Thin Air

FIFTEEN

It felt like too short a flight, since we spent it horizontal, naked, and blissful under silken covers, protected and secluded by a swirling bubble of opal energy. David’s body fit perfectly under my hands, as though it had been made to match me. In theory I was a virgin, but in practice, memory wasn’t a barrier to this at all. There wasn’t any pain, there wasn’t any hesitation, and there was certainly no trace of shame, no matter what I felt moved to do with him, or for him. It felt like the world had opened up to me for the first time, channeled through his lips, his hands, his firm, warm skin, the urgent and careful strength he used in every touch. There was a kind of fever-dream delirium to it, because surely real life wasn’t like this. Couldn’t be like this. If it was, how had I ever gotten out of his bed?

If he was using any kind of Djinn magic, I was all for the practice. Practice, practice, practice.

As we lay in a dreamy, disheveled state of paradise, twisted together in the sheets, I traced letters on his chest like a lovesick kid. “Do you know what I’m writing?” I asked, and had a sudden dizzying idea that he’d seen lovers play that game back when writing was still in hieroglyphics. Or cuneiform.

“Tell me,” he whispered, and pressed his lips to a particularly sensitive spot at my temple. I shivered.

“I…L…O…V…E…”

“Chocolate,” he said. “Fast cars. Dangerously expensive shoes.”

I drew a single letter-U.

He didn’t speak. He traced with one warm finger the spot on my temple he’d kissed, drawing something that was more abstract than letters, more direct.

“You don’t have to stay with me,” he said. “It’s true that once Djinn let ourselves…feel things like this, we can’t turn it off. But we can turn away. And I would. If you asked.”

I put my head down on his chest. He might not have been human, but his body felt that way. His heart thumped gently under my hand, and I felt the elastic movement of his lungs. His arms went around me and cradled me there.

“Venna said this makes you weak,” I said. “Does it?”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“I do. I will. Does it?”

I felt his sigh stir the damp hair around my forehead. “I think the more connection the Djinn have to the human world, the better off we all are,” he said. “Personally. Politically. In every way. So, no. It’s a different kind of strength; that’s all. I just have to make them believe it.”

“But the Old Ones won’t. Like Venna.”

“Not your problem,” he said in a gentle but subject-is-closed kind of way. “Life over on the Djinn side of things isn’t any more predictable than it is on the human side. We only seem stable because we don’t let the kids see the grown-ups fight.”

I laughed, then fell silent. I never wanted to move. Never wanted to arrive. I wanted this breathlessly perfect time to simply freeze.

But I heard the engines change pitch, and David’s hand stroked gently down my spine. “We’re descending,” he said.

“If you mean we’re going down, I could make some jokes.”

“Stop.” There was a bright edge of laughter in the word, though. I’d made a Djinn laugh. That was…an accomplishment. “Time to get serious.”

“This isn’t serious? Because I kind of thought-”

“Stop,” he said again, this time more soberly. “You need to know what’s going to happen when we land.”

I acknowledged that with a single nod, not raising my head.

“We’ll be met by another Djinn. Rahel. She’s already waiting. She’ll meet you there and guide you to Seacasket. She’s been watching, but she says there’s no sign of the Demon yet. We may have guessed wrong.”

I closed my eyes and reached for that strange vibration I’d felt when I’d been in Kevin’s mind. It was still there, and getting stronger. “No, I don’t think so. I think she’s there, or she’s close. David-what the hell is in Seacasket?”

And he told me about the Fire Oracle. Like Imara, in Sedona, it was a higher order of Djinn, a kind of living embodiment of one of the three major powers. The Djinn revered it, though few of them could actually communicate with it.

By the time he was finished, he’d silently urged me to sit up, and he’d handed me my clothes. They felt wrong, awkward against my skin. It occurred to me, as I fastened the last button on my shirt, that dressing must be a lot faster as a Djinn. I hadn’t even seen him put on his pants, but he was fully clothed.

“You expecting trouble with the Oracle?” I asked.

“No.”

“Well, you sent for Rahel as backup…”

“About that.” He took in a breath and let it out slowly. “I’m not going with you.”

That set up a cold, liquid sensation in my stomach. “You’re…what?”

“There’s something I have to do,” he said. “It’s important. I’ll join you when I can. Rahel won’t abandon you.”

“Venna did. And you’re about to.” That was blunt, but I was feeling a little bit peeved. You didn’t do the things we’d done together and just split up, did you? I wanted him with me.

Always.

“Jo.” He squeezed my hand. “Trust me.”

Couldn’t argue with that, although I wanted to.

The pilot’s cheerful voice came on to tell us to put our tray tables and flight attendants in the upright position, and the opal shield faded around us. The bed became seats, and we were back to reality. It hadn’t been a dream. My whole body was relaxed, languorous with warmth, deliciously sore.

“I love you,” David said. He said it quietly, without any drama, as if it were part of normal conversation. Which maybe it was, for us. Or could be. “No matter how this goes, that doesn’t change.”

I closed my eyes as the plane began a terrifying, jerky descent toward New Jersey.

He stayed with me until we touched down on the tarmac, but by the time I opened my eyes again, my hand was empty of his, and David’s seat was vacant.

He was gone. We were on our own.

