Total Eclipse

Chapter Seven

Leaving Seacasket was like living in a jump cut in a movie. One second, the world was still and hushed and silent and perfectly ordered, as if someone had pressed a giant pause button. . . . The next, we were in chaos.

By chaos, I mean it was worse than when we’d arrived. Much worse. The gray vanished, and suddenly the skies were crowded with black, bloated clouds that bloomed constantly with greenish lightning. Wind lashed the car hard and shoved it from one lane to the other, even with the Djinn’s uncanny reaction time. The sides of the road were littered with wrecks, shattered trees, downed power lines. I couldn’t see any electric lights at all in the houses and buildings that blurred past us. I could see occasional smaller lights—flashlights and candles—moving inside, and I wondered how terrified those people must be. All they could do was wait.

All we could do was keep moving.

Cherise reached over the seat to try the radio, but no matter where she dialed there was just pure static, or one of those emergency alert broadcasts telling people to stay in their homes and wait for more information.

I imagined Twitter had probably exploded from the strain, if the internet had survived thus far. Not to mention Facebook.

“Where are we going?” Cherise asked.

The radio hissed, and the slider took over on its own like a transistorized version of a Ouija board. I expected to hear Whitney’s dulcet Southern tones.

I heard David’s.

“Jo,” he said. “All right?”

“Yeah, we’re fine,” I said, which was a brave interpretation, given the outside world. “Where are you?”

“Jonathan’s house, with Whitney.”

The station changed, lightning fast. “We are not going to be good roomies,” Whitney cooed. “I already want to kick his pretty ass across the room. I wonder if I can.”

David regained control of the radio. “From here, we’ll do what we can to lessen the dangers around you as you go. Whitney’s going to continue to pilot the Djinn who’s driving you.”

“None of which answers the vital question of where are we going!” Cherise said, hanging half over the seat.

“You’re heading for Sedona,” he said. “But be warned—that entire area is under siege. It’s not going to be easy.”

It never was. “We’re going to need to stop,” I said. “We can’t keep going like this. Rest and food, water and bathrooms. Very important.”

“We’ll find you shelter,” David promised. “Try to rest for now.”

Easier said than done, as the thunder crashed and the lightning struck with the regularity of a strobe light to the eyes, as the Djinn driving swerved to avoid first one unseen obstacle, then another. It was like being back at sea again in a full-force gale.

But eventually, inevitably, even that couldn’t keep me from sliding away into dark, dreamless sleep. Cars have that effect, even dodging, swerving ones, if you get used to it. Weirdly soothing. If the Djinn had been on its own, it could have blipped easily from one spot to another by taking a shortcut through the aetheric planes . . . but with humans it was tricky at best. Even the Djinn who had the most experience and ability at taking humans through the aetheric in physical form, not just spiritual, had a less-than-confidence-building success rate. Say, fifty percent.

So we traveled the old-fashioned way, miles passing under wheels. It was a lot of miles, because we were moving very fast despite the dangerous and unpredictable conditions. I woke up periodically, prodded by anxiety or bad dreams, hunger or thirst, or the more basic bodily functions. Food and drink turned out to be no challenge at all; shops were deserted, and many had already been looted. I didn’t mind drinking store-brand cola if it was all that was left. I tried not to see what it all meant, what all this widespread smoking devastation and desperation meant for civilization as a whole.

Things were falling apart. There were people in small groups, and they ran when we roared by.

The internet on Cher’s mobile phone had gone down in a haze of 404 Not Found errors. Then her mobile had failed, too. And mine. And Kevin’s.

We all had different network providers. I assumed that, too, was not a good sign.

We were just heading into the St. Louis area, from the Missouri side—a long and exhausting ride, with as few stops as possible in places that were only marginally dangerous. I’d hoped that maybe the calmer center of the country might still be holding its own.

I was wrong.

You could see the dull red-orange glow of flames coming from St. Louis a long way off against the cold night sky, and low-hanging, constantly rumbling clouds.

“I hate this,” Cherise said, fidgeting anxiously. She’d been fidgeting a long time, nervous with the crackle of power in her blood and the fear of actually letting it loose. I’d managed to get that through her head, finally, and we’d done long hours of power exercises, with Kevin as her spotter, to teach her how to use the aetheric properly, how to center her power and ground it, how to use it in more delicate ways than sledge-hammering every problem into smithereens, along with everything that wasn’t a problem.

She was actually not sucking at it. I couldn’t help but feel that maybe this was a little bit due to my excellence as a teacher, but it probably wasn’t.

Over the radio, David’s voice said, “I need to prepare you for what’s coming.” That was ominous, because he’d never said that before, and we’d already been through some rough patches on the way. He sounded very sober. “You’re going to come up on some problems in the next ten miles. I’ll direct you on the blockage in the road, but we may have to take detours as things get worse.”

“That’s it? Roadblocks?” I felt a little surge of irritation. “Not exactly news, David.”

“It’s not cars,” he said. “It’s people. They’re desperate, and they’re terrified, and they’re angry. They’ll attack the car if it gets too close. They think they can run to safety, but there is none.”

That was very different, and we all knew it. Cherise asked, in a small voice, “How many people?”

“Right now, there are three main groups,” he said. “Two of them are fighting each other for food and transportation. All together, they number about fifty thousand.”

“Fifty—” Words failed me. I couldn’t even echo the number. I glanced in the back and saw that Cherise was staring fiercely at the radio, tears welling in her eyes. “Fifty thousand people. Refugees.”

“That would imply they have some kind of refuge to flee toward,” David said bleakly. “They don’t. If they try to leave, they’ll get picked off by the storms, the fires, the sinkholes. Animal attacks. And there’s no safe harbor for them, not anymore.”

“The Wardens—,” Kevin began.

“They already killed the Wardens who were trying to help them,” David said flatly. “Mob mentality. Just don’t get close. If you don’t share their beliefs, they’ll kill you, too.”

“What beliefs?”

Kevin didn’t need to ask the question, because we topped the next hill and saw the first of the crowds that David was talking about. They were filthy, ragged, wild-eyed, and armed with rifles, axes, sharp sticks—I didn’t see a single person who didn’t have some kind of weapon, even if it was just a stone to throw. A few were carrying badly painted signs that looked like they might have been written in dried blood.

