Heat Stroke
The Weather Warden series, book 2
Rachel Caine
The author wishes to thank:
Cat Conrad
Joanne Madge
P.N. Elrod
Kelley Walters
Annie Wortham
Leah Rosenthal
Sharon Sams
Glenn Rogers
Michael Shanks
Joe Bonamassa
Kenny Kramme
Eric Czar
ORAC
SDJ
Lucienne Diver
Laura Anne Gilman
… not that she personally knows all of them.
But they’re deserving of gratitude anyway.
Said the Lion to the Lioness—“When you are
amber dust—
No more a raging fire like the heat of the Sun
(No liking but all lust)—
Remember still the flowering of the amber blood
and bone,
The rippling of bright muscles like a sea,
Remember the rose-prickles of bright paws
Though we shall mate no more
Till the fire of that sun the heart and the moon-
cold bone are one.”
Said the Skeleton lying upon the sands of
Time—
“The great gold planet that is the mourning heat
of the Sun
Is greater than all gold, more powerful
Than the tawny body of a Lion that fire
consumes
Like all that grows or leaps… so is the heart
More powerful than all dust. Once I was
Hercules
Or Samson, strong as the pillars of the seas:
But the flames of the heart consumed me, and
the mind
Is but a foolish wind.”
Previously…
My name is Joanne Baldwin, and I used to control the weather.
No, really. I was a member of the Weather Wardens. You probably aren’t personally acquainted with them, but they keep you from getting fried by lightning (mostly), swept away by floods (sometimes), killed by tornadoes (occasionally). We try to do all that stuff. Sometimes we even succeed.
But I ran into something bad—something that threatened to destroy me from the inside out—and when the Wardens turned against me too, I ran for my life. I spent a memorable week looking for a man named Lewis Levander Orwell, who I thought just might be able to save my life. I picked up a friend named David along the way, who turned out to be way more then he seemed.
I found Lewis. It didn’t help. I died.
Luckily for me, David didn’t let it end there. But now I’m still on the run—only now I’m one of them. A Djinn.
At least I still have a really fast car…
One
There was a storm brewing over Church Falls, Oklahoma. Blue-black clouds, churning and boiling in lazy slow motion, stitched through with lightning the color of butane flames. It had a certain instinctual menace, but it was really just a baby, all attitude and no experience. I watched it on the aetheric plane as the rain inside of it was tossed violently up into the mesosphere, frozen by the extreme cold, fell back down to gather more moisture on the way. Rinse and repeat. The classic recipe for hail.
Circular motion inside the thing. It was more of a feeling I had than anything I could see, but I didn’t doubt it for a second; after years of overseeing the weather, I vibrated on frequencies that didn’t require seeing to believe.
I gathered power around me like a glittering warm cloak, and reached out for—
“Stop.”
My power slammed into an invisible wall and bounced off. I yelped, dropped back into human reality with a heavy thudand realized I’d almost driven Mona off the road. Mona was a 1997 Dodge Viper GTS, midnight blue, and I was driving her well the hell in excess of the speed limit, which was just the way I liked it. I controlled the swerve, glanced down at the speedometer and edged another five miles an hour out of the accelerator. Mona’s purr changed to an interested, low-throated growl.
“Don’t everdo that when I’m breaking a century on the interstate,” I snapped at the guy who’d put up that wall I’d just slammed into. “And jeez, sensitive much? I was just giving things a little push. For the better.”
The guy’s name was David. He settled himself more comfortably against the passenger side window, and said without opening his eyes, “You’re meddling. You got bored.”
“Well, yeah.” Because driving in Oklahoma is not exactly the world’s most exciting occupation. “And?”
“And you can’t do that anymore.” Thatmeaning adjust the weather to suit myself, apparently.
“Why not?”
His lips twitched and pressed a smile into submission. “Because you’ll attract attention.”
“And the fact I’m barreling down the freeway at over a hundred…?”
“You know what I mean. And by the way, you should slow down.”
I sighed. “You’re kidding me. This is coasting. This is little old lady speed.”
“NASCAR drivers would have heart attacks. Slow down before we get a ticket.”
“Chicken.”
“Yes,” he agreed solemnly. “You frighten me.”
I downshifted, slipped Mona in behind an eighteen-wheeler grinding hell-for-leather east toward Okmulgee and parts beyond, and watched the RPMs fall. Mona grumbled. She didn’t like speed limits. Neither did I. Hell, the truth is that I’d never met any kind of limit I liked. Back in the good old times before, well, yesterday, when my name was still Joanne Baldwin and I was human, I’d been a Weather Warden. A card-carrying member of the Wardens Association, the international brotherhood of people in charge of keeping Mother Nature from exterminating the human race. I’d been in the business of controlling wind, waves, and storms. Being an adrenaline junkie goes with the territory.
The fact that I was stillan adrenaline junkie was surprising, because strictly speaking, I no longer had a real human body, or real human adrenaline to go with it. So how did it work that I still felt all the same human impulses as before? I didn’t want to think about it too much, but I kept coining back to the fact that I’d died. Last mortal thing I remembered, I’d been a battleground for two demons tearing me apart, and then I’d—metaphorically speaking—opened my eyes on a whole new world, with whole new rules. Because David had made me a Djinn. You know, Arabian Nights, lamp, granter of wishes? That kind. Only I wasn’t imprisoned in a lamp, or (more appropriately) a bottle; I was free-range. Masterless.
Cool, but scary. Masterless, I was vulnerable, and I knew it.
“Hey,” I said out loud, and glanced away from the road to look at my traveling companion. Dear God, he was gorgeous. When I’d first met him he’d been masquerading as a regular guy, but even then he’d been damn skippy fine. In what I’d come to realize was his natural Djinn form, he was damn skippy fine to the power of ten. Soft auburn hair worn just a little too long for the current military-short styles. Eyes like molten bronze. Warm golden skin that stretched velvet soft over a strong chest, perfectly sculpted biceps, a flat stomach… My hands had a Braille memory that made me warm and melty inside.
Without opening those magical eyes, he asked, “Hey, what?” I’d forgotten I’d said anything. I scrambled to drag my brain back to more intellectual pursuits.
“Still waiting for a plan, if it doesn’t disturb your beauty sleep.” I kept the tone firmly in the bitchy range, because if I wasn’t careful I might start with a whole breathless I-don’t-deserve-you routine, and that would cost me cool points. “We’re still heading east, by the way.”
“Fine,” he said, and adjusted his leaning position slightly to get more comfortable against the window glass. “Just keep driving. Less than warp speed, if you can manage it.”