by Rachel Caine
“For God’s sake, Jo, stop!”
The voice was Lewis’s. I peeked through my fingers and saw that the dazzle was a plain old garden-variety flashlight. He tilted it slightly, and the backwash of light gave me the long, tanned features of Lewis’s face—only not relaxed and gentle as I was used to seeing. He looked seriously tense.
And there was blood on his cheek. Fresh blood. More splattering his shirt.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked. “Are you okay?”
“It isn’t my blood,” he said. “I need your help. Come on.”
“With what?” Because it wasn’t going to be easy explaining to Lewis that my help would be strictly of the moral-support variety, at the moment.
“Kevin,” he said, and turned away, already moving to focus the flashlight on … Kevin Prentiss’s thin, acne-bubbled face. The kid who had once been the bane of my existence, not to mention my master when I was a Djinn, hadn’t changed much—still greasy, still dressed in floppy, oversized jeans with too many pockets and chains, and a black, sloppy T-shirt that needed at least one more spin cycle. He’d taken on a decidedly goth look since last I’d seen him in Nevada; the nose piercing was new, and so was the pentagram around his neck. He still looked like a wannabe badass. Only with Kevin, it was a mistake to underestimate him. He had the capacity to be a genuinely scary badass, and I’d seen him do it. I didn’t want to witness it in close quarters, underground.
And then I realized that Kevin wasn’t sitting on the ground, back to the wall, because he was being a sulky little bastard, although that wasn’t beyond him; he was pale, leaning, and breathing in shallow gasps.
Hard to tell against the black, but it looked as if the front of his shirt was wet. I didn’t think he’d taken a splash in the surf.
“They came after us,” Lewis said. “Wardens. I got us hidden, but I didn’t know the boy had been hit until we were already down here. I can’t leave him.”
“Why?” It was mean, but hell, Kevin deserved it. “All right, fine. He needs medical help, I get it. Let’s get him out of here.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
He sent me a look, then nodded at the cave around us. I realized—belatedly—that the hard-packed walls were really just packed, sculpted sand. Sand being held together by his willpower. Yep, Lewis had hollowed himself a secret hideout, which was pretty damn cool, but the idea that the whole thing could collapse in on us at any moment didn’t exactly make me glow with confidence.
“I need your help,” he said. “Actually, I need David’s help. I can’t do everything at once. He can hold back the sand while I treat the wound…”
Oh, shit. “Um… I can’t do that.”
Lewis’s expression turned even more tense, which really wasn’t good. “Jo, I just need to borrow him. I won’t keep him.”
“I can’t.”
“I need him.”
“He’s not—he’s not well, Lewis. He’s—”
“Jo! The kid’s going to die!”
I sucked in a deep breath. “I’m not calling David. What’s Plan B?”
For a second I saw sheer fury erupt in him, which was pretty frightening, considering he was the human equivalent of what Jonathan was in the Djinn world—a near-perfect repository of power—but it wasn’t like Lewis to lash out with it. He pulled it all back inside and closed his eyes for a second, and when his voice came, it was low and quiet. “Plan B consists of me watching him slowly bleed to death,” he said. “I don’t like Plan B. Look, Jo, healing is the hardest of everything I do. I can’t do it and hold this place together at the same time. It takes precision. I need help.”
“Fine. Just lift me back up, I call an ambulance, we get him out of here. Regular, mundane medical treatment. It does work, you know.”
Lewis shook his head, watching Kevin’s shuddering breaths. Kevin seemed to not be hearing us. “He’s got a torn artery,” he said. “I’m holding it shut, but between that and keeping this cave open I’m at the limit. You’ll need to get yourself out.”
Something occurred to me. “Where’s Rahel? Why isn’t Rahel helping you do this?”
Another flare of anger in his face. He didn’t bother to hide the edge in his voice. “Rahel doesn’t think he’s worth saving,” he said. “She also thinks she has better things to do. She left. Jo, I wasn’t kidding. I need David. Please.”
Cell phone. I dug it out and checked for reception.
Uh-oh. A couple of dozen feet of sand resulted in a flashing NO SIGNAL. “Um … the answer’s still no. Look, if I call wind down here—”
“You’ll kill us.”
