Susan Mccray

“I could feel Devon’s gaze on my face, reading my body language despite how hard I had tried to keep the irritation from showing. “They’d like you to move them to a tank they have set up. They’re going to trap them for this week and then let them go.” Of course they did.

I managed to keep from rolling my eyes but between Devon’s presence and immediately being swarmed by otters the minute we got near the water, I end up wishing that I had. Otters are fast little mammals in the water; the fur keeps the water off their skin while making them slick and fast while in their preferred environment. The hard lesson I’d learned had been that they could scamper and bound pretty darn quickly on land. Nearly twenty of the brown friendly creatures swarmed up the banks of the tributary and made raucous sounds of greetings at me. Two vets stood nearby with nets and silly grins on their faces and a puny four otters ready to be transported to where ever in two tanks on trucks quietly humming with earth energy. Mags and Evan had backed up when I’d been swarmed but Devon had stuck by my side and seemed highly amused by the otters climbing over and around him to get to me.

“They weren’t kidding about you and otters.” I shoot him a ‘no duh’ look and scoop up a pair to hand off to one of the Earth Elementals. We were saturating their habitat with majick, we’d been asked not to use majick on them, and so catching my willing victims by hand was the way I was going to do my task...”
― Sara Brackett, Elemental