Rachel Caine: NYT bestselling author

OASIS
A Weather Warden short story by Rachel Caine

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. You are free to copy and share this work, but you may not sell it or alter its content.

I know I've complained about this before, but believe me, I'm going to complain about it again, so get used to it: Being human sucks. Especially after you've been a Djinn. Granted, being a supernatural creature subject to a whole different set of physics and laws brings with it some significant downsides -- and Lord knows that includes a humiliating episode with a lecherous teenage master and a Frederick's of Hollywood maid outfit -- but it also has some great advantages. You don't get easily tired out, for one thing. You don't need to sleep as much.

And you don't need to stop to pee when you're trying to prevent the latest Apocalypse.

"I've got to stop," I sighed, and checked the sign flashing by on the passenger side of the car for information about what would be available at the next exit. The next exit, it appeared, was four miles ahead, give or take, and would feature a Conoco station and a Dairy Queen. Probably in the same building. On both sides of the freeway, desert blurred past in a continuous loop. I had started feeling some days back like I'd entered a video game designed by a lunatic with a cactus fetish, and I was nowhere near winning, or even cracking the first level. Hell, I was starting to wonder exactly what kind of game I was playing.

My whole body -- human, thanks very much, universe -- was aching with exhaustion and vibrating with road noise. My lovely Dodge Viper wasn't feeling the strain of this drive across the country (New York to Nevada) nearly as much as I was. I needed sleep. I needed food that didn't contain preservatives. I needed ...

Well, I just needed.

"There's a motel at the next exit," David said, from the passenger seat. Speaking of need ... My Djinn lover was comfortably seated with a book in his hands, reading as if he could do this forever. Which he probably could, being supernatural and therefore not subject to the effects of small bladders and large quantities of coffee. I glanced over at him. He wasn't looking at me, he was focused on the pages of the paperback he was holding -- ah, another Robert B. Parker, he was on a Spenser kick -- but I could sense his attention straying toward me. Behind the innocent round glasses, those dark-brown eyes swirled with random whirls of hot bronze. I found myself glancing over to admire the elegant planes of his cheekbones, the fullness of his lips, and it occurred to me that his comment hadn't been all related to an altruistic concern for my wellbeing.

I cleared my throat and reached for the cold coffee in the drink holder. Ugh. It tasted nasty, oily and old. Really, it was about the same as it had tasted when I'd poured it at the last 7-11 we'd visited, but at least then it had been hot. "I'm okay," I said. "I just need a bathroom."

"No, you need to sleep," he said, and turned the page. I didn't recognize the title of the book, I realized. Maybe David was reading a book that hadn't actually been published yet. I wouldn't put it past him. "You won't be any good if you arrive in this condition. There's a battle ahead of us when we get there. You need to rest."

Djinn. Always right, and always smug about it. You'd think it would get annoying, but from David ... not so much.

I drove in silence for another four miles, which was about two minutes at the current speed, and took the exit too fast. Mona whined in protest as I throttled her down. There was a gas station -- with a faded Dairy Queen sign on the side -- and, just beyond it, a deserted-looking place called DESERT INN. Descriptive. The sign also promised CABLE TV and AIR CONDITIONING. The building was laid out in a long L-shape, one story, with about twelve rooms. One dilapidated 1980s-era Cadillac with dark-tinted windows lurked in the last parking space, and the VACANCY sign flickered on and off in red letters in the grimy office window.

I'd never seen anything so beautiful in my life. I could have written poetry to it.

But we were on a timetable, and frankly, sitting in one spot and waiting for someone -- like, say, Kevin the Teen Psycho, now armed with the power of a VIP among Djinn -- to notice that we were an easy target ... didn't sound like a sleep-inducing idea.

No. I just needed food and a bathroom. I could always sleep in the car and get David to drive, if necessary.

David lifted his head from the book and looked at me as I slowed Mona down even more, preparing to turn into the DQ parking area. He didn't say anything, but I knew he was thinking about it. We had a silent argument. I won.

I drove up to the window and ordered a hamburger, fries, and a chocolate shake. David had the same, which made me mildly curious ... Djinn could eat, of course, but normally they don't bother unless they're trying to fit in. But David was a little bit odd, by Djinn standards. He tended to actually like being human, or humanoid, or however you define it.

"What?" he asked me, raising his eyebrows as I stared at him, thinking about it. I shrugged and handed over money to the cashier, who looked like she was probably working in violation of child labor laws. I hoped she wasn't also the cook. At her age, I wouldn't have been able to turn out a halfway decent sandwich, much less actually operate a fry basket.

"Nothing," I said. "Just don't try anything funny."

"Funny?"

"Funny."

Two bags and two shakes later, I drove around to the front of the gas station, hesitated, and then continued through the conveniently cojoined parking lot into the Desert Inn's domain.

David said nothing, but when I parked, he sucked on the straw of his chocolate shake with evident satisfaction. Speaking of that ... I tasted mine, and nearly had an intimate moment with the smooth, creamy taste of chocolate on my tongue. Well, plus the way David's lips fit around that straw.

"Are we going into the restaurant?" he asked, when I didn't put the car in gear.

"I'm thinking," I said. "Maybe I should just, you know, visit the Little Wardens Room and then eat out here in the car ..."

Whatever else I'd been about to say dissolved into white noise as I watched him lick the taste of chocolate shake from his lips.

"You bastard," I said.

"What?"

"Don't do that."

"What?"

He licked the taste of fries from his fingers.

"Dammit, stop it," I said. "I'm not going to fall for that, so you might as well ..."

He took my hand in his and touched it to his lips. His expression was entirely serious now. "Joanne. I can feel how tired you are. You need this, you need sleep and rest. I won't let anything happen to you."

"You can't promise that."

His eyebrows quirked, then settled. "No?"

"No. Not when it comes to, well, you know who." Jonathan.

David said nothing. There was really nothing he could say about that.

"I can keep going," I said. "Really."

Right about then, Mona shivered in the middle of idling, and my heart skipped a beat. When you're in tune with a car, you can feel that kind of thing like a malfunction of your own body. My hands tightened around the steering wheel.

Mona sighed, shuddered, and died. The engine vibration stopped, and for a few seconds there was just the ticking of a cool engine, and the wind blowing random sand against the windows.

"You need to rest," David said, without emphasis. Careful about it.

I cranked the ignition. Nothing happened.

"I mean it," he said. "One night, Jo. One night, you sleep, we continue."

I kept cranking for a solid minute, then stopped and sat back in the leather seat, staring out at the panoramic view.

"I don't like being manipulated," I said.

"I know," David said. "But you're not leaving me much choice. I won't let you kill yourself."

The unspoken again vibrated in the air between us.

I sighed. I didn't want to fight, I didn't have the energy for it. And my food was calling.

"Fine," I said. "One night."

Mona's engine vibrated to life the instant I turned the key. I turned her wheels into the Desert Inn parking lot. My body was already craving a hot shower and a soft bed, now that I'd let the thought sink in.

One night, I promised myself.

Yeah, myself sneered back. Nothing can happen in just one night, right?

Right.

###

The room rate would have been reasonable for, say, a decent Hilton featuring crisp white sheets, turn-down service and complimentary guest robes. It was a little high for a sagging mattress, yellowing bedding, indoor-outdoor carpet, and a bathroom decorated in early Ugh, What The Hell Is That?

Still looked good to me.

David and I sat on either side of the bed; he ate slowly, watching me wolf down my burger and fries with every sign of fascinated amusement. After a while, he disposed of the remains of his meal -- he'd only eaten a couple of bites, just for taste, I suspected -- and took off his long dark-green coat. He tossed it over the back of the unhappy-looking armchair, kicked off his shoes, and stretched out on the bed full length. Ankles crossed.

Reading.

I sucked contemplatively on my milk shake. Yes, I was bone-tired, but still, there were parts of me that really weren't all that tired, and were clamoring for a little attention. My eyes traveled from his naked, slender feet up blue-jean-clad legs and narrow hips. His checked shirt was lying open over a white t-shirt. He turned a page, apparently not noticing my stare. I tossed my DQ bag at the trash can, missed, and got up to throw it in; he made a gesture, and the balled-up paper levitated itself up and gracefully out of sight.

I waited.

He read.

"Well," I finally said, when I'd noisily sucked up the last of the shake, "I think I'm going to take a shower."

He nodded and put an arm under his dark-auburn head without comment.

I got up, turned around, and unbuttoned my blouse. Slowly. Let it slide off over my shoulders. The air conditioning whispered its way over my skin I bent over to slide off my skirt with a lot of unnecessary slow motion and some equally unnecessary wiggling.

I glanced behind me while I was down there, hair dangling to the ground.

David was still reading. Spectacularly not watching my strip tease. Bastard.

I slammed the door behind me on the way into the bathroom, reached in and cranked the water to full blast. It heated up nicely. As steam fogged up the age-spotted mirror, I shed my underwear and stared at my pale face, my blue eyes. I'd always been fair-skinned, but it seemed like coming back to human form had been a real shock. I still looked kind of ill. Not to mention really, really tired. Raccoon-eyes tired.

I twisted to look at my back. Yep, the bullet wound was still there, though reduced to a fading scar. It only twinged a little, thanks to David's healing touch. I was lucky to be ... well, I was just incredibly lucky to be, actually. The odds hadn't been with me for quite some time now.

And here I was, going into something with even worse odds. Am I crazy? The thought wasn't new, but staring into the mirror, it seemed more pertinent than usual. I should just turn the car around. Go home. Find someplace to live out my life in peace and quiet, with a minimum of people shooting at me or blowing me up or trying to kill me with tornadoes.

Because I'd just climbed out of a hospital bed and was heading for Las Vegas, and near-certain death, and nobody was holding a gun to my head to do it. I could punk out. Nobody would blame me.

Except me, of course.

The mirror fogged over again. The steam in the air was making my hair curl, which it never had before I'd done my brief stint as an immortal, all-powerful being, and where's the justice in that? Shouldn't you get a pass on bad hair days after things like that?

I swiped a palm over the glass, clearing a moist path again to continue moping at my reflection, and found that someone was standing right behind me, in the classic surprise! position of serial killers everywhere.

My heart gave a painful, unpleasant twist. I instinctively jerked forward into the bathroom counter, and the man standing behind me gave me a slow, superior smile. Tall, lean, medium-brown hair thickly salted with gray, eyes like black holes.

I knew him. His name was Jonathan, and he was a Djinn. Well, not just a Djinn. More like, the Djinn. Lord and Master. Grand Pookah of the Universe. Et cetera.

He didn't like me very much. I couldn't quite figure out if it was just a personal thing with humans, or a particular thing with me; I suspected the latter, though. He thought David was wasting himself on me. He probably had a point.

"Just thought I'd drop in," he said, in a perfectly normal tone of voice, as if he hadn't noticed he'd committed a huge personal invasion of my space, and hello, naked? I grabbed for a thin motel-quality towel. Not that he was looking. Jonathan seemed to find me downright boring. I didn't even rate a reflexive hmmm, naked girl glance.

"Get out," I said. I kept my voice down, because the last thing I wanted -- the very last thing -- was for David to come charging to my rescue and become the third leg of this triangle. Jonathan could, and had, overpowered him before, and David had to be tired. I sure as hell was.

"I have a message for you. Don't keep this up," Jonathan said, and looked around the bathroom with an expression of disgusted disdain. Like a debutante faced with a Porta-Potti.

"Don't keep what up? Showering? For humans, kind of necessary. Unless you like the funky smell of -- "

"Quit trying to stop Kevin," Jonathan continued, just like I hadn't spoken at all. He was still focusing on the missing piece of tile in the floor next to the tub. "More to the point, quit trying to stop me. You can't get to Las Vegas. Stop trying. I'll only kill you really, really hard."

"I guess that won't bother you," I said.

For the first time, he met my eyes in the mirror. Unsmiling. Those eyes gave me the shivers, because they were like windows into infinity, the only real outward sign of the power he held within. "Yeah, can't deny there are upsides," he said blandly. "Also problems." As in, David might never trust him again. Killing me might destroy every vestige of friendship between them, and for Djinn as powerful as those two, that couldn't be a good thing. "Do the smart thing. Turn around and go home."

"I can't do that. You know I can't," I said. "Look, I'm doing this to help you, don't you get it? I went through being a slave to that kid, I know how terrible it is. Help me get into Vegas, I'll set you free." Because that had to be what he wanted, ultimately. Wasn't it?

But if it was, I couldn't tell it from his expression, which remained closed and tight. "You're feeling sorry for me?" His tone was dry and clipped. "Funny. I was about to feel sorry for you."

All my instincts kicked to life. "Why?"

He raised his graying eyebrows, shrugged, and slipped on a pair of entirely unnecessary sunglasses. Nice sunglasses, mind you, the kind made for cutting the glare for Everest climbers and hard-core black-diamond skiers. But entirely unnecessary, because the dim fly-specked bulb over the sink didn't exactly give out a majestic eye-blinding glare.

"Ah, but that would be telling," Jonathan said. "Do yourself a favor. Go home before you get hurt worse than you have to be." And he vanished. Just like that. I didn't trust him to be gone, either, but there wasn't anything I could do about it if he chose to hang around in invisible form. I made a short circuit of the bathroom, pacing, and finally dumped the towel and got into the shower.

I was halfway through soaping my hair when the hot water ran out. Guess I'd spent too much time staring into space and being intimidated by the most powerful Djinn in the universe.

Being human sucks.

###

When I came out, chilled and breathless, with my hair wrapped in a loose turban and my body wrapped in chill bumps, David was still flat on the bed, reading.

But he let his book fall to his chest and looked at me directly. Maybe it was the chattering teeth. "Cold?" he asked. I tried to nod, but the shivering probably sent a clear yes anyway. He got up and came to me, and put those warm, broad hands on my arms. As he glided them down, fingers dragging on my damp skin, heat bloomed. Water disappeared. By the time he got to my fingertips I was shaking for an entirely different reason, and warm as if I'd spent an hour out sunning myself by the pool.

"Better?" he asked. His voice had a low, rough edge to it, and as he raised his eyes I saw flickers of orange swirling. His hands circled both my wrists, and I felt an impulse in him to pull me closer ... an impulse he resisted. I could feel things like that, thanks to this nifty new master/Djinn bond we'd developed since I'd finally claimed him. Feel the breathtaking, scary strength inside of him, and how very careful he was about its use.

"David -- "

When he looked up, his eyes were shifting colors to bronze, a breathtaking, alien color that sent shivers up and down my spine regardless of the toasty warmth. "I know he was here," he said. "I was ready if he -- " Flares of gold in those eyes. His skin caught fire in a golden flush, entirely Djinn; he controlled it and kept himself flesh and blood and bone. "Jo, I don't know how we do this. He knows we're coming. He's ready. He knows what you can do, what I can do -- and he can beat us. It will hurt him, but he can win. Our one chance was to get in under his notice, but if we can't do that ..."

"It doesn't matter. There are lives at risk. You know Kevin -- do you trust him with the kind of power Jonathan represents? Hell, with any kind of power? I don't. We both saw what he did to his own stepmother." I bit my lip, watching him. He was still holding my wrists, and warmth pulsed up into me from his touch. "David, this may not be safe, but it has to be done. Somehow."

"I know."

"I just --" I was on verge of tears, suddenly. Adrenaline and exhaustion carbonating together in my blood. "God, I just want to rest. I just want to forget."
He let go of my wrists and put his hands on my face, tilting it up, and then he kissed me, and all of the fear and exhaustion melted away. His lips were damp and hot and silken, and he tasted like the chocolate shake and a dark, male undertone that made me moan and suck the taste off his tongue, and God, stopping at a motel? Best idea ever.

He broke it off and studied me with a warm, yearning distance of about an inch between us. "You should rest." His breath moved over me like his touch. His voice vibrated inside me, deep inside. I resonated to his sound, his touch, everything about him.

Rest was just about the farthest thing from my mind. "Later," I promised breathlessly, and swayed toward him. Our lips brushed, lingered, slid away. Teasing. "Maybe I need to relax first," I murmured. Another gentle slide of our lips, not quite a kiss. "Maybe I need to spend a long ... time ... relaxing."

And unspoken, we were both thinking that somewhere out there Jonathan was lurking. Maybe focusing his attention on us. There was no hiding from him.

David's eyes were brilliant, molten copper, and his skin was a hot inhuman gold, and he was beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

"A long time," he whispered, and we were breathing the same intoxicating air, living in each other's space, each other's skin. He was hot enough to melt me. "Yes. I think maybe that's a very good idea."

He picked me up and carried me to the bed, and for a long, long, long time, Jonathan and the crappy motel décor and the world waiting to destroy us beyond the door ceased to matter.

###

I woke up and it was dark and quiet outside, just a low plaintive moan of wind rattling the big windows. I rolled over on my side, instinctively searching for David's warmth -- the night had gotten cold, the way the desert does once the sun disappears -- but he wasn't there.

Wasn't anywhere.

I sat up slowly, listening, but there was no sound in the room except for a low, slow drip of water from the tap in the bathroom. The clock showed me a dim glow that, when I squinted and blinked, read 3:27 a.m.

I got up, found clean underwear and some not-to-badly-wrinkled rolled up blue jeans and a knit shirt in my bag, toed on shoes and walked outside into the still, chill night.

The sky was unbelievable. Clear from horizon to horizon, a black bowl crowded with stars. I stopped, staring, and craned my neck back to get the full effect. Dizzying. I breathed in deep and felt clean, cold air fill my lungs. I wished I was an Earth Warden, because this seemed to be a place where having a connection to the land would be amazing ... even dull as I was to that side of things, I could feel a kind of power here, a slow, strong pulse that made me want to lay down on the ground and let it flow through me.

When I let out my held breath, it came out as white mist. Colder than I'd thought. I shivered a bit and looked around. Except for my Dodge Viper crouched in its space, looking like a wildcat ready to spring, there were only two other cars -- one, a sun-faded Ford pickup with a missing tailgate, was parked at the office, so I figured it was the manager's. The other was the dusty old Cadillac with its coating of road dust, parked in front of the last room in the motel.

As I stood there, wondering where David had taken off to, and why, I heard someone open a door and close it. When I looked over, I saw that someone had come out of the Caddy's room -- a man, medium height, slender, wearing a black knit shirt and black jeans, with a sleek-looking black leather coat over the monochromatic ensemble. He had close-cropped brown hair, military style, and as I watched, he leaned against the cinder-block wall and lit up a cigarette. I realized I was staring when he cocked an eyebrow at me, and went back to studying the sky. The moon was almost full, a big white eye staring back.

"I hope you're not a werewolf," the man said.

I looked at him, startled. His cigarette glowed hot red, then subsided to embers. He blew smoke out into the clear, still air, and it hung indecisively between us.

He made a lazy gesture up at the sky with his free hand. "Moon," he said. "Full."

"Not quite," I said.

"Not quite full, or not quite werewolf?"

I showed teeth. "Either way, I don't eat strangers."

He sucked smoke and considered me silently. I wasn't sure about him. If I'd really been what I appeared to be -- a young woman, alone, in the middle of nowhere in a deserted motel, vulnerable -- then I'd have been deeply worried. But I wasn't, and he was right about one thing: I was a man-eater when I needed to be. Even if David had taken a long walk and wouldn't be around to defend my honor, I was quite capable of doing it myself.

I drifted up into the aetheric, which was just as still and silent as the desert in real-world; it was layered in white and silver and velvet blues, and it was full of that silent pulse, too, that powerful sense of being. But the Man In Black was just a man, not a Djinn, not a Warden. Hence, nothing to be worried about.

Except that his aetheric image was ... unsettling. Most normal humans don't display well on the aetheric -- they're shapes, ill-defined, insubstantial. Not enough presence and power to manifest clearly. But this guy was different. In the aetheric, he was bigger, more muscular, and instead of being dressed in black he was dressed in white. Or, it would have been white, if it hadn't been drenched in blood.

