Inferno : Elements Series Book One

Gwen

It’s been three weeks without incident. No black outs, no fatigue, no feeling like someone is following me and no real stress. My training is in full swing and I’m learning so much. My power has grown and I’m able to control it too. I feel so much more confident, like I’m not going to hurt anyone anymore. I’ve been working a lot with Jillian to try and get a clear image of the mystery guy who broke into my head that Sunday that I was unconscious, but so far there’s been no luck. As it turns out, I can also teleport. I discovered this completely by accident during a combat session with Jasper. He lunged at me with a spear and I went from dodging his blow to falling thirty feet into the lake all the way across the arena. I had absolutely no idea what was going on and for a moment I thought I might drown, but I made it back to the surface and dragged myself out. Everyone had a good laugh at my expense and when I got over the surprise of what had happened I joined them. Jillian, Oliver and Derek have been teaching me how to teleport (on purpose) with a specific destination in mind. It’s been a fun few weeks and tomorrow is Dirt Day, or Thursday, the day I train with Elijah.

I wake up on the couch, a little confused until I feel Anya twitch. She has her legs over mine, her head in Oliver’s lap at the other end of the couch. I smile at my new friends and immediately get crushed by a wave of guilt as I think of Carmen and Alice back home. It’s been over a month since I’ve seen them and for a minute I feel as though I may have betrayed them or tried to replace them with Anya and Oliver. It takes a moment for me to realise that I’m being an idiot. They are safer where they are and besides, just because I’ve made new friends for the first time in over a decade doesn’t for a second mean that the people that I love back home become obsolete. I shake myself out of my mood and wake my friends, wondering where Derek went.

“Morning,” Oliver says, his greeting nearly unrecognisable as he yawns.

“Yup, hello,” says Anya. I stifle my laugh. Anya is not a morning person, but she’s far too nice to be a cranky morning person. She just shuffles around like a polite little zombie until her morning coffee perks her up.

I stand and head into my bedroom to grab some clothes and take a shower. I don’t have an actual door on my bathroom, just a flower curtain, and it doesn’t even occur to me to ask if anyone is in there. I walk straight in and my jaw hits the floor. I found Derek. I catch a quick glimpse of his wonderfully toned, and naked, behind as he wraps a towel around his waist. He turns to me, completely unfazed.

“Morning,” he says with a smirk.

I’m having a complete brain malfunction.

“M-morning,” I manage to get out. His smirk becomes a full blown grin and he walks toward me. He leans down over me, water droplets still sliding down his chest, and says;

“Shame you weren’t here two minutes earlier, you could have joined me,” and I feel his stubble brush my cheek as he pulls away from my ear and saunters out of the bathroom. Looks like I’m having a cold shower this morning.

I’m dressed in black jeans and a white tank top, coupled with my usual pair of black converse. It’s Anya’s turn in the bathroom and I head into the kitchen to make everyone breakfast like I’ve done nearly every morning for almost a fortnight now. It seems my friends only go back to their apartment when they need clean clothes. I ended up having to give them all a shelf in my closet so that they could keep toiletries and a few sets of clothes here, they’ve just sort of moved in and now I have three roommates, one bed, one couch and one bathroom. I’m not complaining; we’ve worked out a system. First awake gets first shower; I’m the only one here who really has any idea how to cook, or prepare food at all, so I cook breakfast and they do the dishes. It’s a neat enough system and so far there haven’t been any issues. I make up a large bowl of fruit salad and Oliver finishes getting dressed just as I’m serving it into bowls. My kitchen table only has two chairs so most mornings Anya and I sit on the kitchen bench and Oliver and Derek sit at my little table. The fruit is always delicious; it just appears in my fridge every morning along with water and juice. There is fresh pineapple juice and coconut water in my fridge this morning and I pour out glasses for everyone before I sit on the counter and the breakfast chatter starts up.

“Do you know what Elijah has planned for today?” Oliver asks me.

“Not really,” I reply. “I know we’ll be outside though. I’m going to fly us down to that rocky patch beneath Erin’s cliff.”

Elijah likes to keep me on my toes. He says that predictability leads to complacency, complacency leads to laziness and laziness could kill me if a Recruiter catches me unawares. He never tells me what the lesson plans are, not even during the lesson, he just yells out instructions.

“He might need the open space. Maybe he wants you to throw some rocks around?” supplies Anya.

“Maybe,” I say, rinsing my plate in the sink and setting it in the dish rack to dry. I do the very few other dishes as the others finish eating and move out of the way as they step in to wash up their bowls too. I look at the time, we’re running late!

“Guys, we’ve got to go. Now. It’s 8:50.”

Training starts in ten minutes and we all rush out of the door.

We get there just in time.

“Good morning everyone,” beams Elijah. He’s always in such a good mood.

