Windfall tww-4 Read online

  Windfall

  ( The Weather Warden - 4 )

  Rachel Caine

  Weather Warden Joanne Baldwin's stormy personal life is taking its toll on her patience—and her powers. But when the truce between the Wardens and the mystical Djinn starts to self-destruct, Joanne finds herself forced to choose between saving her Djinn lover, saving her Warden abilities—and saving humanity.

  Windfall

  (The fourth book in the Weather Warden series)

  A novel by Rachel Caine

  Dedication

  The following brave writers have made their National Novel Writing goal and wrote fifty thousand words toward a book in November 2004. I salute their incredible dedication, and I was proud to sponsor the NaNoNov community for 2004.

  Jenny Griffee

  Julie “GG” Sade

  Donna Beltz

  Silver_Ink

  Darice Moore

  Leah Wilson

  Jennifer Matarese

  Crystal Sarakas

  Acknowledgments

  The author wishes to thank:

  The Stormchasers, who encourage me in this madness.

  (Hi, guys!)

  JoMadge, without whom neither this book nor ANY Weather Warden books would have been possible.

  The Time Turners: Kel, Katy, Becky, Laurie, Claire (haka, baby!), and Marla.

  Rachel Sheer and Ter Matthies. They know why, and it has to do with werewolves.

  The greatest band in the world: Joe Bonamassa, Eric Czar and Kenny Kramme!

  www.jbonamassa.com

  (and everyone who supports them)

  America’s Best Coffee in Arlington, and whatever brilliant barista invented Caramel Mochas that are served at 5:30 A.M.

  … and, of course, Cat. Always.

  Previously…

  My name is Joanne Baldwin. I used to control the weather, but I’ve given that up. See, I’ve discovered that the Wardens—who are supposed to be protecting all of you from horrible deaths from fires, floods, earthquakes, storms, and other fun rides cooked up by a hostile Mother Nature—haven’t been entirely on the up and up, and besides that, there’s the whole question of the Djinn they use to help them in their work. I used to think it was okay to keep a magical being locked up in a bottle and subject to your will.

  Not anymore, not since I fell in love with one.

  Having given up my day job, I’ve found it necessary to put the tattered remnants of my normal life back together again… no easy task for a girl without many marketable skills outside of the supernatural realm. Plus, there’s the whole issue of having been dead, once upon a time. Kind of makes going home difficult.

  And that really fast car I love so much?

  Could be getting me into trouble.

  Or maybe that’s just my natural state of existence.

  Interlude

  It doesn’t take much to destroy the world as humans know it.

  Unseasonably hot sunshine beating down on a small patch of ocean off the coast of Africa.

  The water warms up a few degrees. As it burns off into gray ghosts, rising up into the air, it could be just another thing, another day, another balancing of wind and water.

  But it’s not. The air is just a few degrees warmer than normal, and it rises faster, carrying the moisture as a hostage. Ghosts turn to shadows as mist condenses and takes on weight. It spirals up into the sky, where the air gets thin and cold. At this height, the water condenses from mist to drops, too heavy for the process to contain them, and start a plunge back for safety of the ocean.

  But the air’s too warm, and as the drops fall they hit another, stronger updraft that sends them up again, dizzyingly high. Drops eat each other like cannibals and grow fatter. Heavier. Head for the ocean again.

  But they aren’t going anywhere; the updraft keeps short-circuiting gravity. The cycle continues, driving moisture into the air and hoarding it, as thin white virga condense and form clouds. You can feel energy building as hot sun and warm sea continue a mating dance.

  It’s no different than what happens every day in the Cradle of Storms.

  But it is, if you know what you’re looking for.

  If I’d been paying attention, none of this would have happened.

  Chapter One

  I kept trying to tell myself, You’ve survived worse than this, but it didn’t seem to be working. Any second now, I was going to scream and kill somebody, not necessarily in that order… You’ve been through worse. Yep. I had. It just didn’t feel like it, right at the moment.

