Firestorm tww-5 Page 3

  David, who would never have willingly hurt me—coming for me with his eyes glowing red. I'd have died there, if it hadn't been for Imara. And that had been open ground. In an enclosed space like this, no place to run…

  "We couldn't stop them," Paul finished softly. "We lost—" He looked momentarily stunned, trying to recall a number.

  Down the table, a quiet voice supplied, "At least thirty. We're lucky we have as many here as we do."

  "Lucky?" A half-whisper from a battered young man I didn't recognize, with the solid hum of energy that usually tokened an Earth power. "What part of that was lucky, man? I saw people—I saw friends just ripped in half—"

  Paul, sighed. "Yeah, kid, I know. Easy. We're going to get through this, okay? Jo, this is pretty much everybody we could pull in that we could reach. Got more on the way, but it's going to take some time to figure out who's still alive and able to help. Plus, we can't yank everybody out. We need them on the ground, especially now." His gaze fell randomly on Cherise, and stayed. "Who's this?"

  "Cherise. She's a friend." After a hesitation, I had to clarify, "Not a Warden."

  He looked completely pissed off. "What are we running here? A tour group? Get her the hell out of here!"

  I looked at Cherise. She was dead scared and didn't know where to look but she especially didn't want to look at the puddles of dried blood on the carpet or the silent, staring faces of the Wardens. "Cher, why don't you wait in the hall?"

  "Hell no," she said. "I've been to the movies. No way am I splitting up in the scary place. C'mon, Jo, I want to stay with you. Please?"

  She had a point. No telling what kind of dangers were still lurking around the corner. I turned back to Paul. "She stays," I said. He glowered. "Paul, she stays. We don't have time to screw around with who's allowed in the cool kids' room when the house is on fire, right? Just pretend she's an intern or something."

  That wouldn't be too hard. Cherise was looking more and more like an out-of-her-depth undergrad.

  "So what do we know?" Tasked, and slid into an empty chair. Cherise hastily took the one next to me. I scanned faces around the room and saw about twelve I recognized. Way too many were missing. I had to hope they were still somewhere out there, doing their jobs. I exchanged quick nods with the people I knew.

  "We started losing contact with Wardens all over the country about three days ago. Started with just a few, but it spread like wildfire," a lean, weathered woman of about forty said. "It took us a while to understand that they were being attacked by Djinn. No survivors until they came after Marion."

  I glanced down the table into shadows, alarmed. I'd seen Marion… Yes, there she was, half-hidden near the end. Marion was an Earth Warden, and her skill was healing, but self-healing was a chancy undertaking at the best of times. She looked terrible. I exchanged another nod with her.

  "Marion, I'm so sorry. Your Djinn—?" I didn't know how to finish that question, because Marion and I knew things about each other that really weren't suited to sharing with a table full of strangers. Such as, I knew that Marion had taken enormous risks to recover her lost Djinn, not so very long ago, and it hadn't been out of selfless duty; she and her Djinn were lovers. That fell under the "forbidden tragic love" section of the Warden code, even under normal circumstances; I just didn't know for certain how tragic it had turned out this time.

  She took me off the hook. "My Djinn helped me take out the two who came to—to free him. Then he asked me to put him back into his bottle. I did, and sealed it."

  "First good advice we had," Paul said. "We've been getting hold of every Warden we can find and telling them the same thing. Get your Djinn safe and seal the bottles until we know what the hell's going on. You got anything, Jo?"

  I stretched my hands flat on the scarred wood surface. "Afraid so. Here's the deal. The Djinn were serving us only because of an agreement made a few thousand years ago between the first Wardens and the most powerful Djinn in the world. His name is—was—Jonathan."

  Silence, and then… "Kind of a modern name, isn't it?" Cherise asked. "Jonathan, I mean. Wouldn't he have an Egyptian name or—"

  "Cherise. This is my story. You talk later. The thing is, once Jonathan made the agreement, which was supposed to be temporary, the Wardens didn't keep their end of the bargain. They didn't let the Djinn go once the emergency was past all those thousands of years ago. There was always some disaster or another to serve as an extension on the contract, and then they didn't even bother making up excuses. Some of the Djinn have had enough of waiting for the Wardens to grow a conscience, and the Wardens forgot that any such agreement ever existed. So the Free Djinn—"

  That term caused a rustle of throat-clearing and shifting in chairs, and the inevitable interruption. "There aren't any such thing as—" someone began to declare, in much the same way people once insisted the world was flat.

