Ill Wind

THREE

Twenty-five miles down the road, there was a battered, shotgun-riddled sign for Iron Road. I slowed down and coasted to a stop at the side of the road, looking down the turn-off and wondering what exactly a smarter, saner person than me would do.

I inspected the place while my blinker clicked. Iron Road was a small two-lane affair that disappeared into some dense, overhanging trees, dappled with sunlight and shadow. Picturesque, which was another word for isolated. Why would Lewis want me off the beaten path? Why wouldn't he just show up in the diner and, say, order an eggs Benedict and chat about the good old days? Well, of course, he had reason to be careful, too. Lewis was, in many ways, the most wanted Warden in the world. In comparison, I hadn't even made the top ten.

"What the fuck," I said to Delilah, and eased her back into gear as I turned the wheel. She purred effortlessly down the hill onto Iron Road, into green shadow and smooth, deserted blacktop. I kept the speed down. On a rural road like this, anything was likely to jump out and present a road hazard, especially wildlife and farm animals. The last thing I needed was to end up picking cow out of my grille while a storm rolled up on me.

Fields stretched beyond the trees, sundrenched and extravagantly green. I rolled down the window and breathed in cool, clear air spiced with earth and new leaves. Lewis hadn't said how far to proceed down Iron Road; I could only guess there'd be another sign.

At the crest of the next hill, I saw a neat red farmhouse with a matching barn behind, the kind of thing people paint for craft fairs; I'd never really seen one that, well, perfect before. It even had a windmill and some paintworthy Hereford cows chewing cud in the fields, ringed with a tumbledown rock fence and a riot of new wildflowers in neon purple and buttercup yellow. Perfect Thomas Kinkade. Wind rippled the grass in long velvet waves, and I remembered one of my instructors—who knows which one—remarking how similar the seas of water and air were to each other. We swim in an ocean of air. Come to think of it, that probably wasn't a weather class. It sounded like English lit to me now.

Iron Road didn't change names, but it should have; after the pretty little farm, it turned into Dirt Road, rutted and uneven. I slowed Delilah to a crawl and fretted about the state of her suspension. Nothing up ahead that I could see except a hill looming green and tan, more trees stretching out their arms over the road.

Delilah slowed down more, without my foot pressing the brake.

It's funny how you can just know these things, if you're true partners with your car. I could feel, as if it were my feet instead of Delilah's tires on the road, that something had gone wrong. Badly. It felt as if we were driving through deep mud, but the road was dry, the ruts hard-caked and laced with brittle tire treads. What was slowing us down?

I heard something hissing against the undercarriage of the car. I knew that sound. It sounded like…

Delilah shuddered, and I heard her engine take on a plaintive, unhappy tone. She was struggling to move, but it was getting harder, and harder, with every rotation of the wheels.

It sounded like loose sand.

The road was turning to sand, and we were sinking into it.

"Shit!" I yelped, and went up into Oversight. As soon as I soared out of body and above the car, I could see it; the earth was dull red, moving, churning like a living thing. The rough dry soil was being crushed into tiny, slippery grains. No, not sand… the road was turning to dust, finer than sand, and not just on the surface—this went deep, ten feet at least.

I yanked the wheel, trying to get Delilah off the road and into the trees, where roots and plants would slow the progress of liquefying earth, but it was already too late, the wheel turned loosely in my hands, the tires spun without traction. Dust geysered into the dry air and puffed away on the waves of the ocean of air. The car settled about a foot, and I knew that there was nothing keeping it up now except an even distribution of weight over a large, flat undercarriage. That and possibly someone's goodwill.

We floated, me and Delilah, unable to escape.

In Oversight, I spotted my enemy before she ever pushed through the underbrush—a blue-green aura, laced through with pure white for power, gold for tenacity, cold silver for ruthlessness.

Marion Bearheart had found me.

I dropped back into my skin and saw her coming out of the trees to my left. She was just about as I remembered her from my intake meeting—middle-aged, dignified, skin like burnished copper and hair of black and silver hanging loose over her shoulders. Marion still had kind, gentle eyes, but there was nothing weak about her.

"Joanne," she said, and her low voice seemed welcoming somehow. "There's no point in trying to run. Wherever you go, I can dissolve the ground under your feet, tie you down with roots and grasses. Let's make this easy."

Of course. I'd forgotten. Marion was an Earth Warden.

A rustle of underbrush on the other side of the car drew my attention to someone else—younger than Marion, male. I didn't know him, but he had Scandinavian white-blond hair, fair skin, and summer-blue eyes. Like Marion, he had on a plaid shirt and blue jeans, practical hiking boots. Another Earth Warden. Their fashion sense—or lack of it—was unmistakable.

The third one, standing next to him, was so small I almost didn't see her—small, dark, delicate. Nothing delicate about her clothes, though, which featured a lot of leather and attitude. Her hair was cut pixie-short, streaked with unnatural greenish highlights, and she had face jewelry—a nose ring, to be exact, with a stud to match in the other nostril.

"You brought friends," I said, turning back to Marion. She smiled faintly.

"Against you? Naturally." She nodded toward them. "Erik and Shirl. If you're thinking of calling a storm, I'd advise you not to try it; Shirl is a damn fine practitioner, but she has a tendency to be a little heavy-handed."

Pieces of the puzzle started to drop together. "Oh. The salt?"

This time I got a full, delighted smile. "I just wanted to talk to you, Joanne. It seemed like the best way to arrange it. I knew you were looking for someone. It stood to reason it was another Warden. I was only hoping it was someone with an Earth power, or that would have seemed a little odd."

Since Lewis had the whole collectible set, nothing would have seemed odd to me… and didn't that just sum up the Wardens in a nutshell? We only thought talking salt was odd on a percentage basis.

Just my bad luck she'd gambled and I'd fallen for it.

I had a slightly darker thought. "The lightning bolt?"

Marion looked startled. "Of course not! We just want to talk to you, not kill you. Shirl's specialty is not weather, in any case."

I saw something flare bright out of the corner of my eye, and turned to see Shirl holding out a palm in front of her. Fire danced on her skin, flickering gold and orange and hot reds. It reflected in her dark eyes, and I felt a surge of dislike for the arrogance I saw there. I know, better Fire Wardens than you, sweetheart. Ones who don't have to show off for the boss. Still, fire gave me the willies, always had. I'd seen what it could do, close up.

"So talk," I said. "Or give me back the road and let me out of here. There's a storm coming."

"I know." Marion speared Shirl with a look, and Shirl put the fire back where it came from. "Let's take a walk, Joanne."

She reached out and opened the car door. A square stepping-stone of solid earth formed in the shifting dust, just big enough for me to stand on. I eased out, feeling Delilah rock like a boat in a pond, and bent down to test what my car was sitting on top of.

My fingers passed into the dust with barely any resistance at all; it was so fine, so frictionless than I felt a second's dizziness. Fall into that, and you wouldn't be coming up.

"This way," Marion said, and turned away. I put my hand on Delilah's dusty finish for a few seconds, trying to reassure her—and me—that things weren't as bad as they seemed, and then stepped off the square of solid ground and into the shadows of the trees.

It felt like another world. Marion's world. The Earth spoke to her, the way the sky did to me: whispers of leaves, dry creaks of branches, the padding footsteps of living things, small and large and minuscule, that made up her realm. I thought about the farm back there, the picture-perfect setting. That had been Marion's equivalent of doodling, while she waited. Perfect grass, artistic dottings of wildflowers. Marion created beauty from chaos, or maybe just demonstrated how beautiful chaos could be when seen through the right eyes.

We came out of the trees into a meadow filled with knee-high grass stalks, silver tipped, that rustled and murmured and bent under the touch of a brisk northeast wind. Overhead, white cirrus clouds shredded into lacework. A plane crawled the blue and threaded a white contrail through the lattice. It all looked flat, but I knew the plane was barely above the troposphere. The cirrus clouds were at least twenty-five thousand feet, maybe higher, well above the level of even a weather balloon. And those peaceful clouds were scudding fast, dragging the storm behind.

Marion turned her face into the wind and said, "The Zuni always said, first thunder brings the rain. But we're far from Zuni country."

"Everybody says something about the weather. Most of it's nonsense."

"Most of it," she agreed, and looked at me with those tired, patient, gentle eyes. "Murder's a serious charge, Joanne. Running from it makes no sense. You know you'll be found."

"I didn't murder him."

Her dark eyebrows rose, but her face stayed still and closed. "You argued, he's dead. Do we really believe this is an accident?"

Well, no. It hadn't been an accident. I'd been trying to kill Bad Bob Biringanine.

I just hadn't expected to succeed.

She took my silence at face value. "You were to wait for me in Florida."

"I couldn't. I had things to do."

"Such as?" She shook her head, brushed hair back from her face when the wind played it into a veil over her eyes. "Tell me what happened between you and Bad Bob. Maybe I can help you."

I opened my mouth to tell her about the Demon Mark, but of course I couldn't; it would be suicide. And she couldn't see it—otherwise, Marion or a hundred other Wardens would have known about Bad Bob's condition long before he passed the infection on to me. Rahel had told me as much—they were impossible for humans to see, even Wardens, unless they asked their Djinn the right questions. I felt sick and trapped and more afraid than I'd been in a long time. Help, I wanted to say. But I didn't dare, because I knew there was no help, no cure, nothing but a long and terrible dying. If I didn't get a Djinn, I would never survive, and the Association would never give up one of their precious store to save my life. They were very firm on that point. One Djinn per customer, rationed strictly on rank, and I'd blown my chance before I got my own. Giving me a Djinn now would just be a waste of a good elemental. They certainly wouldn't sacrifice one just for little old me.

I hedged. Some of the truth was better than none.

"There was something wrong with him," I said. "Bad Bob, I mean. I don't know what it was, but he attacked me. I thought he was going to kill me. I had to do it."

"You pulled lightning," Marion murmured. She crouched down and plucked a weed out of the ground, held it lightly between her fingers. It sprouted a bud, which exploded into luxuriant color. Red, this one. Brilliant bloodred, with a black center like an eye. "You didn't try to, say, immobilize him instead, as you must have been trained to do."

"Hey, this was Bad Bob, not some fifth-year apprentice with a bad attitude. The higher level a Warden is, the worse the consequences if he loses control— hell, Marion, you know that. Power and responsibility. Well, I had to fight him, and I had to use the big guns to do it. You want me to say I'm sorry?"

"No," she said. The flower in her hands blazed brilliantly through summer, faded, withered into winter, and died. A life in less than a minute. Marion's little silent demonstration: You control the weather. I control life itself. "I want you to understand that you will have a chance to tell your side of it. But when the judgment comes, it is final."

"Bullshit. You've already decided, all of you. You think I'm a danger. You want to—" To neuter me. Scrub my head with steel wool. Take away everything that I love.

"I don't, actually," Marion said, and dropped the flower. "But if the Council decides that you cannot be trusted with the powers you control, then those powers have to be taken from you. I know you know this. You can't keep running like this. You have to go back."

"I can't. Not yet."

"The Council meets tomorrow. Nobody sent me after you today, but if you don't submit yourself for judgment tomorrow at the Council offices, somebody will, and my orders will be very different."

"You're traveling with a hunting squad," I pointed out. "Two Earth Wardens and a Fire Warden. That's to counteract my powers without fighting me on the weather front. Right?"

She didn't answer. Didn't have to, in fact.

'Tomorrow's tomorrow," I said finally. The storm had crawled closer on its little cat feet, and I could feel distant tingles at the edges of my awareness; the storm talked to me, the way that the forest and this meadow talked to Marion. My power, and my enemy, all at once. "You going to let me go or what?"

Marion smiled, and I knew what that meant.

I felt tiny, stealthy ropes of grass moving around me, sliding over my shoes, climbing my legs, and I yelped in absolute disgust and ripped free, hopping from one foot to another. The earth softened under my feet, and even though they were relatively low-heeled, my shoes sank in fast, heels first. I kicked them off, scooped them up, and ran like hell.

It was like running on razors. Every stone turned its sharpest edge toward me; every branch whipped at my body or my face. Grass struggled to slow and trip me. I broke into a cold sweat at the thought of having to flail through those trees, but I didn't have a choice; I huddled low, below the reach of most branches, and tried to hop over the thrashing whirlwinds of grasses and roots that reached for me.

Fire blasted bright in a straight line between me and Delilah's open door, and on the other side of the car I saw Shirl, her hands outstretched, placing the fire and directing it toward me. Damn, I hate fire.

There was plenty of fine dust afloat, exactly what I needed to condense water in the air; I quick-froze the air in a twenty-foot circle, crowding molecules closer, forcing water molecules to attach around the tiny grains of dust. Mist hazed the air, and I felt my hair crackle and lift from the power. I poured energy into it, never mind the consequences; out here in the country, there wasn't as much damage to be done by a mistake, and I was damn near mad enough not to care.

Within ten seconds, I had a thick, iron-gray cloud overhead. I flipped polarity above it, and the charge began the process of attraction and accumulation, drops melting and merging and growing until their own weight overcame the pressure of droplet attraction.

The cloudburst came right on cue and right on target. Cold and hard and silver, slicing down from the sky in ribbons. The fire sizzled; Shirl cursed out loud and tried to counter for it, but I'd saturated the whole area with as much moisture as possible, and physics were against her. She couldn't get the core of the fire hot enough, not without pouring more energy into it than most Fire Wardens possessed. Their talent was in controlling fire, not sourcing it.

