Firestorm tww-5

by Rachel Caine

  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.

  Chapter Six

  There was a sudden blowtorch flare out of the forest, and another human figure staggered out of the inferno. Not burned, though she was smudged dark with smoke and coughing like her lungs might blow out. Emily had looked better. Her clothes were smoldering, but she was keeping it together. Barely.

  "Get in the truck!" she screamed. Her eyes skipped right over the glistening twisted form of the Demon, and I realized that she couldn't see it—that Demons, like the dark shadows of Djinn who became Ifrits, weren't visible to normal Wardens. I didn't waste my breath. Emily tried the truck door, found it locked, and cursed breathlessly. She fumbled for keys. I reached in my broken passenger window and unlocked the doors, and we crammed ourselves in. I was sitting on broken glass. Didn't care.

  Emily started it up and hit reverse just as a tree began to topple in front of us. She screamed and floored it, and the SUV slalomed, skidded, and grabbed dirt. We rocketed backward. I hoped she was watching behind us, because I was riveted to two things: the torch of a tree that was heading for the roof of the SUV, and the twisted, flickering shadow of the Demon loping after us in pursuit.

  "Do something!" Emily yelled at me. She looked scared to death, and she didn't know the half of what I did.

  "Do what?" I screamed back, and grabbed for the panic strap as the SUV bounced over rocks. Still moving backward at a speed that no human-operated vehicle was supposed to go, at least in that direction and in the middle of nowhere.

  "Anything!" she roared.

  The noise of the tree crashing toward us was lost in the constant deafening train-whistle scream of the fire, but there was no doubt that it was going to hit us. And if the truck was put out of commission…

  I sucked in a deep breath of air that was almost too hot to breathe, concentrated, and grabbed the dashboard as I stared at the falling tree.

&nbs
p; Come on, come on, come on… Updrafts. There were plenty of updrafts, no shortage of those, but they were wild and unpredictable, fueled by an incredible outpouring of energy.

  I grabbed hold of a rising superheated column of air and wrenched it free of its source, then directed it at an angle at the falling tree. Twenty feet. It was coming for us fast, and no way were we going to clear it in time. Flames all around us. Ten feet. Heading right for the roof of the SUV…

  I let the superheated blast of air go, cooled the outer edge, and it hit the tree like a huge blunt object, hammering it off course. Not by much.

  The outer blackened pine branches snapped off on my side of the truck, and the trunk crushed the underbrush just a couple of inches to the right of the SUV's hood.

  Emily shot me a disbelieving look. I shrugged and took my hands off the dashboard. Left wet, sweaty handprints behind.

  I couldn't see the Demon anymore. Wishful thinking made me hope that Demons weren't impervious to fire, but damn, I pretty much knew better than that. Demons were impervious to everything nature or humans could toss their way. They could be contained by Djinn, but destroyed? Probably not, once they'd achieved full form, as this one had.

  We were clear of the fire suddenly. Trees swayed around us, uneasy in the looming smoke, but nothing was aflame around us. Emily had, temporarily, outrun the flames.

  She slowed the SUV, stopped, and wiped her hands on her filthy pants. She was shaking all over, and black as a coal miner at the end of a shift. Eyes red and bloodshot.

  "That," she said faintly, "was maybe a little too close."

  "A little," I agreed. "Nice driving."

  "Nice wind management," she replied, and was overtaken by a series of racking, tearing coughs. Sounded painful. I leaned over, put my hand on her back, and concentrated on the air inside her lungs. I oxygenated it as much as possible, then extended it into a bubble within the cab of the SUV. Couldn't do it for long, because we'd both get high and giggly, but it would help, short-term.