by Rachel Caine
Lewis had figured it out. He’d teamed up his people in those triangular bases of power, positioning them at strategic locations. I looked back toward the east, where the chaos had been the worst, and it was dying down. For now, the Wardens were handling it, even against all the odds.
It wasn’t a battle we could win, but we could fight to a standstill—for a while.
I spotted Lewis on the aetheric. I’d expected him to be in Seattle, but he was a brilliant, incandescent blaze of power located in Nevada right now. I couldn’t imagine what had drawn him there, but it was unmistakably him. And he was still moving, though not as quickly as I was, given the jet-powered chariot skills of the Mustang.
He was going wherever the battle was the fiercest, I thought. As he should.
I cut my grip on the aetheric and dropped back into my body with that familiar, faintly disorienting jolt, then pulled out my cell phone and checked it. The grid was back up, and I speed-dialed Lewis.
No answer. I wanted to tell him about Kevin, but this wasn’t something that would be good for voice mail. I’d wait until I could tell him on the phone, or face to face. The news wasn’t going to get worse, or better, with time.
I was just hanging up when the phone rang, startling me into a frantic juggling act. When I’d renewed my grip on it, I accepted the call and held the phone to my ear.
Piercing shrieks of static. I yanked the phone away again, no doubt making one of those pained faces, and then carefully eased it back as the feedback diminished into a thick net of noise. The screen said PRIVATE CALLER. I had no idea who it was.
And then I did.
It was me. My voice. And it said, “You need to stop. Stop now.”
I took the phone away and looked at it again. Yep, there was a call. Private Caller. And it was my voice.
Saying, again, “Are you listening to me? Don’t come here!”
“Excuse me, who am I talking to?” I asked, which was a pretty reasonable question at the moment, if a bit existential. This took talking to myself to a whole new level of weird. Then, belatedly, I got it. “Imara?” My Djinn daughter had been a virtual clone, down to the voice, although she’d always somehow sounded more sassy to me. Maybe because I wasn’t used to being on the receiving end of the sass. “Imara, is that you?”
The answer drowned in static, and then my—her?—voice came back strong, again. “—have to stay away, Mom, do you understand?”
There was a particularly violent shriek of feedback, and the connection cut off. I was surprised there wasn’t smoke curling up out of the receiver, as loud as that had been. I waited, but the phone didn’t ring again.
The Djinn behind the wheel—still driving top speed on very treacherous roads—was staring straight at me, not at the road. “Jo?” David’s voice, out of the radio. “Jo, was it Imara?”
“Yes. Can you reach her? Is she okay?”
“I can’t see her. Like the Fire Oracle, I think she’s hidden herself. I’ll try to get through.”
“Hurry,” I said, and chewed my lip nervously. “I think she could be in trouble.”
“We’re all in trouble,” David said, which wasn’t the most inspirational speech he’d ever delivered. The radio shut down. The Djinn turned back toward the road.
I turned around to look in the backseat. Cherise was asleep, cuddled up with Tommy in a camouflage-patterned sleeping bag. We’d stopped in at a sports outfitter in Oklahoma City—Muzak still playing over the speakers, although shoppers were noticeably rattled and tense, and buying survival gear instead of lawn games—and stocked up on things like insulating blankets, sturdy boots and clothes, portable shelters, water and survival foods. Next best thing to Army surplus. And a lot more expensive, since it catered to the weekend wannabe warrior market.
It had felt deeply surreal to be signing a credit card slip while the world was in the throes of chaos, but I supposed one way or another, I’d be paying off my debts.
Cherise looked tired and pale, and from the way she was whimpering in her sleep, she had bad dreams. I reached back and smoothed her hair until the whimpering went away. Baby Tommy seemed to have adapted much more easily; he’d taken to Cherise quickly, and he was a happy kid, smiling and burbling most of the time. From the way he filled his diapers, he was healthy enough. I would have felt better having him checked out by an honest-to-goodness Earth Warden or, at the very least, a pediatrician, but for now, we were all doing okay. Cherise was out of the braces. Her legs had healed straight, and although she continued to be weak and tired, she was recovering remarkably well from having just about died. The jury was still out on how she was going to deal with Kevin’s death, long term.
