Heat Stroke Page 0,53

flow. This hadn't changed. I still had the instincts of a Weather Warden, even if I no longer had the same physical channels.

The ocean was cool and edgy underneath me, muttering in the language of power; there was something unsettled here, but it wasn't the usual evaporative cycle stirring up trouble in the troposphere or mesosphere. No, this was something else. Nothing I could sense, specifically, and that worried me. I traced the cooling and warming cycle. Sunlight on water, evaporating drops to mist . . . mist rising, cooling as it went . . . droplets drawing each other into close embrace, forming clouds . . . clouds growing denser as the drops crowded closer, and energy was released . . . warm air up, cold air sinking, pressing out the clouds into energy-storing layers.

Nothing unusual here. But there was something wrong.

Something in the clouds. Something that shouldn't be there.

It was-what?

I rose up, feeling the mist chill on my skin, sliding like invisible rain . . . then the drops forming, soaking my denim shirt. I was heavy with dew. The air had the metallic taste of ozone, and it scraped the back of my throat when I pulled in a cool, thick breath.

I saw a tinkle of blue at the corner of my eye.

And then I knew.

Shit!

I flamed out of there, fast, blew myself into mist and reformed and hoped I hadn't taken in too much of it, and then I bugged out of there, arrowing for Lewis at top speed.

I almost ran into Patrick, who was still ambling around his house, staring morosely at the politically correct ceiling; I didn't stop to apologize, just misted right through him and braked myself out into human form. Way better this time. Apparently, panic greatly enhanced my organizational skills.

"It's the sparkly stuff!" I yelled. Lewis wasn't there, at least he wasn't in spirit; he was out of his body again, up in the aetheric. I shot up a level, followed the thread, found him doing whatever it is Earth Wardens do to control earthquakes. Not that I'm not sympathetic to the damage a big shake can cause, but once I spotted him I tackled him like a noseguard, snapped him right out of the aetheric and down into himself with a thud.

He staggered, braced himself with a hand on the back of the leather couch, and smacked the other onto his forehead. Owww. I'm guessing that I'd hurt him.

"What?" he yelled at me.

"It's the goddamn blue stuff! Fairy dust! Sparklies!" I repeated, louder than him. "Listen, when I tried to seal this thing, it sent out this puff of- coldlight. Looks like glitter. I didn't think it was anything, really. But it's here!"

"What?" He was still dazed. I'd given him a hell of a shot.

"It's here in the clouds. And this crap is weird, Lewis. I can't really feel it, I can only see it when I touch it. It has a kind of-sparkle."

"Sparkle?" His eyes had taken on a hard, opaque shine. "You slammed me out of there and disrupted me for a sparkle? Tell me you're kidding-"

"Listen!" I yelled over him. "It's everywhere! It's in everything! It shouldn't be here!"

He was starting to get it. The opacity was fading out of his eyes, being replaced by a clear, deep look of alarm.

"I don't know what the hell it's doing, or how the hell to stop it. Tell me you know."

His mouth opened, but there wasn't an answer forthcoming. In fact, he looked downright speechless.

"Oh hell," I supplied for both of us. "I'm glad you're the boss, because as far as I can tell, we're totally fucked."

* * *

Next stop: panic city. Everybody out for the apocalypse.

Big problem. There was nothing wrong with the weather patterns over the Atlantic, anyone with an ounce of Weather sense could tell. And yet, the supercell shouldn't have been there, according to physics. It made absolutely no sense. If I'd still been in the Wardens, I knew there would have been conference calls in progress, with people eyeing this thing from different sides and trying to figure out what the hell was going on. I wondered if they could see the sparklies, and I thought they probably couldn't. Whatever the stuff was, it barely radiated in a wavelength Djinn could see, much less humans. No, I was pretty