Chill Factor (Weather Warden #3)

Chill Factor (Weather Warden #3) Page 34

"He told me you were running drugs," I said. "That other Wardens went along with it. Look, I was going to take the money. I'll still take it. You don't have to kill me."

"Honey, I wish I knew that for sure, because I kinda like you. You don't fold under pressure, and that's a gift." He straightened up and let go of my hands. I didn't try to hit him; there was no percentage in it yet. He still had me pinned. "No, I figure you... you'd take the money and run right back to your little friends, and next thing you know, I'm out of business. Can't have that."

I was too weak to really use my powers, but I had one advantage: He didn't know it. I concentrated hard, readying myself. I wasn't going to get a lot of opportunities, and I'd better act fast and with perfect timing when one came.

"Tell me about the Djinn," he said. "Chaz didn't know much, or at least he said he didn't. It's interesting."

"It's a myth," I said. "It's a TV show. He was putting you on."

"Oh, I don't think so, because I asked him with lots of nice folding money. You, unfortunately, money won't do it. I'll have to be more persuasive." I heard something metallic tap the rock. "You know what that is?"

It could have been anything. A nail file. A ring. A bottle opener. "Knife," I whispered. "It's a knife."

"Good memory." Suddenly the sharp edge of it was under my chin, pressing, and I felt myself start squirming. I couldn't help it. My body wanted to get away so badly that it refused to listen to reason and stay still. "Here's how this works, Joanne. You tell me what I want to know, and you never even feel this knife move. You don't tell me, and this knife knows how to do things the hard way, the slow way. Get me?"

"Yes." I was sweating. I couldn't afford to sweat. My brain felt slow and stupid, desperate for moisture. There was so much around me, in the air... and I couldn't reach it.

"Now answer my question."

"You haven't asked one," I heard myself say.

"What?" The knife moved at my throat, pressed harder. I squeaked. "You playing with me, honey? Because you won't like the way I like to play."

"They're Djinn," I whispered breathlessly. "They live in bottles."

"What kind of bottles?"

"Any kind." No, that wasn't true. "Glass bottles. Crystal. Has to be breakable."

He made a gratified sound. The knife moved away. Where it had touched me, I felt a core of cold that stung hot after a few seconds.

"How do you use one?"

I licked my lips with a dry, rough tongue. "First you have to have the scroll-"

The knife plunged into my skin. I screamed. It was buried about a half an inch deep in my arm, and he kept moving it. Cutting. When he finally stopped, I didn't; the screaming dissolved to helpless sobs, but I couldn't shut up until I felt him prick me in another place with the sharp, merciless tip of it.

"There's no scroll," he said. "Right?"

"Right." I swallowed tears. "You're right, you son of a bitch."

He seemed to like that; I heard him chuckle. A warm, friendly sound. He patted my cheek.

"Tell me the truth," he said. "We got all the time in the world to cut through the lies."

"Quinn's been stealing them for six years," I said aloud. The road was blurring in front of my eyes.

"What?" Lewis had drifted off into a twilight state, nearly asleep; he jerked back awake at the sound of my voice. We were about two hours outside of Vegas, heading north. Mona was running at close to top speed. We were lucky in a lot of ways, but mostly because Rahel was keeping us off the radar, both literally and figuratively.

I swallowed and felt my throat click. "The Djinn. They've been disappearing for six years, and that's exactly when... when I told Quinn about the Djinn. That's how he found them. He gave up drug running to take up black-market Djinn, and I'm the one who taught him how to do it."

Lewis listened to me as it poured out-the fear, the pain, the dark, Quinn's questions. When I stopped, the air tasted poisonous. He didn't look at me.

"You don't know how much Chaz told him," he said. "Don't assume this is your fault, Jo."

"It's very much my fault, Lewis, and you know it. Chaz was a low-level functionary; he knew the basics of the Djinn but nothing else. I'd gotten the advanced-level training because they were grooming me for bigger things. I had the practical info he needed."

