Mindgasm - A Bad Boy Romance With A Twist (Mind Games Book 3) by Gabi Moore (24)

“I wish. Today I’m actually working for a change. I’m here on a fact-finding mission and I think I’ve just located one very interesting fact.” He looked Dion directly in the face.

“Does this concern me somehow?” Dion asked.

“In a way. I found out this morning your uncle owns the mall. Now isn’t that funny? You transfer here from out of town because your parents disappear and move in with your aunt and uncle. No coincidence at all that your other uncle has fronted this entire building project.”

“Have I broken any laws, detective?”

“Not that I know about. It’s not you I’m interested in today. Your Uncle Seth, on the other hand, interests me very much. Him and his entire business empire. I see he’s done quite well for himself over the years. A lot better than most men could have done in similar situations. He took your grandfather’s company public five years ago and now he drops money all over the place.”

“I never even knew I had another uncle until recently.”

Lilly prayed he didn’t reveal how he knew about his uncle. Say the wrong thing and they’d both be carted off to an insane asylum.

“My father didn’t talk much about his family. I knew some cousins and my Uncle Rich, but just recently learned about the man that you are interested in today. I think you might know more about him than I do.”

“Are you kidding me?” Jones snapped. “All the money this guy has and his own brother don’t even acknowledge him?”

“All I know is that my father and he had a falling out and they never spoke again. By the way, detective, how do you know so much about my family?”

“You can find out a lot when you know other police departments. You can find out more if you have friends down at the FBI headquarters in Washington. You can find out a whole lot if there is an active investigation ongoing, which concerns someone who’s made an appearance in your little burg. A whole lot of people are interested in your uncle and how he accumulated so much money in a short amount of time. There are many questions being asked right now and my FBI friends want me to find out some things for them which won’t involve a search warrant.”

“So this is where Dion fits into the picture?” Lilly asked. “Why would he know anything?”

“I don’t know. I would like to find out how much he knows. Anything I can learn from him will be helpful. And it will save me the trouble of digging it out of public records. You can find a lot in public records, but it takes a long time to sort through them looking for what you want. It’s a real pain if you have to do it on your own time and don’t receive any overtime for the job. But sometimes it pays off if you find a rat and get to take him down. I may not be a cat, but I know a rodent nest when I see one.”

“Maybe we need to sit down and talk,” Dion said to the officer. “I see a table by that store with three chairs. If you spring for ice cream, we can have a conversation.”

“I can spare that much out of my pocket,” Jones said and they all headed to the table.

After Jones had ordered three sundaes, Dion began to talk. He told the detective about his parents’ kidnapping and how he was forced to move in with his aunt and uncle on the other side of the country. He talked about what he knew in regards to his Uncle Seth, which wasn’t much. He mentioned how his father and uncle had been rivals for his mother’s heart. He told the detective after they were married; his father started a business and had as little to do with his family as possible. All of which was true, but Dion neglected to tell him about element manipulation or how he’d used a mystical travel agency to jump around time to gain this information. He neglected to tell him about the meeting with his uncle outside the time circles.

“I know most of what you just told me,” Jones grumbled. “I didn’t know the exact connections, but you confirmed most of them to me. Now I suppose you want to know what I have.”

Dion nodded.

“Your uncle took over his father’s adhesives company before the old man passed on. The first thing he did when he had control of the company was to go around and invest in similar companies. Once he gained some control in them, he’d use his influence to have his company buy up all their stock and merge. How he managed to do this with all the anti-trust laws on the books still fascinates me. I think he either paid some people off or worked it in such a way that all the buy-outs happened under the radar.

It didn’t matter, because soon enough he had enough cash to start buying up more companies and make investments. He went into real estate in a big way and over-extended himself plenty of times. Somehow, he’s managed to keep his funds moving around to different shell companies in different states. I think it will all catch up with him and we think he’s crossed a line of sorts.”

“What do you mean?” Lilly asked him.

“He’s cooked up some deal which involved diamonds stolen out of a vault in Chicago. I don’t know the particulars, but there was a huge heist from a secure vault last year where many expensive rocks were lifted. We keep hearing his name mentioned in connection with the robbery. I don’t think he had anything directly to do with it, but he might have financed the operation.”

“Wouldn’t that be under someone else’s territory?” Dion asked. “I mean, why would the local police be involved in a crime on that scale? I thought the FBI was involved if it crossed state lines.”

Jones leaned back in his chair and gave a look of admiration at two college-aged girls who walked past him. He turned back to Dion and Lilly. “You are a smart kid. How is it that you know so much about criminal activity and law enforcement at your age? Thinking on becoming a cop someday?”

“It has crossed my mind once or twice.”

“Keep this in mind,” Jones told him. “The bad guys shoot back and they have better guns. But to return to what you asked, yes it would normally be a case for the FBI. As I said, they are looking into it at the top level, but sometimes they tap people like me where a local eye is needed. I had some people I know in Washington who needed a favor or two call me. We had a long talk and they told me the mall was attracting all kinds of attention because they suspected he was using it to get rid of money he’s not supposed to have. Happens all the time. You would be surprised how many dud records and lousy movies are the result of people dropping cash because they don’t want their accountant to ask questions.”

All three were silent at the table for a good minute. Each of them had more to tell, but were afraid of revealing too much information before they got what they wanted.

Dion couldn’t tell Detective Jones about the travels outside the time circles to Ancient Egypt and he suspected Jones knew a lot more about his uncle’s activities than he wanted to say. The only person who had little in the way of knowledge to contribute was Lilly. She had seen too much to just get up and walk away.

“So what do you want from me?” Dion asked him. “I barely know my uncle and we’ve only spoken one time.” Dion neglected to mention the one time was a few hours ago.

“Let me know if you find out anything that I can use,” Jones said. “I’ll watch out for you. I know you are still trying to find your parents and I might be able to find out some information you can’t. As I said, I know people in Washington. Kidnapping is a federal crime and it falls under the FBI’s jurisdiction, so they will have an open file on it. I’ll see what I can find out if you see what you can find out.”

“I’ll do what I can,” he told Jones. “You do the same.”

“Deal.” Jones turned to Lilly. “No need to tell your parents I said hello again. They’ll wonder why you’ve ran into me two days in a row down at the mall.”

He got up and walked away.

They saw him leave through the nearest exit doors.

“Does he change anything?” Lilly asked.

“Not in the least bit. All it means is that there is one more person to keep in mind. I don’t know if he’ll be of any use to me at all. Your detective friend doesn’t seem to realize my parents are imprisoned here.” Dion starred at the table in thought for a few seconds. “We need to go fetch Emily and Sean. They should be waking up soon.”

It was a short walk to the furniture store and the manager was on duty. As Dion and Lilly walked into the store, he signaled to them and they followed him to the back room. The store didn’t have very many patrons in that day and they passed into the section marked “Employees Only” without much notice.

“Been sleeping sound all day,” the manager told them while he opened the door. “I’ve checked in on them from time to time and they’re fine.”

Both were still asleep when they looked in. The manager didn’t turn on the light to the second back room where the display waterbed was kept. Emily was curled up to Sean and sleeping in peace. Sean had his arm around her and was in the land of Hypnos too.

“Both of you need to wake,” Dion said to them as he stood by Sean. “Time to go home.”

Sean opened his eyes a bit at a time and looked up. He seemed oblivious to where he was and rose up with a backstretch. Emily did the same and turned to look at Sean with confusion. She kicked her feet over the side of the bed, put her shoes on and checked to make sure her clothes were still in place.

“What am I doing here?” both of them said at the same time.

“Do you recall anything that had to do with the cheerleaders?” Dion asked them.

“The last thing I remember was facing down with them in the mall,” Sean told him. “I thought they had some nerve to try and corner us out there.”

“What about you?” Dion said to Emily who appeared to be a little bit groggy.

“It’s the last thing I remember too. We were standing there and they appeared, acting like they owned the place. What happened?”

“Elemental power,” he said. “They had a lot of it and tried to use what they had to get to me through both of you. Don’t worry, I’ve been granted mastery over the air element, so they will be of no further trouble.”

Dion turned again to Sean. “We need to talk later.”

Sean nodded in return.

“I hate to kick you out,” said the manager, “but I do need this room for customers. I’ve had to tell several people today where’re fixing a leak to get them to come back.”

“We’ll be out of here soon enough,” Dion said.

They walked Sean and Emily out into the parking lot with care. At one point Dion thought, he might have to hold onto Sean, as he still seemed to be in a daze. Emily was fully awake by now and kept her eyes ahead as if she tried to remember something. It was better she didn’t.

Once outside the mall and onto the walkway, which snaked down the parking lot, Dion sat everyone down and rested. The outside temperature had dropped, which worried him a bit as this was never a good sign in the spring. Dion looked up in the sky to see if there were any traces of the air elemental sylphs the miniature helicopter scared from the mall, but he couldn’t see them.

“When did you cut a deal with the elemental?” Dion demanded to know from Sean. “And don’t lie to me; I know she promised you a lot if you stole the map from me.”

Sean looked to the ground. Lilly thought he was about to cry.

Sean wanted to, but not in front of Emily. He’s laid there awake with her curled up to him waiting for them to return in the back room of the furniture company. If only he could repeat that hour over and over for the rest of his life, he’d know true peace. When he woke up he had a brief memory of what happened and how the cheerleader elemental had used him to get the map. He knew retribution was on the way, but he could deal with anything if Emily loved him. Although she was asleep, he didn’t care. Maybe someday she’d realize what he’d done and how it was all for her.

“You’ve got everything, Dion,” he snapped. “Both of these girls are crazy about you. Half of the girls in the school swoon when you walk by. I can’t even have one girlfriend. Do you know how many of them I’ve asked to the prom? Three, and I’m not going to ask another one. So, yes, I was pulled out by the hot cheerleader. I’m sorry that I don’t have your good looks and ability to work miracles, but it seemed the only way I’d ever have a girl show interest in me.”

Dion looked at him and tried his best not to feel pity. He’d just confessed to betrayal and for the most idiotic of reasons. Gifted? This ability was a gift? It was a gift to lose your parents and have to rescue them? He was talented because the very things he could do would have him branded a witch in the Middle Ages? All the poor fool had to do was learn how to dress right and be personable and he could live a normal life. Okay, his family might be a mess, but he wasn’t the only one out there with issues. Dion wanted to give him a lecture, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.

“I’ll let it go this time,” he told Sean. “No human alive can stand up to the combined power of twelve elementals of their class. We need to talk some more later.”

Dion turned to Emily. “And you can stop using Sean to do your dirty work! He nearly died to impress you. I’m sorry your home life isn’t the best, but you won’t solve it by playing boys against each other.”

“How dare you talk to me like that?” Emily roared back at him. “I’ve been snatched twice by these creatures just from hanging around with you. I’m still terrified what might come next. Just get me out of this place because I never….”

Her speech was cut short by the sound of a freight train. Except it wasn’t a freight train, it was a tornado.

The large funnel had materialized in the vacant field next to the mall. Sean turned around to see it began to move in the direction of the mall. Of course, the temperature drop and the cloudy skies. The humidity. It was the very air sylphs banished by the toy helicopter. They were back now and headed to the mall with vengeance in mind. They were too dull to realize the mall was far more powerful than anything they could create. At most, the tornado would damage part of the mall, which his uncle could have fixed in a few weeks. But the people who stood in horror in the parking lot could be injured or killed.

Dion left his friends who were still in awe of the funnel and walked to the middle of the lot directly in its path.

The tornado began to leave the field and ripped through the grass and dirt as it came. The field was mostly dirt as it was stripped the previous year for the construction on the mall. A few trees still on the ground were tossed in the air and landed behind it in the barren grass.

Dion glared at the sylphs who were dancing in the middle of it and projected his will into the funnel. They stopped spinning around when they felt his presence and turned to face him. The funnel was slower now and not in motion. The sylphs were watching him and realized they were in front of someone who knew who they were. A command was issued to them from Dion and the tornado evaporated. The last Dion saw of the sylphs were vapor trails as the retreated to the upper atmosphere as fast as they could go.

The funnel was gone. Clouds rolled back in the sky and the sun began to shine through. The mall patrons in the lot, and inside, pressed to the windows, looked relived at the disappearance of the tornado. For years, people would claim a twister had come close to the mall, but vanished at the last minute. No one had a camera with them to take a picture and it soon became a legend told across the town.

Dion walked back to his friends. “We need to leave,” he said and walked towards the car. “We have things to do.”

At eight in the morning, the day Dion appeared to seek the power of the third element, Officer Karanzen had an unexpected visitor in his office. He’d arrived at seven to check the roster from the night before. He prepared for a visit from Matt, the mall’s representative who dropped by on a regular basis to see if there were any security issues they needed to know about. He expected the little toadie to arrive again unannounced today because that punk Dion had managed to get into the mall and obtain what he needed the day before.

The mall owners had played a new game yesterday and told him to stay out of the way. They wanted to handle the local kid who caused them so much grief. He really didn’t care who gave them a hard time, it was all part of the job. Karanzen understood who the kid was and why he needed to be kept at bay, but the mall didn’t make his job easy. Instead of banning Dion from the mall, they wanted him to be allowed to stroll in with his friends and try to reach whatever place he needed to find. Both times, he wasn’t informed from where the kid had to be stopped until it was too late. They didn’t’ want Dion anywhere near the store managers who had the special powers he needed. They seemed to be threatened by this Dion character and Karanzen couldn’t understand why.

If the mall was sitting over the abyss, why didn’t they unleash one of the fiends which lurked inside it against Dion and his friends? There were all kinds of primordial beasts down there that would have him for breakfast if they were allowed to leave. If the mall owners were supposed to stand guard over the Gates of Hell, why couldn’t they let one of these monstrosities out every now and then? There were ways to keep them under control. Even Karanzen knew how to manage his true form until needed. It shouldn’t be much of an issue for the mall owners.

Karanzen had his uniform on and sat behind his desk, the plans of the mall spread out in front of him. If that kid made it back in here today, it left two sections he would try to reach. He betted on the Blue Sector, as he liked to call the part of the mall in front of him. He didn’t know exactly whom Dion needed to reach, but he was almost certain who it might be based on the kid’s activities the last time. Over the years, he’d developed a feel for these things...

“Come on in,” he yelled at the door upon hearing the knock. It had to be one of his guys, who else would be here this early in the morning? Bert for sure; he didn’t have any interests outside his job. He was always the first to clock in when he pulled the morning shift.

The door opened to reveal a man with silver hair and an expensive suit. He was about his age. Karanzen was good about sizing up a suspect. But this was somebody he needed to show some respect. He shot up in his chair and offered a hand, which the man took.

“Lieutenant Karanzen,” he addressed the man. “I’m the security officer for the mall. Is there something I can help you with today?”

“Just the person I want to see. Seth Bach, I am the chief stockholder in the company which owns the mall.”

Karanzen was right again. This was not someone to be taken lightly. He’d heard the name bantered about and it was someone to which you paid attention.

“Sit down, sir,” Karanzen told him. “I suspect this has to do with the problems we’ve had with some of the local kids?”

Bach seated himself at the chair next to Karanzen’s desk. He picked up a service award from it, looked the award over and returned it to the desk.

“It concerns one kid in particular. Dion Bach.”

Karanzen’s eyes flared. “You have the same last name?’

“That’s right. It is because he’s family. Dion is my nephew. He lives here in the area with my brother, his other uncle.”

“Is there something I need to know about? I was told by Matt there was some concern from the office this kid was allowed into the mall. I told him I would need a reason before he could be banned from it. Are you here to give me that reason?”

“You have some idea why this mall was built,” Bach said. “I know because I was the one that sent Matthew out to find you while the mall was under construction. There are two more people he needs to reach. One today, one tomorrow. If he should reach both of them, we can just forget about this mall and everything else in the world. He needs two more elemental powers to obtain the fifth one. Right now, I’m the only fifth element worker in the world. Another fifth element worker would be one too many.”

“Isn’t there a way you could prevent him from reaching the mall?”

