Gale Force Page 0,1

fire going?"

"The fire is going fine, and you need to quit screwing around. You are not on duty. I have coverage on the damn fire, and you need to stop -- "

"Helping? Thought you needed it. Because three days is kind of a long time to be breathing smoke -- "

"Kid. Stop already. We're on top of it!"

I doubted that. "Let me talk to Lewis." Lewis Levander Orwell, my old college buddy and part-time crush, being the only guy in the entire Wardens organization who still had the right to tell me what to do, a fact that made me a little smug and -- yes, I could admit it -- a little insufferable.

"Lewis doesn't want to talk to you. Lewis wants me to tell you to butt out. Get it? You're on vacation. Vacate already."

Before I could fire back, Paul hung up on me. I stared at the phone, surprised and a little wounded. David took it from my fingers, put it on the patio table behind me, and said, "I assume he told you that you aren't needed right now. No, actually I don't assume that. I overheard."

"Eavesdropper."

"People three doors down heard it," he said. "It wasn't a great feat of supernatural detection."

Busted. I glared at him for a second, but honestly, I couldn't stay angry at David. Especially when he gave me that look.

But I glanced toward the fire again, anyway, and I heard him sigh. "Jo. Let go. I know how hard it is for you, but you need to let other people handle their jobs. That's why they have them."

"Three days!" I pointed out, with an accusing finger toward the smoke. "Come on, you don't think they could have been a little more aggressive about it?"

"You know as well as I do that sometimes managing how a fire burns is more important than putting it out," he said all too reasonably, and stepped between me and my view of the conflagration. Not that he wasn't, you know, burning hot his own self. Because he definitely was, and I felt myself inevitably getting distracted.

"Stop that," I said. Not with a lot of strength.

"Stop what?" He reached for my hands, and I shivered as a breeze moved across my back, which was left mostly bare by the sky-blue halter top I had on. Florida had been kind to me, for a change; lots of sun, lots of untroubled cloud-free beaches. It was as if the Wardens themselves had conspired to make my vacation uneventful, at least on the weather front, until this fire thing had popped up.

And that had been okay, for the first couple of days. And then it had just kept on coming. I know it sounds crazy, but I'd gotten a little bit ... too rested.

Not that David couldn't make that haunting feeling of uselessness go away; he was promising to, just with the gentle pressure of his fingers moving up my bare arms.

"Stop making me want you," I said. That got the eyebrows again, and a slightly wounded frown.

"Making you?"

"You know what I mean."

"No, I don't, actually. You think I'm manipulating you?"

"You're Djinn," I said. "Manipulating people is basically built into your DNA, I'm not really sure you can help it. But -- I didn't mean that. I'm just -- I'm sorry. I don't know what I'm thinking. I just -- "

"You want to be taking action," he said. "Yes. I know. You really do need to learn how to let go."

"What I don't need is even more vacation." I stepped back from David and dropped grumpily into a deck chair, stretching my long, bare legs out in front of me. The tan was coming along nicely. Great accomplishment. Everybody else is saving the world, you're golden-browning.

"Oh, I think you definitely do," David said, and draped himself over the other chair, chin propped on his fist. "I have never met anyone who needed to learn to relax more than you do."

And that was saying a lot; he'd met a lot of people. Millions, probably. I still didn't have any clear idea of how old David really was, only that his birth date was so far back in history