Windfall (Weather Warden #4)

Smiled.

He reached out, pulled a fingertip slowly down the line of my cheek, and walked away. Hands in his pockets. Raindrops shattering in his wake.

And then time slammed back in a fevered rush, and the world moved.

He was gone.

And something was very, very, very wrong with me.

I cried out, wrapped my hands over my stomach, and felt the sudden emptiness inside. The spark was gone, the potential, the child that David had put inside of me.

I felt the last of the energy Jonathan had given me leak out. My vision went gray and blurry, and I felt my knees give way.

Falling.

Too much effort to breathe. Nothing left inside to live on. I was a black hole, empty and alone and dying in the rain.

David. I couldn't even call him. And if he came, it would only be more death, faster death, no comfort and no love in it.

Warm arms scooped me up. Fingers slid from my arm down to clasp my limp hand, and as the world telescoped to a black pinpoint I felt a warm pulse of power go through my skin, my bones, my body. Hot as the sun, liquid and silky and rich.

It wasn't enough.

My eyes were still open, and a little color swam out of the gray, but I couldn't focus, couldn't blink. Lewis was bent over me. He looked pale and desperate. He cupped my face in his hands, watching my eyes, and then ripped open my shirt and put his hands on my stomach, right where the worst of the emptiness hid itself.

That sensation came again, a slow and deliberate wave rippling through me to pool like hot molten gold somewhere just below my navel.

It drained away.

I was going, just... going.

"Oh no you don't," Lewis grated, and I felt him breathing into my open mouth, his life pouring into mine with such power and fury that the emptiness couldn't keep up with it. That was David, that emptiness. That was how I would die, sucked into that darkness, and he'd still be trapped and alone, forever a creature driven by hunger and unable to stop feeding...

I didn't want this to end in nightmare.

I couldn't let it end that way.

I breathed.

Lewis was still bent over me, panting, shaking, and I saw the golden light still spilling out of his fingers into my stomach. A thick stream of life.

I knocked his hand away, and he leaned back and braced himself unsteadily on wet pavement. Head down. Gasping for air as if he'd been drowning.

I was almost sure he had been. I'd nearly taken him down with me.

"Dammit," he said furiously. "What is it with you and dying, anyway? Can't you get a new hobby?"

"Shut up." I meant it to be defiant, but it came out a bare, shaken whisper. I curled on my side, pummeled by rain, chilled to the bone, but with a rich, golden warmth somewhere deep inside to sustain me. His gift, like Jonathan's, but unlike Jonathan's it was a human sort of power, and my body was already accepting it. Renewing itself.

I let my breath slide out in a sigh, staring at him, and saw Lewis's narrow pupils expand into huge, black rings.

Felt the feedback begin to build between us.

The pulse beat faster, pulling me like the tide.

I closed my eyes and drifted up to the aetheric. It felt effortless and elegant and perfectly controlled.

"What happened?" Lewis asked.

"Jonathan," I murmured. He kidnapped my child. I couldn't say it out loud, couldn't begin to explain all of what I'd realized while lying here in the rain, and certainly not to Lewis. "He's not going to fight. Ashan's going to win."

Lewis sucked in a very sharp breath, as if he knew implications to that I couldn't imagine. "That can't happen."

"Well, it's going to happen, so you'd better make a plan."

"Joanne, there is no plan for that." He looked miserable, suddenly-tired, soaked to the bone, chilled. "If we lose Jonathan, we lose everything. He's like the keystone in the arch. Take him away-"

"Everything collapses," I finished, and slowly found the strength to sit up, then mutely extended my hand to him. He brought me to my feet. All my parts seemed to be working more or less correctly. "You told me to go. Where can I go that will be safe from that?"

His cold lips pressed against my forehead for a second. "Nowhere. Just-I don't know. I'll try to find him, talk to him. Meanwhile, just go home. Use what I gave you for defense only. Your body needs time to replenish itself." His voice sounded rough and silken, and I tried to keep my breathing slow. Nothing I could do about my heartrate, which spiked like crazy. "Stay alive for me."

"I'll try," I said. My own voice sounded about half an octave lower than normal.

I cleared my throat and opened my eyes to look at him. "Thank you."

He half turned, then whipped back, grabbed me, and kissed me.

I mean, kissed me. This wasn't some peck-on-the-cheek, let's-be-friends gesture, this was hot and damp and desperate, and wow. After the first shocked instant I came to my senses and put hands on his chest to shove hard enough to break the suction and back him off a couple of steps.

We didn't say anything. There really wasn't anything we could say. He wasn't going to apologize.

