Storm Born Page 2

  I didn’t look much like her. Maybe there was some shared resemblance in the shape of my mouth or nose, but I had brown hair and eyes that couldn’t decide whether they were gray or green. Probably, I took after my father, but since I didn’t know much about him, I didn’t have any facts to go on, only gut instinct.

  However, that wasn’t because my mother had ever deliberately hidden things from me. No, she’d always been pretty blunt about how, twenty-five years earlier, she’d decided to go on an extended skiing trip with a college friend, starting out in Aspen with a layover in Flagstaff before heading toward their final destination in Tahoe.

  Except they never made it to Tahoe. Their second day in Flagstaff, my mom’s friend fell and broke her leg, and my mother had been left to amuse herself while Daphne was stuck in traction at the hospital. During that time, my mother had met the man who became my father in a bar in Flagstaff’s historic downtown district. They’d spent two nights together, and then Daphne was released from the hospital and the two girls left, returning home to Westerville, Ohio, which was home.

  Daphne’s leg healed up…and then my mother discovered she was pregnant. My grandparents — whom I’d never met — were prominent members of the community and their Baptist church, and basically threw her out of the house. Because she’d been working part-time as a waitress in addition to going to school, she stuck with waitressing to provide for herself, working up until pretty much the moment I entered this world. That kind of life would have worn down a lot of women, but my mother still looked fresh and pretty and like the sort of country-club PTA mom she might have been if she’d finished college and gotten married to a doctor or lawyer, then gone on to have a picture-perfect family.

  I never asked her why she didn’t get married. There had been a few men over the years, but none of those relationships seemed to last very long. And then once I turned ten and the trouble started, there really wasn’t anyone at all.

  “If I just stare at it and don’t open it, then it still has the possibility of being one thing or another,” I said. “But as soon as I see what’s inside, then it’s all over.”

  Her neatly plucked brows drew together as she appeared to puzzle over that remark. My mother was a smart woman, and more capable than she probably had ever thought she would need to be, but I had a feeling she didn’t know much about the Schrödinger’s cat paradox or quantum mechanics. Not that I pretended to really understand them, either.

  “You know what happens,” I went on, my tone lowering. “When I get upset, I mean.”

  At once, her lips pressed together. We’d had this discussion before, but things had been quiet for a while, and I had a feeling she was doing her best to tell herself that the worst was over, that the storms in our past were no indicator for what the future might hold.

  “You don’t know that for sure, honey,” she replied reasonably. “Actually, you don’t really know that at all. It’s just been…coincidence. Bad luck.”

  I didn’t reply, only turned the letter over in my hands again. Maybe she was right. After all, it was pretty far-fetched to think that every time something went horribly wrong in my life, the weather turned absolutely foul, but if it was all coincidence, then I was batting nearly a thousand. When we were living near Durango, Colorado, I fell off a tree swing on my tenth birthday and broke my arm. At the same time, a small tornado had appeared out of nowhere and flattened a barn on the outskirts of town. Neither of us had thought anything of it, except that it seemed pretty weird for a tornado to set down in such hilly country. That had been the opinion of the locals, too — none of them could recall such a phenomenon ever occurring there before. It had been so out of the ordinary that the National Weather Service had dispatched a team to investigate. The damage was extensive enough for them to declare that yes, it had been an F-1 tornado, but even they couldn’t explain why it had appeared there, of all places.

  Strange, but it wasn’t until one of the boys at school pushed me down on purpose during a rough game of dodgeball and an enormous thundercloud appeared directly over the school, sending a bolt of lightning down which nearly struck the little bastard, that I began to wonder if something very odd was happening to me. But when I told my mother what had occurred, she’d only shaken her head and said my imagination was playing with me, and of course, it was just a coincidence.

