Gale Force (23 page)

‘‘Shhhhh!’’

The reporter donned a transparent raincoat, complete with a cute little hood to protect her hair, and climbed out of the van. Her camera guy and boom guy came after. The equipment was better protected from the weather than they were. ‘‘Ms. Baldwin, wait! We want to talk to you about the Wardens! Was this the work of the Wardens? If so, why was there so much damage? Weren’t you supposed to contain that kind of thing? Was anyone killed or injured?’’

‘‘No one was hurt,’’ David said. I made a frantic shushing motion and kept him walking. It didn’t matter. They kept pace, and now the camera guy had his portable light glaring on us in the downpour.

‘‘How do you know that? Sir? Sir?’’

‘‘No comment,’’ I snapped, and tried to get between David and the camera. I must not have been as photogenic, because they broke off. I toyed with the idea of sabotaging the equipment, but I had the feeling somehow that was a bad move this time. Then I spotted it: Across the street, another news team was following, photographing separately. They were trying to provoke me into a response.

Great. As if I hadn’t had enough trauma in the past few days to last a lifetime.

‘‘Look, this will be a lot easier on you if you talk to us now, rather than force us to run without your side of the story—’’

‘‘Run it,’’ I said. ‘‘Somehow, I can’t see you guys having a lot of credibility left once everybody asks you what brand of crack you were smoking. Now, leave us alone.’’

They dropped back, mainly because we’d reached the car and were already getting in. I was sure the videographer had a great shot of me getting into the car, looking pissed off; the only thing missing from a humiliating fleeing-the-cameras exposé was me shoving the cameraman or giving him the finger. Not that I wasn’t tempted.

Once we were inside the car, I tried calming, deep breaths. It didn’t really work, but it made me feel as if at least I was making an effort. David wasted no time, exerting a pulse of power to dry out our clothes, hair, and shoes, not to mention the seats, even as he locked the doors in case they decided to try one more time. I hastily got the car in drive and pulled away into traffic, leaving the reporters behind.

I distinctly saw a high five behind me in their van.

‘‘That,’’ I said, ‘‘was not the plan.’’

‘‘What, the tornado? Or the reporters?’’

‘‘Both. Either. Not the plan.’’ I chewed my lip; too late to worry about my lipstick at this point. My carefully applied makeup, not to mention my hairdo, was long gone. ‘‘Right. Enough making like a target for the day. Let’s give the Sentinels some time to chew over their options while we go home and . . .’’

‘‘And?’’

‘‘Do whatever comes naturally.’’

‘‘I can think of a few things that aren’t
quite
that natural. Are they off the table?’’

‘‘Depends.’’ My heart rate was slowly declining from the triple digits, but I still felt jittery. Too many shocks, too close together. ‘‘I think I’ll have to ask for a massage first. I’m a bundle of nerves right now.’’

He put his hand atop mine on the gear shift, and a slow warm pulse moved through my body, steadying me. ‘‘I would like that,’’ he said. ‘‘And if you want to take the phone off the hook and turn off that damn cell phone . . .’’

‘‘We’d have Lewis and a bunch of paratroopers storming the apartment,’’ I said. ‘‘Being out of contact, not really an option right now. You know, since we’re bait.’’

He sighed. ‘‘Yes. Bait.’’ Beat. ‘‘I’m sorry about the dress. You seemed very happy.’’

‘‘Yes.’’ I bit my lip, unreasonably distressed, and was glad he sent another pulse of energy through my nerves to counteract my ridiculously out-of-proportion reactions. ‘‘It was gorgeous. Well, I’m sure I’ll find another one.’’ Maybe.

‘‘We can look tomorrow.’’

I couldn’t help it; I laughed. He’d said it in all seriousness, as if our little outing hadn’t netted a significant and near-fatal attack. As if that was just par for the course, an everyday hazard of going to the store.

‘‘Yes,’’ I said, when I was able to speak around the chuckles. ‘‘Oh, absolutely. Shopping tomorrow. But maybe we should try to pick someplace easier on bystanders. ’’

He nodded soberly. ‘‘Internet.’’

‘‘Internet.’’

‘‘I hear there’s pornography on the Internet.’’

‘‘Filthy pervert.’’

His eyebrows quirked, then settled into a severe line. ‘‘I take exception. I’m quite clean, actually.’’

‘‘Too bad. I like a scruffy man.’’

