Page 21 of The Elementalist (Four Elements #1)

Shadow Pines Manor

It might not have been the best time to pursue a confrontation with vampires, being only a few hours before sunset.

Then again, no time like the present, right?

That, and sitting around not doing something about them could get more people killed.

That word ‘people’ bounced around in my head for the entire fifteen minutes or so it took me to drive from the quarry, across town, and to the old boarding house.

Both the quarry and the vampires’ lair sat in the outskirts of Shadow Pines, but not on the same side.

Piper and Derek—or whatever their actual names had been—used to be people, but I couldn’t dwell on that now.

Whatever humanity they once possessed had disappeared a long time ago.

For all I knew, they could have been born during the Great Depression as easily as the Civil War or hell, even the American Revolution.

Though, their ‘greaser’ fashion sense probably meant they’d died in the fifties.

My operational knowledge of vampires remained limited, though I had heard that they tended to become more powerful with age.

If such rumors had any truth to them, I damn sure hoped these two were only around sixty years as vampires and not hundreds.

Crystal kept quiet as we drove across town and headed onto one of the backwoods roads to the southwest.

The isolation of the remote country made me think back to how little fight the two had put up when they confronted me at home.

Initially, I’d wondered if it had been due to my not inviting them in, but even after I’d pursued them outside, they kept running.

It didn’t seem likely that I’d frightened them senseless.

Most ordinary people probably would have shit themselves and run from a guy conjuring ice and lightning from his hands.

However, as far as I knew, even lightning wouldn’t cause permanent harm to vampires.

Sure it could light them on fire if I got lucky.

Neither one of them knew I could conjure open flame yet.

Okay, so I superheated the gun, but heating metal and making fire fly out of my hand isn’t the same.

The hot-hand on the gun was far subtler than throwing fireballs.

Call me silly, but I hadn’t wanted to risk burning down the building I live and work in.

I didn’t want to delude myself into feeling like this would be easy, as if I were an exterminator going after roaches.

I’m sure these two wouldn’t simply roll over and die like pests, especially not when I’m the one invading their home.

Regardless of what made them run last time, I had a sneaking suspicion that wouldn’t be the case today, and I couldn’t allow myself to become overconfident.

Hell, I didn’t even feel confident yet.

This elemental thing is too new for me, and part of me still waited to wake up.

A few minutes after we left downtown behind, I spotted an old wooden sign and pulled off onto an overgrown road—more of a pair of tire ruts in dirt with gravel between them than an actual road—that veered off into the woods.

I stopped to gather my thoughts, staring at the sign I’d seen so many times before but never bothered to take a close look at.

It had, at one time, been plain white with black lettering, but five decades of sitting out in the forest with no maintenance resulted in varying shades of brown and fungus.

Shadow Pines Manor

Boarding House

Men or Women welcome

Rooms by the month - $150

Rooms by the week - $40

“The name of that place makes it sound like an old folks’ home,” I muttered.

Crystal glanced at me with an expression that said she found my observation lame, but also faintly endearing. “Technically, it is housing the elderly. The very elderly… though they’re not people anymore.”

“We’ve got maybe two hours of daylight left.”

“I doubt it will matter.” She swiped at her hair, pulling it off her face so she could see with both eyes.

“Wait… aren’t they weaker or something in the day?”

“Yes, but they’re not going to be outside, are they?” She gestured at the trail stretching off ahead of us. “They’ve been living in this place for years. It’s rather likely all the windows are boarded up to keep it dark inside.”

“Great.” I eased off the brake and let the truck roll forward. “So they become weaker when exposed to the sunlight, not based on what time it is?”

“Precisely.”

“Does that mean they never sleep? Geez, no wonder they’re insane.”

She chuckled. “I’m afraid I don’t understand it exactly, but I do know they sometimes do something that looks like sleep. How often or for how long, I haven’t a clue. But it isn’t tied to sunrise or sunset.”

“Maybe we should approach on foot so they don’t hear the truck coming?”

“They’ll hear us on foot, too. It’s like trying to sneak up on a paranoid cat. You might as well drive the whole way. It will give them less time to prepare.”

I nodded and accelerated a little, pushing the truck up to around twenty-five. “Just need to be careful I don’t get us trapped in a burning house.”

