Thin Air (Weather Warden #6)

I hadn't made a sound; I was certain of that. But he wasn't shooting in the dark; after he'd toweled his hair dry with his T-shirt, Lewis lifted his head and focused his stare right on the scrubby trees that screened me from immediate view.

Busted.

I cleared my throat and pushed through, earning a few scrapes in the process. Apart from another distant mutter of thunder, the lead-colored day was very quiet. Water lapped the shore. Lewis shook out his T-shirt and pulled it on, then a thermal top, then added one of those well-used flannel shirts on top, which he buttoned almost to the neck.

I took the plunge. "Lewis, did we ever-you know...?

He concentrated on his shirt buttons, even though it wasn't like they took a lot of effort. I could see he was thinking about lying to me, and then he gave up and said, "Once."

"Wow." I tried to smile. "Was it that bad?"

"No, it was that good." He kept his eyes fixed somewhere else, not on me, but I still felt a flash of heat and nerves. "Look, I'm not in love with you," he said. "Maybe I used to be, but I'm not anymore. So you don't have to worry about any complications from me."

I nodded. His gaze finally brushed over me, moving fast; even though his eyes didn't linger, I felt another wave of corresponding heat.

"I just want you to understand where I stand," he said. "You don't love me, I don't love you, and that's it. Right?"

"Right," I said. My lips felt numb. "I love David."

"Yes. You do. You don't know it right now, but you do." That warmth-inducing gaze came back to fix on me. With a vengeance. "You'll remember."

"What if I don't want to?"

He let out a breath, and it plumed white on the sharp-edged breeze. For a long, perilous second, it seemed like he had something to say to me, but I felt him give it up before he could make the leap. He looked away. "Hurry up. We have to be on the trail in the next hour." And with that he sat down on the shore, put on thick socks, laced up his hiking boots, and sauntered off.

I guess his ribs had healed. He wasn't favoring them, although there had been a spectacular multicolored bruise on his left side.

On the one hand, it was good that my sole human ally and-to be fair-protector was back in top form.

On the other hand...the rib thing had been convenient for us to use as a shield between us. Now gone.

I watched, but he didn't glance back. The water was still steaming. I bit my lip, sniffed myself again, and stripped even though the bone-chilling wind made it torture.

I'd forgotten how good warm water felt. I guess I'd known intellectually, but the second I waded in and felt it immersing me, I could barely breathe for the pleasure of it. I sank down to my neck, then held my breath and slipped under the surface. I stayed under for at least thirty seconds, then broke through to take in a gulp of air. The bottom of the pond was slimy and the rocks were sharp, so even though I had no specific recollection, I was pretty sure I'd had better baths. It just didn't feel that way at the moment. This was the first real memory I had of one, and it was magical. I couldn't really relax, though. I kept watching the tree line, waiting for the bad guys to jump out.

Nothing. The day was silent, brooding, with a sharp smell of incoming rain or snow.

When the water began to chill I waded out, hastily dried off, dressed, and ran back to the cave. My teeth were chattering by the time I arrived, and Lewis paused in the act of shouldering his pack to toss me a chemical heat pack.

"Open it, rub the pack, and put it in your shirt," he said. "It'll help keep your core temp up."

I tore the package open and shook out what looked like a really big sachet, rubbed it between my palms, and was instantly rewarded with a burst of steady heat. I dropped it down my buttoned-up shirt, between shirt and undershirt, and gave Lewis a trembling good-to-go high sign. My fingernails were a little blue. I scrambled into my coat and gloves, and hefted my own backpack. It clunked with plastic water bottles.

"Enjoy your bath?" Lewis asked. His tone was about as neutral as you could get, so I couldn't read anything into it. I just nodded. "Good. Let's move out."

"What about Kevin and Cherise? Do you think they're still...?"

"David's scouting," he said. "He'll warn us if they come anywhere close."

He took off. I had no choice but to follow.

I'll skip over the day from hell, which was spent scrambling through razor-edged brush, climbing steep hills of loose shale, falling, cursing, sweating, panting, and generally having the sort of outdoor experience most city girls dread. I had no affinity for this whole hiking thing, and while the outdoors looked pretty, as far as I was concerned it'd look even prettier seen from the window of a passing car.

