Heat Stroke

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

Heat Stroke

 

A
ROC
Book / published by arrangement with the author

 

All rights reserved.

Copyright ©
2004
by
Roxanne Longstreet Conrad

This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

For information address:

The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

 

The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is
http://www.penguinputnam.com

 

ISBN: 1-101-13396-1

 

A
ROC
BOOK®

ROC
Books first published by The ROC Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

ROC
and the “
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” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

The author wishes to thank:

Cat Conrad

Joanne Madge

P.N. Elrod

Kelley Walters

Annie Wortham

Leah Rosenthal

Sharon Sams

Glenn Rogers

Michael Shanks

Joe Bonamassa

Kenny Kramme

Eric Czar

ORAC

SDJ

Lucienne Diver

Laura Anne Gilman

. . . not that she personally knows all of them.

But they're deserving of gratitude anyway.

Said the Lion to the Lioness—“When you are amber dust—

No more a raging fire like the heat of the Sun (No liking but all lust)—

Remember still the flowering of the amber blood and bone,

The rippling of bright muscles like a sea, Remember the rose-prickles of bright paws Though we shall mate no more

Till the fire of that sun the heart and the moon-cold bone are one.”

 

Said the Skeleton lying upon the sands of Time—

“The great gold planet that is the mourning heat of the Sun

Is greater than all gold, more powerful

Than the tawny body of a Lion that fire consumes

Like all that grows or leaps . . . so is the heart

 

More powerful than all dust. Once I was Hercules

Or Samson, strong as the pillars of the seas:

But the flames of the heart consumed me, and the mind

Is but a foolish wind.”

 

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

—Edith Sitwell, “Heart and Mind”

PREVIOUSLY . . .

ONE

TWO

THREE

EPILOGUE

PREVIOUSLY . . .

My name is Joanne Baldwin, and I used to control the weather.

No, really. I was a member of the Weather Wardens. You probably aren't personally acquainted with them, but they keep you from getting fried by lightning (mostly), swept away by floods (sometimes), killed by tornadoes (occasionally). We try to do all that stuff. Sometimes we even succeed.

But I ran into something bad—something that threatened to destroy me from the inside out—and when the Wardens turned against me too, I ran for my life. I spent a memorable week looking for a man named Lewis Levander Orwell, who I thought just might be able to save my life. I picked up a friend named David along the way, who turned out to be way more then he seemed.

I found Lewis. It didn't help. I died.

Luckily for me, David didn't let it end there. But now I'm still on the run—only now I'm one of
them
. A Djinn.

At least I still have a really fast car. . . .

O
NE

There was a storm brewing over Church Falls, Oklahoma. Blue-black clouds, churning and boiling in lazy slow motion, stitched through with lightning the color of butane flames. It had a certain instinctual menace, but it was really just a baby, all attitude and no experience. I watched it on the aetheric plane as the rain inside of it was tossed violently up into the mesosphere, frozen by the extreme cold, fell back down to gather more moisture on the way. Rinse and repeat. The classic recipe for hail.

Circular motion inside the thing. It was more of a feeling I had than anything I could see, but I didn't doubt it for a second; after years of overseeing the weather, I vibrated on frequencies that didn't require seeing to believe.

I gathered power around me like a glittering warm cloak, and reached out for—

“Stop.”

My power slammed into an invisible wall and bounced off. I yelped, dropped back into human reality with a heavy
thud
and realized I'd almost driven Mona off the road. Mona was a 1997 Dodge Viper
GTS, midnight blue, and I was driving her well the hell in excess of the speed limit, which was just the way I liked it. I controlled the swerve, glanced down at the speedometer and edged another five miles an hour out of the accelerator. Mona's purr changed to an interested, low-throated growl.

“Don't
ever
do that when I'm breaking a century on the interstate,” I snapped at the guy who'd put up that wall I'd just slammed into. “And jeez, sensitive much? I was just giving things a little push. For the better.”

The guy's name was David. He settled himself more comfortably against the passenger side window, and said without opening his eyes, “You're meddling. You got bored.”

“Well, yeah.” Because driving in Oklahoma is not exactly the world's most exciting occupation. “And?”

“And you can't do that anymore.”
That
meaning adjust the weather to suit myself, apparently.

“Why not?”

His lips twitched and pressed a smile into submission. “Because you'll attract attention.”

“And the fact I'm barreling down the freeway at over a hundred . . . ?”

“You know what I mean. And by the way, you should slow down.”

I sighed. “You're kidding me. This is coasting. This is little old lady speed.”

“NASCAR drivers would have heart attacks. Slow down before we get a ticket.”

