Storm Born Read online

  “Typical monsoon storm?” he inquired, playing devil’s advocate, and at once, Dawson shook her head, fawn-colored ponytail bobbing slightly.

  “No, sir. My research tells me those storms aren’t due to begin until the end of the month at the earliest. Also, there were absolutely no clouds in the area before this storm began. It just…came out of nowhere. Our models give this particular incident an eighty-seven percent chance that it was somehow caused by Adara Grant.”

  Why now, when things had been quiet for so long, when he’d mentally moved Ms. Grant from his very short list of possible subjects down to the also-rans, those people who might have been dogged by strange coincidences but who didn’t seem to show any special abilities after all? Agent Lenz had no idea, but he thought it was time to find out.

  “I’ll need the jet,” he said, and Agent Dawson nodded.

  “On it, sir.” She glanced up at him. “Approximate flight time is three hours and forty-five minutes. There’ll be a car waiting for you at Kanab Municipal Airport when you land.”

  “Thank you, Agent Dawson,” he said, and she nodded but didn’t smile.

  “Anything else, sir?”

  “Have Adara Grant’s updated file sent to my computer,” he told her.

  Another nod, and the analyst went to work. Agent Lenz left her workstation and headed back to his office to retrieve his laptop and briefcase, along with the duffle bag he always kept packed and ready in case he needed to head out on a moment’s notice.

  As he went, he found himself smiling slightly. The young woman in question had managed to stay under his radar for quite a while, but now he thought he might finally have her within reach.

  He couldn’t wait to start exploring the limits of her peculiar abilities.

  Jake’s brother Jeremy sat bolt upright at his workstation, then started hammering away at the keyboard. The burst of activity made Jake look away from his own computer screens, where he’d been scanning through headlines from Phoenix papers and TV outlets, hoping against hope that something might stand out from the usual noise and signal any possible witch or warlock activity. In reality, that sort of task was already being handled by Jeremy’s various algorithms — and it was unlikely that the de la Paz prima wouldn’t have detected the presence of someone not of her clan in the greater Phoenix area, even if Zoe’s gifts in that area were nowhere near as strong as her grandmother’s once were — but mostly, Jake had just been trying to appear busy.

  However, Jeremy’s machine-gun typing seemed to indicate something was up.

  Jake rose from his chair and went over to the workstation where his younger brother was assaulting the keyboard. “Find something?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” Jeremy hadn’t bothered to glance up as he spoke, but kept typing away. “A weather anomaly that fits a pattern flagged by one of my algorithms.”

  That comment made Jake fold his arms and send a narrow look down at his brother. “You didn’t tell me one of your algorithms had caught something.”

  “Because a flag is just that — a flag. It still needs closer examination.” At last, Jeremy lifted his hands from the keyboard and settled back in his office chair, one hand running through his dark hair and thus turning it into a shaggy mess. “But I added a set of parameters to that particular flag…and this is what I got.”

  He pointed at the large cinema display of his Mac Pro, where a series of glowing red concentric circles emanated outward from a point on the map, appearing like the wave pattern of a seismic event.

  “Earthquake?” Jake asked, since that was what it looked like to him.

  “Nope. Unexplained weather event.” Jeremy leaned forward again and hit a few keys, zooming in on the point in question.

  Jake frowned as he stared at the screen. “Kanab, Utah?”

  “Yes. Thunderstorm that came out of nowhere. A couple of downed power lines, one tree that caught fire.”

  “Thunderstorms aren’t that big a deal, you know,” Jake remarked, earning him a dubious look from his brother.

  “A month from now, no, but this one — well, I can’t even say it came out of nowhere, because it didn’t seem to come from anywhere.”

  The screen shifted, showing what Jake thought must be feeds from local traffic cameras, along with security footage from various businesses in the area. All of them appeared to show the skies overhead darkening in what looked like the space of a few seconds, with bright bursts of lightning occurring just seconds later.

  Watching all this, Jake rubbed his chin. It looked pretty suspect to him; even when desert thunderstorms appeared to boil up out of nothing, that wasn’t really the case. The clouds always came from somewhere, although thunderhead creation could sometimes happen in less than an hour, clouds churning up as the desert air heated under the brutal sun. An hour was fast, but not this fast. Kanab had gone from clear blue skies to thunderstorms and torrential rain in literally less than a minute.

  “Weather-worker?” he asked, and Jeremy nodded.

  “Sure looks that way. I started another filter, going through Kanab’s current residents and cross-checking them with instances of extreme or sudden weather behavior over the past five years.” He started typing again, and the feeds from the traffic cameras disappeared, replaced by a driver’s license image featuring a pretty but unsmiling woman a few years younger than Jake, with long brown hair and big greenish eyes. “I think this is who we might be looking for.”

  “Adara Grant?” Jake said as he read the name off the license.

  “I think so.” The screen split then, leaving the driver’s license on one side, and sliding in a list of addresses and associated phenomena on the other. “Tucumcari, New Mexico — tornado. Cheyenne, Wyoming…multiple tornadoes. Logan, Utah, tornado. Durango, Colorado — tornado yet again.”

