Ill Wind (15 page)

“I don't, actually,” Marion said, and dropped the flower. “But if the Council decides that you cannot be trusted with the powers you control, then those powers have to be taken from you. I know you know this. You can't keep running like this. You have to go back.”

“I can't. Not yet.”

“The Council meets
tomorrow
. Nobody sent me after you today, but if you don't submit yourself for judgment tomorrow at the Council offices, somebody will, and my orders will be very different.”

“You're traveling with a hunting squad,” I pointed out. “Two Earth Wardens and a Fire Warden. That's to counteract my powers without fighting me on the weather front. Right?”

She didn't answer. Didn't have to, in fact.

“Tomorrow's tomorrow,” I said finally. The storm had crawled closer on its little cat feet, and I could feel distant tingles at the edges of my awareness; the storm talked to me, the way that the forest and this meadow talked to Marion. My power, and my enemy, all at once. “You going to let me go or what?”

Marion smiled, and I knew what
that
meant.

I felt tiny, stealthy ropes of grass moving around me, sliding over my shoes, climbing my legs, and I yelped in absolute disgust and ripped free, hopping from one foot to another. The earth softened under my feet, and even though they were relatively low-heeled, my shoes sank in fast, heels first. I kicked them off, scooped them up, and ran like hell.

It was like running on razors. Every stone turned its sharpest edge toward me; every branch whipped at my body or my face. Grass struggled to slow and trip me. I broke into a cold sweat at the thought of having to flail through those trees, but I didn't have a choice; I huddled low, below the reach of most branches, and tried to hop over the thrashing whirlwinds of grasses and roots that reached for me.

Fire blasted bright in a straight line between me
and Delilah's open door, and on the other side of the car I saw Shirl, her hands outstretched, placing the fire and directing it toward me.
Damn,
I hate fire.

There was plenty of fine dust afloat, exactly what I needed to condense water in the air; I quick-froze the air in a twenty-foot circle, crowding molecules closer, forcing water molecules to attach around the tiny grains of dust. Mist hazed the air, and I felt my hair crackle and lift from the power. I poured energy into it, never mind the consequences; out here in the country, there wasn't as much damage to be done by a mistake, and I was damn near mad enough not to care.

Within ten seconds, I had a thick, iron-gray cloud overhead. I flipped polarity above it, and the charge began the process of attraction and accumulation, drops melting and merging and growing until their own weight overcame the pressure of droplet attraction.

The cloudburst came right on cue and right on target. Cold and hard and silver, slicing down from the sky in ribbons. The fire sizzled; Shirl cursed out loud and tried to counter for it, but I'd saturated the whole area with as much moisture as possible, and physics were against her. She couldn't get the core of the fire hot enough, not without pouring more energy into it than most Fire Wardens possessed. Their talent was in controlling fire, not sourcing it.

“Joanne, don't!” Marion was right behind me. I eyed the unstable pond of dust on which Delilah floated—quickly becoming mud as the deluge mounted—and swallowed my fear. Cold rain down the back of my neck, soaking my hair flat, drawing a full-body shiver. I had to bet that she wouldn't let me die.

I jumped for the car door.

A leafy vine tangled my foot and tugged me off balance. My fingers brushed the cold wet metal, and then I was falling, falling—

Falling into the soft quicksand.

“No!” Marion screamed.

It wasn't like falling into mud; mud has resistance and weight. This was like falling into feathers.

My instinct was to gasp, but I conquered it, clamped my mouth shut and tried not to breathe, because sucking a lungful of this stuff would be an ugly death. I squeezed my eyes shut against dust abrasion. No sound down here, no sensation except falling, falling, falling. How deep would I go? Marion couldn't possible have softened the earth deeper than ten feet; there wouldn't have been any point. Didn't matter. Ten feet would be more than enough to bury me.

The important thing was that Marion was just as handicapped as I was. She could harden the earth again, but that would kill me just as quickly. This wasn't exactly science; it was art. This was her ocean, her solid ocean, and I was drowning in it. She'd try to save me; there was no percentage in killing me, at least not yet, and she'd have to think of something fast. Maybe she'd be trying to harden the earth in an upward path, like a ramp to the surface; I'd just have to find it.

