Cape Storm Page 0,1

The CEO of magically gifted humans.

Panic didn't look good on him.

"It's not working!" I yelled back. The wind whipped the words right out of my mouth. He nodded and wrestled a yellow storm slicker around my shoulders, holding me steady while I put it on. There. I shivered in sudden relief as the rain pummeled the plastic instead of my skin, but it was just animal reaction. There was no such thing as true relief right now. "We have to get out of here, Lewis! Now! This thing is after us!" Me. It was after me.

A bolt of lightning the thickness of a skyscraper tore through the false night, arcing over the bowl of the sky. It shattered into a thousand stabbing branches. In the glow, Lewis looked worse than I'd expected - tired, of course, and unshaven, but also pallid. He'd pushed himself to the limit, and it hadn't worked.

If the most powerful Warden on the planet, connected to a network of hundreds of other powerful Wardens, couldn't make this thing turn its course, then we were in for one hell of a start to our day.

"Get on the ship," he yelled over the wind. "We need to get it out of the harbor, now !" I looked past him to the massive floating castle of the Grand Paradise. "I can't believe we're stealing something the size of the frigging Queen Mary !"

"It's stable!" he shouted back. "I'd take a destroyer if I could get my hands on one, but this'll have to do. It's fully provisioned and ready to go. It's our only option right now, unless you want to try to take this thing here!"

Yeah, I had to admit, our options were fairly limited. Die on shore or make a run for it and hope the storm wheeled to follow, sparing the city.

Still. A cruise ship? Granted, Wardens generally don't travel cheap. That's practicality.

When you have the power to control the elements of the planet - like living things, geologic forces, wind, and water - and when those elements get pissed about being bossed around, you'd better have some room to duck and cover. And where do you get lots of room when you travel?

First class, of course. It's not all about the free champagne. Although that's good, too.

Taking all that into consideration, commandeering the Grand Paradise was still over the top, even for us. The ship mostly cruised the Caribbean, but it was still enormous, and it had originally been built to give the big boys some transatlantic competition, so it was tough as hell. It was the size of a ten-story building, ridiculously set afloat. The cheery paint colors on the decks and hull made it seem even more surreal.

The problem was that up to about an hour ago, it had been boarding for its normal, tame cruise business. Granted, the storm had reversed that process, but even so, it took time to de-board three thousand passengers, not to mention the thousand or so crew members.

Police were on-site, guiding the confused, angry, terrified tourists out of the boarding area and off to waiting buses to take them to shelter. It was chaos, complicated by pile-driving rain and wind, and I expected it only to get worse.

I'd been watching the steady stream of humanity with a kind of stunned, detached disbelief. As a Warden, I would never pack myself into a ship so full of people and go out to tempt fate - not recreationally, anyway. It's a fact of life: Wardens draw storms, and not just any storms. They might start out as forces of nature, but they develop their own personalities once they reach a certain level of power.

And they develop intelligence. The one thing that seems consistent about storms is that whatever their origin, they seem to really hate Weather Wardens.

Lucky us.

It seemed counterproductive to be boarding a ship under the present circumstances, but Lewis knew what he was doing. He thought that the storm was being drawn here by the high concentration of Wardens, and that was partly true, although I thought it was mostly drawn to me; it also was feeding off the natural energy created by our presence.

If we moved, it would likely follow. Bad for us, good for the millions of people in the Miami area who were looking at a worst-case-disaster scenario.

A year ago, we would never have dared try to snatch a ship like this in broad (if stormy) daylight, but times were changing. The Wardens had