  Frowning at the list on the computer screen, Jake asked, “Isn’t Durango too mountainous for tornado activity?”

  Jeremy grinned. “Well, it should be, but if we’re dealing with a rogue weather-worker here, then that doesn’t matter so much, does it?”

  With a shake of his head, Jake returned to reading the list, which contained more than a half-dozen towns in New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming, all of which experienced strange, unexplained weather events during the times when Adara Grant had been a resident. “She moved around a lot, didn’t she?”

  “Looks that way. Maybe she was trying to get away from the bad weather, not realizing that she was the source of it all along.”

  “Maybe,” Jake agreed. The list seemed to indicate the woman in question had been in Kanab for more than a year, during which time there hadn’t been any incidents…or at least, none that Jeremy’s algorithm had noted. Which meant there probably had been none. Jeremy was too thorough to let something like that slide. “It’s what, three hours to Kanab?”

  “About three and a half,” Jeremy replied. “Think it’s worth a look?”

  “I’m not totally sure, but I can be there and back before dark, so I might as well head out and see what’s going on.” Jake tried to sound nonchalant, but inwardly, he could feel his heart rate speed up ever so slightly. This was why he’d dreamed up Trident Enterprises in the first place, to track down any witches or warlocks who didn’t even realize what they were, and bring them into the witching world. Maybe he was giving Jeremy’s algorithms too much credit and this would all turn out to be a wild goose chase…but he didn’t think so.

  At least he wouldn’t have to worry about stepping on the toes of any witch clans in the area, because Utah was one of the few places in the United States that witch-kind had always avoided. Their existence depended on staying hidden, on not allowing the general population to know who or what they were, and there was too high a risk of detection in a place like Utah, where the close-knit Mormon communities there would be much more likely to detect something odd about the strangers living in their midst. The U.S. was big enough that there didn’t seem to be much reason for settling in a place so fraught
with problems, and so the witch clans had given Utah a wide berth.

  For all Jake knew, Adara Grant’s current location was part of the reason why her presence hadn’t been detected by any other witches or warlocks. Because whenever someone of witch-kind met another magically gifted person for the first time, they experienced a tingle, or a ringing in their ears, or some sort of physical reaction that told them they were in the presence of someone like themselves. It only worked when you were within a yard or two of that person, but since there were no witches or warlocks in Utah, that wouldn’t have happened to her. As for all the other places Adara had lived, well, witch clans tended to pick a spot and stay in it, and not move around a lot. No one had ever done a census of witch-kind in the U.S., but Jeremy had commented once that his calculations made their number around twenty or thirty thousand at most. That might have sounded like a lot of people, but it was still only a drop in the ocean compared to the country’s overall population of more than 325 million.

  Anyway, the why of how Adara Grant had managed to live all her twenty-four years without ever crossing paths with another witch wasn’t the issue. What was far more important was to find her, determine that she truly was a witch and not just someone with the bad luck to be followed by crappy weather wherever she went…and then convince her that she needed to come back to Flagstaff with him so they could try to figure out which clan she belonged to.

  That last would be the hardest part. Jake knew he’d be able to tell right away if he was in the presence of a witch, but even if Adara felt a tingle or a shock or a humming in her ears when she met him, she wouldn’t have the context to understand that those signs were telling her she’d met someone who shared her witch blood. All she’d see was a stranger appearing out of nowhere and coaxing her to cross state lines with him, which for almost anyone would be a non-starter.

  Well, one step at time. “This is the reason why we started this whole thing,” he told his brother. “What’s the point in getting a hit if we’re not going to investigate?”

  “True,” Jeremy responded. His gaze moved back to the computer screen. “What do you need me to do?”

  “Just keep monitoring the situation, I suppose.” As he spoke, he wondered if that remark had sounded completely pompous, like he was trying to impersonate a federal agent or something. While some members of the Wilcox clan were part of the local police force — what better way to escape notice than to have people in an official capacity doing their best to make sure law enforcement wasn’t paying any attention? — Jake wasn’t one of them. No, he was a regular guy with a degree in forest management from Northern Pines University…a guy who just happened to be a warlock with a crazy idea about tracking down the world’s witchy “orphans.”

  However, if Jeremy thought his older brother was play-acting as a cop, he didn’t give any outward indication of it. A slight lift of his shoulders, and he said, “Sure. I can keep an eye on her cell phone calls, let you know whether she’s made any sudden moves or left the area.”

  Jake didn’t bother to ask how Jeremy could do all that. When they were in the planning stages for Trident Enterprises, Jeremy had provided a laundry list of surveillance and data-mining capacities that he’d be able to provide, and added that while he could try to explain how he was able to do all those things, there wasn’t much point. “Just take it on face value,” he’d added, and Jake had given a mental shrug and agreed. His brother’s talent for computers and data hacking truly was just as supernatural as Adara Grant’s apparent ability to summon tornadoes and make thunderheads appear in a sky that had been clear moments earlier, and really didn’t require much analysis. Either you went with it, or you didn’t. And since Jake was a warlock and had been around this sort of thing his entire life, he didn’t see any reason to ask questions. He doubted he would have understood the answers anyway.

