Thin Air

TWELVE

It wasn’t so much the moral quandary that stopped me as the fact that something changed in the room, right at that moment. Not Ashan-he was a stinky, horrifying excuse for a human being, and right at that moment I had no reason in the world not to hurt him as badly as he’d hurt my daughter. I didn’t figure that Venna would really be able to stop me.

What changed was that the three of us were no longer alone.

Venna took in a deep, gasping breath-more reaction than I’d ever heard from her-and moved slowly back, until her shoulders fetched up against the polished wood of the side of a pew.

And then she slipped down to her knees, put her hands in her lap, and bowed her head.

“Oh,” she said faintly. “I see now. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought them here.”

And there was someone sitting in the blackest shadows of the room, an outline of a person, nothing more, but a sense of presence and power sent little shocks up and down my spine.

I hesitated, staring at that dark shape, and then I sat up, grabbed Ashan by his filthy collar, and yanked him to a sitting position. “Who is it?” I asked Venna.

She didn’t answer.

“Venna!”

Whoever it was, Ashan looked destroyed. The expression on his face was horrifying in its vulnerability. His eyes filled with tears, and his whole body trembled with the force of something like grief, something like rage, more toxic than either one of those. I let go, because he didn’t even know I was there, and he crawled away from me, crawled, to kneel at the end of the pew where the shadow figure sat.

“You can’t be here,” he said. “You can’t.”

But whatever the shape was, it didn’t move, didn’t speak, and didn’t seem to notice him at all. I got slowly to my feet and watched Ashan tremble, and suddenly killing him didn’t seem like a priority. He was suffering, all right. Suffering in ways I couldn’t begin to understand.

Good.

All around the chapel, candles came alight-one after another, a racing circle of warm flame.

And I saw who was sitting in the pew. I guess I should have known, from Venna’s reaction, and from Ashan’s, but I still wasn’t prepared.

She looked human, but there was no way she was anything like it; she had a stillness to her that not even Tibetan monks could attain. She was wearing a full brickred dress, shifting and sheer in some places, solid in others; it fluttered in a breeze I couldn’t feel, and her full lips were parted on what looked like a gasp of delight, as if she’d seen something truly wonderful that none of the rest of us could grasp.

And then her eyes, a brilliant shade of hot gold, shifted to fix on me.

Ashan pressed himself down on the floor, totally abasing himself, and I thought, No, this can’t be true. This can’t be happening.

Because it was my daughter. My Imara, the Imara of the memories I’d gotten from Cherise and Eamon. And yet…not her at all.

Not until she smiled, and shattered my heart into a million pieces.

“Oh,” I whispered, and felt my knees go weak. “Oh, my God…” I didn’t know what to say, how to feel. There was this storm of emotion inside of me, overwhelming in its pressure, and I wanted to laugh and cry and scream and, like Ashan, get down on my knees in gratitude and supplication. But I wasn’t Ashan, and I didn’t. I braced myself with both hands on the back of a pew and stared at her until my eyes burned.

She didn’t speak.

“Imara?” I asked. My throat felt raw, and I could barely recognize my own voice. “Are you…?” Alive? All right? I didn’t even know what to ask.

Venna said, “The old Oracle was dying after the Demon wounded her. The Mother made a new Oracle in her place from the energy that was lost. I didn’t know it would be Imara.” Venna sounded very quiet, very small. “Does it help?”

Help? My daughter was there, smiling at me. How could it not help? I swallowed. “Can she…can she hear me?”

“Not the way you think. She hears who you are, though. And she knows.”

“Knows what?” I felt a bizarre mixture of pain and grief and anger fizzing up inside, overwhelming the relief.

“Everything,” Venna said soberly. “She knows you still love her.”

There was something about Imara that kept me from rushing to her, touching her, babbling out everything I felt. Something…other.

But that look, that smile…those were pure love.

“It’s why you could do what you did on the beach, when you made the Earth obey you,” Venna said. “And how you can touch people’s memories. Because through her, you touch the Earth. You’ve got all three channels now. Earth, Fire, Weather. You’re like Lewis.”

