by Rachel Caine
Which no longer looked like a parking lot.
Cars were twisted and smashed, rolled over on their sides and tops, some torn into scrap. People wandered helplessly, looking shell-shocked and confused. One woman, clearly not thinking at all, kept pointing her key-chain remote at one wreck after another, trying to identify her own car, as if it would matter.
Shivering clumps of people were huddling for comfort. Nobody was screaming now. It was too overwhelming, and there was nowhere to go. The woods beyond us were on fire, and smoke darkened the sky. So did roiling black clouds, streaming in from the south.
“My God,” Kevin breathed. It sounded like a prayer—which was new, coming from him. “It’s really happening, isn’t it?”
The Mustang was sitting right where we’d left it. The Djinn was sitting motionless behind the wheel, like some crash test dummy. His head swiveled to regard us as we got near. “Get in,” he said.
I didn’t. I didn’t trust the Djinn anymore, after what I’d seen of the Air Oracle, not to mention Rahel. Still . . . his eyes weren’t that tell-tale shining white, and he’d managed to keep the car safe in the middle of a truly world-class disaster scene.
“Get in,” he repeated, and I heard that odd chorusing effect in his voice again, as if more than one person was speaking through him. “Lord, you people are so hard to save.”
The voice had shifted again, one taking prominence—a honey-dark voice with a Southern accent. Female. I knew it, but I couldn’t exactly place it. “Who—who am I talking to?”
“Who did you think you’d be talking to, sugar?” the Djinn mouthpiece said, and all of the doors blew open on the car, inviting us inside. “Who’s still locked up like that damn genie in a bottle that all the stories talk about?”
David smiled in pure, wild relief. “Whitney,” he said. “It’s Whitney.”
Kevin and Cherise looked at us both like we’d gone insane. “That guy is talking like a girl,” Kevin pointed out. “Like a Southern belle.”
“More like down-South trailer—”
“Hey,” the Djinn said, annoyance curdling the honey in her voice. “This is my long-distance call, children. Don’t waste my minutes. Now get in the car, please.”
“She’s okay,” David said. “Get in.”
And we did, although none of us except David felt a hundred percent good about it, I thought. As soon as we were strapped in, the Djinn’s out-of-character voice said, “Y’all hold on now. This is going to get real interesting.” She said it with all the vowels. Int-er-est-ing.
I gulped as I felt the car lurch, and then it rocketed straight up, twenty feet in the air, and zoomed like a jet over the wrecks in the parking lot. Well, more like a sustained, long jump, maybe, because as we reached the road the trajectory sharpened, and we thumped down on the pavement in the first open space available.
The Djinn hit the gas and started his Jeff Gordon impersonation again.
“Whitney is the Djinn I left behind as insurance when we sailed out,” David said. “Sealed up in a pocket universe at Jonathan’s house, away from everything. She was my backup as Conduit.”
“Still am, sugar,” Whitney said. This time, her voice came out of the radio, which was only about half as weird as when it was coming out of the male Djinn. “And I’m just about the only damn help you’ve got, so be grateful. I can’t believe you stuck me with this job.”
“Not intentionally,” David said, and winced as I prodded his wounded side. “Believe me, I’d rather have my powers back.”
Neither of us mentioned the big, stinky elephant in the car, which was Kevin, sitting in the backseat, looking shaken and deeply disturbed. Kevin, who had somehow acquired powers he shouldn’t have had.
Like Cherise.
Surprisingly, it was Kevin who interrupted the pregnant pause. “I don’t want it,” he blurted. He looked green, and I wondered if he was about to get sick all over us. He swallowed twice, and finally seemed to get himself together. “I want to give it back to you. Whatever the hell that is.”
“Don’t think it works that way,” Whitney’s voice said, briefly snowed by static midway through. The tuner slid to another station, and she came through more clearly. “If it wasn’t you, it’d be somebody else. Maybe somebody not as ready.”
“What are you talking about? And where are you taking us?”
“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me,” Whitney said. “Told you, you were going to regret making me do this, boss man.”