I wasn't sure I wanted him to try. It was a kind of good-bye, and both of us knew it.

That, more than anything else, told me how near to the end of the world we were coming.

He walked over to the Ma'at and bent his head to listen to what Charles Ashworth had to say to him, which looked like plenty, most of it probably having to do with the inadvisability of getting involved with me. So I walked over to join them.

"Seeing as the lightning kind of trashed my ride, I need transportation," I said. "Or at least the loan of a car."

Ashworth, who probably had a fleet of them, frowned at me, then nodded to one of his flunkies, a crew-cut young woman dressed in a sharp-looking tailored suit and shoes I was almost certain were from Stuart Weitzman's new fall collection.

I was surprised to see he was hiring the fashion-enabled. He didn't really seem all that hip to me.

She tossed over a set of keys, looking grumpy. "Don't dent it," she said.

"I'm offended." I scanned the undamaged cars in the lot. I was hoping for the honey of a BMW sport coupe parked near the street, but her ride turned out to be something else.

Oh, dear God.

Even considering the hell my life had descended to, I didn't think I was really prepared, at this point in my life, to be driving a minivan.

Jonathan had left me for dead. That meant he probably wouldn't be coming back at me, looking for revenge-at least, not for a while. And I didn't get the sense that it was cruelty on his part... just an iron-hard kind of indifference.

I'd ceased to be useful to him for what mattered, and he wasn't going to waste his time.

I climbed in the minivan, which was exactly the size of a small yacht, and started it up. Not a high-performance engine. I sat back in the captain's chair and let cool air blow on my face and dripping hair for a minute while I tried hard not to think about what had happened on the roof.

I fished my cell phone out of my purse and speed-dialed Paul Giancarlo. He didn't answer. I left a voice-mail, reporting John's death in as much detail as I dared, and then put in a call to the Wardens Crisis Center and reported that they were officially short a regional officer. The girl on the other end-God, she sounded young-was curt and scared, and I wondered how many calls she'd already had like this. They were clearly in emergency mode already, because the disasters would be coming as storms and earthquakes and wildfires erupted, and there were no high-level, Djinn-armed Wardens to combat them. In fact, today might mark the beginning of the kind of disaster that hadn't been seen on Earth since the Great Flood. These things built on each other, fed on the energy of each other.

"Dammit," I whispered, and tossed the cell phone into the passenger seat. The fire department was winding up the emergency, although I was sure that the fire had gone out thanks to Lewis's intervention and not the hose-and-ladder brigade.

Lewis and the Ma'at were convened in a group near the corner of the parking lot, having some kind of serious huddle. The building's tenants milled around, looking lost and smoke-stained, a few sucking on oxygen masks, but all in all it was remarkably little destruction.

John was the only casualty.

I didn't want to think about how close it had come on the roof to being two bodies instead of one. I turned my attention to my brand-new (borrowed) ride instead. The van was so clean it might have been a rental, except for a few lived-in touches like a custom CD holder on the driver's side.

The mirror showed me an exhausted-looking drowned-rat woman, with dark circles under her eyes and lank, unattractive hair. I wasted a spark of power to dry my hair and clothes. I looked as though I could win a Morticia Addams look-alike contest, but, for once in my life, there were bigger issues than my personal vanity.

I grabbed a Modest Mouse CD from the selection on the visor. The van wasn't exactly the signature style of Joanne Baldwin, Speed Freak, but at least it was wheels and it would get me back home. I desperately wanted to be home. Maybe David was an Ifrit, maybe my sister was by turns nuts and annoying, but at least it was... home.

It's all going to be gone soon, something in me whispered. All this around you. The city, the people, the life you know. When Jonathan goes, everything goes. Are you ready for that? Are you ready to stand by and let it happen?

Jonathan was offering to die for David. I was aware that there was some core of stubborn jealousy in me, and that it wasn't very honorable, but it was more than that holding me back from his solution to the problem. If I released David, if David went after Jonathan and killed him-and by Rahel's assessment, that was almost certain to happen-then I lost David three times over. First, to being an Ifrit; second, to being the killer of his friend and brother. Last, to becoming what Jonathan was... and I didn't think that left any room for me.

Well, it's all about you, isn't it?

No, it wasn't, but I had a stake in it. And I couldn't shake that off.

Jonathan had taken my Djinn-child. I'd thought that was just because he was a cruel bastard, but thinking back on it, maybe he'd just been trying to preserve something of David. Even something of me. He'd known that if I refused to give up David's bottle, I'd die, and David would be lost to him.

Please, let her be with him. Existing, somehow. Not just...

Not just gone.

