earth and plants and fence and began to roar toward me.
I felt the energy come up through my body. It arched my back, pulled a breathless scream out of my mouth, bathed every cell in my body with pure, primal force.
The thing in me ate it, and I felt it happening to me, felt the Demon change from the tentacled horror into a thing of ice and angles, grating on my bones, barely fitting beneath my skin.
I hardly felt the massive nuclear energy of the burn-off, the energy manifesting in visible light and heat.
I was transformed in the fiery inferno.
Made whole.
When I stood up, my shredded, melted clothes fell away, and I stood pure against the storm.
I stretched out my hand and touched the life inside it, caressed it, tasted the dark furious essence of it. Attuned myself to its vibrations and rhythms, learning it, being the storm.
And then I surrounded it with the enormous strength inside me, and I crushed it.
Twenty feet away, the enormous gnashing strength of the tornado fell in on itself, dead. The storm's energy patterns flared and tore.
In the breathless stillness, I heard myself laughing. Naked, soaking wet, infused with the furious power of the deepest darkness, I still found it funny.
I heard the unnaturally loud grate of footsteps on gravel, and came back to myself. Or what was left of my self now.
"My God," Marion whispered. I turned my head to look at her and saw her flinch. "What you did-"
"Saved our lives," I said. I stood up, looked down at myself, and started feeling the shock take hold. So cold. So many cuts and bruises. I looked like a road map of been there, done that. "Got any clothes I can borrow?"
They didn't want to come near me. Shirl stripped off her flannel shirt, leaving herself the T-shirt; Marion dug a pair of loose blue jeans from a bag in the back of the Xterra. They tossed them to me, along with a pair of mud-caked hot pink Converse high-top sneakers. I pulled everything on without worrying about who was watching me; even Erik wasn't interesting in checking me out, right at the moment.
They hadn't even wanted to touch me. I couldn't say I blamed them.
I looked down at myself when I was finished and decided that I wouldn't win any fashion awards, even at the homeless shelter, but it would do. Good enough to die in, or kill a friend in.
You don't need to look good for that. You just have to look scary.
I'd made it seven miles down the road, almost into the Oklahoma City limits, when I ran into the first obstacle.
Wind wall. It was a ferocious east-to-west current whipping across the road at right angles, like a tornado lying down. It wasn't a natural phenomenon- at least, not anywhere other than high elevations with hair-trigger climates-but it was undeniably powerful; lose control, and the Viper would get slammed into a spin that might well turn into an end-over-end movie stunt, only without the padding and professional stuntmen. I could control a lot of things. Gravity and basic kinetic energy weren't among them.
I had one second to recognize the distortion across the road, one second more to make a decision about what to do. No time to focus or do any delicate manipulation.
Chapter Twenty-seven
I flattened the pedal and felt Mona jump forward like a champion racing for the finish.
The wind slammed the front left quarter panel like a speeding freight train, and the front wheels lost traction; I was going into a spin. If it had just been a single fast wind shear, that would have been one thing, but this was a fierce continuing blast, and as the car spun, it slammed directly into the back end, shoving the Viper toward the shoulder; I did exactly the opposite of what you should do; I turned the wheel against the skid, gave it more momentum, kept the car turning so that the momentum spun it like a top down the center line. The wind kept buffeting me, but it was only adding to the car's rotational force, not slowing me down.
I gulped and hung on for dear life as the world beyond the windshield turned into a long brown-black-green blur . . . road, shoulder, field, road, shoulder, field . . . and then I felt