by Rachel Caine
I stayed right where I was, next to the door of the Mustang. “I’m driving my own car.” Technically, David was driving, but Antonelli might not know that. In fact, he didn’t look nearly worried enough, so I doubted he had any idea there was an angry Djinn standing a couple of feet away, eyes lit up like Halloween lanterns.
“Look, I don’t know the plan; I’m just following orders. Lewis says take the van; we take the van,” Antonelli said. “I don’t ask no questions; neither do you. Come on, sister, let’s go. I’ve got things to do.”
There was a ring of sweat around the high neck of his muscle shirt, and dark streaks under the arms. Unless Antonelli had come straight from the gym, something was up. He was nervous.
“We can sort that out,” I said, and pulled my cell phone from my pocket. “Let me just call—”
The circuitry inside the phone fried, boiled into vapor in an instant. I dropped the red-hot case and blew on my blistered fingers. Antonelli hadn’t moved, but something about him had changed. I could almost smell it: the burned-metal bite of desperation, mingled with a coppery odor of fear.
“Get in the fucking van,” he said. “I’m not playing, bitch. Don’t make this a showdown; there are too many people around. Kids. I don’t want to do that, and neither do you. Let’s keep this calm.”
Oh God, he was serious. I could tell it from the sweat on his skin, the dark shadows in his eyes. He was a whole lot more scared of someone else than he was of me.
That needed to change, right now.
I dropped my purse to the ground, glad I’d donned the sunglasses. I made sure my feet were firmly planted, shoulder-width apart, the right slightly forward to give me a more stable base.
“You’re right,” I said quietly. “I don’t want to do this. You don’t want to do this. But somehow, I think it’s going to happen anyway, because I can’t get in that van, Lee. Whatever’s going on, I can’t take the chance. Let’s think this through before we both start something that will end badly.”
David had not moved. Hadn’t spoken. Still, I was feeling the vibration of menace from him like the subsonic pulses from a volcano about to blow; this was going to go south, very badly, very fast.
“Who is it?” I asked. “Lee, tell me who’s making you do this. It’s not Lewis. It’s not the Wardens. Somebody’s forcing you to take me out of circulation. Come on, man, we don’t have to make this a throw down. We can talk about it, work it out.” While I talked, I used my Earth powers, subtly sending calming vibrations to him, lulling him into a state in which he might be more inclined to listen. To trust.
Antonelli shook himself, as if he were throwing off a wrestling hold, and I knew my brief second of opportunity was gone. “Save it,” he snapped. “I’m not some wet-behind-the-ears trainee. You can’t con me.”
And then Lee Antonelli, one of the best natural Fire Wardens I had ever seen, declared war.
I’ll give him credit; it was a strategic strike, not just a general firestorm. He formed a fireball and lobbed it not at me, but at my car. Clearly, he did not understand my relationship with cars. He’d have gotten off easier if he’d gone ahead and set my hair on fire. I’d have taken it less personally.
I formed an invisible cricket bat of hardened air, swung, lined up, and hit a solid line drive, sending the fireball right back into Antonelli’s midsection. It hit him hard enough to drive him against the body of the van, which rocked and creaked on its springs, and his muscle tee caught fire. He glanced down, annoyed, and brushed a hand over it. The fire went out, but there was a nice round hole with scorched edges baring his carefully developed abs. He’d had a tattoo put around his navel—a woman’s face, with the navel representing her open mouth. Classy. “Bitch!” he snarled.
“Repeating yourself already? We just started,” I said. I didn’t alter my stance, and I didn’t go after him. “Walk away. Just get in your van and go. We’ll all be happier.”
Only it wasn’t going to happen. He was scared, and he clearly didn’t think walking away from this was an option. Instead, he pointed his finger at me, and from the tip of it blazed a pinpoint of red light, hot as the sun. Coherent light, concentrated a thousand times stronger than the brightest earth-based laser developed by men.
