The Ice Queen Read Online Free PDF Page B

atmosphere. It was the oddest thing. It was as though I were a cloud instead of a human being. I knew it would start raining minutes before it did. I could feel the charged atoms in the air, and I was quick to call Giselle in before her coat got matted and wet. While I was getting into bed there was a lightning strike nearly five miles away. The strike split a pine tree in two and started a fire that burned several houses down to ash. It was summer lightning, the kind that appears without thunder, without a sign. But I didn’t need anyone to tell me about it.
    It was the one thing I could feel deep inside.
    CHAPTER TWO
    Light
    I
    That’s the difference between light ning and magic? is a joke common among meteorologists.
    Magic makes sense. Lightning does not, even to the experts. Lightning is random, unpredictable. It can be as small as a bean or as large as a house. Noisy or silent, ashy or clear. It can be any color — red or white, blue or smoky black — and it seems to have a mind of its own. Lightning floats down chimneys and enters closed windows, slipping right through the molecules that make up glass. Lightning has its own agenda, most experts say; it can easily cause damage despite all safety efforts. Hide, but it may find you. Plan, but your plan may easily become undone.
    Lightning plays favorites, picking the one out of the many, singling certain people out of groups of hundreds, even thousands. Lightning plays pranks, and seems to enjoy them. Lightning reaches 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, more than five times the heat of the sun. It can be a hundred miles long, as thin as a man’s pinkie. Its effects are puzzling and indiscriminate. There are trees that have been hit that show no effect and then, months later, suddenly wither. Doors are removed from their hinges; cars are set on fire, and afterward only the radio is found to be working, crooning a sad song. People safe in their houses, chatting on the phone, have had lightning come in through the wires, entering the earpiece to strike them deaf. In one case a dog that had been struck farted black sulfur for weeks. Hairpieces have been snatched off bald men’s heads, women have been stripped of their clothes, children have reported seeing flaming objects circling their rooms, only to be disbelieved until all the electricity goes out or the walls themselves catch fire.
    Some people get up after a strike and finish their golf games, go about their business, have quite a story to tell. Others’ lives are forever ruined.
    Is that magic? Does it make any sense? Most incidents of odd weather can be logically explained. Blood rains, once thought to be the wrath of the heavens, are actually made up of the mecondial fluids released by certain lepidoptera simultaneously emerging from their chrysalides. Black rains, those old wives’ tales, are in fact stones picked up in whirlwinds and released elsewhere. Frogs falling from the sky, same thing, no magic whatsoever; the poor creatures are simply swept up in one place by a windstorm, then deposited on the shores of another land. And what if these frogs open their mouths and pearls fall out? Even then logic prevails: the frogs have probably been air-lifted from the China Seas, home of pearls shining in a dozen different shades no one would never expect: red, scarlet, crimson. Pearls the color of a human heart.
    At Orlon University, the team was working backward, trying to understand lightning by studying its effects on human physiology. Our group of survivors met in the cafeteria of the Science Center in the evenings. Summer school wasn’t yet in session; for now the campus was quiet. I didn’t believe in support groups; why should I go? Nothing could save me. All the same, my brother insisted the group was part of the study I had committed to. It was for the greater good, something I rarely considered. Ned called repeatedly to suggest that for once I finish something I’d started. He had a point, I suppose. But I had