Chill Factor (Weather Warden #3)

She transferred her gaze to me. The look was too wise, too compassionate, and it made me feel cheap.

"Not yet, maybe," she said. "Give it time. I do speak from experience, you know."

Interesting. I'd never seen Marion 's Djinn; I didn't know of anyone who ever had. She had one, of course; at her level, it would be impossible for her not to. And yet... she was extremely private about that relationship. Those short sentences were, from her, a bombshell confession. I knew, without looking over my shoulder, that David was manifesting behind me. Not afraid to show himself now that he knew the game was up. I felt a little better for the support, though I knew there was only so much he could do in this situation.

Only so much either of us could do, actually.

"Thanks for the advice," I said. My chilly tone was a little undermined-and muffled-by the fact that I was pulling my black knit shirt over my head at the time. I tested my shoes and found them dry-another silent gift from David. I stepped into them and headed for the bathroom.

Marion, who'd taken a step farther into the room, got in the way. I stopped and frowned. "Look, no matter how urgent this is, it's not so urgent that I can't pee and swig some mouthwash, right?"

She looked doubtful. That scared me.

"I'll be thirty seconds," I said, and ducked around her.

Just to be rebellious, I took a full minute.

The saving-the-world confab took place downstairs in the Holiday Inn lobby, next to the tinkling artificial fountain where I'd first met Chaz. Paul had taken the liberty of rearranging the furniture, pulling sofas and chairs into a tight little group. Circling the wagons. The desk clerks looked oblivious; I guessed that Paul had used his Djinn to put a glamour around us, make us unnoticeable. (It was, as David constantly reminded me, a hell of a lot easier than making us invisible.) I clopped down the lobby stairs, following Marion; David was no longer visible. I never could tell when David was gone, or just pretending to be gone. That was a sense I'd lost along with my Djinn union card.

Paul was pacing. Not good. When Paul paced, it meant things were getting serious. I could see that responsibilities were already wearing on him; a month ago, Paul had been content to be a Sector Warden, overseeing a big chunk of the East Coast, reporting directly to the National Big Cheese. But the events that had taken a hand in making me a Djinn, and then unmaking me, had changed the landscape of the association. So far as seniority, Paul was one of the few left standing who could take on the additional work. And there was, God knew, a hell of a lot to do. The stress had already given him shadows and bags under his eyes, and I didn't remember the fine tension lines at the corners of his mouth.

I was shocked to see him out here, chasing after me. The situation with Kevin was bad, no doubt about it, but he had a national organization to run, and it wouldn't run itself. I hoped he wasn't putting personal feelings ahead of business.

I took a seat on the couch, next to Marion, and Paul stopped prowling long enough to say, "Joanne Baldwin, you know Marion. Meet Jesus Farias and Robert West. Brazil and Canada."

Two heads nodded at me. I nodded back. Neither looked happy to be here.

"The kid you're after-" Paul continued.

"Kevin," I said. Paul's eyes fastened on me for a second, then moved on.

"Kevin," he corrected. "He's got wards up around Las Vegas. Great big ones. He's been fucking with weather systems across half the country to play keep-away with you, and that can't go on. We're killing ourselves trying to keep the peace out there."

"Sorry," I said. I was. "There's not a lot of choices to this, Paul. Either we leave him alone, or we go after him. But either way, it's not going to be good news, and I thought we agreed-"

"We did," Paul interrupted. "We agreed that you should come out here and stop him, but Jo, you haven't stopped him. You haven't even gotten close. Your Djinn doesn't have the power to go up against this punk nose-to-nose, and all that can come out of this is disaster if you cowboy around out here any more."

The Canadian, West, put in, "Your boy Kevin is destabilizing more than the weather. We're reading a huge pressure buildup along the Cascadia Subduction Zone. If we can't stop it, your problems out here will seem very small indeed."

Oh. Right. He wasn't Weather; he was Earth. "How bad?"

