Thin Air

TWO

We broke camp at dawn-well, Lewis broke camp, moving as if doing it were as normal as stumbling out of bed and making coffee. I mostly sat off to the side, huddled in his down jacket. Lewis had layered on all the clothes he had in the backpack-thermals next to his skin, and T-shirts, flannel, and sweaters over it.

He was going to die if he didn’t have a coat. I was still shivering, and I was practically certified for the arctic in the down jacket.

I made a halfhearted attempt to give it back.

“No,” he said, not even pausing. “Zip it up. You need to keep the core of your body warm.”

“But…you’re-”

“I’ll be fine. One thing about Earth Wardens: We’re not likely to die of the cold.” Maybe not, but his lips looked a little blue, and so did his fingernails. As I stared at his hands, he noticed, frowned at them, and dug a pair of insulated gloves from a zippered pocket in the backpack. He continued to break down the camp. I shoveled sand over the fire pit, smothering the embers, and looked around for something else to do. Nothing, really. I shoved my cold, aching fingers back into the pockets of the jacket.

There was still no sign of David. Lewis didn’t refer to his absence. Neither did I. Lewis rolled the sleeping bags into tight little coils, tied them off, and then broke down the tent into a small pouch and some short telescoping rods. It all went into the backpack. He handed me a bottle of water and a granola bar-no coffee-and I frowned at the bottle and shook it.

Frozen solid. “Um…”

“Melt it,” he said.

“What?”

“Melt the ice,” he said. “You’re a Weather Warden. Melt the ice.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. I remembered the world that David had shown me, but I couldn’t think how to apply that to the simple, practical problem in my hand.

Lewis let out a growl of frustration, took the bottle and held it in his hand for about two seconds, then handed it back.

It sloshed.

“How did you-”

“We don’t have time for lessons,” he interrupted. “Let’s move.”

“Um…shoes?”

He stopped in midstride and looked back at me. I was fully dressed down to the thermal socks, but those were rapidly getting muddy and damp.

“Shit,” he said, surprised. “I forgot all about-”

“I didn’t,” said a voice from behind me. I whirled to find David walking out of the trees, making a grand entrance that I instinctively knew must be standard procedure for a Djinn. He was holding a pair of hiking boots.

And a fresh pair of thermal socks.

And a backpack.

“Shopping,” he said, and handed everything over.

“Don’t suppose you bought a Jeep while you were out,” Lewis said.

“I can do a lot of things, but rearranging forest trails without attracting attention on the aetheric…”

“Rhetorical question.” Lewis kept not quite watching David, who’d picked up a stick and was idly poking it into the damp ground. “Any sign of trouble out there?” Which I supposed was a graceful way of asking if David had been off keeping watch, rather than brooding. Not that one precluded the other. I sat down on a fallen log, tugged off my muddied socks and put on fresh ones, then laced up the hiking boots. They fit perfectly.

“There’s snowfall two miles away,” David said. “Heavy. You’re keeping it to the south, I take it?”

“Trying,” Lewis said. “This whole region’s soaked with moisture. Sooner or later it’s going to start coming down. There’s only so far you can push the system before it starts pushing back, and the last thing I want is to start a winter storm while we’re trying to get out of here. How’s Mom, by the way?”

“Quiet.”

Mom? I debated it for a few seconds, then asked aloud. Both men turned to look at me as I tugged the laces tighter and knotted the right boot.

“Mother Earth,” Lewis said. “The primal intelligence of the planet. Mom. She’s been a little…unhappy lately.”

I tried to figure out if he was joking, and decided-rather grimly-that he wasn’t. Great. Wardens who could control all kinds of things. Spooky disappearing Djinn. And now the ground I was walking on had some kind of hidden intelligence.

Losing my memory was turning out to be a real education.

I tied off my left boot and stood up, shouldering my pack. David had balanced it well; it seemed to ride nicely, with no extra strain.

“I can take it if you get tired,” David said, walking past me.

I snorted. “I’m surprised you didn’t try to take it in the first place.”

“I know better,” he said. “When you want help, you’ll ask for it.”

We’d left the campsite and gone about a mile before I broached the question again. David was in front of me, Lewis ahead of him. It was as private as this was likely to get. “David? About last night…what I said…about children.”

No answer. He kept walking, long strides, following Lewis’s progress. I had to hurry to keep up.

“Is there a child?” I asked. My heart was hammering, and I didn’t think it was from the exercise. “Mine, yours, ours? What’s going on?”

“Not now.”

“Yeah, now. Look, the way you reacted-”

“I can’t talk about it now.”

