Gale Force

Unless you counted Kevin.



Kevin Prentiss was seated at the table like an equal member of the war council, and next to him sat Cherise. My best friend wasn't a Warden; she was way cool of course, but controlling the elements wasn't her bag. So I had to wonder what she was doing in such a high-powered inner circle.



She caught my look, raised her eyebrows, and shrugged. "Don't ask me," she said. "Lewis wanted everybody here. Kevin was with me, and he said I could come along." The subtext was that nobody had wanted to piss Kevin off by demanding his ride-along girlfriend step outside. He was maturing, but I suspected he'd always have more than a little of that sullen, aggressive attitude he was known for. He was at that startling age when the changes come fast and furious; his weedy physique was filling out, developing into a fairly impressive chest under that battered black T-shirt. He avoided my eyes, but then, he always did. We had shared some very unpleasant, even embarrassing moments, and neither of us wanted to get too cozy. It had been a big step for him to spend time with Cherise (and coincidentally with me) on the roof of the hospital; he'd made up for it by ignoring me the rest of the day. I'd returned the favor.



Kevin was here because he was a seriously talented young man. Not trained, not restrained, but . . . talented.



And maybe he cared about me. A little.



I was surprised to recognize that there was a Djinn in the room as well. She sat in the far corner of the room, long, elegant legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, displaying lethally gorgeous shoes. I hadn't seen Rahel since the earthquake in Fort Lauderdale, so it struck me how much better she was looking these days. She'd taken a beating at the hands of a Demon, not too long ago; for a while, we'd been worried she wouldn't recover.



When she turned her head slightly, I could see the scars on the right side of her sharp-featured face -  etched grooves, as if she'd been clawed. I nodded to her. She inclined her head, and her thousands of tiny black braids slithered over her shoulders with a dark rustling sound like old paper on stone.



She was sticking with purple again for her outfit. It looked good on her.



Lewis got me and David seated at the table, and didn't waste any more time. He hit a control inset in the table, and a projector beamed a picture onto a screen at the far end of the room. It was grainy surveillance video, and it took me a few seconds to recognize that it was my parking lot, in front of my apartment. I started to ask what was going on, but then I got my answer . . . a delivery person got out of a dark-colored panel van and jogged up the steps toward the second floor. Lewis froze the picture. "Ring any bells?" he asked me. I studied the face of the man on the screen, but it was an awful picture. I shook my head. Lewis released the freeze frame, and I watched the deliveryman disappear into the hallway with a familiar-looking box in his hands. When he came back ten seconds later, no box. Surveillance showed him getting into his van and driving away. It was the kind of thing that happened a dozen times a day at any apartment complex, nothing that would alert anyone to potential trouble. "License plates?" I asked.



"Covered with mud," said one of the Power Rangers down the table - Sasha, his name was, a nice-looking guy with a ready smile. I called him a Power Ranger because he worked with Marion Bearheart, and was part of the unofficial police force of the Wardens. When someone broke the codes, Sasha and those like him took it on. I didn't much care for the system - it bothered me to have so much power in the hands of so few - but most of them were honest. More of them were honest than the rank and file of the Wardens, to be fair. "We've been in contact with every delivery service. None of them had drop-offs at your apartment that day."



"Which leaves us with . . . ?" Lewis asked. For reply, Sasha appropriated the controls, bringing up another video on the screen. This one was better defined, but at an odd angle. One of the traffic cameras, maybe.



"We tracked the delivery van back, but we lost it in the warehouse district. They were damn careful. It took hours to trace them this far, but I don't think we'll get much farther, not with these methods. If they're smart - and I think they are - they'd have had Earth Wardens ready to reduce the entire truck to slag and spare parts in a few minutes." Sasha blanked the screen. "If I had to guess, I'd say we ought to be looking for warehouses rented out in the last two months."



"Put somebody on it," Lewis said.



Sasha folded his arms and sat back with a cocky smile. "Already done."



Lewis turned his attention to another Earth Warden, young but sharp. Heather something or other; I'd heard good things. "What about the package itself?" Lewis asked her.



Heather ducked her head shyly and studied her interlaced fingers. "Still analyzing," she said, so softly I could hardly hear her. "But there is definitely a high decay rate to what's inside. It's dangerous, most certainly."



"But not a bomb."



She looked up at him, then at us, wide-eyed. "Oh yes," she said. "It had a delivery system and a trigger. If you'd opened the package, it would have gone off and spread the contents."



"And the contents are . . . ?" David asked, in that cool, controlled voice so at odds with the look in his eyes.



"Antimatter," Heather said. "Antimatter colliding with any kind of matter will produce a violently energetic reaction. The by-products are - "



"There was a trigger?" I asked. "What kind of trigger?"



Her gaze slid away from mine, toward Lewis, and then back, as if she'd been seeking approval. "It looked as if it was adapted from a more traditional bomb-making approach. Timer and a small charge designed to crack the shell holding in the antimatter, spilling it out into the world."



"Not a skill you pick up at your local community college," Paul grunted.



"Unfortunately, it's not exactly rare, either. And with the Internet so helpfully offering tutorials for this kind of thing, it will be hard to track."



"The paper?" Lewis got us back on track. "The wrapping, the card?"



Heather brightened immediately. "That's a possibility, " she said. "If the Djinn can help us, we may be able to trace the card's history back and find out who came in contact with it."



But that experiment failed. I could have told them it would. When they brought in the card - in a heavily shielded container, since it was saturated with radiation - and presented it to Rahel, she just shook her head. "Nothing," she said. "I see nothing at all."



It was the same with David, and I could see his frustration and growing alarm. He'd dismissed all this at first, but there were too many of us now, and we were too credible. The Djinn had to believe us - but believing us meant accepting half a dozen impossible things. Heather, disheartened, reclaimed the thing and began to have it carted back to the lab for more tests.



