Firestorm tww-5

by Rachel Caine

  I reluctantly moved Imara, got her upright in the passenger seat and strapped in place. Blood dripped from her hand in a steady rhythm onto the leather seat, but I had no idea whether it was real blood or metaphorical—if I bound up her wounds, would it make her better? Or would it just not matter, one way or another? Dammit. No signal on the cell phone. I had no way to contact Lewis until I got to the next town.

  Or I could turn around, go back to Phoenix…

  It hit me in a sudden rush of comprehension. I was meant to turn back, wasn't I? There was a reason Imara had appeared here, now. She was a vivid, unmissable distraction, an emotional roadblock I couldn't help but consider.

  I turned off the engine of the roadster, set the brake, and stepped out onto the crisp gravel of the roadside. The wind was cool and cutting, sharp with the scent of rain in an area that had little of that kind of thing in the normal course of events. I breathed deeper and got an aroma of wet sage. "You might as well come out. I know you're here."

  Ashan was as gray as the clouds, and he seemed to just appear out of them, gliding down like some Hong Kong wire artist, landing with perfect poise and walking toward me without hesitation. A perfectly tailored suit around a perfectly proportioned body. Expensive, shined shoes that disdained little things like rain and wet sand. Ashan was twenty feet away, then ten, then five, and he wasn't slowing down.

  "You bastard," I said, and I called the wind. It came as if it was waiting, as if it was more than willing. A hard wall of air hit him hard, shoved him back on his heels and dragged him ten feet. He stayed upright, staring at me with fierce colorless eyes. "You did this to my daughter."

  He shrugged. "Don't take that tone with me. I could have ripped her into nothing. She's barely Djinn, and yet she's inherited all your arrogance."

  He waved a hand. That was all it took to turn the wind around, and it hit me with the force of a sandblaster, driving me back against the car. I instinctively shielded my eyes and gasped for breath as pressure tried to compress me flat. He was playing with me. If Ashan really wanted to, he'd introduce my ribs to my backbone with shattering force and leave me a ruptured bag of meat.

  The pressure slacked off enough for me to catch my breath. "How long have you been planning to destroy the Wardens?"

  "Not the Wardens," he corrected. "Humans. You're killing us. Draining us of magic, and life. Your kind are a revolting perversion of the Djinn, and you think you are the lords of creation. We are better than you. We were first."

  "Some of you were. Some of you came from humans," I said. "That must really piss you off. I mean, how does the inferior create the superior? By your logic, it can't happen. But it does, Ashan. It happens all the time."

  "No," he said sharply. "Mongrels came from you, creatures like Jonathan and David. Heavy with humanity. I am not like them. My brothers and sisters are not like them."

  I'd forgotten, but David had made that clear, once upon a time: there were Djinn who were created from humans, like the five hundred born out of the destruction of Atlantis, or like Jonathan and David on the battlefield. And then there were the—nobility, if that was the right term. The pure. The ones who'd been spawned directly from the Earth itself.

  Ashan, of course, was one of them. And it appeared he had a whole political party behind him, because I could feel the power crackling around him, the hissing presence of others who didn't choose to show themselves.

  Who stood between me and the next—the last—Oracle.

  "Turn around," he said. "Turn around and go. Die with your people when the Demon turns her mad and wipes your corruption from her skin."

  "If you put a Demon Mark into an Oracle, how do you know it won't destroy you?"

  "It won't," he said. "We are eternal."

  "I thought you said we were killing you. Humans. You can't have it both ways, you know. Eternal, not eternal—"

  "I control the Demons."

  "Sure you do. Ashan, you really have mastered all the basic skills of a bad guy, including arrogance and cluelessness. I'm proud of you. Now, if you can just make an empty, impotent threat—"

  "Shut up or I'll destroy you!" he roared, right on cue. Oh, he was mad. Really mad. I'd succeeded in royally teeing off the second most powerful Djinn in the world, and all his invisible allies, when I was all that stood between humanity and destruction.

