Total Eclipse

Chapter Ten

The aetheric blindness was gone immediately, and David’s powers came flooding back, restoring him. Everybody was happy.

Everybody but me. I kept reliving the kick of the gun in my hand, and the sight of the avatar’s head—

“Jo.” That was David, sitting down next to me on the couch. I had been silent for a long while, and they’d been sensible enough to let me be, but David clearly thought I’d brooded enough.

“Leave me alone,” I said.

“You did the right thing.”

“I know that. Just leave me alone.”

He sighed and kissed my temple, very gently. “I would have done it for you.”

“You think I’d have felt better watching you kill one of your own?” I swallowed a bitter mouthful of stomach acid and wondered vaguely where I’d left the M&M candies. I thought I could have used one right now to get the terrible, bloody taste out of my mouth. “No thanks. I’ll handle my guilt like a big girl.”

David hesitated, then put his arm around me. I opened my eyes and saw that Luis Rocha was slumped in a chair, snoring (somehow, adorably), and Cassiel was pacing, looking like a caged beast with claustrophobia. I didn’t think she would have hesitated to pop a cap in an avatar, but then again, I didn’t really want to be her, either.

She bugged me.

“I should tell you who he was, once,” David said, and that made me turn and look at him in surprise. His brows went up. “You thought he’d always been an empty shell?”

“Well—yeah. Kind of.”

“He was Old Djinn, once—but not like Ashan. More like Venna. He was curious about humans, and liked to help them. He was caught in a convergence of forces, very rare, while trying to save humans from an earthquake. It destroyed the Djinn he had been, and left the shell behind. Since then, he’s been wandering. Empty. Jonathan thought about destroying him, but he said—he said—” David stopped, thinking, and then continued more slowly. “He said that we’d need him someday.”

“Oh Jesus, David!” I found myself covering my mouth with both hands, appalled. Jonathan had demonstrated a turn for prophecy, more than once. “Why didn’t you stop me?”

“Because I think what Jonathan saw was how much you were going to need him. I think he did what he was—designed to do.” He shook his head. “That sounds wrong. That’s not what I meant. But I feel that his destiny was already over.”

Again, that didn’t make me feel better. I wasn’t sure anything right now could make me feel better because Jesus Christ I’d just pulled the trigger and killed someone, even if it hadn’t been a person, a real person, or even a real Djinn.

My body still replayed it, over and over. And it hurt.

“You need to rest,” David told me, in that tone that husbands get sometimes. He meant it, and when I opened my mouth to protest, he covered it with one hand. “Stretch out. Come on. All the way. Legs up. There you go.”

I still felt miserable, but I had to admit that being down felt a whole lot better than sitting up. Cassiel had gotten adventurous and raided a linen closet, and found bags of clean sheets, towels, and blankets. They weren’t the kind of high-thread-count stuff you’d get at the tonier hotels, but they felt good on my skin.

Like the clothes Ashan had gifted me with. Bastard. Well, at least he hadn’t dressed me in knockoffs. Could have been worse.

I flinched again as the sound of the shot rang in my ears, and David’s warmth settled in behind me, holding me close. His hand stroked my forehead, then glided down my neck, over my shoulder, down my arm. . . . It wasn’t erotic, but damn, it really was. Just being touched relaxed something in my body that seemed to have been permanently knotted up, fused into a hard mass.

I let out a slow breath, and with it went some of my grief, my anger, my disappointment. I remembered the first night that I’d insanely decided to sleep with David; I hadn’t known his name then, or that he was a Djinn, or that he was going to alter the trajectory of my life on a course up, toward the stars. He’d been so kind to me then. And he’d touched me exactly the same way, and despite all my best efforts at seduction, he hadn’t touched me any other way. Not then.

It occurred to me now that I should have valued that more. I should have realized right then that he was something . . . special.

But at least I’d been smart enough to hang on to him once I did realize what I had.

“Why are we waiting?” I asked. “The avatar’s gone. We can go now.”

“We will,” David said, and his mouth was so close to my ear that his lips brushed teasingly over its curves. “You need to rest. You picked up a big dose of radiation outside of Amarillo, and I can’t heal you properly if you’re awake. So sleep. Once morning comes, we’ll move on.”