In the shelter of the minivan, where nobody could see it happen, I fell apart.

All the fury, all the fear, all the pain came out in sudden, wrenching sobs, in pounding on the steering wheel, in outright screams of rage. This wasn't right, and it shouldn't be this way-I hadn't come this far just to see the world die around me. Or to let David slip into darkness.

Or to lose a child I barely knew.

There's an answer, I told myself, hands pressing hard enough against my eyes to create white sparks, tears slicking my cheeks in cold sheets. There's a goddamn answer to this, there has to be.

Lightning shivered overhead, raw and uncontrolled. It hit a transformer across the city and blew it into a blue-white shower of sparks. Several square blocks of lights went out, and overhead, the clouds swirled in from the ocean, carrying the smell of rain and the promise of worse.

I had to get home.

By the time I trudged up the steps to my apartment I was exhausted, stinky, smoke-stained, and dispirited. Now that I was full of borrowed power again, I could sense the incredible roiling of the aetheric, mirrored by the wild fury of the sky overhead. The rain was the least of what was coming. I wondered what Marvelous Marvin would be making of it. Probably churning out revised predictions and ordering Ella to make it happen-not that Ella could, at this stage. Things were far too chaotic for any one Warden to try to influence them.

With John Foster dead, and Ella's loyalties questionable at best, it left this part of Florida lightly protected. The same was probably true up and down the Eastern seaboard. The Wardens were falling apart, and the Djinn didn't care about the consequences. And the regular people, the ones the Wardens were sworn to protect? No clue what was coming.

At least I could protect Sarah. That was something, anyway.

I dug my key out of my purse, unlocked the front door, and walked into...

... a stranger's apartment.

For a brief, surreal moment, I thought I really had walked into the wrong apartment, proving that urban legend that apartment keys work on every lock in the building... but then I recognized little, familiar things. The ding on the wall next to the TV-which was now plasma flat-screen, and the size of a small theater. The pictures on the coffee table of Mom, Sarah, an ancient one of our grandparents-although they were encased in new silver frames, all matching.

One of the rugs on the floor looked familiar. It even had a coffee stain on it from when I'd tripped one morning, half-asleep.

Apart from those touchstones, it was a whole new place.

I stood frozen in shock, eyes wide, and Sarah came bustling breathlessly around the corner, wiping her hands on a towel.

"There you are!" she cried, and threw her arms around me. Then immediately withdrew. "Ugh! You smell awful; where have you been?"

"In a fire," I said absently. "What the hell... ?"

In typical Sarah fashion, she skipped right over that, whirled away and did an honest-to-God Mary Tyler Moore pirouette in the middle of the living room. "You like it? Tell me you like it!"

I stared at her, trying to work out what she was talking about. None of this was making sense. "Um-"

She beamed. "I had to do something to make up for the burden I've been on you. Honestly, you've been such a saint these past few days, and I've done nothing but mooch off of you." She looked so bright and shiny, so thrilled. "Chretien finally came through with an alimony check; it showed up this morning-of course, the stupid bank won't cash it, they have to hold it until it clears, but Eamon let me have the cash in the meantime. So I decided to give you a makeover!"

Makeover? I blinked. Not that I was unwilling to go be pampered somewhere, but in the middle of an approaching apocalypse probably wasn't the best possible time...

Oh. She was talking about the furniture.

"Isn't it gorgeous? Look, there's a new sofa, and chairs, and the TV of course, Eamon helped pick that one out-" She grabbed my hand and pulled me through to the bedrooms. Threw open her door. "I got rid of that terrible French Provincial and went for a nice maple... You know, I've been watching those home improvement shows on BBC America, they have all the best ideas, don't you think?

It's just so much fun. Look, see how the maroon pillows complement the sponging on the wall..."

It was all dissolving into nonsense word balloons. Obviously, Sarah had gotten in money, and obviously, she'd been shopping. Her bedroom looked like a showroom in a furniture store, with gleaming, highly polished wood and a lace bedspread over some kind of silky throw. Every detail excruciatingly precise. She must have spent hours with a Feng Shui manual.

"Nice," I said numbly. "Right, it's great. Look, I just need to take a shower and lie down for a while..."

"Wait! I'm not done!"

She towed me next door.

My room was... gone. Gutted. There was a new bed, sleek black lacquer and inlaid mother-of-pearl on the headboard in geometric designs. The dumpy dresser was MIA, replaced by something that looked like a giant Chinese apothecary cabinet in the same black lacquer with brass accents. My knickknacks-not that there had been many-were gone, replaced by red temple dogs and jade goddesses.