“Morning,” I say. “I don’t suppose you’re going to give me a heads up on what we’re doing today?”

“Not a chance!” He says with excitement on his face. He likes to surprise us. “Let’s get going. Gwen, if you wouldn’t mind.”

He motions toward the cliffs and I step straight off. I don’t hesitate anymore, not with this at least. I’m a lot more confident and I can control so much more now too.

“Well,” I say while I hover a hundred metres above the ground. “We don’t have all day!”

Oliver is the first to go. He’s started taking running starts and doing impressive jumps off the edge, waiting for me to catch him. The first time he did this I almost tore his head off. He did it without warning and I thought he was going to die. He just smiled up at me and said;

“Come on, G, as if there was ever a chance that you wouldn’t catch me!”

His trust in me blew me away. Today he takes a running start and back flips off the cliff. Just for fun I mould the air currents to his body and catch him while he’s upside down. Everyone laughs and I poke my tongue out at him when he protests. I leave him that way, I’ll put him right way up when we land but until then he can just hang out for a while. Anya and Derek jump next and then Elijah jumps, with a little squeal of delight, and I float us all down to the canyon floor.

“Okay, Gwen,” says Elijah. He’s all business the moment he sets foot on the ground. “What I’m going to do is simple. I’m going to throw boulders at you of varying shapes and sizes and I want you avoid them without moving an inch from where you are.”

“How?” I ask.

“Use your imagination. I have only two rules; you can’t move from where you are and you can only use the Earth element to avoid being hit. Got it?”

“Got it,” I say. I understand his game. He’s testing my reflexes and my power. It should make for an interesting day. I take a position in the middle of the space we have and nod;

“I’m ready!”

I don’t have to wait long. With a quick swipe of his hand, Elijah sends a massive boulder flying straight at me. I flick my wrist and a sharp edged sheet of rock shoots up in front of me. Elijah’s boulder splits in half and the two pieces pass harmlessly by me, one on either side. I lower my rocks and focus but this next boulder isn’t coming from my front. He’s launched a chuck of the canyon wall at me from my left side. I hold up my hand, palm out, and force the rock to crumble into harmless rubble at my feet. I continue to deflect his shots for over an hour before he calls a stop. By the end I am using the vibrations to find the rock that he’s trying to move and destroying it before he has a chance to get any momentum behind his throw.

“Well done Gwen!” shouts Elijah as he walks up to me. He’s wearing a grin that looks far too big for his small elven face. “You were extraordinary! Simply superb! Your reflexes and control have improved so much in such a short time.”

I feel my cheeks pink. Of all the things I’ve learned over the past few weeks, controlling my traitorous blushing cheeks is not one of them. Nor is how to take a compliment without feeling embarrassed or awkward about it.

“Uh, thanks, Elijah,” I say, awkwardly might I add. “That was a great exercise.”

“It was wasn’t it! Don’t think you’re out of training yet thought, Gwen. I have one more exercise to get on with and I can assure that this one will take a while.”

“Sure,” I say, my eagerness evaporating. The last exercise that he told me would take a while had involved identifying different soils, rocks and dirt by taste. It took five hours. The only good thing to come out of that five hours was getting to watch Elijah force Oliver, Anya and Derek to participate when they tried to laugh about what I was about to do. On the bright side, if I’m ever kidnapped and find myself blindfolded and restrained on a dirt floor then all I have to do is stick out my tongue, lick the floor and figure out where I am by tasting the minerals and other composites of the dirt I’m face down on. That’s a plus right? Yeah, I don’t think so either.

“So, what am I doing now?” I ask.

“Don’t worry, you won’t have to eat dirt,” he says, jokingly. “Not today at least. This exercise will test your control even more than the first. I’m going to call out names of animals, plants, people and objects and what I want you to do is conjure a statue that depicts the things that I have called out. Understand?”

Oh, like magical dirt Pictionary? I can handle this.

“This actually sounds like a lot of fun,” I say, my enthusiasm returning.

“Okay, let’s begin with something easy. Cow!”

Okay. I close my eyes and in my mind I conjure the image of a cow and let it take shape both mentally and physically. I imagine that I’m creating a sculpture and when I open my eyes again there is a surprisingly lifelike stone cow standing in front of me. I hear a loud “MOO!” from my left and turn to see my friends laughing. Elijah has gone over and joined them sitting on a large rock formation by the canyon wall.

“Again!” shouts Anya. “Make a sculpture of Hank!”

