“Lichtenberg figures,” said the man in the white coat. “Also caused by the lightning. But they should fade in a few days. The cataracts are…another matter.”
Rance spoke then, and his voice reminded him of his father’s. It carried a certainty he’d never had before. “I see more now than I ever could before,” he told the room. Then he directed his milky eyes toward his father. His father’s face was nothing but a smear of features.
“Tell me Prophet,” Rance said. “What became of Olivia?”
She’s dead, that voice whispered in his mind again. Strangely, he was already growing used to it. And already he trusted it. She’s dead, and it was this self-proclaimed prophet who took her from you. He is a false prophet, who declared an end that did not come. God does not speak to him. Your father’s time is past. You must remove him.
Rance couldn’t agree more.
Rance Ridley took the podium for the first time the day after his father’s body was found in the cellar. Apparently the former prophet had tripped and fallen down the steep steps and knocked himself out. He suffocated in the dark with his face shoved into the mud that remained from the rains and the flooding.
“My Followers,” Rance said to his congregation. “God sent his light into me the night of the storm, to chase away all darkness. He judged me and found me not wanting, but the same cannot be said of my father, the false prophet Ram Ridley. Let us not mourn the passing of the man who called himself prophet, when God never did. I have heard the voice of God. I have felt his light.”
He gazed out at his people, a blur of perfect white. For a moment, he tried to picture Olivia’s face, but he found it was already fading.
He blinked back tears and said what the voice had told him to say.
“God has chosen me, Rance Ridley, to be your one true prophet.”
Copyright (C) 2011 by Jennifer Bosworth
Art copyright (C) 2011 by Nekro
From
JENNIFER BOSWORTH
DEBUT AUTHOR
Read on for a preview of
STRUCK
On Sale May 2012 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers
Prologue
When you’ve been struck by lightning as many times as I have, you start to expect the worst pretty much all the time. You never know when that jagged scrawl of white fire, charged with a hundred million volts of electricity, might blaze down from the sky and find its mark on you; sear a hole like a bullet right through you, or turn your hair to ash; maybe leave your skin blackened to a crisp, or stop your heart; make you blind, or deaf, or both.
Sometimes lightning plays with you a little, lifts you into the air and drops you twenty yards away, blows your shoes off, or flash-fries the clothes from your body, leaving you naked and steaming in the rain. Lightning could wipe the last few hours or days from your memory, or overload your brain, short-circuiting your personality and rendering you a completely different person. I heard about a woman who was struck by lightning and cured of terminal cancer. A paraplegic who was given the ability to walk again.
Sometimes lightning strikes you, but it’s the person standing next to you who ends up in the hospital. Or the morgue.
Any of that could happen, or none of it, or something else no one’s ever heard of. The thing about lightning is you never know what it’s going to do to you. Lightning could turn you into some kind of freakish human battery, storing up energy, leaving you with the persistent feeling that any day now you’re going to spontaneously combust. Like a bomb is going to go off inside you and do, well…what bombs do best.
Or maybe that’s just me.
My name is Mia Price, and I am a human lightning rod. Do they make a support group for that? They should, and let me tell you why.
My name is Mia Price, and I am a lightning addict.
There. Now you know the truth. I want the lightning to find me. I crave it like lungs crave oxygen. There’s nothing that makes you feel more alive than being struck. Unless, of course, it kills you. It does that to me from time to time, which is why I moved to Los Angeles. As the song says, it never rains in Southern California. But the song also says when it pours, it pours.
The song is right.
My name is Mia Price, and it’s been one year since my last strike, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped expecting the worst. Lightning only strikes in L.A. a handful of times every year. The problem is, I traded thunderstorms for earthquakes, one earthquake in particular. The one that changed the city, and my life, forever.
That day, the day of the worst natural disaster to hit the United States, oh, pretty much ever…it rained.
Actually, it poured.
Part I
Lightning never strikes twice in the same place.
Proverb
April 14
Three days until the storm…
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