Storm Power

by D. N. Hoxa

  He didn’t miss a beat. “Then we’ll handle it. For now, we just go and see what happens. The Carnival is tomorrow.” Putting his hands on my shoulders, he brought me even closer. It was impossible not to look at his lips, dammit. “If we stick together, we’ll be fine. Remember we escaped right under the ECU’s nose, and you saved twenty-seven people all by yourself.”

  “With Elisa,” I mumbled. And Eddie. I hadn’t done shit by myself.

  “Exactly. As long as we keep our ear on the ground, nothing can catch us unprepared.”

  “So you’re saying to expect the worst.”

  “Worse than the worst,” he whispered. “This is very important, Scarlet.” I already knew it was, and he was about to ask me to do something I was probably not going to like, like spy on Sienna or something. “Think about this hard, okay?”

  Oh, boy. “Okay, go.”

  “Were you just thinking about kissing me?”

  What? Heat rushed to my cheeks. Lava poured down my throat.

  “Bastard.” Putting my hands on his chest a second too late, I pushed him off and stormed out of the room while he tried to stifle his laugh. “You picked the perfect time to joke. Good for you!”

  “Who said anything about joking?” He was much closer to me than I realized. Grover and Sienna had already made it to the front of the house and they were waiting for us. “I meant it. I really, truly meant it.”

  “In that case, no, Ax. I wasn’t thinking about kissing you.” The truth was, I shouldn’t have been thinking about kissing him.

  “Too bad. You could use a little encouragement.”

  I forced out a laugh. “Are you talking about yourself? Is that it? Do you need the encouragement?”

  His silence proved it—I had him. I had him good. “I just might,” he said, a second before we reached the others, because he knew there was no way I’d reply to him in front of them. Good thing, too, because I had no idea what to say to that. Suddenly, I forgot all about Sienna, the demons, the ECU, and my mind was stuck on one thing only: Ax wanted to kiss me.

  Twenty-two

  We made it back to Long Island before sunrise. The ride back was even worse than the first, and I suspected it had something to do with the empty bottle of vodka we found Jushko clutching to his chest when we when we went back to him. Who was I to say he was in no condition to fly a plane, when everybody else just hoped on board without question? It was a terrifying three and a half hours, but I was alive and breathing. I’d never take solid ground for granted again.

  The plan was to lay low until the Carnival began at four in the afternoon. Until then, we’d eat, rest, and find a way to get in touch with Elisa. Ask her if Eddie was flipping out, or if Luca and Fallon had reached out to her. If they hadn’t, none of us had any idea how to find them in time.

  Sienna had barely spoken a single word during the flight. She seemed comfortable sitting between me and Ax, not at all bothered by the turbulence or the sudden turns of the plane. I couldn’t stop watching her while she kept her eyes closed, resting her head against the back of the seat. Ax couldn’t, either. It felt like this was the first time I met her and my instincts were telling me that I didn’t know half of what was hiding behind her pretty face.

  We rented two motel rooms in Farmingdale, right behind a Walmart. It was safer than to go back to Manhattan right away and to give the ECU the chance to catch us before we’d made good on our plan. The motel room was decent, the twin beds clean enough. In the absence of Pretters and protective spells—I was beginning to really miss Elisa—we decided to keep guard. Ax, Grover and I, that is.

  Ax went to get us something to eat before he took the first shift, and with a full belly, I crashed on the bed and closed my eyes. I had four hours before guard duty, but those four hours passed before I could even think about sleeping. Funny how, when I wanted to stay awake, the dragon asked no questions. It took me regardless, but when I needed the rest, it refused to knock me out. No adrenaline shots could do to my mind what the anticipation of what was coming did.

  “Are you sure you’re up for it? I’m not tired. I don’t mind hanging out here for a few more hours,” Ax said when I went out in the yard, in front of the dirty pool, to tell him to go get some sleep.

