Gale Force

by Rachel Caine

Page 28

  No answer. She transferred her unblinking stare to me, which at least enabled the doc to make a confused, nervous getaway.

  "There's a book," I said. "The kind of book Star had. You know the one. And Bad Bob has it. "

  Her eyes went black. Storm black. She didn't move, but there was something entirely different about her, suddenly.

  I held myself very, very still.

  "A book of the Ancestors?" she asked. I nodded. I was very careful about that, too. "Then he has power he should not have. Like Star. "

  "Does that change anything?"

  She never blinked, and her eyes stayed black. "I don't know," she said. "I will find out. "

  That sounded ominous. She blipped away before I could ask how she intended to go about doing that, and I didn't think any amount of calling her name was going to get her back. Not now.

  David was still in the shielded room. He was studying Ortega, the way someone might a fascinating abstract sculpture, trying to find meaning in random patterns. I tapped on the window and got his attention; he shook his head, as if he was trying to clear it, and came through the decontamination door. One of the NEST members tried to lecture him about procedures, but he ignored it and came directly to me.

  "Radiation," I reminded him.

  "I shed it in the room," he said. "How about you? How do you feel?" Oh, the joys of being Djinn . . . I wondered how much of the toxic stuff I had crawling through my cells right now. Too much, almost certainly. The Earth Wardens had done their work, so I was probably going to feel sick, but not drop dead.

  Probably.

  "Fantastic," I said sourly. "Do you recognize him at all?"

  David's head shake was just as certain, and just as regretful about it, as Venna's had been. I could see how frustrated he was, how baffled by his inability to comprehend what was in front of him, and it scared me, too. He was one of the most powerful entities on the face of the Earth. He shouldn't have this kind of blind spot.

  I was trying not to think about it as an Achilles' heel, but that was getting more difficult all the time, especially when the whole thing ran through my head and the person imprisoned on that wall and impaled by the black spear was David, not Ortega.

  They wouldn't know him, I thought, with a sickening drop of my stomach. Venna, Rahel, all the Djinn - they'd just stare at his body and not know who the hell they were looking at. They wouldn't even remember him at all.

  Of all the possible ways to destroy someone, that had to be the worst.

  It reminded me, with a sudden snap, of how Ashan had tried to destroy me, not so long ago - on the day that my daughter had died. He'd tried to strip away not just my life, but the memory of my life. He'd been stopped midslaughter, which was why I was still around, but there was something fundamentally similar about what Ashan had done, and what was happening now, to the Djinn.

  The Mother had intervened to stop him - but, I thought, that had mostly been because he'd done it on the grounds of the chapel in Sedona, on what was, for them, holy ground. The same kind of protection might not apply for David out here.

  The answer was in the book. It had to be in the book.

  "David - " I chose my words very carefully, remembering Venna's extreme reaction. "The book, the one that we looked at earlier - "

  He raised his eyes to meet mine, and I saw surprise in them. "The Ancestor Scriptures. "

  "You remember them. "

  "Of course I remember them. "

  "And what about where we left them?"

  "In a vault," he said promptly. "Locked up. "

  "Where was the vault?"

  He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. For a second he looked baffled, then angry, then blank. "I don't know," he said. "How can I not know?"

  "David, what did the book say about Unmaking?"

  His pupils expanded, black devouring bronze.

  "Don't say that. " His words had the ring of command, but I was no Djinn.

  "You have to listen to me. I think that all this is connected to - "

  He grabbed me by the arm. "Don't say it. Don't. "

  "David, stop it!" I yanked free. He hadn't used Djinn strength on me, but plain old human strength was enough to piss me off. I didn't like being grabbed, not in that way, and he knew it. "It's connected to what Ashan did when he messed with our reality, to try to erase me from the world. Bad Bob reappeared about the same time. This weapon, the thing they're using, it's a tool of Unmaking; that's what they're calling it - "

  His eyes flared black, like Venna's. "Stop," he growled.

