Storm Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 4) by Aaron Ritchey (best books to read for students TXT) 📕

was too busy, moving too fast, too serious about her work to sit still long enough for me to touch her.

On those rare times she did pause, we’d play our game.

“What’s in your heart, Cavvy?” she’d ask me. And then tickle me on my chest.

“Faith, Mama.”

“That’s right. Pilate says faith is an old grandpa telling us it’s all going to be okay. What’s in your heart, Cavvy?” Another tickle, and I’d giggle and smile.

“Love, Mama.”

“That’s right. Pilate says love is an orphan who needs a mama. And who’s love’s daddy?”

“Faith, Mama.”

“And who’s love’s mama?”

“Hope, Mama.”

“That’s right. Hope is like bindweed: it takes hold in our hearts, and it grows flowers that are pretty, and it fills us, and if we let the roots go deep, hope will always be with us. Hope, like bindweed, can be hard to kill. Hope brings us love just like faith brings us love.”

Then Mama would hug me and laugh, and she’d sing an old R&B song from when the world made sense and electricity ran strong through all fifty states.

How much do I love you?

Oh, where do I start?

Through the valleys of my soul,

’Cross the mountains of my heart.

What was in my heart now?

Pain. Rage. Sorrow.

Those things wouldn’t help me get to the other side of my despair. No, but then I remembered LaTanya, singing in the darkest of nights as woman after woman was taken away.

Maybe hope was a weapon, but for us Wellers, it was also a weed. And I felt the roots of it down deep.

I’d get up. I’d get over the pain, and I’d find my other side. I’d heal my stick heart green again.

I’d give June Mai Angel the chalkdrive.

Kill me to stop me.

(ii)

On top of my mother’s grave, the night coming in cold, that was when I heard a violin playing, echoing across the plains. I sat up.

Couldn’t be.

It was playing an old cowboy song, “Oh Bury Me Not”, and I listened to it sing, so simple, so full of pain it made my eyes water again.

I got to my feet. Then I saw her: about thirty meters from me, a woman played a violin on her shoulder, sawing out the song.

She turned to me and stopped. She moved the bow from the strings and merely watched me.

She was a short woman, with short black hair, but not buzzed. She had a good haircut, actually pretty fashionable, and it framed her face well. Only, her hair wasn’t important once you saw her eyes.

Even at a distance, I could feel the power in her eyes, the raw energy emanating from them. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, inside her soul I saw a generator with enough shakti to electrify the entire Juniper.

And I knew, only one person in a million can make you feel them from a distance—someone who held life and death in their hands. Someone who was used to controlling their own destiny, the destiny of those around them, the destiny of the world.

June Mai Angel. I’d come to meet the enemy, and there she was, alone, just her and me.

I got up and limped toward her. And I smiled a smile I borrowed from my sister Wren.

Hope was a weedy thing in my heart, the ice was gone, and I was me again. My sisters were gone, the ranch beyond saving, but I still had life in me. I was going to live and finish my imperative despite the death and the destruction.

Sure, I’d give her the chalkdrive, but first I was going to punch June Mai Angel in the nose.

Chapter Fifteen

Come and dance with me,

The truck’s gone, the car is too

We owe too much on the house

To ever make it through

The kids are hungry

The dogs run away

But come and dance with me

like it’s our wedding day

—Isobel Custer

(i)

I MARCHED UP TO JUNE Mai Angel. Her in her uniform with a gun belt and a Betty knife, and I knew I looked a mess. My face was smeared with dirt and tears, my clothes hung in tatters, and I couldn’t help but limp on my ripped-up feet

“Hello, Cavatica,” she said.

Jacker that skank. I didn’t care that she knew my name.

I punched her square in the nose. Like how I hit Becca Olson, my enemy at the Sally Browne Burke Academy for the Moral and Literate.

Becca had gone down bleeding, cursing, and shocked.

June Mai Angel kicked my feet out from under me and then knelt next to me with her Betty knife to my throat. Her violin lay in the dirt next to us.

Every cell in me screamed in happy adrenaline joy. Yeah, violence can do the trick, just like a drink, Skye6, or anything else.

Blood dripped from her nose onto my pink coat. And still, those eyes, those blazing eyes, reached into me.

I felt the need to explain myself. “You burned my house down. You tried to kill me and my people at least twice, so you had that coming.”

She pressed the knife to my throat.

I kind of found it silly. Was she trying to scare me? Hell, she’d have to do better than that.

I kept talking, though each word made the knife bite into my neck farther. She was bleeding on me, but my own blood trickled into the hair on the back of my neck. “I got the cure to the Sterility Epidemic around my neck. If you help me get the truth out into the world, people are gonna know your cause. They’re going to know about how President Amanda Swain sent all the Sino vets to the Juniper with a lot of empty promises, then put up a fence to keep you all here.”

I swallowed to get some spit in my mouth after my long speech.

“Go ahead and cut my throat,” I said, “but I’d ask that you get the chalkdrive out into the world regardless. And I promised some of the hogs you’ve been fighting that we’d cure them if we could, though I think that’s prolly