Read Ill Wind for Free Online Page B

and homicidal, and the only thing that stands between you and hideous, painful death is a couple of thousand people worldwide hanging on by their fingernails. Happy, huh? Most people don’t want to know that. Hell, most of the time I don’t want to know.
    The Wardens are people with one hell of a lot of magical ability, but the Wardens Association is, foremost and always, a bureaucracy. Oh, sure, we’re public servants, saving lives, doing good works, blah blah, but hey, we get paid, and we have structure and job duties and a very nice dental program. Sort of like the IRS, if the IRS kept you from being horribly killed on a daily basis.
    In charge are the High Wardens who make up the World Council (which is, oddly, based in the UN Building in New York, although not on any floor most people are likely to visit). Below them you have your National Wardens, who control entire countries, and beneath them Sector Wardens, Regional Wardens, Local Wardens, and Staff.
    Nobody expected there would be anything more powerful than a World Council Warden, but thennobody had expected Lewis to pop up, controlling all the elements. Lewis didn’t fit. Or . . . to be more accurate . . . he fit in right at the top. A true master of the craft, absolutely unique. Nobody in the great big machine that made up the Association much liked the idea, except they couldn’t very well doubt it, not with Lewis demonstrating it every time they asked by calling fire, water, air, earth. For a while after the incident with the frat boys, Lewis lived like a lab rat, hemmed in by people who desperately wanted to control him, disprove him, understand him, stop him, worship him, destroy him. And some who just wanted his autograph.
    I tried to find out what was going on, but I was just an apprentice, even if everybody agreed I had lots of power and promise. There was no way I’d be kept informed about decisions made at the World level. But at some point—and this is just a guess—I think they decided that it would be safer for everybody if Lewis just didn’t exist.
    I think somebody tried to kill him. Worse. I think they were stupid enough to miss.
    Anyway, we know that Lewis flew the coop. He vanished with three—count ’em, three —of the precious bottles of Djinn from the Association vaults. Poof. Crime of the century, committed by the most wanted man on earth.
    Since then, seven years ago, a lot of people have been looking for Lewis.
    I was just the latest.
    Â 
    Lightning bolts out of the blue. Great. Somebody was trying to kill me. Actively. This was new, different, and not very welcome.
    It was possible—okay, likely—that this had to do with a guy named Bad Bob Biringanine. Bad Bob was not quite two days dead, I’d been there for his big finish, and it was entirely conceivable that I was going to be held responsible. I might have a slim chance of avoiding that, but only if I came in from the cold and talked to the Wardens Council . . . and if I did it wearing the Demon Mark, well, that would be the ball game. I could explain, but they’d never believe me. Never.
    And in any case, whether they believed me or not, they couldn’t help me.
    I was just praying hard that Lewis could. The problem was getting to him before somebody else got to me.
    It was possible that the lightning had been an official warning from the Wardens, in which case I was in really deep, no shovel in sight; I needed to know for sure before I decided on my next move. There was only one person I could trust to ask, these days, who was still on the inside. I retrieved the cell phone, checked the charge—down to one slender bar—and speed-dialed another number.
    I got Paul on the first ring.
    â€œJesus fucking Christ, Jo, what did you just do?” It was a bellow, not a question, and I jerked the phone away from my ear, then tentatively moved it back. “Fuckin’ power surge the size