K. Weiland - Storming

He glanced at her four or five times. What he should do was apologize again and spell it all out. The kiss hadn’t meant a thing; it was a joke as much as anything, a fool trick he should have known better than to play on a girl like her. But the words stuck.

She looked at him sideways. “I have been having thoughts.” She spoke softly, her voice barely audible above the engine and the tires on the road. “About yakor .” She tapped her chest.

“The pendant? I saw you gave it to Earl. He didn’t have any idea how to make it work after all.”

“I am not having full knowledge for how it works either. But you are not wrong. It is connected to Schturming , in a way.” She shifted to face him fully. “We should try it. It is… key, too. It can get us into Schturming , through any door.”

The tires thumped over the ruts.

He shook his head. “When I said that, the last thing I was thinking about was putting you in the way of another lightning strike.” Speaking of which, she’d hardly limped all day. “How’re the joints?”

“Better. I have hardly any bad feelings.”

“That’s something anyway, with the show tomorrow.”

As bad as she’d been hobbling yesterday, it seemed miraculously fast for her to have healed up that quick. If he hadn’t been a blockhead and she hadn’t been so touchy, they might have been able to get in some practice time this afternoon.

He took the turn into the airfield and stopped the car in the gateway. He turned to her, one arm draped over the wheel. “I have a job I have to do this evening. I gotta fly some stuff over the state line to Cheyenne. It’s only about an hour’s flight each way, so I can finish it up tonight easy. And I was thinking, if you want to come along with the pendant, maybe we can see if Zlo decides to show up.”

“I will do it.”

“You sure?”

She raised a shoulder. “There is no storm now.”

THERE MAY NOT have been a storm when they left Scottsbluff, but by the time they finished unloading the crate at the Cheyenne airport, where it would supposedly wait to be picked up by the governor’s people, the wind had started to blow pinpricks of rain.

Hitch pulled Jael’s elbow. “This ain’t good. We need to get out of here before the turbulence gets too bad.”

Halfway back to the plane, something else gusted over. Maybe only fifty feet off the ground, it thundered above their heads like a train with a wide-open throttle. The waning moon, still fat and looking like a smashed headlight, blinked into darkness for five full seconds. A huge shadow blanketed the ground.

Hitch stopped short and craned his head. “What the sam hill was that?”

She clutched at his sleeve. “ Eto bil Schturming ! It worked! The yakor has been working.”

“How can you tell?” Dumb question.

She took off running toward the plane. “Come! We can catch it!”

His heart sped up and he broke into a jog. “We need to push the plane around!” There was plenty of field in every direction, and he needed to take off with his nose to the wind if he didn’t want the Jenny bucking into a ground loop.

Jael shoved hard, then clambered into the front cockpit while he heaved the propeller.

They took off into the wind, then circled around. With the wind at her tail, the Jenny and her Hisso engine careened through the air.

This was crazy, of course. More than crazy: plumb crazy. He leaned forward and squinted, trying to see through the darkness. Night flying was dangerous enough even when you had the whole sky to yourself. If that thing was still out there, they were likely to plow right into it before he even so much as saw it.

In front of him, the dark blob of Jael’s head swiveled above the rim of the cockpit. The wing over her head blocked the sky from her view, but she leaned forward, neck craned.

He kept his own head rotating. The Hisso roared in front of him, and the wind slapped his head, front and back.

Fat chance of hearing the thing. It was either see it or nothing.

They flew for a good ten minutes.

In the dark, ten minutes was more’n enough to get lost in. He stopped craning his neck and dug his flashlight and compass out of his jacket pocket.

Below, the headlight of a train snaked through the hazy darkness. That at least meant they were close on target. The tracks would take him almost all the way back to the airfield.

He pocketed the compass and pointed the flashlight’s beam skyward. Darkness swallowed the weak light a couple feet above his head. He clicked off the light and tucked it under his thigh.

To the right of the Jenny’s nose, a great wall of white rose through the darkness.

A cloud.

But this wasn’t like any cloud he’d ever seen. It was too dense, and in the darkness it was too white. Over the sound of the Jenny’s engine, the thwack-thwack-thwack of a huge propeller thundered.

Oh, gravy. He hauled back on the stick and kicked the rudder pedal.

The Jenny roared into a climbing turn. The wind and the sound of something else—the thrum of tight canvas maybe?—tore through his hearing.

His airspeed was quicker than this thing, but it was climbing faster. He would run into it before he could get above it. Either that, or stall out trying.

He stepped on the rudder pedal and forced the Jenny sideways in a sloppy wingover. The good Lord willing, Jael’d had sense enough to buckle her safety belt.

By the time he leveled the plane back out, now heading in the opposite direction, Jael had shot up in her seat. If she’d had her belt on before, she sure didn’t now. She turned around and leaned over the turtleback between their cockpits. The moon splashed her face. She opened her mouth wide, hollering something he couldn’t hear.

He shook his head.

Frustration crinkled her face before the shadows engulfed it once more.

And then she was at it again—crawling out of the cockpit and leaning across the turtleback, her face jutting over his windshield. Her voice drifted to him, wordless.

“Get back, you little fool!” He leaned forward to be heard and ended up bonking his forehead against hers. “Get back, you hear me!”

“Turn around!” The wind strained her scream to a shrill whisper. “Fly underneath!” She raised one hand from its grip on the windshield. Brass glinted between her fingers: the pendant.

She obviously had something in mind. Something that hopefully didn’t involve lightning—or her trying to climb on board that thing. But whatever else Jael was, she wasn’t stupid. If she wanted to try something, he’d give her credit enough to try it.

He nodded. “All right!”

She slithered into her seat, and he eased the Jenny back around. The wind buffeted them from the right, and they slideslipped a good twenty yards or more. But the air was dry. No more rain, at least.

Two hundred feet below, the North Platte River glinted in the patchy moonlight. At least they had plenty of room to maneuver without ramming into the ground. The trick was not to hit anything up here in the sky . Just to be safe, he took the Jenny down fifty feet more before opening the throttle.

The plane chewed through a mile or two, and then the clouds opened and the moon lit up the night. Ahead, the huge not-cloud exploded into view. As big as a thunderhead—maybe a couple hundred feet long and almost as high—it coasted through the night sky.

Jael whipped around to look back at him, her face glaring white in the moonlight. She brandished both arms, waving toward the beast in the sky. Her mouth moved. Telling him to get under it again, no doubt.

If that’s what the lady wanted, then that’s what the lady would get.