Blood running in thick streams from his hands as he lifted the cigarette to his lips. Pattering from his earlobes to his shoulders. Dripping from his elbows and the hem of his coat. He was standing in a pool of it, shining red, and he just kept dripping. I couldn't tell if the blood was someone else's, or his own -- whether he thought he was a murderer or a victim.

Either way, it was disturbing. I'd never seen anything like it. People saw themselves as supermodels, yeah. Gender-switchers. Knights in armor. Kick-ass bitches in leather jumpsuits. Maybe the occasional pirate. People tended to dress themselves up in their soul-selves, and it was one big, long costume party up on the aetheric.

But he was just ... odd. So full of oddness that it made me shiver.

I dropped back into my body with a snap, took one last deep breath of cool air, and walked away, toward the office.

"Hey," the guy said. I glanced back. He hadn't moved, but he flicked his cigarette down to the ground and crushed it out with his boot. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

I kept walking.

The creaking glass door brought with it a rush of too-hot air and a smell of slightly stale cheap cologne, tobacco, body odor gone just slightly rancid. For a second I wondered if I'd be better off outside with the creepy guy, but the man behind the counter was grizzled, sixtyish, had little half glasses and crazed Albert Einstein hair, and who could be scared of Einstein? He was reading a magazine he hastily stashed under the counter when he saw me coming. I didn't imagine he was reading it for the articles, if you know what I mean.

"Hi," I said. He grunted, pale eyes studying me. "Listen, you're probably an expert on roads around here. I'm looking for some way to get to Las Vegas that's not as direct as the freeways. Maybe a scenic route? Back roads?"

He frowned at me, thick eyebrows rustling together, and I resisted the urge to tell him that if he wasn't careful they might stick together like Velcro; he reached under the counter, rummaged around, and came out with a big road map that he unfolded out onto the cracked vinyl-topped counter between us. He didn't bother to turn it toward me.

"Scenic," he said. "Ain't a lot of scenic around here unless you fancy desert."

"I like desert."

"All looks the same," he shrugged. "Seen one part of it, seen it all. Better off sticking to the highway, get there quicker. You break down out here, you ain't got a lot of help coming. Cell phones don't work a lot of places. Sun gets brutal."

"I know," I said. I knew all about the sun in the desert. That was a memory I didn't call up often, and flinched away from it. "Just show me."

He traced a couple of skinny little road map lines with a blunt, stained finger -- evidently, he worked on the Ford himself to keep it running, and he'd never heard of those industrial-strength grease-cutting soaps -- and I made some notes on a fly-specked piece of paper with a stubby pencil.

The proprietor looked over my shoulder as I wrote, staring out through the glass door. He grunted again. I looked up, then back; Caddy Guy was out there, smoking another cigarette, strolling the parking lot and blowing clouds at the sky.

"Friend of yours?" he asked.

"Don't know him," I said.

"Huh." He looked at me, pale eyes bright behind the Einstein glasses. "Saw you with a young fella earlier. Not him?"

"No, not him."

"Where's your young fella,then?"

"Asleep," I said shortly. "Thanks for the info."

"Checkout's at eleven a.m. sharp," he said, and folded up the map with a snap of his wrists and thick rustle of paper. I was right, those eyebrows were just never separating again. He'd have to get out the scissors to cut them apart. "You oversleep, you got to pay another day."

I wasn't about to oversleep. I could feel my body craving rest, but it'd have to get by; no way was I going to shut my eyes at this point. Not with blood-dripping-guy stalking the parking lot, and Slightly Creepy Einstein in here watching my every move.

I missed David.

I left the office and avoided my fellow motel visitor on my way back to my room. I unlocked the door quickly with the chunky old-fashioned key, locked it behind me with the push-in lock and the deadbolt and the slide chain, checked the drapes to make sure they were fully closed, and sat on the cold, empty bed with my legs crossed.

I drifted up on the aetheric and sent out a wordless call along the shining silver strand that bound me to David, or David to me, or both of us to the other. I felt it zip away, stretching off into the distance ... far, far away.

Wherever he'd gone, it wasn't just distant in terms of geography. I felt a pulse of reassurance along the link, something along the lines of I hear you, back as soon as I can. Nothing clearer than that.

I meditated until my back got sore, and then braced myself against the headboard and picked up the book David had left behind. I'd always liked Spenser, and the clean, crisp rhythm of Parker's words.

Even so, I was only three pages into it when I fell asleep.

###

I woke up to screaming. Genuine, honest-to-God screaming. I flailed, dropping the forgotten book to the floor, vaulted out of bed and landed barefoot on the thin carpet with my heart pounding an erratic salsa rhythm. I jerked aside the curtains and winced at the sudden blinding blaze of light ... the motel faced east, and the sun was well over the horizon. Out here, you were strongly reminded that a star was a big ol' fusion reactor, because it looked dangerous and bubbling and radioactive, closer than it did in safer climates.

The screaming was coming from the Dairy Queen next door.

I stuck my feet into my shoes, grabbed up the key and unlocked the door with shaking hands, then pelted across the parking lot. On the way, I was joined by a dark figure heading out of the last room of the motel -- Number 10 -- who paused to pop the trunk on his Cadillac and retrieve something.

The screaming had the high, panicked pitch of a kid in real trouble. I skidded to a halt at the double doors of the DQ dining area and grabbed the handle, but it was locked. I rattled it and made a cave of my hands to try to see into the shadows inside.

I saw the girl who'd served up my shake pressed against the wall, fists crammed against her mouth. Still screaming. Staring at something hidden behind the counter. I banged on the door hard. Glass and metal rattled. She dashed over and did unlocking things, and as soon as the door was open threw herself on me like a shaking, girl-sized limpet. I couldn't make anything out of what she was gasping at me, so I peeled her off and edged over to peer over the counter.

I'd seen dead guys before, but this guy was really, really dead. In pieces. There was something particularly revolting about a dead guy in pieces on the floor of the DQ, under the brightly-colored posters advertising tasty frozen treats and brazier-cooked meat products.

I swallowed hard, several times, and tried not to breathe through my nose.

"I'm no doctor," the guy in the black leather jacket said casually, leaning over the counter, "but that guy may need medical attention."

Laconic, and not funny. I whirled toward him. He had a shotgun propped casually up against his shoulder, and sunglasses pushed up on top of his head, and he looked bland and utterly disinterested as he stared down at the pieces of what had formerly been known as Bob or Fred or Joe.

"Call the police," I said. I was facing Mystery Man, but I was talking to the girl, who was hovering by the door. She pushed through and sped off at a run, hopefully for the phone in the motel office. "You know anything about this?"

"Why would I?" he asked.

"You come fully equipped for killing people."

"Yeah, not for chopping them into bits, though. And you seem awfully damn calm about it," he pointed out. I wasn't, in fact. My heart was pounding hard, and my hands were shaking, but I knew how to fake it. "Look, I was kidding about that werewolf thing last night, but ..."

"Can it." I could do a lot of things, but quipping over a corpse was a little beyond my gag limit. "Any idea who he is?"

"Not a clue." He studied me for a few seconds. "Let's take this outside. We've already left enough forensic crap on the scene of the crime."

He spun on his heel and walked out, elbowing the door open rather than using his hand. Fingerprints, right. I'd left mine all over it. Out in the sunlight, he looked even more normal than before -- not a remarkable face, dark eyes, intermediate-colored skin, eyes and nose and mouth all in normal proportions. Nothing you'd fall instantly in love with or photograph or remember five minutes later.

Except for the deadly-looking shotgun he was holding, of course. That made him stand out.

He saw me staring at it and dropped the barrel to point toward the ground. "Precaution," he said.

"You always carry that kind of stuff?"

"Pretty much, yeah." He walked back to the Caddy's open trunk and stowed it away in a rack that seemed specifically built for the purpose. Or maybe it was meant to hold fishing rods. How would I know? "What's your name?"

I wasn't planning to get chummy with the potentially crazy and definitely well-armed. "Gail." Gail, as in gale-force winds. I'd have gone for Wendy if it hadn't been so cute and associated with fast food.

"You?"

"Brian McCall," he said. "Pleased to meet you." He slammed the trunk, pocketed the keys, and leaned against the dusty car. "We've got about ten minutes, give or take, to get our story straight."

"Story? I don't have a story. Maybe you have a story."

"Oh, I've got one," he said, poker-faced. "But I'm talking about the story of the dead guy in the DQ. Which, seeing as I don't think the little girl did that, just leaves a few suspects. You, me, the motel manager, or some crazy drifter who happened to break into a Dairy Queen. The motel manager, he's local. They'll like to have a nice easy answer, and you and me, we're easy. Unless you've got an alibi."

I didn't. I swallowed hard.

"Didn't think so," he said, and rolled his shoulders in a gesture that wasn't quite a shrug. "Me neither. I was thinking ... want to be alibi buddies?"

"Not if you did it."

"Lady, if I did it, I'd damn sure be halfway across the state by now and not hanging around for the discovery of the corpse," McCall snapped, and I believed him. He looked like the kind who'd know exactly how to get away with murder. "I thought you checked in with some guy. Where's he?"

"Off on an errand," I said.

McCall fixed me with a stare. "The cops are going to be very interested about why he bugged out in the middle of the night. Not to mention how he bugged out, seeing as you came in the same car and we're in the ass of nowhere."

Lies were going to get too elaborate. I kept silent, staring back, and raised an eyebrow. McCall, unexpectedly, grinned at me.

"I like you," he said. "You don't fluster."

"I'm too damn tired to fluster."

He started to say something, then stopped, face smoothing back into an expressionless mask. His eyes were fixed somewhere just over my shoulder.

"What?" I started to turn.

"Don't move," he said. I froze. "Stay here."

He hit the remote control on his keys and popped the trunk of his car, yanked the shotgun out of its brace, and headed for the office.

Great. My new alibi buddy was about to rob the place. My day was just getting better.

###

I didn't stay put, but hell, I never do what anybody tells me to do, especially armed strangers I barely know. So I trailed along behind Brian McCall as he entered the office. He didn't seem to be wasting any time alarming people; the DQ girl gave a full-throated shriek and made herself into a tiny little ball in the corner, and Einstein held up his hands in the world-weary posture of a guy who'd been through this before.

McCall thumped the shotgun down on the counter and said, "I need the keys."

For a second, nobody moved, and then Einstein cleared his throat loudly and said, "Which keys would that be?"

"Master keys." I couldn't see McCall's face, but what I read of his body language seemed no-nonsense. "Right now. We haven't got much time."

"Should let the police handle this -- "

"I do that, more people get killed. Keys. Now."

Einstein moved one hand slowly toward a ring of keys and then thumped them on the counter. McCall picked them up in a jingle of metal, shouldered the shotgun again, and turned back to see me standing there.

"You're one of those," he said, and walked past me back into the cool, bright morning.

"One of those what?"

"Ones who don't stay put. Here. Make yourself useful." He tossed me the keys. "Open the rooms, one at a time. Stay off to the side when you do it."

He marched me over to Room 1. I slid the key marked 1 in the lock, edged as far over as I could, and turned it. McCall hit the door with his booted foot, and all of a sudden that shotgun was down, aimed and meaning business.

Nothing inside. He scanned it, went in to look at the bathroom, then joined me outside again and nodded at the next room.

Room 2 yielded nothing. I was in Room 3. Rooms 4 and 5, also nothing. I wondered when the cops were going to roll up, and wondered what they would make of us doing room-to-room searches of the armed and dangerous variety.

I was wondering about then when I turned the key to Room 6, McCall hit the door, and something loomed out of the dark inside and hit him back.

He hurtled at least twenty feet across the parking lot, hit, rolled, and lay there limp. I hesitated, shocked, and whipped my head back to stare at the open door of the motel room.

Inside, something large and hulking blinked luminous eyes at me, and I saw the glint of teeth.

And felt a sudden hot gust of wind whip around my legs, swirl up my body, and twist my hair around my face.

It took a step outside into the parking lot, and I had about a half a second to figure out what it was. What it wasn't was easy, because it damn sure wasn't human. It was too big, too twisted, too powerful. I instinctively used Oversight, and damn if I didn't see a great, big red ball of fire, twisting in on itself, full of agony and pain and breathtaking, jagged fury ...

Oh shit.

That was a Djinn. And not just any Djinn. That was a Djinn infected with a Demon Mark. It was destroying itself in the fight, losing itself, and it might be able to win and survive, but meanwhile, it was being eaten alive and the Demon in it wanted to feed ... to ...

I became aware of three things: one, a police cruiser with flashing blue and red lights and a moaning siren was speeding up the road toward the motel; two, McCall was crawling over the pavement behind me; and three, that the body in pieces in the Dairy Queen had probably been a Warden.

And then the Djinn focused on me, and the Demon Mark recognized me as a Warden, and hunger flared in those glowing white-hot eyes. It lunged for me, and I didn't have any time for finesse; I skipped backwards, screaming, and reached out for the wind. If the Djinn wasn't anchoring itself completely, then the wind should disperse it enough to give me some time ...

The wind did nothing but ruffle the rags the Djinn was still barely wearing. She'd been female, at some point, or at least liked to manifest in female form. I slammed a harder gust of wind at her, well aware that I was draining energy out of the atmosphere and something was going to have to create balance for it. Molecules rushed in to fill empty spaces, vibrating faster; temperatures rose from the friction of atom against atom.

But it was too slow. Wind wasn't going to stop this thing, and the weather system was way too stable for me to get anything out of it in time to save my life. No rivers around to redirect ...

Water. Strictly speaking, Djinn didn't need air to breathe; they could adapt themselves just fine. But one thing all cells need, no matter how artificial: they need water just to have form.

I'd never done it before, but it came to me in a blinding and rather scary flash, and I didn't stop to think, I just acted.

I reached out my power into a bubble, surrounded the Djinn, and called every microscopic speck of water out of it.

It was like watching something freeze-dry in time lapse ... between one step and another, the insane Djinn went from huge and bulky and twisted to dry and thin and twisted, a husk of what it had been. It had made itself too real, and reality required human building blocks. Without water, its muscles couldn't function to move. Nerves couldn't conduct impulses.

It let go of flesh and became vapor and flew at me, screaming. I threw up a wall of wind and slammed the vapor back against the cinder-block wall and held it there, pinned. It was strong, oh God it was strong, and it was full of hunger and black fury, and I couldn't keep this up all day. Too many variables, too many witnesses ...

The Djinn snarled and solid or not, proved it was capable of a little weather-manipulation of its own; I sensed the wind coming and braced myself, but didn't dare let up on the Djinn to summon up any kind of shield. It hit me hard and fast, a linebacker of a wind packed with scouring sand, and I was knocked off balance and sprawled full length on the pavement, and the wind kept howling, growing, taking on a life of its own as it swept up sand and random trash into an unsteady broad circle around me.

Trying to form a dust devil. Dust devils are a version of a tornado, one without the killing interaction of moisture and air; they're a dry-air phenomenon, and lack the force to really kill.

Unless, of course, they're powered from an outside force, like the Djinn I was trying to hold helpless against the wall.

I felt my control slipping.

"David!" I yelled, and clawed my hair out of my eyes. "David, I need -- "

But my command was stopped in my throat, rammed back by a monster punch of wind that nearly blew out my lungs. I was pulled off the ground, whirling. I had a great view of the wind dying around the Djinn, and it reforming into flesh and blood, staring up at me and snarling as the dust devil tossed me around like a toy. Heat lightning shimmered across the sky.

The police car, speeding toward us, suddenly left the road and flipped over into the air four or five times, or maybe I lost count because of my own sickening spin ... I saw it in flashes, the metal crunching, bits flying off, the horrible rending shriek of metal.

I had to stop this. Now.

I reached out for the wind, and tried to grab hold, but it was under the Djinn's control and fought me, fought me hard, lashed me bloody with debris and then dropped me with casual, cruel suddenness to the hard ground.

I rolled over, gasping, and saw the Djinn looming over me, and there was something in its mouth, something horrible and I remembered it all too well, the Demon twisting its way into my body and soul ... never again, never again ...

A boom like Armageddon tore the world in half. No, not the world, just the Djinn. It staggered back, a huge hole in its middle, surprise on that twisted face, and I smelled gunpowder and looked up to see Brian McCall standing there with his shotgun smoking in his hands. Pale and scraped, but upright. He pumped it and pulled the trigger a second time.

"You can't kill it!" I screamed at him, and spotted something shiny lying in the weeds growing next to the wall. I lunged for it, praying, and felt the Djinn gathering its insane strength behind me. When it struck, it wasn't going to screw around; it was going to flatten me, McCall, the motel, and everything in sight.

Or it was going to come after one of us and put that Demon Mark down our throats.

Either way, I couldn't let it happen.

There was a brown glass beer bottle half-buried in the weeds. I pulled it out, breathless, shaking, and held it up to the light.

No cracks.

Also, nothing to use for a cork.

No time to worry about it. I felt the hot rush of power behind me, rolled over on my back and held the bottle up in both hands toward the sky and the Djinn, who was falling on me like a storm, and screamed, "Be thou bound to my service! Be thou bound to -- "

It grabbed me by the ankle and yanked. I slid across the parking lot in an abrading scrape of back on asphalt, and somehow managed not to drop the bottle. McCall had his shotgun aimed, but there was no way he could do anything without hitting me as well, and besides, I wasn't sure the Djinn would even pay attention to a little pellet spray, not with a Warden in its hands.

"-- to my service! Be thou --"

It fell on me, driving the breath out of me; it felt exactly like a two-hundred-pound wrestler had dropped with both knees onto my rib cage. I felt things crack, saw red flashing stars, and felt a jet of agony spray through me like acid. My third repetition dissolved into an inarticulate scream, and I felt the Djinn's hand -- or whatever passed for it -- scrabbling at my mouth, trying to hold it wide open ...

Something yanked it off.

I blinked, whooping in painful gasps, and saw that another Djinn was materializing behind the insane one -- bronze and gold, swirls of power, hot molten eyes, fury ...

David.

He put his forearm across the other Djinn's throat and yanked it upright and screamed at me, "Finish it!"

I could barely get my breath, but I forced enough in and whispered, " -- bound to my service," and the Demon-infected Djinn dissolved in an explosion of mist, and I felt the bottle in my hand grow instantly cold and heavy. I slapped my hand over the top of the bottle.

"Cork," I whispered, but David didn't respond. He couldn't. Those were the rules ... he couldn't provide anything to do with bottles or corks, couldn't touch his own bottle or those of other Djinn. "Shit. Forgot."

He knelt next to me, holding me up, combing hair away from my face. Frantic. I didn't have time for that, not now, I was too aware of the bottle I was holding, the energy contained by nothing more than my hand, and the darkness unraveling the edges of my vision. I was going to pass out. If I did, my hand would fall off of the bottle, and ...

I looked up into the sky and called rain. It took a few minutes to get what little moisture there was in the area crammed together, and rub the molecules together enough to produce the energy necessary. McCall, who hadn't moved from where he was standing, shotgun still at half-mast, stared at me without any understanding of what I was doing, but when a lightning bolt suddenly whipped out of the clouds forming above he ducked for cover.

Rain fell in a hard silver curtain, brutally fast, hitting my exposed skin in cold slaps. I didn't care. The chill and pain anchored me, kept me awake. I blinked away water and looked at David. Water didn't touch him, just vanished into tiny wisps of steam a few inches from his body. He was staring at me with an intent half-frown, and when the ground was wet enough, I smiled and turned the bottle upside down, removed my hand and dug it into the mud. Screwed it in tight.

Mud squeezed into the mouth of the bottle three inches deep. I let go of the rain and bled the energy off into sheet lightning, white flares across the sky. Static electricity crawled power lines and hummed, but the rain stopped. Clouds swirled, confused, and the sun burned through in a matter of minutes.

Only the sun was eternal, out here.

I didn't have power over that, but I did over the water; I concentrated on the bottle and yanked the moisture out of the mud packing the mouth and neck of it, jamming it tight as concrete.

And then I remembered to breathe. Ow. It hurt.

David got me up to my feet, mainly by supernatural strength. "Tell me to heal you," he said.

