Total Eclipse

Chapter Five

I woke up with the sun on my face, which felt nice, but the good feeling faded fast as I blinked and looked around, out the car’s windows.

We were still on the road—not a surprise—and I supposed with a Djinn at the wheel we didn’t need to stop for gas. Cherise and Kevin were still deeply asleep. David, however, was awake, and as I moved my head off his shoulder, he reached out for my hand. That felt nice.

What wasn’t nice was the world outside our speeding car.

We were traveling close to the coastline—I could see the gray smudge of the ocean through occasional hills—but what was most noticeable to me was the thick, gray pall of smoke that hung in the air. I could smell it, thick even through the filter of the car’s vents. It gave everything outside an unreal, unfocused look. “It’s snowing?” I said as flakes brushed across the windshield.

“No,” David said quietly. “It’s ash.”

I swallowed. “Can you see the fire?”

“Not yet. But it’s got to be huge to produce this kind of effect.”

The radio suddenly slid channels. I expected more homespun passive-aggressive advice from Whitney, for which I really was not in the mood, but instead it landed on a news station. Even before I started getting the sense of what they were talking about, I could hear the tension in the broadcaster’s voice.

“. . . continues with major flare-ups to the west of I-95, including the Cumberland State Forest area, the Amelia Wildlife Management Area, Masons Corner, Flat Rock, and Skinquarter. There are unconfirmed reports of a major explosion and uncontrolled burn near Chesterfield Court House and the Pocahontas State Park. If you are anywhere in this area, immediate evacuations are under way. Do not remain in your homes; this is an extremely dangerous situation that is overwhelming emergency services. It is only one of several emerging situations that are splitting the resources of our fire, medical, and police throughout the area. Reports are also coming in of significant damage in the Midwest due to torrential rains and flooding, as well as seismic activity along critical fault lines. The Red Cross is—”

Without warning, the voice dissolved into blank, white static. I waited. It didn’t come back.

I reached out and switched off the radio. I couldn’t help it; the feeling of doom was overwhelming. I could hear the suppressed panic in the reporter’s voice; I could feel my own heart pounding uselessly, trying to trigger some kind of survival response.

There was nowhere to run. Not anymore. I was certain that if the broadcast had continued, we would have heard more. A lot more, from all over the country. It was starting in the rural areas, but moving toward the cities, and when it got there . . .

“Faster,” I said aloud, to the Djinn. “Whitney, if you can hear me, for the love of God—”

The radio clicked back on. “You brought this on yourselves,” she said. “Don’t go dragging God into it. You were warned a million times that if humanity got to be too much of a threat, it would get dealt with. Day of reckoning, Joanne. It’s here. Should have spent more time listening to those preacher-men—not that any of that would have headed it off, I suppose.”

She sounded annoyed, verging on pissed off, and I shut up. She was, indeed, the only real help I imagined we had in the bullpen, and it wasn’t a very smart strategy to alienate her.

Satisfied by my silence, apparently, Whitney edged more speed out of the howling engine, and we fled into a dim, surreal day.

Judgment Day.

About an hour later, my phone pinged. It hadn’t rung, but I supposed the connections were bad and getting worse as more and more panicked callers took to the cell phone skies to find their loved ones.

It wasn’t a call; it was a text, from Lewis. It said LOST PARTS OF WASHINGTON STATE—WILDFIRES OUT OF CONTROL. LARGE LOSS OF LIFE.

I swallowed. He wasn’t telling me to ask me to do anything; I knew that. He just had to tell someone. Lewis was, right now, the man at the top, listening to all the litany of horror. It had to go somewhere. I supposed it might as well come to me as bleed- off. We were all going to need counseling before this was over, provided there were any of us left, and of course provided there were any mental health professionals left standing.

The next text said, HEADING FOR SEATTLE. LAST STAND FOR FIRE WARDENS IN THE AREA. WILL UPDATE.

I stared at it for a long, silent moment, then texted back, UNDERSTOOD.

I did understand. I knew why he was texting me, what he wasn’t saying to me, all those fragile and silent things that both of us knew would never be acceptable in the light of day. My fingers hovered over the keys, and I almost added, LOVE YOU, because I did, desperately, like the brother and friend he had been to me these past few years. But I knew what he felt was different, and stronger, and I didn’t want to give him false hope and wrong impressions.

