Rachel Caine - Weather Warden 3 - Chill Factor

GAMBLING WITH HER LIFE

In Rachel Caine's Ill Wind and Heat Stroke, Weather Warden extraordinaire Joanne

Baldwin, who protects the human race from monster storms, was killed, reborn as a

Djinn, and then restored to her original form. She's been through a lot—and stuck her

neck out many times—to save innocent lives. Now she's rolling the dice to stop an

infinitely powerful, deeply disturbed kid from destroying the world....

A teenager named Kevin has holed up in style at a Vegas hotel with the most powerful

Djinn in the world, planning who knows what kind of mischief. The Wardens' senior

leadership is dead, Djinn are disappearing, and a secret society wants to help Joanne

destroy Kevin, even if doing so kills her (again). But everybody in Vegas has a game going,

and Joanne has to learn the rules fast because the stakes have never been higher—and all

hell is about to break loose....

SOMEONE HAS TO DO IT

I'd had a few brushes with how absolutely power could corrupt. The Wardens were

built on solid, idealistic principles, but somewhere along the way some of us—maybe even

a lot of us—had lost the mission. There were a few faithful, altruistic ones left (I didn't

dare count myself among them).

It's never been my job, or my nature, to worry about whether or not what I was doing

was right in the grand scheme of things. I'm a foot soldier. A doer, not a planner. I like

being useful and doing my job well, and so far as the lasting satisfaction goes, owning a

killer wardrobe and bitchin' shoes doesn't hurt.

I never wanted to be in an ethical struggle. It shouldn't be my job to decide who's right,

who's wrong, who lives, who dies. It shouldn't be anybody's job, but most especially not

mine. I'm not deep. I'm not philosophical. I'm a girl who likes fast cars and fast men and

expensive clothes, not necessarily in that order.

But you do the job you're handed.

CHILL FACTOR

Book Three of the Weather Warden Series

Rachel Caine

A ROC BOOK

ISBN 0-451-46010-3

The author wishes to thank:

Good fortune, Godiva chocolates, and Slim-Fast

My long-suffering, long-haired Cat.

Jo, Kel, Glenn, Jackie, Pat, Annie, Circe, and a host of other wonderful friends too

numerous to name here.

Lucienne Diver, for her magnificent support.

My friends and colleagues at LSG Sky Chefs.

Musical support: the great Joe Bonamassa,

Eric Czar, and Kenny Kramme!

www.jbonamassa.com

(And thanks to all the JB fans out there who've

made me welcome in their family!)

PREVIOUSLY …

My name is Joanne Baldwin. I control the weather.

No, really. I was a member of the Weather Wardens. . . . You probably aren't

personally acquainted with them, but they keep you from getting fried by lightning

(mostly), swept away by floods (sometimes), killed by tornadoes (occasionally). We try to

do all that stuff. Sometimes we even succeed. It's amazingly difficult, not to mention

dangerous, work.

I had a really bad week, died, got reborn as a Djinn, had an even worse week, and

saved the world, sort of. Except that in the process I let a kid go who may be a whole hell

of a lot worse than just a few world-scouring disasters.

Oh, and I died again, sort of. And this time I woke up human.

At least I still have a really fast car. . . .

ONE

The sky overhead was blue. Clear, depthless, cloudless blue, the kind that stares back

at you like Nietzsche's abyss. Not a cloud in sight.

I hate clear skies. Clear skies make me nervous.

I ducked and leaned forward again, trying to look straight up from the driver's seat

through the most tinted part of the windshield. Nope, no clouds. Not even a wispy little

modesty veil of humidity. I leaned back in the seat and adjusted my hips with a pained

sigh. The last rest area I'd spotted had been a broken-down, scary-looking affair that

would have made the most hardened long hauler keep on truckin', but pretty soon

cleanliness wasn't going to matter nearly as much as availability.

I was so tired that everything looked filtered, textured, subtly wrong. Thirty hours

since I'd caught three hours of sleep. Before that, at least another twenty-four of

adrenaline and caffeine.

Before that I'd been on the road, driving like a madwoman, for three weeks, poised on

the knife edge between boredom and panic. In a very real way, I'd been in a war zone all

that time, waiting for the next bullet.

