by Rachel Caine
"Should let the police handle this — "
"I do that, more people get killed. Keys. Now."
Einstein moved one hand slowly toward a ring of keys and then thumped them on the counter. McCall picked them up in a jingle of metal, shouldered the shotgun again, and turned back to see me standing there.
"You're one of those," he said, and walked past me back into the cool, bright morning.
"One of those what?"
"Ones who don't stay put. Here. Make yourself useful." He tossed me the keys.
"Open the rooms, one at a time. Stay off to the side when you do it."
He marched me over to Room 1. I slid the key marked 1 in the lock, edged as far over as I could, and turned it. McCall hit the door with his booted foot, and all of a sudden that shotgun was down, aimed and meaning business.
Nothing inside. He scanned it, went in to look at the bathroom, then joined me outside again and nodded at the next room.
Room 2 yielded nothing. I was in Room 3. Rooms 4 and 5, also nothing. I wondered when the cops were going to roll up, and wondered what they would make of us doing room-to-room searches of the armed and dangerous variety.
I was wondering about then when I turned the key to Room 6, McCall hit the door, and something loomed out of the dark inside and hit him back.
He hurtled at least twenty feet across the parking lot, hit, rolled, and lay there limp. I hesitated, shocked, and whipped my head back to stare at the open door of the motel room.
Inside, something large and hulking blinked luminous eyes at me, and I saw the glint of teeth.
And felt a sudden hot gust of wind whip around my legs, swirl up my body, and twist my hair around my face.
It took a step outside into the parking lot, and I had about a half a second to figure out what it was. What it wasn't was easy, because it damn sure wasn't human. It was too big, too twisted, too powerful. I instinctively used Oversight, and damn if I didn't see a great, big red ball of fire, twisting in on itself, full of agony and pain and breathtaking, jagged fury …
Oh shit.
That was a Djinn. And not just any Djinn. That was a Djinn infected with a Demon Mark. It was destroying itself in the fight, losing itself, and it might be able to win and survive, but meanwhile, it was being eaten alive and the Demon in it wanted to feed … to …
I became aware of three things: one, a police cruiser with flashing blue and red lights and a moaning siren was speeding up the road toward the motel; two, McCall was crawling over the pavement behind me; and three, that the body in pieces in the Dairy Queen had probably been a Warden.
And then the Djinn focused on me, and the Demon Mark recognized me as a Warden, and hunger flared in those glowing white-hot eyes. It lunged for me, and I didn't have any time for finesse; I skipped backwards, screaming, and reached out for the wind. If the Djinn wasn't anchoring itself completely, then the wind should disperse it enough to give me some time …
The wind did nothing but ruffle the rags the Djinn was still barely wearing.
She'd been female, at some point, or at least liked to manifest in female form.
I slammed a harder gust of wind at her, well aware that I was draining energy out of the atmosphere and something was going to have to create balance for it.
Molecules rushed in to fill empty spaces, vibrating faster; temperatures rose from the friction of atom against atom.
But it was too slow. Wind wasn't going to stop this thing, and the weather system was way too stable for me to get anything out of it in time to save my life. No rivers around to redirect …
Water. Strictly speaking, Djinn didn't need air to breathe; they could adapt themselves just fine. But one thing all cells need, no matter how artificial: they need water just to have form.
I'd never done it before, but it came to me in a blinding and rather scary flash, and I didn't stop to think, I just acted.
I reached out my power into a bubble, surrounded the Djinn, and called every microscopic speck of water out of it.
It was like watching something freeze-dry in time lapse … between one step and
another, the insane Djinn went from huge and bulky and twisted to dry and thin and twisted, a husk of what it had been. It had made itself too real, and reality required human building blocks. Without water, its muscles couldn't function to move. Nerves couldn't conduct impulses.
