by Rachel Caine
I considered what to do about all that restless energy upstairs. Lightning would be the most logical plan, but it was risky; it was notoriously difficult to control lightning, and discharging it around the city could cause blackouts. Blackouts caused panics. Panics caused deaths. Deaths were, after all, what I was in this to try to avoid.
Then again, there was going to be lightning, sooner or later, and it was going to be worse if nobody controlled its strikes.
I drove for two hours. That sounds like a respectable driving distance, especially in the horsepower-rich Camaro, but unfortunately, traffic wasn't exactly cooperative. Two hours later, I was still within sight of the city. I'd hoped to be well out of range before the prickling at the back of my neck told me that something had to be done, because then it would have been someone else's responsibility. I'd been hoping that some Good Warden Samaritan would jump in and have at it, but no such luck… not that I blamed the folks back at Warden HQ. They had something of a full plate at the moment.
I signaled and pulled over to the side of the road in a spray of gravel, emergency flashers clicking. I settled myself comfortably in the bucket seat and let myself go up to the world above, where the landscape washed away into a surreal swirl of fog and color. Brilliant, up here, and a unique bird's eye view of a gorgeous city. Wow. New York was charged with human purpose, driven by the engine of energy transforming and growing and changing, by passions and hopes and dreams and tragedies. I couldn't see as much detail as I'd once been able to, when I'd been a Djinn, but the city was still magnificent and mesmerizing, and it was tough as hell to look away.
I forced myself to focus on the job at hand, and turned my attention upward, to the disturbance.
The force patterns up there slipped like oil in water, incandescent and rainbow-colored. Beautiful, in their own way. Scary as hell, the way they were blending and morphing and whipping together. When lines of force connected, I saw the ultraviolet zaps of enormous power being channeled.
As I reached out to try to build a stable channel for it, I felt something… notice. That was the most skin-crawling sensation I'd ever had in my weather career, a shock to the system as extreme and terrifying as channeling lightning, if lightning had a brain and an intent. Something was watching me. Something big. The Mother? Was that what it was like?…
I lost control of the chains. They broke into random turning particles again, a soup of energy boiling over. I wanted to reach out again, but something was holding me back… my own fear. I was a tiny little field mouse, and there was a huge eagle shadow overhead, just waiting for me to make a move. If I tried to run, I'd die—crushed, devoured, destroyed.
Something in the real world brushed my hand, then gripped it tight. I opened my eyes, surprised, and saw that I had a passenger in the car, though the doors were still locked.
David was back, and he wasn't disguised as human at all; in fact, if anything, he looked more Djinn than ever before. A whole lot of sleek gold skin on display, because he was wearing only a pair of tight leather pants and an open leather jacket, with no shirt beneath. His hair was longer, down nearly to his shoulders, and it held a vivid, metallic shine. His eyes were their own light sources. I stared at them, fascinated; they were the color of new pennies on the edge of melting in a blast furnace.
His hand was hot enough to be uncomfortable against my skin.
"I came to warn you," he said. He was in my space, very dose. I felt the longing in him, the shivering attraction that had gripped me from the very beginning. "You have to stop."
"Stop what?"
"Trying to fix this. It can't be fixed."
"You know me better than that. Or at least, I hope you do. And by the way, what's with the bad-boy makeover?"
He brushed hair back from my face. Where his fingers touched, I burned. Figuratively as well as literally. "You don't like it?"
"The leather? Um…" I'd have to have been blind and insane not to like it, not to mention hormonally bankrupt. "Looks good on you."
"Not as good as you would."
Oh God. My pulse started fluttering and racing, and as if his heat had crawled inside me, I started a bonfire of my own. At least half my mind—the smart half—was screaming that there wasn't time for flirting around just now. Not now. And not in a confined space with a Djinn who might just flip out and kill me.
I wasn't sure that sex with him in this state wouldn't kill me, anyway.