“But-”

He turned, and I stumbled to a halt, suddenly aware of just how tall he was. He wasn’t especially broad, but I’d had my hands pressing against his chest, and I knew that there was muscle under that checked shirt. Plus, he’d thrown Lewis across the clearing like a plush toy.

“What do you want to know?” he asked, face taut, voice intense. “That we had a child? We did. Her name was Imara. She was part of our souls, Jo, and how do you think it feels for me to know that you don’t even recognize her name?”

He turned, olive coat belling in a gust of cold wind, and followed Lewis up the slope. Lewis had paused at the top, looking down at us.

He didn’t say anything, just plunged down the other side. I saved my breath and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other.

Imara. I kept repeating the name in my head, hoping for some kind of resonance, some spark of memory. I’d had a daughter, for God’s sake. How could I remember the brand name of the shoes I was wearing and not remember my own child? Not remember carrying her, or holding her, or…

Or how she’d died. Because even though nobody had said it, that was what everybody meant. Imara had been born, and Imara had died, and I had no memory at all of any part of it.

And of everything I’d lost, that was the piece that made me feel desperately, horribly incomplete.

Lewis led us through what I could only guess was an old-growth forest of the Great Northwest. Oregon, Washington-somewhere in there. He set a brutal pace, moving fast to keep his body heat up. We didn’t take breaks. When we finally stopped, I dropped my pack and staggered off into the woods to pee. When I came back, Lewis had another fire going, and he was wrapped in one of the unrolled sleeping bags, shivering.

His lips and eyelids had turned a delicate shade of lilac.

“Dammit, take the coat,” I demanded.

“No. I’ll be fine.”

“Ask David to get you a jacket, then! Hell, he brought me shoes!”

Lewis’s eyes flicked briefly past me, seeking out David, I was sure. “When I need one.”

“Unless you’re modeling the new fall line of lipstick, and this season’s color is Corpse Blue, you’d better damn well tell him to get you one now!”

“I didn’t know you cared.” Shaky sarcasm. He was still strong enough to be putting up a good front, but it was all marshmallow and foam peanuts underneath.

“I don’t. I care about getting stuck out here.” I didn’t move my eyes away from Lewis. “David, could you please get him a coat?” Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw David cross his arms and lean against a tree. The expression on his face might have been a smile.

“Of course,” he said, and misted away.

Lewis took in a deep breath, and coughed until I was afraid he was going to spit up a lung. I did what any medically inarticulate person would do; I rubbed and pounded his back. Which probably didn’t help at all, but he didn’t seem to mind. When he’d stopped coughing, he leaned over, breathing in shallow gasps, face a dirty gray.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked. “And don’t tell me you’re tired, or you’ve been up for three days, or whatever bullshit you’ve been shoveling at David.”

He pressed a hand to his ribs. “Took a little fall. Maybe you saw it.”

Oh, shit. David had thrown him across the clearing. Since he’d climbed up again, I hadn’t figured it was any big deal.

Wrong.

“Earth Wardens can’t heal themselves real well,” he said. “It’s coming along. Couple of broken ribs. Bit of a punctured lung. Nothing to alert the National Guard over.”

“Can’t David just, you know, swoop us out of here? To wherever he goes to buy retail?”

Lewis shook his head. His breathing was easing up a little. “Free Djinn-well, I guess they’re all Free Djinn now-can’t take humans along with them when they do that. The times they’ve tried it, the results haven’t been exactly encouraging.”

“Meaning?”

“Dead people.”

Great. So David could go in and out, but we had to hoof it. “What about a helicopter? Some kind of rescue service?”

“We’re still a pretty far hike from the closest place a helicopter can touch down. Believe me, I’ll call for help as soon as I can.”

“Why the hell not now? We’re stuck out here, you’ve got broken ribs, there’s snow coming…Even if they can’t land, maybe they can, you know, winch us up or something.”

“Trust me. We have to be very careful right now.” He looked vaguely apologetic. “It’s not about you. It’s about me.”

Ah. I remembered what he’d blurted out when he’d first found me. Listen, we’re in trouble. Bad trouble. We need you. Things have gone wrong. Like I was the go-to girl for that kind of thing. “What’s happened?” I asked.

“That’s the issue,” he said. “I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s an isolated issue, somebody who just doesn’t like me, or a genuine power grab within the Wardens’ organization. Until I know, you’re just going to have to bear with me.”

“And you want me to trust you?” I shook my head in admiration. “Unbelievable. So who’s after you?”

“If I gave you a name, would you recognize it?” He sounded a little more snappy about that than was strictly necessary, really, and immediately looked sorry about it. “I told you. Trust me.”

