by Rachel Caine
"Clearly, we are getting you transportation."
Right, the Land Rover was a pile of smoking crap. "We're stealing a car."
"Unless they offer late-night test drives, I believe so."
So, it was going to be straight-up grand theft auto. No problem. The idea of a car perked me right up, and besides, next to the death sentence ticking away inside me, prison sounded like a day spa. I had to get to OKC and find Star, and wheels sounded like a damn practical idea.
I scouted around for witnesses. Not much traffic in this part of town after sunset, especially with a storm coming; the predominant sound came from wind-snapped flags and the rattling hum of light poles shivering in the increasingly harsh wind. The few cars that did drive by didn't seem to be bothered by our presence.
Rahel waited for me to say something. I took a deep breath and obliged. "I need something fast but invisible," I said. "High-end Honda, maybe an Acura, neutral colors. I want to blend into traffic. But first, take care of these security cameras."
Rahel looked up at the shiny blind lenses stationed on the roof of the dealership and attached to two or three of the light poles. She stared for three or four seconds. "It's done."
"Really?"
"I fried the circuit boards," she said. "And also demagnetized the security tape."
"Damn, you sure you've never done this kind of thing before?"
Rahel showed me fierce white teeth. "I have done every kind of thing before, sistah."
We stepped over the white-painted iron fence that wasn't designed to keep shoppers out, just cars in; there were some sweet machines parked on the lot, in a rainbow of yummy colors. I reluctantly ruled out the neon yellows, greens, and reds.
"That one," I said, and pointed to the one that looked black in the peach gleam of the sodium lights. It was a BMW, a good solid production car. Not the highest priced set of wheels, not the lowest, but one that would do zero to sixty in under eight seconds without any mods at all. Best of all, it looked kind of like a family car, which meant it wouldn't be so easy to spot at a glance from a passing cop.
And, unless I missed my guess, it was dark blue, which was my color.
Rahel nodded and walked over to do a slow circle of the car, never taking her eyes off it, and finally said, "There is an alarm inside."
"Can you disarm it?"
"Of course."
"Go for it."
"Done." She shrugged. She put her hand on the door locks, manipulated electrical currents, and popped open the driver's side door. "Now you should go, quickly."
I started to. Really. And as I turned to get in, I saw her.
She was sitting all alone in the parking lot, gleaming dark blue with white racing stripes up her hood.
It was love at first sight.
I walked away from the Beamer without any conscious decision to do so. I heard Rahel asking what I thought I was doing, but I was locked on this unexpected beauty sitting there, waiting for me like God himself had put her there.
Rahel caught up with me as I came to a halt next to the car. Car? No, that was too small a word; it could have described anything from a Honda Civic to a Lamborghini. This needed a new word.
"What is it?" she asked impatiently. I put two fingers on the gorgeous metallic blue paint, stroking it.
"A 1997 Dodge Viper GTS," I said reverently. "V10, 7,990 cubic capacity engine, six thousand RPM. The fastest production car in America, top speed of nearly three hundred kilometers per hour. Faster than any Corvette, faster than the 1971 Boss Mustang, faster than the goddamn wind, Rahel."
Rahel looked unimpressed. "It looks expensive."
"About sixty grand, if you're lucky enough to find one." The door was locked, of course, but I could feel the Viper issuing the invitation. "Open it."
"You told me you wanted to blend in and be difficult to spot. This… is not hard to spot."
"Just hard to catch." I flattened my hand against the paint and stroked her flared panels like she was a barely tamed tiger. "She's the one. No question about it."
Rahel shrugged, touched the door handle, and the lock popped up. I slipped inside with a sigh of pleasure; it felt like dropping into my favorite chair, with a purring cat curled up against me. Soul-deep comfort. I adjusted the seat, inspected the cockpit display, and felt a surge of love as strong as anything I'd felt for a car in my life. Even poor Delilah.
"I'll take it," I said. Rahel looked perplexed. "Please."
She touched the ignition. The Viper shivered into purring life. The gearshift knob fit perfectly in the palm of my hand. Rahel closed the driver's-side door. I hit the button to glide down the window and said, "Can you open the gate?"
