Thin Air

Scary.



Joanne stopped just a couple of feet away from him. Cherise couldn't hear the conversation, because all of a sudden thunder rumbled overhead. Cherise looked up, startled, to see dark clouds moving in from the west-which, Cherise thought, was really strange, because she'd just been giggling about Marvin's out-of-the-box weather prediction about storms when the coast seemed clear, and all of the other stations were talking sunny skies.



Joanne must have wondered, too; she looked up at the sky with a frown, and it distracted her for a second from the guy in the trench coat.



Who suddenly lashed out at her with a fist.



I had to admit-this former version of me clearly had fantastic reflexes. She leaned back, and his punch sailed cleanly past her chin. He snarled and reached in his pocket and pulled out...a knife.



"Call the cops!" Joanne yelled to Cherise, who dashed for the doorway. She dialed 911 on her cell while she ran, and yelled for help while it rang. Gaffers and techs came running from the studio-big strong guys, union guys. Tough guys. "Jo's in trouble! Parking lot!"



They scrambled. Cherise blurted out the facts to the 911 operator and hurried back out to follow, terrified of what she'd find...



...only to find a ring of big, tough union guys standing around, and the stalker with the knife on the ground, flat on his face, with Joanne kneeling on his back. She had his left arm twisted up behind him, painfully far, and she looked calm and cool. A passing gust of wind swirled through the parking lot, stirring sand and trash, and blew her hair over her face. She shook it back, and Cherise saw that Joanne was grinning.



"No problem," Joanne said. "One less stalker, Cher. That only leaves Brad Pitt, right?"



Cherise sucked in a shaky breath. "He has got to stop calling me," she said, in a brave attempt to make it look like she hadn't been terrified out of her mind that she'd find the other me dead on the ground. "His wife's getting pissed."



The stalker on the ground writhed and said some not very nice things. Joanne put her right hand on the back of his neck, and Cherise was almost sure she saw some kind of spark zap from her into her prisoner.



"Play nice," Joanne said. "Or you'll be waking up in a coma."



Head electrician Sully, who was commonly acknowledged to be the hardest guy on the union team, clapped his hand over his heart. "I think I'm in love," he said.



All the union guys whistled in agreement.



Cherise held in a crazy urge to giggle as Joanne winked at her.



"All in a day's work for a weather girl," she said, and the howl of sirens took over as the police arrived.



That, I realized, was the day Cherise had truly thought of me as not just a friend, but the friend. Her best friend.



And that feeling...that was love.



I lost the thread of the memory, falling into a blur of sound and color. A spiral of confusion. I felt a dull, leaden ache in my head, and wanted to get off the ride now. And never, ever get back on.



The next thing I caught was only a flash, a very brief one-I wasn't even in it, it was Cherise in a shoe store with a polished-looking blond woman griping about her ex-husband.



And about her sister. From Cherise's sense of disgust, she just never shut up about her sister.



And she was still talking about her. "I didn't like her much, you know. When I was younger. Joanne was a total bitch."



Oh. I was the sister. So this was-who, exactly?



Cherise put a pair of shoes back and turned to face the other woman, frowning. Before she could open her mouth to defend me-if she was going to, which I couldn't actually be certain about-the blonde plunged ahead. "Joanne was always special," she said. "Mom treated her like a little queen. I was always the one who had to work harder, you know? So we weren't close. Really, I wouldn't have come looking for her help if I hadn't been desperate."



"No kidding, Sarah," Cherise said. "I guess it's nice that she's let you stay in her house, eat her food, and use her credit cards." She put some emphasis on the credit cards, and I looked over the blonde with new interest. New dye job and haircut. Fancy designer outfit. The shoes she was trying on must have been a minimum of three hundred, and they didn't even look that cute on her.



Sarah didn't seem to take the rebuke all that well. "Well, it's just temporary. So, do you have sisters?"



"Brothers," Cherise said. "Two."



"Any of them rich?" Sarah was joking, only not really. Cherise gave her a flat stare. "Oh, come on, don't be so judgmental. Marrying for money is a good career move. You're a nice-looking girl. You should take advantage."



