Gale Force (18 page)

‘‘No kidding,’’ he said, and smiled a narrow, bitter smile. ‘‘How the hell do you think the rest of us feel about watching you?’’

I got a lot of ‘‘That was uncalled for!’’ supportive comments on the way out, but not quite as many as I’d expected; the majority of Wardens seemed to want to stay out of the line of fire. Couldn’t really blame them for that; most of them had reason to be gun-shy.

What bothered me was the significant number who seemed to be huddled together whispering in the halls, who fell silent when I came near. I felt stares on me all the time. A few nodded, but it didn’t feel like support. None of them were my friends, and most of them were people I knew only by reputation. Were they Sentinels? Potential recruits? No way I could tell, but it made the back of my neck itch.

Lewis escorted me to the elevators, staying protectivelyclose. We’d agreed that David should stay away for this part; it would have been harder with him in the room. So Lewis was taking his bodyguarding duties seriously, even in the relatively secure confines of the Warden’s own halls.

‘‘You really think somebody’s going to try to take me out here, with all these Wardens around?’’ I asked, as we waited for the elevator to arrive. He had his hand on my arm, and he didn’t smile.

‘‘Let’s just say I’m not counting on anything right now. Where’s David meeting you?’’

‘‘Downstairs in the parking garage.’’ I shook free of Lewis’s grip. ‘‘Honestly, back off, would you? I’m not glass, and I can take care of myself. I’d have thought I’d proven it by now. I’m a big girl. I can ride the elevator all by myself.’’

I could tell he was just itching to go all macho and protective on me again, but he managed to hold himself back, raising both hands in surrender and stepping away. ‘‘Fine. Just don’t come crying to me if you end up dead. Again.’’

The elevator’s arrival saved me from having to make a snappy reply. I got in, a few other Wardens crowded after, and I saw Lewis make a visible effort to stay where he was.
I’ll be fine,
I mouthed as the door slid closed.

I wished I were as confident as I appeared to be.

Still, nobody tried to kill me on the way down, although a few unfriendly looks were thrown my way by one or two of my fellow vertical travelers. One made up for it by delivering a cordial congratulations on the upcoming wedding, although he politely called it a ‘‘celebration,’’ as if he wasn’t quite sure of the legality of the whole event. Well, neither was I, actually.

We made a couple of stops, including one at the lobby level, where half the passengers disembarked.

Next stop was the secured parking area, and as the doors opened, I was relieved to see the familiar form of David leaning against a support pillar, looking deceptively casual. He was wearing his full-on normal guy disguise—jeans, checked shirt, slightly mussed hair. Glasses to distract from his eyes, although at the moment they were solidly unremarkable. And the coat, of course. He hardly ever showed up without the coat, even in the humidly close heat of late summer in New York City.

‘‘You know, you’re going to have to start learning how to dress for the seasons,’’ I said without preamble, taking his offered arm as we headed for the car. ‘‘No more of this one-outfit-fits-all thing.’’

He smiled. ‘‘Are you threatening to take me shopping again?’’

‘‘Threatening? No. It’s an absolute certainty. Besides, we’re supposed to stay public, aren’t we? Present a distraction?’’

‘‘Shopping is a distraction?’’

‘‘It is the way I do it,’’ I said. ‘‘By the way—what’s my new last name?’’

‘‘Excuse me?’’

‘‘Well, I’d like to know how I’ll be signing checks in the future. Mrs. Joanne . . . ?’’

‘‘What’s wrong with Baldwin?’’

‘‘Nothing. In fact, I may hang on to it, but if you’re planning to do the normal-life thing, you need to have an identity other than David, King of All Djinn.’’

He shot me one of those amused half smiles. ‘‘Seriously, King of All Djinn? That’s funny.’’

‘‘Answer the question. What’s your last name?’’

‘‘Whatever you want it to be.’’

I remembered that he’d used a credit card at a hotel early on in our relationship. ‘‘What about David Prince?’’

He sighed. ‘‘If you like.’’

‘‘You don’t?’’

‘‘Jo, I don’t
care.
Even when I was actually built to care about those kinds of things, I didn’t have a family name. It was always David, son of—’’ He stopped, and something indefinable flashed across his expression. I waited. ‘‘Son of Cyrus.’’