  "Do it," I said quietly, and pushed away from the car to stand in the clear. Facing him with my arms at my sides, hands limp and open. Staring right into his eerie Djinn eyes. "What are you waiting for? Smash me. Destroy me. Rip me to pieces. I'm just a mortal, I can't stop you. Come on, Ashan, kick my punk human ass."

  He growled. It was a low, primal sound, and his human form distorted under the pressure of his rage. He misted at the feet, then the legs. The suit disappeared. Everything remotely elegant disappeared, and he was pure flame, pure roaring energy, like the center of a volcano.

  He rushed at me. I flinched a little, but I held my ground.

  He came to a halt less than two inches from my face. I could feel the burn, the fury, but he didn't touch me.

  He couldn't touch me.

  And he knew that I knew.

  I opened my eyes and smiled. "You said it yourself. Jonathan, Lewis, me. She wants to see me. Hear me. Doesn't she? And she's not going to let you kill me."

  He formed himself back into human flesh again, pale and solid as marble, cold as tombstones. His eyes were an unholy shade of teal, glittering with silver. "I wouldn't smile," he said, and there was a grave hint of fury in his voice. "I may not be able to hurt you, but I can take it in trade. Blood for blood. The blood of your lover."

  That meant that David was still alive, oh God… Relief made me weak at the knees, but I couldn't let him see it. "David's willing to die for this if he has to. I don't even have to ask him."

  "Not just him. I'll destroy every one of the Wardens. If you think to play the game with me, you need to know the stakes. Lives will be lost. I will see to it."

  "You already did," I spat back. "Hundreds of Wardens are dead. Tens of thousands are in danger, or dying, and for every Warden that dies, more get put in jeopardy. I know what I'm playing for, Ashan. And you're not going to threaten me into giving up."

  I expected him to laugh and bluster—I mean, good villains did, right?—but he just looked at me, and when his comeback came, it was slow and deliberate and scary. "No," he said. "I have never known you to respond to threats against yourself. Or the world at large. And you're quite right about David and his self-sacrifice."

  He was looking behind me. I know, I know, it's the oldest trick in the book, but I didn't think that he was all that up on strategy.

  I glanced back. Imara was out of the car and standing mute and somehow limp a few feet away. As if she were unconscious, being held up by an invisible hand at the back of her neck. Her head lolled forward, then back, as if someone had tugged hard on her hair.

  Her eyes were empty, flat silver.

  I turned back to Ashan. His were the same color.

  "She's mine," he said. "Until you take her away. Mine to use. Mine to kill, if I want. You can accept your own death. So far as I can tell, you seem to actively seek it out. And like most of humanity, the plight of the distant and faceless doesn't move you. But your daughter is in my hand, Joanne. And I think that means something more."

  I swallowed hard. He was right, of course. Every cell in my body screamed at me to do something, anything, to save my daughter. She was part of me, and I wanted to protect her so badly, it was tearing me to pieces. Ashan might not have human ancestry in his background, but he knew what we feared.

  "It does," I said softly. My eyes filled up with tears suddenly—hot, hard, aching tears that seemed to pour right up from my heart. "I love my daughter more than my life. But I'm going, Ashan. You do whatever you have to do, but I'm going. I have to."

  I got back in the car. I could barely see it for the tears, but somehow I kept myself from sobbing. The wet trails on my face
where they'd streamed felt cold in the sudden blast of the air conditioner as I turned the key and started up the roadster.

  Ashan was still watching me, with my daughter clutched in one hand like a broken marionette. I couldn't tell what he was thinking. Hell, I could barely tell what I was thinking.

  I took a deep, damp gulp of air, pressed the clutch, and put the car in first gear. The engine shifted to a low purring growl, and the car eased forward with a crunch of gravel.

  Ashan didn't move. He was ten feet away, with Imara. Around him, I sensed the other Djinn, his twenty companions, the faithful or faithless, depending which side you came down on in this struggle. I could almost see their calm faces, their inhuman eyes.

  A jolt of lightning joined sky and earth behind Ashan, a pale pink-and-purple line that unraveled into dozens of thin strings on the way. Beautiful. Alien. Powerful. Terrifying.

