Текст книги "Cape Storm"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

Соавторы: Rachel Caine
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Cape Storm

(The eighth book in the Weather Warden series)

A novel by Rachel Caine

To Ter Matthies.

For courage, for peace, for sailing on ahead.

We’ll meet on the shore.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Jim Suhler & Monkey Beat

Joe Bonamassa

Lucienne Diver

Charles Armitage

Katherine Gunther

P. N. Elrod

Jackie Leaf

Christina Radish

Joya Manning

Jenn Clack

Kari Phillips

ORAC

Jackie Kessler

Richelle Mead

Kaz de Winter

. . . and, as always, my lovely and very patient husband, Cat.

Thanks for sharing the voyage, and making all the

lovely, fruity drinks.

What Has Come Before

My name is Joanne Baldwin, and I used to control the weather as a Weather Warden. These days, I can also control the forces of the earth, like volcanoes and earthquakes, and the forces of fire.

Sounds like fun, eh? Not when it makes you a target for every psycho crazy world-killing danger that comes along.

Good thing I’ve got my friends at my back—Lewis Orwell, the most powerful Warden on the planet; Cherise, my best (and not supernatural) friend; and a wide cast of sometimes dangerous allies who’ve got their own missions and agendas that don’t always match up with mine.

And I’ve got David, my true love. He’s also a supernatural Djinn, the fairy-tale three-wishes kind, and he’s now co-ruler of the Djinn on Earth.

What I don’thave is peace, because even while I walked down the aisle to get married to my true love, an old enemy totally ruined my chances for a happy honeymoon and possibly even my survival. I’m not just in danger now, I’m dangerous—to everyone I love.

I’ve got to go and fix this, before the whole world suffers the consequences.

Chapter One

I’ve had many oh crapmoments in my life. If you know me at all, you can imagine how many of them there have been, and the rising scale of crapitude that these moments cover.

So when I say that I looked out past the Miami Harbor horizon to the east and saw the storm that was heading for us, and said a heartfelt oh crap,you’ll understand that my concern was not so much for the state of my already disheveled hairdo, or my not-so-designer clothes, but more about survival.

And not just mysurvival. An ominous line of storm-black out there was spreading like ink, and it was already large enough to rain destruction all over Miami before it ripped through Florida’s panhandle and blew apart into tornadoes, floods, deadly downbursts.

Hurricanes: the gift that keeps on giving.

I tightened my grip around a handy light pole as the wind buffeted me. Rain had already started to fall, and although it was nearly midday, it seemed very dark. I couldn’t see any hint of sun overhead, not even a pale shadow through the clouds.

Chaos ruled the docks, as shipmasters rushed to secure their vessels against the unforecast storm. Tourists scrambled for shelter. Locals resignedly broke out the plywood and hammers. I’d heard that the major freeways were jammed and that the hurricane evacuation plan had been triggered, but it was never going to work. The thing was simply moving too fast, and there wasn’t enough warning.

And needless to say, all this was my fault.

I mean that literally. I’m supposed to be able to control the weather, and other elements at work on this planet; I’m supposed to be able to stop things like this from happening. I’m supposed to be the hero, dammit.

It came as a bit of a shock to be both helpless and—although no one knew it yet—a villain. As the storm came roaring toward us, I knew it was my fault.

I could feel it in the burning of the black tattoo on my back, high up on the shoulder. Not the normal tramp stamp you could get (with hepatitis on the side) at any corner needle shop; mine was courtesy of an old enemy named, appropriately, Bad Bob. Bad Bob had once gotten the upper hand on me, and I was still vulnerable to him in magical ways.

Ways that I was having a very hard time controlling. The sickening thing was that as I studied the approaching hurricane, and felt the black torch on my back burn brighter, some part of me wantedlandfall. Wantedto feel that awesome power rip into the fragile human community, twisting glass and metal, ripping wood and flesh, reducing all of this to a sea of wreckage and devastation.

It terrified me.

Focus,I told myself, and concentrated hard on pushing back against those impulses. I knew where they were coming from. Bad Bob was using the tattoo—no, the mark—to remake me in his image.

I had been denying it for days now, but it wasn’t a tattoo.

It was a Demon Mark, put there by the scariest Demon alive.

And I really didn’t know how to stop it.

“Jo!” A male voice bellowed in my ear, and I clawed rain-soaked hair out of my eyes and turned to look. It was my fellow Warden Lewis Orwell—the boss, actually. The CEO of magically gifted humans.

