by Rachel Caine
"We could stay," I said, attempting nonchalance. "Want some popcorn?"
It was my first try at seduction. It succeeded.
Jimmy reached over and kissed me, more enthusiasm than skill, and we spilled popcorn all over the sticky theater floor, and my warm liquid center heated up some more and started a rolling boil. This kissing thing, this was fun. It went on for a while, and I guess the storm was still raging but I wasn't exactly paying attention, and Jimmy was breathing like a steam engine in my ear and he put his hand on my breast and oh, my—
The lights flickered again and went out. I was grateful.
Jimmy's hand moved, and my nipple went hard, and in that moment I think I even would have let him put his hand down my pants, except that at that particular instant, the roof of the theater peeled open, shedding ceiling tiles and metal struts and cement.
I screamed. We jumped apart, and rain dumped over us again, freezing cold, and hard little nuggets of ice spat out of the dark and shattered on the concrete floor, stuck to the purple plush velvet, stung like wasps on my exposed arms and face. Jimmy put his arms around me, and we stumbled toward a dim exit sign.
The wind howled like a knife-wielding maniac. A chunk of ice the size of a golf ball hit Jimmy hard enough to make him yelp, and I wrenched away from Jimmy's arms and screamed at the top of my lungs: "Hey! Stop it!"
I looked up into the heart of it, this angry temper-tantrum-throwing child of a storm, and I put everything I had into the scream. I shoved at it with muscles in my head that I'd never really exercised.
"I mean it! Quit!"
A ball of ice the size of a soda can smashed at my feet and scattered like broken glass, glittering me with shrapnel. I drew in breath for a third scream. No need.
It stopped.
Silent. Dead still. Overhead, clouds lazily rotated like a watch running down. Lightning laced in and out of the edges.
Raindrops pattered on the ruined roof. Thunder muttered darkly.
Sound of my heart beating hard, hard and fast as a rock 'n' roll drum, and I heard Jimmy make a puking sound and run for the door.
The clouds rotated again. I looked right into the hard dark center of it and it looked back, and we understood each other, I guess. I sat down on a cold, wet seat and looked at the movie screen that would never show me Star Wars because it had a jagged rip down the middle, like a lightning bolt.
I never saw Jimmy again.
I wasn't sure if David reminded me of that divine burst of first lust, or the terror of knowing I no longer controlled my life.
I strongly suspected it was both.
By the time David woke up, we were in Battle Ground, Indiana, and I was pulled over to the side of the road and doing a little car maintenance on a stubborn air filter. It left me even dirtier and grimier than before, and I slammed the car door extra hard because having David peacefully snoring in my ear was just about more than I could stand.
He came awake at the noise like a cat, completely alert and looking neat and self-satisfied.
"Good morning," I said. "We've been on the road for about nine hours, and we're—"
"Outside of Battle Ground, Indiana," he said. "I know."
I'd turned the GPS off, so he didn't get it off the computer screen, and we were nowhere near a road sign. "And you know this—"
"You missed the part where I admitted I was a Djinn?"
"C'mon. Really?"
"Yes." David smiled slightly. "I haven't been completely sleeping. I've been keeping us unseeable."
"As opposed to invisible?"
"Unseeable just means that people don't look at you, not that they can't see you. It takes less effort."
"I thought you were asleep."
"We don't sleep the same way you do. Keeping us unseeable doesn't require much thought, and neither does knowing where I am." He shrugged. "I suppose in the computer age, you'd call it operating system software."
It brought on an intriguing question. "How many ages have you been through, anyway?"
He shook his head. I'd have to ask two more times to get a straight answer, and frankly, it wasn't worth the wasted breath. I was tired and cranky, and I needed food. I was also wishing he'd told me about the whole unseeable thing earlier, because I would have felt safe enough to park and grab a Big Gulp and cheese crackers from a convenience store. Then again, I might have decided to try a drive-through fast food place and they probably wouldn't even have noticed me.
"I'm thinking about pizza," I said. "Deep dish, lots of cheese, maybe some pepperoni. They've got to have good Chicago style around here. Wait, I don't suppose that's one of the handy cool tricks you can do, is it?"
