Thin Air (Weather Warden #6)

I shook my head. "Paul, that wasn't me. She wasn't me."

"So you say. Sorry, but I'm not buying the next load of crap to get trucked by." He was looking a little ill now. "That was you. Joanne. Christ, I've known her-you-half your life. I'd know the difference!"

The scariest thing about it? Maybe he was right about that. Maybe the Demon really had become more me than me.

"She showed you what she wanted you to see," I said. "She showed David the faithful lover. She showed each of you exactly what would get her the maximum mileage..." God, what had she shown Lewis? One hell of a good time. I tried hard not to even consider it. "She wanted you on her side. Against me."

"I repeat: I got zero reason to believe you. And I'm not hearing anything to convince me."

I spread my arms. "I'm not a Demon. You can check."

"How do you think we do that? It's not the fucking Inquisition around here."

"Ask Marion. She'd know. She can see Demon Marks." Which begged the question..."Why didn't she recognize Evil Twin?" I asked it aloud, not expecting an answer, but surprisingly Paul actually had one.

"She wasn't awake," he said. "After you pulled your stunt that night in the clinic, she was in a coma. She came out of it this morning."

"When the person you thought of as me left," I said. He frowned and nodded. "Well, that's a coincidence. Lucky E.T. didn't just kill her."

He looked suddenly ill.

"What?"

Paul's mouth opened and closed, then opened again to say, "Marion's breathing stopped three times in the night. If there hadn't been an Earth Warden with her..."

Evil Twin didn't dare act directly, then, not if she was trying to carry on her campaign to become the one true Joanne. That had saved Marion's life. No doubt E.T. would have been delighted to have dispatched one of the only people in the world who could see her true, unpleasant nature. But Faux Joanne probably would have managed to keep her in a coma indefinitely, until an opportunity came around to quietly shuffle her offstage.

Paul's gaze, which had unfocused to mull things over, sharpened back on me. "How do I know you weren't behind that?"

"We could play this game all day, Paul, but the point is, I'm here, Marion's awake, and she's not pointing at me and screaming, 'Demon,' now, is she? So you're going to have to take something on faith." My turn to fold my arms and frown. "Paul, if I was in love with David, I'd never have slipped off with you. Not that you aren't studly, but..."

He looked deeply uncomfortable. Shuffled his feet and cleared his throat. Adjusted the limp tie at the collar of his much-rumpled business shirt, which was finely tailored but not up to the rigors of a Joanne Baldwin crisis. "Yeah," he mumbled to the floor. "I guess I knew that. I've known you a long time. You're a tease, but-"

"Tease?"

"Flirt," he amended hastily. "Jesus. Touchy, ain't ya? Look, whatever happened, the point is, she didn't get what she wanted, right?"

I wasn't so sure of that. "What did she want?" I pushed away from the door and paced a little, nervous and chilly. "She wanted to cut me off from any support, sure, but it was more than that. She went out of her way to enlist people. She wanted to be part of the Wardens. Why?"

"Because you were?"

I shook my head. "It wasn't just that she wanted a life. It's more than that." I remembered the way she'd felt in the clinic when she'd been about to kill me. And even back in the forest before the helicopter rescue. She'd refined her methods, but what she wanted wasn't just to be me. "Before she came after me, she took over Kevin. She wanted something, and it wasn't just about finding me, because she took him over when he was fighting the California fire-when was that?"

Paul pulled a handheld computer from his pocket and booted it up with a press of his thumb. He had big hands, but he was good with them, tapping out commands with effortless speed. "Same day," he said. "Same day you disappeared in Sedona."

I nodded. "Then I need to talk to Kevin. Now."

Summoning Kevin for a personal chat took about an hour, during which somebody provided lunch; I'd forgotten how good food could taste, and devoured two sandwiches without pausing for much beyond swigs of bottled water. Oh, it was good. I'd been willing to settle for some of Lewis's stale trail bars.

