Read Dark Waters (Elemental Book 1) for Free Online Page B

light it?” I asked. That sounded like
something covered under the teacher’s duties.
    “Because if they did it wrong, it’s going to explode,
and I don’t want it all over me.”
    I sighed, pulled the spare jacket out of my bag, and
draped it over the cauldron. I liked the jacket, but I didn’t want to end up
with a tail or a bird’s foot or something by getting splashed. The cauldron had
three sturdy legs that held it over a silver pan full of sticks and what looked
like hay. I crouched behind the cauldron, discreetly pulled my lighter out of
my pocket, and lit the hay under it. I expected to have to work at getting the
flames going, but it was like the thin sticks were made of paper; they
immediately lit.
    I slipped my lighter back into my jeans, stepped
back, and waited. After a few minutes, I cautiously removed my jacket and
everyone backed up. Nothing happened.
    “Good. Moving on,” the professor said. He put on some
heavy gloves. “You need to get to know your ingredients.”
    Seeing how this could go terribly wrong, I dug around
in my bag until I found my leather work gloves. Four of the other students also
put gloves on as they came to the front of the room. The fifth student was a
young, thin guy who eyed the door in the floor with fear.
    The professor handed one of the two women in class a
vial of sticks. “That’s sandalwood. On its own, that is harmless.” He handed
the guy next to me a bottle of a metallic liquid. “That’s mercury. It’s
poisonous, so don’t drink it.”
    “I wasn’t going to!” the guy said, offended.
    “Why not?”
    “Because I didn’t know what it was.”
    “Well, now you do know what it is. Don’t drink it.
Now, this is a scream-worm,” he said, pulling a big, fat worm out of a box. It
was about six inches long, an inch in diameter, and white, almost pearlescent.
He handed it to the skinny guy who finally looked up from the door in the
floor.
    He grimaced as the worm writhed in his hand. “Why is
it called a scream-worm?” he asked. Then, in the blink of an eye, the worm spit
out some kind of slimy, white feelers that looked like the tentacles of a
jellyfish. The feelers wrapped all around his hands and up his arms. He screamed.
    “First rule in my class; if I wear gloves, you
probably should, too.”
    The rest of the class consisted of us going over
ingredients. Some of them were normal, like lavender, while some of them were
more bizarre than the scream-worm. When he handed me a frog’s tongue, I asked
where the rest of the frog was and he responded that he had a French lunch.
    I knew three things as I walked out of the classroom:
Professor Langril was insane, not all five of my fellow classmates would make
it out uninjured, and this was going to be fun.
    I had an hour before my last class of the day began.
I knew there were books and supplies I needed to get, but I planned to acquire
those later. Oddly, there was hardly anyone out of class, as it seemed like
this was a very busy time of day. I decided to try to find Hunt in order to ask
him for more details of the assignment.
    Unfortunately, my map didn’t show me where Hunt’s
office was. None of the students I asked could tell me either. One C-Four was
particularly unhelpful. “You won’t find the headmaster on a map. You can only
find him by looking for him.”
    “Okay, then which way do I go?”
    “Any way is fine. It doesn’t make any difference
which direction you go.”
    I decided that up was as good a direction as any, so
I made my way up every stairway I could find. One stairway had every other step
missing, but I made it fine. This led to a circular, three-level library that
could impress the hell out of any bibliophile.
    I didn’t find anyone in the library and there was no
door to any other rooms or hallways, so I went back down the stairs. I tried
the next set of steps I came to, but it stopped right in the middle of the air,
about twenty feet high.
    Eventually, I found myself alone in a