Thin Air

He looked ill, and I didn’t think it was airsickness. “I would have helped her do it,” he said. “We were talking about ways to reorganize the Wardens, concentrate their power. Nobody would have questioned her.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Sure it is,” Lewis said, and closed his eyes. “I’m going to take a nap while I still can.”

“How can you possibly sleep while…”

He switched himself off, pretty much just like that. I stayed put through the teeth-rattling jounces, and tried to pretend that I didn’t hate flying at a cellular level. Lewis really was asleep. I hated him.

Now that we were safely in the air-if that was the right term-we were free to take our lives in our hands and move about the cabin. I unbuckled and made my way through the small, cramped area toward the back. Kevin and Cherise were sitting together, heads close, whispering; they looked up at me, and Cherise winked and offered a thumbs-up. I weakly returned it, crushing the back of Paul’s seat in a death grip as the plane dipped and dropped unexpectedly, and he broke off his conversation with Marion to ask me if I was all right. I decided it was better not to lie, so I just smiled palely and kept going.

David was sitting alone at the back of the plane. He hadn’t bothered with anything so superfluous as a seat belt, of course. He, like Lewis, seemed perfectly calm, and he was reading a paperback novel, one that looked vaguely familiar to me. Lonesome Dove. Larry McMurtry.

I dropped into the seat beside him and whimpered under my breath as our fragile flying machine sledded from one punishing draft to another. He closed his book and took my hand.

“Have we done this before?” I asked.

“Flown in a plane together? No. Mostly we drive.”

“Mostly I understand why.” I gulped and tried to relax. “So, you want to tell me about Seacasket?”

“Is that why you came back here?” He was staring at the cover of his book. He was wearing round little spectacles, and they softened the lines of his face and made him seem gentle and bookish. And hot, though the hot part was pretty much a given. “Information?”

“Thought it would be important.”

“Information won’t take up much time. It’s a long flight.”

Not a pleasant thought at all. It was already too long, as far as I was concerned. I wanted my feet on the ground-or at least, my butt in the driver’s seat of a car. Now that was transportation.

“I need to keep my mind off of this,” I said, and gestured a little wildly at the clanking, shuddering aircraft we were trapped in for the next eternity.

“Be careful,” David murmured. His voice had drifted lower in tone as well as volume, and his eyes were half-closed, still focused on the book cover. “There are all kinds of ways to take your mind off of it.”

Even in the midst of ongoing panic, that sounded…interesting. More than a little. “Mmmmm?” That was noncommittal, yet expressed…

David put the book aside, flipped up the armrest that separated us, and shifted to face me. “I want to try to give you some of my memories.”

Whoa, that was not where I’d thought we were going. I’d been in a warm, happy place for a second, and now I was falling right back into Anxiety Alley. “Um…Ve

“You might have noticed that we all have…specialties,” he said. “Ve

“Which you’re stronger in.”

He nodded slowly. Light flickered across the surface of his glasses. I wondered why the hell he was wearing them; was there such a thing as a physically imperfect Dji

He blinked. “My coat?” He wasn’t wearing it at the moment, but it was draped over the back of his seat. Olive-drab, vaguely military from an era about a hundred years ago.

“Yeah. You don’t even need a coat, right? You don’t get cold. And it’s very…specific.”

His eyes widened this time. “Let me understand. We’re on our way to stop a Demon wearing your skin from ripping a hole through this world to hers, possibly allowing other Demons to pour through, and you want to talk about my fashion choices?” He paused for a second. “Wait, coming from you, that actually might make sense.”

I didn’t answer. The plane rattled its way through another set of bounces, and I didn’t have enough breath in my lungs to curse, because my diaphragm didn’t want to function. Maybe, if I held my breath long enough, I’d just pass out. That would get my mind off of the flight.

“The coat was given to me,” he said. “By someone I cared about.”

“Yeah? What was her name?” Shot in the dark, but not much of one, and I had a fifty-fifty chance of being right, even at the Dji

“Helen,” he said. “The coat belonged to her son. She lost him in the war.” Oh. I searched for a way to get him to tell me the rest, but he shook his head. “Wardrobe choices aside, Jo, while Ve

Which took me down another path altogether. “You dance?”

That got a definitely odd look. “Of course I dance.”

“Have we ever danced?”

He braced himself against the bulkhead, turned sideways in the seat toward me, and extended both his hands. “Find out,” he said.

I didn’t move. “I’m not sure if this is a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“Because…it just feels-it feels wrong. I don’t want an info-dump of how I feel about you.”

He lowered his hands to rest on his thighs as he considered that. “You’re not sure how you feel.”

“Yes-no. No, I am, I just-look, I want to build memories, not just stuff myself full of how other people see me. It’s confusing. And it’s kind of painful.” I met his eyes directly. “And it would be cheating for you to show me how deep this goes for you right now. It could scare me off. I don’t want to be scared off.”

I bit my lip in agitation as the plane’s engines shifted to a deeper thrum. We hit a patch of slick-as-glass air, then steadied out. For the moment.

He didn’t seem to have a response to any of that. I pulled in a deep breath and said, in a rush, “Did you sleep with her?”

“Who?” His expression went from blank to shocked. “You mean Helen?”

“No! No, I-wait, did you?”

He ignored that, finally getting my point. “You mean, did I sleep with the other you. The Demon.”

I nodded. For a few long seconds, there was nothing but the sound of the aircraft, the distant buzz of what other people were saying, and the pounding of my heart.

“Even if I did,” he said carefully, “it was because I thought she was you.”

“And you didn’t know the difference?”

He had the grace to look ashamed, and a little sick. “I didn’t have a lot of time to think it through. And to be honest, I don’t think I wanted to question it. Not when…”

“Not when you’d been bracing yourself to lose me forever,” I said. “Right?”

“Right.”

I felt my lips curve into a smile I couldn’t control. “You sure you’ve got the right one now?”

His eyebrows slowly rose. “Fairly sure.”

“Maybe soon we can upgrade that to completely sure.”

“Maybe?”

“Well,” I said, “privacy’s an issue.”

He gave me a slow, wicked smile. “It really isn’t,” he said, “if that’s all that’s stopping you. I’m fully capable of giving us all the privacy we want. Right here. Right now.”