Paul gave me his most impersonal look, and that meant something really, really bad. Paul always took time to notice and appreciate the little things, like a naked woman in bed.
"Get dressed," he said. "Hurry."
He turned and left. Marion stayed behind, shutting the door after the others. She crossed her arms and watched me. I watched her right back.
"A little privacy?" I asked. She cocked her head to one side, eyes bright as a raven's, and smiled a refusal. I threw the covers back and walked naked across the floor to pull open drawers on the dresser. David had left my clothes neatly stacked.
As I dressed, Marion kept her eyes on the bed I'd just abandoned, and finally she said, "It's wrong, you know."
I didn't play dumb. I just asked, "Why?" as I fastened my bra.
"He's at your mercy. Even if he loves you, Joanne- and I have no doubt he does; I've seen enough to know that-inevitably, it'll turn to something else. A slave doesn't love a master. A slave endures a master. This will twist and sicken. It can't do anything else." Her voice dropped lower. "You'll lose him. And even if you don't, it makes you terribly, terribly vulnerable."
"It's not like that." Even as I said it, I felt the lie turn in my mouth, sticky and sour. It's what I'd been afraid of in the beginning. Why I hadn't ever wanted to claim him as a Djinn. What was between the two of us was fragile, and I was human and stupid. It was easy to screw it up.
She transferred her gaze to me. The look was too wise, too compassionate, and it made me feel cheap.
"Not yet, maybe," she said. "Give it time. I do speak from experience, you know."
Interesting. I'd never seen Marion 's Djinn; I didn't know of anyone who ever had. She had one, of course; at her level, it would be impossible for her not to. And yet… she was extremely private about that relationship. Those short sentences were, from her, a bombshell confession. I knew, without looking over my shoulder, that David was manifesting behind me. Not afraid to show himself now that he knew the game was up. I felt a little better for the support, though I knew there was only so much he could do in this situation.
Only so much either of us could do, actually.
"Thanks for the advice," I said. My chilly tone was a little undermined-and muffled-by the fact that I was pulling my black knit shirt over my head at the time. I tested my shoes and found them dry-another silent gift from David. I stepped into them and headed for the bathroom.
Marion, who'd taken a step farther into the room, got in the way. I stopped and frowned. "Look, no matter how urgent this is, it's not so urgent that I can't pee and swig some mouthwash, right?"
She looked doubtful. That scared me.
"I'll be thirty seconds," I said, and ducked around her.
Just to be rebellious, I took a full minute.
The saving-the-world confab took place downstairs in the Holiday Inn lobby, next to the tinkling artificial fountain where I'd first met Chaz. Paul had taken the liberty of rearranging the furniture, pulling sofas and chairs into a tight little group. Circling the wagons. The desk clerks looked oblivious; I guessed that Paul had used his Djinn to put a glamour around us, make us unnoticeable. (It was, as David constantly reminded me, a hell of a lot easier than making us invisible.) I clopped down the lobby stairs, following Marion; David was no longer visible. I never could tell when David was gone, or just pretending to be gone. That was a sense I'd lost along with my Djinn union card.
Paul was pacing. Not good. When Paul paced, it meant things were getting serious. I could see that responsibilities were already wearing on him; a month ago, Paul had been content to be a Sector Warden, overseeing a big chunk of the East Coast, reporting directly to the National Big Cheese. But the events that had taken a hand in making me a Djinn, and then unmaking me, had changed the landscape of the association. So far as seniority, Paul was one of the few left standing who could take on the additional work. And there was, God knew, a hell of a lot to do. The stress had already given him shadows and bags under his eyes, and I didn't remember the fine tension lines at the corners of his mouth.
I was shocked to see him out here, chasing after me. The situation with Kevin was bad, no doubt about it, but he had a national organization to run, and it wouldn't run itself. I hoped he wasn't putting personal feelings ahead of business.
I took a seat on the couch, next to Marion, and Paul stopped prowling long enough to say, "Joanne Baldwin, you know Marion. Meet Jesus Farias and Robert West. Brazil and Canada."
Two heads nodded at me. I nodded back. Neither looked happy to be here.
"The kid you're after-" Paul continued.
"Kevin," I said. Paul's eyes fastened on me for a second, then moved on.
"Kevin," he corrected. "He's got wards up around Las Vegas. Great big ones. He's been fucking with weather systems across half the country to play keep-away with you, and that can't go on. We're killing ourselves trying to keep the peace out there."
"Sorry," I said. I was. "There's not a lot of choices to this, Paul. Either we leave him alone, or we go after him. But either way, it's not going to be good news, and I thought we agreed-"
"We did," Paul interrupted. "We agreed that you should come out here and stop him, but Jo, you haven't stopped him. You haven't even gotten close. Your Djinn doesn't have the power to go up against this punk nose-to-nose, and all that can come out of this is disaster if you cowboy around out here any more."
The Canadian, West, put in, "Your boy Kevin is destabilizing more than the weather. We're reading a huge pressure buildup along the Cascadia Subduction Zone. If we can't stop it, your problems out here will seem very small indeed."
Oh. Right. He wasn't Weather; he was Earth. "How bad?"
"At current levels, we think we can expect a mega-thrust earthquake along the Cascadia line. That's offshore, around Vancouver and Oregon. It could potentially be as small as a nine-point quake, but we think it's probably going to be worse. A lot worse."
As small as a nine-point quake? The one that had just killed 25,000 in Iran had been a 6.5. "How much worse?"
"The amount of energy increases by a multiplier of forty times for every point on the Richter scale. This is probably going to register higher than the scale counts. Hypothetically, perhaps an eleven. Using the Mercalli intensity scale, it's a twelve, total damage, buildings thrown into the air-"
Big enough to scare the holy shit out of the Wardens, in other words. "I don't mean to tell you your business, but what about using smaller quakes to-"
"Bleed off energy? Useless. That amount of energy can't be bled away, not without spreading the devastation farther." His eyes were chilly. "And you're right. You shouldn't tell me my business."
The Brazilian weighed in. His English was excellent, spiced with a slight musical intonation. "Also, we estimate that the temperature all over this region has been raised by a mean of five degrees since this boy began his attacks; he has no conception of how to bleed off energy and balance the system. If it continues to rise, we won't be able to hold the network. Things will shift. And with the equations already so far off scale…"
Paul stopped pacing and looked directly at me. "We're talking about melting icecaps, Jo. Floods. Climatic devastation. Earthquakes worse than we can possibly control, even with Djinn. Which we have too few of, by the way. I don't know if you're aware of it, but things are getting critical on that front. We lost Djinn we couldn't afford to lose, back there in the vaults. We barely have enough to keep things together as it is, and we keep on losing them. Wish to God I knew where they were going…"
Marion shot him a look, a clear we-don't-talk-about-that message. I covered a flash of surprise. The Wardens were losing Djinn? I knew they were in short supply-they always had been-but I'd been under the clear impression that they knew exactly where their Djinn were, all the time. Of course, it made sense that there would be attrition. Once a Djinn's bottle was shattered, it disappeared. For all the Wardens had ever known, they left our plane of existence for someplace more exotic and safe… they'd never known what I knew, that many of them stuck around as free-range, unclaimed Djinn. Hiding in plain sight.