Gale Force

by Rachel Caine

Page 14

  Still, I fished a tissue out of my purse and wiped the plastic down before I started dialing.

  Lewis answered on the third ring. "Somebody tried to kill me," I said. "No, don't interrupt, and don't joke. It was Lee Antonelli. I had things under control, but somebody took him out at a distance. He said something about the Sentinels putting out a contract on my life. "

  There was a silence on the other end that stretched on for longer than I would have liked. "How'd they kill him?" Lewis asked.

  "Some kind of aetheric attack, nothing I've ever seen before. Lewis, they just reached out and destroyed him. What the hell is going on?"

  "Just get here," he said. "The faster the better. " He hesitated for a second, and then his voice softened. "You okay?"

  "Yeah. No damage. "

  "That's not what I meant. "

  "You mean, am I okay with the concept that somebody's capable of hiring marginally loyal Wardens as hit men to take me out, and killing them if they fail? No, not really. "

  I went cold inside when Lewis said, "If it makes you feel better, you're not the only target. "

  "You?"

  "Among others. " He didn't elaborate, and I didn't think it was a good time to ask. "Watch your back. If they can kill Antonelli from a distance - "

  "I've got David," I said. "And we'll both be watching for it now. You be careful. "

  "Always. Call when you get back on the road. "

  "Can't. Cell phone had a fatal issue during the fight. "

  "Get David to fix it," Lewis said. "I don't want you out of contact for a second. "

  And that was it. Sentimental, it wasn't, but then we understood each other too well for that most of the time. Not that we couldn't be friends, but business was business, and staying alive was serious business these days. I'd fought beside him, and he knew that when the situation got dire, I'd be there.

  Still. A little verbal hug might have been . . . nice. I replaced the receiver, listened to the machine swallow my quarter deeper into its gear guts, and peered around the corner of the scratched plastic bubble. The reporters were still there, trying to solicit comments from uncooperative cops. They were also talking to diner patrons. I hoped nobody had any creative explanations that involved magic.

  David came out of the diner, hands in the pockets of his long olive-drab coat. He didn't look happy. Wind caught the tail of the coat as he strode toward me, giving him an almost princely magnificence, but I doubted anybody but me noticed except for some of the waitresses, who were still acutely David-oriented.

  "I didn't find anything," he said as he reached me.

  "Are you all right?" He knew I wasn't. It was a pro forma question, but I especially liked that it was accompanied by a gentle brush of his fingertips along the line of my cheek.

  "Fine," I said. He held my gaze.

  "Really?"

  "No. " I gave him a very small smile that felt crooked and unsteady on my lips. "That was - unpleasant. "

  "I know," he said, and looked down at my hands. They were clean - the cops had allowed me to wash up - but I still felt the psychic imprint of blood on them. "It could just as easily have been you. "

  "Maybe," I said. "I don't think so, though. There was something that made him vulnerable to them, maybe a link they'd created to keep track of him through the aetheric. It pushed us out of the way and went straight for him. If they'd been able to take me out the same way, don't you think they would have done it?"

  I couldn't tell if it had occurred to him or not; David was being extraordinarily secretive at the moment. He gazed at me for a couple of seconds, then turned his attention to the reporters. "We should get out of here," he said.

  "Do you know who was behind it?" I asked.

  "If I did, would I tell you right now?" he asked, all too reasonably. "But I think you already know. "

  "If we can believe Lee, it was the Sentinels," I said. "How come I'm on their hit list when I barely know their oh-so-pretentious name?"

  "Because of me," he said. "Let's get out of here. I'd like it if you were a less stationary target. "

  "Cops want to talk to you. "

  David took my arm, a sweet gentlemanly gesture that didn't exactly fool me. He walked me in the direction of the Mustang, which was currently an awkward bastard stepchild of a convertible, what with all the glass scattered in glittering square pieces on the ground. "I don't want to talk to them," he said. He opened the driver's-side door. "I'll let you drive. "

  "Bribery, pure and simple. You're bribing me to do something illegal. "

  "What's illegal about it? It's your car. You already talked to the police. You're not guilty of anything. "

  Well, he did have a point. But I still felt uneasy, driving away under the noses of cops and television cameras. "We'll be seen," I said, and nodded toward the news crews. David didn't bother to glance their way.

