The Shadow Crosser (The Storm Runner 3)

Drowning in darkness…The words were eerily close to what Ah-Puch had said about floating in utter darkness.

“So you had a bad dream,” Hondo said.

Marco snorted. “We all had the same dream. Or close enough.”

“Who’s all?” I asked, taking deep breaths to prevent my heart from flying out of my mouth.

Louie puffed up his cheeks and exhaled super dramatic like. “Me, Serena, Marco, and a few others that we talked to.”

My pulse raced and blood pounded in my ears. I could sense how close we were to getting answers. “What was your dream, Marco?”

He shoved his fists into his pockets and said, “Darkness, all that same stuff, but my…but Nakon and I were skydiving. He couldn’t open his chute and said he was trapped. And then he said some other stuff I didn’t catch, except…‘not here.’”

A loud screech drew our attention to the trees above. Brooks flew down in normal hawk form, and just as her talons touched the ground, she shifted into a human. She had really gotten good at sticking her landings. Louie’s monkey threw its hands into the air and screamed as it leaped into the nearest tree.

“You scared him away,” Louie whined to Brooks.

Glancing around with a scrunched nose, Brooks shook a glob of donut off her shoe and said, “I’ve been tearing apart the jungle chasing miniature monkeys for the stuff they’ve been stealing, and you’ve been here having a food fight and making friends with the thieves?”

“They’re not all thieves!” Louie cried.

Brooks’s eyes flicked to my bloodied mouth.

“I’m fine,” I said before telling her about the drowning-in-darkness nightmares.

She threw her attention to Louie and Marco. “You guys had the same dream?”

Louie shivered. “Something real bad is up.”

“We bet you know what it is,” Marco added, crossing his arms.

Hondo dragged a hand through his hair. “I better get to the arena, see if the other godborns dreamed about their godly parents. Maybe it all adds up to an answer. You good here?” he asked me.

Nodding, I steered Hondo away from the others and said in a low voice, “I need to tell you what I learned. I’ll meet up with you in thirty.”

After my uncle took off, I rejoined the two godborns. Louie said to me, “That lightning ceremony hurt, by the way. You could have warned us about that.”

Marco had the same scowl he’d worn that day when he was imprisoned in the junkyard. “Did you dream about Hurakan, Zane?”

“No.” Only the Red Queen. And then I wondered why Hurakan hadn’t tried to reach out to me. Probably because the Red Queen had taken up all my headspace.

“So the gods are trying to communicate with their kids through dreams,” Brooks said, but it was more like she was talking to herself.

“Well, they’re doing a pretty bad job of it,” Marco said. “You’d think gods would be able to speak more clearly.”

Louie took another bite of the bar and spoke around a mouthful of chocolate. “My dad talked real clear during my claiming.”

“What do you mean?” Brooks asked.

“When I was pounded with lightning,” he said, “he told me I was the son of the great rain god and didn’t need any training. He said our powers were a force…. No, that wasn’t the word. Maybe he said our powers were the greatest of all the gods. Yeah, something like that.” He licked chocolate from the corner of his mouth.

Marco harrumphed, then his eyes widened. “Wait! Why would the gods need to talk to us in our dreams…? Where are they?”

“At their mountain resort,” Brooks said with so much sarcasm I thought her tongue would fall out of her mouth.

Alana emerged from the trees, followed by Adrik and Ren. “We just ran into Hondo. You found chapat?”

I nodded.