by Rachel Caine
“Comfortably,” added Cherise.
“Okay, well, we have a classic Mustang that I understand is really fast. . . .”
I couldn’t believe my ears. “What kind of classic Mustang?” Because with my luck it would be a 1974, which was the start of the Mustang Dark Ages.
“It’s a Boss 429,” she said, reading from a card with the air of someone who really didn’t speak the language and was sounding it out phonetically. “From 1970.”
She hadn’t even thought about being born when Ford had rolled that racing car off the assembly line, but my heart was starting to pound. “Seriously? You’re sure it’s a Boss 429?”
“We just got it in,” she said. “It has about sixty thousand miles on it.”
I swallowed hard and tried not to get my hopes up. “Can I see it?”
She gave me another professional smile—not quite as polished as the last one—and then brightened the wattage considerably at David. “Sure,” she said, and nodded to another woman, identically lovely (only with dark hair), who came from the back to take her place at the counter. Out we went—although Cherise left the mountain of suitcases sitting in the lobby, thankfully—into the parking lot behind the reception building.
It was like a candy store for car addicts. Seriously. There were a lot of very rich people in Florida, and a lot who visited, and this was their toy box. Classic red Lamborghini? Choose from dozens of identical clones. Want a high-end Porsche? A Jag XJ220? No problem. Even I slowed down and stared as we passed the sleek, rounded chassis of what surely couldn’t be . . . “Hey,” I said, and pointed. “Bugatti Veyron?”
“Reserved,” our guide said. “And you’d need more than a gold Amex, I can tell you that.”
No doubt, because the last time I’d seen a price tag attached to one of those monsters, it was soaring up into the $1.5 million range. I felt I should genuflect or something, because that was definitely one of the Gods of Cars.
Then we cleared a giant, gleaming, black row of tricked-out Hummers, and found . . . my car.
There was just no doubt about it, really. This was mine. The thick, hot pleasure that spread through me at the sight of it couldn’t have felt better if accompanied by a shot of heroin, administered by a male stripper.
Yes, cars are my drug of choice.
She wasn’t wrong. It was a Boss 429, absolutely cherry, painted in Intimidator Black. No stripes, no frills. It looked dangerous. Oh, and it was.
Rental Car Girl was holding a set of keys. She handed them to me and opened the driver’s- side door. It smelled faintly of cigar smoke inside, but the interior was beautifully maintained. The seat was comfortably broken in, and even the leg length was almost right. One minor adjustment, and I fired it up.
A low, deep-throated throb of an engine, hot with power and hungry for speed. Yes.
I realized I was obsessively running my hands over the steering wheel, with a lust that was making David look at me funny. I cleared my throat, shut the engine off, and got out of the car. “Fine,” I said, trying to sound normal. “I’ll take it.”
“Day rate?”
“For the month,” I said.
She didn’t even blink; I supposed the rich did rent things on that scale on a regular basis. Probably for longer. “You’ll have to pay the deposit plus two weeks,” she said. “The car has LoJack, of course. We maintain our own insurance, which we will require you to carry if you can’t provide valid coverage that would include—”
“Fine,” I said. “Whatever. Charge it. We’re in a hurry.”
Surprisingly, that phrase did not inspire confidence. We waited through ID checks, credit checks, whispered conversations, and finally a massive set of paperwork, including a clause that I was fairly sure included forced organ harvesting in the event of nonpayment.
I just signed it, scribbling as fast as I could anywhere her well-manicured finger pointed. She wished us a pleasant stay in Miami. I didn’t correct her, just stood tapping my foot impatiently until the uniformed valet had brought the Boss around to the front.
Cherise opened the trunk and looked inside. “You’re kidding, right? My luggage will never—”
“Downsize,” I said. “You’re not packing for a photo shoot, you know.”
“How do you know? There’s always time to book a good gig before the end of the world. . . . Okay, fine.” She crammed two of the suitcases in, and rolled two more back inside. She came out empty-handed, and I raised my eyes. She scooted her big round sunglasses down to roll hers. “They’re shipping them to Warden HQ,” she said. “What, you really thought I’d just leave them? Girlfriend. There is Elie Saab in there. Ready-to-wear, but still. Respect.”
