“You don’t realize that Ragnarok is escalating at a crazy rate?”
“What are you talking about?” I clicked off the call, muttering under my breath. Coral’s fear had turned into outright terror. I gasped, grabbed at my chest, shut my eyes.
“Storms hit most of the lower East Coast. It’s bad, Kat. What part of Florida is your sister in?”
“The panhandle.”
The tightness around his mouth and eyes eased. “Then she should be okay. Let’s turn on the news to make sure.”
The storm systems that showed up the second we turned on the television made me cover my mouth with my hand. Everything in my body became tight and painful as I watched the frantic newswoman, who looked like she’d been crying and didn’t care who knew it. She talked of evacuations and how the storms sped up and so many hadn’t gotten out. She showed a picture of Cuba—or what was left of it.
“No one could have survived that.” Tyrone set down the second sandwich he’d been eating, his tanned skin going pale. “It looks like some of Florida is gone, too.”
I tried Coral again. Every nerve in my body fired as agitation fueled my anger when this call didn’t even go through. I buried my face in my hands, knocking my phone on my nose as I tried to reach out mentally, to feel that she was fine, but that dread and terror of hers had faded out. The reason that could have happened had me tearing up, shaking like crazy.
Arun came to me, put his hands on my shoulders and squeezed gently until I looked up at him.
“I’m sure she’s okay. You said she was looking for the one with Thor’s soul. If anyone could handle storms, it would be the god of thunder.”
“That’s not the point. I just need to know she’s okay.”
“You guys have a strong connection?”
I nodded. “Yeah, that’s why I’m freaking out. I can feel her fear and it’s awful. Or I could. I’m getting nothing now, and I can’t even call Raven because she lost her cell phone.” My shoulders slumped; then my own dread shot to the surface when the television and the lights suddenly went out.
He squeezed my arm. “Don’t worry. This happens a lot up here. We have backup generators that should kick on pretty soon.”
I hadn’t realized how much noise had been in the greenhouse until it all stopped. The watering hose, the television. Now the storm outside really made itself known with hard pattering snow and wind. A bee buzzed my head and I jerked back.
“Natural pollinators,” Arun said. “Kind of a necessary nuisance but we’ve found that—”
He broke off when screams sounded outside. Loud screams that were easily heard over the snow. Arun, Kara and Tyrone ran toward the sounds.
“Oh no!” Kara cried as she bolted out the door.
My nose twitched as a scent came in through the opened doors. Smoke. “Gods, I think there’s a fire.”
There were very few things I was truly scared of. I was overly cautious and didn’t trust easily, yeah, but outright fear? I’d dealt with a lot of things that would scare a normal person. I’d driven all the way here by myself and only got creeped out once when I’d stopped for a drink at some trashy convenience store. The guy in the restaurant parking lot this morning had made me kind of nervous, too, but not afraid. Sometimes I was scared that Coral would trust the wrong person. She’d come close to it in the past—closer than she even knew. Always willing to embrace Dru’s new boyfriends because she’d hoped for a father figure, she hadn’t realized one of them was a complete perv. I had. When I’d told Dru, she’d pulled her head out of her butt for once and done something about it. I always wondered how long that itching spell lasted.
But there was one thing that sent me into panic faster than anything. Fire. Years of nightmares of burning to death probably had a lot to do with that. And in the past few months, the dreams had been nonstop.
Tyrone and Arun had followed Kara from the greenhouse.
Toward the fire. I knew they needed help, so I squared my shoulders and started to follow. My coat caught on a long splinter from one of the planters. I reached to get it loose just as this horrific roar sounded overhead. It was like a whoosh of furious wind, and as I looked up at the plastic covering the greenhouse, I saw the first spark hit. Then another and another. They came like fiery drops of rain and before I could blink, the plastic shriveled, then burst into flames. The fire licked right and left, rolling down the walls until everything around me had caught. I stood in the center, surrounded by the cracking and popping, the hiss of steam as a stream of water arced into the opening of the roof. Snow pelted hard and fast into the opening.
“Kat!”
Arun’s yell snapped me out of shock. I hadn’t realized that thick black smoke had filled the room. Suddenly I was on my knees coughing, eyes watering.
“Come on,” he urged as he knelt beside me and grabbed my arm. “What are you waiting for?”
A burning piece of wood dropped onto the arm of my coat and instantly melted through the top layer of material. The grip of panic had me so tight in its hold; I didn’t think about running. I just started tugging off my coat.
Familiar pain spiked through my chest and I gasped, forgetting about my coat. I bent over, crying out. It was hot, searing and overwhelming to the point I saw nothing but stars.
“What? Shit, are you burned?” Arun tried to lift me, but I fought him off because I knew what was coming and didn’t want to be stuck up high in his arms.
“Gods!” I yelled as the wooden boxes next to me caught fire. The heat blazed, sweat poured down my body, dripping into my already irritated eyes. And as I blinked, the fire smeared fast to the left as everything around me moved into the spin. Red, green, black and what was left of the brown boxes swirled into the whirl of the world around us.
“Not again,” Arun groaned as he crouched over me. He flinched, then yelled, and I knew it was a cry of pain. I scrambled out from under him, trying hard to keep my balance as my equilibrium took a ride with the spinning world. A burning plant had fallen on him, the vines wrapping his body as if they were trying to stay alive by touching him. I pulled at one and my eyes flared wide as the burning parts of it fell to our feet and the rest sprang fully green and healthy again. But mostly I stared at Arun.
He was fully aware of what was going on around us, and he stared into the swirling mass in shock. He’d said he’d been aware when this had happened to me earlier, but I hadn’t truly believed him because nobody had ever come into my rune tempus with me. Ever. Not even my sisters.
When everything came to a halt, even I stood in awe as I took in the absolute wonder of seeing fire frozen in place. The crackling, the roaring, the popping...all of it had stopped. Even the wind outside had. It was as if someone had taken an image of the flames—like we were looking at a photograph. The glow of red, orange and white had paused in wild curved shapes that reached toward the sky. Smoke hung around us, like suspended granules of ash. I covered my mouth; sure it would be like inhaling rocks. The smoke around the plastic sheeting that had covered the greenhouse was thicker and nearly solid black, making it look like phantoms had been circling us.
Arun straightened, his mouth hanging open as he turned a slow circle. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing. I mean, how is this even possible? Fire is a chemical reaction—what sort of strength do you have to just stop it in place like this?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered. Then my shoulders snapped straight. “We have time to save things! I don’t always have to write right away.” I turned frantically, trying to decide what to grab first.
Arun had flown into motion. He pulled out a small rolling flatbed, and together we piled as many plants as we could on it. He hefted bags of fertilizer, plant food. We focused on the plants that hadn’t gone into the long wooden