Total Eclipse tww-9

by Rachel Caine

  The next text said, HEADING FOR SEATTLE. LAST STAND FOR FIRE WARDENS IN THE AREA. WILL UPDATE.

  I stared at it for a long, silent moment, then texted back, UNDERSTOOD.

  I did understand. I knew why he was texting me, what he wasn’t saying to me, all those fragile and silent things that both of us knew would never be acceptable in the light of day. My fingers hovered over the keys, and I almost added, LOVE YOU, because I did, desperately, like the brother and friend he had been to me these past few years. But I knew what he felt was different, and stronger, and I didn’t want to give him false hope and wrong impressions.

  So instead I said, BE CAREFUL, and sent the message.

  David, watching me, said, “It’s bad.”

  “Lewis and the Wardens are trying to save Seattle,” I said. “It’s not good.” I realized that the pixels on that phone screen might be the last thing I had to remember Lewis by, and a lump formed in my throat. I swallowed it, blinked away stinging in my eyes, and thought, No, it isn’t. We’ll get through this. We always find a way.

  Looming up out of the misty haze in the distance was a tangle of metal. Some kind of crash, leaking black smoke, but no visible flames.

  It was a bus, flipped on its side. It had collided head-on with a car—I think it had once been a car, anyway. Nothing was moving in either vehicle.

  “Slow down!” I said. The Djinn ignored me. “Stop! You have to—”

  We flashed by the wreck at the speed of light as the Djinn expertly drifted around the debris and found open road. Not enough time for me to get all the details, but enough, and it felt like my stomach was trying to crawl out through my throat.

  “No survivors,” the Djinn said, in that eerie chorus-like voice. “No stops.”

  Cherise and Kevin were wide awake now in the back, but neither of them said anything. When I looked back, they were clutching hands and avoiding looking anywhere. David said nothing, either. His face was disturbingly blank.

  “But—” I couldn’t let it go.

  David touched my cheek. “He’s right. Wherever we’re going, we have to get there. We can’t stop. Not for anything. I know you can’t accept that, so I’ll take the responsibility, all right? We don’t stop, not even if you scream and hate me.”

  I gulped. “I wouldn’t—”

  “Yes, Jo, you would. What if that had been a school bus? What if you’d seen crying children?”

  I couldn’t answer him. I knew he was right about me, and I knew he was right about everything, and it hurt. Badly.

  “Whitney,” I said. “Can you hear me?”

  Her voice came out of the Djinn’s mouth this time. “Unfortunately,” she said.

  “Put me back to sleep,” I said. “I don’t want to see this. I don’t want to see any of it until I can do something.”

  David put his arm around me and pulled me close. I let my head fall against his chest.

  I was just dropping off when I saw an old man stagger out of his car, which was half off the road, and fall on his side. We passed him by in a flash. Did I see that? Yes, I did. I know I did.

  “Stop,” I said. The Djinn once again ignored me. “Whitney, I’m not telling you again. Stop this car!”

  “What for?” she asked, bored and resentful. “So you can go play Low- Rent Nightingale? You said we need to get to the Oracle. I’m doing my best.”

  “Please,” I said. “Please stop the car. I’m begging you.”

  Whitney was silent for a second, then I felt the Djinn braking the vehicle, whipping it around in a tight turn, and heading back. “You need to know when to let it go, Joanne. You really do.” Thirty seconds later, he pulled the Mustang to a stop. The old man was feebly moving, trying to pick himself up, but he wasn’t able to do much. I bailed out and ran to his side. He was in his seven-ties, maybe into his eighties, with a tight cap of silver/ gray curls over a face of great dignity—a patriarch, for sure. African American, and he’d probably been tall and broad in his younger days, but now he was lighter and more stooped, and I was able to help him up to a sitting position. More car doors slammed. The others were joining me.

  “Hi,” I said. “My name’s Joanne. You looked like you needed some help.”

  He nodded breathlessly. He was wheezing, and his hands trembled badly. “I saw the devil,” he said. “Back there on the road. It was killing people.”

  I exchanged a look with David, and knew he was thinking exactly what I was—Djinn.