"Yeah, good idea. Heal me, would you?"

I felt it come over me in a hot golden rush, the feeling of his power moving through me -- or my own power, amplified and changed through him. Given form. The grating agony of ribs went away with sharp little glasslike stabs as bones knitted. I coughed and spat blood, wiped my mouth and looked at the innocent-seeming bottle in my hand. Sealed, it felt like any other bottle half-full of dry mud. I could toss it at the side of the road and nobody would pay any attention.

But something like this shouldn't ever be broken again.

I shook my head and focused on David. He looked -- well, like David. With just an unsettling, unfamiliar trace of exhaustion in his face, and a shadow in his eyes.

"Where were you?" I asked. He shook his head. "No bullshit, David. Where were you? Where were you?"

Rule of three. His eyes flared for a second, and then he said, "Talking to Jonathan. Trying to -- trying to find a way for this to work."

"Any luck with that?"

I already knew the answer, from the frustration I could feel radiating off of him. "No."

I nodded wearily, and looked past him at Brian McCall, who'd evidently decided not to shoot us.

"What," McCall asked in a very reasonable voice, "the fuck was that?"

I looked at David. David looked at me, raised his eyebrows and shrugged.

"That," I answered, "was a Djinn. So's this. And trust me, you're not going to want to talk about any of it."

###

It took a little bit of time. I'm not an Earth Warden; altering memories isn't all that easy, even for Djinn, and it sure wasn't in my normal skill set. David fetched a second wrecked car (and that nearly wiped out what power reserves I had left) and we arranged the poor dead guy from the Dairy Queen in the wreckage, then woke up the cop from the police cruiser, who'd fortunately benefited from the presence of airbags and seat belts. I patiently, fraudulently explained the accident. Luckily, the girl had been too panicked to give anything like a rational explanation on the phone, and with the DQ sparkly-clean and nobody backing her hysterical story of finding him dead inside, the cop went with the obvious.

I might have helped that along a little by depleting the oxygen around her and letting her hyperventilate and pass out in the middle of her story.

McCall didn't say a thing to contradict me. His shotgun back in the trunk, he was the picture of innocence, his scrapes and bruises explained by his efforts to get inside the wreckage and save the dead man.

Once the excitement was over, we watched the wrecker clear everything away, and I said to McCall, "We need to talk."

"Figured that," he said. "You going to do some voodoo on me?"

I turned to face him. The sun was up and in full fury now; sweat stung my eyes, and I reached up to tie my hair back with a rubber band from the pocket of my jeans. Possibly in deference to the fact that David was standing next to me, looking human but entirely dangerous, McCall didn't lower his stare to my breasts while I did that.

"Why did you come here?" I asked. "You were tracking it, right?"

He shrugged. "Nobody believed me. Series of mutilations through the Southwest, heading this way -- I thought it was some kind of werewolf, actually. Never thought it'd be -- what was it?"

"A Djinn."

"Right. Always thought of those as being cute, dressed in pink and purple ..."

"Too much television," I said. "How long has this been happening?"

"I tracked it from Michigan," he said.

"Show me on a map."

He traced the roads we'd taken. Dammit. This thing had followed me. If it had just been heading for the same destination, it could have easily beaten us there. It had been stalking me, and I'd finally allowed it to close in.

When I looked up, he was staring at me with nothing at all in his face or his eyes. "It killed a friend of mine," he said. "I watched her die, and I couldn't stop it. It tore her apart right in front of me."

"I'm -- I'm sorry."

He ignored that. "Is it dead?"

I exchanged a look with David. "Not -- dead exactly. But confined. It's not getting out."

"I want it dead, not confined."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"No, you don't know. I want it dead, do you understand? I want its guts strewn over half the county. I want its fucking head on a pike!" The sudden burst of fury out of him was unexpected and shocking, because he did such a good job of hiding it behind that casual toughness. I swallowed, but didn't flinch. He balled up his fists at his sides and took a step into my space. "Now you let it out of whatever prison it's in and give it to me. I'll -- "

"You'll end up dead," David said flatly. He hadn't moved, but there was a sense that he had, that he'd gotten larger, somehow. "Guts strewn over half the county. And it wouldn't bother to stop and put your head on a pike, because you wouldn't matter enough. People don't matter. They're only vessels, or meat. What's in that bottle is insane, and it's powerful, and it's far out of your ability to destroy." His eyes went dark. "Now you need to take a step back, because I promise you, I'm not going to let you touch her."

McCall said nothing. His eyes burned, but they were just human eyes, after all. He didn't strike me as the type to step off from a fight, but this time, he did. He must have had the sense to know that David wasn't kidding.

I cleared my throat. "Look, McCall -- you have to trust me. I'm not letting this thing go, all right? But you have to do something for me. You have to stay quiet about it."

He pulled his stare from David to lock it on me. There was a bleak fury in him, but a bleak humor, too. "Fuck. I look like the chatty type to you?" he asked, and jammed his hands in his pockets. "In my line of work, keeping your mouth shut is a condition of continued breathing." He shook his head and walked away.

I watched as he got into the dusty Cadillac and drove it off the lot. No good-bye wave. Not even a glance back.

When I turned back to David and took his hand, I caught sight of the proprietor of the Desert Inn standing in his doorway, watching us. Amazing. He hadn't bothered to come out for the excitement, but now he was watching.

He tapped his watch. "Eleven thirty," he yelled. "You owe me for another day."

I blinked. "What about him?" I gestured at McCall's Cadillac as it crested the hill and disappeared into the vastness of the desert.

"What about him? That bastard's dangerous, I ain't asking him for money. You, you got to pay another seventy dollars. Plus damages for all those doors you broke in."

Some days, being heroic really doesn't pay.

###

We negotiated it down to an even hundred, and got Mona back out on the road in half an hour. Heading for Las Vegas. Since the motel owner was ripping me off anyway, I'd borrowed a couple of pillows, and they were tightly tied around the beer bottle. As soon as I had a chance, I'd hand it over to a Warden, who could get it back to New York to put into the vault.

David was characteristically silent as I drove, the sun flickering over his skin and hair. He wasn't reading. He was watching the landscape slide by outside the window. Sand, cactus, more sand. Not a lot to see.

"We're not going to make it," he said softly, after a while.

I hoped like hell he was talking about Las Vegas.

"We will," I said, and held out my hand.

He took it, and the warmth of it made me smile and settle deeper into the comfortable seat, and urge another few miles an hour out of the Dodge Viper.

We were on our way to a fight I couldn't begin to imagine, but dammit, we had each other, and that was, for the moment, enough.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. You are free to copy and share this work, but you may not sell it or alter its content.

NO LOVE LOST
A Weather Warden short story by Rachel Caine

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. You are free to copy and share this work, but you may not sell it or alter its content.

She was made of light, and silk, and he could not stop touching her. Fingertips traveling over the delicate arch of her collarbone, as fine as a bird's wing. Skimming over the curve of her shoulder to trace the long, elegant line of her arm.

She stopped. She stopped for me. It was an odd source of wonder to him. She could have waved him aside and pulled her car back on the road. She could have simply asked if he was all right, and left him in her dust once she was sure he wasn't hurt.

But she'd asked him, Need a ride?, and he had made a choice. The kind of choice that altered the course of his life, of hers, of everything they would ever touch.

He had chosen to love. She wouldn't know it yet -- and maybe she would never know it -- but what he had done was irrevocable. Possibly even unforgivable.

She murmured in her sleep, arching into his warmth. She'd intended some great sexual adventure out of this -- for her, it had been wildly daring, to pick up a stranger on the road and end up at a motel with him. An insane level of trust that fascinated him. He could see her past, see that she was a sexual creature, but not ... not so reckless. Never so reckless in her life.

It was the fear that had made her reach out for him. The truth was, she was so soul-deep frightened of what lay ahead of her on the road that he'd felt the ache of it rising off of her skin, and he was not yet such a heartless bastard that he could ignore that kind of pain.

So he'd trailed his fingers over her body, spreading warmth and peace, and she had relaxed in his arms. Asleep, and breathtakingly trusting.

David, having granted oblivion to her, stayed awake. Djinn could sleep -- needed to sleep, sometimes -- but there was something so undefended about her that he felt compelled to watch. The normally active face was so still, so peaceful. Her lips were slightly parted, and her dark hair had slipped forward across one smooth cheek. He let his eyes travel down the elegant column of her throat to the arch of her shoulder. He lingered over his appraisal, moving the sheet in slow increments to bare more of her lovely matte-tan skin. He supposed it was intrusive, but he wanted -- needed -- to burn her into his memory, perfect in this moment. Joanne burrowed closer to him in slow dreaming movements. He placed a light, warm kiss on her shoulder, and as he did, he felt the unmistakable twinge of another Djinn seeking his attention.

No, he replied. The tug came again, very strongly. No, I said. Go away.

This time it was painful, a yank as if a piece of him had been torn away. Careful not to wake Joanne, he got up and walked into the motel bathroom.

He shut the door and put his back against it, and said, "I don't like to be summoned."

His visitor was sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, looking disdainfully around; she tilted her head up to consider him, cornrows of beads clacking. Rahel was blindingly bright against the plain white tiles -- neon-green, today -- and she raised her eyebrows and nodded at what he was wearing.

Which was nothing. Without comment, he formed clothing: a pair of blue jeans and an open flannel shirt.

She barely paused. "Why do you do this?"

"Why is what I do any of your business, Rahel?"

"You had your freedom. You had the chance to break free of these humans and take your rightful place, and instead I find you here, mating with that ... creature."

"Ah. You see, that's what happens when you don't spy on the entire proceedings -- I haven't mated with her, I've only slept with her, which despite all the popular misconceptions doesn't have to include sex. Now, is that all? Because I'd like to go back to bed. There might be sex later."

"You risk being claimed again, and for what? Satisfying your lust for human touch?" Rahel flashed across the room, inhumanly fast, and pressed against him. Her clothes melted away, and he had to admit, Rahel, in naked female form, was as lovely and desirable as any he'd ever seen. "I can see to that."

She put her arms around his neck and kissed him, slow and warm. She banished his clothes again with a pulse of will. He allowed it. Allowed her to play out the moment to its logical end, when she pushed away and smiled at him, licking her damp lips. He deliberately scanned her, from her strong fine shoulders to the firm dark-chocolate slopes of her breasts, and then continuing. A tight waist, flaring to hourglass hips. Long, beautiful legs.

"You see? You can slake that lust with me. Flesh is easy."

He pulled his gaze up from contemplating her perfect, high-arched feet. "Is it? Your best efforts aren't having much of an effect, from a strictly hydraulic standpoint."

She looked temporarily amazed, and then laughed. "As if you don't control every aspect of your flesh. But I have not tried. Shall I?"

"Enough, Rahel." He pushed her off, and formed his clothes again. "This isn't about lust."

"I can feel it coiling off of you, dear one. Don't lie, it doesn't become you."

"This is about love, and that's something you know nothing about."

"Ahhhhhhhhhhh." Rahel dragged it out into a low rumble in her throat, and moved back to perch on the closed toilet seat. Instead of clothes, she formed a soft gold robe that fell away from her knees to drape and frame her bare legs. "Yes, you are the expert in human love, all of us agree. So many human lovers. Does she know? Can she even guess how old you are? Or what you've seen and done?"

"No."

"You can amuse yourself with the lower creatures as you choose, David, but playtime must end. Jonathan summoned you, and you did not answer. That is not acceptable."

He shrugged. "If Jonathan's so angry, he ought to come himself."

"You were summoned."

David gestured around -- at the bathroom, the motel, the situation. "And yet ... I'm still here. If Jonathan wants me, he can come and get me. Otherwise, I'll thank you to tell him, once again, to get the hell out of my life."

"Ages have gone by since your stupid quarrel. Can't you let it go?"

"I have. He hasn't. I'm not going to see him until I get some assurance he's not going to hold a grudge."

She studied him with a puzzled frown. "Do you not understand that he needs you?"

David shook his head, and remembered so many things, so many places. "I haven't turned my back on him, and I never will, but I'm not like him. I can't shut myself up in a bubble."

"No indeed. Instead, you wallow in mud," she said. "Foul yourself with rotting flesh. This woman is nothing. A billion souls like her people overcrowd this earth, and billions more went before her. There is nothing special in her, except you imagine it to be so."

"No," he said softly, and his eyes met her burning golden gaze. He saw her falter. "She is unique. And if you ever use that tone when you talk to me again, Rahel, you'll regret it for eternity. You know I mean it."

Silence. The water in the sink dripped a slow, crystal rhythm. Neither of them breathed, or needed to.

Rahel's lips slid into a wide, wicked smile. "Behold, the great lover. Don't be a fool, David. This will last some brief time. A week, a year, a human lifetime. And then you will be with us again, and you don't want to burn your boats like that fool at Troy, do you?"

"I might," he said. "This time, I just might."

She watched him with a wary light in her golden eyes, as if he had done something unexpected. Something new. He supposed that after so many years of acquaintance between them, that was enough to merit a pause.

When she spoke again, she chose her words and her tone more carefully. "I -- know that you fall in love easily, David. In a Djinn, that is a terrible flaw." Rahel, he realized, wasn't trying to be catty-cruel; she was simply speaking the truth as she saw it. "You must not do this. Not now. Not with her."

"Yes. Now. With her."

"Can you not see that she carries the Mark?"

"Of course I know. I helped infect her, and then she helped free me. I can promise you, I'm not going into this blind, or stupid, or any of the things you assume."

"I see. And what would you have me tell Jonathan?"

"Tell Jonathan -- tell him that I can't come back. It isn't time."

She took in a breath, let it out, and slowly nodded. She stood up, adjusting the folds of the robe with sweeps of her hands, and it flowed into a long-jacketed suit of brilliant yellow. She blew on her fingernails, and they bloomed with the same luminous color.

"I will tell him," she said. "He won't be happy."

"Then he can come here and tell me himself."

She cocked her head to the side, looking at him. "Oh, my dear one. You don't want that."

He took her hands in his, and kissed them with formal grace. "I do," he said. "And deep down, I think you do, too. It's time somebody kicked his ass out of its complacency."

She laughed and patted his cheek, not gently. Tiger play. On a human, it would have left marks.

"I hope she enjoys what you offer," she said. "Someday, perhaps you will offer it to me."

She turned, and walked into the wall. Showy, and unnecessarily complicated for an exit, but Rahel did like to leave an impression. David sighed and leaned against the bathroom door, eyes closed. Memories racing too fast to catch, thousands of years of experiences and regrets and triumphs and tragedies. No love lost between them. He'd always found that a very curious expression. Love was always lost, eventually. Rahel was right about that.

He felt the tug of Jonathan's impatience again. "No," he said, out loud. "Not this time."

This time, he would prove them all wrong.

No love lost, after all.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. You are free to copy and share this work, but you may not sell it or alter its content.

MIDNIGHT AT MART'S
A Weather Warden short story by Rachel Caine

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. You are free to copy and share this work, but you may not sell it or alter its content.


Quitting the Wardens sounded like a really, really good idea at the time. I mean, there's nothing like going out in a blaze of glory with a great exit line, kicking sand in the bully's face, all that stuff. And it did feel good, when I told my bosses to stuff it, and exited stage left with my dignity intact.

Besides, I wasn't exactly losing on the deal, thanks to Rahel's parting gift of cash and newly-minted (and hopefully valid) credit cards. I was feeling like the star of my own slightly over-the-top action film as I burned rubber out of the hotel parking lot and onto the endless desert road.

That feeling wore off after thirty minutes of monotonous travel. After that, I was just feeling tired, achy from all my assorted abuse of the past few days and weeks, and ... lonely.

I couldn't decide whether I loved the desert, or hated it. Bit of both, I supposed. There was something eerie and remote about the vast stretches of land; it seemed so unapproachable, and so empty. Hostile. But when the sun touched it just right, layered it in velvet and gold, it was like a goddess had opened her jewelry box. The sky was a bright, brilliant turquoise, with a glittering diamond sun. The road gleamed like onyx.

I kept the Viper's air conditioning on high. Experiencing the beauties of nature is one thing. Sweating through it is something I like to leave to sturdier people ... say, some who haven't been killed a few times, beaten up, and nearly drowned. I deserved a little peace and comfort, right? I did. I was convinced of that. In fact, I got myself good and worked up about how much I deserved not to be tossed in the center of the crossfire again.

I was so convinced that when I felt the air shift around me in patterns not associated with the air conditioner, and sensed a presence forming in the passenger seat next to me, I felt a flash of utter fury. Enough, already. I'm done. "Get lost," I said flatly to whatever Djinn was about to pay me a visit. It wouldn't be David, and he was the only one I wanted to spend time with at the moment.

Sure enough, it was Rahel. The tall, elegant Djinn looked over at me as she manifested herself, and I returned the favor just for a second. She looked great, as always. Gorgeous, smoothly groomed, dressed in a lime sherbet color that was something of a change from her usual neon shades but still startling against her dark chocolate skin. Eyes of a haunting shade of gold. She'd done something new with her hair. Still in cornrows, but there were more beads woven in, shades of greens and golds and blues. Vaguely Egyptian.

"Is that any way to greet someone who saved your life?" she asked. And yes, she had. More than once, technically. But I wasn't feeling all that fair at the moment.

"Sure, when they just drop uninvited into a moving car. Seriously. Whatever chain you want to yank, yank it and go. I'm done with the drama."

I pressed additional speed out of the Viper. When I'm pissed, I drive aggressively. Yeah, like you don't. Please.

"I need something from you," Rahel said soberly. "A boon."

Wait a minute. Wait just a damn minute. The Djinn didn't ask for favors. They granted them. Grudgingly, sure, but in accordance with an agreement laid down in the mists of time and space. Their view was that mortals basically had nothing they wanted, so ... a favor? Weird.

I thought about it for several seconds, eyes fixed on the road. My shoulders were hurting. I deliberately relaxed them, or at least tried to; apparently while I'd been thinking of other things, my muscles had been replaced with metal guy wires, strung at maximum tension.

"What kind of favor?" I asked.

"Return to the Wardens."

I blinked. Surely I hadn't heard her right. "Why?"

Rahel drummed her sharp-nailed talons on the window glass next to her -- dry, clicking sounds that tightened those guy wires just another ratchet. "They have need of you."

"Oh, please. If you weren't Free Djinn, I'd swear some Warden had put you up to this, but ..." One had. Crap. "Lewis sent you."

The steady percussive rhythm of her tapping continued, as annoying as fingernails scraping paint.

"No," I said. "I'm not going back. Not for Lewis. Not for anybody. I'm done, Rahel, and you can tell him that for me. I'm not putting up with the bullshit, I'm not playing politics, and I'm not going to make compromises and tell myself it's for a just cause. I'm no longer Warden material."

Rahel's eyes narrowed. Burning. "I am asking as a favor, sistah. Understand me. This is not something I do lightly."

"Or ever, I'm guessing," I said. "Respect, babe, but I'm not doing it. Not for you. Not even for Lewis. I got their asses out of a sling, and that's all I'm good for. Just let me rest."

She laughed. It was a thick, velvety laugh, dark with possibilities. It raised the fine hairs on my arms. If tigers could laugh ... "Dead men rest very well."

I hit the brakes. The Viper's tires grabbed, screamed, slid and fishtailed. Even before the car had come to a complete stop, I turned to face her. I was feeling an overburn of fury, and I'm pretty sure she read it in my expression. Or aura, at least. "Don't you dare threaten me," I said, low and certain. "You're a Djinn, sure, but you're not claimed, and I'm a well-trained Warden at the top of my game. Maybe both of us get hurt. I don't care."

Her face went utterly still. With the Egyptian-style beading in her hair, it gave her an eerie look, like Tutankhamen's gorgeous funeral mask.

"You presume," she said. "Crawling mortals do not threaten the Djinn. You should know better."

