by Rachel Caine
"I'm sorry, I didn't see you in there. The pool area's closed for the night," she said. David—just human David again, brown hair and brown eyes, just another guy—nodded and apologized. We strolled back up the hall to the elevators, where we waited politely until one dinged open for us.
I shivered in the air-conditioning as the doors rumbled closed; David noticed, made a casual gesture, and instantly I was warm and dry.
"Wow," I said, surprised. He raised his eyebrows.
"Nothing you couldn't do yourself."
I moved closer to him and found him dry, too; warm as if he wore summer under his skin. He put his arms around me, but he did it carefully. Too carefully.
"David."
"Yes?"
"I'm not fragile."
He didn't smile, didn't look away from my face. Close up, the color of his eyes was a deep, rich gold-stone. "Compared with me?"
"Okay, granted, more fragile than you. But don't treat me like I'm dying, I'm not dying, I'm just— living until I don't." David still didn't look away. "Promise me you won't let all this stop you from throwing me up against the wall right now and kissing me like my life depended on it."
It was a short ride to the third floor, too short for the kind of reassurance I wanted, but he did manage to make me feel better. And warmer.
In the room, with towels and swimsuits discarded, he proceeded to raise my body temperature considerably. This time, there was no demonic tantrum to spoil it for us, just long, slow, delicious heat that kept building and building until I burned.
I fell asleep curled against him, with his hand over the Mark, holding it still.
I woke up alone in a well-mussed bed, felt the cold hollow in the pillow where David had lain, and I felt that cold certainty sweep over me that it was like the first night: I was going to open my eyes to find him gone as if he'd never been.
But when I looked, he was standing at the window, looking out. He was already dressed in a gold flannel shirt and blue jeans, feet bare, and he had his glasses on again. Human disguise firmly in place.
I stretched and let the sheet slip down. David didn't take the bait. He looked uncommonly sober for so early in the morning, especially after a night that had left me still tingling and vibrating all over.
"No good morning?" I asked. "What's so fascinating? Cheerleaders practicing naked in the parking lot?"
He didn't answer. I got up, wrapped a sheet around me in the best movie-star fashion, and togaed over to join him at the plate-glass window. The sun was above the horizon, but not by much; it was layered in pinks and golds, floating just under a gray layer of low-hanging, rounded clouds. More rain up there. And a darker line to the south that I didn't like.
"Nasty," I said, pointing to it. He still didn't answer. "Earth to David? Hello?"
And then I saw where he was looking, down into the parking lot. For a few seconds, it didn't register-cars, lots of cars, nothing special…
… and then my eyes settled on a midnight-blue Mustang with a charred driver's side door, parked innocently in the fourth row. Next to the white Land Rover.
Marion's hunters were here.
"Shit!"
I dropped the sheet and ran into the bathroom, scooped up clothes from the floor, and pulled on stretch velvet pants without bothering with underwear. The lace shirt tore at the bottom as I yanked it over my head. Jacket and shoes went on practically simultaneously, and while I was dragging my tangled hair out from under the coat collar, I yelled at David, "Come on!"
He was still at the window. Shoeless. I grabbed his arm and towed him toward the hotel room door.
He stopped two seconds before the knock came. His face was focused and pale, eyes as dark as midnight.
"Get in the bathroom," he said. "Shut the door."
As if that would do any good. "I'm going down fighting, not hiding."
"Just do it!" His fury was sudden and hot as nuclear fire, and before I could even try to argue, he took me by the shirt and shoved me into the bathroom, banged the door shut, and I heard a huge concussion of sound, of pressure. What the hell—?
I opened the door and saw the glitter of glass all over the carpet. The curtains were blowing in, straight in, like gale flags. The windows were completely gone, nothing but a sugar-dusting of glass left at the corners.
David turned, grabbed me by the hand, and pulled me to the window. Picked me up like a toy in his arms. Behind us, the door to the room shuddered and jumped on its hinges, then caught fire with a red-orange whoosh.
