The Elementals

Stella stared at the worn mass of stone that sat behind the rusted fence in front of her. “This...this is where the light Elemental is said to be?”

“Yep, Roosevelt Asylum, Rockford, Illinois.” Rian replied. Stella assumed that the reason her voice held no fear was that she had not looked up from her book yet.

Stella observed the multiple “No Trespassing” signs hung crookedly on the fence. The links were bent and twisted in some areas, showing that it had been tampered with before. Clearly, people did not know how to read. That or they had a death wish. She turned to the sound Elemental, Joseph.

It had been surprisingly easy to convince him to come. Stella was not complaining. He had been happy to leave the run down building he had been hiding out in, and Stella and Rian had been happy to take him from it.

“Maybe we can come back tomorrow?” Joseph suggested. “When it’s light out?”

Stella nodded in agreement, even though she could see fine.

“C’mon guys, we can’t hide the helicopter that long.” Rian said, laughing. “What’s the prob-?” she stopped talking as she looked up.

Just the sight of the asylum was petrifying. Cold stone walls loomed over Stella, even though it was a couple hundred feet away. The entire building was massive, and in bad need of repair. It held an empty feeling, just completely desolate. Ivy crept unevenly up the sides, making it appear as if the ground was trying to swallow the building into oblivion.

“Are you sure this is where the light Elemental is?” Joseph questioned dubiously, and with a hint of nervousness.

“Yes...” Rian confirmed reluctantly.

No one moved until Stella swallowed and swiftly climbed over the fence. After an aversive pause, Rian and Joseph followed. The thumps of their shoes against the ground were muted by the overgrowing shrubs, but somehow Stella felt that the noise had alerted something of their presence. She felt like she was trespassing, and not because of the signs.

The trio crept forward hesitantly, taking each uncertain step together so no one was first. Of course they had to come at night, when this place was a hundred times more forbidding.

“Wait,” Joseph whispered, causing Stella to jump a bit. She observed him as he listened carefully. His left eye squinted a little in concentration and then he frowned. “Voices. There’re people inside.”

“You can hear from that far away?” Rian asked with awe.

Joseph nodded. “I can pick up the sound waves of speech pretty clearly.” he explained modestly.

Stella was impressed. She herself could not hear much over the fast pounding of her heart. She never was one for horror, and this place looked like something out of a nightmare.

“Who is it?” Rian asked.

“Oh, just some teenagers.” Joseph said, scoffing. He was only a teenager himself, at sixteen, one year younger than Stella. “Doing some stupid “initiation” for a club. Apparently this place is haunted.”

Stella did not like the sound of that, but she walked forward in an attempt to seem brave. “It is probably the Elemental being mistook for a ghost or something. Come, let us go and find them.”

She lead the way to the front of the asylum, and searched for a door in the dark until Rian appeared with a flashlight.

There was not a door really, just the place where a door should be, and then the broken wood of an attempt at keeping people out.

Inside the asylum was not much better. The place held a dank, musty smell of rotting things and stale air. Dust swirled in the beam of the flashlight as Rian waved it around, revealing a thick layer of grime covering the entrance hallway, and something peeling off the walls. Stella did not wish to know what it was.

They advanced further into the building apprehensively. Joseph winced at every step; the echoing sound down the hallway must have been twice as loud in his head.

“We should split up.” Rian said, attempting to sound assured but really just making Joseph grimace at her loud statement. “Sorry,” she said, voice softer now. Joseph smiled tightly and raised a hand to say he was okay, though it still looked as if his ears were ringing.

“Why?” Stella asked nervously, stalling. She did not need Rian to explain the logic of the idea, she understood it just fine. She just did not want to be exploring the asylum alone. She could not even begin to imagine what this place was like for Rian and Joseph; they did not have night vision like her.

She had seen TV shows that used night vision goggles, but her ability was different. Instead of everything being green, her sight was fairly normal until she focused on a shadow. Then it was more like she could feel what was there, sense it somehow. She could picture everything as if it was in broad daylight, yet the scene remained dark.

“Stella, go that way.” Stella snapped out of her reverie in time to hear Rian’s instructions. “Joseph, go down the next hallway we pass. Meet back here in an hour and scream if you’re dying.”

“Helpful.” Joseph muttered, but complied.

Stella faced her assigned direction. The hallway was, of course, dark, but that didn’t matter. She could sense the broken glass and chipped off stone in her way as she tiptoed down the path. Checking the rooms proved pointless. Stella found the entire thing pointless. If the Elemental’s power was invisibility, then there was not a way to see them, was there?

None of the rooms along her hallway consisted of anything but dust, dirt, and rusted hospital beds. She sighed, blowing a lock of white hair out of her face. Stella had never intended to look like she fell face first into a bucket of bleach; she was just born with the white streaks tearing down her hair like lightning.

She was just pushing her hair out of her face for the hundredth time when an ear splitting shriek shattered any last nerves she had.

