Page 35 of The Elementalist
Crystal grinned with a bit of shrug, like she wanted to bust out laughing—but also tried to stay quiet. “I have a few special… talents that clothes get in the way of.”
“I’ll bet,” I muttered past a smile.
“Now whose mind is in the gutter?”
“I’m a man. My mind spends half its day there.” I winked and grasped the knob.
She vanished—except for her clothes.
“Holy shit!” I hissed as quietly as possible.
She returned a few seconds later. “A perk from the fey side of the family. My great aunt’s a wood nymph.”
“Incredible.”
“Not quite… vampires can still see me when I turn invisible. Luckily, they can’t teleport.”
I turned the knob and eased the door open inward. “You can teleport? Are you serious?”
“Quite. Only, it’s fairly useless for anything except escaping bad situations. Only my body teleports… nothing I’m wearing or carrying goes with me. But I found a way around it, sort of. My purse isn’t exactly normal.”
“I kinda got that feeling already. You ready?” I asked.
“More than ready. They killed my sister.”
I nodded. The problem was... I wasn’t ready.
No, not at all.
Chapter Nineteen
Whacking the Nest
The door let us into a short foyer with a coat closet on both sides. Beyond it lay a large chamber with dusty-as-hell burgundy walls, sofas, and chairs. It resembled a cross between the living room of an enormous house and the common area of a hotel. The air hung thick with the smell of wet fabric and age, along with a nearly eye-watering stench of rotting corpse.
I covered my mouth and nose, stifling a cough. “Gah… do you smell that?”
“Mold?”
“No, death.”
She shook her head. “No. It just smells like an abandoned building.”
Whoever used to run this place as a boarding house hadn’t been big on making it homey. The place had a certain sense of austerity to it, decorated in a style reminiscent of the early cheapskate period. Even before the place suffered abandonment, all the furnishings in sight looked utilitarian with little in the way of decoration. A small, round table stood between a pair of padded chairs in the corner by the hallway entrance. It held a rotary phone that probably hadn’t worked—or been touched—since 1962. It honestly surprised me to see electric bulbs on the wall sconces.
Despite my newfound abilities, I still felt like a dumb rube who got drunk and tricked into whacking a hornet nest with a stick while his somewhat-less-drunk friends laughed at him. Hopefully, I won’t end up screaming and running in circles.
Unfortunately, the only light source we had to work with came from the open doorway behind us. The hallway past the phone table looked exactly like the sort of pitch-black deathtrap that characters in horror movies—or any resident of ShadowPines—should never walk down. If I had a flashlight on me, I had the distinct feeling the batteries would have died after three steps.
“You were right about it being dark,” I whispered. “Guess it doesn’t much matter what time we came here.”
Crystal reached out her hand as if to allow a fairy to land on it; instead, a tennis-ball sized orb of yellow-green light appeared over her palm. It floated up and drifted lazily about at random, but never glided more than a few feet away from her. Three more light spheres appeared one after the next, all dancing around in meandering paths like moths.
“Okay… guess you save a bunch of money on batteries.”
She smiled. “Will-o-wisps.”
“Aren’t they supposed to be dark spirits that lure the unwary to drown in swamps or something?”