I was desperate for a bathroom, a bath, and a bed. In that order.

Instead, I edged a little bit more speed out of the accelerator.

"You all right?" asked my passenger. His name was David, and he was turned away,

soaking up the sun that poured through the side window. When I didn't answer, he looked

at me. Every time I saw his face, I had a little microshock of pleasure flash down my

spine. Because he was gorgeous. High cheekbones, smooth gold-kissed skin, a round flash

of glasses he didn't need but liked to wear anyway as protective camouflage. He wasn't

bothering with disguising his eyes just now, and they flared a color not found anywhere in

the human genome . . . warm bronze, flecked with orange.

David was a Djinn. He even had a bottle, which currently rested in the pocket of my

jacket, cap off. And that whole three-wishes thing? Not accurate. As long as I held his

bottle, I had nearly unlimited power at my fingertips. Except it also came with nearly

unlimited responsibility, which isn't the supersized bowl of cherries it sounds.

He didn't look tired. It made me feel even worse, if that were remotely possible.

"You need to rest," he said. I turned my attention back to the road. I-70 stretched on

to the horizon in a flat black ribbon, stripes faded to ghosts by the merciless desert sun.

On either side of the car, the landscape bristled with more spikes than leaves—Joshua

trees, squatty alien cacti. To a girl from Humidity Central, also known as Florida, the thin,

dry air seemed too light to breathe, so hot it scorched the lining of my lungs. And it was all

blurring into sameness, after days of playing cat and mouse out here in the middle of

nowhere.

"Oh, I'm just peachy," I said. "How are we doing?"

"Better than we have," he said. "I don't think they've noticed us yet."

"Yet." A sour taste grew in the back of my throat, not entirely due to the lack of

toothbrush and minty freshness. "Well, how much farther do we have to go?"

"Exactly?"

"Approximately."

"Miles or time?"

"Just spill it, already."

"We just passed a town called Solitude. Six more hours, give or take." David leaned

back in the passenger seat, still looking at me. "Seriously. You okay?"

"I have to pee." I fidgeted again in the seat and glared at the road. "This sucks. Being

human sucks, dammit." I should know. I spent a semi-glorious, spectacular, brief period

as a Djinn. And I'd never had this embarrassing need to pee in the middle of nowhere.

He kicked back in the seat and tilted his head up at the blank car roof. "Yes, so you've

said."

"Well, it does."

"You didn't mind being human before."

"Hadn't seen how the other half lives, before."

He smiled at the roof. Which was a shame, because the roof couldn't appreciate it the

way I do. "Want me to conjure you up a bathroom?"

Bastard. "Bite me."

He gave me that raised-eyebrows expression again, over mockingly innocent eyes.

"Why? Would it help?"

He was taunting me with the whole bathroom thing. Oh, he could conjure one up, that

wasn't the problem; hell, he could probably conjure up one with Italian marble tile and hot

and cold running Perrier. But I couldn't let him, because we had to keep a low profile for

as long as we could, magic-wise. David was doing all he could to keep us unnoticed, but

any big, flashy conjurations would certainly light up the aetheric like a supernova.

And that would be bad. To put it mildly.

I pulled the car over to the side of the road; Mona protested, powered down to a

throaty growl, and shivered to silence when I turned the key. In seconds, heat pushed

through the windshield like a bully. Had to be in the nineties already, even though it was

barely mid-April. I felt sticky, unwashed, cramped, and frazzled. Nothing like a little

two-thousand mile trip and spending three weeks in a holding pattern—driving nearly the

whole time—to make you get that less-than-fresh feeling.

"Are you okay?" David asked me.

"Fine, already!" I snapped back. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"Oh, I don't know. Let's see … in the past two weeks, you've been infected by a demon,

chased across the country, killed, become a Djinn, been reborn . . ."

"Got shot," I put in helpfully.

"Got shot," he agreed. "Also a point. So there's plenty of reason for you not to be okay,

isn't there?"

Yeah. I was a few clouds short of a brainstorm, as we like to say in the Wardens. I'd

thought I was dealing well with all of the craziness that had become my life, but being out

here, alone, with all of this desert and huge empty sky . . .

… I was beginning to realize I hadn't dealt with it at all. So, of course, I insisted. . . .

