Firestorm (10 page)

My heart skipped a beat.

He wasn't kidding about the car. It was pretty much the Holy Grail of cars, and I had the keys.

It was parked in the secured, bomb-hardened garage downstairs—the one reserved for only the most senior diplomats and Warden staffers. Well, what with the death and destruction, there were bound to be plenty of parking spots open. It had a fabulous exotic gleam under the overhead lights, a polished sapphire hiding unsuccessfully in a field of pebbles. The conservatively styled BMWs and Infinitis looked drab in contrast, though somebody had spiced up his love life with one of those kicky little BMW Z4 Roadsters in sleek, polished silver. Very James Bond.

I ran a hand reverently over the Camaro's silky finish. It was a 1969 model, a V8 with a 396 engine—a big, boxy car, nothing really elegant about it, none of that designed-in-a-wind-tunnel slickness of newer cars. I opened the door and popped the hood, leaned in for a look, and felt my heart give that extra-double-thump reserved for true automotive love.

It wasn't just a COPO—a Central Office Production Order model, which would have been cool enough. No, it was one of the rarest of the rare: a 9560 with an all-aluminum ZL-1 427. The lightest, quickest, fastest Camaro ever made. Also, the rarest and most valuable. I winced to think how much cash Lewis had laid out for this beauty. It was in perfect condition, maintained with loving care. Not so much as a scratch.

I almost hated to be taking it out into the field, where things were bound to get ugly…but then again, it might just save my life. Speed counted.

I closed the hood and stood there for a moment, hand on the smooth finish, feeling the latent power of the car. It wasn't a replacement for my beloved, lost vintage Mustang, but that would be like saying that Secretariat wasn't a replacement for Man O' War. It was a thorough-bred, born to run.

And…Lewis had bought it for me.

Huh.

I wasn't sure I liked the implications—a guy buying you a car is at least as significant as him buying you a ring, and maybe more so in my slightly skewed worldview—but then again, I needed fast transportation.

A moral quandry. I hated those. And no question, the Camaro was seductive. I could always return it, I told myself. Sell it. Pay him back later. I didn't have to think of it as some kind of down payment for something more…intimate.

Then again, the Camaro conjured up those kinds of thoughts, all on its own. It just had that kind of aura. Sweaty bodies and smothered cries. Somebody had gotten lucky in this car a lot.

Dammit.
I opened the door and slid inside. It was as perfectly maintained inside as out. Not a speck of trash or dust in it. I closed my eyes and went up into Oversight to take a walk around it, aetherically speaking.

Oh, God, it
glowed.
There was power in this machine. It was infused with love and dreams. In the act of creation, humans gave things a kind of reality on the aetheric, even though there was no life in inanimate objects per se. Every caring act of maintenance, every brush of the cloth on the dash or the chamois over the finish had rubbed a kind of power into this car along with polish.

I'd never seen anything like it. I wondered briefly how it would have looked to my eyes if I'd still been a Djinn; I'd have been able to unroll its past like a carpet, if I'd wanted. As it was, I was willing to bet this was a one-owner car, until now.

And that answered the question of why Lewis had bought it, too. Things like this, infused with this much power and substance, were rare and precious. It would have drawn him to it.

I let out a long, pleased sigh and inserted the key in the ignition. The engine fired up with a low, raw growl, then purred so smoothly that the tiny fine vibration under my body was almost unnoticeable.

“God, you're beautiful,” I said, and ran my hand around the steering wheel. Adding my emotion to what armored the car. “And you know it, don't you, baby? You know it.”

I shifted gears, and it responded perfectly to me. We eased up parking levels, to the secured gate, where my ID was checked by a uniformed security guard, and then I was out. Bright—though unfocused and cloudy—day outside, and my eyes were unprepared to deal with it; I hunted in the glove box and discovered an ancient, still-cool pair of Ray-Bans that cut the glare to something less nuclear.

It wasn't a short drive to Maine, and I didn't have a lot of time to waste.

