Thin Air

NINE

We buried Mr. Hunter, whatever his name might have actually been, in a shallow, sandy grave six miles from Ares, in a stretch of desert that probably hadn’t had human visitors for ten years, and wouldn’t again for ten more. Eamon and I buried him, that is; Sarah slept on in the backseat, the sleep of the OxyContin-coddled innocent. By the time it was done I felt sick, angry, filthy, and gritty with sweat and sand. I wanted to kill Eamon, in a figurative if not literal sense. He had, apparently, saved my life, even though he’d shot someone to do it. Once again, the sticky gray center with him. I wanted to be able to hate him with a whole heart.

Well, of course, there was the threat against my sister. That helped keep me from doing anything stupid.

We didn’t talk, except that he directed me along Highway 95 to 160, where we turned west. He wasn’t telling me the final destination.

I hated the car about as much as I hated him. The pedal was sluggish, the steering was loose, and it shimmied through curves. Looked good on the outside, rotten on the inside, just like Eamon himself.

I didn’t draw Eamon’s attention to it, but somewhere outside of Pahrump we picked up a tail. Of course, it was hard to be sure-highways by definition had a lot of people traveling the same direction, especially in the boonies-but I did some experimenting with speed, and the white panel van stayed right with me, whether I sped up, changed lanes, or slowed down. He was hanging back, and he was covering up with other traffic, but he was a fixture in my rearview mirror.

He hadn’t been there when we’d dumped the body, though. That had been a clear road for miles, and no chance of being spotted by anything but a high-flying eagle. So if he was hoping to catch us red-handed, literally, he was out of luck. No doubt the trunk would sink us with forensics, if it came to that, and of course I was driving, wasn’t I? And Eamon had made sure that my fingerprints had stayed on the wallet, which was safely in his coat pocket. Insurance.

The weather was shifting. I felt it rather than saw it, a sensation like pressure in my head. I tried to focus on it as I drove, and before I knew what I was doing, I was looking at the world through the lenses that David had shown me. Oversight, he and Lewis had called it. And the world was different when you knew how to interpret the clues.

The car I was driving, in Oversight, was a rust bucket, tainted by indifference. Past the hood, the road glimmered flat black, sparking with little explosions of light-tiny creatures, maybe, living and dying in their own little dramas?-and in the distance the sky was a rolling, strange landscape of grays and blues and orange streaks. More like fluid than air. The orange was pushing its way through. I had no idea if orange indicated heat; if so, that was some kind of warm front, and it was creating all kinds of swirls and eddies and muted flashing chains of energy. Those showed as black streaks, like oil dropped in water.

I’d gotten so engrossed in the strange view that I’d backed off on speed. Eamon growled in frustration. “Are we on a sightseeing tour, pet, or do you actually want to get there?” he snapped. I jammed the accelerator down and checked the rearview mirror. It made me light-headed to look at the world this way, but it was weirdly compelling. The van behind me looked like a scarred battlewagon. Whoever was driving that thing had an intimate knowledge of being in the thick of things. I couldn’t get more than a shadowy glimpse of the interior.

Sarah sat up and yawned, and I nearly yelped. In Oversight she looked horribly distorted-puffy, sick, surrounded by a flickering black cloud edged in red.

I didn’t dare look at Eamon. Some things I just didn’t want to know.

I blinked, and the visions were gone. It was just a road, and those were just cars, and in the mirror my sister looked grumpy, tired, and ill. “I need a bathroom,” she said.

“You’ll have to hold it,” Eamon said. “Nothing out here, love. Nothing but sand and things that sting.”

He wasn’t wrong. We’d taken 372 out of Pahrump, and although there was some traffic, there were no towns. A few clusters of sun-rotted buildings, but nothing that deserved the name of town. We’d seen one Nevada state trooper cruising slowly in the opposite direction, but I’d held our speed to just under the legal limit. No sense in tempting fate, when fate included jail time and possibly even a death sentence.

