Thunderstruck

by Shannon Delany

  Thunderstruck

  A Weather Witch Novel

  Shannon Delany

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Prologue: 1844

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Afterword

  Also by Shannon Delany

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Prologue

  1844

  Light was fading from the sky when the first raindrops of a typical Philadelphia Tuesday evening began to dampen the tight salt-and-pepper curls covering John’s head. Looking up, he squinted against the summoned rain clouds and wiped his palm across his forehead. He had fallen behind with his outside work—there could be no arguing that.

  Philadelphia, like many cities in the young United States, had a regulated schedule of rainy and dry weather and of light and dark, all thanks to the Weather Witch at the city’s Hub.

  A few minutes remained before the drizzle became heavier and stuck his clothing to his skin, so he brushed his hands off and gathered the shovel and trowel from the narrow garden bed outside the Astraea estate’s imposing wall. Throughout the city people would be hurrying indoors, servants closing windows, the wealthy members of the Hill settling down for an evening meal.

  The clatter and hiss of a carriage’s wheels skipping across damp cobblestones drew his gaze, and John watched a pair of pale horses pulling a fancy wagon down the street. The driver sat hunched, hat’s brim pulled low over his eyes. The stormlit streetlights reflected off the barrel of a gun in his lap, and John squinted against the growing dark and damp to better see. Two men rode clinging to the back corners of the carriage, heads above its roof, hats forced low to battle the rising breeze.

  The carriage paused at the nearest intersection and John glimpsed the rack on the wagon’s back, usually where additional luggage was secured.

  But not this evening.

  This evening, rather than carpetbags or trunks, there was one long bundle tied tight with fabric and rope.

  John recognized the thing by its shape and size, and when the carriage turned to take the road to the Below, he hurried inside the Astraea gates and into the nearest door. Inside the servants’ quarters, he propped the shovel and trowel against a wall, paying no mind to the dirt that dropped off their edges, making a mess of the floor.

  A quick right turn down the hall and he passed through another door, stumbling out the building’s back and onto the darkening lawn. The grass slick beneath the worn soles of his shoes, still he made his way through the hedgemaze with practiced ease. He paused a moment at the edge of the Astraeas’ expansive yard, perched on the highest of many slate steps, a dizzying distance above the faint and flickering lights of the city’s most dangerous neighborhood—the Burn Quarter of the Below.

  The only place the rival fire companies would rather see burn than saved—because even the most reprehensible gang members understood some people were irredeemable.

  In the distance, John watched the carriage make its slow descent on the main road, weaving past neighborhoods of declining value on its way down the Hill.

  His knees twinged in pain as he jogged down the long flight of steps, wiping his eyes and flicking water off his face as the storm overhead thickened. He splashed through deepening puddles, water soaking his feet and weighing down the hems of his pants legs.

  The carriage turned. If they both continued on their paths they would meet in front of the alley, not far from the slate stairway’s bottom step. John hurried, emerging from the alley just behind the carriage.

  The carriage turned abruptly, rattling down the road leading to the water’s edge, and John maintained his pace, eyes fixed on the object wrapped and still in the vehicle’s rack. The horses snorted, bucking in their traces. No horse willingly neared briny water—not with the threat of hungry Merrow lurking by any salty shore.

  The driver pulled the horses to a stop and lashed the reins down before sliding from his seat, gun gripped tightly in his hands.

  The rain grew heavier; the images before John blurred and swam. His back pinned flat to the wall of the nearest building, he stayed under the roof’s narrow overhang and in the thickest shadow possible, catching his breath and all the time thinking he should turn back.

  Go home.

  What was he but an old man with aching knees? What he’d done recently, helping Reanimate a wealthy woman who tried to take her own life, and now this—racing through the rain and shadows—such adventures belonged to younger men.

  From the carriage’s corners the men jumped down, handily untying the bundle hitched to the rack. They hurled it to the ground and it landed with a sickening thud.

  Long, light-colored hair fell free of the fabric.

  John stiffened.

  It was a woman’s body.

  And she was handled with such indifference it was clear they had no interest in Reanimation.

  But what they planned to do with her instead …

  He had no idea.

  One door of the carriage swung open and a tall man stepped out—a man frequently featured in the city paper.

  Councilman Loftkin.

  “Keep watch,” Loftkin told the driver.

  The man shook his head, adjusting his hat’s brim so water poured off it. “Ain’t no one in his right mind coming outta his home on a Tuesday evening.”

  Sheltered in the shadows, and wicking up water, John would not disagree.

  “Grab the girl.” Loftkin pointed inside the carriage.

  The men reached in and snared the last member of their party. There was cursing and shouting. It took both men, grunting, to drag a very-much-alive girl out and toss her to the rain-glossed ground.

  John gasped, recognizing the girl, as well.

  Cynda. She had worked in the Astraea household until young Lady Jordan was taken to be Made into a Weather Witch. With the family’s subsequent fall from power, most servants moved to other households—Cynda determined to make a fresh start.

  As one man unrolled the fabric from the corpse, the other hefted Cynda, forcing her to look Loftkin in the eye.