REPENT OR DIE.

Oh man.

“You want to know the biggest joke?” Whitney’s voice said, echoing through the silence in the car. “These are the Episcopalians. You don’t even want to run into the hard-shell Baptists right now, brothers and sisters.”

Kevin crossed himself. He did it in a rush, like it came from someplace deep within him, and I wondered how he’d been brought up, in his early days. Catholic, probably. Cherise and I had both been churchgoing girls, too, until recently; I wasn’t what I could call committed, but I had always honored God. Wardens never doubted the presence of higher powers. Heck, we had a direct line to something, even if it wasn’t the Head Bearded Guy.

But this . . . this was people clutching at straws, using religion as an excuse for murder and destruction. And it made me sad and angry.

“We avoid them,” I said. Some of the crowd had already caught sight of us and were streaming in our direction. “If we can’t stop them, we have to stay out of their way.”

“But they’re just people,” Cherise said. “The same people who’d help you out if you had a flat tire. What happens to them? What happens to us?”

“Survival,” I said softly. “It’s selfish, and it’s dark, and we’ve always been a species willing to do anything to satisfy our needs. Individuals have morals. Mobs have appetites.”

The Djinn had taken a sharp left turn down a side road and rocketed along it at insane speed, dodging falling tree branches, a wrecked and still smoldering SUV, and some things in the road that it took me long-delayed seconds to realize were actually dead bodies. I started to ask, but then I realized that I didn’t want to know how bad this was, how far it had gone. I just wanted to stop it.

And I didn’t see any way to do that.

Misery crept up on me, and I swallowed hard against an ache in my throat and stomach. I wanted David. I wanted his arms around me, his strength beside me.

“Jo,” his voice said, and I closed my eyes and pretended he was here, physically here. It was easier than I’d thought. Maybe I was going crazy. “This has happened before. It’s happened in other countries, to other people; it’s even happened here, in some areas. Riots, purges, wars, genocide. There’s never a moment on Earth when someone isn’t suffering and dying at the hands of others. You know that. Human nature isn’t your fault.”

“I know,” I whispered. “But it feels like it is.”

Maybe he would have tried to offer me more therapy, I don’t know, but right then, Cherise screamed and yelled, “Stop the car!”

David must have been the one in control, because there was no debate about it. The Djinn braked the Boss to a stop on the damp pavement in a noisy slide.

“Uh, Cher, that mob is still heading this way,” Kevin said, sensibly checking out the rearview mirror. “Might take them a few minutes, but—”

Cherise wasn’t listening. She bailed out of the car and darted out into the glow of the headlights, and I saw her scramble over debris toward the side of the road. “Dammit,” I said. “Kevin. Go with her. Hurry.”

He was already on his way, and shot me an irritated look. “Like I wasn’t going to anyway,” he said. “Thanks, Mom.”

I was so glad he wasn’t my kid. It felt like cowardice, but I stayed behind. I was nothing but a liability right now, and at least one of us needed to stay with the car. Kevin didn’t seem to mind that decision in the least. In fact, he grinned fiercely as he passed through the headlights, plunging after Cherise to the side of the road.

It seemed to take forever. I watched anxiously through the back window. The mob was coming, and I could hear them screaming. It was a deep, animal roar, and I imagined this was how those soldiers throughout history had felt, holding their ground and waiting while the enemy charged.

It wasn’t good.

I got so focused on the approach of the crowd that it surprised me (complete with yelp) when Cherise yanked open the back door and climbed in with something bundled in her arms in a dirty blanket. It squirmed. Kevin piled in after, looking grim, and yelled, “Go go go!”

Off we went, leaving the swiftest of the mob to clutch at a spray of gravel and dust.

The bundle in Cherise’s arms wailed. It wasn’t the cry of a hungry or tired baby; this was more—aware. A toddler, maybe two or three years old. Cherise unwrapped the blanket, and I saw a small, round face capped by shiny, thick black hair. The child looked as miserable as I felt.

“Cher,” I said. “We can’t—”

Kevin leaned forward, cutting me off. “There was a whole family back there,” he said. “Mom, dad, two other kids. This one’s the only one still breathing. So shut up, okay?”

I swallowed. “What happened to them?”

“What do you think happened? They had something. Somebody else wanted it. Probably a car; they didn’t look like they’d been walking, and they didn’t have any bags.”

Kevin was right. I couldn’t say no to helping this kid. Maybe I should have; maybe Lewis would have. Maybe he would have said something about the greater good and saving the most number of lives.

All I could say, looking at that little face, was, “Okay.”

Whatever David thought, he kept it to himself. The Djinn proxy driver guided us through a winding set of back roads, turning left, then right at intersections until we arrived back at a main highway again. I didn’t know where we were, and I wasn’t sure maps had much relevance anymore. Cherise and Kevin had something to do now; they had found some crackers and juice boxes in their stash of snacks, and were now arguing over whether a kid that age wore a diaper. I didn’t add any insights. They both seemed very earnest about the whole thing, which was a little endearing.

The night passed quietly enough. We’d outrun the worst of the storms, for the moment; no wildfires chased us through the silent trees. It almost looked normal. I rolled down the window, and night air fluttered over my face like a damp veil. I breathed it in and felt, for a moment, a little calmed. This still exists. There’s still hope.

David said, “We should have good travel for the next few hundred miles. This part of the country’s still relatively unaffected.”

“Yeah, why is that?” Kevin asked.

I already knew the answer to that. “It’s rural,” I said. “And the trouble is focusing on centers of population first. That doesn’t mean it won’t spread fast, but for now, people out here are as safe as they can be.”

“It’s more than that,” David said. “There’s a black corner near here—a small one. It’s been here for a thousand years or more. But it tends to keep the Djinn and the Wardens well away.”

I blinked, because I hadn’t known that. It made sense, though—black corners were places that canceled out supernatural forces, all kinds of supernatural forces. It was wasting energy to go near one.

Which made them perfect for hiding people who didn’t, and couldn’t, tell the difference.

“Pull over,” I ordered.

“It’s better if we—”

“David, pull the car over now!”