  “Great,” he said. “Contact me via the sat phone, though — a big piece of that route goes through Navajo lands, and I won’t get any kind of cell signal out there.”

  “No problem.” Jeremy reached over to pat one of their sat phones, which sat in its charging cradle on his desktop. “It’s safer, anyway — the feds don’t generally tap into sat phones the way they do cell transmissions.”

  “You’re expecting the feds to be watching us?” Jake asked with a grin. The idea was sort of ludicrous; the Wilcox clan had always made sure to dot every “i” and cross every “t,” just because the last thing they wanted was to attract any attention from the authorities.

  “Not really,” Jeremy replied. “I’m just paranoid.”

  “That’s probably smart. I’m going to head out — let Laurel know what’s going on when she gets back.”

  Because she wasn’t there on that particular morning, had asked for a few hours off so she could go with one of their cousins to help her pick out her wedding gown at a boutique down in Scottsdale. Jake had wanted to shake his head at the request, thinking it seemed kind of silly to drive all that way to look for a dress, but he’d reminded himself that just because he’d been denied his own chance at happiness didn’t mean he needed to be a Grinch about the whole thing. Besides, Trident had been up and running for almost a week, and they hadn’t encountered a single possible hit in all that time. It was just bad luck for Laurel that she was away when something finally happened.

  “Sure,” Jeremy said easily. “She’s probably going to be bummed that she missed out on this.”

  “Well, she won’t have missed out on the whole thing, since it’s going to be at least seven hours before I get back.” Hopefully, with Adara Grant along for the ride, but Jake knew he would just have to see what happened. He was already mentally rehearsing what to say to her, how he could convince her that he wasn’t some sort of creeper who’d decided she was easy prey.

  “True. Aren’t you forgetting something, though?”

  Jake cocked an eyebrow at his brother. “What?”

  “Her address. Twenty-two East 300 North.”

  “That’s an address?”

  “It is in Utah,” Jeremy replied.

  “Got it. I’ll keep you posted.”

  Jeremy gave him a thumbs-up and turned back to his screen.

  No reason to delay any further. Jake made a brief stop at the refrigerator to get himself a couple of bottles of water, then headed out to the driveway, where his new Jeep Gladiator pickup truck was parked. Good thing he’d filled up just the day before.

  He had a long road in front of him.

  3

  I lay on my bed and stared up at the ceiling. My mother had wisely decided to leave me alone to brood, probably not wanting to provoke another thunderstorm. She’d met the firemen at the door, all apologies, telling them that the rain had put out the fire and that she was sorry to have bothered them. Of course, they’d told her it was no problem at all, and left after exchanging a few comments about what an odd storm it had been and how they’d never seen anything like it before.

  Unfortunately, I’d seen plenty like it.

  Neither my mother nor I was due at work until three, so I still had about an hour before I had to get over my funk and pretend to be the happy, cheery waitress the customers at the diner expected. For some reason, minor annoyances at work never seemed to be enough to invoke the turbulent emotions that preceded the outbreak of one of my strange storms. I supposed I should be glad about that, or I would have left a lot of flattened restaurants and injured patrons in my wake.

  For the moment, I could only lie there in my room and do my best to stay calm as I went through a list of possible options to solve my tuition woes. The first was to get on the phone with the U of U financial aid office and plead my case, but I’d already spent months doing that and had gotten nothing but a bunch of promises that turned out to be mostly hot air. Okay, so I’d take a semester off and save up to pay for my final year. I was already behind the curve, twenty-four years old and only beginning my senior year of college, but because of the way my mother and I had moved ar
ound so much, that hadn’t been exactly by choice. Still, I was already older than half my classmates, so what difference would another six months even make?

  Probably not much in the grand scheme of things. It was more that I had already been chafing to be done with college so I could move on to the next stage of my life. I couldn’t help feeling that I’d always be defined as my mother’s daughter while I was still in school and living at home. That didn’t mean I didn’t love my mother — of course, she was the most important thing in my world, and I’d always be proud of her for giving so much of herself while raising me. At the same time, though, I wanted to be me, wanted to know who Adara Grant really was. My entire life, I’d felt as if there was some piece of me that was missing, and I needed to discover what it was. It was entirely possible that a shrink would have told me that feeling was simply because I’d never known my father, never known much of anything about him.

  I wouldn’t ever know, since we sure as hell couldn’t afford to have me see a psychologist.

  Sighing, I rolled over and propped myself up on my elbows so I could look out the window. The sky was serenely blue again, with not even a couple of clouds drifting by to prove that the storm had really happened and wasn’t just a figment of my imagination. Only the blackened stub of the one tree branch the lightning bolt had hit was proof of the tempest, proof that my anger and disappointment had somehow conjured a thunderstorm from nothing.

  If that was even what had happened.

  Back to the problem at hand. The one thing I absolutely would not consider was dropping out of school entirely. This was a setback, and nothing more. Several times as we’d moved around, I’d had people ask me why it was so important to go to college at all, that it would have been more responsible for me to work full-time after I graduated from high school so I wouldn’t be a burden on my mother. Not that people actually said the word “burden,” but it didn’t take a mind reader to figure out what they probably meant.