Thin Air (3 page)

 

I didn't sleep for long, but when I woke up, I was dressed—blue jeans and a denim shirt over a thermal tee—and wrapped up in a sleeping bag next to the fire. I tried to figure out which one of them might have taken the liberties, but gave up. Either way, it was a deeply unsettling question.

“I can carry her,” David's low voice was saying from somewhere on the other side of the crackling fire. Night had fallen, and with it an absolutely deathly chill. Even in the sleeping bag, fully clothed, I could feel it nipping at me. “I don't like keeping her out here longer than necessary.”

“I know,” Lewis replied. He sounded agitated. Exasperated. “Dammit, I know! But it's more than a day's hike to the closest rendezvous point, and no matter what I do, the temperature just keeps falling. You think she's strong enough to make the trip? Like this?”

“She won't be any stronger tomorrow.”

“Okay, I give. It's not just her I'm worried about. If I don't get some sleep, I could collapse on you, too.”

“You think I couldn't carry you both?” David asked. He sounded amused. “All the way back, if necessary?”

“I'm pretty sure you could, but my pride's already taking a serious beating, and you know I love you, man, but I'm not ready for us to be quite that close.” Lewis's voice was as dry as old paper. “And besides, if I start losing it, we start losing the weather. If you start messing with things, they'll find you, and us, and her.”

“Ah.” Evidently a convincing argument.

“I'll put up the tent,” Lewis said. “Won't take long.”

I peered out from under half-closed eyelids and saw David walking toward me around the fire. Something different about him now—oh, he was wearing a coat. Not a modern hiking accessory; this one was a long olive-drab affair, like something out of the First World War, and it came down almost to his boots. He looked antique. Out of place.

Beautiful.

He noticed me. “You're awake,” he said, and crouched down beside me. “Thirsty?”

I nodded and pushed myself up on my elbows. He unscrewed a plastic bottle and handed it over. I guzzled cool, sterile water, almost moaning with ecstasy as the moisture flooded into me. I had no idea how long I'd been without a drink. Too long.

He leaned forward to move hair back from my face, and I instinctively jerked back, putting air between us. He froze.
Oh, God
, I thought.
We're lovers.
There was no other explanation for the ease of his gesture, and the look on his face, as if I'd stuck a knife in his guts and broken it off. The expression came and went in a flicker, and then he was back to safely neutral.

I took another long drink to cover my confusion, to give myself time to breathe. Lewis glanced over his shoulder at us, and I wondered what the hell the dynamics were of this life I couldn't remember. David was—I was almost certain—my lover. And he wasn't human. Lewis was human, but not my lover—at least, I didn't think he was.

Not that Lewis was exactly the normal choice of the two. He could start fires with a snap of his fingers. And heal people. Whatever it was I couldn't remember about my life, it definitely wasn't what you could ever call boring.

David wasn't much for small talk, it appeared, which was a very good thing, given how confused I felt. He handed over a couple of trail bars, packed with sugar and protein, and I hungrily wolfed them down. Nearly dying takes a lot out of you. Eating served another purpose: It kept me from having to talk. I had a ton of questions, but I wasn't sure I was ready for any of the answers.

Lewis had the tent up in record time. Outdoorsy, clearly, though I guess I should have known that from his battered hiking boots and easy confidence and the neat, meticulously packed bag he was toting around. It wasn't a very big tent, barely large enough for two sleeping bags. We were all going to get very friendly.

At Lewis's orders, I clambered out of my warm nest, dragging my sleeping bag with me, and settled in. Claustrophobic, but at least it would be warm. I turned on my side and listened to the other two, who were still outside. Their fire-cast silhouettes flickered ghostly against the dark blue fabric of the tent.

“I have some MREs. Maximum calorie concentration,” Lewis said. “So…does she like Stroganoff or meat loaf?” He was deliberately casual, but he sounded really, really tired.

“Ask her,” David said. “But I doubt she'd have any idea. She remembers what they
are
, just nothing about how it relates to her directly.”

