Weather Warden - Chill Factor Part 7

Lel nodded. Carl contented himself with gobbling leftover b.u.t.tered toast. Not her, I noticed; she wasn't wasting her perfect lipstick on anything so useless as breakfast.

I didn't like her, and it wasn't because of the shoes. Something about her raised my hackles. Carl was just a cipher, but Lel I really didn't want to be in a car with all the way to Florida.

Speaking of which, I had a bad, bad thought. "Um, Paul? Can I take my car?"

He nodded. "Yeah, fine. You drive. They'll just ride along."

"Both of them?"

"You got a backseat, right?"

Not much of one, but I wasn't going to be concerned about their comfort. "Sure." And the minute I could ditch my escort, I'd be heading back to pick up the pieces of this disaster. Because it was going to be a disaster. No doubt about it.

Carl finished the toast, swilled down half a cup of coffee with a noisy slurp, and stood. Lel followed suit more slowly.

"Jo." Paul reached out and took my hand, just for a second. "I'm sorry."

"Oh, you're not nearly sorry yet," I said. "Get back to me later, though."

It was the hardest thing I'd ever done, to walk away and leave David behind.

I'll find you. I promised it to him with a grim, burning fury. I will.

No matter what.

My Viper started up with a roar.

Lel had called shotgun, leaving a disgrunted Carl in the cramped backseat. She seemed completely uninterested about why they were babysitting me on a drive back to Florida; in fact, she slipped on headphones and flipped a switch on an iPod, and ignored me completely. Which was fine with me. I backed my midnight-blue Mona out of her parking s.p.a.ce and eased her into gear. The freeway beckoned ahead.

"So that was your Djinn, right?" Carl asked, just as we hit merging speed. n.o.body on the road in either direction. I opened Mona up to eighty and kept an eye on the horizon for cops or storms. "Your Djinn they're trading over to the kid? Must suck, right?"

"Sucks," I agreed tightly. "We're not going to chat, right?"

"Long d.a.m.n trip if we don't."

"Longer if we do."

He sighed and settled back. Lel bobbed her head in time with a beat I couldn't hear, and I watched the miles start to spin away.

There was a huge, gaping empty s.p.a.ce inside me. I couldn't feel David anymore, and that was the worst part. Not knowing where he was, what they were doing with him. How could they believe Kevin?

Were they really that stupid, or just that desperate? Kevin wasn't exactly a brilliant strategist, but he had a certain criminal cunning . . .

and you could count on the fact that if he had the chance to double cross you, he would. He was greedy, he was selfish, and he'd never been treated fairly in his life. He'd believe you were going to screw him anyway, so why wait?

As a survival strategy, not half-bad. As a way to live, it was a tragedy.

I kept half my attention up on the aetheric as I drove, looking for trouble and hoping for a sign. There was a huge roiling disturbance centered behind me, in the direction of Las Vegas, but it was like an impenetrable wall of confusion.

David had told me that this had to happen. I didn't understand why, but all I could do was trust him, trust Lewis, trust in the goodwill of the universe.

Not really in my nature.

We'd gone about fifteen miles out into the big nowhere when Lel took the headphones off, looked over the backseat at Carl, and said, "This about right?"

"Yeah," he said. "Looks right."

"For what?" I asked, and that was when Carl took a gun out from under his tan windbreaker and pointed it to my head.

"Pull over," he said.

I felt a cold-hot bolt of shock. "You're kidding."

I heard a metallic snap, cold and harsh, right next to my ear. "The next sound you hear kills you. Pull the car over."

Lel was watching me with a little half smile, satisfied as a cat in a cream factory.

I drifted the car to a stop at the side of the road and stood on the brakes unnecessarily hard. My legs were shaking. I've been on the wrong end of a lot of situations, but the wrong end of a gun was a different story. G.o.d, I hadn't seen this coming. . . .

"Out," Carl said, and handed the gun to Lel. "Cover her."

