Gale Force

Chapter Six

When we came out of the diner, there was a van pulled up behind the car, neatly blocking us in. I felt my nerves tighten up and shiver, but I silently told them to stand down; I’d already made a fool of myself over the semitruck, and this would turn out to be just another idiot picking up, dropping off, or parking badly. In fact, it even looked like a delivery van— battered, a bit weather-faded.

The sunlight caught a glitter on the door, and I paused, blinked, and tried to convince myself it was nothing but random metallic paint flecks. Tried hard, but got nothing. I gave it up and took a quick look in Oversight.

The van took on the dimensions and solidarity of one of those military Humvees, wickedly armored and decorated with spikes. Tough and badass—that was its essential character, interpreted for me visually by whatever processing filter the Wardens had that others didn’t. The aetheric showed truth, but it was a subtle and strange kind of truth.

One thing was unequivocal about the truck, though: On the door panel blazed the stylized sun emblem of the Wardens.

I opened my mouth to warn David, but he already knew, of course. He stopped, studying without expressionthe van and whatever occupants it held. All the playfulness was gone, and he reminded me of a hunting leopard, lean and powerful. His eyes had gone a color that should have been a warning, and probably would have been to anybody with sense.

Unfortunately, the Warden who got out of the van was Lee Antonelli, and he had less sense than a pet rock. He was a big guy, and a gifted Fire Warden, but when it came to subtleties, he was likely to crush them under his big steel-toed boots and never notice. How he’d survived the Warden/Djinn conflicts was anybody’s guess, but the fact that he hadn’t had a Djinn issued to him in the first place was enough to keep him off the initial hit list, and I strongly suspected he’d spent most of the conflict hiding out.

I said Lee was big. Not brave. Hence, of course, the unreasonably tough shell of attitude on his van, not on his person.

He leaned against the passenger side of the van and crossed his arms; they were impressively muscled, and he’d invested a small fortune in body art. It should have made him look intimidating. Instead, I thought it made him look like someone doing hard-ass by the numbers, especially when coupled with the shaved head. “Warden,” Lee said to me. He didn’t so much as glance at David. I wondered why, and then I realized that Lee couldn’t see him. David had made himself invisible, although he was still there to my eyes.

“Warden,” I replied to Antonelli coolly, “who taught you how to park? I’d say Sears, but really, they do a much better job. Maybe you were absent the day they explained what those parallel lines in the lot are for—”

“Shut up, Baldwin. I’m supposed to pick you up and escort you in,” he said. “Since whatever you’ve got going on is so damn important, I guess I’m riding shotgun.”

This was weird, and it wasn’t normal. Lewis knew I was coming; he knew David was traveling with me. Why send Antonelli, of all people, whom he knew I couldn’t stand? Lewis might work in mysterious ways, but that was downright impenetrable. I bought time to think by digging a pair of big sunglasses out of my purse and putting them on. There. Without a clear view of my eyes, Antonelli was going to have a tougher time figuring out what I’d do. “Shotgun,” I repeated, “so you’re the bodyguard. Flattering.”

Antonelli ran one hand over his bullet-shaped shaved head and gave me a grim-looking smile. “Most ladies would say so.”

“Save the smarm, I’m not in the mood.”

He shrugged. Flirting was reflexive for him; he didn’t fancy me, except in the abstract way that somebody like Antonelli fancied anyone with internal sex organs. If I stood still long enough, he’d gladly take a turn, but other than that, I was furniture. “Playtime’s over, then. Let’s move. In the van.”

I stayed right where I was, next to the door of the Mustang. “I’m driving my own car.” Technically, David was driving, but Antonelli might not know that. In fact, he didn’t look nearly worried enough, so I doubted he had any idea there was an angry Djinn standing a couple of feet away, eyes lit up like Halloween lanterns.

“Look, I don’t know the plan; I’m just following orders. Lewis says take the van; we take the van,” Antonelli said. “I don’t ask no questions; neither do you. Come on, sister, let’s go. I’ve got things to do.”

There was a ring of sweat around the high neck of his muscle shirt, and dark streaks under the arms. Unless Antonelli had come straight from the gym, something was up. He was nervous.