“There are many ways I can keep him out of here, none of which I want to employ while I still have family. If it ever became known I’d caused Dion grief to prevent him from reaching the mall, the rest of my family would hunt me down. I don’t have a desire to be a rabbit on the first day of hunting season, Officer Karanzen. Do I make myself clear?”

“Very clear, sir.”

“I’m glad to hear that, officer. Now excuse me, I have a meeting with some investors.”

He stood up and left the room.

***

Dion picked up Lilly early the next morning. She was waiting for him out front of her father’s house in the driveway. She jumped in, slammed the door and kissed him on the lips before she sat down in her seat. It was still not ten in the morning, but some of the neighbors were already out working on their yards.

Dion noticed an older neighbor lady glared at him when Lilly climbed into the van. She taught world literature at the high school and didn’t like him. He’d taken her class last year and found it to be weak in the selection. She lowered his grade because he had the audacity to ask her why an obscure Greek poet from the Middle Ages had more significance than Chaucer or Yukio Mishma.

“Everything alright with your parents?” Dion asked Lilly as he put the gear in drive.

“We had a long conversation,” she said. “I hadn’t thought about some things in a long time. Those cheerleader elementals brought them into my head. I’m not sure if it’s all resolved or not, but we’ll talk some more this evening.”

The previous days’ encounter with the cheerleader elementals, the physical representation of air sylphs, was intense, but not as bad as when they had to rescue Emily from the ghoul cleaners the day before. It didn’t matter now that Dion had two of his four elemental powers. This would allow him to pursue the rare fifth elemental power when the time came.

He was concerned about the effects it might have on his other friends who went along on his quest. Sean seemed to be in better spirits when he dropped him off last night. Now that Sean had finally opened up to Emily, she had the option to accept what he felt for her or breaking it off. If nothing else, it would allow them the opportunity to move on in life. Officer Karanzen and his goon squad hadn’t been around that much. It could change once word was passed up to the clock tower in the center, where the offices of the mall were located, that his security guards failed a second time to prevent Dion from obtaining one of his elemental powers. And they’d learned the man who created the mall was none other than Dion’s own uncle, Seth Bach. As far as Dion knew, his parents were still imprisoned in the clock tower at the center of the mall.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Dion asked Lilly as they headed over to Emily’s house to pick up her and Sean.

Both Sean and Emily insisted on returning to the mall with him and Lilly the next day. They wanted to see the quest through to the end. Dion needed two more powers from the elemental grandmasters before he had all four abilities and the strength to tackle the fifth, which no elemental worker had done in generations. His uncle claimed to possess the power of the fifth element, but had learned it by the dreaded left hand path method. His uncle had not mastered the other elements before it.

“They finally realize I’m not six years old,” Lilly explained to Dion. “Mom told me last night the hardest thing she ever did was admit my sister was a woman and could make her own decisions. I think they want to protect me from the world, but I told them the way to do it is not by locking me away.”

Dion didn’t know how to respond. He’d always had a very open relationship with his parents and never got into trouble in school. He decided years ago it had to do with the way the different element workers were placed into the world at large. You had to be careful that no one saw you create a homunculus or light a campfire with a salamander. It tended to make a kid listen to what his parents had to tell him or her. He remembered watching a nasty water nymph elemental near a group of kids swimming in a lake. Dion was able to coax them all back onto the bank until the elemental left. He was relieved he didn’t have to tell them the reason.

Sean and Emily were waiting for them as he drove up to her father’s house. It took him a few minutes to locate the two as they were under a weeping willow tree on the front yard in the throes of passion. Dion was a little embarrassed to watch Emily as she ran her arms up the back of Sean, and Lilly tried to restrain a smile as they saw them.

“He’ll end up with another bite mark on his neck,” Lilly snickered.

“It will match the one he came home with last night,” Dion sighed.

The two spent the drive home in the backseat last night all over each other. Dion was on the verge of letting them know about the audience in the front when he pulled up to Sean’s house. It took Sean a good minute to untangle Emily from him before he could get out of the van. Emily swooned all the way back home.

Dion waited a few minutes and beeped the horn.

Emily looked over Sean’s shoulder as he turned around with a look of embarrassment. Both of them tried to act normal as they walked up to the van. Sean had turned beet red by the time he was opening the van door.

“I hope we didn’t interrupt anything,” Lilly said to them as they climbed into the back. Dion was quiet; his attention was on the road and the quest that lay in front of them.

Dion parked the van near the third section of the mall. He starred out of the windshield and looked at the main entrance door, which marked the interior to the “water” side of the mall. He couldn’t see Karanzen or his security guards, but he knew they were inside.

The previous evening, Dion had dropped Emily off at her father’s house right after they took Sean home. Emily was quiet all the way back, until, a mile from their destination; Lilly spoke and broke the silence.

“What brought all that on?” she asked Emily. “You’ve been tolerating Sean for the past year and now you’re acting like he’s your long lost soul mate? What changed?”

“I saw a lot of what was inside him. He saw a lot of what was inside me. Something about those cheerleaders, being in close proximity to them merged us on the inside. I don’t know how to explain it, but it brought us together. I woke up an hour after you left and realized where I was in that back room.”

After their encounter with the elementals the previous day, Dion had let them sleep in a back room at a bedding company.

“Do you know,” she continued, “Sean was sitting in a chair fast asleep because he didn’t want me to think he would take advantage of me? He’d moved the chair to the front of the door. He wanted to be there in case anyone tried to come in before I was awake. I knew what happened outside the mall when you stood down those cheerleader elementals. He remembers too. Neither of us could do anything, but we were there when it happened and saw it all. It wasn’t until we were awake that we were in full control of our own minds. In between, we blended somehow and saw a lot of the bad stuff in each other’s heads. He knows about the way my I found my dad in the backyard alone when mom left. I know the hurt his own mother caused him all the years he was growing up. I can’t be separated from him now. I don’t know how to explain it, but we know too much about each other.”

Dion knew the elementals could alter a person’s inner mind if they were too close to them for any length of time. It was one of the reasons so few people could see elementals or even know they existed. It was dangerous to work with any particular elemental for long. Humans could build an attachment to them and would lose their sense of perspective. From there it was a short trip to insanity. This, however, was the first time he’d ever heard of more than one person being around elementals as powerful as those air sylph cheerleaders were.

That night, they’d let Emily off in front of her father’s house. Dion and Lilly watched Emily bounce up to the front door. She unlocked it with her key and let herself in. The light inside stayed on as they pulled away.

“What do you think?” Lilly asked Dion. “Seems to me she’s in love.”

Emily had locked the door from the other side and turned to fix her face in the mirror. She adjusted her top and removed her shoes before turning off the living room lights. In the family room, she could hear the noise of the TV. It was late, but her father liked to stay up and watch the news and then whatever was on afterwards. These days most of the TV stations stayed on the air until the early hours of the morning. On the weekend, several of them never quit broadcasting as the late, late movie finished just in time for the daily farm report. Someday they might run nonstop.

“How was your trip to the mall?” her dad asked. He was an average-sized man who worked in a technical field where most of his colleges were other men.

“It was fine,” she told him. Emily turned to see her reflection in the window to the backyard just in time to see the bite mark on her neck.

“Sure you strictly went to the mall?” he asked her again. “You know, in my day the girls had enough sense to wear high collars.”

Emily looked to the ground in embarrassment. What was she going to say? Her dad had caught her again. When her mother was still at home, she didn’t have to worry. He was too busy staying up at night wondering if his wife would ever return home to give his daughter much concern.

“I know I haven’t been the best father you could ask for, but, Emily, I worry about you. I know your mother isn’t around to and never took much interest in you when she was at home, but I’m trying to make up for it.”

“Daddy, I’m in love,” she said.

Her father was speechless. What was he to say? He’d been there himself and vowed never to remarry after he divorced from Emily’s mother. He didn’t even date other women. His field consisted, for the most part, of men with poor social skills. He’d been alone with his daughter for the past two years, although the divorce wasn’t finalized until a year ago. Her father had the look of a man beaten down by the universe. He’d married the wild bartender girl a year after college when she came weeping to him about her pregnancy. He paid for his mistake over the years.

Inside his mind, he was worried Emily spent too many nights out. She returned home with boys of which he didn’t approve. What could he do now? Her grades were good and she would start college in the fall. He should have cracked down years ago, but now it was too late.

Love? Emily was in love? Kids still used that word after everything they saw? It was almost a relief to hear it from her.

“Anyone I know?” he asked her. It was time to find out. Just in case.

“A boy named Sean. You’ve met him. He’s been over with Lilly a few times?”

“The tall kid who drives the van?”

“No, you have him confused with Dion. Sean is the chunky boy. I need to work with him. He has a good heart and his mother has messed him up.”

Sean had walked slowly up to his parent’s house after Dion dropped him off. He leaned against the car in the driveway before he walked up to the house. There were only two trees in the front yard and he considered going out into the back yard to calm down before he dealt with his mother. His dad was working the second shift this month because it paid better. Although Sean suspected there was another reason.

Both of his sisters were gone. One worked the evenings at a restaurant, the other was over at a friend’s house. Sean noted they spent less time at home the older they got. He was told they were working and preparing for college, but Sean thought they just wanted an excuse to get away from their mother. The woman acted stranger the older she became and Sean wondered if there might be a medical reason. Of course, she would never admit it. The only person who was ever subjected to a medical examination was Sean when he became sullen three years ago.

He knew his mother would either be on the phone in conversation with one of her sisters or watching TV. He betted on the latter, which meant he would be subject to interrogation the moment he stepped through the door. She would stare at him until he told her what she wanted to know. He ran through a list of stories he’d prepared for her in order to get some peace.

There was no way he was going to tell her about Emily. She would immediately want to know everything about her. Over the next hour, she would demand to know where her family lived, what her parents’ names were and the location of her church. If he didn’t know these things, she would find a way to discover them.

Sean closed his eyes and thought about the back of Dion’s van. He’d never been that close to a girl before. What was wrong with him that he felt guilty about being in love? He’s seen the inside of Emily’s mind when they were both trapped by those demon cheerleaders. She had just as much pain in her life as he did. Perhaps more. Her mom was out of the picture and was a continual source of embarrassment to Emily when she would visit. They had this to bond over mothers who were problematic. What was it about this part of Ohio that created such things? He knew too many kids with similar family problems.

Sean had never felt so close to anyone in his entire life. He was already trying to figure out a way to attend college on the same campus where Emily had applied. She wanted to attend school at Cincinnati that fall; he was supposed to go to a local college. He knew why his parents wanted him to stay close, they claimed it was to save money, but his mother didn’t want to let him out of her sight.

Once upon a time, he’d tried to initiate a relationship with another girl in school and it turned into a disaster. Sean never told anyone how depressed he was after she spurned him. He thought about arranging for a disappearance at the time. It used to happen. Guys could run off and join the military or even sign up with an ocean vessel. A quick trip to the library squashed these ideas. The American military was in the middle of major cutbacks after the Vietnam fiasco and it was impossible to get a position on a ship without your merchant marine papers. At least any decent ship and he had no desire to end up missing at sea. Sean swallowed his pride and returned to school that weekend with a better sense of his own place in the great scheme of things. At least only a few people taunted him.

No, the time had come to face up to his mother. He was older now, and if she couldn’t deal with him as a legal adult, it was her problem, not his. He walked to the door and found it open. Yep, she was waiting up for him.

Sean stepped inside and saw his mother at the kitchen table. For some reason, the house was built on one level and the kitchen was visible from the main entrance. His dad talked about doing something so there would be a direct entrance to the back porch. However, he needed to find the time to make the modifications to the house. Right now, he worked too many hours to even think about it. His father didn’t believe in hiring people to work on the house as he felt it was his job.

“Hello, Sean,” his mother said from the coffee table. “Is everything alright? I was worried when it turned nine and you weren’t home.”

“I’m fine, mom. Tired and I need to go to bed. I’m supposed to meet up with Dion and Lilly tomorrow at the mall. I might look for a job while I’m down there.”

His mother had continued to stare at him in the eyes as he walked into the house. He looked away instinctively. It was something he needed to stop doing: assume the submissive tone of a whipped dog. He knew what she was doing, but right now, he just wanted to get to bed and away from her. The last thing he needed was a confrontation.

“Are you sure?” she told him.

Sean kept walking. She would probably leave him alone this evening. At least she hadn’t said anything about the bruise on his color bone. He’s made certain to cover it up before going in the house. Almost to his bedroom, had to be careful not to arouse any suspicion.

“Never felt better,” he told her when he closed the door behind him. There, he’d made it. Now all he needed to do was get in bed and dream nice things about a girl named Emily.

Chapter 2

It was a short hike to Emily’s house the next day and Sean left a note for his mother. He claimed he was headed to the mall with some friends to find a job. Walking anywhere in their neighborhood was a challenge as the subdivisions weren’t built with foot traffic in mind and there were no sidewalks. Anyone walking down the road was seen as a potential troublemaker. He managed to get up early enough to avoid the looks of people leaving for work.

Finally, he arrived at Emily’s house. By his wristwatch, it meant he was just in time to arrive when they’d agreed. Dion would be ready to show up and they would head back to the mall one more time to see what awaited them. After yesterday, he was ready for whatever the mall sent in their direction. All he really wanted was to see Emily again.

She was waiting for him out front when he arrived. Sean walked down the driveway and she almost ambushed him from the hedges. One minute he was wondering if his clothes were presentable, in case her father was still home, the next he felt her arms around him and her lips on his.

“Wow,” he told her. “Do you always greet guys this way?”

“Only you,” she said. “Is everything alright? Did your mother give you a hard time last night when you went home?”

“No. What about you? Is your dad all right? I know you’ve been concerned about him for a long time.” He’d felt her pain when their inner minds merged. Sean still had difficulty separating his thoughts from hers after yesterday. It was as if another person was inside his head.

“We had a father and daughter talk,” she said. “He went into work and I made him promise to get out and meet some decent women.”

“He still can’t get over your mother. He needs to let go. At least you’re eighteen and don’t have to go visit her if you don’t want to.”

“Listen to who is talking. Did you stand up to your mother last night? No? I didn’t think so. Let’s go under the tree and wait for Dion and Lilly. The neighbors will stare if we put on too much of a show. I know a neighbor is watching us right now.”

Sean and Emily continued to be inseparable in the back seat of the van when they continued onto the mall.

“Hey, you two,” Lilly yelled from the passenger seat up front, “keep in mind we have to go back into that mall today and tomorrow. You need to keep your senses sharp before we enter that place.”

She didn’t get much of a response.

“I don’t like it,” Dion said as they approached the entrance to third section of the mall. “It’s too quite outside. Where are Karanzen and his thugs? It’s past ten in the morning and the mall is open. I expect he’ll greet us very soon.

Dion closed his eyes and tried to feel if any elementals were close by. He couldn’t feel any of the stronger ones, but if this part of the mall was dedicated to the element of water, where would they be? The nearest body of water was miles away and it wasn’t more than a large creek. They would make an appearance. He knew it. The elementals had no intention of allowing him to gain power over them if they could prevent it. The others had failed in their attempts to stop him, but he still needed the other two powers. And God only knew what lay inside that tower dedicated to the fifth element…

The doors to the mall popped open the moment they reached them.

Karanzen came marching out with four of his best men. They formed a cup outside the doors with Karanzen at the bottom and the other four on the sides. It was similar to the bowl of death the cheerleader elementals had formed the day before. Same concept.

“Sorry, Dion,” the security chief informed him. “You just lost your right to be inside here.” Karanzen folded his arms across his thick chest and starred down at the four youths in front of him. “I guess your uncle doesn’t want you in here anymore.”

“Your uncle?” Sean said to him. “He owns this place?”

“Majority stockholder,” Dion explained. “Which means he can get what he wants. Don’t worry; I just learned yesterday he was the one who built this place.”

“I guess family isn’t everything,” Karanzen snickered. “Now get out of here before I call the sheriff and have you arrested. Your friends have to leave too. They came in with you, they leave with you.”

“Leave, Officer Karanzen?” Dion asked him. “Leave as you did in the Chosin Reservoir? You want me to flee the same way?”

