Windfall Page 0,2

climate."

I stared at him for about two seconds too long for television etiquette, then turned my smile back on like a porch light and said to the camera, "We'll be back tomorrow morning with more fun weather facts, kids!"

Marvin waved. I waved. The red light went out. Kurt and Janie started doing more happychat; they were about to interview a golden retriever, for some bizarre reason. I gave Marvin the kind of look that would have gotten me fired if I'd given it on the air, and threw my wet hair over my shoulder to wring it out like a mop into the ducky pool.

He leaned over to me and, in a whisper, said, "Hey, do you know this one? How is snow white?... Pretty damn good, according to the seven dwarves. Ha!"

"Your mike is on," I said, and watched him do the panic dance. His mike really wasn't, but it was so nice to see him make that face. The golden retriever, confused, woofed at him and lunged; panic ensued, both on and off camera. I stepped out of the wading pool and squelched away, past the grinning stagehands who knew exactly what I'd done and wished they'd thought of it first. I stripped off the wet rain slicker, stuffed the hat in the pocket, and escaped from the set and out the sound-baffling door.

Free.

Hard to believe that less than a year ago I'd been a trusted agent of one of the most powerful organizations on Earth, entrusted with the lives and safety of a few million people on a daily basis. Even harder to believe that I'd thrown all that away without looking back, and actually thought that I wouldn't miss it.

Normal life? Sucked. I'd become a Warden out of high school, been trained by the elite, spent years mastering the techniques of controlling the physics of wind, water, and weather. I'd been taken care of and coddled and had everything I'd ever wanted, and I hadn't even known how good that was until I had to survive on a poverty-level income and figure out how to make a jar of peanut butter stretch from one payday to the next.

And then there was the magnificence that was my job.

I took a deep breath of recycled, refrigerated air, and went in search of a place to sit down. A couple of staffers were in the hall, chitchatting; they watched me with the kind of bemused expressions people get when they're imagining themselves in your place and thinking, there but for the grace of God ...

I ignored them as I squished by in my big, yellow clown boots.

In the makeup room, some kind soul handed me a fluffy white towel. I rubbed vigorously at my soaked hair and sighed when I saw it was starting to curl-nice, rich, black curls. Ringlets. Ugh.

That never used to happen before I died. I'd been a power. And then I'd had a brief, wildly strange few days as a wish-granting Djinn, which was both a hell of a lot more and less fun than you'd imagine. And then, I'd been bumped back down to mere mortal.

But in the process my hair had gone from glossy-straight to mega-curly. All my power, and I couldn't even keep a decent hairstyle.

Maybe power was an overstatement these days, anyway. I'd turned in my proverbial badge and gun to the Wardens, quit and walked away; technically, that meant that even though I might have some raw ability-a lot of it-I was now a regular citizen. Granted, a regular citizen who could sense and manipulate weather. Not that I did, of course. But I could. For three months, I'd gone cold turkey, resisting the urge to meddle, and I was pretty proud of myself. Too bad they didn't have a twelve-step program for this sort of thing, and some kind of cool little milestone keychain thing.

The fact that I'd been told by my own former colleagues that if I so much as made one raindrop rub up against another they'd bring me in for a magical lobotomy might have had something to do with my amazing strength of will. Some people survived that process just fine, but with someone like me, who had such a high level of that kind of power, getting rid of it all was like radical surgery. There was a significant chance that things would go wrong, and instead of just