Thin Air (Weather Warden #6)

Cherise seemed to try to remember. One second. Two. Two and a half, and then I saw comprehension flood her expression. Then get driven out by fear. "I...I don't know," she said. Her voice was high-pitched with sudden panic. "Jo, we were in the forest. He was showing me...showing me how he did the fire stuff, and it was really cool, you know. He was proud of himself, and he was saying we could help people..."

I nodded. Not that I really understood. "And then what happened? Cherise, can you-"

"I don't remember!" she said. "We were there, and everything was fine. We were doing fine, and..." Something darted through her expression like an electric shock, and her eyes widened. "There was someone else. She came out of the forest. She was...there was something..." Her voice failed, or at least her vocabulary. She shook her head, sniffled, and wiped at her nose. I dug in the backpack for a travel pack of tissues and handed one over. It took her the now-familiar couple of seconds to see what was being held in front of her face, and then she clumsily grabbed it and honked. She sniffled some more, and seemed better. "Something bad happened to us, didn't it?"

I had no idea, but it seemed pretty likely she was right. Something very bad indeed had happened to her and Kevin. The problem was, I had no idea if it was still happening, and if it was, what that meant for my own safety.

I watched her like a hawk, but Cherise didn't display any special powers, monomaniacal or otherwise. The lag time didn't go away. She napped for a while, lulled by the warmth returning to her body-yeah, I knew how that felt-and when she woke up I broke off some energy bar and shared it with her, washed down with plenty of water. I noticed her fingernails. She'd been out there scraping her way through the forest, but once upon a time she'd had a nice manicure. Her skin had that well-lotioned look, too. No wrinkles. A smooth, flawless complexion. She'd had better hair days, but I had the feeling she'd clean up fine.

So what was going on with her? What did her missing time signify, and how did that relate to my missing time, if at all? And why was she Time-lag Girl?

As if she were reading my thoughts-scary idea-Cherise suddenly blurted, "Do you think we were taken?"

"Taken?" I paused in the act of loading the water bottle back in the pack. Cherise looked nearly human again. Amazing what a little color in the cheeks can do for a girl.

"You know. By them," she said. She pointed upward with a trembling finger.

"They...?" And then I remembered the gray alien tattoo. "Oh. Them. Right." Not that I wanted to sound judgmental, and hey, I'd hooked up with a former boyfriend who was apparently made out of liquid metal and could disappear at will, so who was I to scoff? "Uh, I don't think so, honey."

She was staring at me as if she were waiting for my reply, and then, two seconds later, she looked agitated. "But it makes sense! What if they...what if they did something to us!" Cherise suddenly threw off the thermal blankets in a crinkle of foil and began frantically groping at the back of her neck. She twisted the hair up and anxiously turned toward me. "Is there a scar? Did they put the chip in my neck?"

"There's no chip." I waited for her to grasp the fact that I was replying to her, and this time it seemed to take even longer. "Cherise, get a grip. There's no scar, there's no chip, and I don't think you were abducted by little gray aliens. I don't think you were probed, experimented on, or beamed up. I don't think you went to the planet Bozbarr, either. Whatever happened, I think there's a different explanation." Not necessarily one any less crazy.

Cherise frowned, then looked disappointed. "But...it fits all the stories. We were away from people, and I don't remember what happened. There's missing time, and suddenly I'm back out here in the middle of nowhere..."

"This is something else."

She was already talking over me by the time I got the words out. "Unless it's something to do with the Wardens," she said.

"You're sure you don't remember anything? Anything at all?" Cherise, after several seconds of silence, shook her head. I changed the subject. "Do you remember anything about what happened to Kevin? Where he could be?"

The conversational train clickety-clacked along tracks for the required two heartbeats before she caught up. "No. But..." A faint wave of color bloomed in her cheeks. "But if he could, he'd be here with me."

