Ill Wind (Weather Warden #1)

He put his glasses back on, grabbed me by the arms, and used some martial arts trick to sweep my feet out from under me. I fell backwards into the grass with a bone-rattling thud, and he caught himself with outstretched hands just above me. More dust sifted down on me. He muttered something in a language I couldn't catch, and the dust swirled into a compact little ball and dropped away from us.

Somehow, it just made me madder. I opened my mouth to yell at him, and he put his lips down very close to my ear and said, "If you scream, they'll hear you. I can't prevent that."

I caught the scream and held it in because I heard, just about two feet away, the crunch of footsteps in grass. A shadow blocked the light overhead, and I peered past David to see Shirl standing there, looking puzzled.

"Anything?" Marion's voice, coming from the left, coming fast in our direction. Above me, David's face was blank and still, and I could see he was doing something-whatever it was, it was blocking them from seeing us in either the physical or aetheric realms. Unless they stepped on us or I made some inappropriate noise, they wouldn't find us.

"Nothing," Shirl confirmed. Marion's shadow joined the other woman's. "Dammit, this isn't possible. She was down there, I swear she was. But Erik said she was gone when he went down."

"I saw dust here," Marion said. She paced slowly back and forth, too close to my head for comfort. "Right around here. But I don't know how she could possibly have done that. She's not an Earth power."

"Maybe somebody's helping her." Shirl was too perceptive for my taste. That and the nose ring were putting her on my bad side. "She got any Earth Warden friends?"

"A few, but I can't see them sticking their necks out like this, not when they know what she's accused of doing." Marion hesitated again, and I could see her looking down, looking right at me. I didn't even dare to breathe. David wasn't touching me, but I could feel the heat radiating off him-what if they could feel it, too?

"Maybe you should bring in your Djinn." A new voice-Erik. He came trudging up from the other side. "Just set him to tracking her."

"I have other things for my Djinn to attend to," Marion said in a way that convinced me Erik shouldn't have made the suggestion. It apparently convinced Erik, too. He shut up. After another few fast heartbeats, Marion said, "All right. We have her car. She's not going anywhere, at least not fast. We'll wait for her to come back to it."

"What if she doesn't?" he wanted to know.

Marion smiled. "You don't know much about Joanne, I see."

The three of them tramped off through the grass. I didn't dare move, breathe, or speak as the sound of them receded. When the only thing left was the dry whisper of the grass, David let his arms bend and slowly lowered himself to lie on top of me. Sweet, hard pressure that made it hard to breathe.

"Get off," I ordered. His eyes flickered, brown and copper and gold, all the richness of the earth.

"Kind of you to offer, but don't you think we'd better get moving?" With no transition, he was on his feet. He was so fast, I couldn't even see him move. Dammit, he'd been playing with me all this time, playing at being human. That little drama he'd orchestrated back at the motel, that had just been fun for him.

I ignored the inconvenient fact that it had been fun for me, too.

I scrambled up and faced him, very aware that I was filthy and tired and scratched and bruised. At least I wasn't shoeless. I dropped the low-heeled pumps I was holding and stepped into them, ignoring the grit inside. "I am not going with you, not until you tell me whose Djinn you are!"

"You want to go with them?" he asked, and looked in the direction Marion had gone. They were still visible, just at the edge of the trees, heading for my car. Poor, abandoned Delilah. "Just say the word-I can remove the veil and you can go right back to what you were doing. Which was, if I recall, dying."

"You didn't answer my question! Whose Djinn are you?"

David smiled. Not the full, delighted grin of a being of limitless power, but the tight, unhappy smile of a man who knows too much. "My own," he said. "And I was really hoping you wouldn't ask that three times."

Three times. I hadn't meant to, but it was a ritual number, and he had to answer.

He meant he was free. Not bound.

A free Djinn.

That was . . . impossible. Absolutely-

It meant-oh, God, it meant I could claim him. And once I'd claimed him, I could make him take the Mark. He was exactly what I was looking for. He was the thing I had been hell-bent on asking Lewis to give me.

And now I didn't need Lewis at all.

He looked at me steadily, with eyes that were not quite human and not quite Djinn, that copper-brown hair blowing in the northeast wind. Thunder boomed in the distance. The storm was moving this way, and all things being equal, it would be drawn to me because I was its opposite.

I felt the Demon Mark stir in my chest, and the sensation was enough to make me want to gag in horror. I could get rid of it, now and forever.

All I had to do was . . .

I could see fear flickering like heat lightning in the far horizon of David's eyes.

He'd saved my life-not once but several times-

I knew that now. Was this really how I was going to repay him? Enslave him? Force him to be a host to this filthy thing? Trap him into never-ending agony?

Djinn don't die. At least not that anyone has ever recorded. They get the Demon Mark and they go insane and they're sealed away, for all time, with this poison eating away at them. Screaming for eternity.