So instead I said, BE CAREFUL, and sent the message.

David, watching me, said, “It’s bad.”

“Lewis and the Wardens are trying to save Seattle,” I said. “It’s not good.” I realized that the pixels on that phone screen might be the last thing I had to remember Lewis by, and a lump formed in my throat. I swallowed it, blinked away stinging in my eyes, and thought, No, it isn’t. We’ll get through this. We always find a way.

Looming up out of the misty haze in the distance was a tangle of metal. Some kind of crash, leaking black smoke, but no visible flames.

It was a bus, flipped on its side. It had collided head-on with a car—I think it had once been a car, anyway. Nothing was moving in either vehicle.

“Slow down!” I said. The Djinn ignored me. “Stop! You have to—”

We flashed by the wreck at the speed of light as the Djinn expertly drifted around the debris and found open road. Not enough time for me to get all the details, but enough, and it felt like my stomach was trying to crawl out through my throat.

“No survivors,” the Djinn said, in that eerie chorus-like voice. “No stops.”

Cherise and Kevin were wide awake now in the back, but neither of them said anything. When I looked back, they were clutching hands and avoiding looking anywhere. David said nothing, either. His face was disturbingly blank.

“But—” I couldn’t let it go.

David touched my cheek. “He’s right. Wherever we’re going, we have to get there. We can’t stop. Not for anything. I know you can’t accept that, so I’ll take the responsibility, all right? We don’t stop, not even if you scream and hate me.”

I gulped. “I wouldn’t—”

“Yes, Jo, you would. What if that had been a school bus? What if you’d seen crying children?”

I couldn’t answer him. I knew he was right about me, and I knew he was right about everything, and it hurt. Badly.

“Whitney,” I said. “Can you hear me?”

Her voice came out of the Djinn’s mouth this time. “Unfortunately,” she said.

“Put me back to sleep,” I said. “I don’t want to see this. I don’t want to see any of it until I can do something.”

David put his arm around me and pulled me close. I let my head fall against his chest.

I was just dropping off when I saw an old man stagger out of his car, which was half off the road, and fall on his side. We passed him by in a flash. Did I see that? Yes, I did. I know I did.

“Stop,” I said. The Djinn once again ignored me. “Whitney, I’m not telling you again. Stop this car!”

“What for?” she asked, bored and resentful. “So you can go play Low- Rent Nightingale? You said we need to get to the Oracle. I’m doing my best.”

“Please,” I said. “Please stop the car. I’m begging you.”

Whitney was silent for a second, then I felt the Djinn braking the vehicle, whipping it around in a tight turn, and heading back. “You need to know when to let it go, Joanne. You really do.” Thirty seconds later, he pulled the Mustang to a stop. The old man was feebly moving, trying to pick himself up, but he wasn’t able to do much. I bailed out and ran to his side. He was in his seven-ties, maybe into his eighties, with a tight cap of silver/ gray curls over a face of great dignity—a patriarch, for sure. African American, and he’d probably been tall and broad in his younger days, but now he was lighter and more stooped, and I was able to help him up to a sitting position. More car doors slammed. The others were joining me.

“Hi,” I said. “My name’s Joanne. You looked like you needed some help.”

He nodded breathlessly. He was wheezing, and his hands trembled badly. “I saw the devil,” he said. “Back there on the road. It was killing people.”

I exchanged a look with David, and knew he was thinking exactly what I was—Djinn.

“I’m not supposed to be driving, but I had to get Mindy out of there. The whole place was going crazy. I just started feeling sick. My chest hurts.” His face was taking on an ominous gray color, and he made a pained expression and grabbed for his arm. “Damn.”

He was having a heart attack.

“Sir, what’s your name?” I asked. “Sir?”

“George,” he finally panted. “George Templin Bassey.”

“Nice to meet you, George. I’m going to help you lie down, okay? You take slow, deep breaths. That’s right, slow, deep breaths.” I sat back on my heels and looked at Kevin, then Cherise. “One of you is going to have to try to help him.”

“How?” Cherise asked. She looked scared, and I didn’t blame her. This was a fairly significant amount of responsibility to be dumping on someone.

