Windfall (42 page)

“I know.”

“Jo—”

“I know.”
I swallowed hard and put my hand on his cold, wet, beard-roughened cheek. “Go do what you do. Eamon's just a guy, not a Warden. I can handle him.”

I knew Lewis was thinking,
You've done a bang-up job of it so far,
but he was too much of a gentleman to say so.

“Yeah,” Kevin snorted. “Like you've done such a good job so far.”

Case in point.

I walked away, back to the Mustang, where Cherise was still sitting under her poncho. Shivering. Looking dazed and storm-tossed. Her high-gloss finish had been power-stripped, along with her self-confidence about her place in the world.

“Cher?” I said. She fastened a blank stare on me. “We can go back now.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, in a bright, almost normal tone, and slid off the trunk to go around to the driver's side. Sometime during the hysteria, I noticed she'd remembered to put the top up on the convertible. Her hand was shaking uncontrollably as she fumbled for the door handle.

I gently guided her back around the car and opened the passenger side for her. “My turn to drive,” I said. It took her three tries to get in the car, even with help.

The interior was wet enough to squish. I sighed and hated myself for wasting the energy, but the truth was I was tired and cold and shaking too. I banished the moisture from the car and our hair and clothes, leaving a sharp, fresh ozone smell and, unfortunately, frizzed hair. Cherise didn't seem to notice. I turned on the car's heater and pointed all available vents in her direction.

I had to reach over and fasten her seat belt for her. She wasn't responding to suggestion.

The Mustang rumbled and growled as I backed it up and weaved it around the Jeep, catching Lewis and Kevin in the headlights. They looked fragile and bruised, far too small to go up against the fury of nature gathering out to sea. Lewis gave me a nod and a small, funny salute. Kevin's eyes were lingering not on me, but Cherise. I bumped the car over the uneven, buckled road until we were back at clean surface again, and then opened it up to a run. It drove tight and fast, hugging the road and responding to a touch like an eager lover.

I'd missed Mustangs.

Cherise said, “So you're, like, a witch, right?”

“What?”

“A good witch?” She didn't sound too sure of that.

I sighed. “Yeah, kind of. I hope.”

She nodded jerkily. “Okay, sure. That makes sense.” Hollow words, and an empty, scared look in her eyes.

I'd forgotten what it must be like, to have your certainty in life taken away, to find all the science and order and logic taken away. To find out humankind wasn't the center of the universe, and things weren't simple and controllable.

It hurt. I knew it hurt.

“Cherise,” I said. We rounded a curve and the headlights washed a riot of vegetation with color. I caught the glint of green eyes, quickly gone. “What you saw—that doesn't happen all the time, okay? It's not that the world is a lie you've been told. It's that there are some truths you haven't heard yet.”

She shrugged. “I'm okay.” The words were just as wrong as the movement, mechanical and dead. “So when you were working at the station, were you just—was it just some kind of game? Were you ever really—”

“This stuff doesn't pay the bills,” I said gently. “Saving the world really isn't all that profitable. You'd be surprised how little you get paid for that kind of thing.”

That won a smile of surprise.

“Not really,” she said. “Crime pays better than virtue.”

“You hear that on TV?”

“Read it,” she said, and leaned her head against the window glass. “Damn, I'm freaked.”

“Anybody would be. Take it easy, okay? Ask questions. I'll do my best to answer you.”

She hesitated a second, then waved a hand out at the storm assembling over the ocean, like a million soldiers ready to attack. “Can't you stop that?”

“No.”

“Just no?”

“When it's that big and mean? Yeah. Just no. Maybe Lewis can do it—”

“The old one or the young one?”

“What?”

“You know, the old guy in the flannel or the young one in black?”

Old guy?
I threw her a look. “He's my age!”

“In your dreams.”

“Not the young one, the—the—” I glared. “
Lewis
is my age. Kevin is the
punk-ass kid
.”

“Well, the punk-ass kid was nice to me,” she said, and shrugged. “What? It's not my fault I'm twenty-two and you're—not.”