She glanced at me with a flat expression. “You can create fire out of nothing. Can you not send it back where you called it from?”

My brain got stuck. All the time I’d spent with Michael trying to learn how to work this elemental thing, not once had I even considered the notion of ‘un-making’ fire.

Sure, I’d put it out with rain, but ‘reverse-creating’ the fire directly hadn’t even occurred to me.

I’d been too awestruck at being able to summon it…

like a small boy who’d discovered matches for the first time.

“Umm. Yeah, that makes sense, but I haven’t tried it. ”

“Unless you are looking forward to a drawn-out fight and possibly death, I suggest you learn fast and use fire on them.”

“What are you going to do?”

She shrugged. “Improvise, I suppose.”

The long, winding driveway ended at a giant dirt parking lot overgrown with weeds and untamed grass.

An enormous three-story house that had clearly seen better days sat on the left.

To the right, a particularly dense forest came right up to the edge of the dirt.

The second and third floors had balconies bordered by wrought-iron fencing well into the process of falling off.

Every window had boards covering them, except for a handful of giant bay windows on the ground level, which had been blocked off from the inside by heavy curtains.

Ivy crept up the walls, though the plants gave off a sense of sickness, no doubt objecting to the dark energy within.

In fact, the entire property gave me the feeling of a necrotic lesion gradually spreading decay into the woods.

“Yeah… they’re definitely here,” I whispered, peering up at a gauze of cobweb in the closest of the bay windows.

I decided to park on the right side, as far away from the front of the house as I could get, and backed it up until the rear bumper poked in among the trees. If things went really wrong in there, I didn’t want the house collapsing on top of my Ford.

Crystal got out of the truck first—and promptly shimmied out of her skirt.

Whoa. Okay, that I was not expecting. I blinked in astonishment at her red lace panties.

She didn’t seem to care one way or the other if I stared, and calmly pulled off her boots before rummaging around in her purse.

As if the sight of her perfect, albeit pale legs hadn’t stalled every thought in my head already, watching her pull a pair of jeans—and sneakers—from a purse too small to hold them pretty much caused a complete mental shutdown.

She hurried into them, moving like a VHS tape playing on fast forward. Before I could pick my jaw up from my lap, she had her sneakers on and appeared ready to go inside.

“What…” I gestured at her, unable to make the words work or move from the driver’s seat.

Crystal stuffed her fancy boots into the purse before tossing it on the passenger seat, chucked her abandoned skirt on top of it, then shut the door. “One thing I’ve learned is to always carry a change of clothing.”

“Um. Expecting you’ll need to dress practical at a moment’s notice?” I raised an eyebrow.

“No. I hate being stranded in the nude. Not that I’m embarrassed, but it tends to attract unwanted attention.”

“Didn’t think nudity bothered you.”

She smiled. “It doesn’t. However, when I’m trying to sneak around all inconspicuous like, it has the exact opposite effect of being unnoticed.”

“How often has that happened to you?” I finally hopped out, pushed my door shut, and walked around in front of the truck.

She fell in step at my side on the way to the front porch. “Are you asking about intentional episodes, accidents, or emergencies?”

“Do I even want to know?”

Crystal grinned with a bit of shrug, like she wanted to bust out laughing—but also tried to stay quiet. “I have a few special… talents that clothes get in the way of.”

“I’ll bet,” I muttered past a smile.

“Now whose mind is in the gutter?”

“I’m a man. My mind spends half its day there.” I winked and grasped the knob.

She vanished—except for her clothes.

“Holy shit!” I hissed as quietly as possible.

She returned a few seconds later. “A perk from the fey side of the family. My great aunt’s a wood nymph.”

“Incredible.”

“Not quite… vampires can still see me when I turn invisible. Luckily, they can’t teleport.”

I turned the knob and eased the door open inward. “You can teleport? Are you serious?”

“Quite. Only, it’s fairly useless for anything except escaping bad situations. Only my body teleports… nothing I’m wearing or carrying goes with me. But I found a way around it, sort of. My purse isn’t exactly normal.”

“I kinda got that feeling already. You ready?” I asked.

“More than ready. They killed my sister.”

I nodded. The problem was... I wasn’t ready.

No, not at all.