by Rachel Caine
Blue Crush
A Weather Warden story
by
Rachel Caine
I love the ocean. I love the pounding heartbeat of waves on shore. I love the way sunrise turns the endless glitter into a bowl of spilled jewels - rubies, sapphires, with glints of diamonds everywhere.
I love the ocean, but I don’t swim in it.
This is the same reason that Weather Wardens - who have powers that can affect the air and water - don’t like flying. You’re suspended in an alien environment, one that is instinc-tually aware of you and the potential threat you pose. The air always fights back. The ocean chooses its moments, and in a way that’s worse; you can trust it until you suddenly can’t.
So, I don’t swim. Instead, I put on my bikini of the season and lie out on the sand, and occasionally tickle my toes in the rushing cool surf when I get overheated. But sometimes, as I bake on the beach, I watch people playing in the waves, and I long to be having that much fun.
“We should go out there,” David said. Reading my mind, as usual.
I turned my head and skinned my sunglasses down my nose to meet his eyes. My lover was lying in the sun in a pair of black swim trunks and nothing else - a very pleasant picture indeed, and not just for me. David is a Djinn, one of those old-time genies from the bottles; he can be anything he wants to be.
For me, he’s always the same: tall, with the lean, sleek muscles of a runner. Defined, not bulked. His skin is this gorgeous tint somewhere between gold and bronze, a shade you’ll never find in any tanning booth or bottle, no matter how hard you try. He was slightly turned towards me, raised up on one elbow. David likes to wear round, scholarly glasses, but he’d left them off today, and it raised his hotness alert level from smoking to nuclear. His hair was a little shaggy, and it caught the light in gleams of auburn and gold.
“Out where?” I asked, as I allowed my inspection to move from his gorgeous face to his strong neck, his firm chest, down to the ridges of his abdominal muscles. “Because you look good right there to me, mister.”
David has the most sincerely dangerous smile I’ve ever seen — dangerous not because it is so lovely (although it is that) but because it just brims with possibilities begging to be explored. The first time I’d seen him, we’d been enemies; the second time, he’d been trying to help me, or I’d been trying to help him, however you score these things. But it had been that smile that had thrown me off balance, and made me vulnerable to him.
Still did.
“You never swim,” he said. “You should. Seems like a waste to have all this ocean at your front door and never enjoy it to the fullest.”
“I enjoy it academically,” I said. “Besides, I need to work on my tan.”
“Your tan is perfect,” David said, and drew a gentle finger down my arm, soft as a feather. “I want you in the water.”
The hot flash that washed over me had nothing to do with overheating. “Public beach,” I said, but it was a weak defence, at best. His smile widened.
“We don’t get many vacations,” he said. “When we do, we should make the most of them. And you know I can keep us from being seen, no matter where we are.” Two fingers this time, dragged slowly and provocatively down the tender inner aspect of my arm. “No matter what we do.”
I was having trouble keeping my breath. “Man, you’d make a very dangerous criminal.”
“So I have,” he agreed. “From time to time.”
Different masters holding his bottle, I thought, but I didn’t say that. David wasn’t in a bottle any more. David was the conduit, the power connection between the New Djinn - Djinn who’d once been human - and the sleeping power of Mother Earth herself.
In short, he was the boss.
On the other side of the organizational chart were the Old Djinn, or - as they liked to call themselves - the True Djinn, which tells you something about their arrogance. They had a conduit, too, his name was Ashan, and he was a right bastard who didn’t like David, didn’t like me and didn’t like humanity in general cluttering up his planet.
Mutually assured destruction kept the peace between the Djinn.
“You’re going to have to tell me a story sometime,” I said. I rolled over on my side to face David and propped my head on my arm. My long, dark hair slithered over my shoulders and cascaded down, curling at the ends in the moist breeze. “About that part of your life.”
“I’m not sure you want to know.” He considered that for a moment, and from the wry twist of his lips, he knew how wrong that was. “All right, I’m not sure that I want to tell you.”
