Текст книги "Ill Wind"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

Соавторы: Rachel Caine
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

"What is it?" she asked impatiently. I put two fingers on the gorgeous metallic blue paint, stroking it.

"A 1997 Dodge Viper GTS," I said reverently. "V10, 7,990 cubic capacity engine, six thousand RPM. The fastest production car in America, top speed of nearly three hundred kilometers per hour. Faster than any Corvette, faster than the 1971 Boss Mustang, faster than the goddamn wind,Rahel."

Rahel looked unimpressed. "It looks expensive."

"About sixty grand, if you're lucky enough to find one." The door was locked, of course, but I could feel the Viper issuing the invitation. "Open it."

"You told me you wanted to blend in and be difficult to spot. This… is not hard to spot."

"Just hard to catch." I flattened my hand against the paint and stroked her flared panels like she was a barely tamed tiger. "She's the one. No question about it."

Rahel shrugged, touched the door handle, and the lock popped up. I slipped inside with a sigh of pleasure; it felt like dropping into my favorite chair, with a purring cat curled up against me. Soul-deep comfort. I adjusted the seat, inspected the cockpit display, and felt a surge of love as strong as anything I'd felt for a car in my life. Even poor Delilah.

"I'll take it," I said. Rahel looked perplexed. "Please."

She touched the ignition. The Viper shivered into purring life. The gearshift knob fit perfectly in the palm of my hand. Rahel closed the driver's-side door. I hit the button to glide down the window and said, "Can you open the gate?"

"I live to serve." She sounded bemused. Well, I guess she'd never witnessed the sacred bonding of woman and car before. "Do you know where to go?"

"Away from you," I said, and eased the Viper into gear. The power shifted to a low, trembling growl. Sweet."Actually, I have a pretty damn good idea what I have to do now. It's what you always wanted me to do, right? Go back to Oklahoma City. Get to Star."

She smiled. "Perhaps you're not as stupid as I feared." Her hot gold eyes never blinked. "Don't assume David will take your side. He can't, however much he wishes."

Behind her, metal locks snapped and wrought-iron gates swung open with a soft moan, laying down the last token of the Viper's protection. "God be with you," she said. I idled, looking at her.

"How about you?"

She shook her head. "At the last, I must be faithless," she said. "I have done what I could. Ask me for nothing more."

I didn't intend to. As I slipped the Viper in gear, I slid up into Oversight to survey the stormline, and I saw the Demon Mark in me, an ugly black nightmare of tentacles and edges. I closed my eyes against the destruction of my soul and promised, "I'm going to find a way to stop her." I let the Viper slip the leash and run.

The Viper—whose name, I decided, was Mona– hit ninety miles an hour on the way out of Norman, which barely required an effort on her part. She was a throwback to earlier cars, sensitive to touch, steering, braking, no computer-controlled minibrain to interpret between us.

The storm that had been chasing me for the last thousand miles was coming fast, gathering speed and rotation. I'd need to do something about that before I could make any move against Star; too much energy out there, too much risk that it could kick me when I was down. First, though, I was going to have to stop for gas. It was risky, not to mention pricey, but the dealership had left only an eighth of a tank in the Viper, and I couldn't afford to run out of gas.

I pulled into a roadside Texaco as a huge gust of wind blew through carrying grit and shredded papers and plastic bags; it had an earth-heavy, faintly corrupt smell that worried me. I pumped as much gas as my last fewdollars would allow, paid the gap-toothed cashier, and headed back out into the wind. The temperature was dropping, and the white lace top, though fatally fashionable, did nothing to cut the chill.

Another gust blew my hair over my face. I clawed it back and realized that I had company.

A big yellow Nissan SUV had pulled up at the pumps between me and the Viper.

I slowed from a trot to a walk to a full stop. My heart hammered and went up to a level only cardio aerobics should have triggered. Fight or flight. God, I wanted to fight. I neededto fight, but whatever organs in my body controlled the flow of power were badly worked over these last few days, and even trying to gauge the wind speed made me ache.

Out on the freeway, a semi truck blew by, dragging an air-horn blast. The wind shoved me like a bully.

Marion Bearheart stepped out from behind the back of the SUV and stood watching me, hands in the pockets of her fringed leather coat. Her black-and-silver hair was contained in a thick braid that fell over one shoulder, and she looked strong and tough and resolute.