‘‘Cyrus? Your father’s name was
Cyrus
?’’

‘‘It was a very honored name at the time.’’

‘‘Then your name ought to be David Cyrus.’’

He looked thoughtful. There was something going on behind his eyes, something I couldn’t guess and probably had no context to understand even if I could. He’d never mentioned his human father, or his human mother, or anything about that period of his life before it had come to a cataclysmic end on a battlefield, with thousands of men pouring out their life energy. His best friend, Jonathan, had been like Lewis, a Warden with all three powers, and deeply beloved of Mother Earth; David hadn’t been able to let go when Jonathan had passed over and been reborn as a Djinn. David had been reborn as well.

I wondered how much real memory he had of those early, fragile years of his human life. Of his birth parents, before that rebirth. He’d seemed surprised that he’d remembered his father’s name . . . and seemed affected by it, too.

At length, as we passed rows of parked cars, David said, ‘‘Cyrus sounds . . . fine.’’

We arrived at the parked, sleek form of the Mustang, which was in perfect, gleaming condition, for having had its windows blown out less than a day before. David opened the passenger door and gracefully handed me in, like a princess into a carriage. He shut the door and headed around to the driver’s side, and we didn’t speak again until we’d exited the garage and were already on the road, heading for the bridge.

‘‘You haven’t said how it went,’’ he said.

‘‘It was harder than I’d thought,’’ I confessed. ‘‘Not the we’re-getting-married part. The Kevin part.’’

David nodded. ‘‘I was concerned about that. He’s . . . fragile, in some ways. And he has good reason for a lot of his anger. Putting him in this kind of position is a risk, at best.’’

‘‘He said—David, he said that his mother used Djinn against him.’’ I couldn’t even really bring myself to articulate the implications. ‘‘Did she?’’

He was silent for a moment, apparently focused on steering around the traffic and increasing speed as the road opened up in front of us. The steel structure of the bridge flashed past in a blur, and I wondered if the speed wasn’t more about David channeling anxiety than wanting us to get back home quickly. ‘‘You know she did,’’ he said. His face was smooth, expressionless, and he’d changed his glasses now, darkened them to hide his eyes. ‘‘In many different ways.’’

I couldn’t ask. I knew I should; I knew he’d tell me and it would be a relief if he did, maybe for us both, but I just . . . couldn’t. I closed my eyes, rested my head against the window, and tried not to imagine David as Yvette Prentiss’s slave.

As her weapon.

‘‘Sleep,’’ he murmured, and whether it was his influence or my own weariness, the steady roar of the tires and throb of the engine lured me down into the dark.

When I woke up, David was carrying me in his arms. I hadn’t been carried like that by him, except when I was in danger or injured, in a long time, and it felt . . . wonderful. Hard not to appreciate the strength and surety of his body against mine, and his smile was gentle and deadly at such close range. ‘‘Good nap?’’ He set me down, and my feet sank into sand. I hastily stripped off the Manolos. Sacrilege, to walk on the beach in those. Also, awkward. It was night, and the surf curled in from the horizon in sweetly regular silver lines. It broke into lace and foam on the beach, and we were close enough to the water to feel the breath of spray.

‘‘Where are we?’’ It wasn’t Fort Lauderdale. The beach was too quiet, too secluded. It felt as if it had never been touched by humanity.

‘‘Nowhere,’’ he said. ‘‘In a sense, anyway. It’s a place I come sometimes to be alone, when I’m troubled.’’

He was telling me something. I looked around. No lights on the horizon, no roads, no airplanes buzzing overhead. Just the beach, the surf, the breeze, the moon bright as a star overhead.

‘‘This isn’t real,’’ I said.

‘‘It’s as real as we want it to be. Like Jonathan’s house, beyond the aetheric.’’ David shrugged slightly. ‘‘One of the benefits of being the Conduit is you can create your own realities if you feel the need.’’

‘‘And . . . you feel the need.’’

He took my hand, and we walked a bit in the moonlight. It felt as if we were the first people to walk here, and I supposed we were. I didn’t ask. He didn’t volunteer. After a while, we rounded an irregular curve and I saw a low-burning fire ahead, warm and inviting. I knew, without a word being said, that we were supposed to sit down, and I settled into the cool sand without complaining about the damage to my dress. Besides, my dress was still on my sleeping body, somewhere out there.

