by Rachel Caine
I shivered. The Sentinels were at work.
“Bathroom,” David announced, and I closed up the laptop and was unhooked before he’d screeched the Mustang to a stop in front of the gas pump of the BP station. I barely noticed the convenience store, except that as I frantically scanned the interior walls, the bored clerk took pity on me and pointed toward the rear of the store. Clearly, he knew the look.
I found the bathroom; it was unlocked and relatively clean, and all that mattered was the sweet, sweet relief. When I finished, I went to the sink and washed, studying my face in the mirror. I looked okay—a little thinner than usual, more angular, but not as haggard as I’d feared. Stress looked good on me; it always had. Lucky me. As a beauty treatment, though, it sucked.
Hmmm. Maybe some cold cream. And Ding Dongs.
I was gathering up sweet, snack-treat goodness and heading for the register when I felt . . . something. Not exactly trouble, but . . . something. It was subtle, but I’d definitely felt something shift, and not on a natural real-world level.
I put the food down on the counter, smiled meaninglessly, and wandered back toward the cold-drink case to give myself time to think. Time to track what was happening. The clerk must have thought I was giving the Pepsi-Coke debate serious consideration. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that David was gassing up the Mustang, eyes scanning the horizon but without any sign of worry or alarm.
So maybe this sudden foreboding was just my imagination working overtime. Maybe I was tired, on edge, and still recovering from my near miss.
A big semitruck eased into the parking lot. It was a tight fit; the place wasn’t exactly a truck stop, and I wondered what he was doing. Maybe he needed a bathroom, too, or Ding Dongs. Everybody needed Ding Dongs, right? But no driver emerged from the shiny red cab; it just sat, shimmering in the overhead lights, idling.
I felt a chill. I grabbed a drink at random from the case and went back to the counter, threw money at the clerk, and continued to stare at the truck without blinking or looking away. Something. Something wrong.
David didn’t seem alert to anything at all. He replaced the gas cap and stood next to the car, leaning on it, waiting for me to reappear.
“Your change,” the clerk said, and pressed coins into my hand. I shoved it into my pocket without looking, grabbed the sack he handed over, and hurried outside. There was a cool breeze blowing in from the ocean. Couldn’t see the shore from here, but the sound of the surf was a distant, low murmur.
I stopped, staring at the red truck, which continued to idle where it sat. Nothing intimidating about it, other than its size. But then again . . .
“Let’s go,” I said, and climbed into the passenger seat. David raised his eyebrows at my tone, which was fairly tense for somebody who’d achieved the desperately needed pit stop, but he got in the car and started it up. We pulled out onto the road in a smooth growl of acceleration, the tires biting and cornering perfectly.
Behind us, the semitruck lurched into gear and followed.
“Crap,” I whispered, and turned in my seat to look behind us. “That truck—”
David glanced in the rearview mirror. “What about it?”
“Don’t you think there’s anything strange about it?”
“I think you’re tired,” he said. “And you’re worried. Let me worry about keeping us safe.”
“But—” I stopped myself, somehow, and managed a nod. “Okay. Just . . . keep an eye on it, would you?”
“Sure.” He sounded indulgent and amused.
“David, I’m not kidding.”
He gave me a strange look. “I know,” he said. “I’ll watch.”
That was said with a good deal more seriousness. I nodded and turned again, looking behind us.
The truck was still there, but rapidly falling behind as the Mustang’s engine opened up with its throaty growl. I frowned. The truck didn’t seem at all intimidated by my scowl. You’ve seen Duel one too many times, I told myself, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something . . . something wrong. Something dangerous.
But despite all that, the steady blur of passing scenery, David’s impeccable (nay, uncanny) driving, and the soft, lulling roar of road beneath tires took its toll. Before too long, I was leaning against the passenger-side window, sleepily contemplating the headlights visible in the far distance behind us, and slipping over the edge into sleep.
Or almost, anyway. I jerked myself awake with a start, banging my head against the glass, and blurted, “How are they still there? The truck? How fast are you going?”
