Storm Born

by Christine Pope

  But the wind only continued to howl, pulling strands of hair loose from my ponytail so they whipped wildly around my face even though I should have been protected where I was, standing just inside the doorframe. Jake gave a nod, as if he’d expected as much…which seemed to tell me that he knew something about my strange abilities, even though I had no idea how he could have learned such a thing.

  My mother moved closer. “I’m going to call the cops.”

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Agent Lenz responded, his free hand moving toward the gun in its shoulder holster.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I was going to go with him.”

  “What?” she said, even as Jake stared at me in consternation.

  “You don’t need to do that — ” he began.

  “I do,” I broke in. “I don’t know who you are, but this has nothing to do with you.”

  “Actually, it does,” he said. “You just have to trust me on that.”

  “As she said, she agreed to come with me,” Agent Lenz said then. Some rain had made it in through the door and spattered his dark suit jacket and left blotches on his pristine white shirtfront, but he affected not to notice. “Time for you to leave.”

  My mother came up to the door, where the wind caught her carefully styled up-do and pulled loose a few strands, which blew around her face in a flurry of gold. “Let her go.”

  “Mom — ”

  What came next happened so quickly that it was all a blur before my horrified eyes. She laid her hand on Agent Lenz’s arm, and the gun slipped out of its holster as though it had been greased. At the same time, one of the hanging flower pots that decorated the front porch came flying off the nail where it had been suspended, aiming directly for his head. It connected with a crunch. He startled, and the gun went off with a bang that sounded terrifyingly loud in my startled ears.

  I blinked and saw my mother stumble backward, a red stain spreading down the front of the crisp blue uniform dress she wore. At the same time, Agent Lenz let out a curse and staggered, somehow managing to maintain his balance despite the blow he’d just suffered. Before the words had even left his lips, my mother collapsed to the floor, hand to her chest, eyes staring sightlessly up at the ceiling.

  Blood began to spread outward from her limp form, creating a crimson pool on the worn beige carpet.

  So much blood. No one could lose that much blood and live.

  Wind was swirling in the front yard, picking up leaves and scattering them everywhere…but also coalescing into a deadly funnel made of dirt and debris and dead grass. I could barely see for the tears that blurred my eyes, but it seemed that funnel was moving toward the house.

  Another flower pot went flying toward Agent Lenz. He ducked, but the object still smacked the side of his head, this time sending him to the floor, apparently knocked out.

  “We have to go!” Jake shouted at me.

  “My mother!” I screamed back at him.

  He stood there for a second, irresolute, then went and knelt down next to my mother and laid a finger against her blood-spattered throat. Despite the howling of the wind, everything seemed to go horribly quiet as his dark eyes met mine. In his gaze, I saw sorrow, coupled with a terrible urgency.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, the words barely audible above the commotion of the unnatural storm shredding the front yard, and yet they still sounded a knell in my aching heart. He sent a quick glance at Agent Lenz, who was already beginning to stir, one hand feebly moving toward the visible swelling at his temple. “And we have to get away from here. Unless you really do want to go with him.”

  With the man who had just killed my mother? The words swirled around in my brain, not quite making sense. Or maybe it was that I didn’t want to acknowledge what had just happened, that if I could prevent the horrible reality from penetrating my brain, I might be able to go back to a time a few minutes earlier…to a time when my mother was still alive.

  “No,” I said dully. “I don’t want to go with him.”

  “Then come with me,” Jake said, and extended a hand.

  For a few seconds, I could only stare at his outstretched fingers, wondering what I should do.

  Then realization flared.

  Jake’s hand was a lifeline…and I needed to take it.

  I reached for him, felt his fingers clasp mine. And then we were running, dodging the angry, whirling tornado in the front yard as we headed for a big shiny black truck that was parked at the curb. He let go so I could climb in, and I did, then leaned my head against the seat back and felt my eyes begin to burn.