  As were all the other “coincidences” that followed. Part of the reason why we’d moved so much over the past fourteen years was that it only took a couple of those bizarre occurrences for people to start to stare at us darkly and grumble about how those things had only begun happening after we’d shown up in town. After a while, though, my mother and I didn’t even bother to discuss what was going on — she’d shut me down enough that by the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I realized she didn’t want to acknowledge that there was something very strange going on with me. The excuses always were that she’d heard she could make more money in such-and-such a place, or that the manager in her latest job was way too handsy and she didn’t dare report him. Just whatever it took to get us away to a new town where we could start over and pretend that the trail of calamity which appeared to follow our little family was nothing more than simple bad luck.

  I turned the envelope over once again. “We’ve had a lot of it, then.”

  “Not since we moved here,” she pointed out, and I didn’t quite sigh.

  She was right about that. We were outsiders in Kanab, but we’d been welcomed all the same. I’d been patching together my studies as best I could, taking classes here and there, managing to get an associate of arts degree eventually. When we settled in Utah, I applied for financial aid at Utah State University and got it, and had a completely uneventful junior year there, despite the constant undercurrent of worry that something was going to set me off and a tornado would descend and destroy half the pretty little town that was our new home.

  Nothing like that had happened, though. People were friendly, but I also got the vibe — especially from the guys — that since I wasn’t Mormon, I wasn’t going to get asked out on dates, and I wasn’t going to be a part of the local social life. Which was fine by me. It seemed safer to hold myself apart. In a way, being an outsider was all I really knew, since I’d spent my whole life having it be only my mother and me, no father, no grandparents…just the two of us drifting from place to place in a desperate attempt to find somewhere that could be home.

  In Kanab, I thought we might have finally found that home, and I didn’t want to screw it up.

  “Anyway,” my mother went on, “even if you don’t get financial aid for this semester, it’s not the end of the world. You can work and save up, and maybe get a loan — ”

  “No loans,” I said. I’d heard enough horror stories about people graduating with mountains of debt that I would rather have not gotten a degree at all than be saddled with such a burden just as I was starting out in the world. “But you’re right…if I’m not in school, I can work full-time for a while. That way, I can just pay for my final year outright and not have to worry about student aid.”

  My mother nodded, looking relieved that I was being so reasonable…but also a little sad, as if she wished she had the kind of money where paying for my college wouldn’t even be an issue. It wasn’t her fault, though; she’d done her best, and probably far better than most people would have expected her to.

  I never asked why she’d never gone to my father and asked for child support. Maybe she was too proud, or maybe she thought he wouldn’t give it to her, and so it wasn’t worth the time and effort. However, that didn’t make much sense, since the little bit she’d told me about him made it sound as if he had a lot of money. He’d driven a Mercedes and had gotten an expensive hotel room for their trysts, although he apparently had a big fancy house. But he had two boys at home — “he was a widower,” my mother always hastened to add, as if she needed to make sure I knew she hadn’t been sleeping with a married man — and hadn’t wanted to try explaining her t
o them. An older man, but supposedly very handsome, with near-black hair and piercing dark eyes.

  Maybe she’d avoided asking for child support because she feared my biological father might try to take me from her.

  “Whatever you want to do, sweetheart,” my mother said then. “Just know that I support you — just like I support you going out there and taking the world by fire once you do have your degree.”

  Somehow, I kind of doubted I was going to set the world on fire with a bachelor’s degree in business administration, but her confidence in me warmed my heart anyway. I wanted to make her proud, even as I secretly feared that I’d been nothing but trouble for her from the day I was born.

  “I won’t leave you, Mom,” I said, and she just gave me a sad, knowing smile.

  “That’s what kids always tell their parents,” she replied. “But I don’t expect you to stay in Kanab your whole life. There isn’t much here.”

  “It’s a cute town,” I said, feeling a need to defend the place, even though I knew she was right.

