Elite: A Hunter novel by Mercedes Lackey Read Free Book Online Page A

everything in my room, and the lights flickered and went out in the middle of the shaking.
    I stayed put even though my heart was racing like there was a Drakken after me. The worst thing you can do in a situation like this is move, especially move when your gut wants to panic. The shaking stopped; the lights stayed out. I made a mental map of the room I was in, making sure that if the lights stayed out, I knew how many steps it was to the door to the bedroom, and from there, how many to the closet where my pack from home was. I had a flashlight in there and some chem-lights. And then my Perscom lit up, reminding me that in a pinch I could use it as a flashlight.
    “Stay calm and stay put, everyone. We got a series of direct lightning hits on and around HQ, and the local grid is down. We’ll have stand-alone, emergency power up shortly.”
    So I stayed where I was, with my ears ringing a little from how quiet it was in this room, although the thunder was still a distant presence. Back home, of course, it’s always very quiet because we don’t have a lot of things running all the time. But here, there was always the hum from electronics and lights, a faint but ubiquitous sound that I had stopped noticing consciously after a while. And there was the sound of the air moving in the ventilation ducts, a different hum from the cool-box when it turned on, a lot of things I had gotten used to, and now were just gone, leaving silence. But not a complete silence—there was still the faint and muted rumbling of the thunder beyond the thick walls, and the distant whine from the wind as well. It made me conscious all over again how the whole building was vibrating from something that was just not adequately described by the word “storm.”
    I felt the air moving first, then heard the hum as my cool-box came up. Then some of the lights, which were dimmer than usual. My Perscom lit up again. “Limited electric for now. No vid. Try an old-fashioned book,” someone announced, dryly. That surprised a laugh out of me. Well, I was certainly well supplied with those. “Or you can use your Perscoms; wireless is still up.”
    I felt Bya tickling the back of my head, not like he was alarmed, but more like, Would you like me there? As it happened, between the unhappy-making letters and the threat of being thrown into the dark again, I did. I cast the Glyphs and opened the Way, and he came through in greyhound shape.
    I turned off all the lights I didn’t need and moved into the bedroom with Bya and my letters. He laid himself alongside me while I read; not only was it very comforting to have him there, but it was very comforting knowing that if some monstrous tornado hit HQ, between his Shields and mine we would survive the second or two it would take him to bamph us both out together.
    The last ones were a stack from Kei, my best friend from back home. She was absolutely full of cheerful news, ordinary stuff from all the villages on the Mountain and in the valleys, things the Hunters had left out. Like who was paired up, who had broken up, who was doing what new projects. She was now an item with Dutch down in Silverspring—I giggled and hugged Bya over that; it was about time she noticed how crazy he was for her! She described three new outfits she’d made for herself. She’d been watching my vids. She loved what I was wearing as a Hunter, and went into verbal spasms over the dresses I’d worn on my dates with Josh. She thought Josh was adorable. She’d been down with some of the others to meet Mark Knight’s people when they arrived to join up with Brother Vincent’s “flock.” “Stiff,” was her estimation. “But I think they’re all right. They seem grateful to be here, and gratitude will take them a long way. They don’t know about everything yet” —by which she meant the Monastery— “but we figure that’ll come when we know how far we can trust them.” I already knew the Masters were thinking of letting them in