"Joanne, don't!" Marion was right behind me. I eyed the unstable pond of dust on which Delilah floated— quickly becoming mud as the deluge mounted—and swallowed my fear. Cold rain down the back of my neck, soaking my hair flat, drawing a full-body shiver. I had to bet that she wouldn't let me die.

I jumped for the car door.

A leafy vine tangled my foot and tugged me off balance. My fingers brushed the cold wet metal, and then I was falling, falling—

Falling into the soft quicksand.

"No!" Marion screamed.

It wasn't like falling into mud; mud has resistance and weight. This was like falling into feathers.

My instinct was to gasp, but I conquered it, damped my mouth shut and tried not to breathe, because sucking a lungful of this stuff would be an ugly death. I squeezed my eyes shut against dust abrasion. No sound down here, no sensation except falling, falling, falling. How deep would I go? Marion couldn't possible have softened the earth deeper than ten feet; there wouldn't have been any point. Didn't matter. Ten feet would be more than enough to bury me.

The important thing was that Marion was just as handicapped as I was. She could harden the earth again, but that would kill me just as quickly. This wasn't exactly science; it was art. This was her ocean, her solid ocean, and I was drowning in it. She'd try to save me; there was no percentage in killing me, at least not yet, and she'd have to think of something fast. Maybe she'd be trying to harden the earth in an upward path, like a ramp to the surface; I'd just have to find it.

Find it how? God, I wanted to take a breath. Needed to.

That, at least, I could fix. I pulled at the air trapped in the fine dust and formed it into a cocoon around me. It made a shell a few inches thick all around me, not enough to keep me alive for long, but enough for me to take a couple of quick, clean breaths. I needed to get up, but I didn't know how to do that. There wasn't enough volume in the air to create any kind of warming and cooling effect that might serve as an engine. Flailing around in the dark, I couldn't feel anything solid.

I was stuck.

Something touched the back of my neck, warm and solid, and I reached desperately for it.

Skin. Human skin. It was too dark to see anything, but I was touching a living person. Not female, I discovered—even the most flat-chested woman has some softness to her in that region. I extended my bubble of air to fit around the newcomer and spared a precious breath to whisper, "Erik?" Because at least the blond-haired Earth Warden would have been a lifeline, even if it was a lifeline into a cell.

But it wasn't Erik.

Lips touched mine, gentle and warm and entirely tasty, and I knew him in deep places where his touch still lingered.

"David?"

He didn't answer, and I felt his lips fit back over mine. Fresh air puffed into my mouth, and I opened myself to it, to him.

Both of us floating together in the dark, close as lovers.

He grabbed the hand not still clutching shoes, and swam sideways. Which was wrong in so many ways… First, there was nothing to swim against—this stuff had no resistance, hence, no propulsion. But he was propelling just fine. Second, sideways should have taken us right into the solid walls of the channel where Marion hadn't softened the earth, but we just kept right on moving, going and going and going. My lungs burned for air. As if he sensed that, he turned and breathed into my mouth again. That shouldn't have worked; his lungs should have already scrubbed the oxygen out, given him back only waste products to share with me.

I breathed in pure sweet air, or as near as made no difference. It was like a shot from a diver's tank, and I felt energy shoot through me like white light.

After who knows how long, David began to swim up at an angle. I felt things brush my reaching free hand and arms—tendrils—grass roots.

We broke the surface in an empty meadow, where grass shivered and whispered and bent silver heads to the freshening wind.

I didn't have to climb out. The ground hardened under my feet, pushing me up, until I was standing barefoot on the grass, Venus born dusty from the ground.

David was still holding my hand. He had come up with me, and dust fell from the shoulders and sleeves of his coat in a thin dry stream. He shook his head and let loose a storm of it. Behind the dust-clouded glasses, I saw his eyes, and this time he didn't try to hide what they were. What they meant.

His eyes were deep, beautiful, and entirely alien. Copper-colored, with flecks of bright gold. They flared brighter as I watched, then faded into something that was nearly human-brown.

"You bastard!" I hissed.

"Just a thank-you would have been good enough," he said. "Want to call a cloud for us? I'm in desperate need of a bath."

"You're a Djinn!"

"Of course."

"Of course?" I repeated. "What do you mean of course? I was supposed to know? Hello, didn't hear the clue phone ringing!"

He just looked at me. He took off his glasses— glasses he could not possibly need—and began cleaning them on the edge of a dark blue T-shirt that advertised The X-Files. Mulder and Scully looked bad-ass and mysterious. His brown hair had coppery highlights, even under the coating of dust. Except for the eyes, he looked entirely human.

Which, I now knew, was entirely his choice.

I was so mad I was shaking. "Whose Djinn are you? Did Lewis send you?"

He put his glasses back on, grabbed me by the arms, and used some martial arts trick to sweep my feet out from under me. I fell backwards into the grass with a bone-rattling thud, and he caught himself with outstretched hands just above me. More dust sifted down on me. He muttered something in a language I couldn't catch, and the dust swirled into a compact little ball and dropped away from us.

Somehow, it just made me madder. I opened my mouth to yell at him, and he put his lips down very close to my ear and said, "If you scream, they'll hear you. I can't prevent that."

I caught the scream and held it in because I heard, just about two feet away, the crunch of footsteps in grass. A shadow blocked the light overhead, and I peered past David to see Shirl standing there, looking puzzled.

"Anything?" Marion's voice, coming from the left, coming fast in our direction. Above me, David's face was blank and still, and I could see he was doing something—whatever it was, it was blocking them from seeing us in either the physical or aetheric realms. Unless they stepped on us or I made some inappropriate noise, they wouldn't find us.

"Nothing," Shirl confirmed. Marion's shadow joined the other woman's. "Dammit, this isn't possible. She was down there, I swear she was. But Erik said she was gone when he went down."

"I saw dust here," Marion said. She paced slowly back and forth, too close to my head for comfort. "Right around here. But I don't know how she could possibly have done that. She's not an Earth power."

"Maybe somebody's helping her." Shirl was too perceptive for my taste. That and the nose ring were putting her on my bad side. "She got any Earth Warden friends?"

"A few, but I can't see them sticking their necks out like this, not when they know what she's accused of doing." Marion hesitated again, and I could see her looking down, looking right at me. I didn't even dare to breathe. David wasn't touching me, but I could feel the heat radiating off him—what if they could feel it, too?

"Maybe you should bring in your Djinn." A new voice—Erik. He came trudging up from the other side. "Just set him to tracking her."

"I have other things for my Djinn to attend to," Marion said in a way that convinced me Erik shouldn't have made the suggestion. It apparently convinced Erik, too. He shut up. After another few fast heartbeats, Marion said, "All right. We have her car. She's not going anywhere, at least not fast. We'll wait for her to come back to it."

"What if she doesn't?" he wanted to know.

Marion smiled. "You don't know much about Joanne, I see."

The three of them tramped off through the grass. I didn't dare move, breathe, or speak as the sound of them receded. When the only thing left was the dry whisper of the grass, David let his arms bend and slowly lowered himself to lie on top of me. Sweet, hard pressure that made it hard to breathe.

"Get off," I ordered. His eyes flickered, brown and copper and gold, all the richness of the earth.

"Kind of you to offer, but don't you think we'd better get moving?" With no transition, he was on his feet. He was so fast, I couldn't even see him move. Dammit, he'd been playing with me all this time, playing at being human. That little drama he'd orchestrated back at the motel, that had just been fun for him.

I ignored the inconvenient fact that it had been fun for me, too.

I scrambled up and faced him, very aware that I was filthy and tired and scratched and bruised. At least I wasn't shoeless. I dropped the low-heeled pumps I was holding and stepped into them, ignoring the grit inside. "I am not going with you, not until you tell me whose Djinn you are!"

"You want to go with them?" he asked, and looked in the direction Marion had gone. They were still visible, just at the edge of the trees, heading for my car. Poor, abandoned Delilah. "Just say the word—I can remove the veil and you can go right back to what you were doing. Which was, if I recall, dying."

"You didn't answer my question! Whose Djinn are you?"

David smiled. Not the full, delighted grin of a being of limitless power, but the tight, unhappy smile of a man who knows too much. "My own," he said. "And I was really hoping you wouldn't ask that three times."

Three times. I hadn't meant to, but it was a ritual number, and he had to answer.

He meant he was free. Not bound.

A free Djinn.

That was… impossible. Absolutely—

It meant—oh, God, it meant I could claim him. And once I'd claimed him, I could make him take the Mark. He was exactly what I was looking for. He was the thing I had been hell-bent on asking Lewis to give me.

And now I didn't need Lewis at all.

He looked at me steadily, with eyes that were not quite human and not quite Djinn, that copper-brown hair blowing in the northeast wind. Thunder boomed in the distance. The storm was moving this way, and all things being equal, it would be drawn to me because I was its opposite.

I felt the Demon Mark stir in my chest, and the sensation was enough to make me want to gag in horror. I could get rid of it, now and forever.

All I had to do was…

I could see fear flickering like heat lightning in the far horizon of David's eyes.

He'd saved my life—not once but several times—

I knew that now. Was this really how I was going to repay him? Enslave him? Force him to be a host to this filthy thing? Trap him into never-ending agony?

Djinn don't die. At least not that anyone has ever recorded. They get the Demon Mark and they go insane and they're sealed away, for all time, with this poison eating away at them. Screaming for eternity.

I could do it to him. All I had to do was say the words. It hammered my heart faster, made me weak in the knees. Made me light-headed and sick to my stomach. Come on, the logical part of me insisted. Don't go soft on me now!

But when I opened my mouth, I found that all I had to say was, "I don't suppose you know how to get my car back."

I was stunned by the flash of relief in his eyes. I didn't want to see it, either, because that meant I had to think about it, and what it meant. He wouldn't be relieved if he hadn't dreaded it. And if he dreaded it…

I can't think about this right now. Self-preservation first, compassion second, right? I wasn't thinking straight. Later, I'd do what had to be done.

David must have sensed that, because he looked away from me for the first time.

"No," he said. "But if you're not that picky, Marion came in a perfectly good Land Rover with a full tank of gas."

The Land Rover—a massive white beast, liberally splashed with mud to show it wasn't just a suburban wannabe's dream—sat unattended in a grove near the wildly unlikely beauty of the farmhouse. All around it, I could see evidence of either Marion's or Erik's tinkering—grass just a bit greener, trees surreally gorgeous, perfect flowers spreading petals to the sun.

The Land Rover looked like a massive mechanical roach on the wedding cake.

I tried the door, hoping Marion wouldn't have been anal-retentive enough to turn on alarms in the country… no panicked shrieking followed, but the handle clicked and failed to open.

"Locked," I said to David. He reached over my shoulder and touched the door. Metal thunked.

"Open," he disagreed. The door swung wide.

We climbed inside in silence—for me, tired and hurt as I was, it was like scaling K2—and once I was perched in the comfortable seat, looking out through the smoked-glass windows, I let the flavor of another woman's car flow over me. Subtle scents, not as well aged as Delilah's odors… herbs, mostly, and fresh grass, dirt. Nobody had abused this baby with decomposing fast food or spilled coffee; if Marion spilled anything, I guessed it would have been herbal tea. There was a single silver thermos lying on the backseat. Coffee, I hoped. Erik looked like he was manly enough to swill a cup now and then.

David must have thought I was waiting for divine inspiration about the lack of car keys. He reached over and touched the ignition with one finger. A blue spark jumped, and the engine purred.

"You're handy if I ever want to get in the grand theft auto business," I said. "Any other neat tricks you can do I should know about?"

It was a loaded question, and he was right not to answer it. He sat back in the seat and fastened his safety belt. I attached mine, slipped the Land Rover in gear, and bumped gently out of the meadow and back up onto the blacktop of Iron Road, where I hit the accelerator hard. There were a few tense moments for me, watching the rearview mirror, but I didn't see the Wrath of Marion pursuing, and there wasn't a lot she could have done to affect us at this distance, in a car, on a paved road. Earthquake, maybe, but that would put others in danger, and Marion had scruples.

Hopefully.

Even so, I felt tightness ease in my shoulders as I made the left turn from Iron Road onto the highway again.

I turned right, heading north. David stirred, but I beat him to the comment.

"They're expecting me to head south," I said. "And I will, but not this way. I need to get lost before they think about using the mundane cops to track us—this tanker truck isn't exactly inconspicuous."

"And a vintage Mustang was?"

Well, he had a point. I sped north to the next farm-to-market intersection, took a random turn to the west, and followed some roads that didn't have signs and probably didn't need them; if you didn't know where you were going, local theory was, you didn't belong there anyway. I studied the dashboard. Marion had popped for the addition of a global positioning system. I activated it and looked the map over while I was driving. So did David, intensely interested; he traced routes in silence with his fingertip, showing me alternatives, until we locked in one that took us through midsize cities in Kansas, heading for Oklahoma City.

"There's a shorter route," he pointed out.

"I'm starting to worry about the shorter routes. Anyway, I have a good friend who lives near Oklahoma City, so we'll go there first."

"And—?"

"And I'll figure it out from there."

"Well, that's a hell of a long-range plan."

"You're shutting up, now, right?"

