Heat Stroke (31 page)

“Close by. New Jersey, as it turned out. All these years, looking for him, and he was right across the state line. Funny how things turn out.” Ron nodded sagaciously. “They think he's behind this stuff.”

“What?” I didn't have to feign shock on that one.

“Sure. You think it's an accident that they get their hands on him, and all hell breaks loose on not one but three fronts? They've got the West Coast problem under control, but we're going to take a real beating from this storm. Not to mention those poor bastards out in Yellowstone.” He leaned closer. “They think
he might have some kind of Demon Mark. Anyway, they're getting Marion Bearheart in here. I figure they're going to try to, you know—” He made a yanking-up-by-the-roots gesture. I literally staggered, caught by sick surprise.

“They're going to
neuter
him?”

He looked surprised at my reaction. “Well, not . . . actually . . . I meant they were going to, you know, close off his connections. Make sure he couldn't do something like this again.”

I'd known perfectly well what he'd meant. Neutering was the right word for it.
Castration.
Ripping out the heart and soul of who he was. It was as horribly malicious as throwing acid on the Mona Lisa—Lewis was a treasure, a once-in-a-thousand-years goddamn
gift.

They
could not
do this to him. I wouldn't let them.

I forced a smile. “You're on Marion's staff?”

“Afraid so.” Ron tried for a sheepish little-boy cute look. It almost worked. “I'm just in training, though. No way they'd let me even in the same room for a procedure like that. They're waiting for at least four other Senior Wardens before they even try anything.”

I smiled, nodded, and wished to hell that the elevator would start. Not that I couldn't mist out and get away, but I couldn't do it with Ron staring at me, not if I wanted to have any kind of chance for a clean escape.
God, Jonathan, you'd better have him.
I'd tear this building down one steel I beam at a time if I had to, to make sure that they didn't carry through on their threats.

No wonder Lewis had been so paranoid all these years, running for his life. I'd have been catatonic, if
I'd known what was waiting for me back here among my so-called
peers
.

Just as I was starting to wonder whether to seduce Ron or knock him out, the elevator jerked again and started sliding down. Fast. A red light on the panel read
SECURITY LOCKDOWN
.

“They're sending us to the ground floor,” Ron said. “Looks like they'll be searching everybody.”

“Fun.” I rocked back and forth on my low-heeled shoes, ready for fight or flight, but when the elevator doors opened a navy sports coat type with the UN emblem over his vest pocket waved me impatiently out, along with Ron. I followed his pointing finger. It looked like a mob scene, which was great for fading away. You're never more alone than in a crowd of strangers. All Wardens, even better.

“Hey!” Ron was trying to keep up with me as I slipped between people, heading for the sealed and guarded exits. “Um, Gidget! Wait up!”

I stepped behind two particularly bulky women who looked like they might have been part of a Russian delegation, and disappeared.

Jonathan?
I sent silently. No answer.
Earth to Jonathan! Dammit, you'd better be there!

Crap. Getting Lewis out of here without taking him through the aetheric was going to be next to impossible, but we had to find a way. We couldn't chance leaving him here.

I waved my hand through the air and watched it collect an insubstantial weight of blue fairy dust. I crushed it into nothing, but that didn't matter; it was a constant blizzard even here. The aetheric would be choked with it. No. We couldn't leave that way.

I caught sight of a familiar face in the crowd, and went cold. Marion Bearheart was here—had just made it in before the lockdown, by the look of it. Her brown suede jacket was spattered with dark drops, and water caught the light in tiny glints in her gray-and-black hair. She looked grim and haunted, arms folded over her chest. She was listening to an earnest stream of dialogue from Martin Oliver, who even now looked like the nattiest, most in-control man on the face of the world. He wasn't in control of much, today, but I still wouldn't have wanted to cross him. He reminded me of somebody . . . Ashan, Jonathan's chief rival back in the Djinn bubble. The same kind of severe, uncompromising confidence, and a kind of elegant, almost sexual grace.

