There was a fresh, warm breeze blowing in from the ocean, smelling of twilight and the sea. Always people out, even at this time of day-couples taking romantic walks near the surf, posing for pictures. Kids sneaking beers, or if they weren't that brave, sipping on Coca-Cola cans liberally jazzed up with booze.
The night shift would come in soon-the older kids, the harder ones, the ones looking for sandy sex and mischief. The night surfers, who always baffled me.
Why take a dangerous sport and make it even more dangerous?
I looked behind me. I didn't have to look far. Detective Rodriguez, though older and burdened with all that stakeout food, was keeping up just fine. He moved with a loose, easy stride, shortened to match mine. I hadn't noticed it before, but he was kind of pumped. Not obviously, not like the muscle hunks and steroid addicts you saw every day at the beach, but he was strong and agile.
I knew about the strong. I had the bruises to prove it. Oddly, I found I didn't hold it against him.
"Nice form," he said.
"Bite me," I replied.
And that was about the extent of our conversation, for a while. I pushed it. He kept up. I got tired of pushing it and settled into a comfortable, loping rhythm, racking my brains for a way to get rid of him.
About ten minutes in, we passed an SUV pulled up illegally, three teens sitting on the open tailgate and looking like young, rabid wolves. Rodriguez gave them a coplike stare. They straightened up and pretended not to have noticed us.
"Storm's coming in," Rodriguez said.
Well, the Djinn fights had screwed up the aetheric, but I could feel-distantly and muffled-that they had put the patterns back together again. Humpty Dumpty wasn't quite broken beyond repair, not yet. "No, I think it's clearing."
For answer, he nodded out at the sea. I glanced in that direction and saw a dark layer of cloud, way out near the water, almost invisible in the growing night. I reflexively went up into the aetheric, or tried to, and immediately felt the drag that meant I wasn't strong enough to do this. I managed to make it and took a look around in Oversight while my body continued to do the simple, repetitive work of putting one foot in front of the other.
Not that I could make much sense out of it. For one thing, my aetheric vision was clouded, indistinct. Like I needed a laser corrective procedure for my inner eye. For another, my range of perception had gone from nearly infinite to something frustratingly human. I could barely see the horizon, much less make out what was happening there. Energy, yeah, but what kind? A naturally occurring storm? One cooked up inadvertently by the Djinn Smackdown that had occurred back at my apartment, and that the Wardens had failed to fix? All too possible, unfortunately. I couldn't even get a sense of whether or not it was dangerous.
Maybe it was just a squall, bringing nothing but a quick rain shower and some disappointed tourists.
I dropped back into my body. Not by my choice, more as if my aetheric strength had just failed. Wham, and I was falling back down so fast I might have been a missile fired from on high. I hit flesh so hard I staggered, tripped, and went down. I came up spitting sand, disoriented, and angry.
Detective Rodriguez, who'd drawn to a stop, didn't offer me a hand.
"Dammit," I muttered, and dusted myself off. He didn't say anything, just waited until I moved on. The beach glimmered white, sparks of quartz reflecting the last light of day. Surf pounded the sand in muscular, flexing rolls, broke into foam and retreated. I felt my frustration erupt in a white burst of fury, and rounded on him, fists clenched. "Look, would you leave me alone? I just want to be alone, okay? I'm not running away!"
"You don't leave my sight," he said flatly. "Not until you tell me what I want to know about Quinn."
Just run, I told myself. Just run and forget everything. Nice advice. I wished I could follow it, but my brain wouldn't shut down, and it was seriously compromising my endorphin rush. I wanted Lewis to show up. And now I was starting to think that seriously hurting Detective Nosy might not be a bad idea, because he was really starting to piss me the hell off.
Can I take him? I looked over at Rodriguez, who was continuing to jog effortlessly at my side. He had that kind of mechanical, thoughtless motion that meant he probably trained a hell of a lot harder than me, and could run me into the ground without breaking a sweat. He glanced over at me, dead-eyed, and I was honest enough to answer my question with a solid No. At least, not without using Warden powers, and I didn't have those. Not enough to matter, and not enough to burn gratuitously.
"Why didn't you call the cops?" he asked. "After what happened at the TV station?"
"Oh, you mean the unprovoked assault?"
He had the grace to look grim about it. "You made me angry."
"Don't sweat it, you're not the first guy who's gotten physical with me." I grinned when I said it, but it didn't hold a lot of humor. "Your partner got there long before you did."
"All I want is the truth."
"No, you don't. You want to believe that Quinn was some kind of fallen hero, and buddy, I can't help you."
Silence. We ran, wind tossing my hair in its neat ponytail, surf crashing like the heartbeat of the world. Sweat was forming along my back and under my breasts, trickling and wicking up into the jog bra. My Achilles tendons were already screaming. Way out of practice. I told them to shut the hell up and pressed harder. Night was falling like a thick, humid blanket, and it would have felt suffocating if not for the continuing ocean breeze. By my inner alarm clock, it had been over thirty minutes. No sign of Lewis, but it had sounded like he was in trouble, and maybe he was running late. He'll call. If he was conscious. If he wasn't fighting for his life.
