Rachel Caine: Thin Air

His lips and eyelids had turned a delicate shade of lilac.

“Dammit, take the coat,” I demanded.

“No. I’ll be fine.”

“Ask David to get you a jacket, then! Hell, he brought me shoes!”

Lewis’s eyes flicked briefly past me, seeking out David, I was sure. “When I need one.”

“Unless you’re modeling the new fall line of lipstick, and this season’s color is Corpse Blue, you’d better damn well tell him to get you one now!”

“I didn’t know you cared.” Shaky sarcasm. He was still strong enough to be putting up a good front, but it was all marshmallow and foam peanuts underneath.

“I don’t. I care about getting stuck out here.” I didn’t move my eyes away from Lewis. “David, could you please get him a coat?” Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw David cross his arms and lean against a tree. The expression on his face might have been a smile.

“Of course,” he said, and misted away.

Lewis took in a deep breath, and coughed until I was afraid he was going to spit up a lung. I did what any medically inarticulate person would do; I rubbed and pounded his back. Which probably didn’t help at all, but he didn’t seem to mind. When he’d stopped coughing, he leaned over, breathing in shallow gasps, face a dirty gray.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked. “And don’t tell me you’re tired, or you’ve been up for three days, or whatever bullshit you’ve been shoveling at David.”

He pressed a hand to his ribs. “Took a little fall. Maybe you saw it.”

Oh, shit. David had thrown him across the clearing. Since he’d climbed up again, I hadn’t figured it was any big deal.

Wrong.

“Earth Wardens can’t heal themselves real well,” he said. “It’s coming along. Couple of broken ribs. Bit of a punctured lung. Nothing to alert the National Guard over.”

“Can’t David just, you know, swoop us out of here? To wherever he goes to buy retail?”

Lewis shook his head. His breathing was easing up a little. “Free Djinn-well, I guess they’re all Free Djinn now-can’t take humans along with them when they do that. The times they’ve tried it, the results haven’t been exactly encouraging.”

“Meaning?”

“Dead people.”

Great. So David could go in and out, but we had to hoof it. “What about a helicopter? Some kind of rescue service?”

“We’re still a pretty far hike from the closest place a helicopter can touch down. Believe me, I’ll call for help as soon as I can.”

“Why the hell not now? We’re stuck out here, you’ve got broken ribs, there’s snow coming…Even if they can’t land, maybe they can, you know, winch us up or something.”

“Trust me. We have to be very careful right now.” He looked vaguely apologetic. “It’s not about you. It’s about me.”

Ah. I remembered what he’d blurted out when he’d first found me. Listen, we’re in trouble. Bad trouble. We need you. Things have gone wrong. Like I was the go-to girl for that kind of thing. “What’s happened?” I asked.

“That’s the issue,” he said. “I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s an isolated issue, somebody who just doesn’t like me, or a genuine power grab within the Wardens’ organization. Until I know, you’re just going to have to bear with me.”

“And you want me to trust you?” I shook my head in admiration. “Unbelievable. So who’s after you?”

“If I gave you a name, would you recognize it?” He sounded a little more snappy about that than was strictly necessary, really, and immediately looked sorry about it. “I told you. Trust me.”

“If I didn’t trust you, I’d be running like hell right now,” I pointed out. “It’s not like you could really stop me.”

“Don’t kid yourself. I’ve got skills.”

“Apparently,” I said. “Since you’re not dead yet, which with your winning personality amazes me. I want to kill you, and I barely know you.”

“Funny. I’ve said the same thing about you, once upon a time.” He started to laugh. It turned into more coughing, alarmingly. “Damn. You know, I never get hurt unless I’m hanging around with you.”

“If you’d just admitted you were hurt in the first place, maybe you wouldn’t be this bad off right now. And what’s that about, Mr. I Don’t Need a Coat Because I’m the Tough-assed Mountain Man? Is this some kind of pissing contest with David?” No answer. Lewis pretended to be concentrating on the fire. “It is. David wasn’t going to do you any favors unless you asked, and you weren’t going to ask. Right? Jesus. Men. ”

“Shhhh,” he said, and sat up.

“What?”

He shushed me again, urgently, and slipped the sleeping bag away from his shoulders. He reached in the backpack next to him and came up with the last thing, somehow, I expected to see in his hand.

Well, okay, not the very last. That would have been…a tulip or a Barbie doll or something. But a matte black semiautomatic pistol was pretty far down the list.

“What are you doing?” I kept it to an urgent hiss. He shushed me again, silently this time, and mimed for me to stay put while he got up. Oh, no way. I didn’t remember anything about who I was, but I doubted it was in my general character to play it safe, especially when my currently assigned Sir Galahad had a punctured lung and a fifty-fifty chance of keeling over at any moment.

I got up, too, and whirled around at a sudden crash of brush to my right. If it was David, he was making an especially dramatic entrance this time…

It wasn’t David.

There were two people stepping out of the underbrush. Naturally, I didn’t recognize either one of them, but clearly Lewis did, because he turned and aimed the gun at the skinny, greasy young man first, then shifted his aim to split the distance between the boy and the blond little Venus with him, dressed in blue jeans and a hot magenta sweater.

“Whoa,” the girl said, and her hands shot up above her shoulders. The boy just glared. “Easy, Wyatt Earp.”

“Don’t move,” Lewis said. He was absolutely steady, but I could see the sweat glistening on his face. “What are you two doing here? How’d you get here?”

“We were looking for you,” the boy said. “Obviously.”

“We’re trying to help,” the girl put in. She tried a nervous smile, but she kept darting glances at me, as if she couldn’t quite believe her eyes. “Jo? You okay?”

She didn’t look familiar, but I was getting used to that. I gave Lewis a doubtful look; he wasn’t lowering the gun. “I’m going to ask again,” he said. “How’d you get here? Because the two of you were supposed to be in California, last I heard.”

“You need help.” The girl, again. She sounded young and earnest, and she looked it, too. Underdressed for the weather, and that bothered me. “Lewis, man, put the gun down. You know us!”

“Tell me how you got here.” He cocked the gun with a cold snick of metal.

“You’re crazy,” the boy said flatly. “Yo, Joanne, a little help?”

“Jo,” Lewis said, with an unsettling amount of calm, “he’s right, I do you need your help. I need you to move two steps to your left so that when I shoot these two you don’t slow down my bullets.”

I just stared at him, stunned. There was something cold and implacable in his eyes, and I just didn’t get it. These two didn’t look like dangerous desperadoes. The girl was just damn cute . Young, tanned, toned, beach-bunny perfect. If the boy was with her in a romantic sense, he was definitely dating outside of his weight class, because he was greasy, skinny, sullen, and generally unattractive, unless you went in for that sort of heroin-chic bad-boy vibe. Badass, but probably not bad.