Gale Force (22 page)

Still, I was constantly looking for a knife headed for my back.
Our
backs.

Nothing.

We shopped all morning, then ate lunch in a café next to the ocean. I could see that David was settling into his new look, which pleased me; I had the feeling that Djinn changed styles reluctantly. He couldn’t help but notice the attention he was attracting, and unless Djinn were a whole lot less like humans than I suspected, attention wasn’t unwelcome.

Otherwise, he wouldn’t choose to be so gorgeous to start with.

Over chicken salad and iced teas, he asked me about our afternoon plans. I proposed more shopping. He counterproposed other things, which I confess sounded more interesting, but I’d pledged to keep to my timeline.

I really needed to find that wedding dress.

So after lunch, we went to Zola Keller, and I started the arduous task of trying on thousand-dollar-and-up couture. Which is not nearly as much of a hardship as you might think. I went through twelve styles, none of them quite right, and then . . .

And then it happened.

The moment the clerk unzipped the bag, I just
knew
. As the weight of the Italian silk settled around me, I knew even more. When she laced the back and prepped me for the mirror, I knew I’d found
exactly
what would drive David wild.

Unlike most wedding gowns, this was no Disney princess knockoff; it was sophisticated, subtle, sexy. Layers of silk dropped in subtle angles from the low-cut bodice, but it in no way resembled any kind of wedding cake. The fabric rippled in silk waves, layer upon layer, sweeping into a fantastic train.

But the back was what did it—a laced corset, fitted to show a deep, sexy V of skin down the spine beneath the lacings. It was demure enough, but I could sense, like a vibration on the aetheric, that it would drive him absolutely mad.

‘‘I’ll take it,’’ I said. The clerk raised both eyebrows.

‘‘Don’t you want to know—’’

‘‘If you tell me the price, I’ll chicken out, so no. I don’t want to know. Just ring it up.’’

She cleared her throat. ‘‘I really think I should warn you about the cost—’’

‘‘You really shouldn’t,’’ I sighed.

The Warden AmEx was about to get a serious workout. Even though she was undoubtedly making a commission, my saleslady looked concerned for the state of my financial future. As well she should. If it cost anywhere near what it looked, I was going to be paying approximately the cost of a new car.

She fussed around with the dress, looking for necessary alterations and marking them. A thorough professional. We discussed indoor versus outdoor, potential hazards of having a court train to manage, and other things that I couldn’t imagine ever discussing again in my entire life.

But it was done. I had a dress. And it was
the
dress.

I walked out of the dressing room feeling happier than I had in weeks, trailing the salesclerk like a lady’s maid. I was smiling widely, anticipating the pleasant shock of seeing David in his still-new finery, and I wasn’t disappointed; he was sitting sprawled on a velvet couch, looking ready for a fashion shoot. Women were finding reasons to shop in his vicinity. I couldn’t really blame them.

‘‘Done,’’ I said serenely.

‘‘Really? That was fast.’’ It wasn’t, but he was being kind. He kissed me, and that was
very
nice, especially when, as he pulled back, he whispered in my ear, ‘‘I want to take you home now.’’

‘‘Let me mortgage my future first.’’

I don’t think a sale ever went through faster. In fact, I didn’t even notice the total amount as I signed the slip.

And then, of course, everything went wrong.

David sensed it first, by a couple of seconds; he looked up sharply, all the ease and humor draining away from him, and his hand closed around mine in an iron grip. He wasn’t letting us be separated again, not this time.

‘‘What is it?’’ I asked, or tried to. I never got to the last word. David pointed to the world beyond the glass windows.

The clouds were thickening so fast overhead that it looked like special effects from the most expensive disaster movie ever made.

I turned my focus out to sea, out to that calm and tranquil sea. There were no hurricanes brewing there, only the normal cycle of thunderstorms that needed no Warden regulation.

But someone was tampering with the clouds, forcing energy into a stable system—taking a standard garden-variety thunderstorm, which hadn’t even really been threatening rain until later, and packing it with energy until it was a mesocyclone. I’d seen it done, but never this fast, never with so little to work with. The Sentinels were creating an emergency, and doing it so quickly that it made my whole body shiver with the corona effect of the power. Lightning ripped through the sky, blue-white and purple, and struck three times that I could see, blowing up transformers, destroying a metal light pole, stabbing into the lightning at-tractors on a building only two blocks away.

