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Her grandmother shook her head again, looking worried as well as sad. She took a deep breath and sighed, looking away from Alma briefly and then making eye contact once more.
“You are the strongest of the elementals in this family aside from me,” her grandmother said slowly. “That makes you a target for all the disgruntled families. When you come into your abilities fully, you’re going to be as strong as I am, and it will take you some time to get accustomed to the increase in power. It’s dangerous. I need to prepare you before you come into your inheritance.”
Alma absorbed the news. She knew she was strong; other members of her family who exhibited elemental traits had not developed as rapidly as she had. She had moved beyond the simple exercises her cousins struggled with quickly, mastering her abilities as they emerged. She also knew when her powers developed completely, she would have a great deal more to master. It would be more difficult than ever to maintain secrecy as a member of the community and to retain control.
“Am I really that strong?” Alma stared wide-eyed at her grandmother. She hadn’t considered the level of her strength in years, since she had stopped competing with family members because her grandmother had insisted she was showing off.
Alma’s grandmother nodded slowly. “There are other things we need to talk about, but right now a cup of tea and a piece of cake is what’s needed most. Then you need to get some sleep.”
Alma knew there was no arguing with her grandmother, no way to insist she wasn’t hungry. She also knew better than to offer to help. Her grandmother stood slowly, folding the recliner back onto itself and shakily getting to her feet and walking slightly unsteadily into the kitchen. Her grandmother could still get around, but advanced age stiffened her joints. Her body was less responsive than it had once been, but it was expected. Alma’s grandmother, however, was proud and refused to let anyone help her.
Alma took a seat at the kitchen table, twirling a lock of her long brown hair around her finger, and watching as her grandmother closed her eyes a moment, murmuring something to herself. The older woman touched the kettle on the stove and Alma smiled to herself. She knew the little trick her grandmother performed to ensure by means of magic there was enough water for two cups of tea. She moved around the kitchen, taking mugs from a high shelf in the cabinet, then pulling sealed jars of herbs from a rack and adding them to the bottom of the cup while she waited for the water to boil.
Alma knew whatever her grandmother was putting into the mugs, it would be sleep-inducing, and shortly after the “bedtime snack” she would be more than ready for bed. The subtle manipulations of her grandmother had occasionally frustrated her as a teenager, but as her restlessness had increased, along with her abilities, she had often begged her grandmother for a few sachets of the tea to drink on nights when she particularly needed to sleep.
One of her grandmother’s gifts—a result of the way she applied her elemental abilities—was an uncanny knowledge of herb weaving, an ability to know what ingredients to blend into a soup, a tea, or a wound dressing, to get the results she wanted.
* * *
Alma was deep in thought as she watched her grandmother slicing pound cake to go with the tea. She had grown up knowing magic existed. She had laughed secretly at her peers as they experimented with Wiccan practices, knowing that kind of magic was an echo of what she was learning and the skills she was developing. She smiled as she remembered the time she terrified a coven mistress, in a display of youthful pride, by calling the wind with a whistle on a clear and stagnant day…all because the coven mistress had insisted she just “didn’t have the magic” in her. It had been a victorious moment—being able to display some measure of her ability—but her grandmother had given her hell about it afterward. Alma still remembered the scolding she had received: “What good does it possibly do for you to attract attention to your abilities? Don’t you realize you could have gotten yourself killed? That was a damn fool stunt, and you know it.” At the time, the reprimand stung. Alma hadn’t even put her abilities to full use. Gradually she noticed the reactions to her more “normal” elemental traits and realized that she was regarded by normal humans as something of a freak and that a fear of her could lead to danger—not just for her, but for all elementals.
Alma’s grandmother brought the tea and cake to the table, and they ate as Alma asked questions about her grandmother’s garden between bites to avoid sitting in silence. The tea was slightly minty with honey-rich floral tones mingled in the warm brew. While Alma didn’t know what was in it, she savored it slowly, with bites of the moist cake. By the time she finished her tea and cake, she was sleepy and barely had enough energy to get her suitcase out of the car. Her grandmother preferred to sleep in the recliner, so Alma wished her a good night as she passed the front living room on her way to her bedroom at the back of the house.
She changed into a nightgown and crawled between the crisp, fresh-smelling linens on the bed. She fell asleep almost the moment her head hit the pillow.
two
Alma awoke the next morning feeling changes in her body stronger than ever. She knew the energy from the land around her grandmother’s home was partly the cause, but it was also a result of the culmination of her abilities emerging. Her limbs tingled, her mind buzzed. She took a deep breath and waited for the moment to pass, for the sensations to ease away. She had felt them increasing as her body prepared itself.
Her mind focused as she became awake. The wind howled outside the window like the onslaught of a rainstorm, shaking the trees and sending eerie shivers through the bushes. Alma inhaled deeply and the wind calmed, humming a quieter tune.
Part of Alma’s training had been to learn the ways her elemental alignment manifested itself as well as the qualities common in the elemental types—water, earth, air, fire. Her grandmother, as a water-aligned elemental, had a talent for gardening, an extreme affinity for growing things. She also had the ability to heal others. Her nature was fluid like the water, almost perverse and with intense emotions and heady resentments. Along with those intense emotions, she had a profound intuition. There had been nothing Alma could keep secret from her grandmother. Even when her mother hadn’t caught her, her grandmother called when Alma had done wrong to chastise her privately. And when she was hurting, the compassion her grandmother offered had been a soothing balm for Alma’s nervy nature.
