Page 22 of The Elementalist (Four Elements #1)

Whacking the Nest

The door let us into a short foyer with a coat closet on both sides.

Beyond it lay a large chamber with dusty-as-hell burgundy walls, sofas, and chairs.

It resembled a cross between the living room of an enormous house and the common area of a hotel.

The air hung thick with the smell of wet fabric and age, along with a nearly eye-watering stench of rotting corpse.

I covered my mouth and nose, stifling a cough. “Gah… do you smell that?”

“Mold?”

“No, death.”

She shook her head. “No. It just smells like an abandoned building.”

Whoever used to run this place as a boarding house hadn’t been big on making it homey.

The place had a certain sense of austerity to it, decorated in a style reminiscent of the early cheapskate period.

Even before the place suffered abandonment, all the furnishings in sight looked utilitarian with little in the way of decoration.

A small, round table stood between a pair of padded chairs in the corner by the hallway entrance.

It held a rotary phone that probably hadn’t worked—or been touched—since 1962.

It honestly surprised me to see electric bulbs on the wall sconces.

Despite my newfound abilities, I still felt like a dumb rube who got drunk and tricked into whacking a hornet nest with a stick while his somewhat-less-drunk friends laughed at him. Hopefully, I won’t end up screaming and running in circles.

Unfortunately, the only light source we had to work with came from the open doorway behind us.

The hallway past the phone table looked exactly like the sort of pitch-black deathtrap that characters in horror movies—or any resident of Shadow Pines—should never walk down.

If I had a flashlight on me, I had the distinct feeling the batteries would have died after three steps.

“You were right about it being dark,” I whispered. “Guess it doesn’t much matter what time we came here.”

Crystal reached out her hand as if to allow a fairy to land on it; instead, a tennis-ball sized orb of yellow-green light appeared over her palm.

It floated up and drifted lazily about at random, but never glided more than a few feet away from her.

Three more light spheres appeared one after the next, all dancing around in meandering paths like moths.

“Okay… guess you save a bunch of money on batteries.”

She smiled. “Will-o-wisps.”

“Aren’t they supposed to be dark spirits that lure the unwary to drown in swamps or something?”

“That’s the actual living ones. This is pure magic. And, yes, wisps can be dangerous to humans, but they’re friends of the fey.”

“You would never lure someone off alone into the woods, would you?”

She overacted innocence. “Never.”

“But isn’t that what succubi do?”

“Perhaps the full-blood versions. I’m just a harmless variant.”

“How harmless?”

She winked. “Okay, maybe not that harmless.”

Since I could see, I advanced into the hall, hands poised like an Old West gunslinger. Only, instead of a Colt .45—or even the Ruger .44 under my arm—I planned on reaching for something a little hotter. “Well, I hope you don’t go around killing the horny bastards.”

Crystal’s sigh floated over my shoulder. “No. My feeding from a human only makes them a little tired. Okay, a lot tired. But trust me, they receive as much pleasure as I do. I don’t know where that bit about devouring souls came from.”

So much for my first impression. Guess she isn’t the type of girl who waits for marriage.

Strips of peeling wallpaper rustled in the air behind us as we went by.

The dust made it hard to tell for sure, but I think the walls had once been blue with patterns in darker blue.

Here and there, scraps of wooden molding lay loose along the corridor.

We passed a huge dining room as well as a hall with four bathrooms. Guess when this place operated forty years ago, the boarders had to come downstairs for a shower.

Everywhere I looked, things appeared to be falling apart.

More interesting, nothing seemed to have been repaired, like ever.

The front room had been the closest to clean, suggesting the two fiends might actually use it, but it didn’t seem like they set foot anywhere else downstairs.

Not like vampires had any need of kitchens or dining rooms.

A door in the kitchen revealed steps down to a basement, heavy with the smell of mildew.

Of course, I figured the vampires would be down there, but the stink of death didn’t hit me as bad here.

It had weakened the deeper into the house I went, so I turned around and headed back down the hall to the front room.

A wide archway on my right led from there to a trash-strewn room with more sofas, tables, and bookshelves.

Stairs at the back led to the second floor, and another, narrower hallway past the stairs contained closets of ancient cleaning supplies and a utility sink.

“Damn. When was the last time anyone sold Borax?”

“What’s that?” asked Crystal.

“Old cleaning stuff.” I shut the closet and headed for the stairs.

“Look out, Max!”

Before I could even whirl to look at her, she grabbed me by the shirt and dragged me backward.

A body sailed off the stairs above me on the right and fell in a blur to the floor.

He—no doubt a vampire—bounced back to his feet before I finished stumbling into Crystal.

I didn’t recognize the guy. Like the other two, he appeared to be somewhere in his twenties; however, he didn’t do the greaser thing.