David didn’t even need to glance at the speedometer to say, “About one-fifty.”
No semitruck on the planet was going to do more than eighty on these roads, and that was if they were asking for trouble, especially at night. So at half our speed, more or less, he should have been far behind us by now.
Invisibly far.
I checked the headlights again. They were still visible, and if anything, they were closer. “How fast is that truck going?”
It no longer mattered, because I felt a sudden snap of power out at sea, as if someone had pulled a steel wire taut in front of us, and I had time to see a wall of water rise up, glistening and glass-brick thick in the moonlight, beautiful and deadly. . . .
David let out an almost inaudible hiss and reacted instantly, faster than any human could have.
It was almost fast enough.
Plowing into a puddle of water three inches deep in a car going a hundred miles an hour creates an incredibly strange set of physical problems. Forces shear in unpredictable directions, and as the driver, if you don’t get it right in that first second, you’re out of control. Spinning, skidding, flipping . . .
If only it had been that easy. But this was a wall of water, not just a puddle. It was at least a foot thick, probably more than that, a huge amount of mass.
If we’d hit it head-on, the car would have been crushed. Instead, David’s reactions were just fast enough to throw us into a skid, which burned off some of the kinetic energy. In that extra quarter second, he and I both reached out to snap apart the wall of water.
Again, we almost succeeded. It was evaporating into mist even as we hit it, but part of it was still inevitably solid.
The impact was like being slapped by God. I heard crumpling metal and I was jerked violently from side to side. The glass next to me shivered and cracked into a frosted geometric mess. I heard David’s voice but couldn’t sort it out; there was too much to process, and my body couldn’t decide what to complain about first.
“I’m fine,” I said, although I probably wasn’t. David did something to the car, swore quietly, and I heard metal grinding in the engine. Well, he could fix it. He was Djinn, after all. That was what they did; they fixed things. They were nature’s great handymen.
“Hold on,” he said, and his hand closed over mine. I turned toward him. Mist leaked in through the window cracks. The water we’d vaporized had formed a thick, heavy, creamy fog that swallowed us up. “I love you. Hold on. I’m sorry I didn’t believe you, I’m sorry—”
The fog was getting lighter. It wasn’t anywhere near dawn. David was still talking, low and quietly.
“I can’t get us out,” he said. “I can get myself out, but not you. If I try to pull you out, I’ll kill you. So hold on. I’ll protect you. Jo, I love you. I love—”
The semitruck burst out of the fog like the red fist of a vengeful god, and I felt the surge of power around us as David pulled together a bubble of protection just before the world came to a sudden, sharp end.
“Hey.”
I jerked awake, sweating and trembling. The sun was coming up, a hot blur on the horizon, and I wasn’t dead—we weren’t dead, and there wasn’t any truck. There hadn’t been any truck for hours, since we’d left it behind at the gas station.
We were alive. It had been a dream . . . no, not a dream, a goddamn nightmare, so real it still ached in every muscle. My heart was thumping so fas
t it felt as if it were on the verge of needing a shock to bring it back to normal rhythm. I was damp with cold sweat.
David was looking at me with worry in his eyes. His hand was on mine, just as it had been in the dream. Exactly as it had been. I twisted around, sure I was about to see the specter of the truck rising up behind us, but no.
Nothing but road, and early-morning mist, and the traffic of another normal, busy day. I recognized the road. I’d traveled it before I’d met David, driving non-stop through the night, heading for Lewis’s last-known address in a desperate bid to save myself from a death sentence.
Why did it feel as though I were still on the run?
David chose not to ask about my all-too-obvious freak-out, for which I was extremely grateful. He downshifted the Mustang and blended smoothly into the traffic as he reached down between the seats and came up with a smoking hot cup of coffee. Not a word spoken. I cried out in relief, grabbed it, and found it was exactly right—just hot enough, not one degree over, although I would have gladly chugged it if it had been the same mean temperature as lava, damn the burns and blisters. I felt badly off balance and unsteady.
