Thin Air

ELEVEN

Luckily I didn’t have to decide whether or not I had the ethical strength to give Eamon the kiss of life. After the firefighters formed a human chain and pulled us out of the mysteriously formed pit of dry quicksand, the paramedics pounced, did some paramedic-y things, and got him breathing, choking, and swearing again. He looked like he’d taken a bath in flour-dusty white except for his bloodshot, furious eyes and the blood caking his mouth and nose. He started raving, but he shut up quickly enough when he realized our little feud was no longer private.

Stan was sweating bullets. I stood next to him, shaking a little myself, as the cops formed a cordon around the sinkhole and the news crews swarmed in frustration near the barrier, camera lenses and microphones pointed our way.

“Oh, man, this is bad,” Stan whispered.

“You’ve got some kind of system for handling these things, right? Right? This can’t be the first time in the history of the Wardens that people saw something happen…”

“Well, it’s the first time for me!” he shot back. “Jesus, I’m not even allowed out on my own yet. I’m still on probation! I’m not equipped to handle this!”

“And you think I am?”

“Well…you’re the most senior, right?” He looked puppy-dog hopeful.

We didn’t have time to do any more plotting; one of the cops-a detective in civilian clothes with a badge hung on his shirt pocket-came over and herded us away, behind a crime scene van parked a little way down the beach. “Names?” he barked. He looked more stressed than me and Stan put together.

Oh, crap. I was supposed to be out on bail in Nevada, and I was pretty sure it was a violation to be out here in California…and maybe there was more that I didn’t remember that could jump up and bite me when he entered my name in the system. So I gave him my best, shiniest smile and said, “Jo Monaghan.” Where it came from, I have no idea. He wrote it down and pointed a pen at Stan, who said, “Stanley Waterman.”

Waterman? For an Earth Warden? Funny.

“ID,” the cop demanded. Man of few words. I was about to fumble around for an excuse when I felt a tug on my sleeve and looked down to see Venna.

Kind of Venna, anyway. Not blond Alice in Wonderland anymore; she’d ditched the telltale blue dress and pinafore in favor of blue jeans and a cute pink shirt with kittens on the front. “Mommy?” she said, and held up a purse. “You dropped it.”

I blinked at her, trying to take it all in, and smiled. “Thank you, honey,” I said, and accepted the purse as naturally as I could, under the circumstances. I glanced at the cop; he was smiling at Venna, so evidently she’d gone with a total-reality appearance this time. The purse was Kate Spade, and not a knockoff, either; Venna’s little joke, I guessed. Inside, there were a few random things that she must have thought I’d need, like a travel-sized deodorant (trying to tell me something, Venna?), a small bottle of hand cream, a compact black shape that it took me a few seconds to recognize…

A Taser. She’d handed me a purse with a Taser in it.

I shot her a look. She kept smiling at me in sunny innocence.

The wallet was red faux alligator. I opened it, and there was a California driver’s license in the name of Jo Monaghan, with my wide-eyed mug shot picture next to it. Unflatteringly realistic. I passed the plastic-coated card over, and the cop inspected it for a few seconds, noted down the address that appeared on the card-I wondered whose address it was-and then gave it back. Stan had produced his own ID. The cop followed the same process. Not a chatterbox, this guy. He hadn’t even offered his name.

“Okay,” he finally said, and looked at each of us in turn. “Somebody start talking.”

Stan looked at me with mute desperation on his face. I controlled the urge to thwack him on the back of the head, and summoned as much charm as I could. (Not a lot. It had been a long day.) “I don’t know what we can tell you, sir. My daughter and I were just walking on the beach-we saw the lights and sirens, and we thought we’d take a look.”

“Your address isn’t anywhere near the beach.”

Venna looked chagrined. Of course, a Djinn wouldn’t think about things like that.

“No,” I agreed. “We were out sightseeing, and I didn’t realize how late it had gotten. We were still driving around when the storm hit. Some storm, huh?”