"What did Quinn do to you?" Rodriguez asked.
I took a ragged breath. "I told you."
"You said he was a rapist and a murderer."
"There you go."
"You're still alive. So the murder part, that didn't happen to you."
That didn't require an answer. I kept going in silence until Rodriguez suddenly reached over, grabbed my wrist, and dragged me to a stumbling halt in the sand.
Surf roared and crashed, stinging us with spray.
I couldn't see his expression. I pulled myself up into the aetheric again, feeling like I was pulling the weight of the world, and saw him as a dim orange smudge. Whatever he was feeling, I no longer had the capacity to read it, but then the auras and patterns of regular humans had never been all that clear, even on my best days.
I could only trust my gut, which said that Detective Rodriguez might be a hard bastard, but that he wasn't a killer, and he wasn't blind to the truth.
"Tom hurt you," he said.
"Yes."
"Got any proof to back this up?" he asked.
"No."
"Then why should I believe you?"
I studied what I could see of him in the dark. "Because you already know something that you didn't want to believe. Right? You know he wasn't the sunshine-and-light guy you thought he was all these years. You say you just want the truth from me, Detective. Well, I'm giving you the truth. Right here, right now. And you can take it or leave it. Do you want to listen?"
"It's why I came out here," he said. "I'll listen."
So I told him. Not about the Ma'at, not about the Djinn, which was a bit of a problem, narrative-wise, but the high points. I'd gone to Las Vegas to help a friend, run into Quinn, and fallen into a nightmare out of my past. And Quinn had tried to stop me from revealing the truth.
When I was done, Rodriguez cocked his head, unblinking, and asked, "Is he really dead?"
"Yes. I was there, and I saw it. But you'll never bring anyone to trial for this, and if you keep trying, you can only hurt the very people you want to help. I don't know anything about Quinn's wife, but if she's a good person, it can't help her to know that her husband wasn't. Just let it go."
Rodriguez looked impassive. Unreadable. "I can haul you in as an accessory to the murder of a police officer."
"So you've said. I don't see any hauling on the horizon, Detective." I backed off a step. "I'm sorry about Quinn. I liked him, too, and you have no idea how profoundly that bothers me, all things considered."
He let me go. I turned back the way we'd come and kicked it up a notch, running from my memories, legs pumping, heart pounding. The red pulse of effort dissolved the anxiety inside me, washed away doubt and fear and anguish. I was healthy, I was alive, and just for this moment, I was in control.
If Rodriguez had been straight about what he wanted from me, he'd go back to his van. Think over what I'd told him. Probably get on a laptop and match up dates and times from his own records, find out if Quinn had alibis for anything.
He'd find I was being straight. And then he'd go away and leave me with the humpty-dozen other life-threatening crises I had going on.
I was feeling cautiously good about that when the sand suddenly went soft and liquid under my feet, and I disappeared under the surface so fast that I might as well have vanished in a puff of smoke.
INTERLUDE
As the storm approaches the islands, it picks up speed, traveling at fifteen miles per hour, but by now it's so huge that the increase in speed means little.
Anything trapped in its path is in for the worst. Winds at the outer wall whip ahead at pulverizing speeds, and their forces are so great that they actually press down the waves, creating greasy-smooth swells that hump in huge shudders toward the horizon, a slow-motion shock wave that is an indicator of just how massive that explosion in the clouds really is.
There is no force in nature so huge, so unstoppable, and so intelligent as a hurricane.
Rain begins to fall on a massive scale. On the ocean, there's no way to measure how much water is plummeting from the lead-thick sky, but anything on the surface that disappears into the shimmering black curtain of the storm will never be seen again The force kills fish under the surface of the sea. There's no wreckage in its wake; it churns everything in its path to pieces, digests it, and feeds on the pain. The sea left behind the storm is glassy-smooth, shocked into silence. The water is forgiving. Its wounds heal quickly.
The shore won't be so lucky.
Those curiously ribbonlike swells roll toward land, traveling impossibly fast-flat humps that reach shallow water and roar into explosive life. The waves shatter with stunning force against rock, sand, flesh. The smashing force comes in wave after ever-building wave, monsters fleeing a greater terror behind.
As the winds increase, trees rip free of ground that has held them safe for a hundred years or more.
As the storm approaches the first large island, the storm swell raises ocean level by more than twenty feet, and many parts of the land are already sinking into the sea.
Nothing can survive this one.
It is not lethal.
It is legend.
FIVE
I dropped straight down, sliding through slippery, frictionless sand, arriving on a solid surface with a bone-jarring thump that transmitted through my legs, up my spine, and exploded in my skull like a grenade. I pitched forward and reached out blindly, felt something like stone under my hands. Bedrock. I'd fallen a long way. Lucky I hadn't broken anything.
