Total Eclipse

The storm had already noticed her. And it was going to get very interested now.

Everybody piled into the car, and I found the keys and started up the Boss. His engine caught with a fierce grumble, and I threw it into reverse as another lightning bolt slammed home, this one torching a tree near the corner of the parking lot. Combined with the still-burning telephone pole, the place was starting to look like it needed to be renamed the Disaster Drive-In.

“Sorry,” I whispered, and peeled out of the parking lot. Once I hit road speed, I began to really start liking Cherise’s shield, even if it was an energy suck monster. It was like driving under a mobile bridge, and it kept the rain from hammering the windshield, which was excellent. I opened up the Boss as we gained the access road for the freeway. When we reached the top of the ramp, I glanced over and saw three stabs of white-hot light smash down from the boiling clouds into the roof of the motel.

The trees weren’t the only thing on fire anymore, and now there were innocent lives at risk—not just ours. The roof was burning, and it was possible that even with the rain, it would spread. The tree and telephone pole weren’t showing any signs of going out.

“Kevin,” I said. “Get that fire out.”

“The rain will take care of it. I don’t need to—”

“Did you hear me ask? Because I’m pretty sure I put it as an order, not a request for your opinion. Just do it. Now, Kevin!”

Kevin shut up and looked toward the burning roof. Seconds later, it snuffed itself out. He ended the blazes on the telephone pole and tree for good measure. Show-off. “Anything else, boss?”

“Yeah. Be quiet.”

He shot me the finger, which did not shock me, and slumped back in his seat with a mutinous, pouty expression. Still not out of his teen angst, I saw. Or maybe he’d just grow up to be a pouty, petulant man. Yeah, that was going to be attractive.

I took a deep breath and looked over at David. “Are you okay? Not burned?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “He put it out before it did any damage.”

I made sure I had the Boss aimed straight and steady on the nearly empty rain-slick highway, and focused on the blurring lane markers for a while. Finally, I said, “Cherise, I need you to think how it felt when you put up the shield. What made you do it?”

“Um . . . I guess . . . I was getting wet. I didn’t like it.”

“Okay. Are you getting wet now?”

“Obviously not . . . Oh. Right. Okay. But I’m still wet. And kind of cold.”

I turned up the heater and directed the blast toward the back, although I was cold and shivering, too. “Once your body is convinced you don’t need it, you’ll be able to let go,” I said. “Your instincts are controlling your power, and that’s a very bad thing, Cher.” The other bad thing, although I didn’t dare say it, was that in my experience, regular people weren’t Wardens for a reason. There were changes in body chemistry in Wardens: different nerve conduction times, subtle differences that allowed us to handle and channel the kinds of power that would destroy —sooner or later—non-Wardens who tried to handle the same forces.

I didn’t know whether the transfer of powers from me to Cherise—if that was what had happened—had also given her an upgrade on the physical side. If it hadn’t, it was like putting jet fuel in a car’s gas tank. It would run for only a short time before it exploded under the stress.

I needed her to back off from using them until a specialist, an Earth Warden with real knowledge, could get a look at what was happening inside of her. But if she allowed instinct to dictate how those powers were used, we were all in serious trouble, and there was no way she’d be able to control any of it. I didn’t feel much like Yoda, but I’d have to do as a mentor.

“There is no ‘try,’ ” I said, and then swallowed a laugh. “Okay, how is it now?”

“Better,” Cherise said. “I feel better. Not as cold.”

And sure enough, overhead, the shield holding the rain off us cut in and out for a few seconds, then collapsed completely. Instant white noise, from the rain pounding on the Boss’s metal, and I engaged the wipers on full. No trouble seeing the road ahead, even with the torrential downpour. . . . Lightning was a constant event, strobing everything into horror- movie shadows and glares. “Good,” I said, and put warm approval into my voice, even though I was freezing, still. “Good work, Cher. Did you feel it when it let go?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“All right, here’s your first test. Try putting the shield back up again.”

It took about thirty seconds, but she reestablished a flickering, uncertain rain shield above the car, then, at my direction, let it go. We did that three times, until she could put up and take down the shield on command. “Good,” I said. “Now you’re controlling it; it’s not controlling you. You feel that pulse of power that comes when you call? If you feel it coming when you didn’t mean to call it, stop it. You know how. It’s the same way you dropped the shield.”

As teaching went, this was desperately inadequate. She ought to be sitting safely in a secured facility, hooked up to biofeedback equipment, getting instruction from a qualified Earth Warden who could walk her through things properly. But this was the Warden equivalent of first aid to the injured. . . . I just needed to get her stable for now. That meant teaching her whatever I could, as quickly as I could, while limiting her use of powers to the smallest expenditures possible.

It also meant outrunning this storm.

I opened up the Mustang and let him fly, and oh man, could he fly. The road vibration that was noticeable at lower speeds vanished as he hit his stride, and then it settled into a power glide so smooth it was like levitating as the speed needle hit a hundred.

This was dangerous. It wasn’t that I hadn’t driven this fast, under these conditions, before; I’d even done it while splitting my attention between controlling external supernatural forces and the road. But now I felt acutely human, powerless, and exposed. David couldn’t cover me. Cherise was now as much of a hindrance as a help, and Kevin—God only knew what Kevin could do, other than blow things up. Which he would do with great enthusiasm, of course. That wasn’t always a downside. . . .

“Something’s happening,” Cherise said suddenly. There was suppressed panic in her voice, and when I looked in the rearview mirror I saw that her eyes had gone wide, her face tight with fear. “I feel—it’s like a spike, in my head, this feeling—something’s looking at me. . . .”

I knew that feeling. It was the storm, and it had found her. We were about to be targeted.

“Easy,” I said, in my most calm and soothing voice. I gripped the steering wheel tightly to keep my hands from shaking. “That’s okay, that’s normal, all right? Take a deep breath. I need you to close your eyes now, and tell me what you see.”

“What I see? With my eyes closed?” She laughed wildly. “I can tell you that right now. Black!”

“Just do it, Cher.”

“Bitch, you are on my last nerve right now.”

“I know. Just do it.”

She shut her feverish, terrified eyes, and said, “Okay, happy now? It’s dark. And—” Her words fell away into a sudden silence, and then she said, “Oh,” in an entirely different voice. “What the hell is that?”

“Oversight,” I said. “It’s sort of the heads-up display version of going up into the aetheric, the energy realm. In the beginning you have to close your eyes to see it so you can concentrate. What do you see?”

“Uh . . . colors? Lots of colors. It’s a trippy lava-lamp groove thing up in here. Which is cool, I guess.” She was back on firmer ground now, and I could hear the relief in her voice. “What am I looking at?”

“Remember those Doppler radar maps we used back at the TV station?” I asked, and that helped steady her, too: the reference to our time together working at that low-rent local station as your stereotypical weather girls. Not that we hadn’t gotten our own back on that one. “The neon-colored ones?”

“Oh yeah. Those things. So this is the storm I’m seeing.”

“You’re seeing the energy flows. I need you to tell me where it looks worst.”

“Worst how, exactly?”

“You’ll feel it.” I couldn’t explain it any better than that; I wasn’t sure that how I’d perceive it would be a guide to how she would be able to process the information.