Time. Right. I felt a pulse of alarm, remembering Eamon's two-day deadline, but I couldn't do anything about that; I couldn't even begin to try. I pictured Sarah, crying and afraid, hurting. I had to believe that he wouldn't hurt her. After all, I'd seen him with her, and I knew that on some level, Eamon did care for her. He wouldn't torment her to make a point unless I was there to witness it.

It was all no good without an audience.

I hoped.

Even with the dark thoughts, it felt good to be in the world again, and moving under my own control. I didn't think I could stand to be trapped inside the headquarters building for long, cut off from the hum of the wind and the whisper of the sea.

Okay, so New York hummed more from traffic and whispered more of sirens, but it still felt good.

The Camaro prowled through traffic like a big, dangerous beast…not feline, the way it was built. More wolf than cat. It turned heads, except for the cabdrivers, who ignored me to the point that I had to look sharp not to add yellow paint to the Camaro's shiny finish. I couldn't afford to go up into Oversight, not in heavy traffic, but I could sense an electric crackle in the air, potential energy heavy as impending rain, but without the healing moisture. That was going to ground itself soon, and in a particularly ugly manner, if something wasn't done.

Well, the good side of things was that I no longer had to worry about other Wardens second-guessing me when it came to things like this, and for the first time in a long time, I was at full power. So as I hit the bridge and sent the Camaro loping over the water, I concentrated on reading the systems swirling overhead. They were huge, invisible tornadoes of power. Unstable. Charges clicking together in chains, whipping wildly, then breaking when the stresses got too great. This was a reaction problem. The Wardens were concentrating their forces on handling a myriad of disasters; there were bound to be consequences.

And here was a big one.

The sky was surly overhead, soggy with thick, darkening clouds that blew in from the sea. The water under the bridge heaved and breathed on its own, a secret life most of the millions in the city would never even sense, much less understand. Water had memory, of a kind. Blood had DNA, and water had a similar structure that existed only on the aetheric plane. That DNA had been badly damaged over the years, but it still purified itself, renewed itself, struggled continually against the assaults of mankind to corrupt it.

We were damn lucky, the human race. Damn lucky that the earth's systems protected us as a side effect of its own survival mechanism, because we damn sure weren't smart enough to do it for ourselves.

I considered what to do about all that restless energy upstairs. Lightning would be the most logical plan, but it was risky; it was notoriously difficult to control lightning, and discharging it around the city could cause blackouts. Blackouts caused panics. Panics caused deaths. Deaths were, after all, what I was in this to try to avoid.

Then again, there was going to be lightning, sooner or later, and it was going to be worse if nobody controlled its strikes.

I drove for two hours. That sounds like a respectable driving distance, especially in the horsepower-rich Camaro, but unfortunately, traffic wasn't exactly cooperative. Two hours later, I was still within sight of the city. I'd hoped to be well out of range before the prickling at the back of my neck told me that something had to be done, because then it would have been someone else's responsibility. I'd been hoping that some Good Warden Samaritan would jump in and have at it, but no such luck…not that I blamed the folks back at Warden HQ. They had something of a full plate at the moment.

I signaled and pulled over to the side of the road in a spray of gravel, emergency flashers clicking. I settled myself comfortably in the bucket seat and let myself go up to the world above, where the landscape washed away into a surreal swirl of fog and color. Brilliant, up here, and a unique bird's eye view of a gorgeous city. Wow. New York was charged with human purpose, driven by the engine of energy transforming and growing and changing, by passions and hopes and dreams and tragedies. I couldn't see as much detail as I'd once been able to, when I'd been a Djinn, but the city was still magnificent and mesmerizing, and it was tough as hell to look away.

I forced myself to focus on the job at hand, and turned my attention upward, to the disturbance.

The force patterns up there slipped like oil in water, incandescent and rainbow-colored. Beautiful, in their own way. Scary as hell, the way they were blending and morphing and whipping together. When lines of force connected, I saw the ultraviolet zaps of enormous power being channeled.

