Rachel Caine: Gale Force

That was Cherise, cheerfully mowing down the barriers.

I sat down on the other bench, legs crossed, feeling exposed and vulnerable in my lacy underthings. I had a huge list of things still to do for the wedding, and I was running out of time, and the last thing I needed to be doing was obsessing about the dress. I mean, I had good taste in clothes, right? I could usually walk into a store, grab something right off the rack, and get it right.

Today, I’d gone through more dresses than I’d worn in the last year. Maybe I ought to try the designer line again. Or get married in a garbage bag. Add a couple of frills, a nice bow—couldn’t be worse than what I’d just seen myself in today. There was a fashion hell. I’d been there.

“You okay?” Cherise finished buttoning up her jeans, skimmed her top down to street-legal levels, flipped her hair, and voilà, she was fantastic. She stepped out of the Jimmy Choo pumps and boxed them up with the care usually reserved for crown jewels or religious relics, and slid her perfectly pedicured toes into a pair of hot-pink flip-flops. “Because you look a little bit—”

“Spooked,” I supplied sourly. “Worried. Scared. Nuts. Insane. Completely, utterly—”

“I was going to say hungry. It’s already two hours after we should have had lunch.”

Low blood sugar probably was impairing my impressive dress-choosing skills, and even though this was a full-service bridal store, I doubted that they catered. “Oh,” I said. “Right. Lunch.” Now that she mentioned it, my stomach growled impatiently, as if it had been trying to get my attention for a while and was ready to cannibalize another body part. I reached for my own jeans and top and began tugging them on. I wasn’t as perfectly body-balanced as Cherise, but I had legs for days, and even in flats I topped her by several inches.

The hardworking clerk came back, sweating under a forklift’s worth of alternate dress choices. I froze in the act of zipping up my pants. “Um—”

Cherise, rightly identifying a moment when a maid of honor could take one for the bridal team, smiled winningly at the clerk and said, “Sorry, but I’ve got a nail appointment. We’ll have to come back later. Could you keep those out? I swear, it’ll be an hour, tops.” She caught my look. “Two, at the most.”

The clerk looked around the dressing room, which had far fewer hooks than she had dresses, sighed, and nodded.

I had just finished fastening the top button on my pants when I felt the whole store distinctly shake, as if a giant hand had grabbed the place and yanked. I froze, bracing myself on the wall, and saw Cherise do the same. The clerk froze under her load of thousand-dollar frocks.

And then all hell broke loose. The floor bucked, walls undulated, cracks ripped through plaster, and the air exploded with the sounds of glass crashing, things falling, and timbers snapping. The salesclerk screamed, dropped the gowns, and flung herself into the doorway, bracing herself with both hands.

I should have taken cover—Cherise sensibly did, curling instantly into a ball under the nearest cover, which was the bench on her side.

What did I do? I stood there. And I launched myself hard into the aetheric, rising out of the physical world and into a plane of existence where the lines of force were more clearly visible.

Not good. The entire area of Fort Lauderdale was a boiling confusion of forces, most erupting out of a fault line running directly under the store in which I stood. It looked as if somebody had dropped a bucket of red and black dye into a washing machine and set it on full churn.

We were so screwed.

I sensed other Wardens rising into the aetheric, responding to the crisis; there were two or three of them relatively close whose signatures I recognized—two were Weather, which wasn’t much help, but one was an Earth Warden, and a powerful one.

I flung my still-new Earth Warden powers deep into the foundations of the building in which my physical form was still trapped, and began shoring up the structure. It was taking a beating, but the wood responded to me, healing itself and binding into an at least temporarily unbreakable frame. The metal was tougher, but it also fell within my powers, so I braced it up as I went, creating a lightning-fast shell of stability in a world that wouldn’t hold together for long.

I reached out, in the aetheric, and connected with the other Earth Warden; together, we were able to blanket part of the rift with power, like pouring superglue on an open wound. Not a miracle, it was just a bandage, but enough. I didn’t know enough about how to balance the forces of the Earth; it was different from the flashing, volatile energy of Fire or the massive, ponderous fury of Weather. It had all kinds of slow, unstoppable momentum, and I felt very fragile standing in its way.

Help, I said to the other Earth Warden—not that talking was really talking on the aetheric. It was crude communication, at best, but he got the message. I watched as he spread himself thin, and his aura settled deep into the heart of the boiling red of the disturbance.

Oh, hell no. No way was I going there.

Then again, if I didn’t, I was leaving him alone to do the dirty work—the potentially fatal dirty work.

I took a deep metaphorical breath, steadied myself, and stepped off the cliff.

Sensations are different on the aetheric—properly, they’re not sensations at all, because all the nerve endings are still firmly planted down on terra firma. But the mind processes stimuli, no matter how unpleasant or strange, and so what it felt like to me on my way down, following my Earth Warden colleague, was . . . pressure—being squeezed, lightly at first, then more intensely. It was like diving in the ocean and swimming deeper and deeper, but this didn’t feel like liquid; it felt more like a metal vise, cranking inexorably tighter.

I faltered and nearly bugged out, but I caught a glimpse of the other Warden. He was below me, only a bit farther, and I decided that if he could do it, I had to. Down I went, and if I’d had an actual, physical mouth and lungs, I’d have been screaming and crying by the time I got there.

His aetheric form—which, I noticed, sported shadowy, shoulder-length hair and the ghost of a guitar slung across his back—was kneeling down, studying something. I joined him. He silently indicated what it was he was examining.

I’d never seen anything like it in the aetheric, but I didn’t need a college course to tell it was very, very bad. It looked like some kind of black icy knife, sharp on all edges, wickedly pointed at the end. It was plunged deep into the ground, or what represented the ground up here.

The Earth Warden reached out and touched it, and from the way he jerked back, it was a very painful experience.

Well, I hadn’t come all this way not to try.

The jolt that went through me when I tried to take hold of the thing felt like being on the receiving end of a live power cable, only not as much fun. I let go— couldn’t do anything else—and looked wordlessly at my colleague.

He shook his head and pointed up, indicating we should rise. I nodded. Up we went, slowly, letting the pressure bleed off. I didn’t suppose we’d get the bends in the aetheric, but it didn’t seem prudent to push it, and besides, I was still trembling from the jolt that piece of black ice had sent through me.

Far above, in the softer regions of air, he made a gesture that was clear even in the aetheric—thumb toward his ear, little finger toward his mouth. And then he pointed from himself to me.

He was going to call me. I nodded and waved, and dropped out of the aetheric, back into my body.

The earthquake had stopped . . . temporarily, at least. The dress shop was a mess—plaster cracked, mirrors broken, racks toppled. Disaster with a designer label. Somebody was shaking me. Cherise. She had her hands fisted in my shirt and was trying to haul me up, but I was bigger and she was shaking too much to really be effective on leverage.