Prologue
What Has Come Before
My name is Joanne Baldwin, and I used to control the weather as a Weather Warden.
These days, I can also control the forces of the earth, like volcanoes and earthquakes, and the forces of fire.
Sounds like fun, eh? Not when it makes you a target for every psycho crazy world-killing danger that comes along.
Good thing I've got my friends at my back - Lewis Orwell, the most powerful Warden on the planet; Cherise, my best (and not supernatural) friend; and a wide cast of sometimes dangerous allies who've got their own missions and agendas that don't always match up with mine.
And I've got David, my true love. He's also a supernatural Djinn, the fairy-tale three-wishes kind, and he's now co-ruler of the Djinn on Earth.
What I don't have is peace, because even while I walked down the aisle to get married to my true love, an old enemy totally ruined my chances for a happy honeymoon and possibly even my survival. I'm not just in danger now, I'm dangerous - to everyone I love.
I've got to go and fix this, before the whole world suffers the consequences.
Chapter One
I've had many oh crap moments in my life. If you know me at all, you can imagine how many of them there have been, and the rising scale of crapitude that these moments cover.
So when I say that I looked out past the Miami Harbor horizon to the east and saw the storm that was heading for us, and said a heartfelt oh crap, you'll understand that my concern was not so much for the state of my already disheveled hairdo, or my not-so-designer clothes, but more about survival.
And not just my survival. An ominous line of storm-black out there was spreading like ink, and it was already large enough to rain destruction all over Miami before it ripped through Florida's panhandle and blew apart into tornadoes, floods, deadly downbursts.
Hurricanes: the gift that keeps on giving.
I tightened my grip around a handy light pole as the wind buffeted me. Rain had already started to fall, and although it was nearly midday, it seemed very dark. I couldn't see any hint of sun overhead, not even a pale shadow through the clouds.
Chaos ruled the docks, as shipmasters rushed to secure their vessels against the unforecast storm. Tourists scrambled for shelter. Locals resignedly broke out the plywood and hammers. I'd heard that the major freeways were jammed and that the hurricane evacuation plan had been triggered, but it was never going to work. The thing was simply moving too fast, and there wasn't enough warning.
And needless to say, all this was my fault.
I mean that literally. I'm supposed to be able to control the weather, and other elements at work on this planet; I'm supposed to be able to stop things like this from happening. I'm supposed to be the hero, dammit.
It came as a bit of a shock to be both helpless and - although no one knew it yet - a villain.
As the storm came roaring toward us, I knew it was my fault.
I could feel it in the burning of the black tattoo on my back, high up on the shoulder. Not the normal tramp stamp you could get (with hepatitis on the side) at any corner needle shop; mine was courtesy of an old enemy named, appropriately, Bad Bob. Bad Bob had once gotten the upper hand on me, and I was still vulnerable to him in magical ways.
Ways that I was having a very hard time controlling. The sickening thing was that as I studied the approaching hurricane, and felt the black torch on my back burn brighter, some part of me wanted landfall. Wanted to feel that awesome power rip into the fragile human community, twisting glass and metal, ripping wood and flesh, reducing all of this to a sea of wreckage and devastation.
It terrified me.
Focus,I told myself, and concentrated hard on pushing back against those impulses. I knew where they were coming from. Bad Bob was using the tattoo - no, the mark - to remake me in his image.
I had been denying it for days now, but it wasn't a tattoo.
It was a Demon Mark, put there by the scariest Demon alive.
And I really didn't know how to stop it.
"Jo!" A male voice bellowed in my ear, and I clawed rain-soaked hair out of my eyes and turned to look. It was my fellow Warden Lewis Orwell - the boss, actually. The CEO of magically gifted humans.
Panic didn't look good on him.
"It's not working!" I yelled back. The wind whipped the words right out of my mouth. He nodded and wrestled a yellow storm slicker around my shoulders, holding me steady while I put it on. There. I shivered in sudden relief as the rain pummeled the plastic instead of my skin, but it was just animal reaction. There was no such thing as true relief right now. "We have to get out of here, Lewis! Now! This thing is after us!" Me. It was after me.