The detective grunted. “So after that you decided to come looky-loo?”

“Yes.” I pointed at the rock wall, dangerously sagging now. “We were sitting there on the rock wall, with a couple of other people-I didn’t know them. There was a British man; I think he might have been a little…” I made the international symbol for crazy at my temple. “He was rambling, you know? And he sounded really angry. I was going to take my daughter home when he got up and ran out there and started yelling. He started to come back at us, and he started sinking.”

The knife, I remembered, just as the detective turned his chilly X-ray eyes on me and said, “Somebody said he had a knife.”

“Oh,” I said faintly. “Did he? Oh, my God.”

“Any reason this man might want to hurt you?”

I shook my head. Venna shook hers, too.

“So when he started sinking, you…what? Tried to save him?”

It didn’t take a lot of work to look guilty. “Not right at first. I was afraid,” I said. “I ran for help. I found this guy”-I nodded at Stan-“and he came with me. We managed to pull the other man out, but-”

“Yeah, yeah, I know the rest,” the cop said. “So you, Waterman, you never saw Miz Monaghan before?”

“Never saw her before today,” Stan said. He sounded utterly confident on that score. “She saved his life, though.”

The detective was looking faintly disappointed with the whole thing. “Either of you here when the building came down? See anything either before or after I should know about?”

“Wasn’t it an earthquake?” I asked, and tried to sound anxious about it. “The building collapsing, I mean? It wasn’t bombs or anything?”

“We’re still looking, but yeah, so far it looks like bad luck and bad weather. Still, we like to ask.” He demanded phone numbers. I made Stan go first, then made mine up, hoping that his area code would work for mine as well. It must have, because the detective snapped his notebook shut. “Okay, I’ve got your statements. If anything comes up that I need clarification about, I’ll call.” He unbent enough to give Venna another smile. “Better get the kid home,” he told me. Venna looked up with a grave expression, and I wondered just how funny she was finding all this. Hilarious, I was willing to bet. The Djinn seemed to have a very strange sense of humor.

I had no car. I was about to say something to Stan about that, but Venna shook her head minutely, pulled on my hand, and led me across the sand in the opposite direction from where all the crazy news media was gathered. Stan trotted to keep up. “Hey!” he said. “You can’t leave!”

“Bet I can,” I said. “Bet you can’t stop me, Stanley. In fact, I’ll bet you don’t even want to try.”

“What about Jamie Rae?” he challenged, and got in my way. Venna looked like she might be tempted to say or do something; I squeezed her hand in warning. “What am I supposed to tell the Wardens?”

“Tell them you were overmatched,” Venna said sweetly. “They’ll believe that.” She smiled. I was glad I wasn’t on the receiving end of that particular expression. “Your friend is waking up,” she said. “You’d better go get her and leave now.”

“But…the sinkhole…”

“You stopped it from growing,” she said. “Someone else will fix it. We have to go now.”

“But…the newspeople-they’ll have tape!”

“Then I suppose the Wardens will have to handle that,” Venna said serenely. “I can’t be bothered. Move.”

He did, skipping out of her way as she advanced. I trailed along, shrugging to indicate that I didn’t have much choice, either; I was pretty sure Stan believed it. There was a hill beyond him, and we trudged up, avoiding the scrub brush and sharp-edged grasses. Stan didn’t follow. He stood there, hands on his hips, looking lost, and then he turned and went back to get Jamie Rae and, I presumed, make a full report to the Wardens.

Venna was right: We needed to get the hell out of here.

“I hope you have a bus schedule in your bag of tricks,” I said, and glanced back down the hill. Some of the news crews had spotted us, and a couple of athletic Emmy-seeking types were pounding sand next to the road, curving around the cordoned-off area and heading our way. “Oh, boy.”

She tugged my hand harder, and we climbed faster. The poststorm air felt clean and soft, the sand under our feet damp and firm. It would have been a nice day, except for all the chaos and mayhem.

