The Fifth Element

Greta sat behind her wood desk watching me with her gray eyes, “Is that the entire report?” she asked, and I nodded.

“What has been done with the boy who was with her?” she asked.

“He was put in solitary confinement for further observations and testing,” I replied, “Although I don’t care for their definition of testing.”

She shook her head at me, place, “And I don’t care that you don’t care for their methods, you can leave now,” she said and waved her hand in dismissal at me and went back to working on her papers on her desk.

I, however, did not leave and stepped closer to her desk and she looked up from her papers to once again stare at me with her gray eyes, “Anything else you need Mr.Hemlock?” she asked, nd I could detect a hint of annoyance in her voice. The bobbing lights above her cast harsh shadows on her face making it look sharper, more predatory.

I leaned forward and placed my hands on top of her desk, “The Kraken entered through a portal, and it seemed to have been controlled by someone. Funny how those abilities seem to mirror your own,” I said and watched for her reaction, but her expression remained blank.

“What are you implying Mr. Hemlock?” she asked, and I swore I detected a note of panic underlying the anger that now saturated her voice. “Have you ever thought of the possibility that there may be others like me?” then she added, “All my actions have been in accord with the school board and the magic council. I don’t have my own vendetta if that is what you think.”

I narrowed my eyes at her, “Why were you trying to move her? Was it because of the decision the school board was probably going to make?“I pressed.

Greta’s bottom lip curled up into a snarl, “I’m not sure I like what you keep insisting that I’m doing anything besides following orders! I suggest you check on your charge before I reassign her to someone else. She’s in the infirmary, poor thing. I was just visiting her before you came here.”

“Alright, I’ll go check on her,” I said. “But one more thing,” I lowered my voice, “on that night, I saw that someone dangerous was coming for her, and sent Amber to retrieve her a couple of days before the scheduled abduction for her own safety, that person wasn’t a danger to her at all, was he? I had a distinct feeling that someone had tampered with my vision,” and with that, I turned and walked away from the desk.

I could feel Greta’s eyes boring into my back while I walked through the intricately carved doors. At the same time I walked out, a dark haired man walked in. We locked eyes briefly and I found myself staring into eyes so dark that you couldn’t even see his pupils. I recognized him as one of the heads of the school, I wondered why he was going to talk to Greta. But I didn’t have time to think about it. I had somewhere I needed to be. But my head was beginning to feel cloudy. Why was I in Greta’s office again? To report to her about the boy and nothing more. Yeah that seemed right.

POV; Somewhere in a Dream

Grass crunched under my shoes as my feet pounded the hard earth. The moonlight reflected off my onyx black hair as it flowed out behind me. I didn’t know why I was running, or even what I was running from, but I just knew I had to run. In the distance, a horn sounded, and dogs howled in unison. My skin crawled with the thought that soon their teeth would be ripping into my flesh.

A great feeling of relief came to me as I spotted the giant tree standing all by itself in the center of a field of black flowers. My feet kicked up countless petals as I ran towards it. When I reached the trunk of the ancient oak, I leaned against it, panting heavily. I looked around, and what I didn’t see made my heart drop.

“Neeva? Neeva!?” I cried out, very much aware that I had no face to match to the name I was calling, but I thought I had heard that name before not too long ago. I became frantic when no one answered my call.

“I’m up here mommy,” a small voice said from above. My head snapped up to the branches twisting above my head, in one sat a little boy, around the age of six, wearing ragged looking clothes, and looking like he was barely hanging on to the low hanging limb. The little boy had straight midnight black hair like me and my haunting purple eyes. My heart broke when I saw the condition he was in. No mother should have to see her child in such a pitiful state.

I managed a weak smile. “Jump down baby,” I cooed, holding my hands up to him. He let go, and I caught him and hugged him to my chest. I enjoyed the feeling of his little body in my arms, for what I knew was going to be the last time.

I reluctantly set him down and knelt down in front of him. I unslung my bag from my shoulder, and removed my water skin from it, before unscrewing the cap and pressing it to his parched lips. He eagerly gulped down the water and would have drunken it all had I not stopped him.

“You have to save some for later,” I explained as I pulled the water skin from his lips, and sucked the water skin back into the leather bag. The little boy had been staring at it longingly as I had been putting away.

