Firestorm

Chapter Five

Ashan was intimidating as hell, and he knew it; his predominant color scheme was gray, with a little silver for highlights. As always, he looked elegantly tailored. A double-breasted suit, the color of mourning doves. A pale gray shirt. A teal-blue tie, with eyes to match. Ashan, of all the Djinn, struck me as less than human; he gave the impression that he just wore a bipedal shape with opposable thumbs for convenience, but he gave it no more importance than that. His movements had that liquid grace that all the Djinn seemed to possess but which they didn't usually flaunt quite so openly. Even Rahel seemed more part of my world.
He walked steadily toward us down that gravel path. There were dark spots marring it. Bloodstains, all of them mine. A flaming branch was blocking his path, and he kicked it casually out of the way with so much power that it hit one of the quaint weathered tombstones and snapped it off like a broken tooth.
Imara made a low sound of terror. I pushed her behind me.
"Ashan," I said. "Thanks for your concern, but really, we're fine. No need to be worried."
"Freak," he said. "Filthy groveling worm. You defile the ground you touch." Voice like nothing at all. Gray, monotone, flat. No anger, but that didn't make me feel any better. Ashan didn't need to be angry. He just needed to be awake. "You defiled the Oracle with your stench."
"I saved the Oracle from a Demon Mark," I said, and watched his expression. No surprise there. "You knew. You knew he was infected. Why didn't you come running to save him?"
"You have no right to be here." His empty eyes flashed toward Imara. "Either of you."
"Leave the kid out of it. If you want to smack somebody around--"
He moved too fast for me to see, and suddenly there was a stinging agony on the side of my face, and I was on my hands and knees. He'd slapped me. A leisurely, open-handed slap. If he'd used his fist, he'd have snapped my neck. "Do not speak to me again."
Imara threw herself in his path. "You're not hurting my--"
Ashan didn't even break stride. He backhanded her so hard, she left the ground, twisted in midair, and flew twenty feet to slam into a massive gray headstone. I watched her, horrified. She didn't move after landing.
When I looked back at Ashan, it was too late. He grabbed my throat and dragged me kissing-close. I scrabbled and scratched at his hand, but it was like trying to pry steel with your fingernails. Overhead, dark clouds scudded in from the sea, moving fast and high, as if they wanted a ringside seat for the action. I could sense a certain eagerness up there. Storms always loved to see Weather Wardens getting their comeuppance.
"You," Ashan said with gentle precision, his lips to my ear, "should have stayed far, far away from here. You're too late, in any case. I've told the Mother the whole filthy history of humanity. None of Jonathan's benevolent, willful ignorance. None of David's foolish sentiment. The truth."
"Truth?" I croaked. "Or just your version?"
He was right. I should have headed the other way, fast, the minute I'd seen him turn the corner, but with Ashan, as with any major predator who has you at his mercy, it's best not to run unless you have an even shot at getting away. Bravado's the only real defense.
"You know the thing I like best about human beings?" he asked, and took hold of my right arm with his big, cold left hand. "You break so easily."
He pressed with his pale, white thumb. That was all. Just his thumb, and I felt the hot electric snap of a bone breaking, followed by a wet cascade of agony. I couldn't even scream. Couldn't get it past his choking hand.
His thumb moved. There were two bones in the arm, and he found the second with unerring precision.
Snap.
My shriek came out a strangled whimper. I saw red, and stars, and I wanted to heave but I'd just choke faster. And Ashan wasn't finished with me, that much was obvious.
"Call him," Ashan murmured in my ear. He hadn't so much as raised his voice a single degree in temperature. "Call your pet for me. He'll save you if you call him. He won't let me kill you."
I wanted to. Badly. But I knew all too well what Ashan was doing; he wanted David here, alone, with a lover and a daughter to try to protect. David had power--boatloads of it, inherited from Jonathan--but Ashan wasn't far behind. And he wanted David's place as the hub at the center of the Djinn universe. He wanted to remove the only real threat to his power.
But mostly, he just wanted to do to David what he was doing to me. Terrorize, humiliate, torment.
"No." I managed to mouth the word. I could protect David, if nothing else. His right hand flexed, and I felt my throat flex with it. It would be easy for him to kill me. Too easy.
"We'll see." He still had hold of my arm, and now he deliberately, slowly, twisted it. I screamed again, but he'd trapped the sound in my throat where it frantically beat inside, like a bird in a trap. Red-hot wires of agony ran through me. It was like low-budget electrocution. I could feel tears streaming down my face and over his hand, and I was staring pleadingly at his blank teal-blue eyes. Looking for mercy. Looking for anything I could recognize as remotely human.
He smiled. It was the coldest expression I could imagine seeing on a face that pretended to be flesh and blood.
Somehow, I knew that the serene little town of Sea-casket hadn't noticed a thing, and wouldn't. Ashan could stand here in broad daylight and pull me apart like a rag doll, and nobody would notice a thing. Just when I thought that he was really going to do it, he dropped me. I fell painfully hard to my knees, hugged my broken arm to my chest, and swayed on the verge of passing out. My wandering eyes focused on the crumpled form near the tombstones. Imara was still down. Not moving. I felt something go still inside me. The swirling darkness that had threatened to drag me down blew away, leaving me cold and utterly clear.
I gulped back the tears and the terror, and shifted my gaze up, to Ashan.
"You know what?" I croaked. It sounded ragged, and not quite sane. "You and me, we have an understanding. Fair game. But I don't care how badass you think you are, you shouldn't have hurt my daughter."
The artificially calm weather of Seacasket had been shattered by the tinkering I'd done to produce my lightning bolt; I reached out, grabbed the air, and started shaking. The world was going to hell anyway, and I wasn't about to let Ashan do this. Not to Imara. Not to me.
Not without a fight.
"You can't," he said flatly.
Bullshit, I couldn't. I was a Warden. I had the power, and the lack of conscience to go with it. I'd had a Demon Mark, once upon a time. Maybe it had rotted something inside me that should have been thinking of the big picture, I don't know, but right at that moment, I was all about the world within fifty feet, and my child lying unconscious and at Ashan's nonexistent mercy.
