Windfall tww-4

by Rachel Caine

  About the fifteenth folder I picked up—and it was huge, papers spilling everywhere—had my name on it. I paused, startled, and flipped it open. The clips that held reports in the file were missing, and everything was crammed in at odd angles, as if it had been gone through fast.

  The memo on top was signed by Paul Giancarlo, National Warden Pro Tem. It was an order to keep me under close surveillance for any suspicious activities related to fraud, blackmail, and illegal trading in weather control.

  I felt a wave of cold rush over me, and in its backwash came another one of heat, burning down from the top of my head and taking up residence somewhere in my gullet. In the memo, Paul practically accused me of collusion with two other Wardens—one of them Bad Bob—in carrying out a scheme to steer tropical storms, hurricanes, and tornadoes toward certain areas of the coastline, where an outfit named Paradise Kingdom seemed to be making a business of building expensive resorts and condominiums, only to have them destroyed before opening by bad weather.

  For the insurance money.

  The score so far: storms four, ParadiseKingdom zero. They’d never actually opened a single property.

  Paradise Kingdom. I remembered that name, and it came back with a jolt… the drive out along the coast. A dead dad and kids. Tornadoes twisting the under-construction hotel to wreckage.

  I flipped pages. The photos showed shoddy construction, with detailed notes.

  Substandard parts. Bad wiring. Reused materials. If the buildings had ever actually opened, they’d have been deathtraps—but the insurance records showed payouts as if the construction had been to the finest possible standards.

  I’d never even heard of ParadiseKingdom, but I was starting to shake with fury and a little bit of fear.

  The folder was snatched out of my hands and slapped shut. John frowned at me, handed it to Ella, who mutely began straightening up the papers inside it.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “I wasn’t supposed to see that.” Except Ella must have thought differently; she’d pointedly ignored the folder lying all by itself, and left it to me to pick up.

  “You know I can’t talk to you about it.”

  “Don’t I have the right to at least try to clear my name?”

  “Nobody’s blackened your name,” he said, and crossed his arms. He looked tired.

  There was more gray in his hair than I remembered. “Look, yes, there’s talk; there has been talk ever since Bad Bob died. Lots of people think you killed him to shut him up.”

  “It was self-defense!” I practically yelled it. He nodded, arms folded; the body language of rejection. “Dammit, John, don’t you believe me? You knew that old bastard! He was a corrupt, scary old man—”

  “He was a legend,” John said softly. “You killed a legend. You have to understand that no matter what he was, what bad things he did, nobody’s going to remember that now. What they remember are his accomplishments, not his flaws.”

  He stuck a demon down my throat! I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. And it didn’t matter. John was right, Bad Bob was an untouchable saint, and I was the evil, scheming bitch who’d slaughtered a helpless old guy in his own home. No doubt the ParadiseKingdom scheme had been all his; it had all the hallmarks of his style. He’d probably involved a few other Wardens in it, for profit, but he hadn’t included me. He’d known that I would have busted him.

  I could practically hear him laughing, out there in hell. I hoped it was extra hot and he was drinking Tabasco sauce to cool off.

  “I don’t know anything about this,” I said. John gave me a funny look, then turned to Ella. She shot him another glance back, raised her eyebrows, and nodded toward the other side of the room. John walked silently away. His Djinn was standing there, fixing up a shattered desk with long, smooth strokes of his fingers over wood. Where it had splintered, it fused together seamlessly.

  “John can’t say anything about this,” Ella said, “but I’ve only got a couple of years to retirement; I couldn’t give a shit what the Wardens do to me. Petal, claiming ignorance about ParadiseKingdom isn’t going to do you any good. You’d better come up with another story, fast.”

  “What? Why?”

  She straightened more papers in my file, reached for a bracket, and pushed it through the holes of the folder. Began systematically attaching reports to it.