He looked up from the bag to my face. “Mommy should have a drink too,” he told me solemnly.

I shook my head even though my throat burned with thirst. “Mommy doesn’t need it, but Neeva does,” I said, slinging the bag over his tiny shoulders. I leaned forward and placed a gentle kiss on his forehead before pulling away.

Tears began pooling in his eyes as he looked at me. He knew I was going to leave him.

“I want you to listen carefully, Neeva,” I said, wiping away the tears with my thumb. “I have a friend waiting for you over there under those trees.” I pointed to a clump of trees off in the distance, barely visible in the moonlight. “You are going to run as fast as you can towards them, and I’m going to stay here and distract them.”

“No!” he cried throwing his arms around my neck. “Don’t leave me again!”

“Shhh,” I soothed. “I’ll be right behind you after, I take care of the bad guys,” I lied.

He let go and looked at me like he really wanted to believe me.

From not too far in the distance, the dogs howled. I turn to see that I could make out their small furry shapes barreling towards us.

“Run!” I commanded him and pushed him away from me. He stumbled backward and gave me one last longing look, before turning and running towards the small clump of trees.

With my son heading towards safety, I turned towards my death and placed my hands on the dry earth. I felt the first movement of life as the first of the dead began to stir in their graves.

“HEY WAKE UP!” I was jolted awake as someone screamed in my ear. I found myself in the next instant on the floor tangled up in a white mess of sheets. I looked around to see white walls surrounding me on all four sides, they seemed to glow softly in the dim light. I was lying beside a cot, that I had, presumably, fallen out of when I received my rude wake up call. There were no doors to be found in the entire room, typical.

“Ah, finally you’re awake.” The red headed ghost’s head appeared over the side of the cot. “You know you sleep like the dead,” she said and began giggling as she realized the irony in her word phrasing.

“Where am I?” I said, using the side of the cot to help me stand. The smell of rubbing alcohol filled my nose.

The sheets dropped away from my body to reveal that I was wearing one of the blood red uniforms with gold trimming. The skirt of the uniform came to about the middle of my thigh, and the top of the uniform was buttoned up to my neck. Long sleeve stretched over my slender arms and ended just above my wrists.

“You’re in the infirmary, you just keeled over and dropped to the floor, like a bag of potatoes in the middle of your sentence, it was actually kind of funny.”

I gave her a dirty look before sitting on the cot. “Who dressed me?” I questioned, adjusting my skirt, so it covered a little bit more leg.

“Henry.”

“Wha-what?” I stammered, looking up sharply.

“Just kidding, the nurse did, but you should’ve seen your face, talk about gullible!” she laughed.

I let out a sigh of relief and shifted my body, so I was leaning against the wall the cot was pressed up against.

“What’s your name?” I asked the ghost.

“Why do you want to know?” She gazed at me curiously with her holes for eyes, which I was gradually getting used to seeing.

I shrugged my shoulders. “Well, I just had been calling you the ghost girl with red hair in my head.”

“Really, what a creative name, but why do I care what you call me in your head?”

“Because I’ll start calling you that out loud.”

I could tell that the ghost was considering this for a moment. “Lacy,” she finally said, “my name is Lacy.”

“Lacy?”

“Yes Lacy, do you have a problem with it!?”

I tried to suppress the giggles rising up in my throat, but failed miserably. “Lacy, seriously? That name doesn’t fit you at all. It sounds like a name for some delicate and shy girl.”

She scowled at me. “Do you think that I think it fits me either!? At least I’m not named after a crayon.”

“Okay, I’m done. I’m sorry.” I said taking deep breaths in an attempt to stop my laughter, but I kept cracking up. After another good ten minutes of laughing nonstop, I finally calmed down enough to speak.”

“You have a weird sense of humor,” Lacy said as she floated back and forth lazily across the room.

“At least I don’t find humor in other people’s misery,” I retorted. I crossed the room and examined the contents of a few glass jars lined up on a shelf against the wall. Something moved in one of the jars, and I let out a shriek, jumping back from them.

I heard the distinct sizzling sound as part of the wall evaporated, and Henry came charging into the room. He took a quick scan of the room, before focusing his attention on me.