Fifty feet happened to include the mausoleum that held the Oracle, too.
"You started it," I said. I continued to shake up the system. It wasn't easy, especially with agony throbbing through my body in waves, but I was making progress. There was serious instability in the atmosphere. And offshore, the storm that had been hanging back saw its shot, and started rolling in with the wind at its back. Huge black sails of clouds, belling tight in the wind. Lightning was a scimitar in its teeth, and yo ho, mateys, the pirates were coming ashore.
"Stop," Ashan said, and grabbed me by the hair. I grinned at him. Must have been gruesome, bloody teeth, bloodshot eyes.
"Make me." I flipped electron polarities in the air, turning and turning and turning. Locking the chain in place with a sudden furious surge of energy, grounding energy from the storm clouds. "I don't need David to whip your punk ass."
Lightning hissed up from the ground, down from the clouds, and he was caught in the middle.
Flesh and blood vaporized instantly, along with all of Ashan's nice couture. I was too close. I caught the corona, was blown backward into the mausoleum wall, and ended up on the ground, screaming into a mouthful of grass because my broken arm had just gone up five steps on the ten-point agony scale, to fourteen. Man, I was trashed.
But Ashan was vapor.
That didn't mean he was dead, not at all, just not manifesting properly in human form. Didn't matter much to him, in terms of hurting him in any lasting way, but I was willing to bet that it had stung. He wasn't exactly roaring right back for a rematch. I lifted my head and saw him trying to coalesce out of the mist, and focused the wind into a hard, narrow channel, straight for him. It hit him like a cannon, blasted the mist apart, and this time, he came together more slowly. Hanging back. I didn't bother to get up as his face formed in the fog. Not flesh and bone, more of a ghost-image. Spooky. I sounded a hell of a lot more confident than I felt. "Turn around and leave, Ashan, because I swear, the next thing I hit will mean a lot more to you than your skin."
I sensed his smug disbelief. So I hit the mausoleum with a lightning bolt.
The world went nuts. Really nuts. Winds howling, lightning stabbing all over the sky in an insane display of fury, ground rumbling... hailstones pelted out of the clouds, the size of golf balls. A couple hit me, and if my arm hadn't already been overwhelming me with agony, that would have been serious pain.
Ashan managed to form himself into pseudoflesh--not quite human, for certain, because he was misting out just below the hips into a gray swirl of fog. He still clung to the business suit for the top half.
But he had something to say. His eyes had gone completely dark. Lightless as space.
"You'll die for that. No matter how many friends you have among the Djinn. This is a sacred place."
"Bring 'em on," I said grimly. "Maybe you'd like to explain why you let the Oracle suffer like that. Unless you were just blaming it on poor old humanity. Again." I struggled up to my knees, then somehow to my feet. It was more of a stagger than a graceful rise, but the fact I was standing was pretty much a victory. "Guess what? I talked to her. And now she knows that you've been lying to her, you bastard."
Which was a blatant lie, because I'd gotten zero sense she'd paid the slightest attention to me, but hopefully Ashan couldn't know that. The air was full of threat, his and mine and something else, something vast. I was guessing that Mom was telling us kids to quit, she didn't care who'd started it. Of course, this mom was capable of administering a smack to the bottom that would flatten half the eastern seaboard.
Maybe I'd been a little hasty, using the last lightning strike. But it had been that, or roll over and die, not something I was very good at doing.
Not with my child at stake.
Ashan just... vanished. Not so much a puff of smoke as a wasting away, tatters on the gusting wind. I put my unbroken hand against the wall of the mausoleum and leaned for a few minutes, breathing hard, trying not to faint; my knees buckled a couple of times, but somehow I got upright. The storm was growling overhead, but when I read its pedigree, it was still a punk, not that much of a threat. I'd unsettled it, for certain, and upped it a few degrees on the dangerometer. I needed to smooth it down.
And I'd get around to it. But first, I stumbled across grass, around tilting old headstones, and collapsed next to my daughter, who was lying motionless on the ground.
"Imara?" I reached out and touched her.
My hand went through her. Not in the way that it would have if she'd been, say, consumed by little blue sparklies that seeped in from an alien dimension, but as if she was mostly vapor, held together by memory and will. She didn't move. I withdrew my hand hastily, and used it to cradle my broken arm across my chest. Damn, that hurt. I saw stars and jagged red streaks, and managed somehow to breathe through the pain. "Imara, can you hear me?"
If she could, she wasn't giving any sign. She was in a kind of there and not-there state, lying facedown on the grass. I couldn't grab her to move her, or turn her over. All I could do was call her name.
Rain pattered down, cold and hard on my exposed skin. I sat on the grass and shivered, next to my unconscious Djinn child, and fought the urge to call for David. He'd come, I knew that. But I wasn't entirely sure that it would be safe for him; if Ashan was still hanging out there, watching, this could still turn wrong.
Not that it was in any way right to begin with.
After I while, I noticed that Imara's clothes began to absorb water. I reached down and lightly touched the fabric. It had texture and weight.
At my touch, she exploded into movement, like a startled deer--up and on her feet, white-faced and wild-eyed. Scanning the skies, then the land, then focusing on me.
I wasn't sure she even remembered who I was. One thing was certain--there was so much menace coming off her that I didn't dare move. She'd have whacked me halfway across the cemetery, just the way she'd been hit, and without a doubt, it would have snapped more than my arm.
The panic cleared from her eyes. "Mom?" She was across the intervening space in seconds, crouched next to me, reaching out. I was cold, wet, and shaking, and I was probably going into shock, if I hadn't already booked a full vacation package there.
She was speaking a liquid language, words that sounded fast and golden in my ears, and I didn't know what she was saying, but I knew it was in the language of the Djinn. I recognized it, from moments with David.
"Hey," I said weakly. "English, kiddo."
She felt warm. So warm. I vaguely remembered leaning on her support as I staggered out of the cemetery and onto the street. The Camaro was sitting right where we'd parked it, looking bold and sassy through the downpour. Imara got me in the passenger seat.