It let go of flesh and became vapor and flew at me, screaming. I threw up a wall of wind and slammed the vapor back against the cinder-block wall and held it there, pinned. It was strong, oh God it was strong, and it was full of hunger and black fury, and I couldn't keep this up all day. Too many variables, too many witnesses …
The Djinn snarled and solid or not, proved it was capable of a little weather-manipulation of its own; I sensed the wind coming and braced myself, but didn't dare let up on the Djinn to summon up any kind of shield. It hit me hard and fast, a linebacker of a wind packed with scouring sand, and I was knocked off balance and sprawled full length on the pavement, and the wind kept howling, growing, taking on a life of its own as it swept up sand and random trash into an unsteady broad circle around me.
Trying to form a dust devil. Dust devils are a version of a tornado, one without the killing interaction of moisture and air; they're a dry-air phenomenon, and lack the force to really kill.
Unless, of course, they're powered from an outside force, like the Djinn I was trying to hold helpless against the wall.
I felt my control slipping.
"David!" I yelled, and clawed my hair out of my eyes. "David, I need — "
But my command was stopped in my throat, rammed back by a monster punch of wind that nearly blew out my lungs. I was pulled off the ground, whirling. I had a great view of the wind dying around the Djinn, and it reforming into flesh and blood, staring up at me and snarling as the dust devil tossed me around like a toy. Heat lightning shimmered across the sky.
The police car, speeding toward us, suddenly left the road and flipped over into the air four or five times, or maybe I lost count because of my own sickening spin … I saw it in flashes, the metal crunching, bits flying off, the horrible rending shriek of metal.
I had to stop this. Now.
I reached out for the wind, and tried to grab hold, but it was under the Djinn's control and fought me, fought me hard, lashed me bloody with debris and then dropped me with casual, cruel suddenness to the hard ground.
I rolled over, gasping, and saw the Djinn looming over me, and there was something in its mouth, something horrible and I remembered it all too well, the Demon twisting its way into my body and soul … never again, never again …
A boom like Armageddon tore the world in half. No, not the world, just the Djinn. It staggered back, a huge hole in its middle, surprise on that twisted face, and I smelled gunpowder and looked up to see Brian McCall standing there with his shotgun smoking in his hands. Pale and scraped, but upright. He pumped it and pulled the trigger a second time.
"You can't kill it!" I screamed at him, and spotted something shiny lying in the weeds growing next to the wall. I lunged for it, praying, and felt the Djinn gathering its insane strength behind me. When it struck, it wasn't going to screw around; it was going to flatten me, McCall, the motel, and everything in sight.
Or it was going to come after one of us and put that Demon Mark down our throats.
Either way, I couldn't let it happen.
There was a brown glass beer bottle half-buried in the weeds. I pulled it out, breathless, shaking, and held it up to the light.
No cracks.
Also, nothing to use for a cork.
No time to worry about it. I felt the hot rush of power behind me, rolled over on my back and held the bottle up in both hands toward the sky and the Djinn, who was falling on me like a storm, and screamed, "Be thou bound to my service!
Be thou bound to — "
It grabbed me by the ankle and yanked. I slid across the parking lot in an abrading scrape of back o
n asphalt, and somehow managed not to drop the bottle.
McCall had his shotgun aimed, but there was no way he could do anything without hitting me as well, and besides, I wasn't sure the Djinn would even pay attention to a little pellet spray, not with a Warden in its hands.
"— to my service! Be thou — "
It fell on me, driving the breath out of me; it felt exactly like a two-hundred-pound wrestler had dropped with both knees onto my rib cage. I felt things crack, saw red flashing stars, and felt a jet of agony spray through me like acid. My third repetition dissolved into an inarticulate scream, and I felt the Djinn's hand — or whatever passed for it — scrabbling at my mouth, trying to hold it wide open …
Something yanked it off.
I blinked, whooping in painful gasps, and saw that another Djinn was materializing behind the insane one — bronze and gold, swirls of power, hot molten eyes, fury …
David.
He put his forearm across the other Djinn's throat and yanked it upright and screamed at me, "Finish it!"