“How…”

“He took it from her.” David's voice had turned hard and brittle as metal. “We have to get her back.”

“I'm not disagreeing, but…look, David, what if we can't get her back? We've got no idea at all what we're dealing with here. And the last thing we should do is get into this before we know—”

“He's taken everything!”
David didn't shout it, but he might as well have; his voice ached. It bled. “Djinn can see the history of things, and she has none. Do you understand? As if she never lived. The people who know her—we're all that's holding her here. Without us, without our memories of her, she disappears. Unmade from the world. Clearly that's what he meant to do. We
must
find a way to undo it.”

Lewis was quiet for a moment. I heard the fire crackle, as if he'd thrown another log on. “Then that's all the more reason not to go running off into the woods without a better idea of what we're doing,” he said. “We've got problems beyond Joanne.”

“
I
don't.” David sounded fierce and furious.

“Yes, you do, David, and you know it. We're crippled. Both of us. Between the Djinn's withdrawal and the problems with the Wardens—”

“She's the only thing that matters to me now. If she's not the only thing that matters to you, then you shouldn't be here.”

“I'm just saying that we need to take our time. Be sure we understand what's happening here.”

“Use her as bait, you mean.”

“No. I didn't say that.”

“And yet I think that's what you mean. There's something out here—you know that. Something very wrong.” Silence, and a rustle of cloth. David's shadow lengthened as he stood up. “She always thought you were a cold-blooded bastard at heart,” he said, and ducked into the tent.

I hastily squeezed my eyes shut, but there was no way he wouldn't know I was awake. I could just…sense that. He'd be a very hard man to fool.

He settled down next to my feet, his arms propped on his upraised knees. “You heard,” he said. It wasn't a question. “What do you want to know?”

I sighed, gave up, and opened my eyes. “Where have I been? Do you know?”

Either my eyes were adjusting to the dark, or there was a dim, suffused illumination running through the walls of the tent. Moonlight. I could see a vague shadow of a smile on his face. It looked bitter. “No,” he said. “I don't. I'm sorry.”

“Well, tell me what you do know.”

“Beginning where?” he asked. “With your birth? Your childhood? Your first love?”

Just how much did he know about me? “How did we meet?” I asked.

“Ah. That's a good story. I guess you might say that I tried to kill you.” He paused, head cocked to one side. “Technically, I guess you could say I succeeded.”

“What?”

“It's a long story. You sure you want to hear it?”

I felt a bubble of panic growing in my chest, making me short of breath. “I want to know who I am. What's my name?”

“Joanne Baldwin,” he said. “You're a Warden.”

“A what?”

“Warden,” he said. “You're part of a small group of humans who have the ability to channel the elemental power of the world. Control fire, earth, or weather. You control the weather. And fire, these days, although you're still learning that skill.”

“I control the…Are you high?”

That drew a strange smile out of him. “Try it,” he said. “Reach out and feel the wind. Touch the sky.”

“You know, those lyrics must have been lame even back in the seventies.” But even while I was mocking him, I remembered that vivid ghost vision I'd had, of the wind running like a river in the sky. I'd been able to see curls and eddies in the flow.

Was that what he meant? But that wasn't controlling the weather; that was…X-ray vision. Or something.

“You're insane,” I declared. Which he found oddly amusing.

“I'm Djinn,” he said. “So yes. At times, at least by your standards. Try, Jo. Try to reach out and touch the clouds. I'll help you.”

I bit my lip and thought about giving it a try. What was the worst thing that could happen?
No
, something told me inside, the same thing that had told me to get up and run, out there in the woods.
Don't do it. You have no idea what you're risking. What kind of attention you might draw.

“How?” I asked.

David held out his hand. I slowly reached out to take it, and our fingers instinctively intermeshed.

Before I could even think about saying no—not that he was asking—he pulled me up and against him, body to body.

“Hey!” I yelled, panicked, and tried to push him away. Not a chance. “Get off, dammit!”