  “I’m fine,” I said with a smile. He wasn’t. His eyes were red from lack of sleep, the bags under them made even bluer than before.

  “If you need me, just shout,” he said, and dragging his feet, he went back to the room he shared with Grover.

  Sienna hadn’t made a single sound, but I doubted she’d slept. What was coming put a lot of responsibility on her shoulders, responsibility she was way too quick to accept, if you asked me. As I walked around the small pool and looked at the windows facing it to check for any sign of danger, my mind went back to that one horrifying thought that kept my heart from beating normally.

  What if, by inviting every witch like us to the Carnival, we’d invited them to their deaths?

  The ECU had devices that could detect our energy, and though logic said that they wouldn’t turn the Carnival into a bloodbath, you could never be sure of how they’d react at the sight of us.

  And the demons…

  All of us together, fifty people in one place—we were going to be the biggest beacon in the history of beacons. Again, logic said they wouldn’t make an appearance in front of the whole world, but that was then. Now, they’d become smarter. They spoke, just like the rest of us.

  Taking a walk outside the motel complex, I saw the Starbucks across the street and my mouth watered. As much as it was tempting, I stuck to my job and made sure nobody suspicious was around. Two hours passed before Ax, Grover and Sienna came out of the rooms and found me standing next to the pool, looking at my reflection in the dirty water. So far, only a few humans had come and left their rooms. We seemed to be under the radar still.

  “We need weapons,” I said when Grover went to get us coffee at the Starbucks. “We need to be prepared for all the possibilities.” Ax had said it himself. Prepare for worse than the worst.

  “When Grover comes back, I’m going to go to reception and ask to use their computer to get in touch with Elisa,” Ax said with a sigh. “But that could be risky.”

  “It’s a risk we have to take. We have to know what’s going on with Eddie. Don’t forget to remind her to tell him that I’ll be back.”

  Ax flinched. “You can’t go back to him, Scarlet.”

  “I can, and I will.” Eddie had made it clear that he was going to kill me if I pushed his hand. I would not turn a man into a murderer by breaking a promise. “Do you have any idea where to get weapons?”

  “Walmart?” he offered. His eyes were still swollen from only a couple hours of sleep, but I tried not to think about how much that added to his sex appeal.

  “What about Mathias?” His godfather had helped us before, and now by paying Jushko for our trip to Iowa in his piece of shit plane.

  But Ax shook his head. “I’ve risked him enough. What about your family?”

  A cold knife right through my heart, his words. “We might have better luck getting Erick Adams to help us,” I said reluctantly.

  “Will magic not be enough?” Sienna asked, making us both turn to her in surprise.

  “We’re going to have to anyway, but the more we use our magic, the easier the demons find us.” I had no idea how much she knew about them, but so far this was the most valuable information about those suckers.

  “But we’ll use as much as needed if we have no other option,” Ax said. “Let’s just hope it won’t come to that.”

  Grover came back with the coffee a few minutes later, Ax went to the reception desk, and Sienna asked us to tell her everything that had happened. The deaths of the witches like us, what the ECU did to us when they had us cuffed to beds, what the demons did. She looked like she could see everything that had happened through our words when we told her, and the tears never stopped slipping from her eyes. It was like she felt the pain of each
and every one of us, and held it all inside her chest.

  When we were done, she asked us to explain to her how…basically our entire world operated. After the heavy conversation, that was a good distraction, and within the first hour, I began to feel the fatigue. The dragon had noticed my lowering heart rate, and it was there to claim me. Before that happened, I excused myself and went to the room. If I was going to pass out, I would rather do it on a bed and give my body a chance to rest.

  The sign we’d designed made much more sense to me than ever now. A storm was really coming and we weren’t nearly as ready as we thought we were.

  ***

  Elisa came through, just like she always did. Ax managed to get in touch with her. They agreed on a meeting place, right after she gave him the best news ever: she’d found a potential place for us to stay after the Carnival.

