Total Eclipse

Chapter Nine

I don’t remember getting hit; my entire concentration was on slamming shut the elevator door, cutting the cables, overriding the friction brakes, and letting the car drop in a free fall. At first I felt sick and dizzy, and figured that was an effect of the falling, but then I smelled blood. I looked down and saw two separate wounds in my side, ragged holes puncturing my protective white suit. I unzipped it and stepped out. There wasn’t any pain yet, or a lot of bleeding, though red rings were steadily forming on my lab coat around the bullet holes.

“Fantastic,” I said. “That’s just great.”

Gravity was definitely a harsh mistress, and never more than at a time like this. I watched in Oversight, gauging how far I’d fallen, how much farther still remained, and trying to do complicated math in my head. I was approaching seriously terminal velocity, and I was going to have to start slowing my descent.

“Jo!” David’s voice, blasting unexpectedly from the speaker in the elevator. I jerked, and my concentration shattered. Pain began an insidious drumbeat in my side, dammit, too soon. . . . I pushed it, and David, aside and concentrated harder. I was sweating now. Shaking. And there was a growing pool of blood forming around my shoes, how had that happened? Didn’t seem right.

I dropped to my knees, then pitched forward flat on my stomach. I screamed at the impact, because damn that hurt, but it was important to try to distribute impact force over as wide an area as possible.

I reached out for power in the air around me, found it, and began building a thick, cold cushion of air beneath the falling elevator. I increased its density, and felt a significant decrease in the speed at which I was falling.

But I was still falling.

David was saying something, but I couldn’t pay attention, not anymore. I needed more power, more braking, and I needed it now.

I couldn’t get it. When I reached out for power, it slid through my grasp like oil. I felt weak, clumsy, and wet—oh yeah. I was wet because I was lying in a pool of blood.

David was almost screaming at me now. I couldn’t spare a second of concentration; I had to maintain what I’d already done, keep slowing down, try to make this crash survivable. I was running out of elevator shaft.

I threw one last, ultimate effort into it and eased the car to a sliding, jerking stop.

The button dinged, and the doors opened.

For some reason, I couldn’t get to my feet. Maybe because the blood was slippery. I was a mess, and I needed a bath, a nice warm bath to let all of this float away. . . . That sounded good.

But I forced myself up, bracing myself with both bloody hands on the doors of the elevator. My vision was spotty, with circles of darkness swallowing the glare of white lights. Everything seemed to be moving except me.

Walk, I told myself sternly. You have to do this. Now. Because deep down inside, I knew that I wasn’t going to have the strength to wait and do it in a more orderly fashion.

I didn’t make it very far, but then I didn’t have to—this whole area was hot and live with the kind of thing I needed. This was a storage area, deep underground, and the doors were massive affairs on hydraulics. There were six doors. I fell at the first one, flailed around on the floor for a while, and left a hell of a bloody mess trying to get up. The control pad was way the hell up there. That seemed wrong. Why didn’t they build them closer to the floor, for convenience?

Oh, the hell with subtlety.

I blew the door off its hinges in a massive burst of superheated air. It flew over my head, slammed into the far wall with an impact hard enough to be felt in Switzerland, and embedded itself in the concrete to a depth of at least a foot.

Inside that storage locker, about the size of a medium-sized residential home, were stacked row upon row of containers marked with vivid red radiation warning stickers. All very neat and orderly. The aetheric here seethed black, and my own distress didn’t help much.

One more thing to do.

I triggered a reaction.

It wasn’t really all that hard; destruction never is. All I had to do was put some chemical chains together, add heat, pour in energy, stir to a rolling boil.

I didn’t have enough left in me to set up any kind of protective shielding—not that I thought it would have worked in any case. I hoped that the evacuation had worked. I hoped that Dr. Reid and his people were safely outside the facility.

Right now, though, that was a very moot point.

I rolled over on my back, staring up, and my last conscious thought was of David. How much I wished I could die in his arms, if I couldn’t live in them.

I heard his scream echoing through the hallways a second before the brilliant flash of light, and then it took all the power I had left to hold the explosion in, point it down, driving it like a spike deep into the skin of the Mother.

Then there was just . . . light.

And dark.

I didn’t expect to ever open my eyes again—who would, really? After exploding a stockpile of nuclear material? Who the hell survives that?

Me. I’m just lucky like that.

I opened my eyes and found myself floating in a sheer bubble surrounded by flames and destruction. I was still bleeding. There was a pretty significant amount of red pooled at the bottom of the bubble, and my clothes were soaked. My heart was struggling to keep on pumping what little remained.

So, I wasn’t going to go out in a blaze of glory. I’d just bleed to death, lying here inside of this protective cocoon that I swore I hadn’t constructed, and wasn’t maintaining. I couldn’t have, because there was almost nothing left inside me to use.

Someone had saved me. Sort of. And I hated them for it.

Something moved, out there in the fire, in the rubble, in the chaos of smoke. I breathed slowly, steadily, listening to my laboring heart, and watched the figure come clear.

It was the Djinn Venna, in her Alice in Wonderland blue pinafore. Her pale, long hair shone in a shimmering curtain around her shoulders. Her hands were clasped in front of her small body.

Her eyes blazed milk-white.

“I kept you alive,” she said. “Don’t you want to thank me?”

“Not really,” I said, and coughed. That hurt, as if I was tearing pieces of myself loose with every movement. I ended up sobbing, and tried to stop. “Let me go.”

“No,” Venna said, and watched me with icy focus. “You hurt her. We all felt it. The others will all come here to hurt you in return. I have to keep you alive for them.”

This was the part that Lewis and I hadn’t discussed, because it was a terrible thing to even think about. He’d hoped, as I had, that I’d be dead, obliterated in the destruction.

Survival was one hell of a lot worse as an outcome. I wished I could will myself to death, but there are some things I just couldn’t manage, and my heart refused to do anything but keep beating, beating, beating.

“Venna,” I said. “Venna, you have to help me. Please help me.”

“No,” she said. It was a flat, inhuman sound, and there wasn’t even any anger behind it. There was nothing. “You stay alive.”

I should have been dead already, I realized; from the amount of blood I’d lost, and the fact that the flow had slowed to a leak from the wounds, I’d already bled out. Whatever my heart was pumping, with such great effort, through my veins was not my blood.

I was an animated corpse, living at Venna’s whim.

I remembered David’s screams, and I wondered if he knew. I wondered if he could see, from that distant, cold vantage point of Jonathan’s picture window, helpless to stop this, helpless to do anything but grieve. If he left, if he tried to rescue me, he’d be lost himself. Don’t do anything crazy, I begged him silently, through the cord that still, even now, was holding us together. Let me go. Let them do whatever they want, so long as they come here and leave the Wardens alone. I’ll hold out as long as I can.

It sounded brave. I didn’t feel brave, not at all. I felt sick, weak, and dying, and more than anything, I didn’t want to hurt anymore.

Venna was joined by more figures, moving out of the aetheric shadows and into the real world. Some of them I recognized—there was Rahel, glowering at me with real hatred. Ashan, the leader of the Old Djinn—he, at least, didn’t need any incentive to loathe me. He’d gotten a jump-start, early on. I saw plenty of Djinn I’d clashed with before, only a handful of whose names I’d ever learned.

So many Djinn, all with those eerie pearl-white eyes. All stalking me like tigers. Talk about overkill.

I floated in my blood-soaked bubble, waiting for the end.

Venna was the one to make the first move. She reached through the force bubble and ripped a hole in it, gutting it from within. It made a sighing sound, and disappeared, and my blood fell in a sudden rain to the smashed concrete and steel. Followed by my body. I screamed as I hit, although I’d sort of promised myself I’d keep my dignity and not give them the satisfaction. Yeah, that hadn’t even lasted until they actually touched me.

Venna leaned over me as I struggled to right myself. She reached out with her little-girl hand and touched my cheek in a curiously gentle way, cocked her head to one side, and then—with no warning at all—she walloped me so hard that I flew ten feet into a broken wedge of folded steel. It had once been a door, I supposed. If I could have bled more, I would have. It didn’t seem at all fair that I could hang here in this state, on the edge of death, and that my nerves hadn’t shut themselves off yet. It would be okay if I couldn’t feel this. But that was the whole point: they wanted me to feel it.

Every last bloody second of it.

I coughed and clawed my way out of the rubble. I got to my feet and stood there, trembling but erect. I lifted my chin and said, “That’s all you’ve got? You hit like a girl, Venna.”

She bared her teeth and became a feral animal, rushing at me with clawed fingers and snapping teeth, and I knew this wasn’t going to go well, not at all.

But I’d signed up for the whole ride, hadn’t I? I’d known what I was getting into, and in that split second before Venna actually reached me, I gave up all hope of living through any of it. That was a black kind of peace, perversely comforting.

