The Fourth Horseman, excerpt 1

Okay, everybody, here we go!  Below is the first excerpt from The Fourth Horseman, my sequel to my book The Fifth.  This version is close to final, but it isn't written in stone, so please feel free to ask questions, point out issues, comment on the things you're seeing.  I am very interested in hearing all of it!

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Chapter One

You would think having magical powers would make life easier. I’d thought so, even though the Beryls had tried to tell me, in their boy way, that it wasn’t true, magic didn’t solve all problems like it did in the movies. I hadn’t heard them. In my defense, I’d been distracted by my mother’s potential death, but I don’t think I would have heard them on my best day.

Now that I’ve experienced them both, I think magic is a lot like romantic love; it changes less and takes more than we’ve been led to believe.

“Yes, very deep,” Jason said when I unloaded this theory on him during a phone call one afternoon in September. “You should major in philosophy.”

“Better than majoring in smartass,” I told him.

“mmm, agree to disagree. Does this mean Clark Kent isn’t as perfect as we thought?”

I glanced down at the practice field, where my boyfriend Gabriel was running around with ten of his teammates, and cupped my hand around the phone like he could hear me where I sat at the top of the bleachers. “Nope, still perfect. Which may be the problem.”

“It creeps you out, doesn’t it?” Jason asked. “He’s so nice and seriously hot and how could there be literally nothing wrong with him? You’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“I thought it already had!”

“Fair,” Jason said. “What are you going to do about it?”

I considered my answer, but before I could speak, I spotted a tall thin blond boy climbing across the bleachers toward me. “I gotta go,” I told Jason. “Spencer’s here.”

“Tell the baby chick I said hi.” Jason said. “And call me later. There’s big gossip you want to hear.”

“Will do. Ciao.”

“Ciao.”

Spencer clambered over the last few benches and sat down next to me, folding himself up like origami. He’d had a growth spurt over the summer and was now a jumble of knees and elbows almost taller than me. “Jason?” he asked.

“He says hi.”

The corner of Spencer’s mouth quirked up, half a smile. “Hi,” he murmured. They’d met a couple times since the night at the Point, once when Jason came out to visit me and once when I took all the Beryls except Anastase down to the lakefront. Spencer didn’t talk about it, but he had a crush on Jason, the way you crush on the older siblings of your friends. “Did I miss anything?”

“Like I know.”

 On the field, the players ran around in predetermined patterns in time to the coaches’ whistles. It didn’t seem fun at all, although Gabriel assured me it was. My opinion, shared by Spencer and most of the rest of Gabriel’s family, was football was a dumb waste of time. But Gabriel liked it, so I supported him by attending his practices at least once or twice a week like the other football girlfriends. “You don’t have to do this, you know,” I told Spencer.

“I know.” Another thing Spencer didn’t talk about was how his first semester up at the high school was going.  I suspected it wasn’t great for him, mostly because it was the only explanation I could find for why he would hang out and watch football practice with me instead of doing anything else in the entire world.

“How was school?” I asked.

He shot me a look. “Fine, thanks.”

“Do you have homework?”

“Are you my mother?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, were you trying to watch the practice?” I grabbed him around the shoulders, and shook him affectionately. “Am I bugging you?”

“Yeh-eh-eh-eh-es!” He shoved himself away from me, grinning. Spencer was the youngest of four Beryls, and the most powerful, and I thought his brothers sometimes treated him too carefully, like he was breakable, so I tried not to.

One of the other football girlfriends, a senior, turned and glared at us. I stared back, daring her to say something, but she didn’t. None of them ever did. They weren’t big fans of mine, the other girlfriends, maybe because of my irreverent attitude about football, but more likely because before me Gabriel had dated Angela, a pretty brunette cheerleader. I am the opposite of a cheerleader. I am sarcastic and sly, not interested in school sports or pep, and none of them could figure out what Gabriel saw in me. But none of them crossed me, either.

“I’m bored,” I murmured to Spencer. “Aren’t you bored?”

“No,” Spencer said. “. . . maybe a little.”

“Wanna do something about it?” I asked.

“Like what?”

I held out my hand.

He laced his fingers between mine and tipped his head against mine like he was telling me a secret. “I am Spencer,” he whispered in my ear. “I am the air and the east, the fourth of the Beryl Circle. Hear me.”

I smiled. “I am Suzanne, the Fifth,” I murmured back. “I am the center and the crossroads. Hear me.” The wind lifted, blowing the fluffy white clouds into a swollen, darkened heap. Spencer’s hand clenched mine. He was the Air, master of the wind and electricity, and my job was to be the booster that added to his power. “Now,” I said.