“Eamon?” I asked, as we achieved the top of the hill. “He’s alive?”

“Oh, yes,” Venna said. “You saved him. I suppose that makes you happy.” She sounded mystified about it. Well, I was a little mystified about it, too. “It was good you told them he was crazy. That’ll take time for him to convince them he’s not, but then they’ll be looking for you.”

“So, bus?” I asked. A well-dressed anchorwoman-well dressed from the waist up, anyway, wearing blue jeans and sneakers below-was sprinting up the road, with her heavyset cameraman puffing behind her. “Anytime would be good.”

“You don’t need a bus.” She pointed. “That’s your car.”

Parked next to the side of the road sat…a gleaming, midnight blue dream of a car. I blinked. “What the hell is that?”

“It’s a Camaro,” she said. “Nineteen sixty-nine. V-eight with an all-aluminum ZL-one four twenty-seven.” She said it as if she were reciting it out of a book. “Lewis gave it to you.”

I turned to stare at her. “Lewis gave me this. Lewis gave me a car.” She nodded. “And…I took it?” She nodded again. “Oh, boy.”

“You needed a car,” she said. “He just thought you should have a nice one.”

“When did this happen?”

“Just before-” She stopped herself, frowned, and edited. “Before you lost your memory. You drove it on the East Coast. You took a plane from there to Arizona, so it’s been sitting in a parking lot, waiting for you.”

“And you…had it driven here?” We were at the car now, and I ran my hand lightly over the immaculate, polished finish. Not so much as a bug splatter on its surface anywhere. “You get it detailed, too?”

Venna shrugged and opened the passenger-side door to climb in. She looked more little-girl than ever once she was inside, with her feet dangling off the floor. Somebody had installed after-market seat belts; she gravely hooked hers, although I figured there was little chance of a Djinn being injured in a collision. Still playing the daughter role, evidently.

I wondered if my real daughter had ever been in this car. I could almost imagine her sitting there…

“Better hurry,” Venna said. I blinked, looked back, and saw that the newsanchor was hauling ass toward the car, already shouting breathless questions.

I got in and turned the key that was already in the ignition.

Peeling out and spraying gravel wasn’t a skill I’d lost with my memory.

It didn’t give me much comfort when I looked in my rearview mirror and found a white van pulling out of a parking lot and quietly, tenaciously following.

“I need a plan,” I said to Venna. She stared out the window, kicking her feet, and didn’t respond. “Venna, I need to get my memory back. No more screwing around. Tell me how I can do that.”

“You can’t,” she said simply. “Your memory belongs to her now. And you don’t want to try to get it back. She’ll kill you. The only way to make this right is to get Ashan to go back to the Oracle.”

We were about fifteen minutes out from the beach, and I was just driving, with no clear idea of where we were heading. The steady rumble of the car gave me a feeling of being in control at last, and I thought that I might be happy if I could just drive forever. Or at least, until my problems went away.

The white van, for instance. It didn’t seem inclined to vanish on my say-so, however. It kept a steady three-car distance from me, not really hiding, but not really making itself known, either. Too far back for me to catch sight of the driver.

“Ashan has my memories.”

“No. He…” Venna searched for words for a second. “He tore them from you. Threw them away, made them excess energy. It put you adrift in the universe, and when the Demon found your memories, it knocked things out of balance. I think only Ashan can fix that.”

“But Ashan…he’s not a Djinn, right?”

“No,” she said. “Not anymore.” For a brief second Venna’s expression revealed something that physically hurt, a kind of anguish that I could barely comprehend. “He was one of the first, you know. One of the oldest. But he just couldn’t understand that the Mother loves you, too.”

“Me?” I asked, startled.

“Humans. Maybe not as much as she loves us, because she understands us a little better. But she’s fond of you, too, in a way.” She shrugged. “He blames you. You made her understand that humans weren’t intending to hurt her.”

“I did.”

“Yes. You.”