“If we’re together, we’re together. Good times and bad.”
“I’ve got plenty of bad,” he said. “I’d rather make some new experiences with you. Pleasant ones.”
“After you tell me a story.”
He tried to suppress a smile. “Can it be a bedtime story?”
“You wish. Something personal. About your - criminal past.”
I think he might have actually started to open up to me. His lips parted, and I saw the resignation on his face - and then a shadow fell across both of us. A big shadow, maybe twice as broad in the chest as David, with biceps as large as my thighs.
A bodybuilder. One with so much overdevelopment that you could almost smell steroids in his sweat. He’d adopted a stiff military-style haircut, and a lot of truly ugly tattoos.
And he had friends. Four of them. Although none of them was anywhere near his desperation-level of intimidation. Lots of tattooing and attitude. They weren’t exactly fitting in, but then, they didn’t intend to.
Muscles stared down at David with what I suppose he thought was ferocious menace. “Move,” he barked.
David looked up at him, eyebrows arched, perfectly at ease. “Why?”
Apparently, Muscles wasn’t prepared for anyone to ask a reasonable question. “Because I said so,” he blurted back, and then pulled his face into a frown that looked very odd on a grown man’s face. “Because you’re in our spot, asswipe. Get your punk ass up.”
Here’s the problem with being supernaturally gifted: you really can’t go around blowing away every goofball idiot who tries to make himself your problem, no matter how convenient it might be. Muscles might think he was badass, but he wasn’t up to going one round with me, never mind David. It’s always difficult to break that fact to them gently, without wounding their sensitive, macho feelings of inadequacy.
David was already moving forwards on that. “There’s plenty of beach,” he pointed out.
“I said this is our spot. Now get up and leave before we bury you in it.”
David looked at me, and I saw the frustrated humour in his shrug. I sighed and started to gather up my things. It wasn’t worth the fight.
At least it wasn’t until Muscles said, “Not you, bitch. You, you stay. We need us some candy.” He stuck out his tongue and fluttered it in the approved Gene Simmons manner, although he was nowhere near able to pull it off like His Rockness. Meanwhile, his friends spread out around us, trying to cut us off. I noticed that other people who’d parked their towels and coolers nearby were hustling away, sensibly thinking that maybe they had better places to be right now.
I sat up and pulled my knees together, wrapping my arms demurely around them. “Excuse me? Did you just call me ‘bitch’? Because I’ve got a name. In fact, every girl you leer at has a name. Mine’s Joanne. Hi, nice to meet you.” I let a slow, wicked smile spread over my lips. “Now take your inked-up posse of posers and find another spot.”
“Oh, here we go,” David murmured. He flopped down on his back, hands crossed peacefully on his chest.
Muscles stared at me like I’d grown another set of breasts. “What? Bitch, did you just tell me to move on?”
“Wait, let me go to the instant replay - the judges say ‘yes’, And congratulations on mastering listening for comprehension. Your mom must be so proud.”
I lost him on that one, so he took the shortcut straight to the point. “Shut the fuck up, or I’ll fuck you up, bitch!”
Muscles was waiting for David to leap to my defence. He kept glancing down at him. David responded by moving his hands from their resting position atop his chest to a more comfortable behind-the-head pillow.
“Don’t look at him, look at me,” I said, and shook my hair back from my face. “This is between the two of us, right?”
“Bullshit.” Muscles decided to get proactive, since he really wasn’t into fighting girls, at least as a first choice. He raised one massive foot and brought it down on David’s stomach. Well. He tried.
David didn’t bother to so much as flinch, but then, he didn’t need to.
I reacted for him.
Muscles let out a raw yelp of surprise, and his back foot disappeared into the sand to the depth of about three feet as I instantly pulverized and dried the sand underneath him, making it as fine as powder. He flailed, fell backwards, and poof, disappeared in a puff of dust. I let him drop about two more feet beneath the surface before I hardened the sand again, added a little water for thickness, and helpfully raised him until his mouth and nose were in the air, gasping for breath. I left him there, buried to the chin.