Cassiel paused in her pacing to look at us in a guilty sort of way, as if she just realized she was probably being annoying, and settled into a chair close to where Luis was sawing logs. Rahel stood at the door, a silent statue, watching and waiting.

I don’t think I intended to fall asleep, but between the seductive warmth of David’s hands and the exhaustion buried deep in my bones, I really didn’t have a choice.

I woke up to David’s hands, again, but this time they were shaking me, and when I started to speak he put a finger to my mouth. Unmistakable warning. I went still, fighting my way back toward some kind of alertness, and saw that Luis Rocha and Cassiel were already up and on their feet, hands clasped. Rahel was closing the door with calm, competent motions, locking it, and waiting with her entire body radiating tense expectancy.

We were all very, very quiet. I don’t know why, but I felt that primitive kind of terror, the kind our ancestors probably felt hiding in caves and hoping the lions and tigers passed them by.

Something slammed into the locked door with a shocking roar, and the wood jumped and bowed inward.

The being quiet strategy hadn’t done much, clearly. I got up, and David unfolded himself from the couch as well, both of us laser focused on the door, which wasn’t going to hold. I threw Earth power into it, along with Rocha and Cassiel, and that helped, but whatever was on the other side of it had Earth power as well, and man, was it pissed.

Rahel, with a negligent wave of her hand, ripped the heavy serving bar loose from the left-hand wall and slammed it against the failing door like the world’s largest burglar bar. “I think it’s time to go,” she said. “Back door?”

Oh yeah, I’d sealed it. Good planning. But then, it was probably good that I’d done it, because I was no more than halfway through undoing my melted metal seal when another pissed-off, very large thing slammed into that door as well. If I’d undone it faster, it probably would have sliced me open on its way to destroy everyone else.

“Not that way,” I said. “What the hell is out there?”

“I don’t think you want to know,” Rahel said, as if it was amusing to her—and it probably was. “Go up, not out. Nothing out there strikes me as good at climbing.”

David nodded, looked up, and ripped open a significant hole in the roof, which spilled in predawn light of an uncertain gray color. He flexed his knees and fired his body up, landed easily fifteen feet above us outside the hole, and did a little scouting before nodding down at us.

“Damn,” Luis said. “Forgot my jet pack. Knew I should have packed that.”

Cassiel let out a sound that was too frustrated to be a sigh, and offered him a cradle of her linked fingers for his foot. He raised both eyebrows. “Are you kidding, chica?”

“Do I seem to be?” she snapped. “Hurry.”

He put his booted foot in her hands, and she tossed him straight up, letting out a yell of fury that sounded like it was ripped out of her spine. It was an impressive demonstration of how strong she was when using her Earth powers, and even as solidly built as Rocha was, she got him up high enough that he grabbed the hand David reached down to him. David pulled him up without any effort at all.

“Rahel,” David said. “Bring Cassiel. Joanne can make her own way.” I loved that about him—he knew I wouldn’t want to be evacuated ahead of the others. Besides, he wasn’t wrong. I was a Weather Warden. Lifting myself up wasn’t a challenge.

Rahel looked at Cassiel, and Cassiel looked back. I felt sparks fly, not the romantic kind, and I wondered what kind of unpleasant history there was between these two. Knowing Cassiel’s nature, it didn’t surprise me that she’d clashed with Rahel. It only surprised me that Rahel had survived it.

Rahel looked like she really didn’t want to touch Cassiel, and Cassiel looked pretty much the same.

“Do you want me to make it an order?” I asked Rahel. She gave me an are you kidding? sort of look, and then I remembered that Cassiel actually held the bottles, all of them except Venna’s, which was buried in my own bag. So technically, I couldn’t order Rahel to do squat. Not and have her listen.

“No need,” she said. “And no time. I’ll take my shower later.”

Mee-yow, that was harsh. Cassiel might have scratched back, but Rahel grabbed her around the waist and leaped up, dragging Cassiel with her. She let go as soon as they reached the roof, not even bothering to steady Cassiel, who went sprawling.

Rahel grinned.

“Play nice,” I said, and formed an air cushion under me, then heated it. Low pressure above me, high below, and zap, Bernoulli’s principle was my friend. Up I went, on my invisible elevator pad, and stepped lightly off just as the back door below gave with a metallic shriek.

