Rules of Fate

Chapter 18 - When the weather changes...

Soon after I fell asleep, my sugar depleted brain couldn't function too well at the best of times. Faced with the uncertainty of the future it decided it was better off asleep. That is until the loud banging started.

'Go away!' I mumbled into my pillow.

But the banging continued and I flipped over with a groan. What the hell! Maybe there was a psycho at the door waiting to kill me. But then the rational part of my mind told me that it was highly unlikely a psycho would knock at my door.

'Who is it?' I yelled when the knocking increased in tempo to a consistently irritating level.

'Open the damn door!' came the harassed reply.

Scott? I leapt out of bed and unlocked the door to see his worried face. It was then that I felt it. That uneasiness, the same feeling I had had at the gas station before we were shot at. Something was very wrong, but what? I turned to face the open window where the curtains were now flapping crazily and were perpetually horizontal, being blown into the room by the stiff breeze. I could smell the weather change but before I could understand what was happening I felt a tremor.

'Is that...?'

'In here!' he yelled and dragged me into the small bathroom. At first glance I realised my instincts had been dead on; the bathroom was a complete disaster.

'What is it?'

'Twister,' he replied as he slammed the door shut and turned to me.

'Twister?' My blood ran cold as I realised we were on the second floor of a very unstable motel. Did this area even get twisters? I asked Scott as much and he shrugged as usual.

'Possibly, not many though.'

Great! I was on a road trip to who knew where with a guy who was as vague as possible and we had just hit a twister. What were the odds? At this point I was in a fair way of believing that hitting a twister was pretty routine in the general chaos of my life at the moment. In second sight the threads vibrated and sang with a merry abandon that made me gasp.

Natural disasters happen all over the world and Fate has a big hand in them, but for some reason this didn't feel like Fate's routine tantrum, this was unusual in the extreme. And it was powerful. The entire floor was shaking now and I could almost hear the foundations creaking in protest. The furniture in the bedroom was being tossed against the walls and from the sounds of splintering, not holding up too well against the forces of Nature.

Scott and I crouched on the dirty floor in close contact with each other since the bathroom could barely stretch to fit one person let alone two. I noticed his face was blank, like when we were being shot at. Shock? I doubted it. It looked like he was doing something, but what? A flashback taunted my mind.

A year ago I'd seen one of the high-level guys calm down a storm raging out at sea. A president's yacht had been caught in a maelstrom and for this Fatelist the president's aide was very important to the future. He had rushed into second sight and literally grasped the Fate lines, re-aligning them and dragging the yacht to safety, toying with Fate so to speak. The president had died later but the aide was safe and had gone on to become vice-president. The whole thing had struck me as being surreal at the time, but maybe I could do what that Fatelist had.

I went into second sight now and saw the twister raging in brilliant colours disrupting threads. It seemed to have a mind of its own. Hang on...I frowned, no natural event started out of nowhere and twisters were no different. This one seemed to have appeared out of nowhere and was seemingly running contrary to other weather patterns. Its polarity was all wrong. It was as if something had created it. But how? Its vortex was speeding up even though it should have been slowing down and according to all meteorological rules disappearing into the stratosphere.

But this was being manipulated by forces beyond my understanding until I looked around and saw a brilliantly coloured thread heading for the vortex with a single-minded purpose. Scott. His thread glowed brilliantly against the darkness of the twister and he was now within the vortex. I couldn't see what was happening but I could now feel the floor and walls of the bathroom shaking with alarming force. The motel was slowly being destroyed by the twister in the physical world.

I dropped back and clung desperately to a towel rail and grabbed Scott by the hand, dragging him closer. If this thing went berserk like it was threatening to do, we would need the support of something secure. I shut my eyes tightly as the complimentary shampoos and toiletries, which I was sure had last been used at least ten years ago, flew like missiles off the shelves and slammed into the walls, shattering their contents all over us. I used some of my power like I had been taught at the Academy to shield us, but I knew we had almost no chance of survival if the motel crumbled from the force of a now F5 tornado. I hugged Scott tightly, my other arm wrapped at an impossible angle round the towel rail. The three of us would get through this together or not at all.

The sudden calm hit me as forcefully as if the motel had been destroyed. I opened my eyes a tiny bit to find that the shaking had stopped. The bathroom was a wreck, more than it had been, and Scott, drenched in age-old shampoo, was sitting calmly next to me wearing a small smile.

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