“Chicken.”

“Yes,” he agreed solemnly. “You frighten me.”

I downshifted, slipped Mona in behind an
eighteen-wheeler grinding hell-for-leather east toward Okmulgee and parts beyond, and watched the RPMs fall. Mona grumbled. She didn't like speed limits. Neither did I. Hell, the truth is that I'd never met any kind of limit I liked. Back in the good old times before, well, yesterday, when my name was still Joanne Baldwin and I was human, I'd been a Weather Warden. A card-carrying member of the Wardens Association, the international brotherhood of people in charge of keeping Mother Nature from exterminating the human race. I'd been in the business of controlling wind, waves, and storms. Being an adrenaline junkie goes with the territory.

The fact that I was
still
an adrenaline junkie was surprising, because strictly speaking, I no longer had a real human body, or real human adrenaline to go with it. So how did it work that I still felt all the same human impulses as before? I didn't want to think about it too much, but I kept coming back to the fact that I'd
died
. Last mortal thing I remembered, I'd been a battleground for two demons tearing me apart, and then I'd—metaphorically speaking—opened my eyes on a whole new world, with whole new rules. Because David had made me a Djinn. You know, Arabian Nights, lamp, granter of wishes? That kind. Only I wasn't imprisoned in a lamp, or (more appropriately) a bottle; I was free-range. Masterless.

Cool, but scary. Masterless, I was vulnerable, and I knew it.

“Hey,” I said out loud, and glanced away from the road to look at my traveling companion. Dear God, he was gorgeous. When I'd first met him he'd been masquerading as a regular guy, but even then
he'd been damn skippy fine. In what I'd come to realize was his natural Djinn form, he was damn skippy fine to the power of ten. Soft auburn hair worn just a little too long for the current military-short styles. Eyes like molten bronze. Warm golden skin that stretched velvet soft over a strong chest, perfectly sculpted biceps, a flat stomach . . . My hands had a Braille memory that made me warm and melty inside.

Without opening those magical eyes, he asked, “Hey, what?” I'd forgotten I'd said anything. I scrambled to drag my brain back to more intellectual pursuits.

“Still waiting for a plan, if it doesn't disturb your beauty sleep.” I kept the tone firmly in the bitchy range, because if I wasn't careful I might start with a whole breathless I-don't-deserve-you routine, and that would cost me cool points. “We're still heading east, by the way.”

“Fine,” he said, and adjusted his leaning position slightly to get more comfortable against the window glass. “Just keep driving. Less than warp speed, if you can manage it.”

“Warp speed? Great. A
Trek
fan.” Not that I was surprised. Djinn seemed to delight in pop culture, so far as I could tell. “Okay. Fine. I'll drive boring.”

I glanced back at the road—good thing, I was seriously over the line and into head-on-collision territory—and steered back straight again before I checked the fuel gauge. Which brought up another point. “Can I stop for gas?”

“You don't need to.”

“Um, this is a Viper, not a zillion-miles-to-the-gallon Earth Car. Believe me, we'll need to. Soon.”

David extended one finger—still without cracking an eyelid—and pointed at the dial. I watched the needle climb, peg out at full, and quiver. “Won't,” he said.

“O-kay,” I said. “East. Right. Until when?”

“Until I think it's safe to stop.”

“You know, a little information in this partnership would really help make it, oh, say, a partnership.”

His lips twitched away from a smile, and his voice dipped down into octaves that resonated in deep, liquid areas of my body. “Are we partners?”

Dangerous territory. I wasn't sure what we were, exactly, and I wasn't sure I wanted him to tell me. He'd saved me; he'd taken the human part of me that had survived an attack by two demons, and transformed it into a Djinn. I hoped that didn't make him my father. Talk about your Freudian issues. “Okay, genius, I don't know. You define it. What are we?”

He sighed. “I'd rather sleep than get into this right now.”

I sighed right back. “You know, I'm a little freaked out, here. Dead, resurrected, got all these new sensations—talking would be good for me.”

“What kind of new sensations?” he asked. His voice was low, warm, gentle—ah, sensations. I was having them, all right. Loads of them.

I cleared my throat. “First of all, things don't look right.”

“Define right.”

“The way they—”

“—used to look,” he finished for me. “You've got different eyes now, Joanne. You can choose how to look at things. It's not just light on nerves anymore.”

“Well, it's too—bright.” Understatement. The sun glared in through the polarized windows and shimmered like silk—it had a liquid quality to it, a real weight. “And I see way too much. Too far.”