  "We won't. " Only a Djinn could sound that confident. Or arrogant. I supposed if I didn't love him so much it would have been just a shade more on the arrogant side. "If we get entangled here, more lives are at risk. We need to be moving, Jo. "

  Djinn were nothing if not ruthlessly logical. And they weren't above hitting the pressure points, even on those they cared about.

  I silently got behind the wheel of the Mustang. It started up with a low rumble. Nobody looked in our direction. "Repairs," I reminded David. The broken remains of our windshields and windows rose up in a glittering curtain from the pavement, liquefied into a pool in each open area, and then solidified into clean, clear safety glass. I checked that the driver's-side window rolled down, and it functioned perfectly.

  "I'm disappointed in you," David said. "You believe I'd do it wrong?"

  "I think that you have enough to think about already, " I said. "His van's still in the way. "

  Moving a working crime scene would have been a puzzle even to one of the most powerful Djinn on Earth, but David was a lateral thinker; he didn't bother to move the van, or the cops, or anyone else.

  "Hold on," he said, and our car lurched slightly and then began to float above the road. It rose at a steady pace, carefully level, then moved forward over the gabled roof of the diner. Nobody looked up to follow our progress. I held on to the wheel in a white-knuckled death grip; flying had never been my favorite method of transportation, and far less so when the vehicle wasn't actually designed for flight. Shades of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

  "What are they seeing?" I asked. My voice was a half octave higher than I wanted it to be.

  "Nothing of any significance. To them, the car hasn't moved from where it's parked. They see the two of us standing at the phone booth. Oh, and a flock of birds overhead, just in case someone has some rudimentary sense of the aetheric. " Some people did; the ones with a strong sense of it generally put out shingles as psychics or became wildly successful investors or gamblers. If they had more than that, they probably would have ended up in the Ma'at, where they were taught to combine their powers with colleagues, and work in concert, if their abilities weren't enough to qualify them as Wardens.

  I had to rely wholly on David to keep me off the Warden radar. I would remain mostly difficult to find until I had to draw on my powers, but at that moment, I'd light up the aetheric like a spotlight in a cave.

  My brain was babbling to distract itself from the impossibility of a ton of metal hanging in midair, gliding at an angle away from the diner and toward a very busy road. "Landing will be tricky," David said. "Are you ready? When we touch down, you'll have to really accelerate to make the merge. "

  Great. Now freeway merging was taking on a whole new dimension of complexity. I nodded, and got ready to put my foot down and shift as David brought the car in at a gliding angle, moving us faster and faster as the road blurred on approach. . . . It was like landing a jet, only way scarier, from my point of view.

  The tires hit pavement with a lurch, and I instantly clutched, shifted, and
accelerated, leaving a rubber scratch where we'd hit. The Mustang bounced but recovered nicely, and when I checked the rearview mirror, the car behind us was still a few feet away. Not quite heart-attack distance, at least not on my end. I could only imagine that on the other driver's end, having a car just appear in front of him might have been . . . unsettling. Maybe when people said he came out of nowhere after an accident, they really were telling the truth.

  I got the inevitable honk and New Jersey salute, returned the favor, and settled into the drive. David relaxed - but not all the way. I could translate his body language pretty well, and he was still tense. Trying hard not to let me know it, but tense.