The Demon was in Seacasket. Somewhere. I could feel that noise in my head, like subtle static on a channel I’d never known my radio had received before.

The process of shuttling my little raiding party from planeside to Seacasket wasn’t short, but it was fairly efficient; the Wardens, it seemed, excelled in logistics. That meant a passenger van, complete with communications gear and a hotline that Lewis immediately used to chat with somebody in an office. He hadn’t commented on David’s disappearance, which seemed odd to me until I realized that he probably knew where David had gone, and why.

Or maybe he was just distracted by Rahel, who’d shown up in the van without preamble or introduction, scaring the holy crap out of at least some of the Wardens, including Paul, who’d nearly jumped out of his seat. “Post-traumatic fucking stress,” he’d growled at me, and thumped down hard. “Last time a Djinn popped in on me like that, she was trying to rip my head off.”

Rahel raised one sharp eyebrow, elegant and amused. “I can’t imagine why,” she said coolly. She was in neon orange today, a beautifully tailored pantsuit with a tangerine sheer top layered over neon yellow. Matching fingernails that looked sharp enough to slice paper. She’d jazzed up her multitude of black braids with tiny gold bells and glowing orange beads, and she gave off a very faint chime when she moved. “You’ve treated the Djinn so well during your partnership with us, Warden.”

“Hey. This particular Djinn wasn’t trying to kill the institution.”

They exchanged the kind of look reserved for respected adversaries, and went to their separate corners, metaphorically. In actuality, the van wasn’t that big.

“I should help the driver,” Rahel said, and moved up a row to lean over to touch him on the shoulder. She didn’t speak, though, that I could see. I wondered what kind of “help” she was providing, and decided that maybe sometimes it was just better not to ask.

“It’s the town,” Lewis said, following my gaze. “I’ve tried to send Wardens here for more than six months. They never make it within twenty miles before they turn around.”

“That bad?” I asked.

“No. They just forget where they’re going. It’s part of the protections the Djinn put in place ages ago.” He nodded toward Rahel. “She’s navigating for him.”

The closer we got, the stranger the weather seemed. It had been cold and windy in Newark, with that chilly, damp edge that could only mean snow on the way. But as we moved toward Seacasket, everything went quiet, smooth as glass. Like weather simply didn’t exist, or was artificially flattened out to some even balance.

I put my hand up against the van’s window. Cool, but not frigid outside. The clouds had swirled away, and the sunshine seemed brighter than it should. The fall colors were gorgeous, and the leaves fluttered in a very slight, decorative breeze.

We passed a sign that announced we were entering the historic town of Seacasket, and I felt a shudder go through every one of us-not a reaction to what we were reading, but something else. Some force dragging over us like a curtain.

Rahel continued to sit quietly, communing with the van driver, as we drove through town. I stared out at what looked like a normal place, normal buildings, normal people. It looked too normal, in fact, a Norman Rockwell perfection that existed all too rarely in reality. Kids in this town would be happy and well-adjusted, with just enough spice of harmless rebellion for flavor. Adults would be content and well-grounded, going about their productive and busy lives. Crime would be low. Lawns would be perennially neat.

Too good to be true, although it was true at the level most people lived.

But up on the aetheric, it was different. There was a kind of illumination to everything that spun it just slightly toward the positive, and it was easier here than anywhere I’d ever been to move from the real world into Oversight-it happened in an effortless slide.

The veils were definitely thin here.

We parked on a main street next to what looked like the most picturesque town graveyard I’d ever seen, all gracefully sculpted willow trees, manicured grass, artfully aged tombstones. Ethereal. If I had to pick any place to get my bones planted, well, I could certainly do worse.

I tried not to think that it could happen sooner than I thought.

We filed out of the van onto the sidewalk, moved around in the Brownian motion of people who didn’t have any idea where they were going, and Rahel emerged last. She swept us with a look that clearly said, Hopeless, and turned to Lewis. “Perhaps you’d like to deploy them,” she said. “Unless you think they look less suspicious this way.”

I covered a snort of laughter with a cough.

“It’s Joanne’s show,” he said, which made the laugh on me. “We’re here for muscle, not brains.”

I smiled thinly. He smiled back in a way that made me paranoid about just how solid David’s privacy bubble had been on the plane. Surely I was imagining things.

Dear God, let me be imagining things.

“Spread out,” I said. “Rahel, Lewis, maybe you should each take a corner. The rest of you, find someplace to blend.”

There was a general shuffle, and then people broke up to assume their chosen locations. Except for Lewis, who was waiting for something else from me, and Rahel, who just wasn’t going to be given orders by some mere human anyway.

“Where are you going?” Lewis asked. I nodded at the open gates of the cemetery.

“I need to go in there,” I said. “Right?”

He exchanged a glance with Rahel, who inclined her head silently.

“I’ve been here before,” I said. “The other me, she remembers everything, including how to reach the Oracle.”

That made some fierce golden fire light up in Rahel’s eyes, and she looked hard all of a sudden. Cutting edges and slicing angles.

“Is the Demon here?” she asked. “Inside?”

I shook my head. “Not yet. At least, I don’t think so. It doesn’t feel that specific. But she’s got to be close.”

My own voice said, from right behind me, “She is close,” and something hit me with stunning force. I was tossed forward and collided with the stately brick wall. I somehow managed to get my arms in front of me, which resulted in some bad bruises but no broken bones, and tried to summon powers to fight.