Clouds boiled up in the west by the time we’d crossed the border into California. Sarah had whined periodically about a need for bathroom, water, and food; I felt the same needs, but I knew better than to encourage her. We raided the polyunsaturated goodness of the snack aisle of a Quik Stop on the outskirts of Tecopa, which was more or less the last call for calories, gas, and restroom facilities.

Night closed in early, and with it came rain. Blinding, silvery waves of it, glittering in the car’s headlights like a downpour of diamonds. In a strange way it felt comforting. I’ve done this before, I thought. I could sense that, although I couldn’t really touch the memory of it. I could sense the energy up there in the sky, feel it rippling through me in ways that I couldn’t begin to understand or explain. It was soothing.

Eamon fell asleep. I kept driving.

And the white van stayed in the rearview mirror all night.

Ever driven all night through a rainstorm?

Tiring.

I stopped the car about dawn, or what would have been dawn if the sun had been able to pierce the cloud cover, and switched places with Eamon. We ate convenience store food, drank stale coffee, and after a while I dropped off to sleep, or at least an uneasy approximation of it, lulled by the steady drum of raindrops on the roof of the car.

I dreamed there was something staring at me from outside of the car window, something that looked like me but wasn’t me, something with my smile and eyes as black and empty as space. I can see you, she mouthed, and grinned with razor-edged teeth. You can’t run. You don’t belong here. I woke up feeling sick and afraid and lost, and it didn’t get any better when reality set in. I was sick and afraid and lost. I couldn’t trust Eamon. I couldn’t trust my sister. And I had no way of contacting anyone who might have had my best interests at heart.

Sometimes you’ve got to save yourself, I told myself. It didn’t make me any less afraid, but I did feel a significant improvement in my ability to keep a stiff upper lip about it.

“Where are we?” I asked. We were in the burbs of a major metropolitan area, and the landscape had definitely changed from flat desert to hilly desert. The rain had stopped, but the weather was still cloudy and-by the feel of my window glass-blood-warm. Eamon, still driving, looked tired and annoyed. Sarah was asleep again. I felt in the pocket of my jeans to be sure I still had possession of her Oxy. She was whimpering quietly to herself-bad dreams or withdrawal, I couldn’t be sure.

“Doesn’t matter where we are; we’re not where we’re going,” Eamon snapped. “Someone’s following us.”

No kidding. Well, I hadn’t thought he’d miss it. “White van?”

“Yes.” He glanced at me with hard, shiny eyes like wet pebbles. “You knew.”

I shrugged and stretched. “Didn’t matter,” I said. “Right? Plus, I didn’t want you solving the problem with a bullet.”

“The first problem I solved for you with a bullet is buried back there in the desert, love, and if I hadn’t, we’d be identifying you on a cold steel slab,” he said. I was ominously afraid he was right. “We need to find out who might have an interest in tailing us. One of your Warden friends, perhaps. Or someone from the police.”

“It’s not the police. At least, not official. They wouldn’t be following us across state lines. Besides, I think it’s probably about you, not me. You don’t strike me as the kind of guy who makes a lot of friends, Eamon.”

He evidently found that logic to be slightly persuasive. He even looked a little thoughtful. “They do tend to have a short shelf life,” he admitted. “Friends, lovers, relationships of any sort. I’ve often regretted that.”

Just when I thought it was possible to really work up a decent hate for him, he had to disarm me with self-deprecation. Dead guy, I reminded myself. Shot in the head. Remember who you’re talking to.

“Speaking of short shelf lives,” he continued in a far too casual tone, “I’m surprised you’re not traveling with your beau.”

“Beau,” I repeated. Was he talking about Lewis? David? Somebody else altogether?

“How soon they forget. And I thought it was true love.” Eamon’s smile became positively predatory. “Oh, come now. You do remember him, don’t you? I wouldn’t think amnesia could wipe out that.”

“Just because I don’t want to talk about it with you doesn’t mean I don’t remember,” I said hotly. “Back off.”

