Gale Force

Chapter Seven

The rest of the drive was full of the normal annoyances of traffic, construction, and generally idiotic behavior by other motor vehicle operators. David didn’t have to ward off any supernatural assaults, and all that the day required of me was moderately offensive driving to avoid the unexpected lane changes and people failing to check their blind spots.

We rolled into the Warden parking garage, checked through the extensive security procedures, and got our passes for the headquarters floor. It had been remodeled, again; somebody had kindly seen to taking my name off the Memorial Wall, where they’d hastily had it added when I’d been thought to be dead. That was what I thought, anyway, but then I looked closer. They’d really just put some kind of filler into the engraving, a clear indication that they expected me to get clobbered at any time. This way, they could rinse it out and voilà, I’d be memorialized all over again. At a bargain.

I cannot even begin to say how much that bugged me, but I bit my lip and smiled when I noticed, and ignored David’s slightly alarmed look. He was picking up vibrations, all right, and I tried hard to keep myself under better control.

Lewis was waiting for us in the big round conferenceroom, the main one, and there was a crowd with him. Most of them I knew by sight, and some I counted as closer friends. There wasn’t a single unfriendly face, which was something of a relief.

Unless you counted Kevin.

Kevin Prentiss was seated at the table like an equal member of the war council, and next to him sat Cherise. My best friend wasn’t a Warden; she was way cool of course, but controlling the elements wasn’t her bag. So I had to wonder what she was doing in such a high-powered inner circle.

She caught my look, raised her eyebrows, and shrugged. “Don’t ask me,” she said. “Lewis wanted everybody here. Kevin was with me, and he said I could come along.” The subtext was that nobody had wanted to piss Kevin off by demanding his ride-along girlfriend step outside. He was maturing, but I suspected he’d always have more than a little of that sullen, aggressive attitude he was known for. He was at that startling age when the changes come fast and furious; his weedy physique was filling out, developing into a fairly impressive chest under that battered black T-shirt. He avoided my eyes, but then, he always did. We had shared some very unpleasant, even embarrassing moments, and neither of us wanted to get too cozy. It had been a big step for him to spend time with Cherise (and coincidentally with me) on the roof of the hospital; he’d made up for it by ignoring me the rest of the day. I’d returned the favor.

Kevin was here because he was a seriously talented young man. Not trained, not restrained, but . . . talented.

And maybe he cared about me. A little.

I was surprised to recognize that there was a Djinn in the room as well. She sat in the far corner of the room, long, elegant legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, displaying lethally gorgeous shoes. I hadn’t seen Rahel since the earthquake in Fort Lauderdale, so it struck me how much better she was looking these days. She’d taken a beating at the hands of a Demon, not too long ago; for a while, we’d been worried she wouldn’t recover.

When she turned her head slightly, I could see the scars on the right side of her sharp-featured face— etched grooves, as if she’d been clawed. I nodded to her. She inclined her head, and her thousands of tiny black braids slithered over her shoulders with a dark rustling sound like old paper on stone.

She was sticking with purple again for her outfit. It looked good on her.

Lewis got me and David seated at the table, and didn’t waste any more time. He hit a control inset in the table, and a projector beamed a picture onto a screen at the far end of the room. It was grainy surveillance video, and it took me a few seconds to recognize that it was my parking lot, in front of my apartment. I started to ask what was going on, but then I got my answer . . . a delivery person got out of a dark-colored panel van and jogged up the steps toward the second floor. Lewis froze the picture. “Ring any bells?” he asked me. I studied the face of the man on the screen, but it was an awful picture. I shook my head. Lewis released the freeze frame, and I watched the deliveryman disappear into the hallway with a familiar-looking box in his hands. When he came back ten seconds later, no box. Surveillance showed him getting into his van and driving away. It was the kind of thing that happened a dozen times a day at any apartment complex, nothing that would alert anyone to potential trouble. “License plates?” I asked.