  Behind the trio, the first man pulled a knife and went to work on the dead girl’s body, contemplating his every cut as the driver stood silent nearby, watching.

  Fighting the swimming sickness in his gut, John crept forward to better hear and see.

  “You will stay the night here,” Loftkin explained to Cynda. “In the morning you will scream, and, panicked, tell people Merrow attacked you and your friend.”

  Cynda shook her head miserably.

  Grabbing her by the shoulders, Loftkin shook her until her head lolled. “You will.”

  “They’ll never believe me …”

  The man with the knife stood, a strip of bloody fabric in his fist. Striding over, he thrust it into Cynda’s shaking hand. “Make them believe.”

  Loftkin stooped, his face and Cynda’s nearly touching. “If you do not obey
—do not succeed—I will arrange for you a meeting with the very same man your friend saw last. We shall see how it goes for you.”

  The men climbed back aboard the carriage, the driver turning the horses once more toward the Hill. Left by the mutilated corpse of her friend, Cynda sobbed, and John looked on, thunderstruck.

  Chapter One

  To be awake is to be alive.

  —Henry David Thoreau

  Aboard the Airship Artemesia

  Borne high above the world of the Grounded population, a breeze whisked around the brightly painted and carved body of the great airship Artemesia. It danced across her figurehead’s wild feminine face, tracing along her shoulders and open arms to race up the broad balloon and painted wings at her back. Up the breeze scurried, cresting the great netted balloon to come Topside. Skimming the pockmarked surface of the deck, it teased around the hem of ship’s Conductor Jordan Astraea’s blue dress, leaving it fluttering in its wake. Jordan seemed not to notice, resting her head against the broad chest of the handsome blond sporting questionable-looking facial hair.

  From beneath her skirt, two small noses poked out, and the Fennec foxes, Kit and Kaboodle, checked that the deck was clear of the Tempest’s rampaging cook.

  Beside Jordan, a small girl knelt. Never relinquishing her grip on the pleated fabric of Jordan’s skirts, she giggled, spotting the two furry troublemakers.

  Surreal. That was the best way to describe Rowen Burchette’s life: utterly and irrevocably surreal.

  He stayed still, his arms wrapped around Jordan, his breathing shallow. Standing quiet as a man whose only goal was to hold a girl as long as he could now he’d found her.

  His gaze took in Topside’s sweeping rails, the glowing stormlanterns topping each post, and the largest stormcell crystal he had ever seen mounted in wicked and reflective jags of wire—making the ship’s heart and power source. Non-human power source, he mentally corrected. Because, central to every function of this airship was its Conductor, the very human Jordan Astraea.

  “You came,” Jordan whispered, her lips brushing the rough muslin of his shirt. Her breath warm, it pushed through the shirt’s thin fabric, and Rowen stiffened, sucking in his breath.

  The scent of her—like the smell of the forest on a cool summer morning—washed through him—and her hair, cut so strangely short, brushed the tip of his nose. He sighed.

  This was it, then, he thought, this was rescue.

  Rescue for her and—he closed his eyes tightly and pushed the memories of his recent losses away, stuffing them down—rescue for him.

  The whirr of gears and the sound of wood and metal crunching against each other as something thumped to a stop nearby drew Rowen’s attention. A set of three joined walls pierced the Topside floor, an elevator rising out of the heart of the large airship. Crushed together and wearing the blue and gold of the Artemesia’s staff stood men dressed in sharp uniforms, their eyes sharper yet. Grasping thick loops of heavy rope connected to leather with strange metallic stitching, they carried collars and leads reminiscent to those used on hunting hounds.

  Only stronger. Thicker.

  Fiercer.

  They eyed the Artemesia’s deck, covered with the mangled remnants of lightships plucked from the sky by the little girl’s temper tantrum? Rowen considered but determined to keep his mouth shut about the possibility of so young and strong a Witch.

  Torn from the air, the ships had gouged their way across the deck’s boards, scattering debris behind them.

  Among the wreckage lay the lightships’ wounded and stunned riders: Wardens, Wraiths, and their prisoners turned accomplices.

  Hats skittered and rolled across the deck, veils flapping from brims and unmasking Wraiths. Rowen shuddered, holding Jordan the smallest bit tighter. Every child heard tales of what was beneath the Wraith’s veils, along with warnings of “I will sell you to the Wraiths for stew meat”—but the reality of tormented and puckered flesh was more than imagination might conjure.

  The Wardens were oddity enough: tattoos boldly marking their faces and necks, permanent sepia-colored reminders of the brutal touch of the sky’s cruel finger—what many called Lightning’s Kiss. But being an oddity was worlds different from being a living horror.

  The Wardens’ tattoos looked like the strange burn that bloomed pink and frost-like across Jordan’s left cheek and scrawled down her neck—running along her shoulder and disappearing beneath her gown. On Jordan it was beautiful.

  On Jordan anything was beautiful, Rowen realized.

  But the Wraiths … Lightning had twisted them, their faces forever caught in a moment of torment no joy could erase. There was a crooked man, who walked a crooked mile, Rowen thought remembering the old nursery rhyme. Lightning’s Kiss had shaped the Wraiths down to their long and pointed teeth—teeth that shook Rowen back to memory.