"I'm fine." What else could I say, realistically? I suck, this is awful, I'm a complete

failure as a human being and a Warden, we'll never pull this off? Hell, David already

knew that. It was a waste of breath.

David gave me a look that said he plainly thought I was full of crap, but he wasn't going

to argue. He pulled a book out of his coat pocket. This one was a dog-eared paperback

copy of Lonesome Dove, which somehow seemed appropriate to the current

circumstances. One benefit of being a Djinn . . . David had a virtually limitless library of

reading material available to him. I wondered how he was on DVDs.

"I'm waiting here," he said, opening the book. "Yell if a rattlesnake bites you."

He settled comfortably in the seat, looking every inch the normal guy, and refused to

respond to my various irritated noises. I opened the door of the Viper and stepped out

onto the shiny black asphalt of the shoulder.

And yelped, as my sexy-but-sensible heels promptly sank into the hot surface. God, it

was hot! Forget about frying an egg on the sidewalk; this kind of heat would fry an egg

inside the chicken. Waves of it shimmered up from the ground, beating down from the

hot-brass sky. I tiptoed over to the safety of gravel, skidded down the embankment, and

tromped off into the dunes.

Open-toed shoes and desert: not a good combination. I cursed and shuffled my way

through burning sand until I found a likely looking Joshua tree that had just enough

foliage to function as a privacy screen to the highway. It smelled astringent and sharp,

like the thorns that spiked it. There was nothing gentle about this place. Everything was

heat and angles and the hot stare of a clear, unwilling sky.

No way around it. I sighed and skinned down my panties and did the awkward human

stuff, worrying all the time about rattlesnakes and scorpions and black widow spiders.

And sunburn in places that didn't normally get full western exposure.

Surprisingly, nothing attacked. I hurried back to the car, jumped in, started Mona up.

David kept reading. I pulled the car back out into nonexistent traffic, shifting gears

smoothly until I was cruising at a comfortable clip. Mona liked speed. I liked giving it to

her. We weren't even approaching the Viper's top speed, which was somewhere around

260, but in about thirty seconds we were rapidly gaining on 175. It was a tribute to

American engineering that it only felt like we were going about, oh, 100.

"Much better," I said. "I'm okay now."

"You don't feel okay," David said, without looking up from the book. He flipped a page.

"That's creepy."

"What?"

"You ought to say, 'You don't look okay.' Not, you know, feel. Because you aren't—"

"Feeling you?" He shot me a sideways look; those oh-so-lovely lips eased toward a

smile. "I do, you know. Feel you. All the time."

I understood what he meant; there remained this vibration between the two of us,

something radiating at a frequency only the two of us could feel. A low-level, constant

hum of energy. I tried not to listen to it too much, because it sang, and it sang of things

like power, which was way too seductive and frightening. Oh, and sex. Which was just

distracting, and frustrating, at times like these.

When I'd been a Djinn I'd existed in a whole other plane of existence, accessing the

world through life outside of myself. The Djinn don't carry power of their own; generally,

they act as amplifiers for the world around them. When they're paired up with someone

like me—a Warden, someone with natural power of her own—the results can be amazing.

David swore, and I believed him, that what we had going on between us now was

something other than that, though. Something new.

Something scarier in its intensity.

"You feel me all the time," I repeated. "Careful. Talk like that will get this car pulled

over."

"Promise?" He leaned over and adjusted my hair, pushing it back from my face and

hooking it over my ear. His touch was fire, and it sent little orgasmic jolts through my

nervous system. Jesus. He was studying me very intently now, as if he'd never seen me

before. "Joanne."

He rarely used my full name. I was surprised enough to edge off the accelerator and

cast another quick glance at him. "What?"

"Promise me something."

"Anything." It sounded flippant, but I meant it.

"Promise me that you'll—"

He never got to finish the sentence, because the road curved.

Literally.

It heaved and bucked, black asphalt rippling like the scales of a snake, and I yelped

and felt Mona rise up into the air, engine screaming. A sonic boom like a cannon going off

slammed through the air, so loud I felt it shudder my heart in my chest.

Oh, shit.

"Levitate!" I screamed, which was about all I had time for, and instantly I felt that

vibration between me and David turn into a full symphonic thunder of power. It cascaded

out of me, into him, transformed into a nuclear explosion on the aetheric, and forged itself

into a matrix of invisible controls.