David and Rahel replaced the roof, rapidly duplicating existing materials over the hole. With any luck, it’d buy us time.

Above us the rest of the hotel rose up in a central column. The pink stucco was, in the light, smudged mostly black, and the windows were all boarded up. In the daylight, the place looked even more derelict than at night.

But what drew my attention were the things pacing at ground level below us. My mouth went dry, and I suddenly wanted to retch. That was just wrong.

“What the hell is that?” Rocha was asking, sounding just as shaken as I felt.

“Chimera,” Cassiel said. She’d rolled to her feet and was studiously ignoring Rahel, although I had the feeling that she wasn’t going to forgive, or forget for the next several millennia. “It’s a forced merger of several animal forms. Bear, mountain lion, scorpion.”

That was what creeped me out the worst, I decided. The bear with the mountain lion’s head I could handle, but the giant curving arthropod stinger that twitched and curled and dripped with venom . . . no, that was just too much. This thing was a killing machine, and there were several of them.

Not only were the chimeras awaiting us, but there were wolf packs, too, thin and half starved and snarling up at us. They made running starts and leaped up the wall, trying vainly to claw themselves up. I knew something about wolves, and that wasn’t normal. Not in the least.

“Above us!” Rocha yelled, and I yanked my attention skyward. There was a small battalion of birds up there, big ones. I didn’t see any more bald eagles, but there were a couple of gigantic hawks, and several smaller ones. One or two turkey vultures were riding the thermals, evidently waiting for the inevitable mop-up operation. “We need a shield!”

I got one up just in time, and I curved it as much as I could, so that as the birds stooped and fell toward us they wouldn’t hit quite so harshly. Even so, at least half of them collided with such hard smacks I knew they’d broken their necks. Blood ran down the sides of the shield, sickeningly bright in the rising sun. The surviving birds took wing again, circling, and I knew they’d make another run. I hated it, and I reached out, trying to find them on the aetheric, trying to turn them aside.

No use. They were being completely controlled by a force far, far more ruthless and powerful than me.

David yelled a warning and ripped a large satellite dish clean off its moorings. He threw it as if it were a discus toward the edge of the roof, where one of the bear/ lion/scorpion things was clawing its way over the edge. The satellite dish hit it squarely and tipped it backward, off balance. I saw the scorpion legs underneath the fur, and once again felt the urge to retch.

The things could climb. Great. That was just perfect.

“We’re in trouble, guys,” I said. “I’m going to have to take drastic measures.”

“By all means,” Rahel said. “I always find that entertaining.”

I shot her a dirty look and readied a fireball. When the next chimera crawled creepily onto the roof and scuttled toward us, roaring out a mountain lion’s snarl with a bear’s boom, I let it fly. The temperature was well into the thousands of degrees, and the bear’s fur burst into flame. The chimera writhed and shrieked, and I pushed it, still burning, off the roof.

When I looked over, the dying chimera was being torn apart by its kin. Ugh. I just love nature.

“There’s more coming,” Rahel said quietly. She had dropped all hint of being amused now, though to her all this was still a highly academic exercise. “I would suggest you find a way out.”

My car was roof-deep in the road out there, and I didn’t think it was ever coming out, or that it would be in any way drivable if somehow it did. It was for damn sure that three of us wouldn’t fit on the motorcycle, and even two wouldn’t survive these things—these chimeras—which would rip anyone apart in seconds once they were at ground level. Even Cassiel. Two Djinn couldn’t carry three of us to safety without taking us through the aetheric, which would likely kill us anyway.

“Right,” I said. “Rahel, take Rocha. David, take Cassiel. Get them out of here. Take them all the way to Vegas if you have to. David, you can come back for me. I can hold out.” I was the logical one to remain; my combination of powers was something that outclassed Luis Rocha’s not inconsiderable talents, and even Cassiel’s, which was limited by her connection to him. I could pull Earth, Fire, and Weather to defend myself, and now that I knew these things were killable, I felt confident I could hold out.

David looked as if he wanted very, very badly to say no, several times, loudly, but he knew I was right. Luis and Cassiel were vulnerable here, and they’d saved our lives before. They deserved our help now.