When my road-show Daniel Boone finally called a permanent halt, it was because of the snow. Flakes had begun to drift silently out of the clouds just an hour after we'd started the trek, light and whispery and dry, brushing against my sweaty face like cool feathers. At first I'd been grateful for it, but that was before it started to stick to the cold ground. A few random flurries became a full-fledged blizzard within the next couple of hours, and what started out a nuisance became more of a hardship with every trudging step. Lewis held my hand, and sometimes the only thing real in the world seemed to be the pressure of his hold on me. I sometimes heard rumbles, as if miles up it was raining, and I supposed I ought to feel grateful that it wasn't sleeting. Sleet would have been a step down, circles-of-hell-wise.

No cave this time, but Lewis put up the tent and we crawled inside, into our sleeping bags, too tired to do more than murmur a couple of words before sleep sucked us down. I wanted to ask Lewis where we were going, but I didn't have the energy. I no longer cared all that much, frankly. Just kill me and get it over with, I thought. I ached all over, and I was still aching when, with the suddenness of a light switched off, I fell asleep.

It didn't even occur to me to wonder where David was, or why he hadn't joined us. The ways of the Djinn, I'd already guessed, were not necessarily easy to figure out, even if you were dating one.

I woke up alone. All alone. The tent was silent, not even a breeze rattling the fabric, and it was deeply dark. And very, very cold. The chemical pack I'd gone to sleep with was an inert, stiff, dead thing next to me in the bag, and my hands had taken on a waxy chill. I burrowed deeper in the sleeping bag, conserving warmth, and listened for some sign that Lewis was up and around and doing something useful, like making the weather balmy or at least making coffee.

It was quiet as a grave out there.

"Lewis?" I whispered it, because somehow it seemed like the time and place to whisper. No response. I contemplated staying where I was, but that didn't seem practical in the long term. Lewis's sleeping bag was neatly rolled up and attached to his pack, which was leaning where his body had been when I'd fallen asleep. I crept out, wrapped myself quickly in my coat, jammed gloves on my hands and a knit cap over my head, and ducked out of the tent into the night.

Only it wasn't night. It was full daylight, and the reason it had been so dark in the tent was that the tent was covered at least four inches deep with snow. It looked like an igloo. My first step sank almost knee-deep in pristine white powder: great for skiing, terrible for hiking.

Lewis's tracks went off in the direction of the tree line. One set, though midway through the unbroken snow another set of footprints joined him.

Had to be David, since the two of them had walked on without any obvious trouble.

So I was on my own, at least for a little while.

I swigged some water-on Lewis's advice, I'd taken a couple of bottles into the sleeping bag with me, to keep it sloshy-and tried to ignore a dull, throbbing headache. Caffeine withdrawal, pressure, general stress...who knew? I had no idea if I liked caffeine, but it seemed likely. I felt a surge of interest at the idea of hot coffee.

And then I heard something. Not Lewis, I was pretty sure of that; Lewis had that woodsy thing going on, and this sounded too heavy-footed for him. Bear? Something worse, maybe? I swallowed the water in my mouth in a choking gulp, screwed the cap back on the bottle, and hastily stowed it in my pack as I surveyed the underbrush. The lead-gray light seemed to bleach color out of everything that wasn't already piled with snow, and all of a sudden the tent was looking quite cozy.

"Lewis?" I didn't say it loudly, because I felt stupid saying it at all. Obviously it wasn't Lewis. There was another confused flurry of sound from the underbrush. Bear, I thought. Definitely a bear. I am so dead.

And then the underbrush parted, shedding snow, and a small woman pitched face-forward into the drift. Her skin was a sickly white, and her hair was matted and tangled with leaves and twigs and...was that blood? And she was definitely underdressed for the weather in a hot-pink sweater and blue jeans...

It was the girl who'd attacked us before. Cherise. She wasn't looking so tough anymore. In fact, she wasn't looking good at all, and as I hesitated, staring at her, she moaned and rolled over on her side and pulled her knees in toward her chest. Her half-frozen hair, now caked with snow, was covering her face, but I could see that her eyes were open.