“If you’ve got my powers, you’ve also got Earth Warden powers,” I said. “That means healing. George here needs your help. I’ll walk you through it, okay? Kevin, he said something about Mindy. See if there’s anybody else in the car.”

Kevin opened the car door and peered in, and almost got his face chewed off by a squat, ferocious English bulldog, who lunged off the floorboard at him with furious, deep-chested barks. Kevin slammed the door again. The bulldog continued to glare and bark. “Uh, yeah, found Mindy, I guess. She’s a charmer. Looks okay, if you like fangs.”

Under other circumstances, I’d have laughed. Kevin had been fine with fighting toe to toe with a particularly dangerous Djinn, but give him an angry dog, and he was just like anybody else. That was refreshing.

I pushed away that momentary pulse of amusement and focused back on Cherise, who was staring at George with wide eyes.

“Okay, ready?” I asked. She shook her head. “Yes, you are. Give me your hand.”

I thought for a second Cherise was going to revert to a second-grader and hold her hands against her chest, but finally she stretched one arm out, and I took hold and guided her to place her palm on George’s forehead. He was moaning softly, and he really didn’t look good. “I need you to feel the ground under us,” I said. “It’s full of energy. It feels like honey, or syrup—something slow and golden, okay? Can you feel that?”

Cherise squeezed her eyes shut, and finally nodded. “It’s not very strong,” she said doubtfully. She was right. It was my weakest specialty, generally. “What do I do?”

“Imagine pulling that up into your body. Once you get it started, it’ll just flow on its own.” God, I realized I hated being a teacher. So much easier to do it than to say it. Words were so clumsy for this kind of thing. If I could just show her . . .

The frown deepened on her face, then cleared. “Oh. Oh, right, I get it. That feels weird. Good, but weird.”

“Weirder than getting hit by lightning?”

“That felt great!”

We were wandering off topic, and poor George was looking more than a little spooked. “Well, this will, too. Now, I want you to just let that power move into your hand, your fingers, your palm. Then let it flow from you to George. Don’t try to direct it. Just let it flow.”

I remembered learning this, in fast, terse lessons from other Wardens who hadn’t had the time to teach me all the proper techniques. Being a late bloomer meant I’d missed all the classical education, but I had a good working knowledge of down-and-dirty first aid. One of the key things Lewis had taught me was that if you don’t know how to do fine control with Earth power, don’t try. There’s a certain instinct to it that pulls the power to where it’s needed most. Bodies want to heal. All we have to do is help them.

“It’s going in,” Cherise said. I couldn’t see a thing, but Kevin was watching in fascination, eyes gone wide and unfocused as he followed along in the aetheric. “I think it’s working. I can see it in his blood. It’s moving—there’s some kind of a block. I think I can—”

“No!” both David and I said at the same time. I kept going. “No, I told you, let the power work. Don’t try to direct it!”

From the look on her face, she was trying, but she’d already made the mistake, and I could see it in George’s choked gasps. Wielding Earth power is like working with nanotechnology—you have to be able to make controlled, very slight adjustments at a microscopic level. It’s not brute force.

Cherise cried out, and George arched his back. His eyes rolled back in his head. “I tore it!” she yelled frantically. “I tore something, it’s all bleeding out—”

Kevin reached out and added his hand on top of Cher’s, and even as magically blinded as I was, I felt the power flooding out of him. His eyes sparked and changed, and George’s labored breathing suddenly and dramatically eased.

“Oh,” Cherise said, in a very small voice. “Like that. I see.”

Kevin sat back, staring at her with those glittering, powerful eyes, and he said, “Do you? Because you almost killed this guy because you were stupid. She told you not to do that. You blew out an artery, for God’s sake!”

Cherise went white, clearly horrified and shocked as Kevin turned on her. It wasn’t him, I realized; it was the fact that with David’s power, he was seeing way too much. He saw Cherise’s secret delight in having power, finally—something that as a Warden he’d probably never have picked up, but it reminded him of someone else.

It reminded him of his stepmother, I realized. Yvette. He’d seen her turn into a predatory monster, driven by that same kind of excitement and ambition. What he saw in Cherise was the opposite of Yvette Prentiss . . . a woman without any of that power, without any desire to have it or use it.