  I don't know why I said it, but I whispered, "Please." It was a sacred prayer, as much as a request.

  And then I hit the gas.

  At the last minute, he stepped aside as graceful as a matador, using my child for a cape.

  I hit the freeway and shifted gears while my soul burned and crumbled into ruins.

  When you give up everything—and I mean everything—there's this eerie sense of calm that comes over you. I didn't have David; I knew now that I couldn't have him. Whatever Ashan had done to him, it was thorough enough that he couldn't be my personal lifesaving God-in-a-bottle anymore. No power on earth could have held him back from coming to Imara's defense, if he'd been able to break free. Ashan had him, and now he had my daughter, too. I'd abdicated the one responsibility that should have been impossible for me to give up: motherhood. I'd turned my back on my own child. I'd let myself count her as a cost of doing business.

  It felt like Pompeü on volcano day, and all I could taste was ashes.

  I let him have my daughter.

  I could hear Lewis's warm, dispassionate voice telling me that I'd made the right choice, the only choice, but it didn't matter. It's written in our DNA somewhere: our children first, the rest of the world second. I couldn't believe I'd done it. Couldn't believe I was that much of a monster.

  Ashan was going to kill her, and I was going to let him, and that tore my heart to bloody shreds. I hated this. I hated being strong. I hated understanding that this was the cost of things.

  Please. I said it again, with all my heart and soul, letting it fill me up in prayer and desperation. Please God, take care of her. I don't know how you fit into all this—I don't know whether you're in everything or nothing, whether you're an absentee landlord or watching the flight of every bumblebee. But I beg you, don't let my daughter pay the price. Please. I don't care what it costs, but please, find a way…

  God must hate our me-me-me whining; like kids sent off to college, we call only when we need a favor. I wasn't sure if I'd built up any credit in the Bank of Miracles. Probably not, given my history, but maybe the Bank of Mercy didn't have such strict lending rules.

  I wiped my eyes and opened up the roadster down the clean, straight road. It seemed to go on forever, and then I took the indicated turnoff, AZ-179, to make the last leg of the journey.

  It was beautiful. Really, searingly beautiful, even with the gray cotton of cloud cover obscuring that burnished blue sky—the rocks were ancient and powerfully sculpted, and it was a landscape to conjure the old, old gods of the empty spaces. The road looked alien and out of place here. I was no Earth Warden, but even I could feel the power that whispered through the air and ground; this was a place where the skin between the real and aetheric was paper-thin. No wonder New Agers flocked here, not to mention the religious of all faiths and sects. It had a purity that I'd never felt before, not even in other desert spots.

  The clouds, already thinning, broke into haze by the time I reached the town of Oak Creek, which according to the rental agency map was just outside of Sedona proper. Behind them was that limitless sky, the bright unblinking stare of the sun.

  It occurred to me, rather stupidly late, that I had no street address for the Oracle, and now, with Imara gone (my heart dried up and died at the thought of that, and I felt another flood of tears burn my eyes) I didn't have a native guide, either. AH I had was instinct, and not much of that.

  Well, the last Oracle was an Earth spirit, so I didn't figure to find it hanging out at the Old Navy store, but that left a lot of territory.

  I kept going, absent any reason to do anything else. Oak Creek passed in a blur of houses and xeriscaped yards, businesses and cars, and was swallowed up again by the desert that outwaited everything. The silence took over again. The sky brightened, and my hands shook on the steering wheel. I kept expecting Ashan to smite me with righteous fury, but he hadn't made a move. I wondered why. Maybe he was still trying to figure out why I'd abandoned my daughter to die…

  I shook my head violently to clear it of the images.

  The sun was molten out here, pouring energy in syrupy waves, and the ground soaked it up. Shadows were sharply drawn and as cold as black holes where they fell. The flora was angular and beautiful in its austerity, and it passed by in a continuous roll until I topped a rise and saw Sedona up ahead.

  At the same instant, I felt the same artificial sense of calm and steadiness here that I'd felt in Seacasket. I was in the right place, all right.

  I just didn't know where to go from here.