"I live to serve." She sounded bemused. Well, I guess she'd never witnessed the sacred bonding of woman and car before. "Do you know where to go?"
"Away from you," I said, and eased the Viper into gear. The power shifted to a low, trembling growl. Sweet. "Actually, I have a pretty damn good idea what I have to do now. It's what you always wanted me to do, right? Go back to Oklahoma City. Get to Star."
She smiled. "Perhaps you're not as stupid as I feared." Her hot gold eyes never blinked. "Don't assume David will take your side. He can't, however much he wishes."
Behind her, metal locks snapped and wrought-iron gates swung open with a soft moan, laying down the last token of the Viper's protection. "God be with you," she said. I idled, looking at her.
"How about you?"
She shook her head. "At the last, I must be faithless," she said. "I have done what I could. Ask me for nothing more."
I didn't intend to. As I slipped the Viper in gear, I slid up into Oversight to survey the stormline, and I saw the Demon Mark in me, an ugly black nightmare of tentacles and edges. I closed my eyes against the destruction of my soul and promised, "I'm going to find a way to stop her." I let the Viper slip the leash and run.
The Viper—whose name, I decided, was Mona— hit ninety miles an hour on the way out of Norman, which barely required an effort on her part. She was a throwback to earlier cars, sensitive to touch, steering, braking, no computer-controlled minibrain to interpret between us.
The storm that had been chasing me for the last thousand miles was coming fast, gathering speed and rotation. I'd need to do something about that before I could make any move against Star; too much energy out there, too much risk that it could kick me when I was down. First, though, I was going to have to stop for gas. It was risky, not to mention pricey, but the dealership had left only an eighth of a tank in the Viper, and I couldn't afford to run out of gas.
I pulled into a roadside Texaco as a huge gust of wind blew through carrying grit and shredded papers and plastic bags; it had an earth-heavy, faintly corrupt smell that worried me. I pumped as much gas as my last few dollars would allow, paid the gap-toothed cashier, and headed back out into the wind. The temperature was dropping, and the white lace top, though fatally fashionable, did nothing to cut the chill.
Another gust blew my hair over my face. I clawed it back and realized that I had company.
A big yellow Nissan SUV had pulled up at the pumps between me and the Viper.
I slowed from a trot to a walk to a full stop. My heart hammered and went up to a level only cardio aerobics should have triggered. Fight or flight. God, I wanted to fight. I needed to fight, but whatever organs in my body controlled the flow of power were badly worked over these last few days, and even trying to gauge the wind speed made me ache.
Out on the freeway, a semi truck blew by, dragging an air-horn blast. The wind shoved me like a bully.
Marion Bearheart stepped out from behind the back of the SUV and stood watching me, hands in the pockets of her fringed leather coat. Her black-and-silver hair was contained in a thick braid that fell over one shoulder, and she looked strong and tough and resolute.
"Don't run," she said. Somehow, I heard her even over the wind.
"Dammit, I don't have time for this!" I shouted. The words whipped away, but their es
sence remained. Her hands stayed in her pockets, but she took a step closer.
"Make time," she said. And took another step. I wanted to back away, but there was something powerful and immortal in her eyes, something larger than my fear. "I know you have the Mark."
I wondered how long she'd known, or suspected. She'd been pretty careful with me, back on Iron Road—afraid of rousing the Mark? Or just putting it together afterwards?
"It's all right," she said. The wind whipped unexpectedly sideways, then back; strands of hair tore loose from her braid and floated black and silver around her face. "Joanne, trust me. This will all work out. Please, let's figure this out together."
She held out her hand to me, silver-and-turquoise rings gleaming in the harsh lights of the gas station.
I took a step back. She tried again.
"Once your powers are gone, the Mark won't be able to feed," she said. "It will starve and wither. You'll live. I can make that happen."
I couldn't live like that, not blind and deaf, cut off from the breathing of the world. Cut off from the aetheric. Like Star, I was just too deep in the world.