  “There are a lot of cute towns in the world. And big cities. I hope you get to travel the world, see all the places I never got to see.” Her expression was wistful, and I secretly vowed to do what I could about making that particular dream come true. Honestly, we’d moved around so much that I was all right with the idea of sticking to one place, once I knew it was the place, but there was no reason why I couldn’t one day buy my mother a trip to Paris, or a cruise to Mexico, or a sightseeing tour in Egypt.

  Well, except all those kinds of expeditions cost a lot of money, and I’d never made anything more than minimum wage plus tips. That was all right, though. My mother had taught me a lot of things, and how to save money on a shoestring budget was one of them.

  “Maybe,” I allowed, not wanting to promise more than that. I knew if I told her that I’d rather pay to send her on the vacation she’d never had, she’d protest and say I didn’t need to be so extravagant, that she’d rather see me take the vacation instead. “First, I need to graduate, though. And so….”

  I turned the letter over one more time, then forced in a breath and told myself to just do it. After all, even though the past year or so had been a placid one, that didn’t mean I hadn’t had my share of minor upsets. A grabby customer — some jackass tourist who thought he’d cop a feel and instead got a plate of fries dumped in his lap — a car that wouldn’t start because the battery had died — a jerk professor who’d taken half a grade off one of my papers because I hadn’t used the correct font — all those aggravations had come and gone without a single crack of thunder, not one lightning bolt out of a clear blue sky. Maybe whatever it was that had afflicted me from the time I’d turned ten was now going away, like some kind of weird allergy that eventually disappeared as I got older.

  Well, a girl could hope, anyway.

  Jaw set, I slid my finger under the flap of the envelope, then drew out the folded piece of paper inside.

  My eyes didn’t scan any further than, We regret to inform you that….

  I didn’t need to read anything else.

  Overhead, thunder growled. My mother startled and stared at me, giving the slightest shake of her head, as if some part of her realized the thunder and my upset were connected, despite her protestations to the contrary. “What is it, Addie?”

  “They denied my financial aid,” I said, my voice toneless and bleak. “Want to read it?”

  She didn’t reply, only reached for the piece of paper I held. Another wince as thunder rumbled again, echoing off the sandstone rock formations that surrounded the town. The day had been bright and blue, relentlessly sunny as only June in the Southwest could be, with at least a month before the monsoon rains returned and brought much-needed — and beloved — moisture to the area. But the light coming in through my bedroom window was darkening rapidly, and I didn’t need to look outside to know clouds were converging on Kanab, turning day into night.

  Somehow, I could feel those clouds, knew they were racing across the skies, converging on one central point like iron filings being drawn to a magnet.

  Stop it, I thought, closing my eyes and trying vainly — once again — to prevent what I had unwittingly begun.

  As if in mockery of my inner plea, thunder cracked again, this time so loud and so close, I winced in pain at the noise, could feel the hair on the back of my neck lifting in response to the charged air.

  “Adara,” my mother said then, using my given name, as if she thought that might shock me into making the whole thing go away. “You need to stop it.”

  So much for coincidence. She knew those phenomena were connected to me, even if she didn’t want to admit such a thing out loud.

  I didn’t tell her I’d tried and failed utterly. No, I only gave her a very small nod and then breathed in again, telling myself I needed to be calm. Everything was going to be okay. Thousands and thousands of kids in worse situations than mine somehow managed to get through school without financial aid. It wasn’t the end of the world. There was absolutely no reason for me to be overreacting like this.

  Unfortunately, those calm, measured inner words didn’t seem to change much of anything. Outside, lightning crackled, and the air stank of ozone. My mother cried out in alarm, and I jumped off the bed and looked outside. The bolt had struck one of the cottonwood trees on the property, and the poor thing was now ablaze, flames racing along its branches.

  “Call the fire department!” I yelled at her, and she hurried away, white-faced, following my orders as if I were the parent and she the child.

  Rain, I thought then. Please, just rain. Put out the fire. Save my tree.