A bolt of lightning the thickness of a skyscraper tore through the false night, arcing over the bowl of the sky. It shattered into a thousand stabbing branches. In the glow, Lewis looked worse than I'd expected - tired, of course, and unshaven, but also pallid. He'd pushed himself to the limit, and it hadn't worked.
If the most powerful Warden on the planet, connected to a network of hundreds of other powerful Wardens, couldn't make this thing turn its course, then we were in for one hell of a start to our day.
"Get on the ship," he yelled over the wind. "We need to get it out of the harbor, now !" I looked past him to the massive floating castle of the Grand Paradise. "I can't believe we're stealing something the size of the frigging Queen Mary !"
"It's stable!" he shouted back. "I'd take a destroyer if I could get my hands on one, but this'll have to do. It's fully provisioned and ready to go. It's our only option right now, unless you want to try to take this thing here!"
Yeah, I had to admit, our options were fairly limited. Die on shore or make a run for it and hope the storm wheeled to follow, sparing the city.
Still. A cruise ship? Granted, Wardens generally don't travel cheap. That's practicality.
When you have the power to control the elements of the planet - like living things, geologic forces, wind, and water - and when those elements get pissed about being bossed around, you'd better have some room to duck and cover. And where do you get lots of room when you travel?
First class, of course. It's not all about the free champagne. Although that's good, too.
Taking all that into consideration, commandeering the Grand Paradise was still over the top, even for us. The ship mostly cruised the Caribbean, but it was still enormous, and it had originally been built to give the big boys some transatlantic competition, so it was tough as hell. It was the size of a ten-story building, ridiculously set afloat. The cheery paint colors on the decks and hull made it seem even more surreal.
The problem was that up to about an hour ago, it had been boarding for its normal, tame cruise business. Granted, the storm had reversed that process, but even so, it took time to de-board three thousand passengers, not to mention the thousand or so crew members.
Police were on-site, guiding the confused, angry, terrified tourists out of the boarding area and off to waiting buses to take them to shelter. It was chaos, complicated by pile-driving rain and wind, and I expected it only to get worse.
I'd been watching the steady stream of humanity with a kind of stunned, detached disbelief. As a Warden, I would never pack myself into a ship so full of people and go out to tempt fate - not recreationally, anyway. It's a fact of life: Wardens draw storms, and not just any storms. They might start out as forces of nature, but they develop their own personalities once they reach a certain level of power.
And they develop intelligence. The one thing that seems consistent about storms is that whatever their origin, they seem to really hate Weather Wardens.
Lucky us.
It seemed counterproductive to be boarding a ship under the present circumstances, but Lewis knew what he was doing. He thought that the storm was being drawn here by the high concentration of Wardens, and that was partly true, although I thought it was mostly drawn to me; it also was feeding off the natural energy created by our presence.
If we moved, it would likely follow. Bad for us, good for the millions of people in the Miami area who were looking at a worst-case-disaster scenario.
A year ago, we would never have dared try to snatch a ship like this in broad (if stormy) daylight, but times were changing. The Wardens had been around since the last spire of Atlantis slipped under the waves, but they'd existed in secret, a kind of paranormal FEMA that was noticed only when it failed. Governments rose and fell, but they all worked with us. They all funded us.
They really had no choice.
Now, though, it wasn't all hush-hush and top secret. We'd come out to the public. We'd had to; we'd pushed the secrecy as far as it could reasonably go, and in an age when every person had a cell phone and a video camera our days of operating in deep cover were long gone. We were tired of exerting energy to keep people quiet.
The new strategy - of which I'd been a part - was to just let the chips fall where they may.
Less work on our part, which was good, because our ranks had been thinned recently.
The upside of coming out in public was that when we said we needed the Grand Paradise to save the city of Miami ,the government really had to make it happen, no matter what the fallout might be later on. Even if a good percentage of the population of the world thought we were a bunch of hoodoo con artists out to defraud them.
