by Rachel Caine
The roof wasn’t going to work any longer.
I started fires around the roof line to give myself a little time as I stuffed things back into my bag. The fire should have slowed them down, and maybe it did, for all of fifteen seconds or so, but then they ran shrieking—human shrieks—through the walls of flame and came straight for me with those deadly stingers upraised and ready.
No time for anything fancy. I had to evacuate.
I levitated myself up on a strong updraft, and—apprehensively—over the flames and the struggling, snapping chimeras that were swarming up the building. This wasn’t something even most hard-core Weather Wardens were good at doing; short bursts of this kind of thing were fine, but if I faded now, I’d be dropping myself into a boiling mass of these things at the base of the wall. I had to keep going. I had to hope that it would take them time to realize I was gone and to find me.
Personal levitation is exhausting, sweaty work, and my pack quickly felt like it increased in weight from ten pounds to fifty, to a hundred. I breathed in ragged, gasping breaths, holding diamond-hard focus on keeping the forces in delicate balance as I sped along, skimming over the desert at the speed of maybe thirty miles per hour. Not exactly fast, but I didn’t dare push faster. Every bit of forward motion I added made it harder to compensate on all the other, constantly shifting energies. I’d never done this for longer than a minute, at best.
I held it for almost fifteen minutes before my concentration snapped, and I tumbled out of the sky toward a razor-sharp stand of brush cactus. At the last second, I altered course and landed in sand instead, and hit the ground running. It was good I did, because when I looked back I saw that my footprints were filling up with something dark.
Fire ants. My very touch on the ground was bringing them boiling to the surface.
Not just fire ants, either. The desert’s defenses were on high alert, and I had to dodge swarms of smaller, nonchimeraed scorpions as well as some tarantulas crawling out of their holes ahead of me. Running was not my best sport, and broken-field running even less so, but I didn’t have a choice. When I reached out with Earth powers to try to clear my way, it only made things worse, as if the entire wildlife was sensitized to the presence of a Warden in their midst.
My breath was burning in my lungs, and I knew I’d have to stop soon, or at least slow down. But I wasn’t sure how I could, considering the fierce antibody reaction to my passage. Not only that, but as I looked back over my shoulder I saw movement about a thousand feet behind me. Chimeras, and they were catching up.
Las Vegas was a long, long way off. It looked drab and overbuilt in the desert shimmer. I realized that no planes were flying in or out, and although there was a road up ahead, about a half a mile out, there were no cars on it. It was eerily quiet.
No sound except for the overhead shriek of hunting birds, which made me realize how vulnerable I was to attack from that avenue. I didn’t want to have to kill more birds. I didn’t want to kill anything, except maybe those awful chimeras, but I didn’t think I was going to have a choice. Mother Earth had declared war, and I was going to have to fight back, hard.
Except that I wasn’t sure anything I had would really keep me alive for long.
I put on a burst of speed, pulled from Earth power, and outpaced the scuttling pursuers, heading for the road. Not that the road was safe, given that it had already eaten my damn car, but it was flat and clear of fire ant burrows, at least.
What it wasn’t clear of were hornets. They boiled up out of nowhere from the side of the road, a bomber squadron of inch-long furious insects, and headed straight for me as soon as my feet hit the asphalt. I gasped and instinctively swatted at them with a blast of air, driving them back as I kicked my run into even higher gear. I was dripping with sweat now, gasping like a fish out of water, but I couldn’t slow down. I could hear the relentless buzz of the insects zipping closer.
I came to a sudden halt, closed my eyes, and formed a hard shell of air around my body. The bugs hit the windshield with vicious force, leaving gruesome splatters, and those that didn’t die immediately jabbed their stingers into the barrier, over and over, trying to get to me with their last breath. A few, warier than the others, backed off and circled, looking for an opening.
I couldn’t wait forever.
