Page 21 of Elemental Hall: Nautica
I am the one who has to try to keep us from dying while he does it. I take the water and form it into a bubble around us, holding it as a shield against the wrath of the storm. I grit my teeth as the wind batters at it, as rain lashes down on it, as lightning strikes nearby.
“I can stop pulling it in,” Darius says. “I can help you to hold off the storm.”
“Don’t!” I insist. If Darius stops, then the storm will drift away from us again, endangering everyone else. Wehaveto hold it here. “I can do this, Darius.”
I sit there, gritting my teeth, trying to control the shield of water around us, holding it against everything the storm can throw at us. The winds tear at that shield, trying to rip it to pieces. It’s all I can do to hold against them. The first time lightning strikes the shield, I yelp in pain and shock, but the shield grounds it. I hold, barely.
Ikeepholding. For minute after minute, I sit there, but it is obvious that the storm will not abate anytime soon. This was something summoned to last the night. If it does so with the fury that Ash and Sybil have managed to pour into it, I am not sure that I will be able to hold out.
Darius clearly senses that, because I feel the moment when he lets go of his control of the storm, pouring his energy into helping me hold the shield.
“Darius! You can’t!” I insist.
“The whole storm is over us now,” he says. “I’ve set the wind patterns tokeepit over us. It will hold here, at least until its power abates. You need my help, Sera.”
I can only acknowledge the truth of it, especially when the next lightning bolt comes down. I brace for another shock running through me, but instead, Darius seems to take that power, pouring it back into the shield, energizing it more.
We hold there, together, and I stare into his eyes while our joined power keeps off the hurricane battering us. His palms are pressed against mine, that simple human contact almost impossibly intimate, when I can feel the totality of what he is through that touch. In that moment, it is as though we are not two separate people, but joined.
Darius smiles then.
“What are you smiling at?” I demand.
“Simply that I did not expect to spend this night so close to one of the most beautiful girls in the academy.”
I don’t blush, but only because I’m too busy focusing on maintaining the shield. “This is not some kind ofdate, Darius!”
Yet it is impossible to ignore how close he is, and how good-looking he is. Under other circumstances, if I’d been told that I would be spending the night this close to someone who looked like him, I would be… well, I’m not surewhatI would feel. Or what would happen.
I’m attracted to him. It’s impossible not to admit that.
“Why haven’t you made more of an effort to fit in with the others here?” I ask.
“You want to have this conversationnow?”
I nod. I need some conversation, any conversation, to distract me from the sheer effort that it’s taking to hold back the storm.
“Talk to me, Darius,” I say. “If we’re going to get through this, I can’t think about how impossible what we’re doing is. Distract me.”
“I can think of allkindsof ways to distract you,” he says, raising an eyebrow.
I laugh. “Does a line like that ever work? Besides, neither one of us can move right now.”
“A most annoying situation,” he says. “To be trapped here, like this, with you, but not to be able todoanything.”
“So talk to me instead,” I say. “Why aren’t you making an effort with the others?”
“Who says I’m not making an effort?”
“I do. You don’t talk to anyone, you haven’t tried to make friends with anyone. You’re still wearing Umbran clothes…”
“Everything about me marks me as Umbran,” Darius says. “Changing clothes would not help. As for the rest, I see the looks. I know that they don’t like me, so whyshouldI go begging to people who hate me for friendship? Should I bow and scrape to Lumina’s nobles the way I had to back in Umbrae?”
“So you push everyone away so that no one can hurt you?” I say. “That sounds like a recipe for loneliness.”
“Why do you care?” he demands.
“Maybe I just think that no one should be alone like that.”
