Firestorm (Weather Warden #5) - Page 6

Ashan was intimidating as hell, and he knew it; his predominant color scheme was gray, with a little silver for highlights. As always, he looked elegantly tailored. A double-breasted suit, the color of mourning doves. A pale gray shirt. A teal-blue tie, with eyes to match. Ashan, of all the Djinn, struck me as less than human; he gave the impression that he just wore a bipedal shape with opposable thumbs for convenience, but he gave it no more importance than that. His movements had that liquid grace that all the Djinn seemed to possess but which they didn't usually flaunt quite so openly. Even Rahel seemed more part of my world.

He walked steadily toward us down that gravel path. There were dark spots marring it. Bloodstains, all of them mine. A flaming branch was blocking his path, and he kicked it casually out of the way with so much power that it hit one of the quaint weathered tombstones and snapped it off like a broken tooth.

Imara made a low sound of terror. I pushed her behind me.

"Ashan," I said. "Thanks for your concern, but really, we're fine. No need to be worried."

"Freak," he said. "Filthy groveling worm. You defile the ground you touch." Voice like nothing at all. Gray, monotone, flat. No anger, but that didn't make me feel any better. Ashan didn't need to be angry. He just needed to be awake. "You defiled the Oracle with your stench."

"I saved the Oracle from a Demon Mark," I said, and watched his expression. No surprise there. "You knew. You knew he was infected. Why didn't you come running to save him?"

"You have no right to be here." His empty eyes flashed toward Imara. "Either of you."

"Leave the kid out of it. If you want to smack somebody around–"

He moved too fast for me to see, and suddenly there was a stinging agony on the side of my face, and I was on my hands and knees. He'd slapped me. A leisurely, open-handed slap. If he'd used his fist, he'd have snapped my neck. "Do not speak to me again."

Imara threw herself in his path. "You're not hurting my–"

Ashan didn't even break stride. He backhanded her so hard, she left the ground, twisted in midair, and flew twenty feet to slam into a massive gray headstone. I watched her, horrified. She didn't move after landing.

When I looked back at Ashan, it was too late. He grabbed my throat and dragged me kissing-close. I scrabbled and scratched at his hand, but it was like trying to pry steel with your fingernails. Overhead, dark clouds scudded in from the sea, moving fast and high, as if they wanted a ringside seat for the action. I could sense a certain eagerness up there. Storms always loved to see Weather Wardens getting their comeuppance.

"You," Ashan said with gentle precision, his lips to my ear, "should have stayed far, far away from here. You're too late, in any case. I've told the Mother the whole filthy history of humanity. None of Jonathan's benevolent, willful ignorance. None of David's foolish sentiment. The truth."

"Truth?" I croaked. "Or just your version?"

He was right. I should have headed the other way, fast, the minute I'd seen him turn the corner, but with Ashan, as with any major predator who has you at his mercy, it's best not to run unless you have an even shot at getting away. Bravado's the only real defense.

"You know the thing I like best about human beings?" he asked, and took hold of my right arm with his big, cold left hand. "You break so easily."

He pressed with his pale, white thumb. That was all. Just his thumb, and I felt the hot electric snap of a bone breaking, followed by a wet cascade of agony. I couldn't even scream. Couldn't get it past his choking hand.

His thumb moved. There were two bones in the arm, and he found the second with unerring precision.

Snap.

My shriek came out a strangled whimper. I saw red, and stars, and I wanted to heave but I'd just choke faster. And Ashan wasn't finished with me, that much was obvious.

"Call him," Ashan murmured in my ear. He hadn't so much as raised his voice a single degree in temperature. "Call your pet for me. He'll save you if you call him. He won't let me kill you."

I wanted to. Badly. But I knew all too well what Ashan was doing; he wanted David here, alone, with a lover and a daughter to try to protect. David had power–boatloads of it, inherited from Jonathan–but Ashan wasn't far behind. And he wanted David's place as the hub at the center of the Djinn universe. He wanted to remove the only real threat to his power.

But mostly, he just wanted to do to David what he was doing to me. Terrorize, humiliate, torment.

"No." I managed to mouth the word. I could protect David, if nothing else. His right hand flexed, and I felt my throat flex with it. It would be easy for him to kill me. Too easy.