“We can sort that out,” I said, and pulled my cell phone from my pocket. “Let me just call—”

The circuitry inside the phone fried, boiled into vapor in an instant. I dropped the red-hot case and blew on my blistered fingers. Antonelli hadn’t moved, but something about him had changed. I could almost smell it: the burned-metal bite of desperation, mingled with a coppery odor of fear.

“Get in the fucking van,” he said. “I’m not playing, bitch. Don’t make this a showdown; there are too many people around. Kids. I don’t want to do that, and neither do you. Let’s keep this calm.”

Oh God, he was serious. I could tell it from the sweat on his skin, the dark shadows in his eyes. He was a whole lot more scared of someone else than he was of me.

That needed to change, right now.

I dropped my purse to the ground, glad I’d donned the sunglasses. I made sure my feet were firmly planted, shoulder-width apart, the right slightly forward to give me a more stable base.

“You’re right,” I said quietly. “I don’t want to do this. You don’t want to do this. But somehow, I think it’s going to happen anyway, because I can’t get in that van, Lee. Whatever’s going on, I can’t take the chance. Let’s think this through before we both start something that will end badly.”

David had not moved. Hadn’t spoken. Still, I was feeling the vibration of menace from him like the subsonic pulses from a volcano about to blow; this was going to go south, very badly, very fast.

“Who is it?” I asked. “Lee, tell me who’s making you do this. It’s not Lewis. It’s not the Wardens. Somebody’s forcing you to take me out of circulation. Come on, man, we don’t have to make this a throw down. We can talk about it, work it out.” While I talked, I used my Earth powers, subtly sending calming vibrations to him, lulling him into a state in which he might be more inclined to listen. To trust.

Antonelli shook himself, as if he were throwing off a wrestling hold, and I knew my brief second of opportunity was gone. “Save it,” he snapped. “I’m not some wet-behind-the-ears trainee. You can’t con me.”

And then Lee Antonelli, one of the best natural Fire Wardens I had ever seen, declared war.

I’ll give him credit; it was a strategic strike, not just a general firestorm. He formed a fireball and lobbed it not at me, but at my car. Clearly, he did not understand my relationship with cars. He’d have gotten off easier if he’d gone ahead and set my hair on fire. I’d have taken it less personally.

I formed an invisible cricket bat of hardened air, swung, lined up, and hit a solid line drive, sending the fireball right back into Antonelli’s midsection. It hit him hard enough to drive him against the body of the van, which rocked and creaked on its springs, and his muscle tee caught fire. He glanced down, annoyed, and brushed a hand over it. The fire went out, but there was a nice round hole with scorched edges baring his carefully developed abs. He’d had a tattoo put around his navel—a woman’s face, with the navel representing her open mouth. Classy. “Bitch!” he snarled.

“Repeating yourself already? We just started,” I said. I didn’t alter my stance, and I didn’t go after him. “Walk away. Just get in your van and go. We’ll all be happier.”

Only it wasn’t going to happen. He was scared, and he clearly didn’t think walking away from this was an option. Instead, he pointed his finger at me, and from the tip of it blazed a pinpoint of red light, hot as the sun. Coherent light, concentrated a thousand times stronger than the brightest earth-based laser developed by men.

Air wouldn’t slow it down. Neither would water, although it would bend the beam and eat up some of its energy in steam. Both options were sure to fail, and I knew from experience that if he could break my concentration, he could hurt me badly enough that I’d have a hard time defending myself at all.

Instead of defense, I went for offense. I had to end this fast, before some innocent bystander traipsed out of the diner and into the line of—literally—fire.

First, I summoned up a gale-force wind that slammed into his chest and pinned him against the van. Then I took away his air.

It’s damn hard to concentrate when you feel like you’re suffocating. I started with the air going in, filtering out the oxygen as he gasped. Then I focused on the oxygen inside Antonelli’s body—in his lungs, in his blood. I knew what I wanted to see, and it glowed bright blue for me.

I separated the hydrogen and oxygen atoms, took away an atom from the oxygen molecule, and within seconds, he was shaking in desperation, nearly out. I let him continue to breathe, because if anything it increased his panic, but I destroyed the oxygen before he could metabolize it.