Oh, I was
so
going to get my own car.

We drove in silence for another ten minutes before I said, because I couldn't resist it, “I'm not old.”

“Yeah,” she agreed, and sighed, and put her head back against the upholstery. “You just keep telling yourself that.”

I gunned the Mustang up to one hundred thirty on the way back through the storm.

 

Surprisingly, we didn't die in a fiery crash, but that was probably just God looking after fools and children, and as I blasted past the
WELCOME TO FORT LAUDERDALE
road sign and had to kill my speed to just under sixty, due to traffic, my cell phone rang. I fumbled for it and took the call.

“Eamon?”

“The same.” That lovely voice sounded as calm and deceptively friendly as ever. “Got what I asked for?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I'd hate for Sarah to suffer.”

“Is she awake? I want to talk to her.”

“What you want really doesn't concern me, love. As we seem to have a storm kicking up hell, I'd like to get this ended as soon as possible. No point in dying tonight, especially from something as stupid as fate.”

My hand was clenched tight around the cell. I forced it to relax. Ahead on the road, some grandpa in an ancient Ford Fiesta swerved into my lane doing thirty-five; I instantly checked perimeters and glided into the left-hand passing lane to whip around him. Tractor trailer ahoy, lumbering like a brachiosaur. I managed to slip around him and behind a white Lamborghini that wasn't any more patient with the current traffic than I was. I drafted him as he negotiated his way to free airspace.

“Where?” I asked. Eamon's warm chuckle was unpleasantly intimate.

“Well, why don't you come to my place? Maybe we can enjoy a nice drink after we conclude our business. Possibly Sarah might be open-minded enough to . . .”

“Shut the hell up,” I snapped. “I have a Djinn. Do you want it the nice way or the hard way? Because all I have to do is tell him to kill you, you know.”

“I know.” All of the needling humor dropped out of Eamon's voice, replaced by something hard and as chilly as winter's midnight. “But if you do that, you won't get your sister back. It took a lot of research—which was accomplished with a lot of screaming on the part of my research subjects—but I know the rules. I know what the Djinn can do, and what they can't. And you'd best not take a chance that I've been misled.”

He was right. There were rules to the covenant with the Djinn. Responsibilities a master had to accept. Violating those rules had some serious blowback, and if he understood enough, he could have set it up to be sure Sarah died with him.

No, I couldn't take the chance. Not that I'd been willing to in the first place.

“Fine,” I said. “Give me the address.”

It was close to the beach, which wasn't an advantage right now; I hung up and checked the progress of the storm. The streetlights were blowing nearly sideways, and signs were fluttering like stiff metal flags in the relentless wind. Hurricane-force winds, and it was just the leading edge of the storm.

As I took the exit from the freeway heading for the beach, I caught sight of the ocean, and it made my guts knot up in fear. Those smooth, greasy-looking swells out toward the ocean, exploding into gigantic sails of spray when they hit shallow water . . . blow on a small bowl of water and look at the way the waves form, heading toward the edge. Concentric rings, mounting higher as force increases.

The storm surge was going to be horribly high. Houses at or near the beach were already doomed. My apartment complex was probably toast, too—so much for the new furniture.

Life was so fragile, so easily blown apart.

“Look out!” Cherise yelled, and threw out a hand to the right.

I barely had time to register something big coming from that direction, hit the brakes, send the car into a spin across two lanes of traffic—thankfully, unoccupied—and manage to get us straightened around in a lane by the time we came to a lurching stop.

A boat bounced in from the right and landed keel-first on the road, oars flying off like birds into the wind. It splintered into fiberglass junk. I watched, open-mouthed, as it rolled off in a tangle.

“Holy shit,” Cherise whispered. “Um . . . shouldn't we, like, get somewhere? Maybe the hell out of Florida?”

Yeah. Good idea.

 

Eamon's building was a needle-thin avant-garde structure, the kind of place that, when they talk about building erection, they really mean the double entendre. I couldn't read the sign, but I decided the best possible name for it was Testosterone Towers, and it was someplace I intended never to live.

