With TEMPEST releasing in only two days, I was going to whet your appetite with all of Chapter One--until I realized that Chapter One is, like, twenty-five pages. That's a lot of text for a blog post, so instead I present the first scene in Chapter One. And if you like what you see, don't forget to buy TEMPEST on Monday from
Amazon,
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Kobo, and other online retailers!
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One
West Hollywood
"Greens are such a pain in the ass.”
I
hadn’t intended my comment to come out loud enough for anyone to overhear,
especially my boss and partner for the night, Teresa West, but she heard it
anyway and gave me a quelling glare from her side of the pile of rubble we were
crouching behind. I didn’t take the words back, though. My personal ass was in
quite a bit of its own pain after a telekinetic blast from the aforementioned
Green knocked me onto it about two minutes ago. “Green” was our chosen word for
young, untrained Metas who thought it was cool to use their newly discovered
powers to break the law.
Such
as the telekinetic Green attempting to rob West Hollywood’s only branch of the
Second National Bank of California. Most average bank robbers go in during the
day, when a teller can hand over the cash. Our bank robber thought she was
clever by going in at three in the morning to tear out a few walls.
Fortunately
for us, she wasn’t clever enough to test her newfound powers before the
robbery, or she’d have known they didn’t actually work on steel. She’d spent so
much time fighting to open the vault, LAPD had showed up—then they decided to
call us in to deal with the mess. As the leader of our band of mismatched
former Rangers, Teresa accepted the job and then promptly assigned
herself. Her Meta ability lets her shoot
awesome purple balls of energy, capable of annihilating walls, out of her fingers,
as well as create the occasional force field. She volunteered me because I can
control the wind. Ethan “Tempest” Swift at your service. Among other handy
things, I can stop the wind from moving, blast it out, spiral it like a drill,
and use it to fly.
The
bank robber—whom we hadn’t actually seen yet, but whose screams of frustration
had a decidedly female pitch—was not happy
when we appeared on the scene.
My pained ass and the pile of rubble serving as our shield against her tantrum
(rubble that used to be part of the building across the street from the bank)
were proof.
“She’s
terrified,” Teresa said.
“That
tends to happen when you rob a bank and the cops show up,” I replied with a
heaping dose of sarcasm.
Teresa
has a thing about helping Metas. All Metas, but especially the Greens. I love
her to pieces, but most days I just don’t get her ability to see the best in
people—especially after all the shit we’ve been through at the hands of
regular, non-Meta kinds of people.
I
peeked over the top of our debrispile.
The entire front of the bank was missing, giving us a clear view of a counter
and several shattered teller windows. The vault was somewhere in the back.
North La Cienega Boulevard was mostly clear, with a cop car parked at each end
of the block to keep gawkers away. Crowd control was about the only thing cops
were useful for in Meta-related situations, anyway.
My
back twinged and I shifted my weight onto my left knee. “Look, I have an idea
to get her out and keep her from smashing anything else with her temper,” I
said.
“Do
tell.”
“Ever
heard of the Tasmanian Devil?”
“The
animal?”
“Old
cartoon character.”
Her
eyebrows furrowed and she opened her mouth to say something, then shut it.
Understanding smoothed out the lines on her forehead. She held out her right
hand, palm up. A hazy purple orb formed there, the kind of fuzzy powerball she
used to knock people around without causing serious damage. “Just tell me when,”
she said.
With
the boss’s vote of confidence, I stood up. Yes, it made me a big freaking
target, but oh well. I had a better view of the bank and the actual volume of
air inside. I moved the air with ease, grabbing it hard and spinning it in a
tight, formed cyclone that sent paper, glass, and other small debris inside the
bank zinging away. The cyclone danced toward the back of the bank, and I closed
my eyes, waiting for the change in pressure that signaled I’d caught something.
Adrenaline
pulsed into my blood, as much from the thrill of using my powers as from being
made a target, standing in the open like that. Any idiot with a gun and a
strong belief in Governor Martin Winstead’s anti-Meta propaganda could get
frisky and try to take us out. Hell, some of the cops had looked ready to take
a pop at us the instant we showed up at the scene, like we were there to assist
the bank robber instead of stop her.
A
little extra wind fluttered around me, but the majority of it had created a
person-sized tornado inside the bank—and a sharp snap against my control told
me that the Green was fighting back. Awareness prickled the skin on the back of
my neck. I zeroed in on the opposing force and shoved right back, tightening
the cyclone, whipping the air around faster, harder.
Ever
stuck your hand out the window of a speeding car just to feel the wind rushing
around your fingers? Imagine that all over your body, slamming against your
face, numbing your skin. The telekinetic pushback felt like that.
Easiest
way to end this would be to send my cyclone into the nearest wall and use the
shrapnel cloud to knock the bank robber silly. Two major problems with the easy
way: one, I’d get my ass reamed (and not in the fun way) by Teresa if I
intentionally injured the Green when avoiding it was still possible; and two,
causing unnecessary property damage was near the top of our To Don’t list.
So
no knocking out a wall to knock out the latest Meta-powered felon of America.
Not tonight.
I
pulled more air into the bank and into the volume of the cyclone. The buildings
around the bank creaked under the pressure changes. If I didn’t end this soon,
a wall somewhere was coming down in the next sixty seconds.
“Tempest?”
I ignored Teresa’s impatient use of my code name and shoved everything I had into
getting that cyclone moving. The teller counter crumpled (not my fault) and
pieces got sucked into the cyclone (by accident). Trying to expel them would
take too much of my concentration, so I tempted Teresa’s wrath and broke
through the telekinetic’s resistance with my cyclone—at the exact same moment,
a piece of desk, aimed right at my head, zoomed out of the bank.
The
desk exploded in a shower of shrapnel and purple sparks.
Note
to self: Thank Teresa.
The
pressure inside my air cyclone had changed now that the Green was stuck inside
it, probably getting the snot smacked out of her by all the crap she’d made me
suck up like the world’s strongest vacuum cleaner. I drew the cyclone out of
the bank, which ripped up the tiled floor and sent pieces sailing into the
street. The thick swirl of gray and brown whipped
the air, and my intense hold on it sent a tremor down my spine.
“Anytime,”
I said, nearly shouting to be heard over the roar of my own powers.
“Now!”
Teresa said.
I
dropped the wind completely and fell to my knees, my entire body shivering from
the stress of holding the cyclone for so long. The debris collapsed to the
ground just outside the bank, and the black-clad figure trapped inside teetered
on her feet for a split second—then a purple orb knocked her backward, into the
wall of the building next door, shattering it with amazing ease. The Green
stayed down.
The
rest of the Second National Bank of California collapsed with a long,
thunderous groan.
As
the dust settled, I looked up at Teresa and grimaced. “Oops?”
“Big
fucking oops,” she replied. She shook her head, her expression as sad as it was
frustrated. “The mayor’s going to have a field day with this.”
Of
that I had no doubt. The mayor of Los Angeles, Christina Ainsworth, tolerated
our presence in her city the way a homeowner tolerates a nearby hornet’s nest—by
ignoring us until we made too much noise, and then attacking without mercy. And
with her favorite presidential candidate, Governor Winstead, in town stumping
for votes on his anti-Meta platform and due to give a public press conference
tomorrow afternoon, we were screwed.
Sometimes
trying to help people came back to bite you.
And
not in the fun way.
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