Chill Factor

ONE

The sky overhead was blue. Clear, depthless, cloudless blue, the kind that stares back at you like Nietzsche's abyss. Not a cloud in sight.

I hate clear skies. Clear skies make me nervous.

I ducked and leaned forward again, trying to look straight up from the driver's seat through the most tinted part of the windshield. Nope, no clouds. Not even a wispy little modesty veil of humidity. I leaned back in the seat and adjusted my hips with a pained sigh. The last rest area I'd spotted had been a broken-down, scary-looking affair that would have made the most hardened long hauler keep on truckin', but pretty soon cleanliness wasn't going to matter nearly as much as availability.

I was so tired that everything looked filtered, textured, subtly wrong. Thirty hours since I'd caught three hours of sleep. Before that, at least another twenty-four of adrenaline and caffeine.

Before that I'd been on the road, driving like a madwoman, for three weeks, poised on the knife edge between boredom and panic. In a very real way, I'd been in a war zone all that time, waiting for the next bullet.

I was desperate for a bathroom, a bath, and a bed. In that order.

Instead, I edged a little bit more speed out of the accelerator.

"You all right?" asked my passenger. His name was David, and he was turned away, soaking up the sun that poured through the side window. When I didn't answer, he looked at me. Every time I saw his face, I had a little microshock of pleasure flash down my spine. Because he was gorgeous. High cheekbones, smooth gold-kissed skin, a round flash of glasses he didn't need but liked to wear anyway as protective camouflage. He wasn't bothering with disguising his eyes just now, and they flared a color not found anywhere in the human genome… warm bronze, flecked with orange.

David was a Djinn. He even had a bottle, which currently rested in the pocket of my jacket, cap off. And that whole three-wishes thing? Not accurate. As long as I held his bottle, I had nearly unlimited power at my fingertips. Except it also came with nearly unlimited responsibility, which isn't the supersized bowl of cherries it sounds.

He didn't look tired. It made me feel even worse, if that were remotely possible.

"You need to rest," he said. I turned my attention back to the road. I-70 stretched on to the horizon in a flat black ribbon, stripes faded to ghosts by the merciless desert sun. On either side of the car, the landscape bristled with more spikes than leaves-Joshua trees, squatty alien cacti. To a girl from Humidity Central, also known as Florida, the thin, dry air seemed too light to breathe, so hot it scorched the lining of my lungs. And it was all blurring into sameness, after days of playing cat and mouse out here in the middle of nowhere.

"Oh, I'm just peachy," I said. "How are we doing?"

"Better than we have," he said. "I don't think they've noticed us yet."

"Yet." A sour taste grew in the back of my throat, not entirely due to the lack of toothbrush and minty freshness. "Well, how much farther do we have to go?"

"Exactly?"

"Approximately."

"Miles or time?"

"Just spill it, already."

"We just passed a town called Solitude. Six more hours, give or take." David leaned back in the passenger seat, still looking at me. "Seriously. You okay?"

"I have to pee." I fidgeted again in the seat and glared at the road. "This sucks. Being human sucks, dammit." I should know. I spent a semi-glorious, spectacular, brief period as a Djinn. And I'd never had this embarrassing need to pee in the middle of nowhere.

He kicked back in the seat and tilted his head up at the blank car roof. "Yes, so you've said."

"Well, it does."

"You didn't mind being human before."

"Hadn't seen how the other half lives, before."

He smiled at the roof. Which was a shame, because the roof couldn't appreciate it the way I do. "Want me to conjure you up a bathroom?"

Bastard. "Bite me."

He gave me that raised-eyebrows expression again, over mockingly innocent eyes. "Why? Would it help?"

He was taunting me with the whole bathroom thing. Oh, he could conjure one up, that wasn't the problem; hell, he could probably conjure up one with Italian marble tile and hot and cold running Perrier. But I couldn't let him, because we had to keep a low profile for as long as we could, magic-wise. David was doing all he could to keep us unnoticed, but any big, flashy conjurations would certainly light up the aetheric like a supernova.

And that would be bad. To put it mildly.

I pulled the car over to the side of the road; Mona protested, powered down to a throaty growl, and shivered to silence when I turned the key. In seconds, heat pushed through the windshield like a bully. Had to be in the nineties already, even though it was barely mid-April. I felt sticky, unwashed, cramped, and frazzled. Nothing like a little two-thousand mile trip and spending three weeks in a holding pattern-driving nearly the whole time-to make you get that less-than-fresh feeling.

"Are you okay?" David asked me.