I had nothing. It was the same eerie, dead flatness, so far as access to power went, that I’d experienced in Sedona when I’d tried to fight Ashan. Oh, boy. Not so good, because although my powers were on the wane, my evil twin’s supernatural abilities weren’t.

Because, of course, she was supernatural. Like the Djinn. It was in whatever passed for her DNA.

Well, one thing she wasn’t, was immune to a punch.

Lewis stepped up and gave her a solid right cross, snapping her head back with real violence. But even as she staggered backward, I heard Rahel scream, “Lewis, no!” and saw that Evil Twin, who looked more like me than I did with her glossy, sleek hair and vibrant, glittering eyes and perfect skin, had grabbed hold of his wrist.

She yanked him forward, body-to-body, and met his eyes with hers, staring deep.

Rahel paused in the act of moving toward them. I shook the stars and explosions out of my head, trying to see what the hell was happening, and felt Lewis doing the impossible: pulling power in a place where power was locked off tight. Seacasket was a town in the aetheric equivalent of an airless, vacuum-sealed iron vault.

And he was ripping the vault door off its metaphorical hinges, as if it were nothing.

I’d never fully appreciated what Lewis was, and what he could do, until that moment. He wanted her to let him go, and she was either going to do it or be blasted into so many tiny pieces that even a Demon would have a hard time surviving it.

And then I realized why he was reacting so violently. Granted, he wouldn’t want her hands on him, but what he was doing was far, far beyond merely trying to get loose from her hold. No, he was fighting to save himself, because she was trying to take him over, the way she’d grabbed Cherise and Kevin and cored them out to insert her own will, power, and thoughts.

If she could do that to Lewis…

Rahel understood what was happening, but she didn’t act. Perhaps she couldn’t here in this place. The power that Lewis was pulling into himself, using as a shield, was absolutely stunning in its intensity, as if the entire Earth were rising up through him in his defense.

And still the Demon was eating right through.

There was a slipping sensation under my feet. I can’t describe it any more accurately; it wasn’t an earthquake, because the ground itself didn’t shift. Not a tremor. Not a shudder of any kind.

And yet, something moved.

“No,” Rahel breathed, stricken, and I saw her make some kind of decision.

She broke out of her paralysis, crossed the few steps, and grabbed E.T. by her shiny supernatural hair. For her part, my evil twin wasn’t going down easy; she snarled and twisted around to backhand Rahel, but she didn’t let go of Lewis to do it. His eyes were closed, his face unnaturally still, as if he were in tranquil meditation. I’d seen this before. I could almost remember…

When Rahel lunged for her again, my doppelgänger did something that blurred in this reality, blazed up in the aetheric, and slammed the heel of her palm into Rahel’s chest.

Her hand kept going deep into Rahel’s flesh and bone, and I saw a flood of what looked like blue sparks shoot down the Demon’s arm disappearing within Rahel’s body. Rahel’s mouth opened in a soundless scream, and I saw the shadowy presence of her on the aetheric turn smoke gray, then a poisonous shade of pale blue.

Could she possess Rahel?

As the Demon pulled her hand out of Rahel’s chest, a flood of tiny blue sparkles followed, foaming over Rahel’s body in a matter of seconds.

She convulsed and went down. It looked…Oh, God. It looked as if she were melting.

Lewis was still fighting, but whatever power he was using was dangerous in the extreme. I could feel that in the unsteady pitch and wave of the ground-no, not the ground, I realized, because the actual soil wasn’t moving. This was something else.

A stray metal button on the sidewalk rattled, rolled, and suddenly flew straight up in the air to impact a metal street sign. Which was bending as if an invisible wind were pulling at it.

Something was going badly wrong with the Earth’s magnetic field. Whatever power Lewis was using was unbalancing it, and although I had no idea what that meant, it just could not be good.

The other Wardens were converging on the spot, but nobody could do much-I saw Paul running to grab Lewis and bodychecked him on the way. “No!” I yelled. “She’ll take you! Don’t touch either one of them!”

“We can’t just stand here!” he screamed back at me. I heard the wail of police cars a few blocks over, and realized with a cold start that the rest of Seacasket, this Norman Rockwell town with a touch of the Gothic, would have just seen a bunch of strangers pile out of a van and some kind of fight. They couldn’t see or feel what was happening all around them, unless they knew where to look.

The Wardens knew, but we couldn’t act.

I felt a displacement of air, heard a faint pop, and looked around to see Venna standing there. She didn’t even glance toward me; she ran to Rahel, scooped her up, and vanished midstep. Taking her somewhere she could be helped, I hoped, but I couldn’t know.

“Now would be a really good time,” I muttered in the general direction of David, hoping he could hear me, but no miracles arrived to scoop me up.

I was going to have to make my miracles myself.

“Hey,” I said. I kept my voice as normal as possible as I stepped away from Paul and began moving toward the Demon and Lewis. “Hey, you. Bitch. You don’t really want him, do you? You just want a big hole ripped open so you can get home. Or bring in a few friends. Whichever.”

She glanced sharply at me, and as our eyes locked I felt that balance under my feet shift again. Violently. Oh, man. It wasn’t just Lewis who was causing this.

It was me. Both of me. We were a destabilizing influence here.

