Windfall (2 page)

I was standing in a kiddie pool with yellow rubber duckies on it. Most of the water made it in. I gasped and looked surprised, which wasn't hard; even when you expect it, it's tough not to be surprised by the idea that someone will actually
do
a thing like this to you.

Or that you will not kill them for it.

The anchors and Marvin laughed like lunatics. I kept smiling, took my rain hat off, and said, “Well, that's the weather in Florida, folks, just when you least expect it . . .”

And they hit me with the last bucket. Which they
hadn't
warned me about.

“Oh, boy, sorry about that, Weather Girl!” Marvin whooped, and came back into frame as I shoved my dripping hair back and tried to keep on smiling. “Guess we're in for a few showers tomorrow, eh?”

“Seventy percent chance,” I gritted out. It wasn't quite so perky as I'd planned.

“So, moms, pack those umbrellas and raincoats for the kids in the morning! Joanne, it's time for our weather lesson of the day: Can you tell our viewers the difference between weather and climate?”

A
climate
is the
weather
in an area averaged over a long period of time, you moron.
I thought it. I didn't say it. I kept smiling blankly at him as I asked, “I don't know, Marvin, what
is
the difference?” Because I was, after all, the straight woman, and this was penance for some horrible crime I'd committed in a previous life. As Genghis Khan, apparently.

He looked straight into the camera with his most serious expression and said, “You can't
weather
a tree, but you can
climate
.”

I stared at him for about two seconds too long for television etiquette, then turned my smile back on like a porch light and said to the camera, “We'll be back tomorrow morning with more fun weather facts, kids!”

Marvin waved. I waved. The red light went out. Kurt and Janie started doing more happychat; they were about to interview a golden retriever, for some bizarre reason. I gave Marvin the kind of look that would have gotten me fired if I'd given it on the air, and threw my wet hair over my shoulder to wring it out like a mop into the ducky pool.

He leaned over to me and, in a whisper, said, “Hey, do you know this one? How is snow white? . . . Pretty damn good, according to the seven dwarves. Ha!”

“Your mike is on,” I said, and watched him do the panic dance. His mike really wasn't, but it was so nice to see him make that face. The golden retriever, confused, woofed at him and lunged; panic ensued, both on and off camera. I stepped out of the wading pool and squelched away, past the grinning stagehands who knew
exactly
what I'd done and wished they'd thought of it first. I stripped off the wet rain slicker, stuffed the hat in the pocket, and escaped from the set and out the sound-baffling door.

Free.

Hard to believe that less than a year ago I'd been a trusted agent of one of the most powerful organizations on Earth, entrusted with the lives and safety of a few million people on a daily basis. Even harder to believe that I'd thrown all that away without looking back, and actually thought that I wouldn't
miss
it.

Normal life? Sucked. I'd become a Warden out of high school, been trained by the elite, spent years mastering the techniques of controlling the physics of wind, water, and weather. I'd been taken care of and coddled and had everything I'd ever wanted, and I hadn't even known how good that was until I had to survive on a poverty-level income and figure out how to make a jar of peanut butter stretch from one payday to the next.

And then there was the magnificence that was my job.

I took a deep breath of recycled, refrigerated air, and went in search of a place to sit down. A couple of staffers were in the hall, chitchatting; they watched me with the kind of bemused expressions people get when they're imagining themselves in your place and thinking,
there but for the grace of God . . .

I ignored them as I squished by in my big, yellow clown boots.

In the makeup room, some kind soul handed me a fluffy white towel. I rubbed vigorously at my soaked hair and sighed when I saw it was starting to curl—nice, rich, black curls. Ringlets. Ugh.

That never used to happen before I died. I'd been a
power
. And then I'd had a brief, wildly strange few days as a wish-granting Djinn, which was both a hell of a lot more and less fun than you'd imagine. And then, I'd been bumped back down to mere mortal.

But in the process my hair had gone from glossy-straight to mega-curly. All my power, and I couldn't even keep a decent hairstyle.