“Covered with mud,” said one of the Power Rangers down the table—Sasha, his name was, a nice-looking guy with a ready smile. I called him a Power Ranger because he worked with Marion Bearheart, and was part of the unofficial police force of the Wardens. When someone broke the codes, Sasha and those like him took it on. I didn’t much care for the system—it bothered me to have so much power in the hands of so few—but most of them were honest. More of them were honest than the rank and file of the Wardens, to be fair. “We’ve been in contact with every delivery service. None of them had drop-offs at your apartment that day.”

“Which leaves us with . . . ?” Lewis asked. For reply, Sasha appropriated the controls, bringing up another video on the screen. This one was better defined, but at an odd angle. One of the traffic cameras, maybe.

“We tracked the delivery van back, but we lost it in the warehouse district. They were damn careful. It took hours to trace them this far, but I don’t think we’ll get much farther, not with these methods. If they’re smart—and I think they are—they’d have had Earth Wardens ready to reduce the entire truck to slag and spare parts in a few minutes.” Sasha blanked the screen. “If I had to guess, I’d say we ought to be looking for warehouses rented out in the last two months.”

“Put somebody on it,” Lewis said.

Sasha folded his arms and sat back with a cocky smile. “Already done.”

Lewis turned his attention to another Earth Warden, young but sharp. Heather something or other; I’d heard good things. “What about the package itself?” Lewis asked her.

Heather ducked her head shyly and studied her interlaced fingers. “Still analyzing,” she said, so softly I could hardly hear her. “But there is definitely a high decay rate to what’s inside. It’s dangerous, most certainly.”

“But not a bomb.”

She looked up at him, then at us, wide-eyed. “Oh yes,” she said. “It had a delivery system and a trigger. If you’d opened the package, it would have gone off and spread the contents.”

“And the contents are . . . ?” David asked, in that cool, controlled voice so at odds with the look in his eyes.

“Antimatter,” Heather said. “Antimatter colliding with any kind of matter will produce a violently energetic reaction. The by-products are—”

“There was a trigger?” I asked. “What kind of trigger?”

Her gaze slid away from mine, toward Lewis, and then back, as if she’d been seeking approval. “It looked as if it was adapted from a more traditional bomb-making approach. Timer and a small charge designed to crack the shell holding in the antimatter, spilling it out into the world.”

“Not a skill you pick up at your local community college,” Paul grunted.

“Unfortunately, it’s not exactly rare, either. And with the Internet so helpfully offering tutorials for this kind of thing, it will be hard to track.”

“The paper?” Lewis got us back on track. “The wrapping, the card?”

Heather brightened immediately. “That’s a possibility, ” she said. “If the Djinn can help us, we may be able to trace the card’s history back and find out who came in contact with it.”

But that experiment failed. I could have told them it would. When they brought in the card—in a heavily shielded container, since it was saturated with radiation—and presented it to Rahel, she just shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “I see nothing at all.”

It was the same with David, and I could see his frustration and growing alarm. He’d dismissed all this at first, but there were too many of us now, and we were too credible. The Djinn had to believe us—but believing us meant accepting half a dozen impossible things. Heather, disheartened, reclaimed the thing and began to have it carted back to the lab for more tests.

I stopped her. “Can I see it?” I asked. She looked surprised. “Well, it was addressed to me. It stands to reason that I might see something others don’t.”

I doubted she bought that theory, but I really did want to see it. It had been meant for me. So had the bomb—for me and David. I supposed the first explosion would have killed me, and the antimatter would have done the job for David. . . .

Heather handed me a pair of protective gloves, draped a heavy shielding vest around my chest, and put a protective hood on me before she allowed me to reach into the container and pull out the card. It was, as Lewis had told me, a greeting card—a fairly nice one, actually, with a graphic of a wedding cake, a bride, a groom. Inside, cursive preprinted script read, Congratulations to the happy couple!

But when I saw what was underneath, I felt cold, clammy, and sick. It said, in plain block letters pressed deep into the paper, Sleep with the enemy, pay the price.

Beneath it was sketched a symbol, kind of a torch. The kind that peasants carry to attack the monster-dwelling castle.

