was pushed aside by an incoming storm of rage. I lifted up my arms and called the wind, felt it sigh and answer, as if it had been waiting for the chance. You bastard, you're not getting away with this... .
The man down in the arroyo looked up, and the aviator glasses flashed red in the rising sun. There was a bag on the ground next to the woman. Bottles spilling out of it, a confusion of glass winking in the dawn light.
It was a goddamn drug deal gone bad. This was what Chaz had been protecting. Murder.
"You bastard," I whispered, and gathered the wind in my hands to take him down.
Didn't work out that way.
Something hard hit me in the back of the head, and I remember falling, sliding weightlessly on cool dry sand down the hill, into darkness.
SIX
Chill Factor
When I woke up, I was in darkness. My head throbbed like a high-performance engine in need of a tune-up, and I was folded into someplace cramped and hot. Blood tasted burnt copper in my mouth. It took me a few stupid seconds to remember where I'd been, what I'd seen, and I saw the man plunging the knife into the woman's unprotected back with a shock that made me flinch.
Focus, I told myself. My senses reported that I was probably in the trunk of a car. A nice big one, at least. Roomy. It smelled of spilled oil and hot metal. There was a wet softness underneath me, and that smelled like blood. Mine. My head was bleeding like a son of a bitch, and that edgy light-headedness-that came from shock.
Judging by the road vibration, we were on the highway. I reviewed my options. One, I could stay still and quiet and hope that a ruthless killer forgot he'd stored me back here. That option didn't look so good. Two, I could knock the car off the road with a wind strike, get out of the trunk, and rip the bastard limb from limb... that one was actually pretty attractive. I felt around and found nothing to use to pop the trunk- no tire iron, which was unfortunate; I'd feel a hell of a lot better with a big heavy weapon in my hand. I hadn't brought my cell phone on the run, and even if I had I doubted the coverage out here in the middle of nowhere.
"Chill Factor"
The car was slowing down. I swallowed a burst of nausea and tried to put myself in the best position possible to launch myself out as soon as the trunk opened. Time to focus, get everything still and quiet inside so that I had the fine pinpoint control of the wind that I required. My pulse refused to cooperate. I'd worked under pressure before, but that had been when I was fighting nature, not a cold-blooded killer. I kept seeing the woman, the knife, the blood. I kept picturing myself facedown in the sand, digging for freedom.
A sudden application of brakes rolled me forward. We were stopping.
I gathered the threads of control together despite the sickening pain in my head. Thermals flowing high and deep, a layer of cool air sinking toward the ground. Warm air slowly circling up. The dance of a stable, quiet system. Chaz had manipulated it to drag the surveillance plane off course, but he'd put everything back, nice and neat.
A Warden had been an accomplice to murder. That made me sick to my soul.
I felt the car shudder as the driver's-side door slammed shut. Felt, rather than heard, footsteps crunching alongside. A key scraped metal somewhere near my nose, and I braced myself...
... and, as the dark got sliced in half by a square of lemon-yellow light, I let out a warrior's yell and lunged up, powered by feet braced against the quarter panel. I grabbed at the dark shape standing there, caught fabric, and as he flinched backward I held on and let him pull me the rest of the way out.
As my feet touched asphalt, I superheated the air above us and created the mother of all updrafts. Its power lifted us off the ground. I wrenched free of my captor and stumbled back against the trunk of the car as the man was yanked upward by the airflow, out of control.
"Wait a minute! Joanne! Help!" he yelled, and I froze and clawed hair back from my eyes.
Chaz Ashworth III, pale as milk, was hovering up there, on the verge of taking a