Windfall

Chapter One

I kept trying to tell myself, You’ve survived worse than this, but it didn’t seem to be working. Any second now, I was going to scream and kill somebody, not necessarily in that order… You’ve been through worse. Yep. I had. It just didn’t feel like it, right at the moment.

I stared blankly at the back wall of the studio and held my place under the hot, merciless lights. The news anchors, seated at the desk about ten feet away from me, were still doing happychat. Morning happychat, which is a whole yak-level higher than the annoying evening forced camaraderie. I was sweating under a yellow rain slicker and matching hat and stupid-looking rain boots. I looked like the Morton’s Salt girl, only not as adorable.

The weather outside was clear, and there wasn’t even a hope in hell of rain from the nice, stable system out there, but Marvelous Marvin McLarty, meteorologist extraordinaire, was about to pronounce a seventy percent chance of downpours in the next twenty-four hours. And this wasn’t the first out-of-the-blue (no pun intended) prediction Marvin had pulled out of his… Doppler. Two nights ago, he’d been the only one to accurately predict landfall of a tropical storm up the coast, while everyone else including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—NOAA to the weather buffs—had put it two hundred miles to the south.

This should have made him good. It only made him even more obnoxious. Unlikely as that seemed.

Dear God in heaven, I never thought I’d miss being a Warden quite so much, but right now—and for some time, actually—I wanted my old job back so bad that I’d have crawled on broken glass for it.

I held onto my big, toothy smile as the red light lit up on the camera in front of me and Marvin, who was standing next to me. He was a big man, bulky, with implanted hair and big, overwhitened teeth, laser-corrected blue eyes, and a face made unnaturally smooth by dermabrasion and Botox. Okay, the Botox was just a guess, but he was holding on to his fleeing, screaming youth with both fists.

Camera Two lit up. Marvin sauntered around, quipped with the anchors, Janie and Kurt, and then turned to the weather map. He started talking about a cold front approaching from the southeast… only there wasn’t one; there was a front stalled at the Georgia border that didn’t have nearly enough zippity doo dah to make it across the state line anytime in the next, oh, year. Behind him, the Chyron graphics did all kinds of cool zooms and swoops, showing animations and time-lapsed satellite cloud movements, which meant zero to about ninety-five percent of the population tuning in.

Marvin was a certified professional meteorologist. A degreed climatologist.

Marvin knew dick about the weather, but he was damn lucky. At least so far as I could tell, and believe me, I could tell a lot.

He walked past the animated map, and the camera followed him and focused on me as he stopped in frame. I turned the smile on Marvin, wishing it was a really big cannon.

“Good morning, Joanne!” he boomed cheerfully. He’d snarled at me earlier, while pushing past me in the hallway on his way to makeup. “Ready to talk about what’s coming up?”

“Sure, Marvin!” I bubbled right back, perky as a cheerleader on speed. I used to have a real job. I used to protect people. Save lives. How the hell did I get here?

He wasn’t listening to my internal whining. “Great! Well, we know how rough the weather’s been the past few days, especially for our friends up the coast. We already know today’s going to be bright and sunny, but let’s tell our viewers out there in the SunshineState what it’s going to be like for them outside tomorrow!”

The camera pulled focus. I was center stage.

I held on to my smile like it was a life preserver. “Well, Marvin, I’m sure tomorrow’s going to be a beautiful day for going outside and soaking up some—”

Marvin had taken the required number of steps out of frame, and just as I said the word “soaking,” the bored, cigar-chomping stagehand standing off-camera to my left yanked a rope.

About twenty gallons of water dumped from buckets directly over my head, right on target. It hurt. The bastards had chilled it, or else it was a lot colder up in those rafters than down here on the stage; the stuff felt ice-cold as it splashed off the plastic rain hat, straight down the back of my neck, to splash down into the stupid yellow rain boots.

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

Or that you will not kill them for it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free.

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

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

And then there was the magnificence that was my job.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That had to be true and eternal love.

“Yo, Jo.”

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

Cherise made the days just a little bit brighter.

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

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

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

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

I considered. “Nine,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The woman left, coffee mug clenched in white knuckles.

“HR?” I guessed.

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

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

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

I gave her a blank look.

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

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

So not hot, I was.

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

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

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

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

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

“Florida?”

“The third planet from the sun.”

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

“How many hits?” I asked.

“Are we doing the drug talk again?”

I eyerolled. “To the web page, geek.”

“Couple hundred thousand so far.”

“You’re kidding!”

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

“What were you doing listening to IT guys?”

She raised an eyebrow. “We were talking about The X-Files. You know? Remember?

The show with Mulder and Scully and…”

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

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

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

It was seven A.M., but that was Cherise. She knew the opening schedule of every store in a tri-state area, and she planned ahead.

Genevieve picked up the hair dryer. My scalp cringed, anticipating third-degree burns. I’d have stopped her, but the weird thing was that at the end of all of this torture, I’d look great. That was Genevieve’s special gift.

“I absolutely need to shop,” I said. Shopping has a deeply therapeutic effect when you’re trapped in a less-than-ideal life situation.

Shopping with money would have been even better, but hell. Can’t have everything.

Fort Lauderdale mornings are beautiful. Soft cerulean skies, layered with pink and gold. Smog is kept to a minimum by the fresh ocean breezes. When I stepped outside of the big concrete box of WXTV-38, I had to stop and appreciate it as only a Warden can.

I closed my eyes, lifted my face to the sun, and left my body to drift up to the aetheric level. It was a little hard to do, these days; I was tired, and out of practice, and it felt sometimes like I had more than my share of worries. Hard to get metaphysical when you’re tied so closely to the real world.

Up there on the aetheric, once I’d achieve it, things were serene, too; glowing bands of brilliant color, swirling and moving together, everything lazy and calm. Out toward the sea there was energy, but it was carefully balanced, sea and sun and sky. No storms on the way at the moment, and no rain, regardless of Marvelous Marvin’s bogus predictions. Poor Marv. Statistically, he should have been right about eighty-six percent of the time just by predicting sunny and warm in Florida, but no, he had to try to be dramatic about it…

Speaking of which, how exactly did he beat the odds? He shouldn’t. I’d looked at him a dozen times up on the aetheric, though, and he was nothing but what he appeared: an obnoxious normal guy. Blessed with the luck of the entire nation of Ireland, apparently, but a regular human being, not a Warden, no matter how deep-cover. And certainly not a Djinn.

As I floated there, basking in the beauty, I felt something coming around to mess it up. Not weather. People. I blinked and focused and saw three bright centers of energy approaching me on foot across the parking lot. In aetheric-sight, you learn a lot about a person. The one in the center was male, tall, stooped, and comfortable with himself—he wasn’t trying to make himself look bigger or better or scarier than anyone else. The other two, though… different story. One of the women saw herself as a warrior, all steel and armor that was designed more from a book cover than actual practical necessity—steel push-up bra and an impractical metal bikini bottom to match, a sword too big for someone her size to draw, much less swing.

The third was also a woman… elegant, wispy, a little unsettling.

I knew two out of three of them. Ghost-woman was a mystery.

I dropped down into my physical form as footsteps approached, and turned with a smile firmly in place. “John,” I said. “It’s really good to see you again.”

“You, too,” John Foster said. It was a friendly beginning, but really, there was no reason for my former Warden boss to show up this early wanting a word, especially flanked by muscle. In no way could this not be a bad sign.

John wasn’t much different in the real world than he looked in the aetheric—tall, well dressed, a little professorial if such a thing could be considered a downside. He liked tweed. I regretted the tweed, but at least he’d gotten past the sweater vests of earlier years.

My eyes drifted over to the shorter, darker, punker woman standing next to him.

Knew her, too, and the welcome wasn’t so welcome-y. She was glaring at me through dark-rimmed eyes. Shirl was a Fire Warden, powerful, and the last I’d run into her she’d been assigned to Marion’s Power Ranger squad, rounding up renegade Wardens for that ever-looming magical lobotomy. She wasn’t exactly top of the list of people I’d wished would drop in. We hadn’t bonded, back when she had been chasing me across the country.

