Who: Cass What: Things go from bad to worse. (Closed, narrative) Where: Aubade When: After this and this. Warnings: General bad feelings, and a weather anomaly about which there has been a post.
He was going to the bookstore.
He was worried about Wren, of course. She was missing, and she hadn't contacted anyone. She could be dead in an alleyway, or in a hospital somewhere, or dragged off some place by a client or someone she had tried to take down where no one would ever, ever find her. He knew something about that, knew how easy it could be to take someone and hide them away where they would never be found, and that just made it worse.
So he called the police, whom he counted on to do nothing, and he checked the phone he usually ignored over and over, and he did not sleep.
The next morning he paced, and he felt useless, as usual. The sky clouded over, the temperature in the general area of Aubade dropped a few degrees.
He decided to go to the bookstore.
What else was there to do? If he stayed in the apartment, he was going to wear a hole in the floor pacing. He could check email and messages on his phone, and he did, every minute or so while a driver took him there.
There weren't many places in the world that could calm him down, but the bookstore usually helped. Being surrounded by quiet, close bookshelves helped him think, and he needed to calm down. He wasn't unaware of what the constant tugging fear in his chest was doing to the atmosphere around him, and he couldn't afford to lose control completely. He felt himself edging toward a full blown episode, a truly intense, symphonic, shaking panic attack. That could not happen.
He was only in the bookstore for four minutes before his body wasn't his own anymore.
But he was there, and he was conscious, and he knew what was happening every second, someone not him driving, and he thought he had finally lost it completely before he walked into the bank and began taking out money. He walked and he talked but it wasn't him, was his voice but was not his voice, and the complete removal of control left him in shock.
When control came back to him outside the bank, in the alley, that edging panic from before became a roar, making him insensible. He began to run, as if he could escape the whatever-it-was, this thing, this person (and it had to be a person, didn't it, someone who had picked today of all days, someone who wanted his money). Clouds began to spin overhead, coming together in knitted rows, and then, out of nowhere, he was knocked to the back seat again of his own body again.
Now that the shock had worn off he absolutely raged. And when this person walked into Edison it was like a punch to the stomach, like they were laughing at him, like they knew. It was a flurry of women and money disappearing flush against beautiful skin. Then, with a snap, the person running his body gone again.
He shoved the woman clinging to him off like she had some sort of particularly virulent disease, and he ran, faster than he had ever thought himself capable of, though nothing seemed fast enough.
He wasn't sure how he made it back to Aubade. What he remembered next was stumbling out of a cab, the shouts of the driver for payment snapping him back to reality. He found far too many bills and dropped them through the window onto the passenger seat.
The temperature had dropped to about fifty degrees. Even for Seattle, that was cool for this time of year.
He got onto the elevator, tried to breathe, tried to make sense of what had happened. Being out of control like that, it had felt like drowning. It had felt like being outside his own body looking in while he hovered between being asleep and awake, between life and death, floating on his back in the ice cold numbness of the Atlantic.
He fumbled for his keys, and felt a burst of fury when his fingers found them in his pocket. The person hadn't even had the decency to strip him of everything, to really prove to him that they were desperate, that they really needed what they had taken.
With the apartment door shut, he made it no further than a step inside. He sat down against the door, head against his knees, and tried to find breath even though that heart attack sensation of panic had crushed in fully now and would not let him rest, would not let him unknot himself. Wren was missing and there were wolves -
And in the midst of it all, of the bone-crushing sensation, of everything spinning outside his control, he noticed, at last, the weather. The temperature was dropping still, even inside the apartment. He thought, maybe, he could stop it. If he could only focus and grasp that slippery thread, he could bring everything back to normal.
But then...why should he? Shouldn't they know? Shouldn't every one of them know, that person know, whoever had taken Wren know? Everything was outside his control now, every single thing - every thing but one.
He slammed a fist against the door hard enough to bruise it, and he let loose a hoarse cry loud enough to be heard in the surrounding apartments. He let his rage, white hot and burning cold, feed into the storm. It carried with it his panic, his fear of the nightmare of losing control happening again, and the intense need to make sure everyone knew that he he missed her, that he knew she was gone, and that he had not forgotten what had just happened to him. He would flush them out - the person, and the one who had taken Wren, and in the whirlwind of panic and rage he thought they just might be one and the same.
It started to rain.
But it wasn't just raining, it was pouring. And then it wasn't just pouring, it was freezing. The temperature, already cool for late May, began to rocket downward. Forty, then thirty, then twenty. The rain began to freeze, ice and snow coming down with enough force to rip leaves off of trees, hail the size of golf balls whipped by wind that stripped the breath and speech from you, settling at last into a blanket of snow. Cold as the middle of the Atlantic ocean. Numbing, freezing, and coming down on Seattle like a plague out of the bible.