“Are you alright?” he asked, looking at me concerned.

“Ye-Yeah, but I think there’s something that isn’t quite dead yet in one of those jars,” I said, pointing across the room to the shelf.

Henry got an annoyed look on his face, and I could already tell that whatever he was going to say next was going to pixie me off.

Sure enough”Don’t yell like that you stupid cow, I thought someone was coming at you with a knife by the way you were screaming!”

Yup, maybe I had the ability to predict the future.

“Sure, I’ll make sure I’ll scream more properly for you next time,” I said, sarcasm dripping from each word. “I wouldn’t want to upset my oh beloved babysitter.”

“I prefer the word guardian,” Henry said coolly and smirked at me.

“Uh!” I screamed pointing at him, my hand shaking in anger. “I’m getting really tired of your smart comments.”

“Well I’m getting really tired of your face, but guess what? I deal with it,” he shot back.

“Ha-ha, really original, you should actually write that one down.”

Henry suddenly started laughing. I blinked a couple of times, confused by his sudden and unexpected outburst.

“Come on that comeback wasn’t that great,” I said wearily. “Or that funny either,” I added.

Henry stopped laughing.

“I’m not laughing because of either one of those reasons. I’m laughing because you make me so frustrated. You get under my skin so easily, and every other thing you do gets me in trouble, yet I want to protect you. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I kind of care for that other place too. ”

“What other place?” I asked, totally confused at this point.

Henry looked at me for a solid minute before finally saying,“Well I guess since you’reF involved in it, I suppose I’ll tell you. You see the wizard council, the people who ordered this school built, aren’t only in charge of protecting this world, but the other world too.”

“The other world?” I repeated like a parrot.

“Yes, it isn’t known by a lot of people, but there if another world besides this one. They are separated by a thin veil; in fact, this veil is so thin that the worlds influence each other daily. But there is a big difference between our world and theirs, their world has little or no magic. The students here have the potential to rip the veil, because of their altered of rare elemental powers and potentially disturb the balance. That’s why they are brought here to be trained to control themselves before they are given jobs where the government can closely monitor them. And that includes you and me, we are special elementals.

“So has anyone been able to cross into the other world, like by ripping the veil?” I questioned.

Henry was silent for a moment. “Yes and no, the people who have been able to cross into the next world have done it purely on accident on both sides. The ones who have done in purposely have never come back. The veil is so thin in some locations that it is easy to slip from one world to the next, especially where you lived, but lately, there’s been an abnormal amount of crossings happening from both sides.

“So someone’s messing with the veil basically?”

Henry didn’t answer me. Instead, his electric blue eyes focused on my stomach.

“Exactly!” a faint smile tugged at the corners of Henry’s mouth. “Maybe you’re not as stupid as I thought you were.”

“Umm, thanks, I guess?” I said, unsure if he was paying me a compliment or insulting me again. “So, where do I come in in all of this? I’m guessing that this problem with the veil is what is keeping the big four from squashing me like a bug.”

Henry nodded. “Because we believe we know who is causing these disturbances and after all, it takes a necromancer to beat a necromancer.”

It took me a moment to process what he had just said, but when he did, I felt my heart leap in my chest. “Wait, the person behind this is a necromancer!?”

Henry shook his head, “But we are working on investigating it more, but just in case we are keeping you around and alive. The school could decide to kill you easily if they decide that you aren’t worth the risk of letting a Necromancer live.”

“So wait, they might decide that at any moment to kill me!?” I cried.

“Yes, so just behave yourself, become powerful, and that won’t happen.”

“But if you can kill me, couldn’t you just kill them without my help?” I said and instantly regretted saying it. Nice going Violet, way to dispute the only thing keeping you alive.

“No, see there is a difference between you and them, they know what they are doing, and you don’t. The school might have taken out a safety measurement, in case they have to kill you,” Heney gazed down at my stomach, and his eyes stayed locked there.

“Wait what do you mean by safety measure?” I asked nervously, but he didn’t answer. He just continued to look at my stomach.

Not caring if he was watching me I grabbed the corners of my shirt and began to pull it up. I screamed when I saw what was beneath.