Something hit Venna before she reached me—a pale blur, something big and muscular. Venna was knocked off course, into a pile of rubble. Her screams of rage pulverized a few of the concrete blocks into beach sand, and I blinked, amazed that I was still standing.

There was another Djinn standing in front of me—facing away from me, toward the others.

Oh.

It was the nameless Djinn who’d been chauffeuring us around the country. The vessel. The avatar.

And now, it said, with my own voice, “Stay away from my mother, you bastards!”

Imara. My daughter, the Earth Oracle. Like David, she couldn’t leave her own personal stronghold, where she was holding out against the madness of the Djinn . . . but she’d found a way to remote-pilot the avatar, the same way David and Whitney had done.

“Imara?” I blurted. “What are you doing?”

“Saving your life, I think. Honestly, do you ever stop doing insane things? What were you thinking?” The Djinn glanced over his shoulder, and in his expression I saw my daughter’s harassed shadow. “You shouldn’t be here. I can’t believe you walked into this with your eyes open.”

“Would you feel better if I’d blundered into it stupidly?”

“Maybe I would.” Imara snapped the Djinn’s head back around as Ashan walked forward, and I felt the energy change, grow darker. Ashan had killed my daughter, in her original Djinn form. She hadn’t forgotten that, not at all. “Back off.”

He didn’t seem to even hear her, or care that there was any kind of obstacle standing in his way. When he got within reach of the Djinn, Ashan simply reached out and pushed, and the Djinn went flying, off balance and overmatched. The only comfort I took was that Imara herself wasn’t being hurt. She was safe, somewhere else.

Ashan was looking every bit the vicious, smooth businessman he’d always appeared to me. He’d always been partial to well-tailored suits, and this one was gray, matched to an off-white shirt and sky-blue tie. His physical form had no more personality to it than a store mannequin.

He reached me, not seeming to hurry at all, and grabbed me around the throat. He did that alien head-tilt thing, just like Venna, as if trying to decide exactly what type of pond scum I might be, and—still holding my throat—turned and dragged me toward the others. Venna had gotten up and was engaged in mortal combat with the Djinn avatar, who was doing his—her?—level best to keep the kid away from my back.

But my dangers were also right in front of me, and there were a lot of them.

Ashan pulled me into the middle of the Djinn, then turned and stared right into my eyes.

“Tell us why,” he said. “Why you did this.”

“I needed to get your attention,” I wheezed, around his iron grip. “I think I have it now.”

“You do.” Ashan’s smile was as artificial and cold as the rest of him, and just as assured. “You will regret it.”

“Oh, sweetie, so ahead of you on that one. Let me go or I’ll bleed all over you.”

“Promise?” His smile widened. “Maybe soon we’ll let you die. Would you like that?”

I had my hands free, so I shot him a finger. “Not as much as I’d like to watch you try it.” It was getting harder to talk around his kung- fu grip, and I wasn’t sure that last smart-ass remark came out as anything but garbled chokes. Ashan liked to play with his food. I thought that as long as I was giving back, he wouldn’t move on to the next phase of agony.

Maybe.

The avatar had lost his battle with Venna. That didn’t surprise me much, but it did alarm me. It meant that Imara was playing hurt, or handicapped. Normally, she could have wiped the floor with any Djinn who got in her way, but now the avatar was down, battered and hurt, and Venna was stepping calmly over the body to get to me.

The beaten Djinn avatar rolled over and up to its feet, but it wasn’t in any shape to come at Venna again on my behalf.

The Djinn looked past Venna, at me, and I saw my daughter’s torment in those strange eyes. “Mom,” she said softly. “Get ready. He’s coming.”

Ashan’s hand gripped tighter, bending cartilage in my throat, and what little air I was gasping in cut off. I flailed at him, and it made no difference. None at all.

It never occurred to me to wonder who he was, until a shadow formed in the corner of my eye, and David walked out of it, carrying a . . . box?

I was clearly hallucinating. Oxygen deprivation.

David put the box down, lunged forward, and grabbed Ashan’s arm.

And broke it.

Ashan yelled in surprise and let go of me as he stared down at the dangling odd angle of his forearm, then caught hold of it with his left and snapped it back into a straight line, reconstructing the damage—but it gave David time to grab me and pull me away from Ashan.

David’s eyes were molten bronze, blazing so hot I could feel the feverish intensity behind them. He glanced at me once, a frantic, horrified look, and then put his attention on Venna, who was shrieking toward us like something out of a first-rate horror movie.

He slammed her back, into the Djinn avatar, who in turn slung her hard into a wall and pinned her there.

“No time,” David gasped. He was trembling now, and I could feel the fear in him. “Jo, in the box. You know what to do. I—”

He cried out, fell to his knees, and I watched the David I knew disappear. He fought it, oh God he fought it with everything in him, but he was a Djinn, and a Conduit, and he couldn’t hold back.

I watched his eyes turn pale, then white.

Panic drove me to follow his orders. I could lose myself; I could stand that. I couldn’t see him reduced to a puppet, something used to hurt me. He wouldn’t survive that. God, why had he done this? He’d been safe!

I ripped back the top of the box and found . . . bottles. Lots of bottles, all with corks in the tops.

It came to me in a blinding rush what he wanted me to do.

I grabbed the first one I could reach, popped the cork with my thumb, and focused on David as the Mother took possession of him.

“Be thou bound to my service!” I yelled, and didn’t dare stop for a breath. “Be thou bound to my service! Be thou bound to my service!” As incantations go, it wasn’t much—I spit the words out so fast that they were almost incomprehensible, and for a terrible second I thought I’d rushed too much . . . that it wouldn’t work at all.

It felt like the entire Djinn world took in a collective breath, and I knew I had only a few seconds to live. They wouldn’t be playing with me anymore now. Not anymore.

David screamed—an inhuman scream, torment and fury—and dissolved into mist.

Venna, behind me, broke free of the avatar and lunged for me. If she could force me to break the bottle before I corked it, he’d go free.

I hung on to the slippery glass like grim death, and corked it. I hadn’t waited for the mist to flow inside, but I hadn’t really needed to; it was the corking that mattered, and suddenly I felt a complex network of power snap into place between me and David, overlaying the bonds we already had.

Now all I had to do was release him.

Venna hit me like a freight train just as I thumbed out the cork, and I was smashed against the floor. Somehow, I managed to cradle the bottle against breakage, and I curled in on myself, holding it, keeping it safe.

The Djinn piled on me, and I knew, as I felt unnaturally hot, strong hands take hold of parts of my body, that I’d be ripped to pieces.

David reformed in the middle of the Djinn and fought them off. That sounds simple. It wasn’t. His eyes blazed bronze again, and I could see the focus and fear on his face as he stood over me and wreaked damage on his fellow Djinn. It allowed me the space to crawl away, inching along over broken concrete and steel to where he’d left the box.

The avatar was there, holding bottles with the corks already out. He passed me one, and I focused on Venna, who was ripping at David like a wild animal. She’d kill him, and me, if she wasn’t stopped. “Be thou bound to my service. Be thou bound to my service. Be thou bound to my service.”

I got all three iterations out before Venna reached me, and she shrieked and disappeared. I hadn’t been at all sure that it would work on the Old Djinn; I’d suspected it wouldn’t. But maybe, somewhere out there, somebody liked me after all, despite the evidence to the contrary.

I corked the bottle and slotted it back into the box. The avatar, in turn, threw me the next empty. This time, I targeted Ashan.

Ashan snarled and misted away before I could complete the incantation. Coward.

Rahel didn’t run. She leaped like a spider out of the shadows as I turned my concentration on her, and sent me, and the bottle, flying before I could stammer out more than half the incantation. The avatar dropped what he was doing and grabbed her, wrestling her to a halt before she could rip my head off, and I finished gasping the last iteration out: “—bound to my service.”

Screams. Mist. A cork in the bottle, which went back in the box.

But the rest of the Djinn weren’t going to let me continue this; most of them had been corked before, and even if they hadn’t been under the Earth’s control they’d have come after me in earnest. They’d killed Wardens for far, far less.

David broke free of a knot of them and backed up to stand over me. He dragged me to my feet and said, “Get us help.”

He meant Rahel and Venna, locked in the bottles. According to the rules that governed bottled Djinn, neither he nor any Djinn could touch the containers once they’d been filled. I had to open them myself.

One of the other Djinn thought faster than I could move. She couldn’t touch the bottles, but she could touch the box they were stored in, and she overturned it, sending dozens of bottles—all corked, all identical—skittering over the debris. Two of them were full. I just had to find those two.

It wasn’t quite a needle in a haystack, but hanging as I was on the edge of death, it was close enough.

“Keep them off me!” I shouted to David and the avatar—whether Imara or Whitney was piloting it now, I couldn’t tell—and lunged for the first bottle. I uncorked it. Nothing. I dropped it where it lay and went to the next. Nothing, again.

One of the bottles was smashed. I hoped that wasn’t one of the two I was looking for, but I didn’t see either Rahel and Venna coming to wreak unholy vengeance on me, so probably not.