The world just . . . stopped.

Well, actually, we stopped. Mona paused, hanging tilted in midair about three feet

above the road. Her engine was still screaming, her tires burning the air, but we weren't

going anywhere. Weren't falling, either. Below us, I-70 continued to ripple and flow like it

was trying to creep off to the horizon. I wasn't sensitive to this particular frequency of

power, but I knew what it was.

"Shit," I said. "I guess they found us."

David, solemn and unrattled, eased back in the seat and said archly, "You think?"

The guy doing this to me was named Kevin, and I couldn't really hate him. That was

the worst part of it. You really ought to be able to hate your arch-nemesis. I mean, it's

only fair, right? Feeling sorry for him, and just a little responsible . . . that just sucks.

Kevin was a kid—sixteen, maybe seventeen—and the fact that his generally punk-ass

personality was hard to like had something to do with his having lived a real fairy-tale

existence. The bad fairy tales. His stepmother had been something right out of a Grimm

story, if the Brothers Grimm had written about sexpot-stripper-wannabe-serial killers.

What she'd done to Kevin didn't really bear close scrutiny unless you had the cast-iron

stomach of a coroner.

So it was no surprise that once power came his way, Kevin grabbed it with both hands

and used it exactly the way an abused, near-psychotic victim would: offensively. To keep

people at a distance, the way a scared kid with a gun pointing it at anything that moved.

Trouble was, the gun—or power—that he'd grabbed was named Jonathan, and if you

could measure Djinn with a voltage meter, Jonathan would melt the dial, he was so

intense. I liked Jonathan, but I wasn't really sure Jonathan returned the favor; he and

David had a close friendship that stretched back into—for all intents and

purposes—eternity, and I'd jumped right in the middle.

Jonathan was not somebody you wanted to be on the wrong side of. And now that he'd

been claimed by Kevin, just like any other Djinn, the whole master-servant relationship

was in force. Which was trouble enough, clearly, but I was beginning to get the very clear

idea that while most Djinn had the skill of working creatively around their masters'

commands—it was like negotiating with the devil—Jonathan either hadn't mastered the

craft or just plain didn't care.

He was certainly not averse to causing me trouble, at least.

So. We hung there in midair, and watched the landscape below rise and fall like the

ocean. Mona slowly evened out from her tilt to a nice, even hover.

"Do I need to ask?" I asked. My voice was more or less steady, but my skin was

burning from the sudden rush of adrenaline.

"Earthquake," David said.

"It was rhetorical."

"So I gathered." He looked icy calm, but his eyes were glittering behind the glasses.

"Jo. You can slow down now."

Right, I was still pressing the accelerator through the floor. I let up and, for no

apparent reason, shifted to the brake. My legs were shaking. Hell, my whole body was

shaking. I couldn't get my hands off of the wheel.

"You know, there are three kinds of waves associated with earthquakes," I said, in an

attempt at nonchalance. "P waves, S waves, L waves. See, the sonic boom is caused by the

primary waves—"

"And the ancient Chinese believed it was the dragon shifting in its sleep," David

interrupted me. "None of that is very useful right now."

Again, he had a point. "Okay. What if I order you to stop it?" I asked.

David shook his head, looking down at the continued waves moving through the

ground. "Power against power. It would only make things worse. I can't oppose him

directly."

"So it is Jonathan." As if I had any doubt. We'd been playing keep-away with the state

of Nevada for nearly three days, circling around. And every time, there'd been something

to stop us. Hail the size of basketballs that I'd barely been able to keep from smashing the

Viper into scrap. Lightning storms. Wind walls. You name it, we'd run into it.

And from it.

I'd spent a considerable amount of my time and energy fixing the careful balance of the

ecosystem. Kevin/Jonathan didn't seem to give a crap that tossing fireballs at us might

seriously screw up the entire matter-and-energy equation, or that whipping up a tornado

might rip apart the stability of the weather half a continent away. Kevin I could

understand; he was a kid, and kids don't think of consequences. But Jonathan … I knew

he had the capacity to balance the scales. He just hadn't.

Hanging in midair wasn't getting us anywhere. I sucked in a deep breath and said,

"Plan B, I guess."