"At current levels, we think we can expect a mega-thrust earthquake along the Cascadia line. That's offshore, around Vancouver and Oregon. It could potentially be as small as a nine-point quake, but we think it's probably going to be worse. A lot worse."

As small as a nine-point quake? The one that had just killed 25,000 in Iran had been a 6.5. "How much worse?"

"The amount of energy increases by a multiplier of forty times for every point on the Richter scale. This is probably going to register higher than the scale counts. Hypothetically, perhaps an eleven. Using the Mercalli intensity scale, it's a twelve, total damage, buildings thrown into the air-"

Big enough to scare the holy shit out of the Wardens, in other words. "I don't mean to tell you your business, but what about using smaller quakes to-"

"Bleed off energy? Useless. That amount of energy can't be bled away, not without spreading the devastation farther." His eyes were chilly. "And you're right. You shouldn't tell me my business."

The Brazilian weighed in. His English was excellent, spiced with a slight musical intonation. "Also, we estimate that the temperature all over this region has been raised by a mean of five degrees since this boy began his attacks; he has no conception of how to bleed off energy and balance the system. If it continues to rise, we won't be able to hold the network. Things will shift. And with the equations already so far off scale..."

Paul stopped pacing and looked directly at me. "We're talking about melting icecaps, Jo. Floods. Climatic devastation. Earthquakes worse than we can possibly control, even with Djinn. Which we have too few of, by the way. I don't know if you're aware of it, but things are getting critical on that front. We lost Djinn we couldn't afford to lose, back there in the vaults. We barely have enough to keep things together as it is, and we keep on losing them. Wish to God I knew where they were going..."

Marion shot him a look, a clear we-don't-talk-about-that message. I covered a flash of surprise. The Wardens were losing Djinn? I knew they were in short supply-they always had been-but I'd been under the clear impression that they knew exactly where their Djinn were, all the time. Of course, it made sense that there would be attrition. Once a Djinn's bottle was shattered, it disappeared. For all the Wardens had ever known, they left our plane of existence for someplace more exotic and safe... they'd never known what I knew, that many of them stuck around as free-range, unclaimed Djinn. Hiding in plain sight.

I wasn't about to tell them.

"All this could be followed by another ice age," Farias continued somberly. "One which we may no longer have enough trained personnel to stop. We've lost too many, both human and Djinn."

It sounded wacky. A teenage kid raised the temperature in Las Vegas by a few degrees, and boom, ice age. But weather's funny like that. The point wasn't the amount the temperature was raised; it was that it caused chain reactions. Altered rainfall. Shifted wind patterns.

El Niсo on a global scale.

The last time a serious, out-of-pattern weather shift had happened, the Mayan Empire died of thirst, and crop failures in Europe sparked chaos that killed millions. Some say it caused the Dark Ages. It had taken the Wardens generations to control things again, put the systems back in balance. Or some semblance of it, at least. When the entire world system wobbled, it was the work of several human lifetimes to correct it.

I sucked in a deep breath. "So if you don't want me to keep going after him, what do you want me to do?"

Paul sank into a chair, leaned forward, and clasped his hands together. The gold chain around his neck swung free. It was a Saint Eurosia medal, patron saint against bad weather. I was reminded that when his relatives had sit-downs like this, it was sometimes to talk about whom to whack.

"The kid's scared," Paul said. "He knows things are out of control, but he won't talk to us. I'm pretty sure he thinks we're going to kill him."

As if we weren't. Yeah, right. "So what's the plan?"

"I'm ready to bring the full power of the Wardens down on him if I have to, but I don't want to go to war here. It's too dangerous. People are going to die if we do it the hard way."

"So you want to make a deal with him."

"Yes."

"And you what-want me to be your middleman? That's bullshit. He's been spending the last three weeks trying to keep me the hell away from Vegas."

They were all looking at me... Paul with a dark, sorrowful intensity, Marion with compassion, the other two with a mix of contempt and curiosity.

I suddenly knew, on a very visceral level, that I really wasn't going to like this conversation at all.

Paul said, "Jo, give me your Djinn's bottle."