He gave me a furious look, and I saw the sparks of fire and gold blaze up in his eyes. Truly a Djinn, in that moment, with his skin shading to metallic bronze. “Don’t die,” he said flatly. “Promise me.”

“I promise,” I said. “Get out of here. I’ll wait.”

He kissed me, and it was a hungry, desperate kind of kiss that left my whole body tingling and alive, my lips sunburned with the force of his emotion. My husband. I touched his cheek and said, “I will always love you, David.”

He kissed my palm. “There is no force in creation that will keep me away. You know that.”

“I know.”

“Then wait for me.”

He turned, fury in his movements, and threw his arms around Cassiel.

Then he launched himself up off the roof, into the air, and began to fly.

Rahel watched him go, then turned her attention to me. “Until later, my sistah.” She blew me a kiss, put her arms around Luis, and purred, “Well, this is certainly an upgrade from my last passenger.” I had to laugh at the discomfort on his face, and then she flexed her knees and they were gone, too.

Another monster scrambled over the edge of the roof.

Time to go to work.

David didn’t come back.

Neither did Rahel.

I paced myself, there on that smoke-stained roof, under the glare of the Vegas sun. I had my pack, and in it was food and water, which I gulped down as the chimeras kept coming, and coming, and coming. Mother Earth must have run out of bears and mountain lions, because around noon, a new breed came scuttling over the horizon and attacked the building.

And these used to be human.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing at first, because my brain refused to process the information. It was too disturbing, too sickening. I had to face it once the first of them scaled the wall, way too quickly, and used its human hands to pull itself up over the lip and its scorpion’s feet to race toward me. The human face on the thing had rolling eyes and a lolling, foaming mouth, but being driven mad clearly hadn’t affected its razor-sharp reflexes. I dropped the juice box I was sucking on and pulled down lightning—overkill, but this thing was completely disturbing, and my skin crawled with the idea it could even exist in the same time and space with me.

I zapped it into a blackened mess when it was still fifteen feet away. My ears rang with the blast, and I felt singed and disoriented, but oddly better for ridding the world of it.

That was before I heard the clattering, and realized that there were a lot of these monsters, and they were climbing in steady, relentless streams. As I watched, stomach dropping, I saw that two more had already cleared the ledge on one side, and at least three on the other. At least the damn bear/lion creatures had been slower.

The roof wasn’t going to work any longer.

I started fires around the roof line to give myself a little time as I stuffed things back into my bag. The fire should have slowed them down, and maybe it did, for all of fifteen seconds or so, but then they ran shrieking—human shrieks—through the walls of flame and came straight for me with those deadly stingers upraised and ready.

No time for anything fancy. I had to evacuate.

I levitated myself up on a strong updraft, and—apprehensively—over the flames and the struggling, snapping chimeras that were swarming up the building. This wasn’t something even most hard-core Weather Wardens were good at doing; short bursts of this kind of thing were fine, but if I faded now, I’d be dropping myself into a boiling mass of these things at the base of the wall. I had to keep going. I had to hope that it would take them time to realize I was gone and to find me.

Personal levitation is exhausting, sweaty work, and my pack quickly felt like it increased in weight from ten pounds to fifty, to a hundred. I breathed in ragged, gasping breaths, holding diamond-hard focus on keeping the forces in delicate balance as I sped along, skimming over the desert at the speed of maybe thirty miles per hour. Not exactly fast, but I didn’t dare push faster. Every bit of forward motion I added made it harder to compensate on all the other, constantly shifting energies. I’d never done this for longer than a minute, at best.

I held it for almost fifteen minutes before my concentration snapped, and I tumbled out of the sky toward a razor-sharp stand of brush cactus. At the last second, I altered course and landed in sand instead, and hit the ground running. It was good I did, because when I looked back I saw that my footprints were filling up with something dark.

Fire ants. My very touch on the ground was bringing them boiling to the surface.

Not just fire ants, either. The desert’s defenses were on high alert, and I had to dodge swarms of smaller, nonchimeraed scorpions as well as some tarantulas crawling out of their holes ahead of me. Running was not my best sport, and broken-field running even less so, but I didn’t have a choice. When I reached out with Earth powers to try to clear my way, it only made things worse, as if the entire wildlife was sensitized to the presence of a Warden in their midst.