Panic didn’t look good on him.

“It’s not working!” I yelled back. The wind whipped the words right out of my mouth. He nodded and wrestled a yellow storm slicker around my shoulders, holding me steady while I put it on. There. I shivered in sudden relief as the rain pummeled the plastic instead of my skin, but it was just animal reaction. There was no such thing as true relief right now. “We have to get out of here, Lewis! Now!This thing is after us!” Me. It was after me.

A bolt of lightning the thickness of a skyscraper tore through the false night, arcing over the bowl of the sky. It shattered into a thousand stabbing branches. In the glow, Lewis looked worse than I’d expected—tired, of course, and unshaven, but also pallid. He’d pushed himself to the limit, and it hadn’t worked.

If the most powerful Warden on the planet, connected to a network of hundreds of otherpowerful Wardens, couldn’t make this thing turn its course, then we were in for one hell of a start to our day.

“Get on the ship,” he yelled over the wind. “We need to get it out of the harbor, now!”

I looked past him to the massive floating castle of the Grand Paradise.“I can’t believe we’re stealing something the size of the frigging Queen Mary!”

“It’s stable!” he shouted back. “I’d take a destroyer if I could get my hands on one, but this’ll have to do. It’s fully provisioned and ready to go. It’s our only option right now, unless you want to try to take this thing here!”

Yeah, I had to admit, our options were fairly limited. Die on shore or make a run for it and hope the storm wheeled to follow, sparing the city.

Still. A cruise ship? Granted, Wardens generally don’t travel cheap. That’s practicality. When you have the power to control the elements of the planet—like living things, geologic forces, wind, and water—and when those elements get pissedabout being bossed around, you’d better have some room to duck and cover. And where do you get lots of room when you travel?

First class, of course. It’s not all about the free champagne. Although that’s good, too.

Taking all that into consideration, commandeering the Grand Paradisewas still over the top, even for us. The ship mostly cruised the Caribbean, but it was still enormous, and it had originally been built to give the big boys some transatlantic competition, so it was tough as hell. It was the size of a ten-story building, ridiculously set afloat. The cheery paint colors on the decks and hull made it seem even more surreal.

The problem was that up to about an hour ago, it had been boarding for its normal, tame cruise business. Granted, the storm had reversed that process, but even so, it took time to de-board three thousand passengers, not to mention the thousand or so crew members. Police were on-site, guiding the confused, angry, terrified tourists out of the boarding area and off to waiting buses to take them to shelter. It was chaos, complicated by pile-driving rain and wind, and I expected it only to get worse.

I’d been watching the steady stream of humanity with a kind of stunned, detached disbelief. As a Warden, I would never pack myself into a ship so full of people and go out to tempt fate—not recreationally, anyway. It’s a fact of life: Wardens draw storms, and not just any storms. They might start out as forces of nature, but they develop their own personalities once they reach a certain level of power.

And they develop intelligence. The one thing that seems consistent about storms is that whatever their origin, they seem to really hateWeather Wardens.

Lucky us.

It seemed counterproductive to be boarding a ship under the present circumstances, but Lewis knew what he was doing. Hethought that the storm was being drawn here by the high concentration of Wardens, and that was partly true, although I thought it was mostly drawn to me; it also was feeding off the natural energy created by our presence.

If we moved, it would likely follow. Bad for us, good for the millions of people in the Miami area who were looking at a worst-case-disaster scenario.

A year ago, we would never have dared try to snatch a ship like this in broad (if stormy) daylight, but times were changing. The Wardens had been around since the last spire of Atlantis slipped under the waves, but they’d existed in secret, a kind of paranormal FEMA that was noticed only when it failed. Governments rose and fell, but they all worked with us. They all funded us.

They really had no choice.

Now, though, it wasn’t all hush-hush and top secret. We’d come out to the public. We’d had to; we’d pushed the secrecy as far as it could reasonably go, and in an age when every person had a cell phone and a video camera our days of operating in deep cover were long gone. We were tired of exerting energy to keep people quiet.

The new strategy—of which I’d been a part—was to just let the chips fall where they may. Less work on our part, which was good, because our ranks had been thinned recently.

The upside of coming out in public was that when we said we needed the Grand Paradiseto save the city of Miami ,the government really had to make it happen, no matter what the fallout might be later on. Even if a good percentage of the population of the world thought we were a bunch of hoodoo con artists out to defraud them.