Find it how? God, I wanted to take a breath.
Needed
to.

That, at least, I could fix. I pulled at the air trapped in the fine dust and formed it into a cocoon around me. It made a shell a few inches thick all around me, not enough to keep me alive for long, but enough for me to take a couple of quick, clean breaths. I
needed to get up, but I didn't know how to do that. There wasn't enough volume in the air to create any kind of warming and cooling effect that might serve as an engine. Flailing around in the dark, I couldn't feel anything solid.

I was stuck.

Something touched the back of my neck, warm and solid, and I reached desperately for it.

Skin. Human skin. It was too dark to see anything, but I was touching a living person. Not female, I discovered—even the most flat-chested woman has some softness to her in that region. I extended my bubble of air to fit around the newcomer and spared a precious breath to whisper, “Erik?” Because at least the blond-haired Earth Warden would have been a lifeline, even if it was a lifeline into a cell.

But it wasn't Erik.

Lips touched mine, gentle and warm and entirely tasty, and I knew him in deep places where his touch still lingered.

“David?”

He didn't answer, and I felt his lips fit back over mine. Fresh air puffed into my mouth, and I opened myself to it, to him.

Both of us floating together in the dark, close as lovers.

He grabbed the hand not still clutching shoes, and swam
sideways
. Which was wrong in so many ways . . . First, there was nothing to swim
against
—this stuff had no resistance, hence, no propulsion. But he was propelling just fine. Second,
sideways
should have taken us right into the solid walls of the channel where Marion hadn't softened the earth, but we just
kept right on moving, going and going and going. My lungs burned for air. As if he sensed that, he turned and breathed into my mouth again. That shouldn't have worked; his lungs should have already scrubbed the oxygen out, given him back only waste products to share with me.

I breathed in pure sweet air, or as near as made no difference. It was like a shot from a diver's tank, and I felt energy shoot through me like white light.

After who knows how long, David began to swim up at an angle. I felt things brush my reaching free hand and arms—tendrils—grass roots.

We broke the surface in an empty meadow, where grass shivered and whispered and bent silver heads to the freshening wind.

I didn't have to climb out. The ground hardened under my feet, pushing me up, until I was standing barefoot on the grass, Venus born dusty from the ground.

David was still holding my hand. He had come up with me, and dust fell from the shoulders and sleeves of his coat in a thin dry stream. He shook his head and let loose a storm of it. Behind the dust-clouded glasses, I saw his eyes, and this time he didn't try to hide what they were. What they meant.

His eyes were deep, beautiful, and entirely alien. Copper-colored, with flecks of bright gold. They flared brighter as I watched, then faded into something that was nearly human-brown.

“You
bastard!
” I hissed.

“Just a thank-you would have been good enough,” he said. “Want to call a cloud for us? I'm in desperate need of a bath.”

“You're a
Djinn!
”

“Of course.”

“Of course?”
I repeated. “What do you mean
of course?
I was supposed to
know?
Hello, didn't hear the clue phone ringing!”

He just looked at me. He took off his glasses—glasses he could not possibly need—and began cleaning them on the edge of a dark blue T-shirt that advertised
The X-Files
. Mulder and Scully looked bad-ass and mysterious. His brown hair had coppery highlights, even under the coating of dust. Except for the eyes, he looked entirely human.

Which, I now knew, was entirely his choice.

I was so mad I was shaking. “Whose Djinn are you? Did Lewis send you?”

He put his glasses back on, grabbed me by the arms, and used some martial arts trick to sweep my feet out from under me. I fell backwards into the grass with a bone-rattling thud, and he caught himself with outstretched hands just above me. More dust sifted down on me. He muttered something in a language I couldn't catch, and the dust swirled into a compact little ball and dropped away from us.

Somehow, it just made me madder. I opened my mouth to yell at him, and he put his lips down very close to my ear and said, “If you scream, they'll hear you. I can't prevent that.”