"I'm tired of pussy-footing around your ego. You have a problem with it? Leave!" I roared it at her. It occurred to me, in that red-tinged moment, that I was doing something really stupid, but I'd had enough crap, and I was being human. Unreasonable. Taking out my wounded, scared feelings on the first likely target.

Well, at least she was up to it.

Rahel regarded me with bright-swirling eyes, as incandescent as the sun above, and I was coldly reminded of the kinds of powers the Djinn could touch, if they chose. Of the vastness of their history, and the fragile bonds that constituted Djinn civilization, at least as it related to humans.

"I will go," she said. "But you should have been more mannered, Snow White. Remember that when you find yourself ... lacking."

And she was gone. She went without fanfare or warning, another shift of air and a slight popping sound, like what you get when you twist the lid on a sealed jar.

I was shaking all over. Hysteria, fury, fear ... shame. Why had I yelled at Rahel? I thought I'd been at the top of the world, when I'd pulled away from the motel, and yet here I was, less than an hour out of town, throwing the most dangerous sort of tantrum. Lashing out.

Humans are weird like that. I had no excuse.

I breathed in and out for a while, then wiped sweat from my forehead, turned up the air conditioner, and put the Viper back in gear.

###

I didn't think she meant it literally, about finding myself lacking.

Rahel's revenge for my fit of temper became blindingly, stupidly apparent when I stopped at Mart's Texaco in Pine Springs, Arizona, because when I opened my wallet, it was empty. All the new credit cards: gone. All the cash she'd granted me earlier: missing. She'd been scrupulously fair about it. I still had what I'd had before her contributions.

Well, that was okay. I didn't need Djinn charity, I told myself self-righteously, and proffered my Warden-issued American Express card to pay for the gas.

It was dead as the proverbial doorknob. Figures. The Wardens hadn't let any grass grow in cutting me off the payroll.

It ain't cheap to gas up a Viper in this day and age. And I had exactly twenty-nine dollars and forty-two cents in my purse -- not enough to pay for the gas, much less the soda and pretzels I was craving. You know that feeling, right? That cold, sinking feeling. The freezer-burn of panic setting in when you semi-calmly check all the pockets and nooks and crannies and come up with an additional penny and a half a mint.

I was the only customer in the place at the moment, which was a relief; at least I didn't have some poor sucker standing behind me, shuffling his feet and sighing over my stupidity. No, I only had the cashier, a middle-aged balding man resplendent in his red canvas vest and nametag that said he was ED. He stared at me over the plastic jar of made-in-China American flags.

"Um ..." He was going to make me say it. He was just going to stand there and wait for it. Probably the most excitement he'd seen in days around here, unless somebody had driven off with the nozzle still in their gas tank. I took in a deep breath and felt my cheeks getting hot. "I'm sorry. I'm a few dollars short."

Nothing. Not even a blink. I got a blank, blue-eyed stare that lasted about an eternity, and then Ed abruptly said, "Seven dollars and twenty-six cents."

Oh, this wasn't going to be easy. "Yes, I know. I'm sorry, I just -- well, I don't have it. So ...?" I tried a smile. That got me nowhere. Without a change of expression, Ed picked up the phone next to him on the counter, punched buttons, and said, "Hello, Sheriff's Office? Oh, hey, Harry, how you doing? Yeah, it's Ed. ... Fine, fine. Listen, I got me a girl here who's trying to drive off without paying -- "

"What?" I yelped, and made wild no motions. "I'm not! Honest! Look, I'm paying! Paying!" Because the last thing I needed was to get rousted by the local police without the invisible might of the Wardens backing me up. Damn, Rahel was sneaky. She hadn't needed to risk breaking a nail in an undignified scuffle with me. All she had to do was step back.

I must have looked pitiful indeed, because Ed hesitated, sighed, said, "Never mind, Harry," and hung up the phone. He leaned on the counter -- a fiftyish guy, lean and sinewy, the kind who deals with truckers and assholes on a regular basis and isn't impressed by a bad mo-fo attitude (or, I was guessing, anything less than a rocket launcher). Tattoos in blurred patterns all up his forearms, crawling into the hidden territory under his short-sleeved shirt. Balding. He stared at me with those cold, empty eyes. "So?"

I did another frantic purse strip-search, which involved taking each and every thing out and laying it on the counter. Except for David's bottle, which was securely sealed and wrapped tight. If he wanted that, he could pry it out of my cold, dead fingers ...

I came up with a battered, faded ten dollar bill stuck in a hole in the lining. It looked as if it might have come out the wrong end of the dog that chewed it. Ugh. I handed it over and took advantage of the mini bottle of hand sanitizer before I repacked my purse. Ed, with no visible change of expression, rang up the sale and handed back my change as I got myself together again. The crisis over, I was feeling hot and fluttery, and falsely relieved. Having come up with the money didn't exactly mean I was out of trouble. I had two dollars and change on which to drive to Florida in a car that drank gas like an alcoholic at open bar. I didn't want to end up holding a cardboard sign that said WILL (verb) FOR FOOD.

Ed kept staring at me. I couldn't detect any warmth in it at all. I finished repacking my purse, gathered up my soda and pretzels, and wondered what I had in my possession at the moment that I could hock. Not a hell of a lot. Damn.

"Hey," Ed called, as I headed for the door. I turned to look at him. He jerked his chin toward a sign hanging from the counter. It read, in jerky Magic Marker lines, HELP WANTED.

"Just thought you might want to apply," he said. "Not long-term or anything. Just for a while, to get you down the road."

I blinked. Offering to work off the debt had frankly never occurred to me. Now, that was a sure sign I'd been a Warden for way too long.

"Apply?" I echoed. Man, I sounded dumb. Might have been why he was being so kind, after the equally brainless floor show with the lack of money. "Oh. Um ... I don't have a place to stay." And I'd slept in my car for two weeks on the way to Las Vegas; no way was I going to make it a life choice. I was way too sore, my body far too abused. "Maybe I'd better keep on going."

Smiling transformed him. He was a hard guy, no doubt about it -- those tattoos were probably the least of it -- but there was something sweet and gentle and warm about his smile that made me feel cozy inside. "That car's going to run dry in a couple hundred miles. What are you going to do then? I'm just saying, there's a lot of trouble to be asking. You could stay here a week, eat cheap, sleep on the cot in the back so long as you don't object to twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week."

I gave him a long stare. "How much?"

"Six an hour. That's as much as I can pay. Free soda, though. One free hot dog a day."

I considered. That was seventy-two dollars a day, and if I stayed a week, that would be enough money, hypothetically, to get me back home and cushion me a little. And Ed seemed hard, but he didn't seem scary. Not in that backwoods chain-your-ankle-to-the-bedpost way, anyway. I had the impression that he was honestly trying to do me a good turn.

As I thought about it, his blue eyes wandered back around and fixed somewhere over my shoulder. Staring right through me. "Of course," he said, and the smile was long vanished, "if you want to move along, that's your business. I don't like to get in anybody's business. Maybe you got some other ways to earn money, pretty lady like you."

I took three steps back to the counter, leaned on it, and got his stare straight-on. "Meaning?"

His thin eyebrows levitated. "Nothing."

Yeah, right. "I'm not allergic to honest work!"

"Good thing," he said. "Got a toilet to clean. Second door, can't miss it."

###

He wasn't kidding. The toilet really did need cleaning, in the worst way. The work wasn't so hard, though, and it had been a long time since I'd donned the bright yellow gauntlets and wielded the toilet brush in battle. There was a kind of simple-minded satisfaction when I threw everything in the bucket and looked around at a nice, clean, gleaming bathroom.

I ached like hell, all over, but then again, I'd been aching before. Not a huge problem. And at least this had the feeling of accomplishment to it, instead of that wire-bound nervous tension I'd had before. Physical labor might actually do me some good.

When I came out, sweaty and triumphant, Ed gave me a grudging nod of thanks and tossed me a red vest. It had a hand-lettered nametag on it that said JOANNE.

"You know how to work a register?" he asked. I didn't. He gave me a ten-minute tutorial, punctuated with frowns and shakes of his head, until I could ring up a sale, cancel one, and make change to his satisfaction. We covered emergency cut-off switches, what to do in case of emergencies (like drive-offs, guys with handguns, and teens trying to buy beer and cigarettes).

And then Ed stripped off his red vest, hung it on a hook in the back, and fixed me with the coldest stare I've ever seen. Including anything from a Djinn.

"I'm trusting you," he said. "You run off with the till, you can't run far enough. Get me?"

I got him. I nodded, one quick dip of my chin, and held his stare. "I'm not a thief," I said. Well, that was stretching the truth a bit, but in my heart, I meant it. "I'll take care of things here."

"I'll be back in an hour. You have a problem, my cell phone number's on the note next to the phone. But don't have a problem."

With that, he turned around and banged out of the back fire door, which thunked solidly shut behind him.

I put on my red vest, adjusted it a couple of times, and gave up. Couture, it wasn't. I perched on the wooden backless stool behind the counter and looked around for entertainment. Free sodas, he'd said. I retrieved a cold one from the cooler and drank it with a clear conscience as I flipped through the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly.

As I was wondering what the hell Viggo Mortensen thought he was doing wearing that godawful bolero tuxedo thing, the brass bell jingled at the door, and I looked up with my heart hammering, expecting to see a masked robber. Because that was kind of my luck.

Nope. Just a guy. He sauntered around the store, bought a candy bar, came and paid for gas and food. Nothing special happened, except that he had a nice smile and told me I was easier on the eyes than ol' Ed.

I went back to the magazine afterward.

The rest of the hour went pretty much the same: customers, no emergencies. When Ed returned, he looked just a little surprised to find that I'd inventoried the cash and totted up all of the sales by item in his absence.

Thus ended my first two hours of indentured servitude. It was better, on the whole, than being a Djinn.

###

Twelve hours is a long time, in a convenience store. Especially one like Mart's, which wasn't exactly the crossroads of excitement ... the Entertainment Weekly's charms paled fast. I moved on to Martha Stewart's Living, only because it was within reach. It wasn't too likely, even now that I had free time, that I'd feel moved to make origami swans or match table linens with my curtains.

Before long, I was stir crazy enough to come out from behind the register and start inventory against Ed's meticulous list. So that's where I was, counting Snickers bars, when the brass bell rang over the door, and things took a radical turn for the nasty.

Night had fallen hard and cold outside -- the dry air didn't hold in the day's simmering heat. It was creeping up toward 10 p.m., and I was looking forward to closing up shop and hitting that narrow little cot in the back room at midnight. Ed hadn't taken off like I'd thought he might; maybe he was worried I'd shoplift some Cheerios if he didn't keep an eye on me. Anyway, I didn't resent it. I wouldn't have trusted me, either.

I wrote down the number of Snickers in the box and looked up, a smile on my lips, to see who was coming in the door, but I couldn't really see. He was hidden by the rack of chips (Lay's, mostly). But what I could see was Ed's face, and I felt something clench up inside of me when I saw that blank, iron-hard expression.

I stayed very still. He was focused on the door, but I saw his left hand, the one hidden from whoever was standing there, gently motion me back. I swallowed hard and silently took three steps back, to the end of the row, then crouched down and crawled around the rack. I was now between the picnic supplies and the glass-fronted refrigerated beverage case. There was cold beer next to me. I felt a moment's wistful longing, but I needed to figure out what was happening up front. Ed wasn't my best buddy, but he'd been fair to me ... more than fair. And he'd trusted me.

"Hey, Israel," Ed said. "I wasn't expecting you."

"Why would you?" said a new voice. Soft, whispery, chilling. Like somebody who'd gargled with acid, or gotten clotheslined in a not-so-friendly game of football. "How's business, Ed? Good?"
Ed's voice stayed exactly the same temperature. "Tolerable."

"Doesn't sound all that positive, bro. Free enterprise is supposed to set you free, not make you a slave to the almighty cash register. Or so I hear." The hoarse whisper sounded amused. Not in a good way. I edged cautiously forward, hands and knees, watching out for reflections in the glass. As a precaution, I allowed myself a barely even noticeable violation of the rules, as a non-practicing Warden: I fogged up the glass, just a little, just enough to hide my image. The part that reflected the counter and the door was still perfectly visible.

But there wasn't anybody standing there. So far as I could tell, anyway ... I could see the door, the rack of potato chips, and Ed standing frozen behind the counter.
Of the mysterious Israel, not a sign.

"You buying something?" Ed asked, and deliberately broke his stare to reach for a cloth and wipe down the battered Formica counter. I could sense the effort it took, to be that casual about it. I edged forward again, trying to catch a glimpse around the rack without risking my neck, but again, nothing. Not a sign, not a clue.

"Yeah," Israel said. "Got any candy bars? I've got a sweet tooth these days. Hungry all the time."

Ed paused in his wiping down of the counter, but kept his head down. I could have sworn I saw him flinch, but then he deliberately continued. "Sure. Down that aisle." He nodded at the place I'd been working. I heard the heavy thud of boots, but dammit, there was nothing in the mirror.

Now, I'm a modern girl. I've read Dracula. I've seen Buffy. I'm not totally without a clue. But who in their right mind could possibly expect to run into a vampire at Mart's Texaco in Pine Bluff, Arizona?

I pulled my head back like a scared turtle when I heard the scrape of footsteps on the other side of the food rack. Thin cover. I wasn't sure how much danger I was in, but I knew one thing: Ed wasn't the kind of guy to protect me unless he really believed it was serious. I held my breath and kept the glass fogged all along the bottom of the refrigerated case, just as insurance. That way, if he glanced that way, he wouldn't be treated to the undignified sight of a Weather Warden cowering on the not-too-clean linoleum floor.

Israel fumbled around in the Snickers bars I had so recently counted, and I heard his footsteps ambling back up toward the register. Weren't vampires supposed to be stealthy and quick? Not this guy. He was taking his time, and his footsteps sounded like he'd borrowed the Frankenstein monster's boots.

"Dollar six," Ed said. I risked another look. Love him or hate him, Ed was made of stern stuff; he was staring right at the man who was bellied up against the counter, and holding out his hand. The sale was insignificant, but I had the feeling that Ed was trying to make a point. Maybe if he let Israel take a candy bar, the next thing would be his life.

Israel himself was smaller than I'd have expected, considering the galumphing boots -- maybe five foot five, and either bald or in the habit of shaving his head. He had an elaborate rose tattooed on the shiny mirrorlike finish of his pale -- I mean pale as sour cream -- skin right at the back of his head, and he was clad, head to foot, in black leather. Including gloves. Sharp-looking sunglasses, from what I could see of the side of his face.

I'd never seen anybody that pale, including the melanin-deficient. His skin had a cold gray tone to it, as if it was made of clay. No veins showing underneath. Even the palest albino I'd ever met had a flush of veins showing, and a living tone to that alabaster skin; this was downright wrong.

Israel was staring at Ed. Ed was staring back, hand still extended. After a good, sweaty half a minute, Israel barked a hoarse laugh, reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out two crumpled dollar bills that he dropped in Ed's palm. "Keep the change," Israel said, and smiled. I only saw the edge of it, but that was weird and sinister enough to make me duck my head back again, heart pounding. Could he hear that? God, I hoped not. "And tell your girl I don't eat anybody I haven't been properly introduced to."

I didn't see Ed's face, but I knew my hands were shaking, and I wasn't easy to scare. I pressed them hard into the floor and stood up slowly. No point in hiding, obviously.

I regretted it as soon as my head passed the level of the food rack, because Israel had turned to look right at me. Even with the sunglasses hiding his eyes, I felt the pressure of his stare. His face was smooth and regular as marble. I couldn't say he was handsome, or not; there wasn't any human frame of reference that applied to a face that looked that ... dead.

I could see the trailing leaves of the rose tattoo spilling over around his neck, indigo blue against cold white. His jacket was zipped open, and he was wearing a black t-shirt underneath. A Grateful Dead t-shirt I remembered well, of a skeleton wearing a crown of roses, barely visible through the gap. He was narrowly built, compact, almost frail. I was right about the boots. They looked like they were made of concrete and painted black. Very Goth.

"Hi," I said in the silence. My voice was a little too high, but he probably wouldn't know that. Probably. "Sorry."

He inclined his head just a bit, not really a nod, more like he was zeroing in on the target. His smile came back, but it was fifty percent more charming. He didn't show teeth. "My name's Israel," he said. "And you are?"

"J -- " I choked it off fast, because I remembered what he'd said to Ed. I don't eat anybody I haven't been properly introduced to. "Just passing through."

He laughed. "Your nametag says different."

Crap. My heart contracted to a painful little walnut when he laughed, because the teeth that showed in his mouth didn't look right. Not right at all. Not vampiric, exactly, in the classic Christopher Lee sense, but ...

"Joanne," he nodded, and kept smiling as he purred out my name in that hoarse voice. "Pleased to make your acquaintance." And then he laughed again, lunged forward and formed his pale hands into claws.

And halted a few inches from my face and yelled, "BOO!"

I don't know how I managed it, but I didn't flinch, and I didn't scream. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, he was moving back, clearly disappointed. He shrugged and started to clump away, but then ... he turned back, a slight frown on his face.

"Israel," Ed warned him.

"Shhh." Israel took a step toward me. "Something different about you. Right? Ed, don't you feel it?"

I backed up. My shoulders pressed against glass, and the chill seeped through.

"Not like the rest at all," he said, and reached up to slide his sunglasses down his nose, and oh God ...

Djinn eyes.

No, my second fast assessment told me; not quite, but close enough. They weren't human eyes, that was for damn sure; they were a dull red, the color of murder in mud. And they flared hot when he looked at me without the intervening Ray Bans.

"Israel!" Ed banged up the counter's service hatch and stepped out. He was holding what looked like a gigantic cattle prod, and as I watched, lightning zipped cold blue at the tip. Ah. It was a cattle prod. For really dangerous cattle. "Leave her alone."

"You don't understand, Ed," the vampire said, and took another step toward me. "She knows. She understands what happened to me. I know she does. And she can fix it!"

He lunged forward, and one gloved hand grabbed my throat. Inhumanly strong. I twisted, got free, and ran backwards away from him, just as Ed stabbed him in the back with his portable lightning rod.

Israel went rigid, grimaced, and went down to the accompaniment of fast snapping sounds. He twisted and twitched for a second, then went limp. I stayed where I was, pressed against a corner display of Charmin Bathroom Tissue, and looked mutely over at Ed.

Ed sighed, and said, "Sorry about that. This is my brother, Israel. Help me get him up, will you?"

###

He had a place to put his brother. Well, it was a refrigerated cooler, actually, the walk-in kind, but it was sturdy and he put a lock on the outside once we'd dragged the limp, cold weight inside and slammed the door shut.

"Won't the cold -- " I asked.

"He won't feel it," he interrupted, and scowled as if he hadn't wanted to think about that. "Son of a bitch. I thought he was decently -- "

Dead. I could almost hear it, though Ed didn't come anywhere near the actual word. "What happened?"

Ed stalked past me to the doors, looked outside, and flipped the sign to CLOSED, then locked up. He turned off the sign and most of the lights, leaving just the few in the back. "Car accident. Israel flipped his truck out on a farm-to-market road about four months back." For the first time, I sensed a failure of courage in Ed; he looked away from me and folded his arms across his chest, staring fiercely at the rack of Cheetos. "You eat your hot dog already?"

"Never mind the hot dog," I said. "What happened?"

"He was trapped in the wreck. Don't know if you understand what that's like around here -- sun heats up metal faster than sticking it in a furnace. He must have cooked inside that tangle ..." Ed shook his head, trying to get the image out of his head. Unsuccessfully. "Nobody found him. I started driving around, looking for him. Found the wreck about ten that night."

"He was dead."

Ed blinked and darted me a look. "He look dead to you?"

"Actually ... except for the walking-around part, yes."

Ed didn't answer. He looked off into that long distance again, arms still folded. "Yeah, well, I identified him. Buried him. Next evening, he walks in here filthy and dressed in his suit, the one they put on him at the funeral home. No shoes. No -- " He stopped. His mouth shut with such a hard snap I heard enamel click.

I let out a slow, aching breath. "What did you do?"