He did. It was kind of a shame, because I had a lot of questions. One of them was, of course, what would happen to Delilah, my sweet midnight-blue baby. The idea that Erik or—perish the thought— Shirl might end up driving her made me almost turn the Land Rover around and go back.

We must have gone about thirty minutes in silence before I asked him, "So you really don't have a master?" Because I still couldn't believe it. Well, sure, in the stories… there were always old copper lamps lying around waiting to be rubbed for three wishes. But real Djinn don't work that way. Real Djinn are numbered, assigned, and accounted for like precious jewels, and their service is eternal.

David was looking out the window at the rolling pastoral countryside, sparsely dotted with cows and neat-rowed fields. He didn't turn his head. "You know that's one of the few questions I had to answer honestly, since you asked it three times. No. I don't have a master."

Djinn could lie about most anything except who they were and who they served—but you had to ask them directly, and be really focused, because they were also Zen masters of the obscure; and weren't afraid of resorting to trickery to misdirect the questioner. But David's answer didn't seem obscure; it seemed simple and to the point. He was that impossible dream, the free-range Djinn. Which meant—no, I didn't want to think about what it meant. Far too tempting. Far too easy.

He turned his head then, and he wasn't troubling to disguise his eyes anymore; they were bright copper, beautiful beyond words, scary beyond measure. His human disguise, I saw now, had been pretty minimal; just a muting of his eyes and hair, an inward turning of his powerful aura.

"You hid in Oversight," I said, instead of what I was really thinking. Djinn weren't the only ones good at avoiding questions. "How'd you do that?"

"It's different when we're free. We come into the full range of our abilities only when we're working for a master. Outside of that, we just have camouflage and some small talents, hardly more than what you have yourself." This from a guy who could start cars with his finger and swim through solid earth like water. But then, I realized, those were things a properly trained Fire Warden or Earth Warden could do. So maybe he wasn't dishing crap after all. "I appear as your subconscious shapes me."

"Human?"

"Mostly. I can be hurt."

"Killed?"

He shook his head. "Maybe. It's been a long time since I've been free. I don't know. But hurt, yes."

"And if I go into Oversight now—"

"You'll see me as human." He shrugged. "Not for your benefit, though. That's just how we look when we're free."

It made sense, actually. Djinn, like any living thing, would have developed the ability to hide themselves from predators. In a very real sense, that's what magic-wielding humans are to them—predators, waiting to pounce and devour. Or at least to enslave. It was an extremely interesting and unsettling thought, because it meant that there might be more than just David out there. A lot more. Hiding in plain sight. Hoping nobody with the right set of facts twigged to their true identity, because it would be so easy to…

I wrenched myself away from temptation. Again.

"You've been following me," I accused. I took my foot off the gas and let the Ranger coast for a while, because we were coming up on one of those smalltown speed-trap zones. Not a big town, Eliza Springs. Not much of a town at all. A speed limit of thirty miles an hour smelled like the ubiquitous traveler tax.

David didn't bother to answer.

"Somebody sent you," I continued. "Maybe not your master, okay, maybe that's true. But somebody."

More silence. Then again, I wasn't asking a direct question. If I were magically compelled to answer questions, I'd resent it like hell, so I kept it conversational and declamatory. "You caused that spinout."

His shoulders tensed, just a bit. He relaxed them. No answer.

"I felt the car tip. I was going to roll over."

"Yes."

"And you stopped it." No answer. It was time for a little force. "Why?"

"Seemed like a good idea at the time." His warm-metal eyes flicked toward me, then away.

I reminded myself that even though he had to answer questions, he wasn't under any obligation to tell the truth, not unless I asked him the same question a ritual three times, and even then only if it fell within certain guidelines. I didn't want to do that, because he also wasn't under any obligation not to disappear at the next blink of an eye. This was a little bit like dealing with a skittish, beautiful wild thing… too much heavy-handed crashing around and he'd run.

"You were going to let me crash and burn." I made it a statement. "Why save me?"

"I liked the way you looked," he said. "I saw you at the diner, when the lightning came for you. You could have run back inside. Why'd you get in the car?"

"You're kidding, right? There were all those—"

"People," he finished for me. "You didn't want to put them in danger. I told you. I liked the way you looked."

"In Oversight." He didn't confirm or deny. "I didn't see you in Oversight, and I was looking."

"We've had this conversation. You can't see me when I don't want you to." He flickered, suddenly, like a failing TV picture, blinking in and out in strobe patterns. I almost ran the SUV off the road. "Sorry. Just a demonstration."

"This morning at the motel—you didn't leave. You were just—" Hiding. I had another thought. "You watched me! You watched me change clothes!"

He closed his eyes and made himself comfortable. The smile on his face made me smack him on the shoulder. Hard.

"Hey! I'm talking to you!" I said. He didn't move, just sat there, relaxed and limp, eyes still closed. "Right. As if Djinn nap."

"We do." He did sound tired. "And I'm going to."

"Whatever."

"Fine."

I fiddled with the radio and worried more about cops, and Marion, and cell phones, and the fact that this damn British boat was all too conspicuous. Of the three stations available, two were country and one was rap; I settled for rap. If David had an objection, he didn't wake up long enough to voice it.

We made it safely past the six intersections and one Dairy Queen that made up Eliza Springs, and hit a farm-to-market road that headed vaguely west. I notched the Land Rover up to a comfortable purring speed and frowned at the speedometer, which told me kilometers per hour instead of miles per hour. Close enough. I had bigger problems than a speeding ticket.

One of them snored lightly at my right elbow, all the way to the state line.

Something about the way David affected me—and he did affect me, no doubt about it—reminded me of my first date. As dates go, it wasn't supposed to be very adventurous; Mom drove me and Jimmy to the movies at the mall. She bought our tickets, Cokes, and popcorn, wished me a nice time, kissed my cheek, and strolled off to go shopping.

Jimmy was sweating. He was trying so hard to be a gentleman that he slapped my hand when I tried to open a door, which sort of went against the basic principles of gentlemanly behavior. I managed not to smack him back. We seated ourselves in the theater with snacks and drinks, sat stiffly next to each other, and prayed for the lights to go down so we wouldn't have to fumble through too much conversation. We exhausted the bad points of Mrs. Walker, the math teacher, and Mrs. Anthony, the English teacher, and Mr. Zapruzinski, the boy's gym coach who always smelled like old sweat and cigarettes, and there weren't any girl-boy subjects either of us felt competent to attempt.

We had just added the band teacher to our mutual-enemies list when the lights went down. Way down. Like, out. And outside, the storm that had been looming overhead and shaking its fist for three hours…

… let me have it. Oh, yeah. It was pissed off. Thunder roared so loudly, I thought we were already watching Star Wars. As I sat there in the dark with a bunch of shrieking preteens and a few panicked adults and my (literally) blind date Jimmy, I heard rain hammer the roof like a million stones from an angry mob. It was a riot storm. An assault storm. I knew, immediately, that things were bad and going to get worse.

Jimmy tried to kiss me. It was a panicked, sweaty attempt, and he missed and smacked his forehead into mine, and for a second I saw Star Wars warp effects to go with the roar, and then he corrected and got his lips on mine and—

Oh.

Well.

That wasn't so bad. He sat back quickly when the house lights flickered on again and looked triumphant. As well he should. I felt—curious. Warm all over, especially in the middle, as if I had started to melt.

"Maybe we should go," I said hesitantly to Jimmy. The theater was emptying out, parents herding kids like frightened sheep, a few teens slouching away and trying to look cool and uncaring and maybe a little bit to blame for all the uproar.

"You want to go?" he asked. He really was kind of nice, I decided. Dark hair, thick and straight, pale blue eyes, and long soft lashes, sensitive looking. We were the last two left in the theater, with hail hammering the roof, thunder booming like a foot kicking the door.

Jimmy had pretty eyes.

"We could stay," I said, attempting nonchalance. "Want some popcorn?"

It was my first try at seduction. It succeeded.

Jimmy reached over and kissed me, more enthusiasm than skill, and we spilled popcorn all over the sticky theater floor, and my warm liquid center heated up some more and started a rolling boil. This kissing thing, this was fun. It went on for a while, and I guess the storm was still raging but I wasn't exactly paying attention, and Jimmy was breathing like a steam engine in my ear and he put his hand on my breast and oh, my—

The lights flickered again and went out. I was grateful.

Jimmy's hand moved, and my nipple went hard, and in that moment I think I even would have let him put his hand down my pants, except that at that particular instant, the roof of the theater peeled open, shedding ceiling tiles and metal struts and cement.

I screamed. We jumped apart, and rain dumped over us again, freezing cold, and hard little nuggets of ice spat out of the dark and shattered on the concrete floor, stuck to the purple plush velvet, stung like wasps on my exposed arms and face. Jimmy put his arms around me, and we stumbled toward a dim exit sign.

The wind howled like a knife-wielding maniac. A chunk of ice the size of a golf ball hit Jimmy hard enough to make him yelp, and I wrenched away from Jimmy's arms and screamed at the top of my lungs: "Hey! Stop it!"

I looked up into the heart of it, this angry temper-tantrum-throwing child of a storm, and I put everything I had into the scream. I shoved at it with muscles in my head that I'd never really exercised.

"I mean it! Quit!"

A ball of ice the size of a soda can smashed at my feet and scattered like broken glass, glittering me with shrapnel. I drew in breath for a third scream. No need.

It stopped.

Silent. Dead still. Overhead, clouds lazily rotated like a watch running down. Lightning laced in and out of the edges.

Raindrops pattered on the ruined roof. Thunder muttered darkly.

Sound of my heart beating hard, hard and fast as a rock 'n' roll drum, and I heard Jimmy make a puking sound and run for the door.

The clouds rotated again. I looked right into the hard dark center of it and it looked back, and we understood each other, I guess. I sat down on a cold, wet seat and looked at the movie screen that would never show me Star Wars because it had a jagged rip down the middle, like a lightning bolt.

I never saw Jimmy again.

I wasn't sure if David reminded me of that divine burst of first lust, or the terror of knowing I no longer controlled my life.

I strongly suspected it was both.

By the time David woke up, we were in Battle Ground, Indiana, and I was pulled over to the side of the road and doing a little car maintenance on a stubborn air filter. It left me even dirtier and grimier than before, and I slammed the car door extra hard because having David peacefully snoring in my ear was just about more than I could stand.

He came awake at the noise like a cat, completely alert and looking neat and self-satisfied.

"Good morning," I said. "We've been on the road for about nine hours, and we're—"

"Outside of Battle Ground, Indiana," he said. "I know."

I'd turned the GPS off, so he didn't get it off the computer screen, and we were nowhere near a road sign. "And you know this—"

"You missed the part where I admitted I was a Djinn?"

"C'mon. Really?"

"Yes." David smiled slightly. "I haven't been completely sleeping. I've been keeping us unseeable."

"As opposed to invisible?"

"Unseeable just means that people don't look at you, not that they can't see you. It takes less effort."

"I thought you were asleep."

"We don't sleep the same way you do. Keeping us unseeable doesn't require much thought, and neither does knowing where I am." He shrugged. "I suppose in the computer age, you'd call it operating system software."

It brought on an intriguing question. "How many ages have you been through, anyway?"

He shook his head. I'd have to ask two more times to get a straight answer, and frankly, it wasn't worth the wasted breath. I was tired and cranky, and I needed food. I was also wishing he'd told me about the whole unseeable thing earlier, because I would have felt safe enough to park and grab a Big Gulp and cheese crackers from a convenience store. Then again, I might have decided to try a drive-through fast food place and they probably wouldn't even have noticed me.

"I'm thinking about pizza," I said. "Deep dish, lots of cheese, maybe some pepperoni. They've got to have good Chicago style around here. Wait, I don't suppose that's one of the handy cool tricks you can do, is it?"

"Make pizza?" He gave it serious thought. "No. I can't create something from nothing, at least not while I'm free. I could probably transmute it for you, so long as what I made it from contained some of the same elements."

"Like?"

"Tomato into pizza sauce. Grain to bread crust. Although I'm not exactly sure how to get pepperoni."

"I think you start with a pig, but let's not get too far into that. Man, what I'd give for a Moon Pie right about now."

David turned and looked around in the backseat; I could have told him the prospects for scavengable food were slim. Marion kept a clean car, something I'd never really been able to do, as much as I loved Delilah. I tended to accumulate slips of paper, receipts, scribbled directions, paper wrappers from straws…

But there was something, I remembered it. "Hey, I think she left a thermos in here. Coffee would be incredibly good."

He didn't see it. I leaned back and spotted a silver gleam under the passenger seat, just about popped a vertebra rooting it out, and came up with the goods. I was just about to check it for caffeine content when David said, "Do you feel that?"

I forgot all about caffeine. The jolt of adrenaline went straight to my heart and tingled in every soft tissue on my body. I put the thermos aside. "Yeah." The hair on my arms was standing up. "Don't get out of the car."

"I wasn't planning to."

I had long ago outrun the storm, but there was a line of clouds dark on the horizon ahead. I'd been playing with the idea of doing some sabotage on the cold front coming down out of Canada, but that was just plain selfish. Bad weather was both natural and necessary. The only time I was really morally allowed to tinker was if it posed a clear and imminent danger to human life… not necessarily including my own.

