Windfall (10 page)

“What the hell happened to you?” I asked.

“What?” He stepped back, blinking.

“Last time I saw you, you looked like warmed-over death,” I said, and studied him more carefully. He actually looked as if he'd gotten some sun and discovered food again. “Remember? Lobby of the hotel in Nevada? You were still—”

“Shaky,” he supplied, and nodded. “I'm better.”

“How?”

He gave me one of those smiles. “Earth Warden.” He shrugged. “Rahel helped it along. I heal pretty quickly when I need to.”

“I'm glad. I was worried,” I said, and couldn't quite keep the smile from my face. He just had that effect on me. “Oh, try not to say anything, you know, confidential. I have company.”

Lewis cocked an eyebrow toward the ceiling as he shut the door. “Male company?”

“Female. As in, sisterly.”

“I forgot you had a sister.”

“I spent most of my life trying to forget, too. But she's family, and she needs a little—help. So I'm helping. You said something about Rahel helping you. Is she—are you—um—”

“She's fine,” he said, which wasn't an answer, and he knew it. Lewis wasn't one to talk about his personal life, even to me. “David?” Equal parts genuine concern and irony. He and David liked each other well enough, but Lewis and I had history, and David knew it. “Doing better?”

I cut my eyes toward the kitchen, where the sound of chopping went on, opened my mouth to reply, and was interrupted by Sarah yelling, “Jo! Is that Eamon?”

Which stopped me in my tracks for a second. I held up one finger to Lewis and backtracked a couple of steps to look around the corner at Sarah, who was finishing up chopping the tomato and sliding the mathematically perfect cubes into a bowl. “Excuse me?” I asked. “Why would it be Eamon at the door, exactly?”

She glanced up, then set the bowl aside and made herself busy rinsing off the cutting board of tomato blood before putting the onion on the chopping block.

“Did you tell Eamon where I live?” I pressed.

“Well, you know, I gave him my phone number and—”

“Did you tell Eamon where I live?”

She pulled her lovely, ripe lips into a stubborn line and started attacking the onion. “I live here, too,” she said defensively.

“Wrong. You're
staying
here, and Jesus, Sarah, you barely unpacked and you're already giving out my home address to guys you meet at the mall . . . !”

I felt warmth behind me, and Lewis's hand fell on my shoulder. “Sorry. Just thought I'd say ‘hi,' and sorry, I'm not Eamon . . . Who's Eamon?”

“Sarah's mall pickup.” I sighed. “Sarah, meet Lewis. Old friend from college.”

She'd stopped chopping, instantly, and I could see her snapshotting him.
Cute,
she was probably thinking.
But way too flannel.
And she was right. Lewis was all about the old blue jeans and worn checked shirts. His hair was getting too long again, curling halfway down his neck, and there were smile lines around his eyes and mouth. I knew for certain that he'd never in his life owned a suit, and never would. He'd never have a hefty bank balance, either. Not Sarah's type.

She smiled impartially at him. Sarah's version of
Hi, how are you, now go away.
I could see she was disappointed that Eamon hadn't come calling to whisk her off to an evening of prime rib and a selection of stout British ales.

“We're making Mexican food,” I said. “You're staying, right?”

“Sure.” Lewis looked around. “Nice place, Jo. Different.”

“Thrift store,” I said, straight-faced. “Kind of like my life right now.”

“Could be worse.” Didn't I know it. His gaze brushed mine, warm and full of concern. “I need to talk to you for a few minutes. Somewhere private?”

Which made all of my warm fuzzies curl up and die. I nodded silently and led the way out into the living room, then hesitated and took him into the bedroom and closed the door. The bed was still unmade. In normal times, Lewis might have made a sly little joke out of it, but he just sat down on the edge of the bed, looking at me, hands clasped loosely between his knees. He was a lanky thing, all awkward angles that somehow always looked weirdly graceful.

It made me feel . . . well. I'd missed him.

“Where's David?” he asked.

