Avalon High (16 page)

Her voice broke.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, dear, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to—I swore I wouldn’t cry. It’s Marco, you see.” She was weeping openly now, while Cavalier barked steadily in the background. “Arthur—my husband—says not to worry, but I don’t see how I can’t…. His gun case was broken into, you see. Arthur’s gun case. And one of his pistols is missing. I think Marco might have taken it. I think Marco might be planning on doing something—”

But I never got to hear what Mrs. Wagner thought
Marco might be planning. That’s because there was another bright white flash of lightning, and the receiver let out a staticky shriek and seemed to spark in my ear. I dropped it with a yelp, and when I stooped to pick it up again, the line was dead.

Not that it mattered. About the phone dying in the middle of Mrs. Wagner’s sentence. I didn’t need to hear the rest. I knew what she was going to say.

Just like I knew what I had to do.

Because I knew where Will had gone. If he wasn’t home or on his boat, and he wasn’t with Lance or Jennifer or me….

Well, there was only one place he could be.

The trouble was, I had no car to get me there. The rain hadn’t started yet, but the sky was getting darker every second. In seconds, not minutes, the clouds would burst.

And the lightning hadn’t quit. If anything, the bolts
were growing more frequent. Thunder was an almost constant rumble now.

Flash. One one thousand. Boom.

The storm was only a mile away.

But so what? I thought to myself, as I threw on my running shoes. You’re not sugar, Harrison. You won’t melt.

Admiral Wagner’s gun case had been broken into.

The park was two miles away. I run two miles every day—more, most days. Okay, not along open road, after a meal, and in the middle of a record-breaking thunderstorm.

But what else was I supposed to do?

I reached for the first coat by the door—a waterproof windbreaker of my dad’s. It even had a hood. Perfect.

A gun. He’s got a gun.

I was halfway out the door when it happened again. This time I saw the bolt streaking across the sky like a crack in a giant celestial plate. It was so close, I thought it hit our neighbor’s house.

And then, just like before, the sky turned a deep bloodred. Only for as long as it took me to blink at the sudden change of light.

Then the sky was a leaden gray once more.

“It’s just lightning,” I told myself. “Not the forces of evil conspiring against you.”

Still, my voice shook as I said it. What were the chances of Marco going after Will in weather like this? Surely he, too, would think twice about going out in the
middle of a raging nor’easter.

Then I remembered the gun. If Marco was crazy enough to steal one of his stepfather’s guns, he wasn’t going to let a little thing like the storm of the decade bother him.

Great.

Well, there was nothing I could do about the weather. But the gun. Marco’s gun…

Revolvers and nightsticks are useless against the wrath of the dark side
, Mr. Morton had said.

And suddenly I’d turned away from the front door and was pounding up the stairs to the second floor.

“Don’t let him have taken it with him,” I breathed, hurrying down the hall toward my dad’s office. “Don’t let him have taken it with him—”

He hadn’t. It was lying there where he’d left it, tossed as casually across his desk as a pen. I wrapped my hand around the hilt and lifted it. It was much heavier than I remembered.

But there was nothing I could do about that now.

I wrapped it in my dad’s windbreaker. I vaguely remembered reading somewhere that you aren’t supposed to get swords wet. Although that might have been the string of a bow—the kind you shoot arrows with. But I couldn’t run down the street holding a sword, anyway. What would the neighbors say? Our Image would be totally blown.

Cradling the windbreaker-swaddled sword in my arms, I hurried back down the stairs. I couldn’t even say
what I planned on doing with my dad’s sword. I mean, was I really going to use it to threaten Marco? A sword—especially a rusty, useless one from the Middle Ages—against a gun? Yeah. That’ll work. He’ll probably surrender the minute he sees it.

Not.

But I had to do something.