I dropped the shell and ran for it, and the remaining hornets dashed in pursuit. The first one came close enough to smash with another gust of air that sent it tumbling, stunned or dead, to the gravel shoulder of the road. My legs felt like lead now, and my muscles were starting to wobble uncertainly as the stress and lack of oxygen took their toll.
The first hornet got me, and it felt like being hit with a bullet. A bullet dipped in acid. I yelped, slapped a hand down on my arm, and felt the insect’s body squash under the slap. The sting hurt, and then began to burn. I gritted my teeth and stopped again, pulling down my windshield. Three more hornets met their gooey death, leaving only two who were smarter than that, or slower.
The running battle of attrition went on for another half mile. I smashed one more hornet, but the other two harassed me, flying in with vicious darting motions. I crushed another one when it landed on me, luckily before it drove home its stinger.
The sole survivor dive-bombed me relentlessly, and score two more stings before I finally managed to kill him, too.
I windmilled to a gasping, gagging stop on the hot asphalt, barely able to keep upright. My left arm, where the first sting had landed, felt hot and swollen; so did the back of my neck and my leg, where the others had scored hits. But I wasn’t going to die of that.
No sign of the chimeras behind me.
No new threat racing up out of the desert to confront me.
There was even a cool breeze ruffling my hair, and I lifted my chin, grateful for anything that lessened the misery I was in . . . and then my eyes snapped open, and I saw the dust devil dancing out there in the desert, a sinuous rope shape made visible with all of the sand it was sucking up. It was mesmerizing to watch as it twisted, bent, and got darker.
I dropped down into a crouch, hardened the air again, and covered my head with my hands as the dust devil—no, dust tornado—raced toward me with the fury of a freight train. It hissed at first, and then, once it was on me, the hiss rose to a blinding roar. I could feel the sand scouring over the shell that protected me, and the heat increased. I couldn’t stay in the shell long without making it gas-permeable, but that meant opening myself to the dust storm. I’d suffocate, one way or the other. My only hope was to disrupt the dust devil’s delicate, powerful structure.
And I probably would have done that fairly easily, if it hadn’t been for the fact that a chimera slammed into the shell around me, and when I opened my eyes I found myself face to face with the lolling, foaming mouth and rolling eyes of a madman. His hands scrabbled at the surface, and I saw that the sand was ripping at him viciously. I’d seen a man stripped of skin once, in a storm like this, and as I saw the first raw patches appear on his body, I felt my stomach clench in nausea.
I couldn’t help him, whoever he’d once been. He was gone. And this thing that wanted to take a piece out of me wasn’t in any way human.
The scorpion tail drove down, hit the hard shell around me, and snapped its stinger off. The chimera howled and lost its footing. The dust devil blew it away into a maelstrom of sand and debris, and I concentrated on Oversight, examining the structure of the twister hovering over me. It was a perfect little engine of destruction—colder air whipping down and heating itself as it moved faster and faster in its spiral, then the hot air blasting up like a furnace through the center of the devil to the sky, where it cooled and spiraled back down. A perfect marvel of physics.
But this one—this one was no accident of nature. This one was being held together by an iron will, and when I tried to break it, it was like hitting a bank vault door with a toy hammer. Someone wanted to kill me, badly.
And I thought I knew who it was.
I kept the shield in place and straightened up. I started at a walk, well aware that I was going to exhaust the oxygen content of the air in this shell in less than a minute once I started running.
The dust devil stayed on top of me, blinding me, slamming me with debris and scouring sand that whipped at killing speeds. I broke into a jog. It paced me.
I kicked it to a run, lungs burning from more than effort now. I could feel my energy dropping, and the danger was that as I used up my available air I was going to start losing focus. Losing focus meant losing the protection of the windshield, and that meant I’d die.
No. There had to be a way. There had to be.
I realized that I was breathing too hard, and getting too little. That hadn’t taken long. A headache was already starting to form, and my legs were informing me that any step now might be the last I was going to take.
