Storm Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 4) by Aaron Ritchey (best books to read for teens .txt) 📗

feeling mean and reckless. I was feeling Wren. I took my pointer finger and stuck it into the barrel of her gun. “I’m tired of you and the ARK. I’m tired of this whole game. Shoot me now if you’re going to shoot me, Grandma.”

It all went quiet. And Mabel wasn’t an old woman any more. She had become a machine, trying to figure me out.

Let her try.

I let out a long breath, and then I really did think it was my turn to die. We all get our turn.

Only some of us get to die lots of times.

People like my sister.

“Hey, skank!”

I jerked my finger out of the barrel of the gun and turned, as if in a dream, turned and watched a ghost come down the hill.

Wren.

Alive, all hips and pistols, she strutted toward us. She was chewing on one of Pilate’s cast-off cigars.

Of course. He’d been leaving them behind like bread crumbs.

“Hey, you ARK skank!” my sister spat. “You jack with my sister, you jack with me. And I gotta say, I think I’m going to love killing you Severins more than I ever did the Vixxes.”

Leave it to Wren to come back from the grave, fighting, cursing, and saving the day.

I smiled so wide that I just had to close my eyes to really enjoy it.

Chapter Eighteen

Hot as a grenade

Sick and afraid

Should’ve run

But I stayed

Girls and guns and tearing up the street

Kill ’em when you’re bitter and kill ’em when you’re sweet

—Charquida Gold

(i)

I DIDN’T THINK TO GET out of Mabel’s reach. My sister was alive! And if Wren had survived, maybe Sharlotte, and if Sharlotte, maybe Rachel ...

That all went through my head, as Wren came traipsing down like she owned the plains and we were in her living room.

Mabel grabbed me around the throat, put the Desert Messiah against my temple, and called out. “Stop. We are taking the chalkdrive. We are taking Micah.”

Wren didn’t pause. She drew a Colt Terminator and shot Mabel in the head.

I felt the bullet, I heard the snort of the Severin taking in a last breath, and I felt her hot blood hit my face. Dutch had taught my sister well. Always, always, always get ’em right between the eyes.

Mabel fell away, dead, and the gunshot echoed across the prairie. That echo seemed to last forever and fill up a vacuum of silence. Then the Regios opened fire, but so did everyone else. The Moby floated above, and either Tech or Peeperz were in the Crow’s Basement, lighting up the ground troops with the triple-Xs, the twin-barreled .50 caliber machine guns which occupied the gunner’s nest. June Mai and her soldiers wheeled around on their horses, running, shooting, engaging the enemy.

Marie Atlas ran toward me.

I thought it was to protect me, but, no. She knocked me to the ground, rammed my head into the frozen mud, and ripped the chalkdrive necklace off me.

She was the spy. She was the Severin, and she’d kept her deadly secret well.

She fled with the chalkdrive in her hand. Stepping into Miley’s stirrups, she mounted up and went streaking across the plain.

I stood cold and laughed a little. She looped the necklace around her head. Skank. Now I had to chase after her.

Too bad an army stood between us and her.

Oh well.

An explosive shell hit behind us. The explosion knocked my hearing out, shaking my head, and smacking me with a wall of dirt.

The ARK’s Acevedo tanks streaked toward us across the plain.

I wheeled, trying to get to Micaiah on Lucky, a tobiano mare, who was frothing and whinnying, scared out of her wits.

I didn’t make it. Another shell landed next to me, ringing my bell again. I went down, tried to get my head together, but I couldn’t think for a minute.

Laying on the ground, dazed, I heard the thunder of a voice—louder than the bombs and bullets. Maybe it was only me ’cause that huge voice had said my name so often, and it said it in a way no one else ever did, and never would again.

“’Teeca!”

Alice.

“Leave my ’Teeca alone!”

I’d thought she’d gone coco for good, but maybe it didn’t work like that. Or maybe her love for me had pulled her out of the grips of her mental illness. Regardless, she was there, with dozens of Gammas tearing down the hill. She had found her command after all. And she’d done what I had told her to do, bringing in reinforcements.

A collective gasp rose from the Regios, from June Mai’s soldiers, from everyone.

A regiment of three-meter-tall monsters with shotguns, assault rifles, axes, defunct chainsaws, all came running on elephantine feet, shaking the ground. Metal helmets enclosed their heads, ’cause like Wren and Rachel, the only way to stop them was a head wound or a spinal cord injury.

A blast struck one of the Gammas, knocked her back, ’cause yeah, the cavalry had come, but the ARK had tanks. We were just muscle and bone, though not for long.

The ground shivered from stomping, and the coal smoke filled the air. Then the chunka-chunka of steam-powered pistons grinding.

I watched in disbelief as the Marilyn Monroe come tromping over the hill, followed by a dozen more Stanleys. They raised their arms and missiles streaked out of their launchers and struck the tanks coming toward us. A few survived the initial blast, but others had their treads ripped off, their turrets blasted into splinters, and one well-aimed missile disintegrated one of the tanks completely.

The Stanleys chugged down the hill, over the grass, their shoulders leaking smoke as their guns rattled.

Down south, coming up quick, were steam trucks and diesel cars. I thought they were reinforcements for the ARK, but they weren’t. Too ragged, too salvaged ... and then I realized, it was June Mai’s outlaws, coming across the plain ’cause June Mai most likely figured, even with our secrecy and planning, that we might need help.

On the ground, steam-powered war vehicles and canola-engine cars zoomed around. In the sky, three of June Mai’s zeppelins