  We pulled away, the truck leaping forward with an angry growl. I tilted my head toward the window, saw the tornado descend on the house, shredding the porch, tearing through the clapboard siding like tissue paper.

  I couldn’t see anything after that, because I was crying too hard.

  4

  Jake had remained silent while he piloted the Gladiator through Kanab’s quiet streets as quickly as he could without attracting any attention from the local cops. His heart ached for the woman who sat in the passenger seat, but even though she’d stopped sobbing just as they reached the town limits, her head was still slumped, and he had a feeling that anything he said would have been horribly, woefully inadequate.

  So he stayed quiet, even as his mind buzzed.

  Who the hell had that guy been? A government agent, but where had he come from? Had Adara’s latest display of weather magic drawn him to Kanab, just as it had drawn Jake himself there?

  Probably, but he knew the questions would have to wait. For the moment, the most important thing was to get as far away from Kanab as possible. He didn’t know how anyone could have survived the whirling maelstrom that descended on the modest one-story house where Adara had been living with her mother, but on the off chance that the mysterious government agent had somehow survived the collapse, Jake figured it was better to head in the opposite direction than he’d planned.

  Which was why they were now traveling southbound on Highway 89 so he could pick up the westbound 389. From there, they’d wend their way through far northern Arizona before going back up into Utah in order to pick up Interstate 15. Then they could take the interstate down into Nevada and, with any luck, lose themselves in Las Vegas.

  That was the plan, anyway. Jake had formulated the contingency just in case anything went sideways and he needed to be sure he couldn’t be tracked back to Flagstaff and Wilcox territory.

  And man, had things gone sideways.

  He hadn’t thought the agent would reach for his gun. Jake had only intended to send one of the flowerpots flying at the man to knock him off balance so he’d let go of Adara. But even though the flowerpot had done exactly what Jake had meant for it to do — his talent allowed him to move much larger objects than a simple clay pot, and so he’d figured the scheme should be effective — what he hadn’t figured on was the agent’s finger reflexively pulling the trigger and firing the fatal shot.

  It had been almost like something out of movie, but the scene had been horribly, horribly real, so real that he knew it would be burned into his brain until the day he died.

  And now Adara was alone in the world.

  No, Jake told himself then. She’s not alone. She has her clan, even if she doesn’t know about us yet.

  “Where are we going?” she asked then, her voice clear and cool, almost painfully precise, as if she needed to exercise what control she could on something — anything — in her life.

  “Las Vegas,” he said. “It seemed safer to take the long way home.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Flagstaff.”

  That reply seemed to stir some life into her eyes. They were reddened with weeping, but he remembered what they had looked like when he first saw her step out on the porch, green-gray, with endless shifting depths, like moss agate. He knew he’d seen eyes like that before, but at the moment, he couldn’t compel his racing brain to remember where.

 
“Who are you?” she asked, and he let out a breath.

  “Jake Wilcox. I’m a friend.”

  That reply made her sit up a little straighter. Voice wondering, she asked, “Are you related to me?”

  Startled, Jake glanced away from the road to see Adara staring at him with something like astonished speculation in her expression. Once again, he got the feeling she was doing her best to focus on anything except the terrible scene they’d left behind them.

  “I don’t know,” he allowed. After all, there was a very good chance she came from some other witch clan. She’d been born in Columbus, Ohio, which was a very long way from northern Arizona. “Why would you ask that?”

  Her fingers, slender and pale, knotted in her lap. “Because my father’s last name was Wilcox. Or at least, my — my mother told me it was. And she met him in Flagstaff.”

  Jake hadn’t missed the slight hiccup as Adara stumbled over that mention of her mother, but he supposed it was good that she’d been able to utter the word at all. At the same time, a rush of triumph surged through him, tempered as it was by the loss he knew she had just suffered. “Then yes, we’re probably related somehow,” he said carefully. “Can you tell me anything else about your father?”