“I’ll do it,” I said. “One tunnel into the void, coming up. Just back off and let him go.”

“Why should I?” she asked. Reasonable question, delivered in the same reasonable tone I was using. “This way he can’t act against me.”

“This way the two of you will end up ripping the place in half, not opening up a doorway. Not good for either one of you. Come on. I know you like this planet. It’d be a shame to ruin it for everybody.”

She laughed. My laugh. “If you want him, I’ll trade,” she said. “Come here.”

The last thing in the world I wanted was to do it, but I didn’t see much of an alternative. Of course, she might be lying, but I wasn’t a pushover, and if she wanted to hollow me out or kill me, I’d demand a lot of her attention.

And Lewis would break free.

“Don’t you do it,” Paul was muttering at me. “Don’t you fucking dare. I’ll kill you.”

“Line forms to the right.” I smiled at him, just a little, and then walked over to my evil twin.

The static in my head was now white noise, blotting out thought, erasing everything but instinct.

I put my hand over hers, where it held Lewis, and pulled it away.

The second the contact broke, Lewis collapsed. Paul, Kevin, and the other Wardens dashed in and did a combat-style drag on him, all the way to the corner, where the van pulled up. Paul threw Lewis inside, slapped the side of the van, and it sped away.

Clearly Paul wasn’t taking any chances.

Blackness smothered me, thick and more painfully intense than ever before. I barely even noticed, though, because now that I was holding her hand, I saw a network of lights flaring inside of her, rich and complex, like a bright snarled ball that sparked in millions of colors.

Oh.

That was mine. My memories. My lost experience. My past.

And I reached in and took it. Or tried to. I grabbed one end of the memory chain, the Demon grabbed the other, and the race was on.

Light and shadow. Infant memories, indefinite and barely there. Faces. Noise. Colors. Perceptions sharpening as I aged. I sped through it, imprinting it on the area that was dark inside of my own head. I didn’t need training for this; there was only one place this stuff could go, and in only one order. Memory, for me, was a spool, and I unwound it faster and faster, flickering images and impressions that I could examine later, when I got time… My mother crying. Sarah. Disneyland. A storm building, breaking, finding its perfect mate inside of me.

Childhood, so many rich moments, so many terrible things. I aged, changed; the world shifted with me and around me. Boys. Boyfriends. Heartbreak. Always the weather, my perfect enemy, hunting an opportunity to betray and destroy.

Power. Purpose. Training. Princeton.

A younger Lewis taking off my clothes in a basement laboratory, introducing me to a whole new level of pleasure and intensity.

Glass shattering with the force of our power combining as our bodies did.

Lewis gone, spirited away. My life consumed with work, achievement, ambition.

Bad Bob. A Djinn holding me down, choking me with a Demon Mark, forcing me to face my own fears and mortality at the same time. Bad Bob died; I lived, crawling away from the wreckage of the fight.

A shattered Djinn bottle. Bad Bob’s slave freed. My quest for Lewis. Meeting a stranger on the road, a vagabond named David I couldn’t quite resist.

A blur of events that I couldn’t even separate, ending in more destruction, more death, my own transformations.

Blue sparklies. A hole in the aetheric. Demons. The fate of the world, again, on our shoulders.

Human again. Faces flashed by at an increasing rate, because I could feel the tension of the Demon on the end of the memory chain, pulling back, and I couldn’t stop now to even try to comprehend what I was seeing.

A glimpse of Jonathan, ageless and cynical and passionate about what he loved.

Fighting for my survival in a flood, and rising in the arms of my lover above the foaming, deadly currents.

The Mother of Storms taking notice, at last, and coming to end the cycle of violence.

Imara conceived. Imara born. Imara-

The memory chain shattered into a million crystalline fragments, and I lost my hold.

It all started to go away. I was losing it. No!

The Demon didn’t waste time with my trauma. She cut to the chase and plunged her hand into my chest, just like she’d done with Rahel.

If she couldn’t be me, then she was going to damn sure make sure I wouldn’t be, either.

The sensation that raced through me was horrifying. I’d been through bad stuff; this was beyond. I’d felt it through Kevin’s memories, and it was even worse this time, because there was no escape.

She simply bored her way through me, ripping apart whatever she didn’t need, and I felt my connection to the aetheric suddenly cutting off. It was like the sun disappearing during a total eclipse, and something in me screamed, trapped and terrified and suffering.

It couldn’t live that way for long. I couldn’t.

Although I felt like there was less and less of an I. It was draining away from me, like sand out of a broken glass, slow but inexorable. I was losing my childhood again. My mother’s face was fading away. I lost the memory of my first date, and the nervous excitement of buying my prom dress, and the scratchy elegance of the corsage my date had bought me. I lost the memory of his name, too.

Evil Twin didn’t care about my troubles. She let go of me, but I didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Hair blew across my face, obscuring my view of her, but it didn’t matter. She could see. I didn’t need to, because now I was fully, completely under her control. I couldn’t fight, because I needed every ounce of strength to slow down the steady erosion of my past.

She was simply going to drain me dry, and then I’d be gone. Erased. Finito.

The Wardens were circling us, trying to decide which one was the good Joanne, which the bad; the problem was that the deck was now stacked, and they were screwed no matter what choice they made. Kevin and Cherise were hanging back, watching with identical expressions of sick horror; more than anyone else, they understood what was happening to me. Not that they could help me.

