Gale Force

the two options.

''I guess I should give up on the friendship bracelets, '' I said. ''Good, I suck at crafts. So, I'm

guessing all this wasn't your own brilliant idea. You haven't had an original one since you set

your cat on fire in the second grade. Who sent you? Think hard, Lee. We're going into the final

lightning round. If I don't believe you, the next breath you take could be water. Or cyanide. I just

love chemistry.''

He didn't want to talk, but self-preservation is a damn fine motivator. No matter how badass his

bosses might be, they weren't here. I was. Like anyone else, Antonelli wanted his next breath to

be sweet and life-giving, not foul and toxic. He knew better than to question whether or not I

could do it.

''Sentinels,'' he croaked. ''Want you dead. Paying cash.''

''Hmmm. How much?'' He looked at me as if I were totally crazy. I wasn't so sure he was

wrong. ''I'd like to know how much it was worth, stabbing me in the back.''

''Five million.''

I sat back, surprised. ''Five million dollars?''

''I'd kill you for free,'' Antonelli muttered. ''Bitch.''

''Is that any way to talk to the person holding your oxygen tank?'' I asked, and cut off the flow

into his lungs. He choked and thrashed. ''Oh, okay. I see your point. Five million is a lot of

temptation. But I don't think it was the money. You might like me to think it was, but I think

whoever sent you scared the crap out of you.'' I let him have an entire ten breaths of sweet,

sweet air. He shook his head. ''Come on, Lee. Please. I don't want to hurt you anymore. Just tell

me who sent-''

I had no warning. Neither did Antonelli.

Some tremendous force slammed into me, throwing me facedown to the gravel path. I rolled,

tossed my hair out of my face, and saw that David had also been driven back from Antonelli.

That was . . . almost impossible. Unless he'd been taken by surprise, by someone or something

of nearly equal strength, it was very hard to knock a Dji

was distracted from Antonelli by a perceived threat against me, while I was busy regrouping and

trying to figure out what the hell had happened.

Antonelli didn't hit us while we were vulnerable; he wouldn't have had either the concentration

or the energy. No, someone else struck Antonelli. I'd gone up into Oversight, struggling to catch

a glimpse of what was going on, and saw a huge red, spectral hand reach through the aetheric

and punch claws deep into Antonelli's chest. I felt the black wave of despair and fury like a

psychic blast. In the real world, Antonelli's eyes locked with mine.

And then the spectral hand crushed his heart like a grape.

Murder, cold and sudden and utterly merciless.

Lee Antonelli swayed on his knees, and as long as I live I'll see his face, see that terrible, sad,

confused expression and those lovely brown eyes begging me to explain why I'd let this happen.

You could say that he deserved it; he'd been willing to kill me.

But you'd be wrong. Nobody deserved that.

David whirled, turning into a blur of light, and was gone. I caught Antonelli as his corpse pitched

forward. Blood burst out of his mouth and nose, and I realized it hadn't been only his heart the

hand had gone after; it had been his lungs, too, and probably any other organ of note. His

murderer had systematically pulped him from the inside, like a kid squashing tomatoes in a bowl.

I cursed breathlessly, well aware it was too late. David had darted off in pursuit, but I could tell

there was little to no trace on the aetheric of who'd delivered the death blow. Someone horribly

powerful, though. Someone not afraid to break every rule.

I'd forgotten to worry about conservation of energy, in those few seconds, and as I eased Lee to

the pavement, the imbalance went critical. First, the windows on the van blew out in a shrapnel-

spray of glass. One second later, the windows in my car followed. Then the diner's plate glass

windows. The concussive effect rippled out, losing strength until it was only cracking glass and

denting metal, and then it faded away.

I didn't care about that. Someone had murdered a Warden right in front of me, and I hadn't been

able to do a damn thing to stop it.

Some hero I was.

I heard a confused babble, and then the patrons and staff of the diner boiled out into the parking

lot, yelling questions, momentarily more upset about their auto damage than anything else.

Someone caught sight of me on my knees, with Lee's body cradled in my arms, and the tenor of

the babble changed and grew louder as people converged around me in a forest of heads and

shadows.

''What happened?'' one of them asked. ''Is he okay?''

''No,'' I said. I sounded calm. That was odd. ''I think he had a heart attack.'' Stupid thing to

say; there was blood on his shirt, on me, still dripping from his gaping mouth. ''Maybe a

hemorrhage.''

''That's sad; he's so young,'' someone else murmured. I heard a cell phone being dialed, and a

voice asking for an ambulance. After a pause, they also asked for the police. Well, I couldn't

blame them. Big dude dead on the ground, with a burn mark in his shirt and blood all over his

face.

And me, with blood on my hands.

I couldn't explain, so I didn't try. I just sat next to Lee's body, and by the time I realized that I

was uncontrollably trembling, it was too late to claim I was too badass to care about what had

just happened.

I was crying by the time the sirens approached.

I should have realized that where the police went, the scavengers would follow. In this case, it

was the local news crews, two different species by the plumage of their satellite trucks. The

reporters had a certain sleek, predatory look to them that identified them clearly from the

casually dressed videographers and sloppy, Earth-shoe-wearing boom guys.

I watched them approach as I was giving my story to the police, and it was like a flock of

vultures circling, waiting for my last breath.

''Ma'am?''

I blinked. The police officer facing me was tall, beefy, ginger-haired, and excruciatingly polite.

Despite that, he wasn't the kind to take any crap, and I heard the warning in his oh-so-polite

question.

''Sorry, sir. I was just coming out of the diner with my-my fiance, and we saw this gentleman

get out of his van. He looked like he was in some trouble. I think he might have been having

some kind of seizure.''

''Seizure,'' the cop said, and noted it down. ''Uhhuh. Was his shirt like that when he got out?''

Oh. The burns. ''I didn't notice right away. I didn't see him with a cigarette or anything,'' I said,

which was the absolute truth. ''Is it important?''

''Probably not. He damn sure didn't burn to death. So, you didn't know him, ma'am?''

I was lucky that nobody appeared to have noticed our little confrontation in the parking lot-then

again, it probably wasn't luck so much as David, taking care of business. Everybody

remembered me and David inside the diner, but nobody appeared to have been paying attention

when we left and went out to the car. The glamour had held until the windows blew out.

''No, I didn't know him,'' I said. It was my first real lie, and I had to make sure he bought it. I

tried not to hold myself too still or keep his gaze too long. A good Earth Warden could have

exerted some mental pressure to make him overlook anything that tripped his suspicions, but I'd

never been that good, and I wasn't about to try something like that at my current level of