F³ Stakeout Food

            I had tailed Kyle Wilson from work to racquetball at the gym to the apartment of his mistress in Fairhaven. The place was quite a step up from the condo he and his wife had in Meriville. Thanks to a car camera setup that Ira had turned me onto, I was able to get pictures of the woman answering the door and letting Kyle in. This wouldn’t be enough to close the case, but I’d have to wait around to get the pics Kyle’s wife would need.

            Really wish this had been a gypsy curse.

            I didn’t like these kinds of cases, but it was just the nature of the business that I would get a lot of people thinking—or wanting to believe—something supernatural was going on, even when it wasn’t.

            Gypsy curses are easier to fix than a broken marriage, too.

            I settled in for the long stakeout, pointing a laser microphone at the living room window so I’d know when to move to the backyard and get pictures through the bedroom window.

            Suddenly, thunder cracked above, making me jump. Instead of the usual drizzle of rain Belport usually got, a full on downpour ensued, making me roll up the window or get completely drenched.

            And then my phone rang, the ringtone telling me who it was.

            “Kate,” I answered, “I’m working a case. Go away.”

            “I have lobster rolls,” she said.

            “I’ll text you where I’m at,” I said.

            Lobster rolls made for great stakeout food.

 

F³ Jack Dailey Frienship

           Lightning flowed in, coursing through my shoulder and into my gut. It writhed like a thing alive. It swirled along its path at the ready, waiting for release. I stretched my fingers apart, letting the current arc between them. No pops, just clean, regular matter electricity. I increased the current, sending it between my palms, widening the distance between them and increasing the current.

            No explosion.

            Thank God that’s over, now.

            I grinned and looked at Jack.

            He grinned back. “About fucking time,” he said.

            “What are you whining about? I was dealing with this for days before you caught it.”

            “Yeah, thanks to you. I flew halfway across the world for you. If that isn’t friendship, what is?”

            He has a point. Even though he’s an ass about it.

            “You’re right. Sorry. Thanks for coming.”

            He grunted. “Catch.”

            He tossed a bolt at me. I caught it, immediately letting it flow across my shoulders, though careful to avoid my heart, and back out my other arm straight at him. We continued to play catch for a few more minutes, each trying to put some sort of zing to trip the other up, either by pumping up the current or creating an alternate, ionizing path to his somewhere else on the other man. Jack was still much more experienced than I was, so none of my tricks worked on him, but I managed to fend off his tricks as well, especially since he taught me.

            As we continued, though, I started to notice something felt off inside me. I sense of hollowness that I didn’t remember from before this whole mess happened. I went on autopilot with Jack, and concentrated on it. The bolt that had recharged us hadn’t been massive, but it was pretty strong.

            Shouldn’t it have charge me up, more, even with splitting it with Jack?

            Unlike phones, storm riders didn’t come with a gauge to tell us when we were fully charged.

            “Hey, Jack?”

            “What?” He didn’t stop tossing bolts my way.

            “You feel like you could hold more than before?”

            He tossed another bolt before putting his hands down. Instead of returning it to him, I just absorbed it, letting it join the rest of my charge.

            Jack drew down his eyebrows, concentrating. He frowned. “Huh. Weird.” Then he shrugged. “Okay, then.”

            I was about to open my mouth to question more, then realized it would be pointless. Jack didn’t have any more answers, and it wasn’t like we had an instruction book around to look up the answers.

            “Cool,” I said.

            “Cool,” he said. He threw a bolt that caught me upside the head. “There. We’re even.”

           

F³ Charging Up

           As the twilight turned to full dark, Melissa tossed fat chunks of wood on the coals used to cook the meal. It didn’t take long until we had a proper campfire going. I felt good, and not just from the two bags of s’mores I had made.

“Well, that concludes the ceremony,” Melissa said. “I have some tents and sleeping bags, if you want, or I can drive you back into town to the hotel.”

The camping option appealed, but the breeze suddenly prickled and turned noticeably colder, at least to us. The breeze turned into a gust. Melissa’s phone lit up and emitted an awful noise that could only be a weather alert.

She checked it. “Oh shit,” she confirmed. “Thunderstorm is forming around us. Just got an urgent alert. We better pack up. This area gets a lot of lightning strikes.”

“Thunderbird, right?” Nat asked.

“Huh?” She glanced at Nat, then back to her phone. “Well, yeah, he would be responsible, but storms like this happen all the time. We should definitely get out, though.”

I stood up, as did Jack, and we walked away from the camp, back to the clearing where I had started this whole mess.

“Where are they going?” Melissa started pouring water over the fire and kicking dirt over it.

“I don’t think you need to worry about the storm,” I could hear Nat’s smirk.

“The storm is probably for our benefit,” Anna-Maria said.

Jack and I stood maybe twenty feet apart in the small crater, and began ionizing the air above us. We only had a little ambient static charge from the time during the feast. Electricity really was everywhere, generated by our bodies or the friction of clothing or the friction of a light breeze on the skin, and storm riders were batteries, soaking it up.

We combined our efforts from that trickle of a charge, ionizing the channel into one big path with a small branching about thirty feet up to feed into each of us. The cloud bank already started to flicker with internal lightning.

“Come on, you bastard, jump,” Jack said.

We had managed to ionizing a few hundred feet up, but didn’t dare try to take the path all the way to the clouds. We just didn’t have the charge. Besides, our ionized paths didn’t stay that way. The wind could dissipate them, too. The large paths made by the cloud bank and the ground were more likely to remain in place because of their mass, but we were just two lone storm riders.

Suddenly, the hair on my arms stood up.

Fuck yeah.

Snap.

The opposite ionizing path from the clouds connected. Lightning slammed into us.