Author’s Note: Now that that part’s settled, they can do a bit of work as a team. Sort of.

“Here,” Enya said, turning the screen so that everyone could see it. Sherwin leaned over her shoulder, trying to get a good look. She shifted her head, bumping Cress, who rose and started pacing the back of the room. She gave him a look before she went on. “This is a list of all the properties owned by Aether Industries. They’re marked on this map here, but what bothers me is them having so many clustered right in the middle of the city. I just don’t see them as places where they’d hide someone like us. There’d be too much of a risk of them using their element to try and escape or just draw attention to the place.”

Moira nodded. “Unless the surrounding neighborhoods were full of vacant buildings or industrial buildings that don’t see a lot of use.”

Terra frowned. “There aren’t any weird rumors involving any of those properties, are there?”

“No.”

“Dig deeper. What about those… What are they called…?” Cress rubbed at his forehead. “Holding companies. Yeah, one of them. Why couldn’t they have a place under one of those names?”

Enya sighed. She rubbed at the back of her neck. “Maybe. I need a break. Too much time staring at those screens, and my head starts to ache.”

“I can fix that for you,” Sherwin told her, moving her hands out of the way to work his magic on her sore muscles. He’d gotten pretty good at this over the years, and even Moira would let him do it for her on occasion. Of course, he preferred women that weren’t related to him, but he still shared a deep bond with his sister. He helped her out when he could.

“I’m going to go take a bath,” Cress said. “If you find something, let me know.”

Sherwin would have teased the other man about the whole bath thing, but that had stopped being funny years ago. Cress was water. He was drained. He needed a bath. The fact that he was admitting it was more worrisome than anything else.

“Damn. I wanted one of those.”

“Would you rather go first, Occie? I’ll let you.”

She shook her head. “No, go ahead. I’ll take my turn after you do. You may as well go to bed when you’re done. We’ll be leaving early tomorrow, right, Moira?”

“Yes.”

Cress nodded, ducking out of the room. Sherwin shook his head, leaning down to Enya’s ear. “So, did that help?”

“Um,” she said, frowning. She moved away from the computer. “I think I might actually have a migraine. I’ll just go ahead and lie down, pick up on the search in the morning. Excuse me.”

“Enya.”

She stopped, turning back to Moira. “Problem?”

“No, just… a thought. We haven’t discussed rooming arrangements yet, so I thought I’d suggest that you share with Oceana and Cress. Normally, they get a room to themselves so that he gets as much of a chance to renew when he’s sleeping, but with your nightmares… a little less rest for him might be an acceptable trade-off for you not waking the whole neighborhood.”

She grimaced. “Yeah. It probably is. As long as Occie and Cress are okay with that.”

“I’m good. Fair warning, though, he snores.”

Enya laughed. “It’s not that bad. I’ve fallen asleep on him a few times, and unless he got twice as loud as he used to be, I’ll survive.”

“Good,” Moira said. She turned the laptop toward herself, putting her fingers on the keys. “It’s been a while, but I will see what I can do with this.”

Terra rose. “I’m going to turn in if you don’t mind.”

“No, go ahead. Get some rest.”

Sherwin watched them all go, shaking his head. He turned to his sister. “Don’t start turning into Cress now. You get to sleep, too. You’re not allowed to start pushing yourself too far and not sleeping and all of that crap.”

She looked up from the computer. “I won’t.”

“Sure.”

“I don’t have half the problems that Cress does, and I don’t… Oh, never mind.”

“What?”

Moira let out a breath. “You know I love you, right?”

“Of course.”

“Then please understand when I tell you that you’re an idiot,” she said with as gentle of a smile as Moira ever gave, putting a hand over his. “To make a terrible pun, I have to tell you that you need to stop chasing after the wind.”

“We need to get you a guy.”

She shoved him back, knocking him into the wall. “I take it back. I don’t love you.”

Author’s Note: I admit, Occie’s accusation made me very uncomfortable.

Cress jerked away from her, staring at her in disbelief. He didn’t know how his sister, of all people, could think he was capable of that. He was a monster in many ways, and he’d ruined all of their lives, but he didn’t do that.

“No. Cress never did that. We might not have been there when your parents died, none of us saw it happen, but that doesn’t mean that it was him,” Enya said, putting her hand on his arm. He looked down at it, unable to lift his eyes from her fingers, the smooth lines of her hand. “It was probably that bastard we went up against earlier, but we don’t have any way of knowing that.”