There was a side effect of this, of course. Destruction creates energy, and I burned off the excess in sharp blue sparks that danced on the antenna of the van, the metal rims of the wheels, even Antonelli’s showy belt buckle.

It felt as though I were killing him, in a cruel and inhumane way, and that was exactly what I wanted him to feel. I wanted him to know that I wasn’t going to give in, and I wasn’t going to screw around. If he wanted to play hardball, he was going to have to live through the opening innings, and I’d taken the game to the professional level.

“Think about it,” I said. “I could just as easily put water in your lungs. Drowning on dry land. Sound good to you, tough guy?”

Antonelli sank to his knees, eyes wide and desperate.I hadn’t noticed before, but he had brown eyes, big and somehow childlike despite all the ’roided-up muscles.

I felt oddly detached about what I was doing, but there was no way I was going to let go until I sensed he was more afraid of me than of the theoretical bad guys.

“Jo.” David’s soft voice. His hand touched my shoulder. “You don’t have to kill him.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “But if he’s one of them, it’d be a damn sight safer in the long run.”

He didn’t say anything. I could tell he’d dropped the veil concealing him from Antonelli, because Antonelli’s mouth stretched wide, and he tried to croak out something that was probably a plea. His lips had gone the color of iron, and his skin looked dead and pale and rubbery.

He was about to lose consciousness, so I let him have a torturous, cruel gasp of air, loaded with O₂. He gagged and pitched forward, openly weeping; he wasn’t coming after me, that much was certain. He just wanted to live to get away.

But I didn’t want him to get away. I let him have just enough oxygen to survive, not enough to get his arms and legs in any kind of working order. Then I picked up my purse and walked over to him, crouched down to where he was sitting against the wheel of the van, and pulled down my sunglasses to look into his eyes.

“What were you going to do to me, Lee?” I asked him. “Don’t lie. It’ll only make me angry, and you won’t like what happens when I lose my temper.”

I let him have more oxygen, just enough. I’d scared him, all right. I’d terrified him almost more than was strategically necessary, and I knew—again, in a detached, academic sort of way—that it might bother me later. Maybe it would bother me a lot.

Or—and this was a lot more worrisome—maybe it wouldn’t bother me at all.

It took Lee six breaths before he was able to decide to choke out, “Going to kill you.”

“Meaning, you’re still going to kill me, or you were supposed to kill me?”

“Supposed to.” His face contorted with effort, and he bared his teeth. “Going to.”

I’d known that was a possibility, but somehow, it was very different hearing it. I glanced up at David. He was standing over us, quiet, but his expression . . . Antonelli was lucky not to be relying on his mercy. I might have developed a nasty streak, but I was the kinder choice between the two options.

“I guess I should give up on the friendship bracelets, ” I said. “Good, I suck at crafts. So, I’m guessing all this wasn’t your own brilliant idea. You haven’t had an original one since you set your cat on fire in the second grade. Who sent you? Think hard, Lee. We’re going into the final lightning round. If I don’t believe you, the next breath you take could be water. Or cyanide. I just love chemistry.”

He didn’t want to talk, but self-preservation is a damn fine motivator. No matter how badass his bosses might be, they weren’t here. I was. Like anyone else, Antonelli wanted his next breath to be sweet and life-giving, not foul and toxic. He knew better than to question whether or not I could do it.

“Sentinels,” he croaked. “Want you dead. Paying cash.”

“Hmmm. How much?” He looked at me as if I were totally crazy. I wasn’t so sure he was wrong. “I’d like to know how much it was worth, stabbing me in the back.”

“Five million.”

I sat back, surprised. “Five million dollars?”

“I’d kill you for free,” Antonelli muttered. “Bitch.”

“Is that any way to talk to the person holding your oxygen tank?” I asked, and cut off the flow into his lungs. He choked and thrashed. “Oh, okay. I see your point. Five million is a lot of temptation. But I don’t think it was the money. You might like me to think it was, but I think whoever sent you scared the crap out of you.” I let him have an entire ten breaths of sweet, sweet air. He shook his head. “Come on, Lee. Please. I don’t want to hurt you anymore. Just tell me who sent—”

I had no warning. Neither did Antonelli.

