Suddenly, a piercing alarm rang out, making both Aiden and I cringe. Aiden slapped his hands over his ears, ducking his head down. The shadows emerged from the ground beneath me, searching out the sound.
They found the source just as Aiden pointed. There were several large power poles along the pier, all with speakers attached to the top.
“That’s a fucking tsunami alarm,” Aiden yelled. “We gotta go.”
The tide did seem abnormally low, now that I really looked at it. The waves had stopped crashing a while ago, I just hadn’t noticed. I tried to remember everything I knew about the islands and their flood warning systems. Something I’d read explained that the alarms didn’t always mean a tsunami. Sometimes they signaled a large storm that’d pulled enough water from the shore to trigger the alarm.
Thunder clapped overhead, and Aiden paused, his fists clenching as he looked up into the storm clouds. I’d been keeping a careful eye on him for this exact reason. He didn’t appear to have any lingering trauma from his new affinity awakening, but I was still watching closely.
Aiden shook off whatever memory he’d just been sucked into, and the two of us made eye contact before turning back toward the main street. We jogged along the pier toward Skye’s café, not stopping even as the sky opened up and rain began to pour.
I heard Aiden curse next to me as the freezing rain soaked us down to our fucking underwear. Aiden could at least warm himself up. I, however, was fucking freezing.
I looked everywhere, but the constant lightning and bright fucking street lamps didn’t provide a good place to shadow-walk.
The shadows flared away from me, running along the wet concrete as they searched out a good spot for us to leave. Just as the shadows gravitated toward a darkened alley between two buildings, another streetlight turned on, and I cursed.
I sent shadows at the streetlights, just enough to make them flicker, but the constant lightning didn’t give me an opening to leave. I was fast, but not faster than the speed of light. I was about to suggest we run again when Aiden grabbed my arm, making me pause. He looked up into the sky, then to the streetlights.
He had exactly thirty seconds to do whatever the fuck he was about to do before my dick froze off from hypothermia.
Skye hadn’t even seen it yet. It couldn’t freeze off before she got to admire it. That would be tragic.
Aiden chewed his lip, then lifted one of his hands, and suddenly, the area around us went dark, lit only by the flashing lightning and a glowing ball of fucking electricity in Aiden’s hand.
We both stared, dumbfounded, as the ball sizzled and hissed, sparksjumping off of it even in the rain. Aiden thrust his hand upward with a hiss, sending the ball of light careening into the clouds. Thunder clapped while the clouds lit up as if lightning had snapped inside them.
“Holy shit,” Aiden said, and then I grabbed him.
Aiden had never shadow-walked with me before. Well,technicallyhe had, he was just overdosing on drugs at the time.
I cringed at the memory. I’d been so worried about Aiden’s mental health after that whole situation, I’d barely paid attention to my own.
I pushed that thought aside as another roll of thunder nearly deafened us. But for a moment, the lightning waned, and the shadows moved us.
The apartment was a ghost town.
Aiden ran out toward the café, but the apartment seemed empty. Zephyr had just been here with Skye. Where the hell were they?
I could hear Skye’s raised voice, sending the hair on the back of my neck into the air as my body reacted to her distress.
She didn’t like loud noises. She didn’t like thunder. I knew that. Willow had told me that, Zephyr had confirmed it. As much as I wanted to run out to the café to get to Skye, I decided heading into the apartment was better. Zephyr could use my help, and Aiden would be better suited to calm Skye down if she was upset.
But as I made my way into the apartment, my unease only grew.
It really was empty.
“Zephyr?” I called out during a lull in thunder.
No reply.
A strange sensation stirred in my gut. Something…wasn’t right.
I made my way down the hall, peeking in the bedrooms, the makeshift gym, the spare bathroom. I finally came to a stop at the utility room.
The shadows prodded along the concrete floors, but as I turned to leave, I heard a creak. I turned back to see that the large, heavy doorleading to the basement was cracked open. One of the shadows poked at it, making it creak again.
Neither sibling had allowed me to go into the basement with them. Part of me knew I shouldn’t go down there alone, but I was searching for Zephyr, and the storm was only getting worse. Maybe it wasn’t a tsunami headed for us, but clearly there was a massive storm sucking up the ocean water.
