Unknown

“Is it always like this?” I asked him, between gasps. It took him a long time to form words for an answer.

“Sometimes,” he managed to reply. “Between—really strong Wardens—but different.”

That was nondescriptive, but interesting to me. I traced a fingertip over the strong muscles of his shoulders, and I actually saw power moving between us, strong enough to manifest in a golden afterimage where I touched.

I laughed, took hold of his shirt collar, and pulled the knitted fabric over his head to bare his chest to me. The color of his skin was like the darkest honey, the muscles strong and tensed beneath. He had more tattoos than those on his arms, I discovered, though the tribal symbols meant little to me except in sharp indigo contrast to the rest of him.

I felt his hands on me now, restlessly moving, finally coming to rest around my waist on either side.

Moving up and in, to cover my small breasts in warmth through the thin material of the shirt.

Without breaking his intense, dark gaze, I pulled the shirt from my body and dropped it on the floor to mix with his. The difference in our skin tones was startling, and beautiful to me . . . my milk to his honey, and mine was begi

Bodies. Instincts. It was all frighteningly uncontrollable.

“Cass,” he whispered. I sensed the fight in his voice, the struggle to contain the same instincts that haunted me. “Cassiel—”

I kissed him, and we melted together, one constant ecstasy of light and sound, power and bodies, and yet

I knew there was more to this; my body craved it, demanded it, screamed for it.

Luis twisted and took me down to the couch in one swift, almost violent movement. My hands struggled to reach the fastenings of my pants, because I knew only one thing now, and that was how much I wanted to feel his skin everywhere, hot and damp against mine.

The air around us suddenly chilled, and I felt a crackle of energy that pierced even the fog of desire around us as heat was forcibly ripped from the air and coalesced together. I felt it before Luis, and I was able to shove him bodily out of the way of the strike, rolling him up and over the top of the couch.

He yelled in surprise. Before his body hit the floor on the other side, I was rolling the other direction, off the couch and to the floor, shoving the coffee table as I did. The bottle of whiskey tipped and spilled.

Lightning tore through the room, exploding from every electrical socket, stabbing toward a central point—the couch. It was a one-shot attack; the forces cha

Before the blue-white afterimages faded, I rolled to my feet, glanced at the burning couch, and reached down for my shirt. I pulled it on, then yanked on the leather jacket as Luis scrambled up on the other side, breathing hard, eyes wide with surprise.

“Someone just tried to kill us,” I said.

“No shit. Really?” He came around the couch, took up his own shirt, and tugged it over his head. “Weather Warden, right?”

“Most likely.”

“That won’t be their only shot.” He looked at the couch, charred and smoking, and then at the blackened outlets on the walls. The power was out in the house, of course. “Fuck, there goes my insurance premiums. You got any direction on this asshole?”

We had effortlessly shifted from intimacy to professional alertness, and I felt Luis burning the intoxication out of his blood, then out of mine, ensuring we were both perfectly prepared for battle. I crossed to the window, but I saw nothing amiss on the street outside; Luis launched his awareness out of his body and into the next plane of reality, which both the Wardens and the Dji

Luis showed himself not too differently from his usual physical body, but the flame tattoos on his arms glowed red, and moved like real fires. It struck me that on the aetheric, he looked very much like a Dji

As a Dji

Luis and I hovered close together, and his wraith form took the hand of mine. I felt the indefinable click of power cementing into place, and then we rose together—up, far up, to dizzying heights. Beneath us, Albuquerque spread out into a map, but it glowed not with physical lights, but aetheric energy. History pooled and glowed in the older buildings, violet and green. Old battles and crimes stained the map in angry reds. But what we were looking for was easy to spot, even among the confusion . . . a spark of power like no other color showing. A Warden, moving among the streets. I saw the white flare of our own two presences as well. The attacking Warden was close, but not close enough to be within our physical line of sight. Weather Wardens did not need to be.

As we watched, the Warden reached out for power, gathered it in like a black vortex from the world around him, and flung it out in a focused, cohesive blow. It was not aimed for the house in which our physical forms stood.

It was aimed up, at the warm, stable weather systems covering the city. There was little for the Warden to work with, but all clouds contain stored energy, and there were enough to make a difference.

The Warden slammed together a storm, working in a crude, brute-force way that spoke of little training. This was odd, because in general the Weather Wardens were among the most precise; they had to be when working with such massive and volatile forces, which could so quickly spin out of even a gifted user’s control.

Luis silently noted the Warden’s location, and the two of us plummeted down through the shimmering layers of force and color, back in a dizzying fall to our bodies. I felt a second’s disorientation, and then grounded myself in my flesh and whirled to run with Luis to the back door of the small house. He hit it first, slamming it open and leaving it to swing on its hinges, and jumped down the three shallow concrete steps that led down to the packed earth and sparse grass of the backyard. The back fence was sagging chain link, and beyond it we saw a figure in a black coat, ru

Overhead, clouds swirled, gray and troubled. Lightning flashed within them, still randomly aggressive but building up to a level that could become dangerous. I noted the risk, but we had little choice; a Weather Warden could rip the house down around us with surgical precision, and there would be very little we could do to stop it. Luis’s powers were primarily those of stability, of life, of healing; there would be little overlap to cancel the more ephemeral, destructive powers of air and water.