“He made quite a production of telling me to stay away from you, once upon a time,” Eamon said. “I’ve got the scars to prove it. Thoughtful of him to leave them-although to be fair, he did keep me from bleeding to death. So, shall I worry about your somewhat supernatural boyfriend charging to your rescue?”

“Maybe,” I said, and smiled back at him. One good menacing pseudo-grin deserved another. “Nervous?”

“Terrified,” he said, in a way that indicated he wasn’t. But I wondered. “What about the girl?”

I stayed quiet. Girl covered quite a lot of territory.

“Don’t tell me you don’t remember your own daughter.”

Imara. He was talking about…How did he know her? What had happened between the two of them? I glared at him, trying to find a way to phrase questions that wouldn’t reveal my ignorance, and failing miserably.

“Let’s agree to stay off the subject of my personal life,” I said, “because I swear to God, if you mention either of them again, I’ll rip your tongue out and use it for a toilet brush. Please tell me we’re getting close to wherever it is we’re going.”

“Yes,” he said. “We’re getting close.”

“Then explain to me what it is you want me to do.”

“Nothing too terribly exciting,” Eamon said. “I’d like a building destroyed.”

I gaped at him. Honestly. Gaped. He what? “Are you insane?” I asked. “No, strike that; the answer’s pretty obvious. What makes you think I’d do a thing like that?”

“For one thing, you’ve done it before-and, of course, so have more than a few of the Weather Wardens, for fun and profit. I told you I had a construction investment in Florida-it was more of a construction investment designed to experience catastrophic failure during some natural disaster or other. Florida’s quite prone to them, but California…well. It’s the mecca for that sort of thing, isn’t it?”

“Eamon-”

“It’s perfectly simple. I know you can do it without even breaking a sweat. I won’t bother threatening your life, Joanne. You’ve amply demonstrated to me how little your own survival means to you.” Eamon shrugged slightly. “I’d almost admire that, if I didn’t find it ridiculous. Sacrificing your life for others is nothing but a socially accepted version of suicide. It’s just as bloody selfish.”

“You’re one to talk about selfish,” I said. “You want me to bring down a building?”

“A small one,” he clarified. “Hardly the apocalypse you’re imagining. Seven stories. An office building.”

“Why?”

“Why is not your business,” he said. “Suffice to say, money.”

“No. I’m not doing it.”

“I promise you, there will be no casualties. It’ll be deserted. No chance of murder hanging heavy on your conscience.” He said it with irony, as if I already had a lot to worry about. Which I was starting to think wasn’t far from the truth. “A small price to pay for your sister’s life and ultimate well-being, isn’t it? Not to mention your own, as little as that means to you?”

Eamon was almost-almost-begging. Interesting. I stared at him for a few seconds, read nothing in him but what he wanted me to read, and turned my attention outward, to the passing cars, the landscape, the weather, as Eamon kept us moving relentlessly onward. Clouds hovered close. Gray mist swept the tops of hills, and as we passed a small stock pond just off the road, I saw it was giving up wisps of vapor.

It was an eerie sort of mood out there. And I didn’t think it was just me.

“Nobody in the building,” I said. “Right?”

“Cross my heart and hope to fry,” he said. “There’s exactly one security guard. I’ll make sure he’s off the premises.”

“And how exactly do you expect me to bring down a building without destroying everything around it?”

“You’re joking, surely,” he said. “I don’t care, so long as it appears to be a natural phenomenon. A storm, a tornado, freak winds…use your imagination.”

“All of those are going to do more damage than just the one building.” And I wasn’t capable of handling that kind of thing, anyway, not that I’d be admitting it to him anytime soon. “Unless it’s an isolated location.”

“Well, if you can’t do it, or won’t, then I’ll have to resort to my alternate plan. Sadly, that involves a quantity of C-four explosive and a daytime terrorist attack, which will cost lives and no doubt inconvenience everyone in the world for at least a few days. There’s a day care facility in the building, I understand. It would be quite the tragedy.”