She didn’t look particularly happy about it. Imara’s smile faded, and she looked down at Ashan, cowering near her feet. Her eyes shifted color to a molten bronze.

I didn’t need words to understand that look, and it chilled me.

If Venna noticed, she didn’t mention it. She was frowning now, looking as disturbed as I’d ever seen her. “This isn’t going to work.”

“What? What do you mean?” For a terrifying second I thought she was talking about Imara, that there was something wrong, but no; Venna looked too calm, too still.

“She’s new,” Venna said, and rested her hands, palm down, on her thighs. “She hasn’t come into her full power yet. And that means she can’t help Ashan-even if she wants to.”

I doubted sincerely that what Imara had on her mind for Ashan could go by the description of help.

“So that’s it?” I asked. “We just give up?”

Venna threw me an all-too-human look of exasperation. “No,” she said. “We take him to another Oracle, that’s all. I’ll-take him out of here.”

I didn’t watch how she did it, but I heard Ashan scrambling, and heard him cry out, once. Then they were gone, and the door shut behind them.

I didn’t take my eyes off my daughter, the Oracle.

“Can you hear me?” I asked. “Imara?”

Her eyes slowly swirled back to that lovely shade of gold, but she didn’t smile this time.

I waited, but the candles began to dim, slowly winking out one by one. While I could still see her, I said, “Please say something. Please, baby. I need to know that you’re okay.”

She was just a dim shadow against the deeper shadows, a glimmer of gold eyes in the dark, when she whispered, “Hang in there, Mom. I love you.”

And then she was gone.

I sat down hard on the pew, put my face in my hands, and prayed. Not to my daughter. Not to the Earth, whoever that was.

I prayed to God, whose chapel it was. Who’d built this glittering, beautiful, hurtful world with all its magic and deadly sharp edges. I needed a higher power to get me through the rest of this, because I didn’t think I could do it by myself.

I don’t know if He answered, exactly, but after a few minutes I felt a kind of peace inside, a stillness, and an acceptance.

My child wasn’t suffering, and she wasn’t totally beyond my reach.

Maybe that was enough.

I scrubbed my face clean of tears, got up, and went to find Venna.

Venna had Ashan-actually, he was on his knees, and she had one hand on his shoulder. It didn’t look like restraint, exactly, but I was sure it was. He looked worse in the merciless glare of the motion-activated spotlights on the concrete stairs-bleached, grimy, with an unpleasant light of madness lurking in those blue eyes.

He’d killed my daughter. And if he’d gotten his way, she’d have been completely dead, not sitting in there in the chapel, elevated to some level I couldn’t understand. In a very real way, he’d still taken her away; Imara the Oracle wasn’t Imara at all, not the way I’d known her.

You never knew her at all, some cold part of me said. You never had a past; you never had a daughter. Remember?

That was the point. I didn’t remember. And Ashan had done that to me.

Miles to go before I could see that put right.

“So,” I said. “Where now?”

I’d expected her to hesitate, but instead, Venna promptly said, “Seacasket.”

“Pardon?”

“It’s in New Jersey.”

I hadn’t forgotten geography. New Jersey was a long way from Arizona. A long, long way.

“We should go,” Venna said. “I can drive when you get tired.”

Yeah, like I was going to let a kid behind the wheel of that car. Even a many-centuries-old kid. “One other thing,” I said, and pointed a thumb at Ashan. “He needs a bath. I’m not smelling him all the way to the East Coast.”

Ashan shot to his feet, running like a rabbit for the rocks, not the stairs. “Hey!”

He slammed face-first into an invisible wall, staggered back, and whirled to face us. Venna had broken his nose, and it was streaming blood. Not a good look for him. When he tried to come at me, Venna stopped him again with just as much force.

“Ashan,” she said to him. “You know you can’t fight me. I’ll just keep on hurting you.”

He tried it again, as if he hadn’t heard her, and I winced this time at the sound of flesh and bone hitting the barrier. “He’s trying to make you hurt him,” I said. “He wants you to kill him.”

Venna blinked. “That’s odd.”

“That’s human. And kind of crazy.”

“I will never understand mortals,” she said, sounding aggrieved. “How do I stop him without hurting him?”

“Let me handle it.”