As I reached out to try to build a stable channel for it, I felt something…
notice.
That was the most skin-crawling sensation I'd ever had in my weather career, a shock to the system as extreme and terrifying as channeling lightning, if lightning had a brain and an intent.
Something
was watching me. Something big. The Mother? Was that what it was like?…

I lost control of the chains. They broke into random turning particles again, a soup of energy boiling over. I wanted to reach out again, but something was holding me back…my own fear. I was a tiny little field mouse, and there was a huge eagle shadow overhead, just waiting for me to make a move. If I tried to run, I'd die—crushed, devoured, destroyed.

Something in the real world brushed my hand, then gripped it tight. I opened my eyes, surprised, and saw that I had a passenger in the car, though the doors were still locked.

David was back, and he wasn't disguised as human at all; in fact, if anything, he looked more Djinn than ever before. A whole lot of sleek gold skin on display, because he was wearing only a pair of tight leather pants and an open leather jacket, with no shirt beneath. His hair was longer, down nearly to his shoulders, and it held a vivid, metallic shine. His eyes were their own light sources. I stared at them, fascinated; they were the color of new pennies on the edge of melting in a blast furnace.

His hand was hot enough to be uncomfortable against my skin.

“I came to warn you,” he said. He was in my space, very close. I felt the longing in him, the shivering attraction that had gripped me from the very beginning. “You have to stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Trying to fix this. It can't be fixed.”

“You know me better than that. Or at least, I hope you do. And by the way, what's with the bad-boy makeover?”

He brushed hair back from my face. Where his fingers touched, I burned. Figuratively as well as literally. “You don't like it?”

“The leather? Um…” I'd have to have been blind and insane not to like it, not to mention hormonally bankrupt. “Looks good on you.”

“Not as good as you would.”

Oh
God
. My pulse started fluttering and racing, and as if his heat had crawled inside me, I started a bonfire of my own. At least half my mind—the smart half—was screaming that there wasn't time for flirting around just now. Not
now.
And not in a confined space with a Djinn who might just flip out and kill me.

I wasn't sure that sex with him in this state wouldn't kill me, anyway.

“You look good enough to eat.” He licked his lips. There was something incandescent going on in his eyes, so bright, I couldn't look for long. It was as if he were staring at my naked soul.

“Um—David—” His hand slid down the curve of my cheek, traced my chin, and then his fingers trailed down the line of my throat. His index finger explored the notch of my collarbone, and then dipped lower. He hooked it in the neck of my shirt and pulled. I swayed toward him. “What are you doing?”

“Don't you know?” he asked.

Oh boy. The energy piling up and swirling overhead. The hot crackle between us. The heat of his skin, the restless flare inside me. The sense of something…

Something present, up there.

Something vast, and beyond my understanding.

He leaned forward, and his lips touched mine. Liquid silk, warm and soft and insistent. Whatever defenses I had, they didn't exist against him; I could feel all my resolve evaporating like ice under a summer sun. His hands seemed to be everywhere, soft little touches on my face, my neck, my arms, sliding up under my shirt, thumbs tracing the undersides of my breasts…

I think my mind whited out for a while. When it returned from its sensory vacation, I was back against the driver's side window, braced, with my knees up and apart, and David was kneeling between my parted thighs, and I had
no
idea how that had happened. The rational part of my brain insisted that this was
not the time or place
but then his hand glided warm up my inner thigh and slid inside my panties, and I gasped into the hot cavern of his mouth, and my clutching fingers sank into the lapels of his leather jacket to pull him closer.

Overhead, lightning cracked the sky, blue white. Hotter than the surface of the sun. It raced from horizon to horizon, split into a million sizzling tributaries. It covered the entire bowl of the sky, as if the whole thing had shattered.

The pulse of power that shot through me was nearly as shocking as the visual. Power echoing from the sky, to David, into me.

“Whoa! Hang on,” I blurted. He pulled back, and in a way that was worse, because now I could look at him, and damn, the ruffled hair, the kiss-swollen lips, the golden skin flushed with peach…He could single-handedly destroy the entire concept of celibacy, worldwide.