As I’d hoped, the floating storm went for the power line. It moved carefully through the trees, avoiding branches when it could, setting them alight when it couldn’t go around them. It reached the top of the pole and began to draw power slowly, sipping instead of gulping. Blue arcs flashed out of the top of the pole to the predator.
At the edge of the cliff, the muddy ground beneath me shifted. I fell, sliding with the mud down the slope. I had a sudden image of myself lying at the base of the cliff with a broken back while the predator moved toward me.
I managed to grab hold of a cluster of woody brush and stop my slide. I struggled to my knees, but the angle of the slope was too steep for me to hold myself in place, so I let go and stretched out flat. I slid slowly down the hill, finding one foothold after another in tree roots, trunks, and clumps of bushes. There were a couple of sketchy moments, but I survived.
At the bottom of the hill, I scrambled to my feet. The wind was gentle, but it still chilled me. Maybe Catherine was right, but I left my shirt on. I didn’t like throwing away resources.
I crossed under the power line. The predator was still up there at the top of the cliff, still feeding. It had apparently learned that it could trip the breaker by feeding too fast. I didn’t like that. I wanted it to be like a shark —dangerous but basically stupid. The smarter it was, the harder it would be to kill.
It looked like it was growing larger. Would it stop hunting me if it fed enough from the power pole? I didn’t know what to do, so I jumped up and down and swung my arms, trying to keep my muscles warm for the next leg of the chase. All I was sure of was that I was giving Catherine extra time to prepare.
Then I imagined the predator growing large enough to split in two like a dividing cell. That thought scared the hell out of me.
Five quick cuts with the ghost knife on the nearest power pole made it topple—away from me, thank God—and snapped the power line. The blue arcs stopped popping under the predator. Dinner was over.
The floating storm didn’t move for a couple of seconds. It bobbed up and down as if it was trying to puzzle out why the juice had stopped. I picked up a rotten hunk of branch and threw it.
The predator was too far away for me to hit it. The branch landed in the bushes near the base of the electric pole, and a sudden crack of red lightning blasted the ground at that spot. The sound startled and frightened me, and clumps of dirt and burning wood chips showered down over me.
The floating storm started in my direction. I turned and ran like hell toward the tree farm. The chase was back on.
CHAPTER SIX
There were no trees here, and the landscape between me and the tree farm was a wall of bramble and bush. I sprinted around the edges, hopping over downed trees in some places and pushing blindly through tall grass in others. My shadow began to shorten. Then I hit a rocky little stream and ran along it, picking up speed. I knew it was stupid to have my feet in water, but it was the only place I could run.
The stream disappeared into a drainage pipe. I scrambled up a dirt slope and ran straight into a chain-link fence.
With my ghost knife, I cut a hole in the chain link and pushed through. My shadow was short—too short. Behind me the creature was humming like a transformer, and I expected to feel lightning any moment. I sprinted out into the neat rows of trees. Flat ground. Hallelujah.
The old man had ordered the predator to patrol within the iron fence, but the chain link was made of steel. Obviously, he didn’t know that the black iron fence along the road didn’t ring the property. Or he didn’t care. I had a moment’s hope that the floating storm would turn back at the fence anyway, but that didn’t happen. Damn. I kept running.
The trees themselves were just over two feet tall and offered no cover at all. I was glad. I needed to see.
My shadow slowly stretched out before me. I saw a small cluster of buildings way off to my right and angled toward them. There was a figure waving a long cloth back and forth over its head. Catherine.
I tried to put on extra speed, but I didn’t have it. I didn’t look back at the predator. I didn’t need to. I could feel it back there like a high-tension wire, and I was flagging.
There were three buildings: One was a yellow farmhouse well off to the left. The others were a pair of big wooden barns, both painted red.
Catherine stopped waving her jacket at me, backed toward the red buildings, and ducked between them, making sure I’d seen where she’d gone. I was not far behind her.
“Through here!” Her voice came from the darkened doorway on the right. I staggered toward it just as the shadow of the other building swept over me. The floating storm was close behind.
I rushed into the darkness, barking my shin against something low and wooden. I tumbled onto my face, and the pain in my leg made me curse a blue streak. Something wet sloshed onto my leg.
The ground was packed earth and smelled of pine needles. I scrambled away from the doorway until I struck my head against something metal.
The barn lit up with a flickering electric red light.
I turned around. The floating storm had followed me to the doorway but had stopped at the entrance. It bobbed up and down, as though it didn’t want to enter an enclosed space.
I glanced around, trying to see what Catherine had planned aside from the water-filled trough across the entrance, but the predator was too bright. I couldn’t see into the shadows cast by the doorway.
I had not been this close to the floating storm before. It seemed to be swirling and churning from inside, like a sped-up lava lamp. The outside was a bluish-white cloud of brilliant light, but in the spaces where the swirling gases were thin or parted from one another, I could see a dark red color that swirled like blood in oil. In the center of that was a white-hot fire.
I laid my hand on an old, rusting truck. Would grounding myself lure it inside? Apparently not. To my left I saw a small pile of wooden disks. I grabbed one. It had been cut from the base of a pine trunk and was still sticky. I threw it at the floating storm like a discus. It struck almost dead center, but nothing came out the other side but a little burp of flames. So much for using my ghost knife.