Spencer snapped his fingers and lightning flickered in the clouds, so close the grumble of thunder was pretty much immediate.

“Nice,” I said.

Spencer smiled, turning his head away like nothing was happening, but I could feel the tingle of his power through my palm.

On the field, coaches craned their necks at the sky. Rain didn’t matter to football practice, but lightning definitely did. Spencer snapped his fingers three more times in rapid succession and the coaches’ whistles went off like sirens.

I held up a hand for Spencer to slap. When he did, lightning stuck the goalpost at the far end of the field.

“Whoa!”

Spencer laughed. “Whoops!”

The bleachers below us cleared out, girls clattering down the metal stairs, arms flailing. The players on the field were moving, too, jogging toward the school in clumps, their rigid formations broken. One of them trailed behind the crowd, looking up into the bleachers like he knew what we had done.

I waved, and Gabriel waved back.

*

We met up on the track between the practice field and the school. Gabriel had taken off his helmet and his dark hair was a tangled mess around his face, like a model doing a sports shoot. Even sweaty and gross he was infuriatingly good looking.

“Hey, troublemakers.” He gave me a one-armed hug, unable to kiss me because the coaches didn’t approve of PDA.

“The goal post was an accident,” Spencer admitted.

“You know it just means we practice indoors,” Gabriel said. “I don’t get out of it.”

“No.” I hooked my arm through his. “But I do.”

Gabriel rolled his eyes. “Next time just leave, okay?” He paused before opening the gym door. “Seriously, you shouldn’t do that. Especially in public.”

“Yes, dad,” I said.

“Yeah, dad,” Spencer repeated.

Gabriel pointed a finger at him. “Don’t,” he said. “You know better.”

Spencer made a face, but sighed. “Yeah, okay.”

“Okay.” Gabriel held open the door for us. “I’ll call you later,” he told me, and then he was gone through the double doors to the field house, back to the world of whistles and grown men shouting.

“He’s right,” Spencer said.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “But who wants to be right all the time? C’mon. Let’s go find Anastase.”

*

We found Anastase exactly where he should have been: in the biology classroom, hunched over a microscope. He’d had to come back to high school, even though he’d been a senior last year, because he skipped so much class he didn’t have the credits to graduate. He’d done most of the make-up work over the summer, but he still had science credits left so he came up to the high school in the afternoon for biology and then stayed after to do labs. He hoped to be done by Thanksgiving.

We stopped in the doorway, waiting for him to notice us. Ana stared into the microscope, one hand delicately turning the knob. In the afternoon light, he looked like a painting of a student, all angles and fair skin against his black henley.

Will this ever go away, I wondered. I cleared my throat.

Anastase lifted his head. He didn’t smile—most of Ana’s smiles were reserved to convey gloating or sarcasm—but his expression brightened somehow, and he waved us in.

“Mr. Simmons is teaching drivers ed,” he said, an explanation for why he was alone, holding out one arm for Spencer to curve under and hug him.

“How goes it?” I peered at the slide but without magnification it looked like a smear.

“It goes,” Anastase said. “The lightning was you?”

“Just some fun,” I said.

“We hit a goal post!” Spencer added.

Anastase lifted an eyebrow, but said nothing. It was rare he and Gabriel agreed on something, and they were right—we shouldn’t have done it—but we never did anything fun with the power, and no one had been hurt.

“When will you be done here?” I asked. “We’re about to head home.”

“Give me ten minutes,” he said. “I need to finish this.”

“Cool.” I hopped up onto an adjacent lab table to wait, my legs swinging free, and Anastase went back to work.

He’d cut his blond hair very short in the spring for magical reasons and it was finally starting to grow out to a flattering length again. The back was still clipped tight, a classic boy’s cut, but the front flopped over his forehead past his blue and green eyes. The combination of his blondness and his black t-shirt made him seem foreign and stylish.

And I needed to stop thinking about him, especially when Spencer was close enough to read my mind. Maybe visiting Anastase had been a bad idea.

After a few minutes, he closed his notebook and removed the slide from the microscope, slotting it into a little tray full of other slides and placing the whole tray back on a shelf in a cabinet at the back of the room. Then he turned off the microscope and covered it with its case, making sure it was lined up properly. Finally, he went to wash his hands at the station next to the door.

“Ready?” He tossed a paper towel into the trash bin.

“Have you ever thought of becoming a scientist?” I jumped down off the table.