She’d added some additional facial piercings since the last time I’d seen her, her dyed-black hair was tipped with magenta, and she’d taken up a close, personal friendship with leather. Not an improvement.

The third woman remained a mystery. We’d never met, and I couldn’t tell what her specialty was; but if Shirl was here to cover fire, she was likely an Earth Warden.

“A little early for a social call,” I said, trying to keep it pleasant.

John nodded and stuck his hands in his jacket pockets. Awkward with conflict, John. I wondered why they’d stuck him with the job. Maybe the more senior Wardens were busy. Or maybe they knew I had a soft spot for him and wouldn’t be quite so difficult.

“You already know Shirl,” he said, and gestured to her with an elbow, offhandedly, with a flat tone to his normally warm voice. Ah. He didn’t like her either. Nice to know. “This is Maria Moore, she’s come over from France to help us out.”

Maria, the ghost-girl, was a wispy little thing in the real world, too. Older than she’d looked, up a level, but still a twig. I hoped she wasn’t a Weather Warden; a good strong breeze might blow her out to sea. She looked more like a Djinn than most Djinn I’d ever met.

“Takes three of you to say good morning?” I asked.

“I need you to take a ride with me, Joanne,” John said. He had an interesting voice, blurred with a North Carolina drawl; it always made him sound like he was in no particular hurry or distress. So I couldn’t tell if this was a big deal, a little deal, or a consultation he thought I could help out with… or whether I was taking a ride that would end up with me dead or permanently disabled.

I decided I didn’t really want to find out.

“Sorry,” I said, not as if I in any way meant it. “I really need to get home. I have some appointments—”

“You’re coming with us,” Shirl said flatly. “Whether you like it or not. Get used to the idea.”

I met her eyes. “Or what, Shirl? You’ll get all skinhead on me?”

She’d been kind of hoping that would be my attitude, I could tell. Her hand cupped at her side, and a fireball ignited in her palm. “Or this is going to start loud and end badly.”

I didn’t want to fight. Really. Especially with John Foster in the middle, not to mention the French Ghost, who might or might not be someone I needed to piss off.

I glanced at John, who was stone-faced, and said, “Whoa, there, Sparky, I’m not picking a fight. I just would like a little warning if you’re going to drop in and disrupt my day.”

“Get in the car.”

She wasn’t taking any crap from me. That might have been because I’d kind of kicked her ass the first time around, and she was worried about a repeat; she needn’t have been, as I’d been running on Demon-Mark Power then, and now it was just plain ol’ me, and plain ol’ me was tired and drained and really not up to a big, magical, hand-to-hand battle to the death.

Plus, I wasn’t dressed for it. Stains would never come out of this top.

Maria Moore silently gestured me to a smoky silver Lexus, which I knew for a fact wasn’t John’s; Lexus wasn’t his style. Must have been Maria’s, and come with the ghostly self-image. She was probably aspiring to a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. After just enough hesitation to let them know that I wasn’t always going to be so easily handled, I turned and walked to it, opened the back door and got inside. It was cramped, but then I had longer legs than most women. Maria got in the driver’s seat. I got Shirl as my companion in the back. Joy.

“You want to tell me where we’re going?” I asked.

Maria and John exchanged a glance. “It’ll take us a while to get there,” he said. “I’d suggest you call and cancel your appointments. You’re going to be out most of the day.”

It was a little late to bitch about it, now that the car was moving. I pulled out my cell phone and postponed Mall Day by twenty-four hours, much to Cherise’s disappointment, and settled in for the long haul.

Which, in a Lexus, wasn’t a bad thing.

It was a quiet drive. I dozed, part of the way, because I’d been up since four A.M. and besides, talking to Shirl the Human Pincushion didn’t make for entertaining conversation. She had all the power of someone like Marion Bearheart, and absolutely none of the charm. I missed Marion and all her centered, Native American, Earth Mother attitude. At least she’d threatened me with style and class, and she had a clear moral center. Shirl… well, I wasn’t so sure about any of that. Especially the style and class.

Maria the Ghost sporadically nattered on with John in bright, liquid French.

John was multilingual, which surprised me for some reason. They seemed easy together. Old friends? Current lovers? Couldn’t get a read. I made up dramatic scripts in my head, in which John flew over the Atlantic to sweep Maria off her feet in the shadow of the EiffelTower and the two of them ran around Europe getting into wacky, farcical mistaken-identity bedroom adventures.

Hey, I was bored.

Three and a half hours later, the Lexus made a right turn off the highway, and I started seeing signs of damage. We were entering the area where Tropical Storm Walter had blown in two nights ago. It had been a really bad hurricane season, and even though we were winding down, nobody felt very secure about it. The damage was mostly superficial, it looked like—shredded palm fronds, blown-down fences, the occasional busted sign or toppled billboard. Cleanup crews were out.

Power had already been restored, for the most part. The beach looked clean and fresh, and the surf curled its toes in calm little foaming wavelets over the sand.

We drove about another fifteen minutes, and then John pointed off to the left.

Maria slowed the Lexus, and we passed a partially downed sign with construction information on it. PARADISE COVE, it proclaimed, presented by Paradise Kingdom LLP. With a whole bunch of subcontractors, like the special effects cast of a big-budget movie. The artist’s rendering on the sign was of a hotel about fifteen stories tall, avant-garde in shape.

It was a hell of a lot more avant-garde now, because what lay behind the sign was a mass of twisted metal and slumping lumber. Looked like a war zone.

Construction materials had been scattered around like Legos after playtime for the emotionally disturbed.

Maria put the Lexus in park.

All three of them looked at me.

“What?” I asked. I was honestly puzzled.

“Tell us what you know about this,” John said.

“Well, I’m no expert, but I’d have to say that between this and the Motel 6 down the road, I’d have to choose the Motel 6…”

“I’m serious.”

“Hell, John, so am I! What do you want me to say? It looks trashed.” I suddenly had a flash. It wasn’t a pleasant one. “This is what they were talking about on the news. The freak damage from Tropical Storm Walter.”

“This is it.”

“Okay… and you think I know about it because… ?” They all exchanged looks, this time. Nobody spoke. I rolled my eyes and said it for them. “Because you think I did this. Grow up, guys. Why would I? The Wardens have made it really clear that if I screw around with the weather, somebody like good old Shirl here will come around and put me on Drool Patrol. I mean, I don’t really like the architectural styling, but I don’t feel that passionate about buildings.”

Predictably, it was John who jumped in. “Right at the present time, there are fewer than ten Wardens in Florida,” he said. “Somebody directed the storm. We recorded the shift.”

“Well, talk to the hand, because it wasn’t me.”

Another significant look that didn’t include me. John said, “Are you sure that’s your answer, Jo?”

“Hell yes, I’m sure. And you’re starting to piss me off with this crap, John. Why would I do a thing like this? Why would I risk it, first of all, and why would I pick on this particular section of coast?”

“It’s close to where Bob Biringanine’s home once stood,” Maria the French Ghost observed.

“So, what, I have a grudge against a dead man? Don’t be ridiculous.”

I was starting to sweat. I mean, this wasn’t usual behavior from Wardens. Suspected offenders got questioned, but usually by auditors, and rarely triple-teamed like this. I was starting to feel a little bit like some poor Mafioso taking a tour of the New Jersey dump, right before he joins the great cycle of composting.

“Look,” I said. “What can I do to convince you? I had nothing to do with this.”

After a few seconds of silence, I asked, “Was anybody hurt?”

“Three people were killed,” John said. “The night watchman had brought his two kids with him to work. The kids were asleep in the front when the tornado hit. He tried to get to them, but he’d lost a lot of blood. He died on the way to the hospital.”

Silence. Outside, the insects were droning, and the sky was that clear, scrubbed blue you only get after a vicious storm. The few palm fronds surviving nodded in a fresh ocean breeze.