"Nothing. I didn't know what the hell to do. Law says he's dead, but he's not, he's ... walking. He talked some, then he left. Next night, he came back. I haven't seen him for a couple of weeks now. I thought -- " Muscles fluttered under the skin as his jaw tightened. "I figured he'd finally died. Or whatever they do. People who come back."

Clearly, Ed wasn't a fan of vampire fiction. "I don't think they just ... roll over and do that."

He lowered his chin. Didn't answer directly. Or maybe he did, I realized, as I listened. "I asked him what he remembered. I was thinking -- hell, you know what I was thinking." Yeah, I knew. Some suave European guy in a cape, fangs, scary music. "He said he was dying, bleeding out in the truck, and he started seeing ... fairies."

"Fairies?" I said. "You're kidding me!"

"Wish I was. Fairies. Little Tinkerbelle lights. Blue. He said they swarmed all over him. I figure it was some kind of hallucination. He says -- he woke up the next night and came up right out of the ground. Right out of the ground."

Oh, fuck.

Little blue sparklies.

Israel was entirely right after all. I did understand what had happened to him. Not the mechanics, not the how and why, but the basic mechanisms at play. But ... the little blue sparklies were gone, right? Banished back to their own Demon dimension when Patrick and Sara, my Djinn benefactors, had sacrificed themselves to seal up the rift that was tearing our universe apart.

Maybe they were gone, but they'd left ... wreckage. Israel was something they'd tried to use, probably out of desperation. The Demon Marks invaded Wardens; maybe this was what happened when one invaded a regular human and couldn't find the power needed to twist itself into a full-grown menace. Maybe it sapped life and kept the body moving, hoping to find another shell in which to grow.

I felt a need to sit down.

"You okay?" Ed asked, as I plopped my butt down on the nearest uncomfortable stool and bent over to put my head in my hands.

"I'm fine."

"Yeah, me too," he said. "He seemed to think you could fix what's going on with him. Can you? Do you know?"

"I don't know." I wasn't really sure what Israel was. Maybe he wasn't a vampire. Maybe he didn't kill people. Maybe he was just scary as hell, and was a walking corpse.

But everything that walked the earth consumed something ... and chances were that he wasn't going to live on sunlight and happy Tinkerbelle thoughts.

"He's probably dangerous," I said. "And he's not going away, is he?"

Ed sighed and shook his head. "I thought he would. Guess he's going to stick around."

"Ed. You can't just let him ..."

"I know," he said, and ran his hands over his balding head. It was the same elegant shape as his brother's, minus the rose tattoo, plus a minor fringe of hair. "But I can't just kill him, either. I'm family."

I had a sister. I hadn't thought of her for a while, but suddenly I thought about what I'd do, if Sarah came shambling up to me a day after her own funeral, white and ghost-ridden. God. I'd be utterly unable to live with it, or myself. Unable to act.

That was the hell Ed was in, and would continue to be in, and it was my fault. I needed to do something, but I had no idea what. I was hungry, I was tired, I was scared, and I was badly wishing -- as Rahel no doubt had intended -- that I'd cheerfully complied with her request and not landed myself in this situation to begin with.

Hungry. As if the idea had triggered it, my stomach loudly rumbled.

I looked up, embarrassed, but Ed was already reaching out to scoop a rolling hot dog from the rack and fold it into a soft white bun. "Knock yourself out."

I chewed nitrates and sulfates, mixed in with some meat and carbs. Added some relish and mustard. It was the best hot dog I'd ever eaten, and it smelled heavenly; I devoured it in about three bites. Ed forked over another one. I mumbled a thanks around another bite.

"I'll deduct it," he said. "Now. Let's talk about you fixing my brother."

###

What killed vampires? I contemplated it in silence, laying on my cot in the dim wash of light from the cracked storage room door. Ed had gone home, at my insistence; I think he understood it wasn't good for him to be there, in case I had to do something radical. Wooden stakes ... garlic ... holy water ... well, I could break off a chair leg to make a stake if I had to, and there was some garlic salt in the condiment section. Holy water was in short supply. I wondered about crosses, but somehow, I didn't think folklore would be quite on the money with this one.

I put my hand on my purse, thinking about David, curled in his bottle. Sleeping, probably. Dreaming of better things. Maybe ...

No. I didn't dare open it and summon him. Not when he was so weak. I needed to handle this on my own, without anybody else to back me up.

That felt ... oddly refreshing. Whatever I did here, there was nobody else involved. It was just me, and the problem.

I got up in a restless creak of cot springs, put on my shoes, and walked to the storage room door. It was quiet in the store except for the dull hum of fluorescent lights in the corners. The night was so dark outside the glass walls that it might as well have been black paint. I wanted to go outside, breathe the fresh cold air, see the thick haze of stars, but I had work to do.

I walked to the cooler. The key was hanging from a hook next to the door, but I didn't take it down.

I knocked. "Israel?" No answer. I put my hand flat against the metal. "Israel, talk to me. It's Joanne. I want to help you. I want to figure out what happened to you."

From a great, hollow distance, Israel rasped, "Don't think anybody can help me."

"You said you saw fairies. Blue sparks. That's what changed you."

He seemed surprised. "Yeah."

"Israel, do you -- " I couldn't think of a way to phrase it. "Hunger for anything in particular?"

"Yeah," he said. "But I don't know what it is. Nobody around here has it. Nobody except you."

He wanted power. Warden power. I swallowed hard and removed my hand from the door. He sounded as if he'd come closer. How strong was he, exactly? Strong enough to batter the door down, if properly motivated?

"I think I understand," I said. "The -- fairies -- are inside of you. They're keeping you alive and moving. But Israel, they're trapped here. They got stuck inside of you when the rest of their kind got destroyed, or banished, or whatever. And they need a place to hide. They want me because they can live and grow inside of me." Because I'd once been Djinn.

He listened, and then he just sat in silence. After a long while, he said, rustily, "Can you kill me?"

"I don't know."

"Because I'm not supposed to be here. I'm ..." He cleared his throat, with a sound like nails in a tin can. "I'm supposed to be dead."

"That's why you didn't leave town," I said. "You want Ed to kill you. But he won't, Israel. He can't."

Israel sighed, I heard it all the way through the thick insulation and metal. "Pussy."

"Well, he might if you talk like that."

Israel laughed. It sounded rusty and agonizing, but it held some genuine amusement. "So what the hell do I do? Piss off my brother until he sticks some damn stake through my heart?"

I didn't think that was going to do it. This wasn't traditional folklore vampirism, this was something else entirely. And I wasn't sure what to do about it, but I was sure that it had to end. For Ed and Israel's sake, if nothing else.

I reached for the key and slipped it into the cold brass lock. My hands were shaking again. I didn't let myself think too long about it, just did the mechanical motions and set the lock aside. I flipped the latch back, took hold of the handle, and pulled.

It came open with a whine of metal and a cold, arid puff of air that smelled of the ghosts of spoiled milk and meat. Dead things. I swallowed hard and saw his eyes glowing in the darkness. Djinn eyes.

"Take off your gloves," I said.

He stepped forward into the thin wash of light. It was freezing in the cooler, but his breath didn't fog the air, and he'd even taken off his leather jacket. The Grateful Dead shirt was a muscle tee, and his arms looked ropy and white and strong.

"Why?"

"Just do it, Israel. Please."

He slowly stripped off the leather gloves and plopped them down on the floor next to his jacket. He'd been making himself comfortable against a sealed box of Popsicles. Cherry flavored.

His hands flexed slowly, making fists, then uncurled. Long, thin fingers. Blue short nails.

He reached out to me.

"You scared?" he asked me.

"Yeah."

A crooked, charming smile. It looked strange on that lifeless face. "Me too. But I'll be glad when it's over."

I took hold of his icy hand, and lightning struck. Not true lightning, the kind that sparked from the sky; this was nerve impulses firing, power coursing hot through my veins. Defense. I had a kind of magical immune system, and it was fighting hard ...

... but it was losing.

I held on, and so did Israel, though I could see from the twisted expression on his perfectly white face that it hurt him, too. Cold seeped out of him and into my hand, my wrist, my arm ... crept up to my shoulder ... radiating in ...

I launched myself up to the aetheric and saw the blue sparklies crawling all over me. Flooding out of Israel in waves.

"Tell Ed ... he was good to me and -- " Whatever else he was going to say, it locked in his throat. His Djinn eyes turned plain human blue, and rolled back in his head.

Israel crumpled and hit the floor with a terrifying thud. I couldn't spare any concern, though; I was fighting for breath as the sparks swarmed all over me, trying to sink into me. Fairies. Not like any fairies Peter Pan had ever encountered ... cannibal fairies, with furious sharp teeth and cold, cold hearts.

Let them in. I didn't know where the thought came from, but it sounded like Patrick's voice, my one-time Djinn mentor and betrayer and savior. Let them in. You have to.

That was a terrifying prospect. I was holding my breath, and I'd squeezed my eyes shut, desperate to keep myself intact ... but he was right, I couldn't defeat them by just blindly trying to ignore them. They'd get inside.

Relax, Patrick's whisper said. You know what to do.

I didn't. I hated it when ghosts tried to shine me on. But he was right about the first part, anyway ... and I slowly opened my eyes and parted my lips and took in a deep breath.

The blue sparklies swarmed into my mouth, down my throat in a brilliant frenzy, and I felt them burrow cold inside of me. Pinpricks of ice, weighting me down. Making me heavy and slow and stupid. I wanted to lie down next to Israel's limp, cold body, but I didn't want to die like this, locked in some smelly old refrigerator in some tiny, out-of-the way gas station. Dying unremarked and alone.

I had my standards, and having a box of Popsicles for a headstone was right out.

I staggered out into the store, grabbed onto the counter, and held myself up with an effort. Tell me! I screamed inside. Damn you, Patrick, tell me what to do!

He was quiet. Damn Djinn. Never around when you really needed them ...

I don't remember falling, but I was on the floor, staring up at a rack of magazines. Tom Cruise was on two of them. That seemed unfair, somehow, but at least I had an audience for my swan song now, even if it was two-dimensional.

No. No, I wasn't going to die like this. Ugh. Just no. If I didn't die at the Bellagio, I damn sure wasn't buying the farm at Mart's Texaco. It lacked dignity.

Do you really think they want to be here? Patrick asked me. He sounded bored and disinterested and out of patience with me. They're far from home. And scared. For heaven's sake, think, woman. Use that brain that came in that lovely body.

Oh.

I looked up, on the aetheric plane. It was like looking up through a skyscraper made of glass ... so many levels, so many realities, each one purer and more precise. Colder. Clearer. Humans -- even Wardens -- couldn't go beyond the aetheric, which was the plane above our own mortal world. Djinn could. They could travel up at least four levels at will, higher if they concentrated hard.
I'd been a Djinn. Could I still ...?

No choice but to try. I took in a deep breath, down on the mortal plane, and thought myself higher. My spirit began to rise, shimmering with cold blue light ... up ... I felt the tug as I passed through the top of the aetheric and up into the plane above, a Djinn place, not meant for humans. It dragged at me, as if the air was thicker. Everything was a confusion of light, odd shapes, subtle warps of reality.
I kept rising.

The second barrier was harder, and I slipped through slowly, torturously. Squeezing through. Beyond, the lights had a harsh, cold clarity that terrified me. Nothing seemed right. I felt breathless and scared, and I was no longer in control of how fast I was going up. I wasn't rising anymore, I was being thrown. Propelled. The pressure was intense. It was more like diving into the ocean than rising into the aetheric levels.

The blue sparklies were jittering madly all through my body. I could almost feel them adding their own fuel to my progress, even as they ate away at the center of my power. Cannibals and predators, mindlessly and furiously destroying their own would-be savior.

Faster. Higher. More pressure, a denser barrier that felt as if it was scraping layers of skin and muscle off of my mortal body when I passed through it. But I couldn't stop. I didn't dare look at what was around me; there were things here, intelligences vast and cold that had never bothered with humans. I didn't want to attract their attention. It would be the end of whatever passed for my sanity.

I ran into the last barrier, and stopped. Stuck. Battering at the slick cold ceiling like a drowning victim under the ice. The blue sparklies in my body were ripping me apart in their desire to push me through, but it felt impenetrable, no way I could slide through ...

If I wasn't willing to die at Mart's Texaco, I didn't want it to end here, either. I extended my hands and pressed them flat against the barrier and pushed. Hard. With all the power in me.

Something broke free, as if I'd tapped into a well long covered over, and I felt a flood of hot, raw energy spill into me.

My fingers slid through. My wrists. My arms, compressed almost to the breaking point. It didn't just hurt, it was like being crushed between two plates of glass -- sheer agony. I felt as two-dimensional as Tom Cruise on a magazine cover, and a lot less glossy.

I popped free with an audible snap and drifted at the top of the world, nauseatingly free.

I opened my eyes, then quickly squeezed them shut. Even as a Djinn, this had been impossible to decipher; human eyes had no frame of reference for anything. It was just blind, cold chaos. And I was lost in it.

But luckily, Israel's fairies weren't.

They dragged my body to a point that looked almost black in the swirling fury, and without any direction from me, my arm extended and my fingertips touched the scar.

It was closed.

Open it, Patrick whispered.

I couldn't. If I did, it would rip in half again, I'd kill the world ...

Trust me.

I wanted to weep, but my aetheric form wasn't suited to the job. I jabbed my fingers forward, deep into the scar, and felt it ... give. Suction on the other side. Cold, eerie suction that was completely alien to anything I'd known ... even the chaos swirling up here.

The blue sparklies began flowing up. They marched out of my body, down my arm, into my hand, and flooded through the bridge of my fingers into that other place, that other reality.

When I was sure they were all gone, to the last little Tinkerbelle glow, I pulled my hand back. A single blue mote floated in the air for an instant, and died.

The black scar stayed closed.

And I felt whatever had sustained me start to give way.

Oh crap. Action, and reaction. It existed even here, in this place. The power that had sustained me was giving way, and I was falling.

Hard.

I crashed through barriers that ripped and scraped and tore. It felt like smashing through increasingly thick panes of glass. Gathering speed, plummeting and screaming ... straight through the familiar glow of the aetheric ...

... into my body, where I arrived with a devastatingly hard jerk that made me conk my head into the scuffed linoleum hard enough to see stars.

I looked up at Tom Cruise's toothy smile, and promptly passed out.

###

I came to with Ed sitting on the stool, watching me. I was on the cot in the back room. The storage area had the sharp, clean smell of Lysol, with an undercurrent of dust. I sneezed, whimpered at the strain on my aching body, and curled over on my side. I brushed my hair back with a shaking hand.

Ed didn't say a word. He was looking at me, but I wasn't seeing anything in his eyes. Just ... blankness.

"Hey," I croaked.

He blinked. "You're alive."

"Seems like." I checked the color of my skin. Still its normal color. My heart was beating. Apparently, I hadn't joined the ranks of the vampires, or the zombies, or whatever else Israel had been. Speaking of ... "Your brother?"

Ed cleared his throat. "He's dead."

"You're sure."

He nodded. "He -- yeah. I'm sure." That spoke volumes I didn't want to read. I closed my eyes and rolled back over flat, and tried sitting up. I managed it. It wasn't a happy process. "You okay?"

"Yeah." I had no idea, but even if I wasn't, there was nothing Ed from Mart's Texaco could do about it. I needed Earth Warden help, or Djinn help, or both. Or maybe I just needed sleep and rest. Peace and quiet and a stop to the demands of the universe that I keep on fighting.

Ed dug in his pocket and counted out five hundred dollars in twenties. I sat in silence, watching him, my lips slightly parted but no words finding their way out. He put the pile of money in my lap and stood up.

"Get a hot dog and a soda to go," he said. "On me."

"But -- "

"I want you gone," he said, and there was naked fury in his blue eyes now, an unreasonable anger that had nothing to do with me. I understood that. I'd come to town, and his brother was dead. Even if one had little to do with the other, he'd want me gone.

It was how I'd been with Rahel in the car. All that suppressed terror and fury and grief finding a target.

And he was right to blame me, after all. The blue sparklies had been my doing. Maybe his initial accident had been fate, but the rest had been me.

I crumpled the money in a fist, thought about refusing it, but I couldn't deny that I needed the help.

"Thanks," I said softly.

He didn't look at me again, even when I insisted on paying for the hot dog and soda. Just rang up the sale and stood mutely to the side, staring at the floor, while I walked out into the hot Arizona morning. I slid on sunglasses and breathed in the crisp, clean air. It smelled like fresh sage and the hot metallic stench of gas and oil. My Viper was parked around the side.

When started the car, I looked in the rear view mirror. Ed was standing out front.

Why? I had to ask myself. Why did I stop here? Of all the places I could have picked ... why here?

It might have been Rahel's doing, but I doubted it. Truth was, I'd have ended up here somehow. Power called to power. Fate had plans for me, and there was no use at all in fighting it.

I had a long, long way to go to find that peace and quiet I'd been craving.

I waved at Ed, pulled out onto the freeway, and headed for parts unknown.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. You are free to copy and share this work, but you may not sell it or alter its content.

MIDNIGHT AT MART'S
A Weather Warden short story by Rachel Caine

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. You are free to copy and share this work, but you may not sell it or alter its content.


You know, I really don’t go looking for trouble most of the time. Stop laughing. I can go weeks at a time without a single life-threatening emergency or world crisis. I have a normal life.

Okay, maybe normal is a bit of an exaggeration, but still, I sometimes kick back and relax just like a regular girl. On this particular night, I had normal-girl plans – Friday night out at the club with my best friend Cherise. Like all outings with Cherise, it wasn’t a spontaneous event; it required as much planning and preparation as a trip to visit the Pope, only I doubt I’d need quite so much tanning and waxing to meet His Holiness.

As with all of Cherise’s efforts, the end results were worth the pain. At nine p.m., I stood in front of my floor-length mirror and did the full turn, critiquing the blue dress. It was tight and short, and it fit in all the right places, showing off my freshly-waxed legs. Not quite short enough to make me worry about showing off what else the body waxer had been up to, but definitely short enough to get me past the velvet rope. I spent the usual couple of minutes lamenting my flaws – you can’t fight cellulite forever – but overall, I’d do. I’d broken out a fine pair of pumps to match, and a teeny little designer bag. My hair looked tousled and shiny, my makeup perfect. Ready for my magazine-shoot close-up.

I stuck my tongue out at myself, laughed, and went to answer the ringing doorbell. Hurricane Cherise swept in, trailing a flood-tide of good cheer and dazzle. She was wearing an outrageous gold thing that on most women would have looked like something a hooker might wear to a circus, but on her it just looked sweetly hot. Perfect shoes, of course. She flashed me a wicked urchin’s grin, completely at odds with her Florida-hot exterior, and did a little hip-shimmy thing that made all the gold sequins on her dress chime. “So? Fabulous?”

“Beyond fabulous,” I said. “I’m sorry, I can’t go with you after all. You’d just make me look like your walking Before picture. I refuse to be the sad contrast.”

“You’re kidding. With those legs? Not too damn likely. Come on, get your self-satisfied butt in gear, Jo. I’m thirsty, and there are men just dying to buy me mojitos.”

I could well believe that last part. There’d be guys lining up just to crush the mints for the drinks, knowing Cherise. She was semi-going-steady with my fellow Warden Kevin – so many odd things about that, beginning with the idea that any woman, especially Cherise, would find Kevin attractive, and ending with the whole idea that the obnoxious little jerk was now my colleague. But Kevin wasn’t here, and Cherise wasn’t one to pine away and weep for any man.

I silently indicated my shoes. She gave them the critical once-over. “Elie Taharin,” she said. “Good choice. Classic beauty. Not as out-there as this season’s Manolos. Oooh, is the bag a Loubotin? Gimme.” I handed it over for inspection. “I like.”

“You can borrow it later.”

“Duh. Obviously.” She gave it back. The bag was just barely big enough to hold a credit card, a driver’s license, and a condom without splitting a seam. I’d left the condom out. I wouldn’t need one, no matter who showed up at the club, because none of them would be David.

