Live Wire (Blue-Eyed Bomb #1)

by Amber Lynn Natusch

  Another storm.

  One I’d seen before.

  “Shit!” I cried, doing my best to run with the aid of my crutches. It was a clumsy, inelegant gait, but it was the best I could do. I needed to get to the house quickly.

  I feared what was coming.

  “Why did I tell them not to come right away,” I lamented as I passed the barn. “Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid…”

  It was so dark outside at this point that I could hardly see five feet in front of me, but I could make out the porch steps as I approached them, and I made my way up as quickly as my busted ankle would allow. I took the final step, ready to go inside, and slammed right into someone standing there. Thankfully I didn’t stumble backward and fall down the steps, but I was damn close.

  A bony hand clamped down on my wrist was all that kept me from that fate.

  “It comes for you,” Gabe’s mother said, staring at me intently. With the dark of night surrounding us, I shouldn’t have been able to see her face at all, but I could. I really, really could. It was as if it shone from within. Like she was the light in the darkness.

  “No, no, no,” I said, yanking my arm away. “No more of your cryptic bullshit, lady. Now is when you start making sense, and you start making it in a hot hurry.”

  “It comes for you,” she repeated, unfazed by my threat.

  “Yeah, I put that together, now that I have my wits about me again. The shitty part about it all is that I can’t do anything about it. I’m human, or didn't your Spidey senses tell you that?” She said nothing, only continued to stare at me, as if that were helpful. “Listen, I need you to get your shit together and pull yourself back from whatever corner of your mind you tucked yourself away in and tell me what is going on!”

  “You shouldn’t have left,” she said, her words sounding a little too much like the ones spoken to me while I was drowning for my liking.

  “Are you controlling it?” I asked, my words barely a whisper. “You are, aren’t you? But you look scared by it at the same time. Did you lose control of it? Whatever the fuck this thing is?”

  That seemed to get her attention. Her eyes narrowed to slits in her face as her gaze turned murderous.

  “I am not to blame for this,” she hissed. “You are.”

  “How?” I shouted at her. “How am I to blame? Because I’m a stranger? Is this part of your stranger danger hoodoo that you used to babble about to Gabe?” When she said nothing, I threw my crutches down and grabbed her by her frail shoulders, thrusting my face into hers. “It’s pretty clear to me that you’re not human, lady, so I’ll let you in on a little secret since you don’t seem to already know. I'm a member of the Patronus Ceteri. And soon the cavalry will be on its way. You’re about to be overrun with angry immortals who are none too happy that I’ve been gone for the past three days, taken by some fucking twister from hell after my plane crashed. So unless you want to start telling me what we’re up against and how we’re going to kill it, your life is about to be far more unpleasant than it was before I showed up on your doorstep.” Her narrowed eyes flew wide open at my words, and I couldn’t help but smile with satisfaction. “Yeah, dropping the PC bomb usually induces cooperation in the supernatural community.”

  “You cannot let him kill you,” she breathed. Before I could ask her why, Gabe busted through the front door, looking angrier than a rabid dog. I realized that I was still manhandling his mother and quickly let go, but it was too late. Shit was about to go sideways.

  “You want to tell me why you dragged my mother out here in what’s about to be a killer storm? Why you’re shouting at her? Why you had your hands on her?”

  “I can explain,” I said calmly, hoping to induce a little in him.

  “There is no time for that,” his mother said, shocking both of us. Gabe stumbled back a step or two into the screen door. In fairness, his response was warranted. He hadn’t heard her speak for over a decade. She turned to him, reaching her hand out for him to take. “Gabriel. My sweet Gabriel. I failed your father once. This time I will not fail you.”

  “Mom?” he called, still so uncertain of what was going on.

  “We don’t have much time, dear.”

  “Time?” he asked, his wide eyes flashing back and forth between his mother and me. “Time for what? What in the hell is going on?”

  “He’s come for her. She cannot hide any longer. She has taunted him—thrown the gauntlet. He can no longer afford to bide his time. He must take her now and end this.”

  “Jesus, Mom. What are you saying?” He turned to me. “Who is coming for you, Phira?”

  I sighed heavily, thinking about how Gabe’s mind was about to be fractured just like his mother’s was. Only she wasn’t human. He was—or seemed to be. I feared for what the knowledge we were about to drop on him would do.

  But drop it we did.

  “The storm. The storm is coming for me.” The way his mouth gaped open, I knew that answer was insufficient. “Gabe,” I started, not knowing how to tell him that other things in the world existed—things his mind wouldn’t want to accept as real—but I saw no other choice. “My name is Sapphira, daughter of Sean, the immortal ruler of the Patronus Ceteri, and granddaughter of the Greek god of war, Ares. My father is centuries old. My mother is the most lethal werewolf in the history of the breed. The PC is an ancient organization pledged to maintain the balance and separation between the human and supernatural worlds, and my brothers and I are a part of it. We have laws outside your human ones. We police our own. And me telling you this directly disobeys the rules I’ve been taught to live under my whole life.” He looked pale and ill and unsteady on his feet, but I continued on. He needed to hear that truth. Hopefully it would save his life.