Not that anyone could.

The Demon accessed my Warden powers, blew a hole through the peaceful, artificial shield of Seacasket, and accessed a huge draw of power from the aetheric. She used me to do it. My control shattered, and the memories dissolved faster.

I lost my college years. I lost Lewis, swept away in a tide of oncoming darkness.

I felt the clouds gathering overhead, a soft gray pressure turning rapidly dark, and under the Demon’s direction I rubbed air molecules together, creating friction, heat, driving the engine of a tiny but incredibly concentrated storm. Not my choice, but definitely my fault. The storm broke with a snap of lightning, and drenched a square-block area of sidewalk, catching nearly every Warden in its path.

As soon as they were standing in a thin layer of water, she forced me to slam a lightning bolt down and electrified the whole block.

The Wardens went down like ten pins in a bowling alley, many stunned, a few maybe even dead. I wanted to stop. I wanted to scream.

Instead I turned and walked, under the Demon’s control, into the gates of the Seacasket cemetery.

“There used to be guards here,” E.T. said, as if we hadn’t just lashed out against everything I knew and loved. As if I weren’t dying as quickly as she was coming alive. We were strolling along the path like two sisters, hand in hand. “There were Djinn guards. You remember?”

It was a new memory, not yet pulled apart by the ongoing destruction. I remembered. They’d nearly killed me and Imara. Ashan had been here, too.

“I won’t let you win,” I said. I couldn’t stop her, and she knew it, but she at least allowed me the fantasy of saying it. “You don’t have to do it this way. If you want to go home, we’ll find a way to send you home. But you’re not killing the Oracle. You’re not ripping open any doorways. If I don’t stop you, the Wardens will. The Djinn will.”

“And yet,” she said, with the same cockeyed smile I’d felt on my own face so often, “that’s exactly what I’m going to do. And you’re going to help me, until I don’t need you anymore.”

Gravel crunched under my shoes. Part of me was shrieking in agony, battering at the container that she’d stuffed it into. “I’m fading,” I said. I couldn’t even work up emotion about it, because she controlled my body, even down to the endocrine level. “No good to you if I’m dead. Slow down.”

“You’ll last long enough.” She shrugged. “I need you, because I won’t be able to open the door, not alone-the Oracle will know me for what I really am. I could have used the combined power of the Wardens to blast it open, but you’ve ruined that for me. Now only a Djinn will do-or someone who’s been one before. You.”

We passed some leaning, picturesque headstones. A cracked marble bench. A tree that showed evidence of having sustained some fight damage in the past.

And we arrived at the mausoleum.

“No,” I said. My body couldn’t hear me. It was following a completely different set of instructions as my arm lifted, touched the marble door, and then reached for the inset metal knob. “No. No, no, no!” Memories flared, burned, and dissolved. Bad Bob. Storms. My car spinning out on the road. The Djinn-hot flash of David’s eyes. Lying in his arms, gasping.

My time was running out.

I traced the roots of my power to where E.T. had placed a black stranglehold on them. I couldn’t free myself-no chance in hell-but I could focus on one tiny opening. It was like breaking the pinkie finger of someone choking you-possible, but of doubtful use.

I did it anyway. I focused everything I had, all three forms of power, through the lens of my desperation, and came out with a white-hot stream of pure energy that burned a hole straight through the black cage holding me prisoner.

Something reached through to me. It came in a slow, warm flood, like syrup…the thick, condensed power of the Earth. It was trying to reach me.

Not enough. I couldn’t use it; the opening was too narrow, the cage too confining. No leverage. I screamed inside, trying to cling to the last memories as my hand turned the doorknob, and I fell into another place, one with no up, no down, just stone and an ever-blazing fire too hot and brilliant to approach…

And E.T. was able to come through, too, because she was holding my hand, and physically she was identical.

Part of the cage in my mind cracked. I ripped at it with everything I had, frantically widening the gap, and the power poured in like water through a hole below the waterline. Filling me up.

She felt the change, and she tried to pull away, but I had control of at least part of myself now, and I body-slammed her down on the rocks with one hand around her throat.

“No,” I gritted out. “No, you don’t. You can’t have my life!”

Heat rose up through my body. A wave of fast, tingling fire, a cooling whisper of air and water, then the slow, whispering power of the Earth, the gift of my daughter, Imara. I sensed her now, calm and utterly focused. It’s okay, Mom, she whispered to me. We can do this. The three of us. Just hold her still. That’s all you have to do.

The three of us? Was she counting Evil Twin?

No. She wasn’t. I blinked sweat out of my eyes and looked up as the door opened again, and a Djinn formed out of the darkness, moving fast. His olive-drab coat swirled around him, and he blazed like new morning here. Djinn were children of fire, more than any other element, and he burned-oh, God-he burned so magnificently bright.

David took a bottle out of his coat pocket-a thick, ancient, cloudy thing, sealed thickly with wax and dust. A complicated knot of ribbons and more wax dangled from the neck of it. I recognized it. He’d nearly popped the cap on that thing back in the forest, when he’d thought I was the Demon.

There were more Djinn with him, stepping out of the walls all around us. Silent, powerful, angry. Merciless.