“Right. Bad idea. Water… right, will kill us. Lewis, you called the wrong girl. I’ve got nothing.”
“You’ve got a Djinn!”
“No I don’t!” I yelled back. “I’ve got an Ifrit, dammit, and I’m not fucking calling him, so you need to get your head together! Tell me what I can do!”
“Nothing,” Lewis snapped. “Thanks for dropping in.”
“Guess I’m fucked, then,” Kevin whispered, and opened his eyes. Not by much.
They were vague and unfocused; I guessed that Lewis was also doing some kind of pain blocking. I crouched down next to the kid, feeling a strain in my knees.
Nothing like landing flat-footed after a ten-foot fall to really limber up the joints.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“Like you’d care,” Kevin shot back. It was half reflex, I could see that. His heart really wasn’t in the whole dystopian thing today, and he looked scared.
Really, really scared. “You dropped me like a bag of trash when you got what you wanted. Went back to your nice life. Hey, Jo, how’s that going for you?”
I didn’t want to debate how playing Stupid Weather Girl on an off-brand TV station could constitute nice life. “If you were trying to get attention, there were easier ways of doing it,” I said. He flipped me off. Clumsily. It was actually kind of cute. He had funky shadows on his cheeks, and I realized two things: one, he was wearing black liner—definitely gone to the goth side—and two, it had smeared down his face.
Kevin had been crying.
I felt my heart, which had started to take a clue to ease up on the pounding, start thumping faster again. Kevin was short of breath, and his lips looked slightly blue. “Damn, Lewis, I’m all screwed up inside. It feels—”
“Easy,” Lewis murmured, and got down on one knee beside him to move up the hem of his none-too-clean long-sleeved T-shirt. It advertised some undead band with an umlaut in its name and a zombie graphic, but the real horror was underneath—a long, deep slice in his side, gaping wide and welling a constant, slow pulse of blood. He’d lost a lot of the stuff, and most of it was smeared and spotted on his skin in damp, tie-dyed patterns.
Lewis put his fingers around the wound in a rough circle, bent his head, and concentrated. Kevin shuddered and grabbed convulsively for my hand; I let him have it without protest. He was strong, but not as strong as he should have been.
The bleeding slowed to a trickle again. Kevin choked, coughed, and swallowed convulsively. Trying not to throw up, I guessed.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Kevin’s hand was shaking, and so was his voice. “We were asking around about the Djinn, and Lewis was teaching me stuff. Everybody was kinda—cool, you know? They didn’t hate me or anything. The old guys, the Ma’at, they even said I could help people. I—I was trying—”
“Kevin, what happened?”
“Somebody tried to kill us.”
“You and Lewis?”
“Yeah.” He wiped his face with his free hand, smearing his eyeliner into a sad-clown mask. On his other side, Lewis was a frozen statue, unmoving, doing whatever it was that Earth Wardens do when they fight for a life in jeopardy. I had no doubt it was a terrible strain on both of them; Kevin would rather have died than let me see him weak like this. “Fucking assholes. We weren’t hurting anybody.”
I had a really bad feeling. “Was it the Wardens?”
He nodded.
“Anybody I know?”
He tried to shrug, one of those liquid up-and-down expressions of boredom that teenagers must have invented in the dawn of evolution. He only managed a weak imitation, though. He became even more pale from the effort, and glanced down at the exposed mess of the wound in his side.
It was bleeding again. Not much, but a steady trickle. As I watched, the trickle ran a little bit faster.
“Kevin,” I said to distract him. Kevin’s panic couldn’t do anything but make Lewis’s job harder. “You said it was the Wardens. Tell me what they looked like.”
“You know some bitch with punk piercings and some guy looks like a lumberjack?”
“Maybe.” I thought fast. It could be Shirl and Erik, who had come after me during my first hellride across the country, when I’d been heading for what I thought was a safe haven, and Star. They were on Marion Bearheart’s staff, but I couldn’t see Marion authorizing a hit squad for Kevin, not now. Not after what had happened in Las Vegas. “Where did this happen? Vegas?”