  “I’m not supposed to be driving, but I had to get Mindy out of there. The whole place was going crazy. I just started feeling sick. My chest hurts.” His face was taking on an ominous gray color, and he made a pained expression and grabbed for his arm. “Damn.”

  He was having a heart attack.

  “Sir, what’s your name?” I asked. “Sir?”

  “George,” he finally panted. “George Templin Bassey.”

  “Nice to meet you, George. I’m going to help you lie down, okay? You take slow, deep breaths. That’s right, slow, deep breaths.” I sat back on my heels and looked at Kevin, then Cherise. “One of you is going to have to try to help him.”

  “How?” Cherise asked. She looked scared, and I didn’t blame her. This was a fairly significant amount of responsibility to be dumping on someone.

  “If you’ve got my powers, you’ve also got Earth Warden powers,” I said. “That means healing. George here needs your help. I’ll walk you through it, okay? Kevin, he said something about Mindy. See if there’s anybody else in the car.”

  Kevin opened the car door and peered in, and almost got his face chewed off by a squat, ferocious English bulldog, who lunged off the floorboard at him with furious, deep-chested barks. Kevin slammed the door again. The bulldog continued to glare and bark. “Uh, yeah, found Mindy, I guess. She’s a charmer. Looks okay, if you like fangs.”

  Under other circumstances, I’d have laughed. Kevin had been fine with fighting toe to toe with a particularly dangerous Djinn, but give him an angry dog, and he was just like anybody else. That was refreshing.

  I pushed away that momentary pulse of amusement and focused back on Cherise, who was staring at George with wide eyes.

  “Okay, ready?” I asked. She shook her head. “Yes, you are. Give me your hand.”

  I thought for a second Cherise was going to revert to a second-grader and hold her hands against her chest, but finally she stretched one arm out, and I took hold and guided her to place her palm on George’s forehead. He was moaning softly, and he really didn’t look good. “I need you to feel the ground under us,” I said. “It’s full of energy. It feels like honey, or syrup—something slow and golden, okay? Can you feel that?”

  Cherise squeezed her eyes shut, and finally nodded. “It’s not very strong,” she said doubtfully. She was right. It was my weakest specialty, generally. “What do I do?”

  “Imagine pulling that up into your body. Once you get it started, it’ll just flow on its own.” God, I realized I hated being a teacher. So much easier to do it than to say it. Words were so clumsy for this kind of thing. If I could just show her . . .

  The frown deepened on her face, then cleared. “Oh. Oh, right, I get it. That feels weird. Good, but weird.”

  “Weirder than getting hit by lightning?”

  “That felt great!”

  We were wandering off topic, and poor George was looking more than a little spooked. “Well, this will, too. Now, I want you to just let that power move into your hand, your fingers, your palm. Then let it flow from you to George. Don’t try to direct it. Just let it flow.”

  I remembered learning this, in fast, terse lessons from other Wardens who hadn’t had the time to teach me all the proper techniques. Being a late bloomer meant I’d missed all the classical education, but I had a good working knowledge of down-and-dirty first aid. One of the key things Lewis had taught me was that if you don’t know how to do fine control with Earth power, don’t try. There’s a certain instinct to it that pulls the power to whe
re it’s needed most. Bodies want to heal. All we have to do is help them.

  “It’s going in,” Cherise said. I couldn’t see a thing, but Kevin was watching in fascination, eyes gone wide and unfocused as he followed along in the aetheric. “I think it’s working. I can see it in his blood. It’s moving—there’s some kind of a block. I think I can—”

  “No!” both David and I said at the same time. I kept going. “No, I told you, let the power work. Don’t try to direct it!”

  From the look on her face, she was trying, but she’d already made the mistake, and I could see it in George’s choked gasps. Wielding Earth power is like working with nanotechnology—you have to be able to make controlled, very slight adjustments at a microscopic level. It’s not brute force.

