Windfall

“Sorry,” I whispered, and swiped bloody hands across my face to drag my wet hair back. I didn’t dare take too close a look at my body. The bottom part of my torso felt suspiciously warm and numb. At least my guts weren’t falling out. I was counting my blessings.

I couldn’t kill the cougar—evil people, yeah, okay, but not cats who were just doing their survival job—so I only had a few minutes at most to get rid of the one controlling it.

And he already had something else lined up. I caught the blur of motion out of the corner of my eye. There was no way I could move in time, and my brain snapshotted a snake—a big, unhappy-looking snake—striking for me with enormous fangs in a flat, triangular-shaped head as big as my hand.

Rahel caught it in midstrike, thumped its head with one neon-polished fingernail, and the snake went limp in her hands. She looked perfectly well groomed. There was no sign she’d been in any kind of a fight, and I didn’t see the other Dji

“You should be more careful,” she said—to the snake—and set him down in the underbrush. He crawled away with fast convulsions of his body and disappeared in seconds.

Rahel turned her eerie, hawk gold eyes on the Earth Warden, and smiled. Not the kind of smile you’d want to get on your worst day, believe me.

The Earth Warden took a giant step back.

“Dji

“Good thing for me that I’m not a Warden anymore, then,” I said. “Busy?”

“Not especially.”

“Don’t need to, ah, help Lewis… ?”

Her eyes flicked briefly to the enormous fireball that surrounded the other two.

Inside of it, it looked as though Lewis had Shirl in a choke hold. “I don’t believe that will be necessary.”

“Then would you mind—?”

“Not at all.”

The Earth Warden’s nerve failed and he bolted. Rahel took him down with one neat jump, carrying him down to the shining, wet pavement, and shoved him flat with a knee in the small of his back. He flailed. It didn’t much matter.

“You can let the cougar go now,” she called back to me. “It won’t harm you.”

Oh, right, easy for her to say… I removed the vacuum from around the cat, and it choked in a fast breath, then another, and bounded up and away. Following the path of the snake. I wished them both luck.

Speaking of which… I ski

I gulped damp air and tried not to think how close I’d come to being cat chow, and then moved to where Rahel had the Warden in a position of utter helplessness.

I got down on one knee, which was painful, and he turned his head to stare at me. Yep, there was a definite component of demon-shimmer in his eyes. I didn’t know if anyone else could have seen it; I was a pretty unique case, having had the Demon Mark and Dji

Probably wasn’t even aware yet how the creature growing inside of him under that mark would be influencing his actions, compromising his judgment.

Eating his power even as it stoked the fire and made him feel more in control.

I couldn’t help him with that. He had to help himself, and I was about to take away his only way to do that.

“Hold him,” I said to Rahel. She shifted her weight off the man, but kept him flat with one hand between his shoulder blades.

“Let go!” he yelled. I ignored him and stuck my hand in his right coat pocket.

Nothing. The left held a ring of keys. I dropped them on the ground.

“Roll him over,” I said. The Dji

He started screaming. Whatever she was doing to hold him down, the demon didn’t like it. His whole body arched in pain, and Rahel’s face went blank with concentration.

I ransacked his pants pockets and came up with—of all things—one of those cheap leather lipstick cases, the stiff kind exported from India or China that snap open and have a mirror built in for touchups. No lipstick inside of this one.

This one held some cotton batting and a small perfume sample bottle, open and empty. The plastic snap-in plug was lying next to it.

I reached in and grabbed the cool glass, and felt the world shift in that odd, indefinable way, as if gravity had suddenly taken a left turn.

A Dji

It disappeared. I took the plug from the cotton in the lipstick case and slid it home in the mouth of the bottle, and felt that co

Rahel was watching me with a frown. It’s not good when Dji

“I thought you didn’t believe in slavery,” she said. Her cornrows rustled as she cocked her head, and I heard the cold click of beads even over the continuing pounding rain. “Ah. Unless, of course, it’s expedient. How human of you.”

“Shut up,” I said. “And thanks for saving my life.”

She shrugged. “I haven’t yet.”

And she let go of the Earth Warden.

He came up fast and fighting, and we went back to work.

The aftermath was like a war zone, if war zones had spectator sections. The wrecked SUV still smoldered and belched smoke; the whole damn road was buckled and uneven and burned down to the gravel in places. There would be some serious repaving later.

The spectator section was composed of Cherise and Kevin and Rahel, who were over by the Mustang. Cherise and Kevin were sitting on the trunk, huddled together under a yellow rain poncho held like a tent. Rahel paced back and forth, oblivious to the rain, casting looks out to the east, toward the ocean. Her eyes were glowing so brightly that they were like miniature suns.

Shirl and the Earth Warden—I still didn’t know his name—were unconscious in the Jeep, restrained with good old-fashioned duct tape. Lewis had also done some fancy Earth-power thing that lowered their metabolisms. He could keep them in a sleep state for hours, maybe days, if he didn’t have better things to do.

Lewis and I were leaning against the Jeep, gasping for air and trying not to moan. Much.

“You okay?” he asked me at last, and put that warm hand on the back of my neck.

I managed to nod. “No, you’re not. You’re too weak. Again.”

“I’m all right.”

“Bullshit.” He looked like hell; he was one to talk. Burned, blistered, ragged, suffering in his eyes. And a bone-deep weariness, too. He’d been ru

“Yeah.” I sucked in a deep breath. “It’s bad. Maybe as bad as Andrew back in ’92.”

“Worse,” he said succinctly. “This is bigger and stronger.”

Worse than a Category Five. That wasn’t good news, clearly. “So? What do we do?”

“You do nothing. Jo, you’re like a wet rag; there’s nothing you can contribute. You need to get the hell out of here, I told you before. Fighting will get you killed.”

I swept him with a look. Burns, bloody wounds, and all. “Is this the last of them? The ones looking to take you out?”