  "It's killing you, and you can't even see it. You can't see those you lose. It's just destroying you. "

  He spun around and stalked away, fury in every sinuous movement. He knew, somewhere deep down, but there was something in Djinn DNA that kept him from acknowledging any of it.

  The secret was in that damned book, which I couldn't read without major consequences. I knew I wouldn't be able to resist its pull.

  Lewis was watching us from the back of the room, having completed his own blood donations; he looked tired, but alert. "Everything okay?" he asked.

  "Do you think Rahel is okay?" I shot back, and saw the flinch. "Sorry. I know you - care for her. " I wasn't exactly sure what that entailed, between Lewis and Rahel; I wouldn't have been surprised if they'd been casual lovers. Rahel wasn't the type to fall in love, and Lewis . . . Lewis already had, with the wrong person.

  "He hasn't hurt her yet," David said. He had his back to us, but he was listening. "They're hiding their tracks, but the connection is still there. I can trace her as long as they hold her. "

  Was that a good thing, or a bad thing? I thought about the trap Bad Bob had laid this time around. He'd known - because of Paul, oh God, Paul, you fool - that Kevin and Rahel had been planted to spy on him. Surely he was assuming that David could sense and track Rahel's position, too.

  Surely he would just lay another trap.

  Depressing as that was, we'd won a kind of victory here. Yes, Ortega was dead, but so was Paul; not only that, but the Sentinels had been forced to regroup and retreat. The current count was twelve dead in total.

  Problem was, all of them were Wardens. And it was impossible to tell which of them had been Sentinels, except for anecdotal information about which side they'd been fighting for. I was sure about Paul, Emily, and Janette. The rest . . .

  Once again, we just didn't know who our enemies really were.

  Lewis stood up and walked to where David was standing, facing the window. Facing Ortega's desiccated body. "We can't follow them," he said. "They've got weapons that can destroy the Djinn, and we don't know what they're planning. Let's talk to Kevin. Maybe he's got some information we don't. "

  That was coolly logical, something that neither David nor I seemed capable of being at the moment. David nodded, and the three of us left the treatment area.

  Or tried, anyway. An FBI agent got in our way. She was a tall woman, curved but in that I-work-out kind of way. Feathered dark hair around a heart-shaped face. Cool, impartial green eyes.

  "Sorry," she said. "Nobody moves. We haven't finished our interrogations yet. "

  David was likely to just walk over her, in the mood he was in, and that would at the very least lead to a confrontation we didn't need. I looked over at Lewis, who sighed and dug something out of the back pocket of his jeans. "Right," he said. "All-access pass. "

  He held it up. I couldn't see what it said, but the woman's eyes widened, and she took a step back. I got the impression she hadn't done that in a while.

  "Yes sir," she said. "Sorry. And they are - "

  "With me," Lewis said. "Thanks for your vigilance, but it's not necessary, Agent. We're the good guys. "

  She looked as if she sincerely doubted that, but she didn't say anything, just moved out of the way with a be-my-guest motion. Then she went to tell her boss, a tall gray-haired man. Cover your ass
. It was the absolute code of any governmental agency, no matter how well-intentioned.

  "This," Lewis said, "is a cluster fuck. " He was looking at the parking lot, which was littered with burned-out, crushed vehicles, downed trees, fragments of glass and metal. The hotel, which had luckily been scheduled for demolition anyway, was partially destroyed, whether by us or by the Sentinels it was impossible to say. At a certain point, it really didn't much matter.

  The news media was out in a huge, baying pack. I tried to count the number of satellite trucks, but my head hurt. I was sure that a fair number of those photo and video lenses were being pointed in our direction, though, and remembered the reporter from Fort Lauderdale. Man, wouldn't she feel vindicated? She now officially had a scoop.

  "How much did they get?" I asked.

  "Oh, everything. Tornadoes forming out of nowhere. Cars bursting into flame and exploding. Trees getting thrown. Buildings disintegrating. " Lewis's shoulders twitched, then straightened. "The FBI wants me to give a statement. Something along the lines of, we're a secret government agency; we'd tell you but we'd have to kill you, blah blah. They'd like me to tie it to terrorists. "

  I stared at him. "And what are you going to do?"

