Hungry Earth (Elemental Book 2) (23 page)

Stephen got in the driver’s
seat of the SUV and tossed a cell phone at me when I got in the passenger seat.
“Call Maseré. The number is in the phone.” Stephen was speeding down the
driveway before I could close the door.

Astrid stayed behind to try to make progress on
defeating Gale, which I didn’t know whether to be worried or relieved about. I
found the name and called it. The long beep was immediate. “Busy.”

“God, no. If his son was hurt, there will be a
bloodbath.”

It was almost automatic to connect to Darwin’s mind
by then.
“Darwin? Can you hear me?”

“It’s bad. You have to get back here.”

“I’m on my way. Call your dad and tell him you’re
not hurt.”

“I can’t. I hid in a closet… I’m not hurt, but
there is something barricading the door. Henry’s out there… I don’t know if he
made it. I don’t know if anyone made it.”

I dialed the number again… busy. I redialed over and
over.

“I’m going to run out of oxygen eventually.”

“Just keep calm. We’ll be there in a couple of hours
.”
I finally got a ring and it picked up a second later.

“I can’t talk now, Stephen!” Maseré barked.

“Darwin’s okay!” I yelled. The silence was instant
and I was afraid he had already hung up.

“You’re with Darwin?” His words were soft, hopeful,
and disbelieving.

“I’m not with him, but I can talk to him. He’s in a
closet and it’s barricaded, but he’s uninjured.”

He tried to say something, but it came out as a
choking sound of relief. “I will be there in half an hour,” he said, then hung
up.

“Maseré is heading to the school and he knows Darwin
is safe.”

“You can talk to Darwin in your mind? Can you talk to
Clara?”

“I don’t know her mind.” I reached out for another
mind I was familiar with and felt her recognition as she sensed me.
“Remy,
are you okay?”

The image of Flagstone standing guard by the window
of a motel room came to mind. So he had gotten her out.

“Have you seen Clara?”
I wished I hadn’t asked
when the scene flooded my vision. It was dark and raining, just like in my
vision. Remy was trying to get everyone back into the castle, but the attack
came too fast. Swarms of darkness, impenetrable by light, took people right out
of the air. Then there were the creatures; massive monsters as black as space
with mouths full of teeth and no eyes. They didn’t need eyes.

One of them had Clara pressed into the thick mud by
huge, clawed hands. The creature opened its mouth to eat her…

And that’s when Flagstone got Remy out.

I couldn’t tell Stephen that his daughter was
probably dead.

*          *          *

Stephen broke all speed limits as he drove us back to
the castle, but it was still a long drive. The constant math, probability, and
smattering of foreign languages going through Darwin’s head actually helped me
to calm down. I also sensed when his father found him. The huge wolf busted
into the closet with all the ferocity of a raging grizzly bear and then softly
coddled Darwin like a teddy bear. This confirmed to me that Darwin could touch
an animal without problems, which was why Maseré didn’t shift back for a while.

When we pulled into the driveway, Stephen abandoned
the car without even turning the engine off. I shut it off and pocketed the
keys.

Once again, the castle hadn’t really sustained any
damage. The lawn, however, had massive holes in the ground and was littered
with debris. Some students were unable to get up because they were too injured
or trapped under something. Maseré and his wolf pack were already working on
treating them. They had removed several bodies as well. Darwin was sitting on
the front door step with a blanket wrapped around him.

I crouched in front of my roommate. “Most of the
survivors are inside,” he said, shaking. “Hunt got a lot of students out this
morning, but there were still about a hundred left. He did get all the vampires
out last night except for Clara and her assistant, who refused to leave. The
teachers are all with the students who went home. The council also left. The
death count is at ten and we have at least twenty missing.”

“Where is Hunt?”

He shrugged. “He was helping Dad find people. A lot
of the survivors said they were saved by Henry. They’re saying he was twice the
size of a normal jaguar, blacker than the monsters that attacked us, and fast
enough it was like he could appear and disappear. He’s missing.”

I stood. “I should have been here.”
I would have
just been one more person for Henry to protect without my powers, though.