This time, when he lunged at us, I took the Taser out of my purse, switched it on, and zapped the holy living shit out of him. Ashan convulsed and went down. I crouched next to him. His eyes were unfocused, and there was blood dripping from his chin in a gory mess. “Ashan. Can you hear me?”

He could. He just didn’t answer. I could tell from the immediate flicker of rage in him that I had his attention. The shock had incapacitated him, but it hadn’t done much to make him like me any better.

“Venna’s going to keep you from doing any damage to me, or yourself,” I said. “Right, Ven?” She gave me a look that could have doubled as a crematorium. “Sorry. Venna.”

“Yes.” She wasn’t forgiving me anytime soon for an attempt at a pet name; that was clear from her tone. “Up, Ashan.”

At first he couldn’t get up, and then it was clear he didn’t want to. The smile Venna gave him was evil enough to haunt a serial killer’s nightmares.

“If you don’t,” she said, “then I’ll make you, brother.”

Brother? I didn’t know if that was literal or figurative, but either way, it worked; Ashan climbed silently to his feet and walked down the steps without trying to run, pitch headlong to his death, or take me with him. I looked back up at the Chapel of the Holy Cross; it was quiet, no signs of life. No sign of my daughter haunting its warm, incense-scented shadows.

I wanted to run back up the steps and throw my arms around her, but somehow I knew that it wasn’t the time. Not here. Not now.

Not until this was over.

Venna saw me looking, and said, “We should go.”

Ashan coughed, and spit a mouthful of blood at Venna’s feet. She raised one eyebrow and made it disappear. Just like that.

I raised the Taser and activated it, letting him get a good look at the jumping spark. “Get in the car, Ashan.”

He slid into the backseat. I pointed a finger at Venna. “Watch him,” I said.

“Of course.” She gave me a cool raise of her eyebrows, as if I were being completely stupid, and climbed in the passenger seat.

I stood there for a few seconds with my hand on the car door, looking up at the chapel. For a second, I thought I saw…something. A flicker of red, a dress fluttering in the wind.

A smile.

“I’ll see you soon,” I promised her, and got in the driver’s seat.

We drove out toward the main road, and when I reached an intersection I idled and waited for traffic. Venna seemed lost in thought, but she finally said, “I can conceal us from most, but he is going to be a problem.”

“Venna, could you ever once in a while use a name? Would it kill you? He, who? Ashan?”

“David,” she said, with a little too much enunciative precision. “He’s been looking for you. I can keep him from finding us for now, but I’m not sure I can do it for long. He’s very smart.”

“He’s looking for me?” I felt a surge of gratitude and relief, and then I remembered that it wasn’t a good thing. “Oh. Looking for me because he thinks I’m the wrong one. The fake Joanne.”

“Yes.”

“And where is he?”

She shrugged. “I said I could hide us from him, not keep track of him. It’s not that simple. You’d better get going.”

“Do you think this is going to work?”

Venna looked suddenly very young, and very uncertain. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s never been done before. And I didn’t expect that the Earth Oracle would be Imara. That complicates things.”

I swallowed, suddenly very cold. “What if it doesn’t work?”

“Eventually,” Venna said, “the Demon will win. And I don’t know what will happen then. I really don’t.”

We looked at each other in silence for a second.

“Go east,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

I love to drive, but this wasn’t driving, it was being trapped in a car with a crazy man (who kept muttering things in a language that I didn’t understand), a Djinn who was by turns cute and creepy, and constantly operating under the threat of impending, though nonspecific, doom. It was the Paranoia Ride, which I was sure wasn’t going to catch on at Disney World. Venna wasn’t exactly comforting company, and Ashan…I hadn’t liked him at first sight, I’d begun to hate him when I’d realized what he’d done, and now I outright loathed him. Venna had, at my request, dumped him into a shower at a roadside motel, and I’d bought him some fresh clothes to replace the filthy suit he’d been wearing. Clean, he looked and smelled better.

