Storm (Elemental 1)

“Probably,” echoed Becca. “Let me go get dressed.”

She felt Michael watching her, but she couldn’t look back. She remembered those bolts of lightning on the field, the way the power had flared in the air and brushed against her skin. She remembered the smell of fear and rain and scorched earth.

If they found anyone on the field, they definitely wouldn’t be hungover.

They’d be dead.

CHAPTER 35

Becca pulled on jeans, a tee shirt, and a long-sleeved hoodie to combat the chill in the air. She worried about how the drive would go, considering her history with Michael. Once they were on the road, she realized she shouldn’t have bothered.

He didn’t say a word.

Halfway to school, she couldn’t take it anymore. She’d rather listen to him snipe at her than suffer this silence she could only fill with worry.

“How did you know where I live?” she asked.

Michael glanced over at her. His window was down, his arm on the ledge. The wind pulled strands of hair from his ponytail, and he needed a shave.

“You made a path,” he said.

She rolled that around in her head for a second. “Are you deliberately being cryptic?”

“No.” He looked at her as if she was deliberately being stupid. “Chris told you what we are, right?”

“I think I got the CliffsNotes version.”

He turned back to the road. “You’ve been to the house several times. Once you lay a path, the ground starts to remember you. If you’d only been to the house once, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.”

“So I guess you can’t bitch about me showing up unannounced anymore.”

“I guess I can’t,” he conceded.

“You going to tell me what really happened to you?”

He was silent so long she wasn’t sure he was going to answer. But then he said, “I’m not sure. Someone came after us. I felt the power in the woods behind the house.”

“When?”

“Just before midnight maybe? I didn’t check my watch. I was able to run him off, so I thought it was Tyler or one of his buddies, and then the guys never came home... .” He shrugged and let his voice trail off, but she heard everything he wasn’t saying.

Before midnight. That was later than when the Guide had attacked them on the field.

But also after Hunter left the school for an “emergency.” Becca couldn’t get Chris’s question out of her head.

Just what do you know about him anyway?

The school was deserted, but some of the Homecoming decorations were still stuck to the glass doors of the gymnasium, red and blue decals that had started to peel after the storm last night. Cigarette butts littered the ground around the flagpole.

“Can you do that tracking thing to find them?” she asked.

Michael shook his head. “I already tried. There were too many people here.”

“Come on,” she said. “I last saw Chris on the soccer field.”

He followed her, striding silently by her side. True to form, he didn’t say a word. He just stopped about thirty feet from the bleachers, dropping to a knee to touch his hand to the ground. “This is where you last saw Chris?”

“Ah ... yeah.”