David jumped out into open air.
I didn't know how indestructible free-range Djinn might be, so I formed a thick cushion of air under us, an updraft to counter our fall. It was still a jolt of an impact, but even before my mind could register it, David was already running.
"Put me down!" I yelled.
"Shut up!" he yelled back. There was raw ferocity in his voice, too much to argue with. He skidded to a halt next to Delilah. "Get in the car!"
The door was unlocked. He put me down, and I slid into the driver's seat; no keys, but he reached in the open door and touched the ignition to start her up.
"David—"
"Drive! Don't stop for anything!"
Before I could protest, he was running back toward the hotel, looking up at the black gaping hole that used to be our window on the third floor.
Someone was standing there. I couldn't see who it was, because at that moment the curtains fluttered and started to blow out instead of in. I felt the shock wave of it a second before it hit—straight-line winds, running at least a hundred miles an hour. I felt Delilah shudder and roll backwards; I jammed on the brakes. David hadn't moved, but his shirt was being pulled right off him by the merciless pressure. As I watched, buttons popped and the fabric slid down his arms; the wind took it and it whipped away toward the horizon.
There was a terrible concussive pop from the direction of the hotel.
Something coming at us. Glittering. David turned, screaming at me to drive, now, and it was more the stark urgency in his face than understanding that made me scratch rubber in reverse out of the parking space. When I realized what it was that I saw flying toward me across the parking lot, I hit the brakes again and screeched to a bone-crunching halt.
Every window on this side of the hotel had shattered, and the glittering, slicing fragments were hurtling toward me.
Toward a family of four clinging to the door of a red minivan down the row.
Toward a pregnant woman huddling out in the open, caught between rows of cars.
Toward David.
I threw myself up into Oversight and grabbed for what I could reach, which wasn't much; this was brute-force stuff, and my enemy already had control of just about everything there was to use. I grabbed air and forced molecules to move, move, never mind the chaos factors that introduced; that wall of broken glass was going to shred us all to hamburger if I didn't.
I jammed on the car brakes, abandoned the idea of retreat, and focused everything I had on the moment. I superheated the air and released it in a hard, fast, focused pulse. It didn't have to be much, just enough to disrupt the wind for a fraction of a second; glass is too heavy to continue at right angles to gravity without a clear kinetic force acting on it.
My microburst—five hundred yards wide—blew into the opposing wind-wall and shattered the momentum, and for a second there was a haze there of power meeting power, glass turning over and over like windblown confetti, and then the shards rained down to the asphalt with a sound like a hundred bags of dimes breaking open. The hurricane attack started up again, but it was too late; glass isn't easy to get airborne once it's on the ground.
I realized I could no longer see David. God, I'd been too late, too late to keep the glass from hitting him—he was down somewhere, between the cars, down and slashed to ribbons—
The passenger door yanked open, and David threw himself in, bare-chested and bleeding. "I told you to go!" he shouted. I jammed Delilah back in gear, po
pped the clutch, and squealed rubber in a turn that any stunt driver would have been proud of. We screeched around the corner, heading for the street—
— and almost crashed headfirst into a Winnebago blocking the exit. I jerked the wheel and got us around it, barely, registering the shocked faces of Ma and Pa Retirement as the Mustang roared past.
Hair on the back of my neck hissed and prickled, and I knew it was coming again, could feel those ions turning and connecting overhead. Not just one lightning bolt this time, but hundreds, thousands, a sky full of falling razor blades, and I couldn't stop all of them. People were going to die.
"David!" I screamed. He grabbed my hand, and I smelled the actinic charge in the air, heard the hissing sizzle of it overhead. That power had to discharge, needed to discharge, and it was going to go somewhere fast and hard. It would settle for anything that would form a satisfactory current. Buildings… trees… flesh and blood and bone.
I felt David's strength pouring into me. Not the same magnitude as what I'd felt from other Djinn, but then David's strength wasn't fully sourced until he was bound.
