Nat and I dove our cloud boards into the wide, diffuse eye. Had this been a hurricane, we would have been in deep shit, but the wind speed was much lower. The technical classification by the weather circus put it at a depression/storm. Storm riders classified it as annoying instead of pain in the ass.
Except, this storm felt wrong. It wasn’t anything nearly strong enough to open a rift. We had faced down category 3 and 4 tornadoes with more oomph, but I could sense a wrongness that threatened to tear reality open, which would let horrific things into our world.
Gotta put a stop to this thing.
Together, almost hand-in-hand we dove down the north wall of the almost-storm. She gave the signal, and we unleashed our stored wind, compressed inside our bodies, as a hurricane force wind against the storm’s direction. They met, deflecting north, but it served to lessen the power of the storm. We coursed all the way down the disperse cyclone wall. We didn’t kill the massive front, which was hundreds of miles across, but it would disperse, almost naturally, now.
I joined Nat on a cloud where she tossed me a beer. I popped the top and let the bottle cap tumble down.
“So, what the fuck was with this storm? No way it should’ve been strong enough to open a rift.”
Nat looked at me as if I was stupid, then nodded, as if confirming it. “I keep forgetting how green you are. Or rather, I keep forgetting that Jack didn’t teach anything unless you encountered it first-hand.”
I swigged my beer again.
“This storm,” she gestured with her bottle, “wasn’t from here. It came all the way from the Gulf.”
I stared at her, then pointed down and to the left. “That is fucking Lake Superior. How the fuck does a storm from the Gulf get up here, and how does that answer my question?”
“It’s an unnatural storm for it to be up here. Tropical storms and depressions don’t survive landfall, or at least they’re not supposed to. Something juiced this motherfucker up.”
“Magic?” I asked.
She shrugged. “They’ve happened before, but it’s rare. This bad boy kind of jumped the season, too. It’s barely May. Going to be a long season. Drink up.”