"Don't run," she said. Somehow, I heard her even over the wind.

"Dammit, I don't have time for this!" I shouted. The words whipped away, but their essence remained. Her hands stayed in her pockets, but she took a step closer.

"Make time," she said. And took another step. I wanted to back away, but there was something powerful and immortal in her eyes, something larger than my fear. "I know you have the Mark."

I wondered how long she'd known, or suspected. She'd been pretty careful with me, back on Iron Road—afraid of rousing the Mark? Or just putting it together afterwards?

"It's all right," she said. The wind whipped unexpectedly sideways, then back; strands of hair tore loose from her braid and floated black and silver around her face. "Joanne, trust me. This will all work out. Please, let's figure this out together."

She held out her hand to me, silver-and-turquoise rings gleaming in the harsh lights of the gas station.

I took a step back. She tried again.

"Once your powers are gone, the Mark won't be able to feed," she said. "It will starve and wither. You'll live. I can make that happen."

I couldn't live like that, not blind and deaf, cut off from the breathing of the world. Cut off from the aetheric. Like Star, I was just too deep in the world.

"I'm not the only one with the Mark," I said. "You know that, right?"

"One problem at a time." Marion had a kind of fevered intensity about her, and I could feel her willing me to give in. But she hadn't used her power. Why not? She'd used it on Iron Road…. Ah, of course, the storm. The more power we used, the worse the storm would get, the faster it would reach us. She was being responsible.

As I took another step back, arms closed around me from behind and lifted me straight off the ground. Erik.He was bigger than me, stronger, taller, and he'd taken me by surprise. I felt ribs creak when he squeezed. I kicked frantically at his shins, but if it hurt him, he didn't do more than grunt in my ear.

Marion walked up to me and gently smoothed hair back from my face. She smiled. "Don't struggle. I know, you made a terrible mistake, but it can be fixed, I swear. You're too valuable to the Wardens; I won't let anything happen to you."

I stopped struggling. Erik let me down enough that my toes touched the ground. "It's Star," I said. "She's turned on us. We have to stop her."

Her eyes widened. "Joanne, I expected something a little better from you than turning on the only friend you have left. Star's the one who told us you were coming. She wants you to get help. Accusing her won't make things any better."

She slid her eyes past me to Erik. "Put her in the truck."

Struggling didn't do anything but make him squeeze harder and cut off half my air; I was reduced to kicking and screaming like a scared kid. Marion opened the back door of the Nissan, and I got my feet set on either side of the opening and pushed, hard.

Shirl, who'd come up on the other side of the truck, leaned over and touched my foot. It burned. I yelled, kicked out, and caught her right in the face with a snap that sent her rolling. Marion went after her. Erik staggered as a fresh gust of wind hit him squarely in the back.

I reached for that wind, whipped it around me like a cloak, and lifted me and Erik off the ground. He squawked like a chicken, and his grip loosened; I twisted the wind faster, spinning us in midair, and he let go to flail for balance he'd never get. Higher. Higher. Marion was reaching up toward us, but whatever magic she was summoning was no use; with the storm coming, there was so much potential in the air, so much power, it was as natural to me as breathing to counter her.

I split the mini-funnel into halves, stabilized myself in midair, and let Erik continue to turn and flail.

Faster.The bastard had almost crushed my ribs. Faster.He was just a blur of flesh and cloth, screaming.

With just a little more, I could rip that cloth away, strip him naked, then begin to peel that pale flesh down to red meat and bone….

Jesus.I flinched because somewhere in me, something was licking its lips at the taste of that fear, that blood.

I let Erik drop into a heap on the concrete and held myself suspended ten feet above Marion's head, looking down. Shirl called fire, but Marion stopped her before the wind could whip it out of control.

"Your move," I called down. The wind blew cold and harsh around me, black as night, streaming with power. It was sickeningly easy. I'd never felt so powerful, not even with a borrowed Djinn at my command. No wonder Bad Bob had let himself be consumed by this thing; it felt so… damn… good.

Marion knew better than to start a war here, next to a town full of innocent lives. So did I.

That didn't mean we wouldn't do it.

She slowly lowered her hands to her sides and gave me one short, sharp nod.

"You know I could blow you away, don't you?" I asked. She looked ready to bite the head off a nail, but she nodded to that, too. "You know I have the power to bury the three of you right here."