This guy had a Nirvana T-shirt and jeans on.

Red glowing eyes, fangs, and a near-total lack of color in his face made it beyond obvious I locked stares with an undead.

The stench of death wafting from the guy turned my stomach as much as it filled me with the irresistible urge to destroy him—much the same way the average person reacts to having a giant cockroach appear without warning in the kitchen.

And so, as reflexively as stomping said cockroach, I reacted by thrusting my right arm out and chucking a fist-sized fireball. The dude’s eyes almost shot out from their sockets. He ducked, leaving my pyrotechnic instrument of doom cruising toward the extremely dry, cobweb-covered wall behind him.

Shit.

I focused too much on dampening the flame to react in time to the guy lunging for my throat.

Fortunately, Crystal swooped in front of me and hammered him in the jaw with her fist. My fireball hit the distant wall and whuffed out, thanks to my focused intention; still, a few scraps of flame rushed along cobwebs despite the old paper not igniting.

Since I could feel wherever it burned, I had a fairly easy time of putting it out before disaster happened.

A rapid slapping noise came from Crystal and the vampire, like someone stuck a sirloin steak into a fan.

Their arms blurred from the speed at which they traded punches and blocks…

and I think the vampire had pulled a knife.

Another set of footsteps came down the stairs at a run.

I spun to the right, thrusting both hands out and covering the steps with a thin layer of ice.

An extremely surprised vampire woman flew ass-first down the stairway in a flailing mess of yoga pants, blue hair, and bright red claws.

She slid into the room, bowling over a round wooden table between two wingback chairs, knocking it to pieces.

Initially, I couldn’t bring myself to attack a woman—at least until she sprang upright and pulled a gun on me.

She would’ve shot me right in the face, too—if Crystal hadn’t thrown the other vampire into her.

The bullet went past me into the wall. Time to get my head in the game.

I flung my arm up and hurled a fireball at the pair.

The male vampire blurred into a streak at Crystal, cornering her on the left side of the room.

The woman tried to dive out of the way, but the flames caught her arm. Like a gasoline-soaked rag, she bloomed into a standing conflagration. Her screams tore at my heart for only a moment before her voice pitch-shifted into a deep, demonic range that didn’t stir any feelings of guilt.

Crystal let off a yelp of surprise and vanished straight out of her clothes, which fell to the floor as the vampire stabbed his huge knife into thin air and stumbled past where she’d been standing.

Unable to stop his superhumanly fast sprint on the hardwood floor, he crashed into a bookshelf, embedding himself several inches deep in the wood with a sickening crunch.

The poor bastard just hung there, either unconscious or in too much pain to move.

Or maybe he had some sharp bits of wood stuck into places vampires didn’t much like.

I gathered some fire from the rapidly-decomposing female vampire and tossed it on the male vampire. He, too, immolated in seconds.

Crystal, naked as a forest nymph, stood beside me with her hands on her hips, shaking her head. “Sometimes, I forget how damn fast they are.”

I couldn’t help but stare. Her body looked far too good to be true. Perfect chest, perfect hourglass waist, perfect hips, perfect skin. “My dear, you are going to get me killed.”

“You don’t have to stare at me.”

“That’s like saying fire doesn’t have to consume oxygen.”

She flashed a coy smile while padding over to her clothes, and motioned to what was left of the burning vamps.

“Speaking of fire. Please don’t let the house catch.

We might need to go through this place with a fine toothed comb.

Lots and lots of missing people’s remains might be here.

Plus, overgrown as it is… it would surely set off a big forest fire. ”

While she dressed, I concentrated on containing the flames, enough to burn the vampires without letting any of the dried-out wood ignite. Once she had her clothing back on, Crystal swiped the vampire’s large hunting knife off the floor and examined it with a mild frown of disapproval.

“Something wrong?”

She tossed it and caught it by the handle. “It’s a cheap knife with no balance. I prefer throwing knives as they let me keep some distance. Now that I think about it, I should really pick archery back up. Assuming I could find wooden arrows somewhere.”

“Pick it back up?”

“College sports.”

“Oh. Thought it might’ve been a fey thing.”

She smiled. “No, the fey thing is the attraction to knives over guns.”

The flames engulfing both vampires died down, leaving black ash piles. Even their bones had disintegrated to powder. Only fragments of their shoes remained. When I no longer sensed any active combustion, I turned my attention to the stairs.

“How many do you think there are?”

She cocked her head, one ear toward the stairs in silence for a few seconds. “Three or four more… plus some humans.”

“You can tell that by listening? Humans I mean?”

“Vampires wouldn’t be begging someone to let them go and not kill them.”

“Dammit. Let’s go!”