He did. There was no use trying for Google Maps or GPS; I went at it old-school, rifling the glove compartment for maps. There was a road atlas, years out of date but good enough. I flipped through it until I found a map of the entire continental USA.

“Show me on the map where the black corners are,” I said. Small black areas painted themselves out. There weren’t many, but they were there . . . and they were scattered from coast to coast, north to south. Almost . . . deliberately. “Okay, looking good. David, you’re talking through the radio.”

There was a long pause, and then David said, in the tone of someone who really didn’t understand why I was stating the obvious, “Yes . . . ?”

“Is that just to us, or can you do it anywhere?”

“Define anywhere.”

“All radios in specific areas.”

Another pause, and then he said, slowly, “Yes. Yes, I can.”

“Awesome. You are the new Djinn Emergency Broadcast System.” I got out of the car and spread the atlas out on the hood of the idling car. Cherise and Kevin got out with me; Kevin was holding the toddler, who had fallen charmingly asleep in his arms. “I need dimensions on these black corners. Specifically, how many people they can hold, whether there’s any food and water, shelter, that kind of thing. Get me all the information you can.”

“Uh—how?” Cherise asked blankly. She held out her phone. It still said NO SERVICE. “Internet go boom.”

“The aetheric’s still there,” I said. “You and Kevin get up there, find me these two black corners; they’re the largest ones. Tell me whatever you can. Do it fast.”

Kevin handed me the baby, which was a smart move. I wasn’t sure he wouldn’t drop the kid on his head at the best of times, but being out of his body wouldn’t help him be Best Surrogate Dad Ever. The child was surprisingly heavy and warm, and settled against me with a sleepy murmur. I smoothed dark hair, balanced him (her?) on my hip, and stared down at the map as Cherise and Kevin stood, immobile and vacant next to me. Both of the areas I’d indicated to them were remote; whatever had happened there to damage the planet’s awareness had been significant, but it had also probably happened a very long time ago. Maybe even before humans began building their first mud huts. Maybe they’d been even larger, and the Earth was slowly, steadily healing in those areas.

But what was important to me was that if I put people inside those borders, they’d be safe from supernatural forces. As safe as I could make them, anyway.

Cherise came back first, staggering as her spirit reunited with her body and catching herself with both hands against the car’s fender. She snatched her palms off it immediately. “Ow!” she said. “Damn. Hot. And I’m not talking about myself, you know.” I didn’t need to put her back on track. She took in a deep breath and continued. “It’s pretty large, but it’s wild out there. Overgrown. No shelter or structures I could see. There’s a stream, though, so fresh water. You’d have to arrange for the food.”

“Roads?”

“There’s a kind of road—damn, that map’s too small. Guess you can’t zoom in.”

“It’s paper, Cher.”

“Kidding. Anyway, yeah, there’s a way in, you could probably drive it. Not sure how tough it would be, though.”

“How many people could it hold?”

“It’s about as big as half of Manhattan, so you figure it out. Of course, unless they’re living in trees, you can only put them on the ground floor.”

It was better than nothing. Not a lot better, but still.

Kevin returned a few minutes later. He had better news, from the western black corner—which was large, empty, and easy to reach. Only problem was, it was barren. Really barren. No source of fresh water running through it, or even near it. It was also hotter than hell there, and even with tents and temporary shelters it might be fatal conditions for many.

But we didn’t have a choice. I ordered everybody back into the car. Kevin took the kid back from me; the baby woke up and started fretting. Kevin bounced him in his arms, waking a surprisingly cheerful set of giggles, and the kid put its chubby arms around his neck.

“Boy or girl?” I asked. Kevin gave me a long- suffering, disgusted look.

“Boy, obviously,” he said. “Wow. I thought you were all up on the birds and the bees.”

I tried again. “What’s his name?”

“How am I supposed to know? The kid was lying underneath his dead mom. He didn’t come with papers .” Kevin’s eyes glittered in the white backwash of the headlights, but not with Djinn power, not anymore. Those were real, human tears. “They left him there to starve or get eaten. So maybe his name ought to be Lucky; what do you think?”

“Kevin,” I said, gently. “Deep breaths.”

“Fuck you,” he snapped, and got in the car. I ached for him, because nobody—not even Kevin—should feel the kind of agony I could hear in his voice. He hated this as much as I did, as much as Cher did. I could feel that pain and panic burrowing inside me like a carnivorous small animal. Make it stop. I don’t want to do this anymore. Make it all go away.

For a few seconds, it was so overwhelming that I wanted to scream. I forced myself to take deep, steady breaths, and stared at the map until my eyes blurred. I blinked, and tears slid cold down my cheeks, but I wiped them away impatiently. I have no time for this crap, I told myself. Sack up, Jo. Right now.

I wanted to be strong, but it seemed like the solid rock I’d always felt to be inside me had turned to slippery, clinging mud, and I wasn’t sure I had any emotional footing anymore.

“Jo?” That was David’s voice, coming from the car. I grabbed the atlas and got back inside. The second I slammed the door, we got moving again at Djinn speed, turning the night into a shadowy blur beyond the windows.

Except for the cold white moon, almost full, that floated up overhead like a balloon. Its glow almost eclipsed the stars. Out here in the dark, there were so many of those, thick as spilled sacks of gems in the heavens. Easy to feel small.

Easy to feel a sense of the ice-cold infinite out there, too, for whom the death struggles on this planet were of merely academic interest.

Perversely, that made me feel better.

“David,” I said, and was glad that my voice sounded steady now. “I need you to send messages to all the Wardens you can reach. Tell them we’ve identified two main areas where they can send refugees, and give them coordinates and the details. Give them the coordinates of the other black corners, too. Even if some will only hold a few people, it’s something. We should use it.”

“I’m on it,” he said, and oddly enough, he laughed.

“What?”

“Coordinating. Isn’t that what Lewis tried to sentence us to from the start?”

The radio turned itself off.

I leaned back in the seat, which no longer felt remotely comfy after the long, long hours, and glanced over at the Djinn driver. “So,” I said. “How you doing?”

I didn’t really expect an answer, and I didn’t get one.

It was a long drive to the next major town.