  Providing I could keep my brothers from ending it because of all I’d just divulged.

  “You’re crazy,” he said, still pressed up against the screen door.

  “I might be crazy, but not about this,” I told him, trying to limp my way over to him. “My brothers are coming. You will soon see exactly what I'm talking about. Something bad is about to go down, Gabe, and I need you to stay out of it, understand? I can’t have you being collateral damage,” I explained, swallowing hard against those final words.

  “She is right, Gabriel,” his mother echoed from behind me. “This must end tonight.”

  “What? What is ending?” he shouted. “And why are you so calm about what she just said?”

  “Because I’ve known about the Patronus Ceteri my whole life, Gabriel.” Her reply seemed to do little to calm him. “I am one of those whom they police.”

  Her final sentiment didn’t either.

  “Jesus Christ,” he exhaled, fumbling for the handle on the door.

  “Gabe!” I called, grabbing him by the hand. “Listen to me. You can freak out later, but right now I need you to pull yourself together and listen to your mother because she's about to explain what needs to be done, aren’t you, Mom?”

  “There is little that can be,” she said, her tone regretful.

  “Yeah, that’s not really an option,” I countered, snapping angry eyes back at her.

  “This sacred ground has kept you safe until now, but it cannot forever.”

  “Sacred ground,” I said aloud as I mulled those words over in my mind. “That’s why! That’s why the storm went around us…why I was attacked in the creek. It couldn’t get to me, could it? It couldn't cross the property line?” She nodded once, the motion slow and controlled and incredibly eerie. “Holy shit…”

  “It cannot cross the wards.”

  “So I’m a prisoner here,” I said, the realization of the truth I spoke not fully hitting me until I heard it out loud.

  “Until it is banished, yes.”

  “What are you?” I asked, hobbling toward her.

  She cocked her head to the side and stared at me as if the answer were plain as day.

  “I’m a witch.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Gabe said
softly.

  “Believe it, my son. It is my birthright, as it was my grandmother’s and her grandmother’s and every other generation back as far as the times when the colonization of this country began.”

  “It skips a generation?” I asked, trying to make sense of what she was saying.

  “He must be banished to his prison every hundred years. That is as long as the magic can entomb him. That has been my family’s job for centuries.”

  “He,” I pressed. “He who? What exactly are we dealing with here?”

  “Technically it is two beings merged together. You might best know them as the Anemoi. They are storm bringers and are lethal. They were banished to end the strife of the settlers with the help of the Native Americans. Left to dwell on their own, they will destroy anything and everything they can at will. They are vile beings.”

  “You’ve done this before? Banished them?”

  Her expression fell.

  “Yes.”

  “Great. Then this shouldn’t be so hard.”

  “We are only equipped with enough magic to do it once, Sapphira. That is all that is necessary under normal circumstances.” She looked at me like a teacher irritated with her student.

  “Wait, you’re saying that somehow these assholes got out after you did your hocus pocus last time, and now you don’t have enough juice to send them back?” My voice was tight, straining against my disbelief. “How the fuck did that even happen? Did you screw something up?”

  “Phira!” Gabe snapped, coming to his mother’s defense. Apparently my nasty attitude with her was enough to pull him out of his mental downward spiral.

  “Sorry, Gabe. It’s just a lot to swallow right now—that I’m doomed to stay here so that some fucking storm doesn’t whisk me away and do whatever it is it wants to do with me. And all because your mother might not have done her job right when she had the chance.”

  “I can assure you that I did all I had to, even under great duress. They were sent away as they were destined to be,” she argued, stepping closer to me. “Something has let them out.” Her eyes looked at me like they were prying my head open and rummaging around inside.

  “Let them out? What kind of magic could do that?”

  “Not magic per se,” she replied.

  “Then what? What in the hell let them out?”

  “A great disturbance in the earth. One caused by something unnatural.”

  “And just when did this happen? Three days ago when my plane got ripped from the sky and spanked down on the ground?”

  “No,” she said curtly. “Two years ago.” I felt all the blood drain from my face. “Two years and three days, to be exact.”

  Chapter 17

  I couldn’t breathe.

  I could barely think.

  If what Gabe’s crazy witch of a mother had just said was true, then everything that had happened made a hell of a lot more sense. She stared at me with recognition in her eyes, as if my reaction had confirmed what she had already suspected. That I had facilitated the release of what was now hunting me.

  “This can’t be happening,” I whispered, reaching for the front post of the porch to support my weight.

  “So it was you,” Gabe’s mother said, stepping closer to me. “Tell me something, Sapphira. What did you do to release it? How did you unlock it from the center of the Earth?”

  I shot her a murderous glare.

  “I don’t know.”

  “And after all this time, why has no one tried to stop it?”

  “Because nobody knew I’d let it out in the first place.” Her face went slack at my words.

  “The PC must have known. How could they just leave the Anemoi loose?”

  “I think they were a little too preoccupied cleaning up the shitstorm I released to focus on anything else—pun totally intended. Besides, didn’t you just say that’s your family's job? Putting that thing away?”

  She ignored my deflection entirely.