"You look good enough to eat." He licked his lips. There was something incandescent going on in his eyes, so bright, I couldn't look for long. It was as if he were staring at my naked soul.
"Um—David—" His hand slid down the curve of my cheek, traced my chin, and then his fingers trailed down the line of my throat. His index finger explored the notch of my collarbone, and then dipped lower. He hooked it in the neck of my shirt and pulled. I swayed toward him. "What are you doing?"
"Don't you know?" he asked.
Oh boy. The energy piling up and swirling overhead. The hot crackle between us. The heat of his skin, the restless flare inside me. The sense of something…
Something present, up there.
Something vast, and beyond my understanding.
He leaned forward, and his lips touched mine. Liquid silk, warm and soft and insistent. Whatever defenses I had, they didn't exist against him; I could feel all my resolve evaporating like ice under a summer sun. His hands seemed to be everywhere, soft little touches on my face, my neck, my arms, sliding up under my shirt, thumbs tracing the undersides of my breasts…
I think my mind whited out for a while. When it returned from its sensory vacation, I was back against the driver's side window, braced, with my knees up and apart, and David was kneeling between my parted thighs, and I had no idea how that had happened. The rational part of my brain insisted that this was not the time or place but then his hand glided warm up my inner thigh and slid inside my panties, and I gasped into the hot cavern of his mouth, and my clutching fingers sank into the lapels of his leather jacket to pull him closer.
Overhead, lightning cracked the sky, blue white. Hotter than the surface of the sun. It raced from horizon to horizon, split into a million sizzling tributaries. It covered the entire bowl of the sky, as if the whole thing had shattered.
The pulse of power that shot through me was nearly as shocking as the visual. Power echoing from the sky, to David, into me.
"Whoa! Hang on," I blurted. He pulled back, and in a way that was worse, because now I could look at him, and damn, the ruffled hair, the kiss-swollen lips, the golden skin flushed with peach… He could single-handedly destroy the entire concept of celibacy, worldwide.
"Stop?" he asked. He took my hands and pressed them flat against his naked chest, under the leather jacket. Solid, velvet-soft skin. Real as it could possibly come. "You don't want to stop. You want to go, and go, and go."
I scrambled for sanity. "This isn't exactly the right place—"
"If you're worried about people seeing us, they won't." he said, and his fingers were at the bottom of my knit shirt, yanking it up. Stroking flesh. I was having serious problems getting my breath, especially when he leaned closer, and I couldn't stop myself from pressing back against him. We were still dressed—barely—but I was certainly in a compromised position. My skirt was already so far up, it might as well have been a belt, and he was one fast tug on my panties away from having me. Being a Djinn, he didn't even have to struggle to peel those leather pants off. He could just will them to disappear.
And oh, I wanted them gone. I couldn't keep my hands off him, and there was such an intensely powerful sensation, stroking my fingers down the tight leather pants and feeling him respond…
The sky turned white overhead as lightning laddered across, a hissing curtain of force traveling nowhere. The air smelled acrid and tasted of tinfoil. Wouldn't be long now. It would find a ground target…
Oh, crap.
I marshaled what was left of my dignity, pushed David back—not so far as
all that—and when he tried to lean in again, got my bent leg in between us, my foot on his chest to hold him in place. "No," I panted. "David, you told me not to trust you. And this—this isn't like you. I don't think you're—yourself." Not that the whole new David didn't have some really, really good qualities.
"I'm more than myself. Better." He grabbed my ankle, wrenched my foot to one side, and lunged forward to pin me hard against the door, knees apart. Vulnerable. He was far stronger than a man, not that male strength wasn't usually enough for something like this. "You don't know what this is like, Jo, having this, being this close to her—feeling every breath of the world flowing through you—every heartbeat pounding inside—" He was babbling. Quivering. "It's new. I'm new."
"I like the old David," I said shakily. "Can I have him back, please?"
