Samhain Publishing

It’s not every day a woman faces down the bitch who owns her man’s soul.

Elementals, Book 1

Xia is sick and tired of having her ass served to her every bloody night. Exhausted, she soldiers on, working the Scottish dream beat alone, seeking to identify those who plot to awaken Aqua, one of the four slumbering elements. Should Aqua fully open her eyes, she won’t be happy until she picks her teeth with the bones of the last human on earth.

When an assassin tags Xia, her new guardian arrives—a seal shifter linked to the very element she fears. Adam is certain that Markos, Xia’s boss and sometimes lover, is putting her in unnecessary danger. But Xia has tasted the inhuman cruelty that is Aqua and will do anything to stop her, even relive a terrifying, perilous spell.

Now that Adam has been assigned to protect her witchy spirit wanderings, Xia has to trust him. It isn’t his power or ability she’s uneasy about, but the fact he’ll have to take all the pain meant for her.

Then the Chamber ruthlessly deploys Xia and Adam in a dangerous ritual. Adam can protect her body and defend her mind…but nothing can safeguard her from the backlash of the world-changing knowledge she discovers.

Xia was an expert on dreams. It was safe to say fewer than a dozen souls on the planet had more knowledge than she. Clawing her way across the sweaty, plaid sheets, she choked, body trembling. Her mind tumbled but already her training kicked in. She gasped in one raspy breath. Flashback, she realized. Not real.

Coughing shook her. A body could be slow to strip off the mind’s tricks. And a morphi, a Chamber-trained dreamer witch, knew that invisible magic killed just as surely as physical steel. With another rasping breath, she wrestled her pounding heart. It’s been twenty years since I survived Aqua’s mind. I’m in Scotland. I’m Xia.

Brushing her long, tangled auburn hair from her hot face, her fingertips grazed wet cheeks. Cursing her own weakness, she scrambled to scrub her face dry. I’m not drowning in my own bed. Lady take it, she knew better than to lounge half-awake, even well after dawn. A morphi’s magic worked in the twilight hours of half-light, but with so many years of missions, she had plenty of nasty memories. Her dreams were stronger than most, and her nightmares… Well there were instances where morphi went insane overnight. She’d been so cozy, so lazy, and her subconscious had slipped her a zinger.

She rolled to the edge of the bed and curled her mauve-painted toenails into the bland, sturdy beige carpeting of her rental cottage. Her shoulders still heaved with deep breaths. She’d been here for a frustrating month. If it were a normal assignment, failure to glean information out of her dreamlike elemental patrols would piss her off. But when the assignment was this personal, this momentous, this dire… Her fingers clenched so tight around the edge of the mattress she threatened to puncture the sheets.

She surged to her feet and stormed to her closet, rifling roughly through the hangers. Some psycho nutjob in the magical community was trying to wake Aqua up. Was succeeding. Xia was one of a very few who knew from the inside just how joyous it would make that bitch to drown the world. A huntress’s hunger to find the guilty gnawed in Xia’s gut. Stupid magicals were trying to upset the balance of the sleeping four elements and she was going to stop them. Despite the stench of fear-sweat still drying on her skin, she chafed at having to wait until later that evening to dive into her patrol again, seeking along the edges of the elements’ dreams for answers. She was a soldier for the Chamber, the powerful magicals dedicated to maintaining the four elements’ unconscious state. Working despite emotion was second nature.

Xia stared at the meager choices hanging before her. The limited wardrobe was typical. When you travelled as much as she did, your luggage was your apartment. She pulled out a cream V-neck tee, a moss-green peasant skirt, and Aunt Natty’s hand-knitted brown sweater. Despite it being July, Scottish mornings on the Atlantic coast were usually cool. Perhaps today she’d try to get online to do some girl-time shopping. A few new outfits were called for, to shake off the funk.

This morning’s flashback was the icing on the cake. She was going to get more aggressive. After all, lying low and dogged persistence weren’t getting her anywhere. Last night, once again, Aqua had sensed her on patrol and sent some piranhas. Being a psychic chew-toy hurt. The most optimistic view of her failure could be that she was at least keeping Aqua amused.

In the kitchen, she fired up the laptop and the countertop electric kettle. In the bathroom, she went through her morning sequence, thankful for the good skin her witch genes blessed her with even at the young age of 116. In the middle of brushing, she found herself humming “da roof, da roof, da roof is on fire”. Spitting her toothpaste in the sink, Xia stared at the faint bruises beneath her gray eyes, making her passably pretty face more pale than usual and her freckles more stark. What was with the fire songs that kept popping into her head the last few days?