With the last core of my being, I recognized one of the newcomers standing near me-pale, silver hair, eyes as vicious as a wolverine’s. Oh, he hated me. Not the Demon…me.

Ashan. Still human.

A little girl in a blue dress and white pinafore stood next to him, her hands folded primly in front of her. Blue eyes shimmering with ageless power.

“Hurry,” she said to David. “If you want to save her, yield.”

David faced Ashan. I was caught between the two of them, with the Demon writhing around and trying like hell to get me off of her. Luckily, her ability didn’t include superstrength, and she’d lost her hold over me. Still, all she had to do was wait. I was losing myself fast. She was draining it all away…

David said, “I yield.” He said it to Venna. To Ashan.

And then I saw a swirl of fire erupt out of the pit, wrap around him, and I heard him scream.

“David!” I couldn’t let go. If I did, the Demon would destroy us. “David, no!”

Whatever was happening, it was ripping him apart. I could hear the agony, feel it resonating in the stone all around me. I could hear a distant groan, as if the whole world had felt it, too.

And then the flames leaped from David over my head to engulf Ashan.

And he burned. Venna didn’t move, even as he shrieked in agony, but I saw perfect crystal tears trickling slowly down her cheeks.

“What are you doing?” I screamed at her. She was watching Ashan, watching the tornado of fire that he’d become.

I felt some fundamental balance shift, and in an instant the flames just…went out.

David went to his knees, gasping. Ashan…

Ashan was perfect. Hard as alabaster, inhuman and burning with power.

Oh, my God. What had David done?

He looked up, eyes burning copper-bright. “What are you waiting for?” David gasped. He was fire to Ashan’s cold, frozen steel, and the two of them looked inhumanly strong as they glared at each other. I could feel the violence gathering in the air. “You’ve got what you wanted. Keep your promise, you bastard.”

Ashan’s smile was as thin as a paper cut. “Perhaps I’ll wait a bit.”

David’s voice dropped almost to a whisper. “Now,” he said. “You’ve cost me enough. We have a truce. Don’t test me.”

Ashan’s smile disappeared, not that it was ever real to begin with, and the two of them locked stares in that hot, airless place, with the eternal pale fire burning just steps away. This was a place of power, and it was full of very scary Djinn. I didn’t know what could happen, but it wouldn’t be good.

Venna said mildly, “Ashan. You did promise.” She said it with no particular emphasis, but it sent shivers down my spine. Venna-was that her name? I no longer knew her, or the black-skinned Djinn with cornrowed hair, staring at me with burning golden eyes. Or the well-dressed one with the chestnut brown hair, cold and elegant. There were dozens of them, and they were all riveted on me, on the Demon, or on Ashan and David.

Ashan abruptly reached out and put his hand on the back of my neck. I yelped at the cold shock against my sweating, hot skin, and then felt the ice sink in like winter.

“This will hurt,” he said. That wasn’t a warning. That was a promise.

And then I came apart, screaming, in a red haze, and he rebuilt me, cell by cell, neuron by neuron, in a brutal, fast, cruel process, and I felt every single nanosecond of it like an eternity.

My memories returned with it.

Every one.

I heard the Demon cry out and knew that what she’d stolen was being ripped away, leaving her the shell, making her the excess baggage of the universe, and even though I hated her for what she’d done (and tried to do), I couldn’t help but hate Ashan more.

Because he was enjoying it.

He let go and stepped away, wiping his hand fastidiously against his gray coat. “That fulfills our bargain,” he said, and met David’s eyes with absolute menace. “Finish this, or I’ll finish you.”

And then he just…left. And half the Djinn disappeared with him. The ones who were left seemed to take a collective breath, as if they’d been dreading the outcome of all that, and even David looked a little relieved. Just for a second.

Then he crouched down to eye level with me and touched my face. “Trust me?”

I nodded, but I really didn’t have a choice. And if he had to destroy me to end this, well…then I knew he’d do whatever was necessary. Because David had responsibilities that were greater than his love for me.

I love you. No matter how this goes, that doesn’t change. His words to me on the plane, and they were echoing in the stark, primitive confines of this place. I couldn’t stay here much longer; the heat was suffocating, and the flames blazed hotter every moment, sucking moisture out of my fragile human body, flirting with igniting my hair into a fireball. I didn’t have the time or concentration to spare to protect myself, and I wasn’t sure, with this fire, that I’d be able to in any case.

I blinked sweat from my eyes and managed a smile. “Of course I trust you,” I said. “Do whatever you have to, but she can’t leave here. She can’t live.”

Evil Twin’s eyes widened, and she said in a surprisingly soft, vulnerable voice, “David, no. Please, no.” He hesitated for just a second. Long enough for her to continue. “I’ll leave if you’ll send me home. But please don’t kill me. I’m not like the other Demons you’ve destroyed-they didn’t know; they didn’t understand. I know what’s going to happen. Please, you can’t torture me like this!”

“You want me to send you home,” he repeated without inflection. And tears rolled out of her eyes, vanishing into steam in the superheated air. My skin was agonizingly painful, already beginning to cook.

“Please,” she said. “With this many Djinn you could do it. Open up a portal, then seal it. Then my blood won’t be on your hands.”

“No,” he agreed. “What would be on my hands would be the risk that you would come back, and this time you’d lead an army. That’s exactly what you’re planning, isn’t it?”

