Ill Wind - Page 14/29

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

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

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

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

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

Oh.

Well.

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

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

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

Jimmy had pretty eyes.

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

It was my first try at seduction. It succeeded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I mean it! Quit!"

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

It stopped.

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

Raindrops pattered on the ruined roof. Thunder muttered darkly.

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

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

I never saw Jimmy again.

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

I strongly suspected it was both.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"C'mon. Really?"

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

"As opposed to invisible?"

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

"I thought you were asleep."

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

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

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

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

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

"Like?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I wasn't planning to."

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

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

"Any idea-?"

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

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

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

"Marion's not an enemy."

"She buried you alive."

"It's complicated."

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

"You know what happened. You were there."

"Tell me why you're running."

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

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

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

"I killed somebody," I finally said.

He was unmoved. "So I heard."

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

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

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

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

And then I told him the rest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What?"

"The suit. Designer?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it still felt good.

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

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

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

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