I cleared my throat and turned the card over. “Was there anything else?” My voice was muffled by the helmet, but clear enough. I distinctly saw Heather shoot another of those looks toward Lewis. “Well?”

“Give it to her,” Lewis said. He sounded grim and calm. “No point in hiding anything.”

Heather brought out another container. This one had several sheets of paper that had been folded in half—probably to fit inside the card or its envelope.

Plain white paper, no watermarking. Cheap quality. On it was printed in very small type a—I hesitated to call it a letter, because there was no hint of communication to it. A manifesto, maybe.

The Sentinels were declaring war on the Wardens, and they’d felt compelled to give us all their reasons. It was quite a list, starting with a detailed analysis of why the Wardens could no longer be trusted to put the interests of the human race first. Seems we’d been corrupted not by our own greed or weakness, but by contact with the Djinn.

Most of the manifesto was about the Djinn, and the crazy paranoia gave me the creeps. Sure, the Djinn could be capricious, even cruel; they certainly didn’t forgive those who trespassed against them, and turning the other cheek had never been a high priority for them. Added to that, they had millennia of pent-up anger against the Wardens.

But even so, the Sentinels’ position wasn’t that Djinn ought to be treated with care and caution—it was that none of them deserved to live. That every single Djinn in existence had to be hunted down and destroyed for the human race to survive.

That they had to be punished for their crimes before they were allowed to die.

I felt sick, and I’d barely skimmed the thing. David hadn’t been able to, saturated as it was with antimatter radiation that rendered it effectively invisible to him, but he could read my expression and mood like flashing neon. He stood up and said, “Enough. Jo, enough.”

I nodded and put the manifesto back into the container. Heather sealed it and took back her protective equipment. “They intended that to be found,” I said. “So they really didn’t intend the bomb to go off, did they?”

Lewis and Heather once again exchanged that look.

I was starting to really hate that look. “These weren’t in the box with the antimatter,” Lewis said. “They were in your mailbox, where they’d be found later. But they’re still saturated with radiation, enough to sicken anybody who touched them.”

No question, this was serious. If they’d succeeded with the bomb in the package, I’d be dead or badly injured, and David . . . David would be, too. Putting tainted, taunting letters in my mailbox was worse yet. It reminded me of the cruelest of terrorists, who detonated one explosion and waited for rescue workers to arrive before detonating another. My friends would have been the ones to suffer.

I tried to lighten my own mood. “Special Delivery Guy delivers the mail, too,” I said. “Give him credit, at least he’s a full-service assassin. Maybe we can get him to throw in a pizza and hot wings next time.” All my attempt at humor did was give everybody the opportunity to stare at me with faintly worried looks, as if they were afraid that I was going to scream, faint, or grow a second head.

At length, Heather said, “We’re following up on anyone who goes into the hospitals for treatment of radiation sickness or burns, but I have the feeling that a well-trained Earth Warden could have handled these letters without lasting damage, if he was careful. Or she, of course. And we have to proceed on the idea that whatever the Sentinels are, they’re well organized and well protected.”

Lewis nodded, acknowledging the point. He wasn’t watching Heather, though; he was scanning the faces around the table. I didn’t know what he was looking for, but he stopped and focused on Kevin. “You’ve got something to say,” he told the kid. It wasn’t a question.

Kevin, who’d been staring at the table, looked up, and his face flushed red along the line of his jaw, bringing a few pimples into sharp relief. His eyes were almost hidden by the messy fall of his hair, but I had no problem reading his body language. Busted.

“Yeah,” he said reluctantly. “So, I got this message about a week ago.”

“About?” Lewis’s voice was calm and even, but I wasn’t fooled. Neither was Kevin, who looked down again at his clenched hands.

“About joining the Sentinels,” he said. “They told me they could use my talents.”

There was a long, ringing silence. I instinctively put out a hand to touch David’s, telling him without words to hold his temper.

“What did you say?”

Kevin cleared his throat. “I told them I’d think about it. I figured maybe keeping the bait out there would help.”