  He swallowed hard. He’d seen such teeth on the Merrow who attacked Jonathan and him as their horses drank from a stream they’d thought safe from the ongoing Wildkin War.

  Merrow murdered Jonathan and pushed Rowen to face his destiny alone.

  From the ship’s bow, a man wearing a hood and mask in the shape of a rhinoceros’s head clapped his hands together, striding forward with a grace more suited to an elegant gentlemen than an entertainer. He commanded everyone’s attention. Rowen knew him, masked or not.

  The Wandering Wallace looked at the remnants of splintered lightships scattered about the deck and assessed the groaning Wraiths and Wardens working free of their destroyed vessels. He raised his head, saying through the open mouth of his heavy leather and brass mask, “I dare not say clap them in irons as that could create quite a shocking result, but,” he instructed the gathered guardsmen, “secure them and take them below. Disperse them among rooms so they cannot plot. But do use nice rooms. They deserve to be treated more gently by us than by those previously controlling them.”

  The guards spread out from the elevator, picking paths through the smoldering wreckage, grabbing Wardens, Wraiths, and their more human-looking companions alike, looping the collars so snuggly around their necks Rowen thought more of a hangman’s noose than a dog’s leash. A few Weather Workers threatened, gnashing needle-like teeth as guards approached, but most were too stunned by what they had witnessed to resist a collar.

  Rowen understood too well, his own shock only receding as he held Jordan close—her body a warm reality in a world that kept turning upside down before righting itself in strange new ways.

  Willing as lambs, the Weather Workers were led to their fate below deck.

  All but one.

  A Wraith rolled up to its full height, tall and unnaturally slender, tufts of fine white hair dotting its wrinkled and dented scalp. Its cheeks creased in jagged furrows as thin lips pulled back from fangs. Glaring at the approaching guards, it gathered the moist air, pulling it free from the roiling nest of dark clouds surrounding the airship Artemesia and holding her aloft. Tugging the wisps together, it stirred them in the air and thickened them like a sauce reaching a boil. A hiss escaped its grim and grinning lips and it tightened the storm clouds, whipped the wind up with its will, forcing it all into a circling and screaming gale that tore around the Wraith, clawing its long, black coat. Mouth stretching wide, its lips curled at their ends, barely holding its cruel teeth back.

  Any who somehow kept their hats during the earlier fight now clutched them to their heads, grimacing against the Wraith’s whirlwind.

  Jordan twitched in Rowen’s grasp. The little girl with curls the color of platinum clutched Jordan’s dress tighter, both girls turning their faces from the Weather Worker and squeezing their eyes closed.

  Rowen adjusted his hold on Jordan, shielding her face from the snarling air while he squinted against it, mesmerized.

  In the midst of the growing storm, the Wraith threw back its head and howled. A tornado twisted along its long body, thickest by its booted feet, and with a growl, the wind lifted the Wraith into the air.

 
; The guards moved in, but the Wandering Wallace gave no new command—merely watched dishes and linens from the overturned dining table scramble away, animated by the rush of air. Suspended above them, the Wraith spun once in midair, taking in the view and then, with the flash of a ruby ring, it vaulted into the thick cloud bank beyond, disappearing from sight.

  The Wandering Wallace shrugged.

  The tail of the Wraith’s windstorm wrapped Rowen’s trio even tighter, and he rewarded himself with the touch of Jordan’s silky hair between his fingers. It should have been longer. This awkward hairstyle she sported was nearly boyish, as if by shearing off her dark locks she became someone else.

  Someone new.

  Old or new, scarred or flawless, with long hair or short, Witch or Grounded—to Rowen, Jordan was beautiful.

  The realization gave him pause.

  Jordan Astraea, wearing a lowborn’s dress, her hair chopped short, her face scarred … was beautiful. He had worked so hard to find her—to rescue her—and lost so much to win her. As changed as her physical appearance was, so equally was he changed.

  Inside and out.

  Perhaps she was changed as much as he. Was she the Stormbringer? The one prophesied to unite them and end the conflict?

  Or was she just the girl he flirted with—now battered and worn by being dragged so far from home?

  The child at Jordan’s feet shifted. In the crook of one tiny arm she held a flopping stuffed animal with long ears, horn buttons for eyes, and carefully stitched fingers. She looked up at Rowen, the strange power he’d seen in Jordan’s face shimmering beneath her skin as well. “And who are you?” she asked.

  He hesitated, unwilling to move away from Jordan as she slumped against him, hiccupping from time to time. But running his hand across her short and spiking hair he broke the spell between them.

  She pulled away, meeting his eyes briefly before looking away. Before looking down.

  He managed to keep one of his hands on her shoulder.

  Rowen cleared his throat, darting a glance at the child. He skimmed his right hand down Jordan’s arm, and sank into a crouch, face-to-face with the little girl, and carefully taking Jordan’s hand in his. His gaze flicked from Jordan—stiff, still, and staring off into some place he wasn’t welcomed—and then to the child.