He put a hand over my mouth, stilling my protest—not demanding, more like a gentle caress. “I'm not going to hurt you,” he murmured. “If you allow yourself to feel for a second, you'll know that.”

I didn't. I didn't know. He terrified me in ways that I couldn't even begin to understand, starting with the too-bright, backlit color of his eyes. I had pressed my hands flat against his chest, trying to hold him back from an assault he wasn't even contemplating, so far as I could tell. He took both of my hands in his and interlaced our fingers tightly again.

“Deep breath,” he murmured. He pushed me back to a distance, holding me there as if we were involved in a formal box dance. “Not that deep,” he said, very softly, with a wry twist to his full lips. “Bad for my discipline. Relax.”

Not a chance of that. I stared at his shadowed face, and I felt something beginning to unspool inside of me, as if he were drawing it out. “What…? What are you doing to me?”

“Relax,” he said. “Relax. Relax.”

And the world around me exploded into color. Vivid, breathtaking color, shimmering and trembling with fury and life. My skin glowed. David was a bonfire, glittering and dripping with raw power. Everything was so bright, so beautiful, so
complicated
—even the fabric of my shirt was composed of tiny pinpoints of light, woven from the fabric of the universe.

I felt David holding my hands, but they weren't really my hands anymore. I was drifting up, out of my body, and the world was moonstone and shadow and neon, a confusing, bewildering, amazing place.

I soared up, out of my body, and passed through the thin fabric of the tent as if it weren't even there.

Up, plunging into the sky as if gravity had reversed itself and I was falling up into infinity…

Stars like ice. Cold-shimmering clouds, held together with a crystalline structure that was brighter and more beautiful than diamonds, and oh, God, it was so
beautiful….

I reached out and touched the bonds that held part of the cloud together, and made it rain.

Come back
, I heard David whisper, and the thing that had unspooled inside of me like a kite string was suddenly reversing, tugging me back away from the wonder of the sky, and it felt as if I'd spilled wind from my wings.

I was falling out of control back toward the forest, the tent, the fire.

I slammed back into my body with a sickening jolt, gasped, and convulsively tightened my grip on David's hands. I heard the first cold patters of rain on the fabric overhead.

Outside, by the fire, Lewis cursed, and I felt a sudden hot snap of…correction. The rain stopped.

“Oh, my God,” I whispered. My hands were shaking, not with weakness but with sheer joy. “Oh, my God, that was—”

“Nothing,” David said. “Just a taste. You used to control more than rain, Jo. You will again.”

He pulled me into his arms, and his lips pressed gently on my forehead, my closed eyes…my lips. I didn't know if I should respond, but my body was already making the decision for me. The warm, damp pressure of his mouth on mine raised something wild inside of me, something deep and primal. I sank my fingers deep into the soft silk of his hair. He was a good kisser. Rapt, intense, focused, devouring my lips hungrily.

And then he broke free, sighed, and rested his forehead against mine. His fingers combed through the mud-caked tangle of my hair, leaving it straight and shining and clean.

“How long…” My voice wasn't quite steady. I licked my lips, nearly licked his as well. “How long have we, you know, been…together?”

“A while,” he said.

“Years?”

I felt his smile. “What do you think?” His lips brushed mine when he murmured that answer.
Keep talking
, I thought. Because I was tempted to do a lot more.

“Not years, maybe…um…I don't know.” All I knew was that whoever and whatever David was, he had the key to turn my engine. “Then why don't I remember you? Remember
us
?” I was fairly sure, given the intensity of the kisses, that it was well worth remembering.

“You don't because you can't,” he said, and his fingers stroked through my hair again, gentle and soothing. “Because someone took away your past.”

“Then…how come I can still talk? Remember how to dress myself—okay, not that I dressed myself, bad example…” I got lost on a side thought, and pulled back to look at him. “Did you? Put my clothes on?”

“Do you seriously think I'd let Lewis do it?” David asked, raising his eyebrows. “Of course.” He gave me a slow, wicked smile. “Don't worry. I didn't take any liberties.”