The War for the Waking World Read Online Free PDF Page A

human power, he might have managed to launch it a few feet, maybe a couple of yards. But as Archer watched the shield spin away over the treetops, he realized his post-Rift will had infused his physiology with new strength—and durability. Bouncing off tree trunks should have pulverized me, he thought. But it hadn’t. He’d survived with nothing more than scrapes and bruises, and even those felt like they were healing.
    Archer took to the air, dodging branches until he was clear of the forest. By then it was nearly too late. The tornado had ripped up and scattered the fields surrounding the farms and was currently tossing farm equipment into the air like toys. The storm bore down on the farmhouses, and Archer had no idea what he could do to save them. He poured a new infusion of will into his speed and rocketed toward the storm. In moments, he entered the storm’s debris field. Timber and sheet metal came careening at him. Something struck him in the knee, but he didn’t see what it was. There’d surely be a welt left behind, but at the moment it was a tiny concern.
    â€œHow do I stop a force of nature?” he growled, tearing free once more from the storm’s grasp. As he hovered in the turbulent air between the approaching storm and the nearest farmhouse, the truth became very clear. This was no force of nature. It was worse, a supernatural amplification of someone’s greatest fears that had been given life by the collision of worlds in the Rift.
    A piercing cry from below and behind forced Archer to spin around to face the farmhouse. He saw a man racing across the farm’s front porch. He was carrying two little blond children, one in each arm, clinging to his neck and shrieking. A woman and a girl of maybe seven or eight crouched low and followed an erratic path behind him. They clambered off the front porch and fought the wind to get around the backside of their farmhouse, where a pair of large metal doors lay recessed into the ground.
    Storm doors , Archer thought, and just in time . Glowing tendrils of cyclonic wind churned closer as the man handed off the toddlers to his wife and struggled to open the way down to the cellar.
    â€œNo,” Archer whispered.
    The farmer bent over the doors, straining and pulling, but they didn’t budge. But the tornado had shifted its track, lurching forward, cutting Archer off from the farm and eating up the ground. Rows of crops were stripped and shredded, sucked up into the glowing storm. A scarecrow vanished, then a hundred yards of fences.
    The storm was upon the farmer and his family, and there was no way Archer could fly to them in time.

FIVE
    A GAINST THE W IND
    A RCHER DID NOT HOVER THERE, STUCK LIKE A DEER IN the headlights. The misbegotten monster tornado would not have this family. Archer would see to that. There was no time to fight the winds and cover that distance, but he didn’t need to. His will traveled at the speed of thought.
    First, Archer thought up a stone barrier. He built the forty-foot wall much like the blast vault and placed it between the oncoming windstorm and the farmer’s home. But this tornado was infused with something supernatural. It tore into the wall, its invisible fingers prying open the smallest seams in the wall. The wall began to fall apart, and that would turn each lifesaving chunk of the barrier into a deadly, bludgeoning projectile.
    Archer wrenched the strength of his concentration to unmake the wall. “C’mon, Archer!” he berated himself. “You can do better than that! Think!”
    Archer threw his arms forward and created giant hands of blue light, much like the ones Kaylie had created to deal with the wolf beast. But Archer used his to lift the farmer and his family up from the ground. “No!” Archer cried out. The flaw in this attempt became painfully clear. The farmer, his wife, and children . . . they were terrified. They’d never seen giant, magical