Gale Force

Or tried, anyway. An FBI agent got in our way. She was a tall woman, curved but in that I-work-out kind of way. Feathered dark hair around a heart-shaped face. Cool, impartial green eyes.

“Sorry,” she said. “Nobody moves. We haven’t finished our interrogations yet.”

David was likely to just walk over her, in the mood he was in, and that would at the very least lead to a confrontation we didn’t need. I looked over at Lewis, who sighed and dug something out of the back pocket of his jeans. “Right,” he said. “All-access pass.”

He held it up. I couldn’t see what it said, but the woman’s eyes widened, and she took a step back. I got the impression she hadn’t done that in a while.

“Yes sir,” she said. “Sorry. And they are—”

“With me,” Lewis said. “Thanks for your vigilance, but it’s not necessary, Agent. We’re the good guys.”

She looked as if she sincerely doubted that, but she didn’t say anything, just moved out of the way with a be-my-guest motion. Then she went to tell her boss, a tall gray-haired man. Cover your ass. It was the absolute code of any governmental agency, no matter how well-intentioned.

“This,” Lewis said, “is a cluster fuck.” He was looking at the parking lot, which was littered with burned-out, crushed vehicles, downed trees, fragments of glass and metal. The hotel, which had luckily been scheduled for demolition anyway, was partially destroyed, whether by us or by the Sentinels it was impossible to say. At a certain point, it really didn’t much matter.

The news media was out in a huge, baying pack. I tried to count the number of satellite trucks, but my head hurt. I was sure that a fair number of those photo and video lenses were being pointed in our direction, though, and remembered the reporter from Fort Lauderdale. Man, wouldn’t she feel vindicated? She now officially had a scoop.

“How much did they get?” I asked.

“Oh, everything. Tornadoes forming out of nowhere. Cars bursting into flame and exploding. Trees getting thrown. Buildings disintegrating.” Lewis’s shoulders twitched, then straightened. “The FBI wants me to give a statement. Something along the lines of, we’re a secret government agency; we’d tell you but we’d have to kill you, blah blah. They’d like me to tie it to terrorists.”

I stared at him. “And what are you going to do?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know yet.”

“You really think this is a good time to lie?”

“Well, I don’t think it’s exactly a good time to tell the truth.” He glanced at David, whose eyes seemed to be fading back to a more normal color. “I’ll leave the Djinn out of it, if you’d like.”

“That’s kind of you, but I think we’d better tell everything if we tell anything,” David said. “Let’s talk to Kevin. We don’t have a lot of time.”

Kevin was sitting with his least favorite people. Well, that probably wasn’t fair; he didn’t like anybody, so most people were his least favorite people, but he reserved a special kind of dislike for the Ma’at. I wasn’t really sure why, except that in general, the leadership of the Ma’at was pretty unlikable.

Two of them were flanking him: Charles Spenser Ashworth II and Myron Lazlo. Talk about the Old Boy Network . . . they weren’t just in it, they’d laid the original cable. Lazlo had dressed down for his public appearance; he normally liked subtle, tailored suits that reeked old money, but he’d deigned to wear what I supposed was his “field outfit”—khaki slacks, a cotton shirt open at the neck, and a sport coat that undoubtedly cost nearly as much as the sports car he’d probably arrived in.

Even so, Charles Ashworth’s outfit made Lazlo look cheap.

Both of them were older than the pharaohs, and twice as stern, both in looks and in attitude. Yeah, I liked them just as much as Kevin did.

I thought it was just about the first time I’d ever seen actual relief on the kid’s face as he spotted me.

“About time,” he said. “Who put me in fucking detention with the Mummy Twins?”

I had to admit, that made me smile. The Ma’at had taken a lot of their iconography for their organization from the Egyptians, and it was no accident they’d made their headquarters at the Luxor in Las Vegas. I suppose they could have made a case for Memphis as well, but where else do you get a real live pyramid for a clubhouse?

