In the world of the devvis, there was a grossly disproportionate number of females to males; I was a part of the rarer gender. A she-devvi just coming into maturity should expect to experience her newly realized drive to reproduce homing in on potential mates. She chose multiple bucks, the group she created termed a "queendom."

A gaggle of geese, a queendom of devvis.

The more dominant the female was, the more males she'd take under her wing. It seemed to be an issue of people management, of possessing the prowess and deft to keep so many egos satisfied and in check.

Almost lightheaded with the amount of strange, new information spiraling in my head, there was a bounce in my step as I descended the stairs, casually dressed in linen shorts and a well-fitted High Voltage Hockey T-shirt. I paused halfway down the stairs with the empty glass and silver bowl in hand, and I listened to two quiet voices conversing in the room to the left of the staircase—the study, or so Indy intended to make it. Right now, all there was furnishing the small room were a few empty bookcases awaiting the contents of the moving crates and an antique roll-top desk that she rescued from a roadside flea market.

One of the voices I recognized clearly as Micah's honey tone, but the other... Hastily, I set down the bowl and glass, and then descended the last few steps and rounded the corner. That other voice! I stood stock still in the doorway with my heart in my throat. Alex.

He hadn't been in school today. And now he was here, in my house, dressed in a navy suit. The rich color always seemed right on him. The loose tie and suede shirt with the three top buttons undone and cufflinks removed, maybe stuffed in the pocket of his suit coat tossed over the desk chair, spoke of his tendency for finery, but that he would rather be wearing something much less formal.

He looks good, I decided when the boys' collective attention rose from the laptop they were crowded over, turning to face me in a motion as smooth as melted chocolate that almost seemed choreographed.

His raven bangs shifting, Alex tilted his head in a welcoming gesture, his eyes almost the color of a pristine winter desert sky today. Micah was still in his academy finery. He extended a hand without a word, reaching for mine. They both looked good, standing there, waiting for me. Together. As a she-devvi, it's expected that I'll choose multiple mates.

"Ah, hey guys. What's going on?" It came out more quietly than I intended as I crossed the room. I felt a bit underdressed; I was glad I had decided to go with a bra.

"We were hoping you could tell us about something," Alex replied. He kept his expression neutral when Micah pulled me into a half hug before lifting me onto a stool next to the desk, the action itself a possessive display.

A backward glance told me that someone had closed the laptop before I got within viewing distance, and I squirmed with discomfort on the wooden seat, wondering what they wanted. I stiffened in understanding as soon as my sketchpad appeared on my lap, opened to the Spatula Man composition.

Sending my fingers across the page, the aroma of the crayon I had used rose under my warm touch, the smell of it reminding me of the time I'd put into the drawing, almost obsessing over it. They wanted me to explain this? I pressed my hand to the burnt spot from Micah's thumb, almost in want to hide it. "It's...from a dream." And also, a very real memory.

My gaze rose to see, for the first time, the twin, on-edge light mirrored behind their eyes. I glanced back down at the drawing. The man with his spatula-like weapon was poised rigid, the odd staff held high and his free hand gesturing to the right of the frame, where the building rose off the page. "I've been remembering more of this, from the day the apartment collapsed."

"You recalled more only after you dreamt of it?" Alex asked.

"Repeatedly. I mean, I've been having bad dreams more frequently than not, but this..." I hesitated for a minute. "There was so much confusion that day. Things were already in turmoil when I woke up in..." In the closet.

Micah's expression briefly twisted. He knew very well where I had been. A predawn storm had woken me and driven me into hiding, where I eventually fell back asleep.

"What did he do next?" Alex prompted me.

"Next?" I echoed.

"He's poised in mid-gesture." Alex motioned to the extended arm as the two boys seemed to exchange an unspoken thought.

Deep in remembrance, I slid off the stool and paced across the room to the packing crates. I grabbed a metal yardstick that was propped up against a box, its shiny surface catching the light from the bay window.

He did something. Closing my eyes, I first pictured what I could and slowly turned in demonstration. I swung my arm with the yardstick wide to the right, accidentally scraping the wall, and twisted back around with an almost seductive swivel to bring the pretend weapon overhead. Holding that pose, my other arm pointed to the empty bookcase.

"Fingers," I muttered. I opened my eyes to see the two boys fully transfixed on me, almost mesmerized.