  “ParadiseKingdom’s owned by your boss, Marvin McLarty. Marvelous Marvin. You know, the ‘weatherman.’ ” She paused to give it air quotes and an eyeroll. “So you can’t exactly claim that you don’t have a connection to it. He hired you without an interview. You must have known him before you took the job.”

  That bastard. That snake. That… horny, no-good little poodle! I couldn’t believe it. He was too stupid to be venal. Right? Marvelous Marvin, investing in property fraud schemes with Wardens? That meant he knew about them, in the first place… and she was right, I’d sent in a resume, and Marvin had hired me after giving me one look. I’d thought it was, well, for the cheesecake value, and I’m sure that made the deal sweeter for him. But it must have been something more.

  Somebody must have told him to do it. Somebody, maybe, who wanted a convenient scapegoat if things got scary for them. Because on paper, I damn sure looked guilty.

  If Marvin was involved with Bad Bob, that explained a lot. His percent accuracy rate, for one thing, which would have been a source of amusement to somebody like Bad Bob. He’d have been able to pull it off, too, without attracting Warden notice. Bad Bob’s rating had been far higher than John Foster’s, and besides, he was a legend. Who questioned a legend?

  Bad Bob Biringanine had been willing to sell his ethics and reputation for a nice house, a tidy bank account, and all the comforts of organized crime. But … Marvelous Marvin? Who could take him seriously as a bad guy? And maybe that was precisely the point.

  Ella was watching me, waiting for an answer. I didn’t have one.

  “Don’t you believe I’m innocent?” I asked her.

  “Of course I do, honey. Don’t be ridiculous!” I saw her eyes stay fixed and steady on me, in a way that only happens when the answer is a flat-out lie.

  “Even if you did do it, hell, the whole organization’s falling apart. It’s pretty much every woman for herself right now.” She kept staring at me.

  And I realized something fairly significant. There was still weather manipulation going on, even with Bad Bob dead. If I took myself out of the equation, there was a pretty limited pool of suspects.

  Not John. I shifted my stare to him, watching the way he talked with his Djinn, the way he listened attentively, the way the Djinn moved in such an open, easy fashion. No fear, no guarding, no resistance. John was one of the good guys; I knew it in my heart.

  Carol Shearer, whom I hadn’t known well, might have been in it, but I’d never know, would I? Because she was dead, killed in a car accident.

  If it hadn’t been Carol…

  Why was Ella still looking at me?

  “Does John know?” I asked her.

  “About… ?”

  “Marvin.”

  “Oh, sure. That’s why he won’t talk to you. It’s killing him, you know; he wants to believe in you, but… ah, hell, honey, he’s an idealist. You know how John can get. No sense of the real world.”

  I decided to jump in the alligator pond. “Well,” I said, lowering my voice to a just-us-girls whisper, “confidentially, I wasn’t in on it. But you know that, right? I mean, Bad Bob told me about it that morning, and I was thinking it over, but I had no idea it was still going on. It is still going on, though. Right?”

  She blinked and said, “You don’t think I have anything to do with it, do you?”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  And, after a split second, she lowered her eyelids and whispered, “Not while he’s here.”

  I’m glad I wasn’t quite looking at her; she probably would have read the heartbreak in my eyes. But she didn’t notice. She turned away and finished putting the papers of my file in
order, and bent the brackets to hold everything inside, nice and neat. I noticed there were some papers she hadn’t put back. She shifted the stack in my direction with an unmistakable take-them nod.

  I felt sick, but managed to hold on to my smile. I collected the papers and stuck them into my purse, trying to look casual about it. Ella watched me with a strange little smile, then winked and turned away to grub in folders again.

  We were collaborating.

  I pulled in a deep breath and walked over to John and his Djinn. The Djinn focused on me, swept those white-fire eyes over me, and did such an obvious double take it was almost funny. I knew it wasn’t my outfit—it wasn’t that bad—and after the initial confusion I figured out what he was focusing so intently on.

  I put a hand over my lower stomach, instinctively, as if I could somehow shield my unborn Djinn child from his stare.

