reduce their victims to ashes almost instantly.
Other fire elementals called asteri are similar in shape to a starfish, with five fiery arms. These elementals cling to the surface of walls or ceilings and drop onto the heads of unsuspecting victims.
The most dangerous fire elemental of all is the salamander, a large lizard that basks in the heat of intense flames. These can spit streaks of fire or scalding steam.
A Salamander
Fire elementals are notoriously difficult to defend against, but a metal alloy blade with the correct percentage of silver can sometimes cause one to implode. A spook’s staff is particularly useful for this purpose.3 Failing that, water can seriously weaken a fire elemental and cause it to hibernate until drier conditions prevail.4 Water also offers a refuge when under attack.
Moroi
These are vampiric elemental spirits found in Romania. They are sometimes controlled by the strigoi and strigoica, but even when operating alone are a considerable threat to travelers. In their disembodied form, they inhabit hollow trees and clumps of holly. However, they often possess bears, which crush and lacerate their human victims before dragging them back to their lair. Sunlight destroys them, and they are only at large after dark.
Moroi have one significant weakness: They are compulsive in their behavior and often linger close to their lair, counting holly berries, seeds, twigs, or even blades of grass, wasting the hours that would otherwise have been used to hunt human prey. By the time they have finished counting, it’s usually almost dawn—which can be the most dangerous time of all for unwary humans, because the creatures are desperate to drink blood before the sun rises.
This weakness is exploited by Romanian spooks, who always have a pocketful of seeds or berries. Threatened by the moroi, they cast these toward it. Rather than attack, it is forced to begin counting again.
Tappers
Tappers, distant cousins to the boggarts that plague the County, live deep within rock clefts and sometimes cause tunnels to collapse. County miners fear them more than anything else.
Tappers try to drive humans away from territory they have claimed as their own. First of all, they use fear—hence the mysterious and unnerving rhythmical tapping sounds that are typical signs of their presence. But if fear doesn’t work, they bring down rocks and try to crush those they consider to be interlopers.
In an abandoned mine, huge numbers may gather unchecked over time, endangering the lives of any humans who venture there. Even many of them working together cannot cause a tunnel to collapse unless there is an existing fault line. However, if they do find a serious crack in the structure of the rock above, they can easily bring the ceiling down, either crushing or sealing victims underground so they perish from lack of air or water.5
Water Elementals
Water elementals are mostly found in the north of the County, where the bogs, lakes, and coast are inhabited by other denizens of the dark, such as water witches. There is a dangerous type called a wisp, which appears as a spiral of light over dangerous marshes and lures travelers off the path to their doom. These are usually too elusive to be dealt with unless there is a severe drought (a rare thing in the County). Then a spook can bind one in a pit using the same method as he would for a boggart.
A Wisp
Then there are banshees (also known as bean sidhe), which are female water spirits that warn of death. Mostly they are invisible: All you hear is a wailing cry, uttered just three times each night. If they are heard close to a house three nights running, it is said someone inside will die at the very moment the final wail is heard.
Sometimes banshees can be glimpsed apparently washing a burial shroud. If there is blood either on the shroud or in the water, then a violent death is predicted.6 They are not solid and do not leave footprints or any other evidence of their presence.
A spook has no means of dealing with banshees, but they react to future events rather than bringing them about, so are not in themselves dangerous.7
A Banshee
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1There is some recent evidence to support this view. The Bane was once one of the Old Gods, worshipped by the Little People. At the time of its unfortunate liberation from the catacombs under Priestown Cathedral, where it had little human contact, it had the strength of a demon. Gradually it then began to grow in power. I’m convinced that, using