The woman was good at it; I never felt there was a split second to take advantage of, and besides, there were two Wardens on me, and it wasn't like I could overpower them, not without David. Not without a huge, costly fight. The memory of being shot in the back overwhelmed me. I'd survived it, but not without cost, and not without pain; I didn't have any wish to try a rematch of me versus Smith & Wesson. I opened the car door and stepped out, keeping my hands up and in a helpless position.

"You understand that if I feel so much as a light breeze, you're dead," Lel said conversationally. I nodded. Strange feeling, to be so cold when the sun was so hot; my hands were clammy. I wanted to wipe them on my skirt and didn't dare.

"Look," I said, "if you want the car-"

"Shut up. Walk," Lel said, and jerked her chin out in the direction of the desert. It looked pretty much like every other part of the desert.

Nothing out here but sand, cactus, and the occasional vulture.

Somebody had used the road sign for target practice. The aged buckshot dings were rusted rich orange.

As we struggled through hot sand, heading over the nearest hill, I wished for some more sensible shoes to die in-crazy, the things that go through your head. I wished desperately for David's warm, comforting presence, not to mention his ability to kill these two roaches really, really dead. I wished for a lot of things that I couldn't have. Stupid! Should've seen this coming. Except the idea that someone might have ordered me killed had never so much as entered my mind. Who the h.e.l.l were these guys working for?

The sun beat down like a yellow hammer on the top of my head. I remembered what sunlight had felt like as a Djinn-that incredible sense of pure power soaking into me. As a human, it just made me feel overheated and exhausted.

"Okay, hold it," Lel said.

"I can keep walking; I'm not really tired," I offered; my voice sounded squeaky, full of bravado. Hiking was not my fave, but it was better than . . . well, a hole in the head.

Lel ignored me. She glanced over at Carl, who was on his cell phone, turned away from us, talking softly. The wind was staying still, thankfully; I didn't doubt that she was paying attention to that.

Or that she'd shoot me if she suspected I was trying something tricky.

We waited. I s.h.i.+fted nervously from one foot to the other, watching the clear skies, feeling exposed and all too defenseless.

"Look," I said. "I don't know what's going on, but if it's a matter of money . . ." Not that I had it, but I'd figure something out.

She gave me a beatific smile, waking dimples in her cheeks, and smoothed her perfectly behaved hair as a very slight breeze drifted by us, trailing the sharp, hot smell of mesquite. Carl finished his phone call and turned back to us. Lel handed him the gun. No words between them; they were obviously a tightly rehea.r.s.ed act.

"Um . . . what now?" I asked.

"Now we wait."

"For . . . ?"

No answer. The sun got hotter. Despite the chill that continued to pebble my skin into gooseflesh, I was sweating buckets, and I didn't dare wipe my face. My arms were getting tired from their half-mast position of surrender.

We heard the faint growl of an engine. Lel's eyes turned toward the direction of the highway as it revved and died away.

It appeared the criminal mastermind had arrived. I waited, sweating and worrying, until a tall, lanky form limped slowly toward us from the maze of dunes and spiked thornbushes.

"Lewis!" I blurted, and felt a spurt of relief like ice water . . . just as I realized that neither Lel nor Carl looked surprised to see him.

Oh, f.u.c.k.

"You look bad," Lel said to him-clinical a.n.a.lysis, not concern.

"You sure you're up for this?"

"Yes," Lewis said. He had his cane again, and he was gripping it in a white-knuckled hand as he leaned his weight on it. His color was an unhealthy yellow-gray, and there were hard lines of pain around his eyes and mouth. Pale lips that nearly vanished, they were so colorless. "Just don't take long."

My hands had come down. A jerk from the gun made them go back up again, grabbing sky. "Lewis?" I asked it very softly, watching his face. He looked at me for a few long seconds, then down at the sand.

"It's the way it has to be, Jo."

"Wait-"

He nodded to the Terror Twins. Lel removed a test tube-shaped bottle from her coat pocket. Now there was a bottle I wouldn't have put a Djinn into, under any circ.u.mstances. One roll off of a table, and poof... unfortunately, I was all out of tables, and Carl was holding the gun like he seriously meant to use it.

"Lewis! Just tell me what the h.e.l.l's going on! Look, I can help-"

"You are helping," he said without looking up. "Lel. Do it."

