Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World #1)(57)

There’s a quiet authority to his voice that I’ve never heard before. It brooks no argument. Clive and I both do as we’re told.

Kai steps forward. Starts to sing. Navajo words, soft and low.

Closer, within twenty feet, he lets them come. Voice still steady.

Fifteen. Twelve.

And then he flicks the lighter alive, leans in over the flame, and blows.

His breath catches the fire, sends it whirling. Small at first, but then it grows. Tall as a child, but then taller. And it circles, twisting into a cyclone of blue and orange and yellow and red, until it’s a massive whirlwind of fire that builds, builds. The fire is so bright I cringe back involuntarily. I try to hold my ground but am forced back by the inferno. I can hear Kai still singing, and a soft curse from Clive, before all sound is swallowed in the tornado of flames, itself a living entity. That twists down and swallows the charging tsé naayéé’.

They are incinerated where they stand. The flames shift to the right and the bodies of the dead burn too. They go up like dried kindling, quick and bright and hot. Flesh and bone turn to nothing. Until there’s no trace of monsters anywhere in Rock Springs.

And then just as quickly as it came, the wind and the fire are gone. The only sign the cyclone of flames existed is the gray ash that drifts lazily to the ground in the eddies of a barely there breeze.

Only a handful of seconds has passed.

Kai gasps and falls to his knees. His face is drenched in sweat, and he’s panting and trying to suck in air like he just ran across the open desert at top speed. I move to pull him to his feet, but he waves me off. Leans over and braces his hands against his thighs, still struggling to force air into his lungs.

“What the hell was that?” Clive’s voice comes from behind us, saving me the trouble of asking.

“Just a little wind,” Kai manages to get out. “I wasn’t even sure it would work, but . . .”

But it did. And I’ve never seen anything like it. Not even from Neizghání. And suddenly I understand what Tah was talking about. “Weather Ways,” I whisper, words meant only for his ears.

He grimaces. Doesn’t answer me, although I’m not sure I was really asking a question.

Stunned, we all stare at the place where the monsters were just moments before.

Kai finally breaks the heavy silence. “We’ve got to get Rissa home.” He looks over his shoulder at me, at Clive.

Clive looks back at Kai with a hint of something in his eyes. Awe? Fear? Whatever it is, it lingers as he nods and gingerly lifts his unconscious sister over his shoulder. I help him strap her partway to the bike and partway to her brother with strips of fabric and rope I cut off a collapsed tent. Kai and I stand there for a minute and watch them go. Wait until the sound of the engine fades into the desert night.

“She’ll be okay,” Kai says quietly. “That salve was an antibiotic, but she needs stitches. A healing prayer couldn’t hurt either. As long as Clive can hold her together until we get back . . .”

“What was that, Kai?” I ask him now that we’re alone.

He stares into the distance like he didn’t hear me, but I know he did.

“Did Tah teach you that?”

He laughs. “No.”

“Then what? Some kind of Burque?o magic?”

He looks over at me sharply.

“Because I’ve never seen anything like that. You called the wind.”

“The wind was already there,” he explains. He’s breathing normally again, the superhealing no doubt kicking in, but his voice is dead tired. “I just . . . coaxed it into something greater. And the fire came from this.” He holds Clive’s lighter up, still in his hand. “I can’t create elements from scratch, but if they’re already there, they . . . listen.”

“Is that the Weather Ways?”

He doesn’t answer me. The silence grows between us, and the wind, the very normal wind, picks up a little, shaking the tents and the decorated flag poles behind us.

I rub my hands along my arms, chilled. Whatever power Kai has—medicine, foreign, clan, or some combination of the three—it’s more likely to be feared than praised, and that I understand at a soul level. Someone who can create tornados could raze whole towns. That’s dangerous. And dangerous people need to be controlled. And if they can’t be controlled, best they be put down. No wonder he’s keeping secrets.

“You think they’re gone?” he asks.

“I can’t smell them anymore,” I say, letting the subject of his powers drop for now.

“Me neither,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean they can’t come back.”

“What do you think happened to the people? There’s no ch’?dii here, are there? Like at Crownpoint?”

“No. Hiding, most likely,” he says. “Probably safer than us, standing out here like big targets for whatever else might come over that ridge.”

He’s got a point.

“Did you see?” he says. “They looked like they came from out of thin air. Where do you think they’re coming from? And who’s making them? And why?”

I remember the lightning strike burns by the main camp, and a horrible suspicion starts to form. It seems outrageous, even blasphemous, but Tah said it himself. Neizghání doesn’t think like humans do. And he would have access to the kind of sacred objects it would take to make monsters. Suddenly I am cold to the bone.