Excerpt: Hurricane Jack

The Xenosians seemed to have disengaged to give their witch room; across the clearing the gout of flame arced high in the air and streaked toward the camp. Angus squinted his eyes against the glare and futilely shielded his face against the onslaught.

A bare score of yards from the palisade and crush of soldiers the wall of flame seemed to break against an impenetrable barrier and scatter uselessly. The Xenosians, lit by the red glare of their bonfire, seemed perturbed, and their shouting took on a different note. Angus noticed that the clear sky over the camp was obscured by a boiling mass of clouds over the enemy, whipped away into a dark and seething mass by the shrieking wind. He stared around in confusion; the palisade line was stony silent and intent but for the gentlest of salt-tinged breezes and a single voice, rising and falling like the crash of waves over storm-tossed cliffs.

All at once, the Xenosians mustered a charge toward their line and a second bout of flame; their screaming onslaught made blood red by the blaze overhead. Once again the wall of flame was cast aside before it reached the line. Angus felt the hair on the back of his neck raise and prickle, and the smell of burned metal caught the back of his throat. A flash brighter than the coming dawn rent the field, followed hard on its heels by the most almighty assault of sound that Angus had ever felt. Hands clapped over his ears and squinting against the afterimage, he saw the Xenosian assault thrown into disarray and panic. It dawned on him that the roiling mass of storm clouds over the clearing sparked and groaned heavy with thunderbolts. Again light and fury sounded together, and again, until the Xenosians were naught but a screaming scatter of retreating shadows into the woods. The gale rose back up from whisper-quiet to a dull roar and swept them from their feet; the gibbering witch rose high into the sky only to fall, ragdoll limp, back to the ground far below. The bonfire flared once more in the darkness and expired.