by Rachel Caine
But I had to think about that, didn’t I? It wasn’t just the two of us. The Wardens might have a thing or two to say about a human marrying a Djinn, too. And what minister was going to bless this union, anyway? Aside from their religious beliefs, most ministers didn’t believe in the supernatural, at least not in any good kind of way. And I knew David. He’d want complete honesty in this, no matter how difficult that would be.
The day was getting darker, the sky turning from denim to indigo. On the horizon, the sun was nearly down, pulling its glorious trailing rays with it.
Black, greasy smoke drifted into my eyes, and I blinked and coughed. David glanced at it, annoyed, and the smoke disappeared—moved elsewhere. The air around us was fresh and clear.
“Jo,” he said, “you don’t have to answer now. I just . . . had to ask the question.”
I ought to say no. I knew that. I just knew.
“Yes,” I said, and something in me broke loose with a wild, silent cry. I was off the cliff now, I realized, with a fierce joy, and that felt good. It felt free.
His eyes ignited into a color found only in the heart of the sun. “Yes?”
“Yes, already. I’ll marry you. Yes. Hell, yes. What am I, stupid?”
The phone rang again. David let go of my hands, picked up the extension, and thumbed it on without looking away from my face. “Mr. Garrett, I’m taking my lover to bed,” he said. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll reschedule your deadline.”
And he crushed the phone as if it were made of marshmallow crème and dropped the smashed pieces on the patio table.
“Oh,” I said faintly. “Problem solved. Good approach.”
On the horizon, the fire in Alligator Alley continued to glow. I discovered that I didn’t care at all, as David’s hand pulled me to my feet and into his arms.
I woke up hours later to the sound of screaming sirens. The Wardens had majorly screwed up—again. My apartment complex was on fire. We were being evacuated.
That was it. I was never going on vacation again.
Chapter One
Getting married was like planning a military invasion of a distant foreign country, only instead of moving soldiers and guns, you were organizing bridesmaids and bouquets.
Of course, my bridesmaids were bound to be pretty tough chicks. I couldn’t really be sure there wouldn’t be guns.
“You know,” said my best friend, Cherise, staring thoughtfully into the mirror and smoothing her hands down the clinging lines of her dress, “there’s a math formula for wedding dresses.”
I blinked at her. I was trying to figure out if the layer cake of tulle and lace I had on constituted romantic excess, or if it looked like I’d fought off a demented pastry chef and barely escaped with my life. “What?”
“The problem is, this dress looks totally fabulous on me. And the better the bridesmaid’s gown looks on her, the fuglier the bride’s. I’m just pointing it out because I’m a kindhearted person, you know.”
She was right—she did look totally fabulous in the dress. The color was a dark rose, one that wildly complemented Cherise’s blond hair and beautiful skin. It was a simple sheath dress, clinging in all the right places, and it ended at the right length for her, just below the knee, to display her perfectly sculpted calves to full advantage. No dyed generic pumps for Cherise; she’d scoured the stores and come up with a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes that made me pray to the fashion gods for something half as great to appear in my closet.
The first time I’d ever met Cherise, she’d looked fantastic. Cherise could look delicious wearing an oversized foam-rubber sun—I know, I’ve seen her do it, back in the days we both worked for the local bottom-of-the-barrel TV station as weather girls.
I, on the other hand, did not look delicious. I looked like a wedding cake that hadn’t quite risen properly. And white really wasn’t my color.
“You’re a true friend,” I said, and unzipped my dress to let it slide into a confusion of frippery on the dressing room floor. The waiting dress wrangler rescued it, fussily dusted it, and put it back on a hanger and in a garment bag, the better to protect its doubtful charms. “Right. Something in off-white? With less—” I made a vague, poofy gesture with my hands. The salesclerk, who must have seen brides make a thousand terrible decisions, looked relieved. She nodded and turned to Cherise.
“Ma’am?” she asked. “Can I bring you some more selections?”