It didn’t help his attitude at all. Venna’s calm, menacing presence kept him from trying to bash my head in, but there was nothing she could do to make him any less of an asshole. I couldn’t keep him in the trunk; that would be emotionally satisfying, but morally questionable. Still, keeping him in the backseat was no picnic. Every muscle in my body ached with tension, and when I managed to pull over to sleep (catnaps, at best) I woke up more tired than ever. Ashan never stopped watching me. He was crazy as a rat on LSD, and I thought I could understand why; having spent time with Venna, seen how different she was from human, I could imagine the shock of being busted from Djinn back to merely mortal. Be enough to drive anybody mad-and I wasn’t convinced that he hadn’t been a little mad to start with. If what he’d done to me was, in fact, forbidden, he’d been playing with fire. When the old commercials said, “It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature,” they hadn’t exactly been kidding around.

I wondered what he’d been like before. Maybe Venna inferred that from my frequent, nervous glances in the rearview mirror, because she said about fourteen hours into the drive, “He didn’t hate you at first, you know. You weren’t more than an annoyance to him. It was all because of David-Ashan was jealous, and he wanted to be Jonathan’s heir. You were David’s weakness, so Ashan exploited that, because he wanted to destroy David before he got too powerful.”

All politics. “Funny,” I said. “It feels personal now.”

“Now it is,” she agreed. “You’re like a virus, you humans. You get under our skins.”

“Flattering.”

She frowned. “Was it? I didn’t mean it to be.”

I resisted the urge to explain sarcasm to her. Barely. “What about memories? Are you going to give me his since he’s human?”

She looked away. “Do you think you want them?”

“Just the ones about me.”

This time, she looked at me straight on. “Do you really want them?”

I realized then what I was asking for. Not just memories of me as Ashan saw me, but the things Ashan might have done to me. To other people I loved.

To my daughter.

I cleared my throat. “Let me think about it.”

She nodded. From the backseat Ashan said, in a low, harsh voice that didn’t sound like it got much use, “You can’t be saved, you know. Whether you die today or in fifty years, you still die.”

Cheery little fella. “I’ll take surviving the fifty years, if I have a choice.”

He smiled thinly. “You don’t.” His eyes were bright-not Djinn bright, which was a whole order of magnitude weirder, but plenty bright enough to indicate crazy. “I’ll freely give you my memories, meat. I want you to know everything. It would please me if you went to your death remembering every painful second of what I did to her.”

I thought longingly about the Taser, then deliberately relaxed. “Can’t you shut him up?” I asked Venna.

She glanced over the seat at Ashan. “I don’t like to keep him unconscious all the time. It’s not good for him.”

“Like I care.”

Venna giggled. I nearly drove off the road. “Sorry,” she immediately said, subdued. “Was that wrong? I don’t usually try to laugh. I never was human, you know. I never learned.”

“Really? What a shock, you seem like such a regular kid.” I checked the map. We were making good time, and the lodge that Venna had indicated was our stopping point for the day was only about an hour’s drive down the road.

I was starting to feel pretty good about the possibilities when I felt the engine give the tiniest little hitch.

“No,” I whispered.

There it was again. Stronger. It sent a shudder through the car.

“No!”

The third time, the whole engine seized up with a clatter of valves. Great. “Venna! Little help!”

But she wasn’t looking at me. I wasn’t even sure if she’d realized we were coasting to a stop at the side of the road.

“She’s found you,” said Ashan, and smiled coldly. “They may kill me, but I think they’ll kill you, too. And that would be worth my death.”

“Venna!” I pumped my foot on the gas, but it was stupid; the car wasn’t going anywhere, not without supernatural repairs. “Dammit-”

“He’s right,” Venna said. Her voice sounded colorless, emotionless, but there was a bright spark of fear in her eyes. “David broke my shields. He must know I was hiding you. They’re coming, and they’ll kill Ashan. I can’t risk that.”

I couldn’t help but think that it was the threat to Ashan that got her interested, but I didn’t have time to think about it; something happened to the car’s engine, and it choked, growled, and caught fire again. The car leaped forward. I hastily shifted gears to accommodate.

“Maybe we should talk-” I began.

“No! Drive!” Some invisible force slammed the gas pedal down, and I struggled with the steering wheel as the tires screamed, propelling us down the road at a terrifying rate of speed. “Don’t slow down!”