“Good thinking,” I said. “Thanks, Kev.”

He shot me a frown. “Didn’t do it for you.”

“I know. But as it seems that they’re after me, I still appreciate it. Did they say they’d be getting back to you? Give you any way to approach them?”

“Yeah. They gave me a phone number.”

Lewis let out a slow, quiet breath. “Let me have the number.”

“No.” “No.”

“What?”

“No. It’s my lead. I get to follow it.”

“This isn’t a goddamn game!” I’d never seen Lewis lose his temper, but that was a sharp crack of anger in his shell of Zen. He stood up, leaning both fists on the table. “You can’t screw with these people, Kevin. And you’d better not screw with me, either. They want Jo and David dead, but I don’t think they really care how many people they have to take out along the way.”

It was a mistake, a big one, and I knew it the second Lewis raised his voice. Kevin had been raised by an abusive parent, and he didn’t react well to things that dredged up that bitter past.

He said, without looking up, “Fuck you, Lewis. I’m not your bitch. I don’t have to do what you say.”

Lewis started to reply, but I grabbed him by the shoulder and squeezed hard enough to get my point across. I used fingernails. He flinched and looked at me, and I saw the light dawn in his eyes and clear away the fog of anger. He took a deep breath and walked away from the table, heading for the far corner of the room where Rahel sat in silent witness. Kevin’s narrow gaze followed him, just aching for a confrontation.

I said, very softly, “Would you be willing to join the Sentinels? Go undercover?”

That brought Kevin’s attention back to me with a snap, and for a second he looked his age—far too young to be so angry and defensive. “What?” he asked. On the far side of the room, Lewis turned and made a move, but then he checked himself with a real physical effort.

“You’d be credible,” I continued. “You’re strong, you’ve never really liked the Wardens, and you’re on record as being one of my biggest nonsupporters. They’re recruiting you already. Why not join up? You could be our inside man.”

David touched the back of my hand, just a light stroke of fingers, and I heard him whisper, so softly it could have been my imagination, “Are you sure about this?” I wasn’t, but it was the best chance we were probably going to have to send someone inside the Sentinels quickly.

Kevin abruptly sank back in his chair in a trademark teenage slump, round-shouldered and boneless. His eyes drifted half closed. “Yeah,” he said. “Why not? They’ll probably be better company than the old farts around here. The Sentinels may be assholes, but at least they have some backbone.”

A few eyebrows went up around the table, but nobody said anything. They were leaving it up to me, and I knew—knew—that I was about to make a decision that could cost a young man his life.

I said, “Do it. And Kevin?” He cocked his head to one side. “If they ask you to kill me, demand at least five million. That’s the current market price. Wouldn’t want you getting shorted on the deal.”

He smiled, and I have to admit, it wasn’t a comforting smile at all. “Maybe I’ll do it at a discount,” he said, “because we’re such good friends.”

And then he flipped me off.

That ended the first official war meeting of the Wardens.

“I’m putting a stop to it,” Lewis said an hour later. He’d been pacing for at least forty-five minutes, with occasional stops at the window to twitch back the blinds and stare out at the city street. He looked off balance, and it was odd seeing him so out of control. Lewis had always, by definition, been the guy who held it together in a crisis. “He’s a kid, Jo. You can’t send him in there by himself!”

“I wasn’t planning to,” I said. “Cherise is going with him.”

He spun and looked at me as if I’d lost what was left of my mind. I didn’t blame him; if I’d meant exactly what I said, he’d have every right to order me a padded jacket in designer fall colors.

I raised my voice. “Cherise?” And sure enough, my cute blond friend poked her head around the edge of Lewis’s office door and gave me a tentative wave. “Come in. Explain it to Lewis.”

She eased inside, gave Lewis a charming dimpled smile that didn’t seem to make him feel any less unhappyabout my idea, and shut the office door behind her. That didn’t leave much room. Typical Lewis: Give him a job as the head of the entire Wardens organization around the world, and he’ll do something goofy like take the smallest office available, even if he has to kick a junior analyst out to do it. There was a battered desk that still bore scars from the Great Djinn Rampage that Ashan had led through this place, and a couple of slightly-less-than-new chairs, and paperwork. And a sleek new computer that I doubted he turned on much.

