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Prologue

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 er that coot 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 soot their own endas that don’t always ot 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’t have 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 honeyer now, I’ot to go and fix this, before the whole world suffers the consequences

Chapter One

I’ve had many oh crap ine howscale 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 stor for us, and said a heartfelt oh crap, you’ll understand that my concern was not so much for the state of ner clothes, but more about survival

And not just my survival An o like ink, and it was already large enough to rain destruction all over Miah Florida’s panhandle and blew apart into tornadoes, floods, deadly downbursts

Hurricanes: the gift that keeps on giving

I tightened ht pole as the wind buffeted h 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 shipainst the unforecast stornedly broke out the plywood and hammers I’d heard that the major freeere jaered, but it was never going to work The thing was si

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’ I’m supposed to be the hero, dammit

It cah no one knew it yet - a villain

As the stor toward us, I kneasof the black tattoo on h up on the shoulder Not the noret (with hepatitis on the side) at any corner needle shop; mine was courtesy of an old eneotten the upper hand on ical ways

Ways that I was having a very hard ti was that as I studied the approaching hurricane, and felt the black torch on hter, some part of me wanted landfall Wanted to feel that awesolass andall of this to a sea of wreckage and devastation

It terrified me

Focus,I told ainst those i the tattoo - no, the e

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 kno 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 ood on hi!" I yelled back The hipped the words right out of my mouth He nodded and wrestled a yellow stor 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 aniht now "We have to get out of here, Lewis! Now! This thing is after us!" Me It was afterthe 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 glois 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 other powerful Wardens, couldn’tturn its course, then ere 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 hi castle of the Grand Paradise "I can’t believe we’re stealing so 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 stor the city

Still A cruise ship? Granted, Wardens generally don’t travel cheap That’s practicality

When you have the power to control the eleic forces, wind, and water - and when those ele bossed around, you’d better have soet lots of room when you travel?