I blinked. “You’re bluffing.”

“Am I? Can you really be completely sure of that? Because if you’re not, love, I’d suggest you weigh your own moral values against the lives of the six hundred people who work in that building during the week. And the fourteen preschoolers who could end up tragic statistics.”

It wasn’t possible, was it? He wouldn’t really be willing to bomb a building, especially when it was full of people. Especially with kids inside. My hands ached where I was gripping the dashboard, braced against the tense panic in my stomach. Eamon glanced over at me, but wisely said nothing. He just let me think about it in silence.

Oh, Christ. How was I supposed to know whether he’d do a thing like that or not? I didn’t know him. I didn’t remember him. The best I could do was go by my impressions, and my impression was that Eamon was nobody to screw around with. He might do it. And might, right now, was more than good enough, given the stakes.

“Pull over,” I said.

“Why?”

“Pull over now.”

He did, bumping onto the rough shoulder and activating emergency flashers. I opened the door and stepped out into the humid air, gasping for breath. If he thought I was about to barf all over his leather interior, fine. I just wanted to get away from him for a couple of minutes. His company was toxic.

The wind whipped around me, caressing and cloying. I looked around for the white van, but it hadn’t slowed and it hadn’t stopped; it blew right by us without a pause, and was receding in the distance.

So much for my paranoid tail theory. And Eamon’s. Unless the driver was very, very good, and had overshot us to pick us up later on the road. It was a good strategy, if he had it in mind; the road was pretty straightforward, and we weren’t likely to turn off quite yet.

I heard the crunch of gravel behind me. Eamon had gotten out of the car.

“Jo,” he said quietly. I stiffened at the sound of my name on his lips. “Let’s do this in a businesslike fashion. It doesn’t have to be so ridiculously dramatic. Just do the job, and we’re finished, the two of us. I think it would be best for us all.”

He wasn’t wrong about that. I fought back a powerful desire to turn and knee him in the balls.

“How much farther?” I asked. I managed to keep most of the fury out of my voice.

“Two hours,” he said. “Give or take. If it’ll make you feel any better I’ll let you drive.”

The target building Eamon wanted to destroy was in San Diego, within sight of the ocean. It was built in the shelter of a large ridge, but that wouldn’t pose much of a problem. At least, I didn’t think it would. Hard to know how difficult this was going to be, when I couldn’t remember ever trying anything like it before.

I did some reconnaissance, taking my time, sipping a Mexican mocha from a coffee vendor and enjoying the warm, velvety evening. It was, the outdoor barista told me, unseasonably warm even for SoCal.

Eamon came with me. Not like I could really stop him.

We walked in silence the four square blocks around the building, which was at the outer edge of an industrial park. Its proximity to the beach would make things easy, I sensed. Two floors of it were still under construction, and that would help; any instability would work in my favor.

“Just tell me one thing. Why do you want it done?” I asked Eamon, as we came around the back side of the building. He shot me a glance. “Insurance money?” I asked.

He looked bored with my questions. “Can you do it or not?”

“Destroy the building?” I shrugged. “Probably. But weather’s a funny thing. It’s not exactly a precision instrument.”

“I don’t care about precision. I care about results.” He stared for a second at the building. “It’s a weekend, and I’ve already made inquiries-there’s nobody working today, and the guard’s been called away. Building’s locked up and unattended for the next six hours. How long will it take?”

I had no earthly idea. I was winging it. “Two hours,” I said.

“What do you need?”

I waggled the Mexican mocha. “Another one of these, and you out of my face.”

He left. I wasn’t stupid enough to assume he’d let me out of his sight, and, of course, there was Sarah holding me hostage for good behavior. I sat down on a boulder on the beach, watching the dark tide roll in. Point Loma Lighthouse glowed not far away, and from somewhere back toward town I heard bells tolling. The night air smelled of sea and rain.

I had an irresistible, self-pitying urge to weep.

“So, are you going to do it?”