“This wasn’t Gale,” Darwin said, hearing my thought.
“Nobody lost their powers. This was something worse, and there was no stopping
it. No magic worked on it. It came from the ground and killed for no reason but
to kill. Even Hunt’s magic barely fazed it. Without Henry, we would probably
all be dead.”

*          *          *

I joined the search and used my powers to look for
minds outside of the survivors in the castle. It was difficult with Maseré’s
pack all spread out, but they were making a lot of leeway with their scent
tracking abilities. Between my psychic coverage and his pack, we found
twenty-five students, including Henry.

Henry was unconscious, so I couldn’t see his location
and his mind was nearly impossible to track. I sensed his general location and
Maseré sniffed him out. We discovered him in his person form in the dining
room, where part of the ceiling had collapsed and trapped him between the small
pantry and a huge hole in the floor. Behind him, shielded from glass that had
fallen from the second floor, were Mack and Brian. Stephen never found Clara.

Everyone gathered in the lecture hall, which I didn’t
know we even had. It was the largest room in the castle with row after row of
long tables. Since no one was willing to light the gas lights after the
earthquake, we used torches.

Once again, everyone turned to Hunt for guidance. “At
first light, the remaining students and professors will be relocated to the
nearest town. We will provide you with housing and food, but we cannot keep the
castle open.”

Henry was sitting to my right and Darwin was at my
left. Brian, sitting in the seat right in front of me, put his head down and
sniffled. Henry was quiet, though seemingly unhurt. Although Addison was one of
those who had left with the majority of the students, there was a dark gloom in
Henry’s eyes as if he had just been through war. He wasn’t the only one.

I stood up, surprising myself and getting everyone’s
attention immediately. “When the threat has been defeated, you will need people
to help rebuild. Does anyone here have a home to go back to?”

“I gave up my apartment and job to attend the
school,” one shifter said. Others nodded their agreements.

“I’m from Kyoto; I can’t just go back,” another
student said.

“If you have nowhere to go, you can help rebuild,”
Hunt said. “I will even make your tuition free for the next term.” There was a
small cheer and he held his hand up until it fell silent. “However, you must
leave until the threat has been–”

“I want to fight!” one of the students yelled,
interrupting the headmaster. It was one of Flagstone’s wolves who stood,
shaking with anger instead of fear or shock. “I’ve been living on the streets
between the semesters since I graduated from the sapling! This has always been
my home and I am not getting chased out by something in the dark!”

Other demands to stay and fight joined his until a
short vibration, like a shockwave of the earthquake, struck the castle.
Everyone fell dead silent, but it didn’t come again. “Everyone will be sent
away at first light. No student is fighting this, no exceptions. Please try to
get some sleep.” Hunt walked out, ignoring the protests.

Henry, Darwin, and I went back to the classroom we
used as our bedroom; the potions classroom. Darwin sat on the teacher’s desk
while I sat in the chair. I jumped up, pulled out the red ball that I had sat
on, sat back down, and threw it at Henry, who caught it and tossed it to
Darwin.

“Between the deaths here and the deaths out there, I
think we’re more likely to defeat Gale than the shadows and the monsters that
attacked the school,” I said.

Henry nodded. “We need to split up the force,” Darwin
said. “My dad should have all of the shifters go after Gale. Like Henry said,
it doesn’t take any magic to be a wolf, just to shift.”

“But he can use your shifting magic. First and
foremost, we need to keep the fae and wizards away from him. Henry, did you get
a bite or scent or anything on what attacked the school?” I asked.

“I bit the creatures several times. They are solid
and smooth as glass, but they’re as strong as stone. Despite the fact that my
bones are much stronger than those of another shifter and my bite force can
crush rock, I couldn’t injure the creatures. Not only were they too smooth to
get a grip on, they were also colder than ice.”

“Does that sound like any creature you know?” I asked
Darwin, who shook his head. A sharp meow warned us a second before Ghost
appeared in front of me, sitting on Vincent’s book. “Where the hell have you
been?”

