“I should have been here,” Clark said grimly.
Lois frowned. “I’m not sure how much of a difference you could have made if you had been here.” She hesitated. “How did you get here so fast, anyway?”
“I was already on my way back,” Clark shook his head. “I was right about Jimmy. A couple of thugs tried to sneak in and attack him.”
“Were they…?” Lois asked.
Clark shrugged. “I’m not sure how you tell the difference. I got the drop on them, and they are in police custody now.”
“And Jimmy?”
“He’s all right.” Clark said. “The LAPD have placed him under guard.”
“Clark,” Lois said, “Did you ever see Angela naked?”
Flushing, Clark looked away. “There was never anything between us.”
“She…It taunted the Cortezes.” Lois stared at him intently. “It implied that you rejected Angela.”
“I…It wouldn’t have been right.” Clark said. “They’d taken me into their home, treated me like family. I couldn’t do that to them.”
Lois nodded slowly, not taking her eyes off him.
She’d suspected that he was a good man, but part of her kept expecting him to disappoint her. He was competent, but so were most of the people working at her level.
There was just a strange sort of freshness about him. To the untrained eye, it made him look a little naïve, but Lois was beginning to suspect that there was more than that. He seemed to want to believe the best in people, and the people around him wanted to live up to it.
She certainly did.
“Are you ok?” he asked. “You aren’t hurt?”
Lois shook her head mutely. In the rush of everything that had happened, she wasn’t sure just how she felt about anything.
She’d killed again. Even if the man she’d thrown the burning bottle at had been some sort of weird alien creature, it had been her hand that had thrown the bottle.
She had a flash again of blood and rage and death. She shook her head again to dispel the image from her mind.
Clark hugged her suddenly. Lois stood stiff for a moment before relaxing.
She’d never been comfortable with being touched by strangers. Her own family hadn’t been touchy feely types, and so she’d always felt strange when people tried touching her without permission.
This felt nice, though. She felt oddly safe wrapped in Clark’s arms, and safe wasn’t something she’d felt much of since she’d been in the Congo.
She wondered if the dreams were ever going to leave her.
“I’m glad you are ok,” he said.
“We have to do something for the Cortezes,” Lois said. “It’s our fault that this happened.”
Clark shook his head. “Angelica was the assistant coroner. Anyone interested in delaying the investigation was going to take care of her first. My guess is that they tried bribing and threatening her first. It would have been better for them for a falsified report to come from a living coroner.”
“And once Angelica was turned, whatever anger she held toward her family would have made this inevitable.” Lois sighed.
“Still, I can’t see that she’s going to stop now that she’s tried once.”
Lois nodded at Clark, then stiffened and stepped out of his grasp.
She could hear sirens in the distance. Help had finally arrived.
***********
The lights from the fire trucks and police cars were annoying.
“A woman led the attack,” Lois told the lead detective. “There must have been twenty men following her.”
The evidence was still on the ground in the form of three coolers, some of which were filled with unused Molotov cocktails.
“Let’s go over the fire again. You say that the house was hit by some sort of tornado?”
“I guess that’s what it has to have been,” Lois said. “I can’t think of any other kind of wind that would have hit the house from all different sides and put out the fires.”
“You say it knocked some of the assailants over?”
“It blew them quite some distance,” Lois said. “I already showed you the place where they landed.”
“You didn’t recognize any of them?”
Lois hesitated, then shook her head. She’d overheard the senior Cortez telling investigators that they hadn’t known any of the men, or the woman either.
She could understand wanting to keep the truth in the family. The family had been through enough.
“We’re going to have more questions, Ms. Lane. Please don’t leave town without getting in contact with the LAPD.” The man handed her a card. Lois barely looked at it.
The sky was beginning to lighten already, and Lois found that she was beginning to relax. The worst was over, for tonight at least.
**************
Lois had been lucky. Her room was one of the few that hadn’t been targeted, although she was sure that they would have gotten around to it eventually. Clark hadn’t been as lucky, and everything he owned had been burned or damaged.
She woke, and felt oddly refreshed. Her dreams, if she’d had them had been unmemorable.
A look at her watch told her it was noon. She’d had five hours of sleep.
She dressed quickly after a quick shower. Thankfully the place still had hot water.
A great deal had been done while she was asleep. Much of the mess had been cleaned up, and she could see suitcases and bags sitting in the common room.