No time to plan, no time to do anything but what I knew, at heart, was right.
I built an invisible road for the power to discharge, working fast, touching and turning polarities a billion atoms at a time. I'd never worked on such a scale before, but I had to reach, and reach, and reach without stopping to doubt myself. I stretched myself over the aetheric as thin as a spiderweb, armoring the innocent, leaving a clear and unmistakable path for the strike to follow. A lightning rod with a silver ground wire unreeling back to me.
It had to be back to me. It was the direction all the power was being pushed, anyway.
David felt it. "No! What are you doing?"
"Not now," I snapped, and felt the Mark wake and move inside me. I tightened my grip on David's hand. "Keep it still!"
I felt warmth pulse through his flesh and into mine, strike deep. The writhing inside me went quiet.
The last chains of power snapped together. In Oversight, the silver line went white-hot with potential.
"Hold on," I whispered, and closed my eyes.
The lightning flashed blue white, brighter and hotter than the sun—silent, because sound would come later. I opened my mouth to gasp and tasted the bitter tang of ozone. Pins and needles blew over my skin in a wave, from my feet to the crown of my head.
And then the lightning hit Delilah dead on.
FOUR
Wind shears and lightning strikes are likely in the Norman area, with a large high-pressure system advancing from the northeast; possible severe weather is likely for this evening. Residents are urged to stay aware of changing weather conditions.
People were talking.
I didn't think they were talking to me. They were talking about… about somebody being dead. There was shouting and noise. Metal.
Somebody was saying my name, over and over. I tried to open my eyes, but then I realized I couldn't because they were already open. There was nothing to see, though. Just light. Bright blue-white light.
Was there something wrong with me? I tried to blink my eyes, but nothing seemed to move. If I had something wrong with me, I'd be in pain, wouldn't I?
Maybe I was just tired. I'd been tired for so long.
Maybe now I could sleep.
I wished people would stop talking to me. It was really annoying. And there was something touching me, something hot.
And then there was something cool on my face. Wet and cool.
Water.
The second time was easier. I came almost all the way up from the dark, heard voices, recognized David murmuring something soft and liquid that didn't sound like words, not any words I knew. That was all right. Just the sound of his voice was all I needed.
There was another voice, too. A woman's. I knew it, but… but I couldn't remember. Eventually I felt something soft under my head, felt road vibration quivering in my skin, and knew I was lying down in a car. The hard lump of an unfastened seat belt lay under my left hip.
I opened my eyes on a dull carpeted roof the color of nothing, heard the humming of tires on wet road, and smelled—weirdly enough—blueberry muffins. I moved a hand, carefully, and it hurt—hurt everywhere. It felt like every nerve in my body had been mapped in hot wire. There was an aching sore spot on my right foot, another at the top of my head.
No question about it, I was lucky to be alive. If I hadn't been insulated by Delilah's steel frame…
My hand was still in the air. I stared at it, baffled, and realized I'd forgotten to let it fall down. Before I could do so, somebody reached back and captured it.
David. He looked back over the passenger seat at me. Dressed again in his road-dude disguise, complete with glasses. No sign of the cuts and scrapes he'd had back at the motel. No sign of any damage to him at all, except in the wounded darkness of his eyes.
"You're okay?" I whispered. My throat hurt like hell, and I was so thirsty, I felt like I'd been freeze-dried. And cold. Very cold. His hand radiated warmth into me.
The Demon Mark moved inside me, just a slight stealthy crawl. I closed my eyes and fought it, but I was so tired, so drained.
It kept moving. I felt David trying to stop it, but he was drained, too. Too tired to save me now. I had to save myself.
I reached down and choked the black terrible thing with as much self-control as I had left in me. It writhed and tried to slither around me, but I held it until it stopped its quivering progress.
"I'm okay," David answered me when I opened my eyes again. "Easy, take it easy. Rest."
