Firestorm tww-5

by Rachel Caine

"What the hell just happened?" I asked, in between gasps. Emily put the SUV in gear and managed—somehow—to turn it around on the narrow road so we could drive forward instead of backward. Smoke was thick and acrid around us, blowing our direction.

  "Something's working against us," Emily said grimly. "Don't know what it is. I thought it was another group of Wardens, but now I don't know. It's not just the typical crap you get in wildfires. You know what I'm talking about?"

  I did. Wildfires were dangerous in and of themselves; they hardly needed any villains to come add complications. I still vividly remembered the big Yellowstone fire that had claimed so many lives among the Wardens, several years back… the one that had destroyed Star both physically and mentally. That hadn't been anything but the nature of fire and the cruel purpose of the earth.

  I had a good idea of who had been messing with the fire here: a Demon Mark-ridden Warden. And that made sense of why the Djinn had elected to stay away. The hatching of a full-blown Demon out of its human carapace was nothing they'd want to be around. David had fought a full-grown Demon, once upon a time, and I had to assume he'd won, but it couldn't have been an easy fight.

  Out of nowhere, I remembered David telling me, We are made of fire. He'd meant Djinn, of course, and he wasn't exactly being literal, but it made me wonder. Djinn reacted to light and heat, to the transformation of energy. I wondered if Demons were the same. If they were drawn to these kinds of events to help them—hatch. If so, there might be more of them out there—Wardens with Demon Marks, moving mindlessly toward something that would finish the process of incubation. Probably they wouldn't even understand why. I remembered how it had felt when my own Demon Mark began to manifest itself in a big way… I'd been euphoric, almost godlike. No thought for consequences. And no sense of self-preservation, really.

  I started to tell Emily about it, but then I realized that it wouldn't do any good. Even if she believed me—which was doubtful—there wasn't anything she could do about it. We were on our own out here in the wild Canadian wilderness, apparently. I missed Marion. She'd know, if anybody did, how much trouble we were all in right now.

  Emily got us back to a logging road, then out to a paved two-lane road. There were police barricades flashing in the distance. She slowed and pulled over to the narrow shoulder.

  "We need more Wardens," she said. "Weather and Fire. Think you can get us anything?"

  "No idea. I'll try." I pulled out my cell phone and dialed up the hotline number. Busy. I reconsidered, dialed Paul's personal number.

  Busy.

  Marion's rang, though. She answered without her typical calm assurance; in fact, she sounded downright sharp. "Joanne?"

  "Yeah."

  "Where are you?"

  "Wildfire across the border in Canada," I said. "Long story. Look, there's a desperate need for—"

  "I know," she cut me off. "We've got wildfires breaking out everywhere, and damn few Fire Wardens left to fight it. There's not much I can do for you guys. Do the best you can. Let it burn, if you have to."

  I cradled the phone against my chest and looked at Emily's grimy face. "Where's this thing heading?"

  Under the black oily veil of smoke, she looked troubled. "Ultimately? I'd have to say it's making a beeline for Montreal. But one thing's for sure, it'll take out every town on the way, too. Five thousand, ten thousand homes at a chunk. If this thing isn't stopped…"

  I got back on the phone. "No go on the hands-off, Marion. We need to find a way to firebreak this thing."

  "I'll get Weather on it," she sighed. It was clearly not a new refrain. "See what you can do from there. And Jo?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Lewis says that there's a hurricane brewing just past Jamaica. If it forms and comes inland, we could be looking at another very bad time in Florida. There's another one right behind it that looks like it could veer to hit the Gulf Coast, or South America."

  "Is there anything that isn't going crazy?"

  "No," she said flatly. "Large cave-in in Kentucky, several hundred miners and tourists trapped in the region. Most of our Earth Wardens are converging on that, but we've got warning signs all up and down the Cascadia subduction again."

  "So. This would be the end of the world, then."

  "We're keeping hitching posts handy for the Four Horsemen. Any luck on the Djinn front?"

  "Some," I lied. Didn't seem much point in adding my bad news to the pile. "I'm working on it."

  "Then you'd better quit screwing around with the fire and get the Djinn back on our side," she said grimly. "While we've still got enough of us alive to make it matter."