"Do or don't, it's your choice."

I was sick of everybody preaching to me about choices."No more fucking around, Marion. Don't try to smile to my face and stab me in the back, because I promise you, I'll hurt you. Now, I'm going after Star. You can either come along and help me get her, or you can get in that canary-yellow piece of crap and go home. But you are nottaking me with you."

Her eyes were ice, ice cold. "It seems I was wrong about you. I thought you would do the right thing."

"Well, it's all in the perspective." I waited, hovering, while she thought about it. "What if I can provide proof that Star's corrupted?"

"Then I'll take steps."

We kept up the standoff for another few minutes, and then Marion nodded. Just once.

"Follow me," I said. "Don't get in my way."

She bundled Shirl and Erik into the Nissan, then climbed up into the driver's seat. I lowered myself to a level where I could see her through the window. Somewhere about half a mile away, a fork of lightning blazed through the sky. Sensitized as I was right now to the power, I felt it go through me like a rolling wave of orgasm. She must have read that in me, because for the first time—ever—I saw a flicker of fear in Marion's eyes.

"Try to keep up," I said. I touched down on the concrete and let the wind slip from my control; it raged in a mini-tornado through the parking lot, slamming parked cars, scudding trash, kicking loose stones like a spoiled brat.

I stayed cool until I got in the Viper and then sat there, shaking, and felt the Demon Mark uncoiling and stretching inside me.

"I won't be like that," I promised myself. But I already was. I'd hurt Erik, I'd thought seriously about killing him. It was only a matter of degrees now, of those slow descending steps to becoming what Bad Bob had been.

A monster.

I let the Viper fold me in its muscular strength; Mona was willing to run, and I was willing to let her. The first heavy drops of rain were falling around us as I sped out of the gas station, followed by the Day-Glo Nissan Xterra. We roared up the access ramp and hit I-35, heading for the heart of Oklahoma City.

The storm was fast becoming a problem.

I watched it flowing toward me. The clouds had turned darker, edged with gray green; the light looked different seen through them. Lightning was a constant, hidden flicker somewhere up in the anvil cloud forming at the leading edge. It looked deceptively compact, but I knew it went up into the sky for thirty, forty, fifty thousand feet, a massive, boiling pressure cooker of force and power. Two miles after I left Norman, rain began lashing the road in sheets. Mona's windshield wipers worked on full speed just to keep the lane markers visible; lucky for me, there was no traffic except for the dimly seen SUV behind me. We were the only fools stupid enough to be driving.

Now that it was here, the green-and-gray pinwheel hanging so close over my head, I thought in a strange sort of way that I recognized it. It had a personality, this storm. A kind of surly intelligence. I had the sick feeling—and it was probably true—that this was the storm born of seeds I'd scattered on the coast of Florida in my fight with Bad Bob. Whether it came from me or had been birthed from the bloody womb of Mother Earth, this storm was now waking up to its own power and presence. Sentient. Able to control itself, alter its course, make decisions about how much damage to inflict, and where. There was no longer anybody manipulating the aetheric to control it; in fact, I could see lines of force constantly jabbing at it from a hundred different Weather Wardens, all trying to disrupt its patterns and all failing.

The more I looked at it, the more familiarity I felt. This was mystorm. Created from my meddling. Fed by my reckless use of power. Dragged here by my subconscious, or my bad luck.

Overhead, the storm shifted and rumbled, and I felt it focus on me. Fine. At least this was an enemy I understood. One I could fight. I looked into its black, furious heart. I opened my mouth and screamed at it. No words, nothing but a tortured howl of agony. Come on, you bastard. Come and take your best shot.

When I stopped, there was silence. The storm muttered to itself and kept its own wary counsel; I'd surprised it, at least, even if I hadn't scared it.

I couldn't stop the storm without pulling power through my Demon Mark, and that would increase its rate of growth and burn away at what was left of my soul. Then again, I couldn't go back through the storm without it striking me with all its power and fury.

It was standing between me and Oklahoma City now. Between me and Star, me and David.

The storm stared at me. I stared back.

I pulled Mona off the road and got out of the car.

The Nissan ghosted to a caution-yellow stop behind me.

"Fuck you," I said, staring up at this child of my power. "Let's go to war."