She blinked slowly. "Jo?" she whispered. "Jo, help. Please help me."

I wanted to. She looked pathetic, and she looked desperately in need...but I couldn't forget how she'd been earlier, when not even bullets could stop her. She certainly didn't look invulnerable anymore, though; she looked like she was in deep trouble.

The kind of trouble that kills you.

"Cherise," I said, testing out the name. She was either nodding or shuddering with the cold. I didn't come closer, but I slowly crouched down, at least indicating a willingness to hang around. "What happened?"

Lag time. A long, unresponsive second of it.

"D-d-d-d-don't know." Her teeth were chattering like castanets, and her lips were an eerie shade of blue in her pale, pale face. Her eyes were huge, and they were the color of her lips. "Kevin...I remember Kevin was...he was trying to..."

"Was trying to what?"

"Jo, I'm so cold, please!" She didn't seem to have heard me at all. Her voice was faint. Her shuddering was lessening, and I wasn't so sure that was a good thing. "Kevin was trying to show me how to fight the fire."

"What fire?"

Another lag, as if she had to wait for the words to circle the globe a couple of times before comprehending. "The one..." Cherise seemed confused by the question. "You know the one. The one they sent him to fight."

"They, who?"

She just stopped talking. Blinked at me, like she had no idea why I was being so cruel to her. And honestly, I was starting to wonder about that myself. She looked so helpless, so fragile, that I couldn't just leave her there. Not like some little match girl in the snow.

I looked around for Lewis, but he was a no-show, the fickle bastard. I could have used his ruthless practicality right now. Granted, he probably would have filled the poor kid full of bullet holes, but at least then she wouldn't have been my problem.

No sign of him. No sign of David, either. Just me, Cherise, and the falling snow.

"Hold on," I said. I might have sounded angry, but the truth was that I was scared. My heart was pounding hard, and I wished to hell that I knew the rules of this world, which didn't seem to be the world I expected. Or knew. Or had known. Or maybe I was just going crazy; that would explain a lot.

I shook that idea off and focused back on Cherise. "Can you get up?" I asked her. She nodded, or at least that was what I took the convulsive jerk of her head to be, and tried. She managed to get to her hands and knees, but seemed stuck at that point, trembling like some poor wounded bird. I stood up, reached down for her, then hesitated. If this was a trap...

Then you'll at least die with good intentions.

I sucked down a deep, cold breath, grabbed Cherise under her arm, and hauled her upright. It didn't take much effort, as small as she was. The fuzzy pink sweater rode up, revealing a tattoo on the small of her back. Some kind of little gray alien dude waving hello. That implied a sense of humor. Maybe she wasn't a bad kid, after all.

And maybe you're crazy, part of my brain reminded me. I didn't like that part. I wished to hell it would shut up.

I half dragged Cherise through the snow to the tent. She seemed barely capable of staying on her feet, even with me taking most of her weight, and I was glad I hadn't hesitated about it too much longer. She was hardly breathing.

Getting her through the narrow tent opening was an engineering problem, but I managed, and soon I had her settled, wrapped in two thermal blankets, with heat packs warming her core temperature. In the light of the battery-powered lantern, Cherise looked ghostly, like the living dead. Which, I thought, might not be far from the case.

She didn't say anything for a long time, and I didn't, either. I couldn't think what questions to ask, and obviously she wasn't compos mentis enough to be coming up with conversation on her own. When she finally did speak, it wasn't anything I expected her to say.

She asked, "Where's Imara? I thought she'd be with you."

Imara. I suddenly felt short of breath and I wished David were here. No, I didn't wish that, because I didn't want to think about what he'd be feeling at the sound of that name. This was all hard. It was hard not knowing, but it seemed to get worse the more I found out. Maybe ignorance really was bliss.

Cherise was shaking again, but I figured that was good; shaking meant her body was trying to warm itself, which meant she was coming out of shutdown mode. "Imara? Is she okay?"

I remembered the agony in David's eyes, and again I just knew there was something there it would be better if I never had to face. "Where's Kevin?" I asked instead, because I figured that if he'd recovered from whatever crazy spell he'd been under, he was in the same boat as Cherise...freezing to death out there.