Rachel Caine - Thin Air

Stan was sweating bullets. I stood next to him, shaking a little myself, as the cops formed a cordon around the sinkhole and the news crews swarmed in frustration near the barrier, camera lenses and microphones pointed our way.

“Oh, man, this is bad,” Stan whispered.

“You’ve got some kind of system for handling these things, right? Right? This can’t be the first time in the history of the Wardens that people saw something happen…”

“Well, it’s the first time for me !” he shot back. “Jesus, I’m not even allowed out on my own yet. I’m still on probation! I’m not equipped to handle this!”

“And you think I am?”

“Well…you’re the most senior, right?” He looked puppy-dog hopeful.

We didn’t have time to do any more plotting; one of the cops-a detective in civilian clothes with a badge hung on his shirt pocket-came over and herded us away, behind a crime scene van parked a little way down the beach. “Names?” he barked. He looked more stressed than me and Stan put together.

Oh, crap. I was supposed to be out on bail in Nevada, and I was pretty sure it was a violation to be out here in California…and maybe there was more that I didn’t remember that could jump up and bite me when he entered my name in the system. So I gave him my best, shiniest smile and said, “Jo Monaghan.” Where it came from, I have no idea. He wrote it down and pointed a pen at Stan, who said, “Stanley Waterman.”

Waterman ? For an Earth Warden? Funny.

“ID,” the cop demanded. Man of few words. I was about to fumble around for an excuse when I felt a tug on my sleeve and looked down to see Venna.

Kind of Venna, anyway. Not blond Alice in Wonderland anymore; she’d ditched the telltale blue dress and pinafore in favor of blue jeans and a cute pink shirt with kittens on the front. “Mommy?” she said, and held up a purse. “You dropped it.”

I blinked at her, trying to take it all in, and smiled. “Thank you, honey,” I said, and accepted the purse as naturally as I could, under the circumstances. I glanced at the cop; he was smiling at Venna, so evidently she’d gone with a total-reality appearance this time. The purse was Kate Spade, and not a knockoff, either; Venna’s little joke, I guessed. Inside, there were a few random things that she must have thought I’d need, like a travel-sized deodorant (trying to tell me something, Venna?), a small bottle of hand cream, a compact black shape that it took me a few seconds to recognize…

A Taser. She’d handed me a purse with a Taser in it.

I shot her a look. She kept smiling at me in sunny innocence.

The wallet was red faux alligator. I opened it, and there was a California driver’s license in the name of Jo Monaghan, with my wide-eyed mug shot picture next to it. Unflatteringly realistic. I passed the plastic-coated card over, and the cop inspected it for a few seconds, noted down the address that appeared on the card-I wondered whose address it was-and then gave it back. Stan had produced his own ID. The cop followed the same process. Not a chatterbox, this guy. He hadn’t even offered his name.

“Okay,” he finally said, and looked at each of us in turn. “Somebody start talking.”

Stan looked at me with mute desperation on his face. I controlled the urge to thwack him on the back of the head, and summoned as much charm as I could. (Not a lot. It had been a long day.) “I don’t know what we can tell you, sir. My daughter and I were just walking on the beach-we saw the lights and sirens, and we thought we’d take a look.”

“Your address isn’t anywhere near the beach.”

Venna looked chagrined. Of course, a Djinn wouldn’t think about things like that.

“No,” I agreed. “We were out sightseeing, and I didn’t realize how late it had gotten. We were still driving around when the storm hit. Some storm, huh?”

The detective grunted. “So after that you decided to come looky-loo?”

“Yes.” I pointed at the rock wall, dangerously sagging now. “We were sitting there on the rock wall, with a couple of other people-I didn’t know them. There was a British man; I think he might have been a little…” I made the international symbol for crazy at my temple. “He was rambling, you know? And he sounded really angry. I was going to take my daughter home when he got up and ran out there and started yelling. He started to come back at us, and he started sinking.”

The knife , I remembered, just as the detective turned his chilly X-ray eyes on me and said, “Somebody said he had a knife.”

“Oh,” I said faintly. “Did he? Oh, my God.”

“Any reason this man might want to hurt you?”

I shook my head. Venna shook hers, too.

“So when he started sinking, you…what? Tried to save him?”

It didn’t take a lot of work to look guilty. “Not right at first. I was afraid,” I said. “I ran for help. I found this guy”-I nodded at Stan-“and he came with me. We managed to pull the other man out, but-”

“Yeah, yeah, I know the rest,” the cop said. “So you, Waterman, you never saw Miz Monaghan before?”

“Never saw her before today,” Stan said. He sounded utterly confident on that score. “She saved his life, though.”

The detective was looking faintly disappointed with the whole thing. “Either of you here when the building came down? See anything either before or after I should know about?”

“Wasn’t it an earthquake?” I asked, and tried to sound anxious about it. “The building collapsing, I mean? It wasn’t bombs or anything?”

“We’re still looking, but yeah, so far it looks like bad luck and bad weather. Still, we like to ask.” He demanded phone numbers. I made Stan go first, then made mine up, hoping that his area code would work for mine as well. It must have, because the detective snapped his notebook shut. “Okay, I’ve got your statements. If anything comes up that I need clarification about, I’ll call.” He unbent enough to give Venna another smile. “Better get the kid home,” he told me. Venna looked up with a grave expression, and I wondered just how funny she was finding all this. Hilarious, I was willing to bet. The Djinn seemed to have a very strange sense of humor.

I had no car. I was about to say something to Stan about that, but Venna shook her head minutely, pulled on my hand, and led me across the sand in the opposite direction from where all the crazy news media was gathered. Stan trotted to keep up. “Hey!” he said. “You can’t leave!”

“Bet I can,” I said. “Bet you can’t stop me, Stanley. In fact, I’ll bet you don’t even want to try.”

“What about Jamie Rae?” he challenged, and got in my way. Venna looked like she might be tempted to say or do something; I squeezed her hand in warning. “What am I supposed to tell the Wardens?”

“Tell them you were overmatched,” Venna said sweetly. “They’ll believe that.” She smiled. I was glad I wasn’t on the receiving end of that particular expression. “Your friend is waking up,” she said. “You’d better go get her and leave now.”

“But…the sinkhole…”

“You stopped it from growing,” she said. “Someone else will fix it. We have to go now.”

“But…the newspeople-they’ll have tape!”

“Then I suppose the Wardens will have to handle that,” Venna said serenely. “I can’t be bothered. Move.”

He did, skipping out of her way as she advanced. I trailed along, shrugging to indicate that I didn’t have much choice, either; I was pretty sure Stan believed it. There was a hill beyond him, and we trudged up, avoiding the scrub brush and sharp-edged grasses. Stan didn’t follow. He stood there, hands on his hips, looking lost, and then he turned and went back to get Jamie Rae and, I presumed, make a full report to the Wardens.