“Let's change the subject,” I answered. Not angrily, just with finality. The last time we'd had dealings, he'd been in a scheme to separate me from David, and I wasn't having any of that, ever again. Lewis was probably the only Warden who knew I still had him, and that made me a little bit wary of the whole reunion vibe.

“You don't want to talk about it, fine. I respect that.” Lewis rubbed the pads of his thumbs together and looked down at the carpet. “I'm only asking because I want to be sure you have . . . protection. People are asking questions about you.”

“People?”

“The wrong people. There's a big discussion going on, and a pretty sizeable number are yelling about how you shouldn't have been let out of the Association without—” He didn't say the words
being neutered,
but that was pretty much what we both knew he meant. “—making sure you don't continue to use your powers. They're pointing to some anomalies down here as proof you're still playing Warden without a license.”

That . . . wasn't good. And it explained my visit from the Three Amigos yesterday morning. “Have you told them I'm not? That I'm abiding by the agreement?”

“I'm not telling them anything.” Lewis shook his head slowly. “Look, I'm in the Wardens now, but I'm not really . . .
in
the Wardens. You know what I mean. Whatever I have to say, it's not likely to help you. They respect me. They don't like me, and trust doesn't enter into it.”

I did know. Lewis had spent a lot of years on the outside, making himself thoroughly lost from the Wardens, including me. A substantial number of Wardens probably didn't want him around at all, and an even greater number thought he was useful but didn't trust a thing he had to say.

“Then what's Paul saying?” Paul Giancarlo, current acting National Warden, was a friend, too. But Paul had a streak of ruthlessness about a mile wide, and friendship wasn't going to alter that one bit. Our friendship had taken some pretty good hits in the past few months, too. I wasn't sure I could ever really forgive him for what he'd done to me in Nevada.

It's one thing to put me in danger. It was quite another to blackmail me with the life of my lover. Not a thing friends did.

“He's been trying to keep things reasonable.” Lewis looked up at me with those warm, compassionate eyes. “I'm just guessing on some of this, but from the level of conversation going on, somebody has information, and it may not be in your favor. It might be smart for you to lose yourself for a while. Just take David and go someplace new.”

“Just pick up and go?”

He nodded. He'd abandoned the Wardens early, and it had taken them years to find him. Actually, it wasn't so much
them
finding him as
me
finding him, and he'd let himself be talked into staying. More or less. I suspected some days a lot less. “I think it would be a good idea for you to not present them with such an easy target right now. There's too much going wrong, and nobody to blame for it. Too few Djinn, the Wardens are falling apart after that screwup at the UN Building—it's a mess. Paul's doing everything he can to hold things together, but honestly, Jo, I think they're starting to look for people to scapegoat. You're an obvious choice.”

“I haven't done a damn thing.”

“I know. I've been watching.”

“What?” I took a couple of steps toward him, then stopped. “Want to rephrase that in some way that doesn't sound, oh, creepy and stalkerish?”

“I wish I could, but it is what it is. Paul sent me. He wanted to be sure there was no truth to what was being said about you.”

“I haven't been manipulating the weather!”

He nodded. “I know that. But somebody around here has been. Subtle, mostly, but that Tropical Storm Walter thing was a big screwup. You must have noticed—” He gestured at the windows, where rain lashed and lightning flashed. “I'm just saying that in the absence of a suspect, you're looking awfully tempting. Whatever I say.”

“But you'll tell them—”

“Yes. And do you really think they'll care, in the end? Jo, I'm not exactly the fair-haired boy around there anymore. Besides, we have . . . history. It's not a secret.”

He had a point. A kind of scary one, actually. “So what do I do?”

“Like I said, leave,” he said. “Or join the Ma'at. They can protect you.” The Ma'at were his own creation, a kind of low-wattage version of the Wardens—there weren't any true powers in it, except for Lewis himself, and one or two others. Its strength had to do with its ability to
negate
power, not generate it. It was designed to restore balances that the Wardens—wittingly or unwittingly—had knocked out of whack.

Useful suggestions. However, I wasn't generally fond of them, either. Wardens, Ma'at . . . none of them had gone out of their way to make sure I was taken care of, in the end.