"Fine, already!" I snapped back. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"Oh, I don't know. Let's see… in the past two weeks, you've been infected by a demon, chased across the country, killed, become a Djinn, been reborn…"

"Got shot," I put in helpfully.

"Got shot," he agreed. "Also a point. So there's plenty of reason for you not to be okay, isn't there?"

Yeah. I was a few clouds short of a brainstorm, as we like to say in the Wardens. I'd thought I was dealing well with all of the craziness that had become my life, but being out here, alone, with all of this desert and huge empty sky…

… I was beginning to realize I hadn't dealt with it at all. So, of course, I insisted…

"I'm fine." What else could I say, realistically? I suck, this is awful, I'm a complete failure as a human being and a Warden, we'll never pull this off? Hell, David already knew that. It was a waste of breath.

David gave me a look that said he plainly thought I was full of crap, but he wasn't going to argue. He pulled a book out of his coat pocket. This one was a dog-eared paperback copy of Lonesome Dove, which somehow seemed appropriate to the current circumstances. One benefit of being a Djinn… David had a virtually limitless library of reading material available to him. I wondered how he was on DVDs.

"I'm waiting here," he said, opening the book. "Yell if a rattlesnake bites you."

He settled comfortably in the seat, looking every inch the normal guy, and refused to respond to my various irritated noises. I opened the door of the Viper and stepped out onto the shiny black asphalt of the shoulder.

And yelped, as my sexy-but-sensible heels promptly sank into the hot surface. God, it was hot! Forget about frying an egg on the sidewalk; this kind of heat would fry an egg inside the chicken. Waves of it shimmered up from the ground, beating down from the hot-brass sky. I tiptoed over to the safety of gravel, skidded down the embankment, and tromped off into the dunes.

Open-toed shoes and desert: not a good combination. I cursed and shuffled my way through burning sand until I found a likely looking Joshua tree that had just enough foliage to function as a privacy screen to the highway. It smelled astringent and sharp, like the thorns that spiked it. There was nothing gentle about this place. Everything was heat and angles and the hot stare of a clear, unwilling sky.

No way around it. I sighed and skinned down my panties and did the awkward human stuff, worrying all the time about rattlesnakes and scorpions and black widow spiders. And sunburn in places that didn't normally get full western exposure.

Surprisingly, nothing attacked. I hurried back to the car, jumped in, started Mona up. David kept reading. I pulled the car back out into nonexistent traffic, shifting gears smoothly until I was cruising at a comfortable clip. Mona liked speed. I liked giving it to her. We weren't even approaching the Viper's top speed, which was somewhere around 260, but in about thirty seconds we were rapidly gaining on 175. It was a tribute to American engineering that it only felt like we were going about, oh, 100.

"Much better," I said. "I'm okay now."

"You don't feel okay," David said, without looking up from the book. He flipped a page.

"That's creepy."

"What?"

"You ought to say, 'You don't look okay.' Not, you know, feel. Because you aren't-"

"Feeling you?" He shot me a sideways look; those oh-so-lovely lips eased toward a smile. "I do, you know. Feel you. All the time."

I understood what he meant; there remained this vibration between the two of us, something radiating at a frequency only the two of us could feel. A low-level, constant hum of energy. I tried not to listen to it too much, because it sang, and it sang of things like power, which was way too seductive and frightening. Oh, and sex. Which was just distracting, and frustrating, at times like these.

When I'd been a Djinn I'd existed in a whole other plane of existence, accessing the world through life outside of myself. The Djinn don't carry power of their own; generally, they act as amplifiers for the world around them. When they're paired up with someone like me-a Warden, someone with natural power of her own-the results can be amazing. David swore, and I believed him, that what we had going on between us now was something other than that, though. Something new.

Something scarier in its intensity.

"You feel me all the time," I repeated. "Careful. Talk like that will get this car pulled over."

"Promise?" He leaned over and adjusted my hair, pushing it back from my face and hooking it over my ear. His touch was fire, and it sent little orgasmic jolts through my nervous system. Jesus. He was studying me very intently now, as if he'd never seen me before. "Joanne."

He rarely used my full name. I was surprised enough to edge off the accelerator and cast another quick glance at him. "What?"

"Promise me something."

"Anything." It sounded flippant, but I meant it.

"Promise me that you'll-"

He never got to finish the sentence, because the road curved.

Literally.

It heaved and bucked, black asphalt rippling like the scales of a snake, and I yelped and felt Mona rise up into the air, engine screaming. A sonic boom like a cannon going off slammed through the air, so loud I felt it shudder my heart in my chest.

