Dark Waters (Elemental Book 1) Read Online Free Page A

thoughts.
A man who couldn’t have been more than twenty came in wearing only jeans and
socks. He had light, shaggy blond hair and deep blue eyes. At five-five, he was
fine-boned and verging on too thin, but he struck me as naturally scrawny
instead of malnourished. The man looked right up at me and smiled brightly.
“Hey, man, you must be one o’ me roomies!”
    I sighed, sat up, and had to duck to avoid hitting my
head on the ceiling tiles. “I guess so.”
    “I’m Darwin.” He sat in the seat under the bed with
dark blue blankets.
    “I’m Devon. Are you Australian?”
    “English, but I grew up all over the world. Never
spent more than six months in one country ‘til I was fifteen.”
    “That must have been difficult growing up. It
probably made it hard to make friends.”
    “Naw, bro. It was me mouth that got me no friends.
Never ever stop talking. I even talk in my sleep.”
    Great. “I don’t know if it’s rude or not to
ask, but are you a wizard or one of the other paranormal beings?”
    “Not a wizard, bro. I’m just a throwback.”
    “You’re going to have to explain that one to me.”
    “He means his parents aren’t the same kind of
paranormal,” another man said, walking in through the still-open door. He shut
it behind him and turned the deadbolt. He was right at six feet tall, about
twenty five, and muscular. He wore a dark green t-shirt with jeans. “And you
shouldn’t speak so loudly about it,” he scolded Darwin.
    I could sense it easily; he was a shifter. By his
black hair and gold eyes, I figured he was probably a black panther. He didn’t
have the same aura as a wolf. His naturally tan skin was ambiguous; he could
have been Mediterranean or South American. Whereas Darwin had more of an
Australian accent, the shifter had a British one.
    Darwin didn’t seem to notice the stranger’s
admonishment. “Aye. Mother’s a forest spirit. Dad’s a wolf shifter. I can
neither do magic nor shift.”
    The shifter began reorganizing his already-organized
books. “If a paranormal and a human have a child, nine times out of ten, the
child will take the stronger paranormal gene and be just fine,” he explained.
“Of those remaining ten percent, nine out of ten will be considered gifted
humans.”
    “And that last tenth of a percent?” I asked.
    “They are children who end up with maybe wolf ears
and a tail or wings or something, but will be unable to shift or do magic.
They’re called throwbacks. However, when two different kinds of paranormals
have a child together, the chance of the child being functional is only about
fifty percent. Those who are messed up are also called throwbacks.”
    Darwin showed no sign at all that he was upset over
basically being called a genetic screw-up. “If you have no magic or shifting
abilities, how did you get in here?”
    “My parents went here and I was smart enough to get
into the sapling. I guess they just pushed me through because my parents were
so successful. Hunt suggested I could be a scientist or something. What are
you?”
    “Wizard. What is the sapling?”
    “It’s a nickname,” the shifter answered. “This school
is strictly for adults, but there is another school for children and an
orphanage for paranormal children or children whose parents were paranormals.
Stemming from the Tree of Life stuff, this is the tree, the school for children
is the sapling, and the orphanage is the seedling. How did you get in without
knowing at least that much?”
    I considered my words carefully. Without breaking my
cover, I was going to have to live with these two guys. They would figure out I
didn’t know anything and I would screw up if I pretended to. “I know very
little about the paranormal world.”
    They both stared at me for a moment. Then, finally,
the shifter shrugged. “You must have been good enough because they let you in
here. I’m Henry Lycosa, jaguar shifter.”
    “I’m Devon Sanders.”
    “There’s something very odd about