“I did,” Lewis said. “Thanks, gentlemen.”

The gentlemen in question glared and, in Lazlo’s case, gave him a well-I-never patrician huff. “We are not your staff,” Ashworth snapped. “Do you have any idea what kind of imbalance this little fracas has caused? Oh, of course you do. You’re supposed to be preventing this kind of thing, you know. Protecting people, not putting them in danger. Isn’t that the Warden credo?”

He said Warden as if it were an epithet, which it practically was, for the Ma’at. They looked on themselves as the accountants of the aetheric; they were concerned about balance, always balance. Important, yes, but even supernatural double-entry bookkeeping was still bookkeeping, and I couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for their way of doing things.

“The credo of every one of us is to stop Bad Bob Biringanine from screwing things up any worse than he already has,” Lewis said. “I’ll expect your support.”

He sent them on their way with a jerk of his head. He was probably the only person in the world they’d have taken that kind of treatment from, another mystery of Lewis Levander Orwell. He had an impressive presence, but not that impressive—generally. And yet we all jumped when he snapped his fingers.

Kevin stayed where he was, slouched in the plastic chair, as the two older men vacated. I settled in on one side, Lewis on the other. David paced. It was what David did, at times like these. He looked preoccupied, and I knew that he was tracking Rahel, trying to find out everything about what the Sentinels were doing.

“You saw Paul, right?” Kevin asked. He kept his head down, and addressed the question toward the tops of his dirty Nikes. “Bastard sold us out.”

“I know,” I said. My whole heart hurt, and I hadn’t allowed myself to really feel it yet, the depth of Paul’s betrayal. Things he’d said came back to me—his refusal to disagree with the Sentinels, his reluctance about my relationship with David, and the wedding. For Paul, it had been a matter of us versus them. He had never really understood, deep down, that Djinn and the Wardens were the same. Different points on the same scale.

Sometimes I despaired for the human race.

“I think they bought the cover at first,” Kevin was saying. “They had us in a room for almost a day, talking to us. All about how the Djinn had always been dangerous, and we’d been stupid to ever open ourselves up to them.” His bitter eyes followed David. “Can’t say I ever really disagreed with that. Made a lot of sense to me.”

“That’s why you were perfect,” Lewis said. “How’d Rahel do?”

“Fine. If I hadn’t known she wasn’t human, I’d never have figured it out. She was—” Kevin’s throat worked nervously, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing. “She was really good at being Cherise.” And I couldn’t imagine Kevin had been able to really play along too well, but that might have been okay. After all, he was socially awkward at the best of times.

“When did Paul show up?” I asked.

“About an hour ago,” Kevin said. “That was when they cut us off. Tried to make it seem like they were just testing us, but Rahel knew Paul was in the building, she told me. She knew he’d sell us out.”

“Didn’t she try to get the two of you out?”

“Yeah.” Kevin’s voice faltered. “I made her stop.”

Silence. I looked at Kevin’s hands. They were tightly bound up together, trembling.

“Why?” Lewis asked the question I wanted to, in a voice far more gentle than I could have. “What happened?”

“There was this girl. I didn’t know—she might have been one of them, I don’t know. But they said—they said they were going to kill her if we tried to leave. I had to—” Kevin squeezed his eyes shut. “Christ. I should have just let Rahel get out of here.”

“Trust me, if Rahel hadn’t thought it was important to stay, you’d have been yanked out whether you wanted it or not.” Lewis glanced at David, who was still pacing, but listening to every word. “Then what happened?”

“They had this stuff. Black stuff. I guess it was like—like the stuff you found.” Antimatter. I nodded. “They tied Rahel up with it, and she couldn’t move. I know she tried to get away, but she couldn’t; she was able to make enough noise that I could run. I was looking for a way out when you showed up.” He nodded at me. “I should have—”

Kevin stopped. I knew that feeling, all too well. I wanted to help him, but I knew it was something that he