“If I didn’t trust you, I’d be running like hell right now,” I pointed out. “It’s not like you could really stop me.”

“Don’t kid yourself. I’ve got skills.”

“Apparently,” I said. “Since you’re not dead yet, which with your winning personality amazes me. I want to kill you, and I barely know you.”

“Funny. I’ve said the same thing about you, once upon a time.” He started to laugh. It turned into more coughing, alarmingly. “Damn. You know, I never get hurt unless I’m hanging around with you.”

“If you’d just admitted you were hurt in the first place, maybe you wouldn’t be this bad off right now. And what’s that about, Mr. I Don’t Need a Coat Because I’m the Tough-assed Mountain Man? Is this some kind of pissing contest with David?” No answer. Lewis pretended to be concentrating on the fire. “It is. David wasn’t going to do you any favors unless you asked, and you weren’t going to ask. Right? Jesus. Men.”

“Shhhh,” he said, and sat up.

“What?”

He shushed me again, urgently, and slipped the sleeping bag away from his shoulders. He reached in the backpack next to him and came up with the last thing, somehow, I expected to see in his hand.

Well, okay, not the very last. That would have been…a tulip or a Barbie doll or something. But a matte black semiautomatic pistol was pretty far down the list.

“What are you doing?” I kept it to an urgent hiss. He shushed me again, silently this time, and mimed for me to stay put while he got up. Oh, no way. I didn’t remember anything about who I was, but I doubted it was in my general character to play it safe, especially when my currently assigned Sir Galahad had a punctured lung and a fifty-fifty chance of keeling over at any moment.

I got up, too, and whirled around at a sudden crash of brush to my right. If it was David, he was making an especially dramatic entrance this time…

It wasn’t David.

There were two people stepping out of the underbrush. Naturally, I didn’t recognize either one of them, but clearly Lewis did, because he turned and aimed the gun at the skinny, greasy young man first, then shifted his aim to split the distance between the boy and the blond little Venus with him, dressed in blue jeans and a hot magenta sweater.

“Whoa,” the girl said, and her hands shot up above her shoulders. The boy just glared. “Easy, Wyatt Earp.”

“Don’t move,” Lewis said. He was absolutely steady, but I could see the sweat glistening on his face. “What are you two doing here? How’d you get here?”

“We were looking for you,” the boy said. “Obviously.”

“We’re trying to help,” the girl put in. She tried a nervous smile, but she kept darting glances at me, as if she couldn’t quite believe her eyes. “Jo? You okay?”

She didn’t look familiar, but I was getting used to that. I gave Lewis a doubtful look; he wasn’t lowering the gun. “I’m going to ask again,” he said. “How’d you get here? Because the two of you were supposed to be in California, last I heard.”

“You need help.” The girl, again. She sounded young and earnest, and she looked it, too. Underdressed for the weather, and that bothered me. “Lewis, man, put the gun down. You know us!”

“Tell me how you got here.” He cocked the gun with a cold snick of metal.

“You’re crazy,” the boy said flatly. “Yo, Joanne, a little help?”

“Jo,” Lewis said, with an unsettling amount of calm, “he’s right, I do you need your help. I need you to move two steps to your left so that when I shoot these two you don’t slow down my bullets.”

I just stared at him, stunned. There was something cold and implacable in his eyes, and I just didn’t get it. These two didn’t look like dangerous desperadoes. The girl was just damn cute. Young, tanned, toned, beach-bunny perfect. If the boy was with her in a romantic sense, he was definitely dating outside of his weight class, because he was greasy, skinny, sullen, and generally unattractive, unless you went in for that sort of heroin-chic bad-boy vibe. Badass, but probably not bad.

Probably.

“Oh, come on. You really going to shoot me, Lewis?” the boy asked, and stuffed his hands into the pockets of the leather jacket he was wearing. “Because I don’t think you’ve got the stones.”

“Guess again.” Lewis’s aim didn’t waver.

The boy sneered. Really, openly sneered, which isn’t easy to do with a serious weapon aimed at you. “Please. I’m a Fire Warden. I can make sure that gun doesn’t work.”

“You forget,” Lewis said, “I’m a Fire Warden, too.” And he moved the gun about an inch to the left and pulled the trigger. The noise was deafening. I choked on the stench of burned cordite that wafted over me and yelped.

The boy hadn’t flinched. The bullet dug a fresh yellow hole into the tree next to him.

“Please don’t do that,” the girl said, and deliberately stepped out in front of the boy. “Look, we’re just here to help, okay? There’s no need for this.”