Storms were natural. We—the Wardens—didn’t stop the cycle of nature, we just moderated it. Buffered it for the safety of the vulnerable people who lived in its path. But for a storm like this, we wouldn’t have bothered. It wasn’t that bad, and it was necessary to correct the ever-wobbling scales of Mother Earth.

If somebody had messed with it, it was criminal, and intentional.

And murderous.

“It wasn’t me,” I said. “I’ll take whatever oath you want, John. But I’m innocent.”

He nodded slowly, and turned back to face front. “Let’s get you back home,” he said.

“That’s it?” Shirl asked loudly. “Just like that? You buy it just because she says it?”

“No,” Maria the French Ghost said, and turned her head slightly toward me. She had odd eyes, not quite any color, and they looked a little empty. “Not just because she says it.”

Shirl opened her mouth, sensibly shut it, and scowled out the window. Maria started the car and reversed us back out to the highway.

It was a long, silent drive back, and I had a lot to think about.

I got home too late for any shopping, and way out of the mood anyway. I went home to my grubby little apartment, made chili from a can with some shredded cheese, and curled up on my secondhand couch with a warm blanket and a rented movie. The movie was one of those warmed-over schmaltzy romantic comedies with too much romance and not nearly enough comedy, but it didn’t matter; I was too distracted to watch it anyway.

If somebody had been messing with Tropical Storm Walter, I should have known it.

I’ve always been sensitive to those kinds of things. Of course, I could excuse it with the fact that John Foster’s spider sense hadn’t tingled, either, nor—apparently—had those of any of the eight other Wardens stationed in the state. So maybe I could forgive myself a little.

I couldn’t shake the image of that father bringing his kids to work on a boring, safe job, and facing the nightmare of his life. Struggling to save his family in the face of someone else’s malice.

Wardens screw up, that’s a fact of life. Weather is difficult and tricky and it doesn’t like to be tamed. It has a violence and vengeance all its own.

But this wasn’t a screwup, didn’t feel like a screwup, or a random event. It felt targeted, and it felt cold. No wonder the Wardens were sending out hit squads looking for an answer.

I did have to wonder why John Foster had accepted my word for my innocence. In his place, I’d have wanted proof. I wasn’t sure that the fact he let me off so lightly was a good sign.

I did some internet research, made some phone calls to neutral parties—i.e., not Wardens—and put together a rough picture of what had happened. Tropical Storm Walter had turned vicious at the last second, gathering strength as it roared up on the coastline. It made a last-minute turn to the north instead of the south, and waded ashore with near-hurricane-force winds and a complement of tornados.

So far as I knew, the only one that had touched down had leveled the hotel.

It might have been selfish, but I had to wonder why the investigation had focused on me. If they’d instantly focused suspicion on me, the obvious answer was that they didn’t trust me—which, hey, they didn’t—but there must have been some connection I wasn’t seeing. And not the hole in the ground that had once been Bad Bob Biringanine’s house on the beach, either. Even the Wardens weren’t shallow enough to buy the fact that I’d throw a meaningless tantrum and beat up a helpless coastline, unless they suspected me of going completely wacko.

Then again, I was dressing up like the Morton’s Salt Girl on TV and getting water dumped on my head for money.

Maybe they had a point.

I felt alone. More alone than I had in quite some time, actually. I missed my friends. I missed the Wardens.

Boy kissed girl, and the music came up and tried to tell me that love would make everything all right with the world.

I missed David, oh God I missed David.

I curled up with my warm blanket and watched the rest of the movie, and fell asleep to the cold blue flicker.

The next morning’s show went just about as badly as you might expect. No dumping of rain today; apparently Marvin was forecasting a good day for outside activities, so I got to pose in my stupid-looking walking shorts, oversized T-shirt, boonie hat, and zinc smeared white down my nose, while Cherise wore the cute little bikini and cheesecaked for the camera. One of us was happy. I got sand in my penny loafers, so it probably wasn’t me.

But the worst was yet to come.

Cherise slipped into a thick terrycloth robe as soon as she stepped off camera—her usual habit on the set—and we were talking about doing the mall when I felt a thick, sweaty hand slide around my waist. A little too high to qualify as waist territory, actually—we were getting into oh-I-don’t-think-so range.

Cherise looked startled, then grim, as Marvin’s other arm went around her.

Luckily, her robe was belted the wrong way for him to slide his fingers inside.

“Girls,” he said, and grinned, and squeezed. He’d definitely had his teeth whitened recently. They looked so white I was afraid they might glow in the dark. “Feel like a little breakfast? I’m buying!”

“Gee, boss, I have to fit into this bikini later,” Cherise said. She wriggled free of his hold. “Thanks for the offer.”

He didn’t let go of me quite so easily. “Whaddaya say, Jo? Few pancakes might do you good! Sweeten you up a little! Come on, my dime!”

I blinked, torn between indignation that he didn’t think I was sweet enough, and relief that he’d at least noticed my sour attitude. “Previous engagement,” I said. “Thanks, though. Some other time.” At least he wasn’t trying to drag us out for drinks, although I was pretty sure that if it had been a little later in the day—like, say, noon—it would have been Mojitos all around at the Cuban bar, and an expectation of a three-way at his fabulous bachelor pad later.

Marvin managed to look both crushed and lecherous at the same time. “Okay, doll. You girls go get your beauty sleep. Not that you need it!”

He was up to something. I gave him the flinty eye as he walked away, whistling a jaunty tune. Cherise shook her head, and preceded me off the set and into the changing room. She had to shower off body makeup; I just had to scrub off the zinc oxide and try to get my hair to do something that didn’t look as if I was trying to take Best of Breed at the Purina Cup.

I finished first, and yelled into the showers, “Meet you outside!”

“Fifteen minutes!” Cherise was deep into conditioning territory. I navigated the tunnel-like hallways of the television station, avoiding harried interns and squinty-eyed techs, hid from the news director, and managed to get through the back door without being stopped to help out with anything that wasn’t my job.

I walked over to the tiny lunch area, complete with palm trees, bolted-down picnic table, and overflowing trash container nobody seemed to remember to empty. Not exactly paradise, but it served, at times. I sat down on the cool metal bench, rested my elbows on the table, and watched the morning arrive.

Another lovely sunrise. Wispy clouds out to sea that glowed orange and gold; the ocean glittered dark blue, flecked with white foam. The sky shaded from turquoise in the east to indigo in the west, and a few brave stars were still glimmering through the dawn. A warm ocean breeze that slid over my exposed skin like silk.

It was a lovely way to pass a few minutes. I didn’t do this nearly enough, just sitting, waiting, listening to the whispers of the world.

As I drifted up there I began to feel something inside me start to resonate.

Liquid light. A cell-deep hum. A deeply intimate feeling of coming home.

I had company again. The good kind, this time.

Down in the real world, warm fingers stroked my hair, and up on the aetheric I saw a white, sparkling flare of power, like a ghost.

The tense curls of my hair relaxed, and David’s fingers dragged slowly through it, straightening it into a glossy black sheet of silk that fell heavily around my shoulders.

I turned. David was worth the resulting skipped heartbeat and raised pulse level on a visual level alone—smooth golden skin, dark auburn hair that glittered with red highlights in the sun, lickable lips, and eyes of an impossible bronze color behind a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. He was back in his usual uniform: blue jeans, a comfortably faded cotton shirt, an antique ankle-length olive coat.

David didn’t look like a Djinn, most of the time. At least, not most people’s idea of one, since that included pantaloons, loopy earrings, and bare, rippling chests. Not that his chest, when bare, didn’t ripple satisfactorily. Far from it …

“I thought you were resting,” I said, to get my mind off of the image of him, shirtless. I tried to make it sound stern, but he made it difficult when he leaned into my space. He slipped his fingers through my magically straightened hair, tilted my head back, and came very close to kissing me.

And, teasingly, didn’t. Warm, soft lips just barely brushing mine.

“It’s been too long,” he said. “I want to stay with you for a while.”