It was all over. I'd failed. I'd just... failed.
"Mom?" Imara sounded worried as she put the car in gear and scratched gears getting us out of town. "Mom, where do we go?"
I had no fucking idea. I turned my face away, toward the world outside. The world that was going to die because I'd been inadequate to the task of saving it.
"Find the nearest Warden," I said. "Maybe there's something we can do to help."
"With what?"
I shrugged, one-shouldered. The other one felt like ground glass had been driven into the joint. "Whatever." I wasn't very interested.
Imara kept casting anxious looks my way, but I didn't say another word.
I had no idea how long the drive was, but it wasn't long enough for me to come up with a decent bright idea. So Imara just followed instructions and drove me to the nearest Warden.
That turned out to be Emily, the Earth and Fire Warden who'd given me crap back at the Headquarters building. She lived in a one-dog town in the middle of Nowhere County, Maine, and when Imara coasted the Camaro to a stop on the gravel driveway, she parked it next to a mud-spattered Jeep.
The Warden was home. She came to the door when Imara knocked, stared at my kid as if she was the Second Coming, then at me like the devil incarnate. "Oh," she said flatly. "They sent you. Great."
She turned and walked into the house, not bothering to show us in. I was too sick and in too much pain, not to mention despair, to care about that. I followed her to a homey-looking living room, with one wall painted a somewhat unfortunate shade of cinnamon; Indian blankets and southwestern art lined the walls. The furniture was chunky wood, deliberately primitive. Knickknacks ran to kachina dolls and dreamcatchers.
I knew Emily vaguely. We'd never been friends, or even what I'd call acquaintances, but we'd worked on a couple of projects together, and shared a desk at the national Warden call center before, the one Wardens use to yell for help when things turn really bad. Emily hadn't exactly been a people person then, and I doubted she'd mended her ways. Earth Wardens in general tended to be either hippies or hermits; she definitely fell into the hermit category. Apparently, the Fire Warden tendencies hadn't done much to influence her basic character.
She was wearing what she'd had on the last time I'd seen her--baggy blue jeans and a nondescript tunic top, one that stretched. Bare feet, that was the only real change. Her short-cropped hair feathered around her blunt-featured face, and the scowl looked at home on her face, worn in deep.
I sank down in a chair and cradled my broken arm closer, trying not to scream.
"Huh," Emily said, and jerked her chin at it. "Looks bad."
"Thanks."
"Wasn't a compliment. You want some help?"
"If it wouldn't put you out."
Imara was standing indecisively a few feet away, clearly trying to get a signal from me as to what, if anything, to do. I didn't have time. Emily bent down, took my arm in her big, strong hands, and did a twist-yank thing that hurt so bad, I teetered on the edge of darkness.
"There," she said in satisfaction. "Hold still."
She put her hand around the break, and I tried to obey her order. Not easy. The throbbing agony was hard to ignore, and then the sense of burning, and then the deep itching. The burning just got worse, until it felt as if I were holding my arm over a Bunsen burner. I wanted to snatch it back, but I knew better.
I'd felt this before.
It took about fifteen minutes. Emily wasn't the world's most powerful Earth Warden, though she was competent enough; when she let go, the arm felt hot and sensitive, but more or less healed.
"You're going to want to go easy on it," she said. "The mend's still green. Let it cure."
"Sure," I croaked. My throat felt horribly dry. "Water?"
Without a word, she went into the kitchen and came back with a glass, which I drained without stopping for breath. She refilled it. I managed another half a glass before I decided that too much might make me gag.
"We don't have time for this," Emily said. "The fire's burning hot out there."
"Fire?" I asked. "You didn't come to fight the fire?"
"Not--exactly."
Emily leaned back in her big leather chair, frowning at me. It was covered in what looked like the hide of a Holstein. A little too identifiable for me to be comfortable with it. I didn't like knowing the genetic heritage of my furniture.
"Then what the hell do you want, a meeting?" She made it sound like the filthiest curse she could imagine. It probably was, for her. Come to think of it, I didn't much approve of them, either.
"No," I said, and sighed. "I just... You need help. I was in the area. Let's leave it at that."
Her frown grooved deeper, and she tilted her head to one side, considering the problem of me. "Yeah, you're going to be real useful, the shape you're in." She shook her head. "Not that beggars can be choosers. How do you feel?" She didn't sound like she much cared, but she was forced to ask the question.
"Better," I said. It wasn't a lie, really. I'd been at rock-bottom earlier, now I was a quarter-inch above the ground. Everything's relative. "Thanks for this."
"What, the arm? Part of the job." Emily cocked a thumb at Imara, who had settled back in a corner, watching us. "Thought you said we weren't supposed to trust them anymore. What, you don't have to obey your own rules?"
I decided not to engage on that one. "You don't have a Djinn, right?"
"Never needed one." She sounded as if those who did were clearly lacking some important feature, like guts. "She going to go nuts and kill us?"
"Well, wouldn't that be exciting?" I sighed. "Imara? You going to go nuts and kill us?"
She thought about it. Gravely. "Not quite yet."
"Right. Keep us informed."
I thought for sure that Emily would bring up the resemblance between me and Imara, but she wasn't that observant. Her eyes darted between us for a few seconds, bright but not registering any connections, and then she decided to shift the conversational ground. "What do you know about fighting fires?"
"Pretty much what every Weather Warden knows." From the flash in her eyes, that wasn't something that met with her approval. "Maybe I can wing it."
Emily was old school. She fixed me with a narrow stare. "No, you won't wing it. I'll call up Paul and get a real Fire Warden up here."
"I thought Lewis was--"
"I don't take orders from Lewis Orwell." Didn't like him much, either, from the unpleasant twist of her mouth around his name. A lot of Earth Wardens didn't care for him, for some reason. I think it was because he kept showing them up. That would especially bother Emily, Miss I-don't-have-a-Djinn-because-I'm-too-badass-to-need-one. "Look, this is my territory. There's a chain of command. Lewis isn't even part of the Wardens, as far as I'm concerned; he turned his back on us long ago. If he's what we've got for leadership these days, we're in trouble." "Lewis--"
She cut me off with a sharp gesture. "And the last I heard, you were out of the Wardens completely. Anyway, it doesn't matter. I'm working too hard to keep things together around here to worry about politics. So don't bother with the campaign speeches. What are my chances of getting somebody who knows firefighting from a hole in the ground out here?"
