Ill Wind (26 page)

“That's—”

“Impossible, yeah, you've said. But Bad Bob picked you to pass it to, so that settles that. Who else could have taken it for him? Lewis?” She made a rude noise to the road. “Right. Like anybody can find
that
guy. Jeez, what are you going to do? Is that why the Rangers are after you? 'Cause of the Mark?”

I rubbed my aching forehead with the heels of my hands. “Something like that. I find somebody to pass it on to. Whatever. What's the other option?”

“Well, you could, like, keep it.”

“
Keep
it! Jesus, Star, for crying out loud—”

“Hear me out. Look, everything I know about the Demon Mark, the farther it goes into you, the stronger you get. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe—maybe that's what you ought to do. I mean, we
call
it a Demon Mark, but what do we really know about it? Is it any worse than the Djinn?”

“Oh, trust me on this, it's way worse,” I said, and had a grotesque sense-memory of the thing burrowing inside me, leaving that horrible violated slimy feeling in its wake.

“So you don't want to keep it.”

“God, no.”

Star's knuckles were white on the steering wheel. I watched her flex her fingers and shake them, one at a time. “Well, that narrows it down. I guess you need to get yourself a Djinn.”

And I was back where I'd started. Helpless. Caught in the headlights of oncoming friggin' fate. I wanted to scream at Rahel, wherever she was.
What fucking choice do I have?

And then Star said, shocking me down to my shoes, “Luckily, babe, I think I can help you out on that score.”

 

My asking what Star meant got me nowhere. She just kept giving me that secret little grin and telling me to wait and see; I could see David getting wound tighter and tighter, ready to lash out. He was scared. I was scared for him. God, she couldn't
know
 . . . could she?

We pulled off at a gas station about five miles down the road. Star went inside to pay for the gas and to grab beverages and whatever passed for food; I got out to walk around in the cooling wind, shivering. The storm that had been following me was still on my trail. I could feel it like a tingle at the edges of my mind.

I don't know if you've ever been in that part of the world, but it's flat, and it seems to go on forever. The land can't quite decide whether it's desert or scrub forest, so it sticks clumps of stubby, twisted bushes together and surrounds them with reddish dust. There's no elegance to it, but there is a certain toughness. It's land that will fight you for every drop of water, every green growing thing you want to take
from it. Even though I wasn't an Earth Warden, I could feel that, feel the awesome sleeping power of it surrounding me.

I didn't expect David to touch me, so the heavy warmth of his hands on my shoulders made me tense up before I turned to face him. I was hoping that meant I was forgiven, but I could see in his eyes that I wasn't. He was fully in human mode, walled off from me, but I could sense the power in him, too.

“Why'd you tell her?” he asked me. His hands stayed on my shoulders for a few seconds, then traveled up to cup my face with heat.

I thought of Rahel. “Because it's the only choice I've had this whole trip that's really my own. I need to trust somebody.”

“Then trust me.”

“I do.” I looked up into his eyes and wished
he
trusted
me
—I could feel that reserve in him again, that doubt. “I need help, David. You know that. If I can't get to Lewis—if he can't or won't let me get to him—I need help to fight off whatever's after me. Whether that's Marion, or some other bastard I don't even know . . . I can't do it alone.” And after it was out, I knew how that sounded.

“Is that what you are?” he asked. “Alone?”

I can be a real bitch sometimes, without even meaning to. He let me go, stepped back to minimum safe distance, and shoved his hands in the pockets of his long olive coat.

“So it's you and Star against the world,” he said. “That how it's going to be? Maybe she can even provide a Djinn for you. One that you don't know, so it won't be like eating your own pet dog.”

“Don't say that, dammit. I'm trying to change the rules of the game. I
have
to. The deck's stacked against us.”

“I already changed the rules. Look how much good it's done.”