Venna’s voice. I turned. She was standing just a couple of feet away, perfectly turned out in a sky blue dress, white pinafore apron, white ankle socks, black patent-leather shoes. Straight blond hair, held back with a blue band. Huge cornflower eyes. Looking absolutely the same as she had back in Las Vegas, when she’d left me.

“Are you going to do it?” she asked me again. “You know he only wants it done for the money. I didn’t think you approved of that.”

“Now you show up?”

“Well, I was busy,” she replied. She came and sat down next to me, neat and tidy, hands folded in her lap. The sea air blew her fine blond hair back over her shoulders, and her black shoes dangled several inches off the sand. “Why did you leave?”

“Leave?”

“Where I put you,” she said patiently. “It was a perfectly nice place. I even checked with other people to be sure it was all right.”

“Did you actually rent the room?”

She looked at me like I’d grown a second head. “Why would I do that?”

“Because hotels have a funny habit of renting them out if they’re empty? Like, I got arrested for being a trespasser?”

“Oh.” She contemplated that with a slight frown. “I can never keep you people’s rules straight.”

I gave up. “Why didn’t you just find me and poof me away again?”

“It’s dangerous,” she said. “It could kill you.”

I stared at her, struck dumb for a few seconds. Lewis had told me something about this, but honestly, I’d thought he’d been exaggerating. “You mean teleporting me out of the hospital could have killed me? And you were going to tell me this when, exactly?”

She seemed offended. “Most Djinn kill people every time they try it. I do a lot better.”

“Well, that makes all the difference.”

Another largely indifferent shrug. “You’re all right, aren’t you? I didn’t remember the police would want you, too. It’s hard to remember things like that.” She shook her head as if it was amazing anyone would bother with something as trivial as arrests for murder. “You were supposed to stay. I didn’t know you’d leave.”

“I didn’t leave. I was arrested!”

“If you say so.” Alice-Venna-sat there looking for all the world like a surly ten-year-old girl. Maybe twelve. Not a well-developed twelve. “Are you going to do what he wants? Bring down the building?”

“Not a clue,” I said. “I guess I’ll have to try. He’s going to hurt my sister if I don’t. Unless-”

“I could kill him.” She meant it. And seriously-I considered it, too.

“No,” I said, reluctantly. “I don’t think so. Besides-and don’t take this the wrong way-how do I know you wouldn’t just skip off and leave me with a dead guy and no explanation?”

Alice considered that very gravely. “I suppose you don’t really have any reason to trust me,” she acknowledged. “That’s a problem, isn’t it? I’m sorry. I’m not used to being mistrusted. It’s inconvenient.” Her eyes suddenly focused back on the ocean. “There’s a low pressure system pushing in from Mexico. You can use that. Do you remember how?”

“No.”

She shrugged. “I can show you. Oh, and I’ve thought of a reason you should trust me.”

“Do tell.”

“I could kill you anytime I wanted.” It was a cool, measured observation. Creepy in the extreme. “I’m Djinn. You’re really not very important to me. If that’s true, why would I lie to you? What would be the point?”

I swallowed hard. “Maybe you’re having fun lying to me.”

“Maybe I am. But I’d have more fun doing something else.” She sighed. “I can help you with this, though.”

“You can help me destroy the building. Like Eamon wants.”

“Of course,” she said, as though it were about as easy as scuffing over an anthill. Which, for her, might very well be true. “And then we can kill him.”

Creep. Eeeeee. “No,” I said. “No, we won’t be killing anybody.”

“Why not?” She looked surprised. “Don’t you want him to go away? He scares you, you know.” Yeah, like that was news to me. She must have read that in my expression, because she looked contrite. “I’m sorry. I don’t do this very often. Talk to people. I’m not doing it very well.”

This was turning into pretty much the ultimate in surrealism, I thought. I was having a conversation with Alice in Wonderland about destroying buildings and killing people, and she was worried about her communication skills. We sat in silence for a few seconds, watching people strolling the beach in the distance. It was getting late, so the place was more or less deserted.