With the four of us, it was crowded. I say four, even though David was, to all intents and purposes, a shadow; he hadn’t said a word, and he’d taken up a post leaning in the corner, arms folded, watching us with an expression I could only think of as bemused.

Cherise spread her arms and dimpled even more. “You rang?” she asked.

“You have any objection to going with Kevin when he joins the Sentinels? It could be dangerous, you know.”

“Ooooh, I live for danger! But do you think they’ll believe I won’t run back to squeal to you about what’s going on?”

“I think just the opposite,” I said. “I think they’ll keep you as a hostage for Kevin’s good behavior, and that also ensures you don’t rat them out to me. It puts you squarely in the hot seat. It also makes you the one person they won’t be thinking of as a threat. What do you think?”

Her blue eyes widened; she seemed lost in thought for a second, then nodded. “Could work,” she said. “Could definitely work.”

Lewis lost his cool. “What the hell are you talking about, could work? Look, Jo, I’m iffy about sending a kid in, and I’m damn sure not allowing her to go. She’s not even a Warden—”

“Exactly,” I said. “She’s not even a Warden. If they’re going to underestimate anyone, they’ll underestimate Cherise. Not that she really is Cherise.”

I gave Cherise the nod, and her form shifted, growing taller, darker, the sweetly rounded figure of the beach bunny taking on sharper edges and angles.

Rahel sighed, stretched, and looked down at her clothes as they shifted to her traditional neon-yellow pantsuit. She flicked an imaginary mite of dust from the cloth, and cocked a sassy eyebrow at Lewis.

He closed his mouth with a snap, then opened it again to say, “I didn’t know you could do that.”

Rahel smiled. “I’m sure, my love, there are many things I can do that you haven’t even begun to imagine. ” She winked, to top it off.

“Are you sure you’re strong enough?” Lewis asked. He was trying very hard to ignore the somewhat intimidating charm she was sending his way.

“Strong enough to impersonate a human?” Rahel flicked her taloned, glossy fingers impatiently. “Please. You insult me if you think otherwise. You are nothing like difficult to imitate.”

I thought Lewis found that as profoundly disturbing as I had. I’d known the Djinn could do it, of course; David had pulled it off with me when we’d met, and there was no doubt that he could, when he chose, take on other forms. But he’d told me that Rahel was the master of that sort of disguise, able to perfectly match whatever template she was given—something I hadn’t known any more than Lewis had, evidently. I wondered whose form she’d taken on before, and for what purposes.

“You’re sure you know what to do?” Lewis asked.

“I will watch out for the boy, and gather information for you. I will deliver it to David as often as I dare to, without exposing the boy to danger. Is that not what you want from me?” Rahel recited it like a laundry list, inspecting her nails for flaws. “Don’t worry, Lewis. It will hardly be the first time we have hidden among you, discovering your secrets.”

Well, if that didn’t make us all paranoid . . . Lewis didn’t look happy, but he’d lost some of the stiff, angry body language. “You’re sure you can do this,” he said. “I’m putting Kevin’s life in your hands, Rahel. And in some ways, I’m putting you in more danger than him—these guys don’t like Djinn. In fact, it’s safe to say they’d just as soon destroy you as look at you. And I’m really not so sure they can’t, if they try.”

She let a slow, contemplative smile slip across her lips, and even I shivered. “How would they then be any different from most of my so-called friends and allies?” she asked softly. Her eyes had taken on an unnatural gold glow, and there was no mistaking her for anything but what she was: Djinn, through and through. “We have survived the Wardens. We will survive the Sentinels. You may count on it.”

There was no arguing with the Djinn once they got that look, and Lewis knew it. He put up his hands in surrender, came around the desk, and stood just a couple of feet away from her. They were almost of a height; he had an inch on her, maybe. “Take care,” Lewis said, and leaned in to kiss her lightly on the lips. “Come back safely.”