So—there had been a whole lot of orders issued from the highest levels of government, and cash passed both under and over the table by the Wardens to make sure that everyone bought in. All that had taken time, and lawyers, and paperwork, and we’d burned up our safety margin in trying to make this happen in an expeditious fashion that didn’t involve just storming the ship and pirating it away.

Hence the black morning, and the looming disaster. Sometimes, piracy is the only really efficient way to go.

Lewis took my arm and steadied me against the wind as we staggered down the harbor’s spacious walkway—now crowded with confusion—toward the gangway. It still burped out passengers, though in uneven groups now rather than as a steady flow. The Wardens were clustered and ready to board. Standing at the mouth of the flapping canvas of the covered gangway was my best friend, Cherise, decked out in the latest in bright yellow hurricane-wear. She had a cute little clipboard, and she was checking off Wardens as they moved past her, flashing smiles and thumbs-up signs.

There were a total of one hundred seventeen Wardens gathered in Miami today. Not all of them would be coming with us on the Grand Paradise—Lewis was way too strategic to put all his eggs in one fragile, oceangoing basket—but we’d have a bigger force with us than I’d ever seen gathered in one place. Which—when you’re talking about a group of people who have the ability to control the basic elements around us—is scarily impressive. Each one of us was capable of wreaking incalculable destruction, although of course we were sworn to tryto avoid that. Our job was to make things better for humanity, not worse. Despite the wildfires and earthquakes and hurricanes, without us the human race would have been scoured off the face of the earth a long, long time ago—all because a few thousand years ago, by our records, human beings did something that annoyed Mother Nature. Nobody remembers what.

We’re still waiting for her to get over it.

With enough of us aboard the ship, we were a huge, juicy target, but we could probably defuse most anything that came at us.

Probably.

I hate qualifiers.

Lewis was about to lead a whole team of Wardens (and supernatural Djinn) into the jaws of death. I was really hoping that this plan worked out better than most of my otherlife-and-death adventures.

That triggered a sudden burst of anxiety in me, not to mention a jolt of guilt. “Have you seen David?” I asked Lewis, pulling him to a halt.

My lover, David—leader of at least half the Djinn, the way Lewis was the head of the Wardens—had gone away some time ago to attend to urgent business, which probably involved some supernatural being throwing a hissy fit over being pressed into helping humans. Most Djinn had the power of minor gods and the egos to match; you could think of them as bad-tempered angels, or ambivalent devils. They weren’t one thing or the other. Even the best of them could swing wildly from one end of the spectrum to the other, depending on circumstances.

As he’d left, David had told me that meant he’d be back. No time frame. I felt his absence like grief, although according to my watch, he’d only been gone for a couple of hours.

The dark part of me, the part still giggling maniacally over the approaching destruction, was glad he was gone. David could help me control the black tattoo—and of course it didn’t want that.

Lewis shook his head, spraying rain in a thick silver spiral. “Haven’t seen him!” he said. “Jo, we can’t wait. He can reach you wherever you are, you know that. Get on the damn ship!”

I looked past the flapping canvas toward the storm front again, where lightning was ripping the sky open with vicious glee. My enemy was out there beyond this storm, with at least one hostage, and a whole lot of raw power in a form that was both invisible and fatal to the Djinn.

Bad Bob had bragged that he could kill the planet if he wanted to.

I was afraid he was right.

I was afraid he’d already started.

This was notthe way I’d planned to take a honeymoon cruise to Bermuda.

Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, a white-uniformed ship’s officer with rows of gold braid on his sleeves came pounding down the gangway, avoiding departing passengers and arriving Wardens, to skid to a halt in front of Lewis. “Sir,” he said, and nodded uncertainly to me on the off chance that I was equally important. “We have a problem.”

Lewis dragged me into the cover of the gangway and pushed back the hood of his slicker. “Of course we do,” he said, resigned. “What now?”

“I’m very sorry. We’re doing the best we can, but several of the first-class passengers have been . . . reluctant to leave their onboard possessions. Several of them have valuable items in the ship’s safe, and the hold. They won’t leave without them, and—”

“I don’t give a goddamn about their stuff,” Lewis interrupted tightly. “I’ve given you all morning to make this happen. Get them off the ship, right now, or they’re sailing out with us and they can take their chances. Understand?”