Anastase glanced at me, amused. “No,” he said. “Why?”

“You seem really good at it,” I said.

“I’m good at a lot of things.” He smiled.

“Never mind,” I said. “Forget it.”

“I can make things out of nothing,” he said, snapping a flutter of moths into existence. “Why would I want to become a scientist?”

“I said never mind.” I brushed a moth off my shirt. Spencer came over from the window, where he’d been inspecting the specimens lined up in jars.

“What are you going to be?” he asked. He meant it casually, but Anastase made a face.

“Nothing if I don’t graduate high school,” he said.

“What about you?” I asked Spencer. Gabriel and Merri both planned to go to college, but Anastase and Spencer were so magical I couldn’t imagine them with jobs out in the world.

“I was thinking maybe something with math,” he said. “Like, an engineer.”

“An engineer.” Anastase closed the door behind us. “Really.”

Spencer shrugged. “Maybe. What about you, Suzanne?”

“No clue,” I said. Until six months ago, my only goal for the future had been getting out of Benowa, Wisconsin, but I had crossed over, become an Elemental with the Beryls, and that was no longer possible. “I haven’t really thought about it. Maybe I’ll become a Benowa cop and spend my days giving high school students tickets for failure to come to a complete stop.”

Spencer giggled. Anastase had gotten that exact ticket less than a week ago.

“Please do,” he said. “Then I’ll never get another one again.”

“I don’t know, sir.” I lowered my voice to Cop Voice. “I can’t be showing favoritism.”

“HA!” Anastase snorted, following us out the door into the bright sunlight. Our artificial rain clouds had returned to their natural fluffy white state, bright against high blue sky. “That’s all cops do. It’s the whole point of being a cop.”

A car passed us, honking, but I didn’t recognize it and Spencer and Anastase showed no sign either, lifting their heads and regarding it in the calm way animals regarded something they knew posed no danger to them. I wondered what we looked like to people passing by, me and the two blond boys. Did they think Anastase and I were a couple? Or, most likely, did they not think of us at all except to make sure we weren’t going to dart into the street in front of them?

That was how the Beryls had managed to hide what they were for so long, I realized; no one cared. Anastase was strange, sure, but he didn’t bother anyone and most of the kids at school were too wrapped up in their own psychodramas to give him a second glance. And the others weren’t unusual enough to warrant unwanted attention. It was only those few people who got close who realized none of the Beryls, not even Gabriel, were normal. Indifference was their camouflage.

I opened my mouth to say this, but shut it again. It was one of those things that would be obvious to them, and saying it would make me seem slow. This was the problem with joining a group formed essentially when Spencer was born—they had so much history I was only starting to catch up.

“We like when you try.” Spencer hooked his arm through mine.

“Stop doing that,” I told him.

“I can’t,” he answered. Of all the talents the Elementals possessed, Spencer’s telepathy was the one I wanted the most and the least at the same time.

“Not the listening,” I told him. “The answering.”

“Oh.” Spencer nodded. “Yeah, I probably should.”

“Are you coming in?” Anastase asked as we approached the front walk of their house.

I shook my head. I loved their house, and inside it I was free to express my new Elemental self, but without Gabriel there today it didn’t feel right. “I gotta get home.”

Anastase shrugged and headed up the walk. Spencer hugged me. “Sorry you won’t be joining us,” he said, and winked to let me know he knew why I wasn’t. I slapped him on the arm and headed toward home.

*

Fifteen minutes later, I was opening the kitchen screen door to find my golden retriever, Brady, waving his fluffy yellow tail and hopping back and forth at the top of the short staircase.

“Hi Brady! Hi puppy!” I opened the door and reached up to hug him. He smelled of clean dog and squirmed happily in my hug, panting in my face. Best greeting ever.

“Don’t get him all worked up,” my mother called from the kitchen. “He just spent ten minutes barking at things through the living room window.”

“Did you see something?” I asked Brady, but my power didn’t include the ability to read his mind (would the power even work on dogs? I’d have to ask Spencer) so there was no answer, just Brady grinning at me. “What did you see?”

“In or out, please,” my mother said. I came in, closing the door behind me loud enough for her to hear. Unlike Brady, my mother wasn’t always happy or excited to see me. She loved me, but her love was prickly and could be painful.

“You’re home early,” she said as I came into the kitchen. She sat at the table sorting through papers, her broken leg propped up on a chair.

“So are you,” I said. My mother was a professor at Marquette. She taught English and, because she worked there, I could go to Marquette for free. As a result, I was considering pretty much any other college in the world.