His friends stared down at him, dumbstruck. Muscles let out an inarticulate yell of rage and fear. Under the coating of dust, his big domed head was turning brick red with fury. Well, he could flail all he wanted, he wasn’t getting out of there. Not on his own. Amazing how heavy a little damp sand can be.
A couple of his friends looked at me and David, and at least one of them looked willing to take up Muscles’ cause. I softened the sand under their feet just enough to let them sink in about a foot. “Whoops,” I said. “Quicksand. Who knew that kind of thing was a beach hazard in Florida? Hey, dude, how you doing down there?”
Muscles yelled. I didn’t listen. His lungs were fine.
“What do you think?” I asked David. “Maybe we should go get him some help? You know, eventually?”
“You mean now you want to go?”
“Well, he’s very loud. It’s harshing my calm.”
David shook his head, but I could tell he was more amused than annoyed. I took my time gathering up my stuff, folding my towel, packing the lotion and water. Muscles continued to howl, mostly inarticulately, but sometimes treating me to whole new vistas of insults. His buddies had prudently backed off and were watching from a distance.
“What if they’d been armed?” David asked me, very quietly, as he leaned over me to pick up the picnic basket. I gave him a one-shoulder shrug.
“We’d handle it. But honestly, it’s pretty tough to hide a gun in your swim trunks without getting rousted for lewd behaviour. Not that much of a risk.”
“You were just looking for a fight.”
“No, they brought me one. I just didn’t walk away from it.”
David looked at me from the distance of a vast ocean of years. There were times - rare, but striking - when I realized just how old he really was, how full of experiences. “Sometimes you should try walking away,” he said. “In the old days, honour said no one could back down from a fight without bringing disgrace on themselves. Today, you have a choice. You should exercise it once in a while.”
I kissed him. I couldn’t help it; his lips were close, and parted, and warm. It was lingering and sweet and had the dark, yummy promise of a whole lot more yet to come. “How about over there?” I asked, and pointed down the beach, alluding to an area just around the bend, where it was deserted. “Out of sight, out of mind?”
“Seems prudent,” he agreed. We set off across the hot, sparkling sands, dodging around a few blankets and beach umbrellas and people who were standing around, still watching the show. “Are you going to leave him there?”
“Oh, he’s OK. I didn’t squeeze him or anything. They can dig him out, if they want.”
“Jo, you—” David stopped talking, and he also stopped walking. He turned to look out over the water. “Do you hear that?”
I concentrated. All I heard was the constant rushing roar of the surf, with the continued ranting of Muscles floating over the top. “Hear what?”
“Someone calling for help.”
Even as David said it, I spotted a human shape stumbling out of the waves just a little further down the beach - a boy, maybe sixteen. He fell to his hands and knees in the hissing foam and vomited up an impressive fountain of water.
I grabbed a towel out of my bag and raced to him. “Hey! You OK?” I got the towel around his shaking shoulders and rubbed vigorously as he choked and coughed and got out the rest of the sea he’d swallowed. There was some white spittle around his mouth and nose. He’d come really close to drowning. “Here. Sit. David, help me with him.”
We got the boy up the beach and settled on dry sand, covered in towels. He was still shaking. His skin - a light cocoa, normally - had an unhealthy ashen pallor to it, and his eyes were blank and traumatized.
I took his hands in mine and squeezed. Slowly, his gaze refocused away from whatever horrible memory he had been seeing in his mind’s eye. “What’s your name?” I asked, keeping my voice low and gentle. “I’m Joanne.”
“Cal,” he said. “Calvin Harper.” As if that was some kind of key to the lock on his mind, his face suddenly filled with emotion. With panic. “Where’s Parker? Did you get Parker?”
“Who’s Parker?”