It started small. They always do. Just a breeze against my overheated face, tugging at the hem of my shirt and ruffling my sleeves. Combing through my hair like cold, unfeeling fingers.

Marion got out of the SUV behind me. I didn't turn around. "Better take cover," I said. Maybe she did; maybe she didn't. It wasn't something I could spare attention to check.

Overhead, the storm's rotation sped up. Clouds swirled and blended together. They spawned cone-shaped formations that twisted and turned on their own. Counterclockwise, all storms turn counterclockwise on this side of the world. The colors were incredible, gray and green and heart's-night black. Flashes of livid purple and pink from lightning discharging point to point across the sky.

I waited.

The wind snapped my hair back like a battle flag, even with a drenching rain; I used enough power to clear a bell of stillness around myself and immediately drew a lightning strike. I diffused it down into the ground and felt no more than a tingle, and the subtle, stealthy movements of the Demon Mark under my skin.

I told it to shut up. It was going to get a lot worse before it got better.

When the hail started—golf balls smashing out of the sky to shatter on the road around me at first—I extended my protection over the Viper, too; no point in winning the war and being stuck thumbing for a ride. The hail pounded harder, like white rain, growing into fist-size misshapen chunks that exploded like bombs when they hit. Ice shrapnel sliced through my clothes, cold and then hot as blood began to run. Hundreds of tiny cuts. I strengthened the shield around me, but it wasn't going to be easy to keep all of it out.

Out in the field to my right, dust and grass began to swirl and twist. A delicate streamer of gray shredded off from the clouds above it. Not much force to it yet, barely an FO, hardly more than a dust devil. The storm was testing me.

I chopped through the top of the baby tornado by freezing the air molecules. The sucking updraft lost force, and the dust funnel blew apart.

Round one to me.

I sensed something happening behind me, happening fast. Before I could even turn, I felt the tingle of another lightning bolt coming; I split my focus three ways into protection, diffusion, and moving my body to face whatever this storm was throwing at my back.

Another tornado, this one forming fast and ugly. The full cone was already visible, shivering and dancing through the hard curtain of rain; it was lit from within by an eerie blue-white light. Ball lightning. I felt the hard plasmatic blobs of energy bouncing around inside the wind walls.

Tornadoes are simple, gruesomely effective engines of destruction. They're caused, by the humble updraft—the updraft from hell, driven by wind shear and Earth's own rotation. Imagine a column of air speeding three hundred miles per hour, straight up, blasting up into the mesosphere and erupting like an invisible geyser. As the air turns cold again, it sinks and gets drawn back into the spiral.

Sounds easy. When you're looking at that shifting, screaming wall of destruction heading straight for you, all the knowledge in the world doesn't help you maintain objectivity. This one was already formidably armed with found objects—pieces of wood, twists of wire torn from fence posts, nails, rocks, whipping grasses and abrasive sand. A human body trapped in the wind wall could be sawed apart by all that debris in a matter of seconds.

I went up into Oversight. The storm was gray with pale green, unhealthy light… photonegative, full of destructive energy and the instincts to deliver it with maximum damage. It circled up in the mesosphere like a vast clockworks. There were other Wardens there, working, but nobody came near me or offered to link; they were focused on working the weak points of the storm, trying to warm the air at the top and disrupt the engine cycle that was spawning tornadoes.

They wouldn't be successful. This storm had its parameters well under control, and it wasn't going to let us cut off its food supply. We had to be creative about this if we—if I—expected to survive. Truthfully, the rest of the Wardens probably weren't worried about my survival. They wanted to contain the storm where it was, over open country, until it burned itself out. Any risk to me was a bonus.

Another lightning stroke was forming. Instead of diffusing the power, I channeled it, focused, and slammed that white-hot energy directly down into the vulnerable throat of the tornado roaring toward me.

It choked, stuttered, coughed on its own superheated breath. The residual heat on the ground radiated up, disrupting the cooling end of the cycle.

In seconds, the wind wall fell apart and fled back up into the water-heavy clouds, dropping its weapons of opportunity as it went. A thick whip of barbed wire snaked down from the sky and fell almost at my feet.

I grinned up at it and screamed defiance. "That all you got? You think you're going to stop me with that?Please!"