I caught the scream and held it in because I heard, just about two feet away, the crunch of footsteps in grass. A shadow blocked the light overhead, and I peered past David to see Shirl standing there, looking puzzled.

“Anything?” Marion's voice, coming from the left,
coming fast in our direction. Above me, David's face was blank and still, and I could see he was doing something—whatever it was, it was blocking them from seeing us in either the physical or aetheric realms. Unless they stepped on us or I made some inappropriate noise, they wouldn't find us.

“Nothing,” Shirl confirmed. Marion's shadow joined the other woman's. “Dammit, this isn't possible. She was down there, I swear she was. But Erik said she was gone when he went down.”

“I saw dust here,” Marion said. She paced slowly back and forth, too close to my head for comfort. “Right around here. But I don't know how she could possibly have done that. She's not an Earth power.”

“Maybe somebody's helping her.” Shirl was too perceptive for my taste. That and the nose ring were putting her on my bad side. “She got any Earth Warden friends?”

“A few, but I can't see them sticking their necks out like this, not when they know what she's accused of doing.” Marion hesitated again, and I could see her looking down, looking right at me. I didn't even dare to breathe. David wasn't touching me, but I could feel the heat radiating off him—what if they could feel it, too?

“Maybe you should bring in your Djinn.” A new voice—Erik. He came trudging up from the other side. “Just set him to tracking her.”

“I have other things for my Djinn to attend to,” Marion said in a way that convinced me Erik shouldn't have made the suggestion. It apparently convinced Erik, too. He shut up. After another few fast heartbeats, Marion said, “All right. We have her car. She's
not going anywhere, at least not fast. We'll wait for her to come back to it.”

“What if she doesn't?” he wanted to know.

Marion smiled. “You don't know much about Joanne, I see.”

The three of them tramped off through the grass. I didn't dare move, breathe, or speak as the sound of them receded. When the only thing left was the dry whisper of the grass, David let his arms bend and slowly lowered himself to lie on top of me. Sweet, hard pressure that made it hard to breathe.

“Get off,” I ordered. His eyes flickered, brown and copper and gold, all the richness of the earth.

“Kind of you to offer, but don't you think we'd better get moving?” With no transition, he was on his feet. He was so fast, I couldn't even see him move. Dammit, he'd been playing with me all this time, playing at being human. That little drama he'd orchestrated back at the motel, that had just been
fun
for him.

I ignored the inconvenient fact that it had been fun for me, too.

I scrambled up and faced him, very aware that I was filthy and tired and scratched and bruised. At least I wasn't shoeless. I dropped the low-heeled pumps I was holding and stepped into them, ignoring the grit inside. “I am
not
going with you, not until you tell me whose Djinn you are!”

“You want to go with them?” he asked, and looked in the direction Marion had gone. They were still visible, just at the edge of the trees, heading for my car. Poor, abandoned Delilah. “Just say the word—I can remove the veil and you can go right
back to what you were doing. Which was, if I recall, dying.”

“You didn't answer my question! Whose Djinn are you?”

David smiled. Not the full, delighted grin of a being of limitless power, but the tight, unhappy smile of a man who knows too much. “My own,” he said. “And I was really hoping you wouldn't ask that three times.”

Three times. I hadn't meant to, but it was a ritual number, and he had to answer.

He meant he was free. Not bound.

A free Djinn.

That was . . . impossible. Absolutely—

It meant—oh, God, it meant
I could claim him.
And once I'd claimed him, I could make him take the Mark. He was exactly what I was looking for. He was the thing I had been hell-bent on asking Lewis to give me.

And now I didn't need Lewis at all.

He looked at me steadily, with eyes that were not quite human and not quite Djinn, that copper-brown hair blowing in the northeast wind. Thunder boomed in the distance. The storm was moving this way, and all things being equal, it would be drawn to me because I was its opposite.

I felt the Demon Mark stir in my chest, and the sensation was enough to make me want to gag in horror. I could get rid of it, now and forever.