He was hating her right now, and she could tell.

“Hey,” I said, and put my hands on their shoulders. “Good work. He seems better. George, are you feeling better?”

He nodded, but he looked scared. Well, I’d have been right there with him, if I’d had two amateur psychic surgeons rummaging around in my innards. “Who the hell are you people? You with the government?” He was feeling better, because I heard suspicion kick in.

“In a way,” I said. “Kevin, how’s the patch? Solid?”

“It’ll hold,” he said. “He had a blocked artery. It’s clear now. He’ll be okay.”

“Kev—,” Cher said anxiously. He stood up and walked away, head down, hands in his pockets. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to do it!”

“Give him a minute,” I said. “Cher, he’s used to the other you. The one without powers. He’s never trusted other Wardens, not any of us, not deep down. He hates feeling that way about you, too. Understand?”

She didn’t, really, but she blinked back tears and acted like she did. We got Mr. Bassey on his feet, had him walk around a little, and then put him back in his car. Mindy was extremely excited by this, and obviously protective; she stood with her stubby little legs on his and growled at us through the window.

“Do you have someplace safe to go?” I asked George, as he started up his car. He looked at me like I might have been completely insane.

“I’m going to the church,” he said. “Devil’s walking the streets, and I don’t know what you people are. Church is the only place I’ll feel safe.”

I nodded. “Be safe.”

He put aside his suspicion long enough to say, “God bless you all.”

Mindy barked.

As his car pulled away, I heard Whitney’s pained voice on the radio say, “Now can we leave? Sweet Mother Moses, you people are more sentimental than my grand-mother into her third bottle of sipping whiskey!”

“Where does she come up with this stuff?” I asked David.

He shrugged. “I don’t even know why she’s a Djinn,” he said. “It’s part of her charm.”

The excitement of having saved one life—well, two, if you counted Mindy’s—made me feel pretty good about things for a while, but my impulse to do-gooding was very firmly brought under control by Whitney, who informed us in cold, final tones that we would not stop until we got where we were going.

The next time I tried to get her to stop for a roadside rescue, she put me out like the proverbial light, and I had just enough time to think, You Southern-fried bitch . . . and I was gone.

For a long time.

“Jo?”

Then somebody was shaking me. I fought my way up out of what felt like the deepest, most dreamless rest I’d ever had, and for a long second after opening my eyes I felt . . . good. Happy, even. At peace, because the face I was looking into was David’s.

He shook me harder. “Jo, wake up!” The urgency in his voice made me blink and scramble for a better grasp of things around me.

We were no longer in the Mustang. I didn’t even see the Mustang anywhere. I was propped against a brick wall, sitting on a sidewalk, facing a street. It was eerily quiet here—one might even say dead, because I didn’t see a single sign of life. Not a bird flitting overhead, not an insect moving, not a single person in a car, window, or park. I looked up and down. It was a Norman Rockwell kind of street, clean and neat—a business district, with quaint little shops and cafes.

All deserted.

Overhead, the sky was gray, a kind of thick, featureless gray that seemed wrong even for an overcast. As I stared at it, I realized that it looked like smoke behind glass.

“We’re in Seacasket,” I said. “Home of the Fire Oracle.”

“There’s nothing here still alive,” David said. “We don’t know why. We haven’t found any bodies—not even of insects. Nothing. They’re just . . . gone.”

That was unsettling. The Fire Oracle wasn’t exactly my BFF, but he’d been a lot less antagonistic than the Air Oracle the times I had met him. Not anywhere close to human, but willing to acknowledge us. Seacasket was an unnaturally perfect sort of town, always had been; I thought it was some kind of side effect of the presence of the Oracle. Things had just always seemed a little too much in their place.

“Where’s Cherise? Kevin?” I looked around; I couldn’t see them, either. “Is the Djinn still with us?”

“He went with them,” David said. “I stayed with you.”

Which didn’t answer my question. I grabbed his hand and pulled myself up to my feet. I still felt sticky, hot, caked with sweat and coated in powdered concrete dust from our mall adventure. My hair was lank around my face, and if I could have wished for paradise, it would have been a spa whirlpool tub, and a skin treatment.

