Thin Air

him was like a roar, his voice echoed in my head and deafened me, even the smells were too raw and immediate…

His touch was the only thing that soothed me, stroking through my sweaty hair, over my skin, grounding me gently back in the world.

“Shhhh,” he whispered in my ear, barely a breath. “Shhhh, now. Breathe. Breathe.”

He was rocking me in his arms, and I could feel my heart hammering wildly. My body felt too tight to contain me; I was bursting out of it; I was…I was…

Oh, God.

I exploded with light, convulsing in his embrace, trying to scream but my throat was locked tight, sealing in sound.

And Lewis held me until the waves subsided and left me empty and broken, trembling with reaction.

I’d dug my fingernails into his skin, and when I let go I saw blood welling up in the wounds.

He didn’t speak. I don’t know if he could. His face…his face was full of an indescribable mixture of wonder and horror.

Cherise sat up as suddenly as if somebody had jerked her upright by the hair, and blinked at the two of us in surprise. “What just happened?” she asked. “I feel better. Am I better?”

Lewis let out a slow, unsteady breath. “Yeah,” he said. “You’re better.” And he looked at me. Wordless, again.

“And me?” I whispered. “What am I?”

He was looking at me with unfocused eyes. With the eyes of a Warden.

“I don’t know,” he confessed. “But whatever you are now, you’re damn strong.”

“Yeah, like that’s news,” Cherise said, then blinked and stretched. “Man, I’m hungry. What’s for dinner?”

I was looking into Lewis’s face, and he was staring right back at me. It felt intimate, but not in a sexual kind of way-this was something else. Frank and appraising and a little frightening. My heart rate was slowing, not speeding up. My body was cooling down from overdrive.

“Prime rib,” Lewis said, and broke the stare to turn to smile at her. “Baked potato. Fresh hot bread with whipped butter.”

“Food tease,” she said, and unzipped herself from the sleeping bag. “What’s really for dinner?”

“Trail bar.” He fished in his backpack, found one, and handed it over.

“Comes with champagne, right?” Cherise’s smile was brave, but still scared. He offered a bottle of water with the gravity of a sommelier.

“Only the finest vintage,” he said, and cast another wary, strangely impartial glance at me. “You’d better eat something, too.”

I didn’t want to. The trail bar tasted like…trail dust. Even the chocolate chips seemed bitter and wrong, but I doggedly chewed and swallowed. The water seemed all right, and I chugged it until I burped. It all stayed down, and after I’d finished the brief meal I felt full and more than a little exhausted. Lewis watched me without seeming to, looking for any sign I was about to come apart at the seams, I guessed, but he didn’t ask me any questions. He quizzed Cherise lightly about what she remembered-which was very little, just what she’d told me before-and how she was feeling, which was apparently great. And sleepy, because she kept yawning and finally curled up into the warm nest of the sleeping bag and fell asleep.

I was just as tired, if not even more so, and gravity dragged my eyelids down one remorseless fraction of an inch at a time. Lewis didn’t say anything, just took my empty bottle and set it aside and helped me climb into my own sleeping bag. It felt amazing being warm and horizontal.

Lewis’s hand smoothed hair back from my brow, and his eyes were at once wary and concerned. “Do you know what you did?” he asked.

I mutely shook my head.

He leaned over and kissed me very gently. “You did the impossible,” he said. “And that worries me.”

It worried me, too.

But not quite enough to keep me awake.

“Rise and shine, ladies.” That was Lewis’s voice, too loud and too cheerful. I groaned and tried to burrow into the warmth of my blankets, because the chill outside was sharp, but he robbed me of that pleasure by unzipping the sleeping bag and flipping it open, exposing me to the cold. “Right now. We’re breaking camp. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover if we’re going to make it to the rendezvous.”

I didn’t want to think about it. My calves and ankles and thighs were stiff and sore, and my neck felt like it had been locked in an iron vise all night. I had a headache, and every bruise I’d collected over the past few days was making itself loudly known.

But yes, I got up. Mainly because Cherise was already moving, and it would have looked pretty bad to be outdone by the girl who’d been on the verge of death.

Lewis jerked his head toward me and exited the tent. I squeezed out after him and groaned softly as the brutal cold closed in around me. I was surprised my breath didn’t freeze and fall to the ground.

Lewis wasn’t even wearing his goddamn coat.

“How are you?” he asked.

“Sore,” I said. “Tired. Fine.”

He looked at me, and I was sure he was examining me in more than the normal way. After a few seconds he gave me a grudging nod. “You look all right,” he said. “But, Jo, understand: What happened with you yesterday, that wasn’t natural. It wasn’t right. You’re a Weather and Fire Warden. You are not an Earth Warden. There’s only one person alive right now with all three powers, and that’s me.”

“Is that what this is about? You’re jealous?”

He barked out a laugh that hung white in the still air. “No. God, no. If you were truly a triple-threat Warden, I’d be completely relieved. But, Jo, I don’t see it. I don’t see it in you today, and I never saw it in you before. So what the hell happened? After…You seemed…” He looked honestly uncertain how to phrase it. I saved him the trouble.

“Orgasmic? Yeah. Kinda.” He looked away. “Not normal, huh?”

“There’s no normal when you talk about a thing like this, Jo. Did you access Cherise’s memories?”

I nodded.

“Did they make sense to you?”

“At first. It got more confusing the further I went.”

“Because your brain was overstimulated,” he said. “Which in turn must have triggered the-”

“Big O,” I supplied. “Honestly, Lewis, you’re not twelve; you can say what you mean. Come on!”

He ignored that. “That means you were channeling power through neural paths that normally carry sexual energy,” he said, half to himself. “Which would fit, because some of the Earth Wardens are wired that way, too. But why can’t I see it now? Your aura is just showing normal strength, in the normal range for you. Weather and Fire, and the Fire’s not that strong.”

I shrugged. “Does it matter?”

“It might, yeah.”

“Does it matter enough to freeze our asses off talking about it right now?” I demanded. “Because in case you hadn’t noticed, you’re shivering again.”

“Am I?” He looked honestly surprised, and reached into the tent to grab his coat, which he draped around his shoulders. “There. Happy?”

“Thrilled, man.”

Lewis quickly moved on to other, more practical things, like breaking camp, which Cherise and I didn’t do all that efficiently, and then leading us on the second half of the Winter Wonderland Death March. Cherise asked questions, some of which I could answer and a lot of which I couldn’t. Lewis rescued me on the biggest one, which had to do with what had happened to Cherise and Kevin.

“You remember being sent out by the Wardens,” he said. “To fight the fire in California?”