The Elementals

Audrey

Author's note: Hello! Soooooooooo, 11,348 reads!!! That is fantabulous! (fantastic and fabulous combined to be extra awesome) Like, I cannot even express how much I love you guys for sticking with this! My friend had to tell me to shut up about my - and I quote, "weird orange booky website thing". Gotta love the adjectives, but I do have a tendency to talk a lot...hehe whoops. Sobutand (John Green used it, therefore so can I) this chapter is dedicated to Ana, who is the second of my crazy fangirl friends, you readers are awesome for voting and commenting (I love reading them, it literally makes my day) please keep being awesome, and...I don't have a third thing but I really do love you all (in a totally not creepy way)

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    “No.”

Audrey felt bad saying it, but if she let Sparky out into the snow, she was afraid she’d lose him. He blinked his brown eyes at her persuasively. “Please?”

    “You don’t know how to drive a snow mobile, Sparky.” She reasoned with the six year old.

Sparky stuck out his bottom lip. “Tide didn’t know how to drive a truck.”

    “And we can see how well that worked out.” Audrey muttered to herself, and then said louder, “Tide is also nine years older than you. Now go play with the computers.” Having seemed to get over his first rejection, Sparky raced off to the computer room to cause damage.

Audrey wasn’t a naturally maternal person, even if she did have her own children. A government job didn’t allow much family time, so the divorce shouldn’t have come as a shock, but it still hurt when her husband got full custody of her girls. She sighed. Sparky had the same eyes as her youngest, Maddie.

The last place Audrey expected to find herself was in charge of a slew of part human kids, but they had grown on her. She just didn’t know how to deal with them. How do you entertain a child who has the attention span of a flea, and also holds about nine-hundred volts of electricity waiting to be released?

She sighed, and then jumped as a hand tugged on her sleeve. She looked down and saw Maple staring back at her with an earnest expression.

    “What is it?” Audrey asked.

Maple shifted on her feet uncomfortably. “Um, I was…I was thinking.”

    “About…?”

Maple blinked and glanced at the floor. “I didn’t like being locked up by the mean government people.” She said government hesitantly, mispronouncing it as “govment”.

     “I’m not going to lock you up.” Audrey assured her, slightly offended.

    “No,” Maple shook her head. “But…we did lock up Caelum and the other Tide…and Izila.”

Audrey narrowed her eyes slightly. “What are you suggesting Maple?”

    “Well maybe because we’re doing what they did to us, and because we didn’t like what they did to us, we shouldn’t be doing it to them because then that makes us them because we’re doing what they did.” Maple said quickly.

Audrey stood silent for a moment. A five year old girl had just said something more intelligent than anything she’d heard in five years from her colleagues. Audrey internally sighed again. Maple’s heart was in the right place, but sadly the logic wasn’t quite there.

    “I understand Maple, but if we let them go they’re going to keep doing the bad things. We can’t let that happen, so it’s really better this way.” Her words became more rushed as she heard a crash from the computer lab, and then the faint noises of a baby starting to cry. “Okay sweetie?”