Everything had . . . dimensions. Saturated colors, and a peculiar kind of
history
—I could sense where things had been, how long ago, where they'd come from, how they'd been made. A frightening blitz of knowledge. I was trying to shut it down, but it kept leaping up whenever I noticed something new. Like the gas gauge. Watching that quivering indicator, I knew it had been stamped out in a factory in Malaysia. I knew the hands of the person who'd last touched it. I had the queasy feeling that if I wanted to, I could follow his story all the way back through the line of his ancestors. Hell, I could trace the plastic back to the dinosaurs that had died in the tar pit to give petroleum its start.

David said, “All you have to do is focus.”

I controlled a flash of temper. “Focus? That's your advice? News flash, Obi-Wan, you kinda suck at it.”

“Do not.” He opened his eyes, and they were autumn brown, human, and very tired. “Give me your hand.”

I took it off the gear shift and held it out. He wrapped warm fingers over mine, and something hot as sunlight flashed through me.

The horizon adjusted itself. Sunlight faded to
normal brightness. The edges and dimensions and weight of things went back to human proportions.

“There.” He sounded even more tired, this time. “Just keep driving.”

He let go of my hand. I wrapped it back around the gearshift for comfort and thought of a thousand questions, things like
Why am I still breathing
and
If I don't have a heart, why is it pumping so hard
and
Why me? Why save me?

I wasn't sure I was ready for any of those answers, even if David had the energy to tell me. I wasn't ready for anything more than the familiar, bone-deep throb of Mona's tires on the road, and the rush of the Viper running eagerly toward the horizon.

I had another question I didn't want to ask, but it slipped out anyway. “We're in trouble, aren't we?”

This time, he did smile. Full, dark, and dangerous. “Figured that out, did you?”

“People say I'm smart.”

“I hope they say you're lucky, too.”

“Must be,” I murmured. “How else do I explain you?”

Brown eyes opened, studied me for a few seconds, then drifted shut again. He said, just as softly, “Let's pray you never have to.”

 

The car didn't need gas, and I discovered that I didn't need sleep—at least not for more than twenty-four hours. We blew through Tulsa, hit I-70 toward Chicago, bypassed Columbus, and eventually ended up on a turnpike in New Jersey. David slept. I drove. I was a little worried about mortal things like cop cars and tollbooths, but David kept us out of sight
and out of mind. We occupied space, but to all intents and purposes, we were invisible.

Which was not such an advantage, I discovered, when you get into heavy commuter traffic. After about a dozen near misses, I pulled Mona over to the side of the road, stretched, and clicked off the engine. Metal ticked and popped—Mona wasn't any kind of magical construct, she was just a plain old production car. Okay, the fastest production car ever made, with a V10, 7990 cubic centimeters, 6000 RPM, top speed of over 260 miles per hour. But not magic. And I'd been pushing her hard.

I rolled down the window, sucked in a breath of New Jersey air laden with an oily taste of exhaust, and watched the sun come up over the trees. There was something magical about
that,
all right—the second morning of my new life. And the sun was beautiful. A vivid golden fire in the sky, trailing rays across an intense, empty blue. No clouds. I could feel the potential for clouds up there—dust particles and pollution hanging lazily in the air, positive and negative charges constantly shoving and jostling for position. Once the conditions came together, those dust particles would get similar charges and start attracting microscopic drops of moisture. Like calls to like. Moisture thickens, droplets form, clouds mass. Once the droplets get too heavy to stay airborne, they fall. Simple physics. And yet there was something seductive and magical about it, too, as magical as the idea that chemical compounds grow into human beings who walk and talk and dream.

I watched a commercial jet embroider the clear blue sky, heading west, and stretched my senses out.
There wasn't any limit to what I could know, if I wanted . . . I could touch the plane, the cold silver skin, the people inside with all their annoyances and fears and boredom and secret delights. Two people who didn't know each other were both thinking about joining the mile high club. I wished them luck in finding each other.

I sucked in another breath and stretched—my human-feeling body still liked the sensation, even though it wasn't tired, wasn't thirsty or hungry or in need of bathroom facilities—and turned to David . . .

Who was awake and watching me. His eyes weren't brown now, they were sun-sparked copper, deep and gold-flecked, entirely inhuman. He was too beautiful to be possible in anything but dreams.

The car shuddered as three eighteen-wheelers blew past and slammed wind gusts into us—a rude reminder that it wasn't a dream, after all. Not that reality was looking all that bad.

“What now?” I asked. I wasn't just asking about driving directions, and David knew it. He reached out and captured my hand, looked down at it, rubbed a thumb light and warm as breath across my knuckles.

“There are some things I need to teach you.”

And there went the perv-cam again, showing me all the different things he probably didn't mean . . .