The officer—I wasn’t familiar enough with shipboard command structure to know what he was, but I guessed maybe Executive Officer—straightened his back to full Navy-style attention, clasped his hands behind his back, and gave Lewis a long, steady stare. “Sir, I recognize that this is a matter of urgency, but we cannot permit you to endanger innocent passengers. They must be offloaded before we can put to sea.”

“If we’re still in this harbor in thirty minutes, you’ll be sailing this ship as a fucking submarine!” Lewis snapped. “They’re already endangered. They get off the boat and run for their lives, or they come with us and we do whatever we can to protect them. Those are their choices, but we can’t wait for them to call their lawyers to decide.” He looked past the officer to Cherise. My best friend—endearingly human, not magically gifted at all—gave us both a little half wave and kept checking off names. “Cherise! How many are we missing?”

“We’re halfway in!” she shouted back. “Better tell the rest of your folks to get their beach thongs in gear!” She sounded incredibly cheerful. “Hey, I hope I get to be Cruise Director too, because this is going to be the best world-ending crisis ever!” Cherise was being only faintly ironic. That was the great thing about Cherise; she could find a silver lining in a coffin, six feet under, without a flashlight. She was possibly the only person I could count on who wasn’t supernaturally gifted, unless good looks and a wicked sense of humor counted. Cherise was regular folks, and I loved that she could hold her own with the not-so-regular crowd I tended to attract.

Lewis skipped right over Cherise’s attempt to lighten the mood. “Dammit, what’s the holdup?”

“You’re kidding, right?” Cherise pulled back her rain slicker hat, and her blond hair tumbled out like a flood of sunshine. She looked a little damp, but otherwise perfect, from her beach-approved tan to the hint of dark pink lipstick still kissing her lips. “Getting Wardens to do anythingon cue is ridiculous. It’s like trying to pull Shriners out of an open bar.”

Those who thought Cherise shallow—which, taking one quick glance at her perfect features, perfect hair, and dazzling smile, one might—were in for a major shock once they got past her defensive dumb-blonde routine. She was a ruthlessly competent person, and if shecouldn’t get the Wardens organized, then it couldn’t be done by any nonmagical means.

I knew what was going on with the Wardens, and why they weren’t on board. We’re an egotistical, self-involved bunch—which is, sadly, not our worst feature. Each of us tends to think he or she knows better, no matter what situation we land in. You can call it absolute power corrupting, et cetera, but I think it’s more that we all have to make life-and-death decisions daily, and that tends to make you confident, bordering on delusional. That’s fine if you’re operating autonomously, but in groups it can get in the way. It takes a strong personality, and a stronger grip on your temper, to bend Wardens to your will even in such a simple matter as please board the ship now or we are all going to die.

Lewis had trusted them too much.

“Fuck,” Lewis said. He had a tendency to be very Zen, but his legendary calm was showing significant cracks. “Jo, I need David back here. Can you find him?”

“I can try.” I was glad for the excuse, actually. I stepped back against the billowing canvas wall, feeling the thump of rain like tiny body blows, and concentrated on the magical link that led from me to David. Up on the aetheric plane, the level of reality above the physical, the link looked like a gleaming silver rope, and it felt warm to the touch. It couldn’t be seen here in the real world, but using Oversight—focusing my awareness into the aetheric, without actually leaving my body to go there—I could access it just a little.

Time to go,I whispered down the line, a pulse of power that he’d know came from me. You’re needed, mister.

And the answer came spiraling back, a surge of meaning without the framework of actual words to define it. He was coming, but there was some kind of complication. What else was new? Seemed like neither of us could take a breath without causing, or suffering, some kind of complication.

When I focused on the outside world again, things had not gotten better. In fact, they’d taken a significant turn for the worse, because Lewis’s body language had moved from frustrated to outright furious, and he was fixed on the ship’s Executive Officer like a cruise missile. “What?” he growled. “What did you say?”

The officer cleared his throat. “I said that we’ll need to have your attorneys draw up another set of papers to indemnify the cruise line if you sail with any—and I must stress any—persons who have not signed the appropriate waivers to—”

Lewis had a wicked bad temper, which was something few people had ever had reason to know because he had such a long, patient fuse. Once it blew, though, it was catastrophic; I remembered that once upon a time, it had nearly killed someone. Granted, that someone hadn’t been exactly innocent, but still—it had been like using a nuclear bomb to kill shower mold. Once you pull the pin from Mr. Grenade, he is no longer your friend.