"We'll see." He still had hold of my arm, and now he deliberately, slowly, twisted it. I screamed again, but he'd trapped the sound in my throat where it frantically beat inside, like a bird in a trap. Red-hot wires of agony ran through me. It was like low-budget electrocution. I could feel tears streaming down my face and over his hand, and I was staring pleadingly at his blank teal-blue eyes. Looking for mercy. Looking for anything I could recognize as remotely human.

He smiled. It was the coldest expression I could imagine seeing on a face that pretended to be flesh and blood.

Somehow, I knew that the serene little town of Sea-casket hadn't noticed a thing, and wouldn't. Ashan could stand here in broad daylight and pull me apart like a rag doll, and nobody would notice a thing. Just when I thought that he was really going to do it, he dropped me. I fell painfully hard to my knees, hugged my broken arm to my chest, and swayed on the verge of passing out. My wandering eyes focused on the crumpled form near the tombstones. Imara was still down. Not moving. I felt something go still inside me. The swirling darkness that had threatened to drag me down blew away, leaving me cold and utterly clear.

I gulped back the tears and the terror, and shifted my gaze up, to Ashan.

"You know what?" I croaked. It sounded ragged, and not quite sane. "You and me, we have an understanding. Fair game. But I don't care how badass you think you are, you shouldn't have hurt my daughter."

The artificially calm weather of Seacasket had been shattered by the tinkering I'd done to produce my lightning bolt; I reached out, grabbed the air, and started shaking. The world was going to hell anyway, and I wasn't about to let Ashan do this. Not to Imara. Not to me.

Not without a fight.

"You can't," he said flatly.

Bullshit, I couldn't. I was a Warden. I had the power, and the lack of conscience to go with it. I'd had a Demon Mark, once upon a time. Maybe it had rotted something inside me that should have been thinking of the big picture, I don't know, but right at that moment, I was all about the world within fifty feet, and my child lying unconscious and at Ashan's nonexistent mercy.

Fifty feet happened to include the mausoleum that held the Oracle, too.

"You started it," I said. I continued to shake up the system. It wasn't easy, especially with agony throbbing through my body in waves, but I was making progress. There was serious instability in the atmosphere. And offshore, the storm that had been hanging back saw its shot, and started rolling in with the wind at its back. Huge black sails of clouds, belling tight in the wind. Lightning was a scimitar in its teeth, and yo ho, mateys, the pirates were coming ashore.

"Stop," Ashan said, and grabbed me by the hair. I grinned at him. Must have been gruesome, bloody teeth, bloodshot eyes.

"Make me." I flipped electron polarities in the air, turning and turning and turning. Locking the chain in place with a sudden furious surge of energy, grounding energy from the storm clouds. "I don't need David to whip your punk ass."

Lightning hissed up from the ground, down from the clouds, and he was caught in the middle.

Flesh and blood vaporized instantly, along with all of Ashan's nice couture. I was too close. I caught the corona, was blown backward into the mausoleum wall, and ended up on the ground, screaming into a mouthful of grass because my broken arm had just gone up five steps on the ten-point agony scale, to fourteen. Man, I was trashed.

But Ashan was vapor.

That didn't mean he was dead, not at all, just not manifesting properly in human form. Didn't matter much to him, in terms of hurting him in any lasting way, but I was willing to bet that it had stung. He wasn't exactly roaring right back for a rematch. I lifted my head and saw him trying to coalesce out of the mist, and focused the wind into a hard, narrow channel, straight for him. It hit him like a cannon, blasted the mist apart, and this time, he came together more slowly. Hanging back. I didn't bother to get up as his face formed in the fog. Not flesh and bone, more of a ghost-image. Spooky. I sounded a hell of a lot more confident than I felt. "Turn around and leave, Ashan, because I swear, the next thing I hit will mean a lot more to you than your skin."

I sensed his smug disbelief. So I hit the mausoleum with a lightning bolt.

The world went nuts. Really nuts. Winds howling, lightning stabbing all over the sky in an insane display of fury, ground rumbling… hailstones pelted out of the clouds, the size of golf balls. A couple hit me, and if my arm hadn't already been overwhelming me with agony, that would have been serious pain.

Ashan managed to form himself into pseudoflesh–not quite human, for certain, because he was misting out just below the hips into a gray swirl of fog. He still clung to the business suit for the top half.