My breath was burning in my lungs, and I knew I’d have to stop soon, or at least slow down. But I wasn’t sure how I could, considering the fierce antibody reaction to my passage. Not only that, but as I looked back over my shoulder I saw movement about a thousand feet behind me. Chimeras, and they were catching up.

Las Vegas was a long, long way off. It looked drab and overbuilt in the desert shimmer. I realized that no planes were flying in or out, and although there was a road up ahead, about a half a mile out, there were no cars on it. It was eerily quiet.

No sound except for the overhead shriek of hunting birds, which made me realize how vulnerable I was to attack from that avenue. I didn’t want to have to kill more birds. I didn’t want to kill anything, except maybe those awful chimeras, but I didn’t think I was going to have a choice. Mother Earth had declared war, and I was going to have to fight back, hard.

Except that I wasn’t sure anything I had would really keep me alive for long.

I put on a burst of speed, pulled from Earth power, and outpaced the scuttling pursuers, heading for the road. Not that the road was safe, given that it had already eaten my damn car, but it was flat and clear of fire ant burrows, at least.

What it wasn’t clear of were hornets. They boiled up out of nowhere from the side of the road, a bomber squadron of inch-long furious insects, and headed straight for me as soon as my feet hit the asphalt. I gasped and instinctively swatted at them with a blast of air, driving them back as I kicked my run into even higher gear. I was dripping with sweat now, gasping like a fish out of water, but I couldn’t slow down. I could hear the relentless buzz of the insects zipping closer.

I came to a sudden halt, closed my eyes, and formed a hard shell of air around my body. The bugs hit the windshield with vicious force, leaving gruesome splatters, and those that didn’t die immediately jabbed their stingers into the barrier, over and over, trying to get to me with their last breath. A few, warier than the others, backed off and circled, looking for an opening.

I couldn’t wait forever.

I dropped the shell and ran for it, and the remaining hornets dashed in pursuit. The first one came close enough to smash with another gust of air that sent it tumbling, stunned or dead, to the gravel shoulder of the road. My legs felt like lead now, and my muscles were starting to wobble uncertainly as the stress and lack of oxygen took their toll.

The first hornet got me, and it felt like being hit with a bullet. A bullet dipped in acid. I yelped, slapped a hand down on my arm, and felt the insect’s body squash under the slap. The sting hurt, and then began to burn. I gritted my teeth and stopped again, pulling down my windshield. Three more hornets met their gooey death, leaving only two who were smarter than that, or slower.

The running battle of attrition went on for another half mile. I smashed one more hornet, but the other two harassed me, flying in with vicious darting motions. I crushed another one when it landed on me, luckily before it drove home its stinger.

The sole survivor dive-bombed me relentlessly, and score two more stings before I finally managed to kill him, too.

I windmilled to a gasping, gagging stop on the hot asphalt, barely able to keep upright. My left arm, where the first sting had landed, felt hot and swollen; so did the back of my neck and my leg, where the others had scored hits. But I wasn’t going to die of that.

No sign of the chimeras behind me.

No new threat racing up out of the desert to confront me.

There was even a cool breeze ruffling my hair, and I lifted my chin, grateful for anything that lessened the misery I was in . . . and then my eyes snapped open, and I saw the dust devil dancing out there in the desert, a sinuous rope shape made visible with all of the sand it was sucking up. It was mesmerizing to watch as it twisted, bent, and got darker.

I dropped down into a crouch, hardened the air again, and covered my head with my hands as the dust devil—no, dust tornado—raced toward me with the fury of a freight train. It hissed at first, and then, once it was on me, the hiss rose to a blinding roar. I could feel the sand scouring over the shell that protected me, and the heat increased. I couldn’t stay in the shell long without making it gas-permeable, but that meant opening myself to the dust storm. I’d suffocate, one way or the other. My only hope was to disrupt the dust devil’s delicate, powerful structure.

