Rachel Caine: Gale Force

The Oracles vanished, leaving gusts of hot wind in their place that fluttered the pale layers of my gown. David’s weight pulled me down. It seemed as though he was growing heavier with every passing second.

Ashan stood there, immobile, impassive, perfect .

“Help!” I screamed at him, and grabbed his hand. It felt like cold marble. “Damn you, he’s your brother ! Do something!” The two of them were the same, united by purpose and power, if not by the ties of blood that humans understood.

Ashan pulled free of my grip. “If you want him,” he said, “save him. He won’t save himself. He could, if he wished.”

I couldn’t hold David up. Lewis lunged forward and tried to help take his weight, but there was something strange happening here, something worse than anything I’d expected.

“God,” Lewis muttered. “Hold on, we’re trying to put up the shield. Hold on—”

The Sentinels attacked from all around us, on every front. I heard some physical confrontations, and saw a bloom of fire erupt somewhere off to the side, followed by shouts and screams. Security piled on top of me and began hustling me away; I gathered up my train with both hands, clutching it out of the way of traffic. Lewis had arranged our forces in teams, but even so, the assault was shocking in its suddenness and force. I grabbed Lewis’s arm as he pushed past and shook it fiercely. “They’re using Rahel to get to him! If you’re going to counter, it has to be now. Right now! Go! ”

“Already on it,” Lewis snapped, and spun away. “Stay here. Draw them if you can.”

David was down on the ground, surrounded by fierce-eyed Djinn protectors ready to fight anything that came for him, but they let me through. I sank down at his side in a flutter of silk and held him. He was gasping and trembling, eyes molten gold but with ominous sparks of darkness flying through them. The gray mottling on his face was taking on a shocking life of its own, moving dark tendrils beneath his skin. Seeking out the aetheric pipeline that made David the Conduit. Once it had that . . .

“Let her go!” I shouted, and grabbed him by the lapels. “David, you have to let Rahel go, please!”

He shook his head. His hand grabbed for mine and clenched tightly. “Say it,” he said. His voice was raw in his throat, almost primal. “Say the words. Say it! ”

I felt tears trembling in my eyes. The whole world was coming apart. I heard the crack of gunfire somewhere off to the side, and more screaming. Someone was shouting about a Warden down; someone else was warning of a Sentinel attack coming in the form of a tidal wave from the ocean.

This couldn’t be right. It couldn’t be.

I squeezed my eyes shut, felt the tears burn down my cheeks, and whispered, “Oh God help me, I do. I do.”

There was an eerie second of utter silence, not even the wind moving. Conflicts stopped, pinned on the instant, and I felt something inside me shifting, aligning like a puzzle box.

And a wave of pure golden power flowed into me, through me, and out.

I opened my eyes and saw David watching my face with a look I could think of only as awed relief. The gray faded from his face, back to a silvery scar. Gone.

And I felt the echoing power between us build, and build, and build, waves on the beach, pounding and ceaseless, cascading out into the other Djinn, enhancing their raw power and refining it into surgical weapons.

I’d just made the New Djinn a quantum leap more powerful, by giving them a second anchor into the aetheric.

I’d also just gotten married, even if the minister hadn’t quite gotten around to saying the words before he’d fled to the hills, along with most of the others.

The Djinn snapped a glowing shield of power over us, brilliant as shimmering gold. It covered not just the two of us, but all of the Palms—hell, it went so far out that it might have been covering all of Florida. Whatever the Sentinels were doing, they quit doing it, fast, rightly recognizing that they had just been dealt a very serious blow. It would take them time to figure out exactly what had happened.

“Did you know?” I felt giddy, halfway to heaven. Endorphins kicking in. “Did you plan that?”

David grabbed me and kissed me, long and hard, with a good deal less restraint than most bridegrooms would have shown under similar circumstances. His hands roamed, stroking down the silk, crushing it to my hips, his fingertips brushing over the skin left exposed by the open V of the corset at my back.

“Absolutely,” he said, deadpan, when he pulled back.

“You had no idea.”

“I knew.”

“You liar. You guessed !”

He laughed and buried his face against my neck, picked me up, and whirled me around in the deserted gazebo. A storm wind lashed surf against the rocks, and a wild cascade of lightning slashed out of the sky and grounded spectacularly out at sea. It was the joy of the Djinn, made real.

David sobered, but the light stayed in him, burning fiercely. He kissed me again, this time more gently, with a promise of things to come, and I felt the curling smile on his lips. “I need to go,” he said. “Things to do.”

“Same here,” I said. “They’ll be looking for an explanation of what just happened.”

He stepped back, and his gaze raked me from head to toe, ravenous and warm. “Don’t change,” he said. “I’ll be back. I want to take that off you.”

I shivered, nodded, and watched my lover—no, I supposed I was going to have to get used to the idea of husband —mist away on the hot, humid breeze.

I couldn’t see any other Djinn, but there were plenty of hired security, all looking grim and efficient as they herded guests to cover. I had a whole contingent of them stationed near me, all facing outward. I reached up and tapped the nearest one on the shoulder. “Hey!”

“Ma’am?” He angled in my direction a huge ear that looked as though it had been badly mangled in some kind of sculpting accident, but didn’t turn to face me. “You ready to go?”

“Guess so. Looks like the wedding’s over!”

He snorted. “Right. Let’s get you to the safe zone!”

“Sure,” I said. I felt giddy. Almost invincible, actually, but even if bullets might bounce off me, I was pretty sure they wouldn’t do the dress any good. Priorities. “Hey, didn’t you notice all the cool stuff going on? Supernatural stuff all over the place?”

“Lady,” he said wearily, “I’ve guarded the Rolling Stones. Trust me, you guys are amateurs.”

When the phalanx of guards closed in around me, it was like being in a moving tank of body armor; I clutched the train of my dress well out of reach of their boots, and hustled along down the path, up the steps, and into the narrow hallways I’d come through before. No staff were smiling at me this time; they were probably busy toting up the damage charges. I hoped David’s black AmEx was up to the job.

My security detail arrowed me straight past Lewis and a group of Wardens all huddled together; I tried to bail out to talk to them, but clearly that wasn’t in the plans. No matter how loud I yelled, we continued moving straight for the elevators. The guards broke up there, facing outward in an arc while the guy in charge—Mr. Squishy Ear—took my elbow in one massive, scarred hand and escorted me firmly across the threshold and into one of the lifts. He punched in a key card, and away we went, just the two of us.

“Where’s Cherise? My maid of honor?” I asked.

“Cute little thing? ’Bout this high?” He marked off a height just above the waistband of his ripstop pants. “Blond?”

“That’s the one.”

“Yeah, she’s already upstairs. We got her out ASAP. She wasn’t any too happy about it. Said she wanted to see you kick some ass.” He sent me a sideways look that doubted my ass-kicking abilities. Sucker.