Gale Force (15 page)

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 conferenceroom, 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.

Unless you counted Kevin.

Kevin Prentiss was seated at the table like an equal member of the war council, and next to him sat Cherise. My best friend wasn’t a Warden; she was way cool of course, but controlling the elements wasn’t her bag. So I had to wonder what she was doing in such a high-powered inner circle.

She caught my look, raised her eyebrows, and shrugged. ‘‘Don’t ask me,’’ she said. ‘‘Lewis wanted everybody here. Kevin was with me, and he said I could come along.’’ The subtext was that nobody had wanted to piss Kevin off by demanding his ride-along girlfriend step outside. He was maturing, but I suspected he’d always have more than a little of that sullen, aggressive attitude he was known for. He was at that startling age when the changes come fast and furious; his weedy physique was filling out, developing into a fairly impressive chest under that battered black T-shirt. He avoided my eyes, but then, he always did. We had shared some very unpleasant, even embarrassing moments, and neither of us wanted to get too cozy. It had been a big step for him to spend time with Cherise (and coincidentally with me) on the roof of the hospital; he’d made up for it by ignoring me the rest of the day. I’d returned the favor.

Kevin was here because he was a seriously talented young man. Not trained, not restrained, but . . . talented.

And maybe he cared about me. A little.

I was surprised to recognize that there was a Djinn in the room as well. She sat in the far corner of the room, long, elegant legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, displaying lethally gorgeous shoes. I hadn’t seen Rahel since the earthquake in Fort Lauderdale, so it struck me how much better she was looking these days. She’d taken a beating at the hands of a Demon, not too long ago; for a while, we’d been worried she wouldn’t recover.

When she turned her head slightly, I could see the scars on the right side of her sharp-featured face— etched grooves, as if she’d been clawed. I nodded to her. She inclined her head, and her thousands of tiny black braids slithered over her shoulders with a dark rustling sound like old paper on stone.

She was sticking with purple again for her outfit. It looked good on her.

Lewis got me and David seated at the table, and didn’t waste any more time. He hit a control inset in the table, and a projector beamed a picture onto a screen at the far end of the room. It was grainy surveillance video, and it took me a few seconds to recognize that it was my parking lot, in front of my apartment. I started to ask what was going on, but then I got my answer . . . a delivery person got out of a dark-colored panel van and jogged up the steps toward the second floor. Lewis froze the picture. ‘‘Ring any bells?’’ he asked me. I studied the face of the man on the screen, but it was an awful picture. I shook my head. Lewis released the freeze frame, and I watched the deliveryman disappear into the hallway with a familiar-looking box in his hands. When he came back ten seconds later, no box. Surveillance showed him getting into his van and driving away. It was the kind of thing that happened a dozen times a day at any apartment complex, nothing that would alert anyone to potential trouble. ‘‘License plates?’’ I asked.

‘‘Covered with mud,’’ said one of the Power Rangers down the table—Sasha, his name was, a nice-looking guy with a ready smile. I called him a Power Ranger because he worked with Marion Bearheart, and was part of the unofficial police force of the Wardens. When someone broke the codes, Sasha and those like him took it on. I didn’t much care for the system—it bothered me to have so much power in the hands of so few—but most of them were honest. More of them were honest than the rank and file of the Wardens, to be fair. ‘‘We’ve been in contact with every delivery service. None of them had drop-offs at your apartment that day.’’

‘‘Which leaves us with . . . ?’’ Lewis asked. For reply, Sasha appropriated the controls, bringing up another video on the screen. This one was better defined, but at an odd angle. One of the traffic cameras, maybe.

‘‘We tracked the delivery van back, but we lost it in the warehouse district. They were damn careful. It took hours to trace them this far, but I don’t think we’ll get much farther, not with these methods. If they’re smart—and I think they are—they’d have had Earth Wardens ready to reduce the entire truck to slag and spare parts in a few minutes.’’ Sasha blanked the screen. ‘‘If I had to guess, I’d say we ought to be looking for warehouses rented out in the last two months.’’

‘‘Put somebody on it,’’ Lewis said.

Sasha folded his arms and sat back with a cocky smile. ‘‘Already done.’’

Lewis turned his attention to another Earth Warden, young but sharp. Heather something or other; I’d heard good things. ‘‘What about the package itself?’’ Lewis asked her.

Heather ducked her head shyly and studied her interlaced fingers. ‘‘Still analyzing,’’ she said, so softly I could hardly hear her. ‘‘But there is definitely a high decay rate to what’s inside. It’s dangerous, most certainly.’’

‘‘But not a bomb.’’

She looked up at him, then at us, wide-eyed. ‘‘Oh yes,’’ she said. ‘‘It had a delivery system and a trigger. If you’d opened the package, it would have gone off and spread the contents.’’

‘‘And the contents are . . . ?’’ David asked, in that cool, controlled voice so at odds with the look in his eyes.

‘‘Antimatter,’’ Heather said. ‘‘Antimatter colliding with any kind of matter will produce a violently energetic reaction. The by-products are—’’

‘‘There was a trigger?’’ I asked. ‘‘What kind of trigger?’’

Her gaze slid away from mine, toward Lewis, and then back, as if she’d been seeking approval. ‘‘It looked as if it was adapted from a more traditional bomb-making approach. Timer and a small charge designed to crack the shell holding in the antimatter, spilling it out into the world.’’

‘‘Not a skill you pick up at your local community college,’’ Paul grunted.

‘‘Unfortunately, it’s not exactly rare, either. And with the Internet so helpfully offering tutorials for this kind of thing, it will be hard to track.’’

‘‘The paper?’’ Lewis got us back on track. ‘‘The wrapping, the card?’’

Heather brightened immediately. ‘‘That’s a possibility, ’’ she said. ‘‘If the Djinn can help us, we may be able to trace the card’s history back and find out who came in contact with it.’’

But that experiment failed. I could have told them it would. When they brought in the card—in a heavily shielded container, since it was saturated with radiation—and presented it to Rahel, she just shook her head. ‘‘Nothing,’’ she said. ‘‘I see nothing at all.’’

It was the same with David, and I could see his frustration and growing alarm. He’d dismissed all this at first, but there were too many of us now, and we were too credible. The Djinn
had
to believe us—but believing us meant accepting half a dozen impossible things. Heather, disheartened, reclaimed the thing and began to have it carted back to the lab for more tests.

I stopped her. ‘‘Can I see it?’’ I asked. She looked surprised. ‘‘Well, it was addressed to me. It stands to reason that I might see something others don’t.’’

I doubted she bought that theory, but I really did want to see it. It had been meant for me. So had the bomb—for me and David. I supposed the first explosion would have killed me, and the antimatter would have done the job for David. . . .

Heather handed me a pair of protective gloves, draped a heavy shielding vest around my chest, and put a protective hood on me before she allowed me to reach into the container and pull out the card. It was, as Lewis had told me, a greeting card—a fairly nice one, actually, with a graphic of a wedding cake, a bride, a groom. Inside, cursive preprinted script read,
Congratulations to the happy couple!

But when I saw what was underneath, I felt cold, clammy, and sick. It said, in plain block letters pressed deep into the paper,
Sleep with the enemy, pay the price.