We never quite reached it.

The sun was just coming up, and we still had six hours or so to go to the next town big enough to merit the name, when I finally put my foot down and said that we needed beds, showers, food, and restrooms. That wasn’t as tough as it sounded to achieve; two curves of the road later, we spotted a roadside motel, the no- name-brand kind made of bravely painted cinder blocks that doesn’t have to go into double digits on room numbers. Technically, it was a motor court. I wasn’t sure what the difference was, except that “motor court” sounded slightly more upscale than “no-tell motel.”

It wasn’t.

The office was locked, but somebody had already done yeoman work breaking in the door, which swung wide open. The cash register was on the floor, cracked and empty. There was a TV missing from a stand in the corner, cable connections left dangling. Looters always take the TVs. And it always seems insane, but never more than now.

There were keys hanging on hooks behind the counters. I grabbed three and tossed one each to Kevin and Cherise. “Be careful,” I said. “Could be anybody out there. Make sure you lock the doors once you’re inside.”

Kevin cast a significant look at the busted office door. “Yeah,” he said. “That’ll help. What do they make these things out of, cardboard? An arthritic eighty-year-old on a walker could kick these things down.”

“Your body odor could knock it down faster,” Cherise said crisply. “I cannot wait for a shower. They want to go all Psycho on me, fine. At least I’ll die clean.”

She held out her arms, and Kevin passed her the toddler, who was awake, alert, and watching me with shining black eyes. He was drooling on himself. I didn’t take it as a compliment. “Come on, Herbert.”

“You are not calling him Herbert,” Kevin said, as Cherise got the boy situated on her hip.

“Okay, how about Ronald? I’m trying to go with a dead president theme, here.”

“He’s too good looking. Go with Thomas.”

“Tommy,” Cherise said immediately. “Jefferson. Yeah, okay. How’s that, Tommy? You like that, big man?” She made nonsense sounds to him, and Tommy laughed and clapped his hands. “Tommy it is. Awesome. Tommy and I are going to get clean.”

“Enjoy,” I said. I was going to be in hot pursuit of that shower, but first I wanted to go through the office. The looters had probably taken everything of value, but I wasn’t looking for things to pawn or spend.

Kevin hesitated at the door. “You going to be okay?”

I flipped a hand at him without looking up from the contents of a drawer. He shrugged and went away.

The drawer seemed heavy, although there wasn’t much in it. I frowned playing with it, and realized that it had a false bottom. I pressed on the back, and the front popped up.

Underneath that lay a big, black semiautomatic pistol, with two full clips and a box of bullets . . . and a sawed-off shotgun, and shells.

“Sweet,” I said, and stuffed it all into a recyclable shopping bag that was lying on the floor. Small-business owners. Like Boy Scouts, always prepared.

I also found a private stash of alcohol, which I left, except for one bottle I planned to use for first aid. Or morale emergencies, whichever came first. There was also a pretty significant first aid kit, well stocked, and some shelf-stable cookies, power bars, and chips that I put into another bag.

I was feeling pretty good by the time I locked the flimsy door on my motel room. The room was clean and empty, and as far as I could tell, nobody had bothered to loot it. The bathroom still had soap and shampoo. With the power off, it was dark as a cave, but I’d brought a flashlight from the office, and set it up to shine on the shower area. I dumped my filthy clothes in the sink to soak. The water was lukewarm, but that was better than nothing.

The shower started out lukewarm, then turned cold, but I didn’t care; feeling clean again was an intense relief. I could have hope again. Hope that if I had to die, at least I would do it with shiny, bouncy hair.

Something flashed across the glow from the flashlight. I gasped, got soap in my eyes, and rinsed as fast as I could. It’s a moth, I told myself. A moth flying around in front of the light. You’d have heard somebody come in.

I listened. The falling water drowned out any sound of an intruder.

“It’s a moth,” I breathed, willing myself to believe it. Okay, I was in a creepy deserted motel with no lights. Okay, I was in a horror movie cliché, naked in a shower in a creepy deserted motel with no lights.

But dammit, I wasn’t going to be some horror movie damsel who got killed naked in a shower in a creepy deserted motel. With no lights.

I shut off the water with a firm twist of the knobs, grabbed the thin shower curtain, and rattled it back. Water trickled ice-cold down my back from my wet hair and brought up chill bumps all over my skin.

Nobody there.

I grabbed a towel, dried off, and wrapped it spa- style around my body, then used the second one to do the turban thing. This wasn’t the kind of place that provided free plush robes, or even paper-thin ones. I stood on the cold tile, picked up the flashlight, and angled it around in every corner of the small room.

Nothing.

“Moth,” I said, triumphantly, and propped up the light to help me see what I was doing as I scrubbed my clothes with bath soap. I refilled the sink several times, finished by wringing it all out, and hanging it up on the side of the tub and the shower rod.

Then I walked out into the main room, which was flooded with light from the opened curtains, and saw the Djinn sitting on my bed waiting for me.

And not just any Djinn.

Rahel.

Rahel was back to her old self—beautiful, sharp-edged, dressed in a neon yellow tailored pantsuit with a plunging neckline white shirt. Cornrowed hair, with amber and gold beads woven throughout. Her long pointed fingernails matched her outfit, and her eyes were a pure, luminous white.

I stopped in the doorway and braced myself with one hand. Rahel didn’t move. She didn’t speak. She didn’t seem to even know I was there.

I licked my lips and said, “Rahel?”

For a moment, nothing happened, and then her head tilted, very slowly, to one side. Beads clicked together with a dry-bones rattle like the warning of a rattlesnake in slow motion.

I stood there waiting for it, but she didn’t move again. I took a tentative step forward, then another one. No reaction. I made it to the rickety side chair that came with the “office table” and its cheap lamp, and sat down because I wasn’t sure if my legs would hold me for too long. She didn’t feel like Rahel. She looked the part, but Rahel would already have fired off some snarky, lazy insult or threat, clicked her fingernails, tried to kill me, laughed . . . something.

What was wearing Rahel right now was very far from the Djinn I knew.