People began to react nervously.

Outside the windows, I saw the classic formation take shape: anvil cloud, hard and gray as lead; cloud striations below, showing the shredding forces at work; wall cloud pushing rapidly toward us, forming and hardening as it came.

An occlusion downdraft was taking shape, leading the forces into a spinning, fatal vortex.

I felt the forces coalescing, and turned my face upward as I rose into the aetheric.

Yep. Tornado. Right over the store.

David was right with me. We rose up into the boilingstorm of opposing forces. I couldn’t see the perpetrator; there was too much confusion, too much random energy masking his presence, but I sensed he was here, watching. Waiting.

The tornado was a trap, but it was one I couldn’t help but spring. It was dipping down out of the clouds, heading for the crowded street. Heading for the bridal store.

Heading for
my dress
.

I took a deep breath, tightened my grip on David’s hand, and prepared for battle.

‘‘I’m with you,’’ he said. ‘‘I’ll give you what I can.’’ I understood, in that second, that the Mother had cut his circuits again, stranded him from the core of his power. He had whatever was in him, and no more.

Just as I did.
Why was she on the side of the Sentinels?
Or maybe it was simpler than that: Maybe she didn’t want the Djinn interfering in our internal struggles anymore.

I could understand that. It did seem a massive waste of resources.

‘‘Watch our backs,’’ I told him, and focused on the glittering, complex, deadly snake of the tornado that was dropping toward us with the speed of a freight train.

It wasn’t the classic rope-style tornado; this one was a brutal wedge of power. That was not necessarily a bad thing; the intensity of a tornado doesn’t depend on its width. But if it was an F4 or F5, being a wedge tornado would make things that much worse.

Luckily, it wasn’t quite that bad. An F2 at most, with wind speeds of about a hundred miles per hour— not bad, and not nearly as bad as it could have been. The Sentinels know how to make it look nasty, but that wasn’t the same thing as truly building it right in the first place. I needed to reduce the core temperatures inside of the vortex, and I needed to do it fast. But as I reached out for it, the Sentinels sprang the trap.

A
second
tornado—this one a slender rope, and definitely built to the most exacting specifications— shot down out of the cloud beside the wedge I was focused on, and this one packed deadly, razor-edged debris. Metal, all kinds of metal junk and scraps. It was also spinning at a rate of more than two hundred miles per hour: F4.

One of them was going to hit. I could handle only one at a time, and I had no choice but to go for the worst. I abandoned the wedge and went for the rope, ripping into it with desperate force, drawing heat out of it as quickly as I could.

Not fast enough. I heard it hit the roof, which shuddered and groaned, and then heard the rising roar of the wind as it drilled through steel and wood and concrete.

People were screaming, running, looking for cover. They wouldn’t find it, not in the store. ‘‘Outside!’’ I grabbed my salesclerk, who’d thrown my dress to one side, and pushed her to the door. David was grabbing everyone else he could find and shoving them that way as well. ‘‘Run! Get to cover! Go
now
!’’

I’d succeeded in weakening the vortex down to an F2, but just then, the slower-moving wedge slammed down like a clenched fist, and the whole building shivered and began to come apart.

The two tornadoes, too close together for even the Sentinels to fully control, began to merge and feed off each other. The metal inside the smaller vortex spread out wider, slashing and cutting like the edges of knives as it whirled. Nobody had been hit yet, but they would be.

This had to stop. Now.

‘‘David!’’ I screamed his name over the roar of the wind as the roof ripped off, disintegrated into a million tiny fragments of blowing chaos, and I felt the eye of the storm focus directly on me.

David put his arms around me from behind, anchoring me, and we faced it together. The power that flowed out of him was rich and strong, golden. It was easy to direct, capable of the finest touch and control.

Nobody did tornadoes better than me. I knew that without conceit; it was a gift, and one I’d had since childhood. For all their fury and force, they were fragile constructs, held together by finite forces. Like everything else, they had keystones. Change that one point, you could change everything.

