Heat Stroke

Paul Giancarlo was sitting bent over with his head cradled in big, thick-fingered hands. Not crying—men like Paul didn’t cry, it was against the whole tough-guy code of ethics—but he was rocking back and forth, chair creaking, and I could feel his distress like heat from a stove. He wasn’t fat, but muscular, and he stressed the structural limits of the sharp hand-tailored suit he was wearing. I’d never seen him in a tie before. It was strangely sweet. I wanted to put my arms around as much of him as my embrace could reach. I wanted to sink into his bear-hug warmth and never come out again, because one thing about being with Paul, he made you feel safe.

Fu

“Should’ve done something.” His words were muffled by his hands, but he was talking to the man who sat next to him. “You fucking well should have done something, Lew. What’s the use of being the biggest swinging dick around if you can’t save the people who matter? Answer me that!”

He slapped the question at Lewis Levander Orwell. Lewis might actually be the most powerful human on the planet, but next to Paul he looked like wallpaper. Tall, rangy, with puppy-dog brown eyes and a reasonably handsome face, he could have fit the part of an ad executive, or a lawyer, or any of a hundred normal white-collar jobs. He didn’t look like a guy who could command the weather, fire, and the very power of the earth itself. But the things I’d seen him do, the sheer force I’d felt him wield… incredible. Humbling.

“Being the biggest swinging dick around? It’s not much use at all,” Lewis said. He had a low, warm tenor voice, just a hint of roughness around the edges. He was staring down at his hands—long sensitive fingers, the hands of a pianist or a sculptor— as they pressed down on his thighs. His suit was not nearly as nice as Paul’s—serviceable, generic, forgettable. He never had been much of a fashion plate. “I tried to save her. You have to believe I tried. It was just… too much.”

“I guess I don’t have any choice but to believe you, right? No witnesses.” Paul sucked in a breath and sat up. His face hovered on the border between brutal and angelic. Gray salted his temples these days, which I hadn’t noticed before. He was ten years older than me, which put him close to forty, but the gray in his hair was the only indication he’d aged a day since I first saw him. I’d been eighteen, scared and irrationally arrogant; he’d been twenty-eight, and arrogant for damn good reason. He’d saved my ass then, when Bad Bob Biringanine had tried to stop me from becoming a Warden.

I couldn’t believe he was blaming himself for not saving my ass five days ago. I wanted to smack him one and tell him it was okay, I was right here, that the Joa

Unmistakably seeing me.

Oh. Well, of course he could, he’d seen me before, at Estrella’s house, when I was new-born into Dji

I shaped a silent hi. He half closed his eyes and smiled. Not surprised to find me here at all. Hi yourself, he mouthed, and the warmth in his expression made me tingle all over. Yeah, it’s like that between us. Always. Nothing either of us could control, no matter how much we wanted to.

Holding the stare, Lewis said, “She’s okay, Paul. Believe me. She’s in a better place.” About three feet to his left.

“Yeah? You got a fuckin‘ pipeline to heaven these days? I knew you were supposed to be some kind of god, but I didn’t know you had the all-access pass.” Paul’s bitterness was scorching. He wiped his face and sat back with another creak of the chair. “Whatever. Look, she never said so, but I know she had a thing for you.”

Lewis broke eye contact with me to blink at Paul. “She what?”

“Had a thing.” Paul shrugged. Only Italians could put so much into a shrug. “One night we got drunk and she told me… about college. That time.”

“Oh.” Lewis looked thrown, but not as thrown as I felt. I’d told Paul? About me and Lewis doing it on the floor of the Storm Lab one rainy afternoon when I was a freshman? I’d told Paul about Lewis being my first guy? No way. Although I dimly recalled a night four or five years ago, with blue agave tequila and strip poker… hmmm. Maybe I had. Wouldn’t be the first indiscreet thing to pass my lips.

Paul was still talking. “So she wouldn’t want you to be here.”

I wouldn’t?

“Given the circumstances,” he finished.

What circumstances?

Lewis glanced at me. I shrugged to indicate I had absolutely no idea what Paul was talking about. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to stay,” he said, as much to me as to Paul. “Seeing that the Wardens Council and I had that little disagreement about my Dji

The Wardens Council, unhappy with Lewis? About Dji

Which made, what? A standoff? Lewis versus the entire Wardens organization? Not that it wasn’t even odds…

Paul grunted agreement. “Steer clear of Marion and her gang. They’re still under orders to bring you in for questioning.”

“Thanks. I will.” Lewis started to get up. Paul reached out and grabbed his arm, pi

“Don’t flatter yourself. I don’t give a damn whether you stay out in the cold or make yourself emperor of the world. I got something to say before you go.”

“Go ahead.”

It took him a few seconds to work his way up to it, and then he said, bluntly, “She loved you. I knew that even if she didn’t. And you were a fucking idiot not to realize it when you still had the chance.”

Lewis deliberately didn’t look my way. There was a bitter sadness in those dark-chocolate eyes. “Oh, I realized,” he said. “What do you want me to say? That I loved her back? What difference does it make now?”

Shit. Dji

I felt David react, even across the room, and shifted my attention away from Lewis and Paul back toward the entrance, where David was standing. Still in human disguise, still gorgeous, but with the flaring powerful aura of a Dji

Not a Dji

Apart from that, she had ci