Cape Storm Page 0,2

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 Paradise to 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 try to 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 other life-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