Gale Force (Weather Warden #7)

Gale Force (Weather Warden #7) Page 23

Oh. Actually, I'd thought Rahel was the backup plan, but I could see his point. "So what did Roy have to say?"

"Kevin was taken from his apartment a half hour ago, along with Rahel disguised as Cherise. It was efficient. He fought, but he was contained with a minimum of effort."

If you knew Kevin, this was ominously impressive. "Sentinels?"

"I can't think of anyone else with the strength and the motivation," David said. "The thing is, they did this while they were hitting us. Which implies - "

"A whole lot of organization," I finished. "Not to mention power to burn."

We looked at each other for a long moment, and I finally started up the car again. "It's too late to change our minds, isn't it?"

"I'm afraid so. The game's in motion now, and we have to follow the play. I dispatched Roy to follow at a safe distance; he should report back when Kevin and Cherise reach a final destination. I don't think they'll be taken far."

"Meanwhile?"

He reached out and traced his thumb over my lips. "Meanwhile, we should find a place to stay that's far from innocent bystanders, and be prepared for another attack. Any ideas?"

"Yep." I put the Mustang in gear and pulled out of the parking lot, merging with the rain and traffic. "But you're not going to like it."

I'd been right, and wrong. David wasn't wild about the beach house - which belonged to the Wardens, and was normally used to host visiting dignitaries -  because it was long on ocean views and short on actual security. He also wasn't crazy about staying in a location where most of the Wardens would guess we'd go, but I wanted to continue to provide some kind of attractive target for the Sentinels. Anything to give Kevin time.

At least here, the beach was private, we were nowhere close to neighbors, and if the Sentinels decided to lower the boom on us, they'd do a minimum of collateral damage.

The rain stopped about the time I pulled up in the private drive, opened the massive metal gates with a pulse of Fire Warden power, and drove inside. The entrance was heavily landscaped, mainly with palms and leafy bushes to conceal the grounds from prying eyes. It looked like the sort of place a midlevel, once-all-powerful Hollywood player would stay to get away from it all.

I made sure the gates shut behind us, and followed the winding narrow road around the curves until the white beach house emerged at the end. It was a neat little bungalow, big enough for a few people to stay out of each other's way, but not a place for massive entertainments unless you wanted to get full-body contact. I'd last been here back in my former boss Bad Bob Biringanine's time; he'd used it to house visitors to the Florida territory, and it was, in fact, the very place he'd performed his historic act of heroism in shaving vital strength out of Hurricane Andrew. If he hadn't, I doubted most of the state would have survived its landfall.

I hadn't thought of Bad Bob in a long time, but it seemed like his ghost walked over my grave at that moment; I almost felt his presence, strong and astringent, charming and bad tempered. Corrupt, but hiding it well. Of all the things I couldn't forgive Bad Bob for - and one of them had led to massive damages, once upon a time - I thought the worst was that he'd known what Kevin's stepmother was, what kind of perversions she enjoyed, and he'd allowed her to continue.

Worst of all, he'd given her David to play with as her own personal sex toy.

David sat in silence, looking at the beach house. If I hadn't known him so well, I'd have thought he had no reaction at all. I reached over and took his hand, and his gaze shifted toward mine.

"I know," I said. "I'm sorry, it's the best place.

All right?"

"I'm fine," he said. He wasn't, but he also wasn't ready to let me see that wound. He was all courtesy, opening my car door for me, handing me out, walking me up the steps to the front door. "Keys?"

It didn't need one. I extended my hand, the one with the Warden symbol invisibly etched into the skin, and heard the lock click over. I opened the door, and the smell of the place washed over me, bringing with it another rush of memories as I stepped inside. Bad Bob hadn't been gone long enough for his imprint to completely fade from this place; I swore I smelled the ghost of his cigar smoke, before the more powerful odor of musty carpeting and furniture took over. The house needed a full-scale cleaning. Something to keep me busy, I supposed.

David hadn't followed me inside. I turned toward him and saw that he'd put out a palm, which was spread flat against an invisible barrier. As I watched, he moved his hand from side to side. I could see his skin flattening as it came into contact with . . . something.

