Gale Force Page 0,44

move the van, or the cops, or anyone else.

"Hold on," he said, and our car lurched slightly and then began to float above the road. It rose at a steady pace, carefully level, then moved forward over the gabled roof of the diner. Nobody looked up to follow our progress. I held on to the wheel in a white-knuckled death grip; flying had never been my favorite method of transportation, and far less so when the vehicle wasn't actually designed for flight. Shades of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

"What are they seeing?" I asked. My voice was a half octave higher than I wanted it to be.

"Nothing of any significance. To them, the car hasn't moved from where it's parked. They see the two of us standing at the phone booth. Oh, and a flock of birds overhead, just in case someone has some rudimentary sense of the aetheric." Some people did; the ones with a strong sense of it generally put out shingles as psychics or became wildly successful investors or gamblers. If they had more than that, they probably would have ended up in the Ma'at, where they were taught to combine their powers with colleagues, and work in concert, if their abilities weren't enough to qualify them as Wardens.

I had to rely wholly on David to keep me off the Warden radar. I would remain mostly difficult to find until I had to draw on my powers, but at that moment, I'd light up the aetheric like a spotlight in a cave.

My brain was babbling to distract itself from the impossibility of a ton of metal hanging in midair, gliding at an angle away from the diner and toward a very busy road. "Landing will be tricky," David said. "Are you ready? When we touch down, you'll have to really accelerate to make the merge."

Great. Now freeway merging was taking on a whole new dimension of complexity. I nodded, and got ready to put my foot down and shift as David brought the car in at a gliding angle, moving us faster and faster as the road blurred on approach. . . . It was like landing a jet, only way scarier, from my point of view.

The tires hit pavement with a lurch, and I instantly clutched, shifted, and accelerated, leaving a rubber scratch where we'd hit. The Mustang bounced but recovered nicely, and when I checked the rearview mirror, the car behind us was still a few feet away. Not quite heart-attack distance, at least not on my end. I could only imagine that on the other driver's end, having a car just appear in front of him might have been . . . unsettling. Maybe when people said he came out of nowhere after an accident, they really were telling the truth.

I got the inevitable honk and New Jersey salute, returned the favor, and settled into the drive. David relaxed - but not all the way. I could translate his body language pretty well, and he was still tense. Trying hard not to let me know it, but tense.

"You're starting to believe me," I said, "that things aren't quite as straightforward as they seemed."

"They never are with you. I've always taken you seriously," he said. "But now I'm taking your enemies seriously as well."

Not a good sign for them, and that cheered me up as much as the food back at the diner. I was tired, and achy from the stress and the drive, but there was something restful and strangely comforting about having the wheel beneath my hands and my feet on the pedals. And David at my side, which happened far less than I'd always craved. Which reminded me . . . "You're hanging around," I said. "Do Djinn get vacations from the day job?"

"Since I'm the boss, I can take vacation whenever I want," he said, and took off his glasses to needlessly polish them. It was so cute that Djinn had poker tells, just like humans; I knew instantly that he was fibbing. "I can take the time."

David's job wasn't exactly low-key. He served as the Conduit for half of the Djinn, a link between them and the raw power of Mother Earth. Without that link, the Djinn were reliant on Wardens and their relatively feeble draw of power from the aetheric. His job was different from that of the Oracles, but even more crucial, and it didn't have time off.

The Djinn didn't like being reliant on humans. Ever. I supposed that