Albert was yelling something about a ranger station. I could barely see. The rain stung like angry wasps, and under the trees the blackness was complete. Better not to stay under the trees anyway, too much risk of drawing another lightning strike.
Pins and needles across my back, at the top of my head.
"Get down!" I yelled, and rolled into a ball on the ground, trying to present the smallest exposure to the storm. I could feel it now-it was like a blind man with an ax hunting a mouse. It wanted me. It was drawn to me.
It hated me.
Lightning hit close, very close. I felt the concussion and heard something that was too loud to be just a sound, it was a force with energy and life of its own.
I was sobbing now because I knew the next time it would get me. It knew where I was. It could smell my fear.
Somebody grabbed my arm and dragged me to my feet. We ran through the darkness, slipping on grass and mud. Deer burst out of the darkness and across our path like white ghosts fleeing a graveyard.
We made it to the ranger station, and I realized only when I saw Mom and Albert were already there, wrapped in blankets and shivering, that the person who'd dragged me up and out from under the storm wasn't anyone I knew.
She was small and golden skinned and dark haired, and she was laughing as she swept off her park ranger hat and hung it up to dry.
"Nice day for a walk," the other ranger said, the one handing Mom and Albert steaming cups of coffee. My rescuer grinned at him and looked out the window. Rain lashed the glass as if it were reaching inside for us.
"Yup," she agreed. "Just about perfect."
She glanced over at me, and I felt it like a current humming between us. We were the same, shared something fundamental.
The storm wasn't hunting me. It was hunting us both.
"You should be more careful," she said. "Some people just aren't cut out for communing with nature."
"What's your excuse?" I shot back. She lifted one shoulder.
"Somebody's got to be on the front lines," she said. "Estrella Almondovar. Star, for short."
I told her my name. We shook hands. She got me a blanket and, instead of coffee, hot cocoa. As she handed it over, she lowered her voice and said, "You have a notice? From the Association?"
"Yeah. I'll have an Intake Board at eighteen."
"Well, don't wait. Start getting the training now, like me-this is my internship. You need it. I've seen the Park react like this to only one other person before."
"Who?" I asked. She gave me a teasing little wouldn't-you-like-to-know smile.
"You don't know him," she said. "But his name is Lewis."
She went back to the cabin window and stood watching the fire up on the ridge, the one that the first lightning strike started. As I watched, it flickered, sizzled, and went out.
That's when I knew. She wasn't a Weather Warden, not like me. She had power over fire.
From that day, we were friends. I don't really know why; we didn't have all that much in common, beyond the obvious, but we had a kind of vibe. Energy. We resonated to the same frequencies.
We ended up roomies at Princeton, shared a thousand joys and tragedies and triumphs. She was the best friend I ever had, and it looked for a while like we were going to live charmed lives forever. Smart, beautiful, gifted. Two peas in a pod. Perfect.
And then Yellowstone burned, and everything changed for both of us.
I gloomily considered Oklahoma City. The most direct route was to follow the Connecticut toll roads until I could get on I-90. It would be the better part of a two-day journey. The coffee I'd slammed down in a caffeinated frenzy at 4 a.m. was no more than a memory, and my stomach rumbled to remind me that delicious as it was, mocha was not a food group.
So should I stop to eat, or pile up the miles? My decisions almost always depend on the forecast, so I flipped stations until I got a weather channel.
The storm that had followed me out of Florida was now ravaging the eastern seaboard. I could see darkness amassing on the horizon behind me, and a flanking line at the edges of the supercell. It was starting to turn, driven by Coriolis effect and the powerful internal engine of water heating and cooling; when it completed its rotation, it would be that most dreaded of East Coast storms, the nor'easter.
I didn't intend to be anywhere near it.
You might wonder why I didn't just give it a wave of my hand and get rid of it-which was entirely within my powers. Well, Newton was right: action gets reaction. Every time a Warden balks the weather, the power has to go somewhere, and believe me, you don't want the power of a supercell discharging through you; it's something on the order of three or four larger-than-average nuclear bombs. If I'd tried directly to make my stalker-storm disperse-waved my hands and parted the winds, to give it a biblical interpretation-I might have succeeded here and created the world's largest-ever tornado whirling its way directly at me from the opposite direction. Plus, I wasn't an official Warden in this area ... or anywhere, come to that. Not anymore.
Still, I'd been one of the most subtle weatherworkers in history, all my performance reviews said so; I could probably slide it under the radar of anyone who might be looking for me up there in Oversight. Not that I had a lot of choice, really . . . No matter how fast I drove, this storm was bound to catch me. It had the scent of me now.