The cat scowled at me and stepped off the book, which
suddenly flipped open. The pages turned themselves and stopped about three
quarters of the way in. I ignored the words and focused on the picture.

It was a brown beast, similar to what I thought of as
a troll. It was roughly shaped, huge, but not what I would call fat or
muscular. It wasn’t even what I would call humanoid, although it was bipedal,
had two arms, two legs, a torso, and a head. It also had way too many teeth and
no eyes.

“That’s what attacked everyone!” I said, pushing the
book to Darwin. He frowned at it.

“That isn’t what either of you described. That’s a
golem.”

“What the hell is a golem?” I asked. “Like from Lord
of the Rings?”

He rolled his eyes. “Don’t you ever read? A golem is
a creature made of the earth.”

“Like a gnome?”

“Not at all. A gnome is an elemental. There are wild
elementals, which are the essence of nature, and there are man-made elementals.
An elemental can be created for any purpose and can look like anything. In the
case of an elemental that you create, you share your soul with it and it does
whatever you created it to do. However, the longer you maintain it the more
powerful it becomes, until it’s more powerful than you, at which point it stops
obeying you. A golem is a different matter entirely; it has no soul. You create
it with your power, but you don’t give it a name or a soul. Golems are simple
servants, or sometimes guards.”

“Why are there golems here?”

“Because they are the school guards,” Hunt said from
the doorway. Ghost vanished.

“Why are your guards destroying the school?”

“They’re not mine anymore.” He entered the room and
shut the door behind him. “The golems have been guarding my school since I
opened the place, which is why I didn’t believe Jackson that he was attacked
right inside the campus. I assigned the golems to search the underground, which
is why I thought it was safe to send the vampires back down there. Until I saw
them tonight, I had no idea they were behind the killings. My golems were
normal and mud-brown. These golems were turned black when they were possessed.”

“What would possess golems?”

“Something that could not get here on its own.”

“So you can just dissolve them and be done with it, right?”
I asked. The book vanished as I tried to reach for it to see if there were any
instructions.

“Unfortunately not. I already tried to dissolve them,
but they are no longer mine to control. I have even tried to destroy them, but
the shadow walkers are too strong.”

“What are they?”

His expression was resigned as he opened his mouth,
finally going to tell me who this enemy was…

And another earthquake struck.

We ran into the hall and were almost run over by
students trying to get out. The shaking was violent, but the castle was much
better designed than the dorms, so it wasn’t completely falling apart.

“Inside or outside?” Henry asked me.

I understood; he trusted my instincts on whether
everyone was safer in or out of the castle. A deafening roar echoed in the
hallway. “Outside.” I unleashed my power openly on everyone.
“Get outside,”
I told them. Hunt’s mind was closed, but Henry and Darwin shuddered as they both
fought to resist my order. “Hunt and Darwin, guard everyone outside. Henry,
help me get everyone out.”

I didn’t really think Darwin could do much
protecting; I just wanted him to be by his father. Darwin had just turned
twenty-two, which was way too young to be fighting. It wasn’t at all that I
thought he was helpless, for I had seen his “throwback” handicap. I believed he
was a lot more powerful than he knew.

Darwin and Hunt went outside without argument while
Henry and I started getting everyone out. It would have been easier if the
castle wasn’t shaking. Fortunately, no one was injured. We had just gotten the
last group outside when Henry shoved me out of the way, the floor burst upward,
and we came face to face with a golem.

It stood about ten feet high and was about five feet
wide. The creature roared, displaying row after row of long, sharp teeth. The
distinct roar of a jaguar answered an instant before the golem fell back
several steps. Henry faded from invisible to black. He was a little darker than
the black jaguars I had seen in pictures, but it was his size that could have
stopped anyone in their tracks.

He stood nearly as tall as a horse. Two sharp fangs
stuck out of his mouth, not as long as a saber-tooth cat’s, but a lot longer
than a normal jaguar’s. He pounced again, struck the golem’s short neck, and
toppled the larger creature over. The golem tried to grab Henry, who was too
fast for him, while Henry tried repeatedly and failed to break the golem’s
skin.