“Then tell me how you got here.”

She took a step toward him, hands outstretched. “We don’t have time for this.”

“Cherise, right?” he asked. “Don’t push it, Cherise. I will shoot you.”

“I think you would if you really thought I was dangerous,” she said. “But look at me. How can I be-”

Lewis was totally not above shooting the pretty girl.

And he did, three times, right in the center of her fluffy hot pink sweater.

Cherise rocked back, lips parting, and stared down at the damage to her sweater for a few seconds, and then looked back up at Lewis. “You bastard! That was cashmere!” She lunged at him. He grabbed her by the arm, swung her around her own axis of motion, and slammed her face-first into a tree.

Which did about as much damage as three bullets in the chest, apparently.

And she was my friend? That either kicked ass, or was a big, big problem.

The boy grabbed hold of Lewis, stripped away the gun, and the two of them got down to some serious fighting, only some of which was happening in the real world; I could feel the stinging force of powers being slung back and forth along with punches, but I couldn’t tell who had the upper hand.

Cherise grabbed my arm, locked eyes with me, and panted, “Run! Come on, we have to go, now!”

“But-you were shot-”

She waved that off impatiently. “I’m okay. Come on!”

We ran. The trail was thin, and heavily clogged with debris, but Cherise was fast, and I moved as quickly as I dared, leaping over logs and branches and struggling to keep up. I was cold, very cold, and I couldn’t believe she was this active without at least a coat. But I guessed that if she was bullet-resistant, being immune to the chill wasn’t much of a stretch.

I felt a pulse of energy so strong it knocked me to my knees, and Cherise yelled and dropped flat, and a wave of heat rolled over us, thick and shocking.

A fireball erupted behind us.

“Kevin!” Cherise was up and running back toward the inferno, but she didn’t get far before the flames drove her back. “Kevin!”

She didn’t need to worry. The boy plunged through the flames as if they weren’t even there and doubled over, breathing hard. He wasn’t even singed. “Damn,” he gasped, and coughed. “Ow. That hurt.”

Cherise immediately went to him. “What happened?”

“He went for it,” Kevin said, and braced his hands on his knees. “Damn. I’m sorry, I thought I could contain him, but he-he just-”

It dawned on me that Lewis wasn’t coming out of the fire. “You killed him,” I said numbly. “You killed Lewis.”

Kevin glanced up at me. “He did it himself. I just couldn’t stop him. Look, the dude was going to kill you. We were lucky to get to you in time.”

I wished I’d picked up Lewis’s gun. I felt hot, sick, disoriented, and oddly on the verge of tears. I didn’t know the guy, not really, but…I couldn’t believe what Kevin was saying. Lewis, going to kill me? No. That couldn’t be true.

I needed to think, but I didn’t have time. The fire was spreading. It had already jumped from one winter-dried treetop to another, and there were tendrils of flame and ash falling on us. Kevin might be fireproof, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t.

Cherise yelped as a branch exploded from the heat, spraying us with burning splinters.

I didn’t even plan what happened next. I don’t even know how it happened. I just reached blindly for help, any kind of help.

And it came in a blinding, disorienting flash. Rain, driving down like a firehose to douse me to the skin. Cold water met hungry flames, and the resulting steam flooded the clearing in fog. The rain kept falling, a tap I didn’t know how to turn off. Hell, maybe I’d broken off the knob. The underbrush was still smoking, but the flames were out, and they couldn’t flare up again while the downpour continued.

Kevin looked like a stunned, drowned rat. He stared at me with narrowed eyes, measuring me, while rain beat down on his head and plastered his lank hair to his skull. “You shouldn’t be able to do that,” he said. “How did you…?” Weirdly, I could almost hear another voice overlaying his, a female voice. Not Cherise’s, who was just mutely staring at me.

“How’d you get here?” I yelled over the roar of the rain.

“Not that again!”

“It’s a good question! How the hell did you two find me?” I backed away, and saw Cherise and Kevin exchange a glance. Not one that was particularly reassuring. Man, I wished I’d picked up the gun-not that it had done Lewis a lot of good. But I felt particularly vulnerable right now. “Lewis was going to a lot of trouble because he thought somebody was following. He thought we were in danger.”

“Not from us,” Cherise said, and I almost believed her. She just had that kind of innocent trust-me face.

But I caught Kevin smiling, and my heart went cold.

I backed away a few more steps. Kevin’s smile faded, and Cherise’s blue eyes turned cool and expressionless.

“All right,” she said. “I guess we do this the hard way.”