"She's awake?" The woman's voice, the one I almost recognized. Spanish accented. Slightly slurred. I squinted, but all I could see in the rearview mirror was a flash of dark eyes. "Mira, Jojo's back among the living."
And then I knew who she was, with a burst of happiness that exploded right out of my core. It hurt to smile. I did it anyway. "Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight…"
She laughed that silvery laugh I remembered so well, and glanced back from the driver's seat. Still beautiful, Estrella Almondovar, my good friend. At least on that side of her face.
She joined in with me in a duet. "Say a prayer, say a Mass, keep this fire off my ass." It wasn't the way the children's rhyme went, but it was our variation. And she finished by holding up the middle finger on her right hand in the universal screw-you symbol. A tiny flame danced on its tip.
"Chica, you're still crazy," she said. "But then that's why I love you so much."
After my disastrous Yellowstone getting-back-to-nature camping trip, Estrella and I talked every week. I ran up my mom's phone bill to outrageous levels; like the teenager I was, I could talk about nothing for hours, and Star was more than happy to go along with it. She was lonely, and we were soul mates; somehow, we could find a telephone book funny, if we talked about it for more than two minutes.
Star was the only friend I had who understood.
So. My intake meeting happened, Princeton happened, graduation happened (and wasn't that something, but that's a story for later). Fast-forward to 1999, and my rotation as a Staff Warden on the Help Desk. We call it something more official than that, of course—the Crisis Center Support System—but really, it's a Help Desk, just like ones computer departments all over the world have in place, and for much the same reasons. When things go wrong for the Association, they go wrong in a big way, and communication is everything because the aetheric doesn't carry sound for shit. Everybody gets a turn in the hot seat at the Help Desk, which is run 24/7 with a minimum of twenty staffers, who are empowered to do everything from troubleshooting to calling National Wardens out of bed in the middle of the night.
About six days into my tour, I got a phone call from— who else? — Star. There was a wildfire out of control in Yellowstone, and the Regional Warden was on vacation; Estrella and her boss felt that it was serious enough to escalate it and get specialty teams on the job. A Yellowstone fire is no laughing matter.
It's one of the richest natural preserves left in the United States, and it's also a sinkhole of random energy; put the two together, add any kind of instability, and you get disaster.
We laughed, we chatted, we talked. Two friends catching up on time lost. She wasn't really worried.
Except it got worse. I could tell that from the tone of her voice. It changed from light to businesslike to dead serious as she fed me map coordinates, burn rates, wind speeds, all the alchemical elements that went into making up a disaster.
"Got it," I said, typing the last of the data into the system. There was a dull sound in the background, like airplane noise. "Hey, you want to turn the stereo down? It's getting a little loud on this end."
She coughed. Dry coughs at first, but they raised goose bumps on my arms. "No can do, babe. Guess you'll just have to yell."
"Is that the fire?" Close enough to roar like that? Oh, God. I knew that Estrella was calling from a Ranger Station somewhere near the edge of the blaze. As a Fire Warden, she had to be close to work her magic—not like Weather Wardens, who can manage things from miles or even countries distant. Fire was too interactive. It required real risk on the part of those who engaged with it. But I'd never imagined how close, or how much risk.
"That or somebody's throwing one hell of a barbecue." She started coughing. Thick, choking coughs. I was sitting in a Situation Room on the nineteenth floor of the Association offices in Chicago, and I could still hear the crackle of the fire; it wasn't just close, it was right there. All around her. "Aw, shit."
"What?"
More coughing. When it stopped, I heard the sound of things bumping, crashing. "It's blocking the front. Hang on, I'm going for the back door."
"Estrella?" No answer. I could hear her hoarse, heavy breathing, could almost taste the smoke.
"Bastard's cut me off," she said at last. I could tell from the shaking in her voice that she was really scared this time. "Hey, Jojo? This is really getting screwed up. I need out of here. 'Cause I don't look good in black, know what I'm saying?"