She popped the cork, and a Djinn misted into being next to her.

Tall, dark-haired, kind of a business-cla.s.s version of Raquel Welch.

The Djinn's eyes had a distinct reddish tinge to them, which was unsettlingly demonic, and the red-painted nails on her flawless hands had definite talon potential. She was wearing a suit that d.a.m.n sure looked like Prada to me, sleek and dark and elegant.

No shoes, disappointingly. Her legs misted down around calf level, in the traditional Djinn way. She didn't waste her energy on anything as human as feet.

I waited for Lewis to say something. Anything. To G.o.dd.a.m.n well look at me.

He moved the cane in front of him and braced himself with both hands, staring down. Absolving himself of responsibility.

"I swear to G.o.d, Lewis, I won't forget this," I said. "Whatever you're doing-"

Lel cut me off with a simple, direct command to her Djinn. "Stop her heart."

I sucked in a fast, hard breath, not really expecting to finish it, but then my lungs were full and I was holding my breath and still nothing was happening. The Djinn in Prada and Lel were exchanging looks like nuclear weapons.

"Did you hear me?" Lel asked through gritted teeth.

"Clarification is required," Prada said. Ah, it was like that.

Apparently, Lel had done something to get on the wrong side of this Djinn. Bad timing: Djinn liked to toy with people, especially ones they didn't like. And they really didn't like to be used as cheap executioners.

Lel's fingers tightened around the test tube, then relaxed; she couldn't risk even a hairline crack in it. Her dimples started looking hollow instead of cute, and her eyes took on a hard, sharp s.h.i.+ne.

"Stop her heart from beating. How much more clarification can you need?" Lel's eyes cut to Lewis, but he didn't comment or move. His head was still down, his shoulders tensed.

Prada had a cruel tilt of a smile. "Specify," she purred. Carl muttered a soft, exasperated "f.u.c.k me!" and the Djinn's smile gathered force, as if she were really very amused. I glanced frantically from Prada to Lel to Lewis, and felt a scream building somewhere like fizzy soda at the back of my throat.

"Lewis, help me," I whispered. I got an involuntary look from him, a flash of dark eyes that betrayed how much this was costing him, this stillness and silence.

And he looked away again, leaving me to my fate. My heart was hammering so fast and hard I thought it was shaking me apart; I was trembling all over, and my knees had gone the consistency of rubber bands. There was some panicked screaming going on in the back of my head, along the lines of I don't want to die! and if this went on any longer, I wasn't going to be able to keep my cool.

"If you're going to do it," I said in a surprisingly steady voice, "don't screw around. I'm not going to beg." Unless it went on another thirty seconds.

For the first time, Prada's reddish eyes flicked toward me. Read me like a book. I saw her face go still and blank, and then those flawlessly made-up eyelids went to half-mast and she held out a hand toward me. An open hand.

I felt her power reach out and fold around me, sink deep into my skin, my muscles, my bones. It kept moving, tightening, focusing around the panicked thick drumming of my heart.

"No," I whispered, and tried to back up.

No use. There was a second's pain, and then my heart just . . .

stopped.

So much silence. I never knew how quiet it could be. The wind whispered over me, brushed black hair over my shoulders, and I knew I should breathe but breathing didn't seem that important now.

Listening was important. There was so much to hear. . . .

I fell to my knees. I know that because I heard it happen, heard the heavy, fleshy thump and each individual grain of sand rolling and sc.r.a.ping.

Lel bent over me. The sun gave her a completely inappropriate and undeserved halo. "By the way, they're not knockoffs, b.i.t.c.h."

Prada kept squeezing the life out of me. I wanted to say something, but I had no idea what, and anyway, there was nothing left now, nothing but the vast silence and a burning desire to see David, one more time. . . .

It all happened so fast.

The cold black glitter of an Ifrit launched itself over me and battened on Prada like a glittering black second skin. It began to feed.

Prada reflexively did the only thing that would save her . . . she translocated. Because she was still sunk elbow deep in me, stopping my heart, I felt the drag as she towed me with her.

"No!" That was Lewis, yelling. "No, not yet, not yet-"