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."