I wondered if Eamon was watching us. Probably. I could almost feel the oily slime of his regard.

Venna turned her attention to the dark, rolling ocean, and I felt a stronger puff of breeze. “I can show you what to do,” she said. “But we need to make the rest of these people go away first.” She was talking about the few hardy souls out strolling the beach in the moonlight. I was going to ask how she planned to do that, but I didn’t have to.

The skies opened up, and the rain began to fall like silver knives.

“There,” Venna said, and smiled. “That’s better.”

I should have known that we wouldn’t go unnoticed, but somehow I just wasn’t prepared for the cops to show up.

Not the actual cops, the handcuffs-and-truncheon patrol; these were the other kind. The kind who radiated competence and power, and they showed up after Venna had been demonstrating how to curl the strands of storm one on top of another, building the tightly controlled fury of a tornado.

Two of them. I didn’t know them, but they clearly knew me. The smaller one, female and prone to piercings, circled around to face me, while her partner, the tall, dark, and silent type, shadowed Venna. Not that Venna was paying the slightest bit of attention to him.

“Warden Baldwin?” the woman shouted over the wind and pounding surf, and held out her hand, palm out. Lightning flashed, hard and white, and illuminated something like a stylized sun on her palm. “I need you to cease what you’re doing!”

“Hi,” I said. “I can’t do that.”

“Warden, I’m not messing around with you. I know who you are, and there’s a warrant out for your detention and return to the headquarters in New York. So, please, let’s not make this hard, okay? Nobody has to get hurt!”

I sighed. I felt grimy, tired, and angry. Too much had been taken away from me, and if Venna was right, I was in real jeopardy of losing whatever was left. To a Demon, wearing my face. “What’s your name?” I asked.

“Jamie,” she yelled. “Jamie Rae King.”

“Weather?”

“Yes, ma’am.” She looked cautious, and she kept flicking looks at her partner. “That’s Stan. He’s Earth.”

“Hey, Stan,” I said.

“Hey.” He nodded, and the wet sand suddenly went soft under my feet and dragged me down to my knees, trapping me. “Sorry, ma’am. But we’ve got orders.”

Venna, who’d been oblivious to that point, turned to face him, and I saw Stan gulp. I was busy trying to pull my legs out of the sand, but it was no good; the stuff was like cement, set around my feet to hold me in place. He was good at this kind of thing, obviously. “Stan,” Venna purred. Not a drop of rain had touched her, of course; it just slid off in a silvery curtain about four inches from her body. “You don’t want to do that.”

“No,” he panted. “Probably don’t. But I don’t have a lot of choices. You’re Djinn, right?”

She didn’t answer, but then again, she didn’t really have to. She walked up to him, a force of nature packaged in a pinafore, and put her small hand flat on his chest.

She blew him twenty feet. Stan impacted the wet beach, rolled, and flopped to a limp stop. He groaned and tried to get up, but she held up a finger.

One finger.

And he shuddered and went flat.

“Hey!” I yelled at her over the boom of thunder. I was soaked to the skin, shivering, and more than a little scared by the fact that Jamie Rae was standing there looking from me to Venna as if trying to decide which of us to put the smackdown on first. “Leave him alone!”

“Oh, relax; he’s not dead,” Venna said impatiently. “I didn’t break him.” She turned to Jamie Rae. “You want to stop trying to do that.”

Whatever Jamie was doing-and in the chaos of the storm that was quickly getting worse, I couldn’t tell-she kept doing it, because Venna looked frustrated and annoyed, and flicked her fingers in Jamie Rae’s direction.

Bang. She went down, coldcocked. I felt bad about that. She and Stan didn’t seem like bad types, comparatively speaking.

At least they weren’t trying to bring down a building.

“We should hurry,” Venna said, and glanced at the sand where I was buried knee-deep. It let loose, spilling me to my hands and knees, and I climbed out of the resulting hole. “Focus now. You know what to do?”