Even if Eamon wasn't there.

Cherise looked pale and scared, and I didn't blame her; the weather was getting worse, and this was exposed territory. Last place I wanted to be was in a high-rise . . . safe from the storm surge, sure, but way too much glass. I was thinking of something in a tasteful concrete bunker, up on a bluff. And as soon as I had Sarah back, we were going to find one.

“Should I stay here?” Cherise asked cautiously. I pulled the Mustang into the parking garage and went up to the next-to-highest level. It was the logical spot . . . not completely exposed, only one level could collapse on you, and it was higher than the likely storm surge. Bottom level would be safest from flying debris, but a collapse was possible, and drowning an added hazard.

“I think you'd better come with me,” I said. “Just stay close.”

We got out, and even in the shelter of the garage the scream of the wind was eerie. It ripped past me at gale speeds, pulling my hair and grabbing at my clothes. I braced myself and went around to take Cherise's hand. I had a little more height and weight than she did; she was too small and light for this kind of thing.

We made it to the stairs and found a hamster tunnel of plastic and lights leading from the parking garage to the building. It looked like being in the middle of a dishwasher on full spray, and I could hear an ominous creaking and cracking from the plastic. I tugged Cherise along at a trot. The concrete under our feet—padded by carpet—trembled and yawed. Leaks ran down the walls, and half the carpet was already soaked.

When we were three-quarters through it, I heard a sharp
crack
behind us, and turned to look back.

A huge metal road sign had impaled itself through the plastic and hung there, shuddering. It read
SLIPPERY WHEN WET
.

“Funny,” I told Mother Nature. “Real funny.”

The plastic shivered under the force of another brutal hit from the wind, and I saw stars forming around stress points. This little tunnel through the storm wasn't going to last.

I tugged Cherise the rest of the way. The big double doors were key-locked, but I was well beyond caring. My little theoretical addition to the practical chaos already swirling around wouldn't matter a damn, really; I focused and got hold of the running-on-empty power I had left, and found just about enough to fund a tiny lightning bolt to fry the electronic keypad.

The door clicked open.

Beyond that was a deserted, impersonal lobby, with a long black couch with kidney-roll pillows running down one wall. It was very quiet. There was a large computer screen displaying names and numbers—almost all of the spaces were vacant. In fact, it looked as if the building was just opening up for renters.

Pity about the hamster-trail tunnel out there, in that case.

These kinds of places usually had security on duty, but there was a noticeable lack; I figured that the cops had already been around and instructed evacuation, and the security guy had scurried along with them.

I walked over to the touch screen and paged through the floors. Blank . . . blank . . . an import/export company . . . blank . . . blank . . .
Drake, Willoughby and Smythe
. Seventh floor. I took a look around the lobby. It was built for impressing visitors, not views, so there weren't many windows. That was good. I spotted a camouflaged door behind the empty security desk. When I tried the doorknob, it was locked; I braced myself and kicked half a dozen times before I got the lock to yield. It looks easier on TV, trust me.

The room behind was small, bare except for a cot, desk and chair. I sat Cherise down on the cot and took her hands. “Wait for me,” I said. “Don't leave here unless you have to, okay? It's a windowless interior room; you're pretty safe here.”

She nodded, pale and looking young enough to braid her hair and sell Girl Scout cookies. I couldn't help it; I hugged her. She hugged me back, fiercely.

“I won't let anything happen to you,” I said. I felt her gulp for breath. “It's going to be fine, Cher. Who's the tough girl?”

“Me,” she whispered.

“Damn right.” I pulled away, gave her a smile, and watched her try to return it. She was scared to death. Had reason to be. I was trying not to indulge in a complete, total freakout myself.

I left her there, kicked off my shoes, and hit the stairs.

 

When I got to the seventh floor, I was wheezing and flushed and the place the cougar had slashed me was throbbing like a son of a bitch, but the bleeding was still minimal. Still, I was willing to bet that I was looking like a wrathful Amazon. Frizzy hair, bloody, ripped shirt, and I hadn't had the time or energy to shave my legs in days.