And I probably would have done that fairly easily, if it hadn’t been for the fact that a chimera slammed into the shell around me, and when I opened my eyes I found myself face to face with the lolling, foaming mouth and rolling eyes of a madman. His hands scrabbled at the surface, and I saw that the sand was ripping at him viciously. I’d seen a man stripped of skin once, in a storm like this, and as I saw the first raw patches appear on his body, I felt my stomach clench in nausea.

I couldn’t help him, whoever he’d once been. He was gone. And this thing that wanted to take a piece out of me wasn’t in any way human.

The scorpion tail drove down, hit the hard shell around me, and snapped its stinger off. The chimera howled and lost its footing. The dust devil blew it away into a maelstrom of sand and debris, and I concentrated on Oversight, examining the structure of the twister hovering over me. It was a perfect little engine of destruction—colder air whipping down and heating itself as it moved faster and faster in its spiral, then the hot air blasting up like a furnace through the center of the devil to the sky, where it cooled and spiraled back down. A perfect marvel of physics.

But this one—this one was no accident of nature. This one was being held together by an iron will, and when I tried to break it, it was like hitting a bank vault door with a toy hammer. Someone wanted to kill me, badly.

And I thought I knew who it was.

I kept the shield in place and straightened up. I started at a walk, well aware that I was going to exhaust the oxygen content of the air in this shell in less than a minute once I started running.

The dust devil stayed on top of me, blinding me, slamming me with debris and scouring sand that whipped at killing speeds. I broke into a jog. It paced me.

I kicked it to a run, lungs burning from more than effort now. I could feel my energy dropping, and the danger was that as I used up my available air I was going to start losing focus. Losing focus meant losing the protection of the windshield, and that meant I’d die.

No. There had to be a way. There had to be.

I realized that I was breathing too hard, and getting too little. That hadn’t taken long. A headache was already starting to form, and my legs were informing me that any step now might be the last I was going to take.

I dropped the shield, sucked in a dust-laden breath, closed my eyes, and dropped flat on the hot pavement. The dust devil screamed as it closed over me, clearly sensing triumph, and I tried not to scream as it battered me with raw fury.

When I’d hyperventilated enough, I put the shield back in place and ran on. I’d only gotten a few steps when the dizziness started. I couldn’t keep this up.

I crouched down again, grabbed my pack and opened it, groped inside, and found the one Djinn bottle I’d kept with me.

I thumbed off the cork.

A rush of black mist, and hidden in it I saw sharp angles and edges and alien geometries. Venna, in the form of an Ifrit. I’d never understood how much Ifrits really comprehended—not much, in all probability—but this was one moment when her needs and mine aligned perfectly.

“Ashan,” I gasped, and spat out a mouthful of sticky dirt. “He’s out there. Go get him.”

I couldn’t tell if she knew what I was saying, or if she sensed his presence, but she let out a shriek that vibrated at the very limits of my hearing, and disappeared.

Seconds later the dust devil collapsed in a confusion of sand and clattering license plates, barbed wire, and pieces of broken brush. Its demise left drifts of brown sand and chips of red sandstone littering the road in concentric circles around me.

I dropped the shield and spent the next several seconds just breathing. My whole body was shaking with effort, and sitting down seemed to be the only thing to do, really.

Down the road, about a hundred yards away, Ashan was screaming. Venna had battened on him, and sunk sharp, angular spikes into his pseudobody. When he tried to mist away, she only consumed faster.

I coughed and tasted blood. The bottle was in my hand, and the cork was dangling, ready to be slammed back in place. All I had to do was recall Venna before it was too late.

Ashan screamed, and screamed, and screamed, and I didn’t call Venna back to the bottle until his pale, shrieking face had dissolved into bloody mist, and had been absorbed into her twisted, nightmarish alien form.

It broke up into mist, too—black, greasy mist that turned gray, then white, and reformed around the body of a small girl in a pinafore dress, crumpled on the pavement.

“Venna!” I could barely stand, but somehow I managed to run to her side. Her eyes were open and blank. I touched her face, and she felt cold. “Venna, can you hear me?” I wasn’t sure that she would be stable in this form; sometimes Ifrits used up their energy and reverted to the primitive form.

But not Venna. She lay there, broken and defenseless, and when I saw her finally blink it brought tears to my eyes.