“Or it was some of our parents. The only ones we put in the ground before then were Enya’s, so why the hell not one of ours?” Moira shook her head. “None of us know how the Landons died, and there was no retrieving the bodies of my parents from the bottom of that mountain. Not by anything we knew how to do or were capable of at the time. Sherwin and I tried, but we couldn’t even see the car. Who’s to say any of our parents were really ‘dead’ when we thought they were?”

“Oh, this just gets more and more twisted.”

Cress moved over to the window. He couldn’t think right now. He had to admit, when his parents had told him that Enya should die, he’d wanted to kill them. He’d wanted to make their deaths long, slow, and painful, but he’d never been that good at defying them. He kept the peace, didn’t rock the boat, that was what he did. If there was something that would cause a division, he kept it to himself. He didn’t go looking for fights. He just wanted to find a way to give them all a chance, and he’d thought that he could do it by sending Enya away and working with the others to stop the rogues. They’d had almost a full year without any interference from them, and he’d discussing parting ways with them when the “agents” showed up and forced them back on the run.

He had wanted something simple, but they couldn’t have simple, could they?

“Cress, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that or doubted you, but I thought, if they’d threatened someone you loved—and you love all of us—that you might have thought you had no choice. You’d do anything for us, right or wrong, and you have, but not that.”

He didn’t look away from the window. “Leave me alone, Occie. Please.”

“For now. I just… I can’t leave it like this forever.”

He turned back and touched her face. “Our bond is way too strong for it ever to get broken. Bruised and stretched near that point, but we’ve always come back from it in the past, no matter what one of us said or did.”

“I never accused you of murder before.”

“True, but you had a lot to say about me playing favorites, and that made me plenty angry. I just need some time.”

She nodded, stepping back and returning to the others. He put a hand on the glass and watched the rain start to fall. His mood made controlling that impossible, and he didn’t feel like stopping it even if he should.

“Guilt will destroy you. Remember telling me that?”

He shook his head. “Enya, I just made my sister leave. Why would I want you here?”

“Oh, I know you don’t want me here. I just know you need someone to push you at the moment, and I was always the best at that. Occie was right about one thing—your parents did a real number on you. When they died, I bet you were relieved and hated yourself for it.”

He nodded. “Yeah. It was like getting a gift in some sense, and yet at the same time, it scared the hell out of me because I knew what was coming. They’d want me to lead, and I knew how terrible I’d be at it, and I knew that my ‘best’ would never be good enough. I wanted to run and abandon everyone. Maybe I should have.”

“Don’t say that. You know you’ve held them all together for years now.”

“But did we ever need to be together? All I knew about rogues was from my parents. Who’s to say they’d ever have been a threat if we’d all decided to go our separate ways and lead normal lives? Well, as normal as we freaks can get. You didn’t have any problems until I made the agency cross your path.”

“We’d have settled close enough to each other where it might still have happened. This is family, Cress. All of us. We’ve all been family, even if I wasn’t a part of it for a while. All I wanted you to tell me about when you called was how everyone was, and I could see your smile when you’d tell me about their antics. You know you never shared any of the bad times? You always made me smile, let me share in those good times… You’d talk right until I fell asleep. I looked forward to those calls, even if they sometimes meant a nightmare after you were off the line.”

He touched her cheek. “Sending you away was hard. I didn’t want to do it, but I wanted you to have a chance.”

“You would have let me stay if I’d wanted to, if I refused to go.”

“Yes. I… I wouldn’t have forced you to go. I might have threatened to order you to, but you’d have defied me and stayed, and I wouldn’t have been able to stop you.”

“I miss looking at the clouds with you.”

He winced. That was one of his stupider tricks. “I haven’t done that in years.”

“You haven’t done anything for yourself in years. Admit it.”

He shook his head. She didn’t understand. He was a selfish bastard, and he’d stolen plenty of moments for himself. He’d made excuses to take them, and he would have gone on doing it if the “agency” hadn’t intervened. “Trust me, I did. I just have simpler pleasures than most.”

She shook her head. “When we get Stone back, I want you to do something you really want. To travel somewhere you really want to go or rekindle things with Hannah or something…”

He grimaced. “No to the last one. Maybe the first one, but only if we do enough damage to their organization that we’ll all be safe.”

“Deal.”

Author’s Note: The more I wanted Cress’ reasons to make sense, the more convoluted they and his past became, and I finally hit a point where I decided I didn’t want to know.

“Cress, please tell me you’re wrong about that.”

He shook his head. “I wish I could, Enya, but as I was trying to fight that storm, I realized that when I made it rain that night, when Oceana was flooding the house from the water main… Someone was fighting against us. I haven’t felt that kind of pushback in a long time—we don’t get a lot of rogue water elementals—but today I felt the same thing.”