“I’m sorry,” Ashan was saying. I had no idea if he was sorry he was in the car, sorry we were all going to die, sorry that he’d done what he’d done to Imara, and to me. Or just a sorry excuse for a human being. It didn’t really matter, and I could barely hear him over the shriek of tires on the curve. The Camaro was drifting over the line. I fought the wheel and got her straight by sheer force. Come on, baby. Work with me.

I didn’t know what was chasing us, but whatever it was, it was scary enough to panic one badass Djinn, and one who at least used to be.

Sounded good enough for me to panic, too.

I loved driving fast, but this was a little too fast, on a road that snaked like a car commercial and featured oncoming tractor trailers loaded down with raw lumber and giant tree trunks. Venna didn’t enhance my ability to keep my cool; she continued to put the mystical hammer down on the Camaro while looking steadily out the rear of the car.

Leaving me with the not very enviable task of steering in overdrive.

“Slow down!” I yelled at her, and tried to downshift. The gear knob didn’t budge. I yanked at it anyway. The clutch pedal didn’t respond, either, even when I jammed it to the floor. Ditto, brakes. In desperation I yanked the emergency brake, but it flopped uselessly.

“If we slow down, you die,” Venna said. She sounded unnaturally calm. I was glad I was too busy to see her face. “So does Ashan.”

“News flash: If we don’t slow down I’m going to die, and ruin a perfectly beautiful car!” I shot back. I nearly bit my tongue off as the Camaro hit a patch of ice, tires broke traction, and the whole thing started going sideways with a vengeance. “Shit!” I’d heard somewhere that these days, that was most often a person’s last word. I didn’t want it to be mine, and I fought the skid, begging the car to find some traction.

It did. The tires caught, squealed, bit, and slewed us back in the opposite direction just in time to avoid an oncoming RV. I kept the Camaro off of the steep, narrow shoulder, sprayed gravel, and managed to point it in the right direction.

Another truck barreled past us, buffeting us in its wake. Busy road.

“Venna!” I yelled. “Plan B! Because plan A’s not working!”

The engine seized up again. It was catastrophic, a crunching grind of metal followed by the sound of parts coming off, breaking loose, and ripping apart everything in their path. Steam erupted in a white cloud from beneath the hood, and no amount of magical gas pedal pressing was going to get us moving again. Not unless Venna was one hell of a roadside mechanic.

The car lurched, clunking metal, and slowed drastically.

We coasted, moving more and more slowly, and I found a slightly wider spot on the shoulder that would double as an emergency breakdown lane, flipped the hazard lights, and hit the brakes-which, finally, worked.

The road, which had been choked with traffic a few seconds ago, seemed quiet now. The last eighteen-wheeler was disappearing over the ridge, grinding gears, and there didn’t seem to be anybody else in view. I was having trouble getting my breath, and I was shaking in reaction to the adrenaline rush.

“Venna, what the hell-” I began, but I didn’t even make it to the end of the sentence.

“Get down!” She reached over, grabbed my head, and forced me sideways across the seat, with the safety belt digging into my neck nearly to the choking point.

I forgot to complain about the discomfort of that, though, because I started to feel it, too. A disturbance in the aetheric, one even somebody like me, who was all but a novice, could feel.

There was a sound. I’m not sure what it was like, because there was nothing in my mind I could equate it to; it was a chaos of sharp snapping sounds, thunderous crashes, howls, screams…

Venna threw herself on top of me just before a wall of wind hit the car and flipped it, end over end, through the air.

I blacked out when the car slammed into the ground, which was probably lucky. When I woke up I was out of the wreck, lying on the cold gravel shoulder of the road, and there was a smoking heap of metal a dozen feet away that wasn’t immediately recognizable as anything like a motorized vehicle. Certainly not the lovely, gleaming car that I’d been driving. But I saw a glint of unblemished midnight blue paint, and felt a mournful stab of anguish. The poor Camaro wasn’t coming back from that with a little body work, even if there’d been a way to save the engine.

When I focused past the wreckage, I forgot to breathe, because the Camaro hadn’t taken the brunt of the brute-force attack…and it hadn’t exactly been a surgical strike. It was like a bomb made of air had exploded, and the Camaro had been ground zero. The indescribable sound I’d heard had been the howling wind slamming into old-growth trees and snapping them off their bases, or uprooting them completely to crash into their neighbors.

