"Wait a minute!" That was Will's debating opponent, a big-boned woman with a horse face and bitter-almond eyes. "You can't just make a decision like that! Who the hell do you think you are? You're not even a Warden anymore!" I remembered her. Emily, a double threat—an Earth and Fire Warden out of Canada. She was blunt, but she was good at her job; she also had a reputation for being pushy.
"Back off," Paul said wearily from his chair in the conference room. His voice echoed through the silence. "She's one of us. Hell, she may be the only one who knows enough to get us through the day." He sounded defeated. I didn't care for that. I hadn't meant to take away his authority—at least, not permanently—but Paul wasn't acting like a guy who could shoulder the burden anymore. "Jo, do your stuff."
"Okay," I said. I turned back to the woman, who was still giving me the fish eye. "Emily, you think you can make this work because you think you're smarter than the Djinn, or faster, or more powerful. You can't. You all need to unlearn what you know about the Djinn. They're not subservient. They're not stupid. And they're not ours, not anymore."
The assembled Wardens were whispering to each other. Emily was staring at me. So was Will. I heard my name being passed around, in varying degrees of incredulity. I thought she was dead, someone said, just a little too loudly for comfort.
"This is stupid," Emily finally said. "Paul, I thought she was out of the Wardens. How does she know anything?"
"She knows because she was with the Djinn when it happened," Marion said, and rolled closer with a brisk snap of her wrists. "Right?"
I nodded. "I saw it happen. We've lost control, and as far as I know, we've lost it for good. We need to face that and figure out how to go forward."
"Forward?" somebody in the crowd yelped. "You've got to be kidding. We need the Djinn!"
"No, we don't," another person countered sharply. "I barely escaped, and only because mine got distracted. Whatever's happening, we can't risk involvement with the Djinn."
"Exactly," I said. "We have to rely on ourselves, and each other. Will? You up for the job?"
He swallowed hard and nodded. "I'll get started."
"Get some people to help you. Draft them if you have to, and don't be afraid to use Paul's name as a big stick." I waited for some confirmation from Paul; he waved a hand vaguely. I turned to Emily. "You're not going to give this guy any shit, right?"
She was silent for a few seconds, looking at me, then shrugged. "Not right now. You're right. We need to stop the bleeding, and save the surgery for later."
I was glad Emily let me push it through, because she'd be a tough opponent. Nothing weak about her, and we needed her on our side.
There was only one side, right now. The side of survival.
I faced a crowd of people, and everybody looked tired and harassed and worried. Not the faces of winners. They looked… lost.
"All right," I said. "Everybody, listen up. We've taken some serious hits, and there's no question, things are desperate. But we are Wardens. Wardens don't run, and they don't abandon their responsibilities. There are six billion people on this planet, and we stand up for them. We need to be strong, focused, and we need to be united. No more backbiting, politics, or ambition. Understood?"
"Oh, come on! Look around you. It's impossible," someone in the crowd complained. I fixed that area with a stare that, from the way those in its way quailed, might have been Djinn-strength.
"I was just hanging in midair glowing like a UFO," I said. "Don't tell me about impossible. We're Wardens."
A ripple of laughter. Some of the tension fled from their faces, and there were a few nods.
"I need a volunteer to handle cleanup crew," I continued. "Earth Wardens, probably, maybe a couple of Fire Wardens. Get this place back in operation. Everybody else, pick a conference room and get to work triaging the crisis information. Go."
And amazingly, after a scant second, Emily raised her hand and bellowed, "Right! I need two Earth and one Fire for cleanup!" and the rest of them began milling around and filtering into conference rooms.
They were actually listeningto me.
I looked at Marion, who was sitting, hands folded in her lap. She inclined her head, very slightly. Under the bruises, she was smiling.
I said, "Somebody had to."
"You have a gift for it," she countered. We both looked at Paul.
He was gone. Sometime during my little speech, he'd walked away. I felt a little stab of regret and worry. I'd taken away Paul's authority again, maybe for good this time, and that was not only unkind, but also deeply unwise.
"Excuse me?" someone asked from behind me. "Warden Baldwin?"
I turned to find a petite blond woman standing there. I didn't know her, but she was different from the others in the hallway. There was no worry in her expression, and no exhaustion. Perky, which just seemed strange. There was something else, though, that sent a ripple of unease up my back that exploded in an ice-cold shudder on the back of my neck.
The woman was just… wrong.
"Jo!" Marion's warning shout came a second too late.
The woman had a gun. Must have taken it off one of the guards. Nathan? Janet? One of the many who'd died? And now she raised it and pointed it straight at me. I froze, unbreathing. The muzzle of that damn pistol looked big enough to swallow the sun.
And she fired.
I felt it happening in slow motion—the hammer striking the cartridge, the blooming flare of explosion inside the metal jacket…
I felt it. The same way I usually felt the flare of lightning bursting out of the sky, or the swirl of air and water.
I not only felt it, but I could… touch it.
It didn't take much, just a whisper, and I killed the spark before it ignited the powder in the cartridge.
Click.
My would-be assassin looked baffled, then angry, and pulled the trigger again, with the same results. I smiled thinly at her, reached out, and took the pistol away. While I was doing that, Nathan, the tall security guard, pelted breathlessly around the corner. I emptied the clip out of the gun—well, it always looked cool in the movies—and Nathan took it away from me the way you'd take a semiautomatic away from a teething baby.
He also took possession of the Warden, and handcuffed her.
She still had that same eerily calm, predatory light in her eyes, and she hadn't taken her eyes off me. I recognized that starvation in her. I'd had it eating through my own veins not so very long ago.
I was staring at her, wondering how to go about handling this particular problem, when an arrival at the end of the hallway stole my thunder. Heads popped out of conference rooms, and whispers flew down the hall, contagious as the flu. "Lewis!"
Well, well, well… Elvis was back in the building.
Lewis Levander Orwell wasn't looking his best, but then, who was? Rough and tired, but intact except for some livid dry cuts and scrapes that looked suspiciously like road rash, as if he'd gotten dragged over asphalt. At least a three-day growth of beard. Still, much improved from the last time I'd seen him. There was a palpable sense of relief as he walked down the hall toward us, a feeling that at last, stability had arrived. Lewis had that effect. He was, without question, the most powerful living Warden, and he was the proverbial triple threat—weather, fire, and earth powers, all in one package.
He didn't look like the big head cheese, really—tall, long arms and legs, a kind of lanky grace and an ironic smile, brown hair that badly needed a trim, a worn pair of close-fitting blue jeans and a loose flannel shirt folded up to expose the aforementioned cuts and road burns, and corded, sinewy arms. Hiking boots. Competence and authority in a handy carrying case.