Something lower than my stomach twisted, and I almost forgot what I was going to say. All I could wonder for a long moment, under their intense stares, was what they were thinking—really thinking. You know, if they came up with something "fun/sexy" for us to do together instead of this, I wouldn't mind... A shiver tore down my spine. Yeah, none of us were focused on the spatula demonstration. Boy, I was really glad I put a bra on.

I mentally forced my shivering away. "First he made a fist, then opened his fingers in order like this," I showed them. "Pinky, thumb, middle finger, and fist closed. And then opening: thumb, pointer, and pinky." Like the gesture of a gun.

"Ka-pow," I said softly, bringing my wrist up as if I had shot the bookcase. "He then brought the weapon down and the windows on the first few floors shattered." I let my arms drop to my sides. "Before the shattered glass...it was really bright for an instant," I said absently, just now remembering.

My gaze went out of focus as it came back to me. The flash had been fast, like the flick of a switch. I turned away from the boys when a memory of people being struck by debris flitted through my mind. They had only asked to see the reenactment. They didn't need to see the emotions that went with it play across my face.

"Little one," Micah said in concern. He crossed the room to scoop me up and bring me back, leaving behind the yardstick. He placed me on the stool again.

"The spatula shaped staff, what is it?"

They were quiet for a minute before Alex finally spoke. "The staff you saw him wield is no doubt a focusing rod. It's a physical manifestation of a devvi's aura."

"A weapon of sorts," Micah explained further. "It can be called forth into existence from the soul and helps to channel one's elemental will. As a lightning devvi, it would allow me to handle a great amount of power without becoming overly electrified myself."

"So you have one of these focusing rods, but not everyone has one?"

"Correct." He squeezed my hand. "Being able to call up an aura-realized weapon is one of the requirements of a guardian. This way, I can work with lightning if the situation calls for it and still handle you." His mouth smoothed into a tight line. "Though I never want to try that," he added.

I squirmed on the stool and glanced back at the drawing on the desk.

His gaze followed mine, tension mounting in him as he stared at it with me. Anxiety was coming off him in waves, bitter and raw, coating the back of my throat, a burning mixture of anger and regret—and yet, there also existed a newly-grasped certainty.

One that was born from my having revealed to them what I knew; I had just confirmed who the bad guy in all of this was. "You are familiar with this spatula person."

Micah shifted at my side while Alex remained still.

"Eelios!" My guardian finally growled the unfamiliar name, the sound laced with a venomous anger.

Worried for him, I watched as he strode to the middle of the room, his smooth movements almost that of a wild cat's agitated stalk. "He was assigned as your substitute guardian when I left for preliminary trials, but he wasn't from our North Atlantic clan," Micah said as he paced, bare feet making soft stomps. "As the piss-poor excuse goes, our resources were low at the time. The peons back at headquarters pulled a temporary relief from the stables of The Rising Sun to fulfill my duties in my absence."

"Japan?" I said, recognizing the country as the only "land of the rising sun" I knew.

"The People of the Sun occupy the skies over the south Pacific and the east coast of the Asian continent," he explained, still pacing. "There is a trade agreement in place between our two clans which allows for the guardianship services of one to be imported from the other if ever a need should arise. This sun warrior, Eelios, was such an import, sent in my place to watch over you. The bastard hasn't been seen since the evening before the apartment collapsed."

Micah crossed arms over his chest as he added, "Days later, we discovered that even though the fire alarms were going off in the building, they had been disabled externally, delaying the response of the fire department."

Holy crap, somebody tampered with the fire alarms? He went on to explain that Indy had received a call the evening before about a meeting with a clothing distributor. I guessed the person never showed up. Micah seemed to think the call had been part of some larger plot to lure my aunt away from the apartment—and from me.

"Wait, so Eelios is a sun devvi?" Perhaps the same sun devvi who was chased off the night at the movies? The quiet look Alex exchanged with me confirmed that he too was probably entertaining this same thought.

Clearing his throat, Alex prompted, "You're suggesting that this Eelios is a person of interest in the mystery of who has been tapping on the walls of the valley's outer defenses these last couple of days?"

The valley had defensive walls? Where? They must be on the astral plane, as there certainly weren't any physical walls.

His amethyst eyes were shockingly livid among his ash bangs when Micah's gaze rose from the floor. "I don't know."