I remembered, out of nowhere, a conversation I'd had back in college about a man I'd been thinking of dating.
Describe him,
my best friend had said. I'd giggled and said,
He's sweet.
And she'd looked at me very seriously, taken my hands, and said,
Corazón, sweet men are only sexy until you realize that they're too weak to hurt you.
I hadn't agreed with her—still didn't, in some ways—but there was no denying that dangerous men had a visceral attraction.

The woman who'd said that was on the Wardens' wall of the dead. Like me. I hadn't even had time to mourn her. I didn't even really know if I should, and that was the worst of it.

Marion's cool, strong gaze swept my direction. I quickly put out the
don't-notice-me
vibe. She scanned right past me, frowned, and turned to someone at her elbow. I focused on her lips. She was asking if
he sensed anything strange. He shook his head, but she didn't look convinced.

Man, we needed to get the hell out of here. And I needed to get down to the vault.

A huge, rolling crash of thunder like the world's largest pane of glass dropped from ten thousand feet made everybody in the room flinch and duck. Most clapped hands over their ears. Some, like Marion, turned toward the big picture windows, and the sharp white crack of lightning lit up their strained faces.

I heard the dull thump of the first of the hail hitting the street outside. Ice exploded like a bomb, scattering frozen white shrapnel for twenty feet. Before the debris had rolled to a stop, another piece of football-sized hail crashed down onto the roof of a yellow cab speeding by. It ripped a hole right through the steel.

The storm had shaken loose of any semblance of control, and now it had a target: the only people who had a hope in hell of stopping it.

Us.

I felt it drawing in, focusing around the building, and it was a sense so suffocatingly strong that I wanted to gag. Even as a Djinn, this was oppressive; I couldn't imagine what it would feel like to a Warden. I didn't need to imagine it, actually, all I had to do was look around. They were scared. Scared out of their minds.

“Down to the shelter!” That was Martin Oliver, who'd climbed on top of the security desk to address the crowd of several hundred milling around the lobby. “Everybody! Quickly!” Even now, he looked
controlled and calm. No wonder he was the guy in charge.

Security started directing people toward a gray door marked with a bomb shelter symbol; the crush got intense, quickly. I noticed that Martin hadn't joined the stampede. In fact, he stayed where he was, on top of the security desk, staring out at the street as rain started lashing the windows in thick, lightning-shot streaks.

More hail was crashing down. Cars had stopped moving out on the road, and drivers were abandoning their vehicles to run into any available cover. I felt power stirring, and knew what he was trying to do: cover the potential victims as they scrambled for shelter. I reached out and did what I could, which wasn't much; I was feeling weaker all the time, and the connection to David had shrunk to a tiny filament, sparkling silver but feeding me nothing but a trickle of power.

I felt the storm shift its attention, responding instinctively to the lash of power.

Oh boy,
I thought. It was like being caught in the full glare of the biggest spotlight in the world. With a big target painted on your chest.

The storm lobbed a twenty-pound piece of ice sideways, into the windows.

“Down!” I screamed, and leaped. Djinn defiance of gravity let me carry the leap the last ten feet, and gave me enough momentum to impact hard against Martin Oliver and topple both of us back behind the desk, onto a bruising hard floor.

The window shattered with so much force that fragments flew past to embed themselves in the
teakwood wall behind the desk. Some of them were bloody. I shoved Martin down when he tried to get up and risked sticking my head up. Wind was screaming through the jagged hole in the window. It instantly jerked my hair back straight as a flag.

There were at least twenty people down, some moving, some not. There was a lot of blood, more leaking out over the marble floor with every faltering heartbeat. The noncombatants, mostly UN staffers and delegates who'd gotten caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, screamed and jammed up against the exits. Marion was already heading toward the wounded against the tide of panic. As an Earth Warden, she'd be of a lot more use than anything I could do. Some of them could still be saved. She was the one to do it.

“Baldwin.” The name snapped my head around, and I was blinded by my wind-whipped hair until I clawed it back and held it fisted in my left hand. Martin Oliver had gotten to his feet and was staring at me with intense, grave concentration. “Joanne Baldwin?”