I could barely get my breath, but I forced enough in and whispered, " — bound to my service," and the Demon-infected Djinn dissolved in an explosion of mist, and I felt the bottle in my hand grow instantly cold and heavy. I slapped my hand over the top of the bottle.
"Cork," I whispered, but David didn't respond. He couldn't. Those were the rules … he couldn't provide anything to do with bottles or corks, couldn't touch his own bottle or those of other Djinn. "Shit. Forgot."
He knelt next to me, holding me up, combing hair away from my face. Frantic.
I didn't have time for that, not now, I was too aware of the bottle I was holding, the energy contained by nothing more than my hand, and the darkness unraveling the edges of my vision. I was going to pass out. If I did, my hand would fall off of the bottle, and …
I looked up into the sky and called rain. It took a few minutes to get what little moisture there was in the area crammed together, and rub the molecules together enough to produce the energy necessary. McCall, who hadn't moved from where he was standing, shotgun still at half-mast, stared at me without any understanding of what I was doing, but when a lightning bolt suddenly whipped out of the clouds forming above he ducked for cover.
Rain fell in a hard silver curtain, brutally fast, hitting my exposed skin in cold slaps. I didn't care. The chill and pain anchored me, kept me awake. I blinked away water and looked at David. Water didn't touch him, just vanished into tiny wisps of steam a few inches from his body. He was staring at me with an intent half-frown, and when the ground was wet enough, I smiled and turned the bottle upside down, removed my hand and dug it into the mud. Screwed it in tight.
Mud squeezed into the mouth of the bottle three inches deep. I let go of the rain and bled the energy off into sheet lightning, white flares across the sky.
Static electricity crawled power lines and hummed, but the rain stopped.
Clouds swirled, confused, and the sun burned through in a matter of minutes.
Only the sun was eternal, out here.
I didn't have power over that, but I did over the water; I concentrated on the bottle and yanked the moisture out of the mud packing the mouth and neck of it, jamming it tight as concrete.
And then I remembered to breathe. Ow. It hurt.
David got me up to my feet, mainly by supernatural strength. "Tell me to heal you," he said.
"Yeah, good idea. Heal me, would you?"
I felt it come over me in a hot golden rush, the feeling of his power moving through me — or my own power, amplified and changed through him. Given form.
The grating agony of ribs went away with sharp little glasslike stabs as bones knitted. I coughed and spat blood, wiped my mouth and looked at the innocent-seeming bottle in my hand. Sealed, it felt like any other bottle half-full of dry mud. I could toss it at the side of the road and nobody would pay any attention.
But something like this shouldn't ever be broken again.
I shook my head and focused on David. He looked — well, like David. With just an unsettling, unfamiliar trace of exhaustion in his face, and a shadow in his eyes.
"Where were you?" I asked. He shook his head. "No bullshit, David. Where were you? Where were you?"
Rule of three. His eyes flared for a second, and then he said, "Talking to Jonathan. Trying to — trying to find a way for this to work."
"Any luck with that?"
I already knew the answer, from the frustration I could feel radiating off of him. "No."
I nodded wearily, and looked past him at Brian McCall, who'd evidently decided not to shoot us.
"What," McCall asked in a very reasonable voice, "the fuck was that?"
I looked at David. David looked at me, raised his eyebrows and shrugged.
"That," I answered, "was a Djinn. So's this. And trust me, you're not going to want to talk about any of it."
###
It took a little bit of time. I'm not an Earth Warden; altering memories isn't all that easy, even for Djinn, and it sure wasn't in my normal skill set.
David fetched a second wrecked car (and that nearly wiped out what power reserves I had left) and we arranged the poor dead guy from the Dairy Queen in the wreckage, then woke up the cop from the police cruiser, who'd fortunately benefited from the presence of airbags and seat belts. I patiently, fraudulently explained the accident. Luckily, the girl had been too panicked to give anything like a rational explanation on the phone, and with the DQ sparkly-clean and nobody backing her hysterical story of finding him dead inside, the cop went with the obvious.
