The mission had been doomed to failure. She had been unable to find anyone suitable for the job after her first two recruits had been so unfortunately disposed of by that sneaking unspeakable. And that stranger, the one with all the sterling attributes, the one who seemed too good to be true, had simply walked off the moment she had come to depend on him. What should have been accomplished with stealth and guile and a minimum of blood loss had turned into a nasty fire fight, the sort of thing she hated. It didn’t matter that she was good. It was simply not her style.

The flash of lightning, the clap of thunder, and the single sharp ring of the phone in the hall were almost simultaneous. The lights flickered twice before the power failed entirely, taking the unsaved game into good riddance. Just as well, Juliet would be coming home from church at any time now. Juliet the lovely. Juliet the perfect. Juliet the absolutely intolerable. What the rest of the world did not know about that particular darling would choke a horse.

And of course Robin was blind to her faults. Say anything, and who would seem petty? Not that he was entirely at fault: she was a charmer when she wanted to be. Juliet did not consider Abby worth the effort, that was all.
She came in with a dramatic blast. The leaded door flew all the way open almost knocking the hall tree over. Fortunately, it was a heavy thing, mahogany as sturdy as the house itself, and almost as old, but Abby’s bright red jacket and black beret shook on the heavy brass hooks as if they were trying to escape the violence.

Abby left the parlor and came into the front hall to see what the noise was all about. Juliet was standing in the doorway, pale in the lurid green light, terrified. “Tornado, “ she gasped.

“Where’s Robin?”

“The car stalled. In the intersection. He said run. We have to go to the basement. It’ll be here in a minute.” She was already beginning to unfreeze and start toward the kitchen and the door to the cellar stairs.

At that moment Robin arrived with a cluster of other people in tow. “Hurry! There isn’t any time to fool around. Come on, Abby.”

Persephone was pacing around her feet, bothered by the noise and fuss. Abby scooped the anxious cat up and flipped her onto her shoulders, then she grabbed the spare flashlight by the umbrella stand. In a moment of clarity she realized that she was still dressed as she had been when she started gaming after breakfast, in her pajamas. She snagged the jacket, too, and almost against her will, closed the door in what she realized was a futile gesture toward keeping the storm away from the house. She hated the idea waiting in the dark for something to happen. Meeting things headlong was easier, if not always wiser. Besides, she had never seen a tornado.

Everyone always said the sound would be like a freight train. She expected to hear the sound rumbling out of the distance. She couldn’t hear it. There was so much noise from the wind bending a half mile of trees down to near ground level. That, and the creaking of the big old house around her filled everything to create soundlessness and dark. In the still hallway, Abby could feel the world around her moving through her bones. With that, her curiosity disintegrated and she fled toward the illusion of safety.

Downstairs, Robin had already lit the battery powered lantern, and was directing everyone toward the center of the room, away from the windows and the cellar door. Away from the stairs. Stairs could fall. Hell, whole houses could fall, and did. On top of people hiding in basements like mice. The sight of Abby, stumbling down the steps, mismatched pajamas and wearing Persephone like a seal collar would have been good for a few cracks under most circumstances. This time, Juliet was beyond caring. She sat huddled on the floor with her bible clutched in one hand and her Marc Jacobs in the other, paying no attention to anyone or anything around her. Not even Robin, settling down to put an arm around her waist, seemed to exist in Juliet’s small universe by the time Abby reached the solid floor below the shaking wooden steps.

Even with windows in the room, the darkness surrounding the lantern’s circle seemed as absolute as a moonless midnight. More, without that manmade glow which diffuses the night over every city, it was black.
Abby noticed that the table on which the light stood was moving. Odd. At the same moment, Persephone dug into her shoulder like a handful of fire. The next thing she knew, she was sitting on the floor. The noise was inside her and all around, and she could not think.
“Honey, it’s all right,” were the first words she could hear above the storm. By then it had bulled its way across the hill to tyrannize the rest of Riverside.