Apparently, Djinn were capable of morning-after regrets, too. “Fine. New rules. Rule number one: Let me do this my way. You've been herding me from one place to another ever since I left Westchester. You've been trying to tell me what to do, when to do it. And I can't live that way, David. I need to—”

“To what?” He glared at me, and I saw orange sparks flicker in his eyes. “To make yourself a target? Tell the world you have the Demon Mark? Trust your
friend
to protect you?”

I watched his eyes. “You don't like her.”

He stepped toward me, intimate and aggressive. “I don't
trust
her. I don't trust
anybody
with your life.”

“Not even me?”

He growled in the back of his throat and stalked off toward the convenience store, where Star was paying for a stack of bottled water and portable calories. She was laughing with the cashier about something, but when she turned to wave at me, I saw the cashier watching her, studying her scars. Everybody did. She had to know that, had to feel it all the time. She had to resent it, even if she never showed it on the surface.
God.
Could I have managed that? No. Never.

She hip-bopped the door open and came out with her armload of goodies. I grabbed some that were toppling and looked over her shoulder. The cashier was staring.

“Is he checking me out?” she asked.

“Uh-huh.” I didn't tell her the look wasn't so much admiration as there-but-for-the-grace-of-God fascination.

Star gave me her two-sided comedy-tragedy smile. “I'm telling you,
chica,
guys dig scars. Makes 'em think I'm tough.”

I opened the passenger door and dumped the load in David's seat. Let him sort it out. “News flash, babe, you are tough. Toughest girl I ever met.”

“Damn straight.” She offered me a fist. I tapped it. She raised her voice for David. “Yo, boy, let's motor!”

He was watching the horizon. Clouds were creeping out there, doing something stealthy that sounded like barely more than a low mutter in Oversight. Too far off to concern us yet, but it was definitely my old friend the storm, coming back for more. The wind belled out his coat and snapped it behind him. I walked over.

“When she says
boy,
I think she means you,” I said. He squinted into the distance behind his glasses.

“I got the point.”

“And?”

He gave me a long, wordless look, then went back to the Land Rover, picked up the water and fast food, and sat himself in the passenger side. I climbed into the back. As Star shut the door, she looked quickly at David, then at me.

“Don't mean to get in the middle, but is there something I should know?” she asked.

“No.” We both said it instantly, simultaneously. It couldn't have been more obvious we were lying.

“O . . . kay.” She put the Land Rover in gear and rolled the big boat out to the freeway. “You down with my plan?”

“Star, I have no idea what plan you're talking about.”

She accelerated the truck and slid smoothly in between a red rollover-prone SUV and a station wagon held together with duct tape and baling wire. “The one where I save your ass, babe.”

“I'm still waiting for a plan. That's an outcome.”

“Picky, picky . . . Okay, here's the deal. I have a source in Norman who can put us in touch with an honest-to-God masterless Djinn. You know, the kind running around, ready to be claimed. Sound good to you?”

I didn't dare look at David. He handed me a water bottle, and I cracked the plastic ring and sucked down lukewarm liquid. It tasted like sweat, but my body was shiveringly grateful.

“Sure,” I said. “Sounds fabulous.”

 

Norman, Oklahoma, was just twenty miles from Oklahoma City proper, but Star was making caution her new religion; we drove just about every cowpath and haypicker road in the county, watching for any sign Marion or her folks were on to us. Nothing. By the time we exited I-35 and crossed into Norman's city limits, it was getting close to sundown, and the burritos and bottled water were just a fond, gut-rumbling memory.

Norman's an old town, a strange mixture of prewar buildings and hypernew neon. The local college
ensured a steady parade of coffee shops, clothing boutiques, used CD emporiums, and bookstores.

“Who's your source?” David asked. He upended his water and drained the last few drops from blue plastic; I wondered if he was really thirsty, if he even really felt such mundane things as hunger and thirst. He'd eaten with me that first afternoon, I remembered. And in the diner. Maybe he was more flesh than spirit, after all. And hey, sex? Pretty much of the flesh.

“Excuse me?” Star asked.

“Your source. The one who told you about the Djinn.”