Karanzen became quiet.

He was in the frozen landscape of Northern Korea as he fled from the burning tank. The Chinese ‘volunteers’ had destroyed the tank minutes after they found it and flowed over the hills after him and his men. He’d accidently discovered the main body of the Chinese counterattack as it swarmed across the mountains after the United Nations Forces. He ran and didn’t stop until his legs gave out. In the distance, he could hear orders and commands in Mandarin as the Chinese hunted down any troops they could find. It was cold, colder than he’d ever had to encounter in the open before. Explosions lit up the sky and it revealed the extent of the troops moving south. But he had no radio to let his side know what was on the way.

Dion watched Karanzen, as he stood there with his mouth opened, hardly able to say a word. His own men stopped and turned to look at their boss. A few of them had seen these episodes. They were rare, but the smart thing to do was just ignore them and go about your business. No one, other than the four they were supposed to keep out of the mall, stood outside the doors. It could change in a minute with more people walking their way through the parking lot.

Finally, one of the security guards, Izzy, walked over to Karanzen and spoke to him. It was all fine for him not to respond to questions in his office, but out in front of the mall it made everyone look bad.

“Are you there, boss?” the man said to Karanzen.

As they stood and watched Karanzen’s still form, everyone heard the sound of a bus pull up in front. No one found it odd the bus didn’t make any noise as it entered the parking lot. One minute the traffic was normal inside the lot, the next minute they were startled by the sound of an English double-decked bus as it pulled up in front of the walkway to the mall entrance. The bus was noisy and let everyone know it arrived by the loud sound of its horn when it came to stop. They could hear the sound of the brake as it was set in place.

“I didn’t know those things were over here,” Lilly said to Dion. “First time I’ve ever seen one outside of movies.”

“I don’t think this is a normal bus,” Dion said to them. “I feel some elemental movement. I believe we are about to see something other than people arriving for a tour.”

The moment he finished speaking, the doors opened to the bus and a horde of young women poured out of it. For a second Dion thought, it was a return of the air elemental cheerleaders, but these girls, all of who looked no older than eighteen, wore tracksuits and flip-flops. Across the front of their designer suits the logo “Aquarian Synchronized Swim Team” was emblazed. They proceeded to climb out of the bus for a good two minutes until an older woman in the same outfit exited with them. She looked at the mall and made some notes on a pad. Satisfied, she returned to the bus, the doors closed and it continued on its way.

Halfway out of the parking lot, the bus vanished.

“Nymphs,” Dion announced. “They’re nymphs.”

“Really?” Sean said. “Sounds like my lucky day. Ouch!” The exclamation came from Emily punching him in the side.

“Not those kind nymphs,” Dion said. “Water nymphs. As in elementals. These are water elementals and they’ve arrived just in time to get us into the mall.”

They had the same clear skin and ivory teeth as the cheerleaders the day before, but this group seemed light-hearted. The skipped down the walkway, singing and dancing as they went. The security guards neglected their boss who was still in a daze and turned their attention on the young women. On the side of the doors were glass windows and Dion could see men pushing to get a better view of the swim team as they came up to the entrance.

“Naiads I think,” Dion continued as they came closer. “Just be careful. I don’t know whom they are bound to at this moment. They tend to stick with a particular location. If they’ve been brought in here, it’s for a reason. Don’t get to close, if you form any type of attachment to them, they can become very possessive.”

He felt Lilly’s arm around him and noticed Emily pull Sean over to her.

The effect of the Naiads was powerful and neutralized any bad thoughts a person might have. Unlike the sylphs from yesterday, these creatures were already in their natural form. He’d seen them in lakes and on the beach at the ocean with his parents, who warned Dion to avoid them. Countless sailors had learned the hard way it wasn’t a good idea to spend time with the Naiads. If they took a fancy to you, they didn’t like to give you up.

The four friends moved out of the way, as the swim team swarmed around the guards, admiring their uniforms and badges. One took off a guard’s cap and admired herself in its reflection. Another patted the badge on one guard’s uniform. They seemed happy and carefree, which made it hard to avoid starring at them.

At that moment, Karanzen left his cataleptic state and saw two of the young women dance around him. He was speechless. He’d been terrified for his life and now he was facing two of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen. Where was he?

The swim team swarmed past the speechless guards and began to flow into the mall on a wave of laughter. Dion realized they had the opportunity needed to get inside.

“Follow them,” he told his friends. “Go in with them; just don’t get taken in by them.”

Dion and his friends joined the mass of the naiad swim team as it swept into the mall as one continuous wave. The security guards had no idea what they encountered as the young women swept past them. Dion and friends managed to position themselves inside the group and avoid any confrontation with the security guards.

It worked. They were inside the mall in seconds, moving with the happy swim team as it continued onward in one mass. The four friends stayed to the middle and bounced along with them. They waited until they were far inside the mall and away from the main entrance until they peeled away from the water elementals. Exhausted, they went to one side of the mall and panted in relief.

The swim team had an instant effect on the shoppers in the mall. Men turned in their direction and looked on in admiration. Young women were impressed, as were the older ones with daughters. Young guys were inclined to find out who they were, what school they attended and did any of them have boyfriends? The elementals stayed together, but for the next few minutes they could have robbed the mall blind and no one would’ve noticed. They shared this with the air elementals that’d been there the day before in the form of cheerleaders.

Dion watched as they found their destination and headed toward it: a temporary store that sold swimwear for people who planned to vacation in the Caribbean. The mall had several of the “pop-up” stores which used spaces not rented out full-time and only needed the location for six months. By August, the store would close and a new place would open in the same location, probably a place that sold Halloween costumes.

Still in their tracksuits, the girls wandered over to and filed inside. As Dion still observed them, the swim team proceeded to strip off their suits. This created another round of interest as a mob of men soon gathered outside the store and watched. Much to their disappointment, and to the relief of their wives, the swim team had swimsuits on underneath the tracksuits. Each of them wore a different one. Most had two-piece bikinis, others had one-piece suits. Each was a different style. As the crowd of curious on-lookers moved into the store, the manager placed a sign in the window, which told those interested in the team who they were.

“I don’t believe it,” Sean said as Emily held on to him. “A bikini team.”

“Not all of them have bikinis on,” Dion said. He watched them take their tracksuits and stack them in the corner.

“I’m not complaining.”

This time Emily stepped on Sean’s foot.

Most of the customers appeared to be guys. Dion watched through the window, as men of all shapes and sizes would go inside the store, see a member of the swim team with a suit on her that he liked, and then ask about the price. This repeated itself over and over until the cash register was running full throttle and the sales staff working hard to keep up with everyone. Soon, a long line ran down from the sales counter to the end of the store. A large group waited outside the store, and private security guard appeared to escort people in and out.

“You have to admit,” Sean said to Dion, “it is an effective way to boost sales.”

“Are you going to go buy me something?” Emily said. “Because I have my eye on one of those.”

Sean took out his wallet and looked at it. “Uh, cash is a little short today.”

“Then don’t go anywhere near it!”

“I’m glad I don’t have to be the one who tells those men the girls aren’t human,” Dion said. “I don’t think they’d like their bubble popped, so it won’t happen.”

“And these are water spirits?” Lilly asked him. She had on a jeans jacket to match Dion’s today, but wore a pair of black pants and heels. Her mother commented before he picked her up that she had to have her eye on a new boy since Lilly was taking so much time to get ready.

“Elementals,” he corrected her. “A spirit is someone who once walked the earth in human form. These have existed as separate intelligences for thousands of years. They may have been here before humanity made an appearance.”

“I’m guessing they come in different forms?”

“Of course. You have the various types. Some never leave the water. The ones over there can exist out of water for long periods of time. Then you have the mermaids, which can never leave the ocean, the Lorelei that only live in mountain streams and the sirens that lure men to their death through song. The sirens are the most dangerous ones, but I don’t even think the sprites, which have very little interaction with humans, are safe. All of them resent the way humanity have manipulated the waterways and ocean to their advantage. I always find a way to warn people away from them if I see any around when I swim or even use a boat. You can’t allow yourself to get too close because they will become infatuated with you and won’t leave. If you spurn one they will find a way to do some harm. Too many people every year become involved with water elementals and fail to realize what they’ve done.”

“Always women?” Lilly asked further. “If they’re supernatural, why couldn’t they assume any form they wanted?”

“One of the great mysteries of the universe. I’ve only seen water elementals manifest as women. Same for the air elementals. Something to do with generative powers, but I don’t really know. I don’t think anyone does. When you work with elementals, there are things you don’t question so long as they give you the results you want. Since you need to be very careful when manipulating them, it doesn’t pay to toss the rule book away.”

“Since we know they’re elementals and not human,” Sean said, “we’ll be safe and not have to worry.”

“Not for the time being… “ Dion said. “Now we have to figure where the Water Elemental Grandmaster is located in this part of the mall.”

“You sure know a lot about them,” Lilly said.

“I was raised by water elementals until I was five.”

“What? I thought you had normal parents like the rest of us.”

“I did, but they needed help to raise me. Mother was busy typing up all of dad’s material and she didn’t have time to watch me all the time, so she found some water elementals to look after me until I was old enough to leave unsupervised for more than five minutes. At least that’s what they told me.”

“I thought you just said water elementals are dangerous,” Emily spoke up.

“They are to most people. But mother had two elemental manipulation powers: water and fire. She was able to bind some of the higher elementals to work for her for a limited time. When you do that, you have to give them something in return, but I don’t know what she traded to get help. All I remember are three young girls who looked after me day and night. Every time I woke one, would walk me to the bathroom or get whatever I needed. I was in the hospital when my tonsils were removed and they took turns in shifts watching after me. Mother didn’t have them out of the house much because she didn’t want the neighbors to be suspicious. We were in a middle-class suburb and no one had servants. If they saw three young girls supervising me all the time weren’t family, people would have asked questions.

“It was nice because I didn’t have to worry about ever being left alone. There was always one of them on stand-by. I dropped a crayon and one of them would pick it up. They don’t get bored and lose their attention like human girls, so there was never any worry they might ignore me.

“It’s a wonder you ever learned how to do anything on your own,” Sean said. “Did you learn to tie your shoes?”

“Yes. Mother had them show me how to do it over and over again until I got it right. As I said, water elementals don’t get bored. They took one of them to the store a few times and it turned out not to be such a good idea. They would ignore everyone else in the place except me and my parents. For some reason, mother decided they would blend in better if the ones she chose appeared to be cute, tiny little girls about sixteen to eighteen years of age. They had to be careful if they took them out because every young man in the store or restaurant would find a reason to come talk to them. They would ignore the guys, but even then, I can remember how irritated it would make the men. Plus, if I asked for something, they would get it for me. It didn’t matter if my parents had the money or not.”

“You parents took them all out at once?” Lilly asked. “I can imagine the looks all of you got.”

“No. When they did take them out, it was usually one at a time. They had a big pool in the backyard and it was alright to leave them in it. I don’t know where mother found them, but she mentioned one time they were causing a problem in a neighbor’s Olympic-sized pool at one point.

“Did they ever spank you when you did something wrong?” Sean laughed.

“No, discipline was something my mother handled. I couldn’t get away with anything because they would let her know right away.”

“So what ever happened to them?” Lilly asked.

“My parents had to get rid of them when I turned six. They tried to attack me.”

He could see the eyes widen on his friends.

“I was at the beach one day with them, playing just like we always did. Never had much trouble from the locals once they realized they wouldn’t take their attention off me. I was splashing in the water when an older woman came up and talked to them. I thought it was a little odd because even if they acknowledged someone else, one of the three had their attention focused in my direction. This time they all listened intently to what she had to say.”

“When I came out of the water, they turned and started to walk in my direction. I was scared because of the look on their faces, it didn’t seem normal and I ran. They chased after me, but a man driving a delivery truck saw them and called to me. He raced them off and they didn’t follow. He went right away to a pay phone and phoned my dad. I still think he was another element worker who recognized something. My parents came and took me home. The next day mom told me the girls were gone and would not be replaced.

I remember my parents having a big fight over it and I don’t think it was just because of the three water elementals. There was more to it and I’ve always thought it was strange the delivery truck driver, whom I never saw again, was there when it happened.

Anyway, that is my story about being raised by water elementals. I think they are unstable when it comes to humans. Too much unpredictability to make good use of them. They might look to be all happy and free, but they are still wild at heart.”

“That one beat any bad story about growing up I ever had,” Sean said. “My mother was a little nuts, but I never had to worry about a killer babysitter.”

“I’ve carefully worked with water elementals because of what happened. I still don’t know who the woman was that talked to them. I don’t know if she had some way to control them and why she would want them to harm me. I was afraid; certain they were going to kill me.”

Dion pulled the map of his jacket and began to look at it. It should tell him where the elemental grandmaster was located; he only needed a few minutes to consult it. As he began to go over the parchment and look for the location, Emily and Sean went to one side of him, right next to one of the support pillars while Lilly stayed by his side.

They obviously needed to talk.

“I don’t like it when you are looking at other girls,” Emily told Sean. “If we’re going to be together for a long time, and last night you told me you wanted to be with me, you need to give me some respect.”

Sean was silent. He didn’t know what to say. Women were such a mystery to him. Most of the time girls just avoided him. To hear one tell him that they wanted to be with him all the time was a new experience. He tried to remember how his dad met his mother and decided it wasn’t a good way to judge Emily. Instead, he tried to hug her without the rest of the mall starring at them.

Emily couldn’t understand why Sean was acting in the manner he did. She had talked to him the entire night on the way home to his house in the back of Dion’s van. She assumed he was like her dad: suffering for attention. She was ready to give it to him. Having Sean taken away as Dion dropped him off at the house was almost too much. She watched him go inside and felt part of her heart removed. It was a new sensation to be so close to someone. She knew he must feel the same way.

So why had he been so cruel and made those comments about the other girls? All right, maybe she didn’t resemble any of those bikini models, but there was nothing wrong with her body. And none of the boys she’d dated ever complained about her appearance. Emily knew how to look good. Today she’d even worn a pair of white pants because she felt Sean would appreciate it on her with the silver streaked top she’d bought last week. He should appreciate what he had by his side.

What neither of them could see was the whole person they’d melded with for a few hours the day before. Eventually the union would be gone. There would be no memory of the way both of their inner minds merged together for a brief moment when the cheerleader elementals had captured them.

But the memory of yesterday was still strong inside their hearts. Sean could still feel the loss of her mother and she the humiliation from his. They shared some pain, not a lot, but enough to bond. For a few hours after they awoke, they were ready to be married. It faded over night, but not by much. Each still felt the other close and couldn’t put a name to the sensation. So they called it love, which, given what happened, made sense.

Dion looked up from his map and saw Sean and Emily in a deep conversation. He’d expected something like this. They’d been in close proximity to the elementals yesterday and it meant their hearts merged for quite some time. At least he was able to get them away from the sylphs in time. People who were in the same situation for days could go mad as they lost sense of who they were. The ancient Greek and Roman legends were filled with stories of people who spent too much time around elementals and were never the same again. He hoped they would be able to get some perspective on what happened over time.

Poor Sean had to deal with a girl who really cared for him and had no clue how to take care of her. Poor Emily had to work with a boy who had no sense of worth and didn’t understand how she would react to his idle comments. It would be difficult, but in time, they could work it out on their own. In a small way, Dion hoped they would find the strength to stay together. So much dissolution in the world these days and it wasn’t good.

“I’m sorry if I offended you,” Sean told Emily. “I just never seem to be able to say the right thing. How can I make it up to you?”

“You will,” she said and gave him a pinch. “Just don’t do it again. My mother left because she liked the attention from other men better than the home my father provided. I guess she’s doing fine now, but it was hard for me to take. It was hard for my dad to take and he still has me around. I worry about him when I leave for college.”

“I know,” Sean said, “you still can’t get him to consider other women. I saw it yesterday and I know how you want him to get out. I guess he’ll never get back with your mom.”