But he had something to say. His eyes had gone completely dark. Lightless as space.

"You'll die for that. No matter how many friends you have among the Djinn. This is a sacred place."

"Bring 'em on," I said grimly. "Maybe you'd like to explain why you let the Oracle suffer like that. Unless you were just blaming it on poor old humanity. Again." I struggled up to my knees, then somehow to my feet. It was more of a stagger than a graceful rise, but the fact I was standing was pretty much a victory. "Guess what? I talked to her. And now she knows that you've been lying to her, you bastard."

Which was a blatant lie, because I'd gotten zero sense she'd paid the slightest attention to me, but hopefully Ashan couldn't know that. The air was full of threat, his and mine and something else, something vast. I was guessing that Mom was telling us kids to quit, she didn't care who'd started it. Of course, this mom was capable of administering a smack to the bottom that would flatten half the eastern seaboard.

Maybe I'd been a little hasty, using the last lightning strike. But it had been that, or roll over and die, not something I was very good at doing.

Not with my child at stake.

Ashan just… vanished. Not so much a puff of smoke as a wasting away, tatters on the gusting wind. I put my unbroken hand against the wall of the mausoleum and leaned for a few minutes, breathing hard, trying not to faint; my knees buckled a couple of times, but somehow I got upright. The storm was growling overhead, but when I read its pedigree, it was still a punk, not that much of a threat. I'd unsettled it, for certain, and upped it a few degrees on the dangerometer. I needed to smooth it down.

And I'd get around to it. But first, I stumbled across grass, around tilting old headstones, and collapsed next to my daughter, who was lying motionless on the ground.

"Imara?" I reached out and touched her.

My hand went through her. Not in the way that it would have if she'd been, say, consumed by little blue sparklies that seeped in from an alien dimension, but as if she was mostly vapor, held together by memory and will. She didn't move. I withdrew my hand hastily, and used it to cradle my broken arm across my chest. Damn, that hurt. I saw stars and jagged red streaks, and managed somehow to breathe through the pain. "Imara, can you hear me?"

If she could, she wasn't giving any sign. She was in a kind of there and not-there state, lying facedown on the grass. I couldn't grab her to move her, or turn her over. All I could do was call her name.

Rain pattered down, cold and hard on my exposed skin. I sat on the grass and shivered, next to my unconscious Djinn child, and fought the urge to call for David. He'd come, I knew that. But I wasn't entirely sure that it would be safe for him; if Ashan was still hanging out there, watching, this could still turn wrong.

Not that it was in any way right to begin with.

After I while, I noticed that Imara's clothes began to absorb water. I reached down and lightly touched the fabric. It had texture and weight.

At my touch, she exploded into movement, like a startled deer–up and on her feet, white-faced and wild-eyed. Scanning the skies, then the land, then focusing on me.

I wasn't sure she even remembered who I was. One thing was certain–there was so much menace coming off her that I didn't dare move. She'd have whacked me halfway across the cemetery, just the way she'd been hit, and without a doubt, it would have snapped more than my arm.

The panic cleared from her eyes. "Mom?" She was across the intervening space in seconds, crouched next to me, reaching out. I was cold, wet, and shaking, and I was probably going into shock, if I hadn't already booked a full vacation package there.

She was speaking a liquid language, words that sounded fast and golden in my ears, and I didn't know what she was saying, but I knew it was in the language of the Djinn. I recognized it, from moments with David.

"Hey," I said weakly. "English, kiddo."

She felt warm. So warm. I vaguely remembered leaning on her support as I staggered out of the cemetery and onto the street. The Camaro was sitting right where we'd parked it, looking bold and sassy through the downpour. Imara got me in the passenger seat.

It was all over. I'd failed. I'd just… failed.

"Mom?" Imara sounded worried as she put the car in gear and scratched gears getting us out of town. "Mom, where do we go?"

I had no fucking idea. I turned my face away, toward the world outside. The world that was going to die because I'd been inadequate to the task of saving it.

"Find the nearest Warden," I said. "Maybe there's something we can do to help."

"With what?"

I shrugged, one-shouldered. The other one felt like ground glass had been driven into the joint. "Whatever." I wasn't very interested.

Imara kept casting anxious looks my way, but I didn't say another word.