I felt my eyebrows pull up, but I wasn’t really surprised, not deep down. Lewis had a lot of secrets, but he’d always been intrigued by Rahel, and she was drawn to his power, if nothing else. Maybe it wasn’t the world’s great love affair; maybe it was just casual, but it eased some anxious part of me to see that Lewis wasn’t still pining after me.

Okay, it vexed that part of me, too, but that’s a personal problem.

Rahel effortlessly folded her shape back into Cherise’s cute, compact little body, tossed her blond hair with a flair so familiar it would have fooled even me, and winked at him. We all stared after her as she left, Cherise’s trademark little gray alien tattoo waving at the small of her back.

I didn’t even notice what she was wearing as Cherise; that was how much she’d thrown me off stride, and after all, I’d known who she really was.

Lewis turned his attention to David, still standing silently in the corner. David cleared his throat and pushed his shoulders away from the wall. “She’ll be all right,” he said. “No, she’s not full strength, but that could play well, considering what she’s doing. There’s no danger. Rahel can always leave if things get too hard.”

He sounded too casual about it. I felt an uneasy lurch; there it was, again, that strange blind spot, as if the Djinn just couldn’t see the threat when it was right in front of them. What was it about these Sentinels? How could they have that kind of power—or were they just taking advantage of a weakness I’d never really seen before? I’d always thought the Djinn were invulnerable, except when they took on each other, or a Demon.

I’d been feeling good about my plan, but the good feeling was going away fast. “But we’re going to give her backup, right? Just in case?”

“Of course,” David said. “What’s next?”

As far as he was concerned, it was settled. I exchanged a look with my boss, and Lewis raised both hands and shrugged. “It’s your show. Go run it.”

“Then it’s time for us to do some distracting, to keep them focused on their main targets. You get to live the dream, my love,” I said. “You get to take me shopping.”

David and I began to make sure we were seen, often, in public—usually hand in hand. It was nice in one way, and nerve-racking in another, as, waiting for trouble, we both kept half our attention on the world around us.

Ominously, it didn’t come. I’d been hoping to lure the Sentinels into more threats or attacks, and I’d especially wanted to keep their focus extended out toward us, instead of turning toward the all-too-vulnerable undercover operatives we’d sent to them.

To bring things to a head, and present the Sentinels with even more of a target, Lewis called a mass meeting of the Wardens. Even on short notice he got about a third of the total membership—an impressive number. Not quite as robust as the UN General Assembly, but with nearly as many languages, nations, and attitudes represented. The lecture hall had seen better days, and still hadn’t fully recovered from the devastation of the last Djinn assault, but it was still impressive, paneled in teak with mahogany trim, opulently chaired, with an illuminated sun symbol of the Wardens on the ceiling that served as a massive light fixture. I’d always liked the room.

Today, I kept looking for the exits.

Ostensibly, the program was a half-day presentation from various National Wardens on threat assessments in their fields of specialty—all of which were true and timely indeed, and much needed. We’d had far too many changeovers in staff, and too many crises for comfort. A little training and communication was positive, and desperately needed.

But really, the main point of the meeting was pure theater, and I was the starring act.

It came toward the end of the meeting, as Lewis was making his closing statement. He paused, glanced over his shoulder toward where I sat behind him, and said, “I have one last item of business, and I think you’ll all be pleased to know that it’s a positive one. Joanne Baldwin has an announcement.”

My palms were damp, my knees were weak, and my heart raced as if it were trying to use up its entire quota of lifetime beats in the next ten minutes. I hoped I didn’t look as nervous as I felt. Scratch that; I hoped I didn’t look as panicked as I felt.

At least I’d dressed for it. If I couldn’t be self-confident wearing a kicky Carmen Marc Valvo dress and a pair of honest-to-God Manolo Blahniks in matching tangerine, I needed to turn in my fashion police badge. My hair looked good—wavy and glossy and glamorous. My makeup was fine, even though I was fairly sure I could use another touch-up on the powder to get rid of the shiny spots.