  There was an old monastery somewhere near North Riverdale. It was a complex made of three separate buildings. There were no pictures online, but Elisa believed there would be enough rooms and beds for everyone to sleep in. The best part? The last monk who took care of the place had died a couple of months ago, and nobody had claimed the property yet. With any luck, we could inhabit it for a few weeks, though Elisa had told Ax that the buildings were in a very poor condition, as nobody had wanted to invest in something so old and secluded from civilization, when there were so many other options out there. But old building, secluded from civilization, was exactly what we needed. Now, if only we could make it out of the Carnival alive…

  The Carnival was going to begin in the Upper East, and move down to Midtown, to end in Geraldine Street, where the paranormal-only celebrations would continue until dawn—which I was pretty sure would be cancelled upon our arrival. The black clouds covering the sky made everything look darker than it should have been. We were squeezed into a human cab, moving closer to Manhattan by the second. There were no weapons on me—other than the dragon—and that kept me on edge. Ax had bought us black shawls to cover ourselves with in case the night wasn’t enough to shield us until we made ourselves known. How were we going to do that? We had no idea.

  “We’ll play it by ear,” Ax said in the cab for probably the twentieth time. He was trying to hide his panic for our sake, but his shaking hands gave it all away. “We just have to get as many people as we can together in one place, and we’ll be fine.”

  “Hey, you’re sweating it, bro. Relax. We’re doing this one way or another,” Grover said, holding his thumbs up from the front seat. He was the only one in our midst that was only excited about what we were doing. I prayed his positivity would rub on me, but so far it hadn’t.

  Sienna said nothing the whole ride. She barely even moved, though she must have been uncomfortable squeezed in the backseat between me and Ax. We’d told her everything we knew about the ECU and the covens and the wolf packs. She probably was categorizing all that information in her mind, and trying to figure out a way to use it.

  “Have you thought about…” I started but my voice trailed off. I felt so uncomfortable speaking to her that way. “Have you thought about what you’re going to say?” The insecurity was killing me. I didn’t want to have to put everyone in danger only to get stuck when the whole world watched us.

  “I have,” Sienna finally said. “I think we’ll be okay.”

  Well, we weren’t. We had no idea how we were even going to transport all those people to the monastery in the first place, but I was tired of being so negative, so I bit my tongue and kept that thought to myself. We’d figure something out, simply because we had to. Necessity is the mother of all inventions, right?

  We’d been on the road for more than an hour when the cab driver stopped. He looked at Grover in the front seat, but he had no idea what to say. That’s when we noticed the traffic. The streets were packed, full of honking cars stuck in place. People were coming out and trying to pick fights, others were shouting through the windows, but nobody was moving a single inch.

  Ahead, we could see the crowd of people around the corner to our left, only barely.

  “They’ve gathered,” Ax whispered and I checked the clock on the cab’s dashboard. 6:57 pm. The time had come.

  “We’ll be fine right here,” Grover said and got out of the cab. Ax threw some bills on the cabdriver’s lap because he’d have no idea how to answer if we asked how much, and we all got out.

  Panic and anxiety made me even more paranoid than usual. The city was as busy as always, but now, I had the feeling that everyone was watching us. That everyone knew who we were, what we were up to, and they were just waiting for us to make a move before shooting us down.

  I followed the others to the sidewalk with my head down and my shawl wrapped tightly around my head and shoulders. Hiding among the crowd was out best bet but my nerves were getting the best of me, my mind screaming at me, you’re not prepared for this!

  Ignoring it was torture, but I managed to drown out the voice by reminding myself that this was not the first stupid thing I’d done, and probably wasn’t going to be the last. We were there to fight for our freedom. We didn’t want to kill or to steal. We didn’t want to be the bad guys. We just wanted what was ours. Karma had to take that into account.