When I’d taken enough in that I felt part of the world again, I sighed, tilted my head back against the seat, and asked, “So how far do we have to go?”
“Couple of hours,” he said. “We’ll be there on time. Do you need a comfort stop?”
Of course I did. We found a small roadside diner with clean facilities and a pretty spectacular breakfast. Probably not too smart to order the Heart Attack Special, given my earlier cardiac fibrillations, but damn, eggs, biscuits, and gravy all sounded like heaven. If heaven came with a side of bacon.
David watched me consume with a lazy sort of pleasure in his expression as he nursed a cup of coffee and a bowl of mixed fruit. If he noticed that the waitresses kept whispering and looking him over, he didn’t mention it. “That was some dream,” he said. “What happened?”
I didn’t want to talk about it. Unlike most dreams, this one remained vivid and terrifying. “We died,” I said. No explanations. His eyebrows climbed, and I saw him think about asking for details, and then think better. “That truck. Did you ever see—”
He was already shaking his head. “There was nothing weird about the truck, Jo,” he said. “It turned off and went its own way a little after you fell asleep. It was a Peterbilt, carrying a load of television sets. The driver was a Haitian immigrant. Want to know his name?”
I paused, studying him. A forkful of eggs cooled on my upraised fork. “You really did pay attention.”
“Of course I did. He has six kids, a wife, and an elderly mother. I know everything about him, everything about the truck, everything about its cargo. I wasn’t taking any chances. Not with your life. I’ve nearly lost you too many times.” He said it without any emphasis, but it went straight to my heart. I lowered my fork and put it down, and fought to catch my breath. He leaned forward, cup cradled in both hands with exquisite care. “Nothing will happen. You have to trust me on that.”
I held his gaze. “And you have to trust me that everything may not be as simple as you think it is.”
“You’re talking about the package.” I nodded. “Jo, I promise, I’ll try to keep an open mind. No matter how . . . unlikely all this seems to me.”
He really was trying. More than that, I knew it wasn’t easy for him to devote so much time to me; there were constant demands in the Djinn world, just as in the human one. He had a day job, after all.
“I love you,” I said. “More than chocolate. And you know how much that means to me.”
“Eat your eggs,” he said, and gave me that slightly off-kilter smile, with an intriguing tilt of his head. “Wouldn’t want you to faint like a girl later and blame it on low blood sugar. Again.”
“Hey, buster! When have I ever fainted like a girl?”
He picked up the spoon from his fruit bowl and licked it, slowly and contemplatively, tongue moving very deliberately around the sleek curves. “I can think of one or two times.”
“That,” I said severely, “is totally unfair.”
“What is?” He dipped the spoon into the little pot the waitress had left out for my coffee, and then licked that off, tongue curving lovingly into the bowl of the spoon. “Mmmm. Fresh cream.”
I think one of the waitresses dropped a water glass. I distinctly heard one of the other ones murmur something that sounded like Thank you, Jesus.
“Stop it. Not even you can make me faint with desire, ” I said. I was trying for stern, but it was coming out more indecisive than anything else. It wasn’t that I was weak-willed; it was that nobody was immune to David when he really put effort into it. Especially me.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, and even his voice was pure seduction. “Five minutes from now, when I do this thing I was just thinking about—”
“Is it that thing with your little finger? Because I’m ready for that one this time.”
“Oh no,” he said, very earnestly. “I was thinking of the thing with my tongue, actually.”
“What thing with your tongue?”
His smile deepened, and sparks flew in the darkness of his eyes. “You sure you really want me to demonstrate? Right here?”
I was pretty sure that if he did, there’d be a lot of women asking to order what I was having. I took a deep, slow, determined breath, and said, “Play nice, David.”
“I’m always nice.”
Oh, I didn’t think so. That was part of his dark, chocolate-rich charm, and as I’d already noted to him . . . I really couldn’t resist chocolate.
