Windfall

The intensity of the flares meant that substantial power was getting expended. I couldn’t help but imagine what that meant. Wardens were being killed, or fighting for their lives at the very least. And there was nothing I could do about that, either. A lot of them would be friends, people I’d met or worked with. Lots of names going up on the memorial wall, if there was a world at the end of this to remember them at all.

I couldn’t see anything that would help me. The closest Warden to me was in the Florida panhandle, and he or she was hard-pressed with some kind of tornadic activity. Besides, from the intensity of the flares, no Dji

Somebody has you, I whispered into the fog. Where are you, David? Who found you? Who took you?

Something stirred, creating eddies of power that whispered warm on my skin. I couldn’t see him, but I could feel him. David was still alive. Still barely qualifying as Dji

Just tell me, I begged him. Tell me and I’ll come get you.

I wasn’t prepared for something to hit me, but something did, hard, knocking me in a stu

Whoever had David didn’t want me finding him.

I remembered, with a hard shock, that I’d actually seen someone with a Dji

… then, if I found Lewis, I’d find Shirl. And a Dji

I went up on the aetheric level again, this time searching specifically for Lewis. A bright flare of power to the west, maybe an hour down the coast. Where other Wardens showed up in Roman candle spurts, Lewis was a steady, bright torch. He had the ability to disguise himself nearly as well as a Dji

I kept half of my attention in Oversight, grabbed minivan keys and purse, and banged out of the apartment. I didn’t have a lot of time, and God knew the mommy-mobile was hardly power transportation…

When I got to it, I realized that the land yacht was canting sideways, like a ship heeled over on a reef. Eamon had taken the trouble to slash two of my tires before he’d absconded with my sister. Probably had done it while I’d been sleeping. Son of a bitch… !

I grabbed my cell phone and hit speed dial, pacing the parking lot nervously while it rang, and rang, and rang…

Cherise’s sleepy voice finally said, “Oh, you’d better be cute, male, and horny.”

“Shut up. I need you,” I said flatly. “Skip the gloss and get your ass over here.”

A rustle of sheets. Cherise’s voice sharpened into focus. “Jo? What’s wrong?”

“I need a ride and a driver who’s not afraid of the gas pedal. Are you up for it?”

“Um… okay…” She sounded cautious. I didn’t blame her. She’d never heard me in full-on action mode before. “Give me thirty min—”

“I don’t have thirty minutes. I don’t care if you show up in a sheet and fuzzy slippers; for Christ’s sake just get here. Five minutes, Cherise. I’m serious.”

I chewed my lip and finally added, “My sister could die if you don’t.”

I heard her intake of breath and had a bad moment, wondering if she’d just quietly hang up and leave me stranded. But Cherise, when it came down to it, was made of sterner stuff than that.

“Five minutes,” she promised, and I heard the phone clatter to the nightstand before it shut off.

It was six minutes, but I was impressed with her commitment; when Cherise’s car screeched to a stop in front of me, she was wearing a pink crop top, tight sweat pants, and flip-flops. No makeup. Her hair was yanked back into a ponytail, still frizzy from the bed.

It was the most unpolished I’d ever seen her look, and I loved her for it.

I dived into the passenger door as she threw it open, and she hit the gas and scratched the Mustang’s first gear as she accelerated back toward the road. I managed to get myself buckled in—that much, I figured, was necessary—and got myself up into Oversight. Just enough to keep an eye on Lewis’s beacon.

“Get to the beach and head west,” I said. Cherise threw me a look, blew past a yellow light, and scratched the gears again as she hit third. The car roared and threw itself into a flat-out run. “I owe you.”

“Fuckin’ A,” she said, and checked her rearview mirror. No cops, so far. I didn’t dare glance at the speedometer, but when Cherise made the turn onto the highway I felt the tires screaming and struggling to hold the road. She wasn’t cutting it any slack. The Mustang got traction and fishtailed and broke into a full gallop on the open road. There was early-morning traffic, but it was light.

Cherise pegged her speed at just under a hundred and maneuvered in and around the slower traffic with the kind of precision reserved for combat drivers and NASCAR professionals. I’d picked the right girl. She did love to drive.

“So,” she said as we hit a clear stretch and the Mustang opened up to a low, feral growl in fifth, “maybe you’d better explain to me why I’m about to get my ass arrested, not to mention take a mug shot with bad hair and no makeup.”

“Cute British Guy,” I yelled, and held my whipping hair back from my face in the brutal wind. I’d forgotten how much of a beating it was to drive this speed in a convertible. “Turns out he’s not so cute. He says he’s going to kill Sarah if I don’t turn over a ransom.”

“What?” Cherise’s eyes were all pupil in the dim wash of the headlights, her face zombie green from the dashboard lights. “No way. Cute British Guy? Dude, he was fine!”

“I’d tell you that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but…”

“I know, first I’d have to have read one.” Cherise sent me a faint, wind-whipped smile. “I’m not dumb, you know!”

“I never thought you were.”

“I just like guys!”

“Yeah. I know.”

“So he’s bad? Really?”

I thought of him on the couch, smiling, a hand gripping Sarah’s pale, slack throat. “The worst.”

Cherise considered that for a few seconds in silence, and then nodded. “You going to pay him off?”

“I don’t know.”

She nodded again, as if everything I’d just said made perfect sense. “I’m glad we have a plan.”

We blew past one hundred twenty miles an hour, still accelerating.

The winds started kicking up twenty minutes later. I shifted my view in Oversight and saw that the storm was picking up speed and rotation. From the color bands in the aetheric, the eyewall probably had already hit Force Three speeds, and it was just getting started. The clouds were unfurling like war ba

I could feel it. This storm was old, and angry, and it wanted blood. The core of it was surrounded by a thick, black curtain that felt like death.

I swallowed hard as I dropped back into real-world time. Cherise was nervously eyeing the clouds.

“I think I’d better put the top up,” she said.

“Do you have to stop to do it?” She sent me a wordless Are you mental? look. “We don’t stop, not for anything.”

“We’ll get soaked!”

“I’ll keep the rain off of us,” I said. There wasn’t any point in concealing anything now. “I can do that. Just worry about keeping us on the road.”