“Who are you?” I whispered. Those white eyes stared at me, unblinking, but blind. I just happened to be the direction in which they stared; it didn’t feel like focus. “Is this—are you—”

I couldn’t exactly come out with it, but I understood, on a very primal level, who was looking out through that blank gaze. An intelligence so vast that it couldn’t possibly understand me. So huge that it was trying to make sense of something impossibly tiny to it. . . . As if by staring unaided at the surface of the table, I could see the molecules that made it up. She was trying to understand. But I didn’t think she did. Or could. And that was . . . alarming.

“Can you let me talk to Rahel?” I asked, in the softest, most respectful voice I could manage. “I just—she can translate for you. Help you understand.” Although how that was going to get across I couldn’t imagine. It was like an ant trying to communicate with me by the pheromones and scents that made up its language. I couldn’t detect it, much less understand it.

So much easier to squash the bug, especially when the hive was so, so large.

I was screwed.

Rahel stared through me for what seemed like an hour, but couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes, and then suddenly her head snapped back upright, and she surged up to her feet, took two steps forward, and her hand went around my throat. I yelped, trying to press backward; the chair tipped against the wall, pinning me in place. I kicked at her, for all the good it did. It was like kicking bare toes into solid rock. I felt the sharp, biting sting as her fingernails pressed in, and I had a grim, graphic vision of how it would look when she flexed her hand and drove those nails into soft flesh and ripped my throat out in a spray of blood. . . .

But that didn’t happen. Rahel froze, our faces inches away. This close, the white glow in her eyes broke up into a coruscating brilliance—every color, all colors, flickering by at such speed that only the constant white glow was left. I was looking into something that humans should never see, and I felt parts of my mind giving up, shutting down, refusing to hold the information flooding into them. I could hear that awful shrieking again, just as I had on board the ship, and I couldn’t shut it out.

And then, just like that, it was over. She let go, I overbalanced and fell to the floor on my hands and knees, and Rahel turned and stalked toward the door.

It blew outward in a spray of splinters—wood mist, really—and the untouched lock and knob fell with a clatter to the concrete outside. She didn’t pause on her way out. I heard one of the other doors slam open, and heard Kevin yell.

“Kevin, no!” I screamed, and scrambled to get to my feet. “Leave her alone!” I wasn’t at all afraid he could hurt Rahel, only that he was going to actually get her attention.

I made it to the door too late. Kevin had a fireball in his hand, and before I could shout again, he was throwing it at Rahel’s back.

Sometimes, the ant stings.

And there’s really only one response to that, isn’t there?

I threw myself backward and to the side as Rahel spun, braids flying, and backhanded the ball of fire out of the air, sending it rocketing at blurry speed for the proverbial bleachers. Before that had even happened, she was launching a counterattack at Kevin, a wave of force that hit the building and blew it apart in a cascade of shattered concrete, rebar, and splintered wood.

I was on the floor, hugging cheap carpet. I’d lost my towel, but that was completely meaningless at the moment. As things came apart around me I grabbed the mattress on the bed and yanked it off the frame. It slid across, tilted down, and formed a small sheltered space as I curled up into a protective ball.

I heard screaming. Could have been Cherise, or the toddler. Tommy. Could even have been Kevin. I hated myself for hiding, but my body wouldn’t move, wouldn’t obey my orders to get up and help.

Nothing you can do, part of my mind said. You’re not a Warden. Rahel can’t even see you. You’re just collateral damage. Keep your head down.

What had I told Cherise, once upon a time? Mere humans were part of this, too. They were the reason the Wardens kept fighting.

And I had to fight for myself, too. No matter the odds.

Another stunning blow hit the building, and the roof overhead ripped off and went flying. The front window shattered, and a piece of glass plunged all the way through the mattress to emerge two inches from my face in a lethally sharp exclamation point. I choked on concrete dust as the cinder-block front wall collapsed in. Some of the blocks—not all, thankfully—slammed down on top of the mattress, pressing it down on me, and I burrowed in toward the bed frame to gasp in more air.

And then it got quiet.

I went very still, listening, and over the faint groan of debris that was still succumbing to gravity, I heard slow, deliberate footsteps. They weren’t heading away.

Rahel was going to finish the job.

I huddled there, heart pounding. All the will to get up and fight had bled right out of me at the sound of those footsteps; there was something terrifying about them.

The sound of death.

I closed my eyes as the crunch of shoes on debris stopped nearby.

The mattress covering me suddenly flipped up and off, flying into the air like some startled bird. I gasped as its comforting weight disappeared. I’d never felt so exposed, naked, and helpless in my life.

I forced myself to open my eyes, and saw Rahel standing over me, staring down with those eerie white eyes. I remembered the first time I’d met her—how she’d just appeared in my car, nearly sending me off the road in surprise. How she’d casually tormented me, but helped me, too. I’d seen Rahel do amazing things, and terrible things, but it had always been her.

This wasn’t her. And suddenly, that made me angry.

“All right, Mom,” I said, and climbed up to my bare feet. I’d lost my towels, not sure where or how; my cold, damp hair straggled down my back and over my shoulders, and I was unevenly coated in concrete dust like I had a serious case of mange. “You want me? Here I am!” I had a black rage boiling inside me, fueled by sheer terror, and I wasn’t the type to go down without a fight. I bent and scooped up a bent piece of iron rebar. It felt gritty and cold in my hands as I took up a batting stance.

Rahel reached for me. I swung, connected with her shoulder, and the rebar snapped in half, sending a piece flying away to clatter against the rubble of the far side of the destroyed room. I wasn’t done. I jabbed at her with the broken end, hoping to bury it in her guts, but she just batted it easily away. When I tried it again, she took hold of the rebar and ripped it out of my hand.

She flung it contemptuously after the other half.

I thought desperately of David—not as a savior, not as someone to come running in and sweep me off my feet. I thought how desperately I was going to miss him, and how much this would hurt him, and how sorry I was not to be able to tell him—tell him . . .

As Rahel swiped a hand full of razor-sharp talons toward my neck, I knew I was going to die. I’d heard other people talk about coming to some kind of peace, acceptance, whatever. Not me. I wanted to howl out my defiance and fury.

Instead, I ducked.