  I hung up, took in a deep breath or two, and turned back to Emily. "Right," I said. "Let's get back to work."

  There was a ranger station seven miles down another logging road—abandoned, since the rangers were out doing fire spotting, and had field radios with them. Emily and I commandeered the radio that had been left behind—a huge old clunker of a thing, and proof positive that upgrades weren't high on the federal budget triage scale. I tried to figure out the ancient technology. Seemed simple enough. I spun the dials to the right frequency—the Wardens' emergency frequency—and clicked the old-fashioned button on the old-fashioned microphone.

  Now, if I could only remember all the codes…

  "Violet-violet-violet," I said. "Anyone reading? Respond."

  Static. White noise. I looked over at Emily, who was washing her filthy face in the sink; she needed more than a little soap to get clean, but that did a fair job. She only looked like a chimney sweep now, instead of a smoke eater. As she scrubbed a second time, I clicked the button again. "Violet-violet-violet," I repeated. "Respond, please."

  This time, I got a sharp metallic click, and a tinny voice that sounded about twelve years old saying, "Hang on!"

  Not exactly the approved format for responding to emergency calls, but I understood. It wasn't shaping up to be a normal day anywhere in the world, but least of all in the Warden Crisis Center.

  I waited. The voice came back, eventually, right about the time Emily finished her third ablution. "Name and location," it said. Not the same voice. This one was male, authoritative, and familiar.

  "Hey, Paul," I said. "It's Joanne. They've got you answering phones?"

  "I've got damn graduate students answering the phone. You wouldn't even believe the magnitude of the trouble we're in. Where are you?"

  "I'm up at the Canada fire, with Emily. Who else is up here?"

  "Canada? Fuck if I know. Hang on, let me check." He clicked off. I knew how the Crisis Center worked—there'd be a huge write on-wipe off board with events and Wardens assigned—usually. Today, who knew. I had the feeling that it was all just happening too fast. "Yeah. Jo, Emily's Earth and Fire—you've got a second Fire Warden located about eleven miles away from your current position, on the other side of the fire. Gary Omah. He's not real high on the scale, by the way. Not a lot of heavyweights left up there."

  "I don't think we can count on Gary Omah," I sighed. "Who else?"

  "Weather Warden out of Nova Scotia. That's what I've got for you."

  "Who is she?"

  "Janelle Bright."

  I didn't know her, but that wasn't unusual; she was probably young, and probably lower level. Those seemed to be the survivors, so far. Probably because they hadn't earned any Djinn, and hadn't encountered any along the way. Also, Nova Scotia wasn't exactly the crossroads of the world. She'd probably be safe enough, if she didn't make a target of herself.

  But then again, there were no longer any guarantees of anything, were there?

  "Okay," I said, and then remembered to click the button. "Right, Paul, I'm going to organize this one, okay?"

  "Fine by me. We're up to our necks around here. You're senior on the ground pretty much wherever you go right now. Take charge."

  Now that was a really scary thought. It told me more than a Weather Channel documentary just how much trouble we were in.

  I glanced over at Emily. "
Um, Paul? One other thing."

  "Please, let it be something fluffy and happy."

  "Not so much. Demon."

  "What?"

  "There's a Demon loose. I saw it break out of a dying Warden—Gary Omah, I'm presuming. It tried—" I swallowed hard and kept my voice even with an effort, because the crispy zombie flashbacks weren't easy to suppress. "It tried to get to me, but I managed to fight it off."

  Paul was quiet for so long, I thought I was having a conversation with static, and then he said, "I can't spare anybody else to help you."

  "Make it happen, Paul. I need someone."

  He put me on hold. Mercifully, there was no annoying music, it was just straight static. I listened to white noise and thought about Gary Omah, wondered how he'd come in contact with a Demon Mark, wondered whether taking it on had been his own choice or an infection that had happened against his will. I couldn't afford to agonize over Gary, though. If he was the blackened, hollowed-out corpse I'd met in the forest, then he was better off dead, and I had bigger problems.