“What’s going on?” Lois asked. Clark was carrying a number of bags, which he dropped gently to the floor.
“They are sending the women and the children away to stay with relatives out of state,” Clark said. “They plan to be gone by nightfall.”
At least the children were out from school, Lois thought, although she wondered what the women were going to do about jobs, those who had them.
“The men are staying?”
“The younger, stronger men,” Clark said.
The door opened and the eldest Cortez stepped in the room carrying a box. He was followed by several men, also carrying boxes.
He pulled a box cutter from his pocket and bent down to open the first one, pulling out a gleaming weapon of metal.
It was a thing of odd beauty, that crossbow. Lois’s hands ached to touch it.
She’d never had an interest in weapons before. In fact, she’d always been a strict advocate for gun control.
Yet she couldn’t help her visceral response to the weapon.
The other men were also opening boxes. They pulled out an odd assortment of crossbows, clearly bought in different places and of all different makes and models.
The eldest Cortez set his crossbow down on an end table, then slowly rose to his feet. He sighed.
He turned to Lois and said, “We’ll remember what you’ve done for us. You’ll always be welcome among us.”
Lois shook her head. “I didn’t do anything.”
“You saved my life,” he said. “And the life of my wife. You ran at someone who was shooting at you to give us the time to get away. “
He took her hand and said, “Those things aren’t nothing.”
Clark was staring at her, and Lois realized that she hadn’t bothered to mention much about her role in the attack. It hadn’t seemed important last night.
Her mind flashed back to the sensation of grabbing a flying object out of the air a moment before it would have hit the elder Cortez.
It was impossible. Nothing human could move that fast.
Lois didn’t want to think about the implications. The thought that she might be changing into something alien, inhuman was frightening.
“We won’t be unprepared the next time,” he continued. “If they come back, we will be ready.”
*************
“I’ve been thinking about the wind that hit us,” Lois said.
Clark was driving again, and he didn’t look at her. For some reason, a muscle in his jaw tensed.
When he didn’t speak, she continued. “They just don’t have tornadoes in this part of the country.”
“Yes they do,” Clark said. “California averages around five tornadoes a year. You just don’t hear much about them.”
“It’s a pretty big state,” Lois said. “What are the odds that one of the five tornadoes in the whole state would hit just at the right time to save the Cortez family ranch?”
Clark shrugged. “It happened.” He wasn’t looking at her.
“The sky wasn’t even cloudy last night.”
“What are you getting at?” he asked. His voice was oddly tense, and Lois looked at him curiously.
“With everything else we’ve seen…well, heard about…it makes you wonder.”
“Yes?”
“They were burning people as witches in Sunnydale. It could be mass hysteria…but what if it wasn’t?”
Clark relaxed and glanced over at her with an amused look. “So you think some witch called up a storm to save the Cortezes?”
“Maybe one of the Cortezes IS the witch,” Lois said. In her mind she envisioned one of the old women muttering protective spells in the garden.
“The Cortezes are Catholics,” Clark said. “Very devout.”
Lois caught his amused grin and she scowled. “You weren’t there. You didn’t see what I saw. What else could it be?”
Clark grinned at her. “Alien intervention?”
“Get serious,” Lois said. She scowled again and turned to stare out at the passing countryside.
At least they were getting to pick up Jimmy. She didn’t feel comfortable leaving him alone and unprotected, not when she knew what was out there.
***********
Jimmy grinned up at her from the wheelchair.
“I could get used to this,” he said. “Getting pushed around by beautiful women.”
“From what I hear, that’s pretty much your dating history,” Lois said dryly.
Jimmy shrugged. “It works for me.”
“You haven’t heard from the girl in the leather pants, have you?” Lois asked. She’d checked with the hospital. Faith hadn’t left any sort of information with them. She’d slipped out shortly after delivering Jimmy.
Jimmy shook his head, ten grimaced. “Don’t I wish. It’s just my luck. I meet the girl of my dreams and a minute later I get my face smashed into a wall.”
“Love is like that,” Lois said. It wasn’t as though she’d ever felt that way, but it was what she’d always heard.
The front doors of the hospital slid open, and Lois pushed Jimmy out into the light.
Jimmy stood up slowly at curbside, and Clark, who was waiting with the car helped him inside.
As they slid into their seats, Clark spoke.
“I have a lead on a living member of the cult they found in the mass grave.”