  "You're starting to believe me," I said, "that things aren't quite as straightforward as they seemed. "

  "They never are with you. I've always taken you seriously," he said. "But now I'm taking your enemies seriously as well. "

  Not a good sign for them, and that cheered me up as much as the food back at the diner. I was tired, and achy from the stress and the drive, but there was something restful and strangely comforting about having the wheel beneath my hands and my feet on the pedals. And David at my side, which happened far less than I'd always craved. Which reminded me . . . "You're hanging around," I said. "Do Djinn get vacations from the day job?"

  "Since I'm the boss, I can take vacation whenever I want," he said, and took off his glasses to needlessly polish them. It was so cute that Djinn had poker tells, just like humans; I knew instantly that he was fibbing. "I can take the time. "

  David's job wasn't exactly low-key. He served as the Conduit for half of the Djinn, a link between them and the raw power of Mother Earth. Without that link, the Djinn were reliant on Wardens and their relatively feeble draw of power from the aetheric. His job was different from that of the Oracles, but even more crucial, and it didn't have time off.

  The Djinn didn't like being reliant on humans. Ever. I supposed that if I'd been one of them, ancient beings who'd been forced into the worst kind of slavery imaginable for centuries at a time, I wouldn't be all that fond of relying on others, either.

  What else David did besides managing that power flow for his people, though, was a mystery to me. I knew he had to leave me on a fairly frequent basis to attend to business; I knew some of that business had to do with Djinn stepping out of line and needing correction. In a sense, David had become the court of last supernatural resort, a role I instinctively knew he didn't want and wasn't comfortable in playing. His friend Jonathan had been a great leader, one who'd held the Djinn together despite all the infighting for thousands of years; he'd had a certain ruthless wisdom that everyone respected.

  David, however, was crippled by two things: One, he wasn't Jonathan; two, he had me to worry about. I was his Achilles' heel, at least when it came to his fellow elementals. Most of them didn't understand why he spent so much time in human form, and they'd never understand why he had offered marriage to a mere bug like me. They'd forgive him for it, those who liked him; after all, pledging to stay at my side would only last a human lifetime, barely a blink to the Djinn.

  But it was a worry. He'd become kind of a Crazy Cat Lady among the elementals, far too attached to humanity for his own good. It was a sign, faint but definite, that he wasn't destined for the same long-term status that Jonathan had held.

  It made David vulnerable in ways I could only dimly imagine.

  "What are you thinking about?" David asked. His eyes were closed, and his head was back against the cushion.

  "Whether I want purple roses or yellow ones. I think purple might be a nice touch for the wedding bouquet. "

  "That's not what you were thinking about. "

  "How do you know?"

  He smiled, but didn't open his eyes. "Because I know when you're happy, and you're not. Thinking about wedding bouquets is something you do when you're happy. "

  "You make me happy," I said, and that wasn't at all a lie. I took his hand in mine. "And that's all that counts. "

  He lifted my fingers to his lips and pressed a warm kiss against them. "Yes," he said. "It is. "

  Chapter Seven

  The rest of the drive was full of the normal annoyances of traffic, construction, and generally idiotic behavior by other motor vehicle operators. David didn't have to ward off any supernatural assaults, and all that the day required of me was moderately offensive driving to avoid the unexpected lane changes and people failing to check their blind spots.

  We rolled into the Warden parking garage, checked through the extensive security procedures, and got our passes for the headquarters floor. It had been remodeled, again; somebody had kindly seen to taking my name off the Memorial Wall, where they'd hastily had it added when I'd been thought to be dead. That was what I thought, anyway, but then I looked closer. They'd really just put some kind of filler into the engraving, a clear indication that they expected me to get clobbered at any time. This way, they could rinse it out and voilà, I'd be memorialized all over again. At a bargain.

  I cannot even begin to say how much that bugged me, but I bit my lip and smiled when I noticed, and ignored David's slightly alarmed look. He was picking up vibrations, all right, and I tried hard to keep myself under better control.

  Lewis was waiting for us in the big round conference room, the main one, and there was a crowd with him. Most of them I knew by sight, and some I counted as closer friends. There wasn't a single unfriendly face, which was something of a relief.