Gale Force Page 0,55

One made up for it by delivering a cordial congratulations on the upcoming wedding, although he politely called it a "celebration," as if he wasn't quite sure of the legality of the whole event. Well, neither was I, actually.

We made a couple of stops, including one at the lobby level, where half the passengers disembarked.

Next stop was the secured parking area, and as the doors opened, I was relieved to see the familiar form of David leaning against a support pillar, looking deceptively casual. He was wearing his full-on normal guy disguise - jeans, checked shirt, slightly mussed hair. Glasses to distract from his eyes, although at the moment they were solidly unremarkable. And the coat, of course. He hardly ever showed up without the coat, even in the humidly close heat of late summer in New York City.

"You know, you're going to have to start learning how to dress for the seasons," I said without preamble, taking his offered arm as we headed for the car. "No more of this one-outfit-fits-all thing."

He smiled. "Are you threatening to take me shopping again?"

"Threatening? No. It's an absolute certainty. Besides, we're supposed to stay public, aren't we? Present a distraction?"

"Shopping is a distraction?"

"It is the way I do it," I said. "By the way - what's my new last name?"

"Excuse me?"

"Well, I'd like to know how I'll be signing checks in the future. Mrs. Joanne . . . ?"

"What's wrong with Baldwin?"

"Nothing. In fact, I may hang on to it, but if you're planning to do the normal-life thing, you need to have an identity other than David, King of All Djinn."

He shot me one of those amused half smiles. "Seriously, King of All Djinn? That's funny."

"Answer the question. What's your last name?"

"Whatever you want it to be."

I remembered that he'd used a credit card at a hotel early on in our relationship. "What about David Prince?"

He sighed. "If you like."

"You don't?"

"Jo, I don't care. Even when I was actually built to care about those kinds of things, I didn't have a family name. It was always David, son of - " He stopped, and something indefinable flashed across his expression. I waited. "Son of Cyrus."

"Cyrus? Your father's name was Cyrus?"

"It was a very honored name at the time."

"Then your name ought to be David Cyrus."

He looked thoughtful. There was something going on behind his eyes, something I couldn't guess and probably had no context to understand even if I could. He'd never mentioned his human father, or his human mother, or anything about that period of his life before it had come to a cataclysmic end on a battlefield, with thousands of men pouring out their life energy. His best friend, Jonathan, had been like Lewis, a Warden with all three powers, and deeply beloved of Mother Earth; David hadn't been able to let go when Jonathan had passed over and been reborn as a Djinn. David had been reborn as well.

I wondered how much real memory he had of those early, fragile years of his human life. Of his birth parents, before that rebirth. He'd seemed surprised that he'd remembered his father's name . . . and seemed affected by it, too.

At length, as we passed rows of parked cars, David said, "Cyrus sounds . . . fine."

We arrived at the parked, sleek form of the Mustang, which was in perfect, gleaming condition, for having had its windows blown out less than a day before. David opened the passenger door and gracefully handed me in, like a princess into a carriage. He shut the door and headed around to the driver's side, and we didn't speak again until we'd exited the garage and were already on the road, heading for the bridge.

"You haven't said how it went," he said.

"It was harder than I'd thought," I confessed. "Not the we're-getting-married part. The Kevin part."

David nodded. "I was concerned about that. He's . . . fragile, in some ways. And he has good reason for a lot of his anger. Putting him in this kind of position is a risk, at best."

"He said - David, he said that his mother used Djinn against him." I couldn't even really bring myself to articulate the implications. "Did she?"

He was silent for a moment, apparently focused on steering around the traffic and increasing speed as the road opened up in front of us. The steel structure of the bridge flashed past in a blur, and I wondered if the speed wasn't more about David channeling