  I stared blankly at the back wall of the studio and held my place under the hot, merciless lights. The news anchors, seated at the desk about ten feet away from me, were still doing happychat. Morning happychat, which is a whole yak-level higher than the annoying evening forced camaraderie. I was sweating under a yellow rain slicker and matching hat and stupid-looking rain boots. I looked like the Morton’s Salt girl, only not as adorable.

  The weather outside was clear, and there wasn’t even a hope in hell of rain from the nice, stable system out there, but Marvelous Marvin McLarty, meteorologist extraordinaire, was about to pronounce a seventy percent chance of downpours in the next twenty-four hours. And this wasn’t the first out-of-the-blue (no pun intended) prediction Marvin had pulled out of his… Doppler. Two nights ago, he’d been the only one to accurately predict landfall of a tropical storm up the coast, while everyone else including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—NOAA to the weather buffs—had put it two hundred miles to the south.

  This should have made him good. It only made him even more obnoxious. Unlikely as that seemed.

  Dear God in heaven, I never thought I’d miss being a Warden quite so much, but right now—and for some time, actually—I wanted my old job back so bad that I’d have crawled on broken glass for it.

  I held onto my big, toothy smile as the red light lit up on the camera in front of me and Marvin, who was standing next to me. He was a big man, bulky, with implanted hair and big, overwhitened teeth, laser-corrected blue eyes, and a face made unnaturally smooth by dermabrasion and Botox. Okay, the Botox was just a guess, but he was holding on to his fleeing, screaming youth with both fists.

  Camera Two lit up. Marvin sauntered around, quipped with the anchors, Janie and Kurt, and then turned to the weather map. He started talking about a cold front approaching from the southeast… only there wasn’t one; there was a front stalled at the Georgia border that didn’t have nearly enough zippity doo dah to make it across the state line anytime in the next, oh, year. Behind him, the Chyron graphics did all kinds of cool zooms and swoops, showing animations and time-lapsed satellite cloud movements, which meant zero to about ninety-five percent of the population tuning in.

  Marvin was a certified professional meteorologist. A degreed climatologist.

  Marvin knew dick about the weather, but he was damn lucky. At least so far as I could tell, and believe me, I could tell a lot.

  He walked past the animated map, and the camera followed him and focused on me as he stopped in frame. I turned the smile on Marvin, wishing it was a really big cannon.

  “Good morning, Joanne!” he boomed cheerfully. He’d snarled at me earlier, while pushing past me in the hallway on his way to makeup. “Ready to talk about what’s coming up?”

  “Sure, Marvin!” I bubbled right back, perky as a cheerleader on speed. I used to have a real job. I used to protect people. Save lives. How the hell did I get here?

  He wasn’t listening to my internal whining. “Great! Well, we know how rough the weather’s been the past few days, especially for our friends up the coast. We already know today’s going to be bright and sunny, but let’s tell our viewers out there in the SunshineState what it’s going to be like for them
outside tomorrow!”

  The camera pulled focus. I was center stage.

  I held on to my smile like it was a life preserver. “Well, Marvin, I’m sure tomorrow’s going to be a beautiful day for going outside and soaking up some—”

  Marvin had taken the required number of steps out of frame, and just as I said the word “soaking,” the bored, cigar-chomping stagehand standing off-camera to my left yanked a rope.

  About twenty gallons of water dumped from buckets directly over my head, right on target. It hurt. The bastards had chilled it, or else it was a lot colder up in those rafters than down here on the stage; the stuff felt ice-cold as it splashed off the plastic rain hat, straight down the back of my neck, to splash down into the stupid yellow rain boots.

  I was standing in a kiddie pool with yellow rubber duckies on it. Most of the water made it in. I gasped and looked surprised, which wasn’t hard; even when you expect it, it’s tough not to be surprised by the idea that someone will actually do a thing like this to you.

  Or that you will not kill them for it.