I stopped her. "Can I see it?" I asked. She looked surprised. "Well, it was addressed to me. It stands to reason that I might see something others don't."



I doubted she bought that theory, but I really did want to see it. It had been meant for me. So had the bomb - for me and David. I supposed the first explosion would have killed me, and the antimatter would have done the job for David. . . .



Heather handed me a pair of protective gloves, draped a heavy shielding vest around my chest, and put a protective hood on me before she allowed me to reach into the container and pull out the card. It was, as Lewis had told me, a greeting card - a fairly nice one, actually, with a graphic of a wedding cake, a bride, a groom. Inside, cursive preprinted script read, Congratulations to the happy couple!



But when I saw what was underneath, I felt cold, clammy, and sick. It said, in plain block letters pressed deep into the paper, Sleep with the enemy, pay the price.



Beneath it was sketched a symbol, kind of a torch. The kind that peasants carry to attack the monster-dwelling castle.



I cleared my throat and turned the card over. "Was there anything else?" My voice was muffled by the helmet, but clear enough. I distinctly saw Heather shoot another of those looks toward Lewis. "Well?"



"Give it to her," Lewis said. He sounded grim and calm. "No point in hiding anything."



Heather brought out another container. This one had several sheets of paper that had been folded in half - probably to fit inside the card or its envelope.



Plain white paper, no watermarking. Cheap quality. On it was printed in very small type a - I hesitated to call it a letter, because there was no hint of communication to it. A manifesto, maybe.



The Sentinels were declaring war on the Wardens, and they'd felt compelled to give us all their reasons. It was quite a list, starting with a detailed analysis of why the Wardens could no longer be trusted to put the interests of the human race first. Seems we'd been corrupted not by our own greed or weakness, but by contact with the Djinn.



Most of the manifesto was about the Djinn, and the crazy paranoia gave me the creeps. Sure, the Djinn could be capricious, even cruel; they certainly didn't forgive those who trespassed against them, and turning the other cheek had never been a high priority for them. Added to that, they had millennia of pent-up anger against the Wardens.



But even so, the Sentinels' position wasn't that Djinn ought to be treated with care and caution - it was that none of them deserved to live. That every single Djinn in existence had to be hunted down and destroyed for the human race to survive.



That they had to be punished for their crimes before they were allowed to die.



I felt sick, and I'd barely skimmed the thing. David hadn't been able to, saturated as it was with antimatter radiation that rendered it effectively invisible to him, but he could read my expression and mood like flashing neon. He stood up and said, "Enough. Jo, enough."



I nodded and put the manifesto back into the container. Heather sealed it and took back her protective equipment. "They intended that to be found," I said. "So they really didn't intend the bomb to go off, did they?"



Lewis and Heather once again exchanged that look.



I was starting to really hate that look. "These weren't in the box with the antimatter," Lewis said. "They were in your mailbox, where they'd be found later. But they're still saturated with radiation, enough to sicken anybody who touched them."



No question, this was serious. If they'd succeeded with the bomb in the package, I'd be dead or badly injured, and David . . . David would be, too. Putting tainted, taunting letters in my mailbox was worse yet. It reminded me of the cruelest of terrorists, who detonated one explosion and waited for rescue workers to arrive before detonating another. My friends would have been the ones to suffer.



I tried to lighten my own mood. "Special Delivery Guy delivers the mail, too," I said. "Give him credit, at least he's a full-service assassin. Maybe we can get him to throw in a pizza and hot wings next time." All my attempt at humor did was give everybody the opportunity to stare at me with faintly worried looks, as if they were afraid that I was going to scream, faint, or grow a second head.



At length, Heather said, "We're following up on anyone who goes into the hospitals for treatment of radiation sickness or burns, but I have the feeling that a well-trained Earth Warden could have handled these letters without lasting damage, if he was careful. Or she, of course. And we have to proceed on the idea that whatever the Sentinels are, they're well organized and well protected."



Lewis nodded, acknowledging the point. He wasn't watching Heather, though; he was scanning the faces around the table. I didn't know what he was looking for, but he stopped and focused on Kevin. "You've got something to say," he told the kid. It wasn't a question.



Kevin, who'd been staring at the table, looked up, and his face flushed red along the line of his jaw, bringing a few pimples into sharp relief. His eyes were almost hidden by the messy fall of his hair, but I had no problem reading his body language. Busted.



"Yeah," he said reluctantly. "So, I got this message about a week ago."



"About?" Lewis's voice was calm and even, but I wasn't fooled. Neither was Kevin, who looked down again at his clenched hands.



"About joining the Sentinels," he said. "They told me they could use my talents."



There was a long, ringing silence. I instinctively put out a hand to touch David's, telling him without words to hold his temper.



"What did you say?"



Kevin cleared his throat. "I told them I'd think about it. I figured maybe keeping the bait out there would help."



"Good thinking," I said. "Thanks, Kev."



He shot me a frown. "Didn't do it for you."



"I know. But as it seems that they're after me, I still appreciate it. Did they say they'd be getting back to you? Give you any way to approach them?"



"Yeah. They gave me a phone number."



Lewis let out a slow, quiet breath. "Let me have the number."



"No." "No."



"What?"



"No. It's my lead. I get to follow it."



"This isn't a goddamn game!" I'd never seen Lewis lose his temper, but that was a sharp crack of anger in his shell of Zen. He stood up, leaning both fists on the table. "You can't screw with these people, Kevin. And you'd better not screw with me, either. They want Jo and David dead, but I don't think they really care how many people they have to take out along the way."



It was a mistake, a big one, and I knew it the second Lewis raised his voice. Kevin had been raised by an abusive parent, and he didn't react well to things that dredged up that bitter past.