The claws missed my throat, my face, and tangled in my hair. She instantly grabbed a fistful, yanking me off balance toward her. I fought, scratched, punched, did everything I could—a wild animal, fighting for my life.

I heard a distant, wild screaming somewhere at the very limits of hearing, a banshee kind of sound that dopplered closer in seconds. A freight train full of demented shriekers, all of it hurtling straight for me.

Maybe that was death. Rahel’s claws flashed, and I managed to get my arm up to defend my throat. I didn’t feel the cuts, but I saw the skin part like tearing silk, weirdly beautiful. Even the spray of blood looked beautiful—brilliantly colored, every misty drop frozen in crystal clarity.

Then the screaming freight train hit me, full force, and my world went dark. Agony rolled through my body, as if every cell was being ripped apart, rolled in acid, and set aflame . . . but somehow, impossibly, I was still alive.

I heard myself shrieking, just like that sound I’d heard, and then fire exploded out of the ground to engulf me.

No, not fire.

Power.

Thick golden streams of power, flooding up my body, wreathing me in glorious streamers, whipping around and around and then plunging in to waken an explosion that should have ripped me apart.

It should have ripped the world apart.

But instead, I opened my eyes and saw the haze of the aetheric, overlaying the drab, gray destruction. I saw the swirling, unsettled energies, the anger, the stain of all the past in this place.

And I saw the Mother, looking out of a Djinn’s eyes in blind, unthinking fury.

I knocked Rahel’s arm aside and slammed my palm down flat against her chest, directly between her breasts. Force rippled out and down my arm, and blew explosively in a tight-focused blast from me to her.

I knocked the Djinn into the air, over a pile of fallen concrete blocks, and out into the relatively clear area of the parking lot.

I looked down at myself. I was covered in cuts, concrete dust, and blood—so much so that I might as well have been wearing a really skin- tight outfit. But everything was still working, at least while the adrenaline was pumping.

Good enough.

I walked over the broken concrete and glass, heedless of more cuts, and followed Rahel out to where she’d fallen. Not surprisingly, she was already back on her feet, and her sharp teeth glittered as she snarled.

I kept walking toward her, but as I did, I reached for power, and it came, welling up out of the ground, descending from the skies, crackling and bleeding out of every electrical impulse around me. I formed it into a ball of luminescent poison green and threw it like a fast-ball, straight for her face.

She tried to bat it aside, but it dodged, even quicker than a Djinn, and detonated against her torso in a hot flare that knocked her completely down. I reached up into the troubled skies and rubbed water and air molecules together, gathering static into a massive potential energy that turned the clouds black and green.

Then I flipped the polarization of the molecules in the ground, then the air above her, clicking over the changes faster and faster until the circuit was open . . .

. . . And lightning struck in a thick, burning column, pinning her down. Rahel’s body convulsed and dissolved into mist. Not dead—you can’t kill a Djinn like that—but seriously inconvenienced. Even a Djinn has a safety overload, and I’d just burned it right out with those three consecutive strikes.

She’d be back, but not for a while.

I looked around and remembered the power I’d gathered overhead as the sky snarled and rumbled. I reached up and bled the energy back out, slowly, distributing it in a soft, gentle rain that sluiced the blood and dust from my skin. I was still full of power—stuffed with it—but I knew how to let it slowly sink back down into the waiting, silent ground.

A final sigh, and I opened my eyes.

And collapsed.

Ow.

The concrete wasn’t a soft landing, and I realized that my body had simply failed after conducting that much power, energy, and adrenaline. I was shaking now as the tide of hormones receded in my bloodstream and left me feeling human, and vulnerable, again.

I was also hurting. A lot. I looked down at my arm, which was bleeding from deep cuts, and thought, I need to do something about that. It took me a long minute to remember the first aid kit that I’d salvaged from the office. It, and the guns, had been in a bag in my motel room.

I rolled up to my knees, then to my feet, cut off the rain and dried myself off with another burst of power—not so much eliminating the moisture from my skin and hair as moving it somewhere else. Balance. Ma’at.

The sight of the motel was appalling. It was a ruin, barely recognizable as the cheap building we’d arrived at just an hour ago. My room, at least, still had a partial wall standing, though the roof had been yanked off and tossed twenty feet away in a jumble of broken wood and shingles.

Cherise’s and Kevin’s rooms were worse.

Cherise and Kevin. The kid.

It came to me in a physical shock. In the press of adrenaline, fighting for my own life, I’d forgotten about them, but now it came dreadfully clear.

I had my powers back.

Cherise had been harboring my powers, and there was only one reason for those powers to pull away from her and go in search of someone else—if Cherise was no longer a living vessel for them. And I was the only one left standing.

Oh God, no.

I forgot all about the wound on my arm and ran to the mass of broken blocks that was where I remembered Cherise’s room to be. “Cher!” I screamed, and started throwing rubble aside, searching. “Cherise!”

I heard something soft, like a kitten, and stopped to listen. Far corner, under yet another mound of debris—but under the debris was a mattress. She’d done as I had; she’d grabbed the mattress and ducked under it for cover. Yes. Yes, it was going to be okay. . . .

I cleared the rubble off the filthy, broken mattress and pitched it away, heaving with all my strength.

Under it, Cherise lay motionless, with her body half covering the toddler she’d rescued. Tommy. He was the one making the mewling sounds, and when light hit him and he saw me, he let out a full-throated howl of panic and pain. I turned Cherise over enough to pull him out, and checked him with trembling hands. He was bruised, but I couldn’t find any broken bones. She’d protected him.

She’d protected him with her body, and her life.

“Cher,” I whispered, and smoothed her bloodied hair back from her face. “Oh, no, sweetie. No, no, no. You can’t do this to me. You can’t.”

She’d been badly battered by the falling wall, even with the mattress for protection, and I saw the unnatural shape of her legs where they’d been broken and twisted. Her face was oddly unmarked, except for a spot or two of blood. I could almost hear her laughing and saying, I always knew I’d die pretty.

“No,” I said flatly. “You’re not dying on me, bitch. Not happening.”

I saw a flicker inside of her, a golden tongue of fire that hadn’t yet gone out. She wasn’t dead . . . but she was dying. No breath, no heartbeat, and her cells were burning up the last of their energy and shutting down.