He froze, leaning against the glass with a hand on either side of my head. Bronze eyes swirling, inhuman, unreadable. I could barely breathe. If David wanted to take me, it wasn't like I could say no; it wasn't like anyone had any control over what the Djinn did, maybe not even the Djinn themselves anymore. And oh God, I understood what was driving him. There was wildness in the air, wild power coursing through the sky and, for all I knew, through the ground, as well. This was the consciousness of the planet, slowly coming back to itself. A living world, an organism and a consciousness so huge that the rest of us were just dust mites crawling along its skin.
Desperation was driving him. Desperation and intoxication and the need to feel.
I could see a pulse racing under his skin, feel the vibration of his aching, near-painful need. It was echoing inside me, every thundering heartbeat.
I dared an indrawn breath. "David, if you love me, back off."
He leaned away, and then shifted abruptly into a sitting position, braced on the far side of the car against the passenger window. No mistaking, in that position, that those leather pants were very tight and he was, as the artists like to say, in a state of interest.
But he was sitting on the other side of the car.
And his hands were shaking.
When he finally spoke, so was his voice. "I'm sorry," he said. "This is—it's—she's never felt like this before. It's—I don't know how to—" Apparently, it was indescribable, because he just shook his head in frustration and looked away. "It influences us. Seduces us. Makes us—"
"Crazy? Horny? Aggressive?"
The relieved smile he gave me was pure vintage David. "Yes."
"I like to know what I'm dealing with. And dammit, I don't like seeing you lose control."
"I wouldn't be over on this side of the car if I wasn't in control." Yeah, maybe… barely. I could feel the tension humming inside him, a coiled spring begging to unwind. He let out a long breath and deliberately flexed his hands, then laid them on his knees. "Thank you for reminding me."
"Is she awake?"
He parted his lips, not in answer but in surprise. Some of the fog left his eyes, and sanity came back. The bronze swirl muted to a soft brown, sparked with metallic highlights. "Ah," he finally said. "No. Not exactly. But she's—in the process of waking up. And the feelings are especially powerful right now."
"Like a hypnagogic orgasm," I said. He blinked. "The kind you have right when you're in that gray area between waking and sleeping. Really… deep."
"Hypnagogic," he repeated. "Have I told you recently how much you baffle me?"
"No. You were too busy trying to feel me up."
"Sorry."
"Don't be."
David lost the slight smile he'd managed to acquire. "The problem is, I can't tell when it's me, or when it's her driving me. This is—difficult."
"You were going to say 'hard,' weren't you?"
"No."
"Liar."
"Stop distracting me."
He was right. It wasn't a good time to be distracting him, especially not if his self-control was all that stood between the impulses he was receiving and the rest of the Djinn. That thought sobered me considerably. "Sorry," I said meekly. I slowly got my legs folded into something like propriety and curled them around to put my feet on the floor. Another lightning bolt unzipped the sky overhead, broad as a superhighway—this one didn't fork. It was like a solid cable of light and power overhead. Forget about the surface of the sun, that had about as much heat in it as the entire nuclear core. If it had hit a plane, there'd have been nothing left but a floating smear of ash and some raining molten metal.
"I need to do something about that," I said.
"Not a good idea."
"Maybe not, but I have to try something. This system's highly unstable and dangerous."
"It's still not a good idea."
"Right. Can you help me?"
He was working on staying human, I could tell that; his instincts were driving him in all different directions, trying to rip him apart. I watched his bare chest fill and empty of air he probably didn't even need, mesmerized by the play of light on muscles. In the next flash of lightning, he looked almost as he had the first time I'd met him. In a heartbeat, his clothes re-formed from black leather into blue jeans and a gray T-shirt, with an open blue checked shirt on top. Hiking boots. His habitual olive drab ankle-length coat.
And glasses. Round John Lennon glasses that caught the flare in flat white circles, hiding his eyes completely.
"I'll try," he said faintly. "I'm not Jonathan. I can't—I don't have the experience to handle this kind of thing."