"Chances?" If I kept repeating things, she had every right to stick me in a cage and call me a parrot. "Not too good. I think I'm what you're going to get."
She sniffed. "In other words, not much."
I kept my mouth shut and shook my head. She let out a long, slow breath and sat back in her slaughtered-cow chair. I wondered if she'd killed it herself. Well, that wasn't exactly fair. She was an Earth Warden. The cow had probably died of natural causes.
"I heard a rumor there was some other organization out there. Other than the Wardens," Emily said. "Any idea how to contact them?"
"Lewis was handling that. I don't know how far he got with it. How bad is this?"
"Bad," she said. "Real bad."
"Then we should get moving," I said, and levered myself to my feet. The world swam. I sat down again, and leaned my head back against the couch cushions and moaned. When I tried to adjust myself to a more comfortable position, the arm stabbed a protest into my shoulder. Some Earth Warden she was. Hadn't been trying very hard, had she?
Imara was next to me, down on one knee, one long, graceful hand on my shoulder. Sending waves of warmth through me. She wasn't a full Djinn, she couldn't really heal me, just take away the pain temporarily. Still felt nice, though. Nobody turns down magic morphine.
"You can't do this," she said. "You need rest."
"I'm good."
"No." She gave me a long, significant look from those breathtaking Djinn eyes. "I won't allow it."
I started to say, Who made you the mommy? but I wasn't about to let this degenerate into a mother-daughter squabble in front of Emily. Who was looking far too interested, anyway.
"Your Djinn there's probably right," Emily said. "Fact is, the shape you're in, I wouldn't recommend you take on a campfire, much less a forest fire," she said. "You took some pretty good knocks. A good hard impact, and you'll break those bones loose again. No help for it; it's going to hurt while it's healing."
Clearly, she wasn't Lewis in the healing department, which I couldn't really resent. She'd helped me out when I needed it.
And then she spoiled my attempt at charity by saying, "And besides, I really don't want to babysit you out there."
Imara oriented on Emily like a cruise missile. "She can do as she pleases." Typical kid. Whatever the adult's position was, take the opposing view. Hell, two seconds ago she'd been trying to talk me out of going. Emily barely spared Imara a glance, which was pretty gutsy, considering. "Sure. She can please shut up while I borrow her Djinn for the duration."
Oh, crap. I remembered Emily back at Warden HQ, arguing for the release of more Djinn from the reserves. Of course she'd be all about co-opting Imara. I should have seen it coming. Would have, if I hadn't been half-crazy with pain.
Imara growled low in her throat. "I won't leave her," she said.
"Not your choice," I said sternly. "Look, Emily, I'm low on patience, I'm in pain, and no way are you using her to fight a forest fire. I appreciate what you've done for me, but--"
"I said, I'm taking your Djinn," Emily said bluntly. "You don't want to make me take it to a full-on fight. You'd lose, the condition you're in."
Imara moved, unasked, and came right up in Emily's space, close and--I was sure--burning up with menace. Emily went rigid with fear. As well she should. "Keep a leash on her," Emily said.
"Imara?" I asked. "Relax. We're just talking. Aren't we?"
Emily nodded jerkily. Angry. "Yes."
"Then I think I'm ready to leave," I said. "Imara, go get the car revved up, would you?"
"I don't like leaving you with her."
"Emily's a Warden," I said. "We understand each other."
Imara didn't like it, but she threw me a warning look, and vanished.
"You can't," Emily said flatly. "You're not strong enough to leave."
"Funny how that is. Your threat to steal Imara put all that in perspective." I proved it by getting to my feet. The world did that liquid-shimmy thing, but I stayed upright and reasonably stable. "You said you didn't have time for this, and neither do I. Good luck, Emily, whatever your crisis is right now. I'll find somebody who appreciates my help."
"Wait."
I didn't. I headed for the door. But when I got there, I found the handle wouldn't turn. Not at all. It wasn't the dead bolt... The metal was simply frozen in place.
I didn't bother to look behind me. "Emily," I said, "let's not do this. I'm tired, I'm cranky, I'm dirty, and my arm hurts like hell. I am not in the mood to play. Just let me get out of here, and I'll pretend that you're not begging for a fight, because by God if you want one, you're threatening the right girl."
Earth Wardens have power over growing things, living things, and also over metals and woods. The door wasn't going to open if Emily didn't want it to do so, not unless an Earth Warden with greater abilities stepped in. And it was unlikely I'd be able to blow it open, either, not without bringing the whole house down with it. Our powers weren't necessarily the kind that canceled each other out. Imara was an ace in the hole, of course, but I hesitated to put her to use. I wasn't really interested in damaging one of the few surviving Wardens, given the current state of the world.
"Sorry," Emily said. "I've got some real problems here. You can be of use." I sighed and turned around to face her. "Okay, then, let me ask you this: How am I supposed to trust a Warden who holds back on the healing just to bogart my Djinn? Because you could have at least fixed the arm, Emily. That was a low blow."
She went just a shade paler, but held her ground. She'd never lacked in guts... just brains. "They say you're behind all this."
"All of what?"
"Bad Bob. The rips in the aetheric. The Djinn going crazy. Is it true?"
That hit me with a cold, hard shock... Definitely, I'd been responsible for Bad Bob getting his comeuppance, not that many people were ever going to believe he'd actually deserved it. And David and I together had been responsible for the poisoning of the aetheric, when he'd created me as a Djinn. And as for the Djinn going nuts--well, I wasn't sure I had sole responsibility for all that, but I probably couldn't sidestep it altogether, either. If it hadn't been for my actions, and David's actions, Jonathan wouldn't be dead right now, the Djinn agreement would still be peacefully in place, and the Earth would be sleeping quietly.