“Not a chance. Just as if your mother will hound your father until the day he drops dead. I don’t know what the problem is, we seem to have endured bad mothers, but have you ever considered it wasn’t their entire fault? You blame your mother for a lot, but she did raise you to do good the best way she knew how. What do you expect from someone with her background? I’ve come to terms with my mother and her issues, you should do the same.”

The two of them held each other tightly for a while. It seemed to release much of what had happened a few minutes ago.

“Third day I’ve seen you here, Dion,” a voice said to him. “I think we have a pattern developing.”

Emily and Dion looked up to see Detective Jones from the Scipio Police standing next to them. His investigations into Dion’s uncle, who owned the mall, must’ve born some fruit if he was there already. The previous day they’d discussed mutual help, as Dion knew his Uncle Seth was behind the construction of the mall. His uncle was the one who held his parents captive inside the clock tower in the center of it. None of this information did him any good if he couldn’t find a way to use it when he found the other elemental grandmasters.

“I wish I had more information for you,” Dion told him. “But there isn’t much I’ve learned in the past twenty-four hours.”

“I’ve had some interesting developments on my end,” Jones said. “I pulled a rabbit out of the hat, so to speak.”

Jones liked to think of himself as an amateur magician. He used his tricks to build confidence with suspects. Dion had shown him a small sampling of what he could do with his abilities and they immediately struck up a friendship. Now he was investigating Dion’s uncle and wanted Dion to help. Dion was doing his best to keep the exact nature of what he knew about his uncle private.

“Is there anything you can tell me?” Dion asked. “I’m headed to a showdown with him very soon. I can’t promise when it will be, but very soon.”

Lilly stood next to Dion and didn’t say a word. She’d known Jones a long time. She knew about the investigation and how Jones wanted Dion’s help.

“He does have the federal boys interested in him,” Jones said. “I was in touch with some friends in the FBI today and they’re watching him closely. Could be very serious, this one. There is a definite link to the jewel theft I told you about yesterday. They lack evidence to pin it on him. This is why I need you to give me more information if you can find it. The thing is, I just can’t figure out why he built the mall here of all places. This area has the interstate, it’s good for traffic, but it’s still a haul for most people. I don’t see it as really turning over for another five years. He might be a big picture guy, but he doesn’t strike me as the type.”

“There is something he wants very much from this place,” Dion said. “I’m not sure exactly what it is, but he seems to think it will make him more powerful than he already is. The mall is the key to it.”

“Here? In this town. Come on, what could this little berg have that would make him a big player? They were still milking cows out here five years ago.

“What he’s trying to control doesn’t have to exist here in a way you’d recognize. All he needs is a place where he can manipulate it. From there he can pretty much do anything he wants to.”

“You make it sound like he’s building a nuclear weapon or something.”

“It wouldn’t be far from the truth.”

Jones shook his head and stepped a little closer to Dion. “You need to know the FBI is ready to turn this over to someone else. Someone else with more ammunition than they can muster. I don’t know what they’ve found in Washington, but something has scared them very badly. I know they hauled in some guy named Simon and drilled him for information. He didn’t seem to know anything, at least what they wanted to know. The feds won’t stop there. They’ll keep at it until they have decided whether or not your uncle is a threat. If they don’t think he’s a threat, I’ll get to make nice with the county and see what we can do because this place is out of my jurisdiction. If they think he’s a threat, it could get real nasty.”

“How nasty?”

“Nasty as in armored personnel carriers moving into position.”

Dion looked at the wall.

The situation with his uncle was going to get much worse before it was better. How in the world was he supposed to get his parents free if he had to worry about some massive assault from the government? It shouldn’t be a concern; his uncle could summon up forces far more terrifying than Uncle Sam. But if they were looking into his uncle’s work, they might have some idea what he was capable of doing. Perhaps there was a mystical division at the Pentagon, which looked into sinister forces from the abyss and tried to figure out what they could do against them. It wouldn’t surprise him.

“How far do you think they are from making some kind of decision?” he asked detective Jones.

“I don’t like to speculate with the feds,” he replied. “But I think they’ll make their mind up in a matter of days instead of weeks. If they think your uncle is trafficking in any kind of weapon system, they’ll start to move the minute they decide what to do.”

It was something else he had to contend with: an armed response. Dion looked around the new mall and was filled with a hideous vision of paratroopers in the parking lot and soldiers smashing in through the windows. He knew it would only come to that as a last resort, but his uncle played a dangerous game if he thought he could use the power of the abyss and no one was ever going to notice. Someone had, that was for sure.

“Just keep me informed what you learn,” Jones told Dion. “The heavy stuff may come down sooner rather than later and I want to be on top of it.”

“I will,” Dion assured him. “I do have one question though.”

“What?”

“How did you know where to find us? We were on the other side of the mall yesterday.”

Jones pointed across the hall at a bench. “He told me.” Then he walked away.

Chapter 3

Wearing a tracksuit and holding a bottle Doctor Cola, this year’s marketable soft drink, was Edward. He had matching shoes on and a terry cloth headband around his forehead. He stood up, dropped the plastic bottle in the nearest trash receptacle and walked toward the four friends.

“I see you managed to subdue the sylphs,” he said to Dion. “I congratulate you on such ingenuity. Even with full air elemental abilities, few element manipulators would’ve understood how to handle that whirlwind.”

“Thank you. Oh, and the car key gambit worked. It took out the cheerleader elementals the moment I tossed it into their midst.”

“I used it before with other objects. Once you understand the nature of these creatures, manipulating them becomes very easy.”

“Not always,” Lilly said. “Dion just told us that his elemental nannies almost killed him when he was little.”

“I’m aware of what happened there. Did you ever talk to your parents about the incident?”

“No,” Dion said. “My father was furious over the elementals attacking me and refused to ever use them so close again. He told me they can be very unstable and you should never turn your back on them.”

“He never mentioned why the woman had given them a command to injure you?”

“I assumed it was something to do with their nature. She said the wrong thing and it created a coded message in their heads that set them off.”

“I see. And you never wondered why the truck driver just happened to be in the same location when you were forced to run?”

“I assumed he was another elemental worker and I was fortunate that he was around. He recognized what was happening and might have saved my life.”

“We need to talk about this later,” Edward told him. “I would prefer your parents talk with you about it first.”

Dion looked at him for a few seconds then allowed the line of discussion to drop. “So, Edward, you always make you appearances for a reason. What are we to learn from you this time?”

“I’m here to tell you to beware of you uncle. You’ve met him and he is not someone to take lightly. I assume you understand this after your brief conversation.”

“He did seem like someone with a definite goal in life.”

“You uncle wants it all. And he won’t stop with the mall. He’ll take control of the state and everything else before he’s done. If he can achieve world domination, he’ll do it too.”

“You seem to know quite a bit about my uncle.”

“I know more about him than a gentleman should admit. I know he still covets your mother and will not stop until he gets her back. But I expect you know these things too.”

“How do we stop him?” Lilly asked, interrupting their conversation.

“You don’t stop Seth, you find a way to control him and keep the man from doing too much damage. My recommendation is to seek out your abilities and then obtain the fifth elemental power. Dion’s uncle has the fifth power, but he lacks the other four. He assumes he doesn’t need it because it’s the root of the other four. He thinks he can use it to obtain ultimate power over creation, but he’s sadly mistaken. He won’t be able to stand up to Dion should Dion obtain the first four before he gains the fifth. He knows this and is determined to prevent his nephew from getting the final two.”

Dion turned to walk away but then changed his mind. “You still haven‘t told us the nature of my uncle,” he said to Edward.

“You uncle did not make it across the abyss. To master the fifth element you must conquer the dweller of the abyss and he failed to do that. As a result, the abyss now controls him. It thinks to control this world it needs an agent. It’s convinced your uncle that he can have what he needs if it allows the abyss to open the gate and let everything contained inside it across. Should such a thing happen, it will be the end of all life on earth. We can’t let that happen. You can’t allow that to happen. So you see, the quest you undertake is much larger than you first thought. Yes, you can free your parents, but it’s going to be much worse for the human race if you don’t stop your uncle on the way. That’s why you can’t give up.”

“So the only way to defeat my uncle is to obtain the fifth elemental power.”

“Yes. As I have said, if you possess it, he won’t be able to stand up against you. And keep in mind there are things inside that tower which will drive normal people mad just to look at them. Your uncle can call upon them if he needs to do it. But right now you need to worry about finding the Water Grandmaster. And the best way to do it is consider why these charming young ladies are here.”

Edward took a few steps forward and shook his head as he starred at the swim team parading around the inside of the store. “I was born much too soon.” And then he vanished again.

“We didn’t get a whole lot of help from him,” Sean said.

“He gave me some information about my uncle. At least now I understand the reason for this quest better than I did before.”

Dion returned to the map he carried. He unfolded and tried to locate the store where the Grandmaster was located. For some reason it was not as easy as he expected on the map. He looked at it for a bit longer after he placed it on the nearest table, which the mall provided near a few intersections for the shoppers.

This was far worse than he’d expected when he entered the mall a few days ago. Now he’d discovered the reason his parents were trapped inside the clock tower was an uncle he only met yesterday. And he had to get them out in spite of his uncle’s frauds.

Dion roughed his black hair as he tried to figure out what to do next. Lilly sat down next to him and tried to give him comfort. Soon, Emily and Sean were both sitting down at the table.

The map was confusing. The Grandmaster should be visible on the water part of the mall. Everything about this section suggested water. It was painted blue from the main entrance to the firewall between the sections. He’d seen the ghoul cleaners at work here and they bowed as he went by. The ghouls were not in their element in this part of the mall, and they knew it. Their actions were completely different from the way they behaved in the ‘earth’ part of the mall.

Lilly didn’t know what to think about the words spoken by Edward. If it was true, Dion could be in greater danger than she assumed he already was. She felt close to him, but became a little bit worried on the inside. What was it that made her feel so close to him? Both days she had gone home and felt a little bit crazy when she imagined him. She’d looked at the pop star posters on the wall and they felt part of another world. Even college in the fall seemed to be part of a different lifetime. She knew Dion needed her help to find his parents, but she did not feel up to the job of saving the world if what Edward told her was true. Edward hadn’t lied to them yet and she couldn’t imagine why he would start now.

She turned and watched Dion concentrate on the map and try to find the Water Grandmaster on it. It seemed such a silly title for someone who could manipulate the forces of nature. And what did Edward know about the story Dion told them yesterday? How did he know about the elementals that turned on Dion when he was young? The man knew so many things and yet he was barely human. Lilly couldn’t figure out if he was a ghost or not. Ghosts didn’t show up in tracksuits and carry cigars. At least none of the ones she knew about.

Meanwhile, Sean was doing his best to try to reconcile what he felt for Emily with everything else in his life. He’d managed to slip out of the house in the early morning after leaving his mother a note. He planned to check in with her soon enough to let her know he was okay.

In some ways Sean was glad she was asleep so that he didn’t have to answer questions about what he did the night before. Mom would eventually find out what he’d been up to and then she would go from there to whom he’d been with and eventually find out about Emily. And then she would find some way to show Emily off to everyone she knew. She could at last prove to the neighbors that her son was normal. From there she would try to find other ways to involve Emily in whatever machinations his mother could cook up.

The only thing that could stop her was Emily herself. From his brief peek into her soul, Sean knew Emily wouldn’t sit by idly and allow herself to be manipulated. Her mother had done it to Emily’s father and tried to use Emily to get what she wanted. Emily resisted and had a bulletproof shield against anyone who tried to exploit her. Sean worried Emily would tell his mother in clear terms what she thought of her mental manipulation. Then it would be a battle of the will over who was stronger. The problem was, he still lived at home and would be caught in between.

Emily watched Dion go over his map too. It seemed like any other map until you looked at it close and discovered it was printed on papyrus and hand-drawn. Then you would notice the different symbols and stores in the mall map that weren’t supposed to exist in the normal world. She looked across at Sean and wondered if he could stand up to his mother. She’d put her own mother in place, why couldn’t he? They both had fathers who were good providers for their families, but allowed themselves to be used by their wives. Her father had to have known why his wife was out every night and what she was up to back then. His father had to have known why the children wanted nothing to do with their mother when they reached a certain age. Did love make someone so blind they became stupid? It was the only excuse she could see. She didn’t want love on unlimited terms. No one really did. If you loved someone, it was forever, she felt, but you had to have limits and reasons. You need boundaries and expectations. Perhaps their fathers had none of these.

At least Sean dressed better today. She needed to work with him on that, but at the same time, she couldn’t let him think she was the reason for his change of wardrobe. He needed to learn these things himself.

“I just can’t figure this map out today,” Dion told his friends. “It won’t talk to me or tell me where to find the Grandmaster. Usually the place they can be found shows up rapidly on the map and is highlighted. Not today. I think it might have something to do with it being near the sylphs from yesterday. Anytime it gets close to an elemental, it begins to act funny. The elementals interfere with it somehow.”

“Did you look and see if the swimsuit store is on the map?” Lilly asked. “That bikini team is still over there pulling the crowds into the place.”

“No, it’s not highlighted and it’s over here on the map.” He touched the map.

When he touched it, there was a sudden glow from it. They all looked at it and tried to find the light’s location, but it was gone the moment Dion raised his hand. Dion put his finger down on the map again and one of the stores glowed. He removed his hand and the indicated store went dark again.

“You touch the map,” he said to Emily.

Emily placed one manicured nail, coated with a glitter nail polish, on the map, but the store didn’t glow. “Guess it only works when you do it,” she said.

Dion put his finger back on the map and looked for the source of the glow. The map was illuminated and he could see the reason for it. There was one store that shone brightly among all the others marked. He leaned over and read it.

“The Wild Wet World of Wonder?” he said aloud. “What on earth is this place? Have any of you ever heard of it before? The name sounds right, I will give it that.”

“You don’t watch TV much, do you?” Emily asked him. “That place runs ads all the time. You can’t turn on the tube without hearing some jingle about pool season.”

“You have me there,” Dion told her. “I don’t watch a lot of TV and I wouldn’t know of anything from the commercials. I like to get the news from the papers. In the evening after it had a chance to settle down a bit. The local paper only comes out once a week.”

“You sound like my dad,” Sean said. “But he reads the city paper in the morning. After he grumbles a bit he gets into the car and heads off to work. I look at it when he’s done, but only when he’s finished. I try to keep it from my mom because if she finds an advice column which agrees with her, I’ll have to listen to her read it aloud.

“Beats finding a clipping next to the cereal bowel,” Emily said. “My dad’s quiet and it’s how he likes to leave his comments.”

Dion was busy looking at the map. The guideline didn’t trace out the best way to the store this time, which meant it was safe to go there without any interference from them. This could all change in a moment. The security guards didn’t appear anywhere either, so they had to be in the middle of some kind of plan. What it was, he was certain to find out soon enough.

The map showed a much bigger location than he’d ever seen before. This store was huge and took up enough space for three or four storefronts. He traced the outline with his finger and noticed it extended out into the parking lot. There had to be some kind of protective barrier around it from the way it was placed on the map. Inside the exterior perimeter of the store was a selection of circles and ovals. He turned to his friends.

“Alright,” Dion began. “Can someone please tell me what this place sells?”

“Swimming pools,” Lilly said. “My parents were going to put one in a few years ago, but they decided the insurance was too much. I guess it scares insurance agents if they think some kid might drown on your property. So they decided not to put one in and we continued going to the local pool, even if the membership fees kept going up.”

“So that is what these circles and ovals represent,” Dion spoke up. “They must be display models of some kind. Then why does it have so much space inside?”

“Filters, chemical supplies, floatation devices, the rest,” Sean pointed out. “My dad thought about one too and I’m glad he didn’t get one. I knew a family who had one and the maintenance is a mess on those things. If you don’t keep up with them, they turn into a swamp with algae growing on the bottom and worse. They came back from vacation and found all kinds of aquatic bugs in the pool. It was a mess.”

“It must take quite a few people to run this operation,” Dion said. “Anyone ever been inside it?

“I have,” Emily said. “Last year, a guy I was with wanted to see the hot tubs they sell.”