The tears cut off instantly, and the Demon’s voice hardened. “You’d do the same.”

“Trust me,” David said, “I’ve done far worse. And I’ve done it to people I loved.”

And he broke the seal from the bottle, opened it, pressed the heel of his hand to her jaw to pry apart her lips…and fed her a Demon.

I let go. It wasn’t conscious, just instinct; I felt the raw menace of the thing as it snaked its way out of the bottle, and I just had to get away from it in an awkward scramble. David’s face was like cast metal, no softness there, and no mercy. My doppelgänger was screaming, but it was too late; he held her down, slammed her mouth shut to lock the thing inside, and I watched as the Demon shed her human disguise in the extremity of her fear and rage.

The skin simply shredded into a mist of blood and tissue, and underneath red muscle hardened into black, crystalline shell. Insectile and unsettling.

Her eyes stayed blue. My eyes, and she defiantly focused them on me as she struggled to throw off David’s hold and expel the poison he’d just forced down her throat.

But not even the strongest Demon could fight Mother Nature-their Mother Nature, not mine. Theirs dictated that they hunted by territory, and they’d hunt each other if forced together, to the exclusion of other prey.

Two Demons, one body.

I watched them rip each other apart, screaming, into a black shredded mist, and didn’t realize I’d fallen down until David cradled me in his arms, partly shielding me from the heat. I was shaking all over, partly from dehydration, partly from the horror of what I’d seen. Partly from realizing that she’d just been destroyed by the same thing that had once killed me, and my mind had blocked out the details until Ashan had brought it all back.

A stream of blue fog poured from the mouth of the open bottle, and a Djinn formed out of the air and collapsed on his side on the floor, trembling. Wounded, haunted, hurt-but alive. The others closed protectively around and helped him rise.

David didn’t speak. He tossed the bottle to another Djinn-a tall, dark-skinned guy dressed in classic Arabian Nights costume, whose legs misted into fog about midthigh. I recognized him, complete to the one gold hoop earring. He’d once guarded Lewis’s house in Westchester. The Djinn set the open bottle on the floor and stepped away, and the black mist swirling above the remains of the Demon formed a vortex about the bottle.

It fought hard to stay out, but gradually it was pulled in, a steady stream of black fog condensing and rushing into the open mouth.

As soon as the last of it had vanished, the Djinn slammed the wax stopper back into the opening, tied the ribbons, and nodded to David. Who nodded back gravely.

The Djinn vanished, along with the bottle.

“Where’s he taking it?” I asked. My lips were dry and cracked, and my tongue felt like old paper. I didn’t recognize my own voice.

“Someplace safe,” David said, and frowned at me. “Let’s get you out of here.”

But when he opened the door of the mausoleum and we stepped out into the cool, soft air, we had a surprise.

The graveyard was full of Djinn. My first thought was, Wow, when he calls for backup, he calls for backup! But then I realized, with a sick twisting sensation in my guts, that David looked just as surprised as I did.

And then his gaze focused on something in the midst of that crowd of several hundred, and a path formed to let two people walk out of the center.

Venna, in her Alice costume.

And, holding her hand like a father taking his favored child for a stroll, Ashan.

David didn’t speak. Neither did Ashan nor Venna. I shifted my gaze back and forth, worried, because I could feel the battling tides of power and purpose all around us.

Finally David shook his head. “Let her leave,” he said. “She’s got no part in this.”

“But she does,” Venna said, and her hot blue eyes locked on mine. “It should never have gotten this far, David. You put the Oracle at risk.”

“Not the first time that’s happened, Ashan. Is it?” David was growing brighter, more Djinn-like, less human. I let go of his hand and took a step back. “Don’t pretend you’re the savior of the Djinn now. You were more than willing to destroy half of us and all of humanity to go back to being the favored of the Mother. Who gave you the right, you cold bastard? Just because you’re older?”

Ashan’s eyes had turned silver, and they looked like cold pools of mercury, still and uncaring. “Yes. Because I’m older,” he said. His voice resonated with assurance and cool, still energy. If other Djinn were fire, Ashan was pure air and water…nothing hot about him at all. You could drown in his deadly calm. “The Mother makes her own rules, but we choose how to obey them. I have a message for you, David.”

“You have a message.” David looked wary. Worried.

“Through the Air Oracle,” Ashan replied. “We will no longer be one. You may have the New Djinn, but I will command the Old Ones. Two conduits.”

David’s glow cooled. It was a slow process, but definite, and when it was over he stood there looking at Ashan with an odd, vulnerable intensity I didn’t really understand.

“I see,” he said. “You mean to destroy us.”

“No. I merely mean to protect those of my own kind,” Ashan said. “We will not fight you, nor the humans, unless attacked. If the Mother asks, we will answer. But we will have nothing to do with mortals. If you and yours choose to do so, that’s your affair, but no agreements you make will bind us.”

“You’re leaving,” David said, and frowned.

“Not quite yet,” Ashan said, and looked down at his feet. No, at the ground. And I felt that strange slip-sliding again, the rapid movement of the planet’s magnetic force. I heard a distant hum of metal trembling, and felt the metal parts on my clothing, like zippers, pull just slightly away from me. “The magnetic field is shifting.”