I elected not to say any of that, however. I just set my jaw and stared back at her, daring her to continue.
"The fire's across the border, in Canada," she said. "It started small, but it's growing. The Wardens overseeing that territory are dead. Lewis says they can't spare anybody else, last time I checked. I'm on my way there, and I need your Djinn. I'm not going to apologize for doing what's necessary."
"She's not my Djinn," I said. "Nobody owns them anymore."
"Yeah. Yet you're riding around with one as your chauffeur."
"It's complicated."
"Obviously. And there are major population centers in the path of a Class Four wildfire. That's a little complicated, too." She hesitated, then locked her eyes on mine. Surly and difficult, she might be, but I had never known her to be a liar. "I need your help. It's just me and another Fire Warden who's already there. Those people need somebody to save them, and we're it."
Truth was, I agreed with her. If I turned my back on people who actually needed saving, I was losing my way. Losing my honor. Something inside me insisted that you couldn't save humanity by sacrificing your principles.
I didn't like the way Emily had elected to do this, but I could understand why she'd mousetrapped me. She was desperate. I'd have done the same thing, in her place. Because the lives I'd save would be more important than the nebulous big picture. Maybe that made me weak. Maybe that made me unsuitable for the role of great hero. Lewis would have walked away without hesitation--with regret, not hesitation--but I wasn't, and could never be, Lewis.
"I'm not putting Imara in danger," I said.
"But--"
"She's my daughter, Emily. My daughter."
Emily's mouth opened in surprise, then closed. She finally, reluctantly, nodded. "Tell me what you need," I said. "I'll do what I can."
"You'd damn well better."
"Oh, and--?" I made a gesture with my sore arm. She looked ashamed. Briefly.
"Might as well," she said, and reached out to finish up the healing. "You're no good to me passed out."
Imara wasn't any too supportive of my decision to hang around and brush up on my firefighting. "This isn't a good idea," she said. "You're not well. And the fire's too big."
We were standing outside, by the car. I put a hand on the smooth, satin finish, then scrubbed away my fingerprints. "You're probably right," I said. "But I can't walk away from it, either. Emily might be a bitch, but she's right. And I'm a Warden. I'm sworn to protect."
"There are others to do this kind of thing."
"Others who aren't here. I'm here. And it's my job, Imara." I looked up at her, and saw the worry on her face. "Relax, kiddo. It's not my first dance. Not my last, either. Emily's a very competent Fire Warden, and if there's a Fire Warden already working on this, I can work the weather angle. We can end this thing."
Her eyes went distant for a few seconds, then snapped back. "There are no Djinn," she said.
"What?"
"No Djinn near the fire," she said. I must have looked blank. "Djinn are drawn to fire. The bigger, the better. They leave human form and... bathe in it, I guess you'd say. Renew themselves. You remember what it was like to feel sunlight in Djinn form?"
Slow, sweet, orgasmic pleasure. Yeah, I remembered.
"If the Djinn aren't coming to this fire," she said, "that means there is something else happening here. It isn't natural. And it isn't--it isn't safe."
"Not for you," I agreed. "If the Djinn are staying away, I want you to do the same thing. Stay away. In fact, stay here and watch the car. Or go talk to your father, find out what we can do since we didn't exactly knock it out of the park in Seacasket. Right?"
"I'm not leaving you!"
I reached out and fitted my hands around her cheeks. Djinn skin, burning hot. "Yes," I said. "You are. I need you to find out what we do next, Imara. That's very important. In fact, it's absolutely critical."
"But--"
"Don't make me order you around." I pulled her into a fierce, warm hug. "Just go. I'll be all right."
"Is it because--I know I'm not--not as powerful as I should be. As you need--"
"No!" I pulled back and smoothed hair away from her face. "Honey, no. None of this is your fault. You're the only good thing that's come out of all this. Okay?"
She nodded slightly, but I could tell she didn't believe me. My Djinn child was getting a full-on inferiority complex. More than human, less than full Djinn. That was a burden I wasn't sure how to help her carry.
"Go find your father," I said. "Explain to him what happened with Ashan. Find out what we should do next. Okay?"
"Okay," she said, and stepped back. "Mom... be careful."
And then she was gone, blipped out without another sound. I heaved a sigh and turned to see Emily, on her porch, staring at me accusingly. I hadn't heard her come out.
"We really could have used her," she said.
"Imara's the only Djinn in the world we can trust right now. I'd rather not throw her at every single challenge. Besides, we can handle this on our own."
"You hope." She looked surly about it.
"What happened to I don't need a Djinn to solve my problems'?" I asked. "Buck up, Auntie Em. We're going to have an adventure."
I swear, her scowl could have fractured glass.
Imara, not being in much need of transportation, had left the Camaro sitting in the driveway. It was a choice between that and Emily's battle-scarred SUV, with a four-wheel drive that had seen hard use. We didn't, strictly speaking, actually have to go to the site of the fire; Wardens often did their work remotely. But if this fire was as dangerous as she seemed to think, then being on the ground might be the only way to react quickly enough. Fire was the trickiest of all the elements. Even more than storms, fire had an intelligence, a malevolence. A desire to hurt. The bigger the fire, the smarter and angrier it became. Bad combination.
I chose the SUV. The Camaro really wasn't the kind of car I wanted to subject to off-road conditions.
Emily lived in a tiny little burg called Smyrna Mills, which was mostly distinguished by Smyrna Street--we were out of town in less time than it took to flash a blinker, and heading south to I-95. The other Warden, it turned out, was a country music fan; I wasn't. I mostly spent the time on the drive to Houlton and the Canadian border thinking and watching the skies. They didn't look good. The aetheric was in a boil, everything disturbed; flashbulbs of power were popping all over the place as Wardens tried to deal with their local problems, but it wasn't really a local issue. It was bigger. Nastier. And it was going to get worse.
I really didn't have any business taking a side trip like this, but I couldn't think what else I could have done. Walk away from thousands of lost lives? I'd be crawling, not walking, if I did that. And none of it would matter from that point on, because I would have lost my way completely.