If we had any long term, of course.
Up ahead, traffic was snarled, again. As we got into more civilized areas, it was perversely harder to get around these days, what with people frantically trying to get to their survivalist mountain hideouts, or to their relatives, or just to the store to stock up on emergency batteries. We were coming into Amarillo—not exactly a major metropolitan area, but busier than the deserted Texas Panhandle highway had been. The air was dry and stable overhead, and the landscape was mostly flat and scrubby, with tough vegetation. Very different from the trees where we’d left Kevin.
I hoped I wouldn’t end up dying somewhere without trees. I liked trees.
Even the Djinn’s prodigious driving skills couldn’t cope with the jam of traffic, and pretty soon we were cooling our engine at an idle, watching brake lights. Funny; this type of backup on the East Coast would have been a howling chorus of impatient horns sounding. Not here in the Southwest. People just . . . waited, listening to their music or talk radio, poking at their hair, arguing with whoever was in the car along with them. Or with themselves, apparently. I didn’t hear a single angry honk.
“This is restful,” I said, to nobody in particular. The Djinn wasn’t exactly chatty company. Cherise was asleep. The radio stayed quiet, not falling for my opening gambit. “David? Do you think we should stop?”
“You all need rest,” he said. “I’ll find you a place to stay for a few hours, and someplace to eat.”
That sounded heavenly. Not that I couldn’t sleep in the car and eat bagged food, but stretching out on real sheets was better than sex right now. The mere thought of fresh food made me salivate.
“We should probably push on,” I said, being the brave little toaster. “It’s only about another ten hours to Sedona, and that’s not counting the bat out of hell multiplier.”
“You’d get there exhausted,” he said. “It’s been hard, and it’s going to get worse, I think. You need to rest while you can.” He spoke with authority, and I remembered that in his brief human life he’d been a soldier. He’d been used to exhaustion, to snatching what little rest and relief he could in between fighting for his life.
I gave in. Truthfully, it had been a token protest anyway, and Imara’s inexplicable warning had made me worried. My daughter, like David, had a much wider view of things than I ever could. What if we were making things worse instead of better? What if we were actually forcing the battle instead of preventing it?
I couldn’t think straight anymore. I’d been holding back emotions for a while now, but there’s one thing about emotions: they never really go away if they’re strong. You can bury them, but like a vampire they keep lurching back up. I knew that I was still numb about the loss of Kevin, but it was going to come out, and probably soon. I’d rather suffer through that in private, lying in a bed and hugging a pillow. It wouldn’t help Cherise to see me lose it.
I’d put him in the ground myself. I’d felt the unmistakable absence in him, the void where his life had been.
No, I didn’t want to remember how it had felt to hold his empty shell, or how he’d looked so pale, bound up in that cheap motel sheet—but the image wouldn’t go away.
With a shocking intensity, that mental picture suddenly shifted, and it was Lewis’s face pale and still, it was Lewis lying in my arms as
I abandoned him to the dirt—alone, cold, unmarked. I almost gasped out loud with the emotion that brought rolling through me, and rested my burning forehead against the glass as I squeezed my eyes shut. No. No, that’s not going to happen.
David and I had our powers back. Cherise had survived. We’d saved some lives along the way. We were winning, dammit. I couldn’t get spooked now. I couldn’t lose focus. That was another good reason to recharge. When I was in the throes of exhaustion, it was far too easy to let things overwhelm me, even the unlikely threats. I lost all ability to filter.
While I was thinking, David had been acting, and I felt the Mustang suddenly leap forward. I looked up and saw we were hurtling straight for the back of a stopped eighteen-wheel truck . . . and then the car lurched sideways with a scream of tires, jumped over a curb, and bumped down on the other side, onto an off ramp. Free of the traffic block, we rocketed down the access road toward a nice, neat- looking, moderately priced hotel/ motel.
