against the buffeting winds and the raging of the storm, feeling like he stood under a raging waterfall.
Another flash, and he could see the hill descending toward him, rolling like a tidal wave. Boulders, trees, bushes—a garbage can and an old bicycle, a ten-speed like the one he used to ride before his jogging kick.
The wave of mud and debris rumbled toward him.
Then the blackness descended, but not before he caught a flash of movement at the top of the hill. Two figures, apparently isolated from nature’s carnage. Their cloaks unruffled, their cowled heads bowed.
In the resurging darkness, he tried to brace himself, but the car jolted with the impact. Jolted, and flipped, tossing Aickerman on his back into the mud. He gagged, got to his feet, just in time to see the movement—the black shape of the car tumbling side over side toward him.
He turned and tried to run, but his legs were stuck, the mud holding him fast. Tried to scream, but his throat was full of rain and muck. Tried to dodge, but the car slammed into him, pinned him back down and drove him deep into the earth where the trees and the mud and rain voraciously crushed his lungs, tore his flesh and drowned his soul.
O O O
Moments later, the rain stopped and the clouds blew apart, scattering in all directions; Venus and her children took up their lofty perches over a hill now bereft of sycamores. Below, only the trunk of the senator’s car remained visible, propped up from the hardening muck, a metallic tombstone with its license plate his only epitaph.
Atop the hill, one of the shrouded figures pulled a sleek black cell phone from his sleeve. Punched a number, and waited, twirling the gnarled staff in his free hand.
“It’s done,” he said after a moment, as a starlit smile emerged from the shadowy cowl. In a gentle easterly breeze, he snapped the phone shut, nodded to his companion and walked out of the quiet grove, leaving behind only a crudely-erected circle of stones.
Book 1
Chapter 1
At San Diego’s Channel Seven Doppler Weather Center, a small command-room style chamber with no windows to glare off of the sixteen monitors and computer screens, Primetime Weather anchor Mason Grier sat hunched over his chair, staring at a small array of LCD screens, poring over statistics from the twelve-county area, measuring them against chronological graphs from the past forty-eight hours.
Clear weather patterns stretched across the digital maps in all directions, far out into the Pacific even; but then, sudden red concentric circles flared up, localized over the suburb of Sunset Hills, exploding like fire-bursts, then disappearing just as fast.
Mason reversed the time and played the sequence again from several angles on the different screens.
He leaned back, shaking his head. “Impossible.”
The door opened behind him, letting in a shaft of bright afternoon sunlight. His producer, Pamela Brock, stood there beaming. “Mason, time to go. Unless you want to be late for your own award ceremony.” She was fifty-six, and despite two divorces and six kids and fifty extra pounds, still full of frenzied energy. High-strung, her office across the hall was littered with empty cans of Red Bull, which happened to be her nickname among the news team.
“I’ve got a killer intro for you, Mace, got all the press there already. Even imported some special fans of yours.”
“Who?” He had no fans. Mason (“Mace” to his producer, and only to her) was a meteorologist, and if you looked up his class description in a role-playing game, his ilk would be described as reclusive, hermetic even. They hid from the limelight, preferring the damp recesses under rocks and in the shadows while people like Emory Jiles the sportscaster and Diana Newman the lead anchor sought all the attention. Meteorologists, weathermen like Mason, studied almanacs, pored over statistics and averages, and culled all sorts of data together to attempt the challenging feat of predicting the unpredictable.
At forty-five, Mason was and always had been, a weather fanatic. However, it was a love-hate relationship, spawned in a Petrie dish and fermenting over the years until it outpaced its confines, exhausted its food and went out seeking fresh fodder, thriving off of Mason’s tragedy and taking impersonal glee in shattering his life at every turn.
His first memories were of the tornado in Indiana, the one that tore through half his childhood home—the half with his parents’ bedroom. With a force of such malevolent fury, it scattered their broken bodies across a field nearly