Free Wet (Elemental 1) by Rose Wulf Page A

an invisible spot
on the coffee table and her hands fisted in her lap, “is where could the
lightning have even come from? It’s a clear day.”
    “I was wondering
that, too,” Logan admitted even as his brothers nodded silent agreement.
    No one had anything
more to add, and once again the room fell silent. Lillian’s muffled voice
became all that could be heard as she continued whatever conversation she was
having.
    Brook shifted her
weight on the loveseat, drawing Blake’s attention, and their eyes met. He could
read her confusion and concern as easily as he could discern his own. But he
didn’t have the opportunity to try to get her alone before his mother returned.
    Lillian stepped
back into the room, her gaze downcast and her lips drawn into a tight, thin
line of unhappiness. Her eyes were slightly puffy, and there was a faint tinge
of red around the white.
    “Lillian?”
Christopher asked, curiosity and concern mingling in his voice as she reclaimed
her seat beside him.
    She took a deep,
heavy breath, keeping her eyes closed for a long minute. When she finally
looked up again a new layer of tears was visible around her faded blue eyes,
though they did not fall. “I just got off the phone with Nicholas,” Lillian
declared, only the faintest wobble detectable in her voice.
    Blake’s eyes
widened. Nicholas was one of her brothers, and therefore one of their uncles.
He, like Dean, controlled the fire element. Unfortunately, due to a horrible
car accident which had left him crippled from the waist down, he had very
little influence over his natural element. None of the Hawke children had seen
their uncle since the boys had been ten, though he did send cards reliably on
birthdays and holidays.
    “Why did you call
Uncle Nicholas?” Angela asked when her mother paused.
    “I always thought
it was strange,” Lillian began softly, in a tone that indicated she was
divulging a shameful secret, “that one of my brothers was struck and killed by
lightning, and two more of my brothers were caught in a freak snow storm where
one of them died, and the other very nearly died, too.”
    Blake looked away
from his mother’s saddened gaze, and beside him, his brothers and sister
shifted. Angela’s gaze was back on the coffee table. No one knew what to say,
or where she was going with this, so they held their tongues.
    “After the
accident, Nicholas had nothing better to do, so he threw himself into our
family’s history. I always knew he had done the research, but I always assumed
nothing had come of it. After today, I thought it was worth asking. I don’t
want to lose any of my children … the way I lost two of my brothers.”
    Christopher’s hand
wrapped around one of Lillian’s, which had been curled in her lap, as a tear
slipped down her cheek.
    Lillian took only a
moment to push aside the lingering pain of her lost brothers, dragged in a
breath, and said, “Even so, I really wasn’t expecting what he said.” She paused
and wrapped her free hand over the top of the hand her husband still had around
hers. “A long time ago, when there were still many other families with powers like
ours, there were other kinds of elemental families, too.”
    “Other kinds…?”
Angela repeated, clearly confused. Around her, her brothers shifted again,
their expressions turning from concern and frustration to confusion of their
own.
    Blake noticed a
similar expression on Brooke’s face when he glanced in her direction.
    Lillian nodded and
continued. “There were families with the ability to control the weather, in a
more direct way than any of us. The stories that Nicholas was able to dig up
all said that these other families were supposed to be a sort of balance to our
own ancestors. So the power that these other families were best known for was
the ability to control, or summon, lightning.”
    She let that hang
for a long moment, knowing it wouldn’t take them long to figure out what she
meant. Electricity was the main