I nodded, and followed her into the aetheric. In Oversight the storm was a glittering layered network of tight-spinning forces. I couldn’t see Venna clearly, but I could see what she was doing, and it was amazing. My attempts to help were clumsy by comparison; I could see her reaching to slightly alter the magnetic force of one part of the storm, and what that did to the direction and speed of the wind. See it…not necessarily do it. Or even control it. But I could feel it coursing through me like a continuous warm pulse, pounding harder and louder with every beat.

It was intoxicating. Freeing. I heard myself laugh, and reached out to touch a glittering chain of molecules. Lightning sparked through the net and flashed in my eyes down in the real world.

It was like playing God. Beautiful and terrifying.

The first lightning strike hit the roof, and the concussion was so intense at this close range that I went temporarily deaf and blind, and every hair follicle on my body seemed to rise in the electrical aura. When it passed, I barely had time to draw a breath before the next bolt hit steel, and then a third. Hammer of the gods.

When the wind hit the smoking, glowing structure, spinning down in a dark spiral from the low-hanging clouds, the metal just collapsed in on itself like a dropped Tinkertoy model, and the whole beach seemed to vibrate from the impact. Fire licked and hissed as some of the more flammable components caught, but it wasn’t likely to spread; the rain was intense, and concentrated right on the worst of it.

Venna hadn’t moved. She was smiling slightly, and when she looked at me she said, “Now you have to balance it.”

“What?” I yelled over the roar of thunder and pounding, wind-driven surf. I stumbled toward her and swiped wet hair back from my face. “Balance what?”

“The scales,” Venna said. “Make it all go away, but don’t let the energy bleed over into more storms.”

“You mean it’s not over?”

Venna shook her head. She’d let the funnel cloud dissipate, its purpose completed, and the rain was slacking off from a monsoon to a downpour. “You’d better hurry,” she said. “The Wardens will be screwing it up if you don’t hurry. They never can get it right.”

I had no idea what she meant, but Venna was notably not helping me. She crossed her arms and stood there, Zen Alice, untouched by the chaos she’d helped unleash.

I turned my attention to the storm.

“The Wardens teach you to do this from science,” she said very softly; I didn’t know how it was possible to hear her over the wind, but she came through as if it were a still, silent day. “Science can fail you. Learn to listen to it. Sing to it. It doesn’t have to be your enemy. Even predators can be pets.”

I struggled to make sense out of what I was seeing. So much detail, so much data, all in spectra the human eye wasn’t meant to see, much less understand. I can’t do this. It’s too big. It’s too much.

I took a deep breath, stretched my hands out to either side, and stepped into the heart of the storm.

It hurt. Not only physically, though the windblown sand and debris lashed at me like a dozen whips. It got inside my head, and howled, and I flailed blindly for something I could touch, could control, could stop…

And then, when I opened my eyes on the aetheric, it all made sense. The swirling chaos became a shifting puzzle of infinite intricacy, and where the pieces met, sparks hissed through the dark, bright as New Year’s fireworks lighting the sky. I reached out and moved two of the pieces apart; the spark leaped and died in midair. I tried it again and again, until the grand, gorgeous pattern of the air was whisper-quiet, glowing in peaceful shifting colors.

When I blinked and fell back into the real world, I could see the stars.

Venna gave a very quiet sigh. “Yes,” she said. “Exactly like that. Now you are Ma’at.”

So now I was guilty of some kind of supernatural sabotage, at the very least, but I figured it probably boiled down to plain old insurance fraud. Something simple and skanky, something with an immediate financial benefit for Eamon, of course.

But hey, at least I’d learned a useful skill.

“Astonishing,” Eamon murmured, looking at the wreckage and all of the emergency crews swarming around the scene in the predawn light. We were sitting on the low rock wall-Eamon, Venna, me, and Sarah, with the two Wardens asleep behind the rocks, held in that state by Venna. I didn’t think Eamon could see Venna at all, because he hadn’t asked about her, and she didn’t exactly fit in.