“No, here. Me and Lewis were up the coast, checking out some ruined hotel where we heard some Djinn were fighting. They came at us—” He stopped and gulped. “Oh, shit. I’m gonna die, right?”
I wanted to reach over and put my arms around him. It was manifestly a bad idea for so, so many reasons.
“You’re not going to die,” I promised him. I risked a look down at the wound, and Jesus, was I wrong? Was it bleeding more, not less? Lewis was locked in silence, concentrating. Trying to heal, or at least keep things at a rough status quo.
He wasn’t going to be able to lift me out of here, and he couldn’t do this alone. The wound was too deep, and he was having to split too much of his power off to keep the cave intact.
None of which I could help with.
“Oh, damn,” Kevin whispered. His breath hissed in, caught, and I saw his face grow paler. “You know, this is actually a lot worse than it looks.” He was trying to joke about it. That broke my heart. He was too young for this. Too young for a lot of the things that had been done to him during his short life, and way too young for some of what he’d done to others. Kevin was a freak and a killer and a surly little bastard, but he hadn’t exactly been born lucky.
“I’m not glad to hear that, because it looks pretty damn bad,” I said. “But you’ve got Lewis. And nobody can do this better.”
It occurred to me that there actually was something I could do, albeit not on a mystical level. I took a look at what I was wearing—nothing I could use to wad up without revealing a hell of a lot more than was really PC. “Lewis. Lewis! I need your shirt.”
I tugged on his shoulder, dragging the fabric half off; he shifted to accommodate me, letting me pull the blood-spattered flannel off of him to reveal a bare chest, lean arms, and abs that, if we’d been in better circumstances, I’d have taken the time to admire the washboardiness of.
“Dear Penthouse,” Kevin whispered. “I never thought this would happen to me …”
“Shut up, already.” I folded Lewis’s shirt up into a clumsy pad, and pressed it hard against the open wound, or as much of it as I could reach around Lewis’s hand. That got a gasp and a shudder, and a parchment pallor I didn’t like very much.
Kevin slipped into unconsciousness.
“Lewis. Lewis! How bad is it? Really?”
His tired brown eyes opened and focused slowly on me. “Fatal if I don’t keep on it. There’s a major artery severed. I’m doing what I can to keep it clamped, but …”
But he couldn’t keep it up forever. That kind of thing took a hell of a lot of concentration. “Can you heal him?”
“No. Too much damage.”
“What do you want me to do?” I asked, as calmly as possible.
He didn’t answer. His eyes drifted closed.
“Lewis?”
No response. I reached over and tapped his face lightly, got a flicker of his eyelids and then a slow return. I repeated the question.
“Get help,” he said. “Find a way. If you don’t…”
He didn’t go on. He wasn’t unconscious—if he’d passed out, Kevin would have bled out in thick, pumping bursts. Instead, the bleeding slowed to a warm trickle against my hands and the already-soaked pad of the shirt. Lewis had gone deeper into trance to try to keep things locked down.
I took Lewis’s hand and moved it to press down on the bandage. He took over the pressure.
“Hey,” Kevin whispered. Awake again. He stared at me with wide, bloodshot eyes. He smelled strongly of stale, unwashed clothes, and faintly of the green, earthy aroma of pot. Lewis, I thought, you suck as a guardian. Not that I’d have been any better. “What are you going to do?”
“Can you make fire?” It was Kevin’s native power, and he’d always been strong in it. Plus, fire was one of the easiest of the states of energy to manipulate, so long as it didn’t get large enough to develop any kind of sentience.
He nodded. “Stupid, though. No ventilation. Kill us all. Lewis said there’s a limited supply of air in here.”
“Trust me. I’ll get us air.”
He made a weak, theatrical, one-handed gesture at the sand behind me, and presto, a fire exploded into red-yellow-orange glory. Burning up the limited oxygen we had available.
My turn. Concentrate, I ordered myself, and shut my eyes.