Cherise turned, hands on hips. “You’re kidding, right? Look, I gave her fair warning. I am not giving up this dress. I’ll be maid of honor, but not matronly of honor.”
“Keep the dress,” I said hastily. “It really does look great on you. So you’re done. It’s just me we’re still working on.”
Cherise, mollified, unzipped and shimmied out of the dress. She was the one who fussed with it, getting it hung just so, and zipped it into the garment bag before handing it to the salesclerk. “Be sure nothing happens to it,” she said. “Put my name on it in giant letters: Cherise. In fact, if you’ve got a vault—”
“Cher,” I said, “leave the poor lady alone. She’s dealing with enough as it is. Your dress is safe.”
“Maybe I should take it with me.”
“Maybe you should put your clothes on. I’m feeling kind of outclassed, here.”
Cherise grinned, undermining her Playboy Bunny appeal but making herself real in a way most pretty women weren’t. She looked after herself with care, but she also didn’t put too much emphasis on it. Cherise liked to do things that the Genetically Chosen Few generally didn’t, like read, geek out on TV shows, indulge in online gaming. Her most prominent body decoration, which showed plainly as she turned to gather up her jeans and tank top from the bench, was a Gray—a little gray alien tattoo waving hello from the small of her back, where most beautiful women would have put a rose as a tramp stamp.
That was Cherise, cheerfully mowing down the barriers.
I sat down on the other bench, legs crossed, feeling exposed and vulnerable in my lacy underthings. I had a huge list of things still to do for the wedding, and I was running out of time, and the last thing I needed to be doing was obsessing about the dress. I mean, I had good taste in clothes, right? I could usually walk into a store, grab something right off the rack, and get it right.
Today, I’d gone through more dresses than I’d worn in the last year. Maybe I ought to try the designer line again. Or get married in a garbage bag. Add a couple of frills, a nice bow—couldn’t be worse than what I’d just seen myself in today. There was a fashion hell. I’d been there.
“You okay?” Cherise finished buttoning up her jeans, skimmed her top down to street-legal levels, flipped her hair, and voilà, she was fantastic. She stepped out of the Jimmy Choo pumps and boxed them up with the care usually reserved for crown jewels or religious relics, and slid her perfectly pedicured toes into a pair of hot-pink flip-flops. “Because you look a little bit—”
“Spooked,” I supplied sourly. “Worried. Scared. Nuts. Insane. Completely, utterly—”
“I was going to say hungry. It’s already two hours after we should have had lunch.”
Low blood sugar probably was impairing my impressive dress-choosing skills, and even though this was a full-service bridal store, I doubted that they catered. “Oh,” I said. “Right. Lunch.” Now that she mentioned it, my stomach growled impatiently, as if it had been trying to get my attention for a while and was ready to cannibalize another body part. I reached for my own jeans and top and began tugging them on. I wasn’t as perfectly body-balanced as Cherise, but I had legs for days, and even in flats I topped her by several inches.
The hardworking clerk came back, sweating under a forklift’s worth of alternate dress choices. I froze in the act of zipping up my pants. “Um—”
Cherise, rightly identifying a moment when a maid of honor could take one for the bridal team, smiled winningly at the clerk and said, “Sorry, but I’ve got a nail appointment. We’ll have to come back later.
Could you keep those out? I swear, it’ll be an hour, tops.” She caught my look. “Two, at the most.”
The clerk looked around the dressing room, which had far fewer hooks than she had dresses, sighed, and nodded.
I had just finished fastening the top button on my pants when I felt the whole store distinctly shake, as if a giant hand had grabbed the place and yanked. I froze, bracing myself on the wall, and saw Cherise do the same. The clerk froze under her load of thousand-dollar frocks.
And then all hell broke loose. The floor bucked, walls undulated, cracks ripped through plaster, and the air exploded with the sounds of glass crashing, things falling, and timbers snapping. The salesclerk screamed, dropped the gowns, and flung herself into the doorway, bracing herself with both hands.
I should have taken cover—Cherise sensibly did, curling instantly into a ball under the nearest cover, which was the bench on her side.