  Cherise cried out, and George arched his back. His eyes rolled back in his head. “I tore it!” she yelled frantically. “I tore something, it’s all bleeding out—”

  Kevin reached out and added his hand on top of Cher’s, and even as magically blinded as I was, I felt the power flooding out of him. His eyes sparked and changed, and George’s labored breathing suddenly and dramatically eased.

  “Oh,” Cherise said, in a very small voice. “Like that. I see.”

  Kevin sat back, staring at her with those glittering, powerful eyes, and he said, “Do you? Because you almost killed this guy because you were stupid. She told you not to do that. You blew out an artery, for God’s sake!”

  Cherise went white, clearly horrified and shocked as Kevin turned on her. It wasn’t him, I realized; it was the fact that with David’s power, he was seeing way too much. He saw Cherise’s secret delight in having power, finally—something that as a Warden he’d probably never have picked up, but it reminded him of someone else.

  It reminded him of his stepmother, I realized. Yvette. He’d seen her turn into a predatory monster, driven by that same kind of excitement and ambition. What he saw in Cherise was the opposite of Yvette Prentiss . . . a woman without any of that power, without any desire to have it or use it.

  He was hating her right now, and she could tell.

  “Hey,” I said, and put my hands on their shoulders. “Good work. He seems better. George, are you feeling better?”

  He nodded, but he looked scared. Well, I’d have been right there with him, if I’d had two amateur psychic surgeons rummaging around in my innards. “Who the hell are you people? You with the government?” He was feeling better, because I heard suspicion kick in.

  “In a way,” I said. “Kevin, how’s the patch? Solid?”

  “It’ll hold,” he said. “He had a blocked artery. It’s clear now. He’ll be okay.”

  “Kev—,” Cher said anxiously. He stood up and walked away, head down, hands in his pockets. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to do it!”

  “Give him a minute,” I said. “Cher, he’s used to the other you. The one without powers. He’s never trusted other Wardens, not any of us, not deep down. He hates feeling that way about you, too. Understand?”

  She didn’t, really, but she blinked back tears and acted like she did. We got Mr. Bassey on his feet, had him walk around a little, and then put him back in his car. Mindy was extremely excited by this, and obviously protective; she stood with her stubby little legs on his and growled at us through the window.

  “Do you have someplace safe to go?” I asked George, as he started up his car. He looked at me like I might have been completely insane.

  “I’m going to the church,” he said. “Devil’s walking the streets, and I don’t know what you people are. Church is the only place I’ll feel safe.”

  I nodded. “Be safe.”

  He put aside his suspicion long enough to say, “God bless you all.”

  Mindy barked.

  As his car pulled away, I heard Whitney’s pained voice on the radio say, “Now can we leave? Sweet Mother Moses, you people are more sentimental than my grand-mother into her third bottle of sipping whiskey!”

  “Where does she come up with this stuff?” I asked David.

  He shrugged. “I don’t even know why she’s a Djinn,” he said. “It’s part of her charm.”

  The excitement of having saved one life—well, two, if you counted Mindy’s—made me feel pretty good about things for a while, but my impulse to do-gooding was very firmly brought under control by Whitney, who informed us in cold, final tones that we would not stop until we got where we were going.

  The next time I tried to get her to stop for a roadside rescue, she put me out like the proverbial light, and I had just enough time to think, You Southern-fried bitch . . . and I was gone.

  For a long time.

  “Jo?”

  Then somebody was shaking me. I fought my way up out of what felt like the deepest, most dreamless rest I’d ever had, and for a long second after opening my eyes I felt . . . good. Happy, even. At peace, because the face I was looking into was David’s.

  He shook me harder. “Jo, wake up!” The urgency in his voice made me blink and scramble for a better grasp of things around me.

  We were no longer in the Mustang. I didn’t even see the Mustang anywhere. I was propped against a brick wall, sitting on a sidewalk, facing a street. It was eerily quiet here—one might even say dead, because I didn’t see a single sign of life. Not a bird flitting overhead, not an insect moving, not a single person in a car, window, or park. I looked up and down. It was a Norman Rockwell kind of street, clean and neat—a business district, with quaint little shops and cafes.

  All deserted.