“Frank?” Sean asked.

“Yes.”

“Oh, him.”

“We went in and looked around for a while,” Emily tried to ignore Sean. “But I don’t think there was anything that he was interested in. He’s an older guy I knew through one of my friends back at school and he started to make me uncomfortable, so I had him take him take me home.” She gave Sean a ‘there satisfied?’ look and continued.

“Anyway I think one of the sales clerks mentioned the place is only open six months out of the year, so they’ve just started up. They pay for the space all year around, but they shut down the facility in the fall and don’t reopen it until the spring because there aren’t enough indoor pools to justify keeping it open all year around. Or maybe they keep it open with a skeleton crew; I never did get the story straight. If you look at the front it’s not got a high profile even though it’s pretty big on the inside.”

The spot on the map flashed again and Dion looked down at it. “It just gave me the name of the owner. I expect she’s still there.”

“What is it?” Lilly asked him.

“Salacia Delphi,” it says. "Anyone ever hear about her?”

The table was silent. Dion didn’t read the news; they could tell if he didn’t know who she was. He was from out of town and it explained quite a bit. However, each of them had lived with the name for years. It was legendary around the town and they’d all heard it spat out or praised over the years.

“She’s one of the rich ladies in town,” Lilly finally spoke up. “If you’ve lived around here long enough, you’d hear it every other day. She owns a lot of businesses. I guess the pool store fits right in if she’s the water elemental person you need to find.

From what Dion learned, Salacia Delphi made an appearance one day from out of nowhere. She just showed up and rented a store to sell jewelry. This prospered and she got into the beverage business. She had the local market to herself after a few years. From there she branched out into restaurants and gas stations. Before long, she owned just about any business worth having in the town.

She sat on several boards to directors for the town and managed to use her position to find out when any good government projects or opportunities were on the horizon. She always made sure her bids were in on time and she got them more often than not. Still, few people knew about her or where she’d come from.

One theory had her as a gangster’s woman who used the money she inherited when a hit was carried out to finance her first business. Other people claimed she knew the dark arts and was able to talk to spirits and find out where buried treasures were located.

She had a tie-in with the local powerboat racing team and sponsored their races every year. It was claimed she saved the life of a boat pilot one year when she managed to get him out of the water quickly after a collision. No one knew how she did it, but the man was seen to emerge from the boat before it sunk and was pulled across the lake. He came straight to her on the shore, but never remembered crawling out of the boat.

“She bound an elemental to get him out, “Dion concluded when Lilly told him the story. “It would have been easy for her to do it, being a Grandmaster.

“Someone told me she never calls the water truck in to fill up her own pool,” Sean said.

“I’m told she wears blue all the time,” Emily added. “She once said it was her favorite color.

“Her company is listed as ‘Queen of Water Cups,’ Sean said. “I had a friend who did yard work for her and he showed me the check she gave him.”

“Settles it,” Dion said. “She has to be the woman we’re trying to find. Does anyone know if she wears anything with aquamarine on it?”

“Never been that close to her,” Emily said. “She’s private and doesn’t leave the house very often from what I understand. She bought an old bank building and remodeled it. I think someone said she uses the vault for her own valuables.”

“She might be keeping a really big elemental in there,” Dion said. “If she’s an elemental Grandmaster, she could easily do it. I’d be afraid of anything she needed a vault to lock up.”

“What do you think it might be?” Lilly asked.

“Hard to say. There are all kinds of things she wouldn’t want out in public when it comes to the water element. Elementals that can cause floods or freeze water. You unleash the wrong one and the town could find itself in the middle of a disaster. They’re nothing to mess with, especially if you don’t understand them.”

“I think she’s Greek,” Emily said. “Someone told me he heard her speaking in Greek on the phone when she was at one of her businesses.”

“The Elemental Grandmasters can come from anywhere,” Dion said. “They don’t have to be tied into any one country or land. I know one of the Air Grandmasters was from the Khalari.”

“How long does it take to become a Grandmaster?” Sean asked. “Is it something you’re born into or do you have to train?”

“Like everything else, some of us have a little bit more ability than others. I was given my ability when I was born, but it doesn’t mean I’ll always have it. Furthermore, everyone has some ability to control the elements, but most people don’t know and wouldn’t want to put the work into acquiring it. So it’s a little bit of both. You can learn and you can be born with more than the next person can. But if you don’t work and develop what you have, it will soon be gone. There is no guarantee you will always have the ability. It’s why I train as hard as I do.”

“I wish it was possible to just summon up a picture of her,” Lilly said, “and then we would know exactly what she looks like.”

“That day has not yet come,” Dion said. “I can’t even conceive of that level of ability. I would think it would happen by technology before it would be something you could use an element to create.”

Chapter 4

Ohio had more than its fair share of backyard swimming pools. Much of the state spent the spring months paying for water trucks to come in and fill their backyard lakes. It was part of the local culture and nowhere was it more evident than the subdivisions outside the city of Scipio. An entire industry evolved around men who wanted to place small oceans behind their houses because it gave them status and the kids something to do in the summer months.

The working class families would pay for above ground pools, in the hopes they could do the installation themselves. It was possible to do it, but it was no easy task to carry out.

First of all, the ground had to be dug out in a radius much larger than the pool itself was going to occupy. Most of the time it was for maintenance, but some families liked the placement of crushed stone or small river pebbles around the pool to make it easier to work on the yard around it. Once the dirt was dug out, it needed to be transported somewhere. In some cases, the dirt could be hauled to the side of the house and dumped against it. If there were no better way to eliminate the dirt, it would need to be hauled out to a dumpsite. This was not too hard to do if you had children at home who were eager to get the pool up and become the talk of the neighborhood.

Next came the layer of sand beneath the pool, which had to be hauled in to the yard. Only the cleanest sand could be use as there could be no rocks or other imperfections beneath it. Once the sand was in place, it had to be smoothed out. This was often done with a big roller that was weighted down to accomplish the task. The sand needed smoothed to a mirror finish, nothing else would do.

Because the next phase involved the liner itself. Made of the highest quality vinyl polymer, the liner needed a smooth base, which would not puncture it. Once the liner was placed, the aluminum wall would be assembled in a perfect circle around the sand. The final part of the assembly took place when the liner was mated to the wall around the pool. The junction needed to be perfect so no water would leak out. When the liner was in place and the wall up, it was inspected for suitability, as any leak or warp in the wall could bring it down in seconds, sending a useless tidal wave across the yard.

The water truck would arrive and the neighborhood children would become quiet as the pool was filled. There was a special moment of silence as the fresh and clean water filled the pool. After the water was placed inside it, the parents would appear and check the pool for sturdiness. Only when the pool was pronounced safe were the neighborhood children allowed to make use of it.

Pool culture ranged everywhere in this Midwestern town. To the north of Scipio, there was an entertainment complex, which consisted of a drive-in movie theater and a swimming pool. Across the road, there was another swimming pool. Private pools where you had to pay an annual membership and pass approval by a committee where everywhere. Too far from the coasts for surf culture to exist, the young kids nevertheless created their own water culture around small fishing boats wherever they could find a lake. It was a thing particular to that time and place.

This is why Salacia Delphi’s big pool store did such great business in the spring months. Already the families were lining up to see what new pools she had for them this year. She’s spent the cold months unloading prefabricated pools and finding just the right balance of art and practicality for each one. It was a work of art to find the right look for each display and she was often seen spending hours to get the perfect effect.

Salacia Delphi was not a large woman, but she was not one to be trifled with. Woe be to the delivery van driver who thought he could drop his items and get out without giving her exactly what she ordered. Salacia was known to spend hours examining the manifest to find just one missing bucket of water treatment chemical. It was said she could tell you exactly where any item was at a given time in the any one of her stores. She was known to drop in at an unexpected moment and do an inspection.

Few people were aware of her abilities as a Water Element Grandmaster. She wanted to keep it that way. The less people knew about what she could do, the better. She would wait a good five minutes after everyone left before she would go out to her private pool and see what her water nymphs were up to that day. She’d brought a whole class of them from Greece with her that no one knew about. She’d found them at the bottom of a well on the island of Patmos and bribed them into coming with her. This batch could create a tidal wave with very little trouble. Since they would be inland, there was very little opportunity for a disaster of that scale to take place.

However, there were many other things this species of elementals could do and she planned to take advantage of them. Right now was not the time to make use of their powers, it would come later. So she kept them in her private pool when she was home and placed them back inside the safe while she was gone. It continued to worry her about what might happen should a thief try to crack her safe. He or she would be in for quite a surprise.

***

“So, now that we know the location of the Water Grandmaster,” Sean said to Dion. “Do we just walk over there?”

“We might as well. If they try to stop me reaching her, and they will, they won’t try anything until we get near the store.” Dion rolled up the map and put it in his jacket.

“I think they already have something planned,” Lilly said as she nodded toward the swimwear place across from them.

Dion looked at it and saw the swim team putting on their tracksuits. They formed a line and went to the back of the store where each one picked up their own suit and slipped into it. Next, they formed another line and marched out of the store, much to the disappointment of the men waiting on the outside. The swim team line swam out of the store and headed down the main concourse of the mall.

“You think they’ll go toward the pool store?” Emily asked Dion.

“They’re going in the right direction. Guess we’ll head there too and find out.”

The four friends stood up from the table and walked down the concourse in the same direction.

They didn’t notice any of Karanzen’s security guards watching them. However, it wasn’t important since the mall had plenty of new security cameras. The cameras covered only the areas with the heaviest traffic, but they still could track their movements through the mall. Right now, the officer was probably in his office doing the slow burn over the four of them gaining entrance to the mall. Dion kept in mind the offensive maneuver by Karanzen might’ve been a ruse to make them think he didn’t want them inside. The swim team elementals had appeared conveniently when he blocked the entrance.

The foot traffic picked up once they entered the main part of this section of the mall. There were quite a few people who made their way, as the day was good for an excursion to the mall. No one gave four young people walking together a second glance as they were assumed to be out shopping, just like everyone else.

The pool store had a small profile on the inside of the mall. Since it was open only six months out of the year, the mall had rented them a corner section that didn’t allow for much window space. It meant the windows could be cleaned with little trouble, but the potential customers couldn’t see the vast interior of the store. It compensated by having a large exterior display, which was where the actual pools were kept. The patrons of the store would enter from the outside through a gate or from another door inside the store.

When they reached the pool store, the water elementals were already there. Crowds of them stood at the entrance and blocked it as they chattered on with the store manager. Dion looked, but couldn’t see the owner who he needed to reach. He hoped she was inside the store somewhere.

The swim team made their way inside and soon had the same effect on the pool store’s patrons as they did on the ones in the swimsuit store. From the outside, they watched them walk through the store and talk with the staff. They would swarm around and check out the products on display. Once again, mass chaos had broken out.

Dion took them inside the store with him. No sales clerk greeted them, as they were all busy with the sudden appearance of the swim team. Still he could not see the form of Salacia Delphi. They wandered around the isles watching the nymphs in human form pull things off the shelf and put them back.

“Can I help you with something?” Dion heard one clerk ask one of the elementals as she picked up a box containing a raft from the stack and look it over. The nymph ignored him and placed it back, then grabbed one of the exact same types and looked at it.

This continued while Dion attempted to ask any of the staff about the lady who owned the place. None of them could help him because he was too busy ensuring the nymph he watched didn’t walk off with a product from the store. In effect, the staff was overwhelmed.

“Let me try,” Emily told Dion.

She walked into visual range of a sales clerk who was restacking a display the nymphs had torn down a minute ago. Emily gave him her best ‘little girl lost’ look as he made eye contact with her.

“Excuse me, sir,” she said to him. “Is Ms. Delphi in today? I needed to see her about a pool.”

“No,” he said, “I’m afraid she won’t be in until this afternoon. I can help you with anything you might need once they’re finished.” He glanced in the direction of the swim team, still picking over the store merchandise.

The moment he spoke, one of the nymphs discovered the outside display. She yelled to the rest of them who proceeded to file out the rear door in the direction of the pools. The sales clerks on the inside where relieved to see them go, but their problems were far from over.

Minutes later, the elementals were in the fenced-in area of the exterior store. Two senior sales people worked in this part of the store, as it was the most profitable part of the business. One was in the process of expounding on the attributes of a new pool model to a potential customer. He turned as the swim team column walked past him in the direction of the other pools. Both of the salesmen stood speechless as the girls proceeded to remove their tracksuits and stack them in a corner again. They stood there in a daze as the nymphs, still dressed in an assortment of bikinis climbed up the ladders on the pools and splashed into the water.

Sean saw two guys from his math class enter the store and watch the nymphs splash around in the pool. They came up behind Dion and the girls and stood next to them for a while, trying to figure out the source of the commotion outside. Finally, one of them turned to Sean.

“Where did that swim team come from?” he asked him. “We saw them in the swimsuit store and followed them over here.”

“I have no idea,” he lied. “We’re trying to decide who they are too.”

He remembered the names of the guys because they were twins. Not identical twins, but fraternal ones. They both wore glasses and were in his classes. It took him a few more minutes to remember their names: Doug and Dennis. One was slight of build and did not stand out other than having a brother who was in most of the same classes. The other played basketball and was bigger.

“Has anyone tried to speak to them?” Doug, the larger one said. “Not a bad looking one in the bunch.”

Sean, who still felt the laser beams of Emily on his back, turned to Doug. “They don’t seem to speak to anyone. None of the clerks in here or out there have been able to get them to say a word.” He was tempted to tell them the girls in the pool were all nymphs, but decided that explaining to them about water elemental wouldn’t help anyone.

Doug was the out-going popular of the two and played on the basketball team. He was in the company of the cook kids and seemed to have a different girl on his arm every month. Sean remembered him from elementary school as the fat kid who grew out of his weight and became popular when he filled out. They lived several blocks away from him in a new house his parents constructed a few years ago. Previously, they’d lived on a farm further out, but his dad sold it to some real estate developers and now the farmstead was a mass conglomeration of houses. His parents had done very well in the deal and lived in a one of the largest houses in the neighborhood.

Dennis, on the other hand, was a bit smaller and had no interest in sports. He spent most of the time in the library studying and working on another college application. He couldn’t count on a college scholarship, because his parents told both of them they would have to finance their own higher education. Dennis was obsessed with finding a college where he could get a full scholarship and not have to pay for anything. He figured it would be possible to get a job off campus to provide for his needs, but he needed a place where he didn’t have to worry about going into debt for his tuition. And he wanted a prestigious school where he could graduate and find a job in a month after he left college.

Although they were brothers, the two seldom socialized together. Doug had his basketball team friends and spent the summer at basketball camp. Dennis had his books and lab experiments as he tried to find another angle to get into college. If he didn’t know they were brothers, Sean would have wondered why they were at the mall together.

“We’re here to get some clothes for the spring,” Dennis told him. “We were coming out of the Better Men store when we saw those girls in the swimwear place. “Naturally, Doug had to stand there and try to figure out a way to meet one.” He glared at his brother.”

“You’re just jealous, little brother,” Doug sniped at him. “You spend all the time with the books; you’re never going to meet any girls. He’s mad because I dragged him over here to see if we could meet some of these babes. I’ve got the car keys and he’s stuck with me.”

“I really wouldn’t try too hard when it comes to these girls,” Sean tried to tell him.

“Why?” Doug countered. “You not had any luck?”

“It’s not that.” Sean groped for a word. “They’re not what you assume they are.”

“You’re going to have to explain yourself.”

Sean caught a collective look from Lilly and Emily. “I think they’re from some foreign country. They don’t seem to understand English.”

“Where?” Dennis said to him. “If any of them are from Europe I’d expect them to speak our language as it’s widely understood over there. I speak Spanish and German, maybe I could interpret.”

“See?” Doug said. “You just put him in the right situation and he comes around. I knew all he’d have to do is get out of the library for a few hours.”

Doug turned and looked at the girls. “So are you all double dating or something?”

“Something like that,” Emily said to him and moved closer to Sean.