What did I do? I stood there. And I launched myself hard into the aetheric, rising out of the physical world and into a plane of existence where the lines of force were more clearly visible.
Not good. The entire area of Fort Lauderdale was a boiling confusion of forces, most erupting out of a fault line running directly under the store in which I stood. It looked as if somebody had dropped a bucket of red and black dye into a washing machine and set it on full churn.
We were so screwed.
I sensed other Wardens rising into the aetheric, responding to the crisis; there were two or three of them relatively close whose signatures I recognized—two were Weather, which wasn’t much help, but one was an Earth Warden, and a powerful one.
I flung my still-new Earth Warden powers deep into the foundations of the building in which my physical form was still trapped, and began shoring up the structure. It was taking a beating, but the wood responded to me, healing itself and binding into an at least temporarily unbreakable frame. The metal was tougher, but it also fell within my powers, so I braced it up as I went, creating a lightning-fast shell of stability in a world that wouldn’t hold together for long.
I reached out, in the aetheric, and connected with the other Earth Warden; together, we were able to blanket part of the rift with power, like pouring superglue on an open wound. Not a miracle, it was just a bandage, but enough. I didn’t know enough about how to balance the forces of the Earth; it was different from the flashing, volatile energy of Fire or the massive, ponderous fury of Weather. It had all kinds of slow, unstoppable momentum, and I felt very fragile standing in its way.
Help, I said to the other Earth Warden—not that talking was really talking on the aetheric. It was crude communication, at best, but he got the message. I watched as he spread himself thin, and his aura settled deep into the heart of the boiling red of the disturbance.
Oh, hell no. No way was I going there.
Then again, if I didn’t, I was leaving him alone to do the dirty work—the potentially fatal dirty work.
I took a deep metaphorical breath, steadied myself, and stepped off the cliff.
Sensations are different on the aetheric—properly, they’re not sensations at all, because all the nerve endings are still firmly planted down on terra firma. But the mind processes stimuli, no matter how unpleasant or strange, and so what it felt like to me on my way down, following my Earth Warden colleague, was . . . pressure—being squeezed, lightly at first, then more intensely. It was like diving in the ocean and swimming deeper and deeper, but this didn’t feel like liquid; it felt more like a metal vise, cranking inexorably tighter.
I faltered and nearly bugged out, but I caught a glimpse of the other Warden. He was below me, only a bit farther, and I decided that if he could do it, I had to. Down I went, and if I’d had an actual, physical mouth and lungs, I’d have been screaming and crying by the time I got there.
His aetheric form—which, I noticed, sported shadowy, shoulder-length hair and the ghost of a guitar slung across his back—was kneeling down, studying something. I joined him. He silently indicated what it was he was examining.
I’d never seen anything like it in the aetheric, but I didn’t need a college course to tell it was very, very bad. It looked like some kind of black icy knife, sharp on all edges, wickedly pointed at the end. It was plunged deep into the ground, or what represented the ground up here.
The Earth Warden reached out and touched it, and from the way he jerked back, it was a very painful experience.
Well, I hadn’t come all this way not to try.
The jolt that went through me when I tried to take hold of the thing felt like being on the receiving end of a live power cable, only not as much fun. I let go— couldn’t do anything else—and looked wordlessly at my colleague.
He shook his head and pointed up, indicating we should rise. I nodded. Up we went, slowly, letting the pressure bleed off. I didn’t suppose we’d get the bends in the aetheric, but it didn’t seem prudent to push it, and besides, I was still trembling from the jolt that piece of black ice had sent through me.
Far above, in the softer regions of air, he made a gesture that was clear even in the aetheric—thumb toward his ear, little finger toward his mouth. And then he pointed from himself to me.
He was going to call me. I nodded and waved, and dropped out of the aetheric, back into my body.
The earthquake had stopped . . . temporarily, at least. The dress shop was a mess—plaster cracked, mirrors broken, racks toppled. Disaster with a designer label. Somebody was shaking me. Cherise. She had her hands fisted in my shirt and was trying to haul me up, but I was bigger and she was shaking too much to really be effective on leverage.