It hit me with more lightning, five times to be exact, one on top of the other. I fumbled the last, and it bled off into me, not enough to fry me but enough to scramble my already-abused nerves. I fell, rolled over on my stomach, and looked up into the heart of my enemy. There were no eyes to this storm, no face, but there was a kind of center…the cold still place around which the rest of it rotated and screamed and rattled.

I stayed down, relaxed my body, and again flew up into Oversight. More chains were forming; it sensed weakness and was preparing a massive lightning attack. I snapped the links and drove the polarity back, all the way back, into the center of the storm.

And then I did something that I'd been told never, ever to do.

I reached for the rotation of the storm itself.

It's a funny thing about momentum. It's a force multiplier for objects in motion, like kids on bicycles.

But momentum only aids force when force operates according to logical, controlled rules.

When kids on bikes go too fast, they begin to lose control. Handlebars shake. Wheels wobble. Lines of force operate at angles instead of straight on.

Speed can be the enemy of momentum.

I didn't try to act in opposition to the storm—it would be worse than useless; it would actually add to the fury of the energy circling me. No. I reached for the disturbed, chaotic winds operating at the fringes of the storm and addedthem to the storm, like a drain sucking in more water. I fedthe storm. Pumped energy into it with abandon.

Other Wardens noticed what I was doing, and some of them tried to stop me. I shoved them back, hard. One or two had Djinn support, but I had the Mark; the power in me was black and hot and blending with mine to such an extent now that I didn't need a Djinn anymore.

One or two of the other Wardens fell out of Oversight and didn't come back. I didn't let myself wonder what I'd done. The storm was what was important. Spinning it faster, faster, pouring more energy into the sink until it was overflowing.

The storm was rotating, in the physical world, with a speed that was eerie to look at. Tornadoes popped and bubbled all over the underside of it as power struggled to regulate itself; but there was too much, no control, angles of force intersecting and canceling each other out.

Faster. Faster. Faster.

I laughed out loud, looking up at the spinning pin-wheel, and the center of the storm stared furiously back. Lightning was firing so continuously that the whole black-green-purple mass was lit within, pulsing with energy.

Not a single tornado touched the ground. A massive one formed in the air, almost a mile wide, struggling to reach damp earth and rip apart everything in its path. I warmed the air under it so quickly that rain turned to steam.

The storm readied another lightning bolt. The chain of polarity led straight to me, and it was as strong and inflexible as braided cable. No way I could break it.

Let it come,something in me said, something black and hard and riding the edge of my adrenaline. Bathe in the power. It is your right.

The idea was so diverting that I lost my grip on the air below the F5 tornado chewing its way out of the sky. Temperatures dropped.

The tornado hit ground, bounced, ripped up earth and plants and fence and began to roar toward me.

I felt the energy come up through my body. It arched my back, pulled a breathless scream out of my mouth, bathed every cell in my body with pure, primal force.

The thing in me ate it, and I felt it happening to me, felt the Demon change from the tentacled horror into a thing of ice and angles, grating on my bones, barely fitting beneath my skin.

I hardly felt the massive nuclear energy of the burn-off, the energy manifesting in visible light and heat.

I was transformed in the fiery inferno.

Made whole.

When I stood up, my shredded, melted clothes fell away, and I stood pure against the storm.

I stretched out my hand and touched the life inside it, caressed it, tasted the dark furious essence of it. Attuned myself to its vibrations and rhythms, learning it, beingthe storm.

And then I surrounded it with the enormous strength inside me, and I crushed it.

Twenty feet away, the enormous gnashing strength of the tornado fell in on itself, dead. The storm's energy patterns flared and tore.

In the breathless stillness, I heard myself laughing. Naked, soaking wet, infused with the furious power of the deepest darkness, I still found it funny.

I heard the unnaturally loud grate of footsteps on gravel, and came back to myself. Or what was left of my self now.

"My God," Marion whispered. I turned my head to look at her and saw her flinch. "What you did—"

"Saved our lives," I said. I stood up, looked down at myself, and started feeling the shock take hold. So cold. So many cuts and bruises. I looked like a road map of been there, done that. "Got any clothes I can borrow?"

They didn't want to come near me. Shirl stripped off her flannel shirt, leaving herself the T-shirt; Marion dug a pair of loose blue jeans from a bag in the back of the Xterra. They tossed them to me, along with a pair of mud-caked hot pink Converse high-top sneakers. I pulled everything on without worrying about who was watching me; even Erik wasn't interesting in checking me out, right at the moment.