As we approached the border crossing, I remembered something with a sick, falling jolt. "Um, Em? Little problem."
"Which is?"
"No passport."
"What? Where is it?" "In Florida. With everything else I own that hasn't washed away." She was staring at me as if she couldn't believe I'd leave home without it. "I wasn't planning on any international trips."
She shook her head and took a quick turn-off on a narrow trail into the woods. "Hold on."
I grabbed the roll bar as we started bouncing along at speed through the wilderness. Four-wheeling at its finest. I had no idea where we were going, or whether Emily had the slightest idea of direction, but she didn't seem worried.
"Thing is," she said, whipping the wheel to the left to avoid a tree stump, "normally I wouldn't be able to slip around behind them like this, but it's chaotic right now. If they do manage to stop us, shut up and let me do the talking."
I planned on it.
No Mounties materialized out of the trees to flag us down. Thirty minutes of twisting back road--and no road--later, we emerged from the trees and hit Canadian Highway 2, turning north.
I lost track of our route somewhere around Presque Isle; Emily, on her cell phone, followed back roads in response to directions. We got stopped by a police blockade; whatever Emily said, they let us past. The roads got progressively more challenging on the suspension. I hung on to the panic strap on the passenger side and tried not to think about the residual pain in my healing arm.
I was feeling more than a little nervous, out here in the wilderness, and I wasn't really dressed for firefighting, either. Someday, I promised myself, you'll be able to get back to a normal life. Nice clothes. Bikini on the beach. Shoes that don't have sale tags.
I closed my eyes, but when I did, I didn't see visions of Jimmy Choos or Manolo Blahniks, but David's face, the way he'd been the first time I'd seen him. That sweet, ironic smile. The deep brown eyes, flecked with copper. Angular cheekbones just begging to be stroked.
That smile.
I missed him so much, it felt like a physical pain, brought tears to clog my throat. We hadn't had a chance, had we? So little time to know each other, to find our balance. The world just kept pushing, pushing, pushing. I wanted it to stop. I wanted quiet, and I wanted a place where I could be in his arms, wrapped in silence and peace.
And I wasn't sure that was ever going to happen, especially now that we were two steps from the end of the world.
The SUV hit a particularly axle-rattling bump on the dirt fire road. I opened my eyes and saw a storm cloud looming over the tops of the huge trees.
No, not a storm cloud.
Smoke. Black and thick and pendulous.
A deer bounded out of the underbrush and rushed past us, staying out of our way somehow--it looked wild and terrified. Emily slowed the truck to a crawl. Other wildlife was coming down the road--rabbits, a bear cub, a huge lumbering mama bear behind it hurrying it along. More deer, leaping ahead of the pack.
Emily braked. The fleeing animals ran under the truck, if they were small enough; the larger ones went around. The bear passed close enough to my window that I could smell the hot rank odor of her fur, and hear her heavy chuffing breath.
"We have to go on foot," Emily said. "The other Warden is up ahead."
"Why can't we drive?" Because this was about as close to a big huge bear as I really wanted to get. Emily spared me an irritated glance.
"If I take it farther in, the fire could get around us, the gas in this truck could explode," she said. "I'm assuming you don't want to be in it at the time. Besides, I like my truck."
The exploding part made an impression on me. I unbuckled and scrambled out of the truck, careful of my feet, but it looked like the evacuation had slowed down. A couple of late-breaking gray rabbits broke right at my appearance, and some field mice ran under the truck. No additional bears, thank goodness.
The air felt heavy and hot. There was a steady furnace breeze blowing toward us. It was a tiny little hint of the forces already at work--the fire, which had already been burning for hours, would have created a huge updraft, which would have shoved cooler air in front of it outward in a circle. Cooler air, being heavier, would have been forced out in concentric waves as the temperature increased. It would look like a frozen nuclear explosion, with a hot central column and the rings emanating out.
The breeze was just the forerunner of what was behind it.
Hell.
People think they understand what a forest fire is. They don't. At a certain point, fire becomes semiliquid--plasmatic--and it behaves like liquid, becomes heavy with its own energy, rolls and floods through dry brush, consuming everything in its path. It saps every single ounce of moisture from the air, leaving it dead and dry; its own energy release whips the winds higher, spreading it like a virus. It can jump and encircle an area like an invading army before anyone can see it coming, and then the rising temperature will cook anything caught inside before the flames close in. Most people trapped in fires die of the smoke or superheated air, which cooks their lungs into leather from inside on the first indrawn breath. It's an awful way to die, suffocating, but it's still better than the fire rolling over you and burning out every nerve ending in slow, awful progression.
The only mercy fire shows is that after your nerves burn, you can't feel the rest of it. You can't feel your body being turned to cooked meat and ash. And you're probably--although not certainly--dead before your internal organs burst, and your brain's superheated liquids blow open your skull.
No, the last thing I wanted to do was die of fire. The very last. Even drowning would be better.
And I was starting to wonder why in the hell I'd agreed to this. Pragmatism was starting to get the better of altruism.
As if she sensed it, Emily looked at me over the hood of the SUV, mouth twisted into an unpleasant grin. "You like doing this from a nice, safe distance, don't you?" she asked. "Some nice conference room where you can't feel the cinders on your back."
"If you had any sense, that's how you'd like it, too," I said. "But I'm not letting you do this by yourself."
"That's sweet. You afraid for me?"
"No, but you said it yourself: There are way too many lives depending on this. This is important." I swallowed hard. There was a sound out there in the forest, a roaring that I didn't need to be a Fire Warden to know wasn't right. Not right at all. "Let's just get it done, if we're going to do it. I've got places to be."
"Shoe shopping?" she said archly. My reputation preceded me. "Fine. Watch yourself--I'm not going to have time to keep your ass out of trouble. You see a bear or a mountain lion, freeze, turn profile, and if it charges you, curl into a ball and get under the truck. They probably will ignore you, given the fire, but you don't want to run from them. They do enjoy the exercise."
I gulped. Audibly. She smiled. I wondered if she was just needling me, but then I decided she wasn't. She'd take her responsibilities more or less seriously, out here.