It was a veritable crop circle of downed trees.

I tried to sit up, and something in my back lodged a loud protest. I groaned, told it to shut up, and compromised by rolling over on my side. No sign of Venna or Ashan. No sign of anybody, actually. Just me, a bunch of killed trees, and the dead Camaro puffing black smoke into the empty sky.

“Venna?” My voice sounded thin. I tried again, but it didn’t work any better. Mindful of my back pain, I rolled to my hands and knees, then got to my feet. Gonna be sore in the morning, I thought crazily.

Somebody had destroyed almost a quarter mile of forest to try to kill me. Being sore was the least of my problems, and if Venna hadn’t acted as my Djinn air bag…

I wondered if Ashan was still in the twisted wreckage of the car.

“Venna?”

A car topped the ridge, heading toward the devastated area. No, a truck, an SUV, and there was another one behind it. It was moving slowly because of the debris, but steadily enough. I didn’t want any Good Samaritans right now; I wasn’t sure I could protect them against whatever had just put the unholy smackdown on me. No, actually I was sure…I was sure I couldn’t. My heart sank as I saw it was a family, and they slowed radically as they got close to the crash scene.

“Keep going!” I yelled as the father rolled down his window. I forced myself to get up to my hands and knees, then to my feet. I managed not to black out doing it. “I’m fine! Don’t stop; it’s not safe!”

He seemed like a nice enough guy, but he had kids in the back of his truck, and a wife who looked hugely pregnant, and I did not want their lives on my conscience. “I’ll call nine-one-one!” he yelled. I waved frantically, trying to shoo them on by sheer force of will, and it seemed to work.

He negotiated his way around the maze of downed trees and got the hell out.

I remembered there’d been a second SUV behind it, and turned to look.

It had stopped about fifty feet away-a large black SUV, tinted windows, very classy. I thought I saw something shimmer on the paint, and blinked, then went into the aetheric and saw a stylized sun symbol on the door not visible to the naked human eye. It was where an official seal would have been for a government vehicle.

Wardens.

I backed up out of the center of the road and looked around for some kind of cover, but of course there wasn’t any. I didn’t feel like cowering in a ditch, especially when they’d undoubtedly already spotted me. Maybe they’re friendly, I thought.

Yeah, and maybe the next Djinn I met was going to look just like Brad Pitt and grant me three wishes, too.

The SUV eased forward very slowly. It crunched to a stop a few dozen feet away and idled its engine. Nobody got out. I couldn’t see inside. I felt an odd sensation, as if every hair on my body were stirring-static electricity, maybe.

“Let’s get this over with,” I muttered. “What’re you going to do, stare me to death?”

The driver’s side of the SUV opened, and David got out. He looked fantastically good to me in that moment, and I let out a sigh of relief and took a step toward him…

And stopped, because there was no welcome in his face. Nothing but blank fury.

“David?”

I felt the energy gathering above me, and flung up a hand to catch it before it could form itself into a deadly strike. I wasn’t sure what he’d intended, but the devastation around me was proof that somebody had removed the safety switches on this game. I let the power bleed harmlessly off in a thousand smaller tendrils that manifested in gusts of wind, blowing my hair across my face, then switching directions and streaming it back like a flag.

“Give up,” David said flatly. “You don’t have a choice.”

“David, you don’t understand-”

This time I wasn’t quick enough to stop him. The aftermath of the lightning strike left me blinking, half-blind, concussed, and with an ache on my right side that felt suspiciously like first-degree burns. I smelled something burning, feared it was me, and rolled, trying to smother the flames.

When I writhed around to try to spot what David was doing, he was just…standing there. Watching me. I couldn’t read his expression, but he wasn’t exactly racing to my rescue.

There were other people climbing out of the SUV. I recognized only one of them: Lewis. My onetime savior looked like he was badly regretting that decision. I stared at him, trying to guess what he was thinking, but like David, he’d closed himself off.

Neither of them liked being here; that was all I could tell.

And both of them were more than prepared to kill.