“Never could see it,” he told her. “Prefer one-on-one myself. This has to be the first time I’ve ever seen you with a girl, Sean. Dion, it doesn’t surprise me. You have more attention from them than you know what to do about.”

Dion ignored him and turned from the sight of the splashing nymphs. “We’re here to meet the store owner,” he told him. “But she had to leave and it looks like we’re stuck in the mall for the next few hours.

“Come on, little brother,” Doug said to his twin. “Let’s see if we can go out there and make some connections.” The two went off in search of the nymphs who were frolicking in the pools. The two clerks still stood and watched them, unsure of what to do.

“I really should have warned them,” Dion said to his friends, “but I don’t know how to do it without making it impossible to find the Grandmaster.”

“What do they have to be afraid about?” Lilly said to Dion. “They seem harmless enough. At least they’re not trying to kidnap us like the last groups of elementals tried to do.”

“They have to be here because someone hired them,” Dion explained. “You saw them arrive on that bus. Someone, probably my uncle, paid for their arrival. These are not your normal lake and river water elementals. They have abilities I can only speculate. My uncle wants to keep me away from the Grandmaster so I don’t obtain any further powers that might threaten him. He’s brought this group in to carry out his plans. Keep in mind they may appear to be normal girls, but they are elementals.”

“What harm can they do?” Emily said. “I would think we’d be alright so long as we don’t get pulled into one of the pools.”

“They’ll find a way to work their power. All they need is a source of water to cause a flood or worse. And those two have no idea what they’re walking into.”

They watched Doug, with Dennis in tow; stroll over to the nearest pool that was set-up in the back lot. They walked over to the side of the pool and called to the two women who were swimming in it. The women ignored Doug as he continued to call out to them. Finally, one of them swam over to his side to see what he wanted.

“The problem with water elementals,” Dion told them. “Is that they are attracted to humans every now and then. You see, some of them were human at one time. I don’t know how it works, but sometimes an elemental starts out as a human. Sometimes a human ends up an elemental. It all depends on how they find their place in the universe. It’s really bad for a nymph to become infatuated with a human. They don’t do very well outside water and few people live close enough to large bodies of water. So what happens if a sailor should have a nymph fall for him? He has to stay constantly around a source of water or she will sicken and breakdown. It creates all kinds of problems for both of them.”

“You mean she could die?” asked Emily.

“There is no death in elementals,” Dion said. “At least not any death we would recognize. They can dissolve after a long time, but the process takes centuries. If they are out of their environment, they go into a form of hibernation and no one knows how long it can last. There are stories of water elementals that became normal again after they’d spent generations in a desert. The other problem of a water elemental falling for a human is what it can do to him. If she tries to keep him under the water, he’ll drown. Most elementals understand why humans can’t live under the sea, but some of the lower ones don’t understand why. Those elementals are very strong, so I assume they know better than to mess with humans.”

They looked again across the lot and saw Doug in a deep conversation with one of the nymphs. She had long blond hair, which was plastered across her head from swimming in the water. Her friend was Asian and had black hair, also trailing down her back. She was swimming across the pool as Dennis made eye contact with her.

“So what you’re saying,” Emily said, “is that a relationship with a water element always turns out bad.”

“Not necessarily. But neither the human nor the nymphs seem to realize what they are up against until it’s too late. She ends up a pile of salt until he can resurrect her or he ends up sick from spending too much time in the sea. The environment for one isn’t always the best one for the other. And eventually, if they are always close to each other, it will happen. Nymphs always appear to be the most beautiful women in the world to the human.”

Now both of the water elementals were on the side of the pool talking with the brothers. It wasn’t hard to see, even from this distance, the two guys were more than casually interested in the nymphs. Doug had removed his glasses and Dennis his hat while they had deep conversations with the two water elementals that appeared to be human.

“Sometimes the elemental doesn’t even know it is one,” Dion continued.

“How is that possible?” Sean asked. “Are you telling me some people who are walking around are elemental and are unaware? I would think the first time they caused a log to catch on fire, they’d figure it out.”

“But they might consider it lighting or spontaneous combustion. No one knows where elementals originate. They have always been here before, as I heard someone say. Every now and then, someone just remembers they’re supposed to be in the water all the time and they’re gone. Some people say these strange reports of people who combust happen because someone was supposed to be a salamander and then remembered one day.”

“So do you think we should at least warn them about the water elementals?” Sean asked.

Right now, the two men were busy talking to the nymphs. They didn’t seem to be lucky that day as the women were busy swimming back and forth while talking to them. They seemed to be playing games with the two young men.

“Right now they don’t appear to be making much progress,” Emily said as she starred out the back window of the store.

Dennis was still busy at the side of the pool. He’d learned the name of the girl swimming in the pool with the straight black hair: Dirce.

“Dirce?” he called back to her. “Is that anything like Circe?”

“No!” she cried, splashing water at him. “You’re thinking of someone else. She’s a distant cousin of mine.”

Dennis had never seen a girl so beautiful before. Her skin was flawless and colored a deep tan that could only come from steady exposure to the sun on a beach. Her eyes were a deep green and he could see the entire world inside them. She wore a yellow bikini and swam across the pool as if she was born in it.

“Where did you learn to swim so well?” Dennis asked her.

“Where did you learn to walk?” she returned. “I don’t worry about things like that. I’ve always been able to swim. Have you always been able to walk?”

“Well, no, I had to learn, but we all do.”

“You can swim a few weeks after you’re born, did you know that? If you’d been taught, you might have been swimming earlier than walking.”

The girl swam across to the other side of the pool and pulled herself up on the edge. As she sat there, the rays of the sun fell down upon her illuminating her body a bright gold. She leaned back and her hair became instantly dry. Dennis couldn’t figure out how she managed to do that one, he decided it had to have something to do with the angle of the sun. She looked across the pool at her with her big green eyes and smiled at him.

“I like you,” she said and jumped back into the water.

His brother wasn’t having much luck with the blond near him. She kept swimming back across the pool, trying to avoid conversation. However, he continued to push himself on her.

“What school are you from?” he asked. “If you’re on a team it has to be one of the local ones? Montfair? St. Barbara? You can tell me, come on.”

“Why don’t you guess some more?” she sighed, as the girl paddled back.

Dion watched the girl with the black hair swim back across the pool toward Dennis. She stopped when she was right at the edge where he was standing and put her hands on the edge of the pool. As he watched, the girl reached one hand out to Dennis and touched his.

Dennis felt as close to heaven as he would ever be in this life. Ever since he was a small kid, he’d believed the only way to succeed in life was by pure reason. It had lifted humanity out of the pit and created civilization. To that end, he applied himself with his studies and tried to get ahead as much as he could. It wasn’t easy; the school where they went was full of professor and military officer kids, all of whom wanted the open slots at the major colleges. He would spend endless hours at night studying for exams. Dennis spent more time on science fair projects than most scientists did on grant proposals.

It helped him be noticed by some important colleges when he began to apply to schools. The endless hours he spent on prep work for his college entrance exams helped too. But what it didn’t help was get him noticed by the opposite sex. It wasn’t that he had trouble with attention from the girls… they considered him invisible. He had that in common with Sean, but at least his parents understood. His parents felt their children should leave the house and make their way in the world when they turned eighteen and no money would come from them for college. This was another reason Dennis spent all his time pouring over books in the library.

So when he found that a beautiful girl swimming in a pool wearing a bikini paid attention to him, Dennis was overjoyed. His brother had dragged him into the pool store after they saw the swim team go inside it. Dennis wanted to get back home. There were more applications for financial aid to fill out and letters to write. Wasting time on some trivial girl chase was beneath him. However, his brother had the car keys, so he was forced to follow along.

And now a gorgeous girl, easily the loveliest one he’d ever laid eyes on was touching his hand.

“I need to get down there,” Dion said, “or something bad is going to happen.” He made his way out the door to the exterior lot where the pools were on display and the swim team elementals were frolicking. He didn’t have a lot of time and needed to act quickly.

The two sales clerks where still in the lot starring at the sight of twelve stunning girls swimming in the pools. No one was supposed to enter those them without the owner’s permission. She didn’t like anyone using the pools; they were supposed to be there just for display. On some special occasions, she would allow select customers to use them, but this was rare.

“I guess the boss hired them to come out and promote the pools?” one clerk said.

“I guess,” the other added. “But you’d think she would have called and told us first. What do we do?”

“Let them swim,” the other said. “The boss will be here in a few hours. She can tell us what to do then. You know how she doesn’t like it when we call her at the office.” He turned and looked at the growing crowd assembled at the windows, as they looked into the exterior lot from the main store. “Seems to be attracting potential customers, so it must be her doing.”

Dion was almost down the aisle between the pool models when he saw the elemental’s hand touch the one that belonged to Dennis.

Dennis felt her fingers make contact with his and looked at the fine white hand over his own. He looked up into the eyes of Dirce as she smiled at him.

“I really like you,” she told him.

The pool and entire lot vanished.

Chapter 5

Dennis was at the bottom of the ocean. At least it appeared to be the bottom of the ocean.

Don’t starfish live on the bottom of the sea, he thought. That’s funny; I didn’t realize so many fish were around here. He looked at the soil where he stood and realized his feet were sunk into a layer of sand, which lined the floor. He looked up and saw the surface of the water from the other side. There was a creature floating down to his level. Was it a dolphin?

It turned out to be Dirce; she was covered with her long black hair. It had to be her because the green eyes were the same. She swam around him and lightly touched his face.

“I like you very much,” he heard her say. She didn’t say it as much as think it because her mouth never opened.

He watched her swim around him without effort. She was right; it was so much easier to swim than walk. He stood there and wondered why it had never hit him before that life on the bottom of the sea was so much better than life on land. He felt warm in the water and it was very quiet, as sound in the ocean didn’t travel very far.

Dirce came closer and took his hand. He felt himself begin to fly over the floor of the ocean. She held onto him as she swam to an outcropping of coral on the floor. Once she found it, Dirce sat her and Dennis down on it and continued to look at him.

At that moment, he forgot about the mall, college, his brother, the family and everything else in his life. All he wanted to do was sit there and stare at the most beautiful woman in the world. She sat there with the long black hair drifting about her and stroked his face. Dennis was beyond care. It didn’t matter if he was in a dream or not. This was the only place he wanted to be. The sun drifted down to their level through the hazy underwater world and he felt at peace for the first time in his life.

“Do you like me?” Dirce said without speaking to him. She had her legs folded underneath her golden body, but the long black hair clothed her better than any gown could.

“How could I not like you, Dirce?” he said. “You are gorgeous. I think I must be dead and in heaven. Are you some kind of angel?”

“No,” she laughed in a voice, which sounded of bells, “I’m a naiad, a water nymph, elemental; your kind call us many things. I have been around for a long time and I will continue to be here for much longer. Time has no meaning to us, not like it has to you, because you have so little of it.”

He continued to sit on the coral and admire the ocean. More fish swam by, some very big. He saw a shark in the distance circling around them and turned his attention back to her.

“Is that a shark?” he asked her in his head.

She cocked her head and watched it swim across their line of vision. “I think it is,” she responded.

“Should we be afraid of it?”

“No, it knows better than to come near me. Nothing in the sea will hurt you so long as I am here.”

They watched the shark swim away and she turned her attention back to him. “Would you like to come and live here with me forever?” she asked him.

“I can’t do that. I’ll drown. I’m human and I can’t breathe water.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that. It’s too bad; I would so much like to have you with me. Is there some way we could always be together?”

“I’d love to be with you, Dirce. I’ll find a way, just give me time.”

Then he was back on the blacktop of the exterior part of the pool store. Dirce was still in the yellow bikini in the pool, but their hands no longer touched. He felt a hand on his shoulder pull him back as Dirce swam back to the other side of the pool with a frown on her face.

“That was close,” a voice said behind him. It was Dion. “You can thank me later.”

What had happened? It reminded him of a dream where he was in a place of perfect joy and happiness with all he ever wanted, only to be woke by the alarm clock because it was time for school. It happened repeatedly. He would wake and look at the ceiling with a sensation of great sadness. The real world had come back and pulled him out of the enchanted place where he’d been.

“Why did you do that?” he said to Dion as he pulled him away. His brother broke off contact with the girl in the pool he’d tried to converse with and walked over to them. Dion had him almost to the door of the pool store.

“Is something wrong?” Doug asked Dion and his brother. In truth, he’d sat there and noticed Dennis drift off into a coma the moment the girl’s hand made contact. He’d assumed it was from the shock of contact with a girl. As far as Doug knew, his brother had never been on a single date.

“Let me go back to her!” Dennis was crying out. “You can’t take me away from Dirce! I want to go back!” Dion shook his head and took him inside the pool store.

“What is wrong with him?” Doug asked when he caught up to Dion with his brother. Dennis was kneeling in the corner in tears. People in the pool store had stopped to watch him. It was obvious he was in the middle of a breakdown of some kind.

“He attracted the attention of the nymph in the water,” Dion explained to Doug. We need to get him out of here before she comes after him again.

Doug gave him a strange look. He walked Dennis outside the mall with the Dion and the other three. Once outside the store they found a bench and sat Dennis down where he continued to sob.

“I’ve never seen him like this,” Doug exclaimed to Dion. “What happened in there?”

“I’ll go get him something to drink,” Lilly said.

“Take Emily and Sean with you,” Dion instructed her. “None of us should be alone with these elementals on the move. Get back here quick if you see the security guards.”

“We won’t go far,” Sean told him as he walked away with the girls.

“I won’t move until you get back here,” Dion reassured him.

Dennis placed his head in his hands and continued to weep, a little bit more in silence this time. He didn’t seem to understand Dion and his brother were with him as they tried to calm him down. Dennis was close to hysterical at this point and Dion couldn’t figure out what to do for him. He was told once that encounters with nymphs could do horrible things to the susceptible, but this kid was a wreck.

“So are you going to tell me what happened back there,” his brother began, “or do I have to go and ask that girl he was with? He can’t go home like this!”

“Sit down,” Dion told Doug and seated himself by Dennis. “Your brother has been through something traumatic. I don’t know any other way to tell you. He’s been touched by a water elemental. You are witnessing the effects of that contact.”

Doug sat down on the side of Dion opposite his brother. “Look, I don’t need a lot of mumbo jumbo; can you just tell me what happened out there? I was making progress with the other one when I saw you pulling him back from that brunette. Now what happened and tell me in Standard English?”

Dion sighed. “There are things out there which don’t fall under rational explanation. I’m in touch with some of them. I’m here because I need to meet the owner of that pool store. She will give me the ability I need to bring them under control, but that is not the reason I need to find her. The swim team out there in the display pools isn’t real girls.”

“They looked real enough to me.”

“Because it’s what they want you to think. They’re water sprits, nymphs, naiads, and undines, whatever you want to call them. This whole section of the mall is under control of the water element. Okay, I don’t expect you to believe me, but it’s true.”

“Assuming any of what you just told me is true,” Doug replied. “How do my brother and her fit figure into all of this.”

“He attracted one of them. I don’t know why, sometimes they just take an interest in people. She was attracted to him and made contact. When that happens, the person who they like will become obsessed with the elemental. They won’t be able to go anywhere or think about anything until they’re with the nymph. I tried to get to him before she touched his hand, but I couldn’t do it. Now we have to figure out some way to get the glamor she put on him away.”

“Is this some sort of curse?” Doug asked. “Can we get a witch to remove it?”

“Wrong sort of affliction. But you have the right idea and you need an elemental worker to take it away from him. I just happen to be one, let me see what I can do.”

Dion kneeled down to Dennis level and looked into his eyes when he got him to hold his head up. He saw despair and pain. He saw the face of the nymph that Dennis had attracted. She wasn’t about to leave him without a drawn-out fight. This was severe. It meant he would have to go back to the pools in the rear and get the nymph elemental to release him. This was not easy to do and would involve all kinds of promises. Nymphs didn’t like to leave someone with they had them under their influence.

“We have a real problem here,” Dion said to Doug. Dennis brother had a look of concern on this face. “Did he ever have a girl?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did your brother ever go out with a girl or see one at any time?”