Oh, shit.

"Levitate!" I screamed, which was about all I had time for, and instantly I felt that vibration between me and David turn into a full symphonic thunder of power. It cascaded out of me, into him, transformed into a nuclear explosion on the aetheric, and forged itself into a matrix of invisible controls.

The world just… stopped.

Well, actually, we stopped. Mona paused, hanging tilted in midair about three feet above the road. Her engine was still screaming, her tires burning the air, but we weren't going anywhere. Weren't falling, either. Below us, I-70 continued to ripple and flow like it was trying to creep off to the horizon. I wasn't sensitive to this particular frequency of power, but I knew what it was.

"Shit," I said. "I guess they found us."

David, solemn and unrattled, eased back in the seat and said archly, "You think?"

The guy doing this to me was named Kevin, and I couldn't really hate him. That was the worst part of it. You really ought to be able to hate your arch-nemesis. I mean, it's only fair, right? Feeling sorry for him, and just a little responsible… that just sucks.

Kevin was a kid-sixteen, maybe seventeen-and the fact that his generally punk-ass personality was hard to like had something to do with his having lived a real fairy-tale existence. The bad fairy tales. His stepmother had been something right out of a Grimm story, if the Brothers Grimm had written about sexpot-stripper-wannabe-serial killers. What she'd done to Kevin didn't really bear close scrutiny unless you had the cast-iron stomach of a coroner.

So it was no surprise that once power came his way, Kevin grabbed it with both hands and used it exactly the way an abused, near-psychotic victim would: offensively. To keep people at a distance, the way a scared kid with a gun pointing it at anything that moved.

Trouble was, the gun-or power-that he'd grabbed was named Jonathan, and if you could measure Djinn with a voltage meter, Jonathan would melt the dial, he was so intense. I liked Jonathan, but I wasn't really sure Jonathan returned the favor; he and David had a close friendship that stretched back into-for all intents and purposes-eternity, and I'd jumped right in the middle.

Jonathan was not somebody you wanted to be on the wrong side of. And now that he'd been claimed by Kevin, just like any other Djinn, the whole master-servant relationship was in force. Which was trouble enough, clearly, but I was beginning to get the very clear idea that while most Djinn had the skill of working creatively around their masters' commands-it was like negotiating with the devil-Jonathan either hadn't mastered the craft or just plain didn't care.

He was certainly not averse to causing me trouble, at least.

So. We hung there in midair, and watched the landscape below rise and fall like the ocean. Mona slowly evened out from her tilt to a nice, even hover.

"Do I need to ask?" I asked. My voice was more or less steady, but my skin was burning from the sudden rush of adrenaline.

"Earthquake," David said.

"It was rhetorical."

"So I gathered." He looked icy calm, but his eyes were glittering behind the glasses. "Jo. You can slow down now."

Right, I was still pressing the accelerator through the floor. I let up and, for no apparent reason, shifted to the brake. My legs were shaking. Hell, my whole body was shaking. I couldn't get my hands off of the wheel.

"You know, there are three kinds of waves associated with earthquakes," I said, in an attempt at nonchalance. "P waves, S waves, L waves. See, the sonic boom is caused by the primary waves-"

"And the ancient Chinese believed it was the dragon shifting in its sleep," David interrupted me. "None of that is very useful right now."

Again, he had a point. "Okay. What if I order you to stop it?" I asked.

David shook his head, looking down at the continued waves moving through the ground. "Power against power. It would only make things worse. I can't oppose him directly."

"So it is Jonathan." As if I had any doubt. We'd been playing keep-away with the state of Nevada for nearly three days, circling around. And every time, there'd been something to stop us. Hail the size of basketballs that I'd barely been able to keep from smashing the Viper into scrap. Lightning storms. Wind walls. You name it, we'd run into it.

And from it.

I'd spent a considerable amount of my time and energy fixing the careful balance of the ecosystem. Kevin/Jonathan didn't seem to give a crap that tossing fireballs at us might seriously screw up the entire matter-and-energy equation, or that whipping up a tornado might rip apart the stability of the weather half a continent away. Kevin I could understand; he was a kid, and kids don't think of consequences. But Jonathan… I knew he had the capacity to balance the scales. He just hadn't.

Hanging in midair wasn't getting us anywhere. I sucked in a deep breath and said, "Plan B, I guess."

"I think we're midway through the alphabet," David replied. "Jo, I really thought we could get through to Las Vegas, but we're not even coming close. Maybe we should-"

"I'm not giving up, so don't even think about saying it."