All I had to do was sell as good as I looked.

I stepped up to the podium as Lewis gracefully relinquished it, and the spotlight found me, and all of a sudden it was time. No more thinking, no more nerves. You leap, and hope for the net.

“Hello,” I said. “I’d like to thank Lewis for allowing me to make this announcement today, because I think it’s an important one. The Wardens have been through so much over the past few years; we’ve lost great colleagues to unavoidable accidents, and worse, to each other. We were drawn into a conflict with the Djinn that nobody wanted, and we suffered for it. So many lives were lost, and none of us can ever forget that.”

There was utter silence in the lecture hall—not even a nervous cough. I knew that many people in the audience—probably most—had lost friends, lovers, family. They’d survived, but many still held on to the pain, and the bitterness. Those were the prime recruiting ground for the Sentinels.

The ones who hurt the most.

“That’s why this is important,” I continued. “You all know me. You all know that I owe my life to a particular Djinn who’s been my friend and my protector through all of this. What you may not know is that it’s more than gratitude; I love David, and he loves me. And we know it’s not easy, and it may not be popular, but I’m here to announce that we’re going to do something no Warden and no Djinn have ever done in history.” I felt short of breath now, elated, scared, exhilarated. “We’re going to pledge ourselves to each other in marriage, and I hope that you’ll all join us in the next couple of months for a great celebration of our wedding. We believe that in making this vow, we’ll bring the Wardens and the Djinn together again, in friendship, respect, and cooperation.” I swallowed hard, suddenly feeling very exposed. “Thank you all.”

For a heart-stopping second, there was still nothing—no sound at all. And then a lone pair of hands clapped, somewhere in the darkness, and then a few more, and then it turned into a round of applause. Not cheers and champagne, but it seemed positive enough. Lewis reclaimed the podium and I went back to my chair and sank into it, feeling relieved and a little sick with adrenaline.

The next bit of theater belonged to Kevin, who was standing at the back of the hall, looking surly and militant, as only Kevin could do. When a lull came after the applause, Kevin said, clearly enough to carry throughout the room, “I thought screwing a Djinn was off-limits. What, you’re special?”

There was an audible intake of breath, and heads turned. Somebody laughed, but it was quickly smothered. Lewis, who’d been about to speak, seemed thrown off balance. He focused on Kevin with a baleful stare, and said, “If you want to offer your congratulations, Warden, do it to her face. I’m sure Joanne will be glad to take them personally.”

That got general laughter. People knew me all too well. I stood up slowly, making sure that everybody saw my expression.

Kevin pushed away from the wall. “Yeah? Well, I’m just saying what everybody in here is thinking. We just got done burying people who were killed by these bastards, and now she’s going to marry one? Not just a Djinn, but the Big Kahuna? What’s the matter, Jo? Blowing off the Warden rules wasn’t enough of a thrill anymore?”

“Shut up, Kevin.” We’d worked this out, but I was still taken aback by the venom in his voice. Kevin had a huge backlog of hate stored up, and some of it was meant for me; it was an officially approved opportunity for him to vent some of it, and I was going to have to be the one to control my reactions. He’s a kid, I reminded myself. He’s a kid who’s been wounded, over and over. Cut him some slack.

My slack-cutting hand was getting tired.

“Shut up? In your dreams, bitch.” He stepped up again, this time addressing the entire hall. “Look, you can see where this is going, right? You think the Djinn are just going to forgive and forget all the time we spent sticking them in little bottles, making them do our shit work? You think they don’t hate us for that? Don’t kid yourselves. She thinks this is some kind of peace process. It’s not. It’s obscene. Believe me, I know all about obscene. Especially when it comes to people using the Djinn for sex.”

“That’s enough,” I said, and moved to the edge of the stage. “Enough, Kevin.”

“Don’t think so. Bad enough the two of you popped out some kind of mutant kid—”

I saw red, and fury burned up from around the base of my spine and jolted into my head like a physical shock. Son of a bitch. He’d never said he was going to drag Imara into this, and while I was prepared to overlook personal insults to myself, my kid wasn’t part of the deal. Some of the audience agreed with me; they were shouting him down. But a significant portion was either silent or nodding in agreement, shooting me frowns and dark looks.