My pulse jumped into high gear. I knew he could hear it. Feel it through the brush of our mouths. I’d left him alone in the bottle for more than a month, hoping he’d be stronger for it, although I hadn’t capped the bottle and sealed him inside. I just… couldn’t bear to do that. It was too much like prison.

“You’re sure?” I asked. My voice didn’t sound too steady. It sounded breathless with excitement, actually.

“Just say the word.”

“Which one?”

“The one you didn’t learn from your mother.” He made a low humming sound at the back of his throat, not quite a growl, not quite a laugh. I could almost forget how fragile he was at the moment. My body wanted to forget, but then, it had Attention Deficit Disorder, big-time.

“Are you—” I hated to ask it—it was like asking someone with cancer how the treatments were going. “David, be straight with me. Really. Are you feeling better? Are you strong enough to—to do this?”

Because David had, since I’d met him, been through even more than I had. He’d fought demons and split himself in two to give me life when I died, and he’d allowed an Ifrit—a kind of Djinn vampire—to drain him nearly dry. He wasn’t really healed from any of that.

Worse, I wasn’t sure he could really heal. Jonathan, high muckety-muck of the Djinn world, hadn’t been all that clear.

But today, he looked almost… normal. Maybe I’d been right. Maybe time healed all Djinn wounds.

He smiled. At close range, that was a deadly weapon. “Don’t worry. I’m strong enough to spend a little time with you,” he said. His eyebrows—fabulously expressive, those eyebrows—canted upward. “Unless, of course, you have a date?”

Right on cue, the back dock door banged open, and Cherise began flip-flopping down the steps to the parking lot. I looked over David’s shoulder and expected him to mist away—like Djinn usually did—but he just turned to take a look as well. Which meant that he’d decided not to leave, but just to disguise himself with a minor use of his powers, a don’t-see-me kind of magic that would direct Cherise’s attention away from him…

“Whoa! Who’s the hottie, Jo?” Cherise asked, focused directly on David. She came to a hard stop, wiggling her tanned toes in the designer flip-flops. Those bright blue eyes swept him head to toe, narrowed, and sparkled. “My, my, my. Holding out on me. Bad friend. No biscuit.”

It was possible that David was just in the mood to be part of the human world for a while. He did that, sometimes; that was how I’d met him. It had taken me days to figure out that he wasn’t entirely human, but in my defense, I was just a little distracted at the time with people trying to kill me.

What I was afraid of, though, was that David was visible to Cherise because he was too weak to magic himself out of being seen.

If that was the case, I couldn’t see any sign of it in his body language. He looked relaxed, open, and friendly.

“Hi. My name’s David,” he said, and held out his hand. Cherise took it and made the handshake look way too intimate.

“I can be a friend. A really, really close friend.” She pursed shiny, Maybelline-enhanced lips, and sent me a pleading look as she leaned into his personal space. “So, when you get tired of him, can I have him?”

“No.”

“Trade you a date with Johnny Depp.”

“Cherise, you don’t have a date with Johnny Depp.”

She sniffed. “Well, I could. If I wanted. So I suppose the arrival of Mr. Hottie means we’re not going shopping.”

“Would you go shopping if he showed up for you?”

“You’re kidding, right? I would have shopping surgically removed from my system. And you know how much of a commitment that is for me.” Cherise gave me a preoccupied kind of smile, tearing her attention away from David for about point oh two seconds, and finally heaved a theatrical sigh. “I suppose I’ll just have to go abuse my credit rating all by myself. Although I plan to shop heavily, and it would be handy to have some nice, strong man to carry my—”

“Go,” I said. She lifted an elegantly sculpted shoulder and flip-flopped off toward her red convertible, hips swaying, alien tattoo doing a funky hula to the motion. Yeah. She’d be carrying her own bags, sure. When hell opened a hockey rink.

“Did I interrupt something?” David asked, and moved back into kissing distance again. “I know how seriously you take a mall visit. Wouldn’t want to stand in your way.”

He was teasing me. I leaned in, too, brushed his lips with mine, and stared deep into his burning bronze eyes. Teasing could go both ways.

His pupils widened and drank me in.

“The mall doesn’t open until ten,” I whispered into his parted lips. “Plenty of time.”

His kiss took control and dissolved me into sparkles and tingles and a massive surge of heat. Damp, urgent, passionate lips, demanding my full attention. I felt myself collapsing against him, wanting badly to be horizontal somewhere with a lockable door. Jesus, he made my whole body shake.

“I missed you,” he said, and his voice had gone low and rough, hiding in the back of his throat. His thumbs caressed my cheekbones, drawing lines of heat like tattoos.

“Show me.”

“Right here?” He looked pointedly down at the gravel, asphalt, and thin grass.

“Looks uncomfortable. Then again, I remember how much you like public displays of affection.”

“Beast.”

Those eyebrows went up again, dangerously high. His smile turned dark. “Oh, you really don’t want to know how true that is.”

I felt a tiny little tremor inside. Sometimes, David could be like a pet tiger—glorious and terrible. He wasn’t just a sweet-natured, nice, agreeable guy, although he was certainly capable of being that. It was just that he was capable of anything. Everything. Djinn weren’t fluffy little bunnies you kept as pets, they were dangerous. David was gentle with me, I knew that. But sometimes, occasionally, I would see the vast, dark depths underneath, and I’d get dizzy and breathless.

And hot. Dear God. Spontaneous-combustion hot.

He knew, of course. I saw it flash in his eyes.

I said, “I’m not afraid, you know.”

His hands—everything about him—went still. Wind brushed over us with curious hands, ruffling my hair, belling his coat. It tasted of ocean. Palm trees rustled and shook out their fronds over our heads.

“Maybe you should be. You don’t know enough about me.”

Well, he was right. He’d live for eons. He’d seen human civilizations rise and fall. I barely knew a fraction of who David was, and what he was.

Sometimes I just forgot.

“Try me,” I said. Cherise’s glitter-bright flirting had reminded me, with a chill, that I wasn’t some sweet young girl anymore, and next thing I knew I’d be buying in the Women’s World section where dowdy clothes go to die. Reading Modern Maturity. Learning to tat lace and make scrapple. I wanted to know David.

I wanted this to be something bigger and deeper and forever, or as far as my forever could go. “If we’re going to stay together, then you can’t just show me your good side, you know. And I mean it. I’m not afraid.”

He looked uncommonly solemn, and he didn’t blink. There was a hint of the tiger in those eyes again. “I don’t think you understand what you’re saying.”

I heaved out a sigh. “Of course I don’t understand. Everything about the Djinn is one big, dark, booga-booga secret, and just because I’ve been one doesn’t mean I got the operating manual—”

He stilled my lips with his, in a damp, slow, breathless kiss. His hands slid up into my hair, stroking those achingly sensitive places behind my ears, at the nape of my neck… I lost my train of thought.

Which made me jump tracks to another one when he let me up for breath. “We need to get you home.” What that really meant was, to put him back in his bottle—yes, Djinn really had bottles, glass ones; they had to be glass and they had to come with stoppers or a way to seal them, no exceptions. The worst case I’d ever seen had been a soap-bubble thin ornamental glass perfume bottle; it was stored in the Wardens Association vault in the U.N. Building in New York, because that thing would shatter if you so much as gave it a hard look.

David’s was a somewhat sturdy ornamental kitchen bottle, the blue-glass fancy kind that store flavored oils and decorative grains. I kept it in a very safe place, right in my nightstand drawer next to oils, lotions, and other things I wouldn’t want casual visitors to inventory.

Which inevitably led to thoughts of my bed, soft sheets, cool soft ocean breezes sighing over my skin…

“Yes. Let’s go home.” His hands slid over my shoulders, stroked down my arms, and lingered on my hands before letting me go. The heat from him stayed on my skin. Afterimages of light.

My car was parked over in the far corner of the lot, away from casual door dings. She was a midnight blue Dodge Viper, and I loved her dearly enough for her to qualify as my second-favorite-ever ride. The first-place winner had been a Mustang, also midnight blue, named Delilah, who had gotten scrapped around the time I met David, as if I had to give up one really lovely thing for another.

