tried to do.

Of course, to do that, we need to get back, and there’s one problem with that:

The bridge we crossed to get here is gone.