Free Dark Waters (Elemental Book 1) by Rain Oxford Page A

shifters, but---”
    “Any shifters? Does he know what you are?”
    “I don’t think so. Deja is too powerful to succumb to
mind tricks. She sleeps most of the day, but she did take notice of Devon at
the meeting. I don’t see what they have to do with each other. We should take
this to Logan.”
    “No. He doesn’t fear vampires like the council, but
he would not think twice when it comes to the safety of the students. He would
shut down the school, the council would investigate, and what do you think they
would say about you? How will they react when they find out you’re still
alive?”
    I heard footsteps and instantly backpedaled around
the corner with Darwin right behind me. Once we were a few feet away, I
stopped, causing Darwin to halt, and turned around. “Now we just act like we
are coming from the dorms,” I whispered. We were rounding the corner again just
as Professor Nightshade and Mrs. Ashcraft reached it. “Good evening, Mrs.
Ashcraft, Professor Nightshade,” I said as brightly as I could.
    Professor Nightshade was clearly surprised to see me,
but Mrs. Ashcraft’s smile was natural. “Good evening, Devon. Isn’t it a little
late to be going for a stroll?” the deputy principal asked. She was the woman
who had been arguing against going to Hunt with information on the vampire.
    “Actually, we were just heading to the library. You
wouldn’t happen to be able to point it out to us, would you?”
    “Not a problem.” She pointed to a large, rounded
doorway in front of us. “That’s the one most suited to Circle One students. I’m
glad to see you are taking your studies so seriously. Have a good night.” She
walked off and Professor Nightshade followed hesitantly.
    “That door wasn’t there a second ago,” Darwin
whispered.
    I opened the heavy wooden door and hesitated. There
was no light.
    “What’s wrong?” Darwin asked, trying to peer around
me.
    “I guess it’s closed for the night.”
    “The library doesn’t close, bro.”
    When I stepped through the threshold, a torch on
either side of the door caught fire. The library was about
twenty-four-by-twenty-four and every inch of the walls was lined with ten feet
tall floor-to-ceiling shelves. There were also three columns and six rows of
bookshelves, so that the walkways had barely enough room for two people to pass
each other.
    I pulled the torch out of the sconce on my right and
went in search of my book. There were no section headings, but I soon figured
out that the books were organized in a relatively normal fashion. Among others,
I found a section on fiction, a section of textbooks, and a section on spells
and potions. As I scanned for titles on vampires in the history section, Darwin
was pulling down every book that caught his eye, only to put it back a few
seconds later.
    “Hey, check this out,” he said after a while. I looked
at the big, leather bound book in his hands. “This is on the history of this
place. Logan Hunt bought it in 1960 and made it into the school.”
    “That’s not possible. Hunt would have to be over
eighty years old.”
    He shot me a look. “Wizard, yo. Anyway, it says here
that Heinrich Baldauf, born 1850 in Germany, died 1876 in the United States,
was obsessed with the supernatural. He married when he was fourteen, but his
wife died within a year of unknown causes. He remarried a month later… and she
died within six months. Publicly, he said both girls were frightened to death
by poltergeists. There were no physical signs of injury, but the second wife
was documented to be severely malnourished.”
    “That sounds suspicious.”
    “It gets worse,” he said, sitting on the floor while
still reading. “He moved to the United States and married again. She became
pregnant almost immediately, but within two months, she committed suicide by
jumping off a building. Heinrich said it was the baby that made her do it; that
the dead were trying to get out by possessing her unborn baby, and the