I look to Elijah and he nods, indicating that I should do it. It’s not like Elijah to take suggestions. I turn back to my stone cow and turn it back into a solid block of stone. I concentrate hard, thinking of Hank and his facial features. He is a massing man and I need more stone to work with. I return the block I made the cow from to the canyon floor and have another rise from the ground. This one is larger and will be better to work with if I’m going to turn all seven feet of Hank into a sculpture. I struggle a little bit with Hank, people have so much more detail to them than cows. I place my hands on the stones block and, summoning a little earth magic, begin to vibrate the stone. Strongly at first, but gradually more subtle as I mould the vibrations and have them add the finer details into my Hank Statue. When I finally finish and look up I’m startled by how much detail I did manage to put into the stone. Everyone gets up to get a better look, complimenting me on what a good job I did but my mind has drifted. Funny how often I find myself zoning out these days. I focus on something completely different. The vibrations I used to carve Hanks statue went out into the surrounding rock as well and are bouncing back to me. I feel a little like a bat using echo location. There are other vibrations that interrupted mine and set them moving at a different frequency. I extend all of my senses, searching for the cause of the disruption, and find what I’m looking for on a ridge about eighty feet above us. There are two people concealed on a small ledge, watching us from above. I reach my mind out to my group.

“Act like you’re still admiring the stature but listen carefully to me,” I speak quickly to them hoping to avoid any obvious changes. “We’re being watched. There are two people hidden on a ridge just above us. They’ve been watching us.”

“How do you know?” His voice and his body still appear to be admiring the detail I managed to put into my statues beard, but Derek’s minds is racing. He’s in Warrior mode now and so are Anya and Oliver.

“I used vibrations to create the statue and while I was doing that I felt them. They are about eighty feet above us.”

“Are they Human?” Asks Anya. I reach out until I touch their vibrations again and even dare to lightly graze their aura, hoping that they can’t feel it. My mind freezes, just for a moment, when I make contact. I’ve felt that energy before.

“They’re Recruiters.”

You wouldn’t think that stunned silence could be something the mind could relay but it is; it just registers a little bit like static. The static ends almost immediately after it started.

“Are you sure?” asks Derek.

“Yes, their energy is the same as the Recruiters who attacked me outside my house. What do we do? Do we just pretend like we don’t know they’re there and move on with our day?”

“No,” says Anya. “There is a procedure to follow. One of us is has to go alert the Warriors and they have to come out and arrest them. They can’t be left to go and report back to whoever sent them out here to spy on us.”

“That is the usual procedure, but we don’t have time for that. There isn’t any easy way for Gwen to fly one of us back up to the entrance without making them suspicious and by the time anyone got here it would be too late. They will have just moved on.”

“Derek is right,” provides Elijah.

“We have to do it,” says Oliver.

“Are we even allowed?” I ask.

“Yes, we are. Anya and I are Warriors and even if we weren’t, it’s not just Warriors who can make arrests. They’re Recruiters. The more arrests the better and it doesn’t matter who does the actual arresting,” explains Derek.

“So, it’s settled,” says Oliver excitedly. “Gwen finally gets some real action!”

“Me?!”

“Yes you!” he continues. “Who else is going to be able to fly up there, take them out and fly them back down here before they know what’s hit them?”

“I must admit,” supplied Elijah. “That is the most viable option available to us. They would see me using Earth to pull them down to the ground and we can’t climb up there to them, they’d see us from a mile away.”

This doesn’t sound too unreasonable to me. Just fly up there, knock them off their ledge, and catch them before they become pancakes and then land. Not a big deal. Okay, that I can do.

“Okay, how do we go about doing this?”

“Whenever you’re ready you just do what comes naturally. All we need is to make sure they don’t get away,” says Derek. “Don’t worry about a thing. We’ve got your back.”

“Kick their ass, G,” says Oliver.

“You’ve got this Gwen!” encourages Anya

“Just concentrate and you will do fine,” Elijah advises.

Okay then. I reach out once more to pin point their exact location and as quickly and discreetly as I can I gather the wind around me and propel myself through the air. It takes even less time than I expected for me to land right beside them. They jump to their feet and get ready to attack me but I flick my wrist and have heavy rocks fly at them. The rocks hit them and in an instant they are both unconscious. I mould the air to their bodies and float the three of us back to the small group waiting on the ground below us. Even though they came up with this idea, they still have looks of surprise on their faces when I land, the unconscious men floating in the air by my sides.

“Well,” says Derek recovering first. “I guess we can all agree that went way more smoothly than we were expecting.”

“Hell yeah! Way to go Gwen!” shouts Oliver, his voice echoing off the canyon walls.

Elijah clears his throat in an effort to get everyone’s attention.

“We can all agree that was impressive work but we can save the celebrations for later. Let’s get them to Hank before they wake up,” he says, motioning for me to fly everyone back into the arena.

I do as I’m asked and we set off through the corridors towards Hank’s office. Everyone is staring at us in shock and surprise as we move through the refuge and they gawk at me a lot too. Having someone running around with two Recruiters floating about their head would be a rare sight indeed.