“And by Mother, you mean…”

“Earth,” she said. “Mother Earth, of course.”

I decided to stick to driving. “Where am I going?” I asked. “If we’re heading for Ashan?”

“I have him safe.” Venna took a map out of the glove compartment, unfolded it, and traced a line with her fingertip. Where she touched it, a route lit up. I glanced over. We were going to take I-8 to Arizona, apparently. “It’s about eight hours. Well, the way you drive, six.”

“Was that a joke?”

Venna shook her head. Apparently it was an expectation.

“What do we do when we get there?” I asked. “I’m not killing anybody, Venna.”

“I wouldn’t let you,” she said. “Although if you knew Ashan, you’d probably want to… What do you want me to do about the man following us?”

“You noticed.” She gave a little snort of agreement. I supposed it wasn’t exactly beyond her capabilities. “Do you know who it is?”

“Yes,” she said. I waited. She waited right back.

I gave her a hard look. Which was just a little bit hilarious, admittedly; I was giving her a hard look? As far as I could tell, Venna could pretty much destroy me any day of the week, and twice at matinees. “Just tell me!”

“I don’t have to,” she said. “You’ll have to stop soon. When you do, you’ll find out.”

She seemed smug about it. I gave her another completely ineffective glare, and checked my gas gauge. Still nearly full. Why in the world would I have to stop…?

The back left tire blew out with a jolt and a sound like a brick slapping the undercarriage of the car, and I cursed, fought the wheel, and limped the Camaro over to the shoulder of the road. The uneven thump thump thump made it clear that we weren’t going to do any quick getaways.

“Fix it,” I said to Venna. She smoothed her palms over her blue jeans. Was there a way to be beyond smug? “Come on, Venna. Be a pal.”

“You have a spare tire,” she said. “I’ll wait here.”

I cursed under my breath, opened the door, popped the trunk, and unloaded the jack, spare tire, and other various roadside disaster tools. I was evidently no stranger to mechanical work, but I wasn’t in the mood, dammit. I had the lug nuts loosened in record time, but as I was jacking up the car with vicious jerks of the handle, I saw a sparkle of glass behind us, and the white van glided over the hill…slowing down.

Shit.

“Hey, Venna?” I said. She looked out of the window at me. “Little help?”

She rolled up the window.

“Perfect.” I sighed. “Just perfect.” I went back to cranking the jack, grimly focused on the job at hand but keeping at least half of my attention-the paranoid half-on the van as it crawled and crunched its way slowly toward me. The brakes squealed slightly as it stopped.

I couldn’t see a damn thing through the tinted windows, and I was suddenly very glad of the tire iron in my hand.

And then the doors on both sides of the van opened at once, and people got out. The woman was young, toned, and well coiffed. She had a microphone. Behind her, in a flying wedge, came a fat guy with a camera and a skinny guy with a boom microphone.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, and stared, paralyzed, while they moved purposefully in my direction. “Holy crap.”

“Joanne Baldwin?” The reporter got out in front, framed the two-shot, and made sure her best side was to the camera. “My name is Sylvia Simons, and I’m an investigative reporter for-”

My paralysis snapped, replaced by a quivering all-over tremor. She knew my name.

“I don’t care who you’re with,” I interrupted, and started pumping the jack again. The tire crept upward, cleared the asphalt, and I repurposed the jack to start removing the lugs. “Get lost.”

“Ma’am, do you have any comment about what happened back there on the beach?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “And I don’t know any Joanne Baldwin. You’ve got the wrong-”

“I interviewed your sister a few weeks ago. She gave us a photo,” Sylvia Simons interrupted, and held out a picture of me and Sarah, which had been removed from its frame. We looked happy and stupid. I still felt stupid, but I certainly wasn’t very happy. “She told us that you’re a member of an organization called the Wardens. Can you tell me something about that?”

“No,” I said. Four lug nuts off. I kept moving, careless of the grease and grime on my hands or what was getting on my clothes.