"Theoretical," Lewis pointed out. "You didn't own one. You'd never worked with one. You were telling him what everybody knew."

"The thing is," I said, "it doesn't matter. If he'd gotten the information from Chaz, he might have blown it off as the bullshit of an amateur. Chaz couldn't back it up, after all. But I confirmed it, and that means he started to take it seriously based on what I said. That means I'm to blame. This happened because I cracked."

He looked somber. "Everybody cracks. You stayed alive. That matters."

I didn't think so, at the moment.

Lewis checked the side mirror to make sure that the silver Viper was still behind us, then glanced at the speedometer. It registered two hundred, but I was pretty sure we were doing better than that. I'd helped us with a strong tailwind, and screw the balance. The headwind was a bitch, and it kept trying to shove the car sideways. My arm was getting tired, and my whole body was vibrating with tension.

I kept waiting for something, anything to stop us, but it was clear sailing all the way to White Ridge.

The gates to the Fantasy Ranch were wide open when we arrived, tarnished silver girls arching their backs to the sky; I pulled the Viper in cautiously, alert for trouble from any direction, but apart from the creak of iron and the skitter of tumbleweeds, the place was utterly still.

"He's got a rifle," Lewis warned me. "Let Rahel do this."

Rahel, in fact, was already out of the silver Viper and moving fast as a blur toward the house. She didn't pause for the door. It blasted open ahead of her, and we sat tensely, in silence, waiting.

She appeared in the doorway a few minutes later and shook her head. I let out an aching breath.

"He's gone."

"Looks like." Lewis popped the passenger door. I found myself looking at the separated garage off to the side; the doors were rolled up, and Quinn had left behind a dirty green Cherokee and a black Explorer. The Explorer had boxes in the back window, neatly stacked, labeled glass, fragile.

They were full of sealed bottles. I turned them over in my hands, wondering, but Rahel wandered over and checked them out simply by reaching over to pick one up.

"Decoys," she said. "There are many like these inside. He hid the priceless among the cheap. He's been gone for a while."

I dumped the box over, furious. "How are we going to find him? Can you track him?"

Her eyes were dark and serious. "I can try. It's difficult. Jonathan is masking their movements."

"Try." I kicked the scattered bottles. "Let's move it."

Back on the road. Rahel and Marion led the way this time, and I concentrated on staying right on the gleaming silver bumper, drafting. We were back on the freeway, and then made an abrupt turn to a farm-to-market road that wasn't built for speed. We were forced to slow down.

"Jo," Lewis said. "You need to accept that he may get away, for now."

"Bullshit. He's not getting away. No way in hell."

I kept a paranoid watch, but there was no sign of Quinn trying to pick us off with a sniper rifle. Although I doubted even Quinn could have made a hero shot at this speed. There was nothing to do but think, or talk, and neither one of us seemed to want to do much talking. The sun crawled over the sky, and we were losing time.

Rahel directed us down another road, this one heading into the desert. It was a little better. We edged the speed higher, heading for what looked like even more deserted country.

Lewis said, "Let me have David's bottle. Maybe there's something I can do to help him."

The purse was still slung across my body, under the seat belt. I resisted the urge to clutch it close and settled for a quick, definite headshake. "He's sick, Lewis. You can't take him out of the bottle right now. If he isn't an Ifrit, he's close. Just... leave him alone."

"Do you trust me?"

"Don't start."

"Do you?" He reached over and unzipped the compartment.

"Swear to God, Lewis, if you touch that bottle I'll rip your fingers off."

"I'm trying to help," he said, and reached inside.

I grabbed his wrist. It was like grabbing a ground wire-enough power to make me jerk and swear and have to quickly put both hands back on the wheel so that we didn't veer sideways around the tractor-trailer rig to our left, spin out, and flip like some Hollywood stunt gone horribly right. As it was, Mona fought me. She was stubborn, like my lovely Delilah, scrapped back in Oklahoma and still bitterly mourned. At this speed, steering was razor-sharp and as temperamental as a bipolar opera singer. Her tires were shrieking against the urge to turn. I held her straight, blindly concentrating, and didn't let my breath out until I felt her unclench first.