A Djinn grabbed my ankle as I reached for the next bottle, and yanked me toward him. I managed to close my fingers around it as I was dragged backward, and as I felt him take hold of the other leg, I knew he was going to wishbone me—just rip me in half with one pull.

I uncorked the bottle, and felt that rush of power and control settle in.

Venna formed, blue eyes calm and utterly in control. She looked down at me, nodded, and grabbed hold of the Djinn who was about to subdivide me. Venna didn’t mess around. She couldn’t kill him, but she could—and did—rip enough out of his physical form that he had to mist away and recover.

Then she turned to me and helped me up. I was now holding two open bottles, hers and David’s, and it occurred to me that balancing another one was going to be problematic—but I needed to throw Rahel in on their side. There were far too many possessed Djinn, not enough defenders, and already David had bloody cuts on him that weren’t healing. It was a sign of how much power he was expending.

Plus, I needed healing, and I needed it fast, so that I could funnel power to my Djinn before it was too late.

Under normal circumstances, David could have healed me, and I could have replenished his power after I was feeling better—but these circumstances were far from normal. We were in a smoking, radioactive hole in the ground, fighting for our lives against an enemy that could, at any time, destroy us all.

I went up into the aetheric, looking desperately for something, anything to help . . . and found it, heading our way at a very fast clip. Two bright, shimmering spots that radiated power.

Wardens.

They were still minutes away, but they were coming, and they were powerful. It would help. With two more Wardens to anchor the bottled Djinn, and capture others . . .

But first I had to make it until they arrived.

Venna and David suddenly left their individual fights, heading for the same spot at the same time, which looked like a recipe for disaster. I should have known better. One of the Djinn had picked up a massive section of concrete, and was pitching it out of the shadows and smoke at me. It would have flattened me like a cartoon if it had landed.

David and Venna caught it and threw it back into the Djinn, bowling a few of them over. But David staggered, and I saw his wounds start to bleed more heavily. Venna also was looking less than steady.

Because I was losing ground, too. Adrenaline had sustained me for a while, but now I could feel my body starting to lose its way. Having the additional drain of the Djinn didn’t help, either.

I didn’t think I was going to make it until help arrived. That might have been a character flaw, but I could feel the resignation growing inside of me, the willingness to finally, ultimately just . . . let go.

David looked at me, and I saw the emotion in his face, the knowledge. He understood what I was feeling, and thinking, and he couldn’t bear it. He couldn’t.

He exchanged a look with Venna and backed up next to me, took me in his arms, and poured energy into me, healing me in a hot, burning rush that made my body arch against him in a parody of love. I heard myself screaming, I heard him whispering to me, frantic and desperate.

“No!” Venna said sharply, and grabbed David and pulled him off me. She shoved him away, at the oncoming group of three Djinn who were coming at us. “Stop them!” He let out an anguished yell and hit them head-on.

Venna grabbed my hands and took up what David had started. She poured power into me in a burning wave, forcing my body together and sealing it with more power than I’d ever felt. It hurt, oh God, it felt like being boiled alive, and I knew I was screaming but I couldn’t stop.

She wasn’t just healing me, she was undoing what she’d done to me before—and that was some serious magic. Whatever she’d done to suspend me at the edge of death, it had been significantly more powerful than I’d thought.

Venna drained herself dry. I saw the blaze in her blue eyes die down, go dim, and then go out. She released my hands and started to disappear—but not into mist. Into sharp-edged shadows, angles, an alien and terrifying geometry that I recognized instantly.

She had just given up so much of herself, so fast, that she was becoming a creature made up of hunger. She was losing herself, but not to the Mother; she was losing herself to desperation.

Her eyes turned black, all black.

Ifrit.

I think that some part of Venna was still aware, because instead of battening on the closest possible Djinn—David—she bypassed him, grabbed hold of one of the three he was fighting, and hooked her oddly angled, blackened limbs around the other Djinn. Ifrits fed by ripping away aetheric energy, draining their victims as they voraciously and endlessly fed, to sate a hunger that couldn’t really be stopped, not by any power short of an Oracle’s.

Venna had brought all her primitive fury and power to it, and within a matter of seconds, she’d reduced the screaming Djinn she was holding to ashes. Ashes.

She’d destroyed him utterly.

The stronger the Djinn, the more viciously predatory the Ifrit could become—and Venna was, without question, the most fearsome Ifrit I could dare to imagine. She went after another victim, who prudently misted away and left the fight.

I was still shaking and sweating, on my hands and knees. I felt better, and much worse, at the same time; light-speed healing will do that to a human body. I’d be dealing with the aftereffects for days. For now, though, I needed to overrule my body’s shock, and just get on with it.

David helped me stand. He was watching Venna’s rampage, lips parted as if he literally couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t sure I could, either.

Venna shifted and made for a Djinn I knew slightly—she was exotically beautiful, with white hair and eyes that normally glowed a brilliant yellow. She tried to mist away, but Venna was quicker, and sank her claws into the Djinn, who howled in rage and pain.

“We have to stop her,” David said. “She’ll kill everyone. Everyone.”

I scrambled for Venna’s bottle and said, firmly, “Venna. Back in the bottle. Back in the bottle. Back in the bottle! ” I almost added, Dammit, because she wasn’t listening to me. . . . But then, inevitably, the compulsion set in to obey, and she was dragged away from her victim in a mist of shifting black that oozed slowly back into the glass container.

I jammed the cork in.

There were still ten or so Djinn facing us—no small number, and Ashan could decide to pop back in at any minute. But Venna had bought us just enough time. The Wardens were here.

And they were Earth Wardens, which was good; the radiation in here would fry Weather or Fire Wardens. Two Earth Wardens would be a lot of use.

I wasn’t prepared for who they’d be, and it took me a few seconds to recognize the man scrambling down the maze of broken concrete toward us. He—or they—had cleared a tunnel along the way, so I could see faint glimmers of daylight, far above. He was Hispanic, good looking in a tough-guy kind of way, with muscled arms that rippled with flame tattoos. Like most Earth Wardens, he favored jeans and hiking boots, which served him well here.

Following him was a tall, thin, pale woman with hair as white as the Djinn on whom Venna had just been munching. She had skin to match, coloring that missed albino only by the shade of her eyes, which were an unmistakable shade of green. They weren’t a Djinn’s eyes, not anymore, but they once had been.

That was Cassiel, the Djinn who’d been locked into human form. And her partner, Luis Rocha.

“Sorry we’re late,” Rocha said, and jumped down the rest of the way to land with a solid thump next to me. “Madre, you don’t go halfway when you blow shit up, do you? There’s enough rads burning in here to barbecue lead. We can’t stay here long.”

“We have to,” I said. “How’d you get here?”

“We were close, and Cassiel’s hell on wheels with moving fast. Hey, Cass, you remember Joanne?”

Cassiel inclined her head, just a little. She didn’t smile, or look at all excited to see me again.

That took a turn for the worse as she looked at her fellow Djinn. “They’re hers,” Cassiel said. “They won’t stop coming for you. They know you hurt her.”

“I know that,” I snapped. “It was kind of the plan. Here. Rocha, take this. Try to bind one of them.”

“Try to what?” He looked shocked, as I pressed a bottle into his hand. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Two Djinn came for us before I could answer. David took one and got body-slammed into a pile of broken rock and bent rebar, and I felt suddenly sick at the damage he was taking, for me. I raised up wind and began whipping it around the chamber, vicious eddies and currents that pulled at the Djinn and flowed through them. Unless they commit completely to human form, Djinn often wear shells—bodies that aren’t quite completely stable.

Wind is their enemy, and I shredded several of them apart into vapor. They tried to reform. I kept hitting them with blasts of air.

The ones who’d taken on entirely physical forms came at us in a rush, and I realized, belatedly, that the one who’d been heading for me had disappeared. He’d veered off course, and was lunging for Cassiel, who had grabbed the bottle from Luis’s hands.

“Be thou bound to my service,” she shouted, and had just enough time to repeat it two times before his fist slammed into her chest. She staggered under the blow, but it was nowhere near as deadly as it could have been, because the Djinn was dissolving into mist when he’d made contact. He siphoned into the bottle, and she corked it and tossed it to Rocha. Then she took a deep breath and grabbed another bottle.

He stared at her with utter disbelief as she bound another Djinn. She shoved that bottle into a pocket and grabbed yet another empty—only that one turned out to already be occupied. Rahel misted out of it—the Rahel I knew—and took a look around at the chaos. Then she flashed me a reckless, shark-toothed grin and threw herself into the fight.

Cassiel raised an eyebrow and put that bottle in another pocket, and kept on binding Djinn in a terse, methodical way until the only one left was the one David was fighting.

Luis finally decided to join in, and bound that one.

Silence.