“My leg was bothering me, so I cancelled office hours and came home.”

I nodded. “That sucks. Did you take a pain pill?”

She smiled and held up two fingers.

“Okay, well, I’ve got homework, so I’ll leave you alone. Let me know if you need anything.” I grabbed a can of soda out of the refrigerator and headed up the back stairs, eager to get away from the evidence of my guilt.

My mother’s leg had been broken in a car accident a few months ago. It had been bad; she almost died. And it had been because of me.

I didn’t cause the accident, technically. Like, I didn’t cut her brake lines or hire someone to crash into her. She’d been a pawn in a game a psycho had been playing for my life, a way to convince me I had to go with him or no one I loved would be safe. It had almost worked.

My mother was on the mend, now. But we’d only gotten rid of the hospital bed in the living room last week, and she was still on a lot of pain medication, and every time I saw her wince or flinch or take a deep breath before she tackled the twelve stairs to her bedroom, I felt guilty. I had done this to her, and I couldn’t even tell her I was sorry.

“This sucks a little, huh, Brady?” I asked. Brady flopped his fluffy tail against the bedroom rug in agreement. He agreed with almost everything I said. It was one of the reasons I loved him.

*

Gabriel didn’t call me after football practice as promised; he showed up at my house around eight while I was scrubbing the pans from dinner, one of the many ways I assuaged my guilt for my mother’s accident. I knew it was him when I heard the doorbell. He had a way of pressing it that made it sound polite, somehow.

“Suzanne!” my father called from the living room. He was not ten feet away from the door watching television with my mother, but he knew it was Gabriel, too.

“Coming!” I wiped my hands on a clean dishtowel.

“You’re not going out,” my mother said as I passed the couch.

“I’m going out on the porch,” I answered.

“You know what I mean,” she said.

“Yeah, yeah.” I opened the door.

“Hi.” Gabriel smiled. Unlike his brother, Gabriel smiled all the time, sweet smiles that warmed you like you were standing in the sunshine. His smile would have been his best feature, if it weren’t for the rest of him.

“Evening, Robert, Patrice,” he said through the screen. My other friends didn’t get to call my parents by their first names, but Gabriel had managed it the first night he met them. He wouldn’t admit it to me, but I figured he’d used his power on them.

“Hello, Gabriel,” my father said. My mother waved. I stepped out onto the porch and shut the interior door behind me before they all got caught up in the ritual of polite chitchat they enjoyed so much.

“I thought you were going to call me,” I said as he put his arms around my waist and drew me close.

“I like this better,” he said, and kissed me.

Before Gabriel, the guys I dated had been a specific type: thin, sarcastic, non-joiners with attitude problems. Guys like Anastase. Gabriel could not have been more different. Varsity football player, member of the Student Council, beloved by students and teachers alike, Gabriel Beryl was a poster child for middle class suburban perfection. I wouldn’t have looked at him twice if it hadn’t been for his powers, and now I couldn’t imagine life without him.

I stepped back before we got too graphic and lead him by the hand to the porch swing. “How was practice?”

“What would you do if I gave you an actual answer to that question?” he asked as we sat down.

“What?” I put my legs across his lap. “I’m learning. You’re a running back—”

“Corner back,” he said.

“—and you stop guys from scoring stuff. Points.”

“Touchdowns,” he said.

I slugged him in the shoulder. “I know what touchdowns are!”

“Do you?”

“Besides, you know I don’t actually care about practice.”

“Then why do you ask?”

I leaned in and kissed him again. “I care about you.”

“That is . . . really romantic,” he said after the kiss. “Like, really.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Don’t make too much of it or I’ll never do it again.”

“Yeah, so, speaking of things you should never do again . . .” he said.

I tipped my head back against the arm of the swing, my mouth dropping open in a dramatic reenactment of falling asleep. “Snore!”

“Come on, Suzanne,” Gabriel said. “Don’t—”

“‘Don’t do this,’ ‘don’t do that’—what do we get to do?”

“You made lightning strike a goal post,” Gabriel pointed out. “Someone could have been hurt.”

“Actually, Spencer did that,” I said. “And no one was.”

“Still,” Gabriel said. “Besides, it’s not so much about the danger of your little trick, which was very dangerous, but about getting caught.”

“By who?” I asked. “Who’s going to catch us?”

“The other Horsemen are still out there.” Gabriel glanced over his shoulder, like they were just on the other side of the porch rail. “And they know we have a full circle.”

“I don’t get what the point of power is if you can’t do anything with it.”