  A long hesitation, during which she sent him a considering glance. Damn. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so quick to press her for more information. What if she decided to stonewall him?

  Then you let it go for now and ask again later, he told himself. The woman just saw her mother gunned down in front of her.

  To his surprise, however, Adara spoke then.

  “I don’t know much,” she said. One hand lifted to push a lock of heavy brown hair away from her face. “My mother met the man she said was my father in a bar in downtown Flagstaff. He told her he was a widower with two boys.”

  At hearing those words, Jake felt his heart give a weird thump. As a general rule, witches and warlocks didn’t lose their spouses at relatively young ages, which meant there couldn’t have been too many warlocks who matched the description Adara had just given him. Yes, he supposed that the man Adara’s mother had met all those years ago had lied to cover up his philandering, but again, witches and warlocks were generally faithful and didn’t go looking for relationships outside their marriages.

  “His name?” he asked, hoping his voice didn’t sound too strained.

  “Jackson,” she replied. “Jackson Wilcox. Do you know him?”

  Jake’s fingers clenched on the steering wheel. The woman had just lost her mother, and now he was supposed to tell her that her father had been dead for more than twenty years?

  At the same time, his brain was working feverishly, trying to make sense of what she’d just said. How was it even possible that Jackson Wilcox, Connor’s father, had been able to father another child, and a daughter at that? The curse that had ruled the primuses of the Wilcox clan for more than a hundred years until Connor and Angela finally broke it several years ago had stipulated that the men of Jeremiah Wilcox’s line would only have one son, and that they would never be able to know happiness in their marriages. Then again, Connor himself had been a mystery, a child who shouldn’t even have been born, and therefore maybe it wasn’t so strange that Jackson had somehow managed to father a third child.

  Well, that particular conundrum was for greater minds than his to puzzle out. At the moment, the most important thing was to make sure he kept Adara far away from anyone who wanted to use her powers for ill. She was even more important than he’d thought.

  Since she was staring at him, obviously expecting a reply, Jake said, “Jackson Wilcox passed away when I was just a kid. I’m really sorry.”

  “So I am alone,” she responded in a murmur he guessed she hadn’t intended him to overhear.

  “Not completely,” he said quickly, wanting to offer her whatever good news he could think of. “You have a half-brother — Connor Wilcox. And he and his wife Angela have three children. That doesn’t include all the rest of us Wilcoxes, either.”

  Adara’s eyes widened. “I’m an aunt?”

  “Yes. Ian and Emily are seven — they’re twins. And Miranda is three.”

  “Wow.” Adara was quiet for a moment, apparently absorbing that information. When she spoke again, her tone was musing. “And we’re…cousins?”

  “Distant cousins — our great-great-whatever grandfathers were brothers, but that’s seven generations back.”

  “You said ‘the rest of us Wilcoxes.’ How many are there?”

  Good question. It was his cousin Marie’s job to keep track of all the Wilcox family members, to keep an eye on all the various lineages to make sure cousins who didn’t have at least three degrees of separation were carefully kept away from each other. Connor also had access to that database, but he seemed content to let Marie manage that side of things. “Around five hundred or so, mostly in Flagstaff, but we’ve got branches of the family ranging across northern Arizona, from Williams out to Winslow and into Holbrook.”

  “Five hundred?” Now Adara sounded vaguely aghast.

  Jake supposed it would have to be something of a shock to think you were completely alone in the world, only to discover you had so many relatives — distant or not — that it would be almost impossible to keep up with all of them. “Give or take. We Wilcoxes have lived in the area since the late 1870s, so we’ve had plenty of time to be fruitful and multiply…so to speak.”