“Try not to act any crazier than you already are, Xia. Keep it together or they’ll put you back with a counselor.” She glared sternly at herself and rinsed her mouth.

She’d fought hard to piece herself back together after she’d Returned. Very few witches suffered the subsumation ritual into an element’s dreaming consciousness, and not all of those emerged whole. She was lucky. Xia wasn’t about to descend into desperate paranoia again.

She had a new thought about what her brain was trying to tell her with the recent fire songs. Markos. Wiping her face with the barely damp cloth to avoid pure water on her face, a coping mechanism Dr. Smith had taught her, she moved into the kitchen, looking for her cell. She’d only put the pattern of odd songs together yesterday and didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of the obvious.

Markos was her boss of eighty-six years, officially titled an advocate. He’d occasionally been her partner, and even her lover. He was a massive, sexy minotaur in his prime…and also an Ignis elemental. She never thought of Markos without also feeling warm, inside and out. He was a good friend, most of the time. When he wasn’t being an irritating bull, a chauvinist Greek or a secretive boss. Xia wasn’t outright prescient, being a dreamer witch, but she did tend to get hunches.

Sure enough, a text from Markos was waiting.

New assignment. Pick up package at post. I’m sorry.

After staring at the message for a full minute, she deleted it with cold fingers. So. They wanted to send her back inside another element. The situation had reached critical and the Chamber was ready to sacrifice a few morphi, ordering them to subsume themselves into one of the four sleeping elements. She picked up the washcloth off the floor, where it had fallen. That bastard. He could have called, told her in person. But he’d been cowardly. She knew this wasn’t his choice, so she wouldn’t blame him. The order came from above. But he’d handed her a nightmare in a mere text message, which hurt.

If she’d managed to dream anything in the past month, gotten any decent information, would this new assignment still have arrived? If she managed to pull something out of the ether tonight, wringing Aqua’s neck for her secrets, could she get out of this order? What about a protest to insist someone else be assigned? After all, it had taken two years for her to be cleared for duty after she’d Returned last time. Yet apparently they were going to send her back, deep inside an alien mind.

Making her tea with extra honey, Xia inhaled above the mug. Stilling her mind, she found control in the nonmagical ritual of morning tea. The first sip braced her and the cheerful print of Highland Terrier puppies over the sink reminded her of the innocence that existed out there, clueless. I am a morphi. This is what I signed on to do, and now it’s what I am. I follow the Chamber’s orders. Quit being weak, or the elements will own you. She took another swallow and almost believed her pep talk.

She checked her email, sent the same depressingly empty report on last night’s patrol, and glanced at the headlines. Her gaze caught on one and she glared at it, anger firing in her blood at her failure to find answers. Malaysia Mauled by Mega Monsoon.

Oh yes, Xia was born a dreamer witch. But she’d chosen to become a morphi, a spy dedicated to keeping the Four in balance and asleep. She had her reasons why. Their names had been Mom and Dad. That didn’t explain the pride with which she’d trained, or the extra reserve of will she fed on to twist inside an element’s dream. I’m a damn fine morphi. I am a powerful guardian of the planet, working to defend all life. I’ve done it before and I can do it again.

Xia pulled on her sweater and took her white wicker basket off the counter. Pausing at the door, she smiled at the giant straw hat hanging there. It was much too stylish to be called a sombrero, but it had been made in Mexico. A bright blue ribbon threaded around the base and through the brim, so it could be tied on firmly. She put it on, feeling her sister’s warmth from across the planet.

Under the carport waited the Schwinn, her pride and joy. When it had become clear after the first week that this was going to be a long placement, she’d had it shipped from Glasgow. The paint glittered bright royal purple, the handle grips were sunshine yellow, and the seat was contoured white leather. She’d added the wicker basket herself. Once she got it started, it felt like she could pedal all day, and sometimes she did take lovely daytrips through the winding country roads near Mallaig, on this western Atlantic shore of Scotland.

Taking a deep breath of the clean air, she enjoyed the fact she couldn’t smell the ocean this morning. Enough. It was time to get on with the day. She set off down the cottage’s unpaved lane. She kept her mind determinedly blank of what waited in the package at the post, blank of thoughts of Aqua, or Ignis for that matter. Navel-gazing was a useless activity unless you were trying to prove to a shrink you weren’t crazy, and Xia was over that.

When she came into the village, she parked her bike behind a board papered with local advertisements. Stopping first at the grocery, she chatted with Anne, the sweet owner who’d been so friendly to her. She picked up a sausage pasty for lunch. She chatted with Mr. Branough, dozing on the bench outside the post, with his border collie Rougher sleeping across his feet.

