Ill Wind Page 0,107

to a caution-yellow stop behind me.

"Fuck you," I said, staring up at this child of my power. "Let's go to war."

It started small. They always do. Just a breeze against my overheated face, tugging at the hem of my shirt and ruffling my sleeves. Combing through my hair like cold, unfeeling fingers.

Marion got out of the SUV behind me. I didn't turn around. "Better take cover," I said. Maybe she did; maybe she didn't. It wasn't something I could spare attention to check.

Overhead, the storm's rotation sped up. Clouds swirled and blended together. They spawned cone-shaped formations that twisted and turned on their own. Counterclockwise, all storms turn counterclockwise on this side of the world. The colors were incredible, gray and green and heart's-night black. Flashes of livid purple and pink from lightning discharging point to point across the sky.

I waited.

The wind snapped my hair back like a battle flag, even with a drenching rain; I used enough power to clear a bell of stillness around myself and immediately drew a lightning strike. I diffused it down into the ground and felt no more than a tingle, and the subtle, stealthy movements of the Demon Mark under my skin.

I told it to shut up. It was going to get a lot worse before it got better.

When the hail started-golf balls smashing out of the sky to shatter on the road around me at first-I extended my protection over the Viper, too; no point in winning the war and being stuck thumbing for a ride. The hail pounded harder, like white rain, growing into fist-size misshapen chunks that exploded like bombs when they hit. Ice shrapnel sliced through my clothes, cold and then hot as blood began to run. Hundreds of tiny cuts. I strengthened the shield around me, but it wasn't going to be easy to keep all of it out.

Out in the field to my right, dust and grass began to swirl and twist. A delicate streamer of gray shredded off from the clouds above it. Not much force to it yet, barely an FO, hardly more than a dust devil. The storm was testing me.

I chopped through the top of the baby tornado by freezing the air molecules. The sucking updraft lost force, and the dust funnel blew apart.

Round one to me.

I sensed something happening behind me, happening fast. Before I could even turn, I felt the tingle of another lightning bolt coming; I split my focus three ways into protection, diffusion, and moving my body to face whatever this storm was throwing at my back.

Another tornado, this one forming fast and ugly. The full cone was already visible, shivering and dancing through the hard curtain of rain; it was lit from within by an eerie blue-white light. Ball lightning. I felt the hard plasmatic blobs of energy bouncing around inside the wind walls.

Tornadoes are simple, gruesomely effective engines of destruction. They're caused, by the humble updraft-the updraft from hell, driven by wind shear and Earth's own rotation. Imagine a column of air speeding three hundred miles per hour, straight up, blasting up into the mesosphere and erupting like an invisible geyser. As the air turns cold again, it sinks and gets drawn back into the spiral.

Sounds easy. When you're looking at that shifting, screaming wall of destruction heading straight for you, all the knowledge in the world doesn't help you maintain objectivity. This one was already formidably armed with found objects-pieces of wood, twists of wire torn from fence posts, nails, rocks, whipping grasses and abrasive sand. A human body trapped in the wind wall could be sawed apart by all that debris in a matter of seconds.

I went up into Oversight. The storm was gray with pale green, unhealthy light. . . photonegative, full of destructive energy and the instincts to deliver it with maximum damage. It circled up in the mesosphere like a vast clockworks. There were other Wardens there, working, but nobody came near me or offered to link; they were focused on working the weak points of the storm, trying to warm the air at the top and disrupt the engine cycle that was spawning tornadoes.

They wouldn't be successful. This storm had its parameters well under control, and it wasn't going to let us cut off its food supply. We had to be creative about this if we-if I-expected to survive. Truthfully, the rest of the