Gale Force Page 0,73
to house visitors to the Florida territory, and it was, in fact, the very place he'd performed his historic act of heroism in shaving vital strength out of Hurricane Andrew. If he hadn't, I doubted most of the state would have survived its landfall.
I hadn't thought of Bad Bob in a long time, but it seemed like his ghost walked over my grave at that moment; I almost felt his presence, strong and astringent, charming and bad tempered. Corrupt, but hiding it well. Of all the things I couldn't forgive Bad Bob for - and one of them had led to massive damages, once upon a time - I thought the worst was that he'd known what Kevin's stepmother was, what kind of perversions she enjoyed, and he'd allowed her to continue.
Worst of all, he'd given her David to play with as her own personal sex toy.
David sat in silence, looking at the beach house. If I hadn't known him so well, I'd have thought he had no reaction at all. I reached over and took his hand, and his gaze shifted toward mine.
"I know," I said. "I'm sorry, it's the best place.
All right?"
"I'm fine," he said. He wasn't, but he also wasn't ready to let me see that wound. He was all courtesy, opening my car door for me, handing me out, walking me up the steps to the front door. "Keys?"
It didn't need one. I extended my hand, the one with the Warden symbol invisibly etched into the skin, and heard the lock click over. I opened the door, and the smell of the place washed over me, bringing with it another rush of memories as I stepped inside. Bad Bob hadn't been gone long enough for his imprint to completely fade from this place; I swore I smelled the ghost of his cigar smoke, before the more powerful odor of musty carpeting and furniture took over. The house needed a full-scale cleaning. Something to keep me busy, I supposed.
David hadn't followed me inside. I turned toward him and saw that he'd put out a palm, which was spread flat against an invisible barrier. As I watched, he moved his hand from side to side. I could see his skin flattening as it came into contact with . . . something.
"What is it?" I moved back to the threshold and waved my hand through the air. No barrier. I could even make contact with David's hands, but I couldn't pull him through. "What the hell . . . ?"
"Wards," he said. "Set to keep Djinn out. You'll have to take them down before I can come inside."
Wards - magical boundaries - were an exclusive specialty of Earth Wardens, and they were usually fiendishly difficult to unravel. They could be set to exclude anything the Warden designed it to exclude - Djinn, in this case, but I'd seen them engineered to hold out humans, and even specific individuals.
I was, theoretically, an Earth Warden, but I hadn't exactly been trained in the finer points. It was on the to-do list, but from all that I understood, breaking wards was definitely a graduate-level course. Maybe even postdoctoral. "Any idea who put this up?" I asked. Not Bad Bob, at least; he was purely and completely a Weather Warden. But he'd had a lot of friends, and most of them had been . . . questionable.
"Yes, but it won't do you any good. He's dead. Bad Bob had me kill him."
The matter-of-fact way that David said it made me freeze for a second, and not just in the not-moving sense. "You . . . killed for him."
"I had no choice at the time."
"I know that. I just didn't know - " I shook my head. "I'm so sorry, David. He had no right."
David said nothing to that; he clearly wanted to drop the subject, and I obliged by focusing on the structure of the wards holding him outside the door. They were strongly made, and if they'd survived the death of their maker, they were independently fueled by some source. If I could locate the source, I could disable the wards - like pulling the battery. Problem was, a good Earth Warden (and this one had been very, very good) could imbue nearly anything with aetheric energy and set it on a slow, steady discharge. It could be something as innocuous as a teacup hidden in the back of the pantry, or as obvious as a big switch labeled TURN OFF