  She took in this piece of information without comment and fell silent again, gaze fixed on the desert flashing by outside the windows of his Jeep pickup. Although he’d been thrilled to buy the vehicle, wanting to put it through its paces on the rough 4x4 trails in the forests that surrounded his hometown, now he found himself thinking it might have been smarter to buy something a little less flashy…and rare. The Gladiator had only recently come to market, and there weren’t many of them in Arizona, let alone out in the hinterlands where he planned to travel. The silver Toyota Tundra pickup he’d traded in to buy the Gladiator would have been far less conspicuous.

  “We shouldn’t have left like that,” Adara said then, gaze still apparently fastened on the rocky landscape moving past them at a brisk seventy-five miles per hour. “I should have stayed and called the police.”

  “And been there when Agent Whoever woke up?”

  “Lenz. Agent Lenz.” Her lower lip wavered for a moment, but then she pulled in a breath and blinked, hard, as if doing her best to make sure she wouldn’t begin crying again. “Just because he’s a government agent doesn’t mean he’s above the law.”

  Jake didn’t bother to tell her she was being naïve. It would be good to think that this Agent Lenz might face some sort of punishment for what he’d done, but people like that very rarely were forced to deal with the consequences of their actions. If he’d been in Kanab to fetch Adara, then that probably meant he worked for some anonymous agency which operated by its own rules. Far more likely, he would claim self-defense — even though Adara’s mother hadn’t been armed — and walk away from any investigation by the local police.

  No, Jake figured the best possible outcome was that Lenz had still been unconscious when the tornado Adara had called descended on the house and tore it to shreds. That seemed like a nice, biblical piece of justice, and probably about the most they could hope for.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “That wasn’t — that wasn’t supposed to happen. I was supposed to go there and see you, tell you who you really were, who your family was…and then hope you’d come with me back to Flagstaff.”

  “Why would I leave everything I knew to go to Flagstaff with you?”

  Good question. On the surface, he supposed that it would seem strange for him to expect her to drop everything and take off with a man she didn’t even know.

  “Because of who you are,” he said.

  Her fingers clenched around themselves again. Blue glinted on her right hand, and he realized she was wearing a silver band set with turquoise stones on her middle
finger. “Who am I…really?”

  The highway around them was empty and straight, and so Jake figured it was safe enough to glance over and hold her gaze as he delivered the news. “You’re a witch from the Wilcox clan. Your father Jackson was the clan’s primus, or leader. That’s probably why your gift is so insanely strong.”

  For a second or two, she didn’t respond, only stared at him as if she wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly. Then one corner of her mouth twisted, and she shook her head. “Okay, seriously…witches? This is no time for jokes.”

  No, it wasn’t, but he hadn’t been joking. “It’s the truth,” he said, then returned his attention to the road. “I know this may be hard to believe, but there are witch clans like the Wilcoxes all over the world. Maybe not as big and prosperous as ours, but witches and warlocks are real. We each have our particular talent, a gift that usually starts to appear when we’re ten or eleven.”

  That revelation seemed to surprise her, or maybe it was simply that he’d explained something she’d been wondering about for years. Even as her eyes widened again, she gave the faintest of nods, as if acknowledging something to herself. “Why can’t I control it, then, if it’s something that just naturally happens to us witches?”

  “You didn’t have anyone to show you the ropes, so to speak,” Jake replied. “I mean, yes, our powers develop naturally enough, but we still need someone to help us learn how to work with them, to figure out their parameters.”

  She tilted her head at him. “And yours — your power is telekinesis? You threw those flowerpots at Agent Lenz?”

  “I was hoping to distract him. I didn’t mean — that is, I would never have done it if I’d thought he would — ”

  “It’s all right,” Adara cut in. Her mouth tightened, and she shook her head, as though correcting herself. “I mean, no, it’s not all right, but it’s not your fault. Agent Lenz shouldn’t have been waving his gun around a bunch of unarmed civilians.”

  Despite the seriousness of the situation — the horrors they’d left behind them — Jake couldn’t quite keep his lips from twitching in an unwilling smile at her choice of words. She must have caught the shift in expression, because she frowned at him, her next words positively icy.