What I felt wasn't the storm ahead, and it wasn't the storm behind. It wasn't a storm at all. I wasn't entirely sure what it was, except that it was strange.

"Any idea—?"

"No," David said. "Not yet. Maybe you should start the car."

I did, and eased the Land Rover into gear and back onto the road. We accelerated without any problems. After half a mile I remembered to breathe. Nothing fell on us out of the sky or rose up out of the ground, which was downright encouraging.

"So," David finally said. "Exactly how many enemies do you have?"

"Marion's not an enemy."

"She buried you alive."

"It's complicated."

"Apparently." He settled back in the seat… not relaxed, exactly, but cautiously watchful. "Tell me about what happened."

"You know what happened. You were there."

"Tell me why you're running."

I felt a lurch somewhere in my gut. "You know, I really don't want to talk about it. If I'd wanted to talk about it, I would have done the whole This-Is-My-Life thing with Marion, where it might actually matter."

"You need to tell someone," he said, which was very reasonable. "And I don't have a stake in the matter."

In other words, he was Djinn. He could walk away at any time. I wasn't even a flash of a second in terms of the eternal life he could look forward to. My story was something to pass the time. Hell, I was something to pass the time.

"I killed somebody," I finally said.

He was unmoved. "So I heard."

"Somebody important," I said, as if he'd contradicted me. I was surprised to feel tears burn at the back of my throat. "I had to."

David reached over and touched my hand. Gently. Just the tips of his fingers, but it was enough to send a warm cascade of emotion through me that I didn't fully understand. Was it a Djinn thing or a David thing? Was there even a difference?

"Tell me," he said. "Please."

I told David about the first encounter I'd had with Bad Bob at my intake meeting, and then the weird showdown we'd had at the National Weather Services offices, the time I'd worked the Bermuda Triangle and stopped Tropical Storm Samuel.

And then I told him the rest.

After I'd calmed down with a few drinks at a sand-side bar, I'd decided to put Bad Bob's bizarre problems behind me and just be a girl for a change. I'd strolled down to the sea in my fancy new few inches of perfect spandex. Beautiful girls are a dime a hundred on Florida beaches, so I didn't feel special…. Well, okay, maybe I did, a little, because it was a really good bikini. Beach studs checked me out, and there was nothing bad in that. I staked out a section of warm white sand as far as possible from screaming kids and teenagers blaring the greatest hits of Eminem on boom boxes, applied sunscreen and dark glasses, and settled down on my beach towel to soak up the love of Mother Sun.

There's nothing like a good day on the beach. The warmth steals slowly into every muscle like an invisible full-body massage. The dull, constant rhythm of the seas counts out the heartbeat of the world. The smell of fresh salt water, banana and coconut oil, that ripe undercurrent of the cycle of life turning somewhere under the waves. The sounds of people talking, laughing, whispering, kissing. Happy sounds. Somewhere out there, in the wet darkness, sharks hunt, but you can forget that, lying there in the sun, letting your cares slide away like sand through your fingers.

I had almost succeeded in forgetting about everything that was bothering me when a shadow cut off my sun and sent a chill running through my blood. It didn't move away like it should have.

I opened my eyes and peered up, dazzled, at a dark shape with a brilliant white halo of windblown hair… then blue eyes… the face of Bad Bob Biringanine.

I sat up fast. He was crouching down next to me. I did one of those involuntary female things one does when wearing too few clothes in the presence of an intimidating man…. I put on my coverup, then crossed my arms across the thin fabric.

"That's too bad," Bad Bob said. "It's a nice look for you."

"What?"

"The suit. Designer?"

"Yeah, right. On what you pay me?" I shot back. "Don't think so." I glared. In my experience, guys who gave grief and then came bearing compliments were not to be trusted. Especially guys who held my future in the palm of their hand.

His face was different out here in the world—more natural, I guess. There was something that hummed in tune out here, near the sea and sky. This was what true power looked like in its element—not dealing with people, which annoyed him, but being part of the vast moving machine of Earth.

"I scared you this morning," he said. "That's not what I meant to do. It's not personal, Baldwin. It's not that I think you're a crappy Warden. It's that I've seen too many turn out that way."

"Thanks for the warning. I got the message."

"No, you didn't. And hell, I can't blame you, I'm the king of arrogance, and I damn well know it. Anyway, you did good," he said. "Most people screw it up their first time out in the Triangle. There's something out there that isn't anywhere else on the planet."

"Really?" I shaded my eyes and tried to see if he was kidding me. "What?"

He eased himself down to a sitting position on the sand. "If I knew that, I'd probably be National Warden by now instead of some cranky old bastard with a nasty reputation. Maybe someone with more guts and less self-preservation than me will find out. They don't call it the Mother of Storms for no reason."

"A discovery like that could really make a reputation," I said.

He grinned, and it was a street urchin's grin, full of Irish charm, and I had the sense he'd done some sweet-talking of girls in his immoral past. Lots of girls. "Oh, I think my reputation's secure, don't you?"

It was, of course; whatever else Bad Bob Biringanine got up to, he was bound to be a legend for generations to come. I sighed. "Why'd you come down here? Just to get in my light?"

He dropped the grin and just looked at me seriously. "I liked your work. Steady, calm, never mind the bullshit. You didn't let me get to you, and that takes guts. I've rattled plenty of cool customers in my day just by looking at them, and you looked right back. That's impressive, girl."

Oh. Now that my heart rate was slowing to under two hundred, I realized that Bad Bob was trying to make a connection with me, not just ruin my afternoon. Had he ever done this before? Probably, but the stories of Bad Bob that play well are the confrontations, not the conciliations. Nobody would buy me a drink to hear that Bad Bob patted me on the back.

But it still felt good.

"I've been looking for somebody with steady nerves," he said. "Special project. You interested?"

There was only one sane answer. "No offense, sir, but no. I'm not."

"No?" He seemed honestly puzzled. "Why the hell not?"

"Because you'd crush me like a bug, sir. It was all I could do to get through an afternoon with you staring down my shirt. I don't think I could handle a full eight hours of it a day."

And had I said that out loud? Yes, I had. And he had been checking out my boobs all morning there at the Coral Gables office. So there. Let the charming old bastard chew on it.

He stared at me steadily, with those eyes like pale blue glass, and said, "Oh, it wouldn't be eight hours a day. Twelve, minimum. Possibly as much as eighteen. Though I will give you time off for good behavior, if you keep wearing that bikini."

"No." I settled back on the sand and closed my eyes. "If you're going to keep sexually harassing me, could you do it from about three feet to your left and quit blocking my sun?"

He didn't move, of course. He stayed solidly in my light. After a few dead moments, when I didn't open my eyes or try to fill the silence, he said, "You're still six months away from qualifying for a Djinn. I can make that happen in two weeks. Or I can make sure it never happens. Your choice, sweetness."

I threw an arm over my eyes and groaned in frustration. Of course, it would come to this. Blackmail. Perfect.

"Come on, Baldwin, you're an ambitious little ladder-climber. We both know you'll work for me just for the bragging rights. Quit playing coy. Here's the address."

He dropped a business card on the bare skin of my stomach. When I opened my eyes, he was walking away, a bandy-legged white-haired man still broad in the chest, muscular in his arms and legs.

An aging tough guy. A hero of the kind they don't make anymore.

On the back of the business card was his home address. On the front was his name, Robert G. Biringanine, and in very small letters below it, Miracles Provided.

I held the card in my hand for the next thirty minutes as I tried to empty my head and concentrate on sunshine, but the cold, pitiless blue of his eyes kept intruding. By four o'clock I'd had enough, and trudged back to my car, lugging beach bag and beach umbrella. Two hunks in Speedos—six-pack abs and all—tried to convince me to do some snorkeling in one of their beach houses, but I had things to think about. Big things.

At six, I called Bad Bob's, got his answering machine and left a message that I'd be at his house at 7 a.m.

See, I'd like to blame it on Bob's cynical little threat-and-reward strategy, but the fact of the matter was, I found him interesting. More than twice my age, white-haired, wrinkled, bad-tempered, notoriously difficult… and there was something intensely alive behind his eyes that I'd never seen before. Well, not since Lewis, anyway.

Power calls to power—always has, always will.

Two minutes before seven the next morning, I was standing on Bad Bob's porch, which had a stunning view of the blue-green ocean. It rippled like blown silk and flowed up on sand as white as snow. He had a private beach. It was a measure of who—and what—Bad Bob really was. As was the house, a postmodern sweeping dome with lines that reminded me of wind tunnels and race cars.

"No bikini?" Bob asked me when he opened the door. That was his version of good morning, apparently. He had a coffee cup in his hand as big as a soup bowl. His striped bathrobe that made him look like a disreputable version of Hugh Hefner, and he had the moist, red-rimmed eyes of a morning-after drunk.

I hesitated over choices of responses. "Do I have to be polite?"

"Polite isn't a word people often use to describe me," he answered. "I don't suppose I can expect it from you, either."

"Then no more cracks about the bikini, or I turn around and walk. Seriously."

He shrugged, swung the door wide, and turned away. I followed him into a short hall that opened up into a truly breathtaking room. It must have gone up thirty feet in a curve, with windows overlooking the ocean all along one side. Carpet so deep I wondered if he hired a lawn service to maintain it. Leather couch, chairs, furniture that combined style and comfort. All unmistakably masculine, but with a finer taste than I would have expected from somebody of Bad Bob's reputation.

"Nice," I said. People expect that kind of thing when you first see their home.

"Ought to be," he said. "I paid a fortune to some unspeakably horrible woman named Patsy to make it that way. Through here. Coffee?"

"Sure."

He led me into a vast kitchen that could have catered dinner for a hundred without breaking a sweat, poured me a cup, and handed it over. I sipped and found it had the rich, unmistakable taste of Jamaican Blue Mountain, fifty dollars a pound. Not the kind of thing I'd give away cups of to marginally welcome guests. I took as big a mouthful as I could get away with, savoring that smooth caramel aftertaste. I could get used to all of this… fancy house, ocean view, fine imported beverages. I had no doubt his collection of whiskey was first-rate, too. And he struck me as the kind of guy with a killer DVD collection.

"So," I said. Bad Bob leaned against a counter, sipping coffee, watching me. "Staying off the subject of the bikini, what exactly am I here to do?"

"You're here to work as my assistant. I need a good, solid hand in manipulating some small-scale weather patterns for an experiment. Nothing I couldn't do myself, but it would save time to have another pair of hands."

"Hands?"

"Metaphorically speaking. You've worked with Djinn before?"

"Sure. Well, not closely. But I've been linked to them." Man, the coffee was excellent. He'd poured a pretty generous cup; I wondered how open he'd be to the concept of refills. I was going through this mug pretty quickly. "I can handle it."

"I'm sure you can," he said. "You know, I have the feeling you're going to be absolutely essential to the success of this project. It's groundbreaking. I think you'll be truly impressed by the scope of what we can accomplish together, Joanne. By the way, how's the coffee?"

"Fabulous. It's—" My eyes blurred. I blinked, felt the world slip sideways, and reached out to brace myself against the counter. I could hear my heart beating, suddenly. " — it's Jamaican Blue—"

I must have dropped the cup, but I didn't hear it shatter on the ceramic tile. I remember my knees letting loose, I remember sliding down with my back to the cabinets, I remember Bad Bob taking another long drink from his cup and looking down at me with those pitiless blue eyes.

He smiled at me. His voice sounded slow and wrong and far too friendly. "We're going to do great things together, you and I."

I woke up on the edge of panic, fighting nausea, with no idea where I was or what the hell had happened to me. It took a full minute for my brain to start connecting chemical chains long enough to remember Bad Bob, the tainted coffee, the collapse. Jesus, what kind of a bastard ruins Jamaican Blue Mountain with knockout drops?

I was lying on the leather couch, and my hands were tied behind my back. I could barely feel them, but I knew it was going to be painful if—when—I worked my way free. I blinked shadows from my eyes, shook my head to get hair out of my way, and found Bad Bob sitting in the leather armchair just about five feet away. The bathrobe was gone, replaced by a pair of khaki pants and a loud Hawaiian print shirt. He was holding a half-empty glass of something on the rocks, which might have been apple juice but probably had a lot more punch.

"Don't struggle," he said. "You'll just dislocate a shoulder, and I'm not much on the medical stuff."

My tongue felt thick as a sausage, but I managed to fit it around words. "Fuck you, you bastard. Let me go."

His bushy white eyebrows rose. They curled up and out, and reminded me of a lynx. The eyes were predatory, too.

"Ah, ah, be nice," he said. "My offer to you was absolutely valid. We're going to do some great work together."

"What in the hell do you think you're doing? You think you can just abduct me and—" My brain caught up with my mouth and told it to shut up, because he had abducted me, and chances were he was going to get away with it, too. Nobody knew I'd come here. I had no close friends, no confidants. I hadn't spoken to my sister or my mother in a month. John Foster might wonder where I'd gotten off to, but like most Wardens, I wasn't a slave to the nine-to-five. Could take weeks for anybody to begin to worry.

"You'll be fine," he said. He took a long slug of his drink, made a face, and put the crystal tumbler on a glass table next to him. There was no sound of anybody else in the house, just the usual everyday hum of electrics and air circulation. The surf hitting the shore came as a dull, unceasing drum. "I have something important for you to take part in, and I want your word that you're going to take this responsibility seriously. You're going to change the world."

