Heat Stroke

“Hey,” he said. His low, slightly rough voice had a gentleness to it that I hadn’t heard before. “How are you?”

I stood up and walked into his embrace. A full-body hug, lots of male upper body strength carefully controlled. He smelled of leather and wood smoke, and I wondered if he’d been camping somewhere. Lewis is the outdoorsy type. His hiking boots certainly had the chapped, bunged-up look of having tramped through half the real estate of the world.

I’m not a short woman, and he still had some height on me. Lean, tall, with gorgeous dark-ci

I remembered he’d asked me something. “Mmmm. I’m doing good, for a dead chick.”

He kissed the top of my head and didn’t let me go. I was okay with that. I had the total hots for David, was more than 80 percent of the way to total head-over-heels in love, but I could still enjoy a strong man pressed against me, yes lawdy.

“You scared me,” he said. “I didn’t expect you to drop off the edge of the planet like that. Don’t do it again.”

He loosened his grip and stepped away, and I felt noticeably colder outside and warmer in. Which maybe made me fickle, and more than maybe a complete slut. But I was prepared to accept that.

“You were supposed to come find me,” he said. He had a small frown engraved between his brows, and I noticed that he had acquired some fine lines at the corners of his eyes. He had one of those faces that lines made look distinguished, not run-down.

“Yeah, sorry… got busy.” I flipped a hand around to indicate Patrick’s incredibly tasteless pad. “Um, Dji

“Not really, but I’ll take your word for it.” His gaze moved to Patrick, and they exchanged guy nods, the ones that indicated acquaintance but no actual fondness, because that would be less than manly. “Thanks for letting me talk to her.”

Patrick shrugged, which made the things that Mickey and Mi

“Which is?” Lewis wanted to know.

“Survival.”

Nice to know that it was possible to surprise Lewis, once in a while, although I wished it could be for a less urgent and personal cause; he looked as blank as if somebody had taken an eraser to his face. “Survival? Jo, anything wrong?”

I fielded that one, since it was an easy ground ball. “You could say.” I pulled out the third chair at the table for him; he folded himself down, long legs bumping into obstructions that hadn’t bothered me, and looked at my coffee cup with such pitiful longing that I picked it up and started for the steaming pot.

“Ah!” Patrick wasn’t looking at me, but he held up a finger like some offended schoolmaster. “Break that habit.”

Right, I’d been through this painful lecture before. Stop being human. Start acting like a Dji

And felt damn proud of myself, too. You betcha.

Lewis was even more impressed. He didn’t say anything, but by damn he looked respectful as he took the mug, lifted it to his lips, and sipped.

And it was a bad time to wonder if I’d fucked up the recipe and created something lethal, but then he was an Earth Warden, he’d be able to tell anyway, and fix it if I had. The perfect guinea pig.

“It’s good,” he said, and took another, longer sip. “Colombian?”

“Guatemalan Antigua,” Patrick answered. “If she did it right.”

He held up his cup for a refill. I did it without moving a muscle. Same routine—sip, surprise, cautious approval.

Lewis put the coffee aside and didn’t let himself get distracted by the fine imitation of a barista I was doing. “You said something was wrong.”

No sense in beating around the bush, not with him; I laid it out just the way it had been spelled out for me. David’s power constantly bleeding off into me, David getting weaker, me the sucking leech that was going to kill him. Yeah, what a happy story it was, just the kind to make the heart warm and cozy. Lewis’s dark eyes got darker as it went along, and even though he always had a kind of i

I finally said, into the ringing and too-loud silence, “So. You wanted…?”

He looked away. Patrick had put the little glass bottle back on the table, unstoppered; Lewis picked it up and rubbed it thoughtfully between his thumb and forefinger. I wondered if he was thinking about food. I could try whipping him up a nice bagel or something, but I wasn’t sure that my culinary skills as a Dji

“I wanted to ask you a favor,” he finally said. “But given what you’ve just told me, I’m not sure it’s such a good idea right now.”

Patrick glanced over the top of the paper at both of us. “I’m pretty sure it is.”

“Well, no offense, but you’re not the one who’ll end up with the nightmares if it turns out to be a rotten idea.” Lewis wasn’t usually so snappish, in my experience. He was clearly rattled. “No. Forget it. It’s okay. You have enough to worry about already.”

“Wait a minute, you haven’t even told me anything yet!” I said. Why do guys always try to make the decision before they even state the problem? “Come on, Lewis, spill it. What do you need?”

He was still rolling the bottle around in his fingers, focused on it with such precision that I wondered if he was about to try to Copperfield it out of existence. Hey, I wouldn’t put it past him. Glass was a pure, if nonorganic, manifestation of earth. He could reconstitute it into a pile of sand, if he wanted. How many degrees of heat did it take to melt sand into glass? I’d slept through most of my basic Earth Sciences classes, since it had all been about the weather for me. I remembered something about trillions of dust particles being used to make a single drinking glass, but apart from the fact that the instructor in the class had been a ski

“There’s something up there,” Lewis said. “In the aetheric. I think it’s a rip into the Void.”

“Come again?”

“The Void.” He finally lifted his gaze and met mine. “The place where demons come from. Where they reach through to leave the Mark.”

Oh yeah, I know all about the Mark. Had one, didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as you’d think. Something about demons trying to claw their way out from inside me, incubating like baby spiders in the helpless stu

“Not at the moment.” Lewis let the bottle roll out of his fingers onto the tabletop, and prodded it gently around in a circle. “Doesn’t mean one won’t. We need to shut the door and seal it.”

“And when you say we, that’s a royal I’m-the-biggest-bad-ass-Warden-there-is-and-I-don’t-need-any-help sort of we, right?” Because I really didn’t much like where this conversational trail of breadcrumbs was leading. There was a witch at the end of it, and an oven, and a really unpleasant fairy tale.

“I mean that I can’t do it alone,” he said. He sucked in a deep breath and came out with it. “I need a Dji