Gale Force

quite right, and then . . .

And then it happened.

The moment the clerk unzipped the bag, I just knew. As the weight of the Italian silk settled around me, I knew even more. When she laced the back and prepped me for the mirror, I knew I’d found exactly what would drive David wild.

Unlike most wedding gowns, this was no Disney princess knockoff; it was sophisticated, subtle, sexy. Layers of silk dropped in subtle angles from the low-cut bodice, but it in no way resembled any kind of wedding cake. The fabric rippled in silk waves, layer upon layer, sweeping into a fantastic train.

But the back was what did it—a laced corset, fitted to show a deep, sexy V of skin down the spine beneath the lacings. It was demure enough, but I could sense, like a vibration on the aetheric, that it would drive him absolutely mad.

“I’ll take it,” I said. The clerk raised both eyebrows.

“Don’t you want to know—”

“If you tell me the price, I’ll chicken out, so no. I don’t want to know. Just ring it up.”

She cleared her throat. “I really think I should warn you about the cost—”

“You really shouldn’t,” I sighed.

The Warden AmEx was about to get a serious workout. Even though she was undoubtedly making a commission, my saleslady looked concerned for the state of my financial future. As well she should. If it cost anywhere near what it looked, I was going to be paying approximately the cost of a new car.

She fussed around with the dress, looking for necessary alterations and marking them. A thorough professional. We discussed indoor versus outdoor, potential hazards of having a court train to manage, and other things that I couldn’t imagine ever discussing again in my entire life.

But it was done. I had a dress. And it was the dress.

I walked out of the dressing room feeling happier than I had in weeks, trailing the salesclerk like a lady’s maid. I was smiling widely, anticipating the pleasant shock of seeing David in his still-new finery, and I wasn’t disappointed; he was sitting sprawled on a velvet couch, looking ready for a fashion shoot. Women were finding reasons to shop in his vicinity. I couldn’t really blame them.

“Done,” I said serenely.

“Really? That was fast.” It wasn’t, but he was being kind. He kissed me, and that was very nice, especially when, as he pulled back, he whispered in my ear, “I want to take you home now.”

“Let me mortgage my future first.”

I don’t think a sale ever went through faster. In fact, I didn’t even notice the total amount as I signed the slip.

And then, of course, everything went wrong.

David sensed it first, by a couple of seconds; he looked up sharply, all the ease and humor draining away from him, and his hand closed around mine in an iron grip. He wasn’t letting us be separated again, not this time.

“What is it?” I asked, or tried to. I never got to the last word. David pointed to the world beyond the glass windows.

The clouds were thickening so fast overhead that it looked like special effects from the most expensive disaster movie ever made.

I turned my focus out to sea, out to that calm and tranquil sea. There were no hurricanes brewing there, only the normal cycle of thunderstorms that needed no Warden regulation.

But someone was tampering with the clouds, forcing energy into a stable system—taking a standard garden- variety thunderstorm, which hadn’t even really been threatening rain until later, and packing it with energy until it was a mesocyclone. I’d seen it done, but never this fast, never with so little to work with. The Sentinels were creating an emergency, and doing it so quickly that it made my whole body shiver with the corona effect of the power. Lightning ripped through the sky, blue-white and purple, and struck three times that I could see, blowing up transformers, destroying a metal light pole, stabbing into the lightning at-tractors on a building only two blocks away.

People began to react nervously.

Outside the windows, I saw the classic formation take shape: anvil cloud, hard and gray as lead; cloud striations below, showing the shredding forces at work; wall cloud pushing rapidly toward us, forming and hardening as it came.

An occlusion downdraft was taking shape, leading the forces into a spinning, fatal vortex.

I felt the forces coalescing, and turned my face upward as I rose into the aetheric.

Yep. Tornado. Right over the store.

David was right with me. We rose up into the boilingstorm of opposing forces. I couldn’t see the perpetrator; there was too much confusion, too much random energy masking his presence, but I sensed he was here, watching. Waiting.

The tornado was a trap, but it was one I couldn’t help but spring. It was dipping down out of the clouds, heading for the crowded street. Heading for the bridal store.

Heading for my dress.

I took a deep breath, tightened my grip on David’s hand, and prepared for battle.

“I’m with you,” he said. “I’ll give you what I can.” I understood, in that second, that the Mother had cut his circuits again, stranded him from the core of his power. He had whatever was in him, and no more.

Just as I did. Why was she on the side of the Sentinels? Or maybe it was simpler than that: Maybe she didn’t want the Djinn interfering in our internal struggles anymore.

I could understand that. It did seem a massive waste of resources.

“Watch our backs,” I told him, and focused on the glittering, complex, deadly snake of the tornado that was dropping toward us with the speed of a freight train.

It wasn’t the classic rope-style tornado; this one was a brutal wedge of power. That was not necessarily a bad thing; the intensity of a tornado doesn’t depend on its width. But if it was an F4 or F5, being a wedge tornado would make things that much worse.

Luckily, it wasn’t quite that bad. An F2 at most, with wind speeds of about a hundred miles per hour— not bad, and not nearly as bad as it could have been. The Sentinels know how to make it look nasty, but that wasn’t the same thing as truly building it right in the first place. I needed to reduce the core temperatures inside of the vortex, and I needed to do it fast. But as I reached out for it, the Sentinels sprang the trap.

A second tornado—this one a slender rope, and definitely built to the most exacting specifications— shot down out of the cloud beside the wedge I was focused on, and this one packed deadly, razor- edged debris. Metal, all kinds of metal junk and scraps. It was also spinning at a rate of more than two hundred miles per hour: F4.

One of them was going to hit. I could handle only one at a time, and I had no choice but to go for the worst. I abandoned the wedge and went for the rope, ripping into it with desperate force, drawing heat out of it as quickly as I could.

Not fast enough. I heard it hit the roof, which shuddered and groaned, and then heard the rising roar of the wind as it drilled through steel and wood and concrete.

People were screaming, running, looking for cover. They wouldn’t find it, not in the store. “Outside!” I grabbed my salesclerk, who’d thrown my dress to one side, and pushed her to the door. David was grabbing everyone else he could find and shoving them that way as well. “Run! Get to cover! Go now!”

I’d succeeded in weakening the vortex down to an F2, but just then, the slower-moving wedge slammed down like a clenched fist, and the whole building shivered and began to come apart.

The two tornadoes, too close together for even the Sentinels to fully control, began to merge and feed off each other. The metal inside the smaller vortex spread out wider, slashing and cutting like the edges of knives as it whirled. Nobody had been hit yet, but they would be.

This had to stop. Now.

“David!” I screamed his name over the roar of the wind as the roof ripped off, disintegrated into a million tiny