I had no idea how long the drive was, but it wasn't long enough for me to come up with a decent bright idea. So Imara just followed instructions and drove me to the nearest Warden.

That turned out to be Emily, the Earth and Fire Warden who'd given me crap back at the Headquarters building. She lived in a one-dog town in the middle of Nowhere County, Maine, and when Imara coasted the Camaro to a stop on the gravel driveway, she parked it next to a mud-spattered Jeep.

The Warden was home. She came to the door when Imara knocked, stared at my kid as if she was the Second Coming, then at me like the devil incarnate. "Oh," she said flatly. "They sent you. Great."

She turned and walked into the house, not bothering to show us in. I was too sick and in too much pain, not to mention despair, to care about that. I followed her to a homey-looking living room, with one wall painted a somewhat unfortunate shade of cinnamon; Indian blankets and southwestern art lined the walls. The furniture was chunky wood, deliberately primitive. Knickknacks ran to kachina dolls and dreamcatchers.

I knew Emily vaguely. We'd never been friends, or even what I'd call acquaintances, but we'd worked on a couple of projects together, and shared a desk at the national Warden call center before, the one Wardens use to yell for help when things turn really bad. Emily hadn't exactly been a people person then, and I doubted she'd mended her ways. Earth Wardens in general tended to be either hippies or hermits; she definitely fell into the hermit category. Apparently, the Fire Warden tendencies hadn't done much to influence her basic character.

She was wearing what she'd had on the last time I'd seen her–baggy blue jeans and a nondescript tunic top, one that stretched. Bare feet, that was the only real change. Her short-cropped hair feathered around her blunt-featured face, and the scowl looked at home on her face, worn in deep.

I sank down in a chair and cradled my broken arm closer, trying not to scream.

"Huh," Emily said, and jerked her chin at it. "Looks bad."

"Thanks."

"Wasn't a compliment. You want some help?"

"If it wouldn't put you out."

Imara was standing indecisively a few feet away, clearly trying to get a signal from me as to what, if anything, to do. I didn't have time. Emily bent down, took my arm in her big, strong hands, and did a twist-yank thing that hurt so bad, I teetered on the edge of darkness.

"There," she said in satisfaction. "Hold still."

She put her hand around the break, and I tried to obey her order. Not easy. The throbbing agony was hard to ignore, and then the sense of burning, and then the deep itching. The burning just got worse, until it felt as if I were holding my arm over a Bunsen burner. I wanted to snatch it back, but I knew better.

I'd felt this before.

It took about fifteen minutes. Emily wasn't the world's most powerful Earth Warden, though she was competent enough; when she let go, the arm felt hot and sensitive, but more or less healed.

"You're going to want to go easy on it," she said. "The mend's still green. Let it cure."

"Sure," I croaked. My throat felt horribly dry. "Water?"

Without a word, she went into the kitchen and came back with a glass, which I drained without stopping for breath. She refilled it. I managed another half a glass before I decided that too much might make me gag.

"We don't have time for this," Emily said. "The fire's burning hot out there."

"Fire?" I asked. "You didn't come to fight the fire?"

"Not–exactly."

Emily leaned back in her big leather chair, frowning at me. It was covered in what looked like the hide of a Holstein. A little too identifiable for me to be comfortable with it. I didn't like knowing the genetic heritage of my furniture.

"Then what the hell do you want, a meeting?" She made it sound like the filthiest curse she could imagine. It probably was, for her. Come to think of it, I didn't much approve of them, either.

"No," I said, and sighed. "I just… You need help. I was in the area. Let's leave it at that."

Her frown grooved deeper, and she tilted her head to one side, considering the problem of me. "Yeah, you're going to be real useful, the shape you're in." She shook her head. "Not that beggars can be choosers. How do you feel?" She didn't sound like she much cared, but she was forced to ask the question.

"Better," I said. It wasn't a lie, really. I'd been at rock-bottom earlier, now I was a quarter-inch above the ground. Everything's relative. "Thanks for this."

"What, the arm? Part of the job." Emily cocked a thumb at Imara, who had settled back in a corner, watching us. "Thought you said we weren't supposed to trust them anymore. What, you don't have to obey your own rules?"

I decided not to engage on that one. "You don't have a Djinn, right?"

"Never needed one." She sounded as if those who did were clearly lacking some important feature, like guts. "She going to go nuts and kill us?"