I had a lot of ambition, but changing the world was a little outside the scope. I tried the ropes again, felt sharp pain dig into my shoulder, and decided to work on things a little less directly. I couldn't go head-to-head with Bad Bob Biringanine… few people on the planet could. But maybe I could take him from behind.

I started slowly, slowly working the oxygen out of the mixture in the room. Nothing obvious, because obvious would get me swatted like a fly. At the fastest rate I dared to work, I needed to buy at least ten minutes for the O₂ levels to drop far enough to put him to sleep. If he didn't realize what I was doing. The alcohol would help that, slow his perceptions and make him more susceptible to nodding off.

"I–I came here to work for you," I said. "Really. You didn't have to drug me. You could have just explained it to me."

"Sweetheart, I couldn't really take the chance you wouldn't agree. I need you. It's more of a draft than a volunteer army." His eyes skipped away from me, toward the windows, where the Atlantic rolled endlessly toward the Pacific. "Stop fucking with the air in here or I'll knock you out and do this while you're unconscious. It doesn't really matter, either way. I just thought you'd like to be a witness."

I swallowed hard and let my manipulations of the oxygen drop. "To what?"

"To your transformation. I'm about to transform you from some second-rate, arrogant little weatherworker to a world-class talent. And in return, you're going to save my life." He got up, stretched, and went to refill his glass from a crystal-stoppered decanter on the sideboard, near something that looked like an authentic Chinese terra-cotta solider, like the ones found in the emperor's tomb. It almost looked real enough to walk across the room.

"Sir, please, I have no idea what you're—"

"Shut up." He didn't raise his voice, but there was something dark and violent in it that made me instantly seal my lips. Liquor splashed ice in his glass, and he took a drink. "How do you think all this works, Baldwin? You think the Wardens Association is just some not-for-profit do-gooder fraternity, like the lions Club or the Shriners? We run the world. That takes power. More power than you can even imagine."

I had no idea what he was talking about, but so long as he was talking, I had breathing time. I worked on the knots with numbed fingers. It was all I could think of to do.

"When Hurricane Andrew hit the shore in 92, it was a killer of the worst kind. It was all set to destroy us, singly or in groups. Somebody had to take on the responsibility to stop it." He snorted and tossed back the rest of the liquor. "Some poor bastard like me. But humans aren't built that way, Baldwin. They're built to come apart under that kind of pressure."

He was talking. I decided I should be cooperating. "That's why we have the Djinn. To take the stress."

"What crap. You don't know dick about Djinn, girl. They have power, but they dole it out in little bits and pieces, always looking for ways to screw us— they hate us. They'd kill us if they could." He rattled the ice in his glass and tried to suck the last drops of his drink from between the cubes. "Rely on the goddamn Djinn, you get killed. No, to stop Andrew I needed something else. Something bigger."

He was insane. Bad Bob was literally insane. There wasn't anything bigger than the Djinn except…

I bit my lip and felt a fingernail rip off against rope, but that was nothing compared with what I was afraid he was about to do to me. It was all falling together now, and it made a hideous kind of sense.

"A Demon," I whispered. "You took on a Demon."

"Smart girl," he answered. "Too bad, really. I can't afford to put my Djinn out of commission with this thing—level of Demon this is, if d probably eat him alive, but it'd damn sure poison him past usefulness— so it has to go somewhere. My heart's going. Can't die with this bastard in me."

"Wait—"

"Sorry, time's up." Bad Bob put his drink down, walked over to me, and put his hand on my forehead. His skin felt ice cold. It might have been a compassionate gesture, but he put some strength into it and forced my head down, pinning me against the leather couch. I kicked out at him, writhed, wriggled like an eel regardless of how much pain tore at my arms and wrists. "Don't worry. This'll be quick. Demon goes in, and then I burn you. You probably won't feel much pain at all."

He tried to pry my mouth open. I fought back with every muscle in my body, desperate to get him off me, away, because I could feel it in him now, a black cold hunger devouring him from inside.

"Dammit!" He backed off, blue eyes glittering with rage, and reached out for a bottle of wine—very old, with a flaking, yellowed label and a cork that looked fossilized. He worked the cork out of it, set the bottle on the floor, and said, "I need you."

In the movies they always show Djinn coming out of the bottle in a puff of smoke, but that rarely happens, unless the Djinn is a traditionalist with a sense of humor. Bad Bob's Djinn just appeared—blip— without any dramatics at all. I've always wondered how Djinn decide how to look, and why they always seem to look so nearly human; this one was nearer than most. He looked like an accountant. Suit, straight black tie, pin-striped shirt. Young, but ancient around the eyes. The eyes, of course, gave him away: a kind of phosphorescent green that caught daylight the way a cat's eyes reflect at night.

"Sir?" he asked. He didn't even look at me.

"Hold her down," Bad Bob said. "Don't kill her like you did the last one. It's hard enough to find a match, you know."

The Djinn leaned over and put his hand on my forehead. Instantly, gravity tripled and pinned me down; made it an effort to drag in a breath, much less fight. I wanted to say something, but I knew it wouldn't do any good; Bad Bob wasn't listening, and his Djinn couldn't do anything against his orders. Don't kill her like you did the last one. His Djinn didn't want the Demon moved. Maybe, if I could think fast enough, I could get his help….

"Open her mouth," Bad Bob said. The Djinn laid one fingertip on my lips, and even though I clenched my jaw muscles, I felt it all slipping away, felt my lips parting. Oh, God, no. Maybe I imagined it, but the Djinn's touch seemed to make it less painful, less horrific. Help me. Please stop this. But if he could, or if he even wanted to, there was no sign of it in those inhuman green eyes, clear as emeralds. I felt gray edging in around the knife-sharp spike of fear, the desperate desire to get away. Maybe I could pass out. I wanted to pass out. Anything not to feel this.

The Djinn's touch burned. My lips slid open, and cool air hit the back of my throat with drowning force.

Bad Bob bent over and touched his lips to mine. Not a deep kiss, just a touch. Just enough to create the bridge of flesh. He tasted of booze and stank of fear, and I tried to scream….

Too late.

I felt it squirming in my mouth, shooting tendrils down my throat, invading me in a way that even the worst rape couldn't equal—it was inside me, ripping furiously through my flesh, looking for a place to hide. I tried to scream, tried to vomit, tried to die, but it just kept going, down my throat, burning in my chest, squirming and moving through me like a hand until it closed into a fist around my heart.

The pain was so bad, I left my body and escaped into Oversight, and that was when I saw the Demon Mark for the first time. A black nest of tendrils writhing around the core of my magic, my life, feeding. The last of it slid out of Bad Bob and left him shining and clear of taint.

And utterly devoid of power. He'd carried it for so long that it had eaten away the power he'd started with. He was an empty shell of a man whose heart continued to beat, but I felt the horrible hollow space where this thing had been.

And then his heart jumped, shuddered, and froze in his chest. His face took on a dull sheen of surprise.

Can't die with this thing inside me.

Oh, God, no. This couldn't be happening.

I felt the particles charging around me, and it reminded me suddenly of Lewis, turning his bloodied face to me, holding out his hand for power. Because it was power forming around me, funneling through me. Taking the last of the energy that kept Bad Bob alive. I could taste the drowning blackness of his despair, the wailing terror of his death. The Demon Mark sucked it down and began to taste what was inside me, too, and the sensation was so bitterly wrong that I couldn't help but fight back. It was as instinctive as gagging.

I reached for power, and it came, a rolling white wave through Oversight, circling me like a tornado. It would wreak havoc on the real world, but I didn't have a choice. Every cell in my body, real or aetheric, was screaming to get that thing out of me.

In the real world, the dome house literally exploded. Glass blew out from the windows in a pulverized mist. Wind tore through the room at speeds impossible to withstand and shredded wood to splinters, plastic to shards. The terra-cotta warrior exploded into dust. Charged particles glittered and flashed and rolled like crystal waves around me, storm-ready. So much potential energy, my hair lifted and crackled with it, on the verge of burning. Every circuit in the house blew, frying electronics, starting fires in the walls. In Oversight, the power draw flared photonegative, out of control, and ice crystals began to form around minute particles of dust in the swirling air of the living room.

Outside, steaming hail the size of baseballs, soccer balls, hit the beach; I heard the hard, brittle impacts all over the house. Temperatures soared, then dropped, as pressure rose. Outside, over the sea, clouds massed with incredible speed, darkened, began a lowering rotation.

Bad Bob fell to the floor, a lifeless lump of flesh, already being torn apart by the forces in the room. By my own power, out of control.

His Djinn disappeared into the maelstrom, and I saw the wine bottle picked up by the wind and hurtled against the far wall with so much force, it literally vanished into crystals no larger than sand.

The leather couch I was still lying on was blown back with a tidal force of wind, and I rolled over debris. Shards of glass everywhere; I barely noticed the cuts, but I managed to get my fingers around a sharp needle-edged piece and slashed at the ropes that held my hands until they parted with a moist snap. It hurt, but my standards of pain had changed; a little flesh-and-blood agony was nothing to worry about.

I scrambled until I found a wall at my back. Lightning flashed, and I could feel the thing feeding inside me, out of control; greedy little bastard sucking down every mote of energy. It fed off storms. It fed off the power burning inside me.

I had to shut it off. Somehow, I had to reach down into that—thing—and force it to obey. It was growing inside me, growing angles and cutting edges; it would burst out of me like some evil child and then… and then…

Something warm and gentle touched the back of my neck. Breathe, a voice whispered inside me. Under my skin. Child of air, breathe in your strength.

I gasped in a breath. Another. The air felt warm, smelled faintly of ozone.

The Demon is of the darkness. Use your light.

I opened my eyes and there, in front of me, was the Djinn. Bad Bob's Djinn. He was a column of living fire, a pair of golden eyes, something wonderful and terrible at the same time.

Breathe in your strength, it said again, and when I inhaled, I felt the fire go into me, burning like raw lava down my throat, into the darkness.

Now go.

I was outside in the rain, in the cold, with my arms wrapped around my body, shivering. The surf pounded the dome house, sucked at it like a tasty treat. Overhead, the eye of the storm whirled and stared down on me.

Inside me, the Demon Mark shuddered and went quiet.

I breathed out mist and steam, and around me the energy levels faded. Lightning flashed, hit close, and I felt the burn of ozone on my flesh like the heat of a distant cold sun.

And then I slammed back down, hard, into reality. Cold, wet, windy reality, the storm screaming over tortured waves, the stench of burning and dead things and my sweat. There was something inside me, stuck inside me. I ripped open my shirt, expecting to find—something—some horrible black tangle under the skin. There was only a faint, intricate black scorch mark. I touched it, trembling, and felt the thing underneath stretch and murmur in its sleep.

I went to my knees, hard, and threw up.

I don't know how long I was there, huddled near the ruins of Bad Bob's house, but I felt the Wardens when they arrived—Janice Langstrom, Bad Bob's exec, and Ulrike Kohl. Ulrike concentrated on the storm raging out at sea, but I could have told her it was useless; the storm was mine, keyed to me, born of my fury. All she could do was tame it down to a sullen retreat.

It was Janice who found me. "Joanne?" We knew each other. Not well, but enough for nodding acquaintance. I let her help me up to my feet and pulled the tattered halves of my blouse together, more out of an instinctive desire for her not to see the Mark than any impulse to modesty. "Oh, my God! What happened here?"

I opened my mouth to tell her… and then didn't. I couldn't even begin. Something in me—that wily, scared-to-death primitive part of my brain—told me that if I said anything about the Demon Mark, I could kiss my ass good-bye.

I just shivered.

She searched my face, her frown deepening; she was an older woman, younger than Bad Bob but not by much. Moderately powerful. Extremely perceptive.

"That storm has your smell all over it," she said, and her grip on my arm tightened. "Where is he? Where's Bob?"

I didn't answer. I saw the blooming of anger in her cool gray eyes, and then there was a wind-torn shout from the ruins of Bad Bob's house, and Ulrike staggered out.

"He's dead!" she screamed.

Cold gray eyes snapped back to me and narrowed. The grip on my arm was as tight as a vise. "You killed him?" she asked, and didn't wait for the answer. "You killed him!"

She shoved me backwards. I felt energy gathering around her, phasing in blacks and reds. No, I couldn't fight her. Couldn't fight anyone.

I couldn't control this thing inside me, and it wanted to fight.

I reached out and physically shoved her, and ran like the Demon itself was after me.

Miraculously, Delilah was still untouched, up on the road. I jumped in, started her up, and hit the gas, spinning tires and leaving a scream behind as Ulrike and Janice pelted out after me, both yelling.

I had killed Bad Bob. Bad Bob was a legend, and I was the one who'd called the storm. The Wardens wouldn't listen to what I had to say; if they could sense this thing inside me, they'd cut me apart to destroy it.

I had to get rid of it. Bad Bob had passed it to me. The idea of passing it on made me sick. Everything I'd ever read about Demon Marks had the same grim message attached: no way to get it out of you once it was in, except by giving it to some other poor bastard, the way Bad Bob had given it to me. God, no.

I can't afford to put my Djinn out of commission with this thing, he'd said.

I could give it to a Djinn. Only I didn't have one, did I? Bad Bob's Djinn was gone. That meant I had to find one.