Maybe
power
was an overstatement these days, anyway. I'd turned in my proverbial badge and gun to the Wardens, quit and walked away; technically, that meant that even though I might have some raw ability—a lot of it—I was now a regular citizen. Granted, a regular citizen who could sense and manipulate weather. Not that I
did,
of course. But I
could
. For three months, I'd gone cold turkey, resisting the urge to meddle, and I was pretty proud of myself. Too bad they didn't have a twelve-step program for this sort of thing, and some kind of cool little milestone keychain thing.

The fact that I'd been told by my own former colleagues that if I so much as made one raindrop rub up against another they'd bring me in for a magical lobotomy
might
have had something to do with my amazing strength of will. Some people survived that process just fine, but with someone like me, who had such a high level of that kind of power, getting rid of it all was like radical surgery. There was a significant chance that things would go wrong, and instead of just coming out of it a normal, unmagical human being, I'd come out a drooling zombie, fed and diapered at the Wardens' expense.

They weren't likely to do that to me unless they had to, though. The Wardens needed people they could trust. The organization had taken a lot of hits, from within and without, and they couldn't afford to burn bridges, even as shaky and unreliable a bridge as I represented.

I sighed and rubbed moisture from my hair, eyes closed. There were days—more rather than fewer, now—when I really regretted giving in to the impulse to fling it in their faces and walk away. I was one speed-dial away from having my life back.

But there were reasons why that was a bad idea, principal among them that I would lose the one thing in my life that really
meant
something to me. I'd willingly live in a crappy apartment and wear secondhand clothes and knockoff shoes for David's sake, for as long as it took.

That had to be true and eternal love.

“Yo, Jo.”

I looked up from vigorous toweling and found a steaming cup of coffee in front of my nose. My benefactor and personal deity was a petite little blonde who went by the name of Cherise, impossibly young and pretty, with a beach tan and limpid blue eyes and a fine sense of the inappropriate. I liked her, even though she was just too damn cute to live. Not
everybody
in my new life was a burden. Cherise made the days just a little bit brighter.

“Nice 'do,” she said, poker-faced. “Is poodle-hair coming back in style?”

“Didn't you get the latest
Vogue
? Next big thing. Poofy hair. And Earth Shoes are making a huge comeback.”

“I don't know, honey, you've got sort of a Bride of Frankenstein meets Shirley Temple look going on there. I'd page the emergency stylist on call.”

She, of course, looked perfect. She was wearing a midriff-baring mesh knit top with big yellow smiley faces, and a Day-Glo orange camisole underneath. I envied the outfit, but not the pierced belly button. Low-rise hiphuggers showed off smooth, sculpted curves. The shoes were designer flip-flops with little orange-and-yellow jeweled bees for decoration. She smiled as I took inventory, lifted her arms, and did a perfect runway twirl. “Well? What's my fashion score of the day?”

I considered. “Nine,” I said.

Cherise whipped back around, offended. “
Nine?
You're kidding!”

“I deducted for nonmatching nail polish.” I pointed at her toes. Sure enough, she was wearing yesterday's Lime Glitter Surprise.

“Damn.” She frowned down at her shapely toes, one of which had a little silver ring. “But I got points for the new tat, right?”

I'd missed it during the twirl. “Let me see.”

She turned around and pointed at the small of her back. Just at the point where the hiphuggers met the curve, there was an indigo-fresh . . .

I blinked, because it was a big-eyed alien head. Space aliens.

“Nice,” I said, tilting my head to study it. The skin was still flushed. “Hurt much?”

She shrugged, eyeing a woman in a conservative black pantsuit who'd come in and given her one of those blankly disapproving looks, the kind reserved for girls in hiphuggers, tattoos, and belly button piercings. I saw the demon spark in Cherise's eyes. She pitched her voice to carry. “Well, you know, those tattoos kind of sting. So I did a little coke to take the edge off.”

The woman, who was reaching for a coffee mug, froze. I watched her rigid, French-manicured hand slowly resume its forward motion.

“Smoked or snorted?” I asked. Still the straight woman. Apparently, it was my new karmic path.

“Smoked,” Cherise said blandly. “Best way to get my high on, but then I got all, you know, nervous. So I smoked a couple of spliffs to calm down.”