I couldn't give up. Kevin and Jonathan were a partnership made in hell, and it was my fault. I'd given Kevin the opportunity to do that. Also, I should have been able to stop Kevin from stealing the powers of the most gifted Warden in the world, my friend, Lewis Levander Orwell.

So I was not giving up now. The cost could be incalculable in lives and property, and one of them I knew personally. Lewis would die. He was dying right now, the same way he'd die if somebody came along and ripped important biological parts out of him that his body needed to keep functioning. Lewis was so powerful magically that magic was part of him. He couldn't do without it.

However, the trouble was that Kevin now possessed so much power that David and I-and any other poor, stupid, magically talented idiot trying to make it to Las Vegas-were as obvious and vulnerable as black bugs on a pristine white floor. No place to hide. Nowhere to go, except onward, hoping we'd be able to avoid the giant's crushing power.

We had, so far. But clearly they were just playing with us.

I had a dreadful thought. "Is there anybody else on this road?" Kevin, I knew, wouldn't go out of his way to rack up civilian casualties, but I was far from convinced he'd go out of his way to avoid it, either.

"Not in range. I can dampen the vibrations a little, at the outskirts, and he's focusing it right beneath us. No one's been hurt." The unspoken yet made me wince.

"How long can he keep it up?"

David shot me a look. "You're kidding."

"As long as he wants?"

"Exactly." From the desert-dry tone, David was feeling a little inadequate. "We'll have to wait him out." Again.

"So," I said, and forced a little lightness into my voice, "how will we pass the time?"

David wasn't in the mood for banter. He watched the road writhe like a living thing below us and said, "Catch some rest while you can. I'll keep watch."

Not exactly what I was hoping for, but I got his point. I was tired, and unlike David, I was only human these days.

Not that I was bitter about that, or anything.

Much.

Weather is nothing but the practical application of quantum mechanics. There's no way to make quantum mechanics simple, but ultimately it boils down to the interactions of particles so small they make atoms look big. Everything is divisible by something else, down to particles so small the human mind can't grasp them or even measure them in any way except by the effects they leave behind. Particles behave like waves. Nothing is what it seems.

Controlling quantum interactions is a macro/micro science, or magic, or art-or the true marriage of all of those. When you're controlling the weather, manipulation occurs at subatomic levels, gaining or losing energy, annihilating quarks against antiquarks or protons against antiprotons, and it's both destructive and clean. It can mean the difference between a sunny day and a gentle spring rain, or a thunderstorm and a killer F5 tornado. It can mean flood or drought. Life or death.

It's a lot of responsibility, and I'm afraid the Wardens don't really take it all that seriously sometimes. We're human, after all. Like everybody else, we've got lives, and families, and all the normal human complement of sins and vices. Hey, nobody likes getting the four a.m. call from the office, especially if it's to fix somebody else's mess.

And sins, yes, we've got plenty of those. Greed, for one. Greed and power have always been really good bedfellows, but greed and magic are the deadliest of evil twins.

I'd had a few brushes with how absolutely power could corrupt. The Wardens were built on solid, idealistic principles, but somewhere along the way some of us-maybe even a lot of us-had lost the mission. There were a few faithful, altruistic ones left (I didn't dare count myself among them).

It's never been my job, or my nature, to worry about whether or not what I was doing was right in the grand scheme of things. I'm a foot soldier. A doer, not a planner. I like being useful and doing my job well, and so far as lasting satisfaction goes, owning a killer wardrobe and bitchin' shoes doesn't hurt.

I never wanted to be in an ethical struggle. It shouldn't be my job to decide who's right, who's wrong, who lives, who dies. It shouldn't be anybody's job, but most especially not mine. I'm not deep. I'm not philosophical. I'm a girl who likes fast cars and fast men and expensive clothes, not necessarily in that order.

But you do the job you're handed.

I couldn't sleep. I mean, could you? Hanging in midair over an earthquake, waiting for the other shoe to drop? Even as exhausted as I was, fear kept me from closing my eyes for more than five seconds at a time.

So we were hanging there, watching the road ripple in the bright merciless sun, when something occurred to me and made me sit up straight, blinking.

"Can I fly this thing?" I asked. As if we weren't already hanging a ton of steel in midair without benefit of an airplane engine. D'oh! "I mean, move the car to another highway. Without them knowing."

That got David's complete attention, with a slight puzzled frown. "It's not exactly built for gliding, but yes, I suppose. Why?"

"Because if you can keep an illusion on the aetheric of us staying here, I can move the car with wind power to another route, and maybe we can gain some time before he figures it out." I hesitated, then asked the question I'd been afraid to put into words. "He could kill us, right? Anytime he wants."