It all came together in a brilliant flash in my head.

Lewis. I could get one from Lewis.

It was dead silent in the Land Rover when I finished. David wasn't looking at me. He wasn't looking anywhere, exactly, just staring straight ahead. I couldn't tell what he was thinking.

"Now you know," I said. "You know what you're risking just being around me. Because I swear to God, David, I can't have this thing get loose again the way it did on the beach. I'll kill myself first."

"No!" He lunged at me, and I almost ran the truck off the road. He held up his hands, more to stop himself than to reassure me. "You can't. Listen to me, you cannot die with this thing in you."

"Well, I can't let it just destroy everything, either! I have to control it, or get rid of it. Or die."

David sucked down a deep breath. "If you die with the Mark, the Demon will tear itself from your body, and it will walk the aetheric. If that happens, the destruction you saw before will be nothing next to what it can accomplish in its aetheric form. It will take more power than all of you have to stop it then."

"Well, I'm not just passing it on to somebody like the goddamn herpes virus." He was watching me with that creepy intensity again. "What?"

"Give it to me," he said. "Say the words, bind me, and give it to me. You can. You have to."

"No!" The idea gave me chills. Worse than chills. I had no idea what the Demon Mark would do to a Djinn, but I had no doubt that if the Mark fed off power, it would find an all-you-can-eat smorgas-board inside a Djinn.

"It can't overcome me," he said. "It'll be trapped inside of me, forever."

"It'll destroy you!"

"No worse than it will you, in time," he said. "I can be contained. Once I'm sealed inside a bottle and put back in the vault, I'm no danger to anyone. You—"

"No!" I shouted, and slammed my hands on the steering wheel like I wanted to beat sense into him. "No, dammit, I said no!"

David was so very reasonable, so convincing. "I'm what you were looking for. I'm a Djinn, Joanne. I'm your way out."

I felt tears burning in my eyes, couldn't get my breath around the lump of distress in my throat. God, no. Yes, it was what I wanted, and I couldn't do it. Couldn't. There had to be something else, some other way….

"I'll find Lewis," I whispered. My head was pounding from the force of my misery. I wanted to cry, or scream, or just whimper. "He'll know what to do."

"Why?" David's voice was so soft, so reasonable.

I felt a surge of absolute panic, because I realized… realized I didn't know. Why would he know any better than I did? Lewis was more powerful, all right— more powerful than anybody. That didn't mean he could save me, except by presenting me with the same choice I had right now. Destroying someone else. A Djinn, maybe, but in every way that mattered, a real person.

"I'm so tired—" It came out of me in a rush, uncontrolled. "I can't think about it. Not now."

"You have to," David whispered. "Let's just get this over with."

The car lurched, sputtered, and coasted to a stop. Dead.

"No," I whispered. "I won't let you… take it…" I'd fight him with my last breath, if I had to. I wouldn't be the cause of his destruction. If there was any right thing left in my life…

The lights flickered and died, and in the ghostly whisper of the fan spinning down, I felt David reach across and draw his hand gently across my forehead.

"Then rest," he said.

I woke up in the passenger seat, belted firmly in place, cramped in places I hadn't known I had muscles. The clock made no sense. My mouth tasted like the bottom of a fish tank, and I needed to pee so badly, it hurt.

"What…." I mumbled. David was driving. "Thought you couldn't drive."

"I lied," he said. "Djinn do that."

I muttered something about his mother under my breath—did Djinn have mothers? — and squinted at the clock again.

"Wait a minute," I said. "I've been asleep for only thirty minutes?"

He didn't answer.

"Oh. Twelve and a half hours."

"We're an hour outside Tulsa," he said. "We should be nearing Oklahoma City."

There was a brilliant blaze of light on the horizon, like frozen gold smoke against the cloudy sky. Still light rain falling, but when I checked Oversight, I found everything even and steady. No storms chasing me, for a change.

"Let's stop," I said.

David glanced aside at me. "Where?"

"Anywhere with a bathroom."

"I'll find something."

I nodded and ran my hands through my hair. That didn't cut it. I hunted around in Marion's glove compartment, came up with a brush, and attacked the tangles in my hair until it was shiny and smooth. Nothing much I could do about my generally gritty condition, but Marion had also left behind some nice wintergreen gum that took care of evening breath. I was starting to feel caffeine deprived, but just about the time I thought about complaining, a sign appeared in the distance: loves. The billboard text underneath Said GAS—FOOD—BATHROOMS.

"Miracles provided," David said. I froze for a second, then remembered to breathe. Surely he didn't know that was Bad Bob's tag line. Surely.

At exactly 9 p.m. we pulled into a parking lot big enough to hold at least thirty or forty long-haul rigs; it was a little more than half full. Oklahoma was having a damp spring, it seemed; the clouds overhead were inoffensive nimbus, spitting light rain, and we hurried inside to a warm, well-lit vestibule. On one side was a convenience store, on the other, a traditional sit-down diner; straight ahead was the sign for bathrooms. I left David to his own amusements and headed for the relief station. On the way, I ran across a gleaming bank of pay phones, and I remembered something I'd forgotten to do.

Star. I'd meant to call Star and tell her I was coming.

I picked up the handset and thought about it for a while, hung up, then finally completed the call. She wasn't there, but her answering machine took my message. Coming into town tonight or tomorrow. See you soon.

I hoped I would, anyway. I was feeling desperately alone. I wanted to count on David, but I was such a danger to him…. It was like traveling with someone bent on suicide. If I said the wrong thing, got desperate… I had to be on my guard. Always.

When I came back, I found David sitting at a table in the diner, contemplating a menu. He had a cup of steaming coffee in front of him. I gestured at the waitress for the same and picked up my own copy of the house specials.

"Any ideas?" I asked.

I got a quick flash of copper eyes over the top of the menu. "A few," he said. It sounded neutral, but his eyes weren't. They were verging on Djinn again, not enough human camouflage to matter. "You need to end this. Now. Before it's too late."

"Get stuffed." I studied choices. The waitress— who, amazingly enough, had pink hair to go with her pink uniform—delivered my coffee, and I made an instant decision. "I know it's weird, but I want breakfast. Got any blueberry muffins?"

"Sure," she shrugged. "What else?"

"Pancakes. And bacon."

Pink hair nodded. "For you, handsome?"

David shrugged. "The same." She folded our menus and was gone in a flash of a cotton-candy skirt.

Which left us looking at each other in uncomfortable silence.

"You have to stop," David said at last. "You're running out of money. You have no friends, no family. You don't even know if Lewis will help you."

"I've got you," I pointed out.

"Do you?" A flash of hot-metal temper in his eyes. "Not unless you say the words."

There was no way to answer that, and I didn't try. I looked down at my hands, adjusted the silverware into neat rows, and finally sipped coffee.

"You're a fool," he finally said, and sat back. "Marion's hunters will be coming for you, and how will you fight them?"

"Same way I already did."

"The Mark is taking you over. It's moving slowly, but it's moving. It's filtering into your thoughts, your actions—that's why you won't take what I'm offering. It isn't because you care about me. It's because the Demon won't allow it."

He touched a nerve I didn't think was raw. "Shut up," I snapped. "Enough. We're going on to Oklahoma City. I've got friends there. Besides, Lewis will know what to do."

He leaned across the table and fixed me with those eerie, inhumanly beautiful eyes. "What if he doesn't?"

"Then I guess Marion's people are going to get a big surprise when they try to give me a power-ectomy."

He sat back as the waitress slid plates of food between us. We ate in silence, avoiding each other's gazes like old married folks.

When we were finished, there was still a basket of blueberry muffins between us. I asked for a sack and bagged them up. Not like there was a chance in hell I'd live to starve to death, but still. Reflex.

We got back in the Land Rover and drove into the surreal yellow glow of Oklahoma City.

I don't suppose anybody ever forgets how they lose their virginity. I certainly can't forget. And, of course, it involved a storm.

Rain is a mixed blessing when you're in college. Everybody likes rain, to a point, but when you're trudging around campus, soaked to the skin and looking like something the Red Cross would put on a poster, it loses its charm. So there I was—cold, wet, eighteen, and a virgin. Yes, really, eighteen. I wasn't saving myself or anything noble like that; the simple fact was that I thought most guys who wanted to drag me into the backseat were losers, and I had more standards than hormones.

College was different. Here I was at this great school, with all its rich history and good-looking young men, and even better, I was in a program that not only didn't punish me for my weirdo status, it valued me. After four months, I was blooming. Putting away the baggy shirts and shapeless sweatpants, indulging in clingy, flirty clothes my mother wouldn't approve of.

That was how it happened: clingy, flirty shirt, tight blue jeans, and a storm.

I came into the Microclimate Lab blown on a cold gust of wind, dropped my backpack to the floor with a squish, and leaned against the wall to catch my breath. My lab partner was already there and looking so dry and comfortable, I knew he hadn't been out of the building all day.

"It's about time," he said. "You're thirty minutes late. We've got to map the pressure streams and have all this done for Yorenson by noon tomorrow—"

He was turning around, and about the time he got to that part of the sentence, he saw me standing there and stopped talking. I wiped water out of my eyes and saw him staring at me. Well, not at me, exactly. At my chest.

The clingy, flirty shirt? The rain had turned it about as transparent as fishnet.

I wasn't wearing a bra. And my nipples were as hard as thumbtacks from the cold wind.

I crossed my arms over my chest and tried not to look too much like the fool I felt. My lab partner— somebody I'd had a crush on from about the first ten seconds of laving eyes on him—didn't care how much of one he looked, apparently, because he just blinked and kept staring.

"You were saying?" I asked.

He clearly drew a blank.

I sighed. "Yes, I'm a girl. Don't tell me you never noticed before."

He had the grace to blush, and he did it well—one of those neck-to-hairline flushes that makes some men look all the more attractive. He was one of them. Dark hair, bedroom eyes. Not that I cared, of course. Much.

"Here," he said, and stood up to take off his jacket. He started to hand it over, then hesitated. "Maybe you should, um, turn around first."

When I did, he draped the jacket over my shoulders and let me situate everything to my not-so-high standards of modesty. The jacket was warm dark leather, and it smelled like aftershave and male sweat. When I turned around, he was working hard at being the gentleman the jacket offer implied. I was frankly a little disappointed.

"Guess we'd better get to work," I said.

"Not yet. You're freezing."

I was shaking, all right, but it was half hormones; the lab was empty except for the two of us, and we had it scheduled for the entire afternoon. Rain lashed the windows, and thunder rumbled so deep, I felt it like a caress.

Showing off, he warmed up the room by about five degrees. I was grateful, but we both knew it was a violation of the rules. No adjusting of temperature for anything but assignments. Still, no teachers taking notes.

"I'm okay," I said, and took my seat at the table. My hair was still wet and dripping, so I bent over and squeezed as much out of it as I could. When I straightened up, the jacket gaped open, and I saw his eyes dive to get another look.

We pretended to work for a while—okay, maybe we even did work for a while—and actually came up with some right answers for the day and recorded them in our logs. Fast, too; we finished the assignment and had at least an hour left. The storm was still blowing outside, and the energy tingled all over, begging me to come out and play. I was almost dry now, but still wore his jacket, and he hadn't asked for it back.

"Well," I said, and stood up. "I guess we might as well get out of here."

"Might as well." He stood up, too. Taller than me. Broader. Standing too close.

I looked up into his eyes and slid the jacket slowly down my arms, and held it out to him. He took it and dropped it on the floor somewhere behind him.

I looked down at myself. The blouse hadn't quite dried; my nipples were still clearly visible through the thin fabric.

He took one step forward and put his hands on my waist. When I didn't step back, he moved his hands up along my sides, thumbs out, up, along the underside of my breasts. Those thumbs settled on the second most sensitive area on my body, where he moved them in a slow, gentle circle that took my breath away.

"So," he said, and his voice was coming from somewhere much deeper than it had before, "we're supposed to be researching energy, right?"

"Energy," I agreed. My voice was shaking.

"Heat."

"That, too."

He leaned down, and our lips met and melted. No shortage of heat there, or friction. I was shaking all over again, but I'd never felt so alive, so fully in my skin as I did at that moment.

Rain, and rain, and rain. His jacket made a pillow on the floor behind the lab table. We fumbled at each other's clothes until they slid away. The sting of cool air on naked skin, then the flare of shared warmth. Not a lot of foreplay, but hell, I didn't need it; the storm combined with the energy passing between us had made me as ready as I'd ever be. The pain took me by surprise, and so did my sudden desperate desire to make it stop, make him stop.

And with the tearing of my hymen, something else happened. Power. Power raced into every nerve in my body and snapped me into full awareness. I knew the man who was making love to me, every cell, every nerve, every pulse beat that echoed between us. I felt… everything.

I felt the huge rumbling cascade of his power as it flooded me, making me arch hard against him, and the extreme pain of it, the pleasure… sparks snapped between us, blue-white, bleeding off energy that our bodies weren't built to contain. Power, echoing between us, waves bouncing from one of us to the other and getting stronger with every second.

He wasn't prepared any more than I was. We were swept away on a rhythm like the sea, and when the tide came, it came high, and I drowned on waves and waves of a pleasure I'd never felt before, felt him drowning with me, clung to him for dear life.

I heard things shattering around us. Lightbulbs. Glass windows. I felt wind scream over us in whipping, out-of-control gusts.