“Hey, you’ve got your drug. I’ve got mine.” I made sure the trunk was closed, and opened up the door for her as I flipped the driver’s seat forward. She got in with care. I was glad, because I really didn’t want to see any tabloid flashing. Kevin piled in next to her, and I smirked a little as I slammed the passenger seat back into place. With those long legs, he was not going to be overly comfortable . . . but then again, he wouldn’t have been comfortable in much except a stretch limo.
David and I slid into the front seats, and I turned the key. The vibration of the engine came straight up my spine, doing interesting things in all kinds of key pleasure points, and I hit the clutch and shifted into first gear.
The Boss scratched right out of the box, leaving a thin mist of smoke behind us as it roared off. Zero to thirty, way too fast, and I had to back off dramatically on the fuel mix. He was temperamental, this beast. I liked that. It took a few experimental shifts to find the sweet spot in the clutch and get the feel of the pedals, but not more than a minute. The rental company had added a plug-in GPS, which showed me the route to the nearest freeway, and by the time I hit the on-ramp me and the Boss were good friends.
Oh God, it felt good to be behind the wheel again, in control, heading somewhere with a purpose. No more Bad Bob. No more old ghosts haunting me. Just me, the car, my lover, and . . . okay, Cherise and Kevin. And a trunkload of couture. But still. I felt . . . light.
And oh Lord, the Boss had power. I had to watch to keep it hovering at reasonable speed, and it was still blowing the doors off Italian sports cars in the other lanes. I was glad it wasn’t a convertible. We might have died of the wind buffeting.
“Storm coming in,” Cherise said, after we’d put about twenty miles under the fast-turning wheels. I glanced in the rearview. She was facing west, out the window, with an odd expression on her face. I looked, and saw a smear of clouds on the horizon. I automatically tried to reach out and grab information from the aetheric, but I had that phantom limb syndrome that amputees sometimes have. Nothing there. Just a sensation that there had once been.
“Doesn’t look like much,” I said.
“It’s bad,” she said. “I think it’s bad.”
I gave her a sharper look. “What?”
She shook her head and slipped her sunglasses on, leaning her head back. “I’m going to take a nap. Wake me if we pass a hot male strip bar.”
Kevin growled, and she smiled and tucked her small hand in his. “Could we at least have some tunes?” he said. “Or is this car too sacred for a radio?”
“No car is too sacred for a radio,” I said. Sure enough, there was one—not factory original, apparently an upgrade from the rental agency. Satellite radio. I fiddled until I found a classic rock station. Billy Preston, “Will It Go Round in Circles.” Sweet. I cranked it up, opened the throttle a little more, headed for trouble.
Feeling better than I had in months.
I drove like the devil was after me.
As it was, because Cherise had been right about the storm. Even I could tell now that it was going to be a bad one; the clouds were massing up, boiling in black towers as warm and cool air collided. A huge anvil formation, spreading out over the entire western horizon. It hadn’t been moving fast, but it had been moving, the last I could see of it before it blocke
d out the sunset and sent us into premature darkness. I shifted stations from rock to weather, and caught reports of massive winds, fleets of tornados, flooding. The Weather Wardens were having one hell of a bad time, though so far they’d kept the tornados from touching down in any heavily populated areas. That was the best maintenance strategy—let the storm vent its energy where it wouldn’t do as much damage and injury. But just from the news reports I could tell how much power was stored in that storm. Massive. And even the best Weather Wardens weren’t going to be able to get to everything.
The rain hit us viciously about two hours later, right about the time that my body began urgently waving the yellow caution flag. I checked the clock; it was after midnight, and I’d been driving for far too long. I found a halfway decent roadside motel—a bland chain thing, but I wasn’t concerned about originality right now so much as availability of pillows and mattresses. Cherise and Kevin had both fallen asleep some time back, and I had to wake them to check in. I hated leaving the Boss unescorted—somebody was going to recognize its value—but the best I could do was park it outside the two rooms I rented, under a strong light, and hope for the best. I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.