‘‘I can be scruffy.’’ His tone changed. ‘‘Pull over.’’

‘‘What?’’

‘‘Pull over
now
.’’

Oh. Not part of the banter, then. I looked in the rearview mirror but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Still, David wasn’t exactly one to overreact. I took the next left and found a shopping center parking space, right between a nail salon and a Spanish-language video rental store. ‘‘What is it?’’

‘‘We’re being followed,’’ David said.

‘‘I didn’t see—’’

‘‘By a Djinn.’’ He was already opening his door. ‘‘Stay here.’’

‘‘David! No, you can’t—’’ I was having flashbacks to the horrible scene in my apartment, David on his knees and helpless at the hands of his fellow Djinn. I didn’t trust any of them now, certainly not any of them who felt compelled to follow us in secret.

‘‘I have to.’’ No point in arguing, because I’d be arguing with the rain; he was already gone, and even though I hurriedly scrambled out after, I saw no trace of him.

And then I did, in the deep shadows at the side of the building. David was in conversation with a very tall man—Djinn—with hair too long to stand up in the nearly pompadour style he was wearing. Thin, intense, and entirely unfamiliar to me. He was wearing retro clothes, circa the mid-1950s, but he didn’t seem at all
Father Knows Best
to me; he radiated an unfocused kind of don’t-mess-with-me menace.

The Djinn’s gaze fixed on me, and I saw his eyes flare into a bright crimson. He bent his head and said something else to David, and blew apart into mist and was gone.

David came back in no particular hurry, hands in his pants pockets, lost in thought.

We both got back into the car at the same time, and I dried us off, a flick of power that felt satisfyingly productive for a change. He hardly noticed.

‘‘Who was that?’’ I asked. David stirred, glanced at me, and looked surprised.

‘‘Roy,’’ he said.

‘‘Who’s Roy?’’

‘‘One of mine,’’ he said. ‘‘You don’t need to have him over for drinks. He’s not polite company. In fact, I’d rather you never met him. But he’s very useful for some things.’’

‘‘Such as?’’

‘‘Such as keeping an eye on Kevin and Rahel.’’ He cocked an eyebrow at my expression. ‘‘You didn’t seriously think I would let them do this without some kind of backup plan?’’

Oh. Actually, I’d thought
Rahel
was the backup plan, but I could see his point. ‘‘So what did Roy have to say?’’

‘‘Kevin was taken from his apartment a half hour ago, along with Rahel disguised as Cherise. It was efficient. He fought, but he was contained with a minimum of effort.’’

If you knew Kevin, this was ominously impressive. ‘‘Sentinels?’’

‘‘I can’t think of anyone else with the strength and the motivation,’’ David said. ‘‘The thing is, they did this
while
they were hitting us. Which implies—’’

‘‘A whole lot of organization,’’ I finished. ‘‘Not to mention power to burn.’’

We looked at each other for a long moment, and I finally started up the car again. ‘‘It’s too late to change our minds, isn’t it?’’

‘‘I’m afraid so. The game’s in motion now, and we have to follow the play. I dispatched Roy to follow at a safe distance; he should report back when Kevin and Cherise reach a final destination. I don’t think they’ll be taken far.’’

‘‘Meanwhile?’’

He reached out and traced his thumb over my lips. ‘‘Meanwhile, we should find a place to stay that’s far from innocent bystanders, and be prepared for another attack. Any ideas?’’

‘‘Yep.’’ I put the Mustang in gear and pulled out of the parking lot, merging with the rain and traffic. ‘‘But you’re not going to like it.’’

I’d been right, and wrong. David wasn’t wild about the beach house—which belonged to the Wardens, and was normally used to host visiting dignitaries— because it was long on ocean views and short on actual security. He also wasn’t crazy about staying in a location where most of the Wardens would guess we’d go, but I wanted to continue to provide some kind of attractive target for the Sentinels. Anything to give Kevin time.

At least here, the beach was private, we were nowhere close to neighbors, and if the Sentinels decided to lower the boom on us, they’d do a minimum of collateral damage.

The rain stopped about the time I pulled up in the private drive, opened the massive metal gates with a pulse of Fire Warden power, and drove inside. The entrance was heavily landscaped, mainly with palms and leafy bushes to conceal the grounds from prying eyes. It looked like the sort of place a midlevel, once-all-powerful Hollywood player would stay to get away from it all.