David's eyes were mercilessly clear. "He could try. Eventually, he'd succeed. I can't fight Jonathan power-for-power. But he doesn't want to kill you. If he did, you'd be dead already."

I noticed the change in pronoun. I was the one in danger of dying. The worst that could happen to David was that while the car was being crushed like a beer can and my bones shattered, the bottle in my pocket would break and he would be set free. Jonathan would no doubt consider that a bonus. Which, leaving aside how I felt about David and hoped he felt about me, wasn't an unreasonable point of view. I wasn't exactly comfortable with the whole master-slave dynamic of things, either.

"Can you hold him off?" I asked.

"For a while. If he attacks directly."

"Long enough for me to-"

"Save yourself," David finished. "In a game like this, you're playing Kevin, not Jonathan. I can block Jonathan, but the strategy has to be misdirection, not direct defense. We have to keep moving. If we let them pin us down, we're finished."

I nodded, noting little details: white lines around David's mouth, tension around his eyes. This was hard for him. Very hard. The scope of his friendship with the Djinn named Jonathan stretched back to an age when they were both human and breathing, dying together on a battlefield in the dim mists of prehistory. Saved by a force so primal it could suck the life out of thousands, maybe millions of living things to create a creature like Jonathan-a living, thinking being composed of pure power. Even among the Djinn, he was something special, and that was no small statement.

And now he was on the wrong side. At least, the wrong side of me.

"We can't hurt him," I said. David shot me a surprised glance. "Right?"

"I don't know of much that could. And nothing that you'd want to mess with."

"But he could hurt you."

"He won't."

"He could." The reason he could hurt David was, essentially, me. David had spent his power freely to pull me back from the dead and put me in a Djinn form; he still hadn't entirely recovered from that.

In the tradition of lovers everywhere, we didn't talk about it.

David shrugged, glanced down at the undulating I-70, and said, "We'd better get moving, if we're going to move. It's just a matter of time before it occurs to Kevin to order Jonathan to swat us down."

That was the saving grace of all this-we had the power of a nuclear weapon in the hands of a petulant child, but at least he wasn't what you might call a great thinker. Jonathan, though bound to serve him, wasn't bound to give him advice, and so far hadn't taken it upon himself to act as general in this fight. Thank God.

I nodded, took in a breath, and shut my eyes. Drifted out of my body and up to the higher plane of existence we among the Wardens knew as the aetheric level… the plane where the physical dropped away, and only the energies of the world were displayed. Human senses could see only certain spectrums; when I'd been a Djinn, the aetheric had shown me a hell of a lot more, and deeper, but I was trying to be satisfied with what I had.

Just now, the aetheric was showing the road below me lit up like a giant glowing runway, glittering with power that three-D'ed down below the surface deep into bedrock. The little idiot was destabilizing the whole region. I couldn't stop him; my powers related to wind and water, not earth. Somebody else would have to balance those scales. In fact, somebody's cell phone in the Warden's organization was probably ringing right now.

Time to make the kind of trouble that was my specialty. I reached out into the still, arid air, went high, carbonated air molecules in one place and stilled them in another. The by-product of that is heat. That's all wind is, the interaction of hot and cold, of hot air rising and colder air rushing to fill the void that nature really does abhor. I rolled down the car window and felt the first freshening breeze blow warm against my cheek; a little more energy and the breeze became a stiff wind. I felt the car rock lightly.

"Get ready," I said aloud. "I'm going to have to push pretty hard."

"He won't know we're moving," David promised.

I increased the range of heat, focusing the power of the sun in a massive surge, and saw the wind shear building up on the aetheric. It came boiling at us in an invisible, syrup-thick wave.

It hit Mona broadside, spun us around, and then we were moving.

I yelped, tightened my grip on the steering wheel, and felt the sickening sense of falling for a full two seconds before we steadied out again, moving fast. I stretched myself farther on the aetheric, spinning atoms, holding chains of force together. This thing was as slick and slippery as glass.

To magical eyes, the halogen-bright glow of the car stayed where we'd been. It was a complicated illusion, requiring massive amounts of directed power that had to be hidden and buried in the natural processes occurring around us; I could feel that power pouring out of me like blood from an open wound. David was amplifying and redirecting it, but it was at a huge cost to both of us.

"How long?" I managed to stammer, and held out my hand. He grabbed hold. His skin was fever-hot.