I might have helped that along a little by depleting the oxygen around her and letting her hyperventilate and pass out in the middle of her story.
McCall didn't say a thing to contradict me. His shotgun back in the trunk, he was the picture of innocence, his scrapes and bruises explained by his efforts to get inside the wreckage and save the dead man.
Once the excitement was over, we watched the wrecker clear everything away, and I said to McCall, "We need to talk."
"Figured that," he said. "You going to do some voodoo on me?"
I turned to face him. The sun was up and in full fury now; sweat stung my eyes, and I reached up to tie my hair back with a rubber band from the pocket of my jeans. Possibly in deference to the fact that David was standing next to me, looking human but entirely dangerous, McCall didn't lower his stare to my breasts while I did that.
"Why did you come here?" I asked. "You were tracking it, right?"
He shrugged. "Nobody believed me. Series of mutilations through the Southwest, heading this way — I thought it was some kind of werewolf, actually. Never thought it'd be — what was it?"
"A Djinn."
"Right. Always thought of those as being cute, dressed in pink and purple …"
"Too much television," I said. "How long has this been happening?"
"I tracked it from Michigan," he said.
"Show me on a map."
He traced the roads we'd taken. Dammit. This thing had followed me. If it had just been heading for the same destination, it could have easily beaten us there. It had been stalking me, and I'd finally allowed it to close in.
When I looked up, he was staring at me with nothing at all in his face or his eyes. "It killed a friend of mine," he said. "I watched her die, and I couldn't stop it. It tore her apart right in front of me."
"I'm — I'm sorry."
He ignored that. "Is it dead?"
I exchanged a look with David. "Not — dead exactly. But confined. It's not getting out."
"I want it dead, not confined."
"I know. I'm sorry."
"No, you don't know. I want it dead, do you understand? I want its guts strewn over half the county. I want its fucking head on a pike!" The sudden burst of fury out of him was unexpected and shocking, because he did such a good job of hiding it behind that casual toughness. I swallowed, but didn't flinch. He balled up his fists at his sides and took a step into my
space. "Now you let it out of whatever prison it's in and give it to me. I'll — "
"You'll end up dead," David said flatly. He hadn't moved, but there was a sense that he had, that he'd gotten larger, somehow. "Guts strewn over half the county. And it wouldn't bother to stop and put your head on a pike, because you wouldn't matter enough. People don't matter. They're only vessels, or meat.
What's in that bottle is insane, and it's powerful, and it's far out of your ability to destroy." His eyes went dark. "Now you need to take a step back, because I promise you, I'm not going to let you touch her."
McCall said nothing. His eyes burned, but they were just human eyes, after all.
He didn't strike me as the type to step off from a fight, but this time, he did.
He must have had the sense to know that David wasn't kidding.
I cleared my throat. "Look, McCall — you have to trust me. I'm not letting this thing go, all right? But you have to do something for me. You have to stay quiet about it."
He pulled his stare from David to lock it on me. There was a bleak fury in him, but a bleak humor, too. "Fuck. I look like the chatty type to you?" he asked, and jammed his hands in his pockets. "In my line of work, keeping your mouth shut is a condition of continued breathing." He shook his head and walked away.
I watched as he got into the dusty Cadillac and drove it off the lot. No good-bye wave. Not even a glance back.
When I turned back to David and took his hand, I caught sight of the proprietor of the Desert Inn standing in his doorway, watching us. Amazing. He hadn't bothered to come out for the excitement, but now he was watching.
He tapped his watch. "Eleven thirty," he yelled. "You owe me for another day."
I blinked. "What about him?" I gestured at McCall's Cadillac as it crested the hill and disappeared into the vastness of the desert.
"What about him? That bastard's dangerous, I ain't asking him for money. You, you got to pay another seventy dollars. Plus damages for all those doors you broke in."
Some days, being heroic really doesn't pay.
###
