woman who stood amid the white-hot bolts like a pagan goddess.
Her long black hair flew out around her in the charged atmosphere, snaking across her eyes, whipping around her throat. Her fingertips practically vibrated with power as lightning danced to her whims.
Electrified white bolts cracked across the black sky, then forked into the desert floor. Sand geysers erupted all around her as energy sizzled and burned. Thunder roared. Clouds roiled. Juniper and manzanita dipped and swayed with the wind. The skeletal arms of the ocotillo behind her waved, scraping at her back like a demon demanding attention.
But she ignored every distraction—including her own apprehension. Exhilarating as it was to command nature in such a way, a part of Teresa cringed, horrified at what she was now able to do. The lightning danced, plowing into the earth at her feet again and again, and every cell in her body sizzled from the near contact. She felt as if she, too, were electrified and that tiny, horrified part of her wanted to run and hide from all of this.
She didn’t, though. Couldn’t. Couldn’t turn her back on the very legacy she had been training for most of her life. Now that it was here, magic opening up inside her, she would simply have to find a way to master it.
Four days ago she had had the first dream. A terrorfilled nightmare with flames chewing at her skin while demons howled and crowds cheered. She’d jolted from sleep in a sharp panic, her own hair wrapped around her throat like a noose as she gasped for air that wouldn’t come. She had known then that her abuela’s prophecies were coming true.
Then the magic appeared. Small things at first. Sparking a match without striking it against anything. Touching the television and it coming to life. Lightbulbs shattering when she touched them. Streetlights blinking out when she brushed against the pole.
And today … She had followed her instincts, somehow knowing that the lightning was calling to her. At first sight of the storm on the horizon, a deep well of power had opened up inside Teresa, as if it had been waiting for nature’s fury to completely awaken. She had driven into the desert outside Sedona, Arizona, to meet that storm head-on. To walk into the maelstrom and somehow master it.
For more than an hour now, she had worked, pulling down the lightning, trying to direct it to specific targets—because what was the point of having the power if she couldn’t control it? And in this time, when witches and even those suspected of witchcraft were being locked away, or worse, she needed that control. Her new power would make her a magnet for disaster. She had to be able to draw on her own strengths to protect herself and those she loved.
“Come on,” she whispered. “Focus, Teresa. Make it work.”
Red sandstone rock formations surrounded her. With sunlight slanting across them, the rocks seemed to glow a brilliant orange and red. Under a forbidding gray sky, they were filled with shadows, their wind-carved surfaces taking on the shapes of faces that seemed to watch her.
She was just outside Red Rock State Park and hoping that both the weather and the harsh terrain would keep tourists at bay.
October in Arizona meant cooler temperatures and an influx of visitors who came to Sedona not only for the natural beauty but also to gather at the many vortexes in and around the city. The vortexes were sites of spiritual ceremonies and drew the mystical and the curious every year. Teresa had gone to a few ceremonies herself over the years, knowing as she did that there was far more to the spiritual plane than most people suspected.
Now, though, she drew on the spirituality of this place to open the heart of her magic. She waved one hand, directing the lightning toward a tower of red sandstone rocks. The jagged bolt of pure power slammed into the ground twenty feet away from the target and she knew that wasn’t nearly good enough. If she were attacked, “close” wouldn’t save her life.
Teresa fought to hone her magic. To perfect the power that had begun to quicken inside her only days ago. She had known what was coming all her life. What she was destined for. But the mystery had been when her magic would appear. The world wasn’t a good place for witches these days, but magic ran in her blood, stretching back through her family’s maternal line for generations.