I helped her out by lurching to my feet and checking on the store’s other occupants, including the clerk. Apart from being terrified, they were all miraculously unharmed, though hair, makeup, and wardrobe had been sacrificed to sweat, tears, and sifting plaster dust.
I made Cherise sit down on a bench and stood for a moment, letting my awareness spread through the structure, looking for major damage. A few cracked support beams, but nothing that couldn’t be braced, and nothing that would come down unexpectedly, unless there was another hard jolt like the first one, which I couldn’t guarantee wouldn’t happen.
I pulled my cell phone out as it began to ring, and walked to the front, where plate glass windows had once been. They were now a glitter of broken fragments inside and outside the store. People were gathering out in the street, which was a hazard in itself, as drivers tried to navigate their way through to check on their families, their homes, their businesses. Nobody looked badly hurt, but everybody looked shell-shocked. Earthquakes in California came with the territory, but in Florida?
I answered the call. “Joanne Baldwin.”
“Warden, it’s Luis Rocha. Earth Warden. We met up top.” Meaning, up in the aetheric. I didn’t know his voice, but I liked it—warm, brisk, efficient. No wasted words. “Everybody okay there?”
“Looks like.” No wasted words here, either, apparently. “Good work up there.”
“You too, but I’m worried. I don’t know what the hell that thing is we saw, but whatever it is, it needs looking into.”
“You think it’s the cause of what just happened?”
“Any place can have earthquakes, but not without some warning signs, and there weren’t any. External cause, has to be. That thing—it seems to be the epicenter, and no way is that supposed to be there.”
I frowned. “You think it could do more damage?”
“Don’t know, but I wouldn’t leave it there. We need to figure out what this thing is, fast.”
“My job,” I said. “I’ll get the Djinn on it. You do your thing, Warden Rocha, and thank you. Excellent job.”
I heard the grin in his voice. “Yeah, well, put it on my bonus schedule. Adios, señora.”
“Adios,” I said, and hung up. I slipped the phone into my pocket and wondered, for the first time, why David wasn’t—
“I’m right here,” David said, appearing o
ut of thin air in midstride. He was dressed for business, not pleasure—sturdy blue jeans, a plain shirt, thick boots, and his long olive-drab coat. Glasses, too. They glittered like ice in the reflected shine from the broken glass. He didn’t halt at a polite distance; he came right up and put his hands around my face, wordlessly smoothing away plaster dust, and placed a warm kiss on my forehead. I felt the various aches and pains melt away, and a mad jittering inside me go still and calm. I hadn’t even realized how tense I was.
“What kept you?” My tone stayed dry, although I had a strange desire to burst into tears. “Next time, don’t stop for traffic lights, okay?”
He sighed and put his arms around me. “Safe driving isn’t just a good idea; it’s the law,” he reminded me, in that mocking way that only Djinn can. He’d no more think of obeying traffic laws than I would that thing about not wearing white after Labor Day. “Sorry. We were busy.”
“Yeah, no kidding. Busy here, too. What’s—” My phone rang. I stepped back from him with an apologetic what-can-you-do lift of my hands, and answered, “Baldwin.”
It was my friend and (technically) boss, Lewis, and he was uncharacteristically angry. “What the hell did you think you were doing?” he demanded. He was someplace close, or at least equally affected; I could hear the rising babble of confused voices and car alarms. “We’re going to be damn lucky if the whole eastern seaboard isn’t in chaos by the end of the day!”
I stopped what I was about to say, frowned, and rewound what he’d said. I listened to it again in my head before saying, cautiously, “Hang on a second. You think it’s my fault?”
I felt, rather than heard, him coming to a complete stop wherever he was, as if I’d gotten his undivided attention. I hoped he wasn’t standing in the middle of the street, like the idiots outside. And I thought he was replaying what I’d just said. “Are you saying it isn’t your fault?” he asked.