"What is it?" I moved back to the threshold and waved my hand through the air. No barrier. I could even make contact with David's hands, but I couldn't pull him through. "What the hell . . . ?"

"Wards," he said. "Set to keep Djinn out. You'll have to take them down before I can come inside."

Wards - magical boundaries - were an exclusive specialty of Earth Wardens, and they were usually fiendishly difficult to unravel. They could be set to exclude anything the Warden designed it to exclude -  Djinn, in this case, but I'd seen them engineered to hold out humans, and even specific individuals.

I was, theoretically, an Earth Warden, but I hadn't exactly been trained in the finer points. It was on the to-do list, but from all that I understood, breaking wards was definitely a graduate-level course. Maybe even postdoctoral. "Any idea who put this up?" I asked. Not Bad Bob, at least; he was purely and completely a Weather Warden. But he'd had a lot of friends, and most of them had been . . . questionable.

"Yes, but it won't do you any good. He's dead. Bad Bob had me kill him."

The matter-of-fact way that David said it made me freeze for a second, and not just in the not-moving sense. "You . . . killed for him."

"I had no choice at the time."

"I know that. I just didn't know - " I shook my head. "I'm so sorry, David. He had no right."

David said nothing to that; he clearly wanted to drop the subject, and I obliged by focusing on the structure of the wards holding him outside the door. They were strongly made, and if they'd survived the death of their maker, they were independently fueled by some source. If I could locate the source, I could disable the wards - like pulling the battery. Problem was, a good Earth Warden (and this one had been very, very good) could imbue nearly anything with aetheric energy and set it on a slow, steady discharge. It could be something as innocuous as a teacup hidden in the back of the pantry, or as obvious as a big switch labeled TURN OFF WARDS HERE.

I systematically examined the house and its contents on the aetheric, looking for any telltale sparks, but nothing became obvious. David was unable to give me any pointers; the Earth Warden who'd created the wards had also done a damn fine job of erasing any tracks the Djinn could use to identify the control mechanism.

This left us at a standstill, ultimately. I couldn't break the wards. David couldn't enter.

"Okay, bad idea," I sighed, then shut the front door and sat down with David on the steps. A cool breeze was blowing in off the ocean, and we sat for a while watching the surf roll in. "Maybe it's a good thing we couldn't get you inside. I know there must be -  echoes."

"Not as many as there were at Yvette's house, but yes, the history's very close to the surface here," David said. He sounded remote and cool, as if he'd withdrawn into himself for protection. "I'd rather not stay, if we can find somewhere else to go."

I'd always liked the beach house; it had been my favorite of the Warden properties in this part of the country. But that had been before I'd known the truth, and the depth of all the cruelty that the people I'd trusted were capable of inflicting on others. "That Earth Warden. Was he the only one Bad Bob made you . . . ?"

"No," David said, and got up. He looked down at me with dark, impenetrable eyes, and offered me his hand. "Still trust me?"

I took it and let him pull me to my feet. "I will always trust you," I said. "Thank you for trusting me."

He kissed me, just a gentle brush of lips. Something about this place turned him cautious, opened old wounds, and I could tell that even if I'd found a way to break the wards, it would have been hard for him to stay inside these walls. "Do you mind if I choose the next stop?" he asked.

"Hey, you're the guy with the black AmEx and unlimited credit line," I said. "Speaking of which, you know that humans pay their debts, right?"

He didn't look at me. He was staring at the beach house, with a shadow in his eyes that I'd never seen before. "So do Djinn," he said. "When they can."

Chapter Ten

David's choice for our temporary refuge was just outside of Miami: another beach house, but if the Warden retreat was one that would comfortably fit a B-movie lead actor, this was A-list all the way. A Mediterranean-style villa, probably large enough to hold twenty people in comfort on a long stay, it had a gracious, sweeping stretch of grounds, a sculptural waterscaped pool, and its own white-sand private beach, a near-impossibility in Miami. I shuddered to think what the place would cost to maintain, much less buy.