The downpour was localized around us, but as I reached the margins, fire suddenly flared up. Kevin. I could feel the energy pouring out of him. I held my ground, because running would be damn near suicidal; once I got outside of the downpour’s zone, he could toast me up like a s’more. I wasn’t sure I had a second trick up my wet, dripping sleeve.

Cherise and Kevin didn’t make a move toward me. They just watched me, and I got the strangest feeling, like they were just…there. And not there. Like they weren’t really present anymore.

And then I sensed something else. I couldn’t even put a name to it-big, dark, wrong. Very, very wrong. It wasn’t a real shadow, but I could feel it, spreading over the ground toward me.

And then there was a shadow in the trees, something flickering and indistinct.

Cherise blinked and said, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

But there was. There most definitely was. Whatever that was in the trees was not right; I could feel it like a sick black ache in my chest that was only getting worse with every breath.

The shadow seemed to be flickering in time with my heartbeat, and with every frantic beat it looked a little bit…darker. More real. More distinct.

I saw the curve of a pale face, dark hair.

I didn’t want to see what came at the end, but I felt weak now, and bitterly cold. My knees threatened to fold up under me, and I thought, This is it. I’m done.

And then something inside me just refused, cold and furious, and I felt myself get steadier again.

“There’s something to be afraid of,” I heard myself say to Cherise. “Me.”

And I reached up into the sky and pulled at the air, pushing a whole wall of it like an invisible hard shield at them, driving her and Kevin backward.

Driving away the shadow.

I turned and ran, dodging blooming flames, barely managing to avoid slipping in the squelchy mud under my boots. Overhead, the downpour sputtered, let loose a final shower of ice-cold drops that froze into sleet as they hit the ground, and subsided. I kept running, and checked over my shoulder. I could see Cherise and Kevin standing there, dumb statues, and that shadow, that shadow was with them, and for a second…

For a second, in a flash of lightning, it looked just like me.

And then it just…vanished.

Cherise and Kevin toppled over facedown to the ground. Dead, stunned, I couldn’t tell, but there was no way I could go back; I knew the shadow was still there, hoping to lure me in, and I couldn’t fight it.

I hated myself for running, but I ran. It was survival instinct, nothing more, nothing I could be proud of, and tears streamed down my face, self-pitying and turning to ice in the cold, cold wind. You should have tried, something was screaming inside me, but I knew better. If I’d tried, I’d be dead.

I was alone, and I couldn’t risk it.

I had no warning of another approach, but suddenly there were hands on my shoulders, and I was spun around, violently, slipping in the mud. I instinctively raised my arms, trying to block a punch, trying to break free, but stopped when I recognized the stark pale face, dark eyes, and rough growth of beard.

Not dead, but definitely singed around the edges. There was a quarter-sized raw burn on his cheek, and bruises forming.

Lewis looked terrible, but he was alive.

“I thought you were dead!” I yelped, and his hand closed around my left wrist. He silently jerked me into a run. I barely had time to gasp, because we were running straight for a thicket of thorns and he wasn’t slowing down…

And the thorns pulled right out of the way. I tripped, trying to twist around and stare, but Lewis’s grip around my wrist was unforgiving.

“Wait,” I panted. “We can’t just-”

“Damn right we can. Run or die.” He sounded raw and exhausted, but he was outpacing me. I concentrated on not slowing him down; for some reason, having Lewis afraid and vulnerable was worse to me than my own terrors. The forest flew by in a blur of tree bark, flashing leaves, the occasional glimpse overhead of gray cotton sky.

It felt like we ran forever. I caught one glimpse of what might have been the shadow standing at the top of a hill, but it misted away like a bad dream.

We just kept on running. When I looked back again, I didn’t see anything. No sign at all, just the sullen smoke still rising from the place where Lewis and Kevin had combusted.

“Where’s David?” I finally gasped. Lewis shook his head without answering, still struggling for breath. He was holding his side with his left hand as we ran, and I didn’t like the color of his face and lips. Or the bubbling sound when he took in air. “You need to stop!”

“Not yet.”

“No, we have to stop now!” I insisted.

His effort to reply brought on a coughing fit, and when it was over he spat up blood. A lot of it. Enough to make my skin shrink all over.

We needed help. We needed it badly. And we needed it now.

And he must have known it, because he finally nodded. I could read the exhaustion in his face.

“Cave,” he said. “Over there.”

Over there proved to be a long way off. I forced him to move more slowly, and I kept watch behind us for any telltale signs of a hot-pink sweater, or fire sprouting up around us. Nothing. The whole thing could have been a dream, except for the burned patches in my clothes. We walked for a good half hour before an outcropping of rock came into sight-the end of the ridge. It commanded a good view of the valley floor below, and had a low shelf of rock that jutted out over the cliff. Below-far below-a shining ribbon of river glittered in the dull light. The trees, tall as they were, reached only about halfway up the cliff face.