"I do," Cherise said, and shrugged. "I'm on television. That's shallow enough for me."



"That's not what I mean. Surely you've met some rich, successful guys, especially in television."



"Of course I have." The feeling flooding through Cherise was annoyance, mixed in with a little toxic-feeling contempt. No, she didn't like my sister. At all.



"So with a little planning, you could really secure your future," Sarah continued, clearly not seeing the stop sign Cherise's expression had to be flashing. "Girls like Jo, they don't really understand the world. In the end, she's going to end up with some loser, if she can get a guy at all, and she'll never be happy. Strong women end up alone, that's just the way things are. I, on the other hand, plan to end up in the Diamond Club surrounded by a huge circle of friends."



"Yeah, well, didn't you already try that?" Cherise asked blandly. "You know, marrying for money. Wasn't your ex loaded?"



"My ex was a bastard," Sarah said. "And he was a criminal, too."



"But you stayed married."



Sarah shrugged. "Until I didn't."



Cherise was busy foreseeing a future for Sarah, one of bitter martini-fed binges, debt, and multiple divorce. She was kind of having fun at it, too.



"I don't think you know Joanne at all. Your sister kind of rules," Cherise said. "And the next time you say anything bad about her, I'm going to smack you so hard the rocks in your head will rattle."



Sarah's mouth opened, then closed.



Then she laughed, because she assumed that Cherise was kidding.



Only I knew Cherise hadn't been, really, and that warmed my heart.



Blur.



Things flashed through my mind faster and faster, memories that didn't belong, things I didn't want to know, things I never wanted to know, and I needed it to just stop, stop, stop.



Cherise and Not-me in a car, racing ahead of a storm. A fight on a deserted road. Kevin holding Cherise while Lewis and I fought off enemies. Cherise behind the wheel, whispering prayers under her breath as we drove into a storm.



I couldn't take it all in. Overload. Stop!



I tried to pull out, and somehow the connection began to fail, but in the last instant I saw a face.



My own face, with eyes that weren't human-incandescent, glowing eyes. Eyes like David's. I watched her lips part and heard her say, "Mom?"



Chapter Five



FIVE



I screamed and sat up, lost my balance, fell, and ended up sobbing and gasping for breath. The air around me was still and cool, and there was grit under my palms where we'd tracked snow and dirt into the tent from outside. It smelled like unwashed blankets and sweat and fear.



Back to reality.



I felt an overwhelming surge of sickness, fought it down, and slowly sat up. My breath came hot and ragged, and I wasn't sure if my head would ever stop throbbing. Oh, God, it hurt.



Lewis's hand pressed warmly and silently on my shoulder, and then he went past me to kneel beside Cherise. Her eyes were closed, and she was very still.



Too still.



"Is she okay?" I asked. My voice sounded raw and ragged, and I didn't like the way it seemed to quaver at the edges. My head felt as if someone had stuffed it, mounted it, and used it for batting practice.



Mom, the image in Cherise's memory had said. Mom. David had said that we had a child. I hadn't expected her to be...adult. And look so much like me.



Imara.



"She's alive," he said, and for a crazy second I thought he meant Imara, but he was focused on Cherise. "Christ, Jo. How did you do that? How could you do it? You're not an Earth Warden; you've never..." He turned to me, and I saw his eyes flare into colors, like the Djinn, but no, that was on the aetheric; I was seeing it superimposed over the real world and it was disorienting, sickening. I tried to get up, and fell down. Hard.



"Jo!" He grabbed me and held me, and I could feel his whole body trembling, a wire-fine vibration. He was so bright, I couldn't see. I squeezed my eyes shut. "Focus. God, what did you do to yourself?"



I could barely breathe. Nothing was right. Too much color, too much sound, every heartbeat thundering from him was like a roar, his voice echoed in my head and deafened me, even the smells were too raw and immediate...



His touch was the only thing that soothed me, stroking through my sweaty hair, over my skin, grounding me gently back in the world.



