Thin Air (Weather Warden #6)

"There's snowfall two miles away," David said. "Heavy. You're keeping it to the south, I take it?"

"Trying," Lewis said. "This whole region's soaked with moisture. Sooner or later it's going to start coming down. There's only so far you can push the system before it starts pushing back, and the last thing I want is to start a winter storm while we're trying to get out of here. How's Mom, by the way?"

"Quiet."

Mom? I debated it for a few seconds, then asked aloud. Both men turned to look at me as I tugged the laces tighter and knotted the right boot.

"Mother Earth," Lewis said. "The primal intelligence of the planet. Mom. She's been a little...unhappy lately."

I tried to figure out if he was joking, and decided-rather grimly-that he wasn't. Great. Wardens who could control all kinds of things. Spooky disappearing Djinn. And now the ground I was walking on had some kind of hidden intelligence.

Losing my memory was turning out to be a real education.

I tied off my left boot and stood up, shouldering my pack. David had balanced it well; it seemed to ride nicely, with no extra strain.

"I can take it if you get tired," David said, walking past me.

I snorted. "I'm surprised you didn't try to take it in the first place."

"I know better," he said. "When you want help, you'll ask for it."

We'd left the campsite and gone about a mile before I broached the question again. David was in front of me, Lewis ahead of him. It was as private as this was likely to get. "David? About last night...what I said...about children."

No answer. He kept walking, long strides, following Lewis's progress. I had to hurry to keep up.

"Is there a child?" I asked. My heart was hammering, and I didn't think it was from the exercise. "Mine, yours, ours? What's going on?"

"Not now."

"Yeah, now. Look, the way you reacted-"

"I can't talk about it now."

"But-"

He turned, and I stumbled to a halt, suddenly aware of just how tall he was. He wasn't especially broad, but I'd had my hands pressing against his chest, and I knew that there was muscle under that checked shirt. Plus, he'd thrown Lewis across the clearing like a plush toy.

"What do you want to know?" he asked, face taut, voice intense. "That we had a child? We did. Her name was Imara. She was part of our souls, Jo, and how do you think it feels for me to know that you don't even recognize her name?"

He turned, olive coat belling in a gust of cold wind, and followed Lewis up the slope. Lewis had paused at the top, looking down at us.

He didn't say anything, just plunged down the other side. I saved my breath and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other.

Imara. I kept repeating the name in my head, hoping for some kind of resonance, some spark of memory. I'd had a daughter, for God's sake. How could I remember the brand name of the shoes I was wearing and not remember my own child? Not remember carrying her, or holding her, or...

Or how she'd died. Because even though nobody had said it, that was what everybody meant. Imara had been born, and Imara had died, and I had no memory at all of any part of it.

And of everything I'd lost, that was the piece that made me feel desperately, horribly incomplete.

Lewis led us through what I could only guess was an old-growth forest of the Great Northwest. Oregon, Washington-somewhere in there. He set a brutal pace, moving fast to keep his body heat up. We didn't take breaks. When we finally stopped, I dropped my pack and staggered off into the woods to pee. When I came back, Lewis had another fire going, and he was wrapped in one of the unrolled sleeping bags, shivering.

His lips and eyelids had turned a delicate shade of lilac.

"Dammit, take the coat," I demanded.

"No. I'll be fine."

"Ask David to get you a jacket, then! Hell, he brought me shoes!"

Lewis's eyes flicked briefly past me, seeking out David, I was sure. "When I need one."

"Unless you're modeling the new fall line of lipstick, and this season's color is Corpse Blue, you'd better damn well tell him to get you one now!"

"I didn't know you cared." Shaky sarcasm. He was still strong enough to be putting up a good front, but it was all marshmallow and foam peanuts underneath.

"I don't. I care about getting stuck out here." I didn't move my eyes away from Lewis. "David, could you please get him a coat?" Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw David cross his arms and lean against a tree. The expression on his face might have been a smile.

"Of course," he said, and misted away.

Lewis took in a deep breath, and coughed until I was afraid he was going to spit up a lung. I did what any medically inarticulate person would do; I rubbed and pounded his back. Which probably didn't help at all, but he didn't seem to mind. When he'd stopped coughing, he leaned over, breathing in shallow gasps, face a dirty gray.

"What's wrong with you?" I asked. "And don't tell me you're tired, or you've been up for three days, or whatever bullshit you've been shoveling at David."

He pressed a hand to his ribs. "Took a little fall. Maybe you saw it."

Oh, shit. David had thrown him across the clearing. Since he'd climbed up again, I hadn't figured it was any big deal.

Wrong.

"Earth Wardens can't heal themselves real well," he said. "It's coming along. Couple of broken ribs. Bit of a punctured lung. Nothing to alert the National Guard over."

"Can't David just, you know, swoop us out of here? To wherever he goes to buy retail?"

Lewis shook his head. His breathing was easing up a little. "Free Djinn-well, I guess they're all Free Djinn now-can't take humans along with them when they do that. The times they've tried it, the results haven't been exactly encouraging."

"Meaning?"

"Dead people."

Great. So David could go in and out, but we had to hoof it. "What about a helicopter? Some kind of rescue service?"

"We're still a pretty far hike from the closest place a helicopter can touch down. Believe me, I'll call for help as soon as I can."

"Why the hell not now? We're stuck out here, you've got broken ribs, there's snow coming...Even if they can't land, maybe they can, you know, winch us up or something."

"Trust me. We have to be very careful right now." He looked vaguely apologetic. "It's not about you. It's about me."

Ah. I remembered what he'd blurted out when he'd first found me. Listen, we're in trouble. Bad trouble. We need you. Things have gone wrong. Like I was the go-to girl for that kind of thing. "What's happened?" I asked.