She chatted with the postmaster, asking his opinion of Talisker’s gold label and agreeing with him that it was their best. She took the small, innocent white envelope being held for her without looking at it, and kept her smile fixed in place. Focusing on the envelope made the sight out the old wooden doorframe that much more of a shock.

Time stopped. Her blood ran cold. Macgregor the goat was eating her hat.

“You beast!” Xia rushed out of the post office flapping her mail.

The goat remained unmoved, standing planted on the sidewalk, munching with contented, circular jaw strokes.

Xia snatched her sweater off her bike’s handlebars and beat it on the rump. “No! Bad goat!”

He started, dropped the straw hat, trampled over it, and clambered up onto a fieldstone wall.

Xia picked up the bedraggled hat and wiped goat spit off it with a grimace. “This is Scotland. You’re supposed to be a fluffy, grass-loving sheep, not a goat.” She forlornly dusted the wide brim, now containing a missing arc.

The goat flicked his tail at her. If she were a Christian, she’d say its slitted eyes looked demonic. But she’d met cuter demons. Better behaved ones too. This wretched creature was more of an orc.

“Ah, now. There’s a shame. Macgregor would eat the pope’s hat, he would.” Elderly Mr. Branough still sat on the bench against the gray stone wall of the tiny post office. He had on a flat tweed hat, a tweed sport coat over an ivory wool fisherman’s sweater, oiled leather pants, and tall rubber boots. If he looked any more like a stereotypical British country gentleman, some tourist would come along and put him in a scrapbook. He thumped his cane. “Young rascal.” His devoted old border collie lifted his head, looked at his master, and lay down again with a groan.

“Oh, Mr. Branough. My sister gave me this hat. It came all the way from Mexico.”

“Aye, well, take it to the missus. She’ll put some pretty plaid across that bit missing and make it right.”

Scotland was a land of misty, rolling glens of heather. It was ruins on craggy cliff tops. It was little thatched cottages with roses along the whitewashed walls. But it was also incessant wind, clouds of midges, and people who were brutally matter-of-fact practical. Xia loved it all, except Macgregor.

“I’m that sorry, lass. I was dozing with Rougher, here. Such a bonnie day.”

Xia put the damaged straw hat on her head with a sigh, tying the ribbon under her chin. “That’s all right, Mr. Branough. You weren’t tasked with guarding my things. Enjoy the sun.”

“Well done, you. Go shake it off and ride your bicycle out to the beach. Listening to the waves always soothes the spirit.”

Xia pursed her lips against reacting to his outrageously erroneous statement. She tried to keep her face clear of her opinion. “Mr. Branough, it’s always so nice to visit with you and Rougher.”

“Aye-uh. Now there’s a sour puss.” Clearly, he wasn’t buying it. “Haven’t ye found what ye been seeking then?”

Like most people who respected magic, Mr. Branough sensed it enough to suspect Xia of being something more than human, which of course she was. The villagers generally nodded pleasantly, assuming Xia’s presence in the rental cottage was recreational. “Oh, aye, how loovely,” they’d say when she explained her visit was temporary.

The first time she’d met him, Mr. Branough had looked her up and down. He should have seen nothing more than her average height, her gray eyes, and average face with long, thick, dark auburn hair. But he’d given her a small bow. Nothing obvious, just a respectful courtly gesture she’d been used to seeing more in her youth. He had responded with the same words the other villagers had, but he’d stretched each word out with a knowing weight. Then he’d winked before bending to pat Rougher.

Taking a deep, calming breath, Xia put her sweater in the wicker basket hanging on sparkling purple handlebars, along with her mail and the sausage pasty. “Mr. Branough, there’s much in this world that doesn’t want to be found.”

“I assume a smart lass like yourself will know not to bother that which is best left alone.”

Her hands tightened into skeletal claws on the cheerful yellow grips. His simple, wise words brought it all back. Her heart thumped in her chest with memories made fresh from this morning’s flashback. Drowning in her own bed. Screaming through tears at her lover for failing her. A nightly dose of sleeping herbs for years. Xia had gone poking into the deepest parts of a very large something that was best left alone, and she’d paid. But orders were orders.

“That’s good advice. Don’t worry about me. I’m good at what I do.” She smiled fondly at Mr. Branough, with his funny eyebrows and kind, sharp eyes. She swallowed, pushing her heart back into her chest.