  Paul came back on the line. "Paul, I need—"

  He interrupted me by covering the phone and bellowing, "You! Yeah, you in the fucking yellow! I told you, get those people over to the west side of the thing, do you understand me? West!" The muffling came off the phone, not that it had concealed much. "Shit. I've gotta go. Do your best. I've got to go be the first officer of the goddamn Hindenburg." He was trying to sound light, but somewhere underneath I could tell he was genuinely, grimly terrified. "At least Lewis is the one wearing the shiny hat."

  "I know," I said softly. "Keep bailing, buddy."

  "Jo, just get the fuck out of there. Do what you've gotta do. We can't save everybody. Not this time."

  "I can't just walk away."

  "Learn how," he said. "People are dying. People are going to die. It's all just a question of how many, and how bad they go. We need the Djinn back, and we need them now. So you've got to stay focused. Do what you can, but stay on mission."

  He clicked off before I could respond. I sat back, looking at Emily; she was staring out the window at the orange-colored distance.

  "I can't get anybody besides one Weather Warden out of Nova Scotia," I said. "They're swamped."

  She nodded. "We're really fucked, aren't we?" she asked, like it was an academic consideration.

  "Not necessarily. All we have to do is pile in the Jeep and leave."

  She gave me a bleak, absent smile.

  "Yeah," she said. "That's likely."

  Of course, we didn't leave. We didn't even discuss it. We just went to work. I spent time up on the aetheric, trying to move weather patterns around and layer cooler air over what was increasingly a troubled system. The fire was generating enormous amounts of heat, and that heat was affecting the already-unstable weather. It kept sliding out of my control, finding ways to twist back like a snake trying to strike. Lightning, for instance. Just when I thought we'd gotten things contained at a reasonable level, the energy began churning around and creating vast random pulses. It had to go somewhere. I deflected most of them as sheet lightning, or sent the energy flaring across the sky instead of down to earth, but it only takes one, sometimes.

  And one slipped through, hit a giant pine, and ignited it like a torch.

  Beginning of the end.

  "Emily!" I yelled, and pointed. She was busy trying to contain the forest fire itself, but this was a second front, and we couldn't afford to let it get busy at its job. I shot up into the aetheric and looked for the other Weather Warden who was supposed to be helping us. Janelle. She was a weak spark indeed, barely glowing up on the aetheric; she was, I sensed, exhausted. Whatever was going on in Nova Scotia, it wasn't good. She was working the systems from the back, which was about all she could do, with the strength she had at hand. I wasn't about to push her for more. We were all redlining our limits today.

  I caught sight of something in the aetheric. No, caught sight of wasn't exactly accurate—I sensed something, although everything looked just about as normal as an unsettled higher plane could look… The fire was a gorgeous lavalike cascade of colors, pouring out over everything in its path, but there was something going on that didn't belong. I couldn't pin it down, exactly. I just knew something wasn't right.

  Then the fire arrived at the first human structure, a luxurious hunting lodge that was, luckily, empty of inhabitants, and set to work industriously licking at the propane tanks in the yard as if it had made straight for them.

  That hadn't been a natural progression. That had been a choice.

  "Crap," Emily said from her post at the window. She sounded matter-of-fact, but she was pale and shaking with strain. I didn't have an up-close-and-personal relationship with fire—well, not until recently—but I understood that the stress of being a Fire Warden was unique. I could see that she was caving under the pressure, and there was nothing I, could really do to help. I had my hands full already; lightning was jumping around in that storm, struggling to find new targets. My newly discovered Fire powers were too raw to be of any real use in a situation like this. Fire Wardens, even more than Weather, needed fine control.

  I had no idea how long it had been since my call to the Crisis Center; time is funny when you're in the middle of something like this. It can make minutes crawl, and hours fly; there wasn't a clock in easy view, and I was too busy to consult one anyway. Any little slip in my attention meant the fire gained new ground against the rain I was directing over it. Janelle, my remote support, was weakening further; she wouldn't be able to last long, and when she was gone, the weather system would swirl out of control out to sea, and the winds whipping in would spread this fire far and wide. I remembered how it had happened at Yellowstone, the day Star had gotten burned. The day so many Wardens had paid the price. Once a wildfire took control, it would be coming after anything and everything it sensed might be able to fight it.

