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“It’s for my personal collection.”
“Now you want to convince me that you’re a psycho? No way. I know how personal items are used for magic. It’s what Ophelia is doing to keep her hold on the boys. And you hate them.”
“Then goodbye. And stop pestering me.”
Oh, just great. “Why don’t you ask Ophelia for those locks!” I shout after her. “Since you’re best buddies and all.”
She doesn’t reply back.
Disheartened, I wander the halls of the Academy, not in the mood to go to class. What am I doing? I keep failing, over and over. Nothing comes from nothing and I feel that’s what I have to work with: a big pile of nothing. Yes, I feel disheartened and angry. Crushed.
I stop, kick at a wall. Screw you, Vanessa. You won’t help me? Fine, I don’t need your frigging help. Think you’re so mighty and so righteous? Think you’re on the right side? That you know what’s going on? That Ophelia gives a damn about you?
I can train all on my own. I don’t need anyone’s help.
I walk out among the clusters of trees. Maybe I just need to walk away from everything and everyone for a moment, yell my frustration into the void.
But when I stop, I just sink to my knees and shake.
“Why?” I whisper. “Why can’t I get a break with this? Have some revelation, some stroke of good luck? I’m… tired.”
So tired.
I close my eyes and press my palms on the earth. Where is my magic? What is it? How do I gather it, ball it up, thrust it outward? How do I use it?
Leafing through all those books last night, reading aboutthe power of words, the power of objects imbued with one’s aura, about speaking to spirits, about drawing on the elements, the so-called magia naturalis, I had hoped for an epiphany.
The only elemental magic I seem to have drawn was from the boys. Did I siphon them like Ophelia did? Am I as bad as her, only weaker?
Can I draw on the natural forces directly? Can any witch? Or is it always through the use of an elemental conduit—a vampire, a werewolf, a fae, a daemon?
I know how the elements feel—how the boys’ magic feels—and I search for that signature, letting my senses open to the world. Hitting the block around them still comes as a shock—but I make myself search further, search for the magic itself.
Water, I think, start with water. Droplets, rain falling, clouds, fog, the vast underground reservoirs, the lakes and rivers and oceans. A sensation like cool mist envelops my mind and I reach out for it, breathe it in, almost tasting it on my tongue—like shaved ice, like rainwater.
Come, I think, come…
My arms are trunks, my fingers are roots, I should feel the earth but all I can feel is water, flowing, moving around obstacles, soaking into me. I’m drowning in it, trying to kick up to the surface, feeling its great rivers move through the world like snakes—
A shadow falls over me. “Mia?”
With a start, I open my eyes and lift my hands off the soil—only to find Percival, Ashton’s gang buddy standing over me, watching me through narrowed eyes.
“What do you want?” I demand, my breath short. It feels as if my clothes and my feet inside my shoes are wet, but I’m dry.
“I came out here…” He glances around him. “I thought someone was calling me.”
“Calling you?”
“Inside my head. Something pulled… on me.” He looks confused, brows drawn together. “I thought I heard water trickling.”
I gape at him as it sinks in. I called him out here? “Your element is water?
“I belong to the House of Water,” he says as if it’s self-evident.
All magical creatures had elemental magic first. Then came the rise of demonblood and it overpowered the unpredictable, uncontrollable elemental magic, but the elemental never died. It was passed on from parents to children, generation after generation, and though Percy’s demonblood is intact—unlike the case of my boys who were hit with bespelled arrows to suppress their demonblood—his elemental nature, though dormant and faint, is still there.
And I sensed it. Not only did I sense it, but I called him through it.