And then I remembered what had set things off.

David's bottle was in Lewis's hands. Held casually, catching the light through the tinted window in a pretty home-decorating sparkle. It looked empty, but then, it always did. What David was had no weight in the aetheric state, and when encased in glass, failed to even register at all on any plane of existence we could reach.

"It took a human death and Jonathan's and David's power to bring Rahel back," he said. "It'll take Jonathan's power and more death to bring David back. Are you prepared to pay that price?"

"Sure," I said grimly. "Quinn might as well serve some useful purpose. And hey, Mr. Morality, you were willing to sanction Quinn's putting a bullet through Kevin's head, as I recall. Don't break anything climbing off that soapbox; it's awfully high."

Lewis kept turning the bottle in his hands. "Does he make you happy?"

I didn't answer. I didn't have to. Lewis knew well enough. "Put it back, Lewis. Don't make me hurt you."

"I have an idea-"

"I have an idea that you're going to put that back right n-"

I never finished that, because all of a sudden I was just simply... not there. I'd been yanked out of the car with tremendous, magical force, far up into the sky. Below me, a dot of a blue car veered wildly, corrected, and shuddered to a screeching halt. The silver one braked after a two-second delay.

Then I was spinning out of control, heading...

Thump.

I landed in a dusty sprawl, out of breath, sweating, gasping, and blind. I clawed hair back from my eyes and saw that I was in shadow, lying on a soft bed of sand. To either side of me, canyon walls crawled up hand over hand toward the sky. They were astonishing... harvest gold shading to brick red shading to dull brown, a muted but glorious rainbow of layers. Overhead, the sky was the perfect, supernaturally bright blue of a Djinn's eyes. Where the sunlight hit, it hit hard and woke glassy sparkles from the sand.

The place wasn't completely devoid of life; there was a raw scuttling in a thin, straggly cactus that probably meant either a lizard or a rabbit, or both. It wasn't even devoid of hints of human visitation. There was a cool silver moon slice of a beer can partially visible near the canyon wall.

But nobody in sight.

I licked dry lips and called, "Jonathan?" I couldn't think who else would have had the ability to yank me out of the driver's seat and deliver me here without also delivering me in pieces. I got up and slapped dust from my jeans-what use it was, I have no idea, since the rest of me was thoroughly caked. I ached. I stank. I was grimy and horribly itchy and pissed off as hell.

I was also scared to death.

"Quinn?" I tried. "Hello?"

His voice came down to me like God from the mountain, amplified into a divine echo. "Shouldn't have come after me, Joanne. I didn't come after you."

Like hell. "You tried to shoot me!"

"You wouldn't leave well enough alone," he said. His voice sounded hollow but self-satisfied; I couldn't see a thing, couldn't tell if he was up at the top leaning over or standing on some concealed ledge. "Sooner or later, you'd have figured it out. You're like a bulldog. I respect that. I was just removing a risk. And now you just won't leave me the fuck alone, will you? I'm just trying to leave, you know. Get on with my life."

"News flash, now the Ma'at know. And the Wardens will know. And whether you've got Jonathan or not, there's no place you can hide. They'll hunt you down and-"

"And kill me, yeah, I know. Very dramatic."

An explosion echoed through the canyon, louder than a scream; I felt stone chips dig hot into my shoulder, and dived for the dirt again. As if that would help. He was shooting down at me, and I had no place to hide. But then, if he'd been all about the shooting of me, he could have easily put one or two through my head.

"What do you want?" I yelled, and spat sand. "Hey, grab a knife, come down here, and stage a rematch, you bastard! I'll give you a really good time!"

"You know, I used to just want to get away with this, but you're pissing me off. Now I'm thinking, maybe I need a little recreation before I hit the road."

Another shot pinned me to the sand. He could drill me anytime he wanted; I knew it. And there wasn't a lot I could do to stop him.