And then it was over, and we were lying together, sweating, weak, and still feeling the power building between us.

He realized how dangerous it was before I did. He pulled away from me and kept going, far away, scrambling backwards until his back touched the wall. I scuttled back and hid under the lab table. All around us, the wind whipped and screamed and overturned tables and chairs until it finally faded to a breeze, then a sigh.

Stillness.

"God," he whispered, and put his head in his hands. I sympathized. My head was pounding, too. Every nerve in my body felt crisped.

I licked my lips and said, "It's not supposed to happen like that, right?"

There was blood on the floor where I'd been lying. I stared at it for a few seconds and saw he was staring at it, too.

He looked utterly stricken. "No," he whispered. "God, I'm so sorry. I didn't know—"

I didn't know whether he was apologizing because I'd been a virgin or because we'd almost destroyed the campus. I didn't really have time to find out.

The man was, of course, Lewis Levander Orwell. And so far as I know, he never again touched a girl who was in the Program.

I was still looking for my panties when Professor Yorenson arrived to find out what the hell was going on.

I don't know what I'd been expecting. A message from above, complete with cherubs and singing choirs, inviting me to join Lewis in whatever hole he'd crawled into? Crap.

We cruised around I-40, looking for signs from the heavens while I restlessly cycled through radio stations, hoping for a cryptic message.

Nothing.

If Lewis was here, evidently he didn't want to talk to me.

I finally pulled up in the parking lot of a La Quinta Motor Inn.

"He's here?" David asked, frowning. I was on the verge of hysterical tears or worse, hysterical laughter— worn down to nothing by the strain.

"He's around," I lied. My voice was shaking. "I need a shower and a good night's sleep in a real bed. If you've got a problem with that, thumb a ride."

He shook his head and followed me into the hotel lobby.

I checked us in with the last of my cash. I was so tired, I would have taken a cell in a monastery, but La Quinta turned out to be quite a showplace, with an indoor pool and a bubbling jewel of a hot tub that we passed on the way to the elevators. They'd booked me third-floor accommodations, facing the parking lot and the approaching storm. That was perfectly fine with me. Always best to keep your eye on what's coming.

The room was spacious, tasteful, with a huge king-size bed and pillows big enough to qualify as mattresses in their own right, or maybe that was just my exhaustion talking. David went straight to the far corner and set his backpack down.

"Why the hell do you carry that? It's just window dressing, right?" I was pins and needles all over, aching, itching for a fight. "Like the clothes. To make me think you're really human. Well, give it up. I know better now."

"Do you?" He sat down on the bed and put his hands on his knees, watching me pace back and forth. "I doubt you know any more about the Djinn than you do about the Demon Mark."

I couldn't look at him. I liked the way he looked, and I knew what I saw was constructed, artificial, something he'd put together to please me. Which was just—wrong. Obscene. And it pissed me off. "I know everything I need to know about the Djinn."

Dangerously quiet on that end of the room. I paced restlessly to the windows. Rolled the curtains open on a night sky rich with stars.

"Maybe I will claim you," I said. "Maybe I'll claim you and order you to get the hell away from me for a change. Wouldn't that be a stitch?"

He knew I was baiting him. "Don't start this, Joanne. I don't want this."

"Well, news flash, I didn't want any of this! I didn't want to be gang-raped by Bad Bob and his pet Djinn. I didn't want to end up with this thing inside me. And I didn't ask for you, either! So why don't you just—?"

He stood up. I turned to face him. Energy crackled the air, and it wasn't entirely emotional; it couldn't be separated that way. Djinn were creatures of fire, and I was… whatever I was becoming. Water. Air. Darkness.

"Just what?" he asked in a soft, dangerous, purring tone. "Let you throw yourself on the pyre of your own arrogance? Don't tempt me."

"Just get the hell out," I said flatly. "I thought you didn't want to fight."

"I don't! I've tried to help you! I've tried to make up for—" He stopped himself. His eyes were molten bronze, glittering with gold flecks. Shimmering hot. "Say the words. It's the only way you're going to get out of this alive—you know that."

"Oh, so now you're going to kill me? Oh, hell, why not? There's probably a Let's Kill Joanne club, with cool little membership cards and souvenir rings. You can be the president, and Bad Bob the Ghost of Honor—"

He grabbed me by both arms and shook me. Hard. "No! Stop being a smart-ass bitch and listen to me! You have to say the words and give me the Mark, now! Just do it!"

I put my hands flat against his chest and shoved. It was likes pushing at a block of David-size concrete.

"Say the words!" He yelled it at me. Shook me harder, so hard my head snapped back and forth, my hair fell in a blinding curtain over my eyes. "In the name of the one true God, say it or I swear I will hurt you so badly, you'll beg me to kill you! I will hurt you!"

He was hurting me. His hands were tight as vises, crushing skin, bending bone. God, it hurt. It was like dying from the inside out, and the Mark, the Mark was fighting back, ripping at my flesh with invisible claws….

"Say it! Be thou…"

I wanted it to stop. I wanted the pain to stop. "Be thou bound to my service!" I screamed. "There! Happy?"

His face went pale, but his eyes burned brighter. His fingers squeezed tighter. "Again!" He shook me again, just to be sure, as if he could rattle it out of me. "Say it again!"

"Be thou bound to my service!" I didn't want to say it, but it was ripping itself out of me, the words like knives in my throat. The pain was incredible, blinding, suffocating. My skin was burning where he touched me. Scorching. I could smell my skin cooking under his hands….

"Again!" David shouted. "Say it again!"

Three times the charm. Three times would bind him to me for the rest of my life. Three times for him to trap me into doing what I did not want to do.

I remembered Lewis's Djinn back in Westchester, burning my hand where it touched the door of the house.

I choked on tears of rage and pain and croaked out, "Nice try, asshole. No way."

He froze, staring at me, and I saw something incredibly vulnerable in his face—a kind of ashen despair. It was instantly gone.

The pain vanished just as instantly—bruising, no broken bones, no burns. Illusion.

He hadn't even left a mark. His hands were gentle on me, and the only heat there was skin on skin. Human heat.

"Say it," he whispered. "Please. Just end this, and say it. Please don't make me watch it rot you inside. I can't stand that."

I sank down on the bed and cradled my head. "Why the hell do you want to do this for me?"

He went down on his knees on the carpet next to me, started to touch me and then stopped as if he didn't trust himself. "It's the Mark. Can't you feel it? It's seeping into your thoughts, your feelings. Soon you won't want to be free of it. It's got to be now, or you're lost."

He was right, of course. That's where the anger was from, the constant, itching fury. From the Demon Mark. It was growing, developing, taking me along for the ride. I could feel it tapped into me now. Its power was at least partly mine. Soon, we'd be joined, and there'd be no going back unless I was ready to give up my soul with it.

When I looked up we were at eye level, close as lovers. I put my hand on his cheek and said, "I swear to the one true God, David, you will never take this Mark. So give it up. Just go away. Let me have a little peace, while I still can."

It hurt, that moment. It was a wire stretched between the two of us, buried deep in our hearts, pulling and singing with tension.

I broke it. I got to my feet and stepped around him. He caught my wrist. "Where are you going?"

"To take a shower," I said. "I stink like a cattle truck. Don't worry, I don't think the Mark is going to wash off and spoil your chance to be a martyr."

I walked calmly to the bathroom, shut the door, and locked it. All the normal bathroom hotel amenities, like a coffeemaker and a hair dryer, complimentary shampoo and lotion… Life looked so normal in here, preciously, wonderfully normal.

I sat down on the closed toilet seat and stared at the spacious bathtub for a while. I was too tired to think, but luckily there was no need for it; I stripped off my filthy clothes and piled them in an untidy mess under the bathroom counter, started the water, and got in while it was stingingly cold. As I started to cry, I felt the Demon Mark moving inside me, stretching lazily, like a bully waking up from a nice long nap. I sank down to my knees in the tub, hugging myself, letting the warming water pound my neck and back. Water sluiced away, sluggish with dirt, but even when it ran clear, I felt far from clean. I would never be clean again.

Soaping and rinsing my hair was oddly therapeutic, though. By the time I rinsed for the third time some of the chill in me had started to thaw.

I was going to live, I discovered. Even though turning down David's offer had effectively signed my death warrant, there had to be something left. If Lewis came through, fine. If not… there were options. There had to be. I could read, research—find out how to fight this thing.

Still, it took every ounce of courage I had to get myself out of the tub and through the ritual of drying off.

When I ventured out of the steaming bathroom again, David was gone. His backpack was there, still leaning drunkenly in the corner; his long olive-drab coat was hung neatly in the closet, and his clothes were in a drawer. Even his shoes were present and accounted for.

As I hunted around for clues, I discovered he'd left me a present. There was a bikini laid out neatly on the bed. Turquoise, teeny, outrageously daring. I stared at it, baffled; the hotel gift shop was long-ago closed, and I hadn't rescued any clothes of my own; surely David wasn't in the habit of carrying around a thing like that in his pocket.

I remembered the beautiful blue jewel of the pool below and the quietly bubbling hot tub. Ah. Of course. The invitation was silent, but it was there. I could either accept or crawl in bed and go to sleep.

I dropped the towel and put the two tiny pieces on. It fit like it had been made for me. Which, I knew, it had been. It had that aura about it, that warmth of David's skin.

I checked it in the mirror.

It was… the perfect bikini.

I grabbed a hotel towel and the key card, and went to find him.

David was sitting in the hot tub. Bare-chested, eyes like shimmering copper that got brighter when he saw me. I laid my towel and key on a nearby table. He held out his hand to help me down the steps into the hot, silken water. I eased in slowly, one inch at a time; it felt like I was dissolving, all my worries and cares bubbling away. The kindest acid in the world. I sank down to my neck, then back up, slowly, gliding closer to him.

"Ground rules," I said. "Don't you ever threaten me again, or I'll bind you all right, I'll bind you into a bottle of drain cleaner and bury you at the bottom of a landfill. If you're lucky, some archeologist might dig you up in a few thousand years."

His hair was damp at the ends, dark and curling. I lifted my hand and touched it, trying to comb the curls back under control, but my fingers weren't interested in his hair, not really; they glided down to the smooth, hot landscape of his skin. Down the column of his throat, to that sexy bird's-wing sweep of his pectoral muscles, and I felt him tensing in a slow, pleasurable way.

"I'm going to die," I said. The tension turned dark. "No, it's okay. If I can die and take this bastard thing with me, I'm doing the world a favor."

"No." His eyes burned, shimmered, not human and not concealing it. Somehow, that made the absolute humanity of his body that much more powerful. He was human because… because he wanted to be human. Because of me. "You can't."

I put a damp finger on his lips. "Ground rules, David. You don't tell me what I can and can't do. If you like me even a little bit, you'll let me have this freedom, okay?"

His hand came out of the water and traced the line of my bare shoulder. Where he touched, shivers followed. God, such a touch… caramel warmth, spreading through me like a slow orgasm. Maybe it wasn't magic, but it felt that way. Felt… bewitching.

I felt him surrender to it, too.

"I don't like you," he said. "Like has no pulse. No fever. No fire." His right hand came out of the water now, joined the left in gliding up my shoulders, my neck. I could feel my pulse pounding wildly. Both my hands on his chest now, mapping the golden territory of his body. "Like isn't what I feel for you. It never was."

Our lips met, slowly. Damp, hot, hungry. He tasted darkly exotic, like a fruit from deep in an undiscovered jungle. Jets from the tub pushed us closer together, closer, until all that was separating us was the practically nonexistent fabric of my bikini and whatever he might have been wearing under the bubbles. It felt deeply right, utterly wrong. Forbidden. Natural. Perfect.

He'd been so careful to stay in control, but now I could feel the fire in him, wild and raging like a nuclear core. His hands touched my breasts and traced the hard outlines of my nipples under the water, and the bikini might as well have been imaginary, the way my nerves caught fire. I didn't want to ever stop kissing him, but I had to breathe; when I pulled back for a gasp of air, he let me do it, and a necessary rush of sanity came between us.

"A little too public," I managed to say, between deep breaths. His hands were still on my breasts under the water, thumbs gently caressing thickened, aching nipples under thin turquoise fabric. His eyes weren't anything like human now; they were glorious, alien, beautiful beyond anything I'd ever imagined. I couldn't fathom how I'd ever mistaken him for just a guy, no matter what kind of magic he'd worked.

"Don't worry," he murmured. His voice was deeper now, richer, almost a purr. He drifted closer again, put his lips right next to my ear. "They can't see us."

There were jacketed hotel employees at the desk right beyond the windows, chatting among themselves. Nobody looked in our direction. A grumpy-looking businessman wheeled his suitcase past and didn't spare us so much as a glance.

David put one finger under the stretch turquoise fabric of my top and pulled me right up against him. I couldn't stop touching him, tracing the hard, yielding planes of his chest, the flat ridges of his stomach. My hand slid down, and I felt a thin layer of waterlogged fabric gathered at his waist.

"If they can't see us," I breathed into his mouth, "get rid of the bathing suit."

Before the words left my lips, there was nothing under my fingers but wet skin. Nothing to hold me back.

David braced himself on the ledge, watching me with those unbelievable eyes the color of burning pennies, as I stripped off the wet bikini top and tossed it onto the side of the hot tub. Before I could reach for the bottoms, his hands were on the job, sliding them down my legs.