"What I need from you is to hang back here and do what you can to get a decent rain going. Counteract the prevailing winds. Think you can do that?"
I could do that in my sleep. I confined myself to a quick nod, gathered up my hair in one hand and tied it back with a rubber band from my pocket. The way the wind was swirling, that last thing I wanted was to obscure my vision. Too many things could sneak up on me. Fire, for one. Or bears. The bears were worrying me. Badly.
"Take two steps to your left," Emily said.
"Why?" I froze, staring at her. She nodded down at the ground.
There was a timber rattler gliding along the ground right by my foot. I jumped out of the way with a little shriek, hands held high. "Snake! Snake!"
"No shit," she said dryly. "Trust me, she's not paying attention to you. She's got plenty of problems of her own. Not so quick a traveler as the larger critters. She'll have a job of it to try to get out of here in time, poor girl."
I watched the snake wiggle its--her--way down the road. Emily was right; the reptile didn't pay me any attention. Good. On the plus side, now I wasn't nearly so worried about bears. Bears didn't sneak up on your feet like that.
When I looked up again, Emily was striding along the road, straight for the fire. "Hey!" I called after her. She didn't answer. I suppose she really didn't need to answer; I knew what I was tasked to do, she knew what she was doing, and there wasn't a lot left to discuss.
Still, when she looked back, I said, "Good luck. I'll do whatever I can."
She had a surprisingly sweet smile, when she wanted to. "I know," she said. "You're a Warden."
I sat down on the bumper of the SUV and contemplated the sky.
The fire wasn't big enough yet to truly drive the system--weather systems are massive, full of energy of their own, and it would take a real out-of-control wildfire for that synergy of elements to take on an unstoppably deadly partnership. But the weather wasn't feeling particularly cooperative, either. The heat from the fire definitely had it feeling its oats, and the evaporation of moisture was creating low-level disturbances. Lots of cumulonimbus action forming, but it was hanging out on the fringes, getting pushed along by the warmer air of the fire. I needed to pull it in and start squeezing those moisture-rich clouds for rain.
First things first: I had to pump more moisture back into the air, keep the underbrush from drying out quite so quickly so that it wouldn't just continue to explode into flame. There was a lake five miles to the east of where we stood; I went up in the aetheric and soared across the fire, which looked like a giant twisting tangle of ghosts, twisting and mating and soundlessly screaming. On the aetheric, you couldn't feel the heat, but you definitely felt the forces at work; it translated as pressure on me, a resistance that was hard to push through. I made it and touched down for a landing--still in spirit-form. I was at the edge of a glowing, whispering fog that was, back in the real world, a nice place to boat and fish.
Ever seen one of those fog fountains? They sell them in stores now, complete with transducers that create fog from water. Simple process. All you have to do is bombard the water with ultrasonic pulses, and it breaks up into fog. Not quite without cost--six hundred calories of heat per gram of water, in terms of energy--but a nice benefit. As mist evaporates, energy exchange results in temperature reductions, too. With the humidity as low as it was in the vicinity of the fire, mist evaporation would bring down the temperature by about twenty degrees.
I started shaking up the water.
Mist began rising almost immediately... thick, milky tendrils off the surface of the lake. I kept it going, piling mist in layers until it was as thick as foam on a latte and as tall as a three-story building. I'd drained the lake level by quite a bit, but if the fire reached the shore, the evaporation would occur anyway, and for a lot less constructive a reason.
When I had enough airborne moisture, I sent wind to blow it toward the unburned areas around the fire. Just a strong breeze, and I kept careful hold of it; it wouldn't do any good to send my carefully made fog right into the blaze itself, where it would be instantly zapped. No, I pushed it just far enough to layer it over the outlying underbrush, a thick wet blanket that would make it much more difficult for the advance scout sparks to take hold.
Once that was done, I shot up into the clouds. I'd long ago learned to deal with the dizziness of altitude, but this was just plain disorienting... I could see the heat rising up from the twisted trauma of the forest being destroyed below me, and it came in waves of red and pink and purple, like some crazy 70s acid trip. I hadn't usually been this close. It was--different.
I decided not to look down. My business was with what was overhead, in any case.
The updraft was making inroads, getting the attention of the weather system, but it was more of an annoying dinner guest than a partner in crime so far. If I could turn the weather system against the fire, so much the better, but if I couldn't, then at least I could cut off any kind of sympathetic energy exchange that could make both more dangerous.
I lowered the temperature at the higher elevations, forcing the moisture in the air closer together. My goal was rain, but I wasn't sure if there was enough aggregated moisture to really bring it off, without feeding the process out of the ocean. That would take time I wasn't sure we had. Best to get started with what there was, then work on the supply lines to keep it going.
Even a good downpour wasn't going to put out this kind of a fire, not as well-established as it was, but it could help contain it. With a decent Fire Warden--which Emily was, as far as I remembered, in addition to being an outstanding Earth Warden--this could come to a peaceful conclusion.
If everything went right.
Of course, there was no reason everything should go right. Especially not now, with everything I'd grown up knowing as fact turned into rapidly shifting fiction. The laws of nature were only laws so long as nature intended them to be. And I wasn't sure where we stood anymore. The rain started to fall--not a downpour, but a nice steady shower, anyway. It would raise the humidity and bring down the temperature, and if it couldn't douse the fire, at the very least it could soak the surrounding areas and intensify the fog layers.
It was, I decided, a pretty damn good job.
I let go on the aetheric and plummeted back down into my body, a scary thrill ride of fast-moving colors and a sense of imminent disaster that ended suddenly--and safely--as I found myself back in my body again. I sighed, breathed deep, and gagged on the taste of smoke.
And I opened my eyes and realized the trees right in front of me were burning.
"Shit!" I screamed, and slid off the bumper of the SUV. The air was intensely hot, well over a hundred degrees; my clothes were dripping with sweat. While I'd been doing all that careful manipulation, the fire had slipped up like the serial killer in the movies, and as I looked wildly around, I saw that the fire was leaping from one treetop to the next. The rain--which hadn't yet reached this spot--was doing its job; it just wasn't doing it fast enough.