“My understanding is that you have some kind of responsibility for protecting the general public from natural disasters,” Simons continued. Lug nut five came off, then six, and I slid the tire free with a screech of metal and let it thump down on the road between us. I wiped sweat from my forehead and ignored her as she leaned closer. “She claimed it was magic. Care to tell us exactly what that means? We’ll get the information some other way if you don’t, but this is your chance to tell your side of the story…”

Crap. I put the other tire on and began replacing lug nuts. “I don’t have a side,” I said, “and there isn’t any story. Leave me alone.”

I could tell they weren’t going to. They’d been digging, and struck gold. Sarah had dropped the dime and taken the money after ensuring that the white van and the reporters knew to keep on my trail. And maybe she’d called somebody else, too. Somebody who’d dispatched a killer to silence me before I could talk. That way she’d have the money from the reporters free and clear, and no Wardens after her.

“Tell you what,” I said, spinning lug nuts down with both hands. I didn’t look at the reporter directly, wary of being even more on-camera. “If you turn around and leave now, nothing’s going to happen to your nice digital equipment.”

Simons made a surprised face, and looked at the camera as if she wanted to be sure it caught her amazement. “Are you threatening us, Ms. Baldwin?”

“Nope.” I finished finger-tightening the nuts, and released the jack to let the car settle back on four tires. I began applying the tire iron to finish the job of making the wheel road ready. “But things do happen.”

And right then, things did happen. The camera guy said, “What the…?” and a whisper of smoke suddenly oozed out of three or four places in his equipment. I heard a cooking sound from inside the electronics.

Nice. I sure did enjoy some things about being a Fire Warden.

“What’s wrong?” Simons asked, and moved toward him. Together, with the sound guy craning in for a look, they reviewed the damage. Which, I could have told them, was catastrophic. Yay, me.

I shoved the old flat tire and all the equipment in the trunk, slammed it, and said, “I think the phrase I’m searching for here is ‘no comment.’”

Simons stared at me with a grim, set expression as I got in the Camaro and headed off down the road.

When the van tried to follow, its engine blew in a spectacular white cloud of steam.

“I should be ashamed. That,” I said to Venna, “was really low. Then again, blowing out my tire was pretty low in the first place, Venna. Shame on you.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “But you needed to know. So you won’t trust your sister again.”

“No,” I said grimly. “I don’t think I will.”

Driving is therapy for me. Interesting thing to discover about yourself…There was something hypnotic about the road, the freedom, the feeling of being in control and having a direction. I drove fast, but not recklessly, and if Venna had anything to say, she said it to herself.

I had a lot of time to think. After a couple of hours of that, I said, “Venna. Why haven’t you given me your memories?”

She raised her eyebrows. Pint-sized haughtiness. She was still wearing the blue jeans and pink shirt; I was getting used to the less formal look, but I didn’t let it fool me. There was nothing informal about Venna.

“You couldn’t handle it,” she said. “Djinn memory isn’t the same as human. We see things differently. We see time differently. It wouldn’t make sense to you, the way human memories do.”

“But…you can become human, right?”

“We can take human form. That doesn’t mean we become human. Not really.”

So even though David had fathered a child with me, he hadn’t been…human. Not inside. Comforting thought.

I edged a bit more speed out of the accelerator. “You said David would be on her side, not mine. Are you guessing, or do you know that?”

She didn’t answer me.

In a way, I supposed, that was answer enough.

The countryside began feeling weirdly familiar. If I’d put together the pieces properly, Sedona had been the last place I’d been seen before my absence from the world, followed by my appearance, naked and memory-free, in the forest. I felt like I ought to remember it.

I was, quite simply, too tired. Sedona had motels, and I had cash, and although Venna was contemptuous of the whole idea, I checked myself in for the day, took a long, hot bath, and crawled into a clean bed for eight blissful hours. When I got up, the sun had already set.

Venna was watching a game show, something loud that seemed to involve people shouting at briefcases. She was cross-legged on the end of the bed, her chin resting on her fists, and she was absolutely enraptured.

