Thin Air

Paul’s gaze, which had unfocused to mull things over, sharpened back on me. “How do I know you weren’t behind that?”

“We could play this game all day, Paul, but the point is, I’m here, Marion’s awake, and she’s not pointing at me and screaming, ‘Demon,’ now, is she? So you’re going to have to take something on faith.” My turn to fold my arms and frown. “Paul, if I was in love with David, I’d never have slipped off with you. Not that you aren’t studly, but…”

He looked deeply uncomfortable. Shuffled his feet and cleared his throat. Adjusted the limp tie at the collar of his much-rumpled business shirt, which was finely tailored but not up to the rigors of a Joa

“Tease?”

“Flirt,” he amended hastily. “Jesus. Touchy, ain’t ya? Look, whatever happened, the point is, she didn’t get what she wanted, right?”

I wasn’t so sure of that. “What did she want?” I pushed away from the door and paced a little, nervous and chilly. “She wanted to cut me off from any support, sure, but it was more than that. She went out of her way to enlist people. She wanted to be part of the Wardens. Why?”

“Because you were?”

I shook my head. “It wasn’t just that she wanted a life. It’s more than that.” I remembered the way she’d felt in the clinic when she’d been about to kill me. And even back in the forest before the helicopter rescue. She’d refined her methods, but what she wanted wasn’t just to be me. “Before she came after me, she took over Kevin. She wanted something, and it wasn’t just about finding me, because she took him over when he was fighting the California fire-when was that?”

Paul pulled a handheld computer from his pocket and booted it up with a press of his thumb. He had big hands, but he was good with them, tapping out commands with effortless speed. “Same day,” he said. “Same day you disappeared in Sedona.”

I nodded. “Then I need to talk to Kevin. Now.”

Summoning Kevin for a personal chat took about an hour, during which somebody provided lunch; I’d forgotten how good food could taste, and devoured two sandwiches without pausing for much beyond swigs of bottled water. Oh, it was good. I’d been willing to settle for some of Lewis’s stale trail bars.

When he arrived Kevin wasn’t alone; he screeched up the drive in a black Warden-issue SUV, the kind with the sun symbol aetherically embossed on the side, and for a second I was afraid that Evil Twin had come home for a High Noon-style showdown.

But when the passenger door opened, it was Cherise who got out. I was unreasonably cheered to see her, because she looked a hell of a lot better than she had-fresh, scrubbed, cute as a button in her snowflake-patterned tight sweater and blue jeans.

She had to be feeling better. Her nail polish matched the outfit.

“Jo!” Cherise was the only person I didn’t need to win over; she flew across the room and hugged me like a sister. Well, from what I’d been through with Sarah, more like the sister I wished I had. “God, you look like hell! Hygiene, honey! Look into it!”

“Been busy,” I said.

“Too busy to comb the crap out of your hair?” But she was kidding, and her grin faded fast. “What’s going on? I thought you were better.”

“Was I?” I gave her a long look as we stood at arm’s length, and she slowly shook her head.

“Oh, man, that wasn’t you, was it? Dammit. I knew something was wrong; I knew.” If she had, Cherise had been the only one. Ironic, since she was also the only one of the entire group without some superpower or other, beyond looking fabulous under difficult circumstances. “You didn’t seem like…you.”

“But I remembered you.”

“Sure.” She shrugged. “But still. So. Evil twin?”

“Evil twin.”

“That’s hot.”

“Not so much, from this side.”

“Oh, come on, I’d kill for an evil twin. How cool would that be?”

I reached out and put a hand on Cherise’s shoulder. “Cher, I think she’s the one who hurt you. And Kevin.”

I felt her flinch, but somehow she managed to hold on to her smile. “Okay. I take it back. Wouldn’t kill for an evil twin, but I might kill her.”

Kevin had come in sometime during our conversation, stomping snow off his heavy Doc Martens and shooting distrustful looks around the room. He wasn’t judgmental about it. He didn’t like anybody, except, of course, Cherise. He unzipped his black jacket-it was a Raiders down jacket, with the pirate logo on it-as if he were intending to pull out an Uzi and mow us all down, but that was just his normal urban ’tude.

“You yanked my leash?” he said to Lewis, who was sitting next to the fire with a cup of coffee. Lewis lifted his mug in my direction. “Great. Not her again.”

I ignored his hostility. Seemed the best way to deal with him, all the way around. “Kitchen,” I said. “Let’s do the inquisition over some lunch.”

It was a pretty strategic move, seeing as how it put me within reach of a plateful of chocolate-chip cookies someone had left behind, and Kevin was too busy shoving turkey on rye into his mouth to give me much grief. Cherise quizzed me on ingredients, natural versus processed, organic versus pesticides, and other questions that I cheerfully lied my way through to get her plate filled. She even nibbled her way through a quarter of a cookie, looking mortified the whole time that she was doing it.

“You ask us here just to feed us?” Kevin mumbled around a mashed-up mouthful of sandwich. I resisted the urge to tell him not to chew and talk.

“I need to ask you about what you remember,” I said. “When you were taken over that day.”

He stopped chewing, swallowed, and put the sandwich down, growing fascinated by the pattern of the tablecloth. I felt for him, but I couldn’t let it go this time. “Kevin,” I said. “She was in your head. That means you know things that can help me now.”

He shook his head. His hair looked lank and oily, and I wondered if he ever washed it. I marveled at my urge to mother him, considering how much he disliked me. And how generally unlikable the kid was.

“She’s still out there,” I said. “She could do to other people what she did to you. For all I know she’s already doing it. You can’t seriously be okay with that.”

Another mute shake of his head. I didn’t know what it meant, but it was at least a response.

“You don’t want to remember,” I said. “I know. I get that. But we don’t have a lot of choices now. We have to find her.”

“What’s this ‘we’?” He looked up, and his eyes were dark with resentment. “It’s never about the ‘we’ with you. When you say ‘we,’ you just want something. And then you’ll leave me behind.”

“I won’t. Not this time.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“No idea. But I’m telling you the truth. If you want to go with me, I’ve got no issues with that. You’ve got more motivation than most people out there to take her down, right? I could use that.”

He frowned. “What if Lewis says no?”

“You think Lewis is the boss of me?”

He chewed another bite of sandwich while he thought about it, then gave me a grudging nod of acceptance. “Okay. What do you want me to do?”

I took in a deep breath and looked at Cherise, who’d put down her barely nibbled cookie and was watching, wide-eyed. “It’s what I did to Cherise before. I want to look at your memories and-”

I didn’t get to finish, because Kevin slammed his chair back with a screech of wood on wood, and headed for the door. I summoned a blast of wind to slam it shut in his face-too much wind, too clumsy, and I had to bleed off the resulting energy into a surge of static that made sparks flare in the light fixtures.

“Screw you! You’re not touching me!” Kevin yelled, and grabbed the doorknob. Another unintended consequence of my ham-fisted use of power: It was hot enough to burn. He yelped, cradled his hand, and backed away.