a lady's maid. I was smiling widely, anticipating the pleasant shock of seeing David in his still-
new finery, and I wasn't disappointed; he was sitting sprawled on a velvet couch, looking ready
for a fashion shoot. Women were finding reasons to shop in his vicinity. I couldn't really blame
them.
''Done,'' I said serenely.
''Really? That was fast.'' It wasn't, but he was being kind. He kissed me, and that was very nice,
especially when, as he pulled back, he whispered in my ear, ''I want to take you home now.''
''Let me mortgage my future first.''
I don't think a sale ever went through faster. In fact, I didn't even notice the total amount as I
signed the slip.
And then, of course, everything went wrong.
David sensed it first, by a couple of seconds; he looked up sharply, all the ease and humor
draining away from him, and his hand closed around mine in an iron grip. He wasn't letting us
be separated again, not this time.
''What is it?'' I asked, or tried to. I never got to the last word. David pointed to the world beyond
the glass windows.
The clouds were thickening so fast overhead that it looked like special effects from the most
expensive disaster movie ever made.
I turned my focus out to sea, out to that calm and tranquil sea. There were no hurricanes brewing
there, only the normal cycle of thunderstorms that needed no Warden regulation.
But someone was tampering with the clouds, forcing energy into a stable system-taking a
standard garden-variety thunderstorm, which hadn't even really been threatening rain until later,
and packing it with energy until it was a mesocyclone. I'd seen it done, but never this fast, never
with so little to work with. The Sentinels were creating an emergency, and doing it so quickly
that it made my whole body shiver with the corona effect of the power. Lightning ripped through
the sky, blue-white and purple, and struck three times that I could see, blowing up transformers,
destroying a metal light pole, stabbing into the lightning at-tractors on a building only two blocks
away.
People began to react nervously.
Outside the windows, I saw the classic formation take shape: anvil cloud, hard and gray as lead;
cloud striations below, showing the shredding forces at work; wall cloud pushing rapidly toward
us, forming and hardening as it came.
An occlusion downdraft was taking shape, leading the forces into a spinning, fatal vortex.
I felt the forces coalescing, and turned my face upward as I rose into the aetheric.
Yep. Tornado. Right over the store.
David was right with me. We rose up into the boiling storm of opposing forces. I couldn't see the
perpetrator; there was too much confusion, too much random energy masking his presence, but I
sensed he was here, watching. Waiting.
The tornado was a trap, but it was one I couldn't help but spring. It was dipping down out of the
clouds, heading for the crowded street. Heading for the bridal store.
Heading for my dress.
I took a deep breath, tightened my grip on David's hand, and prepared for battle.
''I'm with you,'' he said. ''I'll give you what I can.'' I understood, in that second, that the
Mother had cut his circuits again, stranded him from the core of his power. He had whatever was
in him, and no more.
Just as I did. Why was she on the side of the Sentinels? Or maybe it was simpler than that: Maybe
she didn't want the Djinn interfering in our internal struggles anymore.
I could understand that. It did seem a massive waste of resources.
''Watch our backs,'' I told him, and focused on the glittering, complex, deadly snake of the
tornado that was dropping toward us with the speed of a freight train.
It wasn't the classic rope-style tornado; this one was a brutal wedge of power. That was not
necessarily a bad thing; the intensity of a tornado doesn't depend on its width. But if it was an F4
or F5, being a wedge tornado would make things that much worse.
Luckily, it wasn't quite that bad. An F2 at most, with wind speeds of about a hundred miles per
hour– not bad, and not nearly as bad as it could have been. The Sentinels know how to make it
look nasty, but that wasn't the same thing as truly building it right in the first place. I needed to
reduce the core temperatures inside of the vortex, and I needed to do it fast. But as I reached out
for it, the Sentinels sprang the trap.
A second tornado-this one a slender rope, and definitely built to the most exacting
specifications– shot down out of the cloud beside the wedge I was focused on, and this one
packed deadly, razor-edged debris. Metal, all kinds of metal junk and scraps. It was also spinning
at a rate of more than two hundred miles per hour: F4.
One of them was going to hit. I could handle only one at a time, and I had no choice but to go for
the worst. I abandoned the wedge and went for the rope, ripping into it with desperate force,
drawing heat out of it as quickly as I could.
Not fast enough. I heard it hit the roof, which shuddered and groaned, and then heard the rising
roar of the wind as it drilled through steel and wood and concrete.
People were screaming, running, looking for cover. They wouldn't find it, not in the store.
''Outside!'' I grabbed my salesclerk, who'd thrown my dress to one side, and pushed her to the
door. David was grabbing everyone else he could find and shoving them that way as well. ''Run!
Get to cover! Go now!''
I'd succeeded in weakening the vortex down to an F2, but just then, the slower-moving wedge
slammed down like a clenched fist, and the whole building shivered and began to come apart.
The two tornadoes, too close together for even the Sentinels to fully control, began to merge and
feed off each other. The metal inside the smaller vortex spread out wider, slashing and cutting
like the edges of knives as it whirled. Nobody had been hit yet, but they would be.
This had to stop. Now.
''David!'' I screamed his name over the roar of the wind as the roof ripped off, disintegrated into
a million tiny fragments of blowing chaos, and I felt the eye of the storm focus directly on me.
David put his arms around me from behind, anchoring me, and we faced it together. The power
that flowed out of him was rich and strong, golden. It was easy to direct, capable of the finest
touch and control.
Nobody did tornadoes better than me. I knew that without conceit; it was a gift, and one I'd had
since childhood. For all their fury and force, they were fragile constructs, held together by finite
forces. Like everything else, they had keystones. Change that one point, you could change
everything.
This tornado's keystone was hard to find, hard to get my hands around, but once I found the
specific area I needed to affect, I poured David's power into it, added my own, and the weight of
oxygen and nitrogen cooled, slowing the tornado's spin, shattering the forces that held it in form.
It blew apart in a confusion of winds, pelting down debris like deadly, sharp rain. I yelped and
ducked, and David formed a shield above us. Good thing he did. The Sentinels took one last,
spiteful swipe at me, arrowing a metal girder directly for me, but it met the shield and bounced
off . . . and slammed into the bag that held my dress, shredding plastic and fabric as the girder
was driven a foot into the concrete below.
I stayed where I was, sucking in deep breaths, until it was over and the rain started to fall in a