“Well,” I said as I zipped up my black jeans, “I guess now I know who the target audience is for reality TV.”

If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought she was embarrassed. She slid off the bed, and the TV flicked off without her hand coming anywhere near a remote control. She folded her arms. “Are you done sleeping?” she asked.

“Obviously, yes.”

“Good. It’s such a waste of good time.” She moved the curtain aside and looked out. “We should go.”

We pulled out of the parking lot and cruised slowly through town. Venna navigated, my very own supernatural GPS, pointing me through the streets until I was thoroughly lost. Sedona looked pretty much like any other town-maybe a little funkier, with more New Age shops and Southwest architecture, but McDonald’s looked the same. So did Starbucks.

“Are we close?” I asked. I was still tired, but it was a pleasant kind of tired, and for the first time in a long time I felt like I was going into trouble with a clear mind. The road vibration was almost as good as a massage.

“That way.” Venna pointed. I didn’t ask questions. We made turns, crawled along a road that led into the hills, and eventually stopped in a parking lot at the foot of a bluff whose definitions were lost in the growing darkness.

The sign said, CHAPEL OF THE HOLY CROSS.

Venna said, very quietly, “We’re here.”

“Where’s Ashan?”

“Safe,” she said. “I’ll bring him here when we’re ready. If he panics, he can be hard to control.”

A Djinn-well, former Djinn-who had panic attacks. That was a new one. I parked the Camaro in a convenient spot, killed the engine, and sat listening to the metal tick as it cooled. Outside, there was a living silence that pressed heavily against the car windows.

I didn’t like it here.

“This is hard for you,” Venna said. “Yes?”

“Yes.”

She turned those blue, blue eyes on me and said, “Do you know why?”

I silently shook my head. I didn’t think I wanted to know.

We got out of the car and walked to a steep set of concrete stairs leading up into the dark. Motion-sensitive lights bathed the steps dusty white, a startling contrast to the reddish rocks. I put my foot on the first one, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move.

Venna took my hand. “I know,” she said quietly. “This place remembers. It remembers everything.” She put her head down, as if there were things she didn’t want to see. I could understand that. I could feel it brushing at the edges of my consciousness, and without meaning to I drifted up into the aetheric…

And I saw chaos.

Raw fury. Horror. Anguish. An abiding, keening grief that had reduced this place, on the aetheric level, to a black hole of emotion.

“My God,” I whispered numbly. “What did this?”

Venna glanced up at me, then back down. “You did,” she said. “David did. We all did. When she died-”

She shut up, fast, but not before I put the pieces together. “Imara,” I said. “Imara died here.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “We didn’t know what to do. She was part human, and that part couldn’t be saved. He tried, after you were…after you disappeared.”

“David tried to save her.”

Venna bit her lip and nodded. She looked genuinely distressed. No wonder there was so much pain here, so much grief. David’s agony, staining this place like ink.

Maybe mine, too.

“We’d better go,” she said, and took my hand. Hers felt warm, childlike, human. “It’ll be better at the top.”

It wasn’t exactly easy ascending those stairs; I felt as if I were moving through the same quicksand I’d fought through back on the beach. The handrail felt sticky. I looked at my hand, almost sure I’d see bloodstains, but no…nothing. Up above, stars were twinkling in the dark blue sky; there was still a band of pale blue toward the horizon, shot through with threads of red and gold. Beautiful.

There seemed to be a thousand steps, and every one of them a sacrifice.

When we made it to the landing I was gasping for breath and shaking; Venna let go of my hand and moved to the door of the chapel, which was closed and had a sign on the front that gave the hours it was open-which didn’t include the hour of now.

That didn’t seem to matter to Venna, who simply pulled, and the door opened with a faint snick. The puff of air from the darkened interior smelled of incense and cedar, a timeless scent that carried none of the horror present outside.