  This one was right on the edge. You could feel it thinking, and, boy, not nice thoughts, either.

  The propane tanks at the hunting lodge blew with movie-spectacular effect. It bloomed white-hot at the center, curling yellow petals toward the sky on a stem of black smoke.

  The deafening roar rattled the glass a couple of seconds afterward.

  It was warm in the cabin. I realized that I was sweating, and it occurred to me to take a look around; we'd been staring out the front window at the advancing blaze working its way up to slop toward us, but it was still a good half a mile away and moving slowly, thanks to the rain I continued to pour on it.

  But I hadn't checked behind us.

  I stayed where I was in the real world and turned on the aetheric plane to take a look.

  Oh, lord.

  It was advancing like a lava flow, rolling down the hill; it had crested the mountain, and was eating everything in its path. No wonder it was hot inside the cabin.

  The fire had outflanked us.

  We were trapped.

  "Em!" I yelled. She didn't answer, transfixed on what was going on in the front window. Focused to an extent that was going to get her killed. This was why Fire Wardens died so often; fire could turn so fast, and it required so much concentration. I lunged over, grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, hard. Her eyes rolled back in her head. She collapsed against me, heavy and loose, and I had to let her slide down to the floor. If she was unconscious, not just entranced, we were so screwed, because the fire would lunge straight for this cabin like a tiger for a staked-out goat. Like called to like, power to power, and fire didn't like being caged.

  I grabbed Emily under the arms and began dragging her across the dusty wood floor to the cabin door.

  Oh my God. This wasn't happening. It couldn't happen this fast…

  I felt a wave of heat across my back, and heard glass shatter; the back window had just blown out. I gritted my teeth and heaved—dammit, why couldn't I get some willowy little girl who was easy to rescue?—and Emily's workboot-clad feet scraped another two feet of board on
the way to the door. I was seeing stars. My pulse was hammering, and the air I was sucking in tasted burned and hot and nearly unbreathable.

  The cabin was burning. Smoke was flooding in, heavy and black. I tested the doorknob and found it not quite burning hot, so I grabbed it and yanked. The door flew open, letting in a wave of hot air thick with smoke. I crouched down low and grabbed Emily's heavy form under the arms and started pulling. There were four steps to the ground. I wasn't too careful about how gently I was pulling her down them, and then I had to dump her in a heap on the gravel as I opened the back door of the SUV. Her turn to suffer being scraped over broken glass, but I figured she'd rather that than the alternative.

  Fire took hold of a tree on the left side of the ranger station with an unholy bright-blue flare and snap. Sap exploding. Everything was superheated, ready to go up at a spark. My clothes were drenched with sweat, plastered to my skin as if I'd been swimming, but I was shivering; the intense heat was evaporating the sweat too fast. I needed water. Badly. The inside of my mouth tasted like dirty cotton, and I was feeling light-headed. I couldn't smell anything anymore; it was all just the same overwhelming smell of things dying.

  A hugely antlered buck burst out of the burning forest, plunging past me, head down, blind with pain and terror. No way I could help it. I wasn't even sure if I could help myself.

  I shoved Emily the rest of the way into the backseat of the SUV with the strength of the truly desperate. I turned to glance behind me, like Lot's wife, and saw the eeriest, most beautiful thing: fire flowing like heavy syrup down the hill, sliding over every charred, twisted thing its path. This was fire at its most elemental, its most powerful. No wonder Emily had collapsed, if she'd been trying to hold this back.

  The stuff was going to roll right over the ranger station, and then right over us.

  Cinders blew in my face. I slapped sparks from my clothes, jumped in the driver's seat, and started the truck. The situation called for a fast exit, and I gunned the engine, fishtailed on the loose gravel, and then found enough traction to leap forward down the bumpy fire road.

  I was going too fast for the terrain. Gravel banged and rattled on the windshield and grille, and the suspension bounced me around like a toy inside the cabin. Emily was a rag doll in the backseat. The temperature inside the car was like a kiln, and I tried to pull in short, shallow breaths to spare my lungs. I could barely see ten feet ahead, as black smoke swirled across the road, but I kept my speed up. No time to slow down.