Some tremendous force slammed into me, throwing me facedown to the gravel path. I rolled, tossed my hair out of my face, and saw that David had also been driven back from Antonelli.

That was . . . almost impossible. Unless he’d been taken by surprise, by someone or something of nearly equal strength, it was very hard to knock a Djinn for a loop. For a fatal second, David was distracted from Antonelli by a perceived threat against me, while I was busy regrouping and trying to figure out what the hell had happened.

Antonelli didn’t hit us while we were vulnerable; he wouldn’t have had either the concentration or the energy. No, someone else struck Antonelli. I’d gone up into Oversight, struggling to catch a glimpse of what was going on, and saw a huge red, spectral hand reach through the aetheric and punch claws deep into Antonelli’s chest. I felt the black wave of despair and fury like a psychic blast. In the real world, Antonelli’s eyes locked with mine.

And then the spectral hand crushed his heart like a grape.

Murder, cold and sudden and utterly merciless.

Lee Antonelli swayed on his knees, and as long as I live I’ll see his face, see that terrible, sad, confused expression and those lovely brown eyes begging me to explain why I’d let this happen. You could say that he deserved it; he’d been willing to kill me.

But you’d be wrong. Nobody deserved that.

David whirled, turning into a blur of light, and was gone. I caught Antonelli as his corpse pitched forward. Blood burst out of his mouth and nose, and I realized it hadn’t been only his heart the hand had gone after; it had been his lungs, too, and probably any other organ of note. His murderer had systematically pulped him from the inside, like a kid squashing tomatoes in a bowl.

I cursed breathlessly, well aware it was too late. David had darted off in pursuit, but I could tell there was little to no trace on the aetheric of who’d delivered the death blow. Someone horribly powerful, though. Someone not afraid to break every rule.

I’d forgotten to worry about conservation of energy, in those few seconds, and as I eased Lee to the pavement, the imbalance went critical. First, the windows on the van blew out in a shrapnel-spray of glass. One second later, the windows in my car followed. Then the diner’s plate glass windows. The concussive effect rippled out, losing strength until it was only cracking glass and denting metal, and then it faded away.

I didn’t care about that. Someone had murdered a Warden right in front of me, and I hadn’t been able to do a damn thing to stop it.

Some hero I was.

I heard a confused babble, and then the patrons and staff of the diner boiled out into the parking lot, yelling questions, momentarily more upset about their auto damage than anything else. Someone caught sight of me on my knees, with Lee’s body cradled in my arms, and the tenor of the babble changed and grew louder as people converged around me in a forest of heads and shadows.

“What happened?” one of them asked. “Is he okay?”

“No,” I said. I sounded calm. That was odd. “I think he had a heart attack.” Stupid thing to say; there was blood on his shirt, on me, still dripping from his gaping mouth. “Maybe a hemorrhage.”

“That’s sad; he’s so young,” someone else murmured. I heard a cell phone being dialed, and a voice asking for an ambulance. After a pause, they also asked for the police. Well, I couldn’t blame them. Big dude dead on the ground, with a burn mark in his shirt and blood all over his face.

And me, with blood on my hands.

I couldn’t explain, so I didn’t try. I just sat next to Lee’s body, and by the time I realized that I was uncontrollably trembling, it was too late to claim I was too badass to care about what had just happened.

I was crying by the time the sirens approached.

I should have realized that where the police went, the scavengers would follow. In this case, it was the local news crews, two different species by the plumage of their satellite trucks. The reporters had a certain sleek, predatory look to them that identified them clearly from the casually dressed videographers and sloppy, Earth-shoe-wearing boom guys.

I watched them approach as I was giving my story to the police, and it was like a flock of vultures circling, waiting for my last breath.

“Ma’am?”

I blinked. The police officer facing me was tall, beefy, ginger-haired, and excruciatingly polite. Despite that, he wasn’t the kind to take any crap, and I heard the warning in his oh-so-polite question.

“Sorry, sir. I was just coming out of the diner with my—my fiancé, and we saw this gentleman get out of his van. He looked like he was in some trouble. I think he might have been having some kind of seizure.”

“Seizure,” the cop said, and noted it down. “Uhhuh. Was his shirt like that when he got out?”

