Elementals: Entwined

Chapter 4: Amy

 What I saw on Tiffany's wrist shocked me.

 Eleven negators.

 That shouldn't have been possible. Even if Tiffany was just an elemental like me, she should have been only able  to take one. There was no way she was completely human with this on.

 I conjured a pair of gloves and reached for the charms. Tiffany shrieked at the sight of them, and I dimly realised that I'd forgotten to tell her about that ability. Oops.

 I carefully turned each one. Any onlooker would have assumed the coated plastic discs were just gold charms, but the symbols on them told another story. The first one I touched featured a teardrop design, except that looped around the design was a thin silver band. If I didn't know what that band meant, I might have found the design pretty, but that band was representative of a chain. It meant that the water element was locked. I reached along the other charms, finding the same thing repeated. A chained leaf design for the plant element, a chained sun for Lux, a lightning bolt for Volta... finally I stopped at the crescent moon that was representative of my own element, not daring to touch it. I knew that if I did, the very gloves I'd conjured would disappear as my power would be blocked until I let go of the symbol. I had to test it though. I touched it with a gloved hand.

Immediately a feeling of emptiness ran through me as everything that made me a Midnight was blocked from my system. My gloves disappeared and pain radiated from my hand to my entire body.   

I let go immediately. Tiffany looked at me alarm. "Amy? Are you okay? Your nose is bleeding."

 "I'm fine." I conjured a tissue and wiped it away before re-conjuring my gloves. I had an apprehensive feeling as to what the eleventh charm would hold, but didn't want to believe it until I'd seen it for sure.

The banded symbol was a simple circle, a tiny ring no bigger than the tip of my pinkie, but that circle was symbolic of wholeness, completeness of all ten elements.

 It was the symbol of Drydan, king of the elementals. And that meant...

 I stared at Tiffany. Speechless. Drydan hadn't had a single child in the past two hundred years. Instead of giving birth, he'd sired chosens. Children who were born completely human that had been handpicked to wield all the elements of one house. A fire chosen, for example, would have power over the fire, electric and light elements. Chosens weren't as crazily powerful as Drydan's children, and as a result less dangerous. It was because of how powerful Drydan's children were that he'd stopped having them.

 So what had caused him to break protocol now? I stared at Tiffany's bracelet in shock. Only a child of Drydan could have worn that bracelet all the time and not died or gone insane. A human would have been made comatose within minutes, or killed within a day. A single elemental like me would have become insane within a week. Tiffany seemed fine unless she got so mad the bracelet couldn't contain her abilities.

 And you had to be one powerful elemental for that bracelet not to work. No wonder we hadn't been able to pinpoint her type: she was all of them.

 That jolted me out of my awed reverie. The bracelet was the only reason that no weather demon had ever sensed what she was. If they were on her way here now, and they found out what she was, they'd hunt her more doggedly than the CIA stalked terrorists.

 "Amy...?" Tiffany looked at me uncertainly. Shelby chose that moment to enter the room with Martin, the pair holding hands. Those two had been going out for two years now, much to Lily's annoyance.

 Lily and Martin were the only siblings I knew whose mother had ended up with two separate elementals. Martin was an earth elemental, whilst Lily was a fire. They clashed so often it was unbelievable. At that moment, I was glad Martin was there. I might need him to restrain Tiffany in order to get her into the car.