“This way,” he said, and edged around the side of the hive-shaped rock formation. There was a crevasse that was larger than the others. Not what I’d call large, though. Big enough to squeeze through, if you didn’t mind claustrophobic shock, and somebody was going to kill you if you didn’t find a hiding place.

Lewis, without comment, wedged himself into the tiny space, wiggling his way through in grim silence. How that felt with broken ribs I didn’t even want to imagine. I took a deep breath and then had to let half of it out-my chest was a little bit larger than Lewis’s, and shoving my way through the opening in the rock was panic-inducing. I thought for a few seconds that I’d be stuck, but then my flailing right hand found something to hold, and I pulled myself all the way through…

…into fairyland.

“Careful,” Lewis said, and pointed up when I started to straighten. Stalactites, dripping frozen from the roof in needle-sharp limestone. I gulped and ducked, following him as he crouched against the wall. There was a pool of dark, perfectly still water in front of us, and the cave was cool and silent. Not warm, but not freezing, either. The only sounds were ones we made-shuffling on the rock, chattering teeth, the drips my soaked clothes made pattering on the floor.

“I can’t make a fire,” Lewis said. “Too dangerous in an enclosed space. Not sure I can manage the carbon monoxide.” He sounded mortally tired, but he opened the backpack he’d dumped on the floor-how the hell had he had the presence of mind to hang on to it through all that?-and dug out some packages. He threw two of them toward me, and I saw they were some kind of silvery thermal blankets. “These work better if you get undressed. Your clothes are too wet. It’ll just-”

If he was waiting for me to have an attack of modesty, he was sorely disappointed. “Whatever,” I said, and began unbuttoning. The drag of wet clothes was making me nuts, and the cold had driven deep enough into me to make me uncaring about things like strangers watching me undress. Or maybe I was normally immune to that kind of thing. Hard to tell. I only knew that I didn’t feel inhibited with him. Boy, and didn’t that open up a ten-gallon drum of worms?

Lewis politely faced away while I skinned out of the sopping-wet pants. I decided to leave on the underwear, and wrapped myself up in crinkling silver foil. My skin felt like cold, wet plastic. “So,” I said through chattering teeth. “What the hell just happened?”

He glanced over his shoulder at me, saw I was more or less decent, and fussed with his own crackling thermal sheets to avoid answering. Or at least, that was how it looked. I waited. Eventually Lewis said, “Those two weren’t right. They weren’t themselves.”

“No kidding,” I said. I was feeling the cold now like sharp needles all over, and shivering violently. “There was something else, too.”

“What else?” He paused, staring at me. “What did you see?”

I didn’t want to tell him, exactly. “Nothing definite. Kind of a shadow.” A shadow that kind of looked like me. No, I didn’t want to say that.

Lewis looked like he felt sicker than ever, but he nodded. “I was afraid of that.”

“Afraid of what?”

His sigh echoed cool from the stone. “There’s a Demon after you. And we have no way to fight it.”

“Demon,” I repeated. “Okay. Sure. Right. Whatever.”

That definitely told me just exactly what was going on.

I was taking a walking tour of Hell, and my Virgil was insane.

I tried to avoid discussing the whole Demon thing under the grounds that, hey, keep your delusions to yourself, but Lewis kept on talking.

“They don’t come from Hell,” he said very earnestly, which only made him seem even nuttier. “At least, not as I understand it. They’re not from this plane of existence. They come from somewhere else. They’re drawn here to our world because of power; they need to feed on the aetheric, and the best way they can do that is to grab hold of a Warden, because we’re the equivalent of a straw to them-they can pull power through us. The more power they draw, the more dangerous they get.”

We’d been talking for a while. I wasn’t exactly believing in the whole Demon idea, but he was scarily matter-of-fact about the whole thing, and besides, I’d seen a few impossible things in the past couple of days. Including, well, him.

But really. Demons? How was that right?

I took a deep breath, put my doubts aside, and said, “So isn’t there some kind of, I don’t know, spell or something? Pentagrams? Holy water?”

“The only way we’ve ever found to stop a Demon, a full-grown Demon, is a Djinn,” Lewis said slowly. “The Djinn and Demons are pretty evenly matched.”

Great. David was coming back, right? Problem solved. Lewis must have seen it in my face, because he shook his head. “Not that easy,” he said. “Any Djinn that engages with a Demon directly is probably going to die, and die horribly. The only thing we can do to contain the fight is seal the Djinn, and the Demon, into a bottle. It traps the Demon so it can’t do any more damage.”