When he arrived Kevin wasn't alone; he screeched up the drive in a black Warden-issue SUV, the kind with the sun symbol aetherically embossed on the side, and for a second I was afraid that Evil Twin had come home for a High Noon-style showdown.

But when the passenger door opened, it was Cherise who got out. I was unreasonably cheered to see her, because she looked a hell of a lot better than she had-fresh, scrubbed, cute as a button in her snowflake-patterned tight sweater and blue jeans.

She had to be feeling better. Her nail polish matched the outfit.

"Jo!" Cherise was the only person I didn't need to win over; she flew across the room and hugged me like a sister. Well, from what I'd been through with Sarah, more like the sister I wished I had. "God, you look like hell! Hygiene, honey! Look into it!"

"Been busy," I said.

"Too busy to comb the crap out of your hair?" But she was kidding, and her grin faded fast. "What's going on? I thought you were better."

"Was I?" I gave her a long look as we stood at arm's length, and she slowly shook her head.

"Oh, man, that wasn't you, was it? Dammit. I knew something was wrong; I knew." If she had, Cherise had been the only one. Ironic, since she was also the only one of the entire group without some superpower or other, beyond looking fabulous under difficult circumstances. "You didn't seem like...you."

"But I remembered you."

"Sure." She shrugged. "But still. So. Evil twin?"

"Evil twin."

"That's hot."

"Not so much, from this side."

"Oh, come on, I'd kill for an evil twin. How cool would that be?"

I reached out and put a hand on Cherise's shoulder. "Cher, I think she's the one who hurt you. And Kevin."

I felt her flinch, but somehow she managed to hold on to her smile. "Okay. I take it back. Wouldn't kill for an evil twin, but I might kill her."

Kevin had come in sometime during our conversation, stomping snow off his heavy Doc Martens and shooting distrustful looks around the room. He wasn't judgmental about it. He didn't like anybody, except, of course, Cherise. He unzipped his black jacket-it was a Raiders down jacket, with the pirate logo on it-as if he were intending to pull out an Uzi and mow us all down, but that was just his normal urban 'tude.

"You yanked my leash?" he said to Lewis, who was sitting next to the fire with a cup of coffee. Lewis lifted his mug in my direction. "Great. Not her again."

I ignored his hostility. Seemed the best way to deal with him, all the way around. "Kitchen," I said. "Let's do the inquisition over some lunch."

It was a pretty strategic move, seeing as how it put me within reach of a plateful of chocolate-chip cookies someone had left behind, and Kevin was too busy shoving turkey on rye into his mouth to give me much grief. Cherise quizzed me on ingredients, natural versus processed, organic versus pesticides, and other questions that I cheerfully lied my way through to get her plate filled. She even nibbled her way through a quarter of a cookie, looking mortified the whole time that she was doing it.

"You ask us here just to feed us?" Kevin mumbled around a mashed-up mouthful of sandwich. I resisted the urge to tell him not to chew and talk.

"I need to ask you about what you remember," I said. "When you were taken over that day."

He stopped chewing, swallowed, and put the sandwich down, growing fascinated by the pattern of the tablecloth. I felt for him, but I couldn't let it go this time. "Kevin," I said. "She was in your head. That means you know things that can help me now."

He shook his head. His hair looked lank and oily, and I wondered if he ever washed it. I marveled at my urge to mother him, considering how much he disliked me. And how generally unlikable the kid was.

"She's still out there," I said. "She could do to other people what she did to you. For all I know she's already doing it. You can't seriously be okay with that."

Another mute shake of his head. I didn't know what it meant, but it was at least a response.

"You don't want to remember," I said. "I know. I get that. But we don't have a lot of choices now. We have to find her."

"What's this 'we'?" He looked up, and his eyes were dark with resentment. "It's never about the 'we' with you. When you say 'we,' you just want something. And then you'll leave me behind."

"I won't. Not this time."

"Why should I believe you?"

"No idea. But I'm telling you the truth. If you want to go with me, I've got no issues with that. You've got more motivation than most people out there to take her down, right? I could use that."

