Thin Air Page 0,32

the normal way. After a few seconds he gave me a grudging nod. "You look all right," he said. "But, Jo, understand: What happened with you yesterday, that wasn't natural. It wasn't right. You're a Weather and Fire Warden. You are not an Earth Warden. There's only one person alive right now with all three powers, and that's me."

"Is that what this is about? You're jealous?"

He barked out a laugh that hung white in the still air. "No. God, no. If you were truly a triple-threat Warden, I'd be completely relieved. But, Jo, I don't see it. I don't see it in you today, and I never saw it in you before. So what the hell happened? After...You seemed..." He looked honestly uncertain how to phrase it. I saved him the trouble.

"Orgasmic? Yeah. Kinda." He looked away. "Not normal, huh?"

"There's no normal when you talk about a thing like this, Jo. Did you access Cherise's memories?"

I nodded.

"Did they make sense to you?"

"At first. It got more confusing the further I went."

"Because your brain was overstimulated," he said. "Which in turn must have triggered the-"

"Big O," I supplied. "Honestly, Lewis, you're not twelve; you can say what you mean. Come on!"

He ignored that. "That means you were channeling power through neural paths that normally carry sexual energy," he said, half to himself. "Which would fit, because some of the Earth Wardens are wired that way, too. But why can't I see it now? Your aura is just showing normal strength, in the normal range for you. Weather and Fire, and the Fire's not that strong."

I shrugged. "Does it matter?"

"It might, yeah."

"Does it matter enough to freeze our asses off talking about it right now?" I demanded. "Because in case you hadn't noticed, you're shivering again."

"Am I?" He looked honestly surprised, and reached into the tent to grab his coat, which he draped around his shoulders. "There. Happy?"

"Thrilled, man."

Lewis quickly moved on to other, more practical things, like breaking camp, which Cherise and I didn't do all that efficiently, and then leading us on the second half of the Winter Wonderland Death March. Cherise asked questions, some of which I could answer and a lot of which I couldn't. Lewis rescued me on the biggest one, which had to do with what had happened to Cherise and Kevin.

"You remember being sent out by the Wardens," he said. "To fight the fire in California?"

"Yeah." Cherise was flushed and breathless, but on her it looked good. Lewis wasn't exactly immune to it, either, even if it wasn't conscious attraction on his part; he was simply lagging back, paying more attention to her than mercilessly slave-driving us through the snow like a pack of sled dogs. "He was showing me how he did some stuff. Like creating firebreaks. It was cool."

"Do you remember what happened then?"

She was silent for a few seconds, blue eyes far away, and then she nodded. "This woman came out of the trees. At least, I think it was a woman." She frowned. "Why can't I remember what she looked like?"

Lewis sent me a look that clearly said, Demon. I didn't disagree. Once you're already off the cliff, you might as well pretend you're flying.

"What happened after that?" Lewis asked as we puffed our way down another treacherous hillside, feeling for good footholds beneath a cruelly smooth blanket of snow. I nearly slipped on a rock that turned under my foot, and grabbed wildly. Lewis caught my arm and steadied me.

Cherise took her time answering. "Um...I remember falling, and there was-I don't know. Pain, maybe. I mostly remember passing out. And waking up out here, in the snow. Freezing."

Eerily similar to my experience, in fact, except that she'd managed to hang on to her clothes. Lewis and I traded another long look.

"Could I have been-"

"No," he said, definitely. "What happened to her was clear. What happened to you isn't."

He tested the featureless snow ahead of us with a long twisted branch, then nodded for us to come ahead. We trudged in silence for a while.

"I do remember something," Cherise said suddenly. "I remember-hey, did you shoot me?" She frowned and unzipped her coat to peer at her sweater. "Oh, man. You really did. But I'm not-"

"We'll talk later," Lewis promised. "Save your strength. We've got a ways to go."

No kidding. Hours of it, breathlessly scrambling over cold, slippery terrain. Not my best time ever. But I had to laugh when Cherise, clearly tiring, accepted Lewis's help across a narrow frozen stream.