"I think we're midway through the alphabet," David replied. "Jo, I really thought we

could get through to Las Vegas, but we're not even coming close. Maybe we should—"

"I'm not giving up, so don't even think about saying it."

I couldn't give up. Kevin and Jonathan were a partnership made in hell, and it was my

fault. I'd given Kevin the opportunity to do that. Also, I should have been able to stop

Kevin from stealing the powers of the most gifted Warden in the world, my friend, Lewis

Levander Orwell.

So I was not giving up now. The cost could be incalculable in lives and property, and

one of them I knew personally. Lewis would die. He was dying right now, the same way

he'd die if somebody came along and ripped important biological parts out of him that his

body needed to keep functioning. Lewis was so powerful magically that magic was part of

him. He couldn't do without it.

However, the trouble was that Kevin now possessed so much power that David and

I—and any other poor, stupid, magically talented idiot trying to make it to Las

Vegas—were as obvious and vulnerable as black bugs on a pristine white floor. No place to

hide. Nowhere to go, except onward, hoping we'd be able to avoid the giant's crushing

power.

We had, so far. But clearly they were just playing with us.

I had a dreadful thought. "Is there anybody else on this road?" Kevin, I knew, wouldn't

go out of his way to rack up civilian casualties, but I was far from convinced he'd go out of

his way to avoid it, either.

"Not in range. I can dampen the vibrations a little, at the outskirts, and he's focusing it

right beneath us. No one's been hurt." The unspoken yet made me wince.

"How long can he keep it up?"

David shot me a look. "You're kidding."

"As long as he wants?"

"Exactly." From the desert-dry tone, David was feeling a little inadequate. "We'll have

to wait him out." Again.

"So," I said, and forced a little lightness into my voice, "how will we pass the time?"

David wasn't in the mood for banter. He watched the road writhe like a living thing

below us and said, "Catch some rest while you can. I'll keep watch."

Not exactly what I was hoping for, but I got his point. I was tired, and unlike David, I

was only human these days.

Not that I was bitter about that, or anything.

Much.

Weather is nothing but the practical application of quantum mechanics. There's no way

to make quantum mechanics simple, but ultimately it boils down to the interactions of

particles so small they make atoms look big. Everything is divisible by something else,

down to particles so small the human mind can't grasp them or even measure them in any

way except by the effects they leave behind. Particles behave like waves. Nothing is what

it seems.

Controlling quantum interactions is a macro/micro science, or magic, or art—or the

true marriage of all of those. When you're controlling the weather, manipulation occurs at

subatomic levels, gaining or losing energy, annihilating quarks against antiquarks or

protons against antiprotons, and it's both destructive and clean. It can mean the

difference between a sunny day and a gentle spring rain, or a thunderstorm and a killer

F5 tornado. It can mean flood or drought. Life or death.

It's a lot of responsibility, and I'm afraid the Wardens don't really take it all that

seriously sometimes. We're human, after all. Like everybody else, we've got lives, and

families, and all the normal human complement of sins and vices. Hey, nobody likes

getting the four a.m. call from the office, especially if it's to fix somebody else's mess.

And sins, yes, we've got plenty of those. Greed, for one. Greed and power have always

been really good bedfellows, but greed and magic are the deadliest of evil twins.

I'd had a few brushes with how absolutely power could corrupt. The Wardens were

built on solid, idealistic principles, but somewhere along the way some of us—maybe even

a lot of us—had lost the mission. There were a few faithful, altruistic ones left (I didn't

dare count myself among them).

It's never been my job, or my nature, to worry about whether or not what I was doing

was right in the grand scheme of things. I'm a foot soldier. A doer, not a planner. I like

being useful and doing my job well, and so far as lasting satisfaction goes, owning a killer

wardrobe and bitchin' shoes doesn't hurt.

I never wanted to be in an ethical struggle. It shouldn't be my job to decide who's right,

who's wrong, who lives, who dies. It shouldn't be anybody's job, but most especially not

mine. I'm not deep. I'm not philosophical. I'm a girl who likes fast cars and fast men and

expensive clothes, not necessarily in that order.

But you do the job you're handed.