Air wouldn’t slow it down. Neither would water, although it would bend the beam and eat up some of its energy in steam. Both options were sure to fail, and I knew from experience that if he could break my concentration, he could hurt me badly enough that I’d have a hard time defending myself at all.
Instead of defense, I went for offense. I had to end this fast, before some innocent bystander traipsed out of the diner and into the line of—literally—fire.
First, I summoned up a gale-force wind that slammed into his chest and pinned him against the van. Then I took away his air.
It’s damn hard to concentrate when you feel like you’re suffocating. I started with the air going in, filtering out the oxygen as he gasped. Then I focused on the oxygen inside Antonelli’s body—in his lungs, in his blood. I knew what I wanted to see, and it glowed bright blue for me.
I separated the hydrogen and oxygen atoms, took away an atom from the oxygen molecule, and within seconds, he was shaking in desperation, nearly out. I let him continue to breathe, because if anything it increased his panic, but I destroyed the oxygen before he could metabolize it.
There was a side effect of this, of course. Destruction creates energy, and I burned off the excess in sharp blue sparks that danced on the antenna of the van, the metal rims of the wheels, even Antonelli’s showy belt buckle.
It felt as though I were killing him, in a cruel and inhumane way, and that was exactly what I wanted him to feel. I wanted him to know that I wasn’t going to give in, and I wasn’t going to screw around. If he wanted to play hardball, he was going to have to live through the opening innings, and I’d taken the game to the professional level.
“Think about it,” I said. “I could just as easily put water in your lungs. Drowning on dry land. Sound good to you, tough guy?”
Antonelli sank to his knees, eyes wide and desperate.I hadn’t noticed before, but he had brown eyes, big and somehow childlike despite all the ’roided-up muscles.
I felt oddly detached about what I was doing, but there was no way I was going to let go until I sensed he was more afraid of me than of the theoretical bad guys.
“Jo.” David’s soft voice. His hand touched my shoulder. “You don’t have to kill him.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But if he’s one of them, it’d be a damn sight safer in the long run.”
He didn’t say anything. I could tell he’d dropped the veil concealing him from Antonelli, because Antonelli’s mouth stretched wide, and he tried to croak out something that was probably a plea. His lips had gone the color of iron, and his skin looked dead and pale and rubbery.
He was about to lose consciousness, so I let him have a torturous, cruel gasp of air, loaded with O2. He gagged and pitched forward, openly weeping; he wasn’t coming after me, that much was certain. He just wanted to live to get away.
But I didn’t want him to get away. I let him have just enough oxygen to survive, not enough to get his arms and legs in any kind of working order. Then I picked up my purse and walked over to him, crouched down to where he was sitting against the wheel of the van, and pulled down my sunglasses to look into his eyes.
“What were you going to do to me, Lee?” I asked him. “Don’t lie. It’ll only make me angry, and you won’t like what happens when I lose my temper.”
I let him have more oxygen, just enough. I’d scared him, all right. I’d terrified him almost more than was strategically necessary, and I knew—again, in a detached, academic sort of way—that it might bother me later. Maybe it would bother me a lot.
Or—and this was a lot more worrisome—maybe it wouldn’t bother me at all.
It took Lee six breaths before he was able to decide to choke out, “Going to kill you.”
“Mea
ning, you’re still going to kill me, or you were supposed to kill me?”
“Supposed to.” His face contorted with effort, and he bared his teeth. “Going to.”
I’d known that was a possibility, but somehow, it was very different hearing it. I glanced up at David. He was standing over us, quiet, but his expression . . . Antonelli was lucky not to be relying on his mercy. I might have developed a nasty streak, but I was the kinder choice between the two options.
“I guess I should give up on the friendship bracelets, ” I said. “Good, I suck at crafts. So, I’m guessing all this wasn’t your own brilliant idea. You haven’t had an original one since you set your cat on fire in the second grade. Who sent you? Think hard, Lee. We’re going into the final lightning round. If I don’t believe you, the next breath you take could be water. Or cyanide. I just love chemistry.”