She whirled around, eyes wide as the scream ended, the last pitches echoing off the stone walls and surrounding Stella. She clenched her hands to stop their sudden shaking, but it didn’t help the clamminess.

“- to get out of here!”

Stella heard a voice, cracking in the middle with fear, and instantly plastered herself against the wall, feeling the layer of dirt and cringing before the shadows enveloped her. If she remained motionless and silent, she was essentially invisible unless someone was looking really hard.

Pounding footsteps came down the stairway and a girl sprinted past Stella and skidded around the corner to the outside. Cackling behind her made Stella tear her gaze from the girl’s retreating back and to the front of the passage, where three other girls and two guys were doubled over in hysterics. Stella frowned. This was a prank.

“Did you see her face?" the redhead with a beak nose squealed.

Their laughter died out eventually, as they realized the girl was not coming back, but one voice kept going, morphing into a throaty chuckle that sounded downright diabolical. The teenagers stiffened, looking at one another with irritated confusion, and then mounting terror as they realized no one was laughing. That is, no one visible.

“Very funny, Kent,” one of the two blondes said, but the one called Kent was already out the door. “Kent? Hey! Wait -”

“Boo.”

The girl screamed at the disembodied voice, and then she too was racing with the rest of the teenagers to escape the asylum while the malicious laugh chased them out the door.

Stella held her breath as the chuckling came closer, but then it did not sound nearly as menacing because the voice was now giggling.

“Oh,” it gasped. “Oh my god, that never gets old!”

Stella gawked as not two feet in front of her the lanky form of a boy appeared, not much older than herself, with black hair so dark that in the moonlight it glinted blue. He seemed to be coming into sight like a fog rolling in, slowly and at first faded. Stella squinted and made the mistake of stepping forward for a closer look.

Instantly the boy’s head snapped in her direction as her cover was blown by her movement. His large, light brown eyes widened even farther and he backed up a step. “What the -” he did not finish, and instead his figure disappeared in a second, like a switch, and was gone.

“Stop!” Stella shouted into empty air. “I am just here to ask you something!”

“Yeah, sure. Whatever it is, no.”

Stella turned as the boy’s voice retreated down the hall. She stepped in that direction, carefully holding out her hands in case she ran into him. “We can help you though.” she reasoned.

"We?”

Stella pretended to look confused, all the while tracing where the voice was coming from. “I have two other friends; they do not wish to hurt you.”

“Let me tell you something.” he replied scornfully. “Everyone I’ve ever met has said that. Also, there’s this thing called lying, where someone says something that isn’t true to manipulate someone else. Sound familiar?”

Stella wrinkled her nose at the suggestion, listening intently as the boy’s voice came closer. Her eyes flicked to the floor, where there was slight shifting in the dust right in front of her. “I am not a liar.” she stated firmly.

“Okay, look, Cruella, I don’t -” he did not finish because Stella lashed out and slapped him. Her guess of his location was slightly off so the heel of her hand slammed into his cheekbone with excruciating force, causing the boy to become visible with surprise. ”Ow! What the -”

Stella cut off his explicit exclamation by hissing, “Call me Cruella ever again and I will have no qualms with kicking you harder!”

His eyes, more of a coppery color up close, regarded her with a new fearful respect. “Okay, Jesus, calm down.”

Stella took a breath, eyes in slits. She had forgotten the anger that surfaced when her appearance was referenced to the insane woman who was obsessed with Dalmatian fur. Of course, when the other kids teased her in town, she never got to feel the satisfaction of connecting her hand to their skin. Rico had always protected her without her needing to ask.

The boy started to disappear once more but Stella reached up quickly - feeling satisfied when he flinched - and grabbed his collar. “Do not even try." she said with iron force. It was unusual for her to lose her cool like this, but now that she had, it felt good.

“My friends and I are here to retrieve you and bring you back to a base in the Himalayas, where there are others with powers.” She explained with an air of authority and composure that seemed to bother the kid.

“So here’s the thing Your Highness,” the boy said, mocking her. “You can talk all night and it won’t do squat. I’ve got it made here, so why don’t you leave me alone and mind your own business?”

Stella remembered Tide saying that if they did not want to come, she should not make them. She decided to ignore that.

“That was not a proposal.” she said, never letting her eyes drop from the boy’s. Her fingers curled around the fistful of his shirt tighter with menace. “And my name is Stella.”

“Is this how you usually do introductions?” the boy sneered. “Because speaking like you’re from the eighteenth century doesn’t work.”

“You have two choices. You can tell me your name now, or after you wake up in the base with a splitting headache from being punched in the face.”

He searched her face for any hint of a bluff, but there was none. “Noah.” he said eventually, and then suddenly winced. “Ow!”

Stella stepped back as Noah crumpled to the floor, and then her stomach twisted when she saw a dart in his shoulder. She turned her head as a pain hit her side, and then her heavy lidded eyes stayed open just long enough to see the cold, satisfied smile on Izila’s face before she succumbed to the darkness enveloping her body and fell to the floor as well.