Oh. The burns. “I didn’t notice right away. I didn’t see him with a cigarette or anything,” I said, which was the absolute truth. “Is it important?”

“Probably not. He damn sure didn’t burn to death. So, you didn’t know him, ma’am?”

I was lucky that nobody appeared to have noticed our little confrontation in the parking lot—then again, it probably wasn’t luck so much as David, taking care of business. Everybody remembered me and David inside the diner, but nobody appeared to have been paying attention when we left and went out to the car. The glamour had held until the windows blew out.

“No, I didn’t know him,” I said. It was my first real lie, and I had to make sure he bought it. I tried not to hold myself too still or keep his gaze too long. A good Earth Warden could have exerted some mental pressure to make him overlook anything that tripped his suspicions, but I’d never been that good, and I wasn’t about to try something like that at my current level of emotional trauma. “Sorry. I think he didn’t really know what was going on. Maybe he was high . . . ?” Slandering the dead, Joanne. Good one. I felt an uncomfortable roll of guilt, but then again, Antonelli had been willing to abduct and murder me. A little slander might have been appropriate.

“Where’s your boyfriend?” the cop asked.

“Fiancé,” I automatically corrected him, and smiled nervously. “I think he went to the bathroom. It was— this was awful. Really awful.”

The cop nodded, probably thinking of all the much more awful things he’d no doubt seen in his career. Probably thinking I was a lightweight ditz. That was fine, because in some senses I was, and besides, I didn’t want him to take me too seriously. That would be a very bad thing.

“Okay,” he said. “If you’ll wait over there, Ms. Baldwin, it’ll be a little while. You said you were on your way to New York?”

“Yes,” I said. “I have a business meeting. Look, can I call—?”

“Sure,” he said. “Just don’t go anywhere.”

I walked away, not in the direction of the reporters, and headed for the pay phone. How long had it been since I’d had to use a public phone? Years. I missed my crispy-fried cell phone, especially when I saw the grime and dried spit on the telephone receiver. You’re an Earth Warden, I reminded myself. You laugh at public phone germs.

Still, I fished a tissue out of my purse and wiped the plastic down before I started dialing.

Lewis answered on the third ring. “Somebody tried to kill me,” I said. “No, don’t interrupt, and don’t joke. It was Lee Antonelli. I had things under control, but somebody took him out at a distance. He said something about the Sentinels putting out a contract on my life.”

There was a silence on the other end that stretched on for longer than I would have liked. “How’d they kill him?” Lewis asked.

“Some kind of aetheric attack, nothing I’ve ever seen before. Lewis, they just reached out and destroyed him. What the hell is going on?”

“Just get here,” he said. “The faster the better.” He hesitated for a second, and then his voice softened. “You okay?”

“Yeah. No damage.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“You mean, am I okay with the concept that somebody’scapable of hiring marginally loyal Wardens as hit men to take me out, and killing them if they fail? No, not really.”

I went cold inside when Lewis said, “If it makes you feel better, you’re not the only target.”

“You?”

“Among others.” He didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t think it was a good time to ask. “Watch your back. If they can kill Antonelli from a distance—”

“I’ve got David,” I said. “And we’ll both be watching for it now. You be careful.”

“Always. Call when you get back on the road.”

“Can’t. Cell phone had a fatal issue during the fight.”

“Get David to fix it,” Lewis said. “I don’t want you out of contact for a second.”

And that was it. Sentimental, it wasn’t, but then we understood each other too well for that most of the time. Not that we couldn’t be friends, but business was business, and staying alive was serious business these days. I’d fought beside him, and he knew that when the situation got dire, I’d be there.

Still. A little verbal hug might have been . . . nice. I replaced the receiver, listened to the machine swallow my quarter deeper into its gear guts, and peered around the corner of the scratched plastic bubble. The reporters were still there, trying to solicit comments from uncooperative cops. They were also talking to diner patrons. I hoped nobody had any creative explanations that involved magic.

David came out of the diner, hands in the pockets of his long olive-drab coat. He didn’t look happy. Wind caught the tail of the coat as he strode toward me, giving him an almost princely magnificence, but I doubted anybody but me noticed except for some of the waitresses, who were still acutely David-oriented.