I could do it to him. All I had to do was say the words. It hammered my heart faster, made me weak in the knees. Made me light-headed and sick to my stomach. Come on, the logical part of me insisted. Don't go soft on me now!

But when I opened my mouth, I found that all I had to say was, "I don't suppose you know how to get my car back."

I was stunned by the flash of relief in his eyes. I didn't want to see it, either, because that meant I had to think about it, and what it meant. He wouldn't be relieved if he hadn't dreaded it. And if he dreaded it ...

I can't think about this right now. Self-preservation first, compassion second, right? I wasn't thinking straight. Later, I'd do what had to be done.

David must have sensed that, because he looked away from me for the first time.

"No," he said. "But if you're not that picky, Marion came in a perfectly good Land Rover with a full tank of gas."

The Land Rover-a massive white beast, liberally splashed with mud to show it wasn't just a suburban wannabe's dream-sat unattended in a grove near the wildly unlikely beauty of the farmhouse. All around it, I could see evidence of either Marion's or Erik's tinkering-grass just a bit greener, trees surreally gorgeous, perfect flowers spreading petals to the sun.

The Land Rover looked like a massive mechanical roach on the wedding cake.

I tried the door, hoping Marion wouldn't have been anal-retentive enough to turn on alarms in the country ... no panicked shrieking followed, but the handle clicked and failed to open.

"Locked," I said to David. He reached over my shoulder and touched the door. Metal thunked.

"Open," he disagreed. The door swung wide.

We climbed inside in silence-for me, tired and hurt as I was, it was like scaling K2-and once I was perched in the comfortable seat, looking out through the smoked-glass windows, I let the flavor of another woman's car flow over me. Subtle scents, not as well aged as Delilah's odors . . . herbs, mostly, and fresh grass, dirt. Nobody had abused this baby with decomposing fast food or spilled coffee; if Marion spilled anything, I guessed it would have been herbal tea. There was a single silver thermos lying on the backseat. Coffee, I hoped. Erik looked like he was manly enough to swill a cup now and then.

David must have thought I was waiting for divine inspiration about the lack of car keys. He reached over and touched the ignition with one finger. A blue spark jumped, and the engine purred.

"You're handy if I ever want to get in the grand theft auto business," I said. "Any other neat tricks you can do I should know about?"

It was a loaded question, and he was right not to answer it. He sat back in the seat and fastened his safety belt. I attached mine, slipped the Land Rover in gear, and bumped gently out of the meadow and back up onto the blacktop of Iron Road, where I hit the accelerator hard. There were a few tense moments for me, watching the rearview mirror, but I didn't see the Wrath of Marion pursuing, and there wasn't a lot she could have done to affect us at this distance, in a car, on a paved road. Earthquake, maybe, but that would put others in danger, and Marion had scruples.

Hopefully.

Even so, I felt tightness ease in my shoulders as I made the left turn from Iron Road onto the highway again.

I turned right, heading north. David stirred, but I beat him to the comment.

"They're expecting me to head south," I said. "And I will, but not this way. I need to get lost before they think about using the mundane cops to track us-this tanker truck isn't exactly inconspicuous."

"And a vintage Mustang was?"

Well, he had a point. I sped north to the next farm-to-market intersection, took a random turn to the west, and followed some roads that didn't have signs and probably didn't need them; if you didn't know where you were going, local theory was, you didn't belong there anyway. I studied the dashboard. Marion had popped for the addition of a global positioning system. I activated it and looked the map over while I was driving. So did David, intensely interested; he traced routes in silence with his fingertip, showing me alternatives, until we locked in one that took us through midsize cities in Kansas, heading for Oklahoma City.

"There's a shorter route," he pointed out.

"I'm starting to worry about the shorter routes. Anyway, I have a good friend who lives near Oklahoma City, so we'll go there first."

"And-?"

"And I'll figure it out from there."

"Well, that's a hell of a long-range plan."

"You're shutting up, now, right?"

He did. It was kind of a shame, because I had a lot of questions. One of them was, of course, what would happen to Delilah, my sweet midnight-blue baby. The idea that Erik or-perish the thought- Shirl might end up driving her made me almost turn the Land Rover around and go back.

We must have gone about thirty minutes in silence before I asked him, "So you really don't have a master?" Because I still couldn't believe it. Well, sure, in the stories . . . there were always old copper lamps lying around waiting to be rubbed for three wishes. But real Djinn don't work that way. Real Djinn are numbered, assigned, and accounted for like precious jewels, and their service is eternal.

David was looking out the window at the rolling pastoral countryside, sparsely dotted with cows and neat-rowed fields. He didn't turn his head. "You know that's one of the few questions I had to answer honestly, since you asked it three times. No. I don't have a master."

