Firestorm Read online

Chapter Three

  He wasn't kidding about the car. It was pretty much the Holy Grail of cars, and I had the keys.

  It was parked in the secured, bomb-hardened garage downstairs--the one reserved for only the most senior diplomats and Warden staffers. Well, what with the death and destruction, there were bound to be plenty of parking spots open. It had a fabulous exotic gleam under the overhead lights, a polished sapphire hiding unsuccessfully in a field of pebbles. The conservatively styled BMWs and Infinitis looked drab in contrast, though somebody had spiced up his love life with one of those kicky little BMW Z4 Roadsters in sleek, polished silver. Very James Bond.

  I ran a hand reverently over the Camaro's silky finish. It was a 1969 model, a V8 with a 396 engine--a big, boxy car, nothing really elegant about it, none of that designed-in-a-wind-tunnel slickness of newer cars. I opened the door and popped the hood, leaned in for a look, and felt my heart give that extra-double-thump reserved for true automotive love. It wasn't just a COPO--a Central Office Production Order model, which would have been cool enough. No, it was one of the rarest of the rare: a 9560 with an all-aluminum ZL-1 427. The lightest, quickest, fastest Camaro ever made. Also, the rarest and most valuable. I winced to think how much cash Lewis had laid out for this beauty. It was in perfect condition, maintained with loving care. Not so much as a scratch.

  I almost hated to be taking it out into the field, where things were bound to get ugly. . . but then again, it might just save my life. Speed counted.

  I closed the hood and stood there for a moment, hand on the smooth finish, feeling the latent power of the car. It wasn't a replacement for my beloved, lost vintage Mustang, but that would be like saying that Secretariat wasn't a replacement for Man O' War. It was a thoroughbred, born to run.

  And. . . Lewis had bought it for me.

  Huh.

  I wasn't sure I liked the implications--a guy buying you a car is at least as significant as him buying you a ring, and maybe more so in my slightly skewed worldview--but then again, I needed fast transportation.

  A moral quandry. I hated those. And no question, the Camaro was seductive. I could always return it, I told myself. Sell it. Pay him back later. I didn't have to think of it as some kind of down payment for something more. . . intimate.

  Then again, the Camaro conjured up those kinds of thoughts, all on its own. It just had that kind of aura. Sweaty bodies and smothered cries. Somebody had gotten lucky in this car a lot.

  Dammit. I opened the door and slid inside. It was as perfectly maintained inside as out. Not a speck of trash or dust in it. I closed my eyes and went up into Oversight to take a walk around it, aetherically speaking.

  Oh, God, it glowed. There was power in this machine. It was infused with love and dreams. In the act of creation, humans gave things a kind of reality on the aetheric, even though there was no life in inanimate objects per se. Every caring act of maintenance, every brush of the cloth on the dash or the chamois over the finish had rubbed a kind of power into this car along with polish.

  I'd never seen anything like it. I wondered briefly how it would have looked to my eyes if I'd still been a Djinn; I'd have been able to unroll its past like a carpet, if I'd wanted. As it was, I was willing to bet this was a one-owner car, until now.

  And that answered the question of why Lewis had bought it, too. Things like this, infused with this much power and substance, were rare and precious. It would have drawn him to it.

  I let out a long, pleased sigh and inserted the key in the ignition. The engine fired up with a low, raw growl, then purred so smoothly that the tiny fine vibration under my body was almost unnoticeable.

  "God, you're beautiful," I said, and ran my hand around the steering wheel. Adding my emotion to what armored the car. "And you know it, don't you, baby? You know it. "

  I shifted gears, and it responded perfectly to me. We eased up parking levels, to the secured gate, where my ID was checked by a uniformed security guard, and then I was out. Bright--though unfocused and cloudy--day outside, and my eyes were unprepared to deal with it; I hunted in the glove box and discovered an ancient, still-cool pair of Ray-Bans that cut the glare to something less nuclear. It wasn't a short drive to Maine, and I didn't have a lot of time to waste.

  Time. Right. I felt a pulse of alarm, remembering Eamon's two-day deadline, but I couldn't do anything about that; I couldn't even begin to try. I pictured Sarah, crying and afraid, hurting. I had to believe that he wouldn't hurt her. After all, I'd seen him with her, and I knew that on some level, Eamon did care for her. He wouldn't torment her to make a point unless I was there to witness it.

  It was all no good without an audience.

  I hoped.

  Even with the dark thoughts, it felt good to be in the world again, and moving under my own control. I didn't think I could stand to be trapped inside the headquarters building for long, cut off from the hum of the wind and the whisper of the sea.