I dropped to my knees again, shaking and sweaty, coated in my own drying blood, and I realized the enormity of what we’d just done. We’d enslaved the most powerful of the Djinn, and if anything was going to make the rest of them come screaming after us, that was it. Well, Lewis had wanted me to be bait. I didn’t think he’d expected me to achieve it on this level of success.

“What did we just do?” Luis asked nobody in particular. “Fuck.”

“We did what we had to do, to survive,” Cassiel said, in her cool, uninflected way. “But we won’t survive long if we don’t leave this place. The radiation is too high even for Earth Wardens.”

I nodded, and climbed painfully to my feet. I needn’t have bothered; David swept me up in a carry position, and I reflexively threw my arms around his neck for balance. “You’re hurt,” I said. “Let me walk.”

“I’m not the one wearing the entire contents of my veins as body makeup,” he said grimly. “Shut up, Jo. Let me help you.”

Feeling him against me was better than morphine, and I couldn’t find it in myself to argue with him, not now. God, I didn’t realize how much I’d missed him when he’d been gone. A voice on the radio, a presence in an avatar—those things weren’t David. This was David.

“Don’t ever do anything this stupid again,” he told me, as Cassiel led the way up the treacherous rocky tunnel. I rested my head on his shoulder and sighed.

“If I had a nickel for every time somebody said that . . .”

“Jo, I’m serious. I’m not letting you die for them. Let him die for the Wardens for a change.” By him he meant Lewis. There was more than a bite of anger and jealousy in there. Although he and Lewis had always been friends, they were also always rivals. Frenemies? “This is out of control. I’m sorry I had to do that.”

“Do what?”

“Bring the bottles.” He looked at me bleakly. “The last thing I wanted was to enslave my people, again.”

“Starting with yourself.”

“It was the only way I could come here and protect you. If you hadn’t claimed me, I’d have been one of them. I’d have come after you, and you know I couldn’t live with that. Not if I—” He didn’t want to say it. We climbed in silence. It was a brutal angle, and uneven footing, and I was pretty sure that I’d never have been able to manage it on my own after all. Even David slipped from time to time, and Cassiel and Rocha were helping each other along.

I looked back over my shoulder, but there was no sign of the Djinn following along, other than Rahel, standing at the bottom of the tunnel. “Rahel?” I called.

She shook her head. “I’m not walking,” she called up, and clicked her long fingernails together. “See you on top.”

She misted away.

Man, I wished I could do that—although I felt the burn inside me as she pulled power from me, just as David had to do to continue this grueling climb. He probably would have preferred to blip out, too, but he couldn’t take me with him, and I could tell he wasn’t about to leave me on my own, even with two other Wardens to help.

We didn’t speak the rest of the way, but I took huge comfort in just being with him. For now, at least.

We arrived at the top, and Luis Rocha collapsed toward the ground in a fluid crouch when he got there, breathing hard. Cassiel, who was only lightly winded—the bitch—settled down next to him. “Damn,” Rocha wheezed. “Next time remind me to angle my tunnels better.”

“You were in a hurry,” Cassiel said, as if all this was the most normal thing in the world. She began taking bottles out of her pockets and setting them out in front of her. Luis added his, and I gave up all of mine except for the one that contained Venna. There was no way I was risking her getting out, not until we had some way to control her.

I looked around. The buildings were toast, shattered and leveled, and black smoke still poured out of some of the holes that were left. I’d done a good job of directing the initial damage from the blast; pretty much the entire compound was gone, but only inside the fence. Even the guard towers seemed to still be okay, although I wouldn’t go climbing them without good reason. A gleaming Harley-Davidson motorcycle was parked just outside of the fence, as was the Boss, which no longer gleamed; it was covered in layers of grit and grime. As dusty as it was, it could have been there for years.

I saw no signs of anyone else. I guessed that Dr. Reid had finally come down on my side, and hustled the skeleton crew off the base and into total evac mode. Good. I would have shouldered the burden, but I was so, so glad I didn’t have to do it.

“We’re not the only ones who were headed this way,” Rocha said, and accepted a bottle of water from Cassiel out of the pack she was carrying. I hadn’t noticed before, but she was dressed in white motorcycle leathers. They were immaculate, even after all the scrambling around down and up the tunnel. She passed me water as well, and took the last bottle for herself.

It wasn’t until the liquid hit my tongue that I realized how incredibly parched I was, and I sucked down the bottle so fast that the plastic crackled in protest. I drained the whole thing in a rush, then had to sit down as it filled my stomach. Right, that was too fast. I kept it down, but it was a struggle.

Once the discomfort faded, I looked down at myself. Ugh. Not pretty. My body was mostly healed, but there was no helping the filthy coating of blood and dirt I was wearing, or the ragged clothes. The lab coat had helped, but it was shredded and so bloodstained I might have been an extra in a chain saw massacre movie. A dead one.

It occurred to me, belatedly, what Rocha was telling us. “Who else is on the way?”

“Cops, fire, every federal agency still in business, probably. Maybe the military. This wasn’t some small-time target, you know. It’s going to get a lot of attention.”

Well, that’s what I’d intended—just not from the human world. “So I suppose the smart thing to do is . . .”

“Seal up the tunnel, contain the radiation, and get the hell out of Dodge? Yeah. That’d be it.” Rocha was taking his time with his water, which I wished I’d done, but he was almost finished. He tipped it back and drained the last mouthful, then tossed it down the tunnel.

“Bad recycler,” I said, and tossed mine in with it.

“Jo, you brought down the whole fucking complex. I don’t think water bottles really count at this point.”

He held out his hand to Cassiel as he stood, and she rose to match him. Their hands linked, and I felt the low hum of power start to build.

“We should help,” I said to David. He shook his head.

“No, you need to rest. So do I. Let other people do the work for a while.”

Not really my style, but I could see his point. While they were filling in the tunnel—I could feel the rumble under my feet—I rooted around in Cassiel’s pack and found another bottle of water. Probably wasteful, but I stripped off the lab coat and then my shirt underneath, which wasn’t quite as filthy. I used it as a washcloth to swipe blood and dirt off my face, arms, and hands. Short of calling up a gully-washing rain, there wasn’t much I could do to get any cleaner until we reached civilization. Or at least a bathroom.

Dust plumed out of the collapsing tunnel, but we were out of line of the blast, luckily. I felt the long burn of the radiation through the soil, but even that was dialing back to a low background hum as Rocha and Cassiel put their blocks in place. It took about five minutes, and I heard the distant call of sirens in the distance before they were finished.

Funny, I’d have thought it was later—it seemed like days had gone by—but the sun was just now slipping toward the horizon, turning the whole landscape a fierce blood red.

I used the lab coat to wrap up the Djinn bottles, and stuffed them into Cassiel’s pack. “Try not to fall on that,” I said. “That would be bad.”

She looked at me with those odd green eyes, and cocked an eyebrow. Very Mr. Spock, it seemed to me, although she probably didn’t even know what that would mean. As Djinn went, she was very much out of the pop culture loop.

“Do you imagine I like enslaving my own?” she asked. “Having done it, do you think I would like for them to win their freedom and come after me?”

I hadn’t really considered it, but Cassiel was a Djinn through and through, in every way except her physiology, which was stone-cold human . . . except that she couldn’t survive without a Warden partner to replenish her energy stores. She’d never liked people, and she really had never liked Wardens. So this had been a dramatic step for her to take, and one that indicated how human she was really becoming.

Right now I was pretty sure that she loathed it.

I inclined my head to her without another word, and after a long stare, she looked away, toward the horizon where there was a distant glitter of fast- moving vehicles. “We need to go,” she said. “Now. The Djinn will be back on us soon, and we don’t need the entanglements with humans.”

I thought—but didn’t say—that we were actually in a much stronger position now, with all the bottled Djinn at our command. Some of them would be royally pissed, and would do everything in their power to sabotage us, but I thought most of them would understand why we’d done it, and how vital it was for them to put aside their personal issues until we could put Mother Earth back to a sound, restful sleep.

Then they could—and probably would—kill us just for the principle of the thing. The absolute last thing the Djinn wanted was Wardens getting their hands on bottles again. The cooperation the Djinn had originally given, thousands of years ago, had come back to bite them in a big, big way; many of them, David included, had suffered through centuries (or even millennia) of harsh servitude at the hands of Warden masters.

They’d kill to prevent it from happening again, and now Cassiel, Luis and I were a big risk to them.

“One problem at a time,” I said. “Let’s get the hell out. Any ideas where to go?”

Rocha shrugged. “It’s all pretty much apocalyptic, so take your pick. We were going to head to Sedona.”

Fate seemed to want me to go there, but Imara had very clearly said don’t. I couldn’t understand why, but I was willing to take it on faith; my daughter had risked a lot to come help me here, even for a few minutes. I didn’t want to put her in even more danger.

“David?” I looked at him for a suggestion, and he smiled a little.

“Trouble finds us,” he said. “Let’s head for where the Wardens are gathering. That’s where they can use us, and the Djinn you claimed.”