“Whitney, just—” David made a frustrated little gesture. “Get on with it. I’m bleeding.”
“Bet that’s new for you,” she said, about as sympathetic as a shark. Talk about your steel magnolias. “Making you just a little irritable?”
“Whitney, I’m going to climb through that radio and kick your ass,” I snapped. “He’s not the one you ought to be worried about.”
She laughed, a rich, whiskey-dark sort of sound. The least likely Djinn I’d ever met, and I’d met some doozies. I guessed that was why she’d made such an impression on David in the first place. Choosing Whitney for his backup as Conduit had been unorthodox, to say the least, and (I suspected) not exactly popular with the few thousand others who probably felt they had a better shot.
But she had qualities; I’d give her that. For one thing, none of the other Djinn would ever be able to get the better of her, because none of them could understand her. There was such a thing as being too human, and Whitney was the poster child.
“You are just full of it, Joanne,” she purred. “Nice to know some things just never change. Now, what were we talking about?”
“You said if it wasn’t Kevin . . .”
“Of course. Ain’t that obvious? If it isn’t Kevin, it’s whoever’s standing closest to you two. You didn’t really think the law of averages worked that way, that the two people you picked to tag along just happened to end up with your lost powers?”
When she put it like that, I had to admit, it did seem unlikely. There had been lots of people on board the ship, and any one of them could have received the power that had been ripped out of us in the formation of the black corner. . . . So why had it been the two people closest to us now?
“It’s not them,” I said slowly, working my way through it. “It’s us.”
“You’re not nearly as silly as you look,” Whitney said. “Fact is, whatever happened to you out there, it blew you apart and put you back together again, but somehow your power got left out. It’s like a ghost, trailing you around. It’ll settle into anybody you spend time with, including those two.”
David straightened up, which probably wasn’t smart; more blood darkened his shirt, and he pressed a hand to the wound. “Then we can get it back.”
“Can’t get it back,” Whitney said crisply. “Not like you are. You’re all locked off, and I have to tell you, you ain’t looking too good. Never mind that hole in your side. . . . You’re drying up like a water hole in the Sahara, running out of power. Won’t make it all that much farther, you know.”
I looked over at David in alarm. His face was set and pale, giving away nothing, but I knew it was true. Whitney wasn’t known for her tact, but she wouldn’t lie, not about that. “Nothing I can do about it,” he said. “If I can’t get my powers back . . .”
“Not on your own. But that’s why I’m taking you to someplace you can get some help.”
“Whitney, you can do it,” I said. “You’ve got the Conduit to the Earth now. You could fix this.”
“Could,” she agreed blandly. “But my orders were to stay right here, in this cozy little house with the roaring fire where nobody can get at me. And I like it here. You seen what’s going on out there? It’s messy.”
She was hiding out in Jonathan’s house, a peculiar little bubble of the aetheric that seemed to float apart from everything else. Time and space didn’t really exist there—or at least, they existed only as Jonathan had first created them to be. Which wasn’t like anywhere else. The
advantage was that anything in that house was protected from the chaos here on Earth.
The downside was that the protection was very specific. Humans couldn’t reach the refuge, only Djinn, and only Djinn who were allowed in. David and I were completely out of luck.
“You have to come here,” I repeated. “Whitney, he’s . . .” Dying. I couldn’t really say it. Saying it would make it terrifyingly real. “Please come.”
Her radio-wave voice gentled, turned warm and compassionate. “I know,” she said. “I know how scared you are. But if I leave here, I’m gone, and you know it. Every Djinn out there is hers now, no thoughts, no personality. They’re just lashing out at whatever hurts her. You don’t want me out there. I wouldn’t help, and I’d be just as lost as the rest of them.”
Except, curiously, for the Djinn driving the car. I frowned, staring at him. He turned his head and stared back, not bothering to watch the blurring road. Djinn—they’re really not like us. And sometimes it’s really, really creepy.
