Rachel Caine - Gale Force

“He wrote you a note,” Cherise said. “While he could still write. Do you want it?”

Cherise was a better mind reader than most of my magic-gifted colleagues. I sighed and nodded, feeling the hot prickle of tears in my eyes. She dug paper from the front pocket of her jeans, unfolded it, and handed it over.

Jerome’s handwriting was messy. I couldn’t tell if that was normal for him, or if the damage was taking its toll. It took me a while to work out what the note said, but when I did, it hit me hard.

It said, I was wrong. Thought I could control it. Not your fault.

And, on a separate line, Hope you’re okay.

I folded it up, closed my eyes, and fought back wave after wave of useless tears. When I’d managed to get control again, I handed the note back to Cherise, who exchanged it for a box of tissues.

“The dead Djinn?” I asked.

“Well, that’s the weird thing,” Cherise said. “I mean, I wasn’t there, obviously, but I heard people talking. According to David, the Djinn wasn’t there.”

“What?” He most certainly had been there. I could still remember Silverton’s knife slicing his body open, remember the elastic tension of holding open the edges of the incision so Silverton could pull out the black glass shard.

“Well, the Wardens say he’s there. The Djinn say he’s not. They say there’s a body, but it’s not Djinn. They can’t see the black thingy, either. Nothing.”

I opened my mouth and shut it again, thinking hard. “David, too?” I finally asked.

“Yup. None of them can see it, sense it, whatever. It’s just not there for them.”

Oh, man . Not good. “So what are the Wardens doing about it?”

“They’re ‘containing the situation.’ ” Cherise made air quotes around the phrase, and rolled her eyes. “Some of them are talking about encasing it in a big block of lead. Some are talking about shooting it into space. Nobody knows what the hell to do, but everybody agrees, it’s way too dangerous where it is.”

“Everybody except the Djinn.” I couldn’t leave that alone. “Seriously, they can’t see it ? How can they not see it?”

“No clue.”

“What does Lewis say?”

“ He can see it, and yeah, he knows it’s a problem. The Djinn thinks the Wardens have some kind of psychosis. They say that if the thing was there, they’d be able to sense it.”

Great. “How do they explain Silverton? Me?”

Cherise looked grim. “They think one of you screwed up, accessed something you shouldn’t have. They can’t explain it, but they don’t believe the Wardens’ explanation, either.”

“Not even David?”

“No,” she said softly. “Not even David. Sorry, babe.”

Wow. That was . . . strange. And I was too tired and too sick to do anything about it. Cherise didn’t need to worry about me going all heroic and crazy on her; all I wanted to do was hide under my blankets and pretend it was all just a bad dream.

And for a while, that was exactly what I did, as the morphine dragged me off to a dream-rich sleep.

Two days later, I was interrogated by a panel of Warden elders: Guillard from Switzerland, Jones from Australia, and Lewis representing the U.S. I felt a little better, and they’d let me walk to the shower and wash my hair, which made a difference in both body and soul.

There was also a Djinn in the mix—a short, round little thing with that indefinable glimmer to her skin and eyes. She was introduced as Zenaya, and gave me a slight nod but no other indication of how she stood on the subject of me.

No David. That was deeply troubling.

I went through things, step by step, detailing what I’d seen and experienced. Zenaya said nothing, but her eyes flashed an eerie green when I talked about the dead Djinn, and the manner of his death. I addressed a question to her. “Wouldn’t you know if one of your people disappeared?” I asked. She shrugged slightly. “Wouldn’t David know?”

“Yes,” she said. “But he says he finds no one missing.”

“Ashan?”

Another green flash to her eyes. She folded her arms. “Ashan says his Djinn are all well. He says nothing more.”

Which might or might not mean anything. Ashan wasn’t chatty at the best of times. “But I saw him. And trust me, he was a Djinn.”

“How could you tell?” Zenaya asked me, very reasonably. I started to answer, then hesitated.

Because I really wasn’t sure how I knew. I just . . . knew . “His aetheric signature,” I finally said. “Only the Djinn look like that.”

“Leaving aside that point,” Guillard said, in his rich, dark chocolate voice, “clearly you came into contact with something highly dangerous. Earth Wardens have not been able to correct some of the damage you sustained. We are dependent on simple human methods, which is why we’ve had to hospitalize you for so long.”

Lewis nodded. He wasn’t looking at me; he kept his gaze focused on the window, on the rain outside. “Sometimes damage just surpasses our ability,” he said. “That could have been the case this time.”

“No,” I said. “David tried to heal me, and you know he should have been able to. He has before.”

Lewis had no answer to that. Whatever he was thinking, he was keeping it close to the vest, and he wouldn’t damn well look at me. I wondered why. Was he angry about Silverton? He had every right to be, I supposed. I’d screwed up, big time, and a Warden had paid with his life.

Guillard asked more questions about the black shard, things to which I had no real answers except to give a recitation of my conversation with Silverton in the basement. And then the whole thing was over; Jones and Guillard wished me well and departed, and Zenaya left without a backward glance.

Lewis stayed. He still wouldn’t look at me. Out of sheer stubbornness, I refused to speak first. I sipped water and tugged irritably at my drying hair, trying to get it to stop poodle-curling around my face. I used to have straight hair. I liked my old straight hair.

When I finally turned my attention back to my guest, Lewis was staring at me, and what was in his eyes wasn’t anger at all. Or even disappointment. It was something neither one of us could ever really acknowledge, and it was big and powerful and breathtaking.

He cleared his throat and looked down, and said, “You scared the shit out of me.”

“Yeah. Sorry, I had no idea it was going to be that dangerous, or I’d have done more, taken better precautions—”

He waved that aside. “Silverton was your expert; you were listening to him. So if there’s blame, it’s his, and he’s beyond all that now, poor bastard. Even if you’d pulled back as soon as you found the dead Djinn, it would have been too late to keep you from getting sick. This stuff is badly toxic. We couldn’t have left it there. As it is, we’ve had to inform NEST, and they’re following up with radiation treatments for anyone who reports in sick to the hospitals.” NEST was the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, out of Homeland Security. I didn’t want to imagine how that conversation had gone.

“But by taking it out of the Djinn’s body—”

“The Djinn’s body must have been containing it, to a certain extent. You exposed yourselves to a massive dose,” he said. “Silverton more than you, because he actually touched it, even with protective gloves.”

It could have just as easily been me. Maybe Silverton had known the risks when he’d reached into that cavity to grab the thing; maybe he’d just been unlucky. No way to know. I’d come close to dying lots of times—I’d actually gone over the edge, once or twice—but this felt different.