"Make pizza?" He gave it serious thought. "No. I can't create something from nothing, at least not while I'm free. I could probably transmute it for you, so long as what I made it from contained some of the same elements."
"Like?"
"Tomato into pizza sauce. Grain to bread crust. Although I'm not exactly sure how to get pepperoni."
"I think you start with a pig, but let's not get too far into that. Man, what I'd give for a Moon Pie right about now."
David turned and looked around in the backseat; I could have told him the prospects for scavengable food were slim. Marion kept a clean car, something I'd never really been able to do, as much as I loved Delilah. I tended to accumulate slips of paper, receipts, scribbled directions, paper wrappers from straws…
But there was something, I remembered it. "Hey, I think she left a thermos in here. Coffee would be incredibly good."
He didn't see it. I leaned back and spotted a silver gleam under the passenger seat, just about popped a vertebra rooting it out, and came up with the goods. I was just about to check it for caffeine content when David said, "Do you feel that?"
I forgot all about caffeine. The jolt of adrenaline went straight to my heart and tingled in every soft tissue on my body. I put the thermos aside. "Yeah." The hair on my arms was standing up. "Don't get out of the car."
"I wasn't planning to."
I had long ago outrun the storm, but there was a line of clouds dark on the horizon ahead. I'd been playing with the idea of doing some sabotage on the cold front coming down out of Canada, but that was just plain selfish. Bad weather was both natural and necessary. The only time I was really morally allowed to tinker was if it posed a clear and imminent danger to human life… not necessarily including my own.
What I felt wasn't the storm ahead, and it wasn't the storm behind. It wasn't a storm at all. I wasn't entirely sure what it was, except that it was strange.
"Any idea—?"
"No," David said. "Not yet. Maybe you should start the car."
I did, and eased the Land Rover into gear and back onto the road. We accelerated without any problems. After half a mile I remembered to breathe. Nothing fell on us out of the sky or rose up out of the ground, which was downright encouraging.
"So," David finally said. "Exactly how many enemies do you have?"
"Marion's not an enemy."
"She buried you alive."
"It's complicated."
"Apparently." He settled back in the seat… not relaxed, exactly, but cautiously watchful. "Tell me about what happened."
"You know what happened. You were there."
"Tell me why you're running."
I felt a lurch somewhere in my gut. "You know, I really don't want to talk about it. If I'd wanted to talk about it, I would have done the whole This-Is-My-Life thing with Marion, where it might actually matter."
"You need to tell someone," he said, which was very reasonable. "And I don't have a stake in the matter."
In other words, he was Djinn. He could walk away at any time. I wasn't even a flash of a second in terms of the eternal life he could look forward to. My story was something to pass the time. Hell, I was something to pass the time.
"I killed somebody," I finally said.
He was unmoved. "So I heard."
"Somebody important," I said,
as if he'd contradicted me. I was surprised to feel tears burn at the back of my throat. "I had to."
David reached over and touched my hand. Gently. Just the tips of his fingers, but it was enough to send a warm cascade of emotion through me that I didn't fully understand. Was it a Djinn thing or a David thing? Was there even a difference?
"Tell me," he said. "Please."
I told David about the first encounter I'd had with Bad Bob at my intake meeting, and then the weird showdown we'd had at the National Weather Services offices, the time I'd worked the Bermuda Triangle and stopped Tropical Storm Samuel.
And then I told him the rest.
After I'd calmed down with a few drinks at a sand-side bar, I'd decided to put Bad Bob's bizarre problems behind me and just be a girl for a change. I'd strolled down to the sea in my fancy new few inches of perfect spandex. Beautiful girls are a dime a hundred on Florida beaches, so I didn't feel special…. Well, okay, maybe I did, a little, because it was a really good bikini. Beach studs checked me out, and there was nothing bad in that. I staked out a section of warm white sand as far as possible from screaming kids and teenagers blaring the greatest hits of Eminem on boom boxes, applied sunscreen and dark glasses, and settled down on my beach towel to soak up the love of Mother Sun.