My insides felt like they pulled together in a knotted ball. “But what about the Djinn?”

“Like I said, they die horribly. And it takes some of them centuries.” Lewis’s face was hard, his eyes bright. “I didn’t say I liked it.”

“That’s-horrible.”

Lewis looked away. “Yeah,” he said. “Which is why we have a problem. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t let David-”

“Let David what?” said a voice from the shadows, startling me. David, of course, had arrived just in time to pick up his name being taken in vain. He stepped out of the shadows and stood there, watching us both, and whatever that was in his eyes, I couldn’t read it. “Let David make his own decisions? Thank you, Lewis. I thought the Wardens never let Djinn think for themselves.”

He was angry, and he was-I thought-scared. I didn’t know how much he’d heard, but clearly enough to disturb him.

Lewis didn’t answer. Probably a good move.

He dropped a thick forest green down jacket, complete with hood, on the floor next to Lewis. “Here,” he said. “Something to keep you warm. We don’t need you dying on us.”

Lewis let out a slow breath and sat back, bracing himself against the wall. “Thanks,” he said. “Nice to know you still care.”

“To a point,” David said, and turned to me. “Are you all right?”

I nodded, still shivering, but the last thing I wanted from him at this moment was a hug, which clearly he was thinking of offering. David slowly crouched, putting our eyes on a level. Not too close. He understood body language, at least, even if he wasn’t human; I could feel the yearning in him, the frustration, the anxiety. I wondered if he could tell what I was thinking, and decided that he couldn’t. He didn’t look worried enough.

“Is there anything you can do for him?” I asked, and jerked my chin toward Lewis. “Heal him?”

“He wouldn’t welcome that,” David said. He edged just a bit closer. “That is the stubbornest Warden I know, and considering I know you, that’s saying something. Here. Put these on.” He reached behind him and retrieved my damp clothes from the floor-when I took them, they were soft and warm, like they’d come straight from a dryer. Something hardened in his eyes. “Did you take these off yourself?”

Lewis laughed, a bitter sort of sound. “David, if you think I’m in any shape to seduce her, you’re giving me way too much credit,” he said. “She was freezing, she was soaked, and I didn’t even look. Can we move on to the next problem, which is a damn sight worse than your jealousy?”

“You think there’s a Demon,” David said. “I heard.”

“Worse than that,” Lewis replied. “I think there’s a Demon that’s managing to control Wardens and walk them around like puppets. You got any idea how bad that is?”

David looked profoundly troubled. “That means we can’t trust the Wardens, either. Something’s very wrong.”

I snorted. “Wrong? I’ll tell you what’s wrong. I saw Lewis put three bullets into one of them-a girl named Cherise-and she didn’t go down. That’s wrong. She’s little!”

“Cherise?” David echoed, and looked to Lewis for confirmation. He nodded. “The human girl? Why would a Demon be using her? Why would it bother? There’s nothing in her to feed off of.”

“I don’t know, but she was definitely in on it,” I said. I was tired now, though considerably warmer; pulling on the clean, dry clothes had definitely helped. I leaned back to zip up the blue jeans and wrapped the tinfoil blanket around me again. “So she’s not a Warden?”

“Not remotely,” he said. “The boy is, Kevin, but not her. She was just-”

“My friend,” I said slowly. “She was my friend. That’s what she said. God…Why is this happening to her? To all of us?”

Lewis didn’t even try to answer. If David could have, he held back; I couldn’t tell what he was thinking at all.

“There’s got to be people we can turn to,” I said. “Hell, if not the Wardens, what about the police? The army? The forestry service?” I was getting bothered by their shared silence. “Dammit-David, you could bring help to us, right? Rescue?”

“If the Demon can puppet humans, it wouldn’t be wise,” he said. “It only adds more potential victims. The fewer we have to worry about, the better.”

“But we have to get out of here!”

“And we will,” Lewis said, and leaned his head against the wall with his eyes shut. His skin was the color of old, wet paper. “But David’s right. Bringing people into this is a bad idea, both for them and for us. We need to find our own way out, and to do that, we need rest.”

“But-” Lewis needed rest, that much was clear. I turned to David. “Seriously, can’t you see he’s hurt? Can’t you do anything for him?”

“If he’d let me,” David said. “Which I doubt.”

“I’m fine,” Lewis growled.

“See?”

“Lewis,” I pleaded. “Don’t be a dick. Okay, if you’re going to be a dick, at least be smart. You’ll slow us down. I need you in shape to get me out of here, right?”