  “Remind me again, how will we know others like us without Luca?” Grover whispered while we walked next to each other, close enough to hold hands. We’d put Sienna between us again because she was the only one who couldn’t use her magic—or hadn’t yet. She was untrained and she’d never had to fight with it before. And we needed her to be our leader, no matter how stupid I still thought putting her in that position was.

  “Look for people who’re hiding,” Ax said. It was the best chance we had—if any of them had actually shown up. Now that I thought of it, I began to look around and to see the signs spray painted on the buildings. Some of them had already been covered, but most were still perfectly visible, in all colors and sizes, nineteen that I could see just in that street. Elisa had done one hell of a job. It made me proud to see those signs and to know what they stood for, and I hoped to God it would have the same effect on others.

  “This is it, guys,” I whispered when we were about to enter the crowd of paranormals on 61st Street. I just needed to say something to try and get myself to breathe deeply. “Whatever happens, don’t separate.”

  “If we end up in the ECU again, I’m going to kill all of you myself,” Grover said, grinning. But we weren’t going to end up in the ECU again. We were going to end up dead if they attacked—it was their new plan.

  Surprise struck me when I finally allowed myself to look around. There were so many people there! The street was completely blocked, not only by them, but by six magnificent white horses attached to two carriages, one of them twice the size but lower than the other. Behind it were two red tour busses with lots of space on the roofs. Another small crowd of people separated the busses from three identical BMWs with the tops down, behind which were the ECU SUVs, too far and too many to count. At first, I didn’t notice the soldiers, because they weren’t among us. They were on the buildings around us, mostly on the roofs, with guns in their hands looking down at all of us, just waiting for the right second to intervene if it came to it. Ice cold chills washed down my back. From up there, they could take us down in seconds and we’d have no way of even knowing when a bullet was coming.

  We tried to elbow our way deeper into the crowd, searching every face that we could see for a sign, but it was impossible. The Carnival still hadn’t begun, all the vehicles and the carriages were still empty, so everyone was stuck in place, waiting. From there, there wasn’t one sad or scared face I saw. Everybody was happy, old and young, even kids sitting on their parents’ shoulders, holding flowers and bags of candy to throw at the humans, together with their calming spells. It was cold outside and though it hadn’t rained yet, it could start at any second.

  “Any luck?” Ax asked, standing on the tips of his toes, straining his neck to get a better view of everyone.
But there must have been at least a few hundred people out there, and there was no way we’d see everyone. Dammit, this wasn’t going to work.

  “We’ll have a better chance if we separate and look in all directions. Two of us on the sidewalks, and two on the streets,” Grover said. That was assuming anybody would move an inch any time soon, to let us through. But they wouldn’t, not yet.

  “Bad idea,” I said to Grover. “If we separate, we might not find each other again.” Very possible, considering the people that were still coming and lining themselves right behind us. Soon, the entire Upper East was going to be blocked.

  My father spoke about the Carnivals he attended both as a kid and as an adult. He’d described them as a magnificent way to give back to the lesser creatures of the world. Stuck up asshole. The only reason he liked it was because he got to feel superior in the process. He got to use magic on humans freely and get away with it because everyone else was doing it, too, and I bet my life that a few other spells made it out into the world, not just calming ones. People with other intentions in mind, especially teenagers who’d just gotten their powers, would never let an opportunity like this get away from them. But I didn’t remember Dad saying anything about this many soldiers. I guessed they’d seen the signs and knew something was going on.

  I wondered if he was there already, together with the rest of my family. I wondered if he could see me…right until I reminded myself that it didn’t matter. What he saw and what he thought of me had no importance.

  To me, nothing at all looked magnificent, even when the lights turned on. There were lots of them, in all shapes and sizes, decorating the busses, the carriages, the cars, and the buildings around. Balloons sprung from almost every window, and the lights made the ECU soldiers hiding in the roofs practically invisible. Freaking great. The people began to cheer and push back.

  “What the—” Ax was cut off by the sudden beat coming from somewhere behind us. Terrified, we jumped around to see where the music was coming from.