Except for the flicker of a couple of red candles here and there, it was quite dark inside; the dim, fading sunset showed a small chamber, inked in shadow at the corners, with a few plain wood pews facing the huge expanse of glass windows. It was breathtaking, and it was, without a doubt, a holy kind of place.

Venna held the door for me, and locked it once we were inside. The place looked empty.

“I thought you said-”

“I said I’d bring him,” she said, and I felt a massive energy surge sweep over my body, staggering me, and I almost saw the golden arc of it blow past.

It seemed to outline a human body, glowing hot, and then the glow vanished and there was only a man standing there, unsteady and pale as a dead man.

He pitched forward to the floor, retching.

I knew exactly how that felt, actually. I’d felt it when I’d flown Air Venna from the Great Northwest to Las Vegas, nonstop.

“I thought you said teleporting could kill people,” I said.

“It didn’t.”

Even though I knew it was a mistake, I took a step toward them and heard that he was gasping for breath in helpless, hopeless sobs. He looked up, and the dim light gilded a pale face, pale hair.

“I shouldn’t be here,” he said. “I can’t be here-” And then he just…stopped, staring at me.

“Ashan?” I asked. He should have rung some recognition bells, I knew that, but…nothing. A frustrating lack of context. “You know who I am?”

He licked pale lips and wiped away his tears with shaking hands. “You’re gone,” he said. “I killed you. I killed both of you.”

He lunged at me, and slammed the heel of his hand into my shoulder. He seemed as surprised as I was-apparently, he’d been expecting a ghost, not flesh and blood. And I hadn’t expected him to move quite that fast. “Whoa!” I said, and skipped back out of reach. “Watch the hands!”

Ashan didn’t exactly look well. He was wearing some kind of a gray suit, but it was dirty, smudged, and torn, and he smelled. I mean, really smelled. His hair was greasy, and all in all, he looked like somebody who’d never discovered the basics of hygiene. Which I suppose would follow, if he’d been busted from near-angelic status to the merely human. Venna clearly hadn’t taken the time to clean him up, or maybe she hadn’t been able to convince him to even try.

He kept looking at me like he wasn’t sure he was sane. Well…actually, he looked like he’d blown past the borders of actual sanity some time ago. I glanced over my shoulder. Venna was still there, watching with unnervingly bright eyes.

“You have to be dead,” he said. “I watched you die. I felt you die. And I paid the price.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” I said. “Guess what? Good news. You get to make amends and help me get my life back.”

He was fast. Faster than he ought to have been, and I hadn’t moved far enough. He crossed the space, grabbed me by the throat, and slammed me down to the floor with such violence that I could barely comprehend it, much less react.

Upside down, Venna’s face was still inscrutable. Great. No help from that quarter.

My instincts reached for power…and failed.

There was no access to the powers I’d started to get accustomed to, not here. This was like a bubble, cut off from the outside. Cut off from the aetheric.

“Get off!” I squeaked, and twisted, trying to throw Ashan’s weight to one side. He wasn’t heavy, but he was wiry, and he had an unholy amount of strength. I had no leverage. I grabbed a handful of his greasy hair and yanked, and he howled and used his free hand to grab my wrist. I bucked, got him off balance, and we rolled down the aisle of the chapel, spitting curses, and this time I ended up on top, my hands on his throat. Holding him down.

“Go on,” he spat at me. “Break my neck. Kill me like I killed your child. Put me out of my misery, you pathetic bag of meat!”

I went very still. I must have looked like a crazy woman, my hair sticking to my sweaty face, my eyes wide, my lips parted on a truth I didn’t want to speak.

He’d killed my child.

That was what Venna hadn’t wanted to tell me. I was facing Imara’s murderer, with his life in my hands.

This time, Venna did react. She stepped forward and said, very quietly, “You can’t. You can’t kill him.”

Oh, I was pretty sure I could. And should.

Didn’t the daughter I couldn’t remember, whose pain had soaked into the very stones outside of this place, demand that much?