Later.

“Where did they go?”

For answer, he nodded down the street. I looked and saw nothing, but I headed in that direction while David quickly caught up. It felt good to walk; my legs had been out of practice, with all the driving. And suddenly, I felt another need, a really practical one. I stopped, feeling stupid, and said, “Bathroom?”

“There’s a gas station up here,” David said. “Nobody in it, but the bathroom is open. We used it earlier.”

“We” meaning everybody but me, I assumed. It seemed like a mile to the corner, where the banners for the gas station hung limp in the still, perfectly neutral air. It was like strolling through a movie set, deserted but ready for the cameras to arrive.

The bathroom was sparkling, except for the presence of a few paper towels in the trash can, which I presumed came from my traveling companions. After taking care of the obvious and pressing need, I took the opportunity to splash water on my face, scrub off the worst of the grubbiness. Nothing I could do for the clothes, which would need to find an incinerator to throw themselves into at some point, but they’d do for now. Although I would have sold a body part—possibly a major one—for fresh underwear.

I took a deep breath and looked at myself hard in the mirror. My eyes were shadowed, raccooned with dark rings. I looked anxious, drawn, and haunted.

Nice to know I was at my best. I tried to summon up the old confidence, and saw a glimmer or two of it in the smile, the cock of my head.

Well, I thought. If I’m going to go down, I’m going to go down fighting. I don’t have to be ashamed of that.

David knocked on the door. “Are you all right?”

All these years, and he hadn’t learned how women linger in a bathroom? “Fine,” I said, sighed, and ran my fingers through my hair again—not that it helped. Then I put that confident smile back on and opened the door. “Let’s go scare up an Oracle.”

The Fire Oracle’s official public entrance—well, public to the Djinn, not to us measly humans—existed in a cemetery. Like the town of Seacasket, it was a little too perfect—a carefully manufactured setting that gets nominated for set design at award shows. It was the very definition of historical and peaceful, what with all the green grass and lovely statues and well-tended grave-stones and mausoleums.

Not a single person visible. Not a bird cheeped. Not a blade of grass stirred.

David and I both stood outside the gates for a moment, looking in; I think we were both feeling a dread we couldn’t consciously explain. Bad things had happened in this cemetery to me before, and I couldn’t help but feel a crawling sense of foreboding.

The air was just so still.

“Jo.” David was looking down at the neatly raked gravel path that wound through the picturesque landscape. “Footprints.”

Two sets of them. One matched Kevin’s giant, battered kicks; the others were Cherise’s, judging from the small size. “Where’s the Djinn?” I asked.

“Floating,” David said. “Djinn do that.”

It had been a dumb-ass question, and I’d known it as soon as I’d opened my mouth. Many of the Djinn didn’t bother to manifest themselves physically all the way; I remembered the one who’d started out guarding Lewis’s old house. He hadn’t bothered with anything below the knees.

David, for whatever reason, had always taken care to do the whole human body. I’d always loved that about him.

Imara, our half-Djinn child, had always done that, too. I had a sudden, visceral flash of her standing here in this exact place with me, smiling, and it took my breath away, shock followed by grief. Imara wasn’t gone. I knew that, but I’d had her for such a brief time, and then . . .

David took my hand. “You’re thinking about Imara.”

“Stop reading my mind. It’s creepy that you can do that even when you’re not a Djinn.”

“I’m thinking of her, too,” he said, and I heard the sadness in his voice, too. “I’m thinking that if we can’t do this, we’re going to lose her completely.”

“That isn’t going to happen.” Come on, confidence—get it in gear! “And we’re wasting time. You want to leave this up to Kevin and Cherise?”

He winced. “Definitely not.”

“Then let’s go.”

We walked together, hands clasped, down the gravel path. Except for the crunch of our shoes, it was like moving through a dream, full of color and light but nothing else. The essential life of the place was gone, or at least hidden.

The door to the mausoleum we wanted was standing wide open. Darkness was a thick, black square in the doorway, like a hole in the world, and I hesitated, glancing at David. “Well?” I asked.