Everybody had their own agendas. I'd quit because I was sick of being at the mercy of everyone else's priorities but my own.

Speaking of that, Lewis was right. I should just go my own way. I should toss stuff in a suitcase, leave Sarah the keys to the apartment, and head out of town, David in the passenger seat and the road in front of me. But
God,
how long had I been doing that? Since the night that Bad Bob and I had fought, and I'd started running, I hadn't had a home or a place in the world, and I was
tired
. I wanted . . . I wanted to rest.

I wanted to belong again, and to be part of the world.

“I'm staying,” I said softly. “I'll be careful, okay? But I'm staying. I don't want to live like that for the rest of my life, looking over my shoulder.”

Lewis reached out and took my hand in his. Big hands, scarred and a little rough in places. Strong fingers and a tight grip. “I'm your friend,” he said. “I'll do what I can for you, you know that. But Jo, if it comes down to it, you have to be prepared to run. I don't want to see you destroyed, but I don't want to have to choose which side I'm on.”

I leaned forward and put a kiss on his forehead. “You won't have to.” He was still holding my hand. His grip tightened, just a bit, and I felt that power humming between us again. We had a kind of complementary vibration to our talents, something that built in waves. Powerful. Dangerous. Kind of sexy, too. It had always drawn us together, and at the same time, driven us apart. We'd had exactly one truly intimate encounter, and that had been pretty much earth-shattering, in a literal sense.

Lewis wasn't a safe date, even if my heart didn't already belong to David.

Sarah knocked on the bedroom door. “Hey! Don't do anything I wouldn't do in there!” she yelled. “And the tomatoes and onions are chopped already. Do you want me to brown the meat?”

“Yes!” I yelled back, and rolled my eyes as I stepped back.

Lewis let go of my hand, stood up, and said, “You know, your sister reminds me a lot of you.”

I gave him a dirty look.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

I opened the bedroom door and went out to help make dinner.

 

It turned out to be okay, really. Lewis was pleasant company, Sarah more or less behaved herself, apart from grilling him mercilessly about the nature of my relationship with him, and going on and on about David, whom she hadn't actually met, which sort of set my teeth on edge.

Lewis kissed me good night chastely on the cheek and strolled off into the night air, hands in his pockets, looking as if he might be planning on kicking back at the beach and doing nothing much. In reality, he was probably off to save the world. That was Lewis. False advertising in battered hiking boots. I wondered what Rahel and the Ma'at were up to.

Decided firmly that it was none of my business.

Sarah didn't do dishes. Apparently they didn't teach that particular skill in snobby culinary classes for bored, rich housewives. I did the dirty work and got to bed at about my normal time, set the alarm, and settled in for a short night's sleep. I tossed and turned and missed David, missed him a
lot
. Hugged my pillow. Reached in the drawer, took out his bottle, and ran slow fingers over it.

But I didn't call him back, and in the end I fell asleep touching the cool glass, imagining he could feel my hands on him.

Which led to a very nice dream. Which was cut short by the ringing of the telephone. I rolled over in bed, flailing, knocking over small, knockable things—luckily
not
the bottle still lying on the sheets next to me—and squinted at the red digital numbers on the bedside clock after combing the mess of tangled hair out of my eyes.

Three thirty in the morning.

It took six rings to remember where the phone was and fumble it to my ear; when I finally did, I heard a conversation already in progress.

“. . . a good day, then?” A velvety-smooth British voice, spiced with a lilt. Liquid and fast and a little spiked with adrenaline. “Sorry to be calling so late. I promise not to call you at this ungodly hour again; I was just on the phone with New Zealand and I forgot what time it was here. Will you forgive me?”

It took my sleep-fuzzed brain a minute to figure out why that voice was familiar. Oh, yeah. Eamon. I started to tell him to call back at some hour when people were actually
awake,
but Sarah's voice interrupted me in midbreath.

She sounded languid and relaxed and very glad to hear from him. “No, not at all. I wasn't really asleep.” Liar, liar, panties on fire.