Saying goodbye to Mr. Branough and Rougher, Xia mounted the Schwinn. With an awkward, hopping push, she strained on the pedals. Soon the large fenders and white-walled tires were rolling with all its considerable retro-charm. It amused Xia to see humans recycle styles round and round, but she was grateful too. So much changed so quickly. It was comforting when familiar items came into fashion again.

Away she zoomed down the street, the breeze flapping the wide brim of her hat. She caught Anne laughing at her in the grocery’s window, but pretended not to notice. No one in this sleepy village just south of Skye appreciated the Schwinn’s glitter paint job. Nor her sister’s hat. Nor her privacy, for that matter. She adored it here.

At the crest of the hill of the main street, she put her foot down, pausing at the corner. She should return home now, read Markos’s letter, clear her mind from the crappy morning and rest for tonight’s patrol. But she didn’t feel like it. She wasn’t sure what she felt. Maybe dangerous.

Dangerous made her think of Adam, the only other magical she’d met so far in Mallaig. Mr. Branough’s advice to go to the sea suddenly seemed enticing. Well, she was only going to visit the seashore by default. Really she wanted to see the man who belonged to it. She was too upset by Markos’s letter in her basket. Macgregor’s insensitive greed was just the excuse not to open it. She would delay returning to her quiet little cottage. She was going to the water to talk to Adam.

Xia knew better, of course. There would be a price to pay. After all, she was trying to stay beneath Aqua’s notice. Being stationed on the coast and actually going down to the water’s edge were two very different things. Aqua could recognize Xia easier tonight, for her proximity. But it wasn’t like Aqua hadn’t been able to shred her just fine these past weeks anyway. She was sick of it. How about she turn the tables. She wanted to toy with one of Aqua’s pets a bit, like a wicked child shaking a hamster awake in its cage. Hmmm. Xia wasn’t sure how that analogy reflected on her maturity.

She slowed at the foot of the pier, where the steps went from the raised road down to the cobblestone beach. Hello, hamster, she thought with a grin. Propping herself still with one foot stretched out, she looked him over. He was tall and blond, dressed in a ragged brown T-shirt and jeans. She never liked blonds. They were too intimidating, tending to ooze confidence. He was trim and strong. She never pursued lean men, as her soft, wide hips tended to be in a different class than muscular, fit bodies. He was tied to the sea down to his very soul. She feared it like nothing else on earth, above or below. And Xia, of all women, knew there was much to be feared.

The hamster’s name—now stop that, she chastised herself—the fisherman’s name was Adam. Others might wonder what a single man of his work ethic and beauty was doing in this struggling village, working in the freezing, harsh, terrifying sea every day. Xia knew he could be no other place, nor wanted to. This was his territory, settled upon him with ancestral blood. He was working on a thousand greasy pieces of a battered outboard motor strewn across a piece of plywood propped on two sawhorses.

“Hello, Adam.” Wakey-wakey, hamster.

He looked up, and his hair glinted in the sun like gilt. He had black eyes. Some would find this color combination odd, perhaps. It suited him. Xia never cared for men with black eyes. Their thoughts were too deep, too private, to ever truly know them. To ever truly trust them.

He straightened, a tool and a cloth in each filthy hand. “Hello, Morphi.”

See, now that right there made this trip down to the beach worth it. To be reminded that this was not a man she’d ever go for. Jerk.

She smiled brightly from her perch straddling the bike, looking down on him from the tidal wall. She ignored the uncalled-for way he used her title, putting a gulf between them. “Such a nice day, isn’t it?” The steady, menacing swoosh of the waves on the cobbles made her spine shrivel.

“Aye. Nice hat.”

Her cheeks stung in the salt air. Even though he said it without any intonation, it felt ungentlemanly of him to call attention to it. “It used to be. Macgregor found it in the short time it took me to pick up the post.”

“Aye. I was thinking it was him, and not you, that ate it.” Now his tone was sardonic.

Nodding blithely, she gamely changed the subject. “How’s the engine coming?”

“As expected. It’s a piece of shite.”

“Ah.” Teeth clenched, she kept her face pleasant. “Well, good luck then.”

He didn’t say a word in return. She stared at him, smiling like an idiot, brain frozen. Those black eyes were as merciless as the sea. And as cold.

Awkwardly, she bounced the bike’s massive front end around, stumbling when her green peasant skirt caught on a pedal, until she’d turned it, puffing. Finally, she was on the seat and huffing to get it started again. His gaze was a tormenting itch in the middle of her back until she was out of sight. It sucked when the hamster you wanted to play with bit you. People who said selkies made wonderful lovers were morons.