Gale Force Page 0,6

they catered. "Oh," I said. "Right. Lunch." Now that she mentioned it, my stomach growled impatiently, as if it had been trying to get my attention for a while and was ready to cannibalize another body part. I reached for my own jeans and top and began tugging them on. I wasn't as perfectly body-balanced as Cherise, but I had legs for days, and even in flats I topped her by several inches.

The hardworking clerk came back, sweating under a forklift's worth of alternate dress choices. I froze in the act of zipping up my pants. "Um - "

Cherise, rightly identifying a moment when a maid of honor could take one for the bridal team, smiled winningly at the clerk and said, "Sorry, but I've got a nail appointment. We'll have to come back later. Could you keep those out? I swear, it'll be an hour, tops." She caught my look. "Two, at the most."

The clerk looked around the dressing room, which had far fewer hooks than she had dresses, sighed, and nodded.

I had just finished fastening the top button on my pants when I felt the whole store distinctly shake, as if a giant hand had grabbed the place and yanked. I froze, bracing myself on the wall, and saw Cherise do the same. The clerk froze under her load of thousand-dollar frocks.

And then all hell broke loose. The floor bucked, walls undulated, cracks ripped through plaster, and the air exploded with the sounds of glass crashing, things falling, and timbers snapping. The salesclerk screamed, dropped the gowns, and flung herself into the doorway, bracing herself with both hands.

I should have taken cover - Cherise sensibly did, curling instantly into a ball under the nearest cover, which was the bench on her side.

What did I do? I stood there. And I launched myself hard into the aetheric, rising out of the physical world and into a plane of existence where the lines of force were more clearly visible.

Not good. The entire area of Fort Lauderdale was a boiling confusion of forces, most erupting out of a fault line running directly under the store in which I stood. It looked as if somebody had dropped a bucket of red and black dye into a washing machine and set it on full churn.

We were so screwed.

I sensed other Wardens rising into the aetheric, responding to the crisis; there were two or three of them relatively close whose signatures I recognized - two were Weather, which wasn't much help, but one was an Earth Warden, and a powerful one.

I flung my still-new Earth Warden powers deep into the foundations of the building in which my physical form was still trapped, and began shoring up the structure. It was taking a beating, but the wood responded to me, healing itself and binding into an at least temporarily unbreakable frame. The metal was tougher, but it also fell within my powers, so I braced it up as I went, creating a lightning-fast shell of stability in a world that wouldn't hold together for long.

I reached out, in the aetheric, and connected with the other Earth Warden; together, we were able to blanket part of the rift with power, like pouring superglue on an open wound. Not a miracle, it was just a bandage, but enough. I didn't know enough about how to balance the forces of the Earth; it was different from the flashing, volatile energy of Fire or the massive, ponderous fury of Weather. It had all kinds of slow, unstoppable momentum, and I felt very fragile standing in its way.

Help, I said to the other Earth Warden - not that talking was really talking on the aetheric. It was crude communication, at best, but he got the message. I watched as he spread himself thin, and his aura settled deep into the heart of the boiling red of the disturbance.

Oh, hell no. No way was I going there.

Then again, if I didn't, I was leaving him alone to do the dirty work - the potentially fatal dirty work.

I took a deep metaphorical breath, steadied myself, and stepped off the cliff.

Sensations are different on the aetheric - properly, they're not sensations at all, because all the nerve endings are still firmly planted down on terra firma. But the mind processes stimuli, no matter how unpleasant or strange, and so what it felt like to me on my way down, following my Earth Warden colleague, was . . . pressure - being squeezed, lightly