David took the shotgun seat, and I prowled Mona through the morning traffic toward my apartment. I’d been really, really lucky when I moved—had to move, thanks to the overzealous actions of some real estate people, who thought that just because I’d had a funeral I’d broken my lease—and I’d ended up with a beachfront second-floor sea view. All of my furniture was secondhand, and nothing matched, but the bed was comfortable and the balcony was to die for.

The bed was the only thing that mattered right now.

I must have parked, but that part was a blur. Then stairs, and then we were in the hall and I was hunting for my key. It was after morning commute time for most of my neighbors, and the place was nearly silent, except for the distant, muted hum of a TV somewhere down near the corner. Probably Mrs. Appel; she worked nights and liked to wind down to a little HBO before nap time.

David came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders, then let them drift down my sides, stroking. Gentle, slow moves. Anyone watching wouldn’t have found it terrifically sexual—we weren’t exactly humping in the hall—but I had to brace my hands on the door and close my eyes. There was something magic about his hands, about the slow, deliberate way he used them. They followed the line of my shoulders, circled my arms, and moved all the way down to my wrists.

He moved closer until he pressed against me like a second skin. I tried to fit the key into the lock again. Missed. My hands were shaking.

“Jo?” His voice was velvet, with a slightly frayed edge that rasped like a purr.

“Maybe you’d better let me do it.”

I held the ring up. He took it from my fingers and leaned around me to fit the key in the lock and turn it.

Which shouldn’t have seemed so suggestive, but maybe that was a combination of my boiling hormones and the heat of his body pressed against my back. Solid summer-warm flesh, hard in all the right places.

The door clicked open. I moved inside, flicked on soft, diffuse overhead lighting, and kicked off my shoes and dropped my purse.

He was behind me again, and this time there wasn’t any holding back for the neighbors. His hands went right around my waist and pulled me against him, and I turned my head to look back at him.

Depthless black in his pupils, and the irises of his eyes were smoking-hot copper.

“I need you,” he said, and moved my hair out of the way. His mouth found the side of my neck, licking and sucking, so fierce that it was right on the skin-thin border between pain and pleasure. His hands slid up to skim lightly over my breasts. “I need you.”

“I—wait, David, I don’t—are you sure you’re—” Feeling up to this was a straight line waiting to happen. “—strong enough for—”

“You give me strength.” His mouth was doing absurd things to my self-control.

“You give me life.” He murmured it against that incredibly sensitive spot just at the base of my ear. “You give me peace.”

Which might have been the sexiest thing any man—or male Djinn—had ever said to me in my life.

“We going to talk all day?” I asked breathlessly, and felt him laugh. Not a nice laugh, and there wasn’t much amusement in it, either. It was the kind of deep, rippling chuckle you might hear from the devil right before he let you see the fine print of your contract on that condo in Aruba, and dear God, it made my spine turn to water.

“That all depends on you,” he said, and the hands reversed course, moved in and down. Demanding. Skimming up the thin fabric of my skirt in handfuls while he pulled me back hard against him in the same motion. “Are you in the mood to have a nice, long chat? Have some tea and cookies?”

It was not what I wanted to do with my mouth.

We fell onto the bed with a bouncing jolt. I didn’t need to undress him; where my hands landed, his clothes just misted away to reveal an incredibly beautiful expanse of flawless golden skin. His eyes turned vague, half-lidded, as I stroked my fingers over his chest and down. His muscles tensed underneath them, corded cable.

He rolled us over, his weight balanced on top of me. I couldn’t stop an involuntary arch in my back, and once I saw the answering glitter in his eyes I kept moving my hips. He moved back. Long, slow, hot torture.

“Yes,” I whispered.

He kissed me. Not romantic, this time. Demanding. Driven by something I didn’t fully understand. I’d never seen him like this before, full of a kind of frantic hunger, as if he wanted to consume me, possess me.

Own me.

This wasn’t equal. It couldn’t be equal, because I still held his bottle, and I’d claimed him. It was a master-slave relationship, no matter how nice the master, how willing the slave. It bothered me.

Just at this moment, I wondered if it bothered him, too.

He was too weak. If I set him free, he’d fade into smoke and hunger. Lose himself.

I couldn’t let that happen. Right or wrong, I couldn’t let it happen.

I lay awake, later, curled against his warmth as he drew lazy magical patterns on my back. They must have been magical. Every place his hand traveled left pools of pulsing silver light inside of me. Parts of my body ached. Other parts tingled and burned. There was a bright, sun-hot throb on my neck, and another several on the insides of my thighs, and I felt as if I’d been completely, breathtakingly destroyed. If that wasn’t being totally possessed, I couldn’t imagine how much more I could take without shattering.

His hand glided down to the small of my back and stayed there for a couple of beats, and I felt a very, very small stirring inside.

I turned my head and looked at him. He didn’t meet my eyes.

“We need to talk,” I said.

“I know.”

“I don’t understand how this is supposed to work.” I rolled over, took his hand, and placed it over my womb.

And we both felt the stirring inside. His eyes flared, then went dark.

“It’s been three months,” I said. “Nothing’s changed.”

“You’re not—” He stopped, shook his head, and those long, gorgeous fingers stroked gently over my skin. Caressing me, but caressing inside me, too. “It’s hard to explain.”

“But I’m pregnant. Right?”

“That’s what’s hard to explain. She won’t—grow like a human child. She’s like a seed, waiting for the sun. Just… waiting.”

“For how long?”

He didn’t answer that one. “I should have asked you first,” he said, and his hand moved again, drawing silver.

“It would have been polite, yeah.”

“I did it to protect you.”

“I know.” At the time, it had been the only way he had known to ensure I’d survive a trip to Las Vegas; and facing down the one Djinn he couldn’t protect me from—his best friend, Jonathan. And it had worked, too. Jonathan hadn’t killed me. He’d even shown some signs of thinking I was a little better than pond scum, which was a huge improvement. “Tell me how this is supposed to happen, then.”

He shook his head again, David-speak for I don’t want to talk about it. I waited him out, watching his face. He finally said, “It may not happen at all. Djinn children are rare. Even then, they’re only born to two Djinn. A Djinn and a mortal… it’s not… She exists inside you as a potential, but—she may never survive.”

“Jonathan said she could only be born if you die.”

His eyes slowly came up to meet mine. “That’s… probably true. We come from death, not life.”

Djinn were very hard to kill, but David was fragile. When he made me a Djinn, he’d fractured something vital inside of him into two pieces, one of which he’d given me to keep me alive. Even when I’d been granted the gift of humanity again, that root-deep fracture had remained. And then he’d gotten in the way of an Ifrit, who drained him nearly to death.

And now he was hanging onto the fragile thread between life and that kind of living death, of losing himself. If he stayed outside of his bottle for too long, or used too much power, he’d become an Ifrit, a thing of ice and shadow. A thing bent only on feeding on others.

As if he’d followed my thought, his hand on my back went still. I felt a shudder run through him, and his eyes dimmed just a little.

“David?” I sat up. He eased back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

“I shouldn’t have done this to you,” he said. “I should never have done any of this to you. You deserve—”

“Don’t do this to yourself. None of it is your fault.”

He closed his eyes. He looked suddenly very, very tired. Human. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“No! God, no.” I put my hand on his chest, then my head. My hair spilled dark over his skin. “Well, not any more than I wanted you to, anyway.”

“I’m afraid I will,” he said. His voice sounded distant, worn smooth by exhaustion. “No, I know I will; I can sense it.” His eyes opened, and the last embers of copper flared in orange swirls. “You can’t let me. I mean it, Jo. You have to have defenses against me. You have to learn…”

The fire was cooling under his skin, the light in him going out. “I have to go now,” he said. “I love you.”

I kissed him, quickly, lovingly, and said, “I love you, too. Go back in the bottle now.”