I stepped up. “Lewis,” I said, and drew his focus. Some of the rage calmed in his dark eyes, but it was more of a move from full boil to simmer; the heat was definitely on .“David’s coming, but it’ll take some time. Why don’t we go round up the stragglers? Cherise can work on evicting the first-class stowaways. She’d love that.”

Cherise gave me a grin that assured me she would, very much. Give the girl a clipboard, and she became an unstoppable force. “Damn straight,” she said. “You two crazy kids go have fun storming the castle. I’ll go schmooze the stars. Damn, was I born for that or what?”

Lewis looked at her helplessly. He couldn’t yell at Cherise, and he had no reason to yell at me. I motioned for the remaining target—Mr. Executive Officer Stick-Up-His-Ass—to back off, but if he saw the signal, he completely ignored it.

“The shipmaster is completely responsible for every soul on board,” he continued, as if he wasn’t facing imminent grievous bodily harm. “I can’t permit this kind of violation of procedures to—”

“Procedures.” Lewis’s voice sounded almost calm, but I had a bad feeling. “Right. According to the papers I signed earlier today, you now work for me, not the cruise line. Are you aware of that?”

From the shock that flickered across the XO’s face, he clearly hadn’t been. He buried that quickly, though. “No, sir.”

“Let me make this absolutely . . . perfectly . . . clear.” I thought at first that I was imagining things, but then I realized that Lewis’s skin had taken on an unearthly hot glow. So had his eyes. He looked about five seconds from detonation. I’d never seen a human do that. I’d rarely even seen a Djinn do it. “That storm out there doesn’t care about laws, or rules, or procedures. It cares about ripping apart everything in its path. And it’s coming for us.So Get On. The. Fucking. Team. Now.”

The XO took a step back. Lewis’s furious glow got brighter, and I saw it reflected in the man’s wide eyes.

Then he saluted, spun on his heel, and marched back up the gangway without another word.

“Dude,” Cherise said in a hushed voice. “That was hot.”

“Down, girl,” I said.

“Hey, can I help it that I find radioactive guys sexy?”

We both gazed at Lewis, who despite not having shaved, showered, combed his hair, or changed his clothes in an appallingly long time was undeniably hot, in a lanky, outdoorsy, glowy kind of way. He gave us both an exasperated look and stalked off to organize the Wardens on his own. The glow stayed on him for several seconds as he went out into the lashing rain.

“I’m surprised you didn’t jump all over that,” I said.

“Moi?”Cherise pressed a small, perfect hand against her breast and did a silent-movie face of astonishment. “I’d never.”

“Since when?”

“I’ve got a sense of self-preservation. Okay, granted, it’s still in the original shrink-wrap, but I’ve gotone if I ever want to use it. Besides. Dude is scary serious right now.” Cherise waggled her clipboard. “Want to go with me? Terrify some mundanes? C’mon, it’ll be fun! And I might need you to, you know, throw a lightning bolt or something.”

Well, I wasn’t doing anything useful standing here worrying. I couldfollow Lewis out into the storm, but that didn’t really have much appeal, his tension level being where it was. He was more than capable of scaring the Warden stragglers into line all by himself. I would only be collateral damage.

Cherise shed her rain slicker, revealing a tight baby-doll T-shirt with, weirdly, a cartoon drawing of a toaster on it, complete with toast. The toaster had some kind of bar on the side with a red glow that looked like an eye.

“Let me guess,” I said, and struggled out of my slicker as well. “Star Trek?”

She rolled her eyes. “Do you not owna television? No. Not any flavor of Trek,and oh my God, what are you wearing? Oh honey. No.”

“Shut up. It’s borrowed.”

“From who, a homeless person?”

“No, from the Jean Paul Gaultier fall collection.”

She accepted that with a straight face. “Oh, that explains it. Homeless color-blind skank is so hot right now.”

We were jabbering because we were afraid. Because the world was coming to an end, again, and sometimes whistling past the graveyard is literally the only thing that gets you safely through the experience.

And I’m just talking about Fashion Week.

I looked down at my outfit, though, and acknowledged that Cherise did have a point. The white miniskirt was too tight and too short, even by incredibly lax South Beach standards. The top would have been rejected by Frederick’s of Hollywood as too trampy, and by Wal-Mart as too cheap. The shoes were plain battered deck shoes, which at least were a safe choice, if not styling.

“They have shops on board,” Cherise assured me, and patted me kindly on the back.

“Cherise, do you reallythink they’ll be opening the mall when we’re running for our lives?”