Air molecules, turning and burning and twisting apart. Being destroyed and reformed. Heat shimmering as the air column rose toward the sand ceiling. I could still see the pale smear overhead where the sand itself was partly porous—the trap door where Lewis had pulled me down. It was gradually trickling down and sagging in on itself. I could see glimpses of black sky overhead. The heat would help speed that process, open the hole further. Widen the air molecules between the grains of sand.
You can do this. You have to do this.
I’d done it before. It was a party trick, something Wardens did to amuse each other during boring patches. Fire and air, interacting. I could do it in my sleep.
Usually.
I took a deep breath and threw everything I had into the effort, and stepped up on top of the fire.
The air cushion felt squishy and unsteady, like a waterbed. Not at all the firm platform it should have been. And it was warm. Verging on, well, hot. And these were not shoes I wanted melted.
I exerted pressure on the hardened layer of air under my feet to pull it tighter together. This would never work unless the heat could push against it…
I started rising. Slowly. I opened my eyes and gasped as the fire’s energy started cooking through my running shoes, blinked away tears, and bit my lip.
Hang on.
Up. Slowly. Dammit, a year ago I’d have done this in five seconds flat.
The heat was intense now, and I was sure my shoes were melting. I smelled burning rubber. Maybe something else, something worth panicking over.
The sky crawled slowly closer, the walls of the sand pit shifting and sagging around me. The thing was starting to lose its coherence. If I didn’t do this right, if I didn’t get help, Kevin and Lewis were going to be buried alive…
I realized I was panting, partly from the relentless pressure of the heat, partly from the pain that was quickly turning to agony. It felt as if flames were licking the backs of my calves. The air under my feet softened like pudding, threatening to drop me the seven feet I’d traveled back down into the flames.
I sank my teeth into my lip, raised my hands to the sky, and chilled the air above me. Blew the molecules far apart, slowed their movement, dropped the temperature at least twenty degrees. Easy stuff. Child’s play. I could barely manage it, and when I did, it felt as if I were seconds from an aneurysm.
Intense pain in my head, shortness of breath. I tasted blood in the back of my throat.
I rose faster. Faster.
I didn’t dare look down because I knew my feet were burni
ng now, dear God, it felt as if the flesh was already roasted off and now the muscles were cooking, but if that were true then I wouldn’t feel anything once the nerves died…
Hang on. Hang on. Hang on.
I clung to the vision of Kevin’s parchment-pale face, of the blood pouring out of his side, and then, suddenly, my face was passing ground level and I was out.
I pitched forward, pushed with the last of my strength, rolled and kept on rolling until I splashed into a shockingly cold surf. A wave curled over me and I heard a hiss as my smoking shoes hit water.
I breathed liquid, coughed, choked, tasted salt and decay, and rested my face on cold, wet sand with a relief so intense it felt like orgasm.
“Son of a bitch!” A pair of hands rolled me over on my back, and I blinked and focused on the barely visible glimmer of Armando Rodriguez’s face. For the first time, he had an easily readable expression: shocked. “What the hell was that?”
Like I could explain. I coughed salt, gagged water, and croaked, “Two people down there in the hole; one’s hurt bad. Get help, now.”
He had a gun in his hand, which wasn’t useful. He put it away and came up with a cell phone, dialed, and gave the rescue bulletin.
“Get an ambulance,” I added. He nodded and kept talking.
I squirmed up to a sitting position and peeled my melted jogging shoes off of my feet. They were pink and tender, but not Cajun-fried.
God, that was going to hurt tomorrow.
“We can’t wait,” I said. “Find some rope, blankets we can tie together, anything. Run!”
He raced back the way we’d come, heading for the glow of headlights that marked the three kids tailgating on some unlucky parent’s SUV. I squirmed back over to the hole. It was widening.
“Kevin!” I yelled. “Help’s on the way!”
No answer. I scrambled back from the hole and looked around. Rodriguez was MIA.
I couldn’t see anybody else on the murky stretch of beach. Time was running out.
Call David, my worst angels whispered in my ear. Call him. You fixed him before. You can fix him again. Ashan wasn’t even hurt all that badly. Was this how it had started for Patrick and his Ifrit love? One little concession at a time, until he was killing his own kind to give her one more small slice of life?