"Is this against the rules?" I asked. I grabbed the edge of the hot tub, one hand on either side of him, and straddled his lap. "Tell me this is against the rules. It feels too good to be legal."

His voice was a hot, breathless growl. "You refused to bind me—I don't have to tell you anything. Ah!…"

He was hard as steel, hot as fire, and he felt so good going in that I shuddered and collapsed against him, holding him in me and feeling life pulsing between us. "Tell me," I whispered. His breath was fast and hot against my neck.

"It's forbidden," he said. "And it's stupid. I need to—to stay—don't—"

"Don't what?" I moved my hips slowly, a liquid circle, and felt him tense against me. "Don't do this?"

His hands came up, gliding up over my breasts, my neck, to hold my face like something precious and fragile. No more words. No more anger. We lost ourselves, fire and water dissolving into each other in a perfect union of opposites, and when I cried out, it was into his mouth, and all his strength, all his magic didn't keep him from joining me.

At the very second that I was completely alive, completely alight, I felt the Demon Mark make its move, like a taloned hand clenching around my heart. I came crashing back to reality with a jolt like electrocution, and the sensation of being violated, being ripped away from him, was so real that I panicked. Lost control. Lost myself. I felt it pushing deeper in me, pulsing like some terrible child, and on the outside David's strength kept me from going under the water, but I was convulsing, crying out, and all the fire in the world couldn't melt the ice forming in me, forming in sharp angles and ridges and forming into…

"No!" I heard him say, and there was helpless pain and fury in it. Not just flesh, not just fire—passion. "Stay with me. Don't let go!"

My body was going limp, shutting down, all my resources turned inward against the invader. Was this how it had been for Bad Bob? Had it really hurt this much? God, I didn't want to hurt. I wanted to go back to that warm, sweet place in heaven, go back to David's arms.

David put his hand flat above my heart.

Hot gold poured into me, melting ice, forcing the black tendrils of the Demon Mark to a stop, but it held tight to what it had gained. It was bigger now. Darker. Full of cool, malevolent life. Tapped deep into the roots of where I lived.

When the pain receded and I could breathe again, I realized David was holding me against him like a child, my head on his shoulder, stroking aimless patterns on my bare skin. No, not aimless. Where his fingers touched, I felt stronger. Warmer.

"Shh," he whispered, when I tried to speak. "My fault. My fault. Let me help."

"Your fault?" I repeated blankly. It was a huge effort to raise my hand and touch his face, but a rich reward when I saw some of the tension ease out of him. "How the hell is this your fault?"

"You asked me if it was forbidden. I shouldn't have let myself do this—"

I put my fingers over his mouth to shut him up. His lips moved, not with words, but with silent kisses.

"Don't ever say that," I said. "Don't ever."

We stayed like that, him on the ledge, me cradled in his arms, for more than an hour. No words, no impulse for more; he stroked my hair in a slow, hypnotic rhythm.

"I'm waterlogged," I finally said, and raised my head from where it rested against his chest. "Going on raisin skinned."

I caught the edge of his smile.

"You're the mistress of air and water," he said. "I can't believe you couldn't fix a thing like that."

"True. But I'm too tired. Can't you just—blink us back up to the room?"

"No," he said. "I can move myself anywhere I like, but taking you is a bit more difficult."

"You tunneled through the earth with me," I reminded him.

"And I'm recovering my strength," he said gravely. "I assume you want me fully restored."

"Bet your ass."

The Demon Mark was silent again, almost invisible; still, it was hard to move, because I kept waiting for it to strike again. David understood. He let me sit up slowly, watching my face, and reached out to place his hand over my heart again.

"It's quiet," he said.

"What if it gets noisy again?"

"It won't. Not tonight." He didn't make any promises for tomorrow, I noticed. Well, I was getting out of the habit of thinking about tomorrow anyway.

I got out of the water, weak-kneed, my bits of Lycra back in place for the trip upstairs. David surged out of the hot tub next. I found myself fascinated by the way water caught and tangled in his hair, flecked his entire body with light. God, he was beautiful. I couldn't quite believe that I'd drawn passion out of that perfection, because he looked so controlled and untouchable now.

"Put some clothes on," I said, "before I have to fight off the desk clerks to hang on to you."

He reached for my towel and wrapped it around his waist. That did not make him any less attractive. If anything…

"Upstairs," he reminded me. I took his arm, and we walked out of the pool area onto the deep pile carpet past the front desk. One of the clerks looked up, frowned slightly, then realized what she was doing and gave us a brilliant smile.

"I'm sorry, I didn't see you in there. The pool area's closed for the night," she said. David—just human David again, brown hair and brown eyes, just another guy—nodded and apologized. We strolled back up the hall to the elevators, where we waited politely until one dinged open for us.

I shivered in the air-conditioning as the doors rumbled closed; David noticed, made a casual gesture, and instantly I was warm and dry.

"Wow," I said, surprised. He raised his eyebrows.

"Nothing you couldn't do yourself."

I moved closer to him and found him dry, too; warm as if he wore summer under his skin. He put his arms around me, but he did it carefully. Too carefully.

"David."

"Yes?"

"I'm not fragile."

He didn't smile, didn't look away from my face. Close up, the color of his eyes was a deep, rich gold-stone. "Compared with me?"

"Okay, granted, more fragile than you. But don't treat me like I'm dying, I'm not dying, I'm just— living until I don't." David still didn't look away. "Promise me you won't let all this stop you from throwing me up against the wall right now and kissing me like my life depended on it."

It was a short ride to the third floor, too short for the kind of reassurance I wanted, but he did manage to make me feel better. And warmer.

In the room, with towels and swimsuits discarded, he proceeded to raise my body temperature considerably. This time, there was no demonic tantrum to spoil it for us, just long, slow, delicious heat that kept building and building until I burned.

I fell asleep curled against him, with his hand over the Mark, holding it still.

I woke up alone in a well-mussed bed, felt the cold hollow in the pillow where David had lain, and I felt that cold certainty sweep over me that it was like the first night: I was going to open my eyes to find him gone as if he'd never been.

But when I looked, he was standing at the window, looking out. He was already dressed in a gold flannel shirt and blue jeans, feet bare, and he had his glasses on again. Human disguise firmly in place.

I stretched and let the sheet slip down. David didn't take the bait. He looked uncommonly sober for so early in the morning, especially after a night that had left me still tingling and vibrating all over.

"No good morning?" I asked. "What's so fascinating? Cheerleaders practicing naked in the parking lot?"

He didn't answer. I got up, wrapped a sheet around me in the best movie-star fashion, and togaed over to join him at the plate-glass window. The sun was above the horizon, but not by much; it was layered in pinks and golds, floating just under a gray layer of low-hanging, rounded clouds. More rain up there. And a darker line to the south that I didn't like.

"Nasty," I said, pointing to it. He still didn't answer. "Earth to David? Hello?"

And then I saw where he was looking, down into the parking lot. For a few seconds, it didn't register-cars, lots of cars, nothing special…

… and then my eyes settled on a midnight-blue Mustang with a charred driver's side door, parked innocently in the fourth row. Next to the white Land Rover.

Marion's hunters were here.

"Shit!"

I dropped the sheet and ran into the bathroom, scooped up clothes from the floor, and pulled on stretch velvet pants without bothering with underwear. The lace shirt tore at the bottom as I yanked it over my head. Jacket and shoes went on practically simultaneously, and while I was dragging my tangled hair out from under the coat collar, I yelled at David, "Come on!"

He was still at the window. Shoeless. I grabbed his arm and towed him toward the hotel room door.

He stopped two seconds before the knock came. His face was focused and pale, eyes as dark as midnight.

"Get in the bathroom," he said. "Shut the door."

As if that would do any good. "I'm going down fighting, not hiding."

"Just do it!" His fury was sudden and hot as nuclear fire, and before I could even try to argue, he took me by the shirt and shoved me into the bathroom, banged the door shut, and I heard a huge concussion of sound, of pressure. What the hell—?

I opened the door and saw the glitter of glass all over the carpet. The curtains were blowing in, straight in, like gale flags. The windows were completely gone, nothing but a sugar-dusting of glass left at the corners.

David turned, grabbed me by the hand, and pulled me to the window. Picked me up like a toy in his arms. Behind us, the door to the room shuddered and jumped on its hinges, then caught fire with a red-orange whoosh.

David jumped out into open air.

I didn't know how indestructible free-range Djinn might be, so I formed a thick cushion of air under us, an updraft to counter our fall. It was still a jolt of an impact, but even before my mind could register it, David was already running.

"Put me down!" I yelled.

"Shut up!" he yelled back. There was raw ferocity in his voice, too much to argue with. He skidded to a halt next to Delilah. "Get in the car!"

The door was unlocked. He put me down, and I slid into the driver's seat; no keys, but he reached in the open door and touched the ignition to start her up.

"David—"

"Drive! Don't stop for anything!"

Before I could protest, he was running back toward the hotel, looking up at the black gaping hole that used to be our window on the third floor.

Someone was standing there. I couldn't see who it was, because at that moment the curtains fluttered and started to blow out instead of in. I felt the shock wave of it a second before it hit—straight-line winds, running at least a hundred miles an hour. I felt Delilah shudder and roll backwards; I jammed on the brakes. David hadn't moved, but his shirt was being pulled right off him by the merciless pressure. As I watched, buttons popped and the fabric slid down his arms; the wind took it and it whipped away toward the horizon.

There was a terrible concussive pop from the direction of the hotel.

Something coming at us. Glittering. David turned, screaming at me to drive, now, and it was more the stark urgency in his face than understanding that made me scratch rubber in reverse out of the parking space. When I realized what it was that I saw flying toward me across the parking lot, I hit the brakes again and screeched to a bone-crunching halt.

Every window on this side of the hotel had shattered, and the glittering, slicing fragments were hurtling toward me.

Toward a family of four clinging to the door of a red minivan down the row.

Toward a pregnant woman huddling out in the open, caught between rows of cars.

Toward David.

I threw myself up into Oversight and grabbed for what I could reach, which wasn't much; this was brute-force stuff, and my enemy already had control of just about everything there was to use. I grabbed air and forced molecules to move, move, never mind the chaos factors that introduced; that wall of broken glass was going to shred us all to hamburger if I didn't.

I jammed on the car brakes, abandoned the idea of retreat, and focused everything I had on the moment. I superheated the air and released it in a hard, fast, focused pulse. It didn't have to be much, just enough to disrupt the wind for a fraction of a second; glass is too heavy to continue at right angles to gravity without a clear kinetic force acting on it.

My microburst—five hundred yards wide—blew into the opposing wind-wall and shattered the momentum, and for a second there was a haze there of power meeting power, glass turning over and over like windblown confetti, and then the shards rained down to the asphalt with a sound like a hundred bags of dimes breaking open. The hurricane attack started up again, but it was too late; glass isn't easy to get airborne once it's on the ground.

I realized I could no longer see David. God, I'd been too late, too late to keep the glass from hitting him—he was down somewhere, between the cars, down and slashed to ribbons—

The passenger door yanked open, and David threw himself in, bare-chested and bleeding. "I told you to go!" he shouted. I jammed Delilah back in gear, popped the clutch, and squealed rubber in a turn that any stunt driver would have been proud of. We screeched around the corner, heading for the street—

— and almost crashed headfirst into a Winnebago blocking the exit. I jerked the wheel and got us around it, barely, registering the shocked faces of Ma and Pa Retirement as the Mustang roared past.

Hair on the back of my neck hissed and prickled, and I knew it was coming again, could feel those ions turning and connecting overhead. Not just one lightning bolt this time, but hundreds, thousands, a sky full of falling razor blades, and I couldn't stop all of them. People were going to die.

"David!" I screamed. He grabbed my hand, and I smelled the actinic charge in the air, heard the hissing sizzle of it overhead. That power had to discharge, needed to discharge, and it was going to go somewhere fast and hard. It would settle for anything that would form a satisfactory current. Buildings… trees… flesh and blood and bone.

I felt David's strength pouring into me. Not the same magnitude as what I'd felt from other Djinn, but then David's strength wasn't fully sourced until he was bound.

No time to plan, no time to do anything but what I knew, at heart, was right.

I built an invisible road for the power to discharge, working fast, touching and turning polarities a billion atoms at a time. I'd never worked on such a scale before, but I had to reach, and reach, and reach without stopping to doubt myself. I stretched myself over the aetheric as thin as a spiderweb, armoring the innocent, leaving a clear and unmistakable path for the strike to follow. A lightning rod with a silver ground wire unreeling back to me.

It had to be back to me. It was the direction all the power was being pushed, anyway.

David felt it. "No! What are you doing?"

"Not now," I snapped, and felt the Mark wake and move inside me. I tightened my grip on David's hand. "Keep it still!"

I felt warmth pulse through his flesh and into mine, strike deep. The writhing inside me went quiet.

The last chains of power snapped together. In Oversight, the silver line went white-hot with potential.

"Hold on," I whispered, and closed my eyes.

The lightning flashed blue white, brighter and hotter than the sun—silent, because sound would come later. I opened my mouth to gasp and tasted the bitter tang of ozone. Pins and needles blew over my skin in a wave, from my feet to the crown of my head.

And then the lightning hit Delilah dead on.