He ate the rest of the fruit, nibbling on the moist bites with such suggestiveness that I think every waitress in the diner made sure to come by and ask if there was anything at all she could do for him. He never noticed. He was having too much fun making me squirm.
But when I glanced down involuntarily at my watch, he sighed, ate the last bite of cantaloupe, and nodded. “Right,” he said. “Let’s get going.”
“As soon as this is over—”
“Don’t think I won’t hold you to it.”
Chapter Six
When we came out of the diner, there was a van pulled up behind the car, neatly blocking us in. I felt my nerves tighten up and shiver, but I silently told them to stand down; I’d already made a fool of myself over the semitruck, and this would turn out to be just another idiot picking up, dropping off, or parking badly. In fact, it even looked like a delivery van— battered, a bit weather-faded.
The sunlight caught a glitter on the door, and I paused, blinked, and tried to convince myself it was nothing but random metallic paint flecks. Tried hard, but got nothing. I gave it up and took a quick look in Oversight.
The van took on the dimensions and solidarity of one of those military Humvees, wickedly armored and decorated with spikes. Tough and badass—that was its essential character, interpreted for me visually by whatever processing filter the Wardens had that others didn’t. The aetheric showed truth, but it was a subtle and strange kind of truth.
One thing was unequivocal about the truck, though: On the door panel blazed the stylized sun emblem of the Wardens.
I opened my mouth to warn David, but he already knew, of course. He stopped, studying without expressionthe van and whatever occupants it held. All the playfulness was gone, and he reminded me of a hunting leopard, lean and powerful. His eyes had gone a color that should have been a warning, and probably would have been to anybody with sense.
Unfortunately, the Warden who got out of the van was Lee Antonelli, and he had less sense than a pet rock. He was a big guy, and a gifted Fire Warden, but when it came to subtleties, he was likely to crush them under his big steel-toed boots and never notice. How he’d survived the Warden/Djinn conflicts was anybody’s guess, but the fact that he hadn’t had a Djinn issued to him in the first place was enough to keep him off the initial hit list, and I strongly suspected he’d spent most of the conflict hiding out.
I said Lee was big. Not brave. Hence, of course, the unreasonably tough shell of attitude on his van, not on his person.
He leaned against the passenger side of the van and crossed his arms; they were impressively muscled, and he’d invested a small fortune in body art. It should have made him look intimidating. Instead, I thought it made him look like someone doing hard-ass by the numbers, especially when coupled with the shaved head. “Warden,” Lee said to me. He didn’t so much as glance at David. I wondered why, and then I realized that Lee couldn’t see him. David had made himself invisible, although he was still there to my eyes.
“Warden,” I replied to Antonelli coolly, “who taught you how to park? I’d say Sears, but really, they do a much better job. Maybe you were absent the day they explained what those parallel lines in the lot are for—”
“Shut up, Baldwin. I’m supposed to pick you up and escort you in,” he said. “Since whatever you’ve got going on is so damn important, I guess I’m riding shotgun.”
This was weird, and it wasn’t normal. Lewis knew I was coming; he knew David was traveling with me. Why send Antonelli, of all people, whom he knew I couldn’t stand? Lewis might work in mysterious ways, but that was downright impenetrable. I bought time to think by digging a pair of big sunglasses out of my purse and putting them on. There. Without a clear view of my eyes, Antonelli was going to have a tougher time figuring out what I’d do. “Shotgun,” I repeated, “so you’re the bodyguard. Flattering.”
Antonelli ran one hand over his bullet-shaped shaved head and gave me a grim-looking smile. “Most ladies would say so.”
“Save the smarm, I’m not in the mood.”
He shrugged. Flirting was reflexive for him; he didn’t fancy me, except in the abstract way that somebody like Antonelli fancied anyone with internal sex organs. If I stood still long enough, he’d gladly take a turn, but other than that, I was furniture. “Playtime’s over, then. Let’s move. In the van.”