"Well, wouldn't that be exciting?" I sighed. "Imara? You going to go nuts and kill us?"

She thought about it. Gravely. "Not quite yet."

"Right. Keep us informed."

I thought for sure that Emily would bring up the resemblance between me and Imara, but she wasn't that observant. Her eyes darted between us for a few seconds, bright but not registering any connections, and then she decided to shift the conversational ground. "What do you know about fighting fires?"

"Pretty much what every Weather Warden knows." From the flash in her eyes, that wasn't something that met with her approval. "Maybe I can wing it."

Emily was old school. She fixed me with a narrow stare. "No, you won't wing it. I'll call up Paul and get a real Fire Warden up here."

"I thought Lewis was–"

"I don't take orders from Lewis Orwell." Didn't like him much, either, from the unpleasant twist of her mouth around his name. A lot of Earth Wardens didn't care for him, for some reason. I think it was because he kept showing them up. That would especially bother Emily, Miss I-don't-have-a-Djinn-because-I'm-too-badass-to-need-one. "Look, this is my territory. There's a chain of command. Lewis isn't even part of the Wardens, as far as I'm concerned; he turned his back on us long ago. If he's what we've got for leadership these days, we're in trouble." "Lewis–"

She cut me off with a sharp gesture. "And the last I heard, you were out of the Wardens completely. Anyway, it doesn't matter. I'm working too hard to keep things together around here to worry about politics. So don't bother with the campaign speeches. What are my chances of getting somebody who knows firefighting from a hole in the ground out here?"

"Chances?" If I kept repeating things, she had every right to stick me in a cage and call me a parrot. "Not too good. I think I'm what you're going to get."

She sniffed. "In other words, not much."

I kept my mouth shut and shook my head. She let out a long, slow breath and sat back in her slaughtered-cow chair. I wondered if she'd killed it herself. Well, that wasn't exactly fair. She was an Earth Warden. The cow had probably died of natural causes.

"I heard a rumor there was some other organization out there. Other than the Wardens," Emily said. "Any idea how to contact them?"

"Lewis was handling that. I don't know how far he got with it. How bad is this?"

"Bad," she said. "Real bad."

"Then we should get moving," I said, and levered myself to my feet. The world swam. I sat down again, and leaned my head back against the couch cushions and moaned. When I tried to adjust myself to a more comfortable position, the arm stabbed a protest into my shoulder. Some Earth Warden she was. Hadn't been trying very hard, had she?

Imara was next to me, down on one knee, one long, graceful hand on my shoulder. Sending waves of warmth through me. She wasn't a full Djinn, she couldn't really heal me, just take away the pain temporarily. Still felt nice, though. Nobody turns down magic morphine.

"You can't do this," she said. "You need rest."

"I'm good."

"No." She gave me a long, significant look from those breathtaking Djinn eyes. "I won't allow it."

I started to say, Who made you the mommy? but I wasn't about to let this degenerate into a mother-daughter squabble in front of Emily. Who was looking far too interested, anyway.

"Your Djinn there's probably right," Emily said. "Fact is, the shape you're in, I wouldn't recommend you take on a campfire, much less a forest fire," she said. "You took some pretty good knocks. A good hard impact, and you'll break those bones loose again. No help for it; it's going to hurt while it's healing."

Clearly, she wasn't Lewis in the healing department, which I couldn't really resent. She'd helped me out when I needed it.

And then she spoiled my attempt at charity by saying, "And besides, I really don't want to babysit you out there."

Imara oriented on Emily like a cruise missile. "She can do as she pleases." Typical kid. Whatever the adult's position was, take the opposing view. Hell, two seconds ago she'd been trying to talk me out of going. Emily barely spared Imara a glance, which was pretty gutsy, considering. "Sure. She can please shut up while I borrow her Djinn for the duration."

Oh, crap. I remembered Emily back at Warden HQ, arguing for the release of more Djinn from the reserves. Of course she'd be all about co-opting Imara. I should have seen it coming. Would have, if I hadn't been half-crazy with pain.

Imara growled low in her throat. "I won't leave her," she said.

"Not your choice," I said sternly. "Look, Emily, I'm low on patience, I'm in pain, and no way are you using her to fight a forest fire. I appreciate what you've done for me, but–"

"I said, I'm taking your Djinn," Emily said bluntly. "You don't want to make me take it to a full-on fight. You'd lose, the condition you're in."

