Page 65 of Another Damned Storm
“Can one of you take me back?” Lily asked, looking expectantly between us. “If there’s a storm brewing, I need to be there to help my people.”
Never nodded. “And I want to go check on Matt and Angie.”
“Do you want me to take you?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I think I can get there. I’m starting to get a handle on how things feel different here.”
“Very well. I’ll take you, Lily.” I turned to Never. “And I’ll come find you shortly, but please, love, leave the bracelet on.” I could see the wheels in her mind turning. She wanted the council to see her. And me. She wanted them to know exactly what we were up to because then they would see what Thrain and possibly Lapalme were up to.
What she didn’t understand was that justice amongst gods didn’t work the way it did with humans. No matter how right we might be about this one thing, we were both still breaking the rules just by being here.
“Promise me, Never.”
She rubbed her lips together. “I’ll keep it on.”
The relief that trickled through my veins was minimal, but it was something. “Thank you.”
I waited for her to make the trip, ensuring she made it safely out of the tiny town with its withering barriers before holding my hand out to Lily. “Shall we?”
She slapped her hand into mine. “Giddy up.”
If our situation had been even slightly less stressful, I might have smiled at that. Instead, I set my mind on Salus and flashed.
The moment we arrived, it was obvious something was wrong. Electricity saturated the air making every hair on my body stand on end. I’d intentionally flashed us to the roof of the main building to keep us out of sight of any non-pack looky-loos, and the view of the storm from that vantage point was like something out of the old days.
Lightning touched down in the dying park over and over again. The bone-numbing thunder from one blast would still be rumbling when another strike would send up a shower of sparks. And another. But there was no rain to speak of.
“Is this how the storms always are on this side?” I yelled, fighting to be heard over the deafening roar.
Lily’s tigress eyes reflected each of those strikes. She shook her head. “You should go find Never.”
Everything inside me wanted to do just that. Thrain’s power was obviously growing, and quickly it would seem, but I didn’t relish the idea of leaving Lily to fend for herself.
I leaned out over the edge of the roof and peered down. “Where are your people?”
Crash.More lightning, this strike hitting the faded yellow upright on the far side of an overgrown field.
“They should be inside,” she hollered back.
A barely audible scream cut through the noise, and that waswhen we spotted the two figures racing through the field. The woman was throwing terrified glances over her shoulder as she all but dragged a young boy through the tall grass. The second time the little one fell, the woman swung him up into her arms and tried to carry him.
Half a breath later, two vicious, snapping demons burst through the fence surrounding the sanctuary hot on their heels.
“Mina!” Lily backed up a few paces and took a running leap off the roof. The move was a thing of beauty, because not only did she manage to shift fully into her tiger in midair, she also hit the ground from a twenty-five foot drop, rolled once, and launched into a dead run.
Rather than give chase, I flashed myself in the path of the oncoming demons, but in the second it took me to make that trip, one of them had already caught up with the woman and ripped her off her feet. The boy, however, was nowhere to be seen.
One thing at a time.
Lily and I worked together to dispatch the two demons, me slicing with my blade and battling with my strength, her using her teeth and claws to inflict an impressive amount of damage. The whole fight lasted less than a minute, and by the time it was over, the towering clouds birthing the brutal electrical storm had begun to dissipate.
The demons were relatively weak compared to the few Never and I had fought earlier. There was one oddity, though, in the way they kept fighting to get back to the woman’s bloody body. Almost as though they were too hungry to focus on the fight through their bloodlust.
Lily’s tiger prowled through the thigh-high grass, letting out a roar filled with a mixture of concern and undeniable authority as she combed the area searching for the boy.
Despite the clawing need to be at Never’s side, I helped withthe search. My connection with her was open enough that I could tell she wasn’t in danger. There was some concern and frustration bleeding through, but nothing to indicate she’d seen the kind of excitement Lily and I had.
Before long, we were joined by a handful of others, some in human form, some shifted into their various animals, but it was Lily who found the boy. He was fully shifted into a small copper-furred fox cub, curled around a trembling branch high up in a tree.