We passed it. I looked back as it receded into the distance and said, “Uh, that one would have been okay—”
“No, it wouldn’t have been, sugar.” Whitney’s accent never failed to make me want to roll my eyes. She could not have been more annoying about how thick she laid it on. “You’re going to have company coming soon. Won’t do to put you up someplace that’s going to just come down on you. Again.” She sounded utterly certain of herself, and casual about the threat, too. Lovely.
“What kind of company?”
“The kind you don’t want to stand up to, not that you could. You remember little Venna.”
Ouch. Venna was the very last Djinn I’d want to have on my tail right now—even worse than Rahel. Venna was impossibly strong, and she was clever, too. Great friend, awesomely bad enemy. I thought about that little girl, the image of innocence, with those ghostly white eyes like I’d seen in Rahel.
I shuddered. “Where can we go?”
“I’m working on that,” Whitney said. “I’m taking over the car now.”
We blurred past a lot of inviting-looking roadside inns, took some turns, and ended up on the northeast side of town, as best I could tell. Businesses of any kind thinned out and stopped.
Wherever she was taking us, it wasn’t going to be the Hilton.
The car slowed and stopped in the middle of nowhere. I could see a faint smudge on the horizon off the black-top to the right, but I couldn’t tell what it was.
“Uh, Whitney? Hello?”
Nothing. No answer from her, or from David. I tried poking the Djinn, but it just sat there, inert and hot to the touch. It was like poking a bag of especially firm rubber.
Cherise yawned and sat up, rubbing her eyes. Tommy woke up with a grouchy grumble, turned his face toward her neck as she lifted him up, and promptly fell asleep again draped all over her. She patted his back, smiled a little, and then looked at me. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, obviously nothing, because we’re just sitting here. Why are we just sitting here?”
“Because David and Whitney are arguing about it,” I said. I just knew that was the case, and I knew that it indicated a potentially major problem. “Whitney says Venna is headed this way. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but maybe she’s on our trail, too. Either way, it’s not good news.”
Cherise shuddered. “Ouch. Okay, got it—crisis imminent. Again—we’re sitting. Why are we sitting?”
“Because running off without a plan is an even worse idea,” David’s voice said, coming from the radio.
Whitney’s voice, at the same time, came from the Djinn. “You’re not thinking straight about this, boss man. You try to run them, she’ll catch up. You try to hide them in the middle of all those people, she’ll just mow down everybody in her way. This is your only real shot at keeping them alive, and you know it.”
“This is the opposite of keeping them alive!” David snapped back.
“I hate it when Mommy and Daddy fight,” Cher said, with just enough sarcasm to cut through. “We’re not just pieces getting pushed around on a board, you know. Tell us what’s going on.”
David got there first. “She wants to take you to a nuclear weapons assembly plant.”
I think Cherise and I both said it at the same time. “What?” I think we were both pretty restrained about it, really.
“That’s it up ahead,” David said. “It’s not a good idea. It’s so easy for Venna to destroy not just that place but everybody in this part of the state, given all that raw material to work with.”
“I know that,” Whitney snapped. “But it’s also one of the only places we can lock off against her, not just with wards and shields, but with lead-lined concrete and bunkers designed to withstand nuclear attacks. Best possible place to hide them, especially if we can erase their traces on the aetheric.”
Wow, Whit must have been upset, because she’d lost most of her Gone with the Wind accent. And she used bigger words.
“It’s too dangerous,” David said flatly. “No. We go on. I’m sorry, Jo, but if we keep moving we can stay ahead of Venna.”
“Venna can materialize any place she wants, and you know it,” I said. “How exactly do we stay ahead of her?”
“We’re shielding you. She can’t know exactly where you are.”
“But she can narrow the area. And like Whitney said, anybody standing around us is collateral damage.”
