The world seemed to quiet as the fog closed in. It muffled the sound of the small, choppy waves and the distant bellowing of horns on massive container ships. Even with all their advanced m-tech, a ship never outgrew its need for horn.
Stopping at the edge of the dock, where old rope coiled around soggy pillars and the smell of brine and oceanic decay clung onto the wet air, Elise unzipped her windbreaker and shrugged it off. She tied it around her waist with a quick knot. Her exertion made her sweat, and that thin sheen of moisture immediately cooled to an uncomfortable layer of tacky coldness on her limbs and throat.
She was dressed unseasonably in an athletic tank top and form fitting black pants, but the cold didn’t bother her. She was, after all, a weather witch.
As far as she knew, no one who had ever publicly attempted contact with the elemental had her set of skills. With no other way of tracking him down besides being everywhere in the city at once, Elise planned to try something enormously, deeply stupid.
I’m just going to keep hoping this won’t offend him or end up with me smeared on the dock and left for the seagulls, she thought, shaking out her arms and legs with a quick little jiggle.
Truly, what harm could it do? Her chances that he was actually close enough to notice her minor meddling were greater on Alcatraz, but not exactly stellar. In all likelihood, she would do little more than waste her evening in the cold and wet, never having seen a glimpse of the being who haunted her dreams.
It was unlikely, but not impossible, that the elemental might take offense to her overture. The fog was his home. It was, for all intents and purposes, his territory. By interfering with it, would she be trespassing? Possibly. Probably. But there was nothing gained in nothing risked, was there?
It didn’t matter that trespassing on a predator’s territory was considered a capital punishment in most of the UTA. Nor did it matter that it was not a crime that would go before jury or judge. If it came down to it, the elemental would be well within his rights to kill her without so much as a warning.
She might just end up like the scum feyrunner: left for dead on the dock because they crossed the wrong person.
“Buck up, buttercup,” she muttered, raising her hands to be level with her shoulders. “You die here, at least you died chasing a story, right?”
Magic rippled out from the place all witches kept sacred, a core of solid energy that pulsed bright and hot with Glory’s gifts. It lapped at her insides in a gentle hello before it surged outward, pouring through pathways that branched ever smaller and closer to the surface of her skin.
Elise breathed out, once, in a long, cleansing exhale, before she let the magic erupt from her skin in a flash.
Ordinarily, she never would have stood a chance of influencing the fog, but this close to the source, her keen inner senses snapped like a steel trap around the currents, the low hum of wild magic. Every fine hair on her body stood on end as she made contact with the behemoth swirling closer.
Magic had so many variations. It came in every color, every texture, every mood and flavor and scent and temperature and speed. It was at once all the same and so different between one pair of hands to the next that it seemed almost unrecognizable.
Elise’s stomach swooped low. Like a gull diving to skim the waves just beyond her feet, it dropped into an exhilarating dive before rising, with a swift turn, to fly upward once more.
The elemental’s magic — the fog’s magic — was like clean, cold rain on her tongue. It slid against her senses with an exploratory caress. It did not buck her off like a stiff wind might, or tease her with what she could not influence like the golden rays of the sun. When she reached a hand out to it, Elise was shocked to feel it reach back.
“Come this way,” she gently coaxed, using her affinity for manipulating water droplets in the air to slowly reel the smallest edge of the fog closer. “Come on. Just turn a little.”
She didn’t try to reel in the whole fog bank. Only a gloriana might be able to accomplish something like that. But even if she could have done it, Elise didn’t need to. All she needed was his attention.
Which… I think I have.
It didn’t take much to coax the fog, it seemed. Within a minute of contact, Elise was amazed to see the rolling, heaving clouds of the bank turn from their natural course toward the island. Normally, on a night like this the fog would have merely skimmed the jagged edges of Alcatraz.
Not tonight.
Elise dropped her arms and watched, wide-eyed, as the fog drifted over the waves to enclose the island in a white veil.
Cold licked up her arms and the exposed skin of her chest and throat. Tendrils of fog snaked around her shoes and through the wisps of hair that escaped her braid. If she thought it was quiet before, it was nothing compared to the muffled silence that pressed close to her now that she could no longer see an inch in front of her face.
Her breaths were too loud, so Elise sucked in a lungful of damp air and held it. Her muscles tensed. Her eyes flickered around her, as if she might be able to make out a shape in the impenetrable fog cocooning her.
Was he here? His fog was, but that didn’t mean he would show his face. The fog had a magic of its own. She’d felt it and its will clearly, separate from a being of higher intelligence. Perhaps he wouldn’t even notice—
A slight tug on the end of her braid made her jump.
Elise whirled around, her heart lodged in her throat somewhere. The tug felt distinctly human. Except there was no one there. Even the old boat house had disappeared under the blanket of fog. There was no chance she could make out a figure who stood even six inches away from her.
Trepidation tickled the back of her mind, souring the thrill of the hunt, the discovery. She really couldn’t see anything. Even when she stretched out her senses, Elise couldn’t pick up anything beyond the background roar of magic that filled the air around her.
“Hello?” she called, inanely. Was he there with her? Had her audaciously simple plan actually worked? Elise swept her gaze left and right as she tried to come up with something more to say than hello. “My name is Elise. I’m—”
Another tug, just on the very tip of her braid, had her whirling around. That definitely wasn’t the fog.