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at him. He looked back. After a moment, he let one corner of his mouth lift in a slow, predatory smile. It didn’t soften the harsh, hard eyes.
    Quinn had managed to look coplike and friendly at the same time. Rodriguez just looked coplike, and didn’t bother with any warm-and-fuzzy bullshit to make me feel better.
    â€œQuinn was a friend of mine,” he said softly. “I intend to find out what happened to him. If anybody did him harm, I’m going to see that that person suffers for it. You understand me?”
    â€œOh, I understand,” I said. “Good luck with that.”
    Any friend of Quinn’s was definitely not going to be a friend of mine.
    I pushed off from the car and walked away, heels clicking, hair ruffling in the breeze. It was hot and turning sticky, but that wasn’t what was making the sweat run cold down my back.
    In retrospect, becoming a television personality probably hadn’t been the best career choice I ever made, when a cop was missing and presumed dead, and I’d been the last one to be seen with him. Guess I should’ve thought of that. I’d spent too much time in the Wardens, where things got taken care of, and frictions with the rest of the mortal world were smoothed over with influence and cash and—sometimes—judicious use of Djinn.
    Shit. I wondered about the Viper now. Since I’d actually stolen it off of a car lot in Oklahoma. Was it listed as hot? Or had Rahel, my friendly neighborhood free-range Djinn, taken care of erasing it from the records? She hadn’t bothered to mention it. I wasn’t sure how important she’d have found that, in the great scheme of things.
    Hell, she’d probably think it was kind of funny if I got arrested. Djinn humor. Very low.
    I needed to take care of that, soon. I had the bad feeling that Armando Rodriguez wasn’t going to just go away, and if there was anything he could find as leverage, he’d start pushing. Hard.
    Just as I started to think my day couldn’t get much worse, I heard a rumble from overhead, and saw that a thick bank of clouds had glided over the top of the mall while I was worrying about how not to get myself thrown in the slammer.
    I stretched out a hand. A fat, wet drop hit my skin. It was as chilly as the water that the stagehands had dumped on me in the studio.
    â€œNo way,” I said, and looked up into the clouds. “You can’t be happening.”
    It peppered me with a couple of drops more for evidence. Marvelous Marvin had been right after all. Somebody—somebody other than me, most certainly—had made damn sure he was right. Looking up on the aetheric, I could see the subtle signs of tampering, and the imbalance echoing through the entire Broward County system. Worse than that, though, was the fact that as far as I could tell, there weren’t any other Wardens anywhere around. Just me. Me, who wasn’t supposed to be doing any kind of weather manipulation at all, under penalty of having my powers cut out of me with a dull knife.
    I was so going to get blamed for this.
    And, dammit, I didn’t even like Marvin.
    Â 
INTERLUDE
    A storm is never just one thing. Too much sun on the water by itself can’t cause a storm. Storms are equations, and the math of wind and water and luck has to be just right for it to grow.
    This storm, young and fragile, runs the risk of being killed by a capricious shift in winds coming off the pole, or a high-pressure front pushing through from east to west. Like all babies, this storm’s nothing but potential and soft underbelly, and it will take almost nothing to rip it apart. Even as attuned as I am, I don’t really notice. It’s nothing, yet.
    But the weather keeps cooking up rising temperatures and the winds stay stable, and the clouds grow thick and heavy. The constant friction of drops churning in the clouds creates energy, and energy creates heat. The storm gets fed from above,