Glimmer in the Maelstrom: Shadow Through Time 3 Read Online Free

but there was no denying the pang of jealousy, instantly quelled. His life was too secretive for a girlfriend, but he noticed the way girls glanced at him, particularly in swim class. They liked the way he was put together. In fact, most of them openly stared. But his weirdness was a barrier no one had crossed, and he was relieved about that. Isolation he could deal with, the bitchiness of girls his age was too harsh. Even while they were leering at him they’d be making snide comments. He hated that. Hated them.
    Besides, he’d never get to the Earthworld of Ennae if he wasted his time socialising. Yet despite his best intentions, at night when he was falling asleep, Vandal would often fantasise about having a girl beside him. He would watch himself strip the cool, wet swimsuit from her to reveal warm skin beneath. Then he would imagine how it would feel to touch the breasts he had seen jiggling as the girls warmed up beside the pool, to knead them with his fingers and to glide his palms over the nipples he had seen poking through wet lycra.
    In reality he could probably coax one of his classmates up to the lake, or even a senior girl. In fact, the right senior would probably drive him so they had somewhere comfortable to … do it. But just because he could, didn’t mean he would. His father’s legacy went beyond looks. Vandal had Guardian power, and if he ignored that simply to gratify the lusts that came and went inside him, he’d never work out how to get to Ennae, and his mother would never get better. It was easy to dismiss his surging desires when he looked at them that way. At least while he was thirteen.
    The gravel ended and Vandal dismounted, wheeling his bike across dirt to prop it against a paperbark tree. He stripped off his singlet and stuffed it in the duffel bag before turning to the lake. It was still. And hot. The leaves in the trees above and around him barely moved. The water, far receded from its usual shoreline, was like glass.
    Perfect.
    He crouched and unlaced his joggers, left them on top of his duffel and walked across the cracked dried mud to the waterline. A year ago it had taken him half an hour to swim to the other side and back. Now it would be lucky to take five minutes. If the drought wasn’t broken, this time next year the lake would be dry.
    It was the same on every continent, as though the water was … disappearing. Logically Vandal knew it couldn’t leave their atmosphere, but recently he’d heard something about the atmosphere expanding, as though their planet had suddenly received an influx of air. Hot air. In the African desert, firestorms had been reported crossing dunes and scientists had no idea what they were feeding on. Some theorised that it was gasses. Unknown gasses.
    Glimmer was involved in that. The Maelstrom. His mother had told him that the girl who had grown up as his sister would control the weather across Four Worlds, eventually joining them into one. It sounded like the sort of crap Brock Winters had come out with the day he’d taken an acid trip. Delusions of grandeur. Only, if Pagan was really a Guardian, Glimmer, with her cold blonde perfection, could well be The Catalyst his mother had described.
    She’d been a better fighter, a quicker thinker, with a cooler head. God, how he’d hated her. Hated the way his father had always deferred to her judgement, as though she was already an adult. The only thing that diminished his hatred in any small measure was the fact that his mother was more obsessed about getting his dad back than she was about losing Glimmer. And it was reassuring that although his mother let Vandal go off without arguing, she became anxious and disoriented if he didn’t return when he’d told her he would. It proved to Vandal that she still loved him, despite the madness that was sapping her will.
    As far as Vandal was concerned, Glimmer was out of the picture. Let her save the universe if that’s what she was born to do. It would keep