There's nothing like a good day on the beach. The warmth steals slowly into every muscle like an invisible full-body massage. The dull, constant rhythm of the seas counts out the heartbeat of the world. The smell of fresh salt water, banana and coconut oil, that ripe undercurrent of the cycle of life turning somewhere under the waves. The sounds of people talking, laughing, whispering, kissing. Happy sounds. Somewhere out there, in the wet darkness, sharks hunt, but you can forget that, lying there in the sun, letting your cares slide away like sand through your fingers.
I had almost succeeded in forgetting about everything that was bothering me when a shadow cut off my sun and sent a chill running through my blood. It didn't move away like it should have.
I opened my eyes and peered up, dazzled, at a dark shape with a brilliant white halo of windblown hair… then blue eyes… the face of Bad Bob Biringanine.
I sat up fast. He was crouching down next to me. I did one of those involuntary female things one does when wearing too few clothes in the presence of an intimidating man…. I put on my coverup, then crossed my arms across the thin fabric.
"That's too bad," Bad Bob said. "It's a nice look for you."
"What?"
"The suit. Designer?"
"Yeah, right. On what you pay me?" I shot back. "Don't think so." I glared. In my experience, guys who gave grief and then came bearing compliments were not to be trusted. Especially guys who held my future in the palm of their hand.
His face was different out here in the world—more natural, I guess. There was something that hummed in tune out here, near the sea and sky. This was what true power looked like in its element—not dealing with people, which annoyed him, but being part of the vast moving machine of Earth.
"I scared you this morning," he said. "That's not what I meant to do. It's not personal, Baldwin. It's not that I think you're a crappy Warden. It's that I've seen too many turn out that way."
"Thanks for the warning. I got the message."
"No, you didn't. And hell, I can't blame you, I'm the king of arrogance, and I damn well know it. Anyway, you did good," he said. "Most people screw it up their first time out in the Triangle. There's something out there that isn't anywhere else on the planet."
"Really?" I shaded my eyes and tried to see if he was kidding me. "What?"
He eased himself down to a sitting position on the sand. "If I knew that, I'd probably be National Warden by now instead of some cranky old bastard with a nasty reputation. Maybe someone with more guts and less self-preservation than me will find out. They don't call it the Mother of Storms for no reason."
"A discovery like that could really make a reputation," I said.
He grinned, and it was a street urchin's grin, full of Irish charm, and I had the sense he'd done some sweet-talking of girls in his immoral past. Lots of girls. "Oh, I think my reputation's secure, don't you?"
It was, of course; whatever else Bad Bob Biringanine got up to, he was bound to be a legend for generations to come. I sighed. "Why'd you come down here? Just to get in my light?"
He dropped the grin and just looked at me seriously. "I liked your work. Steady, calm, never mind the bullshit. You didn't let me get to you, and that takes guts. I've rattled plenty of cool customers in my day just by looking at them, and you looked right back. That's impressive, girl."
Oh. Now that my heart rate was slowing to under two hundred, I realized that Bad Bob was trying to make a connection with me, not just ruin my afternoon. Had he ever done this before? Probably, but the stories of Bad Bob that play well are the confrontations, not the conciliations. Nobody would buy me a drink to hear that Bad Bob patted me on the back.
But it still felt good.
"I've been looking for somebody with steady nerves," he said. "Special project. You interested?"
There was only one sane answer. "No offense, sir, but no. I'm not."
"No?" He seemed honestly puzzled. "Why the hell not?"
"Because you'd crush me like a bug, sir. It was all I could do to get through an afternoon with you staring down my shirt. I don't think I could handle a full eight hours of it a day."
And had I said that out loud? Yes, I had. And he had been checking out my boobs all morning there at the Coral Gables office. So there. Let the charming old bastard chew on it.
He stared at me steadily, with those eyes like pale blue glass, and said, "Oh, it wouldn't be eight hours a day. Twelve, minimum. Possibly as much as eighteen. Though I will give you time off for good behavior, if you keep wearing that bikini."
