Windfall Page 0,123

to stop to do it?" She sent me a wordless Are you mental? look. "We don't stop, not for anything."

"We'll get soaked!"

"I'll keep the rain off of us," I said. There wasn't any point in concealing anything now. "I can do that. Just worry about keeping us on the road."

The rain hit about five minutes later, a patter of thick drops that quickly turned into a flickering silver curtain. Cherise backed off on her speed, shivering, and I hardened the air in a bubble over the top of the car. Warmed it a little, too. Invisible hardtop.

The rain hit the hardened barrier and slid off, just like glass. Cherise nearly wrecked her Mustang trying to get a look at it. "What the hell... ?!"

"I can do that," I repeated. "Don't worry about it. Just keep going." If we survived all this, I'd be in big trouble, but trouble was a cute, fond memory, at this point. I'd settle for mere trouble. If the Wardens wanted to haul me in and dig out my powers with a spork, they were welcome to, but after I finished this. Anybody who got in my way today was going to get a very ugly surprise.

"Man, that's... cool," Cherise murmured. She took one hand off the steering wheel, reached up, and flattened it against thin air. "My God, Jo. That's, like, the coolest thing I've ever seen. Or not seen. Whatever."

The rain slid off in a continuous stream about an inch above her hand. The Mustang hit a puddle of water and shivered, unsure of its footing; she slapped her hand back down on the steering wheel and fought the car's need to spin out.

It took an endless two seconds, but she got it under control and never slacked off the gas. "Okay, that was close."

"No shit."

"Fun, eh?"

We blew past truckers and passenger buses and nervous morning travelers. No cops. I couldn't believe the luck, but I knew it wouldn't last...

There was a sudden, white-hot bolt of lightning through the clouds, traveling in a straight line above our car.

Up on the aetheric, Lewis's beacon suddenly went out.

Chaos. There was a lot of it, and it was getting hard to tell what was significant from what wasn't; the storm towering up over the sea and moving relentlessly this way was filling the aetheric with energy and a kind of metaphysical static. On top of that, there was power being thrown around on a more Wardenish level, adding to the general blizzard of instability.

I could barely get my bearings up there. I hung on grimly, half aware of Cherise talking anxiously next to me, of the Mustang hurtling on through the darkness, and tried to remember where Lewis had been. Had he gotten Rahel to airlift him out? No, Lewis didn't own Rahel, and without that bond, she wouldn't have been able to blip him from one place to another. No Warden I knew-not even Lewis-could do that sort of thing on his own.

So he was still here. Somewhere. Moving, maybe, and concealing his presence from a magical perspective. Lewis was really good at it; he'd eluded the entire organization for years while continuing to do his own thing. That took guts and talent.

I didn't see Lewis, but I did see a distinctive red-hot flare of power that surged and faded like a vacuum tube about to blow. I fixed on it and waited.

Another flare, brighter. It was off to the west, almost directly parallel to the road we were traveling.

"Turn right!" I shouted.

"Where?"

"Anywhere!"

I felt the heavy physical impact of the Mustang taking the turn, and grabbed for a handhold to keep myself from being thrown against the safety straps. Kept my attention up on the aetheric, though. It was getting tougher. The thin-air hardtop I was maintaining over the moving car took a hell of a lot of concentration and control, not to mention draining that finite reserve of power I had from Lewis.

Another pulse of power, this one longer. A couple of answering spurts of gold, weaker and briefer.

"Where am I going?" Cherise asked. She was yelling again, with that edge to her voice that meant she'd asked the question at least once or twice already. "Yo! Jo! Out of the coma already!"

I blinked and dropped down enough to study the real world. Not that there was a lot to