“I didn’t find anything,” he said as he reached me.

“Are you all right?” He knew I wasn’t. It was a pro forma question, but I especially liked that it was accompanied by a gentle brush of his fingertips along the line of my cheek.

“Fine,” I said. He held my gaze.

“Really?”

“No.” I gave him a very small smile that felt crooked and unsteady on my lips. “That was— unpleasant.”

“I know,” he said, and looked down at my hands. They were clean—the cops had allowed me to wash up—but I still felt the psychic imprint of blood on them. “It could just as easily have been you.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t think so, though. There was something that made him vulnerable to them, maybe a link they’d created to keep track of him through the aetheric. It pushed us out of the way and went straight for him. If they’d been able to take me out the same way, don’t you think they would have done it?”

I couldn’t tell if it had occurred to him or not; David was being extraordinarily secretive at the moment. He gazed at me for a couple of seconds, then turned his attention to the reporters. “We should get out of here,” he said.

“Do you know who was behind it?” I asked.

“If I did, would I tell you right now?” he asked, all too reasonably. “But I think you already know.”

“If we can believe Lee, it was the Sentinels,” I said. “How come I’m on their hit list when I barely know their oh-so-pretentious name?”

“Because of me,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. I’d like it if you were a less stationary target.”

“Cops want to talk to you.”

David took my arm, a sweet gentlemanly gesture that didn’t exactly fool me. He walked me in the direction of the Mustang, which was currently an awkward bastard stepchild of a convertible, what with all the glass scattered in glittering square pieces on the ground. “I don’t want to talk to them,” he said. He opened the driver’s-side door. “I’ll let you drive.”

“Bribery, pure and simple. You’re bribing me to do something illegal.”

“What’s illegal about it? It’s your car. You already talked to the police. You’re not guilty of anything.”

Well, he did have a point. But I still felt uneasy, driving away under the noses of cops and television cameras. “We’ll be seen,” I said, and nodded toward the news crews. David didn’t bother to glance their way.

“We won’t.” Only a Djinn could sound that confident. Or arrogant. I supposed if I didn’t love him so much it would have been just a shade more on the arrogant side. “If we get entangled here, more lives are at risk. We need to be moving, Jo.”

Djinn were nothing if not ruthlessly logical. And they weren’t above hitting the pressure points, even on those they cared about.

I silently got behind the wheel of the Mustang. It started up with a low rumble. Nobody looked in our direction. “Repairs,” I reminded David. The broken remains of our windshields and windows rose up in a glittering curtain from the pavement, liquefied into a pool in each open area, and then solidified into clean, clear safety glass. I checked that the driver’s-side window rolled down, and it functioned perfectly.

“I’m disappointed in you,” David said. “You believe I’d do it wrong?”

“I think that you have enough to think about already, ” I said. “His van’s still in the way.”

Moving a working crime scene would have been a puzzle even to one of the most powerful Djinn on Earth, but David was a lateral thinker; he didn’t bother to move the van, or the cops, or anyone else.

“Hold on,” he said, and our car lurched slightly and then began to float above the road. It rose at a steady pace, carefully level, then moved forward over the gabled roof of the diner. Nobody looked up to follow our progress. I held on to the wheel in a white-knuckled death grip; flying had never been my favorite method of transportation, and far less so when the vehicle wasn’t actually designed for flight. Shades of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

“What are they seeing?” I asked. My voice was a half octave higher than I wanted it to be.

“Nothing of any significance. To them, the car hasn’t moved from where it’s parked. They see the two of us standing at the phone booth. Oh, and a flock of birds overhead, just in case someone has some rudimentary sense of the aetheric.” Some people did; the ones with a strong sense of it generally put out shingles as psychics or became wildly successful investors or gamblers. If they had more than that, they probably would have ended up in the Ma’at, where they were taught to combine their powers with colleagues, and work in concert, if their abilities weren’t enough to qualify them as Wardens.

I had to rely wholly on David to keep me off the Warden radar. I would remain mostly difficult to find until I had to draw on my powers, but at that moment, I’d light up the aetheric like a spotlight in a cave.