“Oh, hell, I did, too, but I never wanted to believe, even as two-faced as they were with everyone outside of the house, that they were that evil,” Occie said, biting her lip. “I always wanted to think they were just… Just harsher with us because we were their own, that they had impossible expectations—especially when it came to Cress—but they were worse than I ever imagined.”

Cress held out a hand, and Occie took it, sitting down next to him. She leaned her head against his shoulder, and he wrapped an arm around her. He closed his eyes, and no one spoke for a while, letting them have their moment.

Enya shivered. She didn’t want to think about this. She wanted to ignore his words, and she wanted to pretend she didn’t know what he was talking about or that he was just crazy or something. “I always wondered why no one went for my parents or my brother, why I was the only one pulled out of there.”

“Cress told me to continue with the water, and he got you out, but he was too exhausted to go back, and you were so hysterical that if he hadn’t calmed you the whole thing could have started again.”

He lowered his head. “If I’d known they were hindering us and not helping, I would have gone back. I would have risked it. I could have gotten Enya calm after it was over, but I thought… I thought they were helping. I don’t know why I trusted them.”

“Everything they’d done before was always about elementals. They never once gave us any reason to think they had some weird water supremacy going on or anything, not even when they were talking arranged marriages.”

“Dad told me that we seek our counterpoints as marriage mates. We all had that in our heads, that like sought out like. We never really thought they were doing it to for any other reason. At least, I didn’t. I just assumed that was why your parents were trying to push that on you.”

“I guess. And the marriage thing was after Enya’s family was gone, anyway. I think part of that was them wanting me to stop having anything to do with Hannah, though if they’d been patient, it wasn’t that much longer before it was over, so they kind of jumped the gun there.”

“Yeah, but not by much. They had to know that their control over all of us was slipping. If they were going to get you to do what they wanted, they had a very narrow window of time left to do it.”

“They couldn’t have forced either of us to get married. We would never have agreed, and if they’d pushed me far enough, I could have made sure they weren’t an issue.”

Sherwin shuddered. “Are you saying you actually contemplated killing them?”

Cress looked at him. “What, just because I’m calm on the outside I never get angry? Never feel threatened enough to kill? I do. I have. I always envied how Enya could turn away from what she could do and not get drawn in by any of the ‘cool’ parts of what we could do. That was never cowardice, turning away from our kind of power. That was the kind of strength I never had. I keep wondering if half the reason I became what I was when that mirror broke was because of what that man said to me about water. I know a lot of the reason why I made sure I had control and tried more and more things with it was because I never wanted to be where he had me. That was cowardice. I was so afraid that I turned myself into a monster. On purpose.”

“Cress—”

“I convinced myself you were safer far from us, and I didn’t… I thought I was right. You convinced yourself I was, in the end, to get through it, but you weren’t the monster, Enya. I was. Occie told me I needed to be the one to go, and when she did… I finally understood what I’d asked of you, what I’d done to you, and it wasn’t right. Nothing I’ve ever done was right—”

“No.” Enya shook her head. “I didn’t have to break a mirror in more than twelve years. I missed everyone, but I didn’t have to live in fear of hurting any of you.”

“Is that really worth what you went through? You didn’t want to go, and some of them hated you for something that wasn’t your idea in the first place, and it wasn’t enough of a protection. The agency or whatever they are went after you because of me.”

She crossed over to him. “You gave me a life. I doubt that was in your parents’ plans, and I know you never got what you wanted. What happened to all your plans with Hannah? I know she wasn’t right for you, but you wanted something a whole lot simpler than this, didn’t you?”

He let out a breath. “There were things my parents said about the rogues that had me worried. I didn’t figure there were too many to deal with, and before the agency got involved, I… It looked like it was just about finished. It had already taken a lot longer than I thought it would, but the only people who could stop the rogues were people like us. Of course, if I had known the truth and not what my parents fed me, if I’d known that we were all being manipulated…”

“How much of their plans did you throw out when you took over?”

“Almost all of them. I held onto the money. That was one of few things I took from them. I had to build so much on my own, and I knew I was doing the wrong thing, but I didn’t know what else to do. They had a list of other elementals, ‘friendlies,’ that I was supposed to help everyone pair up with, and I was supposed to keep us all on Eden Drive and… I was supposed to let the fire burn itself out…”

Enya stared at him. “They thought you’d actually let me die the next time I broke a mirror? Or is that referring to not breeding me with another fire elemental?”

“I don’t know.”

She put a hand on his face. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Why burden you with that? They were gone; it would only have hurt you.”

“Cress, we all needed to know.”