He fell silent, which indicated that my logic was, sadly, unassailable. I deeply wanted that little oasis of a working roadside inn, a meal with cooked food and actual silverware, but I understood the risks, and they were far too high—not for the three of us, but for everybody who had nothing to do with it.
“Is she really looking for us?”
“We think so,” Whitney said. David said nothing, which I took for unwilling assent. “She’s not the only one. There are at least four Djinn quartering the country. She just happens to be the one in this area. They’re looking for signs, and ignoring the other Wardens.”
Mother Earth must have really been pissed about me kicking Rahel’s ass. Not good news.
“How about the other Wardens?” I asked. “Anybody close?”
“The three teamed up to cover this area are together in Albuquerque. Not close, but we could try making for their location. Strength in numbers.”
“Not against Venna,” Whitney said, which was probably true. “Not unless you’re throwing an oiled-up Lewis into this cluster.”
“Oiled-up . . .” David sounded utterly mystified, which was probably a good thing, because the image that flashed through my brain was exactly what Whitney intended. Thanks, Whit, you button-pushing bitch. David elected to go with a more literal interpretation. “He’s still in Nevada. Too far.”
“So it sounds like we don’t have a lot of options,” Cherise said. “Is this nuclear place safe for kids?”
“No,” I said, “and it isn’t safe for us, either. But I think Whitney may be right. There isn’t any safe place just now. Maybe it’s the closest we can get. David—can you get us in?”
“Security’s tight, but I think so. The plant’s closed now and under lockdown. Once you’re inside the security perimeter you won’t be seen.”
“Surveillance,” I reminded him. “Heat sensors. Motion detectors. Doesn’t have to be an actual person to bust us for breaking and entering.”
“Nothing electronic is going to pick you up,” Whitney said. “I guarantee that.”
Well, that was about the best I could ask for, in terms of reassurances. Go back, or go into the bunker?
Cherise, oddly enough, asked the logical question I hadn’t bothered to think about. “How long are we staying there?”
“Until we can get Warden tactical support,” I said. “Until we know whether we should go on to Sedona. If Imara really doesn’t want us there, then we’re making a mistake. We need to understand where we’re needed, at this point.” My whole goal, I realized, had been retrieving David’s powers,
and my own. Mission accomplished. Now what? We still had a major, and very difficult, war going on that we were unlikely to win. Restoring David had saved his life but placed him squarely on the sidelines, trapped except for what he could channel through our strange Djinn chauffeur.
Restoring me shifted the balance a little, but only a little. I had to choose where, and how, to apply the strength I could bring. Instinct cried out for me to keep running to Sedona, to see my daughter, to defend her with every breath I had and every power at my command. But Imara wasn’t a helpless child; she was an Oracle, more powerful than her father and me combined, most likely. Instinct could be leading me the wrong way.
I needed to think. And I needed a safe place to do that.
“The plant is our best bet,” I said finally. “If we have to make a stand, it’s got our best chance of survival.”
“I’m not dying in some nuclear warehouse,” Cher said. “Look, enough already. I love you, Jo, but I can’t take little Tommy in there. It’s wrong. It’s full of radiation and crap.”
She was right; it wasn’t any place to take a small boy. No matter how carefully this place conducted its business, it was an inherently dangerous environment for adults, never mind kids.
And I realized that at this moment, our roads were taking different turns. That made me sad, but it also relieved me, just a little. Cherise was warm, and funny, and a true and constant friend, and I loved her.
I didn’t want to leave her in a cold, unmarked grave somewhere, like Kevin. I couldn’t.
“You’re right,” I said softly, and reached over the seat to take her hand. “Cher, it’s not safe for you or for him. I know you feel responsible for him. I can’t ask you to just drop him off somewhere, and I can’t let you, or him, come in there with me. I can control any radiation exposure I get. You’re too vulnerable, and I can’t—I can’t let you get hurt. Not again. Not for me.”
She looked confused for a second, then sad and a little angry—not at me, at herself, because I was sure what she was feeling inside was more relief than frustration. “So that’s it? You’re just going to turf me, after all we’ve been through?”