He nodded, shut his eyes, and walked forward into it, still holding my hand tightly in his. The darkness slipped over him like water, not shadow—it had a thickness to it, and its own surface tension. I watched him disappear into it, staring at our linked fingers until his were gone and mine touched the dark.

It was cold. Very cold.

Like David, I took a deep breath and went in anyway.

The trip through the cold felt as if it took forever, an eternity of freezing to the bone, and when it stopped, when I finally was able to move again, I found myself shaking violently, almost unable to stand. The darkness was gone, at least, and the air felt warm.

No. The air felt hot.

I pulled in my first breath, and it scorched my lungs. David was already coughing, and as my eyes adjusted to the sudden dazzle of light, I realized we were standing not three feet away from a blazing inferno of red, gold, and white flames that seemed to have no upward limit. The fire just dissolved into a haze of lurid glow at the top.

We were in a small rock chamber, round and rough-hewn. It was basically a big chimney, much taller than it was wide, with an opening in the center through which the fire blazed. It was not a safe place to be standing, but there were no doors, no windows, not even a handy alcove in which to try to hide. To make it even worse, I was still violently shivering from the passage through the cold, even while my skin was registering burning pain. I smelled the distinct, bitter odor of hair crisping.

Someone came at us from the other side of the brilliant blaze, and suddenly I felt the pressure of the heat ease back. It didn’t leave completely, but I wasn’t in danger of becoming baked goods.

Kevin. He looked singed and breathless and wild around the edges. His movements were fast and jerky, fueled by way too much adrenaline. “We have to get out of here!” he yelled. “It’s trying to kill us!”

He’d extended some kind of fire protection over me and David, which was damn nice of him, considering. I wondered if Cherise had smacked the back of his head to make him think of it. “If it had wanted to kill us, we’d be dead!” I yelled back, over the roar of the flames. “Has it said anything?”

Kevin gave me a blank look. “It’s a fire.”

“Trust me. It talks!” Even with Kevin’s power canceling out the fire—and this went well beyond the kind of power that Kevin the Fire Warden could have summoned up; it was more on the scale of a Djinn, which fit with the flickers of poison green in Kevin’s eyes—the air pressed boiling hot against my skin, and I could feel it hungering for me. Not that it had anything against me, personally; it just devoured. That was the nature of fire.

My body tried to sweat, to protect me, but that was like spitting in a volcano. Wisps of steam rose off my skin, but it didn’t cool at all.

Kevin stared at me in utter confusion, working through what I’d told him, and then turned to face the fire. “Hello?” he said. It would have been cute if it hadn’t been so dire. “Uh—hi? Anybody home?”

Cherise staggered around the far curve of the room and headed for us. She looked like I expected I would have in her place, if I’d stumbled in here with a haphazard set of borrowed powers I didn’t know how to use, only to find myself in a killing trap.

In other words, not happy.

“What are you doing?” she yelled at Kevin. He gave her a harassed glance. “We have to get out!”

Before I could stop her, she turned to the rock wall and slapped her palm against it.

As she did, she let loose a furious burst of Earth power—uncontrolled, instinctual, driven by her panic and fury. What was it I’d said? She’s like a baby with a nuclear bomb and a shiny red button.

She’d just pushed the button.

“No!” The scream tore itself out of my throat, but I was too late; she’d used enough power that a sharp crack formed in the rock where her hand had slammed down. Encouraged, she did it again. She would have done it a third time, but David got to her first, grabbed her from behind, and pinned her arms behind her; even human, he had a lot of strength in those muscles, and as small as Cherise was . . .

She used Earth power, which, dammit, I’d taught her how to pull, and threw him off, almost into the fire. I grabbed him around the waist and tackled him down, landing both of us on the hard rocky floor only a few inches from the blaze. I felt my hair cook, and rolled us both as far from danger as possible.

Cherise hit the rock wall a third time.

There was a mystical significance in threes for the Djinn. Ask a bound Djinn any question three times, and they’re forced to answer—maybe not the way you wanted, but they have to take action.

Cherise triggered the Rule of Three in a much more active way.

The Oracle’s fire formed into a huge, white-hot ball, and flew at her. Cherise screamed and ducked, but it was so large that even hitting the floor like me and David, several feet away, wouldn’t have saved her.

Kevin saved her.

