Dark and Stormy: Sacred Hearts Coven by Felicia Starr

letters spelling out the words hurricane warning . She clicked on the link for mandatory evacuation areas.
    Sure enough, the town her office was in was at the top of the list. Her heart dropped into her stomach a little. She had never experienced a hurricane, and as far as she knew, there had never been one in their area.
    One thing was for sure; she wasn’t about to find out. She started to pack up her bag and grab her phone. She closed her laptop and slipped it into the soft case. She decided to go to her cousin’s house. Even if Janice wasn’t home, she knew where the hidden key was located.
    Regina planned to call her neighbor to let her know she wasn’t coming home. Hopefully she would be there to look in on Crunch and feed him. She was glad her neig hbor was her dog walker.
    Regina opened one of her desk drawers where she kept a spare umbrella. Of course it was red. She tucked it under her arm and tossed her bags over her shoulder. She scooted over to Reddick’s desk.
    “Come on, we have to get out of here.” Regina was almost out of breath. She’d never packed up so fast.
    Flashes of a childhood storm forced their way to the front of Regina’s memory. Thunder and ligh tning had made her jumpy since she was a young girl. She thought back to when she was eight years old. She vividly remembered her dad teaching her how to calculate how far away the lightning flashes were. He called it the flash to bang theory.
    He taught her that for every five seconds between lightning and the thunder equated to one mile. So if there were twenty seconds between the flash and the boom, then the lightning was four miles away. They counted the s econds together. The lightning started out at least eight to ten miles away. Regina felt good about it not being too close to home.
    As the storm worsened, the seconds between the flash and the boom started to diminish. Within minutes, there was little distinction between the two. A crack came that was so loud that Regina felt the house shake. She felt like a bomb went off. Even though it felt like an eternity, only seconds passed before she heard the screams.
    Regina followed her father downstairs to find her mother screaming. Her sister Amelia was pinned under a tree that had just crashed through the front window. The walls around them were ablaze, and the rain was coming into the living room behind the tree.
    Regina’s father yelled for her to run to the kitchen and call 9-1-1. Regina called, but all she could hear was the screaming and crying from her mother and sister. Her hearing was off from the shock or the pro ximity of the lightning cracking at their home. Lucky for Regina, her mother came into the kitchen and took the phone from her.
    Regina ran back to her father and sister. She vaguely remembered her mother’s voice in the bac kground, telling the operator what happened and their address. Her father was soothing Amelia and telling her to stay calm. He told her that he didn’t want her to move. He was afraid to attempt to pull her out and cause more damage to the young girl’s body.
    Regina would never forget the fear she felt in the pit of her stomach and the fear that flared out from her sister’s eyes dripping with tears. Regina sat beside Amelia and held her hand until the emergency teams arrived. Her mother took her outside because the smoke was getting worse in the house.
    Regina and her mother sat outside in the back of an ambulance, wrapped in blankets, waiting to see them bring her sister out of the house. There were firemen, policemen, and an assortment of emergency medical people all over the front lawn. The lights from the vehicles lit up the entire block.
    Regina’s sister was pulled from the house and rushed to the hospital. Their house was almost co mpletely destroyed by the fire and the tree. Regina and her parents stayed at her grandparents’ house while Amelia remained in the hospital. She wound up losing one of her legs.
     

     
    Reddick told Alita to