“We need to move away from the Djinn, not get all cozy all over again,” Kevin continued. “She just wants everything to go back to normal. What the hell was so great about that, anyway? What about the rest of you? You think we should just rip up the blood-stained carpet, remodel, and get over it? Or should we figure out what the Wardens are supposed to be? Not depending on Djinn, not letting them into our heads or our homes or our beds—”

“What’s the matter, Kevin?” I asked. “Some hot Djinn chick turn you down?”

We’d scripted this part. I hadn’t wanted to do it—had argued against it, in fact—but now I took just a tiny bit of satisfaction in seeing him visibly flinch. The pallor that set into his face, followed by a vivid flush, wasn’t acting. I was bringing up old demons, opening old wounds.

“No,” he said. “I turned them down. But it didn’t matter. They had their orders, and the Djinn always follow their orders, don’t they? My mother made sure of that.”

Rumors had floated around over the past year about Kevin, about his stepmother, Yvette, who was truly one of the most morally grotesque people I’d ever met. About her illicit use of Djinn for personal gratification, and for other, even less savory, purposes.

Kevin had suffered at her hands. I didn’t know whether or not she’d turned her Djinn on him in a sexual sense, but I didn’t doubt it. It would have been a tragedy for the Djinn as well as Kevin, but Kevin wouldn’t necessarily feel that.

The worst part of it was that for at least some period of time, Yvette had owned David. I’d never asked him what his history was with Kevin, and neither he nor Kevin had ever really come clean about it.

I hoped I wasn’t hearing the truth of it, right now, but the pain and rage in Kevin couldn’t possibly be mistaken for anything else but honesty.

“I hope you get what’s coming to you. Both of you,” he spat, and turned to leave.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You think you just get to make a dramatic exit?” I sent a gust of wind past him and blew the doors shut with a heavy thud. “Sit your ass down, Kevin.”

“Bite me.” He whirled back toward me, and there were tears glittering in his eyes, real and agonizing, and I almost stopped it there, almost went to him and put my arms around him and told him he didn’t have to do this.

Lewis got in my way. “Sit,” he said flatly. “I’m not telling you again, Kevin. If you can’t control yourself, I’ll do it for you.”

In answer, Kevin formed a fireball in both hands, glared at both of us through the unholy orange glow, and then turned and threw the fireball straight at the doors. It hit and detonated with enough force to blow the doors open and off their hinges.

He walked out.

“No,” I said, and put out a hand to stop the guards who started after him. “No, let him go. If he wants to leave, let him leave. This isn’t over, but there’s no point in destroying the place. Again.”

That got a weak wave of nervous chuckles. Some of the Wardens out there looked as if they were suffering a PTSD moment; I completely sympathized. This was turning out to be less theatrical and more gut-wrenching than I’d ever intended, but I supposed that was a good thing, ultimately. It’s for his own protection, I reminded myself. If the Sentinels can’t buy his defection after that, it can’t be done.

But I was going to have a hell of a lot of fence-mending to do. And I felt filthy inside, as if I’d dragged my soul through a sewer.

Lewis took my hand, out of sight behind the podium, and squeezed. He knew what I was feeling. I moved back to let him get to the microphone, and he said something to close the meeting. . . . I wasn’t really listening. I was staring at the smoking, destroyed doorway where Kevin had made his grand exit.

God, please, watch out for him, I thought. If anything happens to him . . .

Lewis must have finished, because in the next moment people were getting up in the auditorium, chattering excitedly, making their way toward the exits. And Lewis put his hand at the small of my back, guiding me off into the shadows at the back of the stage, where he whispered, “I think it was all right.”

“Brutal,” I said. My voice sounded strange. “I didn’t want to put him through that.”

“He signed up, Jo. It’s something he wants to do. Let him be a hero for once.”

“Yeah, well, it’s hard to just stand by and watch.”

“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.