One hot shower later, I crawled into bed next to David, who was flipping channels on the television. Looking for a twenty-four-hour news channel, apparently, because that was where he stopped. I sat there rubbing my wet hair to get it as dry as possible while I read the screen crawl at the bottom. The news airing at the moment was about the very storm we were in—not just us, but most of the eastern seaboard. Nasty. Easily as nasty as anything I had ever handled as a Weather Warden. There was a lot of damage. The death toll was already well into the hundreds and still rising.
What caught me, though, was the screen crawl, because it was all about disasters. Not just the storm, or its attendant deadly little brother, flooding . . . earthquakes along the New Madrid fault line, a whopping 7.5 on the Richter scale—more than twice as powerful as the biggest thermonuclear weapon ever exploded. It could have been worse; the scale went all the way up to 10, though the worst humans had ever lived through had measured a 9.5. Past that, it wasn’t really going to be our problem anymore.
The quake had shaken pictures off of walls in South Carolina, and rung church bells as far away as Boston. At the epicenter of the shift, in Portageville, it was going to be much, much worse. There’d be nothing much left standing.
The Portageville quake was far from the only thing going on, aside from the storm. The screen crawl tallied up unexplained increases in animal attacks, particularly by bears and mountain lions, and an unexpected increase in poisonous snakebites in the Western states. Wildfires had started up in the deep forests, in total defiance of wet conditions, and seemed to be getting the better of fire teams and—presumably—Fire Wardens.
And that was just the U.S. The devastation wasn’t confined to our shores. Virtually every continent was under attack. End-of-the-world prophets were out in force already, and they’d only get loonier and louder as things got worse.
The thing was, the end-of-the-world prophets probably weren’t wrong on this one.
I found myself holding David for comfort. He shut off the TV, and we sat in silence, watching the afterimage burn for a few seconds before we collapsed together back to the mattress and pillows I had, just a little while ago, so greatly lusted after. Now I wasn’t sure I could—or should—sleep. My body was still exhausted, aching, and needing to find some oblivion, but my mind was playing the Blame Game. We did this. We started this. And we have to do something to stop it. People are dying.
“Shhh,” David whispered, and kissed my temple. His arms were warm and strong around me, even though I knew instinctively he was right now despairing of how much power he’d had, and lost. How frustrated and grief-stricken he was, too. How helpless in the face of the inevitable. “Let it go, Jo. You have to let it go, just for now. Rest. Please.”
I didn’t want to, but he seduced me into it, with the comforting heat of his body curled around mine, the steady calm rhythm of his heartbeat, his love obvious even to all my blinded senses in every touch and caress. He was being strong for me. Maybe he needed to be.
Maybe I needed him to be, too.
I fell asleep finally, wrapped in his arms, and we woke up hours later to a clap of thunder so loud it rattled pictures bolted to the wall, and set off car alarms in the parking lot. I felt blinded, instinctively terrified, and cringed against David. Clinging for comfort. How long since I’d been afraid of a storm?
I got hold of myself and crawled out of bed to look out the motel room window. It was like looking into a strobe flasher; the lightning was bright, constant, and close. Thunder followed, so loud that I could see the glass vibrate under the pressure of the sound waves. The lights were out in the parking lot, and, I realized, in the room as well; even the low-level night-light glow from the bathroom had gone dark. We’d been busted back to the primitive days, hiding in a cave, cowering from the storm.
It kind of pissed me off. So instead of retreating back into the dark and hugging David, I stood there in front of the glass window, practically daring the storm to do its worst. If I’d still been a Warden, it probably would have taken me up on it, too—but a normal human? It didn’t even know I was there. That wouldn’t keep it from killing me, just as it would ants, birds, cats, or anything else that got in its way, but it wasn’t personal.
I would officially be collateral damage. Which really pissed me off.
