Gale Force

“You guys aren’t going to make this X-rated, are you?” Cherise asked. “Because if you are, I need a barf bag. Or a video camera.”

David didn’t glance toward Lewis, and I had to fight not to. “Nothing that couldn’t air on the nightly news,” he said. “Word of honor.” He held up his glistening hands. “Ready?”

“Oh, yes.”

I closed my eyes in total, animal satisfaction as his fingers massaged sunscreen into every inch of my feet, then worked their way slowly up my legs, my knees, up my thighs, seeking out every ounce of tension in every muscle. He skipped areas that might have led to excessive moaning (not that I wasn’t moaning already) and moved on to my hips, my stomach. What he did to my shoulders should have been in the Kama Sutra. It felt . . . healing. And yes, sexy as hell.

“Turn over,” he said, low in his throat, and I glanced up to see that wicked, lovely spark in his eyes. “Time to do your back.”

Oh, and he did me. Thoroughly. I was a boneless, purring heap by the time he’d finished. David pulled up another lounge chair and parked himself next to me. When I looked at him, he was showing more skin than I could remember seeing from him before in public; he had on a simple black pair of swim trunks, and nothing else, and it was spectacular. I let my gaze wander down the clean sculptural lines of his chest, bump over his taut abs, and found myself staring none too subtly at his swim trunks.

“Jo,” he said. I heard the curl of soft reproach in his voice.

“Sorry,” I said. “But you’re worth a rude stare or two, you know.”

He smiled. I couldn’t tell if he found me amusing or arousing, or both. He took in a deep, slow breath without replying and turned his face up toward the sun. I remembered how it felt for a Djinn, that almost sexual pulse of warmth and energy. Gave new meaning to the term hot.

It was a long, lovely afternoon. Lewis read a book.

Kevin and Cherise played cards. There were cold beers, and all in all, it was just . . . perfect. Peaceful. There was weather out over the Gulf, but it held politely off, stacking up its clouds at the boundaries of the low-pressure system in neat storage ranks.

I wished it would never end, but of course eventually it did. As the afternoon cooled, and the clouds began to move in, David kissed my fingers and murmured, “I have to go.”

“I know,” I said, and opened my eyes. His were brown, almost completely human in color as well as in the emotion they contained. I wondered from time to time what Djinn really thought about us, about the tedious nature of human existence, but David really seemed to delight in participating when the opportunity presented itself. “You’re being careful, right?”

That got me an ironic tilt of his eyebrows. “Look who’s talking.”

“Exactly. You’re consulting an expert here. Nobody better at getting into trouble than me.” I rolled up to a sitting position, facing him. “I mean it, David. I dreamed—” No, I didn’t want to talk about that. The image of him lying broken in the street, pierced by that black thing . . . no. “I mean, I’m just worried you’re not taking this seriously. About the antimatter. ”

That earned me a trace of a frown. “It’s not that I don’t take it seriously. It’s that for the Djinn, it’s invisible. We can’t see it, touch it, measure it. It doesn’t exist to us. How can I possibly watch out for it?”

“If it doesn’t exist, how did it end up inside a dead Djinn?” I demanded. He kissed my fingers again.

“Jo, I already told you, there is no dead Djinn,” he said. “Believe me, we’d know. We always know. None of us is missing.”

He kissed me again, an apologetic good-bye, and that was it. He misted away, off about his business, and I felt a sudden chill. Cherise had thrown a couple of wraparound robes in the beach bag, and I donned one, shivering in its terry cloth embrace.

Lewis noticed. I suspected he noticed a hell of a lot. “Let’s get you back in bed,” he said. “You’re checking out tomorrow. Don’t want you relapsing.”

Not that there was much chance of it; with Lewis’s Earth Warden treatments, and David’s Djinn-powered supplemental healing, I’d have to be damn stubborn to screw up that badly.

But I felt cold—cold and scared, for no reason I could really put a name to. Once I was back in my room, even piles of blankets didn’t seem to thaw the ice. I wanted David. I wanted him here, with me.

I wanted him safe.

And I was desperately afraid that he wasn’t.

When I tried to follow up and find out more about the dead Djinn, the antimatter black shard . . . I was told it was none of my business. Officially. This came in a curt e-mail message from Warden HQ, courtesy of my good friend Paul, who had evidently decided that the only kind of ball I was going to play was hardball, and therefore he’d better play to win.

I couldn’t really resent this, because he was right; I was recovering, I was weak, and it was being handled by competent people. So I needed to stay out of it.

Naturally, I couldn’t stay out of it.

Not really my thing, being sensible. Instead, I did my work quietly, hidden in between the obvious tasks of drafting the guest list for the wedding (everybody wanted to attend, and no, I wasn’t going to feed the entire North American Warden contingent with lobster tails and open bar). I researched caterers, florists, and ministers.

Where we were having the actual ceremony, thankfully, was a foregone conclusion. There was a chapel in Sedona, one of the places where the Oracles reside . . . this one was the home of the Earth Oracle, a kind of super-Djinn who was an avatar of the Earth herself. I wasn’t entirely sure what the Oracles did, exactly, except that they were the direct conduits from the Djinn to Mother Earth. If you wanted to talk to her, you went through them.

This particular Oracle was also my kid. Long story, but she’d been born in the Djinn way, from power— David’s, and mine. Half-Djinn, half-human, and not strong enough to survive the Djinn civil war that had erupted around her literally on the day of her birth.

I’d thought I’d lost her forever, but she was alive, in a sense, if beyond my reach. Oracles didn’t have as much contact with humans, and they couldn’t reach us in the way that Djinn did.

If I wanted my daughter, Imara, to be at the wedding of her parents, then I had to bring the ceremony to her. Super-Djinn badass avatar or not, I didn’t think she could actually leave the chapel, at least on the physical plane. Besides, it was a gorgeous place. I couldn’t think of a better, more sanctified spot to exchange vows.

However, at most, it would hold only a couple dozen people, not nearly enough for the rapidly spawning guest list. That would be like trying to fit Mardi Gras into a two-room split-level. Maybe, I decided, we ought to have two ceremonies. A party in Fort Lauderdale, an all-access blowout to make the rank and file of the Wardens happy. And then a private ceremony in Sedona.

Maybe I could get the Wardens to kick in for the party as a morale builder.

I was working out the costs, and trying to persuade myself that I felt weak because I was tired, not because anything above four figures was unacceptable, when the telephone rang. I picked it up, had a bad reporter flashback, and checked the number. It was blocked, which meant it was probably a telemarketer. Annoying, but not nearly as stressful.

“Hello?”

The sound of breathing on the other end made my hackles go up. Couldn’t really say why; breathing was not, in and of itself, a threatening sort of sound. But I knew something else was coming, and so I wasn’t surprised when a rough male voice said, “You don’t care, do you? You don’t give a shit about the dead. The ones who stood up and died for you.”

I flinched, remembering Jerome Silverton, and forced myself to stay still and listen. “What are you talking about? Who is this?”

“You didn’t even warn them it was coming. You didn’t warn your own friends that the Djinn they trusted, the ones they liked, could turn around and rip them in half.” The hatred in that voice was chilling. “Now you’re screwing one of them. One of the enemy.”

“The Djinn aren’t the enemy. Who are you?”

“You’re already on the list,” the voice said. “Fair warning, Baldwin. You’re a traitor, and we don’t want you in charge. Quit now, before it’s too late.”

He hung up. I sat frozen for a few seconds, staring at the phone, then called Warden HQ and asked for a