"No." I settled back on the sand and closed my eyes. "If you're going to keep sexually harassing me, could you do it from about three feet to your left and quit blocking my sun?"
He didn't move, of course. He stayed solidly in my light. After a few dead moments, when I didn't open my eyes or try to fill the silence, he said, "You're still six months away from qualifying for a Djinn. I can make that happen in two weeks. Or I can make sure it never happens. Your choice, sweetness."
I threw an arm over my eyes and groaned in frustration. Of course, it would come to this. Blackmail. Perfect.
"Come on, Baldwin, you're an ambitious little ladder-climber. We both know you'll work for me just for the bragging rights. Quit playing coy. Here's the address."
He dropped a business card on the bare skin of my stomach. When I opened my eyes, he was walking away, a bandy-legged white-haired man still broad in the chest, muscular in his arms and legs.
An aging tough guy. A hero of the kind they don't make anymore.
On the back of the business card was his home address. On the front was his name, Robert G. Biringanine, and in very small letters below it, Miracles Provided.
I held the card in my hand for the next thirty minutes as I tried to empty my head and concentrate on sunshine, but the cold, pitiless blue of his eyes kept intruding. By four o'clock I'd had enough, and trudged back to my car, lugging beach bag and beach umbrella. Two hunks in Speedos—six-pack abs and all—tried to convince me to do some snorkeling in one of their beach houses, but I had things to think about. Big things.
At six, I called Bad Bob's, got his answering machine and left a message that I'd be at his house at 7 a.m.
See, I'd like to blame it on Bob's cynical little threat-and-reward strategy, but the fact of the matter was, I found him interesting. More than twice my age, white-haired, wrinkled, bad-tempered, notoriously difficult… and there was something intensely alive behind his eyes that I'd never seen before. Well, not since Lewis, anyway.
Power calls to power—always has, always will.
Two minutes before seven the next morning, I was standing on Bad Bob's porch, which had a stunning view of the blue-green ocean. It ripp
led like blown silk and flowed up on sand as white as snow. He had a private beach. It was a measure of who—and what—Bad Bob really was. As was the house, a postmodern sweeping dome with lines that reminded me of wind tunnels and race cars.
"No bikini?" Bob asked me when he opened the door. That was his version of good morning, apparently. He had a coffee cup in his hand as big as a soup bowl. His striped bathrobe that made him look like a disreputable version of Hugh Hefner, and he had the moist, red-rimmed eyes of a morning-after drunk.
I hesitated over choices of responses. "Do I have to be polite?"
"Polite isn't a word people often use to describe me," he answered. "I don't suppose I can expect it from you, either."
"Then no more cracks about the bikini, or I turn around and walk. Seriously."
He shrugged, swung the door wide, and turned away. I followed him into a short hall that opened up into a truly breathtaking room. It must have gone up thirty feet in a curve, with windows overlooking the ocean all along one side. Carpet so deep I wondered if he hired a lawn service to maintain it. Leather couch, chairs, furniture that combined style and comfort. All unmistakably masculine, but with a finer taste than I would have expected from somebody of Bad Bob's reputation.
"Nice," I said. People expect that kind of thing when you first see their home.
"Ought to be," he said. "I paid a fortune to some unspeakably horrible woman named Patsy to make it that way. Through here. Coffee?"
"Sure."
He led me into a vast kitchen that could have catered dinner for a hundred without breaking a sweat, poured me a cup, and handed it over. I sipped and found it had the rich, unmistakable taste of Jamaican Blue Mountain, fifty dollars a pound. Not the kind of thing I'd give away cups of to marginally welcome guests. I took as big a mouthful as I could get away with, savoring that smooth caramel aftertaste. I could get used to all of this… fancy house, ocean view, fine imported beverages. I had no doubt his collection of whiskey was first-rate, too. And he struck me as the kind of guy with a killer DVD collection.
"So," I said. Bad Bob leaned against a counter, sipping coffee, watching me. "Staying off the subject of the bikini, what exactly am I here to do?"