  The anchors and Marvin laughed like lunatics. I kept smiling, took my rain hat off, and said, “Well, that’s the weather in Florida, folks, just when you least expect it…”

  And they hit me with the last bucket. Which they hadn’t warned me about.

  “Oh, boy, sorry about that, Weather Girl!” Marvin whooped, and came back into frame as I shoved my dripping hair back and tried to keep on smiling. “Guess we’re in for a few showers tomorrow, eh?”

  “Seventy percent chance,” I gritted out. It wasn’t quite so perky as I’d planned.

  “So, moms, pack those umbrellas and raincoats for the kids in the morning! Joanne, it’s time for our weather lesson of the day: Can you tell our viewers the difference between weather and climate?”

  A climate is the weather in an area averaged over a long period of time, you moron. I thought it. I didn’t say it. I kept smiling blankly at him as I asked, “I don’t know, Marvin, what is the difference?” Because I was, after all, the straight woman, and this was penance for some horrible crime I’d committed in a previous life. As Genghis Khan, apparently.

  He looked straight into the camera with his most serious expression and said, “You can’t weather a tree, but you can climate.”

  I stared at him for about two seconds too long for television etiquette, then turned my smile back on like a porch light and said to the camera, “We’ll be back tomorrow morning with more fun weather facts, kids!”

  Marvin waved. I waved. The red light went out. Kurt and Janie started doing more happychat; they were about to interview a golden retriever, for some bizarre reason. I gave Marvin the kind of look that would have gotten me fired if I’d given it on the air, and threw my wet hair over my shoulder to wring it out like a mop into the ducky pool.

  He leaned over to me and, in a whisper, said, “Hey, do you know this one? How is snow white?… Pretty damn good, according to the seven dwarves. Ha!”

  “Your mike is on,” I said, and watched him do the panic dance. His mike really wasn’t, but it was so nice to see him make that face. The golden retriever, confused, woofed at him and lunged; panic ensued, both on and off camera. I stepped out of the wading pool and squelched away, past the grinning stagehands who knew exactly what I’d done and wished they’d thought of it first. I stripped off the wet rain slicker, stuffed the hat in the pocket, and escaped from the set and out the sound-baffling door.

  Free.

  Hard to believe that less than a year ago I’d been a trusted agent of one of the most powerful organizations on Earth, entrusted with the lives and safety of a few million people on a daily basis. Even harder to believe that I’d thrown all that away without looking back, and actually thought that I wouldn’t miss it.

  Normal life? Sucked. I’d become a Warden out of high school, been trained by the elite, spent years mastering the techniques of controlling the physics of wind, water, and weather. I’d been taken care of and coddled and had everything I’d ever wanted, and I hadn’t even known how good that was until I had to survive on a poverty-level income and figure out how to make a jar of peanut butter stretch from one payday to the next.

  And then there was the magnificence that was my job.

  I took a deep breath of recycled, refrigerated air, and went in search of a place to sit down. A couple of staffers were in the hall, chitchatting; they watched me with the kind of bemused expressions people get when they’re imagining themselves in your place and thinking, there but for the grace of God …

  I ignored them as I squished by in my big, yellow clown boots.

  In the makeup room, some kind soul handed me a fluffy white towel. I rubbed vigorously at my soaked hair and sighed when I saw it was starting to curl—nice, rich, black curls. Ringlets. Ugh.

  That never used to happen before I died. I’d been a power. And then I’d had a brief, wildly strange few days as a wish-granting Djinn, which was both a hell of a lot more and less fun than you’d imagine. And then, I’d been bumped back down to mere mortal.

  But in the process my hair had gone from glossy-straight to mega-curly. All my power, and I couldn’t even keep a decent hairstyle.

  Maybe power was an overstatement these days, anyway. I’d turned in my proverbial badge and gun to the Wardens, quit and walked away; technically, that meant that even though I might have some raw ability—a lot of it—I was now a regular citizen. Granted, a regular citizen who could sense and manipulate weather. Not that I did, of course. But I could. For three months, I’d gone cold turkey, resisting the urge to meddle, and I was pretty proud of myself. Too bad they didn’t have a twelve-step program for this sort of thing, and some kind of cool little milestone keychain thing.

