Rachel Caine: Total Eclipse

To all the wonderful people who’ve supported Joanne’s adventures through this series—THANK YOU. You all rock.

But I’ll single out one, because she was the first to tell me that the idea for Ill Wind was a good one.

Thank you, Sharon.

Okay, I lied; I will single out two, because about the time I was going to give up on this whole writing gig, I talked with fantastic writer Joe R. Lansdale, and he gave me the encouragement I needed to keep on defying gravity. Thank you, Joe. And hey, thanks for Bubba Ho-tep, too, while I’m at it.

Joe Bonamassa

Lucienne Diver

Sheila Hanahan Taylor

Felicia Day

P. N. Elrod

Jackie Leaf

Heidi Berthiaume

Charles Armitage

Jackie Kessler

Richelle Mead

Patricia Anthony

R. Cat Conrad—always

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, such as volcanoes and earthquakes, and the forces of fire. Don’t ask—it’s a long story. Just go with it, okay?

Controlling all those awesome forces sounds like fun, eh? No. Not when it makes you a target for every psycho 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; 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 coruler of the Djinn on Earth.

But not even the most powerful friends in the world can help when real devastation hits. And it hit me and David, dead center, in our final battle with my old mentor and enemy . . . and it took our power away.

For me, that’s an inconvenience.

For David, it’s fatal.

I have to find a way to fix this before it’s too late to save my beloved—and maybe even humanity, because Mother Nature is waking up . . . and she’s pissed .

Black corner.

It was the name Wardens—and Djinn—gave to a section of the world that had been scorched by something unnatural; a place where the basic energy that coursed through the world, the pulsebeat of the Earth, no longer existed.

A black corner looked fine, but to anyone with sensitivity to power, it was desolate and sterile. Wardens—those who controlled the basic powers of nature—suffered when they were trapped inside one of these dead zones. Still, we got off better than the Djinn.

Djinn died.

We’d been trapped in the massive black corner, sailing hard for the horizon, for days, and it was taking its toll at an increasingly horrible rate.

It was so hard, watching them suffer. It was slow, and painful, and terrifying to watch, and as our cruise ship sailed ever so slowly through the dark, empty seas, trying to get outside the supernatural blast radius, I began to wonder whether we would make it at all. The New Djinn—the Djinn who’d been born human and had become Djinn during some large-scale disasters—were in a lot of pain, and slipping away.

Still, they fared better than the Old Djinn. Original, eternal, with no real ties to humanity at all—they declined far faster. In a very real sense, they couldn’t exist on their own, without a direct connection to power—a connection that was nowhere to be found now, even though we were many miles out from the site of the disastrous ending to our fight with my old enemy. He’d opened a gateway to another dimension, and what had come through had almost destroyed me and David; it had definitely blasted the entire area for hundreds of miles in all directions.

I couldn’t imagine what the consequences of that were going to be. It was a terrible disaster, and I felt responsible. Hell, who was I kidding? I was responsible, beyond any shadow of a doubt. I was recovering from the aftereffects of the long battle and the injuries I’d gathered along the way, but that was secondary to the guilt I felt about how I’d handled things.

I should have been better . If I’d been better, none of this would have happened. I wouldn’t be watching my friends and allies suffer. I wouldn’t be watching helplessly as the best of them, the ones who’d given the most, lost pieces of themselves.

Dying in slow motion.

Lewis Orwell, the head of the Wardens, my old friend, the strongest human being I’d ever met . . . Lewis had developed a perpetual, deep-chested cough that sounded wet and thick. Pneumonia, maybe. He looked as if he hadn’t rested in weeks, and he probably hadn’t. His reserves were used up, his body beginning to shut down in protest.

And still he was up in the middle of the night, sitting with the Djinn. Offering them what little comfort he could. There weren’t so many of them . . . not now. We’d seen three of them die in the past twenty-four hours. The ones who were left were sinking fast.

Djinn were exotic and beautiful and unbelievably powerful. Seeing them laid so low was heart- wrenching. I didn’t know how Lewis could stand it, really. The misery hit me in a thick, sticky wave as I limped into the small infirmary, and I had to stop in the doorway and breathe in and out slowly to calm myself. No sense in going overwrought into this mess. It wouldn’t help anyone.

Lewis was sitting in a chair next to a bed that held a small, still human form the size of a child. Venna—who’d always borne an uncanny resemblance to the famous Alice, of Lewis Carroll renown—was still a pretty thing, with fine blond hair and big blue eyes. The supernatural shine that usually seemed a few shades too vivid for human eyes was missing now. She looked sick and afraid, and it hurt me deeply.

I sank down on the other side of her bed and took her hand. Her gaze, which had been fixed on the ceiling, slowly moved to rest on me. She felt cold. Her fingers flexed just a little on mine, and I felt rather than saw the faintest ghost of a smile.

“Hey, kid,” I said, and smoothed her hair back from her face. “How are you?”

It was self-evident how she was doing, but I didn’t know what else to say. Nothing I could do was going to help. Like Lewis, I was utterly helpless. Useless.

“Okay,” she whispered. It seemed to be a great effort for her to form the word, and I saw a shudder go through her small body. I tucked the blanket closer around her, although I knew it wasn’t going to help. The chill that had sunk into her couldn’t be banished by warm covers and hugs and hot toddies.

We’d tried putting the Djinn on the deck of the ship, hoping the sunlight would help revive them, but it had seemed to make things worse. Venna—who had been alive as long as the Earth, as far as I could tell—had cried from the sheer, desperate agony of being in the sun and not being able to absorb its energy.

It had been awful, and here, inside, she didn’t seem as distressed. That was something, at least.

We were no longer trying to save them. We were just managing their decline.

Venna’s china blue eyes drifted shut, though it wasn’t exactly a natural sleep; she was conserving what energy remained to her. The Old Djinn burned it faster than the New Djinn, it seemed. We’d already lost the only other Old Djinn on board—a closemouthed sort I’d never gotten to know by name.

And, in truth, I loved Venna. I cared about her deeply—in the way you’d care for a beautiful, exotic, very dangerous animal who’d allowed you to become its friend. I’d never thought of her as fragile; I’d seen her slam tanker trucks aside with a wave, and fight monsters without getting so much as a hangnail.