Hands grabbed my shoulders, jerked me backward, off balance. I flailed and screamed, caught myself, and whirled around, striking blind. I connected with flesh hard enough to get another shock wave up through bone. The hands holding me let go, accompanied by the soundtrack of a grunt.
It was black as pitch in this hole under the ground. Not good for me. I'd had bad things happen in a cave; I wasn't comfortable in caves, and I could feel the tense freakout potential in my guts.
Calm. I had to stay calm.
I was facing someone with Earth powers, that much was obvious; it took a pretty special talent to suck someone through the beach and into a cave, especially since Fort Lauderdale wasn't exactly known for caves in the first place.
I felt like a powdered doughnut. I'd been nicely sweated from my beachside run, and the fine-textured sand coated me in a gritty layer that wasn't going to come off without benefit of a shower and a washcloth.
Oh, someone was going to pay.
First things first: I wasn't about to do this in the dark. I needed light, and I was flashlight-free. However, even though I wasn't a Fire Warden, the basic principle of making fire wasn't beyond my powers; I'd created hard-shelled little bubbles of oxygen before and ignited them. A shake-n-bake lamp.
When I reached to do that very simple thing-disengaging the O2 molecules from the long chemical chain of breathable atmosphere and segregating them together inside a vacuum-it was like trying to do microsurgery with oven mitts. Under anesthesia. I fumbled it, felt the air go wrong and stale around me.
Yeah. I wasn't up to doing even the simple things. Great news. I decided I'd better stick to feeling my way through the problem.
Said problem was large, human, and coming at me again. I felt something brush me and instinctively ducked; fingernails grazed my cheek. Not talons, so this wasn't a Djinn-not that I'd really thought it was; they weren't usually so sneaky or so subtle. And they didn't smell like fear and sweat.
I moved back, got a wall against my back, and swept my foot out in a roundhouse kick. It connected solidly with someone who oofed and tumbled. Bull's-eye.
I was feeling nicely ferocious when blinding light suddenly erupted, and I had to flinch backward with my eyes covered.
"For God's sake, Jo, stop!"
The voice was Lewis's. I peeked through my fingers and saw that the dazzle was a plain old garden-variety flashlight. He tilted it slightly, and the backwash of light gave me the long, tanned features of Lewis's face-only not relaxed and gentle as I was used to seeing. He looked seriously tense.
And there was blood on his cheek. Fresh blood. More splattering his shirt.
"What the hell is going on?" I asked. "Are you okay?"
"It isn't my blood," he said. "I need your help. Come on."
"With what?" Because it wasn't going to be easy explaining to Lewis that my help would be strictly of the moral-support variety, at the moment.
"Kevin," he said, and turned away, already moving to focus the flashlight on ... Kevin Prentiss's thin, acne-bubbled face. The kid who had once been the bane of my existence, not to mention my master when I was a Djinn, hadn't changed much-still greasy, still dressed in floppy, oversized jeans with too many pockets and chains, and a black, sloppy T-shirt that needed at least one more spin cycle. He'd taken on a decidedly goth look since last I'd seen him in Nevada; the nose piercing was new, and so was the pentagram around his neck. He still looked like a wannabe badass. Only with Kevin, it was a mistake to underestimate him. He had the capacity to be a genuinely scary badass, and I'd seen him do it. I didn't want to witness it in close quarters, underground.
And then I realized that Kevin wasn't sitting on the ground, back to the wall, because he was being a sulky little bastard, although that wasn't beyond him; he was pale, leaning, and breathing in shallow gasps.
Hard to tell against the black, but it looked as if the front of his shirt was wet. I didn't think he'd taken a splash in the surf.
"They came after us," Lewis said. "Wardens. I got us hidden, but I didn't know the boy had been hit until we were already down here. I can't leave him."
"Why?" It was mean, but hell, Kevin deserved it. "All right, fine. He needs medical help, I get it. Let's get him out of here."
"I can't."
"Why?"
He sent me a look, then nodded at the cave around us. I realized-belatedly-that the hard-packed walls were really just packed, sculpted sand. Sand being held together by his willpower. Yep, Lewis had hollowed himself a secret hideout, which was pretty damn cool, but the idea that the whole thing could collapse in on us at any moment didn't exactly make me glow with confidence.
"I need your help," he said. "Actually, I need David's help. I can't do everything at once. He can hold back the sand while I treat the wound..."
Oh, shit. "Um... I can't do that."
Lewis's expression turned even more tense, which really wasn't good. "Jo, I just need to borrow him. I won't keep him."
"I can't."
"I need him."
"He's not-he's not well, Lewis. He's-"
"Jo! The kid's going to die!"
I sucked in a deep breath. "I'm not calling David. What's Plan B?"