  The fact that I’d been told by my own former colleagues that if I so much as made one raindrop rub up against another they’d bring me in for a magical lobotomy might have had something to do with my amazing strength of will. Some people survived that process just fine, but with someone like me, who had such a high level of that kind of power, getting rid of it all was like radical surgery. There was a significant chance that things would go wrong, and instead of just coming out of it a normal, unmagical human being, I’d come out a drooling zombie, fed and diapered at the Wardens’ expense.

  They weren’t likely to do that to me unless they had to, though. The Wardens needed people they could trust. The organization had taken a lot of hits, from within and without, and they couldn’t afford to burn bridges, even as shaky and unreliable a bridge as I represented.

  I sighed and rubbed moisture from my hair, eyes closed. There were days—more rather than fewer, now—when I really regretted giving in to the impulse to fling it in their faces and walk away. I was one speed-dial away from having my life back.

  But there were reasons why that was a bad idea, principal among them that I would lose the one thing in my life that really meant something to me. I’d willingly live in a crappy apartment and wear secondhand clothes and knockoff shoes for David’s sake, for as long as it took.

  That had to be true and eternal love.

  “Yo, Jo.”

  I looked up from vigorous toweling and found a steaming cup of coffee in front of my nose. My benefactor and personal deity was a petite little blonde who went by the name of Cherise, impossibly young and pretty, with a beach tan and limpid blue eyes and a fine sense of the inappropriate. I liked her, even though she was just too damn cute to live. Not everybody in my new life was a burden.

  Cherise made the days just a little bit brighter.

  “Nice ’do,” she said, poker-faced. “Is poodle-hair coming back in style?”

  “Didn’t you get the latest Vogue? Next big thing. Poofy hair. And Earth Shoes are making a huge comeback.”

  “I don’t know, honey, you’ve got sort of a Bride of Frankenstein meets Shirley Temple look going on there. I’d page the emergency stylist on call.”

  She, of course, looked perfect. She was we
aring a midriff-baring mesh knit top with big yellow smiley faces, and a Day-Glo orange camisole underneath. I envied the outfit, but not the pierced belly button. Low-rise hiphuggers showed off smooth, sculpted curves. The shoes were designer flip-flops with little orange-and-yellow jeweled bees for decoration. She smiled as I took inventory, lifted her arms, and did a perfect runway twirl. “Well? What’s my fashion score of the day?”

  I considered. “Nine,” I said.

  Cherise whipped back around, offended. “Nine? You’re kidding!”

  “I deducted for nonmatching nail polish.” I pointed at her toes. Sure enough, she was wearing yesterday’s Lime Glitter Surprise.

  “Damn.” She frowned down at her shapely toes, one of which had a little silver ring. “But I got points for the new tat, right?”

  I’d missed it during the twirl. “Let me see.”

  She turned around and pointed at the small of her back. Just at the point where the hiphuggers met the curve, there was an indigo-fresh…

  I blinked, because it was a big-eyed alien head. Space aliens.

  “Nice,” I said, tilting my head to study it. The skin was still flushed. “Hurt much?”

  She shrugged, eyeing a woman in a conservative black pantsuit who’d come in and given her one of those blankly disapproving looks, the kind reserved for girls in hiphuggers, tattoos, and belly button piercings. I saw the demon spark in Cherise’s eyes. She pitched her voice to carry. “Well, you know, those tattoos kind of sting. So I did a little coke to take the edge off.”

  The woman, who was reaching for a coffee mug, froze. I watched her rigid, French-manicured hand slowly resume its forward motion.

  “Smoked or snorted?” I asked. Still the straight woman. Apparently, it was my new karmic path.

  “Smoked,” Cherise said blandly. “Best way to get my high on, but then I got all, you know, nervous. So I smoked a couple of spliffs to calm down.”