He stepped into its way, eyes flaring with an unholy Djinn light. He didn’t try to put up his hands or fight it, or even stop it. He just stood there.

It was very likely one of the bravest things I’d ever seen. And it was Kevin. Surely, one of the primary signs of the End Times.

The fireball slowed, and coasted to a halt, flicking little hissing tongues of flames at his face from a distance of no more than inches. He didn’t blink. He didn’t back up. It drifted closer. I knew, instinctively, that if it touched him, he’d go up like an oil- soaked rag, and dread clenched my stomach into a trembling knot.

The ball lengthened to the vague shape of a man—red as lava on the surface, and clothed in fire, but with that same white-hot core shining from its center. It chose the same height and build as Kevin.

And it didn’t back off.

Something like a mouth formed in its blind, masklike head, and some kind of sound came out of it, but it was like nothing I could recognize as speech. I thought it was what it would sound like as the marrow boiled in your bones. Threatening and fatal.

Kevin bared his teeth and kept on staring back. “Do it,” he said. “But you go through me first.”

The sound from the Oracle stopped abruptly, and the mouth disappeared.

It turned—well, no, that was how my purely human senses wanted to interpret it. Actually, it just reversed its body, putting its head on the other way, and walked the few steps back to the center of the pit where the pillar of flame had been.

Then it sat down in midair, floating, legs crossed in a lotus position, hands turned palms up.

Kevin blinked, and some of the insane Djinn shine drained out of him. “Uh—what’s he doing?”

“You’re asking me?” I asked. “No idea!”

“He’s listening,” David said. “Talk.” He offered me a hand up as he rolled to his feet. He was favoring his side again, and I hoped that wasn’t fresh blood. “Say something.”

“Me?” I asked.

“No, he can’t hear us,” David said. “Either of us. It’s as if—human voices don’t register within the range of his ears. That’s the best I can explain it.”

“But he can hear me?” Kevin asked. He was helping Cherise to her feet. She was dusting herself off, shaken but not hurt. Behind her, that dark crack promised escape—to her mind—and she kept looking toward it. “What about Cher?”

“Maybe,” David said. “I don’t know. Jo could be heard, but she was a special case. I’m not sure about Cherise.”

“Guess that makes you our spokesmodel, Boy Wonder,” Cher said. “Go on. Get us out.”

“Uh, I think we came for a reason first.”

“Screw that. We need to go.” For the first time since I’d met her, Cherise sounded like a petulant child, sulky and stubborn and used to having her own way. “Now, Kev!”

Kevin frowned at her, like he was having the same thoughts I was. “Chill, we’re fine. Look, it’s not even that hot in here anymore.”

“Compared to what, the inside of a nuclear furnace?”

Kevin looked at me and David, clearly wondering when, as the supposed authority figures in the room, we’d step in. David held up his hands. “She already tried to kill me,” he said. “You’re on your own.”

I sighed, walked over to Cherise, and put my arm around her. She jerked in surprise but let me do it. “You really need to calm down, Cher,” I said. She gave me a furious look, and I saw that the panic and instability in her was reaching critical levels. “Cher. Deep breaths.”

“I need out!” she wailed, and tried to turn toward the wall.

I wasn’t about to let her get us all killed, and I didn’t think. I just dropped my arm from her shoulders, pulled my fist back, and hit her with a perfect right hook to the jaw.

She went down like a bowling pin. I caught her before she hit the ground and eased her flat. “Kev,” I said. “Put her out. Now.” Because I’d hit like a girl, just dazed her plenty, and she wasn’t going to be at all thrilled when she shook it off. Kevin wasn’t an Earth Warden, but he had David’s power, and that meant he had everything he needed to do as I asked.

If he could access it.

Kevin crouched down and put his hand tentatively on her forehead. Cherise tried fitfully to bat it away. “Sorry,” he said, and I saw a spark of fire catch green in his eyes as he channeled power. It probably was spectacular on the aetheric level, but here, with my human eyes, I could only see the faintest glow around his fingers.

Cherise went limp, breathing heavily. I checked her pulse—strong and steady—and gave a solid thumbs-up to Kevin, who looked deeply relieved. “Don’t make me do that again,” he said. “It feels really weird. What if I get it wrong? What if I put her into a coma or something?”