  "Yes there are, Rosa." That was Marion, and her tone was surprisingly sharp, coming from a woman who was normally so level and soothing in manner. But then, we'd all had a damn hard few days. I could see that it might be difficult to suffer fools with the same level of grace she usually displayed.

  "Continue," Paul said, watching me.

  I swallowed, wished in vain for a drink of water, and got on with it. "So some of the Free Djinn started killing Wardens, trying to free their brethren, as well. But some didn't agree with that tactic, so there was fighting in the Djinn ranks. Jonathan—" What the hell had happened to Jonathan? Something catastrophic. "Jonathan died. And when he died, the agreement between the Djinn and the Wardens, the one that kept them under our command, that went sideways. We don't own the Djinn anymore. Not as of the moment he stopped existing."

  Paul's face went a paler shade of scared. "You mean, they're no longer under our control at all?"

  "Yes, that's what I mean."

  "Well, that's just great. You drove all the way from Florida to tell me we're dead?"

  "You want me to go on, or what?" I glared back. He finally closed his drug-glazed eyes and nodded. "Right. Well, we've always thought we were fighting the planet, one on one. A fair contest. But I have to tell you, it isn't fair, and it isn't even a contest. She hasn't even been awake." Inarticulate noises of protest and denial. I ignored them. "She's not even concentrating on us at all. We're like little mosquitoes she's been swatting in her sleep."

  Paul's face had drained of what little color he had. "Jo—"

  "Hang on, I'm still getting to the bad news." I sucked in a deep breath, then blew it out. "She's starting to wake up. Once she does, she can control the Djinn absolutely, and that means we'll face a thousand times the power we did before. Maybe worse than that. And without any help from the usual sources."

  He looked glassy-eyed. "Was that the bad news? Because for fuck's sake, don't tell me it gets worse than that."

  "Yeah, that was it."

  He didn't say anything. The silence ticked off, one cold second at a time, until Marion murmured, "Then that would be the end of it."

  Paul looked up sharply. "I'm not throwing in the towel, and you're not either," he snapped. "Jo. What else you got for us? Anything on the plus side?"

  "I may—" I edited myself carefully, well aware of the way this might go. "I may know of a Djinn who can still help us."

  "I'm the guy in charge of handing out life preservers on the Titanic. Anything you got that can help, let's have it. I mean, we're talking about Band-Aids on a sucking chest wound, but—"

  "I don't know if this Djinn has the ability to do much," I said quickly. It wouldn't do to get anybody's hopes up, and I wasn't even sure where Imara was, or what she was up to. "But I'll check into it. Maybe we can get some intelligence about what's happening to the Djinn without too much risk. Meanwhile, we have to get off our asses. We're powerful in our own right, but we've been relying on the Djinn for too long. You need to get all hands on deck, make them quit playing politics and doing under-the-table deals. Put them to work for a change." I bit my lip, debating, and
then continued, "And get the Ma'at on board. The Wardens got lazy, using the Djinn to help them. We have to learn a whole new way of doing things. The Ma'at can help."

  There was another stir of resistance. Not denial—this was confusion. Marion knew about the Ma'at, and I'd presumed she'd reported everything to Paul, but surprise… he wasn't looking like he recognized the name, and neither did anyone else. I shot Marion an alarmed, semidesperate glance. She raised an inscrutable you're on your own eyebrow.

  I tried for a calm tone. "I thought you knew, Paul. The Ma'at. I guess you'd call them a rival organization, who can raise up powers that can influence the same things we can. I met them in Vegas."

  "Rival organization? Vegas?" Paul's face went from white to an alarming shade of maroon. "Vegas? You're telling me you knew about all this months ago?"