I felt the sudden indrawn breath of his passing, sank suddenly down in the welter of disordered sheets, and when I opened my eyes again he was gone.

Nothing left but an indentation in the pillows.

I turned over, slid open the nightstand drawer, and took his bottle out of its protective zippered case lined with gray foam.

I started to put the stopper in, but then hesitated. At some very deep level, he was still part of me, drawing on the magic I possessed; putting the stopper in the bottle meant cutting that connection, and although he hadn’t said so, I suspected that the more I could give him, the better. I’d have opened my magical veins if it could have made him better. Hell, I wasn’t in the Wardens anymore; I wasn’t directing the weather or saving lives. I was just a poverty-level member of the vast, unwashed paid labor force.

I needed him for completely different reasons these days than making miracles happen for other people.

I sank back on the pillows with a sigh. I didn’t actually know if he was recovering, or, if he was, how quickly; I’d need the opinion of another Djinn to find out, but then, none of the Djinn had been around to visit since I’d left the Wardens. They were staying clear. I figured Jonathan had something to do with it. The last thing he’d said to me, in a flat, angry monotone, had been, You broke him, you fix him. The unspoken or else had been daunting.

Jonathan hadn’t dropped by since I’d returned to Florida, but with the kinds of powers he possessed, he hardly needed to. He was probably back in his house, watching me through his big plate-glass picture window and sipping magically imported beer.

Probably watching me right now.

I rolled over on my back, flipped the bird at the ceiling.

“Hope you enjoyed the show,” I said. “No encores.”

No reaction. Which was no doubt for the best.

I fell asleep with the bottle beside me, to the steady, pounding whisper of the surf down on the beach.

I catapulted out of bed two hours later to a banging on the apartment door. I was halfway to the door before I realized I was stark naked. Back to the bedroom to throw on a floor-length silk robe, belted in front, and jam my feet into slippers.

“Coming!” I yelled, and hustled back as the knocking continued to thunder. I started to rip the door open, then hesitated and used the peephole.

It took me about ten seconds—long, full ones—to realize who I was looking at, because she didn’t look like herself at all.

Oh. My. God.

I unlocked the dead bolt and flung the door wide. “Sarah?”

My sister was standing there. My sister from California, my married, nonmagical sister who, the last time I’d seen her, had been wearing the best of Rodeo Drive and sporting a designer haircut with fabulous highlights. Sarah had been one of those annoying girls who’d spent all her time scheming to catch a rich man, and … amazingly… had actually done it. I hadn’t expected her to be happy, but I had expected her to hang on to her French millionaire husband with both hands and emotional superglue.

Lots had obviously changed. Sarah was wearing baggy, wrinkled khaki shorts and an oversized Sunshine State T-shirt; the haircut had grown into an unkempt shag, and the remaining, faded highlights looked cheap as tinsel. No makeup. And no socks with her battered running shoes.

“Let me in,” she said. She sounded tired. With no will of my own I stepped back, and she came in, dragging a suitcase behind her.

The suitcase—battered, ugly, and bargain-basement—gave me a bad, bad feeling.

“I thought you were in LA,” I said slowly. The door was still open, and I reluctantly shut and locked it. There went my last chance for a decent escape. I tried for a pleasant interpretation. “Missed me, huh?”

She plumped down on my secondhand couch in an uncoordinated sprawl, staring down at her limp hands, which hadn’t seen a manicure in weeks. My sister was a good-looking woman—walnut brown hair, blue eyes, fine, soft skin she’d worked hard to keep supple—but just now she looked her age. Wrinkles. My God. Sarah had wrinkles. And she hadn’t been to a plastic surgeon and Botoxed them out of existence? Who are you and what have you done with my evil sibling?

“Chrêtien left me,” she said. “He left me for a personal trainer!”

I felt behind me, found a chair, and sank into it, staring at her.

“He divorced me,” she said. Her already-tense voice was rising like a flood tide. “And he enforced the prenup. Jo, he took the Jag!”

That came out as a true, raw wail of grief.

My sister—who’d always made me look like a piker when it came to composure, style, and taking care of herself—blubbered like a little girl. I jumped up and found some Kleenex, which she promptly used with enthusiasm, and fetched a trash can from the bathroom to catch the soggy remains. I was not picking those up.

Finally, she was blotched, swollen, red-nosed, and done crying—for a while—and gave me the rest of the tired, familiar story. Chrêtien and personal trainer Heather (Heather? Really?), meeting every Tuesday for a really intense private session. Sarah getting suspicious because his workout clothes never seemed overly worked out. Hiring a private eye to follow them. Dirty pictures.

Screaming confrontation. Chrêtien invoking the dire terms of the prenup, which had taken her house, her car, her bank account, and left her with her second car, an old Chrysler she’d let the maid use for errands.

And no place to live.

My once-rich sister was homeless.

And she was sitting on my couch with a suitcase, blubbering, looking at me with pleading, swollen eyes.

I silently returned the look, remembering all those childhood grievances. Sarah, yanking my hair when Mom wasn’t looking. Sarah, telling all my friends and enemies about my crush on Jimmy Paglisi. Sarah, stealing my first steady boyfriend out from under my nose. We weren’t close. We’d never been close. For one thing, we weren’t anything like the same. Sarah had been a professional woman… emphasis on the woman, not the professional. She’d set out to snare herself a millionaire, which she’d done, and to live the life she’d always wanted, and damn whoever had to suffer to get her there. She’d signed the prenup because, at the time, she’d thought she had Chrêtien completely beguiled and could get him to tear it up with enough honeyed compliments and blow jobs.

I could have told her—hell, I had told her—that Chrêtien was way too French for that to work.

Sarah was stranded on my couch: sniffling, humiliated, practically penniless. No marketable skills to speak of. No friends, because the kinds of country club friends Sarah had made all her life didn’t stick around after the platinum American Express got revoked.

She had nobody else. Nowhere to go.

There was nothing else I could say but, “Don’t worry. You can stay with me.”

Later, I would remember that and pound my head against the wall. It was the flickering warning light on a road where the bridge was out and, like an idiot, I just kept on driving.

Right into the storm.

I set about getting Sarah settled in my tiny spare room. She’d been weeping with gratitude right up until I heaved her suitcase onto the twin bed, but she stopped when she took a look around.

“Yes?” I asked sweetly, because I could see the words Where’s the rest of it? on the tip of her tongue.

She swallowed them—it must have choked her—and forced a trembling smile. “It’s great. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” I looked around, seeing it through her eyes. Her utility closet in California hadn’t been this small, I was certain. The furniture wasn’t exactly au courant—a rickety ’50s nightstand in grubby off-white French Provincial with a cockeyed drawer, a campus castoff bed too hard and lumpy for even college students. A scarred, ugly dresser of no particular pedigree, with missing drawer pulls and a cracked mirror, salvaged out of a Dumpster with the help of two semipro football players.

A real do-it-yourself nightmare.

I sighed. “Sorry about this. I had to move when—”

“—when we thought you were dead,” she said. “By the time they’d tracked me down to give me the news, your friends already knew you were all right and let me know, thank God, or I’d have just gone crazy.”

Which gave me a little bit of a warm, sisterly glow, until she continued.

“After all, I’d just found out about Chrêtien and Heather. I swear, if I’d had one more thing to think about, I don’t think even the therapy would have helped.”

I stopped feeling bad about the furniture. “Glad I didn’t set you back on the road to recovery.”

“Oh! No, I didn’t mean—”

I sat down on the bed next to her suitcase. The frame creaked and groaned like an exasperated geezer. “Look, Sarah, let’s not kid each other, okay? We’re not best buddies; we never were. I’m not judging you, I’m just saying you’re here because I’m all you’ve got. Right? So you don’t have to pretend to like me.”

She looked just like me, in that second—wide-eyed with surprise, and a little frown crinkling her forehead. Except for the hair. Even my current poodle-hair curls were better than the badly grown-out shag she was sporting.