He didn’t want to talk, but self-preservation is a damn fine motivator. No matter how badass his bosses might be, they weren’t here. I was. Like anyone else, Antonelli wanted his next breath to be sweet and life-giving, not foul and toxic. He knew better than to question whether or not I could do it.
“Sentinels,” he croaked. “Want you dead. Paying cash.”
“Hmmm. How much?” He looked at me as if I were totally crazy. I wasn’t so sure he was wrong. “I’d like to know how much it was worth, stabbing me in the back.”
“Five million.”
I sat back, surprised. “Five million dollars?”
“I’d kill you for free,” Antonelli muttered. “Bitch.”
“Is that any way to talk to the person holding your oxygen tank?” I asked, and cut off the flow into his lungs. He choked and thrashed. “Oh, okay. I see your point. Five million is a lot of temptation. But I don’t think it was the money. You might like me to think it was, but I think whoever sent you scared the crap out of you.” I let him have an entire ten breaths of sweet, sweet air. He shook his head. “Come on, Lee. Please. I don’t want to hurt you anymore. Just tell me who sent—”
I had no warning. Neither did Antonelli.
Some tremendous force slammed into me, throwing me facedown to the gravel path. I rolled, tossed my hair out of my face, and saw that David had also been driven back from Antonelli.
That was . . . almost impossible. Unless he’d been taken by surprise, by someone or something of nearly equal strength, it was very hard to knock a Djinn for a loop. For a fatal second, David was distracted from Antonelli by a perceived threat against me, while I was busy regrouping and trying to figure out what the hell had happened.
Antonelli didn’t hit us while we were vulnerable; he wouldn’t have had either the concentration or the energy. No, someone else struck Antonelli. I’d gone up into Oversight, struggling to catch a glimpse of what was going on, and saw a huge red, spectral hand reach through the aetheric and punch claws deep into Antonelli’s chest. I felt the black wave of despair and fury like a psychic blast. In the real world, Antonelli’s eyes locked with mine.
And then the spectral hand crushed his heart like a grape.
Murder, cold and sudden and utterly merciless.
Lee Antonelli swayed on his knees, and as long as I live I’ll see his face, see that terrible, sad, confused expression and those lovely brown eyes begging me to explain why I’d let this happen. You could say that he deserved it; he’d been willing to kill me.
But you’d be wrong. Nobody deserved that.
David whirled, turning into a blur of light, and was gone. I caught Antonelli as his corpse pitched forward. Blood burst out of his mouth and nose, and I realized it hadn’t been only his heart the hand had gone after; it had been his lungs, too, and probably any other organ of note. His murderer had systematically pulped him from the inside, like a kid squashing tomatoes in a bowl.
I cursed breathlessly, well aware it was too late. David had darted off in pursuit, but I could tell there was little to no trace on the aetheric of who’d delivered the death blow. Someone horribly powerful, though. Someone not afraid to break every rule.
I’d forgotten to worry about conservation of energy, in those few seconds, and as I eased Lee to the pavement, the imbalance went critical. First, the windows on the van blew out in a shrapnel-spray of glass. One second later, the windows in my car followed. Then the diner’s plate glass windows. The concussive effect rippled out, losing strength until it was only cracking glass and denting metal, and then it faded away.
I didn’t care about that. Someone had murdered a Warden right in front of me, and I hadn’t been able to do a damn thing to stop it.
Some hero I was.
I heard a confused babble, and then the patrons and staff of the diner boiled out into the parking lot, yelling questions, momentarily more upset about their auto damage than anything else. Someone caught sight of me on my knees, with Lee’s body cradled in my arms, and the tenor of the babble changed and grew louder as people converged around me in a forest of heads and shadows.
“What happened?” one of them asked. “Is he okay?”
“No,” I said. I sounded calm. That was odd. “I think he had a heart attack.” Stupid thing to say; there was blood on his shirt, on me, still dripping from his gaping mouth. “Maybe a hemorrhage.”