He was hiding it well, but I could tell that he hated the whole claiming thing even more than Cassiel. He was angry with himself, because he’d been the one to think of it. The one to find the bottles and deliver them.

He could rationalize it, but he’d never be able to excuse it. I knew David way too well. Like me, he took on too much and felt too much. His predecessor as Conduit for the Djinn, Jonathan, would have been able to shrug it off as necessary, and that would have been the end of the story. Not David.

I ached for him, but in this, I agreed with my imaginary Jonathan: it was necessary. We’d release them as soon as we could, but for now, it was the only way to keep any balance to this fight.

Cassiel picked up her backpack, and we ran for the vehicles. The ground was pitted and treacherous from the blast, but we made good time and got to the fence just as David blew it open for us. David and I piled into the car, and found—to neither of our surprise—the Djinn avatar sitting at the wheel, ready to go. Cassiel and Luis mounted the motorcycle; interestingly, she was the one driving. I wondered how that negotiation had gone.

“Drive,” David told the Djinn, and no sooner had he spoken than the engine fired up and the car leaped forward, spitting sand as it dug in and raced for the road. We hit asphalt a few seconds later, and when I looked back I saw the motorcycle turning in behind us. “Whitney!”

“You rang, boss?” She sounded just the same as before, amused and none too concerned with our lives. “That was a rock-stupid thing to do, you know. And now I’m stuck back being the damn Conduit, because you went and got yourself claimed. Again.”

“It was that or end up on the Mother’s chain,” David said. “I’ll take a slightly limited version of freedom.”

“You’d better hope it’s slightly limited.” Whitney’s voice cooled, and all of a sudden her rich Southern accent dropped completely away. “Let me make it clear, both of you: I’m not standing for Djinn being stuck in bottles. I know why you did it, but it’s filthy betrayal and I’m going to see you burn for it. Understand?”

“Of course,” David said. “I need you keeping a look-out for Djinn coming in for us.”

“Maybe,” Whitney said. “And maybe I’ll just think about it, boss man.”

That didn’t sound good. Whitney was crazy but consistent, and if she meant what she said, we had a fifty-fifty chance of her just washing her hands of us and letting the Djinn in without a fight.

Granted, we had resources, but I didn’t like losing Whitney’s support. We were in enough trouble as it was.

“Please,” I said. “It’s my responsibility, Whit. Take it out on me if you have to.”

Whitney made a sound that I found particularly irritating. “Oh, I will,” she said, and the Southern accent crept back into her voice. “Believe me.”

“Whitney,” David said. “Hide us. Now.”

“Oh, all right.” I felt something pass over us, like a shimmer of heat, and I knew that she’d done as he asked. From now on, we were traveling unseen by anyone without Warden powers—and probably by most who actually had them. It wouldn’t fool someone of Lewis’s quality, but it would serve to get us past any roadblocks, helicopters, and sharp-eyed patrols.

We zoomed past a road five miles out where several shining military-style vehicles were parked in neat lines. I got a flash of Dr. Reid’s face as he spoke to a group of people. He’d done it. He’d evacuated the compound.

That made me feel better, and also, oddly, very tired. Maybe the anxiety had been keeping me alert, but now I felt like I was dropping fast toward exhaustion. Not too surprising. It had been a big afternoon, what with nuclear explosions and getting shot and bleeding out.

I must have yawned, because David smiled and pulled me close. He felt better than one of those memory foam mattresses.

“Do you want to sleep somewhere more comfortable?” he asked, and touched his lips gently to the skin just beneath my ear. I couldn’t work up much in the way of sexual excitement, but I shivered a little and gave him a weary smile of my own.

“I’m going to dream about hotels. Fancy ones, with the nice fluffy bathrobes and slippers and expensive soaps. None of this window-unit air conditioner crap.” I stopped and thought about it for a second. “Does that sound self-absorbed, given the ending of the world and all?”

“Maybe a little,” he said. “But I understand. And I wish I could give it to you. The best I can do is the backseat, for now.”

I sighed. “That’ll do.”

And truthfully, a fabulous hotel would have been wasted on me, because after I’d climbed over the seat and pulled David’s warm, long coat over me, I was asleep before a mile passed under the fast-turning wheels.

I’d like to say I didn’t dream, but I did. It was vivid, and shocking, and it felt, well, real.

It felt like I’d stepped out of a dark place and into a bright, harsh sun, and I raised my hand to block out the glare. Only it wasn’t the sun at all.

It was a giant, vaguely man-shaped form stalking toward me, and everything it touched in its way—rock, trees, fleeing animals, a car full of people—burst into instant and immediate conflagration. It was the Fire Oracle, but pulled out of his hidden sanctuary and made subject to the will of the Mother.

It was burning everything.

I watched from my frozen, helpless spot as it stalked toward a town in the tree-lined valley below me. That was when I got a sense of scale, and realized that this glowing, terrifying creature was towering hundreds of feet in the air, taller than any building in the modest downtown. I could hear the screaming coming up out of the town, like birds sounding an alert. I could see tiny forms of people running, but there was nowhere to hide. The Oracle walked, and everything, everything turned to slag and ashes. It left behind nothing alive. This was what the Djinn and the Wardens had feared for so many thousands of years.

The extinction, without mercy, of the entire human race, done systematically and thoroughly.

I was watching tens of thousands of lives end, and I knew it would happen over and over and over, and it was so neat, so clean. Nothing left to bury. The charred land would heal itself, as it so often did; nature would take over the abandoned ground. Animals would return, free from being hunted out of existence by humans.

I felt a hand on my shoulder, and turned to face . . . myself. No, it was my daughter, Imara. She looked haunted, the way her father did. The way my own face appeared now, seeing this horror unfolding in front of me.

Imara’s face was mine, but her eyes were different, more like David’s. She was dressed as she was when I’d seen her in Sedona, in a dress made of shifting red sand. It flowed around her, constantly in motion, and flashes of her bare skin showed through. It might have seemed somehow flirtatious, but instead, it was stunningly beautiful. There was a peace and power that radiated from her the same way that heat radiated from the Fire Oracle, or menace from the Air Oracle.

She silently put her arms around me, and I felt the sand move around both of us, whispering secrets.

“Baby,” I said, and felt the hot pressure of tears. “Oh, sweetheart. Thank you. I wanted to see you.”

“I know. I wanted to see you, too.”

I looked back over my shoulder. The town was still dissolving in flames and screams, and my entire body ached with the intensity of the horror I felt. Imara’s arms tightened around me.

“No, Mom, don’t try. You can’t stop it. You can’t help it. This is why it’s so important for me to stay where I am, and not let anybody close. I know you didn’t mean to do it, but you breached the Fire Oracle’s barrier when you broke out of there. You weakened it. And once you did, the Mother’s influence got through to him. He lost himself. That’s why I need you to stay away from Sedona, and I’m so sorry—I know that sounds terrible, and I wish—I wish—” Imara took in a deep breath. “I wish I could keep you safe with me. But I can’t.”

“Is all this happening now?” I asked. The smoke and flame and screams kept rising, and now I started dreading the moment when the screaming would stop. “Is this a dream, or is this really happening?”

“Mom—”

“Tell me.”

Imara looked at me with pity in her eyes, and said, “It’s why the Wardens needed you to distract those of the Djinn you could. And you did; you took out some key players. But it’s not going to be enough.”

My fists clenched, and my nails dug in deep enough to burn and cut. “The Wardens have to do something!”

“They are. But this isn’t something Wardens can fight. It isn’t even something the Djinn can fight, although if you command them, they’ll try. Elemental powers are walking the planet now, and there’s no reasoning with them. No clever tricks or last-minute reprieves. The game’s over. Humans have lost.” She said it so gently, and with so much compassion; I knew she’d lost her humanity when Ashan had killed her, but I liked to think that through me, she retained some memory of it. Some sense of the magnitude of what was happening right in front of us.

But what I saw in her was a distance that I couldn’t cross anymore. She was part of the Earth, and the Earth had rejected my species as flawed and failed. So no matter how much Imara still felt for me, she couldn’t bring herself to feel it for all those suffering and dying below us.

I swallowed a hard lump in my throat and managed to ask, “Then why are you here?”

“Because I can help you, Mom,” my daughter said. “I can help you become something else.”

“A Djinn? Been there, done that, not doing it again. I’m human. I like being human.”

“But you’ll be alone. The only human left. I can keep you safe, but only you. No one else. Is that what you want?”

“No,” I said, and then said it more loudly, because the screaming down there was drilling into my head like a vicious power drill. “No! Dammit, Imara, you have to help us!”

“I’d like to,” she said, and it sounded genuine. “I wish I could. But I don’t have any way to do that, and even if I did, maybe it’s for the best, Mom. Maybe this is what needs to happen, so things can start over. Cleanly.”

“I don’t believe that.” I backed away from her and stood several feet away, fists clenched. “I will never believe that.”

