Instead, he met the wreckage of a village, the houses torn up by their roots.

He had to raise a little whirlwind to lift him over the tumble of a broken forest, with trees uprooted and cast upon each other like a game of pickup sticks.

And then he came to a city where the trapped cried out from inside collapsed walls, where men and women keened aloud over the bodies of the dead, and children wandered looking terrified and lost.

He could not understand their language, though he recognized that it sounded somewhat like the language his mother sometimes spoke to him in snatches, the language she spoke to the birds that gathered around her when she fed them or sang to them in the yard.

None of them seemed to think anything of this stranger among them. They were too caught up in their own misery and fear, in the struggle to release the victims trapped in the fallen buildings. Ced joined in, helping to pull away the wreckage, to lift the broken bodies, to carry the living to safety.

I need you to heal these people, Danny North. I should not be here alone. I can’t be trusted. It’s too much power. Look what I did without even realizing it. I felt the devastation of this town as a kind of crunching underfoot, like tramping over fallen acorns on the pavement near a city oak. But it was these buildings I was kicking aside, and in the wind of my passing I never heard my victims’ pleas and cries, for the wind sings and screams, but it has no ears and never listens.

I have ears. I have eyes. Yet I was far away on a rocky hill, standing there in the ecstasy of power. It was a drug.

I have been a god for only an hour or two, and look what I have done.

Yet as Ced struggled to save people in the aftermath of his tornado, he also felt a dark and terrible pride. On the one hand, he wanted to weep and beg forgiveness, to take responsibility and bear the consequence: I did this. I will help undo the damage, as much as I can.

But the most powerful feeling deep inside him was much simpler, and filled with the fire of pride:

I did this. Look what I can do!

Intervention

3

INTERVENTION

Danny thought he was going to Laurette’s house that night for a birthday party. Not the teen-movie cliche of a party so huge that it overflows the house and infests the neighbors’ yards and results in the police being called. It was just a get-together at Laurette’s house in honor of Xena, Laurette’s friend and, since he arrived at Parry McCluer, Danny’s.