She said, slowly, “All right, I admit it. I didn’t like you when you were younger. You were a bratty kid, and then you grew up into somebody I barely even know. And you’re weird, you know. And Mom liked you best.”

No arguing with that one. Mom really had.

But Sarah kept going. “That doesn’t mean I don’t love you, Jo. I always have loved you. I hope you still love me. I know I’m a bitch, and I’m shallow, but we’re still, you know, sisters.”

It would have been a warm, tender moment if I’d jumped up and thrown my arms around her and burst into tears. We weren’t that kind of Hallmark Card family.

I thought it over and said, “I don’t really know you, Sarah. But I’m willing to get to know you.”

She smiled. Slow, but real.

“That sounds… fair.”

We shook hands on it. I stood up and watched as Sarah unzipped the suitcase and started unpacking. It was a pitifully short affair. She’d left most of the good stuff behind, and what good stuff she had left was horribly wrinkled. We made a dry-clean pile, a “burn this” pile, a Goodwill pile, and a keeper stack. That one was short. It filled exactly one drawer of the dresser.

“Makeup?” I asked. She pointed to a tiny plastic case that couldn’t have held more than lipstick, mascara, and maybe an eyebrow pencil. “Shoes?”

She pointed to the battered running shoes and held up a pair of black, squarish pumps, something suitable for a grandmother, so long as Grandma didn’t care much about appearances. I winced. “The bastard didn’t even let you keep your shoes?”

“He cleaned out the house and gave everything to the Salvation Army,” she said. “All my clothes. Everything.”

“Jesus.” I had a sudden flare of suspicion. “Um, look, Sarah, not that I’m doubting you or anything, but wasn’t Chrêtien the, um, guilty party… ?”

She had the good grace to look just a little ashamed. “He found out about Carl.”

“Carl?”

“You know.”

“Nope. Really don’t.”

She rolled her eyes. “Fine, if you’re going to force me to say it… I wasn’t exactly guiltless. There. I admit it. I was having an affair with his business partner.”

“Jesus.”

“And the donkey he rode in on,” she finished, just the way she’d always done it when we’d been in school. “But he didn’t have to get so personal about all of it. He cheated on me, after all. You’d think he’d at least understand that it was… well…”

“Recreational?” I supplied dryly.

“Yes! Exactly!”

“Should have joined the bridge club, Sarah.”

She gave me a helpless, angry look. “I’m not saying I was guiltless, but… he gave me a couple of hundred dollars and told me to buy replacements. In my new price range. God, Jo, I didn’t even know where to shop!”

I took a deep breath and said, “Tell you what? I was going to the mall anyway with a friend, so if you want to get ready—”

“I’m ready,” my sister said instantly.

I picked up the phone and called Cherise.

Cherise had, of course, changed clothes in the interim. She’d gone to a magenta see-through mesh shirt with lime green tie-dyed patterns, over a lime green camisole. It all matched the lime glitter toenail polish, which evidently she liked enough to accessorize to.

“Ten,” I said instantly when she got out of her red convertible. “Maybe a ten point five. You blind me with your magnificence.”

“But of course. Man, Jo, I knew you were a saint, but you gave up your hottie for your sister? Damn. I’d have blown off taking my grandma to dialysis for that man!”

Sarah came out of the apartment behind me, wearing her wrinkled khaki walking shorts and badly fitting button-down shirt. Cherise’s perfectly made-up eyes widened into something usually seen only in Japanese animation.

“Oh my God,” she said, and looked at me in horror. “You told me it was bad, but damn, this is a seven point five on the fashion disaster scale. And what’s with her hair?”

“Cherise,” I said. “I know it’s hard for you, but please. Sarah’s had a bad time. Be kind.”

“I was being kind. That is way worse than a seven point five.”

Sarah said, “Jo? Did she just say you have a boyfriend?”

Trust Sarah, of course, to blow past Cherise’s fluff to get to the potentially disastrous part of the conversation.

“Not just a boyfriend,” Cherise said. “Boyfriends are Ken dolls. Boyfriends are safe. Her guy is the kind of hottie who needs to keep a fire extinguisher around, just to hose down any passing women who spontaneously combust.”

I stared at her, amazed. For Cherise, this was, well, poetic.

Sarah was, meanwhile, frowning at me. “And you didn’t tell me about him?”

I didn’t want to bring up David yet. That was going to be a strange and difficult conversation, with somebody as earthbound-normal as Sarah, and I couldn’t really mislead her too far. Trying to keep him secret would only lead to low comedy and farce. Not to mention put a serious cramp in my love life.

“He had to leave,” I said. Not a lie. “I’ll see him later.”

“I should have known you’d have a boyfriend,” Sarah said. She sounded bitter. “What was I thinking? When do you not?”

“Kind of a ’ho, isn’t she?” Cherise asked. Sarah nodded wisely.

“Hey!” I said sharply. “Watch it!”

“Oh, come on, Jo. Your libido isn’t exactly on the low end of the curve. I’ve seen you checking out the boys at work,” Cherise said. “Even, you know, Kurt. The anchor.”

“I would never! That man is made of plastic!”

“Oh, the plastic ones are the best,” she said, and gave me a wicked look. “They come with D-cell batteries, off switches, and you never have to meet their folks.”

Cherise worried me sometimes. “Please tell me you haven’t—not with Kurt—”

“Please. I have standards,” she said. “He may be an anchor, but he’s a morning anchor. Hardly worth the investment.”

“Now who’s your boyfriend?” Sarah began again. I hustled her toward the car.

Cherise broke ranks, rushed back, and flipped switches in her convertible. The canvas top whirred up and locked in place.

“Marvin says it’s going to rain,” she said.

“Marvin doesn’t know his—” I bit my tongue to keep from saying something that might get back to him. “His meteorology from a rain dance.”

Cherise looked up at the cloudless blue sky, shrugged, and slid on her dark glasses. “Yeah, well, easy for you to say. You don’t have to wet-vac. And you know all about the Percentage.”

Yes. They liked to use that in advertising: Trust the Percentage. Because Marvelous Marvin really did have the best percentage of forecast accuracy in our area. Not that it was anything but blind luck. I’d asked him to walk me through the calculations for his rainy-day forecast two days ago, and he’d happily brought out the charts, the National Weather Service models, the radar images, all the good stuff… and proceeded to come to exactly the wrong conclusion.

But he was 91% percent accurate over the last two years.

Hard to argue with that, but I lived in hopes that today, at least, would be the beginning of the end of Marvin’s reign of meteorological omniscience.

We piled into the Viper and headed for Shopping Nirvana, otherwise known as the Galleria—150 shops, with everything from Sak’s to Neiman Marcus. I both loved and hated living so close to it. It was like a diabetic with a sweet tooth living next door to the fudge factory. We cruised along, drawing envious stares from teenagers in gleaming low-riders, faded Yuppies in Volvos, soccer moms in enormous SUVs. Mona was a sexy car. I still pined for my beloved Mustang, but I had to admit, the throbbing growl of power from the Viper was seductive.

Even doing something as tame as crawling from one red light to another on this cloudless suburban day.

We’d only gone about three blocks when Sarah suddenly said, “Did you know you’re being followed?”

We were heading down East Sunshine, and the traffic wasn’t exactly light; I looked at her in the rearview (she’d been relegated to the back) and studied her carefully. “Okay, you’ve been living in California way too long. This is Florida. We don’t get tailed in Florida.”

She didn’t look behind her as she said, “Chrêtien had me followed for six months; I know what I’m talking about. There’s a white van with dark-tinted windows and a magnetic sign that says it’s from a flower shop. It pulled out of the apartment parking lot when you did. It’s three cars back.”

I blinked and focused on the traffic. She was right, there was a white van back there. I couldn’t see anything about the sides, but the windows were dark-tinted.

“So? He dropped off some roses. Unfortunately, not to me.” And I so deserved it, for putting up with Sarah.

“Change lanes,” she said. “Watch him.”