So - there had been a whole lot of orders issued from the highest levels of government, and cash passed both under and over the table by the Wardens to make sure that everyone bought in. All that had taken time, and lawyers, and paperwork, and we'd burned up our safety margin in trying to make this happen in an expeditious fashion that didn't involve just storming the ship and pirating it away.
Hence the black morning, and the looming disaster. Sometimes, piracy is the only really efficient way to go.
Lewis took my arm and steadied me against the wind as we staggered down the harbor's spacious walkway - now crowded with confusion - toward the gangway. It still burped out passengers, though in uneven groups now rather than as a steady flow. The Wardens were clustered and ready to board. Standing at the mouth of the flapping canvas of the covered gangway was my best friend, Cherise, decked out in the latest in bright yellow hurricane-wear. She had a cute little clipboard, and she was checking off Wardens as they moved past her, flashing smiles and thumbs-up signs.
There were a total of one hundred seventeen Wardens gathered in Miami today. Not all of them would be coming with us on the Grand Paradise - Lewis was way too strategic to put all his eggs in one fragile, oceangoing basket - but we'd have a bigger force with us than I'd ever seen gathered in one place. Which - when you're talking about a group of people who have the ability to control the basic elements around us - is scarily impressive. Each one of us was capable of wreaking incalculable destruction, although of course we were sworn to try to avoid that. Our job was to make things better for humanity, not worse. Despite the wildfires and earthquakes and hurricanes, without us the human race would have been scoured off the face of the earth a long, long time ago - all because a few thousand years ago, by our records, human beings did something that annoyed Mother Nature. Nobody remembers what.
We're still waiting for her to get over it.
With enough of us aboard the ship, we were a huge, juicy target, but we could probably defuse most anything that came at us.
Probably.
I hate qualifiers.
Lewis was about to lead a whole team of Wardens (and supernatural Djinn) into the jaws of death. I was really hoping that this plan worked out better than most of my other life-and-death adventures.
That triggered a sudden burst of anxiety in me, not to mention a jolt of guilt. "Have you seen David?" I asked Lewis, pulling him to a halt.
My lover, David - leader of at least half the Djinn, the way Lewis was the head of the Wardens - had gone away some time ago to attend to urgent business, which probably involved some supernatural being throwing a hissy fit over being pressed into helping humans. Most Djinn had the power of minor gods and the egos to match; you could think of them as bad-tempered angels, or ambivalent devils. They weren't one thing or the other.
Even the best of them could swing wildly from one end of the spectrum to the other, depending on circumstances.
As he'd left, David had told me that meant he'd be back. No time frame. I felt his absence like grief, although according to my watch, he'd only been gone for a couple of hours.
The dark part of me, the part still giggling maniacally over the approaching destruction, was glad he was gone. David could help me control the black tattoo - and of course it didn't want that.
Lewis shook his head, spraying rain in a thick silver spiral. "Haven't seen him!" he said. "Jo, we can't wait. He can reach you wherever you are, you know that. Get on the damn ship!" I looked past the flapping canvas toward the storm front again, where lightning was ripping the sky open with vicious glee. My enemy was out there beyond this storm, with at least one hostage, and a whole lot of raw power in a form that was both invisible and fatal to the Djinn.
Bad Bob had bragged that he could kill the planet if he wanted to.
I was afraid he was right.
I was afraid he'd already started.
This was not the way I'd planned to take a honeymoon cruise to Bermuda.
Just when I thought things couldn't get any worse, a white-uniformed ship's officer with rows of gold braid on his sleeves came pounding down the gangway, avoiding departing passengers and arriving Wardens, to skid to a halt in front of Lewis. "Sir," he said, and nodded uncertainly to me on the off chance that I was equally important. "We have a problem."
Lewis dragged me into the cover of the gangway and pushed back the hood of his slicker.
"Of course we do," he said, resigned. "What now?"