"Shhhh," he whispered in my ear, barely a breath. "Shhhh, now. Breathe. Breathe."



He was rocking me in his arms, and I could feel my heart hammering wildly. My body felt too tight to contain me; I was bursting out of it; I was...I was...



Oh, God.



I exploded with light, convulsing in his embrace, trying to scream but my throat was locked tight, sealing in sound.



And Lewis held me until the waves subsided and left me empty and broken, trembling with reaction.



I'd dug my fingernails into his skin, and when I let go I saw blood welling up in the wounds.



He didn't speak. I don't know if he could. His face...his face was full of an indescribable mixture of wonder and horror.



Cherise sat up as suddenly as if somebody had jerked her upright by the hair, and blinked at the two of us in surprise. "What just happened?" she asked. "I feel better. Am I better?"



Lewis let out a slow, unsteady breath. "Yeah," he said. "You're better." And he looked at me. Wordless, again.



"And me?" I whispered. "What am I?"



He was looking at me with unfocused eyes. With the eyes of a Warden.



"I don't know," he confessed. "But whatever you are now, you're damn strong."



"Yeah, like that's news," Cherise said, then blinked and stretched. "Man, I'm hungry. What's for dinner?"



I was looking into Lewis's face, and he was staring right back at me. It felt intimate, but not in a sexual kind of way-this was something else. Frank and appraising and a little frightening. My heart rate was slowing, not speeding up. My body was cooling down from overdrive.



"Prime rib," Lewis said, and broke the stare to turn to smile at her. "Baked potato. Fresh hot bread with whipped butter."



"Food tease," she said, and unzipped herself from the sleeping bag. "What's really for dinner?"



"Trail bar." He fished in his backpack, found one, and handed it over.



"Comes with champagne, right?" Cherise's smile was brave, but still scared. He offered a bottle of water with the gravity of a sommelier.



"Only the finest vintage," he said, and cast another wary, strangely impartial glance at me. "You'd better eat something, too."



I didn't want to. The trail bar tasted like...trail dust. Even the chocolate chips seemed bitter and wrong, but I doggedly chewed and swallowed. The water seemed all right, and I chugged it until I burped. It all stayed down, and after I'd finished the brief meal I felt full and more than a little exhausted. Lewis watched me without seeming to, looking for any sign I was about to come apart at the seams, I guessed, but he didn't ask me any questions. He quizzed Cherise lightly about what she remembered-which was very little, just what she'd told me before-and how she was feeling, which was apparently great. And sleepy, because she kept yawning and finally curled up into the warm nest of the sleeping bag and fell asleep.



I was just as tired, if not even more so, and gravity dragged my eyelids down one remorseless fraction of an inch at a time. Lewis didn't say anything, just took my empty bottle and set it aside and helped me climb into my own sleeping bag. It felt amazing being warm and horizontal.



Lewis's hand smoothed hair back from my brow, and his eyes were at once wary and concerned. "Do you know what you did?" he asked.



I mutely shook my head.



He leaned over and kissed me very gently. "You did the impossible," he said. "And that worries me."



It worried me, too.



But not quite enough to keep me awake.



"Rise and shine, ladies." That was Lewis's voice, too loud and too cheerful. I groaned and tried to burrow into the warmth of my blankets, because the chill outside was sharp, but he robbed me of that pleasure by unzipping the sleeping bag and flipping it open, exposing me to the cold. "Right now. We're breaking camp. We've got a lot of ground to cover if we're going to make it to the rendezvous."



I didn't want to think about it. My calves and ankles and thighs were stiff and sore, and my neck felt like it had been locked in an iron vise all night. I had a headache, and every bruise I'd collected over the past few days was making itself loudly known.



But yes, I got up. Mainly because Cherise was already moving, and it would have looked pretty bad to be outdone by the girl who'd been on the verge of death.



Lewis jerked his head toward me and exited the tent. I squeezed out after him and groaned softly as the brutal cold closed in around me. I was surprised my breath didn't freeze and fall to the ground.



Lewis wasn't even wearing his goddamn coat.