Silence ticked on, dragging the seconds with it; I felt blood start to pound loud in my ears. "What?"

"Your Djinn. David." Paul leaned forward, elbows on knees, looking earnest. "C'mon, Jo, it isn't like you have him officially anyway. You got him by accident; he was Bad Bob's originally. If we had a calm minute around here, we'd have asked you to turn him over to the pool anyway. You're not authorized to handle a Djinn yet, and we need every single one right now to keep the systems stabilized."

I sucked in a breath of air that felt thin and hot. "You're kidding me."

"No." Paul held out his hand. Just held it out. Nobody else moved. "Jo, babe, let's not make this official."

"If you didn't want to make it official you should've come without the posse."

Point scored. His eyes flickered. "Please, Jo. Swear to God, I'm too tired to fuck with you right now. Don't make it hard."

"Don't make it hard?" I repeated, and slowly got to my feet. They all stood up, too, and flesh crept along the back of my neck. "I'm not handing him over, Paul. He shouldn't even be chained to a damn bottle, anyway. He's not-"

Instantly David was corporeal, standing behind Paul's chair, face white and eyes blazing. He mouthed one word.

Careful.

I realized, with a cold shock, what I'd almost blurted out. I'd almost told Paul about the Free Djinn, the ones roaming around loose and unclaimed out in the world. There were a lot of them, a lot more than the Wardens could ever have expected, and if I mentioned that then the Wardens would see it as their responsibility to find them and enslave them... for their own protection. Or some equally bullshit backward explanation that boiled down to benefiting the Wardens and no one else. Especially now, when they were running so scared. They'd use anything and everything to bail themselves-all of humanity-out.

I swallowed what I'd been about to say and finished up. "He's not going to be put in any goddamn pool. He's not a resource. I claimed him, and I'm keeping him."

David flickered and was gone. I felt suddenly, coldly alone, standing here with four Wardens staring at me. Four Wardens, I realized, who each had the power of a Djinn at their commands. No accident, that. Not when they were complaining about the shortages.

"You said you don't want a war," I said to Paul. "Don't start one with me, babe."

He let me make half of a dramatic exit. When I put my right foot on the staircase, beside the maniacally cheerful fountain, he said, "I get that you think you're in love with this Djinn-which is fucked-up beyond all measure of fucked-up, by the way. But beside that, which we will be talking about later, this doesn't end with you walking away, right?"

I didn't turn. Didn't let myself hesitate for more than a split second before I took the second stair.

Paul's voice went official. "By the authority of the Wardens Council, I'm ordering you to turn over your Djinn to us. And if you don't, I'm taking you down, and Marion 's authorized to put you under the knife. You'll lose everything, Jo. Everything. Even your powers. And maybe that'll kill you, but right now I can't fucking worry about that."

At the top of the stairs, David flickered into existence, walking slowly down toward me. He had on his traveling clothes, his long olive-drab coat, and he looked young and innocent and angelic. My vision of him, imposed on him? Or his own reality? How much of him was really him? I didn't know. I couldn't.

He locked eyes with me for a second, then went past me down to the lobby. Hands in his pockets. The Wardens had all come to their feet, staring, and I could tell they were a whisper away from throwing their Djinn into all-out battle.

He looked back over his shoulder. The overhead lights trapped a shimmer of red and gold in his hair, and reflected sparks of hot bronze in his eyes as he smiled at me. A gentle, heartbreaking smile.

"Give them what they want, Jo," he said. "It'll be all right."

All around him, Djinn were moving like disembodied shadows. He was surrounded. Hemmed in. Trapped.

I took the bottle slowly from my pocket, felt the pulsing heat of the magic inside of it, thought about what it would be like to lose him.

I can't. Can't.

If I started a fight, it would go nuclear in minutes. Too much power here. Too many people with the ability to destroy half the continent.

Too much goddamn emotion.

I prepared to smash the bottle against the railing.

"Jo." He whispered my name like a caress, and followed it by laying fingertips gently against my cheek. "Don't. This needs to happen. Just do what they tell you."