Gale Force

My best bet was a naval officer named Peterson, but he was on a carrier in the Persian Gulf. Second best choice was an ex-army guy named Silverton. No address listed, just a cell phone. He was shown as NFA—no fixed address. In other words, Ex-Sergeant Silverton was either homeless or liked living out of a suitcase and hotels. Since he could afford a cell phone, I supposed it was the latter.

The phone call with Silverton revealed nothing much, other than he was available and could be on the ground in Fort Lauderdale in eighteen hours. I authorized his travel—paperwork was going to survive the nuclear winter, along with cockroaches—and set about typing up my incident reports on the earthquake. When that got old—which I admit, it did quickly—I began surfing the Net for bridal information. I had a wedding to plan, after all. These things don’t run themselves, unless you’re so famous you can not only get your wedding services for free, but have people pay for the exclusive coverage.

Hmmm, now that was an idea. . . .

I was looking at wedding cakes when the phone rang—the secured line. Paul Giancarlo’s raspy, Jersey-spiced voice said, “We’ve got a fuckin’ note taking responsibility for the earthquake down there.”

“You’ve what?”

“Let me read it to you.”

To the Wardens,

Your time is up. You’ve been given warnings, but you’ve ignored them. Either cut off contact with the Djinn, or face the consequences. Today’s earthquake in Fort Lauderdale is proof that we can do what we say. The Djinn must be stopped.

Paul paused and cleared his throat. “It’s signed, ‘the Sentinels.’ ”

“The Sentinels? You’re kidding me. Aren’t they some football team?” It was almost laughable. Almost. “Seriously, man, I’ve heard rumors, but—wasn’t it just talk?”

“Not according to this. Not according to what I’ve been hearing. Look, we’ve got ourselves a real, live splinter group,” he said. “One not afraid of using terror tactics.”

“And they sent a note? How . . . 1980s of them.”

“E-mail, actually. And yes, we tried tracing it. No luck. We put the NSA on it, but nobody seems real positive about the prospects. This thing in the ground you and Rocha saw, you think it’s some kind of device?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But . . . it didn’t seem man-made. Didn’t register like that on the aetheric at all. I don’t know. This is deeply weird, Paul.”

“Yeah, but what worries me a hell of a lot more is that what I’ve been hearing about the Sentinels makes sense.”

“I—what?”

“We all know the Djinn are unpredictable,” he said. “We’ve seen it, all right? So is it all that surprising that the ones who got hurt the most—the Wardens who survived that whole bloody mess of a civil war— want to see the Djinn stay out of the way?”

I didn’t know quite what to say. “You sound like you agree with them.”

“Not entirely,” he said, which wasn’t, I noticed, exactly a denial. “But I don’t like the idea of putting our people at risk for no good reason, either. Maybe the Sentinels have the right idea, wrong tactics.”

“You’re telling me you don’t trust David?”

“Kid—,” Paul sighed. “I can’t have this conversation with you. You’re not exactly rational on the subject. But I was in the New York offices that day. I saw what happens when the Djinn go off the leash. I fought for my life; I saw friends ripped apart in front of me. You got any idea what kind of impression that makes?”

I couldn’t think of any way to respond to that. He’d caught me off guard. I knew that Paul still had bitterness about the Djinn revolt, and he was right; bad things had happened, mostly to Wardens. But he was discounting—or ignoring—all the thousands of years of suffering the Djinn had endured on their side.

Most Wardens wanted to ignore that.

“Right, moving on,” Paul said into the silence. “I’m getting the team together here for analysis. We’re going to count heads, see who’s not answering the pings for roll call. I want a line on anybody who’s missing, just in case. I don’t suspect my own, but it’s useful knowing if somebody’s in trouble.”

That, I thought, would be a full-time job. Following the Djinn problems of the past year, a lot of Wardens had simply . . . vanished. Most of them were dead, killed in the fighting, but some had slipped away, knowing that we didn’t have time to track down every name on the list. It’d take years to round up any rogue agents out there.

“I’m pulling in Silverton,” I said. “He’s our best option for handling this thing, if it’s radioactive. If I need anybody else, I’ll let you know.”

“Yeah, you do that. And kid?”

“Yeah, Paul?”

“You sure about this wedding thing? Really sure?”

I knew that Paul, once upon a time, had harbored ambitions in the direction of me in his bed, and I’d been kind of willing to contemplate it. But all that had changed, and he was gentleman enough to acknowledge it. Under the exterior of a badass Mafia scion beat the heart of a very sweet man—if you could overlook all the cursing.

“I’m sure,” I said softly. “I love him, Paul.”

He didn’t sound impressed. “You know what he is.”

There it was again, that thread of darkness, that almost-prejudice. “Yes, I know what he is. He’s someone who’s saved my life more times than I can count. He’s someone who’s put his own life on the line not just for me but for the Wardens and all of humanity. I know exactly what he is. And who he is.”

Awkward silence, and then, “Fuck, babe, I’ve gotta run. We’re good, right?”

“We’re good,” I said. “Kisses.”

I said it to a humming disconnected signal. Paul was already gone, off to the next crisis. I finished up at my desk, closed the laptop, and sat back to think.

The Sentinels. That had an amateurish ring to it, but who was I to judge? Lewis had started the Ma’at, a separate Warden-like organization, when he’d been just out of college, and that had turned out to be a useful thing—the Ma’at took in people without enough talent to be Wardens, but more than the average human, and paired them up with Djinn volunteers. They worked on the theory of additive power— forming chains of people and Djinn in order to amplify and direct power that otherwise wouldn’t be strong enough to make a difference.

The Sentinels didn’t sound like they had a new idea, just a difference of political opinion. They were anti- Djinn. Well, that shouldn’t have come as a shock; enough Wardens had been hurt or killed in the troubles with the Djinn to make some kind of backlash inevitable. I just hadn’t thought it would be so fast, or so decisive. I’d never thought that it would come down to reasonable, responsible people doing something like causing unnecessary loss of life.

One thing was certain: Whether it was a good idea or not for David to be involved in this investigation about the black knife, it was going to have to happen. I needed him to know about the anti-Djinn movement, and I needed a Djinn to try to analyze the history of the black knife and tell me where it came from, who made it, who planted it, and how to remove it.

It was logical, all right.

I just had a sinking feeling that it was exactly the wrong thing to do.

Chapter Two

According to the checklist I’d downloaded from the Internet, I was already running about six months behind on planning any decent kind of wedding that didn’t involve shotguns and pissed-off dads. As I waited in the Fort Lauderdale airport for Warden Silverton’s plane, I read over the printed bridal list and anxiously jotted notes in the margins. Some things I just marked out. I wasn’t fooling with wedding advisors, wedding consultants, or wedding planners; none of them would be equipped to deal with the complexities of the wedding of a Warden and a Djinn, anyway. And if they were, they’d be way, way too expensive.

Clergy. Now that was something I did have to think about. Unless we went for a civil ceremony . . . Hmmm.