The underbrush was a wall of fire that roared like a jet engine, sucking in air. I covered my head as sparks drifted down out of the sky and sizzled holes in my shirt. I smelled burned hair. I willed my Fire sense into action, covering myself; I wasn't sure if that extended to hair, but dammit, I had way too many hair issues already. Having it scorched again wasn't going to make things better...
I dived into the SUV and slammed the door. As I did, fire rolled like plasma through the underbrush to my left, on the driver's side, and I realized it was going to cut off my escape route. Once I was encircled, I'd roast, then burn.
The interior of the SUV was already hot. I remembered Emily's comments about the gas tank blowing up, and bit back a curse. I concentrated on the ten feet in and around the SUV itself. I needed to build a shield of cool air. That was a little easier than you might think--cool air being heavier and slower, it was a bit of a natural barrier, and as I chilled the air by stilling the vibration of the molecules, I concentrated on a feeling of calm. Peace. Stillness.
Within the bubble, the temperature began to fall.
And then, without warning, it started moving up again. I grabbed for control of the air, but it wasn't just a fault in my concentration, it was something else.
Someone else.
I opened my eyes and looked around, frantic, and saw something impossible. There was a man standing in the hellish fury of the burning trees. A man on fire, who didn't seem to care that he was on fire. His hair was already gone, his skin shriveling and blackening, but somehow his eyes were open and bright and fixed on me with purpose. He took a step out into the clearing. He left a trail of cinders and shed flesh, and there was something so incredibly creepy about it that I screamed and hit the locks on the SUV doors.
Nothing happened.
Electric. He was interfering with the circuits.
The air was heating up even faster than the blaze around me could account for, and I knew that this man, this creature walking toward me was responsible for it. It wasn't possible that he was still moving, with that much damage. Just not possible at all. Imara had told me the Djinn weren't coming to this fire. So this wasn't a Djinn.
Then what was he?
He reached out to open the door. I grabbed the interior handle and braced myself in an unladylike position, both feet against the steel posts, holding tight. I felt the tug as he tried to yank it out of my grip. He might have been supernaturally alive, but he wasn't supernaturally strong. His muscles had already contracted from the heat, and his hands were blackened claws. I was sickened to see that a couple of fingers dropped off when he pulled back from the door handle.
What in the name of God--?
He was still staring at me, and against all odds, I recognized what was in those eyes. I should recognize it. I'd known that exultation, fury, and most especially, that power.
There was a Demon Mark in this dead or dying Warden, and it wanted an upgrade. I was the next available candidate. It would keep the body it had alive until the very last second it could, and it would come after the nearest available source of power greater than what it had.
Where the hell was Emily? Oh God, was this her?... No, it was a man. I thought. I was almost certain.
Not Emily. This thing was taller.
It circled the SUV, staring at me, and reached for one of the back doors. I lunged over the seat and hit the manual lock with a clenched fist just as the clawed, flaking hand scrabbled at the handle. Another of his fingers snapped off. I didn't waste time; I hit the manual locks on everything I could reach, then slithered over the back into the trunk area and tried to find a manual lock for the trunk lift.
Nothing.
Right about the time that I was trying to figure out what in my weather arsenal would destroy a Demon with access to Fire Warden powers, the right side window shattered. The Demon was more of a lateral thinker than I was; apparently, he'd simply thrown a rock. It lay smoking and nearly molten on the upholstery, which charred in a circle around it. I yelped and grabbed for a leather jacket in the back, wrapped the rock in the coat, and started to toss it out, then changed my mind. It made a pretty good club, sort of an oversize and really clumsy blackjack.
The Warden-zombie, trailing smoke, slithered in through the window like some disgusting man-size snake. Where skin sloughed away, his muscles were exposed. Anatomy class in live action. I gagged at the roast-pork stench and lashed at him with my makeshift blackjack. I shattered at least two bones, and gave him a good crack on the skull, but he kept coming for me, squirming. The face was a mask of charred flesh. I couldn't tell if the grin was thanks to a contraction of the facial muscles, or a look of triumph.
I turned the interior latch on the trunk and bailed out of the SUV.
Talk about out of the frying pan... The fire was intense, a hot orange curtain flickering on all sides of the road. No, not a curtain, a bowl--it was overhead, consuming the treetops. Rain was falling, but there wasn't enough of it; it was slowing the advance but not putting out what was already burning.
Which was about to include me, any second now.
I dropped down on the ground--not by intention. Dizzy. The air tasted thick, too hot to breathe, acrid with filthy smoke. I coughed rackingly and hugged the dirt; then I remembered what it was I was running away from and started a low crawl. No place to go. No place to hide, except under the SUV, and I didn't need Emily to tell me that the fire was going to make that a death trap in short order.
You are fire.
It came in a cool whisper, soft as mist, and for a second I could have sworn I saw the Oracle from Seacasket standing in front of me, burning and lovely. The very polar opposite of the thing stalking me.
A black claw grabbed hold of my ankle. I screamed and lunged forward--into a burning tree. Fire spilled over me.
It didn't burn me.
It just spilled over me, liquid and dripping. Oddly heavy. Where it hit the ground, it hissed and sparked and danced; grass shriveled and blackened at its touch, but I wasn't affected.
I twisted, formed the handful of fire into a ball, and threw it at the grinning dead thing that had hold of my leg.
It exploded like napalm. The zombie-Warden let go and rolled, fighting an invisible enemy, as the flames fed on what should have been just a blackened shell anyway. What the hell was the fire feeding on? It was as dead as a burned-out match...
The creature--I couldn't even think of it as human anymore--opened its black maw of a mouth and screamed. It was alien. Other. Older.
And then it just--ripped apart. Exploded in pieces of burning meat that flew in every direction. I coughed and gagged as something spattered me, and when I looked back, something silvery blue was clawing its way free of the remains.
Oh shit, I thought numbly.
Because I was pretty sure that was an adult Demon.
And it was looking straight at me.