Speaking of David, my lover was notoriously busy these days, and I was getting that fizzy feeling that meant I needed him, and needed him badly. I suspected he knew that, and it was all part of his overall plan to make me even more his addled love-slave than I already was.

Not that that was a bad thing.

We took Cherise’s car, which was a sweet little red honey of a Mustang convertible. This was the new one, paid for by the Wardens after I’d kind of wrecked the previous incarnation during a hurricane – again, not my fault – and it was a hell of a nice car. We sang along to the radio and cruised down glittering neon-lit streets, winking at guys at stoplights and generally acting a good deal less than our actual ages.

It was great.

I was almost sorry when we finally pulled into the parking lot of the club. Cherise ignored any possibility of self-parking and cruised up to the valet stand, where uniformed men were waiting to open our doors and hand us out. I took the valet ticket, since the absence of the condom had left room in my bag, and we stood for a moment looking at the line that snaked around the side of the building. It was full of beautiful people, and wannabe beautiful people. “You’re kidding,” I said to Cherise. “It’s like a mannequin convention!”

“We’re not here for the deep philosophic discussion,” she said. “We’re here to drink, flirt, and dance. This is the place.”

I realized, with a stab of disappointment, that I might actually be getting too adult for this kind of a good time. I was looking for more. Looking for – well, for David. I could imagine him here, standing in the crowd, watching me with the kind of dark intensity he got that burned me from the inside out. I could imagine him parting the sea of people on the crowded dance floor and claiming me.

I could imagine a lot of things, most of which weren’t going to be legal. But none of it was going to happen, because David was working, and I needed to have a life outside of David, dammit.

“I wish David was here,” I said. Which was not what I meant to say, but there you go. Cherise gave me a long-suffering look.

“I hate going clubbing with monogamous people,” she said. “Fine, he’s a total freakin’ hottie, all right? But you can dance with other people for a change. Trust me, it’s good for you.”

“We’re never getting in.”

“Man, you really don’t know me at all, do you?” Cherise bypassed the line, went right up to the velvet rope, and leaned on it to smile at the looming bulk of the impassive doorman. He was straight out of hard-ass central casting: what little expression he had was of the menacing variety, and the combination of pumped-up muscles and shaved bullet-shaped head left no room for any doubt as to his sincerity.

Next to him, Cherise looked like a gilded butterfly. I stood back, electing to let the expert work, and made sure that my legs were displayed to good advantage. Best thing I could do. Cherise chatted, smiled, flirted. The doorman lifted the rope for a few people, but not us. A limo pulled up, disgorging a clown-party of drunken, crappily-dressed people who sailed past the doorman like he was a paper cutout. The rich really are different.

Finally, we got the nod, and he held up the velvet rope for us. I heard the hissed curses of those who’d been patiently waiting, and held up my hands in silent apology. I was just the ride-along, and let’s face it, Cherise didn’t care.

Inside, the club was steamy, thick with pheromones and perfume and alcohol. No smoke, except for a whiff here and there of something that wasn’t tobacco. It was also loud. Really loud, and we were just in the lobby. Cherise took in a deep, satisfied breath, and yelled to me, “Ready?”

Whether I was ready or not, it was too late to have an attack of modesty. I nodded and motioned for her to lead the way.

She glowed in the spinning lights of the club like some fabulous treasure. I could see why she’d picked the dress. I looked almost drab by comparison, although when the black light hit me, I lit up like a star, dress and shoes both. Nice. The club was packed, of course, with sweating, beautiful people dancing, screaming conversations to each other over the pounding beat, or making out in booths. There was probably more going on, but I decided the shadows didn’t bear close inspection.

Cherise and I achieved our goal – the bar – and ordered mojitos. I paid, because that had been the agreement: Cherise would drive, I would buy the first round. Well, more accurately, I tried to buy, but a man put out his hand in a blocking motion and handed over his own credit card.

I didn’t need to hear Cherise to know what she’d say: this is starting out well. Because the man who’d paid for our drinks was tall, dark, good-looking, ripped, and generally conforming to the current standard of hot. He didn’t try to talk, just kissed Cherise’s hand – a tactic that went over well with her – and did the same for me. I have to admit, it didn’t exactly suck for me, either. We both smiled our thanks and accepted the drinks. He gestured toward the back of the club. Cherise nodded, grabbed my hand, and towed me in that direction. It was impossible, in the press of heaving bodies, not to get squeezed and groped, but I tried to avoid it as much as I could. Cherise, small as she was, seemed to have the ability to make space around herself. Presence, that was it. I supposed I could make space, too, but only by summoning enough power to blow people out of my way.

Overkill.

We arrived at a doorway guarded by not one but two doormen, so identical to the one at the entrance they might have been clones. These were no impediment at all; they stepped aside and opened the door, and the three of us – Mr. Wonderful, Cherise, and me – sailed through without pause.

Beyond was obviously the VIP lounge, and it was lush. I hadn’t seen so much velour, leather, and velvet since the last Versace trunk show. It was quieter, although the beat went on, and much less crowded. The prettiest people, and the ugliest, lounged in big circular areas, sharing bottles that probably cost as much as a car. A few greeted our mysterious guide, who led us to a secluded alcove off to the right. It didn’t look quite as decadent as some of the others – a relatively straightforward couple of couches, a table, some glasses, chilling champagne at the ready.

The shock came because of who was already there, curled like a cat in the corner of one of the sofas.

Rahel blinked hawk-yellow eyes at me, smiled slowly, and tilted her head. She looked unbelievably, outrageously alien just now, all angles and darkness. Even the hundreds of tiny plaited braids on her head seemed to be moving on their own, clicking beads together in a random yet sinister pattern. She wasn’t wearing neon yellow, or neon anything. Instead, her dress – yes, a dress, I couldn’t believe it – was a tight spring green tube thing that flared out into chiffon below the hips, revealing legs longer than mine. She even had shoes to match, with terrifying stiletto heels.

“Sistah,” she greeted me, and patted the couch next to her. “Sit. I was waiting for you.”

Cherise should have been scared. Humans who encountered Rahel in her fey moods generally were, because there was something about her that triggered all those fight-or-flight instincts.

Apparently for Cherise it was fight, not flight; she copped an attitude and frowned at the intruding Djinn. A miniature little thunderstorm all gilded up in sequins. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said. “She’s not working. Look, it’s one night off, okay? Just one!”

Rahel held up her hand. Her fingernails were lustrously polished in a green to match the dress, with a hint of opal beneath. They weren’t quite talons. Exactly. “I did not come to fetch her for the Wardens,” she said.

Our hottie drink-buying guy settled down on the other couch. Cherise promptly took the place beside him, leaving me to perch uneasily next to Rahel. I sipped the mojito. Bittersweet, cool, biting hard on the tongue. Perfect, of course. “Then why are you here?” I asked.

“Have you met Fredo?” she asked, and indicated Mr. Wonderful. He gave me a model’s heartbreaking smile. “An old friend.”

“Djinn?”

“Silly girl. No. Just a man.” Rahel poured herself a glass of fizzy champagne from a bottle with a pink rose climbing it, and sipped. “Can I not also have a night off?”

“Not while we’re having one,” Cherise said. “Look, no offense, but you’re kind of scary. Like, Grace Jones on crack scary. I just want to dance and have a good time and not worrying you’re going to take any lyrics about burning this mother up literally.”

Rahel raised one thin, sharp eyebrow and sipped again. “I can mind my manners,” she said. “I have been around humans before. I can behave.”

I doubted that. Her golden eyes were taking in everything around us – especially the passing strangers – with the hungry intensity of a lion watching antelope.

“Fine,” Cherise said. “Behave, then. Fredo? Would you like to dance?”

I wasn’t absolutely sure he spoke English, actually, but the invitation was universal, and he smiled in agreement. He guided her back toward the dance floor.

Leaving me stuck on the couch, with the supernatural scary person.

“So,” I said, and guzzled mojito. “What exactly do you do to have fun when you, ah, go out?”

“People watch,” Rahel said. Her lips shaped a smile, but the expression in her eyes was a lot more forbidding. “Absorb the culture. It’s necessary, you know. Djinn must stay connected to the world around them if we are to blend in.”

“Oh, yeah, honey, you blend,” I said. The rum was starting to take effect. “You do this often?”

“Often enough,” she said. “I like coming to places like this. So much energy. So much – passion.” Her eyes drifted half-closed, and she sipped champagne. “Here is where people are the most honest, I think. In their quest to fulfill their most basic urges.”

“I’m not here to fulfill any basic urges, beyond swilling some ethanol,” I said. “Look. No condoms.” I opened the purse to prove it. Which earned me a what the hell? look from a Djinn. That had to be a first. “I’m just here because Cherise thought it’d be a good idea for me to get out and, you know, relax. Loosen up. Meet people.”

“Dance,” Rahel said. “Yes?”

“Yes. Of course, dance.”

“I used to dance.” She sounded positively wistful about it. “Before – “

“Before?”

“Before I was as I am now,” she said. “When I was a girl.”

I knew that Rahel was what was known as a New Djinn – that she’d been born human, died, and been reborn as a Djinn. But somehow, there wasn’t much human about her. Far less than there was in David, for instance, or even Alice, who’d never been human at all. Rahel always felt … other.

So hearing her talk about being a girl was startling. “Tell me about what it was like, when you were young,” I said. “Not like this, I’m guessing.”

She laughed. “More like this than you could suppose. My people danced constantly. We danced for power, for celebration, for prayer, for rain, for sun, for food, for the waning of the moon. And yes, it was the same for us – we found lovers this way, dancing, admiring, feeling the hot flutter of attraction as we danced. You have taken this ritual, stripped away the magic, but the core is still there. Still living.”

I took another gulp of my drink and tasted sugar. Oh. Already down to the bottom. Probably ought to take it slower. “How old were you when – “

“When my people died?” Rahel toyed with her champagne glass, not quite looking at me. “Seventeen. Old enough to be a mother twice over. We married early in my day. We died early, too.”

“How did it – “

“I will not relive my horror for your amusement,” she interrupted, and her eyes focused directly on mine with unmistakable threat. “Ask any of us for tales of our past, and you will find slaughter, suffering, and pain. I did not come here to dredge up such memories.”

“Sorry.” I swallowed, tasting mint and rum and sugar, and wished desperately that I’d gone with Cherise. Not too late, of course, I could get up and walk away. But Rahel was holding the stare, and I didn’t dare look away.

“I worry,” Rahel said, “about your intentions.”

I blinked. “What?”

“Toward David.”

“I – what?”

“He looks at you and can’t see past his own passion,” she said. “But I know humans, I know them perhaps better than he does. Are you constant, Joanne? Or will you find a lover elsewhere, and betray him? I ask because humans are flawed, and their love is flawed.”

She was warning me. I was sick of being warned. Everybody had hammered it into me, from Lewis to David himself, and now Rahel. Frankly, I was tired of people doubting me.

“Look,” I said, and put the empty mojito glass on the table. “Maybe I’m flawed. Maybe I’m screwed up. Maybe I’m just a weak-willed human woman with the spine of a jellyfish. But I’m not going to betray David. Ever.” I let a beat and a breath go by. “You don’t believe me.”

Her eyes narrowed. “No,” she said. “I don’t. Humans are not capable of the kind of commitment that we feel.”

“What about Patrick and Sara?” Patrick had been human. Sara had been Djinn. And the two of them had loved with a passion that had never faltered.

I realized, the second I said it, that I’d invoked the wrong thing. I hadn’t followed that to its logical conclusion – to the tragedy of the romance. Patrick, dying. Sara reaching out to break the laws of the universe to drag him across to the Djinn, and breaking the core of her own power in the process. Dooming herself to a half-life existence as an Ifrit, preying on other Djinn for her very life.

Rahel said, “Ah, yes. I see you comprehend my point. Such tales never end happily.”

“Ours will.”

“I admire your determination, if not your objectivity.” She drank the rest of her champagne in a single gulp. She stood up, shimmying her hips to get all her chiffon ruffles in place. She was impossibly tall, impossibly gorgeous, and she held out her hand to me. “Come.”

I frowned at her. “Where?”

“To dance.”

Her hand felt dry and hot in mine, and she led me out through the VIP doors and into the madhouse of the dance floor, of people moving and swaying together. Cherise was dirty-dancing with Fredo, looking absolutely beautiful, rapt and ecstatic in the moment. Fredo was looking like the experience was approaching rapture for him, too.

Rahel’s hand slipped out of mine, and the lights and music spun me around, and I felt the pulse building inside of me. I saw her moving in an alien, sinuous rhythm, dancing with no one and everyone, and then Fredo turned to me and included me in the dance, and I felt my body taking over, reaching for that elusive moment, that connection that tied us all together in that moment.

The music threaded its way through my ears, through my body, and spun me around in a frenzy of lights and passion.

I stopped, because at the edge of the dance floor stood a dark shape, unmoving, facing me. Light flickered and caught his face, highlighted the intensity of his stare and the beautiful face. David had left off his glasses, and traded in his plain clothes for a soft, matte-black shirt and tight black leather pants.

My breath left me in a rush.

Neither of us moved for a moment, and then he walked slowly toward me, and just as I’d imagined, the crowd parted in front of him. He came closer, closer, until our bodies brushed together. He leaned down to put his lips close to my ear, and said, “I know it’s your night out with Cherise, but – “

I grabbed the collar of his shirt and kissed him. He tasted like caramel and rum, and I wondered if he’d been drinking. If he had, it looked fantastic on him.

“Dance with me,” I said.

His body fit in with the curves of mine. We kissed again, slowly, deeply, and then his hand found the hollow of my back and I bent backward, relying on his strength to support me as my hair brushed the floor. He lifted me sharply, hard against him, and my right leg lifted of its own accord and wrapped around the back of his thigh. Holding him there. Our eyes were inches apart, and his were burning. Incandescent even in the flaring, uncertain light of the club.

He made a low, rough sound in the back of his throat, and I felt his hand move lower, pressing my hips closer against his. His breath pistoned hot against my neck as I rotated my hips, gently at first, then in widening, provocative circles. We were pressed together, every muscle trembling and full of tension, humming like two halves of a circuit. Our lips were close enough to touch, but we didn’t kiss. I slid my hands down the slick, warm leather of his hips. The heat inside me had built to a bonfire, flushing my cheeks, my lips, glowing right under my skin.

I turned my back to him, and oh, yes, that was good, there was absolutely no disguising how aroused he was right now. I rubbed slowly up and down against him, and felt his hands wrap around my hips to pull me breathlessly close. He kissed my neck, feather-light, and I felt myself go weak against him. His hands were so hot they seemed to burn through the thin barrier of cloth to sear their imprint directly on my skin. As incredible as it seemed, I was pretty sure it wouldn’t take much for either one of us to climax right here on the dance floor, in these moving, liquid shadows.

Magic, Rahel had called it. And ritual.

“Jo,” David whispered. Voice lower now, deeper in his throat, a purr like velvet on her skin. “Turn around.”

I did, never moving away from him, and we were so close all that held us separate were our clothes and some last vestige of sanity. His hands left my hips, slid up between us, and left trails of heat where they touched. His lips were touching mine now, not quite a kiss, an unbearable tease for both of us. “Having fun?” he asked. Despite the constant driving beat of the music – the deafening beat – I could hear every suggestive nuance of what he said.

“You’re kidding.” My voice was uneven and out of control. “Not sure fun quite covers this.”

Another low-in-the-throat, amused rumble, subsonic and audible to me mainly through the vibration in my skin. His lips moved down the column of my throat, and he knew just where to focus their heat where I was most needy, most vulnerable. I felt a tremble building inside, a crescendo that followed the building climax of the music. His teeth scraped along the tender line of my throat, and I pressed harder against him, out of breath and wild and vibrating right out of my skin. I caught sight of Cherise laughing, whirling in the arms of the tall, gorgeous Fredo, and Rahel, dancing an ancient sensual rhythm, face alight and exultant in the strobing flashes of color.

Ladies’ night.

I could get used to this.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. You are free to copy and share this work, but you may not sell it or alter its content.

CLAIMED
A Weather Warden short story by Rachel Caine

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. You are free to copy and share this work, but you may not sell it or alter its content.


I didn't know Djinn could sleep -- not the way humans did. That was a new thought, and a very pleasant one ... after all, most of my encounters with David, from the moment I'd spun off the road and nearly run him down, had been on the order of cars speeding along on parallel routes, only to veer off in the curves.

But David did sleep. And that meant I could not only make love with David -- which was a rare and fascinating thrill -- but I could do the human thing too, curled against his smoldering warmth, both of us exhausted from a long day of driving as we headed for Las Vegas, and our latest life-threatening crisis.

We were sleeping off our worries in a kind of nice roadside motel, one of the bigger chains that promised free in-room wireless internet (not that I had a computer with me) and free movies (though not the ones that featured titles like Hot Atlanta Nights, which was disappointing). On the plus side, the motel had little baskets with free skin care and hair products. So when I'd gone to bed, I'd smelled clean and floral and felt almost normal.

My peaceful dreams suddenly changed to dreams that involved spontaneous human combustion, and as I opened my eyes I realized it wasn't just the bad take-out Chinese we'd had. David's skin had suddenly become unbearably hot -- a ruddy bronze, and it was too hot to touch, as if he'd just rolled out of a blast furnace.

He jackknifed upright, breathing fast. I sat up too, slowly, staring at him in profile. I could see steam rising off of his cheekbones, out of his metallic auburn hair. I smelled scorching cotton, as somebody had walked off with an iron left sizzling on a pair of sheets. There goes the security deposit, I thought crazily, though I was scared half to death. It's not my fault. That's just how my mind works sometimes.

"David?" I asked. He turned his head and met my eyes, and for a chilling, weird second, he looked right through me. I had no idea what he saw for that eternity, but whatever it was, it must have been horrible. "David, it's me. Joanne ...?" He still didn't seem to hear me. "David!"

The spell broke, and his eyes widened, their molten color dying back to a calmer brown. His skin cooled and took on merely human hues, but when I touched him he was still very warm. Fever hot.

And then he grabbed me and held me, stroking my hair, running his hand down my back. Rocking me, holding me tight against him as if he was deathly afraid that I'd slip away.

"What?" Not that I minded this, not at all. I relaxed against him, and felt him relax a bit, too. Animal comforts. "What happened?"

His voice was soft, nearly inaudible. "Nothing."

Ah, the famous, reflexive denial. He was good at it. "Wow, nothing looks a whole lot scarier than I'd imagined it would. Being, you know, nothing and all."

He buried his face in the curve of my neck, and I felt his lips press warm against my skin. "It's nothing for you to worry about," he finally said. "I'm sorry to have disturbed you. Please, you need rest. Go back to sleep."

He lowered me to the sheets again, smiling, and except for the faint trace of darkness and fear in those luminous eyes I might have forgotten all about it. He had ways of making me forget, and I didn't think they had anything to do with the supernatural. Well, not that much to do with it. He was just ... yeah.

But he didn't follow through with the expert seduction I'd expected, if he'd even been considering it. He just settled down, rolled over on his side and stared at me. I stared back. Seemed like the thing to do, and besides, I was wide awake now. Over his shoulder I saw the green glow of the motel room clock. 4:25 in the morning. We had plenty of time to drift off again, and he was right, I did desperately need it ... but somehow, I knew restful sleep was going to elude me. Again.

"Tell me about your nightmare," I said.

"I don't dream," he lied.

"Wow," I said, "then that must have been a totally new experience for you, having a nightmare. Which you did."

He reached out and traced a warm finger down the cool skin of my shoulder, down my arm. Drawing shivers. "I'm not human, you can't psychoanalyze me."

"Hey, I'm not making any guarantees of therapy here, and anyway I do better with weather than people. But -- I want to know. And I think you need to talk about it."