So the beach bunny had a thing for skinny slacker boy? I'd thought they were just unrelated strangers, but clearly it wasn't even just a Mutt-and-Jeff partnership; it was a choice. Her choice, at least, and his, if he wasn't a total idiot.

I kept my voice low and quiet. "How long have you been with him?"

That got me an odd look. "You know. You were with me when I met him."

Great. More big black hole to fill in. "Pretend I don't know," I said. "When-"

There was a scratching at the tent, and I shot up to my feet, grabbing the nearest blunt object-which turned out to be a bottle of water-but my doubtful turf-defending skills weren't necessary. It was Lewis. He snaked through the narrow entrance, reached for his pack, and then he saw Cherise.

His stare fixed on her, and there was this sensation of something happening, something I couldn't see or control. Needles all over my skin. My hair blew back in a sudden gust of breathlessly cold wind, and I felt gravity give a funny little lurch, as if it were thinking of canceling its regular appearance.

I blinked, and however I did it, I saw things. First of all: Lewis. He looked taller, stronger-not substantially different, just...more. He radiated some kind of aura for several feet around him, shifting like oil on water. And outside of that aura was a storm. Not literally, not with clouds and things, but still: a storm. There was no other way to think of it. It was sheer bloody power, sparking and gathering and flaring, coming from everywhere, out of the air, up from the ground, flowing into and out of him. And it was focused directly at Cherise.

I looked at her, and she almost vanished. Not totally, but she'd faded like some sepia-toned photograph, and her aura was weak and pale by comparison. There were broad, ugly, jagged streaks of pure black running through it, like claw marks. The tent around us glimmered with heat and power, and the light was getting stronger, so strong I could hardly stand to look at him.

"Lewis!" I turned back to him. "Don't. She's okay."

"No," he said. "She's not."

Lewis wasn't letting down his guard. When Cherise looked at me, terrified, he held out a hand toward her, palm out, as if he were warning her to stay away.

"How'd she get in here?"

"I brought her. I know, that was probably stupid, but I couldn't just leave her!" Lewis transferred that X-ray stare to me. I got the impression that he was mortally worried about what he was going to see, but then it must have been better than he expected, because he blinked and seemed to back off from spiritual Defcon One.

"What's happening to her?" I asked.

"What we thought. The Demon used her, and now it's let her go. She's been badly hurt."

"I didn't see any wounds..." There'd been blood on her sweater, but nothing wrong with her skin. As if the bullet holes Lewis had put in her had fully healed.

"This isn't the kind of damage you see outside," he said. "And it's not the kind that heals."

I wasn't sure how much of this Cherise was following; she seemed confused, her eyes flickering back and forth between the two of us. Lewis kept staring at Cherise, frowning, tilting his head first one way, then the other.

"This makes no sense," he muttered, and took a step closer to her. Then another one. "No sense. Why would it go after her? She's not a Warden. No power, nothing like what they're usually drawn toward. She barely shows up on the aetheric even when she's not..." He didn't seem to find a word for it. "Does she remember?"

"Ask her yourself. She's not deaf."

He blinked, as if he'd forgotten she was something more than just a collection of interesting problems, and then hunkered down and started asking Cherise questions. It was a short conversation, since it didn't take too many repetitions of time-delayed "I don't know" before Lewis began seeing the light. The light being, of course, more of a murky, indistinct confusion.

When he was finished, he cast a dark look in my direction and said, "Outside. Now."

I wasn't particularly fond of being ordered around, but I was willing to go along, for now. Seeing as he'd probably saved my life a couple of times already. We squirmed through the narrow tent aperture, I made a joke about birth canals that probably wasn't particularly appropriate, and then we were outside in the cutting, frosty wind. Little miniature tornadoes of blown snow whipped by, ruffling my hair and fanning it in a cold sheet across my face. I folded my arms, put my hands in my armpits, and said, "What? What's wrong?"

Lewis was facing kind of toward me, but mostly away. Like he knew he had to have this conversation but didn't particularly want to. "It's bad," he said. "She may seem okay now, but she's not."