  He yanked his gaze back up, and I lifted my chin and dared him to say something.

  He just lifted an eyebrow so dryly it almost made me laugh, then turned to John and said, “Will that be all, John?” He had an English accent, very butler-y.

  John thanked him politely and poof, we were Djinn-free. I wondered what the Djinn’s name was, but it was impolite to ask. When you met a Warden and a Djinn together, you weren’t supposed to even acknowledge the Djinn.

  I don’t think that was etiquette invented by the Djinn.

  “I’m sorry, John, but I need to get going,” I said. He nodded and extended a hand for me to shake; I did, and then held on to it. I leaned forward and brushed a kiss across his cheek. He smelled of a dry, astringent cologne and a wisp of tobacco. “Take care,” I said, and dropped my voice to a whisper while I was next to his ear. “Don’t trust anyone. Anyone.”

  I didn’t want to point the finger at Ella specifically, not yet, but a general warning never did anyone any harm. He pulled back, frowning, and then composed himself and gave me a placid nod. “You take care, now.”

  “You, too,” I said, and made my way through the still-messy room to the Djinn-repaired door.

  It hadn’t been a robbery. Somebody had come in here looking for records, and they’d gone through my file like a fine-toothed comb.

  It looked like everybody wanted to keep track of me—good guys, bad guys, people I didn’t even recognize as being on one side or the other. Who the hell knew.

  I was seriously considering grabbing David’s bottle and my sister, and fleeing the country.

  Interlude

  On the island, the storm strips hundred-year-old trees bare, then snaps the trunks and throws them with lethal force into every man-made structure in the way. Walls disintegrate. Roofs disappear into a blizzard of broken wood and tile. Even palm fronds become deadly cutting instruments, driven by winds of unimaginable force.

  The storm stops, turns, and begins to feed.

  Death comes mostly from the storm surge, which creeps up over the land not in a wave but with the constant pace of a pail poured into a tub. Water rises to fill houses in minutes, drowning frantic occupants who can’t flee into the killing winds. Some structures, farther from the shore, begin to shudder and breathe with the storm, walls collapsing outward, then pulling upright again, each vibration shattering more of the foundations.

  Men, women, children, and animals are pulled from shelter and swept into the fury, where they’re stripped first of clothes, then of flesh, then shattered into ragged bits.

  The carnage is constant and merciless, and the storm feeds, and feeds, and feeds. It has no will to move on from the feast. Even when the island is stripped bare, to the rocks, the winds and waves continue to lash and lick the last fragments of life.

  The exposed bedrock blackens. Even the algae die.

  When the storm has sucked every breath from a land that once held millions, it buries it under the sea and moves on, searching for its next victim.

  This is where I come in.

  Chapter Seven

  As above, so below. The old saying was holding true today. I got to the security doors of the lobby just as the clouds cut loose and the rain began.

  Florida rain is like a faucet—two speeds, flood and stop. The setting was definitely on flood this morning. I stood at the glass and looked out at the thick gray wall of water—couldn’t really make out the parking lot behind it—and looked down at my shoes. They weren’t rain-appropriate, but then the rest of the outfit wasn’t exactly going to be repelling a lot of water, either.

  At least it’s just rain, I told myself. Could be worse…

  And right on cue, a white stab of lightning split the sky outside, close enough that I didn’t need Warden senses to register the power jolt. I felt it sweep over my skin and draw every tiny hair to shivering attention.

  The thunder that followed shook the glass and set off a howling chorus of car alarms.

  The next strike was about fifty feet away from me, right outside in the parking lot, and it came as a fork of blue-white light reaching down and grounding itself in one of the cars. What the hell… ? It shouldn’t have done that.

  There were lots of taller objects to draw it, but then lightning was whimsical that way. And vicious.