And I guess—if you wanted to believe that the nor’easter tearing through Annapolis at that moment was the work of the dark side, and not, as the meteorologist had said, a collision of two weather fronts—my bringing the sword along was upsetting somebody upstairs, since no sooner had I stepped through the door with it than the sky was torn in two by the closest lightning strike yet….

It was so close, in fact, that for a second I thought it had hit me, because the hair on the back of my neck had risen. I shrieked, not daring to look to see what color the sky was turning above me. I couldn’t look. I was too busy running. I ran straight down our driveway, then onto our street, my legs seeming to propel me forward without my even consciously telling them to.

Clutching the sword to my chest, I pounded along the paved road, already breathing hard. I’d thought running through the humidity of a Maryland August was bad. That was nothing, it turned out, compared to running through the electrically charged air of a nor’easter with a medieval sword in my arms.

When I got to the main road, I was shocked by what
I saw. Branches had already been knocked down by the wind, and they dotted the road like track hurdles…or snakes. The leaves that were still attached to them were turned defensively upside down and gleamed a pale gray in what little light the thick black clouds overhead were letting through.

I took a deep breath and, never faltering in my stride, began running around the obstacles, hideously conscious of the fact that I was on a road not meant for pedestrian traffic. There was no sidewalk or bike path. I was running along open highway, dodging fallen tree branches, holding a big sword, and praying that if a car came along, it would see me in time and swerve.

No such luck. A car did come along.

But it was going at such a high rate of speed, there was no way the driver—a harried soccer mom, anxious to pick up her kids before the rain hit and soaked them—could turn in time to avoid hitting me. She came barreling right at me, only seeing me at the last possible minute, which is when she hit the horn and stomped on the brakes at the same time….

Evil won’t stand for any interference from the Light. It will throw insurmountable obstacles in our path—deadly obstacles.

…and I leaped off the road, as fleetly as that deer I’d seen at the edge of our driveway, and began tearing through people’s lawns instead of sticking to the road.

This proved to be a lot more convenient than dodging swerving SUVs and fallen trees. Plus the grass was
gentler on my shin splints than the asphalt….

The powers of darkness—if they existed—didn’t seem to like that any more than they’d liked me bringing along the sword. Either that, or it was simply time for the heavens to open. Because it was right about then that they did just that, unleashing a sudden curtain of hard, stinging rain, that soaked through my T-shirt and shorts in an instant and flattened my hair to the back of my neck.

I kept running, clutching the sword even more tightly to my chest, trying to ignore the fact that the rain was coming down so fast, I could barely see two feet in front of me, and was turning the grass beneath my feet into a river of mud. I had to be, I told myself, close to the Wawa by now. And the Wawa was halfway to the park. Just one more mile. Just one more mile to go.

And they had nothing more to throw at me. Lightning hadn’t stopped me. Oncoming traffic hadn’t stopped me. Rain hadn’t stopped me.

Fear hadn’t stopped me.

Nothing could stop me. I was going to get there. I was going to—

That’s when the hail started.

At first I thought I’d kicked up a rock from beneath my foot. Then another one hit me. Then another. Soon ice pellets were bouncing off my head and shoulders, my thighs and calves.

But I kept going. I lifted the sword—safe from the hail in my dad’s windbreaker—over my head, using it as
a sort of shield against the worst of the hail. And I started dodging beneath trees as I ran, even though the meteorologist on the news had said that was the worst place to be during a storm.

And it was probably even worse to be under a tree while carrying a long metal object….

But I didn’t care. I wasn’t district champ—back home, anyway—in the women’s two hundred meter for nothing. I was too fast for them—too fast for the lightning that ripped through the sky, turning it a sickly teal green this time, instead of bloodred. Too fast for the deafening clap of thunder that followed it less than a second later. Too fast for the rain. Too fast for cars. Too fast for hail…

The storm was right above my head.

And it was furious.

The hail turned back to rain, but it still came down in torrents. I was so wet by then, I didn’t even care. Especially when, through the thick gray curtain of it, the sign welcoming me to Anne Arundel Park—
PLEASE
,
NO LITTERING
—appeared.