I made sure the gates shut behind us, and followed the winding narrow road around the curves until the white beach house emerged at the end. It was a neat little bungalow, big enough for a few people to stay out of each other’s way, but not a place for massive entertainments unless you wanted to get full-body contact. I’d last been here back in my former boss Bad Bob Biringanine’s time; he’d used it to house visitors to the Florida territory, and it was, in fact, the very place he’d performed his historic act of heroism in shaving vital strength out of Hurricane Andrew. If he hadn’t, I doubted most of the state would have survived its landfall.

I hadn’t thought of Bad Bob in a long time, but it seemed like his ghost walked over my grave at that moment; I almost
felt
his presence, strong and astringent, charming and bad tempered. Corrupt, but hiding it well. Of all the things I couldn’t forgive Bad Bob for—and one of them had led to massive damages, once upon a time—I thought the worst was that he’d known what Kevin’s stepmother was, what kind of perversions she enjoyed, and he’d allowed her to continue.

Worst of all, he’d given her David to play with as her own personal sex toy.

David sat in silence, looking at the beach house. If I hadn’t known him so well, I’d have thought he had no reaction at all. I reached over and took his hand, and his gaze shifted toward mine.

‘‘I know,’’ I said. ‘‘I’m sorry, it’s the best place.

All right?’’

‘‘I’m fine,’’ he said. He wasn’t, but he also wasn’t ready to let me see that wound. He was all courtesy, opening my car door for me, handing me out, walking me up the steps to the front door. ‘‘Keys?’’

It didn’t need one. I extended my hand, the one with the Warden symbol invisibly etched into the skin, and heard the lock click over. I opened the door, and the smell of the place washed over me, bringing with it another rush of memories as I stepped inside. Bad Bob hadn’t been gone long enough for his imprint to completely fade from this place; I swore I smelled the ghost of his cigar smoke, before the more powerful odor of musty carpeting and furniture took over. The house needed a full-scale cleaning. Something to keep me busy, I supposed.

David hadn’t followed me inside. I turned toward him and saw that he’d put out a palm, which was spread flat against an invisible barrier. As I watched, he moved his hand from side to side. I could see his skin flattening as it came into contact with . . . something.

‘‘What is it?’’ I moved back to the threshold and waved my hand through the air. No barrier. I could even make contact with David’s hands, but I couldn’t pull him through. ‘‘What the hell . . . ?’’

‘‘Wards,’’ he said. ‘‘Set to keep Djinn out. You’ll have to take them down before I can come inside.’’

Wards—magical boundaries—were an exclusive specialty of Earth Wardens, and they were usually fiendishly difficult to unravel. They could be set to exclude anything the Warden designed it to exclude— Djinn, in this case, but I’d seen them engineered to hold out humans, and even specific individuals.

I was, theoretically, an Earth Warden, but I hadn’t exactly been trained in the finer points. It was on the to-do list, but from all that I understood, breaking wards was definitely a graduate-level course. Maybe even postdoctoral. ‘‘Any idea who put this up?’’ I asked. Not Bad Bob, at least; he was purely and completely a Weather Warden. But he’d had a lot of friends, and most of them had been . . . questionable.

‘‘Yes, but it won’t do you any good. He’s dead. Bad Bob had me kill him.’’

The matter-of-fact way that David said it made me freeze for a second, and not just in the not-moving sense. ‘‘You . . . killed for him.’’

‘‘I had no choice at the time.’’

‘‘I know that. I just didn’t know—’’ I shook my head. ‘‘I’m so sorry, David. He had no right.’’

David said nothing to that; he clearly wanted to drop the subject, and I obliged by focusing on the structure of the wards holding him outside the door. They were strongly made, and if they’d survived the death of their maker, they were independently fueled by some source. If I could locate the source, I could disable the wards—like pulling the battery. Problem was, a good Earth Warden (and this one had been very, very good) could imbue nearly anything with aetheric energy and set it on a slow, steady discharge. It could be something as innocuous as a teacup hidden in the back of the pantry, or as obvious as a big switch labeled TURN OFF WARDS HERE.

I systematically examined the house and its contents on the aetheric, looking for any telltale sparks, but nothing became obvious. David was unable to give me any pointers; the Earth Warden who’d created the wards had also done a damn fine job of erasing any tracks the Djinn could use to identify the control mechanism.