  Overhead, the sky was gray, a kind of thick, featureless gray that seemed wrong even for an overcast. As I stared at it, I realized that it looked like smoke behind glass.

  “We’re in Seacasket,” I said. “Home of the Fire Oracle.”

  “There’s nothing here still alive,” David said. “We don’t know why. We haven’t found any bodies—not even of insects. Nothing. They’re just . . . gone.”

  That was unsettling. The Fire Oracle wasn’t exactly my BFF, but he’d been a lot less antagonistic than the Air Oracle the times I had met him. Not anywhere close to human, but willing to acknowledge us. Seacasket was an unnaturally perfect sort of town, always had been; I thought it was some kind of side effect of the presence of the Oracle. Things had just always seemed a little too much in their place.

  “Where’s Cherise? Kevin?” I looked around; I couldn’t see them, either. “Is the Djinn still with us?”

  “He went with them,” David said. “I stayed with you.”

  Which didn’t answer my question. I grabbed his hand and pulled myself up to my feet. I still felt sticky, hot, caked with sweat and coated in powdered concrete dust from our mall adventure. My hair was lank around my face, and if I could have wished for paradise, it would have been a spa whirlpool tub, and a skin treatment.

  Later.

  “Where did they go?”

  For answer, he nodded down the street. I looked and saw nothing, but I headed in that direction while David quickly caught up. It felt good to walk; my legs had been out of practice, with all the driving. And suddenly, I felt another need, a really practical one. I stopped, feeling stupid, and said, “Bathroom?”

  “There’s a gas station up here,” David said. “Nobody in it, but the bathroom is open. We used it earlier.”

  “We” meaning everybody but me, I assumed. It seemed like a mile to the corner, where the banners for the gas station hung limp in the still, perfectly neutral air. It was like strolling through a movie set, deserted but ready for the cameras to arrive.

  The bathroom was sparkling, except for the presence of a few paper towels in the trash can, which I presumed came from my traveling companions. After taking care of the obvious and pressing need, I took the opportunity to splash water on my face, scrub off the worst of the grubbiness. Nothing I could do for the clothes, which would need to find an incinerator to throw themselves into at some point, but they’d do for now. Although I would have sold a body part—possib
ly a major one—for fresh underwear.

  I took a deep breath and looked at myself hard in the mirror. My eyes were shadowed, raccooned with dark rings. I looked anxious, drawn, and haunted.

  Nice to know I was at my best. I tried to summon up the old confidence, and saw a glimmer or two of it in the smile, the cock of my head.

  Well, I thought. If I’m going to go down, I’m going to go down fighting. I don’t have to be ashamed of that.

  David knocked on the door. “Are you all right?”

  All these years, and he hadn’t learned how women linger in a bathroom? “Fine,” I said, sighed, and ran my fingers through my hair again—not that it helped. Then I put that confident smile back on and opened the door. “Let’s go scare up an Oracle.”

  The Fire Oracle’s official public entrance—well, public to the Djinn, not to us measly humans—existed in a cemetery. Like the town of Seacasket, it was a little too perfect—a carefully manufactured setting that gets nominated for set design at award shows. It was the very definition of historical and peaceful, what with all the green grass and lovely statues and well-tended grave-stones and mausoleums.

  Not a single person visible. Not a bird cheeped. Not a blade of grass stirred.

  David and I both stood outside the gates for a moment, looking in; I think we were both feeling a dread we couldn’t consciously explain. Bad things had happened in this cemetery to me before, and I couldn’t help but feel a crawling sense of foreboding.

  The air was just so still.

  “Jo.” David was looking down at the neatly raked gravel path that wound through the picturesque landscape. “Footprints.”

  Two sets of them. One matched Kevin’s giant, battered kicks; the others were Cherise’s, judging from the small size. “Where’s the Djinn?” I asked.

  “Floating,” David said. “Djinn do that.”

  It had been a dumb-ass question, and I’d known it as soon as I’d opened my mouth. Many of the Djinn didn’t bother to manifest themselves physically all the way; I remembered the one who’d started out guarding Lewis’s old house. He hadn’t bothered with anything below the knees.