They hadn't even wanted to touch me. I couldn't say I blamed them.

I looked down at myself when I was finished and decided that I wouldn't win any fashion awards, even at the homeless shelter, but it would do. Good enough to die in, or kill a friend in.

You don't need to look good for that. You just have to look scary.

I'd made it seven miles down the road, almost into the Oklahoma City limits, when I ran into the first obstacle.

Wind wall. It was a ferocious east-to-west current whipping across the road at right angles, like a tornado lying down. It wasn't a natural phenomenon– at least, not anywhere other than high elevations with hair-trigger climates—but it was undeniably powerful; lose control, and the Viper would get slammed into a spin that might well turn into an end-over-end movie stunt, only without the padding and professional stuntmen. I could control a lot of things. Gravity and basic kinetic energy weren't among them.

I had one second to recognize the distortion across the road, one second more to make a decision about what to do. No time to focus or do any delicate manipulation.

I flattened the pedal and felt Mona jump forward like a champion racing for the finish.

The wind slammed the front left quarter panel like a speeding freight train, and the front wheels lost traction; I was going into a spin. If it had just been a single fast wind shear, that would have been one thing, but this was a fierce continuing blast, and as the car spun, it slammed directly into the back end, shoving the Viper toward the shoulder; I did exactly the opposite of what you should do; I turned the wheel against the skid, gave it more momentum, kept the car turning so that the momentum spun it like a top down the center line. The wind kept buffeting me, but it was only adding to the car's rotational force, not slowing me down.

I gulped and hung on for dear life as the world beyond the windshield turned into a long brown-black-green blur… road, shoulder, field, road, shoulder, field… and then I felt the pressure of air against the car suddenly drop off.

I turned into the skid, smelled burning rubber and my own nerves frying, and the Viper fought me and fought the road like a bucking bronco.

I hit the brakes gently, gently, struggling with the wheel as we did one last, slow spin and jerked to a stop, still on the road.

I was about two inches over the dotted white line.

It would have been a real good moment to open the door and throw up, but I had no time for any of that. The yellow Xterra had been just a few hundred yards behind me, and a higher-profile vehicle stood no chance at all against that wind wall. The force would flip the truck over like a toy.

No time or energy to do it the careful way, the right way; I just brute-forced an equal and opposite force by slamming cold air down into the stream, and held it there while the Xterra blasted through. There was still enough wind to shake it, but not enough to flip it over.

I slipped Mona back in gear and popped the clutch, and we flew toward the city limits with Marion's SUV right on our tail. I expected trouble. In fact, I counted on it.

You can imagine how spooky it was not to have any at all, not even a hint, all the way into the suburbs, all the way to the merge with I-40. There was more and slower traffic now, and I had to slow Mona down from our breakneck gallop. Every passing car made me flinch, because this was a recipe for disaster; if Star wasn't choosy about the body count, this could end up in one of those spectacular forty-or fifty-car pileups, the kind that make the evening news and have the words "death toll" in the tag line.

But nothing happened.

I got Star's cell phone and dialed it one-handed from memory.

"Crisis Center," said a voice that sounded too young and too friendly for comfort. What kind of grade school had they raided now? Had I been that young when I'd been on the Help Desk? Probably. It just raised chills and goose bumps to think my life and everybody's around me now might rest in the hands of somebody barely old enough to buy a legal drink.

"Hi, this is Joanne Baldwin, Weather. I'm in Oklahoma City, and I need to call a Code One general alert."

Dead silence on the other end of the phone for at least ten seconds, and then a very quiet, "Excuse me?"

"Code One," I repeated. "General alert. Look it up."

"Please hold." She was gone for thirty full seconds this time, and when she came back on, her voice was trembling. "Um, Warden Baldwin? I've been told that you need to surrender yourself to the Wardens who are following you. Please."

"Well, here's what I'mtelling you: Oklahoma City is about to be a wide smoking hole in the road if you don't do exactly as I tell you. Call a Code One. Right now."

She sounded stronger. There was probably a supervisor standing over her. "Can't do that, ma'am."

"Do notma'am me, kid. Let me talk to whoever you've got quoting rules and regulations at you."

I'd been right about the supervisor. There was a click, and a basso profundo male voice said, "Jo, you got any idea how pissed off I am right now at you?"