  I jumped back from the glass and slapped my hands over my ears as the thunder exploded, and couldn’t see a damn thing for the overloaded white-hot afterburn on my retinas. I blinked fiercely as I waited for my eyes to return to normal and cursed my lack of strength as oversight would have been a real asset at the moment. Except that I was too weak to get to it, and it was only as the thunder died to an ominous, continuing growl that I realized the car that had taken the brunt of that lightning bolt had been midnight blue, lean, and sleek.

  In other words, it had been Mona. My car.

  “Oh, damn,” I whispered, and blinked faster. Not that I could really see anything through the incredibly dense rain out there. No, wait, I could. There was something flickering orange out there, barely visible…

  My car was on freaking fire.

  “Joanne!” John Foster, breathless, came pelting up behind me, grabbed me, and threw me to the floor. He landed on top of me, and while I was busy registering the unique ways a marble floor didn’t make for a comfortable landing area, something outside exploded.

  Not lightning. Something more man-made.

  The explosion blew in the windows in a bright-edged shower, and the rain followed, pounding in before the glass even hit the marble. I smelled burning plastic and metal and tried to get up, but John held me down with an elbow across my shoulders. He was breathing hard. I could feel his heart pounding against my back.

  “Let go!” I yelled. “Dammit! John! Let go!”

  He finally did, rolling off in a crunch of glass, and as I flipped over I saw that he’d sustained some cuts, but not a lot. So far, we’d been lucky.

  “You all right?” he asked. I nodded. “Come with me.”

  He scrambled up to his feet and held out his hand. I looked back at the parking lot, or at least what I could see of it; there was an unholy bonfire out there, consuming at least three cars.

  The center of it was the blackened shell of the Viper formerly known as Mona, who wouldn’t be taking me on any more fast drives, ever again. I gulped and clutched my purse tight and took John’s hand.

  He led me out of the lobby, past the arriving cluster of alarmed tenants and late-breaking security personnel, to the stairwell. He hit the stairs running, tasseled loafers pounding, and I had to hustle to keep up. John had been working out, or else adrenaline was a wonderful fitness drug.

  We ran full speed up seven floors, all the way to the top of the building, to the door that was marked ROOF ACCESS, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. And I was very thankful when we slowed down at the top, because my shoes were not of the cross-training persuasion, but then he grabbed me and towed me toward the exit.

  “John!” I yelled, and yanked him to a stop before he could stiff-arm the ALARMWILLSOUND crossbar. “John, wait! What’s going on?”

  “You were rig
ht about the Djinn!” he yelled back. “We have to go, now! They’re coming!”

  Oh, crap.

  He broke free and hit the door release. An alarm added its shriek to the general confusion—the fire alarms were going off, too, and I wondered if the fire had spread somehow from the parking lot to the building—and as the door opened out onto the roof, rain and wind shouldered through the opening to hit us like linebackers. I staggered, but John reached back and grabbed my wrist and dragged me outside into the chaos of the downpour.

  “John!” I screamed, over the continuing roll of thunder. “It’s not safe out here! The lightning—”

  “Shut up; I’ll take care of the lightning!” And he could. John was a highly competent Weather Warden in his own right. Even as he finished saying it, I felt a ripple over my skin, and my blunted Warden senses registered something whipping through the aetheric at us like a striking snake…

  John let go of me, turned, and focused his attention on a thick silver stanchion fixed to a corner of the roof.

  Lightning hissed down. I could feel it struggling to reach us, fighting…

  And then turning to hit the stanchion. The building’s lightning protection system bled it off into the ground through a network of inlaid wiring. I could feel the heat of it blast over me from where I stood.

  But I also felt how close it had been. Something was directing that lightning.

  Controlling it. Something a great deal stronger than John Foster.

  He knew it, too; I saw it in the fixed, desperate set of his expression. “Come on!” John was tugging me onward, to a second concrete bunker on top of the roof.

  The door was propped open. He grabbed it just as another flash of lightning came out of nowhere, streaking for us. John wasn’t ready, I knew it—he’d just spent a tremendous amount of energy redirecting that first bolt, and this one was just as big, if not bigger. And it was obviously bent on getting us.