"Then do your voodoo and fix her up," I said. "Make her all-"

"She's dying," he said.

I felt like he'd punched me in the stomach, and for a second or two I was at a loss for words before I rallied. "No, she's not. She's getting better. Look, she nearly froze to death, but she's recovering, and-"

He met my eyes, and the bitter fury rolling in him cut me off cold. "She's dying, Jo," he said. "The stuff that keeps her alive, the...I don't know, the soul, is gutted. Cored out. I can't save her. Once a Demon rips at someone like that, so completely, what's left after it leaves can't sustain itself. She'll just...slow down and die. You saw how hard it is for her to focus. That's only going to get worse. Fast."

"I don't believe in Demons!"

"You should!" he shot back. "You were killed by one!"

I had officially entered la-la land, and obviously it was no longer safe to be traveling on the crazy train with Lewis. Next stop: Lithium City. "I'm not dead," I pointed out to him.

"No, of course you're not..." He stopped himself with an effort, an overwhelming expression of frustration.

"There's got to be something we can do for her," I said. "Something. Anything."

"No. Look, I've seen this before. She'll just fade. Quietly. She'll stop responding to us, and then she'll just...go." For a second there was a sheen like tears in his eyes. I couldn't remember anything about him prior to his finding me in the woods, but I was fairly sure that crying wasn't his usual thing. He'd seen it before. I was guessing it was someone who'd meant something to him.

"So what do we do now?" I asked. Lewis crossed his arms.

"What we were going to do before she showed up," he said. "David and I scouted the route this morning. We hike to the rendezvous, make contact with Wardens we can trust, and find a place to hole up until David can lay his hands on Ashan and find out how to solve this thing."

"Well, we can't just leave her!" I said. "And I don't think she's strong enough to hike it right now. Not in this weather." Wasn't too sure I was, either.

"I'm sorry, but we can't wait. Kevin's still out there somewhere, and I have no reason to believe he can't find her. Or worse, he might know where she is already. We have to leave her. We can get David to lead a rescue party back for her. We'll leave her the tent, food, water, a supply of heat packs."

"You think she'll last long enough to be rescued? Even with all the supplies?"

Silence. Lewis rocked back and forth, restless and weary, and shook his head.

"Then no," I said. "I'm not leaving her here to die alone." Not because she was supposed to be my friend; it's hard to have friends when you don't remember the good times, not to mention the bad. But because it was just plain wrong.

Lewis looked like he wanted to argue with me, but I saw the torment in his face.

And the guilt.

"All right." He sighed. "We'll see how she is in the morning. But I still think it's a mistake."

Cherise looked better when we went back in the tent, but one glance at Lewis told me that was deceptive; he wouldn't be that grim if her condition had improved. At least she didn't seem to be in pain. Certainly she was giving off no on-the-verge-of-death vibes. The only thing strange about her was the haunted, empty look in her eyes, and the fact that she seemed to have a longer and longer lag in responding to anything around her.

I tried to ignore it. The rest of the day was consumed with small talk, nothing very deep or probing. I didn't ask her much about my own life; I wasn't sure I was ready to hear how close we'd been. She volunteered details, though, mentioned people and places that I didn't and couldn't recognize. I was grateful when she fell asleep, finally, and zipped myself into my own sleeping bag next to her. Lewis sat cross-legged, crammed in the corner of the tiny shelter, lost in what looked like meditation but could have been a sitting-up nap for all I knew.

I was about to drift off to sleep when Cherise said dreamily, "Jo?"

I sat up and did some unnecessary adjustments to her burrito-style wrapping. Her eyes seemed to take ages to focus on me, and she smiled slightly.

"You don't have to pretend. I know something's wrong," she said. Her voice was soft. "Look, if I did anything...said anything, you know, earlier...I didn't mean it. You know that, right? I didn't mean it. Don't be mad, okay?"