I didn't have time for long explanations. “In the flesh.” More or less, but it didn't seem the time to spill that particular bean. “Sorry about that, sir.”

He rejected the apology with a sharp hand movement. “Can you do anything about that?”

He gestured out at the monster looming gray-green outside. It was firing off lightning bolts every few seconds, and thunder was a continuous subsonic rumble. What could I do about it? What had he been
smoking? And then I remembered. I'd been told before that I had more power than Bad Bob Biringanine, who had once faced down a certain hurricane by the name of Andrew and killed it before it claimed even more lives. Not that I'd ever believed such a thing . . . and yet Martin Oliver, one bad-ass Weather Warden in his own right, was looking at me as if I was the hope of the world.

And I had to say, regretfully, “No, sir. Sorry.”

Maybe in my human days—maybe—but not now, at the ragged end of my Djinn powers and enslaved toa . . .

. . . I had an idea.

I held up a finger. “Be right back.”

Now that I knew the coldlight wasn't damaging to me, I could travel fast. I rose up into the aetheric, was instantly smothered by a whirling hungry blizzard of the stuff, but I didn't need sight to feel where I was going, not in this case. Homing instinct.

I flew.

The glitter clung to me, built up like a thick snow coating, but I refused to let it slow me down. I didn't see or sense any other presences up on the aetheric, but if there were any, they'd have been blue snowmen like me, masked from contact. Any Djinn still trapped here were probably frozen solid—if not frozen dead.
Damn.

I collided with something. Not anything solid—that wasn't possible, on the aetheric plane—but the pulling confusion was just as surprising and upsetting. I drifted, shook off as much coldlight as I could, and tried to see what it was that I'd hit. I had to
wipe off sparkles like ice on a windshield, but I finally realized that I'd found a Djinn. Which one, I couldn't tell. It didn't matter.

I grabbed hold and towed it with me, fast, bucking the glitter headwind as fast as I could, and then falling, with a shocking sense of gravity, into . . .

. . . Patrick's apartment. It was just as I'd left it. Sedate, well furnished, kind of pallid in a
Better Homes and Gardens
kind of way.

Blood dried to a dull brown mat on the neutral carpet where Lewis had been taken down.

I looked over at the Djinn I'd brought with me as his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed in slow motion to the floor.

I'd brought Patrick home.

Even though there was no time, I couldn't leave him like this, with the coldlight eating its way through him like worms on speed. He was already screaming, skin bubbling and beginning to slough. I grabbed hold—tried not to think about the slick, greasy feel of his flesh—and called all of the coldlight to me. It spiraled eagerly, abandoning the feast and climbing my arms in a blue-white frenzy.

“Nice doggies,” I murmured, and as soon as I was sure I had enough of them, I went across the room and shook them off in a flurry of disappointed critters. They dropped into the carpet like invisible fleas. They'd eventually make their way back to whatever victim was handy, but with any luck, Patrick would survive. At least as long as any of the rest of us would.

“Sara?” Patrick's eyes were open, blue and blind. His glasses were gone. I went back to him, got on
my knees, and leaned over him. He slowly focused on me, and went pale. “Oh. You.”

“Yeah. Nice of you to remember. By the way, this whole slavery thing . . . it's working out just great.” I resisted the urge to punch him while he was down.

His gaze sharpened. “You're still alive.”

“Surprised?”

That woke up a weak smile. “Pleased, actually. Help me up.” He held out his hand. I stared at it for a second, then took it. Warm skin, as human and real as my own. Whether or not it was as human and real as an actual living person was something else entirely. Patrick heaved himself to his feet, staggered drunkenly and used me as a cane for a few seconds. “Ugh. I see you haven't changed your mind about the room.”

“Yeah, well, I admit, the retro trashy look had its charms, but right at the moment I'm more concerned with saving some lives.” I pointed up. Even inside of his apartment, I could hear the thunder and feel the electric snap of the lightning strikes. “Gotta go.”

“Yes,” he agreed. He looked at me very seriously for a few seconds. “Where is Sara?”