"I doubt Jonathan would have had the experience to handle this, either. You're doing fine, David. Just fine." I had no idea if it was true, but I wanted it to be. I reached out to him. He took my hand. His skin wasn't so burning-hot—more of a muted warmth, like someone who'd just come in out of the summer sun.
"I can feel them." He cocked his head to the side, as if listening to something beyond the constant, restless rumble of thunder. "The Djinn. It's like being the hub at the center of a huge wheel, all of them connected—pulling at me. No wonder Jonathan kept himself apart. It must have been easier that way."
Fascinating as that was, I had more practical concerns. "Can you help me bleed off some of this energy?" I made a vague gesture up at the sky just as another painful burst of lightning exploded, racing spidery legs overhead.
He took a deep breath, nodded, and twined his fingers with mine. "Ready?"
I nodded and let go, to drift up into Oversight. David washed into an almost invisible shimmer of light and heat—the Djinn didn't show up well in the aetheric, not to human eyes, anyway. The fairyland glow of the city behind the car was different up here, but no less intense, but what dwarfed it—what dwarfed everything—was the looming power in the sky. It was weather, and yet… not. The swirls and frantic updrafts were caused by the power, not spawning it, and while there were fronts forming and storms on the horizon, it wasn't the engine driving this particular machine. There was something going on that wasn't immediately obvious, and it wasn't the work of any Warden, no matter how ambitious or misguided.
I reached out to try to stabilize the system.
Too late.
Lightning exploded, down in the real world, expending immense power upward, and slamming it down like a pile driver into the ground on the other end. There was so much energy involved that it literally knocked me for a loop in the aetheric. The roar in the physical world was devastatingly, deafeningly huge.
I felt the pulse of alarm from David, and saw something happen on the aetheric that I'd never witnessed. Never heard of, either.
An enormous column of energy erupted up from the ground in a thick, milk-white stream, heading for the sky.
What the hell was that?
I stared at it, stricken, and willed myself to move closer. Movement happens fast on the aetheric, unless you're careful, and I wasn't careful enough. I zipped forward, realized that I was moving too fast and the stream was closer—and larger—than I'd thought, and fought to slow myself down.
That should have been easy. It wasn't.
/> I could feel the suction. This thing was moving, and I mean fast as a freight train. It looked stable, but it was really a wildly speeding column of energy erupting up from the ground and fountaining into the sky, an uncontrolled bleed as if the plane of existence itself had popped a blood vessel.
I dropped back into my body, hurtling out of the sky at a disorienting speed, landed in flesh and jerked from the psychic impact. It didn't hurt so much as leave me reeling. David's grip on my hand steadied me. I opened my eyes and looked at him. "You saw it?" I asked. He nodded. "What is it?"
"There's too much aetheric power in the ground," he said. "It's not the only fissure that's opening. Just the closest."
"What do I do to stop it?"
He looked grim as he said, "I don't think you can."
"And?…"
"And bad things are going to happen," he said. "Very bad things. Look, this problem is too big for the Wardens. Too big for the Djinn, for that matter. You have to accept that you can't—"
"No. I don't accept that. What, you want me to just shrug and say, Oh well, some casualties are expected? You know me better than that! David, tell me what I can do!"
He hesitated. And he might have persuaded me that there really wasn't anything to do, that there were some things beyond my control, but right about then a lightning bolt shattered the sky and struck a light pole about fifty feet away, across the road.
The actinic flash seared across my retinas, even though I squeezed my eyes shut and turned my face away, huddling against the car door; I felt David fling himself forward, and then his hot-metal weight covered me.
I didn't need protecting, but it was nice that he had the instinct.
When he let me up, I blinked back Day-Glo smears and looked around.
The metal light pole was half melted, and it was tipping over with majestic slowness. A tree falling in the forest. I yelled and pointed. It picked up speed, groaning, and slammed down across the road with a heavy glass-breaking thump, trailing hot wires that hissed and jumped.