"That's the issue," he said. "I don't know. I don't know if it's an isolated issue, somebody who just doesn't like me, or a genuine power grab within the Wardens' organization. Until I know, you're just going to have to bear with me."

"And you want me to trust you?" I shook my head in admiration. "Unbelievable. So who's after you?"

"If I gave you a name, would you recognize it?" He sounded a little more snappy about that than was strictly necessary, really, and immediately looked sorry about it. "I told you. Trust me."

"If I didn't trust you, I'd be running like hell right now," I pointed out. "It's not like you could really stop me."

"Don't kid yourself. I've got skills."

"Apparently," I said. "Since you're not dead yet, which with your winning personality amazes me. I want to kill you, and I barely know you."

"Funny. I've said the same thing about you, once upon a time." He started to laugh. It turned into more coughing, alarmingly. "Damn. You know, I never get hurt unless I'm hanging around with you."

"If you'd just admitted you were hurt in the first place, maybe you wouldn't be this bad off right now. And what's that about, Mr. I Don't Need a Coat Because I'm the Tough-assed Mountain Man? Is this some kind of pissing contest with David?" No answer. Lewis pretended to be concentrating on the fire. "It is. David wasn't going to do you any favors unless you asked, and you weren't going to ask. Right? Jesus. Men."

"Shhhh," he said, and sat up.

"What?"

He shushed me again, urgently, and slipped the sleeping bag away from his shoulders. He reached in the backpack next to him and came up with the last thing, somehow, I expected to see in his hand.

Well, okay, not the very last. That would have been...a tulip or a Barbie doll or something. But a matte black semiautomatic pistol was pretty far down the list.

"What are you doing?" I kept it to an urgent hiss. He shushed me again, silently this time, and mimed for me to stay put while he got up. Oh, no way. I didn't remember anything about who I was, but I doubted it was in my general character to play it safe, especially when my currently assigned Sir Galahad had a punctured lung and a fifty-fifty chance of keeling over at any moment.

I got up, too, and whirled around at a sudden crash of brush to my right. If it was David, he was making an especially dramatic entrance this time...

It wasn't David.

There were two people stepping out of the underbrush. Naturally, I didn't recognize either one of them, but clearly Lewis did, because he turned and aimed the gun at the skinny, greasy young man first, then shifted his aim to split the distance between the boy and the blond little Venus with him, dressed in blue jeans and a hot magenta sweater.

"Whoa," the girl said, and her hands shot up above her shoulders. The boy just glared. "Easy, Wyatt Earp."

"Don't move," Lewis said. He was absolutely steady, but I could see the sweat glistening on his face. "What are you two doing here? How'd you get here?"

"We were looking for you," the boy said. "Obviously."

"We're trying to help," the girl put in. She tried a nervous smile, but she kept darting glances at me, as if she couldn't quite believe her eyes. "Jo? You okay?"

She didn't look familiar, but I was getting used to that. I gave Lewis a doubtful look; he wasn't lowering the gun. "I'm going to ask again," he said. "How'd you get here? Because the two of you were supposed to be in California, last I heard."

"You need help." The girl, again. She sounded young and earnest, and she looked it, too. Underdressed for the weather, and that bothered me. "Lewis, man, put the gun down. You know us!"

"Tell me how you got here." He cocked the gun with a cold snick of metal.

"You're crazy," the boy said flatly. "Yo, Joanne, a little help?"

"Jo," Lewis said, with an unsettling amount of calm, "he's right, I do you need your help. I need you to move two steps to your left so that when I shoot these two you don't slow down my bullets."

I just stared at him, stunned. There was something cold and implacable in his eyes, and I just didn't get it. These two didn't look like dangerous desperadoes. The girl was just damn cute. Young, tanned, toned, beach-bunny perfect. If the boy was with her in a romantic sense, he was definitely dating outside of his weight class, because he was greasy, skinny, sullen, and generally unattractive, unless you went in for that sort of heroin-chic bad-boy vibe. Badass, but probably not bad.

Probably.

"Oh, come on. You really going to shoot me, Lewis?" the boy asked, and stuffed his hands into the pockets of the leather jacket he was wearing. "Because I don't think you've got the stones."

"Guess again." Lewis's aim didn't waver.

The boy sneered. Really, openly sneered, which isn't easy to do with a serious weapon aimed at you. "Please. I'm a Fire Warden. I can make sure that gun doesn't work."

"You forget," Lewis said, "I'm a Fire Warden, too." And he moved the gun about an inch to the left and pulled the trigger. The noise was deafening. I choked on the stench of burned cordite that wafted over me and yelped.

The boy hadn't flinched. The bullet dug a fresh yellow hole into the tree next to him.

"Please don't do that," the girl said, and deliberately stepped out in front of the boy. "Look, we're just here to help, okay? There's no need for this."

"Then tell me how you got here."

She took a step toward him, hands outstretched. "We don't have time for this."

"Cherise, right?" he asked. "Don't push it, Cherise. I will shoot you."

"I think you would if you really thought I was dangerous," she said. "But look at me. How can I be-"

Lewis was totally not above shooting the pretty girl.

And he did, three times, right in the center of her fluffy hot pink sweater.

Cherise rocked back, lips parting, and stared down at the damage to her sweater for a few seconds, and then looked back up at Lewis. "You bastard! That was cashmere!" She lunged at him. He grabbed her by the arm, swung her around her own axis of motion, and slammed her face-first into a tree.

Which did about as much damage as three bullets in the chest, apparently.

And she was my friend? That either kicked ass, or was a big, big problem.

The boy grabbed hold of Lewis, stripped away the gun, and the two of them got down to some serious fighting, only some of which was happening in the real world; I could feel the stinging force of powers being slung back and forth along with punches, but I couldn't tell who had the upper hand.