His eyes flickered, and being Djinn, that wasn't descriptive -- they really did flicker, like flames. Complete with orange sparks. His hand spread out on my arm, closed around my wrist. David made me feel small and fragile, two things I was not. Paradoxically, he also made me feel safe, although I could feel the breathtaking strength in him. His fingers lightly stroke the inside of my wrist, where I knew he could feel the quickening of my pulse.

"You could make me talk," he said. I thought he meant in the usual way, with bribes of hot sweet kisses and skin, but he continued without looking up at me again. "You can make me do anything, if you ask it three times."

It sounded casual. It wasn't. And it wasn't a joke. He was right -- I could make him talk, not from any threat or physical violence, but from the power I held over him.

The power of the Djinn, and the bottle to which he was enslaved. I owned David, body and soul.

The realization swept over me, leaving me chilled, and I felt somehow dirty. Small, cheap, and dirty. Some Wardens might have gotten off on it -- no, I knew very well some did -- but owning someone so amazing, having the power to force him to do things that would hurt him, maybe kill him -- it was too much. Too much power for anyone to have.

"I wouldn't do that to you," I said. He had enough strength to shatter me just by closing his hand. It wouldn't even take an effort. And yet I knew that he wouldn't do it. Couldn't. Not because of the bottle, or the master-Djinn bond, but because of something else, something deeper.

Something given to me freely, not taken by force.

He rolled over on his back, and stared at the dimly seen ceiling. Though it was a better motel room than some we'd shared, it was still just an anonymous box with industrial-grade carpet, stiff sheets, and a creaking box spring. He deserved better than this, I thought. Someone so fine deserved better.

"You never asked me how I became Bad Bob's Djinn," he said.

I stopped breathing for a second, because this was a subject that we'd taken care to skirt these last few weeks, since I'd found out that he was a Djinn, and more than that, a Djinn who'd once held me down and helped feed me a Demon at the order of his one-time master, Bad Bob Biringanine.

Not the kind of introduction you forget, really. I'd been hoping we never had to go there again, because it was traumatic not just for him, but for me.

I kept my voice neutral. "Is that what the nightmare was about?"

"Yes."

"Bad?"

"I was hurting you."

"You were -- "

David shut his eyes, as if he wanted to shut me out, and the rest of the world too. "He could have made me do anything, you know that. Hurt you. Humiliate you. Slaughter you. We do what we're told, that's our protection and our curse. We're not to blame, but we can't forget a single moment of it, either."

I knew what he was talking about, knew it all too well. I'd been through it, as a temporary Djinn. I'd seen firsthand how awful that enslavement could be, to a corrupted soul. I put my hand on his chest, and his fingers closed over mine.

"I was stupid," he continued. "When he claimed me, I couldn't believe it. He couldn't have known what I was -- but he did. Somehow, he knew. He didn't need me; he handed me off as an amusement to his -- favorite."

His favorite. Yvette Prentiss. Talk about a corrupted soul. "Amusement," I repeated, faintly. Sick with the possibilities.

"Her word, not mine. She was careful with me, she knew that if she made a mistake I'd have ripped her apart, and besides, Bad Bob made it clear she couldn't -- she had to return me in a year. But a year -- even for a Djinn as old as I am, a year can be an eternity. I -- did things. Things I can't -- "

I'd asked him to talk, and now I wished he would stop; it made me heartsick to hear the pain in his voice. I put my head on his chest, draping my hair over him in a warm blanket. Trying, without words, to assure him that it wouldn't happen again. That I wouldn't let it happen.

But I couldn't guarantee that, I never could. If I freed him, he was still subject to claiming by anyone who discovered his true nature, so long as they knew how to manage it. He was always, ever, vulnerable.

"Jo," he said. His fingers stroked through my hair. "I want you to understand what I've done. I've killed. I've tortured. I did terrible things, even before I helped Bad Bob put the Demon Mark in you. I'm not -- "

"You're not responsible for what other people forced you to do," I said. "First law of rape victims. You're not responsible, David."

His fingers went still.

"That's right," I said. "Anyone who forces their Djinn to do something against their will, against their nature, that's a kind of rape, whether it's physical sex or torturing prisoners or killing people. It's sick, it's horrible, and I wish I could stop it. I would stop it. You have to believe that."

His lips touched the top of my head, a kiss of benediction. "I do believe it," he said. "But most Wardens will argue that sometimes unpleasant things must be done for the greater good."

"Every bad thing wears its happy face for public viewing ... the greater good is neither, David, especially if it's composed of small, lesser evils." I took a deep breath. "I want to let you go."

"I know."

"I'm going to let you go."

"I know."

"And -- you can leave then. If you want to leave."

"I know." As if the Rule of Three worked on the Djinn side, as well as the human side, I felt compelled to stop talking at that point. Mostly, I felt compelled to kiss him, long and slow, our bodies melding together, curves and hollows, nerves whispering their pleasure and agreement at every brush. I felt his hands slide in different directions down my back -- one up, to cradle my head as the kiss deepened, and one down. I liked down. Down had my full approval.

"Jo." He pulled back a little, just a little, enough to allow words to escape between our lips. "Don't release me. Not yet. I need to see you through this, and I can protect you better this way, you know that."

Right in that moment, I had the impulse to reach out for the bottle imprisoning his soul and smash it into a million glittering pieces against the far wall. Someone so fine deserved better.

He deserved so much better than me.

I was weak, I was human, I was going to hurt him even though I wouldn't mean it. I'd disappoint him. I'd say stupid things and make bad decisions and fail to consider what he might want or need, and that was just for openers.

I opened my mouth to tell him that, but instead what came out was, "I love you."

David made a wordless sound deep in his throat and kissed me again, ardently, igniting the warmth already cascading through me into a full-blown conflagration. I could feel the frantic need in him, the need to make me his. To keep me, the way that the bottle kept him.

But whether he knew it or not, he already had my soul.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. You are free to copy and share this work, but you may not sell it or alter its content.

BLACK CORNER
A Weather Warden short story by Rachel Caine

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. You are free to copy and share this work, but you may not sell it or alter its content.


Flying is not my favorite thing. It’s not the favorite thing of any Weather Warden, but the stronger you are in talent, the more likely you are to end up in the middle of some very unpleasant turbulence along the way, especially on a cross-country flight. When you’re up in the air, you’re out of your element as a human, and the forces that exist up there know.

They react.

On the plus side, I was flying with my own personal Djinn bodyguard, which meant that the plane wouldn’t crash, the storms wouldn’t become so bad innocent bystanders would be slaughtered, and I had a strong hand to crush in a death-grip for the duration of the endless, bumpy, slippery trip. David didn’t complain. In fact, he found it a wee bit funny. I hated him a little for that.

We landed in Lubbock amid wind gusts and blowing red sand – in other words, normal West Texas weather. The plane bumped, jerked, slipped, and threw me forward into the too-close seat in front of me as the pilot hit the brakes and flaps. David helpfully pushed me back upright and patted my shoulder. “You did fine,” he said.

“You mean, I didn’t shriek in terror or get tasered by a flight attendant?”

“Yes.”

“Missed it by that much.” I concentrated on slowing my pulse rate and centering myself – easier to do, now that I was ground-adjacent. “Explain to me again why I’m here?”

David’s smile turned just a touch bitter. “Because Lewis snapped his fingers and summoned you?”

That was not exactly fair, although it was more or less accurate.

He hadn't said much on the phone call, other than a simple "Need you here, now, hop a plane." David hadn't provided much in the way of information either, which was odd -- Djinn were usually better than a gossip column if you wanted the skinny on hidden motivations.

"So," I said as we made our way out of the cattle chute and into the gate area. "Is he here? Or are we on our own?"

"You tell me." David nodded at the window directly facing us. It had frost forming on the inside of the glass -- and the outside temperature was hot enough to melt pavement. The frost formed letters: @ BAGGAGE CLAIM.

"Great," I said. "Remind me to teach Lewis the proper use of a courtesy phone. Or text messaging, Jesus."

"He's rattled," David said. "He wouldn't usually make that kind of gesture."

We exchanged glances, and I lifted my shoulders in a mini-shrug. I didn't know what was up; if David did, he was keeping it strictly to himself.

We headed for Baggage Claim.

Lewis was leaning against a much-leaned-against concrete pillar just beyond the rotating metal suitcase carousels – arms crossed, slouching, looking like he’d just walked in out of the desert after two weeks of roughing it. His brown hair had grown out to brush his shoulders and fall across his eyes, and he was rocking a solid week’s worth of manly stubble, which was starting to look more hobo than metrosexual.

It meant he was no longer bothering with appearances.

"Let's go," he said, pushing off of the pillar as we approached. I had to skip a little to catch up as his long strides ate up carpet; David didn't seem to move any faster, but he fell in next to me.

"Yeah, our trip was great," I said. "What's that? You're grateful we dropped everything to come running at your beck and call? Why, you're welcome. I'm sure it's very important - "

"I don't have time for your crap," Lewis said. Not in a funny way. I stopped walking, and David -- attuned with my mood in a way only a Djinn (and/or a lover) could be -- stopped with me. It took Lewis two more steps to realize he'd lost us, and he turned to look at us. There was a jittery energy in him that seemed completely at odds with the usual laid-back man I knew.

"Lewis," I said, very quietly. "Do not snap at me. We came as a favor, and it was a bitch of a flight, and I have no fricking idea what you want from us. We can just get right back on a plane if you're going to give attitude."

His eyes cleared. Nothing like a brisk, cold slap to knock some sense into someone. Lewis took a step toward us, then stopped and pulled in a deep, deliberate breath. "Sorry," he said. "I need your help, and we don't have a lot of time. I'll tell you everything in the car."

David was watching me. I stared hard at Lewis, and finally said, "This had better be good. Seriously. I flew. You know how much I hate that."

"I know," Lewis said. "Please."

That did it. I started walking again.

Outside, the afternoon sun was harsh and unfiltered. A gust of wind spit sand in my face, then rattled away to torment someone else. The parking lot beyond the terminal glittered with windshields and sun-faded paint jobs. We crossed the street to the parking lot, dodging around a few passing cars. He’d parked his vehicle – a battered, dusty SUV – near the back of the lot.

When we got to the truck, Lewis jumped in the driver's seat. David and I looked at each other; David quirked an eyebrow and said, deadpan, “Shotgun.” I stuck my tongue out at him and hauled my self up into the back seat. I stayed behind the passenger seat; the driver’s seat was jammed all the way back to accommodate Lewis’s freakishly long legs. David jumped up with that unearthly grace of the Djinn, and we were in motion almost before his door closed.

“So,” I said, leaning over between the seats. "We're in the car. Now can we hear why?"

Now that there was no good reason for him to keep quiet, he still seemed reluctant to share. It was a good thirty seconds of road noise-filled silence before he finally said, "There's a missing boy."

I'm not hard-hearted, but that seemed to be a relatively small matter to fly two of the most powerful Wardens in the country out here, plus the leader of the New Djinn. There had to be more to the story. I struggled to figure out how to phrase my questions without sounding accusatory, and then gave up. "Any reason why this isn't just a straight-up police matter?"

"Yes. The boy's one of us. Or will be. He's already demonstrating some significant power, and he's only eleven years old." Lewis had another of those curious moments of silence, and then continued. "He's also a friend of the family, I guess you could say."

"Whose family?"

"He's Jane Falworth-Davis's son. Francis's grandson."

Oh. That changed things, no doubt about it. Francis Falworth-Davis was one of the grand old ladies of the Wardens organization; she'd been an amazing talent in her day, and the leader of North America for almost thirty years.

Everybody had expected that Jane, her daughter, would be just as impressive -- and she was, in some ways, but she was also fragile as glass. I'd known her at Princeton. Lewis had, too. She'd had some kind of serious psychotic breakdown at school and been whisked off for emergency psychic surgery -- removal of her powers, because she'd been uncontrollably lashing out. The surgery was always risky at the best of times, and these hadn't been. Jane hadn't come out of it well. As far as I knew, she was still clinically insane.

It was only after the surgery that they'd discovered she was pregnant. Jane never admitted who the father was, and Francis had taken the baby to raise herself.

The Wardens owed Francis, who could have blamed us for Jane's troubles, and hadn't. Not only that, Francis had saved the world dozens of times over. She was within her rights to call in favors, even in the form of Lewis, David, and me.

"I'd think you would be more useful coordinating from a distance," David said.

Lewis slid sunglasses on. I saw a muscle tighten in his jaw. “Tried it," he said. "Time could be running out for the boy. I want the best on this, right now."

On the one hand, it was flattering that we were considered the best.

On the other ... if Lewis couldn't handle it alone, that didn't exactly fill me with confidence. And I couldn't understand what David was thinking at all.

###

Francis Falworth-Davis met us on the porch of one of an old-time ranch house, a sprawling two-story thing of sun-weathered wood with a wraparound porch. I couldn’t decide how old she was at first glance – over sixty, but younger than the house. She had snow-white hair close-cropped around a tanned, strong face mapped with smile lines, but she wasn’t smiling. Not now. As we got out of the SUV she nodded to Lewis, gave David a long, knowing look, then focused on me. It was like being hit unexpectedly with a laser pointer, full in the eyes; the force of her personality was so impressive I felt it from a dozen feet away.

“Welcome,” she finally said. “Come on in.”

Inside, the house had that lived-in feel, floors worn smooth by generations of footsteps. Walls smothered by photographs, from stiff-postured pioneer families to smiling informal snapshots of a smiling, lovely girl I recognized – Jane, the girl from college. In some of the later photos, Jane was missing, and there was only Francis and a smiling little boy. Ethan. Up until that moment, I’d been able to think of him in the abstract, but the sight of that smile made him real to me, a real person in genuine peril.

Francis motioned us to what I thought was the old formal parlor – the stiff Victorian furniture I imagined had once occupied it was long gone, replaced by a sturdy, battered leather sofa and big, comfortable chairs. David paused in the doorway, his gaze darting around the room. Reading the past echoes of energy stored here in the walls, the carpet, the life of the house.

All I could see was a room ... and tucked in the corner next to the couch, a baseball glove and bat, with a dirty red ball cap piled on top. I couldn’t seem to take my eyes off of it once I’d seen that sad little cluster of things, tucked away like Ethan had just dashed off upstairs to wash his hands before dinner. I sat down in one of the chairs. Lewis and Francis took the sofa, and David leaned against the wall, arms folded.

“Lewis here already knows this story,” Francis said, “so I’ll just be repeating it for the two of you. My grandson Ethan was starting to show the signs, you know the ones. Real strong earth potential in the boy. He has a connection to the land, to the animals. Like his mother.” I almost missed the brief flash of pain that sheeted across her face, like lightning. “He came back from ball practice on Tuesday, around ten thirty, just like usual. He went out to feed Drury – his dog -- and take him for a walk. I thought he’d be back for dinner, like always. When he wasn’t home by dark, I started calling folks. By midnight, I was calling the police.” Francis nodded to Lewis. “And you, of course.”

He took up the story from there. “The cops haven’t found a trace of any stranger in the area. They brought in scent dogs, but the trail went cold. There's an Amber Alert, but no leads so far.”

“And the Wardens?” David asked.

“I sent Edward Tally first, and a team of other Earth Wardens. He brought along Gregor.” Gregor was one of David’s Djinn, a burly, intimidating guy in human form with a bluish cast to his hair, very Aladdin gone bad. “They spent the whole day looking. Gregor tracked the boy out to the desert, but he lost him. He wouldn't say anything else.”

“I don’t think he had anything else to tell you," David said. “There’s power involved here, something big enough to block a Djinn and the Wardens. That doesn't bode well. It also rules out mere humans.”

I took another look at the baseball glove, the bat, the cap. I thought about the smiling boy in those pictures out on the living room wall, and the flash of stoic grief that had shown briefly in Francis’s face. “We should start from the beginning,” I said. “If Gregor picked up a trail, we can, too.” I stood up, and Lewis and David echoed the movement. “Let’s retrace his steps. Maybe we can find something they missed."

Francis didn’t rise. She sat there on the sofa and looked up at us, and suddenly she didn’t look strong, or capable, or in control. She looked tired, and very hurt. “Bring my boy home,” she said. “Please, bring him home.”

Lewis took her hands. “I swear, we will.”

###

“So, about Jane,” I said, as we let the screen door slam behind us, and the hot afternoon closed in. “Probably ought to talk about the big elephant in the conversational room. Is Ethan’s mother accounted for?”

“Yes,” Lewis said. Just the one word, dry as the desert air.

“You’re sure. Because I’m thinking if she got herself out of confinement ...”

“She hasn’t. I checked in person,” he said. This time the conversational door was slammed completely shut. “Next idea.”

“I’d say interview all the ranch hands and staff, but – “

“Police are all over that. We need to use the time to our advantage.”

I wasn’t sure what advantage there was. There wasn’t anything much to be found out in the yard, which was a big, carefully tended patch of hardy grass beaten down in places by a big, friendly chocolate Labrador who loped around the chain link and barked at our passage. He was big enough to take down a bear, but I wasn’t worried; Lewis could charm a shark, much less a dog. Built-in, deep-seated Earth powers. I had some, but not nearly as much.

No dog on this earth would go after David, no matter how hungry or angry.

We left the yard and headed for the barn. Lewis and I called up power out of the ground, a thick, golden tingle that spread through the soles of my feet and crept through my body like vines around a tree. Lewis spread the power out in a shimmering golden net that lapped our ankles like fog, spreading and rolling. “You think there’ll still be a trace?” I asked. For answer, Lewis lifted the dirty red ball cap I’d seen back in the house.

“I’ve got a DNA sample,” he said. “Here.”

I took the cap and turned it inside out, running my fingers along the sweat band inside. I didn’t have either the native skill that Lewis was born with, or the training, but I could sense the essence of the boy who’d worn the hat. It seeped into me like a faint, but definite, melody – a child’s melody, simple and beautiful.

I couldn’t hear my own song, but I suspected it was as baroque as an Italian opera.

Lewis slowly turned, orienting off toward the West. David was facing that direction too. As I shifted my weight to follow suit, I heard/felt the melody grow just a tiny bit stronger, and then I saw it – a very, very faint glimmer in the golden field of power Lewis had laid down.

A trace, literally, of Ethan’s passage through this part of the world.

I wasn’t looking forward to a long hike, even though I’d worn sturdy shoes. “There are ATVs in the barn,” I said. “We could make better time that way.”

“We’d lose the trace,” Lewis said. “It’s faint enough that doing it on foot will be hard enough.”

So much for saving myself effort. I should have known that traveling with Lewis was going to mean an excess of healthy exercise. He loved to hike.

“I’ll take the lead,” David said. “If the track disappears, I may still be able to find it.”

“Stay in sight,” Lewis said. “Last thing I need is three people to find.”

###

It was my vacation, and I was spending it tramping through a breathtakingly empty prairie of fine reddish sand, broken with clumps of spiky bushes that erupted out of the soil like grasping hands. Lewis and I worked hard to maintain the field of power surrounding us as David led us deeper into the wilderness – away from roads, trails, and except for the white plumes of planes far overhead, away from civilization. Lewis continued to pick up random sparks of energy that were signatures of Ethan’s trail, but they were few and far between; I doubted any lesser Warden could have managed to find them at all, in so much open space.

The boy had gone pretty far out. I wasn't sure what that meant, but so far, there wasn't any sign that he'd been with anyone else on his nature walk.

David kept ahead of us, but as Lewis had requested, he never got out of our sight. The Falworth-Davis ranch house vanished into the distance behind, and after a couple of hours I broke out water and passed it to Lewis as we paused for a break. David stood motionless on the horizon, facing outward, waiting.

“So, did I interrupt something?” Lewis asked, and took another thirsty swig from the bottle before handing it back.

“Only our first real vacation together in, well, ever. At least, one without a crisis hanging over our heads.”

“Sorry.” Lewis looked down at the swirling golden fog around us, and passed his hand idly through it. It eddied and curled over his fingers, clinging like a pet. “I’ll get you back on a plane tonight if I can. Tomorrow, latest.”

The plane part didn’t appeal to me, but going home did, so I nodded. “Can we talk about Jane now?”