“He’s empty,” Whitney said. “Something bad happened to him, a long time ago, poor thing. Mother Earth can’t lay a finger on him.”
“But you can.”
“Well, yeah.” Whitney sounded surprised. “You got to know how to do it, that’s all.”
I decided I really didn’t want to know. I was tired, beaten up, filthy, and David was . . . was really in need of help. “Where are you taking us?”
I must have sounded so miserable that even Whitney was moved, very slightly, toward pity. “Someplace safe,” she said. “You rest, now.”
I didn’t want to, but the Djinn reached out and past me, putting a hand over David’s shoulder. David let out a sigh and slumped against the car door. The bleeding from his side slowed, and I saw his color start to return to normal. Whitney, working her magic through her supernatural surrogate.
The Djinn let go and reached for me. I knocked his hand away. “No,” I said sharply. “I’ll stay awake.”
“Suit yourself,” Whitney said, back to her old bad attitude. “Want me to pinch you if you drop off?”
“Bite me, Whit.”
The Djinn made an unsettling teeth-snapping noise, and I looked sideways at him, scooting a couple of inches closer to David. When I was sure I was safe- ish, I looked back at Kevin and Cherise.
“You two okay?” I left it an open-ended question, and it was up to them whether that applied to injuries, mental instability, shock, or just plain hating the world.
“I don’t want this,” Kevin said, again. “I didn’t ask for this. It feels—wrong.” He licked his lips, his eyes haunted under the emo flop of hair. “It hurts when it comes out. I don’t think it’s safe.”
That made sense. In fact, I thought it was a credit to Kevin’s strength that it only hurt, because using the power of a Djinn Conduit would probably have torn apart most normal people. Even many Wardens. I wasn’t sure what it had done to him, but Kevin didn’t scare easily, and I felt for him.
“Sorry,” I told him, and reached over to touch his arm. He jerked away. “We’ll find a way to do this. I swear.”
“Well, I don’t mind,” Cherise said. “Because controlling the weather is awesome. I want to do more.”
“Well, you’re not going to,” I said, which sounded sternly authoritative but was a wet paper sack, so far as enforcement might go. “Cher, you need to stay away from it as much as possible. It may not seem like it’s hurting you, but it probably is. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
She normally would have smiled in response to that, but instead she just looked away out the window. “You say that until you need me. Then it’s all ‘bring it.’ ” That didn’t sound much like Cher, and it bothered me.
“Hey.” I tried to catch her eyes, but she kept looking away. “Cher, you know I care about you. You know I don’t want you hurt.”
This time she did look at me, squarely and calmly. “I know,” she said. “Until you don’t have a choice, and then you’ll do anything you have to do. It’s what I always like about you, Jo. That ruthless streak under all the girly polish.”
We had that in common, I realized. Cherise was sweet and compassionate, funny and talented . . . but she was also, deep down, a survivor, with a broad streak of ambition and a little bit of larceny baked right in. In another age, she might have been a charming criminal, holding up coaches at midnight on deserted roads and kissing all the pretty young men.
“We do what we’ve gotta do,” she said. “Right?”
“Right,” I said softly. “But until we’ve got to do it, don’t. Please.”
That won a smile, finally. “Sure,” she said. “Have all the fun yourself, then. Now—” She yawned broadly and bundled herself more comfortably against Kevin. “Now I need some beauty sleep. And a shower. But I’ll settle for sleep.”
The experience must have been overpowering, I realized, because both she and Kevin dropped off in under a minute, dragged down by exhaustion. Made sense. Their bodies weren’t made to take that kind of strain. I remembered how it had felt in the beginning, when my powers first began to surface—it was like hormones on crack. I’d been hungry and tired and bitchy all the time, prone to mood swings and fits of pouting, complaining about how hard everything was when I wasn’t griping about how nobody ever trusted me enough to do things myself.
Cherise had a lot to handle. Kevin, even more.
