“It’s a busy day.” Laconic understatement from the master, as usual. I’d like to see what actually panics you, I thought, and then instantly knew that I didn’t. No way in hell. “Storm rolling in.”
I could feel charged fury in the air, particles churning and forming patterns and being flung apart by ever-expanding forces. The storm was out of control in the Atlantic, and heading this way. I turned out toward the sea and closed my eyes, drinking in the thick warm breeze, the muttering echoes of what was shaping up to be one hell of an early hurricane. At its present rate of growth, it was liable to come charging in to port packing wind speeds fast enough to blow the windows out of every shining building in its path. Experts said you couldn’t bring down one of these skyscrapers with a storm, but they’d never seen the kind of power that was boiling out there.
Few people had, and lived to tell about it.
“Can’t you do anything about that?” I asked. I felt genuinely spooked, every nerve stroked to a trembling edge by the touch of that wind.
“That? Sure.” Nothing happened. I looked over at him, but he was still focused on the building. “What, you mean now?”
“It’ll be a little late after it blows through here and Manhattan becomes the world’s biggest junk shop.”
His dark eyes flashed toward the horizon, then back to me. “I’m keeping it out to sea. Considering it’s not the only damn thing going wrong, I think that’s about the best I can do right now. Unless you think it’s okay to turn the entire five-state area around Yellowstone into charcoal. Didn’t anybody ever tell you that it’s all about balance?”
Balance was great in theory. Not so great when you were having to make choices that would inevitably cost lives. I wasn’t feeling up to godhood. “What about California? Or are you just calling it a loss and hoping Disneyland will set up an undersea kingdom park off the. west coast of Nevada?”
“Atlantis once had the best beaches.” He shrugged. “Coastline changes are a matter of perspective. But no, actually. Lewis took care of that one. The earthquake’s off.”
One crisis down. And speaking of Lewis… I turned back to the building and studied it again, reading energy signatures. Ah. Of course.
“They’ve got him,” I said. “The Wardens. Lewis is in there.”
“Yeah, I know.” Jonathan crumpled the cup and tried for a three-pointer in a trash can at least twenty feet away. Naturally, he made it. “Considering that he’s the only person who ever successfully stole from the Wardens’ vault before, I was considering that a point in our favor. That is, if we can trust him.”
“Yes.” I didn’t hesitate. “Look, in all the time I’ve known him, Lewis has always been about the greater good. It’s one of the reasons the Wardens want him so badly. First, he’s so damn powerful that he can make things happen on a massive scale; second, they’d just like it a whole lot better if he was somewhere they could control him. Because they can’t count on him doing things the way they want him to all the time.”
Lewis had never been ambitious, but if he’d wanted to, he could have snapped his fingers and made things happen in the ranks of the Wardens. For one thing, he could do the work of about a hundred of them, all by himself, and do it with compassion and control. Power like that, he didn’t need the approval of the Senior Wardens, or the Council, or any damn body. He was of the live-and-let-live school of thought. Too bad the Wardens didn’t feel the same way. They’d been afraid of him since the first day they’d realized what he was, and they couldn’t be any less worried about him now.
Especially since he was bad-ass enough that he’d voluntarily given up three Djinn, just to make a point.
Something about the pulse and color shift of that brilliant aura I was watching made me remember how I’d last seen him, at Patrick’s apartment. “I think he might be hurt,” I said. I remembered Kevin kicking him in the head. “Maybe badly hurt.” Paul had said as much. Lewis had shown up at his house looking for information about Yvette—he’d remembered enough to know who had me, apparently. That still didn’t mean he’d been functioning at peak efficiency. If he’d tangled with Yvette…
“Hurt I can fix.” Jonathan stretched, working out the kinks, and pulled a dull green baseball cap from his back pocket. He tugged it in place, one hand on the bill, one on the back. “Ready?”
I looked down at myself and changed into business-ready mode. A black peachskin pantsuit was appropriate anywhere, even inside the UN Building. “Do we have a plan?”
“You distract ‘em, I get Lewis to open the vault, we boost David’s bottle. Outta there.”
“Hell of a plan,” I commented dryly. It scared the hell out of me, actually.
His eyes were as hard as frozen flint, and the soft evening light did nothing to make him look any less frightening. He looked serious. “It’ll do. Move.”
We strolled right past security. I was reminded of the Empire State Building, and surprised myself by missing Rahel intensely; I had liked her. A lot. And it’s my fault she’s…What? Gone? Dead? Discorporated? The Djinn Formerly Known As…? I remembered her skin sloughing away, and couldn’t control a sick tremor. The coldlight was intense now, up in the aetheric. Like a constant blizzard. Any Djinn— except, presumably, me or David—who went up there was doomed. Even Jonathan.
The Wardens Association floor required a card key for the elevator, which I didn’t have, but it didn’t seem to be any big deal for Jonathan; he just put his finger over the slot and got the green light and a lit-up button. The elevator was showing its age, and the trip was slower than usual. We didn’t talk, just waited in that pocket-universe silence that people inhabit in elevators, until the door chimed and rolled back on a long, straight hallway lit with featureless pale squares of indirect lighting.
The Hall of Fame. Important-looking heavy plaques recognizing Wardens for achievement above and beyond. They stretched in a row all the way to the end, most of them black-bordered to indicate posthumous awards. The place smelled of artificial vanilla, wood, and the faintest hint of flop sweat; it was a bad day at the office for everyone there. Except the Earth Wardens, presumably, who at least had the comfort of knowing Hollywood wasn’t going to become a new coral reef.
The place was buzzing with activity. From a human perspective, it looked like any other busy New York office—smartly dressed people walking with purpose from one room to another, talking tensely to each other or cell phones, carrying reams of paper or folders or computers. No Djinn in attendance. I could see why, as I walked through the halls and dodged around unwary staffers; I was trailing blue glitter like Pinocchio’s fairy.
It came to me finally that I was alone. I looked back, but Jonathan had vanished. Poof. Apparently that was part of the plan I wasn’t privy to, up front.
I paused in the doorway of a huge round conference room and saw close to twenty of the most powerful Wardens in the world clustered there while a War Room map showed detailed schematics of weather patterns, real-time satellite imagery, infrared scans of the planet’s surface to pinpoint hot spots. Yellowstone looked like a whiteout, but it wasn’t the only one; there were fires raging in India, in Africa, and in Chile.
Paul Giancarlo was there, looking tired and stressed; he was arguing softly with somebody I didn’t recognize, gesturing at the weather map and the Doppler radar display. From the hand gestures, I figured he was talking about the massive potential for hail. He was right, if that was where he was going; I could sense the ice forming up in the highest levels of the atmosphere, thick and gray and heavy. Freight-train winds intercepted the ice on the way down, added moisture, tossed it back up to freeze again.
New York City was going to be pelted with a disaster of biblical proportions. This would make baseball-sized hail look like Styrofoam. I had power, but not much, and certainly not enough to disrupt a process with this kind of momentum behind it. There were thirty or forty Wardens still working on it, I sensed. But none of them had Djinn.