"Half an hour, maybe," he replied. No sign of strain in his voice, but I felt a fine vibration through his skin, felt it in the bond between us. "Don't worry about that. Worry about the wind."

He was right. The kind of power I was using was treacherous, all too easy to go wrong. Wind has a kind of intelligence-slow, instinctual, but predatory. The stronger the wind, the more cunningly it can manifest, which is why working with major weather systems is reserved for the most powerful of Wardens. It's not just physics. It's lion taming.

And I could feel this particular lion starting to lick its chops in anticipation.

Below us, the Utah desert moved in lazy, deceptively gentle increments. We were traveling through the sky at better than a hundred miles an hour-slow for a plane, but dangerously fast for the air currents I was handling. David was holding Mona steady. I hoped he also had a little attention to spare to keep us unnoticed from the ground; seeing a Dodge Viper do a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in the desert sky might be a little hard to explain, even for UFO nuts.

I spotted a small, likely looking back road at the edge of the horizon, and concentrated hard on slowing us down. That involved a risky and complicated series of adjustments-cooling the air behind us, warming the air in front, creating a collision of forces that would stall out the wind shear. Luckily, there wasn't enough moisture in the air to have to worry about creating a storm. I had to bleed off the buildup of energy as well, because that had to go somewhere, and leaving it roaming around looking for a place to discharge was a rookie's mistake. I crawled it over telephone lines in bursts of blue plasma to discharge it into the earth.

Unfortunately, the wind didn't like the idea of slowing down.

"Shit," I whispered, and reached deeper, trying to grab hold of the fast-moving molecules. Hot processes were always more difficult to stop, things moving too fast, on too big a scale. I steadied myself, listened for the tone of the wind, and spread myself out on the aetheric. It was like becoming the wind, like melting into it. Once I was inside of it, I could slow it down…

And then David said sharply, "Hold on."

It hit us from behind, a shockingly powerful slam like a giant's palm on the bumper. I bit back a scream and felt the car shoot forward, faster, starting to tumble out of control. Fuck! That was the wind, hitting back. I'd given it too much energy to work with. Behind us, the energy was starting to spiral in on itself. I saw the sand begin to rise up, painting the outlines of the biggest damn dust devil I'd ever seen. Not a tornado, not in the traditional sense, but up high where we were, it was far more powerful than down on the ground.

I felt strength flooding back into me as David stopped his draw. I snapped into the aetheric to gather up the shattering chains of control. It was like playing marbles with a dump truck, chaos dancing in gleeful abandon. I can't. Panic threatened to overwhelm me, make me lose what control I had.

And then I felt him, on the aetheric, wrapping himself around me, supporting me, steadying me. You can, he whispered through that silent, strong connection between us. Trust yourself.

And something inside me went still, and the chaos no longer looked like chaos. There were patterns, beautiful sparkling patterns, life, life everywhere, in the wind, in the ground, in me, in David.

There was no chaos. For an instant I saw it, knew it on a level that only the true Djinn could perceive, and I reached out and took control.

And the wind obeyed. Tamed its fury with a sigh, dropped its coating of dust, coiled around us like a pet.

Mona touched down gently on hot asphalt that shimmered off into the distance like a black mirage.

I opened my eyes, blinked away the lingering euphoria, and felt Mona's engine still purring and trembling through the grip of my hand on her steering wheel. I was holding on to David, or he was holding on to me, or we were holding on to each other.

I had to let go to ease Mona back into gear. My hand shook violently on the gearshift, but I just held on until the shakes went away.

He'd just shown me how the Djinn see the world. A sight I'd had, and lost.

I hadn't realized until this moment how deeply I mourned it.

We played cat and mouse with earthquakes all the way to the Nevada state line. I could only imagine how nuts it was making the normal world, not to mention the poor Earth Wardens who were supposed to be keeping the world safe for regular folks; my cell phone kept ringing, but I didn't have the time or energy to answer it. The caller was Paul Giancarlo, who was temporarily acting National Warden for the U.S. -our previous fearless leader having been corpsified in the line of duty just about a week ago. Another thing I hadn't been able to stop, even as a Djinn. I could only imagine how worried Paul was, but it wouldn't reassure him to hear my status reports. His Djinn would tell him we were alive. That was about all the good news there was.

"Highway Six," I said. I was shuffling maps, which was something I could do while David drove. He wasn't as good a driver as I was, but I tried not to hold that against him. He was holding Mona to the road, and we were burning rubber, trying to get as far as we could before Kevin and Jonathan locked onto us again. I knew that anytime now, Kevin would just lose patience with the game and say something unequivocal, like, Smash that car into junk, right now. At which point it would be Jonathan versus David, in the battle for my life, with the winner a foregone conclusion.

