Ill Wind Page 0,58

"We don't sleep the same way you do. Keeping us unseeable doesn't require much thought, and neither does knowing where I am." He shrugged. "I suppose in the computer age, you'd call it operating system software."

It brought on an intriguing question. "How many ages have you been through, anyway?"

He shook his head. I'd have to ask two more times to get a straight answer, and frankly, it wasn't worth the wasted breath. I was tired and cranky, and I needed food. I was also wishing he'd told me about the whole unseeable thing earlier, because I would have felt safe enough to park and grab a Big Gulp and cheese crackers from a convenience store. Then again, I might have decided to try a drive-through fast food place and they probably wouldn't even have noticed me.

"I'm thinking about pizza," I said. "Deep dish, lots of cheese, maybe some pepperoni. They've got to have good Chicago style around here. Wait, I don't suppose that's one of the handy cool tricks you can do, is it?"

"Make pizza?" He gave it serious thought. "No. I can't create something from nothing, at least not while I'm free. I could probably transmute it for you, so long as what I made it from contained some of the same elements."

"Like?"

"Tomato into pizza sauce. Grain to bread crust. Although I'm not exactly sure how to get pepperoni."

"I think you start with a pig, but let's not get too far into that. Man, what I'd give for a Moon Pie right about now."

David turned and looked around in the backseat; I could have told him the prospects for scavengable food were slim. Marion kept a clean car, something I'd never really been able to do, as much as I loved Delilah. I tended to accumulate slips of paper, receipts, scribbled directions, paper wrappers from straws . . .

But there was something, I remembered it. "Hey, I think she left a thermos in here. Coffee would be incredibly good."

He didn't see it. I leaned back and spotted a silver gleam under the passenger seat, just about popped a vertebra rooting it out, and came up with the goods. I was just about to check it for caffeine content when David said, "Do you feel that?"

I forgot all about caffeine. The jolt of adrenaline went straight to my heart and tingled in every soft tissue on my body. I put the thermos aside. "Yeah." The hair on my arms was standing up. "Don't get out of the car."

"I wasn't planning to."

I had long ago outrun the storm, but there was a line of clouds dark on the horizon ahead. I'd been playing with the idea of doing some sabotage on the cold front coming down out of Canada, but that was just plain selfish. Bad weather was both natural and necessary. The only time I was really morally allowed to tinker was if it posed a clear and imminent danger to human life . . . not necessarily including my own.

What I felt wasn't the storm ahead, and it wasn't the storm behind. It wasn't a storm at all. I wasn't entirely sure what it was, except that it was strange.

"Any idea-?"

"No," David said. "Not yet. Maybe you should start the car."

I did, and eased the Land Rover into gear and back onto the road. We accelerated without any problems. After half a mile I remembered to breathe. Nothing fell on us out of the sky or rose up out of the ground, which was downright encouraging.

"So," David finally said. "Exactly how many enemies do you have?"

"Marion's not an enemy."

"She buried you alive."

"It's complicated."

"Apparently." He settled back in the seat . . . not relaxed, exactly, but cautiously watchful. "Tell me about what happened."

"You know what happened. You were there."

"Tell me why you're running."

I felt a lurch somewhere in my gut. "You know, I really don't want to talk about it. If I'd wanted to talk about it, I would have done the whole This-Is-My-Life thing with Marion, where it might actually matter."

"You need to tell someone," he said, which was very reasonable. "And I don't have a stake in the matter."

In other words, he was Djinn. He could walk away at any time. I wasn't even a flash of a second in terms of the eternal life he could look forward to.