This tornado’s keystone was hard to find, hard to get my hands around, but once I found the specific area I needed to affect, I poured David’s power into it, added my own, and the weight of oxygen and nitrogen cooled, slowing the tornado’s spin, shattering the forces that held it in form.

It blew apart in a confusion of winds, pelting down debris like deadly, sharp rain. I yelped and ducked, and David formed a shield above us. Good thing he did. The Sentinels took one last, spiteful swipe at me, arrowing a metal girder directly for me, but it met the shield and bounced off . . . and slammed into the bag that held my dress, shredding plastic and fabric as the girder was driven a foot into the concrete below.

I stayed where I was, sucking in deep breaths, until it was over and the rain started to fall in a drenching downpour.

I’d just destroyed a second bridal shop.

David helped me up. He was keeping the rain off— a minor task, after the shield that had saved us—and I felt the subtle change in him as the Mother opened the flow again, connecting him back to his power base. His whole body brightened, as well as the light in his eyes.

‘‘Did you see them?’’ he asked. I shook my head, frustrated and furious. ‘‘I think I might have.’’

‘‘Still in Key West?’’

‘‘No. Kissimmee. But they’re staying close. Maybe they can’t do this at too great a distance.’’ He looked around, an odd expression on his face. ‘‘Nobody hurt. They’ll call it a miracle.’’

I glared at the ruined wedding dress. ‘‘Some miracle,’’ I said. ‘‘My credit card charge already went through.’’

I checked in with Lewis. He’d gotten word from Rahel that Kevin had been approached by the Sentinels, but it was early days; they were checking him out pretty thoroughly, asking around. No problems there. I doubted anybody had unreserved approval for Kevin; he simply didn’t invite people to like him. He was respected because he was strong, not because he was in any way a team player.

The Sentinels wouldn’t find anything that would put them off. Kevin was an arrogant little shit most of the time, and he could give drug dealers lessons in insensitivity. I’d seen him do murder. Granted, it had been well-deserved murder, but his reaction to it had been disturbingly vacant.

Still, Lewis believed the kid was redeemable, and I had to agree. I’d seen firsthand the horror his stepmother had made out of his life, and while I couldn’t really
like
him, I felt for him.

If Kevin held it together, I was going to owe him big-time.

Not a pleasant thought, really.

My sundress, amazingly, had survived the freak tornado incident, and my shoes weren’t too bad. My hair had a bit of a windblown do, but all in all, I’d gotten off lucky for a change.

Or so I thought.

When David and I emerged from the store and waved away the unnecessary medical attention, we headed back toward where we’d left the car, several blocks away. David was doing some subtle work to keep the rain off, so we were relatively dry. The effect became less subtle when a van pulled up at the curb next to us, launching a wave of dirty water waist-high; it hit David’s shield and rolled off, leaving us dry.

Then I saw the camera in the window, and realized that it was a news van.

‘‘Oh
crap,
’’ I breathed. ‘‘Drop the shield. Drop it
now
!’’

Too late, I realized. They couldn’t have missed it. In fact, they’d counted on it, and they’d gotten it on tape.

I saw it in the triumphant smirk on the reporter’s face as the van door slid open. ‘‘Hi, Ms. Baldwin,’’ she said. ‘‘Want to talk to us about why you’re once again at the scene of a disaster? And how exactly you are staying dry in the middle of a thunderstorm? Who’s your friend?’’ She gave David a special twice-over, which burned me even more than the fact I’d been caught on tape. ‘‘What exactly happened back there?’’

I realized I was clenching my fists, and tried to relax. The rain was plastering my hair to my face, and my dress was becoming a soggy, ill-fitting mess. I tried not to think about the shoes. ‘‘Tornado,’’ I said briefly. ‘‘At least, that’s what they tell me.’’ I took David’s arm and pulled him along.

‘‘Reporters?’’ he whispered.

‘‘Vultures. Keep going, no matter what. They can smell fear.’’

His voice turned warm with amusement. ‘‘Not really afraid of reporters, given what just happened, but I’ll keep that in mind.’’