My guardian paused mid step. Silence overtook the room. It was a restless silence, one that was filled with the constant sound of wind as it frantically buffeted the house.

"Maybe we're going about this all wrong." Micah gestured to the window, the leaves blowing past. "Maybe we should let up on the security instead of increasing it. Do it gradually. Start by sending out less numbers on patrol. Back down from the constant runs."

"Lure them into a false sense of security?" Alex put a hand to his chin, considering the idea.

"Sure, why not? Draw whoever's out there in to us. I mean, we don't know it's Eelios for certain. It could be a rogue fire devvi who has come down from one of the northern clans. Someone trying to prove themselves to their Alpha Pyro by breaking into your little valley here and roughing you up." He shrugged when Alex let his hand drop and his expression went flat. "In which case, they'll rush the valley when it seems we've let down our guard and we still kick their ass."

Unsure, I studied Alex. Where in the world was all this talk of fire devvi hostility coming from? Sure, I suppose the two elements were opposites, but did that automatically mean bad blood?

"Well, taking into consideration what happened after you moved her from New Mexico," Alex began, almost tentatively, "I don't think this is a matter to be taken lightly. Nor do I think it is wise to weaken my security, even if we would be 'strategically faking it.'"

Wait—what? I glanced between the two boys. Their emotional signatures were becoming guarded, closed off to me. They were keeping something from me, but what?

There were news reports! I suddenly remembered that I never followed up on the snippets I'd heard on the radio and television about some large-scale event. Shit, how bad was this going to be?

"I will not pull my forces back. I will not do anything that could put Aurora at risk." Alex shook his head at Micah's hot stare. It was Micah who didn't want me to know what was going on, and Alex wasn't being nearly careful enough to his liking.

"I would never propose anything that could put her at risk," Micah snapped back indignantly. He walked over to the window to stare outside, his jaw firmly set.

"Alex?" My voice trembled when I finally found it.

He leaned close, touching my shoulder while Micah's back was turned. "I am sorry, Eos. I didn't mean to worry you. Everything's okay. We're going to take care of this."

"No! Everything is most certainly not okay!" I huffed. "There's more that you know—that he knows—and it is being kept from me."

Micah's gaze met mine when he turned back around; Alex's fingers vanished from my shoulder.

"What happened after we left New Mexico?" I jumped down from the stool and spun to open the laptop.

Alex didn't move to stop me. He held up a hand in warning when Micah appeared at my other side.

"Aurora, please. You don't need to see this." He tried to close the laptop as the screen blinked to life and a news clip reloaded.

I sent a glare his way. Stepping onto the first rung of the stool, I brought my line of sight even with his. "You will let me watch this," I said softly with a shifting of my head that sent my awareness jumping in through those amethyst eyes; I knew my way so well around him by now.

His soul was deep, but it wasn't fathomless. The breath he gathered to protest caught as my will pulsed against his.

"I understand you are worried for me and you want to protect me," I murmured it soothingly, reading his concern for me straight from his heart. "But you shouldn't protect me from the truth."

I trailed fingers down his forehead, feeling his delicate lashes against my palm as I broke the connection. I leaned close to whisper, "You need to be a good boy now and allow me to deal with this."

Even if the reality of it was that there were people out there who wanted me dead. Micah had already admitted last night that my mother's death was due to a miscalculation that should have been my own funeral. Someone already failed at killing me, so why stop when they had yet to succeed?

I turned my gaze to the screen where all I could make out at first was a giant, colorful explosion.

"What is this?" I tapped the computer screen to restart the video, and the smoky night sky suddenly turned blue.

My eyes went wide as the highway in front of our collapsed former apartment came up. The camera then panned to focus on the familiar corporate sign to the fireworks factory that had once occupied the New Mexican horizon. The landscape behind the sign was charred, containing what remained of warehouses that were barely recognizable now. Firetrucks and people in uniform swarmed in a jostling sea of emergency equipment and chaos, and then the news clip switched over from the daylight scene to what was cited as the night before. The nighttime sky was lit up in an explosion that seemed endless. It didn't even look like night. It looked like the Devil himself riding on a star-spangled horse, raining firework hell across the land. "They blew up Spirit Fireworks?" Shocked, I put my hand to my mouth. The date at the bottom of the news story identified that it was two days after the apartment collapse. Oh god.