“When things die, you have to let them go,” Imara whispered, and I saw eternity in her eyes. “You let me go, didn’t you? You accepted it. You have to accept this, too.”

I couldn’t even speak. My mouth had gone dry, my throat tight, and all I could manage was a violent shake of my head.

Imara sighed and folded her hands together. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Now I have to go.”

“You saved my life! You can save theirs, too!”

“I did,” she said. “But life isn’t a permanent condition. You know that.”

And the sand hissed up over her, whipped into a blinding ball, and then it blew apart in all directions, stinging my skin as it landed.

Imara was gone.

I looked down at the valley. The Oracle was reaching the far edge of what remained of the town. There was a large building there. I could just make out the word HOSPITAL in lights at the top before the power failed.

I grabbed hold of a tree that fluttered its leaves in the hot wind, and watched with dry, aching eyes as the building melted and burned. I thought about the patients in their beds, the babies in their cribs, the doctors and nurses staying at their posts despite the destruction coming at them.

Then I held up my arms and summoned storms. Not the carefully constructed sort that Wardens are supposed to wield, oh no. I slammed together air and water with careless disregard for the balance, the consequences, for anything that I’d ever been taught. I needed rain, a lot of rain, and I needed it fast.

I put together one mother of a hurricane, and I did it in under ten minutes. The clouds were thick and black and stuffed with death, and I unleashed it right over the Fire Oracle as it reached the borders of the town. Water poured down with a vengeance, and I saw steam rising from the Oracle’s body. The destruction of the town cooled, but the Oracle kept burning, and burning, and burning, no matter how much rain I threw at him.

Then the Oracle turned and looked at me, really saw me, and I woke up as suddenly as if someone had slapped me across the face. I jerked upright, and realized I wasn’t standing halfway across the country watching that terrible march; I was in the backseat of the Mustang. I was sweaty, hot, fevered, and scared, and fumbled for some of the supplies that Cherise and I had bought what seemed liked ages ago. Water. I needed water.

David said nothing. He didn’t even ask me what I’d been dreaming about. Maybe he knew.

I choked on the lukewarm liquid, but got it down, and gasped, “It’s true, isn’t it? The Fire Oracle. He’s walking.”

David slowly nodded.

“Can’t you stop him?”

“No,” he said, and I heard the infinite regret in his voice. For the first time, I also heard resignation. “Oracles can’t be stopped—not by you, not by us. Once they’ve been unleashed, they won’t stop until the Mother tells them to stop.”

“There has to be something we can do. David, I saw it. I saw a town—I saw people—I saw—”

He grabbed me and held me as the Mustang plunged on into the night. Stars overhead, cold and precise and uncaring. David didn’t try to tell me it would be all right, and he didn’t try to promise me that we’d find a way to survive. He didn’t promise anything at all.

I sensed desperation in the way he was holding me. He didn’t believe that we could make it.

“No,” I said shakily, and swiped at my eyes with my hands. “No, we’ll make it. We’re going to find a way to stop this. We have to. We can’t give up.”

“It’s not about giving up; it’s about facing facts,” David said. “You think we can fight the Mother. We can’t. She’s judged, she’s made up her mind, and there’s no changing it.”

I couldn’t accept that, I just couldn’t. It didn’t make any sense to me that we couldn’t somehow fix this, make the Earth understand and see humanity as her own.

I pushed it aside, because there wasn’t any point in arguing with David about it. “Where are we?” There was a glow on the horizon, a big one, and since it was due west of us, I didn’t think it was sunrise.

“Las Vegas,” he said. “Lewis brought the unassigned Wardens here. They’ve been working with the Ma’at to fortify the town.”

Vegas would be a prime target, I realized, purely for the fact that it existed in such defiance of the natural order in the desert. So many people, so much artificial water, so much energy being consumed.

I remembered the town I’d seen destroyed, and multiplied that times the huge population of Vegas, and felt shaky all over again. “All right,” I said. “It’s as good a place as any to make a stand. Plus, we might get in a Cirque show and some time at the roulette tables.”

“I didn’t think they let Wardens play roulette. Or slot machines.”

The casinos in the know certainly didn’t. An Earth or Weather Warden could jinx a roulette wheel as easy as snapping fingers, and put a Fire Warden near a slot machine and forget about it. “Look, if the world is going to end, I’m going to win all the money I can. Just because. They say you can’t take it with you, but really, has anybody tried?”

Vegas sounded good to me for another reason—accommodations, and shopping. I desperately needed a shower and new clothes, and even though I could ask David to magically clean me up, it wasn’t the same thing at all as sinking into velvety hot water, scented with lilacs, and floating. . . .

I was fantasizing about a peaceful afternoon and a hot bath the way perverts fantasize about porn.

Hell, maybe I’d throw in some shopping. I’d always loved the clothing stores in the big casinos. Nothing like hitting couture when you’re depressed, and if you’re going to certain death, why not go out wearing Valentino or Prada?

Even the best fantasies have to end, and mine didn’t last long. I went up into Oversight and got the lay of the land. It was unnaturally still, locked down on all fronts. I could see the restless fury of the land and the air, but the Wardens were keeping tight controls on everything, for now. With the amount of energy building, though, it was going to be impossible to hold it off forever.

I checked the rearview and found that Cassiel and Luis Rocha were still behind us, keeping a steady, patient distance. I supposed they’d also received their orders to join up with the other Wardens, or else they had business of their own, though what could possibly be more important than the end of humanity was impossible for me to guess. I supposed it was a matter of perspective.

Suddenly, the Mustang gave a surprised little cough and sputter, and the engine . . . died. We had just crested a hill and gotten a view of the incredible display of Vegas lights shimmering below, like some opium dream about living jewels.

“Please tell me that we threw a rod or something,” I said as the Djinn glided the car off to the side. I heard the harsh blatting of Cassiel’s motorcycle catching up to us, and then it, too, cut off without warning. She coasted the bike to a halt behind us and set the kickstand, and she and Rocha jumped off and got ready for trouble.

The Djinn behind the wheel said, in Whitney’s voice, “Oh, hell, I should have known this wouldn’t go so easy.” She sounded deeply annoyed. “Everybody out of the car, right now. Get whatever you want to keep.”

I bailed out, and David followed me; we each grabbed a bag full of supplies, and I unzipped one bag and found the shotgun and pistol that I’d liberated from the motel where we’d lost Kevin. I loaded the shotgun with shells and tossed it to David without looking; he caught it the same way. “What are we shooting?” he asked, quite reasonably.

I loaded up my pockets with ammunition for the shotgun and the pistol, checked the clip, and shook my head. “No idea,” I said. “But I hate to be underdressed in the event of an attack—”

I didn’t have time to finish, because a silent missile dropped down out of the dark sky and sliced razor-sharp claws at my face. I’d been extending my Oversight out, not up, and the only warning I had of the huge bird’s approach was the sudden cool breeze on my face as it backwinged to slow itself. It shrieked as I fell backward, and I rolled, trying to avoid its next dive.

David turned on a lantern, and I saw the biggest damn bird I’d ever seen gliding low over our heads, angling for another strike. It was a freaking bald eagle, and it was utterly magnificent. I’d have been transported with its beauty if it hadn’t just taken a swipe at my eyes. The wingspan was enormous, probably at least six feet, and it was an expert hunter.

Cassiel suddenly stepped into the circle of light, lifted her arm, and made a sharp, whistling sound.

The eagle glided in, and for a second it looked as if it was going to land tamely on her leather-clad arm—not that the leather would be any kind of defense against those incredible claws. They’d punch through even the toughest hide like it was rice paper. Cassiel’s pale green eyes were watchful, totally focused on the bird as it made its approach.

She barely had time to dodge out of the way as it spilled air from its wings at the last second, altering its trajectory, and let out an ear-piercing shriek as it thrust its claws forward. It raked her leather jacket from neck to waist, shredding it, and with mighty flaps of its wings, it gained altitude again and disappeared into the sky.

“I can’t hold it,” Cassiel said. “And there are others coming. Many others.”

“Birds?”

“Large birds,” she confirmed. “Owls, eagles, hawks. And on land, other things. Bears, wolves, mountain lions. They will catch us. We have to run.”

I lifted the gun. She smiled a little.

“Do you think you have enough bullets for the world?” she asked. “Don’t be a fool. You can’t make a stand here.”

Cassiel was right, but we were still far out from the relative safety of the lights of Vegas. Out here, there wasn’t much—but down the hill about two miles there was some kind of hotel, clearly shut down, all lights off. “Down there!” I said, and grabbed up the bag I’d dropped. “Come on, let’s move!”

“Wait,” said Whitney’s voice from the car radio. “I can’t start this thing, but I can push it. Get in. Might as well ride.”

Cassiel shook her head. “I will take my motorcycle. I can coast it down the hill after you.”

“Not a great plan, Cass; that bird isn’t going to give you a pass just because you used to be a Djinn.”