My brain was babbling to distract itself from the impossibility of a ton of metal hanging in midair, gliding at an angle away from the diner and toward a very busy road. “Landing will be tricky,” David said. “Are you ready? When we touch down, you’ll have to really accelerate to make the merge.”

Great. Now freeway merging was taking on a whole new dimension of complexity. I nodded, and got ready to put my foot down and shift as David brought the car in at a gliding angle, moving us faster and faster as the road blurred on approach. . . . It was like landing a jet, only way scarier, from my point of view.

The tires hit pavement with a lurch, and I instantly clutched, shifted, and accelerated, leaving a rubber scratch where we’d hit. The Mustang bounced but recovered nicely, and when I checked the rearview mirror, the car behind us was still a few feet away. Not quite heart-attack distance, at least not on my end. I could only imagine that on the other driver’s end, having a car just appear in front of him might have been . . . unsettling. Maybe when people said he came out of nowhere after an accident, they really were telling the truth.

I got the inevitable honk and New Jersey salute, returned the favor, and settled into the drive. David relaxed—but not all the way. I could translate his body language pretty well, and he was still tense. Trying hard not to let me know it, but tense.

“You’re starting to believe me,” I said, “that things aren’t quite as straightforward as they seemed.”

“They never are with you. I’ve always taken you seriously,” he said. “But now I’m taking your enemies seriously as well.”

Not a good sign for them, and that cheered me up as much as the food back at the diner. I was tired, and achy from the stress and the drive, but there was something restful and strangely comforting about having the wheel beneath my hands and my feet on the pedals. And David at my side, which happened far less than I’d always craved. Which reminded me . . . “You’re hanging around,” I said. “Do Djinn get vacations from the day job?”

“Since I’m the boss, I can take vacation whenever I want,” he said, and took off his glasses to needlessly polish them. It was so cute that Djinn had poker tells, just like humans; I knew instantly that he was fibbing. “I can take the time.”

David’s job wasn’t exactly low-key. He served as the Conduit for half of the Djinn, a link between them and the raw power of Mother Earth. Without that link, the Djinn were reliant on Wardens and their relatively feeble draw of power from the aetheric. His job was different from that of the Oracles, but even more crucial, and it didn’t have time off.

The Djinn didn’t like being reliant on humans. Ever. I supposed that if I’d been one of them, ancient beings who’d been forced into the worst kind of slavery imaginable for centuries at a time, I wouldn’t be all that fond of relying on others, either.

What else David did besides managing that power flow for his people, though, was a mystery to me. I knew he had to leave me on a fairly frequent basis to attend to business; I knew some of that business had to do with Djinn stepping out of line and needing correction. In a sense, David had become the court of last supernatural resort, a role I instinctively knew he didn’t want and wasn’t comfortable in playing. His friend Jonathan had been a great leader, one who’d held the Djinn together despite all the infighting for thousands of years; he’d had a certain ruthless wisdom that everyone respected.

David, however, was crippled by two things: One, he wasn’t Jonathan; two, he had me to worry about. I was his Achilles’ heel, at least when it came to his fellow elementals. Most of them didn’t understand why he spent so much time in human form, and they’d never understand why he had offered marriage to a mere bug like me. They’d forgive him for it, those who liked him; after all, pledging to stay at my side would only last a human lifetime, barely a blink to the Djinn.

But it was a worry. He’d become kind of a Crazy Cat Lady among the elementals, far too attached to humanity for his own good. It was a sign, faint but definite, that he wasn’t destined for the same long-term status that Jonathan had held.

It made David vulnerable in ways I could only dimly imagine.

“What are you thinking about?” David asked. His eyes were closed, and his head was back against the cushion.

“Whether I want purple roses or yellow ones. I think purple might be a nice touch for the wedding bouquet.”

“That’s not what you were thinking about.”

“How do you know?”

He smiled, but didn’t open his eyes. “Because I know when you’re happy, and you’re not. Thinking about wedding bouquets is something you do when you’re happy.”

“You make me happy,” I said, and that wasn’t at all a lie. I took his hand in mine. “And that’s all that counts.”

He lifted my fingers to his lips and pressed a warm kiss against them. “Yes,” he said. “It is.”