When Dylan asked what was wrong, she answered levelly that she’d twisted her ankle exploring a less-frequented part of the property; but she hadn’t been limping when she walked into the house. Her grandmother offered to look at the injury, Aira said she’d rest a little while instead, that it wasn...
She lay in bed for a long moment, casting outwardly with her mind, trying to find the source of the impinging sensation. One of these days I’m going to quit…Wish mommy would let me stay home from school…First day at the new job!...Why is it so early… None of the voices tha...
The difficulty in that was that the same crystals making it impossible for Alex to escape also made it impossible for Aira to use even the little bit of her ability that the potion allowed her to access. She felt the low hum of earth-aligned elements in the walls around them as they approached th...
They had brought in several intractable elementals; which also meant that Aira had gained some deep-seated enemies. Among them were those who had wanted her dead so that she wouldn’t be a threat to their own ambitions; those who feared that the balance among the elemental rulers would remain shif...
He glanced at his older brother; Aiden was still looking irritated, angry even. Dylan knew that to some degree he had lost his brother’s trust—and he could even understand why. From the perspective of Aiden and Aira, Leigh was dangerous indeed. But in spite of the short time he had known her, Dyl...
The twinges, the shifts in her perception, weren’t as alarming as they might have been had she not expected them. They mirrored the changes she’d gone through at various points in her youth. Once she’d begun showing promising abilities at the age of six, her grandmother kept her every summer from...
She finger-combed her hair back from her face, feeling the kind of bone-deep fatigue that she hated. Leigh—the woman who Dylan had worked so hard to rescue, the keystone to their plan to find at least some of the elementals responsible for attacking the hotel housing the air elemental complement—...
However, in the week following her grandmother’s death, that concern deepened. He knew there would be fallout after the tryst between her and Aiden, but he had not anticipated the sudden abrupt change in Aira’s demeanor. She was more unstable than ever, spending too much time by herself, and caus...
In the days since being awakened abruptly by the sound of Aira’s screams, he had found himself repeatedly jolted from sleep with the anticipation of another crisis. He remembered coming into his full powers and the week before that birthday. He had told Aira about lighting his bed on fire twice, ...