“Jane?” Lewis didn’t look at me; he continued to stare down at the golden fog in his hand. “She’s secure.”

“You’re sure about that.”

“Positive. I checked on her in person before I came out here. She’s in a padded room in Warwick, Rhode Island. They had to dope her last week. She cut herself again, pretty bad this time.”

God. I couldn’t help but remember the pretty, sweet, gentle girl I’d known in college. “You dated her, right?” Lewis had been a serial dater, back then, but he’d mainly gone for the “normal” girls, the non-Wardens at Princeton. Still, Jane had wanted to be normal, and I thought I remembered seeing him with her.

Lewis continued to sweep his hand through the fog. “Back in the day, yeah,” he said. “Before she had her breakdown. Before they screwed up the surgery and left her broken for good.”

I heard the sharp bitterness in his voice. “You liked her.”

“Yeah. I liked her.” Lewis opened his hand and let the golden power roll out of it. He rose from his crouch and scanned the horizon with distant, cool brown eyes. “Let’s keep moving. There’s a cold front coming in from the west. We’ll have rain by tomorrow.”

I blinked, surprised. I hadn’t felt it, but when I opened up my Weather Warden side, I could feel the tingle of the approaching front, the energy being produced as it collided and rubbed with the warm, dry air.

Lewis could balance all this without even thinking about it. That was ... quietly terrifying.

We followed a trail of tiny sparks, and David’s footprints, across an empty space as the sun blazed across the sky.

###

Trouble came on us suddenly, and without any warning. One minute David was there, striding over the sand, following his own invisible trail, and the next he was ... gone.

Lewis accelerated into a lope, long legs eating up space. I had to push myself to a flat-out sprint to catch up. The golden mist around us roiled and eddied; I faltered in my concentration, panting with effort, but Lewis didn’t. When we reached the last spot I’d seen David, the fog was still with us, blanketing the area and sparking with bursts of power. The place David had been glowed hot orange, and the molten-glass color pooled into the hollow of his footprints. Oddly, the fog wouldn’t flow past that point; it piled up there, as if held back by an invisible glass wall.

I walked to the spot. “Careful,” Lewis said from behind me.

I gave him an impatient wave and edged closer. David was at the bottom of the hill. He was crouched, both hands on the sand, like an animal ready to spring. “David?” I asked, and felt a tightening of my guts when he didn’t respond. “David!”

“Something’s wrong here,” he said. His voice didn't sound normal. "Stay back."

I didn’t. I slithered down the sandy hill, half running, half sliding, and landed in a burst of blowing dirt at his side.

Lewis, on the other hand, stayed where he was, at the top.

I crouched down next to David. “What is it?” His face was starkly pale, and his eyes – his eyes were glowing a desperate red.

“Black corner,” he said. “It’s a black corner.”

“I don’t know what that means! Are you all right?”

He tried to get up, but staggered and almost fell. I grabbed him to steady him. “We have to get out of here. Now.”

“What did he say?” Lewis called from the top.

“Get your ass down here and help me!”

“Not until I hear what he said.”

Son of a bitch. “He said it’s a black corner. What’s a black corner?”

Lewis didn’t move. “A dead spot. A spot that’s been burned, damaged through all the planes of existence. There are five or six in the world, but the Djinn can’t sense them; they only know they’re here when they walk into them. Sort of like aetheric quicksand.”

“God dammit! Help me get him out of here!”

“I can’t,” Lewis said. “I’m sorry. If I go down there, I’ll be just as useless as he is right now. You have to find a way to get him back up here without me.”

“You can be such a – “ I controlled myself and slowed my breathing. “Fine, help me pull him up there.” He shrugged off his emergency backpack and unzipped sections, coming up with some thin, flexible nylon rope neatly stored in a figure eight.

I tied one end around David’s waist. “Right!” I yelled. “You pull, I’ll push! Go!”

David was not quite dead weight. He had balance, and he could move a little on his own behalf, but I could see that it was torture for him to fight to stay with us. Black corner. I couldn’t feel a thing, except –

No. I couldn’t feel a thing at all. I stretched out my senses, but it was like grabbing with a phantom limb. I felt nothing from the earth beneath my boots, nothing from the sky and wind. No sense of the world at all. I was entirely, magically blind.

I concentrated on taking in raw, dirt-fogged breaths as I pushed David up the hill.

We were halfway up David jerked, as if something had struck him hard, and a half-second later I heard the rolling crack of a rifle. It took me a stunned instant to process the evidence – the hole in his back, the limpness of his body against the rope’s pull – and then I screamed. Lewis was already yelling. “Get to cover!” he shouted, and let go of the rope. David and I rolled back down the slope, into the black corner. He flopped flat on his back, red eyes open. Unmoving.

I grabbed his outflung wrists and began dragging him toward the shelter of a low dune – the only thing around. Something puffed dust in a small cloud near my feet. I heard the snap of the shot following close behind, but I kept my head down and continued to drag David with all my strength. My breath was coming in short, gasping bursts, and I was starting to shake as adrenaline rushed into my system, trying to give me fuel for the fight.

“David?” I cupped my hands around his face. He didn’t blink. His pupils had expanded, leaving only a small ring of red around the edges. “I know you’re in there. Don’t you dare leave me!”

No response. I closed his eyes with my thumbs and rolled him onto his side, so I could get a better look at the wound in his back. It was big, and it was bloodless; I could see the ragged track going all the way through him. God, I could see daylight.

It would be a fatal wound for a human, but David couldn’t be killed by a bullet. Not even here? some part of me whispered. He’s weak. He’s failing.

I needed to find out where the edges of this dead zone were, and figure out a way to get David out. Now.

“Lewis!” I shouted. “I need a plan!”

“I know! Stay put!” came his distant response from the other side of the hill. I couldn’t feel anything happening, but I saw sand begin to stir up there on the hill, rising up into a curtain, then into a thick red wall as Lewis created a diversion. It pushed forward, and stopped dead at the spot where David’s footprints had shown the limits of the black corner.

It curved around, driven by howls of wind, and slowly defined the edges of the place where even natural forces had no power. Now or never, I thought. I needed to act – get to the shooter and stop him while Lewis commanded his attention and clouded his vision. I pressed David's hand in a silent, desperate promise, and then got to my feet and sprinted hard for the closest edge of the black corner.

I didn’t make it. Another shot rang out, and I zigged, fast. Sand shifted under my feet, and I went down, rolling.

As I struggled to rise, I felt my hands skid painfully on something hard. Wood. I got a palm full of splinters.

There was something was buried under the sand.

“Jo!” Lewis was yelling at me from outside the black corner, but I couldn’t answer him. I knew I had seconds, at most, to save myself, and no power at all. The sand wasn't enough to protect me from the marksman aiming at me.

I swept my hands along the wood, frantically seeking edges, and found them. I heaved with reckless strength, and a broad, heavy trap door creaked up. I slithered into the gap and dropped down into darkness as the door banged shut above me.

The place smelled of fear and sweat and the natural by-product of someone being trapped for a few days. I held myself still, listening, and picked out the sound of breathing. “Ethan?” I whispered. “Ethan Falworth-Davis?” I heard the breathing catch, and start up again unevenly. “Your grandma Francis sent me. My name is Joanne.”

“Prove it,” said a childish, disembodied voice.

“You left your baseball glove and bat in the corner next to the leather couch in the parlor,” I said. “And I brought your hat.” I had it shoved in the back pocket of my jeans; for a miracle, it hadn’t fallen out during my rolling around. “Do you want it?”

“You got a flashlight?” For a kid who’d spent days in the dark, Ethan sounded remarkably calm. “My batteries are almost out.”

“No, sorry. Not even a match.”

“Okay.” He switched on a flashlight, and although he was right, the batteries were definitely failing, it lit up the tiny space like a flash bomb, putting everything in stark relief. Ethan was still wearing a stained baseball t-shirt with a red logo and sleeves. The box we were in – I couldn’t think what else to call it – was concrete on the sides, with metal sheeting on the inside of the wooden door above.

It was full of wrapped plastic packages, and I didn’t think anybody would come all the way out here to stash their corn meal and flour.

“That’s not mine,” Ethan said, sounding remarkably adult about it. He was the same boy from the photos, only he’d lost the smile. Big, earnest dark eyes, and a serious, square face. “I think it’s, you know, drugs and stuff.”

“I think you’re right,” I said, and crouched down next to him. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” He shrugged, embarrassed. “It’s my hideout. I found it a few months ago, but it was empty. When I got here, I found all this stuff, and then this guy showed up. I couldn’t get out, but he couldn’t get in, either.”

“He couldn’t?”

For answer, Ethan lifted a pistol. It was a matte-black semi-automatic, and the slide was jammed all the way back. My heart did a little stutter, and I held out my trembling hand for it. He gave it to me.

Empty.

“You’ve been shooting at him?” I asked.

“I had to. He shot at me first.” For all his bravery, this was a little boy, and I saw that he was deeply scared. “He missed me, though. I just shot to scare him. That's not mine either. I found it in here.”

“You must have done a really good job of scaring him,” I said. “How long have you been down here?”

“I don’t know. Days, maybe. It got really boring after a while. I figured somebody would find me.” He gave me a faint smile this time. "I told him I'd blow all this stuff up if he tried to come in."

"Ah ... and do you have dynamite in your pocket or something?"

"Kind of," he said, and turned the flashlight away, on another box. It had Army stenciling on it, identifying the contents as MK2. It was also clearly marked as EXPLOSIVE. "I didn't open it, though."

I didn’t have a pry bar, but the wood was pretty old; a well-placed smack shattered the top enough to give me a look at the interior.

“Sweet!” Ethan said, wide-eyed.

Grenades, the old pineapple kind. I swallowed hard, thinking about the damage a kid could do to himself in an enclosed space with military explosives. I grabbed two. “Don’t touch these,” I said. “Promise me you won’t, no matter what. I can’t take them with me, but I don’t want you messing with this stuff. It’s very dangerous.”

The kid looked deeply offended. “I’m not stupid.”

At his age, I certainly had been. “Seriously, Ethan. Promise me.”

“I promise.”

I looked at the gun. "I wish we had a reload for this."

He pulled the top off of another nearby box. In it were three more magazines, fully loaded. “I was going to put another one in,” he said, clearly embarrassed. “I kind of forgot, and then when I heard you coming, I couldn’t find the box in time.”

Which explained why he hadn’t shot me, thank God. I decided to save the gun lecture for later, changed out the magazines and worked the slide to load one in the chamber. “So, this is your hideout?” I asked. It didn’t make sense to me, a budding Warden seeking out – even accidentally – a secret hideout in a black corner, where he couldn’t feel the earth around him.

Ethan was quiet for a moment, then said, “It’s the only place where I can be me again. You know? Out there, there’s all this noise in my head, all this stuff. Here, it’s just ... me.”

That made more sense than I’d expected. I remembered what it had been like at puberty – powers waking, complicated by hormones kicking in. No wonder he wanted to have a quiet place to just be. Warden powers were a heavy burden, and he was young. Too young.

I took a deep breath. “Here’s what we’re going to do. You stay here until I come back for you, okay? Don’t worry, it’s all going to be all right. Just chill.”

“Chill? I can do that.” He grinned at me, and something struck me full force -- a powerful sense of recognition. I knew that smile. I knew those dark eyes. It was only a glimpse, and then it was gone, and I wasn’t altogether sure I hadn’t imagined it.

I heard the snap of a rifle shot overhead, muffled by the concrete and wooden and metal, and realized that I was probably running out of time. “I’ll be back for you. Ethan, stay put. Whatever happens, stay where you are.”

“I know,” he said. “I’ll -- ” The flashlight batteries flickered, then gave up the ghost, plunging us into darkness. Ethan’s voice stuttered, then strengthened. “I’ll be okay.”

“I know you will be.” I hugged him, on impulse, and he wrapped his arms around me with near desperation. “Be right back, hero.”

I climbed up on the crates, wary of my weight on the creaking wood, and managed to get a broken piece of concrete wedged near the hinges to hold the door open at an angle as I crawled out. With any luck, the angle and the blowing sand would confuse the rifleman; if not, the metal and wood were at least a thin cover.

I didn’t know where Lewis was, but the sandstorm was in full roar now, except in the area where I was lying. It was eerily quiet here, the eye of the storm.

It occurred to me, as another shot rang out and shivered the propped-up door, that the shooter wasn’t out there.

He was in here with me, inside the black corner. Very close.

I crawled over to the side and risked a look around the door. If I didn’t have cover, neither did he. I saw a flutter of cloth on the ground, and a glitter of sun on glass. He’d taken a sniper position, probably at the maximum range of the pistol in my hand, and I wasn’t that good a shot. Likewise, the grenades were only as good as I could throw, and I was no professional.

While I was considering the best course to get my message across to Lewis, my phone buzzed in my pocket. Oh. Right. Magic didn't work in the black corner ... technology evidently did.

Lewis didn't waste time on pleasantries. “I’m at the edge of the black corner, maybe fifty feet away. I got one of them.”

“Bully for you. Mine’s the sniper, and he’s staying put.”

“You okay?”

That was beside the point right now. “I found Ethan. He’s in a smuggler’s box under the sand. We need to get him out of there.”

Lewis was so quiet I thought about saying, over, but then his voice came in a rush. “I’m coming in. Get him ready. I’ll pull him out and get him to safety.”

The tacit understanding was that once that was done, I’d be on my own. I was kind of okay with that.

Ethan nodded. A second later, Lewis’s pale, tense face appeared above us in the small opening. “Up!” he said, and reached down. I lifted, and Ethan raised his arms. Lewis lifted him straight up and out, and held the boy close to his chest. I saw relief chase fear across his expression.

“Get him clear!” I said. “Here, take this!” I tossed up the pistol, and then one of the grenades. “I’m blowing the hell out of this place, so get the kid as far away as you can!”

Lewis and Ethan disappeared from my narrow view, and I could only hope they were taking me seriously. I jumped for the opening above and hauled myself up by main strength belly down on the hot sand. I saw tracks leading toward the only cover available – the far sand dune where I’d left David.

As I got to my hands and knees, I heard a voice from behind me say, “Don’t move.”

I froze. Through the sweaty, dusty curtain of my hair, I saw a man dressed desert camouflage crouched nearby, aiming a rifle directly at me. He’d made better time advancing than I’d hoped. “Who else is down there?” he demanded.

“Nobody.” I slowly came upright, sitting on my knees, careful to keep my hands at my sides. “Who are you?”

“Who the fuck are you, you crazy bitch? Cops? DEA?”

“You wish. Look, I'll make you a deal – forget about your drugs and get the hell out of here. We’ll call it even.”

“Know what?” He took aim. “Think I’ll just kill you instead.”

“You sure about that?” I turned my left hand over and showed him the grenade. “Already pulled the pin. Shoot me, and we’re both buzzard meat.”

“You think I’m stupid? You didn’t pull the pin.”

I smiled, cold and certain. “Can you really tell from there? Then shoot me. Or leave. Your choice. But I'm not alone, and you really don't want to screw with us."

He wasn’t sure I was bluffing. He couldn’t be, without coming even closer. After a long, frozen second, he took a step back. As he retreated, I edged closer until I was holding the grenade over the door of the smuggler’s box. Even if he was tempted to shoot me, he wouldn’t dare now. He still hoped to get his drugs out of the deal, if nothing else.

"Keep moving," I called to him. "I won't drop the bomb if you leave quietly."

I stayed where I was until he was he mounted a dusty camouflage ATV – it was nearly hidden in a new sand dune, thanks to Lewis’s distraction windstorm – and began revving it toward the horizon. Only then did I breathe a sigh of relief and relax my grip around the grenade.

The pin – still in place – had branded a red ring into the skin of my palm. I pulled the pin, dropped the grenade into the smuggler’s box, and ran to join Lewis and Ethan. We all threw ourselves flat.

Nothing happened. No explosion.

The grenade was a dud.

Lewis slowly got up, holding Ethan close to his side. He stared after the retreating sniper on the ATV, and the expression on his face was somewhere between terrifying and outright insane. “Let’s go,” he said. He looked down at David, still lying silent on the ground. “He’ll be okay once we get him out of the dead space.”

I nodded and grabbed David’s wrists, and we made our way to the closest edge of the black corner.

As we stepped across that invisible boundary, it felt like I’d been suffocating, and now I was given sweet, delicious air. I hadn’t realized how much my body craved its connection to the powers, to the earth, to the wind and water and fire. I hadn’t realized how alone I’d been, until I wasn’t.

As soon as David was pulled across the terminator, he pulled in a deep, retching breath and rolled over on his side. I flopped down beside him, holding his hand, and watched as the wound in his chest knitted itself closed. Not a single drop of blood.

“You’re all right?” David’s voice was rough, not entirely steady, and his eyes faded from red back to gold-flecked bronze. He got to his knees. I met him there, and our embrace was desperate and hungry. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“I couldn’t help you. I couldn’t even help myself.”

“I’m okay.”

“I know you are.” His arms tightened around me. “We need to mark this place, warn the Djinn. They can’t be here.”

“Yeah, it’s not so healthy for Wardens, either.”

Lewis was holding the boy in his arms, but Ethan was squirming to get free. Lewis set him down, and Ethan hurried over to me.
I was watching Lewis, who continued to track the sniper on the ATV as he buzzed toward freedom.

Boom.

ATVs have gas tanks. It didn’t make a very big explosion, but it was certainly big enough. I winced and averted my eyes, but Lewis wasn’t done yet. He turned his hand over, and I saw the dull green pineapple shape of the grenade. He pulled the pin like he’d done it for a living, and in one smooth motion, tossed.

It arced through the air, perfectly placed, and dropped neatly into the open hole of the smuggler’s box.

"Mine was a dud," I said.

"This one's not."

On the count of three, the entire thing exploded in a blast of flame, debris, and airborne cocaine. When the stunning blast died away, there was just a smoking hole in the ground,

“Pretty good throw,” I said, and met Lewis’s eyes. “The kid likes baseball. I guess that kind of thing runs in the family.”

Lewis said nothing. His gaze flicked to the boy, and I saw it again – Ethan’s fine walnut-brown hair, his dark brown eyes. The shadow of Lewis’s smile on his lips.

I let my expression ask the question. Does he know? Lewis shook his head, and I saw the secrets in him, and the torment. I knew why Francis had called him now. I knew why Lewis couldn’t walk away with Ethan still missing, and delegate.
David certainly knew; he’d probably known it from the beginning, from the history written in the walls and floors of the Falworth-Davis house. Lewis must have been a frequent visitor. I knew him well enough to know he’d want to be part of Ethan’s life.

“It’s complicated,” Lewis said, answering some question I didn’t know was in my face. “In the beginning I was on the run from the Wardens, for years. I didn’t want to put Ethan at risk. Later – it didn’t seem like the right time.”

“Time for what?” Ethan asked, and looked at us both in turn.

David studied the horizon, removing himself from the entire conversation as effectively as if he’d held up a NOT HERE sign.

“To tell you,” Lewis said, and stopped, as if the words just wouldn’t make it to his lips.

He needn’t have bothered. “That you’re my dad?” Ethan shrugged. “I know that. I always knew it.”

Lewis blinked. So did I. Even David raised his head. “You did?” Lewis asked, clearly mystified.

“Sure. I could feel it. Grandma says I’ve got the gift. Whatever.” Ethan shrugged. “I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it or anything.”

Lewis slowly sank down into a crouch, bringing himself to eye level with the boy. He didn’t say anything. Neither did Ethan.

After a long moment, he opened his arms, and Ethan flung himself into them. This time, when Lewis picked him up, Ethan didn’t try to struggle free. I clutched David’s hand tightly as I watched the two of them together, father and son, and I was overcome by a feeling I didn’t really understand – longing, regret, pride, anguish.

David knew. He put his arm around me. “It’s good he has someone,” he said.

“Lewis, or Ethan?”

“Both.”

I couldn’t dispute that.

It was a long hike back through the desert, but somehow, it seemed like we were all family, together.

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