Gale Force

Chapter Nine

I rested for a couple of days. My appetite returned with a vengeance on the second day out from the attack, and David was at first amused, then a little appalled at my lust for calories. “Are you sure that’s wise?” he asked when I opened up the fourth bag of barbecue chips. “There’s such a thing as overdoing it. . . .”

I knew there was, but the food and the sleep were recharging my body, and I wanted to hasten the process. Impatient, that was me. And scared. I knew the Sentinels now, in aetheric form if not in actual physical shape. I knew how much power they were packing, and it was terrifying indeed. I wanted my body back and balanced, fast.

I knew that bags of chips weren’t the way to go, but they tasted so good.

David distracted me from the chips by proposing an outing: shopping. “You,” I said, gazing at him approvingly, “are getting to know me way too well.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I plan to research you in the biblical sense later.”

“Mmmmm, maybe shopping can wait.” Those words were a sign of just how much that invitation really meant. I hardly ever delayed shopping.

“No. I want us out and visible,” he said. “If the Sentinels are watching, I want them to see that you’re alive, well, and strong. I don’t think they’ll try that again. You surprised them, and you scared them.”

“I did?”

“If you hadn’t,” David said, “they’d have come back for you already.”

Dressing took on a whole girding-for-battle significance now that I knew my enemies were going to be watching me. I bathed, scrubbed, exfoliated, shampooed, shaved, tweezed, moisturized. I spent half an hour on my hair, and another half an hour on makeup. Choosing the right sundress required another long stretch of time. When I finally appeared in the doorway, David was stretched out on the couch, feet crossed at the ankles, reading a battered paperback, which he dropped on his chest at the sight of me.

“Yeah?” I twirled for him, just fast enough that the floating hem of the light floral sundress showed my thighs. “Healthy enough?”

He pressed his lips together and struggled to sit up. “That’s one word for it.”

“What’s another?”

“Seductive.” That note in his voice made me shiver, but I put my shoulders back and shook my finger at him anyway.

“You said we needed to get out. So out we get, Mister.”

He sighed, stood up, and slipped into his coat.

“David?” I hated to say it, because this was a kind of dividing line, and I wasn’t even sure why. “The coat. If you want to be taken for human, only flashers wear coats in Fort Lauderdale in the summer.”

He seemed honestly surprised. “But—ah. Yes. Right.” He took it off and put it back on the chair, petting its olive-drab surface as he did, like a favorite pet he was sorry to leave behind. “Everything else okay?”

I gave him the walkaround. “Not bad,” I said, “but we can do better.”

“Oh no,” he said.

“That’s right. We’re shopping for you, buster.”

I knew all the good places to shop, but if I hadn’t, even JCPenney would have been able to supply a decent alternative to the ever-present checked shirt that David seemed to think was the height of fashion. But I wasn’t going for better; I was going for make women stop and stare, though with David, that wasn’t exactly difficult.

He was made for Versace.

The salespeople thought so too; David was bemused by the whole affair, clearly wondering what the hell he’d gotten himself into, but as always, he was willing to experiment with the most trivial of human pursuits. I conspired with the lead saleswoman to do before and after digital pictures. Going in, David was a good-looking man, a bit conservative with his blue-and-white checked shirt and jeans.

Going out, he was so attractive that he was a menace to passing traffic. He wore a black, skin-tight Versace knit shirt, long-sleeved to give him sleekness, and his black Diesel jeans that hugged his ass and thighs, and flared out at the ends just enough. Because we were in Florida, I gave him a bit of a surfer fashion sensibility, and it suited him brilliantly. The coppery tan could have been stoked by days paddling in the surf. I added a very fine Hugo Boss sports coat, in midnight blue, and when he put it on, the salespeople gave a collective sigh and snapped pictures. He turned toward me, eyebrows raised, a slight flush in his cheeks.

I’ve made a Djinn blush, I thought. There was a weird satisfaction in that. Also, I planned to try to make him blush more, in private, later.

Some part of me, during all this public playacting, kept monitoring the aetheric for any signs of Sentinel activity. Nothing. It was dead quiet, weirdly so. Maybe I really had given them a shock with not dying on cue.

I started to pay for the clothes, but David slipped a wallet from his pocket and pulled out a jet-black American Express card. I caught a look at the name as he handed it over.

DAVID CYRUS PRINCE.

David knew what I was thinking, and he met my eyes briefly, then smiled at the salesclerk and signed the credit card receipt. We left the store with his old clothes and shoes in a bag. I couldn’t stop stealing glances at him, darkly gorgeous as he was; every woman we passed, young or old, plain or model-in-training, gave him an involuntary stare.

“That,” he said, “was a waste of time. I could have just manifested the clothes, if you’d shown me what you wanted me to wear.”

“The point is to be seen,” I reminded him. “Besides, buying clothes is something humans do. You want to be human, right?”

“Right.” His lips quirked, and he tried to suppress a smile. “That’s the first time I’ve ever purchased clothing, you know. For myself.”

“It’s good to stretch,” I assured him. “Mr. Prince.”

The two of us strolled through the warm, humid morning. My dress rippled and flowed in the ocean breezes, my hair looked fantastic, my shoes were kicking ass, and I had the most beautiful man I’d ever seen on my arm.

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

Nothing.

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

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

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

I really needed to find that wedding dress.

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

And then it happened.

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

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

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

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

“Don’t you want to know—”

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

She cleared her throat. “I really think I should warn you about the cost—”

“You really shouldn’t,” I sighed.

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

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

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

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

“Done,” I said serenely.

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

“Let me mortgage my future first.”

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

And then, of course, everything went wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

People began to react nervously.

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

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

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

Yep. Tornado. Right over the store.

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

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

Heading for my dress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This had to stop. Now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’d just destroyed a second bridal shop.

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

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

“Still in Key West?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not a pleasant thought, really.

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

Or so I thought.

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

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

“Oh crap,” I breathed. “Drop the shield. Drop it now!”

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

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

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

“Reporters?” he whispered.

“Vultures. Keep going, no matter what. They can smell fear.”

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

“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.

This left us at a standstill, ultimately. I couldn’t break the wards. David couldn’t enter.

“Okay, bad idea,” I sighed, then shut the front door and sat down with David on the steps. A cool breeze was blowing in off the ocean, and we sat for a while watching the surf roll in. “Maybe it’s a good thing we couldn’t get you inside. I know there must be— echoes.”

“Not as many as there were at Yvette’s house, but yes, the history’s very close to the surface here,” David said. He sounded remote and cool, as if he’d withdrawn into himself for protection. “I’d rather not stay, if we can find somewhere else to go.”

I’d always liked the beach house; it had been my favorite of the Warden properties in this part of the country. But that had been before I’d known the truth, and the depth of all the cruelty that the people I’d trusted were capable of inflicting on others. “That Earth Warden. Was he the only one Bad Bob made you . . . ?”

“No,” David said, and got up. He looked down at me with dark, impenetrable eyes, and offered me his hand. “Still trust me?”

I took it and let him pull me to my feet. “I will always trust you,” I said. “Thank you for trusting me.”

He kissed me, just a gentle brush of lips. Something about this place turned him cautious, opened old wounds, and I could tell that even if I’d found a way to break the wards, it would have been hard for him to stay inside these walls. “Do you mind if I choose the next stop?” he asked.

“Hey, you’re the guy with the black AmEx and unlimited credit line,” I said. “Speaking of which, you know that humans pay their debts, right?”

He didn’t look at me. He was staring at the beach house, with a shadow in his eyes that I’d never seen before. “So do Djinn,” he said. “When they can.”