The woman left, coffee mug clenched in white knuckles.

“HR?” I guessed.

“Yeah, drug testing. I'll be peeing in a cup within the hour. So.” Cherise dropped into the chair next to me as I applied the towel to my feet. “I hear you have an interview for the weekend forecast position.”

“Yeah.” I wiggled my damp toes and felt the drag of clinging hose. “Not that I have a chance in hell, but . . .” But it was more money, and would get me out of the humiliation business, and I wouldn't miss being Joanne Baldwin, Weather Warden quite so fiercely if I had something else I could be proud of doing.

“Oh, bullshit, of course you have a chance. A good one, too. You're credible on camera, honest, and the guys just
love
you. You've seen the website, right?”

I gave her a blank look.

“Your page is going through the roof. Hits out the ass, Jo. Seriously. Not only that, but you should read the emails. Those guys out there think you're damn hot.”

“Really?” Because I didn't think there was anything hot about getting hit in the face with buckets of water. Or standing around in walking shorts, an
I Love Florida!
T-shirt, and oversized sunglasses with zinc oxide all over my nose. Too much to ask that I appear in a decently sexy bikini or anything. I had to look like a total dork, and do it on cheesy, cheap sets standing in rubber ducky pools or piles of play sand.

So not hot, I was.

“No, see, you don't get it. It's the theory of the magic glasses,” she explained. Cherise had a lot of theories, most of them having to do with secret cabals and aliens among us, which made her both cute and kind of scary. I picked up a brush from the makeup table and started working on my hair; Genevieve, a burly Minnesota woman with a perpetual scowl, bowl-cut hair, and no makeup, took the brush away and began working on me with the tender care of a prison-camp-trained beautician. I winced and bit the inside of my lip to keep from complaining.

Cherise continued. “See, you know in the movies how the really hot girl can slip on a pair of horn-rims, and all of a sudden there's this entire silent agreement between all the people in the movie that she's ugly? And then there's the moment when she takes them off, and everybody gasps and says she's gorgeous? Magic glasses.”

I stopped in the act of sipping coffee and braced myself as Genevieve tamed a tangle in my hair by the simple, brutally efficient method of yanking it out by the roots. I swallowed and repeated shakily, “Magic glasses.”

“Like Clark Kent.” Cherise beamed. “The outfits are your magic glasses, only instead of everybody being fooled, they're in on the joke. It's an open secret that you're totally hot under all that geek disguise. It's very meta.”

“You're not originally from here, are you?” I asked.

“Florida?”

“The third planet from the sun.”

She had a cute smile, one side lifting higher than the other and waking a dimple. I saw one of the office guys leaning in the door, mooning at her—not mooning her, mooning
at
her—but then there was always somebody doing that, and Cherise never seemed to notice, much less mind. Oddly, none of her admirers seemed capable of asking her out. Then again, maybe they knew something I didn't.

“How many hits?” I asked.

“Are we doing the drug talk again?”

I eyerolled. “To the web page, geek.”

“Couple hundred thousand so far.”

“You're kidding!”

“Um, not! The IT guys told me all about it.” This was not surprising, because I was sure the IT guys tried to chat her up all the time. What was surprising was that Cherise had actually
listened
.

“What were you doing listening to IT guys?”

She raised an eyebrow. “We were talking about
The X-Files.
You know? Remember? The show with Mulder and Scully and . . .”

Oh, right. Alien invasions. Weird occurrences. This was, strangely, right up Cherise's alley. Hence the tattoo.

The coffee was decent, which was a surprise; generally it was rancid stuff, even early in the morning, because the station wasn't exactly upmarket. Maybe somebody had gotten disgusted and popped for Starbucks again. I consoled myself with sips as Genevieve continued to torture my hair. She was backcombing, or possibly weeding.

“So? You got the rest of the day off?” Cherise asked. I was unable to move my head to nod, so I flapped my hand in a vague
yes
. “Cool. I have to do some voice promo stuff tomorrow, but I'm outta here for the day. Want to go shopping? I figure we can hit the mall around ten.”