Ill Wind

"C'mon. Really?"

"Yes." David smiled slightly. "I haven't been completely sleeping. I've been keeping us unseeable."

"As opposed to invisible?"

"Unseeable just means that people don't look at you, not that they can't see you. It takes less effort."

"I thought you were asleep."

"We don't sleep the same way you do. Keeping us unseeable doesn't require much thought, and neither does knowing where I am." He shrugged. "I suppose in the computer age, you'd call it operating system software."

It brought on an intriguing question. "How many ages have you been through, anyway?"

He shook his head. I'd have to ask two more times to get a straight answer, and frankly, it wasn't worth the wasted breath. I was tired and cranky, and I needed food. I was also wishing he'd told me about the whole unseeable thing earlier, because I would have felt safe enough to park and grab a Big Gulp and cheese crackers from a convenience store. Then again, I might have decided to try a drive-through fast food place and they probably wouldn't even have noticed me.

"I'm thinking about pizza," I said. "Deep dish, lots of cheese, maybe some pepperoni. They've got to have good Chicago style around here. Wait, I don't suppose that's one of the handy cool tricks you can do, is it?"

"Make pizza?" He gave it serious thought. "No. I can't create something from nothing, at least not while I'm free. I could probably transmute it for you, so long as what I made it from contained some of the same elements."

"Like?"

"Tomato into pizza sauce. Grain to bread crust. Although I'm not exactly sure how to get pepperoni."

"I think you start with a pig, but let's not get too far into that. Man, what I'd give for a Moon Pie right about now."

David turned and looked around in the backseat; I could have told him the prospects for scavengable food were slim. Marion kept a clean car, something I'd never really been able to do, as much as I loved Delilah. I tended to accumulate slips of paper, receipts, scribbled directions, paper wrappers from straws…

But there was something, I remembered it. "Hey, I think she left a thermos in here. Coffee would be incredibly good."

He didn't see it. I leaned back and spotted a silver gleam under the passenger seat, just about popped a vertebra rooting it out, and came up with the goods. I was just about to check it for caffeine content when David said, "Do you feel that?"

I forgot all about caffeine. The jolt of adrenaline went straight to my heart and tingled in every soft tissue on my body. I put the thermos aside. "Yeah." The hair on my arms was standing up. "Don't get out of the car."

"I wasn't pla

I had long ago outrun the storm, but there was a line of clouds dark on the horizon ahead. I'd been playing with the idea of doing some sabotage on the cold front coming down out of Canada, but that was just plain selfish. Bad weather was both natural and necessary. The only time I was really morally allowed to tinker was if it posed a clear and imminent danger to human life… not necessarily including my own.

What I felt wasn't the storm ahead, and it wasn't the storm behind. It wasn't a storm at all. I wasn't entirely sure what it was, except that it was strange.

"Any idea—?"

"No," David said. "Not yet. Maybe you should start the car."

I did, and eased the Land Rover into gear and back onto the road. We accelerated without any problems. After half a mile I remembered to breathe. Nothing fell on us out of the sky or rose up out of the ground, which was downright encouraging.

"So," David finally said. "Exactly how many enemies do you have?"

"Marion's not an enemy."

"She buried you alive."

"It's complicated."

"Apparently." He settled back in the seat… not relaxed, exactly, but cautiously watchful. "Tell me about what happened."

"You know what happened. You were there."

"Tell me why you're ru

I felt a lurch somewhere in my gut. "You know, I really don't want to talk about it. If I'd wanted to talk about it, I would have done the whole This-Is-My-Life thing with Marion, where it might actually matter."

"You need to tell someone," he said, which was very reasonable. "And I don't have a stake in the matter."

In other words, he was Dji

"I killed somebody," I finally said.

He was unmoved. "So I heard."

"Somebody important," I said, as if he'd contradicted me. I was surprised to feel tears burn at the back of my throat. "I had to."

David reached over and touched my hand. Gently. Just the tips of his fingers, but it was enough to send a warm cascade of emotion through me that I didn't fully understand. Was it a Dji

"Tell me," he said. "Please."

I told David about the first encounter I'd had with Bad Bob at my intake meeting, and then the weird showdown we'd had at the National Weather Services offices, the time I'd worked the Bermuda Triangle and stopped Tropical Storm Samuel.

And then I told him the rest.

After I'd calmed down with a few drinks at a sand-side bar, I'd decided to put Bad Bob's bizarre problems behind me and just be a girl for a change. I'd strolled down to the sea in my fancy new few inches of perfect spandex. Beautiful girls are a dime a hundred on Florida beaches, so I didn't feel special…. Well, okay, maybe I did, a little, because it was a really good bikini. Beach studs checked me out, and there was nothing bad in that. I staked out a section of warm white sand as far as possible from screaming kids and teenagers blaring the greatest hits of Eminem on boom boxes, applied sunscreen and dark glasses, and settled down on my beach towel to soak up the love of Mother Sun.

There's nothing like a good day on the beach. The warmth steals slowly into every muscle like an invisible full-body massage. The dull, constant rhythm of the seas counts out the heartbeat of the world. The smell of fresh salt water, banana and coconut oil, that ripe undercurrent of the cycle of life turning somewhere under the waves. The sounds of people talking, laughing, whispering, kissing. Happy sounds. Somewhere out there, in the wet darkness, sharks hunt, but you can forget that, lying there in the sun, letting your cares slide away like sand through your fingers.

I had almost succeeded in forgetting about everything that was bothering me when a shadow cut off my sun and sent a chill ru

I opened my eyes and peered up, dazzled, at a dark shape with a brilliant white halo of windblown hair… then blue eyes… the face of Bad Bob Biringanine.

I sat up fast. He was crouching down next to me. I did one of those involuntary female things one does when wearing too few clothes in the presence of an intimidating man…. I put on my coverup, then crossed my arms across the thin fabric.

"That's too bad," Bad Bob said. "It's a nice look for you."

"What?"

"The suit. Designer?"

"Yeah, right. On what you pay me?" I shot back. "Don't think so." I glared. In my experience, guys who gave grief and then came bearing compliments were not to be trusted. Especially guys who held my future in the palm of their hand.