Didn’t seem prudent to mention her.

“Complete destruction,” Eamon said, and seemed utterly satisfied. “You are a one-woman wrecking crew, love.”

“Thanks,” I said with an ice edge of chill. “We done now?”

“Done?” His eyes were preoccupied, and it took him a second to pull his attention away from the human aftermath on the beach to focus on me completely. “Ah, yes. I did say that I wanted only this one thing from you, didn’t I?”

Bad feeling bad feeling bad feeling. “That’s what you said.”

“I don’t think that will be possible after all,” Eamon said, and smiled just a bit. Just enough to keep me from killing him. “This is the start of a beautiful and very profitable relationship, Jo. After I marry your sister-”

“After you what?” I blurted. “Time-out! Nobody’s getting married. Especially not to you.”

Sarah didn’t even look up to meet my fierce stare. Haggard and strung out, but my sister, dammit. My family. “You can’t tell me what to do,” she said.

“Sarah, wake up! He’s a criminal! And he’s a murderer!”

“Yeah, well, what about you?” she flung back. “You think you’re not guilty of things? You think you aren’t just as bad? Don’t you dare lecture me!”

“Keep your voice down!”

“Or what? You’ll call the cops? Go right ahead, Jo; they’re right over there!”

Sure enough, two uniformed cops standing next to their cruiser were looking in our direction. I swallowed and tried to moderate my own voice to something in the range of reasonable. “Sarah, you do not want to jump into this. Really. You don’t know this man. You don’t know what he’s capable of doing.”

Eamon took her hand. His long, lovely fingers curled around hers, and then he kissed her fingers, staring at me with bright, challenging eyes the whole time. “She’s not jumping into anything,” he murmured. “And really, Joanne, you’re making far too big an issue out of this. I only want to make her happy.”

“You want to use her,” I said. “You want to threaten her to get me to do whatever you want. Trust you to find a way to make money off of disaster.”

He made a tsking sound. “Construction companies, insurance companies, cleanup crews, police, fire, ambulance, paramedics, hospitals, doctors, funeral parlors, coffin makers…all those people make money off of disaster. And thousands more. I’m merely a novice.”

“You want to cause them!”

“Don’t be so negative,” he said. “Freak accidents happen. No reason not to arrange them to our benefit once in a while.”

Venna hadn’t moved. She continued sitting on the wall, neat and prim, kicking her black patent-leather shoes like a kid, watching the emergency crews with every evidence of total fascination. I shot her an exasperated look. “Help me out here.”

“It’s human stuff. I can’t,” she said serenely. “Besides, they can’t see or hear me. I’m a figment of your imagination, Joanne.”

Hardly. My imagination would have conjured up a hunky, half-naked guy Djinn, preferably one who looked like David. I glared at her.

“Do you want me to kill him?” Venna asked, and met my eyes. It was a shock, seeing the complete flat disinterest in them. “I can, you know. I can kill anyone I want. Any human, anyway. Then you don’t have to worry about him anymore. I could make it fast. He wouldn’t even feel it.”

I stared at her for a long, silent second, and then shook my head. No, I wasn’t prepared to do that. Not even to Eamon.

Venna sighed again, jumped down off the wall, and looked up into my face. “It’s been long enough,” she said. “We should think about going now. Do you want their memories before we go?”

“Do I…what?” I was aware it looked to Eamon and Sarah like I was talking to empty child-sized space, because they were exchanging a look. The she’s-lost-her-mind kind of look.

“Like what you did before, although you didn’t do it very well,” Venna said. “I can take their memories and give them to you. If you want. But you may not like it. Decide now, because we can’t stay here much longer.”

Memories. Sarah was the key to a lot of my childhood, wasn’t she? Who else would I get that kind of thing from?

I nodded.

“Oh, you don’t want hers,” Venna said. “Hers won’t be very good for you. You want his.”

Venna didn’t even bother touching me. She just turned those incandescent blue eyes on Eamon, and I was sucked into a different world.