"You're kidding," I said. David came around to the driver's side and opened my door. "David, really. You've got to be kidding. Rich people don't find this kind of thing very amusing when they come home to find us performing Goldilocks and the Three Bears in their bajillion-dollar mansion."

"It's all right," he said. "It belongs to a friend."

"A friend?"

"A very good friend," he clarified, and flashed me a smile. "We'll stay in the guesthouse, if it makes you feel any better."

We made it only about three steps from the car when two huge, evil-looking Rottweilers came bounding out of the darkness, silent and intent on ripping our limbs off one at a time, but both dogs came to a fast, skidding halt when they came within five feet of us, or, more accurately, of David.

"Hello, boys," David said, went down on one knee, and petted the two ferocious attack beasts. They licked his face and rolled over to have their tummies patted. "See? It's fine."

"It would be fine if you'd let me know when you were going to show up. By the way, you're ruining my guard dogs," said a voice from the grand marble sweep of the stairs leading up to the house. Lights blazed on, bright enough to land aircraft, and I squinted against the glare. A man came down the steps, moving lightly despite the fact he was past his athletic days. In his fifties, with a pleasant, interesting face and secretive dark eyes, he was dressed in blue jeans and a comfortable old T-shirt that had DON'T PANIC, along with the little green guy from Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker series as a graphic.

The jeans were expensive. So were the deck shoes. I couldn't decide if he was a well-paid caretaker or a slumming owner.

"Good to see you, too, Ortega," David said, and gestured toward me. "Joanne Baldwin."

There was something about Ortega that felt just slightly off to me . . . not the clothes, not the way he looked, not the smile he gave me. I couldn't define it, not immediately, and then I realized that the feeling was familiar. It was the indefinable sense that I'd had around David, when I'd first met him - a vibration that I'd grown used to now.

I nodded to Ortega. "How exactly does a Djinn come to own a place like this?" I asked. He laughed, and his eyes flashed lime green, then faded back to plain brown.

"Very good," he said. "But then, I expected no less. So, this is the one causing all the trouble? The one you intend to marry?"

David nodded. Ortega gave me a benevolent sort of smile.

"Charming," he said. "And dangerous. But I suppose you know we're attracted to that. Well, then, how may I be of service to my lord and master?"

Ortega was New Djinn, thank God, but then again, that had pretty much been a given; I couldn't picture any of the Old Djinn reading Douglas Adams, much less wearing any kind of a T-shirt with a graphic. Well, maybe Venna, but it'd be a unicorn or a rainbow.

"Need a place to stay," David said. "Guesthouse?" Ortega bowed his head slightly, and in the gesture I got a sense of antique gentility. It went oddly with the jeans and T-shirt. "As always, what I have is yours. Just let me move the cartons. I haven't gotten around to sorting through things quite yet."

"Thank you." David gave the adoring Rottweilers one last pat and stood up to take my arm. "We're not here, by the way."

Ortega smiled. "You never are." My Mustang faded out. "I put your car in the garage. Slot five, next to the Harley. Seemed appropriate."

I looked at David, baffled. He shrugged. "Ortega collects things," he said. "You'll see."

I knew that some of the Djinn lived among humans, but I hadn't known it could be so public. . . . Ortega owned some of the biggest, splashiest real estate in a big, splashy, highly visible community. Granted, the rich were different, but I was willing to bet his neighbors had never guessed just how different. It worked in his favor that the exceptionally well-off tended to isolate themselves in these luxurious fortresses, and only moved in their own particular social circles.

David took my arm and walked me down the wide, flawless drive toward what I could only assume was the guesthouse - big enough to qualify as multifamily housing, and fancy enough to satisfy even the pickiest of pampered Hollywood stars looking to slum it. He must have seen from the bemusement of my expression what I was thinking, because he laughed softly. "We're safe here," he said. "Ortega's known as a recluse - it's not just as a disguise for humans; it's true among his fellow Djinn as well. The few of us he allows to visit here are carefully chosen."