“I know,” she said, not bothered at all. “But I’m not leaving the motorcycle. I like the motorcycle.”

“Well, I’m taking the car. Have fun,” Rocha said, and got in with me and David. Cassiel shrugged and straddled the bike, kicking up the stand, and pushed off. She must have had damn good balance, because the heavy machine hardly wavered at all.

Whitney’s push- method for the car worked just as well; it started slow, but picked up speed on the downhill grade, and we ate up the distance fast enough.

As we got closer I saw why the hotel was closed. Some kind of fire; the six-story pink stucco exterior was blackened around the windows and doors, and its plastic exterior wall-mounted sign was half melted. There were one or two cars, but they looked like derelicts and had signs of fire damage. The giant parking lot was deserted except for tumbleweeds and trash.

The road grade was evening out, and the car was slowing down. I made a command decision and said, “Whitney, how far can you push us?”

“All the way to where you want to go,” she said. “If you insist.”

“Get us to the Vegas strip. This doesn’t look like a very safe—”

Our tires blew out—at least two, from the separate bangs I heard, and the lurch of the frame first right, then left. Oh perfect. Somebody really didn’t want us getting to the other Wardens.

“I amend my earlier statement,” Whitney said.

“Can you fix the tires?”

“Sure,” Whitney said, “if I was there, sugar. I’m not.”

“I can,” David said quietly. “But it’s going to take some power. Are you up to it?”

I nodded, not sure I was, but willing to give it a shot. David closed his eyes and concentrated, and I felt the car lurch again as the tires melded themselves back together and reinflated.

They immediately blew out again. David flinched in surprise. “There’s something working against me,” he said. “Feel it?” I did. It was big, and inimical, and I didn’t like it at all. Whitney stopped the car. “Whitney, keep moving. We can run on rims.” No response. “Whitney?”

The radio stayed dead. The avatar just sat, staring blankly ahead, like a doll whose batteries had run down.

Suddenly, David looked sharply to his right, into the dark, and said, “We have to get out of here. Now.”

“We were doing that,” I said.

Luis Rocha didn’t waste time arguing; he popped open the door. “I’ll push,” he said. “Better than hanging around with a big target around our necks.”

The avatar wasn’t steering, though; he was just sitting, inactive, and David finally dragged him out from the wheel and shoved him into the backseat, then installed me as the driver. Ah, that felt strangely good, even with busted wheels. Rocha and David got behind the car and pushed. I thought it was odd that David didn’t do it himself, and odder still that they were working so hard at it. . . .

And then David stumbled and went to one knee. Rocha let loose of the car bumper and stopped to help him, and I instinctively hit the brakes in alarm.

That was our undoing.

The wheels sank into asphalt that suddenly felt like mud—thick, clinging mud. The front tipped down, and I realized that someone, something was softening the road underneath me. Miring the car in a modern-day tar pit.

“Out!” It was a white shadow at the window—Cassiel—and she didn’t wait for my agreement, just reached through the open window and dragged me unceremoniously through. She was sinking into the road, too, and slung me through the air to the side. She was stuck, but she pulled herself free with a wrenching effort and jumped for the safety of the gravel at the freeway’s shoulder. Luis Rocha, already there, caught her as she landed.

David was off the road, but down, and I scrambled to get to him. He was panting, eyes wide and blind, pupils very large.

“What is it?” I asked, and ran frantic hands over him looking for injuries. “David, what’s wrong? What’s happening?” Because I couldn’t see it in Oversight. I couldn’t see anything. . . .

Anything at all.

It was as if the aetheric had gone completely dark.

The breath went out of me, and I felt utterly, completely alone in a way that I hadn’t since I’d been stripped of my powers. I still had them—I could feel them inside me—but I was blind, in a magical sense. I heard a surprised sound from Cassiel, and a curse from Luis. It wasn’t just me, then. We were all stricken with this supernatural blindness.

And something was very, very wrong with David.

He managed to focus on my face, and said, very faintly, “Kill him.”

I looked over at Luis Rocha, who held up his hands in defense. “Not me, man. I’m not doing it!”

But who did that leave? Not Cassiel, not me . . .

The avatar.

I looked over my shoulder at the car, which was still sinking—it was up to the door level now, embedded in the road’s soft surface. It was as if the road was eating it. Digesting its metal and rubber, plastic and glass. There was a constant crackling sound, and a fizzing, that was faintly sickening, especially considering how much I loved that car.

But the avatar wasn’t inside it anymore.

“It’s the Djinn,” I said to Luis and Cassiel. “Watch out. He’s not channeling Whitney anymore.”

“Who is he channeling? Satan?” Rocha asked. “ ’Cause this doesn’t feel so great, and I can’t see a thing on the aetheric. Cass?”

“No,” she said tersely. “I hear the bird. It may be coming in for us again.”

If she could hear the whisper of feathers in the wind, I couldn’t. But she was right, because a second later I saw the blur of feathers, and the bald eagle dive- bombed Luis. He wasn’t fast enough, and the claws ripped bloody furrows in his upraised right arm. I felt the force of the wind from the eagle’s furious wing beats as it hovered, snapping its hooked beak at his face.

Cassiel was faster. She reached out and grabbed the eagle’s body below the widespread wings, and as the bird shrieked in alarm and battered at her, she summoned up power, and I felt myself sway with weariness.

The bird went quiet. Not dead, just stunned and sleeping. “Hush, child of the sky, I won’t hurt you,” she told it, and I saw a kind of tenderness in her that was . . . unexpected. She’d always struck me as pretty damn pragmatic, but maybe that was only when dealing with humans. She took off her jacket and wrapped the bird securely, with its head sticking out. It made an effective straitjacket. “We need shelter. There were more on the way.”

She’d also said something about bears, and wolves, and mountain lions. I didn’t want to deal with that out in the open, either, especially since the normal Earth Warden defenses weren’t working.

Cassiel’s motorcycle, which had been parked on the side of the road, suddenly tipped over and began sinking into the black tar. She let out a curse that I was pretty sure she’d learned from Rocha and ran to muscle it away from the asphalt and onto the sand—not that that was going to help, I wanted to tell her. There was no safe ground, not really.

But I’d feel better with a roof over our heads and something like walls giving us some defensive shelter.

“Right, the hotel,” I said. “David, can you get up?”

He nodded, but his face had gone pale under its metallic luster, and I didn’t know how much he could do on his own. Rocha and I each took a side and helped David stumble across the long parking lot, heading for the doors. They were blocked off with DO NOT ENTER yellow tape and plywood across what had once been a glass entry. I burned the padlock into slag and unlocked the hasp, left David leaning on Rocha, and stepped inside the ruined casino and hotel with the battery-powered lantern upraised.

The light couldn’t reach far, but it looked like a typical Vegas sort of lobby—ornate carpet (stained by black smoke and loads of footprints), marble counters that still looked intact, some kind of fancy ceiling overhead but probably not as nice as one of the name-brand casinos, like the Bellagio or the Venetian. This was where your grandmother’s bingo club, not the high rollers, stayed when they went to Vegas. Whatever guest rooms still remained were probably no better than an anonymous chain hotel on the cheap.

The fire had consumed most of the casino, it looked like; the damage got worse, and the smell of burnt wood and plastic was chokingly strong, still, even though there was no hint of embers around. This place was a total loss. I imagined they were waiting on insurance before demolition, but in the current dire circumstances every insurance company in the world was probably out of business already, no matter how well funded. This place had just seen the Reaper early, that was all.

But it was still standing, and it would do.

“Right,” I said. “Looks like this part of the building is the least damaged. Follow me.”

It was horror-movie spooky as we moved in our own little island of light through the silent, dark, cavernous lobby. Carpeting squished in places under my feet—still not completely dried from the hundreds of gallons of water that had been dumped in here to finish off the fire, I presumed. The smell of mold overtook the stench of smoke as we went farther in, and I saw black swathes of the stuff on baseboards and in corners. Yeah, this place was finished, even in less apocalyptic circumstances. In Las Vegas it was always considered easier to demo and rebuild than renovate.

At the far end of the lobby was a long marble concierge’s desk, and behind it was an almost undamaged door that said STAFF ONLY. I felt like breaking rules. I opened it a couple of inches and peered inside, and saw a big lounge area with nice chairs and sofas, a big- screen TV (dead, of course), and coffeemakers with glass carafes full of molding brew. Snack machines, phones, even an internet portal in the corner. And beyond that . . . showers and lockers.

It looked perfect, and I led them all inside.

“Oh,” I sighed. I couldn’t help it; the sight of those gleaming bathroom fixtures was just about more than I could take. I forced myself to check for security. It being a casino hotel, there weren’t any large windows, only slits up near the ceiling too narrow to crawl through. There was an emergency exit at the back, but it was secure. I summoned up more power in the form of fire and used it to hard-seal the metal door to its frame. If I had to undo it, it might slow us by critical seconds, but better to be safe. I didn’t like having easy access at our backs.