I put Tommy down, dragged Cherise flat, and began CPR. I imbued every pump of my hands on her chest, every breath I blew into her slack mouth, with Earth power, giving her body an artificial jump-start of energy for those starving cells until I could get the rest going again. It was exhausting, sweaty work, but I wasn’t going to give up. She was there. Cherise was still alive, buried under the broken rubble of her own body, and she needed me.

The Earth power saturating her body formed a link to me, reporting back on all that it found wrong inside my friend. It wasn’t good. It was going to take a lot to bring her back, and even more to restore her to anything like health.

I needed someone like Lewis, someone who had the gift, the fine and delicate touch of healing. But all I had was me, and I would have to be enough.

I started with the worst of it—ruptured spleen, damaged liver, torn internal blood vessels that were flooding her with blood and compressing her lungs. A depressed skull fracture that had driven splinters of bone into fragile tissue.

Each of those took time, and massive concentration and energy. The skull fracture was the worst and most delicate, and when I’d finally coaxed out the bone splinters and dissolved them, and repaired the damage, I had very few reserves of power left.

But I couldn’t stop. Her legs needed healing fast, or she’d lose them. I moved down her body and made sure she was kept unconscious as I moved the broken pieces, aligned them, and started binding them together in golden strips of power, spiraling up the structure and holding it together. The power sank slowly into the bone and fused it together—not strong, yet, but set.

Then I let her come up from the dark, leading her slowly and gently back to the light.

Cherise opened her eyes with a choking gasp, coughed, and stared blindly up at the sky for a few seconds before her pupils contracted and focused on my face.

“Tommy?” she asked. I pulled the toddler over. He was still whimpering, but at the sight of Cherise’s smile he waved his hands and smiled back.

“He’s fine,” I said. “Cher, don’t try to get up. Stay down, let your body adjust, okay? I have to put some braces on your legs.”

“My legs?” She looked confused, then alarmed. “Oh my God, what happened to my legs?”

“They were broken,” I said. “I fixed them, but you’re going to have to watch it for a while. The braces are just to keep you from banging into things, twisting, that kind of thing.” I tried to get up, but my body wouldn’t do it. It just—refused. Okay, sitting was good. I was all right with a little rest, I supposed. I reached out and pulled over a couple of broken pieces of wood, wrapped each one in sheets from the bed, and wrapped the whole thing around her right leg, then repeated my construction project for the left.

Cherise said, in a very small voice, “I don’t feel good anymore. Not like I did.”

“I know.” That energy, humming and snapping through my body, was something that I’d never known I had, really, until it was gone. I could understand how Cherise felt, to have been given that gift, and then to lose it.

“You’ve got it.”

“Yep.”

“Because I died,” she said, which made me stop what I was doing and look at her in mute concern. “What? It’s true, right? I died, and I lost the power, and it moved on to the next person it could reach. Had to be you, or . . .” Her eyes widened, and we both said it at the same time. “Kevin.”

I hadn’t spared a thought for him, not a single second. If I had, Cherise wouldn’t have made it. But she wouldn’t see it that way, and I wouldn’t blame her a bit. It was a callous thing to do, not to at least try to find him. Problem was, now that I had the time, I didn’t have the energy. No way could I find him, or heal him if I did.

“David,” I said, and closed my eyes. The cord that bound us together was back in place now, strong and vital, but stretched very thin. Still, I knew he could hear me. I knew he would. “David, I need you to find Kevin.”

“David can’t do anything; he’s in Djinn Disneyland,” Cherise said, and batted at me weakly. “You have to go! Go find him!”

“I can’t, Cher.” I said it softly, but I thought she could feel the absolute truth of it. “I just can’t right now.”

Her eyes filled with tears, and she tried to push herself up. I held her down. She yelled at me, cursed, called me names that would have stung if I hadn’t been so tired and drained.

Then she went quiet, and I looked over my shoulder to see the Djinn who’d been driving our car walking through the rubble toward us.

Draped in his arms was Kevin’s lank, limp body.

Cherise let out a sound—not a scream, not a cry, but some awful mixture of the two. It was raw and un-thought, and scraped at me like fingernails on a burn. Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry, I thought wearily. We’d all said we understood the risks, but this was different.

We never really understood until it came down to this.

The Djinn knelt down and put Kevin on the carpet next to Cherise. There wasn’t a mark on Kevin, nothing at all.

He was just . . . gone. The life had been taken right out of him. All the working pieces were still there, in a body that could have still lived on, but some great, overwhelming force had commanded it to be still.

And I knew, as I touched his hand, that there was no way I could bring him back. Kevin—all that had made up the complicated, fragile, angry, vindictive, sometimes brave boy I’d known—all that was gone, blown away like a puffball on the wind.

His eyes were open wide, pupils expanded to drink in the light. He looked very, very young. His hair still gleamed in the dim, cloudy light—wet from his shower, or from the rain I’d brought down. He’d been strong, and sometimes he’d been good, and losing him shouldn’t have hurt so very badly.

I put my hand on his forehead, one last and gentle benediction from someone who should have liked him more, helped him more, done better for him. He’d been torn apart as a child, made into a monster, and he’d tried, dammit. He’d tried so hard to be different.

He would have been a good man eventually. I knew it.

I wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come. They choked me deep inside but refused to rise. Maybe I needed them. Maybe it wasn’t time to mourn.

“Jo.” It was David’s voice, coming from the Djinn’s mouth. “There’s nothing—”

“I know!” I snarled at him, suddenly and irrationally furious with David, of all people. “Just leave me the hell alone, okay? I know there’s nothing I could have done!”

He rose to his feet, staring down at me, and then nodded. “I’ll get the car,” he said. “Let me know if you want to bury him before we go.”

Now Cherise was screaming at him. I didn’t think David minded. He was staying quietly neutral, aware that we had to deal with this in our own ways. He moved the Djinn back, out of our view.

Cherise finally stopped spitting out accusations, and gathered up the wailing, frightened toddler in her arms, hugging him close. I’d never pegged her as the motherly type, but watching her, I could see it. She put on a smile for the boy, soothed him, and when that was done, I could see that she’d reached some fragile acceptance inside.