He frowned. "What if Lewis says no?"

"You think Lewis is the boss of me?"

He chewed another bite of sandwich while he thought about it, then gave me a grudging nod of acceptance. "Okay. What do you want me to do?"

I took in a deep breath and looked at Cherise, who'd put down her barely nibbled cookie and was watching, wide-eyed. "It's what I did to Cherise before. I want to look at your memories and-"

I didn't get to finish, because Kevin slammed his chair back with a screech of wood on wood, and headed for the door. I summoned a blast of wind to slam it shut in his face-too much wind, too clumsy, and I had to bleed off the resulting energy into a surge of static that made sparks flare in the light fixtures.

"Screw you! You're not touching me!" Kevin yelled, and grabbed the doorknob. Another unintended consequence of my ham-fisted use of power: It was hot enough to burn. He yelped, cradled his hand, and backed away.

I got up and took his hand in mine, palm up, and smoothed my fingers over the burn. This was easier, somehow. There was a rich, quiet flow of power coming up from my feet, channeled up from the ground, and it spilled like golden light through my body and out of my stroking fingers, to coat his wound and sink in deep.

In seconds the burn was gone.

"Shit," Kevin said, and pulled his hand back to stare at it. Then he looked at me. "Thought you were Weather."

"Well, you know, I joined one of those Power-of-the-Month clubs, and it looks like I've completed the set."

His fingers curled in over the palm, hiding it. "I don't care what you are. I still don't want you in my head."

Kevin had issues, with a capital I. "I'll limit it to just what I need to know," I said.

"And what, I'm supposed to trust you?" He gave me a scorching look of contempt. "Please."

"Kevin."

"What?"

"I'm asking," I said. "I'm just asking. I won't force you to do it. I won't take it from you. But without you I don't know how we're going to do this; I really don't. You're important."

I kept it simple, and straightforward, and he frowned at me, looking for the trick. For the spin.

There wasn't any. I meant exactly what I said.

He looked away, to Cherise. She was uncharacteristically quiet and sober, and she slowly nodded.

"I'll be right here," she said. "Right here."

Kevin sank down in his chair, hands scrubbing his knees in agitation, and gave me one quick, jerky nod of acceptance.

I didn't wait for him to have second thoughts. Sometimes it's better to pull the Band-Aid off quickly.

I put my hand on his head and dropped into the world according to Kevin.

Chapter Fifteen

FOURTEEN

He was just a kid when his dad got married to the Evil Hag Bitch from Hell, just a kid, and she wouldn't leave him alone; she was always touching him, coming on to him; he was a kid...

I tried to pull away from the memories, but Kevin's mind was full of mines, booby traps, sinkholes of horrible things. He'd been a good kid once, or at least no worse than most boys his age, but throw in a stepmother who wasn't above teasing him, then using him, then outright molesting him...

Kevin's mind was a house of horrors. I was afraid to move; everything I did seemed to resonate through him, and there was no clear path, no direction. I tried viewing him in the map of lights that had become my guide, but his lights were gray, bloodred, almost nothing clean. Oh, Kevin. It broke my heart how much he'd suffered, and that the memories never left him. And no matter how careful I was, things shifted, bled, broke open as I moved.

And things oozed out, whether I wanted to know them or not.

The night she finally did it, the night she turned off the lights and crawled into bed and Did It, it all got confused; it all got mixed-up; he felt horrible and wrong and excited and sick and scared and worried, and there was something wrong with him, wrong, and what would Dad think? But Dad was asleep, drunk off his ass, and that was that, this was this, and even though he didn't really want it he did; there was something sick about it he couldn't control, and-

God, stop! I yanked myself away, but the memory was like tar-it wouldn't come off. Wouldn't go away.

- after it was over she went away and he tried to sleep but there was something wrong in his head, something he couldn't start, couldn't stop, couldn't control, and it was this heat, this shimmer, and he could almost...