Alma, however, had aligned with the air. She’d always had a boundless supply of energy. Where her grandmother was quiet and almost passive, Alma had been boisterous and active, her mind leaping from subject to subject. She came to understand her inability to stay still resulted from the magic coursing through her. Just as the wind can create an infinite supply of energy, it seemed Alma could too. It was as much a part of her as her ability to understand any language. An ability she had put to good use, studying linguistics in college and becoming a freelance translator. Although every language in existence was easily interpreted, she’d always been careful to hedge the number of languages she could translate.
Her high energy was used through an instructor teaching her archery and fencing (and at least slightly ladylike) pursuits for her abilities. As she had come into adolescence, elemental qualities became increasingly more intense, Alma’s restless nature transformed into anxiety. An intervention on her grandmother’s behalf was needed to help her balance the overwhelming stress before it got too far out of hand. Alma knew she would never be free of the mentally taxing pressures of her abilities, her grandmother’s healing powers had given her relief on more than one occasion.
As she had gained command of the more “normal” traits associated with her elemental alignment, Alma’s grandmother had also helped her cultivate more magical parts. She had flown for the first time—on accident—at the age of twelve. Only for a few moments but falling from a tree inspired her—in a panic—to lift herself before she hit the ground. She had taken the scolding for disobeying rules in good stead, particularly since her grandmother had told her not to climb the tree to begin with. When it was done, however, her grandmother fought back a smile and told her wryly she might as well learn to fly on command if she was going to do it.
Alma practiced that entire summer, slowly raising herself up off the ground until she reached the top limbs of the tree she had fallen from. Flight was not an easy trick to manage, but it was one of Alma’s favorite talents. As an air elemental, she also communicated and controlled creatures of the air with relative ease. As a teenager, she lured bees to her grandmother’s house to pollinate the flowers, and learned the calls of birds, becoming friends with robins, threshers, mockingbirds and more. She had stayed up late one night, communicating with owls that haunted the darkened boughs of a nearby tree until she finally understood them. While she did not have her grandmother’s level of psychic intuition, Alma had excelled from an early age in divination, reading tarot or playing cards to get an understanding of the future. She also studied the use of other tools of the trade, including a crystal ball given to her at fifteen by an aunt.
Alma had no real notion of what the final manifestations of her abilities would be. She knew her grandmother, as a young woman, had been formidable. The prediction her grandmother had made the night before, that Alma would be as powerful, was both thrilling and nerve wracking. She couldn’t imagine what she would do with the level of power her grandmother possessed with such grace and subtlety. Her grandmother had hinted once that, while Alma was air-aligned, her distinct weather-related talents came from the family’s history of water elementals. The rainstorms she summoned—sometimes unconsciously—was one manifestation of that trait, and Alma was uncertain if she wanted that part of her talents strengthened. She told herself firmly repeatedly that whatever gifts she received in the final transformation into a full elemental, she would learn to use them as effectively as the ones she had first developed as a child.
* * *
Alma rolled out of bed. It was nearly impossible to linger being as restless as she was. Even though the crackling, electric tingles running up and down her limbs didn’t subside once she was up and moving around. The smell of coffee and a lavish breakfast floated on the air to Alma’s room. Her grandmother likely knew she was already awake, and her grandmother wouldn’t remain patient for long. Alma didn’t bother to change out of her nightgown, she brushed her hair and washed her face in the bathroom before walking to the kitchen.
Her grandmother was seated at the table waiting, a cup of coffee in her hand and a feast of a breakfast laid out: scrambled eggs remaining warm in a cast iron skillet, a platter of sausage, freshly made biscuits with a crock of butter and a jar of homemade fig preserves, and yellow grits swimming with butter. It was a breakfast Alma had eaten hundreds of times, and still the comfort of the routine was undeniable.
The only short period in Alma’s life when she had been scrawny came between the ages of twelve and thirteen during a growth spurt. That growth spurt left her lanky, which made her self-conscious enough to avoid the boys she’d been attracted to in middle school. Her grandmother had explained to her time and again—her words falling on deaf ears—that as her magical nature asserted itself over the human realities of her genetics, she would become more womanlike. At age fourteen, she filled out. Her curves intensified. By the time she left for college, she had “blossomed” into a woman with a true hourglass figure. She was the envy of many dorm mates and the desire of voracious frat boys. The years of martial arts training came in handy a time or two. Alma had never slept with any of them against her will.
“You must have been having interesting dreams,” Alma’s grandmother stated calmly, sipping her coffee. Alma sat down and doctored her coffee, adding two spoons of sugar and a healthy dollop of cream from the pitcher her grandmother had placed by her mug.
Alma smiled wryly. “It’s been getting more difficult to control the wind while I sleep,” Alma admitted, taking a sip of her coffee, and savoring it before she considered the feast in front of her. She felt the intent green eyes watching her and fought down the urge to squirm.
“I don’t think controlling the wind is the problem; I think it’s controlling yourself.” It was a familiar refrain. Alma knew she was right—but it was still maddening to be called out for her lack of self-control. She’d been trying to develop the self-control and self-discipline her grandmother demanded her entire life. So far, the only thing she’d truly learned to manage was her temper. She possessed the negative qualities associated with the air and the positive ones. Wind could often be chaotic and out of control. While she had a genius intellect, her ability to focus on a single task long enough to master it was largely determined by how interested she was. Studying had never been a strong suit for her, nor had organization.
“I’m trying, Grams, but it’s a little more difficult to control yourself in your sleep.”