  “What did you do?” she asked again. In truth, it was more of a demand. I felt the weight of her words on me, pushing me to admit what I had done.

  “Something terrible,” I said softly, looking over to Gabe, who still stood braced against the screen door.

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t remember how it all happened,” I told her, which was the truth. But not one that would stand for long.

  “Tell. Me.” Her words were practically a growl, demanding something I couldn’t provide. “Your life might depend on it.”

  Looking back to Gabe, I swallowed down the bile rising in my throat. I was about to tell him something awful—something unforgivable—and it would be the final nail in the coffin between us. Nobody could love someone like me. Nobody deserved that.

  “I wiped out a town,” I admitted, my voice cracking as I spoke. Warm tears spilled down my cheeks. “I woke up encircled by flame and ash and destruction. I don't know how I did it, but I did, and I killed everyone within a ten-mile radius.”

  “Holy shit,” Gabe gasped.

  “I didn’t mean to,” I blurted out. “I didn't mean to do that. I didn’t even know I could. I had no idea my powers were so volatile or strong.”

  “If you have that level of power, then you should be able to destroy what you awakened,” she said, stepping in front of me to obscure my view of her son.

  I scoffed, dragging my sleeve across my face to wipe away the evidence of my weakness.

  “Yeah. About that,” I said, straightening my spine. “I won’t be doing much of anything against that thing.”

  “Why?” she asked, her annoyance plain.

  I leaned in close to her, my face only inches from hers.

  “Because my powers are gone, and I have a hunch about who’s taken them.”

  It was her turn to go pale.

  “No…that’s not possible.”

  “And yet here I am, human as motherfucking Adam and Eve.” I pointed down to my ankle that wasn’t bearing my weight. “You think something like this would normally be a problem for me?” I took her silence to mean she understood. “I’m as human as your son, which means I’m little more than cannon fodder for what’s lurking just off the edge of your land.”

  “It wants you dead,” she whispered. “That’s why it's here. It doesn’t want you at all. It wants you dead.”

  “Yeah, I got that hint the other day when it tried to drown me in the creek.”

  “If you die, it will be able to wield your powers, Sapphira. Do you understand what that would mean to humankind? To this world?”

  Yeah. I did. And it sure as hell wasn’t good.

  “I need to make a call,” I said, scooping my crutches off the porch, then walking toward the front door where Gabe still stood steadfast. I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eye, and thankfully he stepped aside, realizing that whatever issues we had, they paled in comparison to the Anemoi and my impending death.

  I grabbed the phone off the kitchen counter and dialed TS. The second he picked up, I started unloading the facts on him.

  “What do you know about the Anemoi?” I blurted out. “Because we have a fucking situation on our hands. I’m holed up with a not-so-mentally-sound witch who’s telling me that my fucking incident in Colorado basically unleashed the landlocked version of the Kraken on the world ahead of schedule, and that it wants me dead.”

  “Phira, we’re on our way. We will be there momentarily, but I need you to slow down. The Anemoi? Are you sure?”

  I could hear Alek swearing in the background at the mere mention of that name.

  “Yeah. As sure as I can be.”

  “The witch. What did she tell you?”

  “That her family’s job is to banish this thing every hundred years.”

  More swearing from Alek.

  “And she thinks your…meltdown awakened it?”

  “She knew the exact date of when she felt its presence. I’ll give you three guesses as to when that was. And you’ll only need one.”


  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Nico shouted in the background. “How the fuck did this thing even find you?”

  I hadn’t really considered that question until that moment. And when I finally did, something ominous occurred to me.

  “Oh my God…” I looked up to find Gabe and his no-longer-despondent mother staring at me. “It’s been hunting me this whole time. In Portsmouth. In Boston. That feeling…”

  “What feeling?” TS asked, concern in his voice.

  “The one I never told anyone about because you all thought I was batshit crazy enough as it was. I didn’t want to fan that flame, so I kept it to myself.”

  “Now would be a good time to explain,” TS prompted, doing his best to feign calm when I could tell he was anything but. And if TS was nervous, I was shitting-my-pants scared.

  “Like I was being followed. Like something was lurking in the shadows if you and I got too far from home or from the rest of the PC.” I paused for a moment, realizing something else. “Motherfucker…it was just biding its time until we got separated enough for it to make its move. I basically delivered myself to it on that plane.”

  You should never have left… The meaning of those words became painfully clear. I should never have left Portsmouth. I should never have left the safety of my father and his soldiers.

  “But it did not get you,” he pointed out.

  “Not yet, but it got the bulk of what it was after. Now it just needs to kill me to secure my powers for its own.”

  “Phira,” Alek called from the background. “I think you know that we can’t let that happen for various reasons, so I need you to stay where you are and wait for us to arrive. We won’t be long now.”

  “Okay,” I said, fidgeting with the hem of my shirt. “Hurry. Please…”

  “We’ve got this,” Nico said, his voice far softer than it had been only moments earlier. “Whatever this thing is, it can’t have you. End of the fucking story.”

  I hesitated for a second before speaking, having not spoken those words to anyone for a very long time.