I turned the radio on, settled myself comfortably in the body-hugging seat of the Mustang, and began humming while Jim Morrison sang-funnily enough- about riders on the storm. As I drove, I shifted-not gears, but the air above. Cooled it here, warmed it there, slowed the elevator-fast updrafts that were feeding the storm its power. It was delicate work, making sure the energy expended didn't add up to another problem, and still making enough changes that the storm weakened. Also, I had to do it quietly. Last thing I wanted to do was attract attention from the local officials.
It took about two and a half hours to reduce it from a badass mofo to an inoffensive low-pressure system, which is nothing much if you're driving a Mustang and listening to a Doors album marathon. I pulled off the road in the parking lot of a roadside diner called the Kountry Kafe, put the car in neutral, and closed my eyes as I left my body to check out the results.
In Oversight, the world looks very different. I lifted my hand in front of my face and saw a tracery of crystal, my aura cool blue edged with flashes of green and-most unsettlingly-streaks of red. Red was bad. Red was trouble. No wonder the Djinn had smelled the Mark on me.
Nothing I could do about it now. I stepped out in my astral form and admired the crystalline perfection of the Mustang, which was even more beautiful in Oversight than in the mundane world. A real magical beauty of a car. One look at the Kountry Kafe convinced me I didn't want to eat there; it pulsed with bad vibes, like a quaking mass of rancid Jell-O.
I spread my weightless arms and went up. There was no sense of speed-not in this reality-and no sense of resistance, either. I glided up, and up, and up, until the earth curved off beneath me. From that dizzying height, I studied the deforming spiral of the storm. In Oversight it looked almost the same as in the real world, only instead of lightning, the energy displayed in colors-brilliant, vibrant colors that a trained Warden could interpret. I'd done enough with it, I thought. Its overall rotation had been disrupted, and the lightning flickers were showing in golds and greens, sheets of positive and negative charges in scattered glitter. If I'd missed the mark, I would've seen reds and a steady photonegative undertone.
I let go, and the planet rushed back at me. The first time I'd traveled in Oversight, I'd absolutely freaked, and no wonder: the sensation of falling back into your body is one of the most terrifying feelings in the world. These days, I enjoyed it like a thrill ride. Few enough thrills in my life recently. Not to mention fewer dates.
I filled my body again, and the world took on weight and form and dimension. Delilah the Mustang assumed her familiar glossy midnight-blue paint job.
My stomach rumbled again. With one last, regretful glance at the Kountry Kafe, I eased on down the road.
The diner where I finally stopped looked outwardly a lot like the last one, but its Oversight characteristics were more encouraging. It was called Vera's Place. Vera, it turned out, was long gone, but the owner and operator was a perky thirty-year-old named Molly with hair that showed several indecisive home dye jobs and the kind of creamy milkmaid skin that every Hollywood actress wants.
"Pie?" she asked me expectantly as I polished off the last of my open-faced turkey sandwich and mashed potatoes. There wasn't a lot of commerce going on inside Vera's Diner; I counted about six old coots and a yuppie couple dressed from the L.L. Bean catalog who sneered at the menu selections and would never even have considered eating something as middle-American as pie. Which decided me.
"What, you think I'm hungry or something?" I asked, and scraped up the last of the delicious pan gravy with the edge of my fork. I got a dimpled smile in response.
"Last one we had in here didn't eat pie was some hot-shot defense lawyer from L.A.," she confided. I passed over the turkeyless, gravy-free plate.
"Wouldn't want to be included in that company," I agreed. "What kind of pie you got?"
She raised an eyebrow. "You really want the whole list?"
"Just the high points."
The high points could have filled a couple of pages, single spaced. I decided on chocolate.
"German, cream, or meringue?"
"I'm sorry, is that a choice? Meringue, of course. Definitely."
The meringue was taller than most three-layer cakes, a hugely delicious confection that went down perfectly cool with the rich, creamy chocolate beneath. The crust was to die for, crisp and delicious. Best pie I ever had. Honest. The Oversight never lies about the quality of food, especially pies.
While I was savoring the last few bites, I took out a road map and looked over the route. Long. Long and boring. I asked Molly about good places to stay and got two recommendations, visited the little Wardens' room, and went back to my car full of chocolatey satisfaction, with the full intention of finding a Holiday Inn with adult channels and a minibar. One gets fun where one can.