Gabriel sighed, shaking his head, but he didn’t have an answer for me. The Beryls had made a big deal about how powerful it was to have a full circle of Elementals, all four elements plus me, the Fifth, but except for our fight against Morgan, we hadn’t done anything except a couple of ceremonies in the privacy of their fenced-in backyard, and a couple of minor things they could already do, like Anastase’s moths and the lightning. I had given up my future and the possibility of leaving this small town forever to become a member of their Circle, but since then we had done nothing major. Nothing real.

“Just . . . not at school, okay?” Gabriel said. “And nothing that can electrocute people.”

“I told you.” I hooked my arms around his neck. “That was Spencer.”

“Uh huh,” he said. “And your bad influence didn’t affect him at all.”

“What can I say?” I tipped my forehead to his. “I’m a bad girl.”

*

I went inside a few minutes later, kissing Gabriel goodbye on the porch and watching him walk down the sidewalk before I opened the door. Our first kiss back in April had been on the porch, and I liked the serendipity of saying goodbye to him there. It reminded me of our beginning, as strange as that had been.

“How is Gabriel?” my father asked as I shut the door behind me.

“Good.” I bent to pet Brady and let him sniff Gabriel’s smells. “Apparently, he’s a corner back, not a running back.”

My dad chuckled. His interest in football was limited, but he had that sort of sports osmosis many guys seemed to have, picked up from watching games with other men as a form of socializing. “You two seem pretty serious.”

I shrugged. Gabriel and I were way too serious—bonded for life by the Circle—but my parents didn’t know about that. “I guess,” I said. “We haven’t really talked about it.”

“You spend a lot of time together,” my mother said. “You’re always over at his house.”

“Yeah.” I picked the dish towel up off the side table and twisted it. They were going somewhere, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to go with them.

“Are you exclusive?” she asked.

“Mom!”

“What, Suzanne?” she asked. “We aren’t asking if you’re having sex. We’re asking if you’re dating him exclusively.”

“Yes!” I said. “I am dating Gabriel exclusively. Can we be done, now?”

“Are you having sex?”

“DAD! Oh my god!”

“It’s a reasonable question,” my dad said. “We just want to make sure you’re being responsible and making good choices.”

“Good choices!? Dad, I cannot have this conversation with you.”

My mother spoke up. “If you can’t talk about it, Suzanne, then you really shouldn’t be having sex with some—”

“Mom, we are not having sex, okay? Also, there is a big difference between talking about sex with your, um, partner or whatever, and talking about it with your parents.” I spread my hands wide. “A very big difference!”

“Alright, alright, no need to yell,” my mother said.

“But if you do, you will use protection, right?” my father said.

“I would really prefer it if she gets on the pill first,” my mother said, like I wasn’t even standing there. “Condoms are all good and well, but I’m most concerned about pregnancy. Do you want to go to the doctor?” she asked me.

“I, what?”

“For the pill,” she said. “I can make you an appointment.”

What I wanted was for this whole conversation to stop, like, five minutes ago, but I couldn’t think of any reason to turn her down. This was my mother who, not six months ago, had practically put me on house arrest and she was asking me if I wanted to go on birth control so I could have sex with my boyfriend. If I hadn’t been so embarrassed, it might have been touching.

“I, um. Yes. Thank you. That would be great,” I managed.

“This isn’t a carte blanche,” she said. “Just because you have the pill doesn’t mean you have to make use of it.”

I nodded vigorously. “I get it,” I said. “Are we done?”

My parents exchanged a look. “Sure,” my father said.

“Great. Good talk.“ I bolted before they could bring up how old they were when they first had sex, or what positions they liked or something.

The thing was, I wasn’t a virgin. I hadn’t been for almost two years. The first time had been with Jason when we were still trying to date, and it had been sort of awful, but only the actual sex part. He and I adored each other, and I was glad we’d had that incredibly embarrassing experience together. And since Jason there had been a couple other guys, boyfriends, before Gabriel. Did my parents know that? Did they understand that a girl who hung out with the crowd I hung out with before we moved probably wasn’t a virgin after a certain point? Had my father guessed the afternoon he found me in my underwear snorting cocaine off a textbook? Maybe they did know and just didn’t want to remind me of my sordid past. Maybe they were hoping I would lose my virginity to the upstanding citizen that was Gabriel Beryl.

>>Remind me, I texted Gabriel when I was safely up in my room. >>to tell you what my parents asked me tonight.

A minute later I got his response. >>k. miss you.

I smiled at my phone. Gabriel was such a sap. I couldn’t believe I liked it. 

*****