Lord of Lightning

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

A Biography of Suzanne Forster

T
HE CHILDREN SAW IT FIRST.

The iridescent green cloud hung in the evening sky like an ocean mist, clinging to the darkening foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains. It glowed oddly, almost transparent for several seconds. And then its color deepened to a rich emerald flame against the twilight horizon.

The two youngsters stood side by side, transfixed.

“What is it, Danny?” the girl asked her older brother. She brushed dark bangs from her serious gray eyes and pressed closer to the much-larger boy, tugging on his shirt sleeve. The gravity in her expression contradicted her waiflike appearance. She was slight to the point of spindliness, and looked to be little more than a grade-schooler. “What is it?”

“I don’t know, Em,” Danny said, hushed. “It looks as if it’s coming from the rock quarry.”

Set back into the foothills, the quarry was nearly a quarter mile away. It was partially visible through a clearing of thickly wooded sycamores, and as the children began a cautious approach, they noticed a log cabin tucked back into the trees. A windowpane was broken, and the weathered old building appeared to be deserted.

The girl hung back a moment as the boy picked his way through the undergrowth toward the cabin. “Oh, Danny, look at this!” she cried.

She dropped to a crouch near the limp form of a sparrow hawk, its graceful head wrenched backward as through its neck had been broken.

“Don’t touch it, Em,” Danny called out to her as she bent to scoop the bird up. “It’s dead. There’s nothing you can do.”

“But it’s so beautiful—”

“Emily!”

Danny’s voice had a frantic sound. As Emily looked up he was sprinting toward her, waving her away from the bird.

“What is it?” she said.

“I heard something in the bushes behind the cabin.” He caught hold of her hand and pulled her to her feet, dragging her with him toward the cover of the nearby sycamores. “Come on, Em. Something’s out there!”

Emily’s breath burned through her nose as they huddled behind a thicket of mountain laurel and manzanita, their eyes fixed on the cabin. “What do you think it is?”

The answer constricted in Danny’s throat.

A silvery flash of light appeared in the wooded darkness across the way, and he jerked Em close as if to silence an imminent scream. Immobile as graveyard statuary, the two children watched the silvery flashes draw nearer, taking on substance and form.

The luminescent being that emerged from the side of the cabin moved like a man, a very large man, encased in a shimmering metallic skin from head to toe. His features were hidden from view by the dark glow of a face shield, and the apparatus he carried looked ominously like a space-age weapon.

Em and Danny ducked down as the man scanned the area thoroughly, saw the bird, and walked to it. He knelt down and murmured something, then he picked up the limp form and touched its head. The bird twitched and went still again.

Silver flashed in the waning light as the man stood. Suddenly the bird fluttered in the cupped hands, and a weak cry burst from its broken body. In the next moment the creature was all flying wings and graceful, harrowing energy. Silhouetted by an iridescent green aura, it soared into the falling night, its cries echoing sweetly in the foothills.

H
AD
L
ISE
A
NDERSON
foreseen the fateful consequences of roaming the Tools ’R Us Hardware Store with a gimpy shopping cart that bright June afternoon, she might have decided to trade the conveyance in for a smoother running model. She might even have decided to shop on another day. At another hardware store.

But Lise wasn’t thinking about consequences as she browsed in the electronics section, mulling over step-down transformers and rheostats, just two of the high-tech gizmos she needed for her class’s science project the next day. She was wondering how in the world she was going to teach twenty rambunctious summer school students to build a model metrorail when she had trouble telling a monkey wrench from a pair of duckbill pliers.

“‘Connect the red wire to the blue terminal at junction A,’” she mumbled, reading the transformer instructions to herself as she muscled her wayward shopping cart down the aisle. A pyramid of oil cans loomed to her left. She saw it out of the corner of her eye and made an automatic adjustment for it as she continued reading. “‘Make sure the local electric power is AC. If the wires touch adjacent terminals, a severe shock can result.’”

That was when her shopping cart escaped from her.

With a will of its own the cart locked into a curve, wheels jamming, ball bearings screeching. Lise threw her body weight behind it, trying to right the stubborn thing with one hand while she clutched the transformer with the other.