Just as I reached for the car's door latch, a feeling swept over me, pins and needles, unmistakable and terrifying. I snatched the door open and dived. My feet had just left the ground when lightning hissed up from the dirt where I'd stood, down from the gray clouds, and met in the middle with an awesome snap of power. The flash blinded me. My ears rattled from the force of the boom. I smelled harsh, metallic ozone and thought about how close I'd come to being a fuse in that current.
Lightning can come from a clear sky, but it has to be driven by energy from somewhere, and the storm that I'd doctored no longer had the charge necessary.
There wasn't any potential-and yet, I could feel it all around me, a strong positive charge in the ground, negative charges building overhead in the clear but humid sky.
In Oversight, chains of electrons formed and rippled like translucent snakes in the sky-a cold hard glitter striking straight for me. Dear God, somebody was doing this. Somebody really powerful.
I rolled over, clawed hair away from my face, and saw that the ground was blackened and smoking where I'd been standing. The diner's front door banged open, and Molly and the other patrons- even the yuppie couple-crowded around the opening. Too sensible to come outside, too interested to be really safe. I waved at them to show I was all right and started to pull the door of the Mustang shut.
The interior of the open door was charred in a straight line, up and down, poor baby. I hesitated, touched the metal carefully, and found it hot but not scorching. It squeaked in protest when I hauled it closed, but the engine started and the gears still fit.
I had to put some distance between me and what was going on. And I had to undo the damage that had been done up in the atmosphere before lightning started striking like blue-white cobras all over the county, mindless and vicious and enraged. I pulled out on the road and started trying to reverse polarity on the charged particles in the air overhead. The trick was not to try to change everything, just enough links in the chain to break the connections. I chose the particles by feel and instinct, turning that one, and that one, then flipping a whole section like a pancake on a hot griddle.
Breaking the chain of destruction.
The particles rolled back over, connecting faster than thought, heading for me and Delilah.
Dammit!
I hit the gas and Delilah jumped, raced like her life depended on it. I abandoned the sky and focused on the thin line of moisture on the road beneath the tires. I couldn't change the charge in the earth, couldn't even sense if the ground had been sensitized, too, but I could control the water. It was something my enemy- whoever that was-might not have thought of.
In the split second before lightning discharged through the open particle chain, I reversed the polarity of the water and snapped its energy feed to the ground.
The circuit broke, and the energy bled off harmlessly in a million directions.
I waited, watching in Oversight, while my body took care of controlling the Mustang's wild gallop on damp pavement. Watched the living, thinking particles turn and turn and turn, whirring, searching for another circuit to complete.
I watched them suddenly revert to their natural random state as whoever was behind it let go.
I pulled in a deep breath and realized I was sweating. The car reeked with it.
I rolled down the windows and kept driving, not daring to slow down.
The weather isn't what you think it is. Not by a long shot.
It's a predator. In fact, the whole world around you is full of predators you can't see, can't sense, that are held in check only by their own whims and the power of about 1 percent of the human population. You want to know why the dinosaurs died out? Look around. They didn't have any Wardens.
We come in three basic flavors. People who control water and air are Weather Wardens, and we're in charge of keeping the furious storms the planet stirs up from scouring mankind off the face of the planet. Earth Wardens keep us from joining the great march to extinction by diverting dozens of planet-crushing catastrophes every year. Fire Wardens control-or try to control-the tendency of the planet to burn things to crispy ash. Mother Nature is schizophrenic and homicidal, and the only thing that stands between you and hideous, painful death is a couple of thousand people worldwide hanging on by their fingernails. Happy, huh? Most people don't want to know that. Hell, most of the time I don't want to know.
The Wardens are people with one hell of a lot of magical ability, but the Wardens Association is, foremost and always, a bureaucracy. Oh, sure, we're public servants, saving lives, doing good works, blah blah, but hey, we get paid, and we have structure and job duties and a very nice dental program. Sort of like the IRS, if the IRS kept you from being horribly killed on a daily basis.
In charge are the High Wardens who make up the World Council (which is, oddly, based in the UN Building in New York, although not on any floor most people are likely to visit). Below them you have your National Wardens, who control entire countries, and beneath them Sector Wardens, Regional Wardens, Local Wardens, and Staff.
Nobody expected there would be anything more powerful than a World Council Warden, but then nobody had expected Lewis to pop up, controlling all the elements. Lewis didn't fit. Or... to be more accurate... he fit in right at the top. A true master of the craft, absolutely unique. Nobody in the great big machine that made up the Association much liked the idea, except they couldn't very well doubt it, not with Lewis demonstrating it every time they asked by calling fire, water, air, earth. For a while after the incident with the frat boys, Lewis lived like a lab rat, hemmed in by people who desperately wanted to control him, disprove him, understand him, stop him, worship him, destroy him. And some who just wanted his autograph.