I was there. I’d made it. I staggered toward the sign, not even aware, until that very moment, that I’d been crying, probably since the hail started. Me, who never cries.

And then the rain stopped.

Just like that. As if someone had turned off a spigot.

I paused only long enough to wipe the water from my eyes. Then I started running again—sprinting, really—
for the arboretum, while overhead, the sky rumbled in protest, as if there were giants up there, talking among themselves.

As I passed the dripping tennis courts and flooded lacrosse field, I saw a sight more welcome than even a dry towel would have been at that moment:

Will’s car, sitting all by itself in the parking lot.

He was here. He was safe….

Except that he wasn’t in his car. I checked. It was locked tight.

And empty.

He couldn’t have spent the entirety of that hailstorm in the arboretum. Not when he had a nice safe car to run to.

I was too late. I had to be. Marco had already come and gone. I was going to find Will stretched out dead on that boulder of his. I knew it.

But surely, if he were dead, the dark side would not have worked so hard at keeping me from getting here….

Except that it had stopped. The rain had stopped.

Then I caught myself. What was I thinking?
Dark side?

It was a storm.
Just a storm
.

A storm that had come from nowhere. A storm that had turned over trees and electrified a highway and sent my cat streaking for the safety of the inner recesses of the house. A storm that had sent a dog barking hysterically into the phone. Barking at me.

I turned up the pace, running all out now, the sword
clutched in one hand by its hilt.

Inside the arboretum, which I expected to be a mess—branches and even some trees down—everything was precisely as I’d seen it last. The smell of rain was thick in the air, but clearly no rain had fallen here. The trail was so dry, puffs of dust rose up from my feet as they pounded against it.

How that was possible, I hadn’t the slightest idea. But I didn’t really have time to think about it, either. Because finally I was in front of the ravine, cursing myself for not having brought a flashlight, because it was dark in those woods, with the storm clouds overhead. I crashed through the heavy bracken, trying to get a glimpse of the creek bed. I thought I could see someone down there, but it was hard to be sure….

And then I saw him. Will.

But he wasn’t sitting on his favorite boulder. He wasn’t standing on it, either. Instead, he was stretched out across it, on his back, like…

Well, like a dead man.

I didn’t scream.

I don’t think I could have uttered a sound if I’d tried. For one thing, I was breathing too hard from my run.

And for another, the cold hard fear that had been gripping my heart since I’d heard Cavalier barking—but which I had refused to let myself acknowledge—seemed suddenly to convulse, cutting off all the blood supply to the rest of my body.

I don’t even know how I got to the bottom of the ravine. I suppose I stumbled there somehow. I do know that by the time I reached Will’s boulder, my legs were covered in oozing scratches from all the brambles I’d apparently encountered, but hadn’t felt.

Lifting my gaze to where he lay, his eyes closed, I could detect no sign that Will was breathing. But neither could I see any obvious bloodstains. Still, he had to have heard me coming. And yet he hadn’t moved….

My legs trembling uncontrollably—both from emotion and the endurance test I’d just put them through—I walked around the boulder and set down the sword, still safely wrapped in my dad’s jacket. Then I placed the toe of my shoe into one of the footholds I’d used to climb Will’s boulder the last time….

And his face suddenly popped up above mine.

“Elle,” he said. He reached up to pull off a set of headphones he’d been wearing. “You came. I knew you would.”

And then he grabbed my hand and pulled me up onto the top of the boulder….

…where I completely lost it. My limbs turned to jelly. All the blood in my body, which seconds before had been frozen, seemed to thaw at his touch and left me feeling as if I hadn’t the strength to so much as stand.

Will must have recognized this, for just as I felt my knees begin to give, he said, “Hey—” and let go of my hand, throwing an arm instead around my waist. When my still-liquid limbs continued to sway, he caught me up against him with a laugh that ended abruptly as our bodies met, and my hands flattened out against his chest.