"Highway Six turns into Highway Fifty," I said, following the route with my finger. "Loneliest road in America." Which was all to the good, for us; I didn't want to be on a congested highway with the wrath of Jonathan coming down on me. "Unfortunately, it doesn't take us where we need to go. On the upside, maybe that means they won't come after us for a while. I don't know about you, but this crap is getting ridiculous."

He made a noise that could have been either agreement or indigestion, except that I didn't think Djinn could get indigestion.

"It also means we could pull over for the night," I said slowly. I'd lost count of how many hours we'd been in the car. The little sleep I'd been able to catch had left me grainy-eyed, subject to nervous caffeine-sponsored tremors, and having post-traumatic stress flashbacks to the last soft mattress I'd slept on. Of course, that had been a hospital bed, and I'd been recovering from a gunshot wound to the back. Hence, the PTSD.

"We could stop," David agreed. Nothing in his voice. Not looking at me for a long beat, and then cutting his eyes over at the last second. "You should rest."

"Start fresh in the morning."

"There's nothing more we can do now."

"Probably true. Wouldn't hurt to catch some sleep while I can."

We were both quiet for a few seconds, and then I let out a slow, tired breath. "I can't. I can't just sleep while they're out there doing God only knows what, to God only knows who…" We hadn't been able to see anything beyond the wall of Jonathan's power. For all I knew, they'd turned Las Vegas into one giant beach party, like eternal spring break. That would be about Kevin's speed.

"We would've heard if there had been anything spectacular," he pointed out. "There's been nothing on the radio so far; it's business as usual for the regular mortals out there. And even if Kevin is doing something, you can't stop it by burning yourself out like this."

"David, they've killed Wardens." At last count, while I'd been lazing around in my hospital bed, two Wardens and their Djinn had gone into the no-man's-land around Las Vegas, and hadn't returned. Plus, there'd been no contact from either the Wind or Fire Warden in Nevada. The Earth Warden, probably feeling like the only target left on the shooting range, was justifiably nervous. "Jesus, I can't just… relax!"

David's voice was low, warm, and gentle. "I know." And he reached out with one hand and brushed his fingertips against my skin. "Sleep now." And before I could protest, I was gone.

My dreams were haunted.

I was standing in the desert, staring off to a limitless flat horizon. Sand drifted lazily around, but I couldn't feel any wind… couldn't feel anything.

No, that wasn't right. I could sense the external pressure of the breeze against my skin, feel it ruffling my hair… but I couldn't feel it. Not inside.

I had no sense of the weather at all.

Blind. I was blind. Panic ripped through me, and it felt both overwhelming and weirdly unreal, the way things do in dreams… intense and disconnected.

This is what is.

But it wasn't. I was a Warden; I had powers; I was alive and kicking despite the odds.

This is what is coming.

"It's beautiful," a voice said. I turned my head, and there was a woman standing next to me-tall, glorious, with waves of white-gold hair and amethyst eyes. Her pale, diaphanous robes whipped in the wind I couldn't feel, and she raised her face to the sun and drank it in like a happy child.

I knew her. She'd saved my life not so very long ago, just before she'd given up her own existence, damaged and flawed as it was. She'd once been a Djinn like David, but her love for a human had undone her. Made her into an Ifrit, a creature built of shadows, manifesting in its Djinn form only when it had drawn enough power out of another. Ifrits were vampires at best. Cannibals at worst.

She'd clung to that half-life for hundreds of years, to stay with the one she loved. And she'd given it up for me.

I still didn't really know why.

"Hey, Sara," I said, like seeing her was the most normal thing in the world. She didn't open her eyes, but her smile deepened and a dimple appeared on her cheek. "Where are we?"

"At the end of the world," she said, and took my hand. Her skin was Djinn-hot, pale and perfect as ivory. "Where all the rivers run."

There weren't any rivers. I pointed it out. Her Mona Lisa smile didn't diminish.

"Figure of speech, love," she said. "For now… how is David?"

"I burn for him all the time," I said, in the obscure honesty of dreams. "If I lose him I'll die."

"You won't."

"I will." Just the idea of it brought on a massive, black wave of grief that threatened to cripple me. Sara squeezed my hand, as if she knew, as if she could feel what I felt. I gulped down a hot, acid breath. "Where's Patrick?"

"Here."

"Where?"

"Close your eyes."