“It can’t be. It’s not time,” David said, but like Ashan he was staring down, and I sensed it was more of a pro forma objection than a real argument. “Jonathan had plans for handling this.”

“Yes,” Ashan said. “And we will need all of our strength to carry them out. Get the New Djinn. Gather the Wardens and the Ma’at. Get them here soon.”

“Here?” David asked. They were suddenly talking reasonably, two professionals approaching a problem. They’d blown past the personal-that Ashan was a conniving, evil bastard who’d killed my child and tried to kill me-and gone straight to the job at hand with dizzying speed. I couldn’t keep up with the shifting currents.

Venna sent me a pitying look that indicated she knew that feeling all too well.

“It should be here. Sacred space.” Ashan said, and tugged on Venna’s hand. She looked up at him and smiled, and that smile was pure pleasure. “This will be our place. Held by the Old Ones.”

“Here won’t work unless you release the shields that keep us from touching the aetheric,” I pointed out. “And…unless you’re willing to let us mere mortals enter.”

I got a glare. Ashan was angry at the reminder. Wardens weren’t meant to be here. It was, for him, an offense that one had ever stepped onto the sacred ground.

He wasn’t the only one, I sensed. There was a definite energy coming from the crowd, and it wasn’t good, and most of it was directed toward me. I suspected a lecture on tolerance and the evils of bigotry wasn’t really going to be all that well received, so I kept my mouth shut and let Ashan think about it.

“Yes,” he finally said. “We’ll lower them. Bring them here. Bring everyone here.”

David nodded, took my hand, and walked me through the crowd of Djinn-who silently moved aside, although some of them, staring at me, looked like they were holding ancient grudges. I was the Wardens personified, at the moment, and burning in effigy was a tradition going back to when my people were just a gleam in Mother Earth’s eye.

I held my silence until we reached the cemetery gates. Miraculously, the Djinn held their peace. I couldn’t tell that David was worried until we reached the relative safety outside on the sidewalk, where the other Wardens were clustered around, some still shaking off the stun effects, and then he let out a breath that told me everything about how he’d been feeling.

“What the hell was that?” I asked. He didn’t meet my eyes.

“That was a coup,” he said, “and Ashan has effectively been declared the leader of more than half of the Djinn. The Old Ones outnumber my…I guess you’d call it my generation-and they’re more powerful. When Jonathan was in charge that balance of power evened out, but I’m not Jonathan.” He shook his head slowly. “Not even close. I don’t know what it will mean.”

I wanted to ask him harder questions, but the Wardens weren’t letting us have a moment; everybody was talking at once. Paul had grabbed my arm and was trying to hustle me to the van, Kevin and Cherise were blabbing at us, someone was urgently talking on the cell phone, and David…well, David clearly was willing to let me get dragged off if it meant he didn’t have to undergo twenty questions.

I felt the slippery sensation again, heard Paul saying something about magnetic surges as polarities threatened to shift, and the cell phone that the Warden-I knew him now, his name was Otombo; he was a Fire Warden out of Arkansas-the cell phone suddenly let out an earsplitting shriek and exploded into sparks. Otombo winced and dropped the useless piece of equipment. It let out a thin, whiny sound of electronic distress, and a tiny wisp of smoke curled up from the speaker.

“Cell phones off! Off!” Paul bellowed. He was right; it was the only way to save them. People patted their pockets, a couple of women pawed through purses, and most got their phones shut off before anything happened. I heard the electronic wail from another quarter, and a French-Canadian curse. Oops.

“What the hell is going on around here?” Paul demanded-from me, of course. I looked over my shoulder at David. He was staring back at the cemetery, no particular expression on his face.

I started to repeat the question-there had been a lot of cross talk, with the other Wardens all basically asking each other the same thing-but there was no need. David said, “How much do you know about magnetism?”

“Well, if you bang an iron tie-rod on a metal grate, you can make it a magnet,” I said. “I saw it on MacGyver.” And I was ridiculously pleased to be remembering it.

He spared me a glance. Not a patient one. “The magnetic field surrounding the Earth is moving,” he said. “Breaking into islands of polarity.”

Sam Otombo nodded. “Yes,” he agreed. He had a faint tropical accent, and his long, clever face was very serious. “The field has been concentrated as we know it, at the poles, for perhaps three quarters of a million years. But there is evidence that it has shifted before, completely flipped from north to south, and this begins with islands of magnetic polarity shift.” He nudged the remains of his cell phone with his foot. “There was speculation that it could affect some types of communications, global positioning satellites…”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You mean north is now south?”

“In some places, yes. I mean that if you looked at a compass needle right now, in this place, you probably wouldn’t see north,” Otombo corrected. “Anything but. The magnetic field is moving, but it may take hundreds, even thousands of years for it to settle again.”

I was completely lost. They hadn’t really covered this in weather school. “Is it dangerous?”

“Long-term, perhaps. We could have increased cosmic radiation. The magnetic field shields us from that at all but the most remote places on Earth.”

David nodded. “You’re right that it has happened before, sometimes as often as every few thousand years. But the Djinn and the Wardens have kept the system stable for millennia.”

“Until now,” I said. “Because we’re no longer working together to hold it. Right?”

“That’s why you have to bring them here, Jo,” he said. “Bring the Wardens. Bring the Ma’at. And hurry.”