"I'm not the only one with the Mark," I said. "You know that, right?"
"One problem at a time." Marion had a kind of fevered intensity about her, and I could feel her willing me to give in. But she hadn't used her power. Why not? She'd used it on Iron Road…. Ah, of course, the storm. The more power we used, the worse the storm would get, the faster it would reach us. She was being responsible.
As I took another step back, arms closed around me from behind and lifted me straight off the ground. Erik. He was bigger than me, stronger, taller, and he'd taken me by surprise. I felt ribs creak when he squeezed. I kicked frantically at his shins, but if it hurt him, he didn't do more than grunt in my ear.
Marion walked up to me and gently smoothed hair back from my face. She smiled. "Don't struggle. I know, you made a terrible mistake, but it can be fixed, I swear. You're too valuable to the Wardens; I won't let anything happen to you."
I stopped struggling. Erik let me down enough that my toes touched the ground. "It's Star," I said. "She's turned on us. We have to stop her."
Her eyes widened. "Joanne, I expected something a little better from you than turning on the only friend you have left. Star's the one who told us you were coming. She wants you to get help. Accusing her won't make things any better."
She slid her eyes past me to Erik. "Put her in the truck."
Struggling didn't do anything but make him squeeze harder and cut off half my air; I was reduced to kicking and screaming like a scared kid. Marion opened the back door of the Nissan, and I got my feet set on either side of the opening and pushed, hard.
Shirl, who'd come up on the other side of the truck, leaned over and touched my foot. It burned. I yelled, kicked out, and caught her right in the face with a snap that sent her rolling. Marion went after her. Erik staggered as a fresh gust of wind hit him squarely in the back.
I reached for that wind, whipped it around me like a cloak, and lifted me and Erik off the ground. He squawked like a chicken, and his grip loosened; I twisted the wind faster, spinning us in midair, and he let go to flail for balance he'd never get. Higher. Higher. Marion was reaching up toward us, but whatever magic she was summoning was no use; with the storm coming, there was so much potential in the air, so much power, it was as natural to me as breathing to counter her.
I split the mini-funnel into halves, stabilized myself in midair, and let Erik continue to turn and flail.
Faster. The bastard had almost crushed my ribs. Faster. He was just a blur of flesh and cloth, screaming.
With just a little more, I could rip that cloth away, strip him naked, then begin to peel that pale flesh down to red meat and bone….
Jesus. I flinched because somewhere in me, something was licking its lips at the taste of that fear, that blood.
I let Erik drop into a heap on the concrete and held myself suspended ten feet above Marion's head, looking down. Shirl called fire, but Marion stopped her before the wind could whip it out of control.
"Your move," I called down. The wind blew cold and harsh around me, black as night, streaming with power. It was sickeningly easy. I'd never felt so powerful, not even with a borrowed Djinn at my command. No wonder Bad Bob had let himself be consumed by this thing; it felt so… damn… good.
Marion knew better than to start a war here, next to a town full of innocent lives. So did I.
That didn't mean we wouldn't do it.
She slowly lowered her hands to her sides and gave me one short, sharp nod.
"You know I could blow you away, don't you?" I asked. She looked ready to bite the head off a nail, but she nodded to that, too. "You know I have the power to bury the three of you right here."
"Do or don't, it's your choice."
I was sick of everybody preaching to me about choices. "No more fucking around, Marion. Don't try to smile to my face and stab me in the back, because I promise you, I'll hurt you. Now, I'm going after Star. You can either come along and help me get her, or you can get in that canary-yellow piece of crap and go home. But you are not taking me with you."
Her eyes were ice, ice cold. "It seems I was wrong about you. I thought you would do the right thing."
"Well, it's all in the perspective." I waited, hovering, while she thought about it. "What if I can provide proof that Star's corrupted?"
"Then I'll take steps."
We kept up the standoff for another few minutes, and then Marion nodded. Just once.
"Follow me," I said. "Don't get in my way."