Couldn’t hurt. I spotted an opening and did one of those sports-car levitation glides laterally from one lane to another, no signal, and then sped up and whipped back over two lanes. Cherise yelped and grabbed for a handhold; Sarah turned to look back, just a quick glance.

“He’s following, but he’s trying to look casual about it,” she said. I nodded.

It wasn’t easy to do in traffic, but I split my attention and sent part of myself up into Oversight, to see what was going on in the aetheric.

It wasn’t a Warden behind us, at least. Nothing but normal human stuff happening, not even the faint smear I’d come to recognize as a Djinn who didn’t want to be spotted. I dropped back into my body, put my foot down, and felt Mona respond with a fast, eager purr. “Hang on,” I said, and whipped the wheel over hard at the next light. Cherise yelped again, higher-pitched; Sarah grabbed for a handhold and tilted without making a sound.

“Hey!” Cherise blurted. “This isn’t the way to the mall!” She was much more panicked about the idea of missing her shopping appointment than any sinister, faceless stalker we might have picked up.

Hey, I never said she was deep. Just fun to be around.

“Back entrance,” I said. The van turned the corner, a block behind me, and accelerated. I eased back down to a regular street speed, mindful of any cops that might be lurking and itching for a chance to ticket a Viper, and made another turn, to the left.

I took the turn into the Galleria parking lot. It was a typical day, which meant busy; I cruised around for a while, watching for the white van. It was still back there. When I pulled into a space, so did it, several rows away.

All very sinister, suddenly. I didn’t like it at all.

“Cherise, you take Sarah and go on to Ann Taylor,” I said, and popped my door open. “I’ll be right behind you. Sarah, you’ve got my Mastercard. Just—don’t buy big ticket without me.” I realized that Sarah’s standards of big ticket might vary from mine. “Um… that means anything over a hundred dollars.”

She looked briefly shocked, probably at the low-limit amount. Both of them started to argue, but I slammed the door and kept walking, fast and purposefully, heading for the white van that was parked and motionless several hundred yards away. I made sure to stay blocked from it as much as possible by giant SUVs—who the hell needs a Hummer the color of a yield sign, anyway?—and the ubiquitous Gran-and-Gramps-do-Florida RVs, and came at it from the passenger side.

I knocked on the dark-tinted window. After a few silent seconds, a motor whirred and the glass glided down.

I didn’t recognize the man in the driver’s seat. He was Hispanic, older—forty, forty-five maybe—and he had graying hair, fierce, dead dark eyes, and a windburned complexion.

Looked damn intimidating.

“Hi,” I said, and gave him my best, most confident smile. “Want to tell me why you’re following me? If this is about Sarah, tell Chrêtien that he can stick it up his French…”

“You’re Joanne Baldwin,” he interrupted me. No trace of an accent.

“In the flesh.” Scars and all, which had fortunately faded with a little help from silicone patches and the tanning salon.

“Get in the van,” he said.

“Oh, I really don’t think—”

He produced a gun and aimed it at my head. “No, I really do.” I wasn’t good with guns, especially not identifying them, but this one looked big and serious about its job. “In the van. Now, please.”

I felt an overwhelming impulse to do exactly what he said, but I also knew better than to climb into some stranger’s van. Especially in Florida. I tried to focus past the gun and hold his stare. “It’s broad daylight in a mall parking lot. You’re not going to shoot me, and I’m not getting in your damn van, either. Next subject.”

I surprised him. It passed over his face in a flash. Blink and you’d miss it, but it was definitely present. He cocked one eyebrow just a millimeter higher.

“Why exactly do you think I wouldn’t shoot you?”

“Security cameras everywhere, pal, and my sister and my friend both have really good memories for license plate numbers. You wouldn’t get back to the main road before the cops cut you off.” I forced myself to smile again. “Besides, you don’t want me dead, or you’d have shot me already and been out of here, and we wouldn’t be having this lovely conversation.”

For a long, long second, he debated it. I held my breath, and let it slowly out when he shrugged and holstered the gun again, with a move so deft it might as well have been a magic trick.

“You know my name,” I said. “Want to tell me yours?”

“Armando Rodriguez,” he replied, which took me by surprise; I hadn’t expected a guy who’d just pulled a weapon to introduce himself so readily. “Detective Armando Rodriguez, Las Vegas Police Department.”

Oh, dear. I felt goosebumps shiver up the back of my arms.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions about the disappearance of Detective Thomas Quinn,” he said. Which I’d already figured out.

Too bad I knew exactly what had happened to Detective Thomas Quinn. And there was no way on earth I could talk to this guy about it.

“Thomas Quinn?” I didn’t want to out-and-out lie, but the truth was a nonstarter. “Sorry, I don’t think I know the name.”

Rodriguez opened up a folder stuck in the side pocket of his driver’s side door and slid out a collection of photos—grainy, obviously off of surveillance cameras. Me, in a black miniskirt, being escorted by Detective Thomas Quinn.

“Want to try that one again?” he asked.

“I hear everybody has a double,” I said. “Maybe you’ve got the wrong girl.”

“Oh, I don’t think so.”

“Prove it.”

“You drive a blue Dodge Viper. Funny thing—we had a report of a blue Dodge Viper driving away from an area in the desert where Quinn’s SUV was found burned.” His dark eyes kept their level stare on me. “His truck was destroyed, like somebody had loaded it up with dynamite, but we didn’t find any trace of explosives.”

I lifted one shoulder, let it fall, and just looked at him. He looked back.

After a moment, he let one corner of his mouth lift in a slow, predatory smile.

It didn’t soften the harsh, hard eyes.

Quinn had managed to look coplike and friendly at the same time. Rodriguez just looked coplike, and didn’t bother with any warm-and-fuzzy bullshit to make me feel better.

“Quinn was a friend of mine,” he said softly. “I intend to find out what happened to him. If anybody did him harm, I’m going to see that that person suffers for it. You understand me?”

“Oh, I understand,” I said. “Good luck with that.”

Any friend of Quinn’s was definitely not going to be a friend of mine.

I pushed off from the car and walked away, heels clicking, hair ruffling in the breeze. It was hot and turning sticky, but that wasn’t what was making the sweat run cold down my back.

In retrospect, becoming a television personality probably hadn’t been the best career choice I ever made, when a cop was missing and presumed dead, and I’d been the last one to be seen with him. Guess I should’ve thought of that. I’d spent too much time in the Wardens, where things got taken care of, and frictions with the rest of the mortal world were smoothed over with influence and cash and—sometimes—judicious use of Djinn.

Shit. I wondered about the Viper now. Since I’d actually stolen it off of a car lot in Oklahoma. Was it listed as hot? Or had Rahel, my friendly neighborhood free-range Djinn, taken care of erasing it from the records? She hadn’t bothered to mention it. I wasn’t sure how important she’d have found that, in the great scheme of things.

Hell, she’d probably think it was kind of funny if I got arrested. Djinn humor.

Very low.

I needed to take care of that, soon. I had the bad feeling that Armando Rodriguez wasn’t going to just go away, and if there was anything he could find as leverage, he’d start pushing. Hard.

Just as I started to think my day couldn’t get much worse, I heard a rumble from overhead, and saw that a thick bank of clouds had glided over the top of the mall while I was worrying about how not to get myself thrown in the slammer.

I stretched out a hand. A fat, wet drop hit my skin. It was as chilly as the water that the stagehands had dumped on me in the studio.

“No way,” I said, and looked up into the clouds. “You can’t be happening.”

It peppered me with a couple of drops more for evidence. Marvelous Marvin had been right after all. Somebody—somebody other than me, most certainly—had made damn sure he was right. Looking up on the aetheric, I could see the subtle signs of tampering, and the imbalance echoing through the entire BrowardCounty system. Worse than that, though, was the fact that as far as I could tell, there weren’t any other Wardens anywhere around. Just me. Me, who wasn’t supposed to be doing any kind of weather manipulation at all, under penalty of having my powers cut out of me with a dull knife.

I was so going to get blamed for this.

And, dammit, I didn’t even like Marvin.