Another eye-searing flash of lightning, and this time I saw the blue pop of a transformer blowing on a pole not far away. The pole caught fire, blazing like a creosote-smeared torch even through the driving rain. It gave the whole thing a hellish glow that was really, really unsettling.
“I think we need to get out of here,” I said. David was already out of bed and dressing in the dark—cursing softly in a language I didn’t recognize, mainly because he probably hadn’t had to dress himself in the dark for, oh, about five thousand years, and in those days, there weren’t quite as many challenges to the process anyway. “Is the phone working?”
His cursing got louder as he knocked the receiver off, but paused when he checked the line. “Yes,” he said, and handed it to me to continue his fight with pants. I dialed Cherise’s room number by touch. She picked up on the first ring.
“Holy crap, we need to go!” she said breathlessly. “That’s what you were going to say, right?”
“That’s what I was going to say.”
“So glad I didn’t unpack the luggage from the trunk. Let’s do it. But you go first and unlock the doors, okay? Because I am not standing out in that.”
She hung up before I could tell her that the castle had called and wanted its princess back. She was right, actually. I had the keys. I was the point person for this little expedition.
“Stay here until I get everything open,” I told David, and tossed a towel over my head as I opened up the door. The wind promptly blew the wood back against the wall with a crash, and knocked me back two steps by sheer force before I got control and leaned into it.
Then I stepped outside, into the teeth of the monster.
I didn’t dare look up, or around, or anywhere but at the Boss, sitting there with its chrome blazing in the flashes of lightning. Water was running off it in silver strings, and I lunged for the driver’s-side door, got in, and manually unlocked the passenger side before diving out again, honking the horn. Cherise’s door opened, and Kevin ran out, heading for the other side of the car.
Cherise followed him, staggering in the buffeting wind like a post- happy-hour drunk on her clunky platform shoes. The wind definitely made that flirty little South Beach dress not safe for anywhere, but in seconds rain had flattened it securely down against her body. It was the next best thing to a swimsuit, really. Not that my shirt and jeans weren’t waterlogged and streaming.
I didn’t feel it coming the way I would have as a Warden. I felt the hairs rise on my
arms, as if trying to escape my body, and for a blank second I wondered, What the heck is that?
And then a pure white bolt of power hit Cherise.
The force of it blew me over, and if it made a sound I don’t remember hearing it. The shock lasted for at least three heartbeats, and then the cold rain brought me back around and I realized that Cherise had just been struck by lightning.
I staggered up. Cherise was still standing there, exactly as she had been. Wisps of steam curled off her bare arms and legs, up from her hair, and I screamed and closed the distance fast, waiting for her to collapse into my arms.
Instead, she opened her eyes, looked at me with a drugged, blissful expression, and said, “Wow. That felt . . . great.”
I stopped, fighting for balance in more ways than one. She looked utterly relaxed. Unafraid. Maybe it was some weird side effect . . . ?
No, I realized. No, it wasn’t, because over the two of us, the rain had stopped falling. It was running off a clear shield that enclosed us in a warm, still cone of air.
I knew what that was. I’d done it myself, many times.
Not Cherise. Cherise doesn’t have Warden powers. . . . She can’t . . . She never . . .
The shock was slowing me down, obviously, because I should have known already. David did, as he threw open the door of the Mustang and got out again. I saw the sudden, rigid set to his body, and the way he went completely still, even pounded by the rain.
Kevin got out, too, and in the next lightning flash his face looked ghostly and haunted, his eyes gone huge as he stared at Cherise. He looked empty. No, he was empty, I realized; he had gone up into the aetheric, and for a few seconds his body was just a waiting shell. Then he flinched and shook his head. “It can’t be,” he said. “She’s—she’s—”
“She’s got Warden powers,” I said flatly. “What are the odds that they came from someone else but me?”
Cherise smiled, warm and sweet and lovely, and said, “And it is awesome, by the way. Just so you know. It feels so—big! Like I’m part of everything, everywhere in the world—there’s all this energy, and—”