I dropped the shield, sucked in a dust-laden breath, closed my eyes, and dropped flat on the hot pavement. The dust devil screamed as it closed over me, clearly sensing triumph, and I tried not to scream as it battered me with raw fury.
When I’d hyperventilated enough, I put the shield back in place and ran on. I’d only gotten a few steps when the dizziness started. I couldn’t keep this up.
I crouched down again, grabbed my pack and opened it, groped inside, and found the one Djinn bottle I’d kept with me.
I thumbed off the cork.
A rush of black mist, and hidden in it I saw sharp angles and edges and alien geometries. Venna, in the form of an Ifrit. I’d never understood how much Ifrits really comprehended—not much, in all probability—but this was one moment when her needs and mine aligned perfectly.
“Ashan,” I gasped, and spat out a mouthful of sticky dirt. “He’s out there. Go get him.”
I couldn’t tell if she knew what I was saying, or if she sensed his presence, but she let out a shriek that vibrated at the very limits of my hearing, and disappeared.
Seconds later the dust devil collapsed in a confusion of sand and clattering license plates, barbed wire, and pieces of broken brush. Its demise left drifts of brown sand and chips of red sandstone littering the road in concentric circles around me.
I dropped the shield and spent the next several seconds just breathing. My whole body was shaking with effort, and sitting down seemed to be the only thing to do, really.
Down the road, about a hundred yards away, Ashan was screaming. Venna had battened on him, and sunk sharp, angular spikes into his pseudobody. When he tried to mist away, she only consumed faster.
I coughed and tasted blood. The bottle was in my hand, and the cork was dangling, ready to be slammed back in place. All I had to do was recall Venna before it was too late.
Ashan screamed, and screamed, and screamed, and I didn’t call Venna back to the bottle until his pale, shrieking face had dissolved into bloody mist, and had been absorbed into her twisted, nightmarish alien form.
It broke up into mist, too—black, greasy mist that turned gray, then white, and reformed around the body of a small girl in a pinafore dress, crumpled on the pavement.
“Venna!” I could barely stand, but somehow I managed to run to her side. Her eyes were open and blank. I touched her face, and she felt cold. “Venna, can you hear me?” I wasn’t sure that she would be stable in this form; sometimes Ifrits used up their energy and reverted to the primitive form.
But not Venna. She lay there, broken and defenseless, and when I saw her finally blink it brought tears to my eyes.
She didn’t get up. I pulled her into my lap and held her, and she felt like a child, like any child. Her arms slowly rose and went around me, and I felt her body start to shake.
I realized after a few more seconds that she was speaking, very softly. Her voice was a thin, anxious thread. “I didn’t want this. He was my brother; I didn’t want this. . . .”
Ashan was dead, killed in one of the only ways possible for a Djinn. She’d ripped away his life energy to save herself, and—as a byproduct—me. I couldn’t feel nearly as bad about that as she did, but I didn’t have to gloat, and I didn’t. I just held her and rocked her gently. Even Djinn need help, from time to time, and I was glad to give it.
Until I looked back, and saw more chimeras coming.
“Ven,” I said then, and nudged her head off my shoulder. “Venna.”
Her eyes cleared a little, and she regained some of the distance and poise that I was used to seeing in her. “Joanne,” she said. “You put me in a bottle.” That was a dangerous thing for her to be realizing right now.
“I had to,” I said. “You were Ifrit. You could have killed David.”
She nodded slowly, processing the information, and then turned her head to look at the oncoming group of chimeras scuttling up the road toward us. She frowned. “Those aren’t right,” she said, and extended her hand. One by one, the creatures blew up in gouts of blood and some kind of pale fluid. It was nauseating, but effective. In seconds, not one of them remained.
Venna turned her gaze back on me. “You put me in a bottle.” I didn’t repeat my answer; she already knew what I had to say. The only question was whether she’d actually accept it. I knew I could blow up just as gruesomely, and as easily, as those chimeras littering the road out there, and I knew better than to think Venna wouldn’t do it, if she thought it was the right thing to do.