Djinn could lie about most anything except who they were and who they served-but you had to ask them directly, and be really focused, because they were also Zen masters of the obscure; and weren't afraid of resorting to trickery to misdirect the questioner. But David's answer didn't seem obscure; it seemed simple and to the point. He was that impossible dream, the free-range Djinn. Which meant-no, I didn't want to think about what it meant. Far too tempting. Far too easy.

He turned his head then, and he wasn't troubling to disguise his eyes anymore; they were bright copper, beautiful beyond words, scary beyond measure. His human disguise, I saw now, had been pretty minimal; just a muting of his eyes and hair, an inward turning of his powerful aura.

"You hid in Oversight," I said, instead of what I was really thinking. Djinn weren't the only ones good at avoiding questions. "How'd you do that?"

"It's different when we're free. We come into the full range of our abilities only when we're working for a master. Outside of that, we just have camouflage and some small talents, hardly more than what you have yourself." This from a guy who could start cars with his finger and swim through solid earth like water. But then, I realized, those were things a properly trained Fire Warden or Earth Warden could do. So maybe he wasn't dishing crap after all. "I appear as your subconscious shapes me."

"Human?"

"Mostly. I can be hurt."

"Killed?"

He shook his head. "Maybe. It's been a long time since I've been free. I don't know. But hurt, yes."

"And if I go into Oversight now-"

"You'll see me as human." He shrugged. "Not for your benefit, though. That's just how we look when we're free."

It made sense, actually. Djinn, like any living thing, would have developed the ability to hide themselves from predators. In a very real sense, that's what magic-wielding humans are to them-predators, waiting to pounce and devour. Or at least to enslave. It was an extremely interesting and unsettling thought, because it meant that there might be more than just David out there. A lot more. Hiding in plain sight. Hoping nobody with the right set of facts twigged to their true identity, because it would be so easy to ...

I wrenched myself away from temptation. Again.

"You've been following me," I accused. I took my foot off the gas and let the Ranger coast for a while, because we were coming up on one of those smalltown speed-trap zones. Not a big town, Eliza Springs. Not much of a town at all. A speed limit of thirty miles an hour smelled like the ubiquitous traveler tax.

David didn't bother to answer.

"Somebody sent you," I continued. "Maybe not your master, okay, maybe that's true. But somebody."

More silence. Then again, I wasn't asking a direct question. If I were magically compelled to answer questions, I'd resent it like hell, so I kept it conversational and declamatory. "You caused that spinout."

His shoulders tensed, just a bit. He relaxed them. No answer.

"I felt the car tip. I was going to roll over."

"Yes."

"And you stopped it." No answer. It was time for a little force. "Why?"

"Seemed like a good idea at the time." His warm-metal eyes flicked toward me, then away.

I reminded myself that even though he had to answer questions, he wasn't under any obligation to tell the truth, not unless I asked him the same question a ritual three times, and even then only if it fell within certain guidelines. I didn't want to do that, because he also wasn't under any obligation not to disappear at the next blink of an eye. This was a little bit like dealing with a skittish, beautiful wild thing . . . too much heavy-handed crashing around and he'd run.

"You were going to let me crash and burn." I made it a statement. "Why save me?"

"I liked the way you looked," he said. "I saw you at the diner, when the lightning came for you. You could have run back inside. Why'd you get in the car?"

"You're kidding, right? There were all those-"

"People," he finished for me. "You didn't want to put them in danger. I told you. I liked the way you looked."

"In Oversight." He didn't confirm or deny. "I didn't see you in Oversight, and I was looking."

"We've had this conversation. You can't see me when I don't want you to." He flickered, suddenly, like a failing TV picture, blinking in and out in strobe patterns. I almost ran the SUV off the road. "Sorry. Just a demonstration."

"This morning at the motel-you didn't leave. You were just-" Hiding. I had another thought. "You watched me! You watched me change clothes!"

He closed his eyes and made himself comfortable. The smile on his face made me smack him on the shoulder. Hard.

"Hey! I'm talking to you!" I said. He didn't move, just sat there, relaxed and limp, eyes still closed. "Right. As if Djinn nap."

"We do." He did sound tired. "And I'm going to."

"Whatever."

"Fine."

I fiddled with the radio and worried more about cops, and Marion, and cell phones, and the fact that this damn British boat was all too conspicuous. Of the three stations available, two were country and one was rap; I settled for rap. If David had an objection, he didn't wake up long enough to voice it.

We made it safely past the six intersections and one Dairy Queen that made up Eliza Springs, and hit a farm-to-market road that headed vaguely west. I notched the Land Rover up to a comfortable purring speed and frowned at the speedometer, which told me kilometers per hour instead of miles per hour. Close enough. I had bigger problems than a speeding ticket.

One of them snored lightly at my right elbow, all the way to the state line.