“Clear,” I said, and came back with the light. Cassiel and Rocha were easing David down into a chair. “I think the coffee’s past its sell-by date, but there’s shelf-stable food, water, and sodas. And showers.” I put the lantern on a coffee table and knelt down next to David to take his hand. “Talk to me. What’s happening?”

“Darkness,” he said. “Can’t see anything. Feel—drained. Like there’s something trying to pull my power away from me.”

That wasn’t good news, not at all. And the fact that Whitney had so precipitously deserted us wasn’t good, either.

“He’s right,” said a new voice from behind me. I whirled around, ready to blast something with a fireball, but then I held up as the speaker walked into the light. Rahel, back to her old golden- eyed self, but subdued. She seemed as uncertain as David. “I was following on the aetheric. I hit—something. A block. I had to take physical form to get this far. I don’t think I can reach much of my power. It’s like—”

“Like a black corner,” David said. “But only at half strength. It feels artificial. Imposed.”

Rahel walked over to a candy machine, smashed a hand through the glass, pulled the whole thing out in a spray of fragments, and contemplated the selection. She chose a Three Musketeers bar, which I found weirdly amusing, and I watched as she peeled it and bit. I didn’t think I’d ever seen Rahel eat before.

She chewed for a few seconds before swallowing and saying, “It’s coming from the avatar. You know this?”

“David told me,” I said. “But I don’t know how to find him. Do you?”

“No need to find him. He’ll come to you, soon enough.” She nibbled her chocolate bar and selected other things from the machine—M&M candies, a Twix bar, some kind of cookies. She tossed those to each of us. Weirdly, I’d been craving M&M’s, and the smack of that yellow packet in my hand felt like manna from heaven. I ripped it open, popped two peanut candies in my mouth, and chewed. The rush of sweet/salty grounded me a little more, made me feel just a touch better.

“So we wait?”

“Yes,” Rahel said. “I’ll keep watch. Perhaps you should shower.” She emphasized that with a sniff and a pained expression. “If I’m trapped here with you, sistah, you can at least not reek of blood and sweat.”

I almost, almost smiled, but I didn’t think I had that particular expression in me at the moment. Rahel didn’t wait for a response. She walked past us to lean against the doorway to the lobby, peering out with infinite patience as she nibbled down the candy bar.

I looked at David. “You going to be all right for a few minutes?”

He nodded. “Be careful.”

“Trust me, nothing is going to stand between me and that shower right now. I’d shoot Gandhi and Mother Teresa both to get to it. That’s literal. Because I have a gun.”

I kissed him and felt him respond, just a little. He wasn’t that bad off. “Be careful,” he said again.

I stood up. Luis and Cassiel were huddled together, talking in low voices, but they looked up when I cleared my throat. “Shower,” I said. “See ya.”

Selfish, I know, but at least Rahel had reinforced my obsession with getting clean. I ducked into the staff shower area. Lockers were mostly empty, although a few employees had left behind bath products and—in some cases—magazines of questionable taste. I grabbed a selection of shampoos and conditioners, and a still-clean towel, and I dumped my filthy clothes into the sink to soak with some liquid soap on board. Even the rough wash I’d given my shirt back at the nuclear plant hadn’t held up well.

The water was on, but—no surprise—cold. I yelped in surprise when the icy drops hit me, but the sensation of water around me was so breathtakingly good that I ignored the temporary discomfort. I used a little candle flame of power to heat the water locally, and that was even better. It took three shampoos of my hair to get all the dried blood and grit out of it, but by the time I’d finished I felt, once again, clean and whole. I shut off the water, dried myself, and went back to where I’d left my clothes in the sink.

They weren’t there. The sink was empty and dry.

I wasn’t alone in here.

“You should burn those,” said a voice from the shadows, outside of the reach of the thin light trickling in the door from the other room. “They really don’t suit you.”

Ashan. I pulled in a breath to yell, but my vocal cords seemed to be paralyzed. I couldn’t even get out a squeak. I saw him now, materializing out of the shadows, perfectly manicured, with that faintly contemptuous expression that never seemed to leave his face. He looked like every terrible boss I’d ever had, and every bad boyfriend, too.

Except for the white eyes. Those weren’t like anybody I’d ever known at all.

“It’s over,” he said. “And you owe me pain, Joanne Baldwin.”

I needed to scream. I needed to move, but my whole body seemed to be frozen now, and all I could do was watch as he paced forward, confident and steady as a panther.

He was in no hurry, and it seemed to take forever before he was standing in front of me. I realized that there was someone else in the shadows—the avatar, left abandoned like a defective toy. His eyes, too, had gone white.

Ashan closed his hand around my arm, and my towel disappeared in a flash of heat around me. For a second I thought he wanted me naked—and that was particularly sickening—but no, he just wanted me clothed. I’ll say this for Ashan: the bastard is cold and brutal, but he does understand fashion. The clothes that settled on my skin were tailored, understated, and more or less what I would have picked, if I’d been able.

“Don’t thank me,” he said, as if he’d read my mind. “I just don’t want you to imagine I have any use at all for your flesh. Humanity serves no purpose to me except as . . . fertilizer.” He smiled, a thin razor-cut of his lips. “There’ll be a rich growing season for years to come, in the silence that follows this day. And we have you to thank for it. You and my imposter brother.”

I wasn’t sure which I hated more—the sad, resigned distance of my daughter about the loss of the human race, or the lip-smacking delight of Ashan. No, I was sure; Ashan, for the win.

I’m going to kill you, I thought, and I hoped he really could read minds after all. I’m going to smash you until there aren’t two aetheric particles sticking together with your name on them. I’m going to stop you.

It was about as effective as a rabbit’s scream in the jaws of a wolf, but I was going to have attitude to the end. What else did I have?

I had power.

His blackout of the aetheric had distracted me, and so had his special guest appearance in my shower, but I could still pull power. I had to pull power, even though the whole area seemed resistant to it.

I filled myself with Earth power, and reached out for the metal pole behind him. With one swift pull, I yanked it out of the tiled floor, bent it, and slammed it into his back. There was no pointy end. I wanted it to hurt.

He jerked and looked down at the hollow metal pole—about three inches in diameter—sticking out of his chest. A human would have bled, but Ashan never bothered with genuine human flesh and blood, so it was really more of a shell—a particularly convincing plastic doll. It probably hadn’t hurt him, but it had really fucked up the line of his expensively tailored suit, which did my heart good.

I pulled the pole out of him before he could get a grip on it, remove it, and beat me dead with it.

It obviously hadn’t hurt him much, but that was okay, because the pole was a distraction, and I hit him with my second attack, which was a vicious piledriver of wind that focused on that hole I’d made in Ashan, from front to back. The wind forced itself into him, and I increased the pressure to insane levels. Ashan’s white eyes widened. I suddenly found myself back in possession of my voice.

“Bye now,” I said, and with a brutal burst of Weather powers, I blew him to pieces. His scream was short-lived, but very satisfying, and then he was a misty after-image on the air, and I blew that back to hell where it belonged.

I hadn’t killed him, but I’d definitely hurt him that time. The fact that he didn’t re-form and come after me was proof of that.

David hit the door at a run and skidded to a halt, staring at me.

“One second,” I said. “I have something to do.”

I walked out to the other room and began yanking open cabinets until I found a bottle of some kind of coffee flavoring. I dumped its contents out and walked back to the shower area. By then, David had oriented on the remaining threat: the avatar, who was still standing frozen in the shadows.

“Sorry,” I said to him, “but we can’t let you run around loose. You’re too much of a wild card.” I held out the open bottle. “Be thou bound to my service. Be thou bound to my service. Be thou bound to my service.”

Nothing happened. I frowned at him, then at the bottle. Yep, it was empty, and open. I shook it, which was a stupid thing to do, but to no effect. I tried again, reciting the words thrice.

The damn thing just stood there.

“It won’t work,” David said. “There’s nothing in him to capture. He has no soul. He’s just a vessel—his body is already an empty bottle, in a way.” He sounded ragged, but sure of what he was saying.

“So what do we do with him?”

“Kill him,” he said, very softly. “The avatar is physical. It can die.”

There was something really unpleasant about that idea, and I didn’t care to examine it too closely. “Can’t we—I don’t know, evict Mommie Dearest from the avatar?”

“No. We either leave it here, where it can strike at us any time she wants, or we kill it. But there’s no other choice, Jo.”

It felt vile, somehow, and I couldn’t shake it off. But he was right, I’d be destroying a shell, not a person.

Not a person who’d driven me halfway across the country. Who’d saved my life.

I couldn’t stand to think about it any longer. I picked up the gun from where I’d left it sitting next to the sink, cocked it, and aimed at the avatar’s head.

David put his hand on my shoulder—not to stop me, but to steady me.

And I fired.

It was the worst thing I had ever done.