Rachel Caine: Gale Force

I felt a slight bump of power on the aetheric level— it took concentration to detect it—and knew that someone had arrived. Someone of the Djinn variety. Could be a good thing; could be a bad thing. . . . Either way, it would be unpredictable.

I turned, a determined smile on my face, and was relieved to see the Djinn Rahel lounging in the cracked doorway, arms folded, surveying the damage with amused, lambently glittering eyes. She was a tall creature, elegant as a heron, but her nature always put me in mind of a hunting hawk—predatory, alert, always on the verge of striking.

Today she wore a bright lavender pantsuit in what looked like (and probably was) the softest of peach skin. It was tailored within an inch of its life, clinging to her long legs and her sculpted torso. Purple was a relaxed color for her, as it was for me. In a less conciliatory mood, she’d have been wearing neon yellow.

“So,” she said, in a low voice as rich as spilled syrup, “does this mean the wedding is off?”

“You wish,” I said. “Thanks for the help. Oh, wait . . .”

Her smile widened, revealing white, even teeth. My, she was in a good mood. She didn’t even bother with sharpening them to freak me out. “Did you need help, little sister? All you had to do was ask.”

Like I’d had time to pretty-please. She tilted her head, still focused on me, and the hundreds of tiny, meticulous braids in her ebony hair shifted and hissed together, and the tiny beads clacked. Snakes and bones. I resisted the urge to shiver. I liked Rahel, and I thought she liked me, as much as that kind of thing could happen, but I was never really . . . sure. You never could be, with the Djinn.

And once again, she surprised me by saying, “What do you need?”

Djinn didn’t offer . But she did, and I gaped at her for a long, unflattering few seconds before I got control and composed myself into a grateful expression. “If you could check and let me know if you find anybody wounded, anybody in trouble—”

She flipped a negligent hand—perfectly manicured, with opal polish on the sharp nails—and misted away. I looked around. David hadn’t bothered to turn, and the humans in the store and on the street had been too preoccupied with their own trauma to recognize a truly strange thing when they saw it.

Two seconds later, more or less, a shadow darkened the doorway, and Lewis edged in past the sagging, glassless metal frame. He looked first to David and nodded; David had turned to face him, which said something about how Lewis rated on the whole threat-level scale as compared to Rahel. Not that Lewis was a threat, except in the sense that David probably never forgot (or could forget) that Lewis and I had once been . . . close. Not for ages, but still. It hadn’t been the kind of one-night stand you forget.

Even so, the two of them were friends, if cautious friends. And they respected one another.

“Everybody okay here?” Lewis asked. I gave him a silent thumbs-up, not quite daring myself to speak. He looked—well, like Lewis. Drop him in the middle of Manhattan or in a forest in the Great Northwest, and he basically remained unchanged. Blue jeans, hiking boots that had seen miles of hard use, brown hair that shagged a bit too much, a three-day growth of beard on a long, angular face. Almond-shaped, secretive dark eyes. “Jo. We’re setting up a staging area. I’m on my way there now. If you’re done here—”

“Yeah, I’ll come with,” I said. I’d had a purse at some point, and I went back into the changing room to hunt for it. Good thing it was a hobo bag. I felt as if I matched it nicely, what with the rumpled clothes, sweat, and plaster dust.

When I turned, David was right behind me. He steadied me with big strong hands, looking into my eyes, and I couldn’t resist an audible gulp. He just had that effect on me.

“Be careful,” he said, and kissed me. It was probably meant to be one of those gentle little pecks one partner gives another casually, but it turned into something else as our lips warmed and parted and made pledges to each other we couldn’t really keep at the moment.

When we parted, I felt significantly more alone, and I could see he did, too. David tapped me on the end of my nose with one finger, an unexpectedly human sort of gesture, and gave me a heartbreaking smile.

“I almost lost you,” he said. “I hate it when that happens.”

He’d really, truly lost me a couple of times. Once, he’d broken the laws of the Djinn and the universe itself to bring me back. I was well aware how much he’d risked for me, and how much he’d risk again if he had to.

I had to be more careful. Losing myself was one thing. Losing David was an unacceptable something else.

Cherise was still in the main room, hanging up gowns and dusting them off, shaking them out. The clerk, who looked pissed now rather than shattered, was muttering under her breath as she checked each dress for damage. I gave Cherise the high call-me sign, and she flashed me a grin and mouthed, You owe me lunch, bitch!

Cherise was the fastest rebounding human I’d ever seen. And that was only part of the reason I loved her like a sister.

Considering my actual bitchy, whiny, double-crossy, drug-addicted sister . . . better than my sister.

Lewis had a Hummer. I hated Hummers, but I had to admit, it suited him—and he was probably one of the few Hummer drivers who actually used it as God and Jeep intended, to be driven over hard terrain. It looked it, too—muddy, dented, cheerfully well used.

I came to a halt, staring up at the passenger door. “I swear,” I said, “if I split these jeans climbing into your damn truck—”

“Need a boost?” Lewis asked from behind me. And I had a terrifically tactile premonition of his big hands going around my waist and lifting me up. . . .

Bad for my discipline.

“As if,” I said, and, with a mighty effort, levered myself up to the step and into the cab of the truck. It was like an eighteen-wheeler, only with better upholstery. As I got myself strapped in, Lewis swung in on the opposite side with the ease of long practice, and longer legs. I sniffed. The truck smelled like mud, leaves, wood smoke, and mildew. “You ever get this thing detailed?”

“What would be the point?” Lewis put it in gear, and the tank began to roll. He drove slowly, negotiating around stopped cars and people still standing in the middle of the street. Normal life was starting to reassert itself. As we got farther from the dress shop, I saw that the damage appeared limited to broken windows and overturned shelves in the stores. It looked like New Orleans after a really rocky night of Mardi Gras. “Okay,” Lewis said, drawing my attention, “so give me the bullet points.”

I ticked them off, a finger at a time. “One, I was minding my own damn business, trying on wedding dresses when it hit. Two, I worked with Luis Rocha to try to figure out what was causing it and lessen the damage. Three—” Number three was my middle finger, unaccompanied by the other two.

“Classy,” Lewis said. “I’m sure the Wardens Council would be impressed with the summary.”

I repeated the gesture for the missing Wardens Council. Because I didn’t much like most of them, anyway.

“When you and Rocha went up on the aetheric, what happened?”

I described it for him—the red boil of forces out of control; Rocha diving down toward the source; me following; the ice black shard of—something—driven into the skin of the planet.

“You touched it,” Lewis said, “and it knocked you away.”

“Like it was Sammy Sosa and I was the baseball.”

“Nice sports reference. You do that because I’m a guy?”

“No, I do it because I like baseball. Back to the subject. I couldn’t hold on to it, and if I couldn’t—” The only Warden walking around who was stronger than me was currently driving the Hummer. “You want to give it a shot?”