Ill Wind

This time I got a full, delighted smile. "I just wanted to talk to you, Joa

Since Lewis had the whole collectible set, nothing would have seemed odd to me… and didn't that just sum up the Wardens in a nutshell? We only thought talking salt was odd on a percentage basis.

Just my bad luck she'd gambled and I'd fallen for it.

I had a slightly darker thought. "The lightning bolt?"

Marion looked startled. "Of course not! We just want to talk to you, not kill you. Shirl's specialty is not weather, in any case."

I saw something flare bright out of the corner of my eye, and turned to see Shirl holding out a palm in front of her. Fire danced on her skin, flickering gold and orange and hot reds. It reflected in her dark eyes, and I felt a surge of dislike for the arrogance I saw there. I know, better Fire Wardens than you, sweetheart. Ones who don't have to show off for the boss. Still, fire gave me the willies, always had. I'd seen what it could do, close up.

"So talk," I said. "Or give me back the road and let me out of here. There's a storm coming."

"I know." Marion speared Shirl with a look, and Shirl put the fire back where it came from. "Let's take a walk, Joa

She reached out and opened the car door. A square stepping-stone of solid earth formed in the shifting dust, just big enough for me to stand on. I eased out, feeling Delilah rock like a boat in a pond, and bent down to test what my car was sitting on top of.

My fingers passed into the dust with barely any resistance at all; it was so fine, so frictionless than I felt a second's dizziness. Fall into that, and you wouldn't be coming up.

"This way," Marion said, and turned away. I put my hand on Delilah's dusty finish for a few seconds, trying to reassure her—and me—that things weren't as bad as they seemed, and then stepped off the square of solid ground and into the shadows of the trees.

It felt like another world. Marion's world. The Earth spoke to her, the way the sky did to me: whispers of leaves, dry creaks of branches, the padding footsteps of living things, small and large and minuscule, that made up her realm. I thought about the farm back there, the picture-perfect setting. That had been Marion's equivalent of doodling, while she waited. Perfect grass, artistic dottings of wildflowers. Marion created beauty from chaos, or maybe just demonstrated how beautiful chaos could be when seen through the right eyes.

We came out of the trees into a meadow filled with knee-high grass stalks, silver tipped, that rustled and murmured and bent under the touch of a brisk northeast wind. Overhead, white cirrus clouds shredded into lacework. A plane crawled the blue and threaded a white contrail through the lattice. It all looked flat, but I knew the plane was barely above the troposphere. The cirrus clouds were at least twenty-five thousand feet, maybe higher, well above the level of even a weather balloon. And those peaceful clouds were scudding fast, dragging the storm behind.

Marion turned her face into the wind and said, "The Zuni always said, first thunder brings the rain. But we're far from Zuni country."

"Everybody says something about the weather. Most of it's nonsense."

"Most of it," she agreed, and looked at me with those tired, patient, gentle eyes. "Murder's a serious charge, Joa

"I didn't murder him."

Her dark eyebrows rose, but her face stayed still and closed. "You argued, he's dead. Do we really believe this is an accident?"

Well, no. It hadn't been an accident. I'd been trying to kill Bad Bob Biringanine.

I just hadn't expected to succeed.

She took my silence at face value. "You were to wait for me in Florida."

"I couldn't. I had things to do."

"Such as?" She shook her head, brushed hair back from her face when the wind played it into a veil over her eyes. "Tell me what happened between you and Bad Bob. Maybe I can help you."

I opened my mouth to tell her about the Demon Mark, but of course I couldn't; it would be suicide. And she couldn't see it—otherwise, Marion or a hundred other Wardens would have known about Bad Bob's condition long before he passed the infection on to me. Rahel had told me as much—they were impossible for humans to see, even Wardens, unless they asked their Dji

I hedged. Some of the truth was better than none.

"There was something wrong with him," I said. "Bad Bob, I mean. I don't know what it was, but he attacked me. I thought he was going to kill me. I had to do it."

"You pulled lightning," Marion murmured. She crouched down and plucked a weed out of the ground, held it lightly between her fingers. It sprouted a bud, which exploded into luxuriant color. Red, this one. Brilliant bloodred, with a black center like an eye. "You didn't try to, say, immobilize him instead, as you must have been trained to do."

"Hey, this was Bad Bob, not some fifth-year apprentice with a bad attitude. The higher level a Warden is, the worse the consequences if he loses control— hell, Marion, you know that. Power and responsibility. Well, I had to fight him, and I had to use the big guns to do it. You want me to say I'm sorry?"

"No," she said. The flower in her hands blazed brilliantly through summer, faded, withered into winter, and died. A life in less than a minute. Marion's little silent demonstration: You control the weather. I control life itself. "I want you to understand that you will have a chance to tell your side of it. But when the judgment comes, it is final."

"Bullshit. You've already decided, all of you. You think I'm a danger. You want to—" To neuter me. Scrub my head with steel wool. Take away everything that I love.

"I don't, actually," Marion said, and dropped the flower. "But if the Council decides that you ca

"I can't. Not yet."

"The Council meets tomorrow. Nobody sent me after you today, but if you don't submit yourself for judgment tomorrow at the Council offices, somebody will, and my orders will be very different."

"You're traveling with a hunting squad," I pointed out. "Two Earth Wardens and a Fire Warden. That's to counteract my powers without fighting me on the weather front. Right?"

She didn't answer. Didn't have to, in fact.

'Tomorrow's tomorrow," I said finally. The storm had crawled closer on its little cat feet, and I could feel distant tingles at the edges of my awareness; the storm talked to me, the way that the forest and this meadow talked to Marion. My power, and my enemy, all at once. "You going to let me go or what?"