I couldn't sleep. I mean, could you? Hanging in midair over an earthquake, waiting for

the other shoe to drop? Even as exhausted as I was, fear kept me from closing my eyes

for more than five seconds at a time.

So we were hanging there, watching the road ripple in the bright merciless sun, when

something occurred to me and made me sit up straight, blinking.

"Can I fly this thing?" I asked. As if we weren't already hanging a ton of steel in midair

without benefit of an airplane engine. D'oh! "I mean, move the car to another highway.

Without them knowing."

That got David's complete attention, with a slight puzzled frown. "It's not exactly built

for gliding, but yes, I suppose. Why?"

"Because if you can keep an illusion on the aetheric of us staying here, I can move the

car with wind power to another route, and maybe we can gain some time before he

figures it out." I hesitated, then asked the question I'd been afraid to put into words. "He

could kill us, right? Anytime he wants."

David's eyes were mercilessly clear. "He could try. Eventually, he'd succeed. I can't

fight Jonathan power-for-power. But he doesn't want to kill you. If he did, you'd be dead

already."

I noticed the change in pronoun. I was the one in danger of dying. The worst that could

happen to David was that while the car was being crushed like a beer can and my bones

shattered, the bottle in my pocket would break and he would be set free. Jonathan would

no doubt consider that a bonus. Which, leaving aside how I felt about David and hoped he

felt about me, wasn't an unreasonable point of view. I wasn't exactly comfortable with the

whole master-slave dynamic of things, either.

"Can you hold him off?" I asked.

"For a while. If he attacks directly."

"Long enough for me to—"

"Save yourself," David finished. "In a game like this, you're playing Kevin, not

Jonathan. I can block Jonathan, but the strategy has to be misdirection, not direct

defense. We have to keep moving. If we let them pin us down, we're finished."

I nodded, noting little details: white lines around David's mouth, tension around his

eyes. This was hard for him. Very hard. The scope of his friendship with the Djinn named

Jonathan stretched back to an age when they were both human and breathing, dying

together on a battlefield in the dim mists of prehistory. Saved by a force so primal it could

suck the life out of thousands, maybe millions of living things to create a creature like

Jonathan—a living, thinking being composed of pure power. Even among the Djinn, he

was something special, and that was no small statement.

And now he was on the wrong side. At least, the wrong side of me.

"We can't hurt him," I said. David shot me a surprised glance. "Right?"

"I don't know of much that could. And nothing that you'd want to mess with."

"But he could hurt you."

"He won't."

"He could." The reason he could hurt David was, essentially, me. David had spent his

power freely to pull me back from the dead and put me in a Djinn form; he still hadn't

entirely recovered from that.

In the tradition of lovers everywhere, we didn't talk about it.

David shrugged, glanced down at the undulating I-70, and said, "We'd better get

moving, if we're going to move. It's just a matter of time before it occurs to Kevin to order

Jonathan to swat us down."

That was the saving grace of all this—we had the power of a nuclear weapon in the

hands of a petulant child, but at least he wasn't what you might call a great thinker.

Jonathan, though bound to serve him, wasn't bound to give him advice, and so far hadn't

taken it upon himself to act as general in this fight. Thank God.

I nodded, took in a breath, and shut my eyes. Drifted out of my body and up to the

higher plane of existence we among the Wardens knew as the aetheric level . . . the plane

where the physical dropped away, and only the energies of the world were displayed.

Human senses could see only certain spectrums; when I'd been a Djinn, the aetheric had

shown me a hell of a lot more, and deeper, but I was trying to be satisfied with what I

had.

Just now, the aetheric was showing the road below me lit up like a giant glowing

runway, glittering with power that three-D'ed down below the surface deep into bedrock.

The little idiot was destabilizing the whole region. I couldn't stop him; my powers related

to wind and water, not earth. Somebody else would have to balance those scales. In fact,

somebody's cell phone in the Warden's organization was probably ringing right now.

Time to make the kind of trouble that was my specialty. I reached out into the still,

arid air, went high, carbonated air molecules in one place and stilled them in another. The

by-product of that is heat. That's all wind is, the interaction of hot and cold, of hot air

rising and colder air rushing to fill the void that nature really does abhor. I rolled down

Rachel Caine - Weather Warden 3 - Chill Factor

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