  The sense of panic started to set in when I passed the town limits, because I really didn't know. I suppose I was expecting some kind of magic guidance—a flashing sign that said this way to the oracle to save the world! Not that I'd expect anything so crass in this place. Maybe a discreet, hand-carved art nouveau plaque in native woods.

  I pulled in at a gas station, trembling all over, and consulted the map again. Nothing. No helpful Djinn-induced sparks of light. No oracle marked on it, with a pointing arrow. I'd come all this way, given up my daughter, and for what?

  Easy, I told myself when I felt the shaking start to get too bad. You can do this. Ashan wouldn't have tried to stop you if there hadn't been a way to get it done.

  Logical, but not comforting. Hell, Ashan might have been trying to stop me just for the pure joy of seeing me have to choose between duty and child. He struck me as that kind of Djinn.

  I wished, illogically, that Jonathan was still around. Lean, angular, sarcastic Jonathan, with his infinite eyes and shallow patience. David was my love, and he was half my soul, but I needed someone with more perspective. Someone who viewed me as a white knight on a chessboard, not the queen, to be protected.

  Someone to move me to the right square.

  I got out of the BMW and stretched. A couple of guys gassing up stared. Might have been the car they were lusting after, but I smiled wanly at them anyway and walked over to the telephones. After a futile and maddening search for change in my pockets, I went into the gas station and bought one of those phone card things, then came back and dialed the number of Lewis's cell phone from a telephone booth.

  I got him on the first ring. "Jo! I've been trying to find you—"

  "Cell phone service is bad," I said. "I'm still saving the world for you. I need a favor, and it's a big one."

  Silence for a long few seconds. There was a steady, agitated sound of shouts in the background. All was not quiet on the Warden front. "Go," he said.

  "First of all, if you've still got any clout with any Free Djinn, use it. Ashan's got Imara. He's trying to use her to stop me. I need help."

  I felt the sudden intake of breath on the other end of the line, as if I'd gut-punched him across the intervening miles. "Ah, dammit, Jo, I'm sorry. I was trying to get hold of you to warn you. Rahel showed up in the New York offices about fifteen minutes ago."

  "What?" Oh, I had a bad feeling. Bad, bad, bad.

  "It's happening again," Lewis said. "They're—turning. Be careful."

  I swallowed hard and angled my back to the rough adobe wall, so that I could squint th
rough the glare at the parking lot. It looked calm. My BMW sat glittering in the sun, sleek and beautiful and just a touch arrogant; beyond it, two big-ass SUVs were drinking the pumps dry. A woman was tossing trash in the courtesy cans. Normal human life, nothing out of the ordinary.

  "Did she kill anybody?"

  "Let's just say it didn't go well."

  "How many—"

  "Stay focused, Jo." Lewis sounded grim and ragged, very unlike his usual cool self. "You can't afford to worry about individuals right now. I can't do what you're doing, or I'd be knocking down the doors right now, believe me. I've tried. Even though I've got the right mix of powers, there's something missing in me. Something you've got."

  "Djinn," I said. "I have a little bit of Djinn."

  I heard someone yell his name in the background. "I have to go," he said. "We've got wounded. Jo—about Imara—"

  "I understand," I said. The taste of ashes was back in my mouth. "There's nothing you can do."

  "Nothing anybody can do," he said. "We're trying to stay alive—that's it and that's all. Keep as many people breathing as we're able."

  And that, ultimately, was the mission of the Wardens, wasn't it? The greater good.

  "Wait," I said. "I'm in Sedona. Do you have any idea where to—"

  "Find the Ma'at," he said, and hung up.

  Just… hung up.

  I stared at the receiver in disbelief, because that wasn't exactly what I'd call a red-hot clue. The Ma'at weren't listed in the yellow pages under World, Saving Of… and I had no idea if there was even one single person, out of the several Ma'at I'd met, who lived in the Sedona area. As far as I knew, they were all strangers. How the hell was I supposed to find them, send up a flare?

  A flare…

  I was still thinking it through when one of the big SUVs pulled away from the pump and out onto the road, and revealed three figures standing there, watching me. Focused on me like hungry wolves.