“That’s sad; he’s so young,” someone else murmured. I heard a cell phone being dialed, and a voice asking for an ambulance. After a pause, they also asked for the police. Well, I couldn’t blame them. Big dude dead on the ground, with a burn mark in his shirt and blood all over his face.
And me, with blood on my hands.
I couldn’t explain, so I didn’t try. I just sat next to Lee’s body, and by the time I realized that I was uncontrollably trembling, it was too late to claim I was too badass to care about what had just happened.
I was crying by the time the sirens approached.
I should have realized that where the police went, the scavengers would follow. In this case, it was the local news crews, two different species by the plumage of their satellite trucks. The reporters had a certain sleek, predatory look to them that identified them clearly from the casually dressed videographers and sloppy, Earth-shoe-wearing boom guys.
I watched them approach as I was giving my story to the police, and it was like a flock of vultures circling, waiting for my last breath.
“Ma’am?”
I blinked. The police officer facing me was tall, beefy, ginger-haired, and excruciatingly polite. Despite that, he wasn’t the kind to take any crap, and I heard the warning in his oh-so-polite question.
“Sorry, sir. I was just coming out of the diner with my—my fiancé, and we saw this gentleman get out of his van. He looked like he was in some trouble. I think he might have been having some kind of seizure.”
“Seizure,” the cop said, and noted it down. “Uhhuh. Was his shirt like that when he got out?”
Oh. The burns. “I didn’t notice right away. I didn’t see him with a cigarette or anything,” I said, which was the absolute truth. “Is it important?”
“Probably not. He damn sure didn’t burn to death. So, you didn’t know him, ma’am?”
I was lucky that nobody appeared to have noticed our little confrontation in the parking lot—then again, it probably wasn’t luck so much as David, taking care of business. Everybody remembered me and David inside the diner, but nobody appeared to have been paying attention when we left and went out to the car. The glamour had held until the windows blew out.
“No, I didn’t know him,” I said. It was my first real lie, and I had to make sure he bought it. I tried not to hold myself too still or keep his gaze too long. A good Earth Warden could have exerted some mental pressure to make him overlook anything that tripped his suspicions, but I’d never been that good, and I wasn’t about to try something like that at my current level of emotional trauma. “Sorry. I think he didn’t really know what was going on. Maybe he was high . . . ?” Slandering the dead, Joanne. Good one. I felt an uncomfortable roll of guilt, but then again, Antonel
li had been willing to abduct and murder me. A little slander might have been appropriate.
“Where’s your boyfriend?” the cop asked.
“Fiancé,” I automatically corrected him, and smiled nervously. “I think he went to the bathroom. It was— this was awful. Really awful.”
The cop nodded, probably thinking of all the much more awful things he’d no doubt seen in his career. Probably thinking I was a lightweight ditz. That was fine, because in some senses I was, and besides, I didn’t want him to take me too seriously. That would be a very bad thing.
“Okay,” he said. “If you’ll wait over there, Ms. Baldwin, it’ll be a little while. You said you were on your way to New York?”
“Yes,” I said. “I have a business meeting. Look, can I call—?”
“Sure,” he said. “Just don’t go anywhere.”
I walked away, not in the direction of the reporters, and headed for the pay phone. How long had it been since I’d had to use a public phone? Years. I missed my crispy-fried cell phone, especially when I saw the grime and dried spit on the telephone receiver. You’re an Earth Warden, I reminded myself. You laugh at public phone germs.
Still, I fished a tissue out of my purse and wiped the plastic down before I started dialing.
Lewis answered on the third ring. “Somebody tried to kill me,” I said. “No, don’t interrupt, and don’t joke. It was Lee Antonelli. I had things under control, but somebody took him out at a distance. He said something about the Sentinels putting out a contract on my life.”
There was a silence on the other end that stretched on for longer than I would have liked. “How’d they kill him?” Lewis asked.
“Some kind of aetheric attack, nothing I’ve ever seen before. Lewis, they just reached out and destroyed him. What the hell is going on?”
“Just get here,” he said. “The faster the better.” He hesitated for a second, and then his voice softened. “You okay?”