Imara moved, unasked, and came right up in Emily's space, close and–I was sure–burning up with menace. Emily went rigid with fear. As well she should. "Keep a leash on her," Emily said.

"Imara?" I asked. "Relax. We're just talking. Aren't we?"

Emily nodded jerkily. Angry. "Yes."

"Then I think I'm ready to leave," I said. "Imara, go get the car revved up, would you?"

"I don't like leaving you with her."

"Emily's a Warden," I said. "We understand each other."

Imara didn't like it, but she threw me a warning look, and vanished.

"You can't," Emily said flatly. "You're not strong enough to leave."

"Funny how that is. Your threat to steal Imara put all that in perspective." I proved it by getting to my feet. The world did that liquid-shimmy thing, but I stayed upright and reasonably stable. "You said you didn't have time for this, and neither do I. Good luck, Emily, whatever your crisis is right now. I'll find somebody who appreciates my help."

"Wait."

I didn't. I headed for the door. But when I got there, I found the handle wouldn't turn. Not at all. It wasn't the dead bolt… The metal was simply frozen in place.

I didn't bother to look behind me. "Emily," I said, "let's not do this. I'm tired, I'm cranky, I'm dirty, and my arm hurts like hell. I am not in the mood to play. Just let me get out of here, and I'll pretend that you're not begging for a fight, because by God if you want one, you're threatening the right girl."

Earth Wardens have power over growing things, living things, and also over metals and woods. The door wasn't going to open if Emily didn't want it to do so, not unless an Earth Warden with greater abilities stepped in. And it was unlikely I'd be able to blow it open, either, not without bringing the whole house down with it. Our powers weren't necessarily the kind that canceled each other out. Imara was an ace in the hole, of course, but I hesitated to put her to use. I wasn't really interested in damaging one of the few surviving Wardens, given the current state of the world.

"Sorry," Emily said. "I've got some real problems here. You can be of use." I sighed and turned around to face her. "Okay, then, let me ask you this: How am I supposed to trust a Warden who holds back on the healing just to bogart my Djinn? Because you could have at least fixed the arm, Emily. That was a low blow."

She went just a shade paler, but held her ground. She'd never lacked in guts… just brains. "They say you're behind all this."

"All of what?"

"Bad Bob. The rips in the aetheric. The Djinn going crazy. Is it true?"

That hit me with a cold, hard shock… Definitely, I'd been responsible for Bad Bob getting his comeuppance, not that many people were ever going to believe he'd actually deserved it. And David and I together had been responsible for the poisoning of the aetheric, when he'd created me as a Djinn. And as for the Djinn going nuts–well, I wasn't sure I had sole responsibility for all that, but I probably couldn't sidestep it altogether, either. If it hadn't been for my actions, and David's actions, Jonathan wouldn't be dead right now, the Djinn agreement would still be peacefully in place, and the Earth would be sleeping quietly.

I elected not to say any of that, however. I just set my jaw and stared back at her, daring her to continue.

"The fire's across the border, in Canada," she said. "It started small, but it's growing. The Wardens overseeing that territory are dead. Lewis says they can't spare anybody else, last time I checked. I'm on my way there, and I need your Djinn. I'm not going to apologize for doing what's necessary."

"She's not my Djinn," I said. "Nobody owns them anymore."

"Yeah. Yet you're riding around with one as your chauffeur."

"It's complicated."

"Obviously. And there are major population centers in the path of a Class Four wildfire. That's a little complicated, too." She hesitated, then locked her eyes on mine. Surly and difficult, she might be, but I had never known her to be a liar. "I need your help. It's just me and another Fire Warden who's already there. Those people need somebody to save them, and we're it."

Truth was, I agreed with her. If I turned my back on people who actually needed saving, I was losing my way. Losing my honor. Something inside me insisted that you couldn't save humanity by sacrificing your principles.

I didn't like the way Emily had elected to do this, but I could understand why she'd mousetrapped me. She was desperate. I'd have done the same thing, in her place. Because the lives I'd save would be more important than the nebulous big picture. Maybe that made me weak. Maybe that made me unsuitable for the role of great hero. Lewis would have walked away without hesitation–with regret, not hesit