I tried to find out what was going on, but I was just an apprentice, even if everybody agreed I had lots of power and promise. There was no way I'd be kept informed about decisions made at the World level. But at some point-and this is just a guess-I think they decided mat it would be safer for everybody if Lewis just didn't exist.
I think somebody tried to kill him. Worse. I think they were stupid enough to miss.
Anyway, we know that Lewis flew the coop. He vanished with three-count 'em, three-of the precious bottles of Djinn from the Association vaults. Poof. Crime of the century, committed by the most wanted man on earth.
Since then, seven years ago, a lot of people have been looking for Lewis.
I was just the latest.
Lightning bolts out of the blue. Great. Somebody was trying to kill me. Actively. This was new, different, and not very welcome.
It was possible-okay, likely-that this had to do with a guy named Bad Bob Biringanine. Bad Bob was not quite two days dead, I'd been there for his big finish, and it was entirely conceivable that I was going to be held responsible. I might have a slim chance of avoiding that, but only if I came in from the cold and talked to the Wardens Council . . . and if I did it wearing the Demon Mark, well, that would be the ball game. I could explain, but they'd never believe me. Never.
And in any case, whether they believed me or not, they couldn't help me.
I was just praying hard that Lewis could. The problem was getting to him before somebody else got to me.
It was possible that the lightning had been an official warning from the Wardens, in which case I was in really deep, no shovel in sight; I needed to know for sure before I decided on my next move. There was only one person I could trust to ask, these days, who was still on the inside. I retrieved the cell phone, checked the charge-down to one slender bar-and speed-dialed another number.
I got Paul on the first ring.
"Jesus fucking Christ, Jo, what did you just do?" It was a bellow, not a question, and I jerked the phone away from my ear, then tentatively moved it back. "Fuckin' power surge the size of fuckin' New Jersey, and it's right in the middle of my Sector! And don't tell me it wasn't you, I know your style!"
"It wasn't me. Well, it was aimed at me, but I didn't start it," I said, and waited out the gush of curses. Paul Giancarlo was one of the good guys. His temper was mostly a lot of sound, very little fury; for a guy with Family connections-in the Cosa Nostra sense- he was surprisingly sweet. However, I was in Paul's Sector, and within it, he was lord and master of the weather, and he took that responsibility very seriously. If I'd been careless with lives, he'd hold a grudge.
Paul bossed about a hundred Regional and Local Wardens, and his chunk of the world ran from somewhere around Montpelier down through Philadephia, Pennsylvania. I was smack in the middle of it. He had the power to make my trip very uncomfortable indeed, since Paul was great in small scale. He could deliver a monsoon with pinpoint accuracy, hang it right over the Mustang no matter where I turned. He could funnel-cloud me up to Oz, if he chose. And I didn't have time. Besides, conflict between Wardens is rarely good for anybody.
"They're looking for you," he said more quietly. "Guess you already know that, since you dropped out of sight like that."
"Yeah, well, not like I had a choice," I said.
"What with the murder charges and all," he agreed.
"It wasn't murder! It was-" Boy, it sounded lame. "-self-defense."
He grunted. "You know, Jo, that defense don't hold up all that well even in the regular courts, especially when the guy was three times your age and unarmed."
"Like a Warden's ever unarmed. This was Bad Bob we're talking about, after all. Not some helpless old guy I knocked over the head for his wallet."
He sighed. It rattled the speaker in the phone. "He had a lot of friends. Lot of powerful friends. What the hell possessed you to take it this far? I mean, he could be a bastard, but Jesus, you fucking destroyed his house with him in it, Jo. Not to even mention that this storm you cooked up through all that crap has been focused on you like a guided missile."
I didn't want to talk about that, too many things to explain about Bad Bob and Florida. "Later. First things first. Somebody set up an unpredicated lightning bolt."
A long, expressive whistle. "That'd explain the fucking up of my weather. You're saying somebody threw it at you? Specifically?"
"I'm saying somebody really good threw it at me. I kind of need to know who. Was it ... you know . . . official?"
"As in, did anybody clear it with me first? Hell no. Take my word for it: This didn't come through the chain of command." He paused for a few seconds; I could almost hear him thinking. "Jo, look, this is getting too serious. You'd better come see me. Albany. You know the address."