“No, as far as I know the only thing he cares about is his science textbooks and getting into the right college.”

“Wonderful,” Dion said as she slumped back to the wall. “At least it explains the wall of tears.”

“What are you talking about? Tell me what you mean!”

“This is your brother’s first real encounter with a woman. He’s been keeping himself hidden away so long he doesn’t know how to deal with it. He’s fallen in love. What’s really bad is that he’s fallen in love with a water elemental. I don’t know if there’s anything I can do until Ms. Delphi returns and grants me the power to bind water elementals.”

Doug stared at him in disbelief. “Are you trying to tell me my brother is in love with a mermaid?”

“If you want to put a name to it, yes. He’s attracted the attention of a water elemental and the only way to free him is make her let him go. If we don’t do that, he’ll spend the rest of his life trying to get to her.”

“This is insane. I can’t believe any of this.

“You don’t have to believe it. Whether you do or not won’t make any difference to your brother and his condition. If I don’t get back there and make that nymph take the glamor off him he’ll always be this way. And she’ll be lovesick too. Elementals who fall for humans don’t last long either. She can’t survive outside water for long.”

“She’ll dry up?”

“No, go into some kind of crystalline state until reconstituted. Look, it’s hard for me to explain and we don’t have time. I need to get back there and deal with this. Or we can wait it and I’ll make her release him by binding her. I don’t want to do that because when you force an elemental to do something they hate you for it. They might act all obedient, but there is always an aspect of defiance. They’ll look for any way they can to mess you up. I already have two sets of elementals who despise me and I don’t need more. Someone has turned them to keep me from obtaining full powers.”

Dion stood up from the bench when he saw his friends arrive with a bottle of soda. “Just keep him quiet for now and I’ll see what I can do. Give me a few minutes to find some way to solve this.”

“How is Dennis?” Lilly asked as she looked at his quivering form. “He doesn’t seem so good.”

“First love and it’s with an elemental. I need to make her release him. Just help his brother watch him until I come back.”

“Do we need to do anything in the meantime?” Sean asked him.

“Just keep him calm, I have to get back there and get him free from this nymph.”

“You will do no such thing!” a voice boomed from the entrance to the pool store.

Chapter 6

Standing barefoot, dripping wet with water pouring over the floor, and still in her yellow bikini, stood Dirce the water elemental. She was alone and her black hair was plastered down her back. Her green eyes were in flames and she stood facing them with her hands on her hips.

Dion didn’t know what to say. His experience with water elementals hadn’t prepared him for this. He knew they’d be very aggressive toward the person they were attached to, but he didn’t think she would come out here right away. It just wasn’t in their nature.

“Get away from him!” she shouted across the hall outside the pool store.

Dion’s friends, still sitting by Dennis looked to him with incomprehension. What happened to the playful water sprite from a few minutes ago? Had she been replaced by something else? His brother was even more confused. For years, he’d tried to get him to quit grumbling about the girls who wouldn’t give him the time of day. Now he had a girl straight out of a TV show concerned about his brother’s well-being. Something was very much wrong with this picture.

“Pardon me, missy,” he snarled at the girl in the bikini, “but I happen to be his brother. I don’t even know who you are.”

Sean and Emily exchanged glances. They’d been in close proximity with the air elementals the other day and knew about what each other thought. They’d seen the inside of each other’s inner souls and it bound them together. They’d spent the ride home in the back of Dion’s van in a state of euphoria because they finally had someone else on the planet who understood them. They had some idea what an encounter with an elemental could do to a person. They weren’t surprised about Dennis, but an elemental in the picture. This was something unexpected.

“Dirce!” Dennis said as she sat up. “Please don’t leave me. Don’t let them take me away!” He stared up at her in total worship.

The water elemental walked up to Doug and glared directly in his face. She had to be six inches shorter and half his weight, but at that minute, she appeared to grow to a height of eight feet. Doug sat back down as their eyes locked. He saw sharks, stingrays and all manner of dangerous creatures under the sea. Had he been three inches from an electric eel, Doug would’ve felt less fear inside him.

She sat down next to Dennis and placed one wet arm around him. Dennis became calm and serene, as if he’d entered a state of total relaxation. Dirce leaned on him and made a purring sound. People in the mall did their best not to stare at the strange tableaux before them as the little scene played out. His brother, on the other side of her, attempted to say something, but Dirce whirled around to give him another look and he was silent. He promptly shut his mouth and leaned back on the bench.

“Wasn’t there another girl in the pool with you?” Doug managed to say.

“Her name is Appias,” Dirce snapped back at him. “And she’s not the least bit interested in you!”

“Which is a good thing for him,” Dion said. He didn’t want to disturb the tow. They were close together in each other’s arms, even with the water dripping off Dirce. The appearance of the nymph had an effect on Sean and Emily too. They were on the end of the same bench, but hugging.

“Dirce,” Dion said to the water elemental, “do you have any idea what you’ve done to Dennis? You’ve put a glamor on him and he’ll never be happy until you release him. You have to let him go because it’s not good for either of you.”

“What do you know, Master Dion?” she snarled at him. “You think your ability to manipulate elements entitles you to know what goes on in our world? You think your quest to free your parents overrides everything else?” She returned to Dennis who was now calmed down and in control of himself.

The effect she had on Dennis was uncanny. He was calmed and held onto the wet form next to him. The young man was at peace with himself and the hurried look of someone not sure about their future was gone from his face. Dion faced two couples affected by the power of the elementals. But this time half of one couple was an elemental. He only needed to wait until Salacia Delphi showed up, then he could make Dirce leave Dennis alone.

A very easy solution, but what about Dennis? Would he ever recover from this encounter? And Dirce would hate Dion forever. The rest of her water elemental clan would hate him as well. It would make using them for anything difficult, as they would have to be bound to do any task. They would despise him and jeopardize anything he needed done when the opportunity arose.

“You can’t be together for long, Dirce,” Dion tried to explain. “He’s mortal, you aren’t. It’s as simple as that. You don’t do very well out of the water. You’ll need to go back into the pool soon unless you want to feel sick. He can’t stay in the water very long. He can’t stay underwater at all unless he has breathing equipment.”

And then something else struck him. “Dirce,” Dion asked. “Have you ever been attracted to a human before?”

“No,” she said. The elemental began to sob too, her tears flowing over her face. “This is the first time for me.”

It was hard to tell when water elementals cried because they were wet most of the time.

So this was it. Both Dennis and Dirce had fallen in love for the first time and to each other. Dion ran his hand through his hair and tried to figure out what to do about this. Now he was close to the boundaries of his code if he kept Dirce away from Dennis. It would be much worse than the usual binding to keep a nymph away from a human. He wasn’t sure either of them would survive the separation. Dirce wasn’t mortal, but she could still be hurt.

He tried to think if this had happened in the past. It might have and perhaps the Water Grandmaster would know what to do, but how would it look to her if he couldn’t straighten this out? Why should she grant him full powers if he dumped these love seals in her lap? Probably not right away and it might take years for her to make her mind up again. Indeed, his uncle had set all of them up by sending the nymphs into this part of the mall. Small wonder the security guards were absent. They didn’t need to be around when Dion had this on his hands.

‘It’s not like he can take Dirce home and introduce her to mom,” Doug grumbled to the side. “She would have a fit if all that water was on the floor in the house.”

“Just be quiet,” Dion said before Dirce snapped at him again. “There has to be a way to resolve this. Let me think.”

Lilly stood next to Dion. She was in awe of his Solomonic wisdom on display. She didn’t even speculate on what he would do.

“You can stay with us, Dirce,” Dion said to her after he thought for a few minutes. “But you have to get some clothes on. As much as the male half of the shoppers might like it, you can’t go around wet and in a bikini.”

“I’m glad you approve of me,” Dirce said to him coldly. Dion noticed that Sean and Emily were also inseparable. Great, now he had two couples to contend with in order to finish his quest.

“I’ll have to talk to the Water Elemental Grandmaster when she arrives,” Dion said. “It might cost me ability, but I can’t risk the damage it would do to Dennis right now if I send you away.”

He took his wallet out and handed Lilly a credit card. “This is in my aunt and Uncle Rich’s name. If any of the stores give you a hard time about using it, come and get me. Go back and get her something to drink too.”

“Aren’t your sisters going to want to know where you are?” he asked Dirce.

“They already do,” Dirce said and nodded to the front.

Dion turned to the front of the store and saw a crowd of elemental nymphs gathered at the front. All of them still were wet and in their swimming suits. The nymph who’d been in the same pool walked up to them with Dirce’s tracksuit in her hands. Now there would be a lot of water on the floor.

“She’ll need this,” the nymph said to Dion as she handed him the tracksuit. She went over to Dirce and gave her a hug, then rejoined the others who watched from the entrance to the pool shop.

“What will the rest of you be up to?” Dion asked the one who walked back to the door.

“Waiting,” she said. “The owner is on her way back here and she told the clerks to let us continue to use the pools. They don’t seem to mind because they’ve already sold two pools since we’ve been inside them.” She padded back to the others who soon left the entrance of the store and returned to the outside.

None of it changed the problems Dennis and Dirce would face if their relationship went forward. She needed a constant body of water around her and if Dennis planned to get into a major college, he had better major in marine biology. And there was the problem of him aging, but not she. However, he still had to admit, they made a nice couple curled up on the bench with Sean and Emily next to them. Anyone else would think them another high school boy and girlfriend out for a date.

“I need to go home,” his brother said. “Dennis, call me from a pay phone if you need someone to pick you up. I’m outta here.” He stood up and walked out the corridor that connected to the main concourse.

“So as long as I am here,” Dirce said while she put her tracksuit on, “you can at least ask me some questions, because I know that’s what you want to do.”

“You can start by telling me why you and your sisters are here,” he said and sat down on a bench next to theirs to lessen the impact of his words. Dirce slipped her flip-flops on and sat back down next to Dennis.

“We were hired to keep you from the Water Grandmaster. The man who owns the mall specifically wants us to keep you away from her.”

“I suspected it. I suppose you can start from the beginning and tell me how he found you?”

“We live in a cave near the coast of Okinawa,” she said. “I know you guessed my location from the way I look. We take our form from the humans we’re around, so nobody says anything. I’ve been there with my sisters a long time. I remember when the Emperor of Japan visited us six hundred years ago. I remember when the first people showed up on the island. But this is the first time I have ever been attracted to a boy.”

“All these years and it’s the first time?” Lilly asked.

“We don’t have the same sense of time you do. We think of time on a vast scale and don’t get concerned if we’re caught in the middle of it. I know humans don’t have the same perspective.” She hugged Dennis again. “But I hope there might be a way to fix that.”

Dion didn’t have the guts to tell her he didn’t know of any way to extend the human life much beyond a hundred years, but medical science always found ways to make improvements. He let her continue to speak.

“We spend most of our days on the rocks outside the cave singing. It’s something we like to do. It passes the time and the fish seem to like it. The dolphins come to hear us too.”

“Do you eat?” Emily asked her. She’d wondered about it ever since the ghouls captured her.

“Not us. Some water elementals, as you call us, do, but we don’t have to.”

“You sing?” Sean asked. “I’ve heard about mermaids who sing to sailors, is that who you are?”

“Distant cousins. And yes we do. Anyway, last month a boat pulled up right outside our cave and….”

“Could you sing for us?” Sean asked her. “I’d love to hear you.”

“Unless your singing could hurt,” Emily added. She was thinking of the sirens from the Odyssey.

“If you want me to and no it won’t hurt you,” Dirce explained and leaned her head back.

It was a voice which emerged from her throat, but one that used no words. Her song flowed through the corridor and caused a few shoppers to turn and listen to her. It was a song of the waves and surf pounding on the beach. Many of the people who stopped to hear had never been near the sea and were mesmerized by what they heard from Dirce. The small girl with the wet, black hair sang about the sun over the ocean and the mists that rose from the sea. She sang about the moonrise over the waves and the sound of the storms. She sang about the fish leaping through the air and the sunrise on the open sea. It was a song of loneliness and yet was all about the splendor of nature. It was a song she’d sung for thousands of years.

When Dirce finished and lowered her head, the entire corridor outside the mall was silent. And then it began. Sporadic claps that echoed throughout the hall until everyone was applauding her. The applause died out and she looked at everyone. Confused, as if she didn’t understand what they were doing. A man walked up to Dirce and thanked her for reminding him of his years in the navy. Several families expressed gratitude for her for the performance and wanted to know where they could buy her album. Soon, everyone went back to walking and continued on their way.

“That was so wonderful,” Dennis said, his eyes full of joy.

“Do you want me to continue with my story?” she asked Dion.

“Yes.” It was easy to see how men were attracted to water nymphs; they were stunning to look at and to listen.

“It was a big boat,” she continued, “bigger than we’d seen in over a hundred years. Our island doesn’t get a lot of human visitors and we like it that way. It avoids problems with mortals.”

“Anyway, the boat came right up to our rock and dropped its anchor. The captain of the boat had an elemental worker on board. He managed to coax us out of the water and back onto the rocks. It was sunset, so we didn’t mind talking with him for a while.”

“All of you were out on the rocks?” Sean asked her.

“We always to outside in the evening to sing. It’s the best way to hear yourself. We go inside if there is someone we don’t know. We didn’t know these people and almost didn’t go outside, but they were insistent. Plus, one of them was an elemental worker, so he caught our attention.”

“When we went back to the rock,” she continued, “the captain of the boat wanted us to meet with someone he had on board. We don’t like to meet with more than one or two humans at a time because they stare at us.”

“Why do people stare at you?” Lilly asked. The small woman turned her head to face the human girl.

“You see what I have on now? This is more than I have worn in two hundred years. I didn’t mind the bikini because I’ve had men come by and beg me to wear it so they can take pictures of me in it. They pay me with shiny coins, which we like because they look pretty in the cave. We have many shiny coins in there going back hundreds of years. I’ve tried to tell them my picture will never come out, but they refuse to listen. Something about the light, our forms don’t register on a camera.”

“I like the way you look,” Dennis said. She gave him a little hug and kissed him on the cheek. “Of course you would, just as I like the way you look,” she told him.

“Anyway,” Dirce continued, “we made him promise not to bring any more men out on deck. He agreed and went to get the man who wanted to talk to use. When he came out, he introduced himself as Seth Bach.”

“My uncle.” Dion sat up straight.

“He told us that he wanted us to do a job for him and it involved travel. He said we would be far from the sea, but there would be places we could go to refresh once we were there. We wanted to know why he needed us and not some other group of water elementals. He didn’t say, but claimed we were the best he could afford. When we asked him why we should listen to his offer, he claimed there was going to be an oil exploration vessel in the vicinity of our rock in a few days.

Oil and exploration are two of the worst words you can say to a water elemental who lives in the ocean. I’ve had too many relatives forced to relocate because someone wanted to pump the black stuff out of where they lived. We can’t stand it when the men and their big machines start to work. We have to go because of the noise and smells. He promised to send the machines away if we would come and do a job for him. And he promised to bring us jewels, which we like to put in our caves too. It looks nice next to the shiny coins.

He told us he needed us to keep someone away from one of the water elemental grandmasters. He promised us whatever we would need to stay out of water for a long period of time. He even gave us some pretty stones to help us decide.

So we voted. In the end, we decided to take him up on his offer and go along for the job. He had some kind of tank on the ship to transport us, so it worked out without much trouble.”

There was only one thing which bothered us: he was some kind of elemental worker himself, we couldn’t tell which kind. Usually it’s easy to do that, we can feel it. He couldn’t bind us or force us if we didn’t want him to do it, but there was something odd about the way he felt. As if he’d earned something he wasn’t supposed to have.”

“That would describe my uncle,” Dion said. The six of them were sitting on the bench, with Lilly leaning on him. What Dirce had was contagious.

“He put us into some other kind of water tank when the boat docked on the shore,” she continued. “It was nice enough, just a bit restraining. He flew us into some special place where he told us what our cover was supposed to be and issued us the swimsuits and tracksuits. We didn’t like wearing them, but understood it was part of the job he wanted us to do. Today a bus brought us to this place and we’ve followed the script to the letter.