Then he said, “Hey,” again—but in a different, much softer voice.

Staring into his swimming-pool blue eyes, just inches from my own much plainer brown ones, I finally found my voice.

“I thought you were dead,” I whispered raggedly.

“Far from it,” he whispered back.

And then he was kissing me.

And suddenly, my arms and legs didn’t feel like jelly anymore. Instead, I felt as electrified—as if I really had been struck by lightning…only better. Much, much better. Because you can’t wrap your arms around lightning. Or feel lightning’s heart skip a beat beneath yours. Or taste the coffee he’d had to drink earlier, or smell the nice clean scent of his shirt. I could do all these things with Will, and did….

…including press myself as close to him as I possibly could, and not just because I was so cold, after all that rain. Also to prove to myself that he was alive.
Alive.

And he was kissing me.

And seemed to like kissing me. Very, very much.

“Now why haven’t we done that before?” Will wanted to know, when we’d finally stopped kissing and his forehead was resting against mine.

“Because you already had a girlfriend,” I reminded him. I was amazed that I still possessed the ability to speak. I would have thought, after a kiss like that, I’d have been rendered speechless. My lips were still tingling from it.

“Oh yeah,” he said, still holding on to me. Then he lifted his head. “Hey. You’re shivering.” He rubbed my
arms with his hands—his big, warm hands. “No wonder. You’re all wet. How’d you get so wet?”

“Because it was raining,” I said. And as if to confirm this, thunder rumbled ominously overhead.

“Not here,” Will said.

“Obviously,” I said.

“How can that be?” He let go of me, but only for a second, while he leaned down to lift up a jean jacket he’d left lying beside his iPod. He threw the jacket over my shoulders, then pulled me to him again. “Look, I’m sorry about what happened back there. At the school. With Marco. That was bad.”

“Yeah,” I said, loving the way his arms felt around me. “It was. I…I’m sorry, too.”

“Nothing for you to be sorry for,” he said. “You didn’t do anything. I could have killed him when he pushed you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “About Marco, Will.” I swallowed and then, placing both hands on his shoulders, I pushed him away a little, so that I could look up into his face. It was as darkly handsome as ever, his brilliant blue eyes ringed by thick black lashes.

“What?” he asked, gazing down at me. “He didn’t—you haven’t heard from him, have you? I lost him outside school—I drove around, looking for him, but I couldn’t find him. I…I didn’t want to go home.” He glanced away from me then. “I tried calling your house a few times, but the operator kept saying all circuits were busy. I thought about coming by, but after what happened, I
wasn’t sure—”

I grabbed his face between both my palms and turned it so he had to look me in the eye.

“You can’t be serious,” I said. “You think I wouldn’t want to see you? Just because of what happened at school?”

That shadow I knew all too well flitted across his face, darkening his features, although his grip on me didn’t loosen.

“It must be all over town by now,” was all he said.

“Will, your mom called me. She’s really worried….”

He did let go of me then. He let go of me and turned his back, running a hand through his dark hair.

“Look,” he said to the trees. “I just need a little time away from her. And my dad. To think things over.” He looked back at me, his expression wry. “It’s not every day a guy finds out his mom’s not really dead, you know.”

“I know,” I said, again. “That’s not why she called, though.”

He grimaced. “I know why she called. It’s Marco, isn’t it?”

I nodded, not trusting my voice to speak. Overhead, thunder rumbled again.

Will sighed. “What’d Marco do now?” He was grinning, but not as if he found the subject a particularly amusing one. “Trash the Land Cruiser? Empty Dad’s liquor cabinet? No, he’s already done all that. Besides, none of that would hurt me, and I’m the one he blames
for all this. Oh, wait, I know. He took the
Pride Winn
out and ran her aground.”

“No,” I said, and swallowed. “He’s stolen one of your dad’s guns. And I think he’s going to try to kill you.”