I checked David’s side. His wound was healed, but still red and inflamed; bruises were forming, and evidently Whitney had decided that bruises weren’t anything requiring first aid. He was sleeping peacefully. Ahead of us, the road unspooled, lit by furious stabs of lightning and the glow of the headlights. The Djinn kept a machinelike precise grip on the wheel and a foot on the pedal.
And before I knew it, I’d joined the rest of them in sleep.
Chapter Five
I woke up with the sun on my face, which felt nice, but the good feeling faded fast as I blinked and looked around, out the car’s windows.
We were still on the road—not a surprise—and I supposed with a Djinn at the wheel we didn’t need to stop for gas. Cherise and Kevin were still deeply asleep. David, however, was awake, and as I moved my head off his shoulder, he reached out for my hand. That felt nice.
What wasn’t nice was the world outside our speeding car.
We were traveling close to the coastline—I could see the gray smudge of the ocean through occasional hills—but what was most noticeable to me was the thick, gray pall of smoke that hung in the air. I could smell it, thick even through the filter of the car’s vents. It gave everything outside an unreal, unfocused look. “It’s snowing?” I said as flakes brushed across the windshield.
“No,” David said quietly. “It’s ash.”
I swallowed. “Can you see the fire?”
“Not yet. But it’s got to be huge to produce this kind of effect.”
The radio suddenly slid channels. I expected more homespun passive-aggressive advice from Whitney, for which I really was not in the mood, but instead it landed on a news station. Even before I started getting the sense of what they were talking about, I could hear the tension in the broadcaster’s voice.
“. . . continues with major flare-ups to the west of I-95, including the Cumberland State Forest area, the Amelia Wildlife Management Area, Masons Corner, Flat Rock, and Skinquarter. There are unconfirmed reports of a major explosion and uncontrolled burn near Chesterfield Court House and the Pocahontas State Park. If you are anywhere in this area, immediate evacuations are under way. Do not remain in your homes; this is an extremely dangerous situation that is overwhelming emergency services. It is only one of several emerging situations that are splitting the resources of our fire, medical, and police throughout the area. Reports are also coming in of significant damage in the Midwest due to torrential rains and flooding, as well as seismic activity along critical fault lines. The Red Cross is—”
Without warning, the voice dissolved into blank, white
static. I waited. It didn’t come back.
I reached out and switched off the radio. I couldn’t help it; the feeling of doom was overwhelming. I could hear the suppressed panic in the reporter’s voice; I could feel my own heart pounding uselessly, trying to trigger some kind of survival response.
There was nowhere to run. Not anymore. I was certain that if the broadcast had continued, we would have heard more. A lot more, from all over the country. It was starting in the rural areas, but moving toward the cities, and when it got there . . .
“Faster,” I said aloud, to the Djinn. “Whitney, if you can hear me, for the love of God—”
The radio clicked back on. “You brought this on yourselves,” she said. “Don’t go dragging God into it. You were warned a million times that if humanity got to be too much of a threat, it would get dealt with. Day of reckoning, Joanne. It’s here. Should have spent more time listening to those preacher-men—not that any of that would have headed it off, I suppose.”
She sounded annoyed, verging on pissed off, and I shut up. She was, indeed, the only real help I imagined we had in the bullpen, and it wasn’t a very smart strategy to alienate her.
Satisfied by my silence, apparently, Whitney edged more speed out of the howling engine, and we fled into a dim, surreal day.
Judgment Day.
About an hour later, my phone pinged. It hadn’t rung, but I supposed the connections were bad and getting worse as more and more panicked callers took to the cell phone skies to find their loved ones.
It wasn’t a call; it was a text, from Lewis. It said LOST PARTS OF WASHINGTON STATE—WILDFIRES OUT OF CONTROL. LARGE LOSS OF LIFE.
I swallowed. He wasn’t telling me to ask me to do anything; I knew that. He just had to tell someone. Lewis was, right now, the man at the top, listening to all the litany of horror. It had to go somewhere. I supposed it might as well come to me as bleed- off. We were all going to need counseling before this was over, provided there were any of us left, and of course provided there were any mental health professionals left standing.