All up to where I noticed Dennis. Now I don’t know what will happen next because we were supposed to keep you away from the Grandmaster and now you know about everything. I don’t want to go back, because I would leave him behind.” She looked with her sea green eyes into that of Dennis. “Is there any way he could come with us if we go back?’

“Dirce,” Dion spoke softly. “This is difficult to say, but Dennis has to eat, you don’t. It would be easier to keep you here. I don’t know how it can be done, but if there is a method to do it, I’ll find the way.”

“I really don’t want to leave my sisters behind,” Dirce said as she looked at the door to the pool store. “I wish there was some way we could all stay here. I could convince them to stay if there was as quiet lake or pond somewhere.”

Dion sighed. With all the development in the area, one of those would be hard to find. And Dennis would have to see her every day or he would have problems. It was one of the reasons elementals and humans didn’t mix very well.

Dirce stood up, still holding onto Dennis’s hand. “I’m going back there and talk with them. I’ll make them understand everything is changed and I want to stay here.”

“Why don’t you let me do that?” Dion told her. “Look, I’m an elemental worker with all four abilities. I only have full power in earth and air, but I hope to have the third when the storeowner shows up today. Give me the chance to talk to them and I’m sure it can all be resolved.“ He hadn’t liked the sneer on the elemental who’d walked back through the door. At least the water on the floor was gone, mopped up by a grumbling ghoul cleaner.

“I’ll do it!” Dennis said as she stood next to Dirce. “Let me go back there and tell them to let her be here and not cause any problems.”

“Calm down,” Dion told him. “You’re new to all this and excited. I’ve seen this happen before. You’ll be the jarhead who runs across a field of grenades just to impress someone. Let me handle this, I’ve had the experience.”

“I’ll go.” It was Sean, also standing up. “You’re right. He’s new and I’ve already been zapped by elementals. They won’t have the same effect on me they would on him.”

Dion rubbed the back of his head. What had he walked into? Right now, he had an uncle who wanted to eliminate him, a Water Elemental Grandmaster he needed to meet, two lovesick guys, three lovesick girls if you counted Lilly and multiple swimming pools full of water elementals. And he still had to find a way to free his parents from the clock tower. Now he had two different guys who didn’t have a clue about how to negotiate with elementals who wanted to play heroes.

“You can both go back there with me,” Dion told them. “But we’ll do this my way. You don’t talk to any of them unless I say so. Is that understood?”

Both of them nodded their heads.

“How long do you think this will take?” Lilly asked him.

“Longer that it would if I could go back there alone. But they want to go along for the ride, so I’m not going to stop them. Just stay put and keep the rest of the girls calm until I get back. Try to find out more about Dirce, this is new to me, an elemental who wants to be with a human out of their environment.”

Dion turned back to Sean and Dennis. “Okay, let’s go, and remember, let me do the talking.”

They vanished through the door of the pool store.

Dirce sat back down on the bench and folded her legs under her. She watched the flow of traffic for a while down the hall. Eventually she turned to Lilly who sat next to her.

“They all move this way?” she asked her.

“What do you mean?” Lilly asked. Dirce’s green eyes focused on several women and men together as they walked.

“The people. I’ve never seen so many in one place at a time. They move different. Can’t they move up and down or just on one plane? It seems such a crowded way to get around.”

“We’re stuck on the ground,” Lilly said. “Unless you have a flying machine. No floating in thin air.”

“I guess I’ll have to get used to it,” Dirce sighed, playing with her hair. “They don’ even sing?”

“Some of us do. Not like you sing, but for different reasons.”

Lilly and Emily looked at Dirce and wondered how she would fit into human society. The small woman in a tracksuit got lucks of approval from the men in the hall. She didn’t even realize what they did and smiled back each time. Eventually, one of them would come over and try to engage her in a conversation. It was inevitable.

Chapter 7

Dion and his two companions emerged to the rear display area of the pool store to find the elementals out on the concrete sunning themselves. The sun wasn’t too strong this time of the year, but they didn’t need an excuse to enjoy its warmth. Somehow, all eleven of the remaining nymphs had found towels from the pool store. They were stretched out in a row.

A long row of young women in their bikinis and swimsuits was bound to attract attention. As the display area adjoined a parking lot, there were plenty of cars that slowed down as they passed the gate. The trio watched as one car almost rear-ended the one in front as it slowed down to admire the line of nymphs behind the fence.

The two sales clerks in the back of the lot where the display pools were situated continued to stare in wonder at the sight before them.

“We really should tell them to move,” one said.

“You first,” the other replied. “This has to be an idea from the boss. I think that family over by the new model wants to talk to you about it.”

“I’ll let you have that sale this time. Oh darn, there’s another customer who needs help.”

A little frustrated, both of them wandered off to sell pools.

“So where did you get the towels?” Dion asked the nymph called Appias as she lay in the sun. Her blond hair was dry and flowed with grace in the slight breeze that played across the back section of the pool store. Dion turned to watch a small air sylph glide over the parking lot and catch a draft as it sailed into the sky.

Right now Dion wished he were that air sylph element. It didn’t have one percent of his issues.

“The very nice men brought them to us,” she said. “I told them we needed some way to lie on this hard ground and not get dirty. They ran and got towels for us.”

Dion watched Sean and Dennis turn their heads and admire the row before them. Every single one of the girls possessed perfect skin, hair and teeth. Not a single one was made-up, but they didn’t have to be. These water elementals could adapt their form to whatever was the most useful. He had no idea if they’d kept this form for the past twenty years or twenty minutes. Most of them stuck with the same exterior when it worked out.

“I don’t believe any of us have been introduced,” he said to the row as they leaned back and caught some of the warming rays of the sun. “I’m Dion; these are my friends Sean and Dennis.”

“We are very pleased to meet you,” she said, “I’m known as Appias, next to me is Aginappe, followed by Myrtoessa, Sithndes, Bolbe, Limnae, Pallas, Tritonis, Arethusa, Castilia, Cynae, and Ismene. Of course, I see you already know Dirce.”

“Well met,” Dion said. “And I understand you were hired to keep me from reaching Salacia Delphi who owns this store.”

Appias turned to Aginappe and whispered something. They stayed in conversation for a few minutes until the three guys standing over them began to fidget. By now, they’d noticed each wore a very brief bikini of the same cut. Each one was colored fluorescent pink for maximum effect.

“They changed their suits,” Sean said to Dion, as he glanced back to make sure Emily wasn’t glaring at him from the window.

“They’re elementals,” Dion explained. “They can alter their forms if they want to do so.”

“Which means…” Dennis said as she looked too at the window. No sign of Dirce. “They could just get rid--”

“Calm down, tiger. They’re not human and spend most of their time around sea animals. The last thing you want to do is anger them and have the entire group turn into giant starfishes.”

Appias turned her blond head back to Dion. “We were hired and given pretty stones. Some of us think we’re not being fully compensated for the work he wants us to do. He didn’t tell us exactly why he wanted you blocked. Besides, the water in those pools is foul. It smells like a chemical freighter. It would take days for it to get acceptable to us. Then it would get stagnant and smell worse in a few days.”

“So what you’re telling me,” Dion said, “is that you’re open to a counter-offer.”

Back on the other side of the pool store, Emily and Lilly were busy with Dirce. She needed to be brought up to speed about humanity and the culture where she was right now. Dirce had little contact with humans in hundreds of years. The nymphs didn’t need to interact with them, as they preferred to stay away from humans, who were annoying, and fouled up the ocean. Every year brought more of them around her and her sisters, but they felt the ocean was big and there were plenty of places to move. The only thing they liked were the trinkets the human sometimes tossed away, which they used to decorate their cave. They liked coins the best as they could be cleaned and stuck to the walls with the polished stones they would find every now and then in sunken ships.

“We like the clear ones the best,” Dirce told her. “Sometimes we find them in rings. Right now, we have one entire wall lined with the clear ones. When the sun comes up, it makes them shine. We like to watch the patterns the sun makes on the opposite wall.”

“Diamonds.” Lilly said. “You have an entire wall covered with diamonds?”

“Is there something wrong with that?”

“No, just make sure you or your sisters never let anyone know about it. Those stones are expensive and people would try to get them.”

Emily decided after she watched the men bump into each other as they went past Dirce there had to be another reason for their allure. Dirce fit the average ideal for an attractive young girl, but styles and tastes did vary over the years. Would she be shorter if this took place fifty years ago? Somehow, these elemental knew how to bring out the desire in men.

“Anyway,” Dirce continued. “didn’t you tell me people keep rocks as pets around here?”

“Different kind of rock. These are just rocks people find on the ground.”

“So why would the clear ones have more value?”

Lilly started to explain the joke to her and decided it would be lost on Dirce. It was lost on most people and she just didn’t want to explain the concept of satire to the elemental nymph. It was difficult enough to make her understand why she needed to cover up at all times. If she planned to stay around Dennis long-term, there were many hurdles she would need to pass over.

“So, why should we help you instead of your uncle?” Appias said to Dion. “We don’t see much reason to do it. What can you give us that your uncle can’t? I don’t see you with vast wealth and resources. After all, isn’t your uncle an elemental worker too?”

“He’s the wrong kind of elemental worker. He went down the wrong path to earn his ability. He may have the fifth elemental power, but he never learned the ones before it.”

“So why should we care?”

“He’ll find a way to get out of any promise he makes. You go down the path he did and you think you’re a divine being without any responsibilities. Nothing of what he tells you is true. What did he tell you about me?”

“He said you would have power over us and every other water elemental on the planet,” Aginappe said. She was a little bit taller than her sister was and colored a deep black shade of coal. Years ago, Aginappe had found an African sailor stranded on a beach and fell in love with him. She matched his image of the perfect woman and decided to keep it forever after he died from malnutrition.

“Yes, I will be able to bind elementals,” Dion told her. “But it takes a tremendous amount of energy and concentration to do it just once. I have no interest in ruling over the sea or any other place where water elementals thrive.”

This provoked another long conversation as the rest of the elementals whispered to each other and sent messages down the line. After five minutes, they seemed to reach a decision. Meanwhile, a small crowd built up at the other side of the fence, not helped by the slow movements of cars and trucks who tried to get a close look at the young women relaxing in their bikinis as the sun reached its apex. By now, the two sales clerks were busy with all the customers who’d decided to come into the exterior of the pool store and look at the models on display. They were forced to pull extra help from the other side of the store.

“We’re willing to listen to anything you can offer,” Appias told him. “But you better make the offer quick because we were supposed to have a meeting with your uncle in two hours. He’ll want to know what progress we have made.”

Dion pulled his two friends back away from the elementals for a conference. “I think I know a way to get them on our side. Normally, I wouldn’t try what I’m about to do, but I think the situation warrants it.”

“Can you share it with us?” Dennis asked. He kept glancing in the direction of the nymphs.

“No, because if it doesn’t work out, I’ll need to come up with another plan. No matter, give me an hour or so and you’ll know what it is. Sean, stay out here and keep the girls in sight. I know that won’t be too hard. I might send Emily out here to help you.”

“Thanks,” Sean grumbled.

“You need to think long term,” he told him. “Emily is the future. These nymphs aren’t.” He turned and looked at Dennis. “Not for you either. You already have one.”

“Did I say anything?” Dennis asked.

“No, but I could tell you were thinking it. You have the bigger task. Dirce will need time to learn how to be around people. I don’t envy your challenge, but fate was set when you two made contact. Yes, I could eventually get her to leave you, but the best thing is to learn to live with her. Trust me, someday you’ll thank me.”

Dion walked back over to the elementals. “I need to go make a phone call. I’m going to leave one of my friends out here to watch after you in case you need anything. Don’t get too close; he has a girlfriend on the other side of the store. She’s with your sister, Dirce.”

“We’re fine right now,” the nymph told him. “We like the attention. Can we ask any of these nice men to get us anything?”

“No. Talk to Sean if you need anything.” He turned and walked back inside the pool store with Dennis.

Dirce was in a deep conversation with Lilly and Emily when they emerged. Dion and Dennis walked over to them and sat down. The hall seemed to have more people in it that when he left.

“I need to go to a pay phone and make a call,” Dion told his friends. “Sean is out there taking care of the other nymphs.” He saw Emily’s eyes flare. “Don’t worry, he’s just there to keep the men away from them and get them whatever they need.”

“I thought you said they were elementals and didn’t have to worry about what humans could do to them,” Emily said.

“They can’t be harmed by ordinary humans. But they still like the attention they get from them. I’m a little worried about what might happen if the wrong person attracts too much attention from a nymph.”

“Do you have a problem with me?” Dirce demanded. She started to get up off the bench.

“No, I don’t. Dennis is very lucky you were attracted to him. It might not seem so right away, because you’re both in unfamiliar territory, but in the end, he’ll be better off. The same can be said for Sean and Emily, for different reasons. I need your sister’s help against my uncle and I know only one way to do it. So please, excuse me.” Dion turned and walked down the corridor.

“Does he always talk so cryptically?” Dirce asked the others. “I didn’t understand a bit of what he said.”

“Dion tries to explain himself the best way he knows how,” Lilly said. “Sometimes he doesn’t have enough time to get it across. If he has a plan in mind, it will turn out all right. You just have to give him a chance. I’ve seen him turn a whirlwind around, so I think he knows what he’s doing.”

“If you say so,” Dirce said and slid up to Dennis. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too.” And he had. Separation from Dirce for even a few minutes was difficult. He could see Lilly as she watched Dion’s form move away. Even Emily looked forlorn as she stared at the door to the pool store.

“Is there a lake near your house?” Dirce asked Dennis. “I’ll need to get in the water by the end of the day.”

“There might be a pond. I’m not sure about a whole lake.”

“Does it have a cave at or below the water line?”

“I don’t think so. Wait… there’s a creek, which runs past the backyard. I know there was an old bridge over it. They replaced the creek with a corrugated pipe. Would that work?”

Dirce starred at him for a few moments. “I guess,” she sighed. “I’ll have to work with what I have. Does it get very many people back there? I don’t like to be disturbed unless they bring offerings.”

“Offerings?”

“Pretty stones, shiny coins. We like those. People want us to make it rain. We can’t do that, but sometimes we talk to the air sylphs who can.”

Dion made his way to the bank of payphones that were toward the other side of this section in the mall. He didn’t need the map to find them. Each section of the mall had an entire side room where people could make calls from the bulky black phones which were attached to the wall. Usually they were located next to the bathroom as the mall wanted to keep the idle noise limited to one part of the shopping center.

Of course, all four phones were in use. There wasn’t anything else he could do but look at his wristwatch and wait. He glanced around and looked for any security guards. None. Karanzen kept them back today. Once they were inside the mall, there wasn’t a whole lot he could do so long as Dion and his friends didn’t cause a problem.

Dion expected Edward to show up. The little Englishman seemed to know just when he was needed. But, so far, he’d made only one appearance. Perhaps he’d decided to stay put for the time being. Edward did say he only was allowed so much time. It could be he was in the process of conserving as much of it as he could.

“You need anything to drink?” Sean asked the girls who were lying under the sun. It wasn’t too hot outside, but the sun was still sending waves of light to the ground and it heated up.

“No,” one of the nymphs told him. “We don’t usually need to since we spend most of time in water. Don’t need to eat either, in case you weren’t told.”

All of a sudden, they stood up and stretched, which caused more cars to slow down in the parking lot. Sean was certain he saw a man walk into the side of a building as he turned to watch the girls. Eventually, someone would say something about the girls in the pool store outside the display. He could see a number of complaints from their appearance. Not that it bothered the trucks that detoured across the lot to get a better view.

“You can collect the towels,” another one said to him. “The men who brought them to us took the towels out of the cabinet over there.” She pointed in the direction a small locker in the corner of the display.

The nymphs formed a single line, which branched off as they went back into the pools on display. In minutes, they were swimming around the display units and splashing in the water.

“Clean water,” he heard one say to another. “Hate the chemical smell, and there’s no fish.”

“Don’t think the fish would last very long in it,” another one said.