David took a seat beside me. The fire snapped and popped and flared like a real flame, and it warmed like one, too. I stretched out my hands toward it.
As real as we want it to be,
he’d said.

Like the two of us, together.

‘‘The question you won’t ask me is, did Yvette ever force me to abuse her stepson,’’ David said. ‘‘The answer is no. Not in the way you’re thinking.’’

I have to admit, a weight of dread rolled away, and I must have given an audible sigh of relief. But David wasn’t finished.

‘‘What she did force me to do was to bring him to her, and watch,’’ he said. ‘‘Yvette always did like an audience. Kevin avoids me because I’m part of those memories. I’m bound up with all the sex and pain and horror of it. So yes, I was part of it, even though I never—I never hurt him. I wanted to destroy her for it. I wanted to rip her apart into so many pieces not even God could find a trace.’’

I heard the ring of hate in his voice, real as what I’d heard from Kevin. He meant it, and I ached for him, too. ‘‘But you didn’t, because you couldn’t. You were as powerless as Kevin to stop her.’’

He said nothing to that. The Djinn were not comfortable with the idea of powerlessness; in a sense, it was worse now than ever, because they had thousands of years of slavery to try to put into some kind of context. He hurt, and I couldn’t help him. Not with that.

‘‘I’m telling you this because Kevin doesn’t trust me,’’ he said. ‘‘And that’s part of the reason I sent Rahel with him. He’s a bit fascinated with her, like most humans seem to be, and she’s got no history for him to fix on. If he can trust any Djinn, he’ll trust her. But he’ll never truly trust me.’’

This felt so intimate that it frightened me. He came here to face his fears, face his history, and there was a lot of that to get through—more than I’d ever be able to understand. He could read my life at a glance, if he chose, and that more than anything else made me feel disadvantaged.

David put his arm around me, and I leaned against him. We both stared at the fire for a long time before he said, ‘‘My birth mother was like you. Strong, like you. Beautiful. Willful, which gave my father plenty of heartaches; it was a time when women were more constrained by society, or at least had fewer choices in how to misbehave. She taught me many things, but one of the things she gave me was a love of learning, and that was rare then. Not even the sons of kings were learned; it wasn’t considered manly.’’

I closed my eyes and breathed in the night, the peace. Maybe this wasn’t real, but it had a kind of solemnity to it that we couldn’t get out there, in the daily whirl of life.

‘‘Tell me about her,’’ I said, and snuggled closer to his warmth. ‘‘Tell me everything.’’

And he did.

Chapter Eight

When I actually did wake up, we were still driving, and I wasn’t sure that I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing until David looked over at me. He had an expression, open and vulnerable, unlike any he’d ever really shown me before. I’d never even realized how armored he was before, until the armor was removed.

‘‘I wanted to tell you all that,’’ he said. ‘‘I’m sorry I didn’t before, but there never seemed to be time. Always something happening with you. And it usually involves explosions.’’

‘‘That’s an exaggeration,’’ I replied with great dignity. ‘‘Things hardly ever explode. They burn, they shake, and occasionally they break, but explosions aren’t my thing.’’

‘‘Point taken.’’ He gave me an assessing look, and took the next exit. ‘‘You need a break.’’

‘‘Buster, you need to learn how to take them, too. If you intend—’’

‘‘To live like a human, yes, I know. I’ll start tomorrow. First thing. For tonight, I just want to get you safely home.’’

Home. I imagined the soft bed, imagined waking up with him, and imagined that it would be like that every day for the rest of my life.

It seemed too precious to be true.

The truck stop where we pulled off the freeway was one of those open-all-night places that specialized in everything, from deli sandwiches to wind chimes. After investigating the facilities, which were scrupulously clean, I browsed the snack aisles and stocked up on road food, looked over the DVDs, rummaged through the books, thought about purchasing those wind chimes, and finally ended up with nothing but a bag of chips and a cold soft drink at the register. No sign of David. I wondered where he’d gone off to; maybe he was still in the car.

I collected my purchases and went outside. No, the Mustang was empty. I went back inside, strolled the aisles, saw nobody I recognized. Somewhere inside, a slight tightening started in the vicinity of my stomach. I walked faster, looked harder.

Nothing.