“Why not? People got to shop. It’s like breathing.” It was to Cherise, anyway. “Okay, fine. I’ll tell myself that it’s a costume party and you came as a drowned rat.”

I smacked her. She pretended it hurt. “Cher,” I said, and put an arm around her shoulders. “I really love you, you know. I don’t know what I’d be right now if I didn’t have you around to keep me sane.”

We weren’t in the serious-talk business, me and Cher, but it seemed like this might be a good moment to make an attempt. She could have laughed it off; I wouldn’t have been upset if she did, because I just needed to say it.

Instead, she fixed those deep blue eyes on me and said, “I don’t know what I’d be without you, either. Probably nothing half as good as I am.” She smiled faintly, and for just a moment, the storm lessened. Her smile was just that powerful. “Love you, too, you skanky, no-style tramp.”

I smacked her again. Moment over.

We went to try to solve the first-class problem.

Chapter Two

The very rich are like everyone else, provided you classify “everyone else” as “spoiled rotten brats with vast incomes and little sense of responsibility.” There are exceptions, of course, but money gets you excused from all kinds of social constraints, just as fame does, and that never does a body good.

We had a whole cadre of spoiled rotten brats holed up, refusing to leave their stash of gold bars, drugs, or folding money—whatever they had stored in the ship’s hold and safe. I wondered how they’d feel using it as life preservers.

The harassed Chief Steward pointed me toward the first-class lounge area, where apparently a lot of our troublemakers had forsaken their magnificently opulent cabins and gathered to jointly declare their displeasure at being inconvenienced. You’d think that anyonecould see it wasn’t a good idea to be riding out a storm on a boat, but then again, people do dumb crap all the time, and they always seem astonished that it turns out to be dangerous. Seriously. Look at YouTube.

My first brush with the Richie Riches came in the form of a veryfamous singer, with aspirations of being an equally famous starlet. She was actually obeying orders, believe it or not, and she was on her way out, practically clawing the expensively paneled walls with frustration. She was surrounded by a milling entourage who scrambled to juggle her coffee, BlackBerry, bags, appointment diaries, and small yappy dogs. She was scowling as much as Botox would allow, and had her Swarovski crystal– encrusted cell phone at her ear.

“I’m telling you, it’s outrageous!” she was saying. “I want a lawsuit in place before I hit the limo, do you hear me? I want to ownthis stupid ship, and then I want to use it for target practice. Just do it, Steve. And make sure that wherever I’m going, it’s five star. I am notgoing to some shelter with cots!—What? I don’t care what category the storm is, you find me a suite! What do I pay you for, idiot?”

I suddenly had a great deal more sympathy for the business-suited corporate drones who had no choice but to smile and take it for the paycheck. Once the flood of minions was past, I approached an immaculately white-uniformed steward who stood helplessly at the entrance to the first-class lounge, looking in.

“Joanne Baldwin,” I said, and presented ID. “I’ll be taking the room that Botox Diva just cleared.”

He looked at me wearily. “Ma’am? Why that room in particular?”

“Because she probably left Godiva chocolates and chilled Dom Perignon, not to mention random stacks of cash in the couch cushions,” I said, straight-faced. “I’ll guard it with my life.”

That broke the ice a bit. He even managed to produce an anxious second cousin to a smile. “You’re one of them, right?” Thempresumably being the Wardens. I nodded. “I hear you guys have some kind of, uh, magic. Would you mind . . . ?”

“What, working some on these idiots? Not sure you really want me to do that. It tends to not be so great at crowd control, unless you’re trying to kill people or put them in comas. Better let me try the persuasion route first.”

“Be my guest. I hope you brought horse tranquilizers.” He gave me a bow and handed me the room. Cherise and I exchanged glances and stepped inside.

We stepped in it, all right. The place was complete chaos, which was odd, because it really was a room with all kinds of calm built right in. The designers had envisioned the space as a Victorian-style reading room, complete with expensively bound leather volumes and comfy couches and chairs. Nobody was enjoying the decor now, though. Middle-aged society matrons rubbed shoulders, however unwillingly, with young, vapid starlets (I might have recognized one or two of those, but truthfully, they’d all been sculpted and styled into the same person, so it didn’t much matter). A thick cluster of black-clad people who I assumed were New York literary types clumped together like a dour flock of crows toward the outer edge. West Coast bling glittered in a group on the opposite side of the room. It was like a map of the wealth of America, from coast to coast—all arguing at the same time.