Ill Wind

"Adult pay-per-view," I advised him. "Only way to go."

Strangely, I felt less sleepy and less fogged over with weariness since he'd gotten in the car. Maybe there really was something to misery loving company. Plus, a little casual flirting never failed to get my blood moving.

He looked over at me with a smile that was just saved from being cynical by his gentle eyes.

"Real life," he said, "is always more interesting. You just never know what will happen."

What happened was that we drove for another thirty minutes, and the skies were clear and menace free, and I finally was able to pull in for a pit stop at a place called Krazy Ed's Gas 'n Food. Krazy Ed himself ran the register. I don't know if he was Krazy, but he was meaner than a pit bull, and I'd have been willing to bet that he'd killed a few would-be burglars in his time. David stayed quiet, polite, and he got out as quickly as possible with his haul of cheese doodles and Twinkies and diet soda. Evidently his oneness with Mother Nature did not extend to eating organic—or even partially organic— food.

Delilah drank her fill at the pumps, I slid my feet in and out of the now-torturous high heels and asked Krazy Ed if there was anyplace in town he could recommend as a clothing store. Apparently there was. It was a little place called the mall.

"Mall," I echoed after David and I were back in the car, safely out of Krazy Ed's reach. "How big a mall can there be in a town this size? A Wal-Mart I could understand, wherever two or three of us are gathered together, but…"

David didn't say anything. He just pointed to the road sign directly in front of us. It read, green hills outlet mall, biggest in pa! Although, by my calculations, we were just wee miles short of being out of Pe

"Oh," I said. "Pretty big, I guess."

So we followed the signs.

Big wasn't the word; the place was frigging enormous. I'd seen major airports that covered less land mass, and the cars—you could have taken a dozen big-city car dealerships and stuck them together in one contiguous lot, and you'd still have fewer vehicles than were choked into narrow rows around the Green Hills Outlet Mall. I offered David the chance to get a ride with some of the thousands of other mall shoppers, but he politely declined and walked into the place with me, hands in his overcoat pockets and eyes full of sly amusement as if he were on some sociology field trip. I wondered how many malls he'd ever been to. The clothes he was wearing weren't really hand-me-downs after all—blue checkered fla

Which raised a question, because most guys on the road for a couple of years tended to wear miles on their faces. His was mileage free.

Still. I checked Oversight. He was placidly un-menacing.

"I just need a few things," I told him. "Clothes. Stuff like that. You can go to the food court if you want to and eat something with some actual nutritional content for a change. My treat."

We were, in fact, looking at the food court, which was larger and noisier than Barnum and Bailey's big top. Even the pickiest taste could find something in that maze of color and plastic—from hamburgers to Szechuan, curry to pork pies. David looked mildly impressed. I handed him a twenty-dollar bill. "Knock yourself out. See you back here in an hour. If I don't see you, I'll assume you've caught another ride, okay?"

He pocketed the twenty without protest and nodded without looking my way. "I'll be here," he said. "Don't forget me."

Not likely. I looked back over my shoulder when I got to the escalator and saw he was standing there, watching me. The round circles of his glasses caught neon fire as he turned his head, and he walked off into the crowd with his overcoat swinging gracefully around him.

He really was—something. I wasn't quite sure what. Why the hell had I picked him up? No, that wasn't the question. A girl could have the occasional weakness for a cute, mysterious stranger. The question was, why the hell was I still with him?

I made the decision that when I was done here, I'd slip out the side exit and leave him on his own. Hell, I'd given him a ride, contributed a twenty to the cause—I'd done more than my duty, right? And there was, well, me to consider. I had my own problems, dammit.

Yes. Definitely. That's what I would do.

The escalator delivered me to a whole different level of color, this one full of clothes. Trashy clothes, flashy clothes, trendy clothes, clothes even my grandmother would have found too dowdy to wear. I picked a place called Violent Velvet and decided that it deserved a once-over for the name alone.

The color of the season, I discovered, was purple— well, last season, because it was an outlet mall and they were unloading stock that hadn't sold, but that didn't matter. I liked purple. I liked purple velvet even better, and since the spring wasn't so warm, it constituted a comfort-versus-fashion challenge.

Half an hour later I emerged from the fitting room wearing purple hip-hugger pants, a stretch lace white shirt, and a flared purple jacket that harked back to Edwardian styles. Everything I was wearing, from underwear out, was new. It felt so good, it was almost sexual. I paid up, bagged two more outfits and a pair of purple satin pajamas, and reveled in the feel of flat-heeled, fashionably clunky shoes. My feet were shell-shocked but grateful. A quick fifteen-minute stop at the nearby convenience store netted me tampons, toothpaste, toothbrush, travel-size mouth-wash, makeup, and—because a good Girl Scout is always prepared—a discreet travel-size package of condoms. But, I reminded myself again, I was ditching David. So the condoms were more in the way of wishful thinking.

Anyway, it had nothing to do with him. In the outfit I was wearing, I might have a date before I even made it down the escalator.

I was basking in girl power when suddenly the hair along my scalp prickled, and I knew something was wrong. Weather? No, that was okay, a quick survey of Oversight told me all was well. Something else. I couldn't pin it down, but the feeling persisted. Something was wrong here, in the middle of all these busy people, all these stores chewing money at a Las Vegas rate. Something to do with air, I thought. But not weather—

I realized I was feeling faint, and I didn't understand why. I'd been feeling great just a few seconds ago, loving my violent velvet, ready to take on the world. Now I needed to sit down.

I found an unoccupied Victorian-style wrought-iron bench and sat down next to some squatty pine trees. They looked unconvinced by the skylight above, but a finch had somehow found its way in and was perched on one of the branches, watching me with beady finch-eyes. It made a sharp sound that sounded dull and smeared to me, as if I were hearing it underwater, and it snapped its wings and flew away.

Fainter. Sounds fading. I couldn't understand what was happening. I was breathing faster, but the part of my brain in charge of total freakout was shrieking that something was wrong, wrong, wrong.

I was still trying to figure it out when I slid sideways and fell over on the bench. Cool white-painted iron against my cheek. Felt good. So tired.

People gathered. Lips moved. No sound reached me. I was gasping now, panting fast, and because my hand was by my face, I could see that my fingernail beds were turning a pure, delicate blue.