“Swell,” she muttered, unsurprised. She was a battle-scarred veteran of the renegade shopping cart syndrome. Her particular peeve was with carts that headed straight for parked cars in the store lots, as though they were designed to search out and destroy.

She twisted, heaved, and swore under her breath, but none of her gyrations made any difference. The cart lurched like a demon possessed for the oil cans.

One last urgent yank brought the cart around. Wheels screeched, axles ground, and Lise heaved a sigh of relief. As she squeaked past the pyramid and rolled into the plumbing section, she glanced behind her. Home free. Not even one can of thirty-weight motor oil had tumbled to the floor.

She never saw the other shopping cart approaching.

Or its operator.

“Oh, no!” The transformer slipped from her hand as the two carts collided head on, and a shower of electronic minutia bounced out of Lise’s upper tray. Throw switches, battery sleeves, switch brackets, and connectors flew every which way, scattering like a string of pearls.

“I’m
sorry
,” Lise cried as she dropped into a crouch and began scooping up debris. “My shopping cart—”

“Right,” he said, laughing softly. “The shopping cart from hell. Mine too.”

Lise barely registered the low ripple of masculine laughter as she knelt to clean up the mess. She was too busy piling connectors and switch brackets into the crook of her arm. She reached for the transformer just as the man knelt to help her.

Lise saw it coming, another collision, but she was as helpless to stop it as she had been the cart. Her bare arm brushed against his as they touched the metal casing at exactly the same instant. Lise felt as though she’d stuck a wet wire in a live socket. Their hands met and the jolt of electricity that rolled up her arm seemed hot enough to scorch off the fine blond hairs.

What happened next seemed to defy the laws of physics. Lise stared in disbelief as a tiny arc of green lightning connected their fingers. Spiky and white-hot, it was visible even in the harsh glare of the store lights. “Good Lord,” she breathed, realizing that the spark couldn’t have come from the transformer. It wasn’t plugged in!

Seemingly endless seconds flashed by before Lise had the presence of mind to pull her hand away. She had no idea how much time had actually elapsed. The entire incident played like a horror movie scene in slow motion.

In the aftermath of the physical shock, a ringing sensation filled her ears, and the odor that burned in her nostrils smelled faintly of sulfur, as though a match had just been struck.

“What happened?” she asked as the man gripped her arm and helped her to her feet, steadying her as she emptied her load of electronic paraphernalia into the tray.

“I think we shorted out,” he said.

“We certainly did.” Lise laughed shakily and stepped away from him. “I’m surprised we didn’t black out the entire store.”

Lise’s first impression was of faded blue jeans, a chambray shirt, and a log-splitter’s shoulders. An outdoorsman, she thought, registering his dusty gold hair and several days’ growth of beard. As their gazes connected Lise felt another kind of lightning. A type of déjà vu—not quite the feeling that she’d met him before, but that she knew him somehow. The sense of recognition was powerful. Its clarity confounded Lise because there was nothing to confirm it. Her mind searched for the details of a meeting, any kind of a memory, but she came up empty-handed. There was no corroborating data, no personal history to be found, not even a glimmer. “Do I know you?” she asked.

He took a slow, contemplative moment to study her. “I find myself wishing I could say yes. But no, you don’t know me. It’s impossible.”

Impossible ...

Lise examined him quite openly then, taking in his height—well over six feet—and his husky, blue-collar build. Dark blond hair cascaded carelessly to his shoulders, and the beard that chased his angular jawline was shot through with gold and a darker hue, bronze. A head-turner, she thought. Not handsome detail for detail, but arresting taken as a whole. If infinity had a color, she decided, it would be the blue of his eyes. To describe them as dense didn’t begin to do them justice. They looked as though they could absorb all the light in the room.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “You remind me of someone.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know ...” Usually Lise wasn’t one to equivocate, even when she was off balance, which she very definitely was at the moment. But she couldn’t shake the confusion, or the certainty that he was someone she’d met, perhaps even a shaping influence in her past.