“Friend,” she said, which was no more illuminating than anything else she'd said for the past two hours. “Which is all you need to know, seeing as how you're not in the Wardens.” She reached out and passed her hand over his. No glyphs lit up on his palms. “Speaking of which, Jo, you owe me an explanation about how you and this cutie got together.”

She gave him a look that reminded me Star wasn't all fun and games; she'd once been a Warden, tough and very strong. Even if she didn't have full command of her power anymore, she could be dangerous. And focused.

“Joanne told me.” David pointed a thumb back over the seat at me. “Not that I believe any of this, anyway. But it makes a good story.”

“Yeah?” Star's trademark smile flashed. “You planning to write it up, print it in the newspaper?”

“More like the tabloids.”

“Makes sense. So why do you care who told me about the Djinn?”

“I don't,” he said, and shrugged, and pulled a book from the pocket of his coat. Nothing I recognized. The cover had a black-and-yellow road sign blazed on the cover; when I squinted, I saw it read
BE CAREFUL
.

Jesus, he was tempting fate, doing that in front of her.

The cover shifted again, into a Patricia Cornwell mystery, and he opened it to a dog-eared page and appeared to forget all about me.

Star was watching me in the rearview mirror. “You heard about Lewis taking the Djinn, right? Three of 'em? When he bugged out?”

“I heard.”

“Well, rumor has it he let at least one of them go. It's just a matter of tracking him down, that's all. And I've got just the girl to do it.” She hadn't looked away. It was a little eerie, actually. Dark, dark eyes, pupils fading into irises. “Once you have Lewis, what then?”

“Then he helps me figure out how to get this thing out of me.”

Her eyebrows slowly rose. “Yeah? You really think he knows how?”

“Sure.” I was lying my ass off, mostly to myself, but it felt better than the uncertainty of the truth. “If anybody does, he does.”

“Okay, stupid question. What I meant to ask is, why would he? You got something special going with him?”

Oh, that was a subject I really didn't want to dig into, not with David sitting in the passenger seat,
thumbing blandly through a book. Star didn't seem to care. She started to smile, but her eyes were going cold.

“Or you got something
else
going with him? You on some undercover mission,
chica?
”

“Yeah, sure,” I shrugged. “Don't ask, don't tell.”

I meant it as a joke, and I wasn't prepared for the flash of sheer fury in her eyes. “Fine,” she said. “Keep your little secrets.”

“I don't have any secrets.” As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I realized I'd lied to her. Effortlessly. Without a second thought. And I didn't even know why, except that a yellow
DANGER
sign kept flashing into my head. I'd chosen to trust Star. I just . . .

. . . couldn't trust her.

She drove down Main Street, past shops just lightning up against the darkness . . . grocery stores . . . gas stations . . . incongruously, a condom shop. The Burger King on the corner was doing a brisk business in robbing college students of their lunch money. On the other side of the narrow street, gracious Plantation-style homes with Doric columns put on a brave front that the South would rise again.

She slowed and turned into a strip-mall parking lot pretty much identical to the six others we'd passed, and pulled the Land Rover into a parking space barely able to stretch to fit it. I squinted up at the sign, which hadn't yet been turned on against the falling darkness:
BALL'S BOOKS
.

It looked like exactly what it was: a used bookstore, and not the corporate, regimented kind—the kind that conformed to the whim of an owner. I liked
it immediately, but there was still a cold cramp in my stomach, and I couldn't think exactly how I was going to get out of this. More important, how I'd get David out of this.

I grabbed his coat sleeve as Estrella limped away, pulled him down for a whisper. “Take a walk.”

“Where?” he asked mildly.

“Why should I care? I don't want you anywhere near her if she's going to—”

His hand covered mine, and some of his human disguise fell away; his eyes turned burning, swirling bronze, and I felt his heat pour into me and drive out the chill. His smile, though, was all guy. All David.

“It won't matter,” he said. “If she can find me at all, it doesn't matter where I go. If you're so worried about me, there's something you can do to stop it.”