Page 10 of Elemasters

Those fucking leather pants. The ones he’d been wearing the night before, crumpled up on the floor next to his bed. He tentatively reached out with a trembling hand, touching the still-damp leather and recoiling when he realized the truth…

It couldn’t have been a dream. Not only were his clothes still wet from wading through the surf to get to the boat, but he still had that little black ring around his pinky. He started hyperventilating again; his breaths coming in like air through a straw. Thankfully, Chris barged into the room, shirtless and sweating, with a mixture of terror and relief in his eyes.

“Thank God you’re alive,” he sighed, pulling Dustin into a hug that was equal parts grounding and crushing, “I don’t even remember making it back last night. Once Bailey put her ring on, there was suddenly fire everywhere, and everyone was gone. Then the next thing I knew, I was waking up,”

“The same thing happened to m-me,” Dustin stammered, still trying to catch his breath, “except I was underwater,”

“Did you see him too? That weird guy with the pretty face and the white robes?” Chris asked as he sat next to Dustin on the bed, “he said something about… fate,”

“Fate spins along as it should,” Dustin repeated, remembering the words as clearly as a rainbow after a storm, “I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean,”

“Me either,” Chris groaned, “you don’t… you don’t think we all just had a contact high, do you? Like, we weren’t just seeing shit?”

Dustin scoffed.

“Hell no. We’ve both been high plenty of times and there isn’t a strain of weed strong enough to make all five of us react like that,”

Chris couldn’t help but chuckle at that.

“Yeah, you’re right. It sounded stupid as fuck when I asked, but I think I just needed to hear it from someone else,”

The twins were quiet for a moment, but suddenly realization crashed over both of them like a gnarly wave…

“THE OTHERS!” they shouted in unison, Dustin immediately diving for his flip phone resting on his bedside table. He had to call Bailey and make sure she was safe first.

The ringing seemed to stretch on forever, before Bailey’s groggy voice finally crackled to life on the other end.

“Dusty, you better have a damn good reason to be calling me at 7am on a Saturday,” she began, but before she could berate him more, she gasped, “wait, I’m home? When the fuck… how the fuck… what the fuck happened last night?!”

“Me and Chris are wondering the same thing,” Dustin replied, shakily, “what’s the last thing you remember?”

“Walking through some kind of rock quarry or something? It happened right after I put that ring on and… HOLY FUCK I’M STILL WEARING IT,”

Upon hearing her freak out, Chris grabbed Dustin’s phone and put it up to his ear.

“Bailey, hey, chill okay? It’s all gonna be alright. Let’s meet up, yeah? We’ll get together with Chloe and James and find out what’s going on,”

Dustin couldn’t hear Bailey’s reply, but that fact alone meant that she must’ve calmed down at least a little. After another minute or so, Chris flipped the phone closed and tossed it to Dustin.

“Get dressed. We’re meeting up at the library,”

The Milton Square Library was the go-to place for exam prep, or to crank out a book report the day before it was due.

However, on a Saturday, the place was practically a ghost town.

Dustin followed Chris inside, practically drowning in one of his oversized hoodies. The hairspray had been washed out of his hair, and he probably looked like he’d just attended a funeral with how blank his expression was. But he was just trying to… process everything.

The Librarian Assistant at the front desk smiled warmly at them as they approached, but a mask of pure dread took over when she recognized Chris.

“No, no! Y-you’re banned! I haven’t forgotten what you did,” she said, the chain on her glasses trembling as she pointed to his picture on the wall next to her, marked with a bright red message reading TO BE DENIED ENTRY.

Dustin tensed; he too remembered that whole debacle from freshman year. When Chris and some of his dumbass friends thought it would be hilarious to light the pages of Macbeth on fire in protest of being forced to read it…

Half the library went up in smoke after that, and they very narrowly avoided being arrested after Chris managed to “convince” the lady cop who showed up that it had all been a misunderstanding. He’d talked his way out of it somehow.

Dustin never asked exactly what happened; he didn’t want to know what a grown ass woman wanted from a fourteen-year-old boy in exchange for letting him walk.

“Now, now. Let’s not make a scene,” Chris said, cool as ever as he raised his hands in surrender, “a lot of time’s passed, and I’ve turned over a new leaf. I’m just here to meet my friends, new ones, a lot less chaotic. We need to get a jumpstart on our book report and there’s no better place than this,”