She bundled Shirl and Erik into the Nissan, then climbed up into the driver's seat. I lowered myself to a level where I could see her through the window. Somewhere about half a mile away, a fork of lightning blazed through the sky. Sensitized as I was right now to the power, I felt it go through me like a rolling wave of orgasm. She must have read that in me, because for the first time—ever—I saw a flicker of fear in Marion's eyes.
"Try to keep up," I said. I touched down on the concrete and let the wind slip from my control; it raged in a mini-tornado through the parking lot, slamming parked cars, scudding trash, kicking loose stones like a spoiled brat.
I stayed cool until I got in the Viper and then sat there, shaking, and felt the Demon Mark uncoiling and stretching inside me.
"I won't be like that," I promised myself. But I already was. I'd hurt Erik, I'd thought seriously about killing him. It was only a matter of degrees now, of those slow descending steps to becoming what Bad Bob had been.
A monster.
I let the Viper fold me in its muscular strength; Mona was willing to run, and I was willing to let her. The first heavy drops of rain were falling around us as I sped out of the gas station, followed by the Day-Glo Nissan Xterra. We roared up the access ramp and hit I-35, heading for the heart of Oklahoma City.
The storm was fast becoming a problem.
I watched it flowing toward me. The clouds had turned darker, edged with gray green; the light looked different seen through them. Lightning was a constant, hidden flicker somewhere up in the anvil cloud forming at the leading edge. It looked deceptively compact, but I knew it went up into the sky for thirty, forty, fifty thousand feet, a massive, boiling pressure cooker of force and power. Two miles after I left Norman, rain began lashing the road in sheets. Mona's windshield wipers worked on full speed just to keep the lane markers visible; lucky for me, there was no traffic except for the dimly seen SUV behind me. We were the only fools stupid enough to be driving.
Now that it was here, the green-and-gray pinwheel hanging so close over my head, I thought in a strange sort of way that I recognized it. It had a personality, this storm. A kind of surly intelligence. I had the sick feeling—and it was probably true—that this was the storm born of seeds I'd scattered on the coast of Florida in my fight with Bad Bob. Whether it came from me or had been birthed from the bloody womb of Mother Earth, this storm was now waking u
p to its own power and presence. Sentient. Able to control itself, alter its course, make decisions about how much damage to inflict, and where. There was no longer anybody manipulating the aetheric to control it; in fact, I could see lines of force constantly jabbing at it from a hundred different Weather Wardens, all trying to disrupt its patterns and all failing.
The more I looked at it, the more familiarity I felt. This was my storm. Created from my meddling. Fed by my reckless use of power. Dragged here by my subconscious, or my bad luck.
Overhead, the storm shifted and rumbled, and I felt it focus on me. Fine. At least this was an enemy I understood. One I could fight. I looked into its black, furious heart. I opened my mouth and screamed at it. No words, nothing but a tortured howl of agony. Come on, you bastard. Come and take your best shot.
When I stopped, there was silence. The storm muttered to itself and kept its own wary counsel; I'd surprised it, at least, even if I hadn't scared it.
I couldn't stop the storm without pulling power through my Demon Mark, and that would increase its rate of growth and burn away at what was left of my soul. Then again, I couldn't go back through the storm without it striking me with all its power and fury.
It was standing between me and Oklahoma City now. Between me and Star, me and David.
The storm stared at me. I stared back.
I pulled Mona off the road and got out of the car.
The Nissan ghosted to a caution-yellow stop behind me.
"Fuck you," I said, staring up at this child of my power. "Let's go to war."
It started small. They always do. Just a breeze against my overheated face, tugging at the hem of my shirt and ruffling my sleeves. Combing through my hair like cold, unfeeling fingers.
Marion got out of the SUV behind me. I didn't turn around. "Better take cover," I said. Maybe she did; maybe she didn't. It wasn't something I could spare attention to check.
Overhead, the storm's rotation sped up. Clouds swirled and blended together. They spawned cone-shaped formations that twisted and turned on their own. Counterclockwise, all storms turn counterclockwise on this side of the world. The colors were incredible, gray and green and heart's-night black. Flashes of livid purple and pink from lightning discharging point to point across the sky.