She didn’t get up. I pulled her into my lap and held her, and she felt like a child, like any child. Her arms slowly rose and went around me, and I felt her body start to shake.

I realized after a few more seconds that she was speaking, very softly. Her voice was a thin, anxious thread. “I didn’t want this. He was my brother; I didn’t want this. . . .”

Ashan was dead, killed in one of the only ways possible for a Djinn. She’d ripped away his life energy to save herself, and—as a byproduct—me. I couldn’t feel nearly as bad about that as she did, but I didn’t have to gloat, and I didn’t. I just held her and rocked her gently. Even Djinn need help, from time to time, and I was glad to give it.

Until I looked back, and saw more chimeras coming.

“Ven,” I said then, and nudged her head off my shoulder. “Venna.”

Her eyes cleared a little, and she regained some of the distance and poise that I was used to seeing in her. “Joanne,” she said. “You put me in a bottle.” That was a dangerous thing for her to be realizing right now.

“I had to,” I said. “You were Ifrit. You could have killed David.”

She nodded slowly, processing the information, and then turned her head to look at the oncoming group of chimeras scuttling up the road toward us. She frowned. “Those aren’t right,” she said, and extended her hand. One by one, the creatures blew up in gouts of blood and some kind of pale fluid. It was nauseating, but effective. In seconds, not one of them remained.

Venna turned her gaze back on me. “You put me in a bottle.” I didn’t repeat my answer; she already knew what I had to say. The only question was whether she’d actually accept it. I knew I could blow up just as gruesomely, and as easily, as those chimeras littering the road out there, and I knew better than to think Venna wouldn’t do it, if she thought it was the right thing to do.

She stared at me with Djinn-fired blue eyes, and finally said, “His powers came to me. I’m the Conduit for the Old Djinn.”

I should have seen that coming, but somehow, I didn’t. I blinked at her, and bit back an automatic, and utterly suicidal, congratulations. “I’m sorry,” I said instead. “I had to do something.”

“Yes,” she said, and looked moodily out at the land around us. “Yes, I can see that. She’s trying to reach me, but she can’t as long as you have me anchored in the bottle. My power flows through you.”

“Venna—”

She made some kind of decision, and stood up. I waited as she dusted off her dress—not that it would ever get dirty. She could just be moving away so that she wouldn’t be splashed with my gore when she exploded me.

Yeah, I try to look on the bright side.

“Are you going to sit there?” she said. “Or do you want to see Lewis?”

“I want to know what happened to David,” I said. “Something must have. He would have come back for me.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “That’s in his nature. Come.” She extended her small hand, and pulled me to my feet with such ease she might as well have been a linebacker. When I started to drop the grip, she held on.

“We’re going through the aetheric,” she said.

“Wait, that’s not—”

“Trust me.”

And then everything was a rush of color, light, a feeling of being destroyed to a cellular level, pain, and then, suddenly, I was facedown on the carpet of a casino floor, gasping for breath.

Slot machines were ringing, just like the world was still normal. Just like everything that I’d been through had been a terrible, passing nightmare.

I felt like a sack of overcooked spaghetti, and I wasn’t sure I could get to my feet at all, but Venna tugged me back upright. She gave me a long, level look and said, “You should put me back in the bottle now. The longer I’m out, the more of your energy I burn. You can’t afford it now.”

I cleared my throat and nodded. “Thank you.”

“There will be a price,” she said coolly.

That was positively chilling, but I tried not to let her see how much that got to me as I said the words, she misted away, and I capped the bottle firmly. She was right. The second the cork slotted in place, I felt better, stronger, and almost capable of standing on my own. But, since there was a handy wall to lean on, no sense in pushing it.

I heard the metallic rattle of guns being readied, and peered around to see a line of men and women facing me with serious weaponry, and even more serious expressions. Most of them were wearing the tailored blazers of security for the Luxor hotel.

All of them were Ma’at, and I could feel the shields being readied against anything I might try to throw at them.

I was too tired for this crap. I held out my fingers in a peace sign—which was one more finger than I was inclined to show them—and said, “Take me to Lewis.”

Venna hadn’t answered me about what had happened to David, but Djinn were like that.

Lewis would answer, or I’d beat it the hell out of him with my bare hands.