  All right, it wasn’t my tree exactly, since the house was a rental, but I didn’t want the poor thing to perish just because I’d had a flare of panic and anger and had somehow made the very heavens respond to my emotions.

  And the storm-black skies opened up, and the rain came down in a deluge, drowning the fire, causing the yard to run wet with little rivers of moisture, pounding down on my mother’s old Subaru where it was parked in the driveway. I watched the blessed rain, watched it obliterate the fire, saw with relief how only one limb had burned and the rest of the tree seemed to be all right.

  Somehow, I’d brought the rain as well, and done what I could to repair the damage I’d caused.

  I just couldn’t begin to understand how.

  2

  “We’ve had a ping, sir,” one of the analysts told Agent Randall Lenz.

  He immediately set down the tablet that held the report he’d been skimming and walked over to the analyst’s workstation. Not quickly, because he wanted to make sure he always looked in control no matter what the situation, but inside, he couldn’t quite repress a twinge of excitement. The search had been very quiet lately, and he’d begun to wonder if he was going to get called in front of his superiors to once again justify his budget, even though he believed it had more than paid for itself with the subjects he’d collected over the past few years. Unfortunately, most government agencies seemed to operate on the principle of “what have you done for me lately?”, making Lenz even more eager to obtain a new candidate to add to the group already housed here at the facility.

  The division he worked for had a purposely vague title. Technically, he and his support staff operated under the umbrella of Homeland Security, but their mission had very little to do with protecting the country’s borders. No, he was far more interested in the enemies within.

  “Target?” he asked Agent Dawson, the analyst who’d addressed him.

  She glanced up from her screen. With a little more polish, she might have been pretty, but since she wore little makeup and always had her pale brown hair pulled tightly back into an unadorned ponytail, she mostly reminded Lenz of a schoolgirl masquerading as a government agent. “Adara Grant,” Agent Dawson said.

  Interesting. Ms. Grant had popped up on the division’s radar two years earlier, but there had been no further incidents, and Lenz had though
t it most likely that she’d triggered a false positive, rather than possessing any of the special talents he was seeking. But if she’d reappeared again after being dormant for nearly eighteen months….

  “Details,” he said, making sure his tone remained brisk and businesslike, betraying nothing of the excitement that had begun to surge within him. Agent Dawson typed a command into her keyboard, bringing up a screen with a photo of the young woman in question, along with a string of previous addresses and contacts.

  “Kanab, Utah,” the agent told him. “There was a call to 911 after lightning struck a tree on the property her mother, Lyssa Grant, is renting.”

  On the surface, the report didn’t seem particularly conclusive. Lightning struck thousands of trees every year. However, Adara Grant’s file had been flagged so it would send out a ping any time a strange weather event occurred in her known location, meaning this probably hadn’t been any ordinary storm.

  After all, odd weather seemed to dog the young woman, no matter where she went. He supposed it was a good thing that she’d never traveled to the South or the eastern seaboard, or those regions might have been plagued with even more hurricanes than usual.

  “Weather?” he asked.

  “Forecast for Kanab, Utah, called for clear skies and highs in the upper eighties, with light winds. Zero chance of precipitation.”

  “Yet there was a storm.”

  “Yes, sir.” Agent Dawson typed in another command, and immediately feeds from local traffic cameras filled her screen. Lenz could see that the skies over Kanab had been fiercely, brightly blue, making the red sandstone rock formations that flanked the town stand out in sharp contrast. As he watched the videos, he saw the sky darken, fierce thunderheads boiling up apparently out of nowhere to blanket the area. Lightning stabbed downward from those clouds, although the video he watched didn’t reveal where it struck.

  Those images all looked promising, but he knew he couldn’t jump to conclusions. While he wasn’t overly familiar with the weather patterns of the American Southwest — he’d lived his entire life on the East Coast — he did know that Utah and Arizona and New Mexico could get pounded by some fairly spectacular thunderstorms during the summer months.