"We figured out too late that someone had been operating out of one of the warehouses. It was a newly built facility the humans weren't occupying, so no one, human or devvi, would have noticed the activity," Micah explained. "They must have got antsy when our investigation team arrived at the apartment collapse site and decided to destroy any evidence at the factory before we searched it. Once you set off one cement bunker that's storing four thousand pounds of fireworks to take out a single warehouse sitting beside it, all of the other bunkers nearby just sort of follow suit."

"What kind of evidence was worth all of this?"

"The cement floor was chipped and aged beyond its years. Which is evidence they were holding the umbra there that attacked you."

"They destroyed an entire factory to cover chipped cement?"

"The place was charred beyond recognition by the time we got into it. Our team did come across the burnt remains of a leg bone and hoof not too far from the warehouse."

"So a stallion got loose from one of the umpteen ranches in the area and got caught in the firestorm?"

He shook his head. "It didn't belong to a horse."

"Steer?"

"The hoof itself was nearly two feet wide."

"Oh wow. That's definitely not a steer. What on earth would have a hoof that large?"

"That's what we are trying to figure out," Alex cut in.

"At my elder cousin's request, our people released the remains to the BruLagoons," Micah said. "The water devvis of his clan have quite a network of resources when it comes to working cases on the physical plane."

Alex nodded. "I'm having a contact of mine in the biology department at Hartford study the remains."

I rubbed at the tension in my forehead, trying to ease the beginnings of a headache. "You brought me to this valley for the sake of my protection, and now I am a problem Alex has to deal with."

"I knew what I was getting into when I signed a contract with your group's Alpha to permit you to stay in my territory," he said. "I've pledged to provide the only half-breed ever known to our kind with a place of refuge."

So that's what I am to him then? I'm the rare half-breed in need of protection. He had been interested in me before he met me. He even went as far as petitioning Indy to court me, but then after spending an evening with me... I warranted only his protection. Nothing more.

Wow, my "uneventful day" had really taken a nosedive. Didn't people eat ice cream to ward off crappy days? I wish I could do that. Overwhelmed, I brought my knees up to my chin, balancing my heels on the edge of the seat.

Worry flashed through me like the heat of a thousand summers when I thought of the oil refinery located below our houses, plus the neighboring chemical factory just down the road—and then, there was something else. Something independent from the rest of the factories. Situated on the opposite hillside. It had mammoth-sized cooling towers and other missile-type structures, their silver sides glinting in the distance like alien star crafts when the morning sun struck them...

"Good lord," I whispered, lifting my head. "That's a hydrogen plant just above the oil refinery, isn't it?" I'd been around various industrial facilities all of my life. I could identify what was what, though sometimes the more ambiguous ones took some thinking upon. Some I'd never lived by, but I was aware. Holy cheddar, a hydrogen plant. My frightened gaze went to Micah, pleading. "Don't ever, ever let anyone into this valley who has already done all of that!" I gestured at the laptop. "Not even to ambush them. We're not talking some localized mushroom cloud here in the middle of the desert. We're talking a fifty-mile crater if a domino effect starts in the oil refinery and it reaches the top of that hill!"

"That's not going to happen," he said with a stubborn huff.

"Micah!" My eyes went wide, and I slid my feet off the edge

of the stool as I darn near imagined choking the sense into him. "Fifty. Mile. Crater." My god, was my aura really so intense I needed the background ambience of a hydrogen plant to hide it?

I lowered my head back down to my knees—this time nearly between them, because I was starting to see spots. My toes curled on the bottom rung of the stool, and all I could do was concentrate on breathing. How had my day of normalcy turned into the possibility of a crater visible from space?

This isn't good, I agonized with my eyes squeezed shut, leaning even farther forward. I thought I heard Micah say something about getting me water. His voice sounded far away, and receding, like he wasn't in the house let alone the room. I was going to get everyone I cared about killed!

A weight materialized on the edge of my consciousness, a type of heaviness that could be heard as a loud silence bubbling up to fill my ears. As my head became progressively heavy with it, I realized the entire room was beginning to tilt. It wanted to tip forward—and I let it. I let go of every falsehood holding me in place, whispering sweetly that I could have a normal life. That I could have friends and go to college and take an important place in my mother's company, continue her designer legacy. That maybe, someday, I would be able to taste love again. I let it all go.

"Damn it, catch her!" somebody shouted from a mile away.

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