  Well, crap, I'd quit, hadn't I? Why would I have narked on the Ma'at, at that point? "You guys weren't exactly keeping the communication channels open, you know! The Ma'at aren't as powerful as we are. Okay, to be honest, I don't know how powerful they are, but I know they're not as widespread. Still, they have a different approach. They might be able to help."

  "Are you working for them?".

  "What?"

  He surged to his feet and leaned on the table as the other Wardens exploded into babbling argument. "Are you working for them? Is that what this is? You get inside and kill off the rest of us? You bring this Djinn along with you to finish the job?"

  "Paul—"

  "Shut up. Just shut your mouth, Jo." He upgraded the shout to a full-out bellow. "Janet! Nathan! Get in here!"

  That brought in the two guards, who'd been hovering politely out of sight around the corner. Paul gestured toward me. "Stick this one in a room while we talk this over. Do not let her sweet-talk you, and do not let her leave. If she tries anything, you've got my permission to shoot her. Someplace painful but nonvital. Got me?"

  Cherise whirled around, eyes wide. "They're arresting you?"

  "Looks like," I said. I was feeling a tight flutter of panic about it, but there was no point in showing that to her. She couldn't help. "It's okay, Cher. You go back to the car and head for home. I'll be all right."

  "Oh, hell no. I'm not leaving you like this!"

  "You are," Paul said flatly. He nodded the two guards toward Cherise. "Escort the lady out first. Nicely, please."

  It was going to be nice until Cherise grabbed Janet's hair and kicked Nathan in the balls, and then it got a little ugly. Cherise fought like a girl, which meant she fought dirty. There was screeching. Nathan finally got her wrists pinned, and Janet—pink-cheeked and disarranged—looked like she wanted to do some hair-pulling herself, but she restrained herself with dignity.

  The table full of Wardens looked on, wide-eyed.

  Cherise continued to struggle even after they had good hold of her. I went over to her, put my hand on her shoulder.

  "Cherise, stop it! I'll be all right," I promised her. "Trust me. Go home. This isn't your fight."

  I was right, and I was lying, of course, because it was everybody's fight now. It was just that the regular folks, the ones who were going to be mowed down by the uncounted millions, couldn't do a damn thing about it. You can't fight Mother Nature. Not unless you're a Warden. And even then, it's like a particularly brave anthill taking on the Marine Corps.

  She didn't say anything, just stared at me. Hair cascading over her face, half-wild, completely scared. I'd done this to her. Cherise had been a comfortable, self-absorbed little girl when I'd first met her, and I'd dragged her into a world she could neither understand nor control. Another stone on the crushing burden of guilt I was hauling around.

  "Go home," I repeated, and stepped back. Janet and Nathan escorted her to the door—carried her, actually, since she was such a tiny little thing. Her feet kicked uselessly for the floor, but they each hoisted her with an arm under hers, and out she went.

  "Jo, dammit, don't do this! Let me help! I want to help!" she yelled. I didn't move. Didn't reply. "Hey, you jerk, watch the shirt, that's designer—"

  And then she was gone, and it was just me and a room full of Wardens, and it wasn't the time to be picking any fights. Besides, I wasn't fool enough to believe anybody else would jump in on my side.

  "You really going to lock me up?" I asked Paul. He gave me a stare worthy of his mafioso relatives. "I could take down a bunch of you, you know," I said. "On my worst day, I could still take at least three of you if I had to. And no offense, but this isn't shaping up to be my worst day. For a change."

  "Yeah, go on, you're making me not want to lock you up, with a speech like that," he said. "I know you could take any of us except Lewis; you always could. And when did you figure all that out, incidentally?"

  "Started to a couple of months ago," I said, and shrugged. "So. You want to fight, or work together to help people survive this? Because I'm not going to play the traditional who's-on-top and who-can-smooch-the-most-ass game anymore. I'm not letting you stick me in some cell and pretend like this is all my fault and it'll all go away if we hold a tribunal and assign some blame. And most of all, I'm not going to sit back and let people die."