He didn’t answer me. He tried to struggle to his feet, but I put my hands on his shoulders and pushed him back down. Skin-to-skin contact woke my Earth powers, which travelled up in a slow, warm pulse from the soles of my feet and out through my fingertips, ghosting through Cal’s body in a golden wave. He was all right — exhausted from fighting the ocean, and he still had water and foam in his lungs, but I concentrated for a moment and cleared that out. Otherwise, he was just full of pure anxiety.
“Parker,” I repeated. “Who’s Parker?”
“My girl,” Cal gasped. He rubbed his face and close-cut hair with both hands, trying to scrub off the feelings of misery and fear. “I left her. I couldn’t get her. She’s in trouble out there.”
I turned and looked at the waves. I couldn’t see anybody out there.
I turned on my heels to look at David, who dropped the picnic basket on the sand. “I guess we’re going swimming,” he said.
I didn’t see any way around it.
The thing that surprised me was that swimming felt good. It had been a long, long time since I’d voluntarily waded into the ocean. The first cold splash of the water was a livid shock, but then my body adjusted and, by the time the surf was cradling my knees, I felt comfortable.
David, next to me, was scanning the horizon. His eyes had taken on a hot golden shine - a whole lot more than human just now. A shimmer of bronze crept over his skin, giving him the appearance of living metal.
“See anything?” I asked.
“She’s there,” he said, and pointed. “I’ll bring her in. Wait here.”
That wasn’t the agreement, but blip, the next wave that crashed down erased him right out of the picture. David could go anywhere he liked at a whim, but he couldn’t take me with him. I had to travel the old-fashioned way.
Which was why he’d told me to stay put. The problem was, David was going to have to bring the girl back the old-fashioned way, too - faster than a human could swim, granted, but he couldn’t blip her from point A to point B without leaving pieces of her behind.
I hate to wait. I wasn’t intending to swim out there, but I kept pushing forwards, and suddenly I was floating, so it seemed like the thing to do. The cool rush of water over my body was exhilarating, and the little-worked muscles on the insides of my arms began to burn in a pleasant kind of way. As each wave rose towards me I dived into it and came out a little
further out, a little deeper. I still couldn’t see David. White clouds drifted by overhead, a few scudding at the horizon like steam from the waves.
Pretty soon I was swimming steadily out in the direction David had indicated.
My awareness spread out around me, like sonar through the water - an instinctive kind of thing, nothing I planned to do. At first I was only aware of the darting shapes of fish near me that stayed well clear of both the roiling surf and my kicking feet; but then my sense of the ocean deepened, focused, and I felt the vast network solidifying around me. It was different than living in the air - closer somehow. More connected. I was an alien element in a world where I wasn’t necessary, and it was a very odd feeling.
I felt the rushing heat of David’s approach across the water, and adjusted my course to meet him. Something odd was happening near him - no, around him. He was slowing down.
David was slowing down. That didn’t make much sense. I swam faster.
I caught a glimpse of him as I rode the next wave’s crest. He was still making forward progress, and he had a young, limp-looking girl in a rescue hold.
As I watched, they both disappeared under the water as if yanked by an invisible cord.
Crap.
I dived.
I found the girl first, floating free in the water - a drifting ghost, peaceful and silent. I grabbed her and arrowed back for the surface, where I got her face into the air again. She wasn’t breathing. I did a Heimlich to force water out of her lungs, and was rewarded with a sputtering, coughing eruption, and a gasping breath. She flailed wildly, but I managed to keep her above the surface.
Where the hell was David?
I extended my net of perception down instead of out, driving into the darkness and pressure where humans wouldn’t normally be found. Lots of life down there - cold, odd life, with little in common to my own human condition.
David was down there, and he was fighting something big. Something strong, obviously, because you just don’t manhandle a Djinn and get away with it. I could feel the shocks not just through the water, but up on the aetheric level as well - the level of reality above the one we inhabited. Energy was swirling, turning on itself in ugly and destructive ways.