Lewis didn’t open his eyes, but after a long moment, he nodded. David stood up and walked to him, put a hand lightly on his shoulder, and then moved it to the back of his neck. He crouched down next to him, and his eyes burned like lava in the darkness, nearly bright enough to read by.

Lewis made a sound. Not a happy one. His face went an even more alarming shade of gray. “Sorry,” David said quietly. “You should have let me do this sooner. There’s damage to your lungs.”

Lewis just nodded, tight-lipped. He was sweating from the pain, and his hands were trembling where they gripped the foil blanket around him.

With a glance at me, David brushed his other hand across Lewis’s forehead, and with a sigh, the man’s long body relaxed against the wall.

Out like a light.

“He’ll be better when he wakes.” David settled Lewis more comfortably, then turned back to me. “He was afraid to let go. He didn’t want to leave you alone with me.”

“What?” I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. “Why?”

David smiled slowly. “Because like most Wardens right now, Lewis doesn’t fully trust the Djinn. Even though I have more reason than anyone else to want to keep you safe.” David eased down on the rock next to me, not quite close enough to touch. “He thinks my loyalties are divided. He’s right, of course. And the Djinn certainly aren’t making any of this easier.”

“What do the Djinn have against me?” Was there anybody who didn’t hate my guts?

“You, personally? Nothing, really. But many of them hate Wardens, and most of the rest have a kind of benign contempt for humankind in general. Our two species are not friends,” he said. “We’re barely neighbors.”

“What about you and me?” My eyebrows rose. “I thought we were neighborly.”

“We’re different.”

“But Lewis is still worried about you. Because you’re Djinn.”

“Exactly,” David said. His eyes met mine, and in the shadows they were dark, human, and very gentle. “And as I said, he’s right to be worried. I won’t hurt you, Jo. I swear that. But I can’t make that vow for other Djinn, not yet. There’s too much anger. And-long-term, the future for us may not be bright.”

I sucked down a deep breath. “I don’t want to talk about relationships. Look, Lewis said the only way to stop a Demon was to throw a Djinn at it. Which I guess used to be an easier answer-”

“Try convenient,” David said. “At least when the Wardens had plenty of Djinn as slaves. Now, they’ll have to rely on our goodwill if they face a true crisis. Which, as I’ve said, isn’t extensive.” He glanced sideways at me, then became very interested in the deep, still waters of the black pond. “I wish I could tell you that I would sacrifice myself for you, if I had to. I would give anything to tell you that, and a few months ago I would have, without hesitation. But now-now I have to think of my people. I can’t confront a Demon, not directly. Not even to save your life. I also can’t order one of my people to do it. Lewis knows that.”

I could tell what saying that cost him, and I didn’t quite know how to answer. It took me a few seconds to work it out, and when I spoke, my voice sounded soft and very tentative. “You’re ashamed of that, but you shouldn’t be. It’s okay, I’d never ask you to risk your life-or any Djinn’s life-for me. I don’t want Lewis to do it, either. If it comes down to it”-I swallowed, hard-“I want you to promise me you won’t throw yourself on any Demons for me. Because…I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

He didn’t speak, and he didn’t move. I couldn’t tell if that had helped or not, so I blundered on. “I should have stayed back there earlier, to help Cherise and Kevin. They needed help, but I just-I just ran away. So I’m the last person to demand heroic sacrifices, here. I should have-”

“You should have done exactly as you did,” he interrupted. “You should have run. You have to save yourself, Jo. Neither of your appointed guardians are all that capable of helping you now, no matter how much we-” His voice failed him for a second, and then he finished. “No matter how much we want to.”

We sank into silence-not quite comfortable, but it mellowed out, and I felt tensed muscles easing. I don’t know quite how it happened, but soon enough I was leaning against him, and his warmth felt so safe, so reassuring. After a while, he put an arm around my shoulders, and I let my head rest in the hollow of his neck.

“That girl, Cherise,” I said. “Is she still alive? Did I leave her to die?”

His warm fingers stroked across my forehead, the same gentle gesture I’d seen him give Lewis.

“Sleep,” he murmured, and I felt the warm brush of his lips against my temple. “Dream well.”

“I will,” I said faintly.

He kissed my hand, an old-world kind of gesture, full of tenderness, then got up with a grace that looked scarily sexy, and walked toward the opening of the cave. I didn’t see him leave; it looked like he just misted away between one blink and the next.

I slept with that.

Yeah, and you know what? I had the distinct feeling that I’d probably enjoyed the holy hell out of it, too.