  "You'll do what we ask you to do," said Marion, and rolled out from behind the table. Rolled, because she was in a wheelchair. I made a sound of distress, because I didn't realize how badly she'd been hurt—worse than Paul. There was something terribly misshapen about her legs. Marion was middle-aged, but she looked older than that now; lines grooved around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, lines of pain. Even her normally glossy black hair looked dull and tangled, but I supposed that personal grooming probably wasn't on anyone's top ten to-do list at the moment. "This isn't the moment for personal heroics, and you know it. The Wardens need to pull together. That means someone has to lead, and the rest of us have to follow. Including you."

  "Following's never been her strong suit," Paul said morosely. "In case you haven't noticed. And she can probably kick your ass, too, these days."

  "Paul," Marion said with strained patience, "perhaps we should stop discussing whose asses would be hypothetically kicked, and talk about what we're going to do to stop the bloodshed."

  "Somebody needs to contact the Ma'at," I said. "I'm not their favorite person ever, but at least I know some names. How's that for cooperation?"

  "Hand them over to Marion," Paul said. "You're done here until we can check you out and find out who these people are. Marion?"

  Marion, always practical, reached into her plaid-blanketed lap, and pulled out a pad of paper and a pen. I recited the ones I could remember. Charles Spencer Ashworth. Myron Lazlo. Told the Wardens about their lair in the lap of the Sphinx out in Las Vegas.

  She exchanged a look with Paul, and he shrugged. "Check it out," he said. "You, Jo. You're going to spend a little time contemplating how bad an idea it was to keep that from me."

  "Oh, come on, Paul. We don't have time for this bullshit."

  "Sorry," Marion said, and pulled something else out from under that plaid lap blanket. An automatic pistol. It looked like one of the same police-issue models that Janet and Nathan had been sporting. "But he's right. First, we establish contact with the Ma'at, and then we decide what to do with you. Don't worry. It probably won't take all that long, and you look as if you could use the rest."

  I felt a cold chill at how close she'd probably come to putting a bullet in me, just on general principles. I'd been shot in the back before, in this very building, as it happened. Not an experience I was looking to repeat, especially since David wasn't likely to show up again to help me out.

  I slowly put up my hands.

  She shook her head. "I'm not going to shoot you," she said, and put the gun back in her lap, though on top of the blanket. "For one thing, the recoil is murder on a broken arm."

  "Glad your priorities are straight."

  "Up," she said. "I'll show you someplace you can wait in comfort."

  I looked over my shoulder when I reached
the splintered doorway, and saw something that I'd never really seen before in a group of Wardens: fear. And they were right to be afraid. In all the history of the Wardens, stretching through the ages, nobody had ever faced what we were facing: a planet that was about to wake up and kill us, and Djinn who were going to be more than happy to help.

  I wondered if this was how the dinosaurs had felt, watching that bright meteor streak toward the ground.

  Chapter Two

  I spent some time in lockup lying on a clean hospital bed, humming popular songs, and trying to imagine what the new Wardens seal should look like. I was currently going with a shiny circular motif, with the new motto of We're So Screwed running around the outer edge, featuring a graphic of a nuclear mushroom cloud in the center. A gold seal, probably. Gold goes with everything, even an apocalypse.

  Bored with mental graphic design, I got up and wandered around, taking stock. The infirmary was mysteriously intact. Crisp, clean, no sign of struggles. Maybe it had been empty. Djinn wouldn't have wasted time vandalizing; they'd been out for blood, and they were nothing if not focused on the mission.

  Which would have been removing any humans who might pose a genuine threat to them later. I wondered if it had been David's bunch, acting under the red-eyed influence of the Earth. Or if it had been Ashan's little merry band, coming after Wardens just on general principles.

  Either one would have been horrific, in these close quarters. I didn't want to imagine it, but the images kept springing up when I closed my eyes.

  Eventually, not even fevered imagination could hold off exhaustion, and I surrendered to a need to be horizontal. I pulled a waffle-weave cotton blanket up over my aching body and wished—again—for a shower. I was too tired even to take off my shoes, much less undress, although these clothes needed to be burned, not just laundered. I stank to high heaven, and was ruining a perfectly good bed, but as soon as I closed my eyes, all those concerns slid away like oil off Teflon.