“We’re not just leaving him here like this, like road-kill,” she told me. “Promise me.”

“I promise,” I said. “I’ll make sure he’s taken care of.”

I meant it, of course, and she could tell that. She didn’t make any objection as I gestured for the Djinn to come back and scoop Kevin up in his arms. I knew it was David on the inside of the avatar, but somehow I couldn’t make myself reach out for him. It wasn’t really David. Just a flicker of will. A phantom. A shadow.

I pulled myself up to my feet without any help from him, looked down at myself, and said, “I need to find my clothes.” It was a measure of how insane things were that nobody else seemed to have noticed I was naked. Cherise, in fact, looked surprised. “I left them in the bathroom.”

For answer, the Djinn nodded toward a spot on the carpet—a relatively clean one. A pile of clothing materialized there—white shirt, sturdy pants that looked suspiciously like I remembered the drapes to be. My own shoes, recovered and cleaned. Plain white bra and panties and socks.

Djinn couldn’t create out of thin air, but they could recycle. He’d used the raw material of extra sheets, the curtains, towels, whatever textile was around, and he’d managed to produce a decent attempt at a wardrobe. Clean and dry, if not stylish.

I struggled into it fast. It fit, of course. Djinn tailoring always fit. I tied my hair back with a stray scrap of fabric blowing in the dirt and started to follow the Djinn out of the rubble.

“Jo?” Cherise called. I looked back. She was sitting up, cradling the fretful boy in her lap. She looked huge-eyed and emotionally shattered, but at least she was physically okay. For now. “I want to go with you.”

“No. If you put any weight on those legs right now, they could break again. They need at least an hour to finish building the seal in the break. That’s as fast as I can do it.”

“Okay.” She swallowed, but didn’t look away. “I want to see him buried. Please. Take me with you.”

I hesitated, then nodded. “I’ll send the Djinn back for you,” I said. “Wait here, okay? I promise, it’ll only be a few minutes.”

She didn’t like it, but I think she saw that there was no way I could carry her myself, physically or with any kind of magical power. If I pulled power from the world around me again, it’d be a case of diminishing returns and a harder crash once it was over. I couldn’t afford it.

Not knowing that this was far from the end.

I found the Djinn easily enough; he’d left a lighted trail of orange light through the trees. He hadn’t gone too far in, but far enough that I lost sight of the road and the wrecked motel. In here, among the pines, things were hushed. The air smelled sweet and heavy, crisp with the smell of the needles.

Untouched.

The Djinn had dug a grave—six feet deep, wider than needed—beneath a particularly impressive branching tree. Kevin’s body lay wrapped in a simple white sheet from the motel, and he no longer looked like the boy I’d known, or the man I’d wished he’d had a chance to become. He looked . . . empty, rendered pale and sexless by the shroud. I wasn’t sure I wanted Cherise to see him like this, but I’d promised.

“I’ll get him in,” I said. “Go get Cherise and the kid. Don’t let her walk yet.”

The Djinn nodded and misted away. I stood there looking at Kevin for a moment, then hopped down into the damp hole in the earth, reached up, and rippled the ground to move him toward me and onto a hardened cushion of air. I floated him down into my arms, and lowered him the last bit on my own. He still felt heavy. Somehow, I’d expected him to be lighter now.

I leaned over and kissed his lips gently. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Find peace, Kevin. I’ve never known anybody who needed it more, and deserved it more.”

That didn’t seem to be enough, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

I levitated myself up on a heated column of rising air and stepped off at ground level, just in time to see the Djinn arrive back at a run with Cherise and the boy in his arms. They looked like toys, the casual way he balanced them, but I knew he wouldn’t drop them. No chance.

He looked around, then formed a plain wooden chair that was the same color and texture as the trees around us. Fallen wood, probably, reshaped for the purpose. He lowered her into it and came to stand next to me.

“He did a lot of things he probably regretted,” David said. “But he tried to do good. That counts.”

“He died trying to save us,” I said. “That counts for everything.”

We linked hands. It didn’t feel like David, but that didn’t matter right now. I just wanted to feel a touch, anyone’s touch, to remind me I wasn’t all alone in this. I felt a breath of relief pass over me that made me feel a little weak. I wish you were with me, I whispered, deep inside.

And I heard his whisper back, along that golden cord that bound us on the aetheric plane. I am with you, he said. Always.

Together, we filled in the hole. Apart from the singing of birds in the trees, the busy rustle of animals carrying on their lives, there wasn’t any sound. When I looked at Cherise, she was silently crying. The boy was staring at us in confusion, about to break into wails of disapproval for all this craziness, but not sure if he should.

We smoothed the dirt on top of Kevin’s grave, and I sent a pulse through the Earth, bidding the seeds to grow. Grass and flowers, pushing up green and fresh.

“You deserved better, Kevin,” I said. “You always deserved better than what you got, and I’m sorry.”

The Djinn said something, after that—something in warm, liquid syllables, lyrical and lovely that rose and fell in emotional arcs of poetry. When he was done, he bowed his head.

“That was beautiful,” Cherise said, even though I knew she hadn’t understood it any more than I had.

“It’s our prayer for the dead,” said David’s voice. “Given to those who fall in battle.”

When he said our, I sensed that he didn’t mean the Djinn. He meant the human he’d once been, living in that long-ago time.

I squeezed his hand. “It is beautiful,” I said. “Promise me you’ll use it for me if it comes to that.”

“No,” he said. “I won’t. Because I won’t be here to do it if you’re gone.”

We stayed a while longer, but the air was getting cool, and we had miles to go.

The Djinn carried Cherise back to the waiting Mustang, which had only suffered a few scratches and dings out in the parking lot during the general destruction. Good. I’d destroyed way too many automotive works of art in my time. I didn’t want to leave the Boss behind, too.

I looked back at the place where Kevin Prentiss had died until it fell away in the rear window, just another wide spot in the road. Nothing special.

It was special now. It always would be, for me.

I waited for the tears, but they stayed where they were, simmering, angry, hungry.

“Floor it,” I said to the Djinn, and to David through him. “I want to see our daughter.”

He didn’t respond, but the Mustang leaped up to a whole new level of fast.