“Stop it. Just leave him alone,” Occie said, pulling her brother into her arms. She ran her fingers through his hair. “They screwed with your head good, didn’t they? Oh, Cress, I begged you not to, but you did it anyway, didn’t you? There were no rogues that day, were there?”

Author’s Note: Action sequences have never been my strong suit. I did try, and I doubt that I did much justice to the kinds of things they can do with the elements, but here goes…

“I think I can make out four cars, and they’re blocking the road. At least Cress always insists on us driving an SUV even if the gas mileage sucks,” Terra said, frowning as she let the curtain fall back into place. “I can barricade them, but with this much water around us and the kind of vehicles they have, it won’t last for long.”

“Do it,” Moira ordered. She sounded a lot more confident than she felt. Damn Cress for always making this look easy. She had thought she was ready for it, but now she wasn’t sure. “We’ll deal with them breaking out of it after it happens. There’s still a few things we can do on the road if we have to. Enya, you’re still driving. Sherwin, we’re going to need an air shield.”

“Done,” he said, looking at the storm. “We have any idea if there’s more than a water elemental out there? That is one hell of a storm.”

“Thank you.”

Moira turned around, swallowing as she did. Rogues had stopped scaring them years ago, but this one was worse than most. That one had terrorized Cress when he was younger, had sent an army after them, kept sending them. That man had Stone, didn’t he?

Still, the most unsettling part of the whole thing was that he didn’t seem afraid to come up against all of them, that he thought he could take them all on. What made him so damn confident?

“Go,” Cress whispered, his voice strained and almost impossible to hear. “I can’t hold off what he’s doing forever. Get in the car.”

The rogue’s lips curved into a smile. “Yes, you have learned, haven’t you? Still, even you know you have limits.”

“Oh, hell, no wonder it’s so damn cold in here. He’s trying to freeze us.”

“Get in the car,” Moira told her brother, shoving him toward the door. He had to keep up the air shield in case any of the others had been outside of the barricade Terra had created, and the longer they stayed, the more of a chance they gave Cress to falter. He didn’t have the strength to hold off a water elemental that powerful for long.

“One thing you overlooked,” Occie said, her voice cold. She put her hand on her brother and closed her eyes, funneling her energy into his. The ice spread over the man across the room, turning him into an ice sculpture. “My brother’s not the only one who can handle water.”

Cress managed a smile before he stumbled, held up by his sister and Enya. “That won’t hold him for long.”

“It bought us time. Come on,” Moira said, taking hold of him so that Enya could get to the car first. She needed to be behind the wheel. “Drive down to the road. Terra will do her best to even it out for us.”

“Is it me or is that storm getting worse?”

“Just because he’s frozen doesn’t mean he can’t think,” Cress said. “Occie, can you do anything about that?”

“I might be able to shift it out of our path so that Enya can see better. You just rest. You should have grabbed me sooner—none of us would have allowed you to sacrifice yourself even if you blame yourself for us leaving Stone behind and who knows what else.”

Moira pulled herself into the passenger seat, having a bad feeling about what she’d have to do to keep the other cars from reaching them. The barricade wasn’t going to hold for much longer. She’d seen part of it crumbling even as Enya drove away.

Too much water. The whole place would go to mud soon enough. Even if Stone was here, they couldn’t have held off the mudslide for long. She felt Sherwin’s hand on her shoulder even as the car bumped them all, lurching back onto the pavement. She looked back at him and then the road.

The first SUV was closing in on them. Great. “That was fast.”

“Sorry. I was fighting against what that rogue was doing, and the barricade wasn’t good enough—”

“I’m not blaming you,” Moira said, closing her eyes and letting her abilities mingle with Sherwin’s, gusting the air up under one of the other vehicles and knocking it on its side, taking it out of commission. She leaned back against her chair. “Okay, not sure I have another of those in me.”

“Me, either,” Sherwin grunted. “I hate doing that. It wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t have the memories.”

Unless they had that memory on purpose. Moira shifted in her seat, looking at Cress. How much more was there to his theory? What else hadn’t he told them about what his parents had done or given him? Was there more to him sending Enya away than Moira had thought? She’d always had her suspicions, but she’d just assumed that Cress was playing favorites. Maybe it was more than that.

Terra slumped back against her seat. “I didn’t want to break the road, but those potholes might not be enough to stop them.”

Enya looked in the rear view mirror. “You call those potholes?”

Terra grinned. “I do.”

Moira laughed. Sometimes, this could almost pass for fun. “Keep driving ’til we’re out of the storm, Enya. We’ll know we’re safe to make a plan after that.”