I did, and instantly I was in the aetheric, or the dream-aetheric, anyway. And it wasn't Sara holding my hand. The Djinn who did was drawn in shades of power, lines of tragedy, but there were ice-cool blues and greens shimmering around his aura. An aurora borealis of peace.

Somehow, I wasn't surprised. "Oh," I said. "There you are. Hey, Patrick." Not that it was possible to talk on the aetheric plane, as such, but my dream, my rules. Patrick's form turned toward me, and somehow it overlaid itself with the semblance of humanity he'd worn for more than three hundred years… a big man with an energetic explosion of white-blond hair, eyes as bitter and intoxicating as absinthe. Santa Claus, but the kind who'd drop presents on the ground to look up women's skirts as he bent over.

"I've missed you," he said, and an incorporeal hand grabbed my ass.

"Wrong! Wrong touching!" I yelped, and jumped away. He grinned like a naughty schoolboy.

"Can't blame me for trying."

"You're dead," I accused him. "Shouldn't you be giving up bad habits?"

"Seems a bit late to reform. So. You're here to ask what you should do."

"No, I'm having a dream."

"Are you?" He folded his arms across his chest. It made for a weird overlay; it was like seeing a two-dimensional paper cutout held in front of a glowing angel. "You should turn around and go back, love. Can't fight this battle. It's like a wildfire. Even the densest Fire Warden knows that sometimes you have to let the flame burn itself out."

"This kid's going to kill people, Patrick. I can't let that happen."

He reached out and thumped me on the forehead. It hurt. "Ow!" I opened my eyes, and suddenly I was looking at Sara again, beautiful sunlit Sara, who was just putting her hand back at her side. No longer smiling.

"It's raining," she said, and turned away from me. A gust blew her dress back into a set of wings that shimmered in the light.

It wasn't raining. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, not a drop of water anywhere.

She was facing west. Far to the horizon, I saw a tiny smudge of black, a miniature lick of flame that might have been lightning.

It started as a whisper, grew to a mutter, then a rumbling thunder like a million horses running in panic.

And then the flood came in a midnight wave, thundering down canyons below us. It was a thick, muddy wave with a crown of black mist, churning with the smashed remains of homes and businesses and corpses. It was vast, and it was sweeping the human world clean. Nothing could escape it. It slammed into the mountain where we stood, and I felt the world shudder. A cold, wet sigh spread over me, and then the wave split and went around us, thundering past and down, down into the black chasm of infinity.

"Where all the rivers run," Sara said. Her eyes were terribly sad, terribly lethal. "Go home, child. Don't come here to die."

The spot on my forehead where she-or Patrick- had thumped me flashed white-hot, burning, and then I felt myself losing my balance.

Screaming.

Falling toward the churning, foaming, stinking flood of death below.

I jerked back away to the smell of ozone, and the prickly-sharp presence of a close lightning strike. David was still driving, but the sky had turned dark gray. There was a thick purple-black center to the clouds that told me trouble was coming, even without the benefit of using Oversight to look up on the aetheric. Rain lashed the road in thick silver waves. I glanced down reflexively at the speedometer, and found that we were still blazing along at nearly a hundred miles an hour.

The hair standing up on the back of my neck wasn't just from the lightning strike.

I turned my head and worked out a painful kink, ran my fingers through my hair (or tried to; it needed some major shampoo and a monster-class conditioner), and tried to swallow the cotton-mouth I'd acquired during the nap. More lightning flashed on the horizon, blue-white with a delicate fringe of pink. It shattered into ribbons, striking four or five targets at once. The words of an elder Warden came to me: If you're close enough to see it, you're close enough to worry.

David said, "I think we should stop for a while." He gave me a quick, impersonal once-over. "A meal, a shower, a good night's sleep. Doctor's orders."

"There's a difference between being a doctor and playing doctor, you know." Reflex banter. I wasn't trying to argue against it; the dream had knocked all the fight out of me. It had, in its extremely obscure way, been trying to tell me something. Not surprising that I'd dream about Patrick and Sara, the two who'd given up their existence to bring me back to the mortal world… but I could do with a lot less vague prophecy. How come the sage advice never came in plain language, anyway?

David nodded at a blaze of green neon up ahead. "I'm pulling in."

The chiaroscuro blur resolved into a Holiday Inn, and as another bolt of lightning tore its way out of the heavens and into the earth, resetting the delicate polarity of the battery of life, I realized that I hadn't even asked the logical question.

As David turned the ignition off, I turned toward him and said, "Is all this coming for us?"

Another bolt of lightning lit his face ivory, turned his eyes into hot orange-gold flares.

He said, "Isn't it always?"