  He shrugged. "Don't know yet. "

  "You really think this is a good time to lie?"

  "Well, I don't think it's exactly a good time to tell the truth. " He glanced at David, whose eyes seemed to be fading back to a more normal color. "I'll leave the Djinn out of it, if you'd like. "

  "That's kind of you, but I think we'd better tell everything if we tell anything," David said. "Let's talk to Kevin. We don't have a lot of time. "

  Kevin was sitting with his least favorite people. Well, that probably wasn't fair; he didn't like anybody, so most people were his least favorite people, but he reserved a special kind of dislike for the Ma'at. I wasn't really sure why, except that in general, the leadership of the Ma'at was pretty unlikable.

  Two of them were flanking him: Charles Spenser Ashworth II and Myron Lazlo. Talk about the Old Boy Network . . . they weren't just in it, they'd laid the original cable. Lazlo had dressed down for his public appearance; he normally liked subtle, tailored suits that reeked old money, but he'd deigned to wear what I supposed was his "field outfit" - khaki slacks, a cotton shirt open at the neck, and a sport coat that undoubtedly cost nearly as much as the sports car he'd probably arrived in.

  Even so, Charles Ashworth's outfit made Lazlo look cheap.

  Both of them were older than the pharaohs, and twice as stern, both in looks and in attitude. Yeah, I liked them just as much as Kevin did.

  I thought it was just about the first time I'd ever seen actual relief on the kid's face as he spotted me.

  "About time," he said. "Who put me in fucking detention with the Mummy Twins?"

  I had to admit, that made me smile. The Ma'at had taken a lot of their iconography for their organization from the Egyptians, and it was no accident they'd made their headquarters at the Luxor in Las Vegas. I suppose they could have made a case for Memphis as well, but where else do you get a real live pyramid for a clubhouse?

  "I did," Lewis said. "Thanks, gentlemen. "

  The gentlemen in question glared and, in Lazlo's case, gave him a well-I-never patrician huff. "We are not your staff," Ashworth snapped. "Do you have any idea what kind of imbalance this little fracas has caused? Oh, of course you do. You're supposed to be preventing this kind of thing, you know. Protecting people, not putting them in danger. Isn't that the Warden credo?"

  He said Warden as if it were an epithet, which it practically was, for the Ma'at. They looked on themselves as the accountants of the aetheric; they were concerned about balance, always balance. Important, yes, but even supernatural double-entry bookkeeping was still bookkeeping, and I couldn't work up much enthusiasm for their way of doing things.

  "The credo of every one of us is to stop Bad Bob Biringanine from screwing things up any worse than he already has," Lewis said. "I'll expect your support. "

  He sent them on their way with a jerk of his head. He was probably the only person in the world they'd have taken that kind of treatment from, another mystery of Lewis Levander Orwell. He had an impressive presence, but not that impressive - generally. And yet we all jumped when he snapped his fingers.

  Kevin stayed where he was, slouched in the plastic chair, as the two older men vacated. I settled in on one side, Lewis on the other. David paced. It was what David did, at times like these. He looked preoccupied, and I knew that he was tracking Rahel, trying to find out everything about what the Sentinels were doing.

  "You saw Paul, right?" Kevin asked. He kept his head down, and addressed the question toward the tops of his dirty Nikes. "Bastard sold us out. "

  "I know," I said. My whole heart hurt, and I hadn't allowed myself to really feel it yet, the depth of Paul's betrayal. Things he'd said came back to me - his refusal to disagree with the Sentinels, his reluctance about my relationship with David, and the wedding. For Paul, it had been a matter of us versus them. He had never really understood, deep down, that Djinn and the Wardens were the same. Different points on the same scale.

  Sometimes I despaired for the human race.

  "I think they bought the cover at first," Kevin was saying. "They had us in a room for almost a day, talking to us. All about how the Djinn had always been dangerous, and we'd been stupid to ever open ourselves up to them. " His bitter eyes followed David. "Can't say I ever really disagreed with that. Made a lot of sense to me. "