Read Online Lord of Lightning by Suzanne Forster - Free Book Online Page A

looked up. The sparrow hawk was perched on a limb in the uppermost branches. Sunshine brushed its head with gold and tipped its feathers.
    Stephen smiled as the bird glanced down at him.
    “You feel it, too, don’t you?” he said.
    The bird’s head inclined quickly, something very near a nod, and then its eyes returned to the road.
    The dust devils were still moving, floating endlessly, a golden mist in the sunny breezes. The rustling that moved through the trees was a hushed sound that could have been her name. Lise .
    Even the foothills could feel it, Stephen thought.
    She was the one.
    “What happened in here?” Lise’s voice was light with shock as she entered the classroom later that morning. There were dismantled cardboard boxes, uncoiled coat hangers, buckets of plaster of paris, and crumpled newspapers strewn every which way. The place looked as though it had been ransacked by vandals.
    “Surprise,” Julie said, grinning through the wallpaper paste that decorated her face. She swept an arm toward the table where the metrorail pike was under construction. A tiny skyscraper was listing dangerously toward a mountain range that looked like a reject from Picasso’s cubism stage.
    “What is that?” Lise asked, and then she answered her own question. It was Malibu, after the mud slide.
    “It’s Los Angeles!” the kids cried in unison.
    “Of course, I should have known.” Lise managed a faint smile. It was her own fault. Julie had dropped her off at the house to change her clothes and had gone on ahead to hold down the fort until Lise got there. Lise vaguely remembered suggesting that Julie get the kids started on the layout for their project. It was supposed to be a model of the Los Angeles freeway system, through which their metrorail would run.
    Lise had thought that cutting, pasting, and papier-mâchéing would be a harmless enough diversion—the perfect pastime for twenty restless little minds. Foolish woman. It looked as if they’d taken a wrecking ball to the classroom.
    “Hi, Miss Anderson!” Danny Baxter hollered at her from the back of the room. He was mixing a fresh bucket of wallpaper paste to the consistency of heavy cream, and the circle of kids gathered around him were deliriously tearing paper towels and toilet tissue into confettilike strips.
    The strength to endure, Lise thought, that’s all she asked.
    She was trying to figure out where to start the salvage operation when she noticed how much fun the kids were having. By the look of them they’d probably eaten more paste than they’d slapped onto the wire screen forms, and they were definitely sporting more construction paper than necessary for the metrorail pike. One boy had toilet paper trailing behind him. Another had a “Personals” ad stuck to his cheek. But there was no question about it. They were having a high time of it. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Danny Baxter laughing like that.
    “Come on, Lise,” Julie said. “We need bodies!”
    “Help me get my lipths unstuck, Mith Anderson,” someone mumbled from behind her. Lise turned to see little redheaded Susie Laudermilk muzzled by a patch of dried paste.
    Susie was a nonstop talker, and Lise was toying with the idea of leaving her lips temporarily disabled when a loud crash sounded behind her. A glance over Lise’s shoulder confirmed her worst fears. One of the confetti makers had stumbled into the glop Danny was stirring.
    When you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, Lise thought.
    She rolled up her sleeves.
    By the time school let out that afternoon, Lise was as grungy and paste smeared as the best of them. Working as a team, they’d made impressive strides with their futuristic vision of Los Angeles, and although she was sure most Angelenos wouldn’t have recognized their fair city, she was proud of the kids’ progress and told them so.
    She and Julie were recruiting a cleanup crew when Lise felt someone tugging on the back pocket of her jeans.