“She’d still be alive,” David said. “She won’t be if she unleashes more power in here. The Oracle won’t let it happen again. He’ll just destroy her.”

Kevin swallowed hard, looking at the serene, floating figure, wreathed in flames. “Yeah? What about me?”

“He sees you as Djinn. He expects it from you.”

“I—” Kevin stared at David now, with the same kind of alarm he’d given to the figure of the Oracle. “What?”

David tried again, with strained patience. He was leaning against the wall now, and the hand holding his side was subtly trembling. I stepped up next to him to take some of his weight. Also subtly. Or not. “You’re the only one here who can talk to him, using the powers that I used to have. So do it. Explain it to him. Oracles see everything, but their context can be far different from ours. He needs to understand what all of it means to us. To humanity.” David had never put himself on that side of the us before, except in relation to me. I stared at him in involuntary reaction. He shrugged. “I am one of you, for however long it lasts. It’s—weirdly restful.”

“You’re in pain!”

“Yes, but it’s a different kind of pain than I’m used to enduring. That’s something.”

That made about as little sense to me as talking with the Oracle would have, so I shut up. Kevin didn’t need side chatter. He was looking sweaty and scared and well aware of the stakes at play here, in this burning furnace of a room.

“Hi,” he said to the Oracle. “Okay, I have no idea how to do this, but I’ll try. . . .”

“Power,” David said. “Use it.”

Kevin closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened them, I saw a faint green shimmer in his eyes. Sort of like the Hulk, getting a little bit angry. “Hello,” he said in a stronger voice. “Can you hear me?”

The Oracle didn’t make any sign he did. More serene, though extremely fierce, hovering ensued, and the green glare in Kevin’s eyes brightened steadily, like someone was turning up a dimmer switch in the back of his head. Eerie.

“Hear me,” he said, when his eyes were utterly Djinn. It wasn’t loud, but it was . . . profoundly powerful.

The Oracle still hovered, but now features manifested on its face. Eyes opened, and they were the same green as Kevin’s.

“I hear,” the Oracle said. “Speak.”

But that was the last thing Kevin said, at least that I could plainly hear; his lips didn’t move, but the intense stare between the two of them continued.

It occurred to me, after a few long seconds, that it felt just a little hotter in the room.

No, I was wrong. It felt like it was getting steadily hotter, fast. Like a blower had come on, venting heat back into the room.

“Not good,” David said. “Get low.”

“Why?”

“Cool air sinks?”

Oh. I’d forgotten even the most basic physics now, thanks to the extreme state of death I was expecting to happen any second. I helped him down to his knees, then got face-first on the floor along with him.

Kevin was still standing. And now, flames were whipping around the floating lotus-position Oracle, flaring up and twisting in a miniature whirlwind—but never blocking the connection between his stare and Kevin’s. As I watched, the flames stretched out, circling around Kevin.

Binding the two of them together.

Kevin took a step closer. Then another one.

“Kevin, don’t touch him!” I yelled. “You can’t—he’ll kill you!” Because at his core, Kevin was still human. Still a Warden. And we didn’t belong here.

Kevin stopped inches away. The fire was now blazing so hot around them that it was white- hot, like a curtain of flaming diamonds. Even with my face pressed low against the hot stone floor, every breath I gasped in was torturous and searing.

And then, with a tremendous burst of heat and light that seemed to char the entire world, Kevin collapsed. He did it in stages: knees went first, then he folded backward and caught himself with one outstretched arm. The arm failed, and he hit the floor, faceup.

The heat in the room suddenly dialed itself down. Way down, until it felt icy. That probably only meant that it was down to survivable temperature, but the relief was overwhelming enough to make me sob. I felt David shiver from the sudden chill, next to me.

When I tried to get up he said, “No, don’t move.” His voice was hoarse. “Stay down. This isn’t yours to do. Trust me.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. He stood up, swaying on his feet, his face a dirty, pale color that didn’t look at all right.

“David!” I started to get up to join him, but he didn’t pause.

He walked into the center of the room, where the Oracle had turned into a blazing white-hot ball, and before I could stop him . . .

. . . He plunged into the fire.