She stared at me with Djinn-fired blue eyes, and finally said, “His powers came to me. I’m the Conduit for the Old Djinn.”
I should have seen that coming, but somehow, I didn’t. I blinked at her, and bit back an automatic, and utterly suicidal, congratulations. “I’m sorry,” I said instead. “I had to do something.”
“Yes,” she said, and looked moodily out at the land around us. “Yes, I can see that. She’s trying to reach me, but she can’t as long as you have me anchored in the bottle. My power flows through you.”
“Venna—”
She made some kind of decision, and stood up. I waited as she dusted off her dress—not that it would ever get dirty. She could just be moving away so that she wouldn’t be splashed with my gore when she exploded me.
Yeah, I try to look on the bright side.
“Are you going to sit there?” she said. “Or do you want to see Lewis?”
“I want to know what happened to David,” I said. “Something must have. He would have come back for me.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “That’s in his nature. Come.” She extended her small hand, and pulled me to my feet with such ease she might as well have been a linebacker. When I started to drop the grip, she held on.
“We’re going through the aetheric,” she said.
“Wait, that’s not—”
“Trust me.”
And then everything was a rush of color, light, a feeling of being destroyed to a cellular level, pain, and then, suddenly, I was facedown on the carpet of a casino floor, gasping for breath.
Slot machines were ringing, just like the world was still normal. Just like everything that I’d been through had been a terrible, passing nightmare.
I felt like a sack of overcooked spaghetti, and I wasn’t sure I could get to my feet at all, but Venna tugged me back upright. She gave me a long, level look and said, “You should put me back in the bottle now. The longer I’m out, the more of your energy I burn. You can’t afford it now.”
I cleared my throat and nodded. “Thank you.”
“There will be a price,” she said coolly.
That was positively chilling, but I tried not to let her see how much that got to me as I said the words, she misted away, and I capped the bottle firmly. She was right. The second the cork slotted in place, I felt better, stronger, and almost capable of standing on my own. But, since there was a handy wall to lean on, no sense in pushing it.
I heard the metallic rattle of guns being readied, and peered around to see a line of men and women facing me with serious weaponry, and even more serious expressions. Most of them were wearing the tailor
ed blazers of security for the Luxor hotel.
All of them were Ma’at, and I could feel the shields being readied against anything I might try to throw at them.
I was too tired for this crap. I held out my fingers in a peace sign—which was one more finger than I was inclined to show them—and said, “Take me to Lewis.”
Venna hadn’t answered me about what had happened to David, but Djinn were like that.
Lewis would answer, or I’d beat it the hell out of him with my bare hands.
Chapter Eleven
They took me out of the casino area—most of the dedicated players hadn’t paid a bit of attention to the sudden show of firepower—and hustled me through a maze of corridors to a salon privé on the second floor. It had the hushed, elegant vibe of a place where only the highest of high rollers was hosted.
The Ma’at guards opened the door—some kind of biometrics—and pushed me inside before closing it after me. It was a large room, and under normal circumstances it would have been exquisitely appointed, but the Wardens had no time for that nonsense, clearly. Expensive antiques had been shoved like driftwood into corners. A round mahogany table that would have caused those Antiques Roadshow guys to weep had been unceremoniously loaded down with files, computers, and satellite phones. There were folding tables set up with coffee and food, and cots—mostly full of sleeping people—crammed in at every angle possible. The clear space that was left was where the Wardens were working.
I saw Luis and Cassiel, and made straight for them. “What the hell happened to David?” I yelled. That got almost everyone’s attention in the room, even the sleeping ones. I shoved cots out of my way, creating a logjam effect, and scrambled over people to land in front of Cassiel. “He was with you! Where is he?”
She said nothing, but she looked sideways at a tall man pushing his way through the crowd. I didn’t even have to look at him to know who it was—the subdued tingle of his powers was unmistakable against mine.