  Okay, so New York hummed more from traffic and whispered more of sirens, but it still felt good.

  The Camaro prowled through traffic like a big, dangerous beast. . . not feline, the way it was built. More wolf than cat. It turned heads, except for the cabdrivers, who ignored me to the point that I had to look sharp not to add yellow paint to the Camaro's shiny finish. I couldn't afford to go up into Oversight, not in heavy traffic, but I could sense an electric crackle in the air, potential energy heavy as impending rain, but without the healing moisture. That was going to ground itself soon, and in a particularly ugly manner, if something wasn't done.

  Well, the good side of things was that I no longer had to worry about other Wardens second-guessing me when it came to things like this, and for the first time in a long time, I was at full power. So as I hit the bridge and sent the Camaro loping over the water, I concentrated on reading the systems swirling overhead. They were huge, invisible tornadoes of power. Unstable. Charges clicking together in chains, whipping wildly, then breaking when the stresses got too great. This was a reaction problem. The Wardens were concentrating their forces on handling a myriad of disasters; there were bound to be consequences.

  And here was a big one.

  The sky was surly overhead, soggy with thick, darkening clouds that blew in from the sea. The water under the bridge heaved and breathed on its own, a secret life most of the millions in the city would never even sense, much less understand. Water had memory, of a kind. Blood had DNA, and water had a similar structure that existed only on the aetheric plane. That DNA had been badly damaged over the years, but it still purified itself, renewed itself, struggled continually against the assaults of mankind to corrupt it.

  We were damn lucky, the human race. Damn lucky that the earth's systems protected us as a side effect of its own survival mechanism, because we damn sure weren't smart enough to do it for ourselves.

  I considered what to do about all that restless energy upstairs. Lightning would be the most logical plan, but it was risky; it was notoriously difficult to control lightning, and discharging it around the city could cause blackouts. Blackouts caused panics. Panics caused deaths. Deaths were, after all, what I was in this to try to avoid.

  Then again, there was going to be lightning, sooner or later, and it was going to be worse if nobody controlled its strikes.

  I drove for two hours. That sounds like a respectable driving distance, especially in the horsepower-rich Camaro, but unfortunately, traffic wasn't exactly cooperative. Two hours later, I was still within sight of the city. I'd hoped to be well out of range before the prickling at the back of my neck told me that something had to be done, because then it would have been someone else's responsibility. I'd been hoping that some Good Warden Samaritan would jump in and have at it, but no such luck. . . not that I blamed the folks back at Warden HQ. They had something of a full plate at the moment.

  I signaled and pulled over to the side of the road in a spray of gravel, emergency flashers clicking. I
settled myself comfortably in the bucket seat and let myself go up to the world above, where the landscape washed away into a surreal swirl of fog and color. Brilliant, up here, and a unique bird's eye view of a gorgeous city. Wow. New York was charged with human purpose, driven by the engine of energy transforming and growing and changing, by passions and hopes and dreams and tragedies. I couldn't see as much detail as I'd once been able to, when I'd been a Djinn, but the city was still magnificent and mesmerizing, and it was tough as hell to look away.

  I forced myself to focus on the job at hand, and turned my attention upward, to the disturbance.

  The force patterns up there slipped like oil in water, incandescent and rainbow-colored. Beautiful, in their own way. Scary as hell, the way they were blending and morphing and whipping together. When lines of force connected, I saw the ultraviolet zaps of enormous power being channeled.

  As I reached out to try to build a stable channel for it, I felt something. . . notice. That was the most skin-crawling sensation I'd ever had in my weather career, a shock to the system as extreme and terrifying as channeling lightning, if lightning had a brain and an intent. Something was watching me. Something big. The Mother? Was that what it was like?. . .

  I lost control of the chains. They broke into random turning particles again, a soup of energy boiling over. I wanted to reach out again, but something was holding me back. . . my own fear. I was a tiny little field mouse, and there was a huge eagle shadow overhead, just waiting for me to make a move. If I tried to run, I'd die--crushed, devoured, destroyed.

  Something in the real world brushed my hand, then gripped it tight. I opened my eyes, surprised, and saw that I had a passenger in the car, though the doors were still locked.

  David was back, and he wasn't disguised as human at all; in fact, if anything, he looked more Djinn than ever before. A whole lot of sleek gold skin on display, because he was wearing only a pair of tight leather pants and an open leather jacket, with no shirt beneath. His hair was longer, down nearly to his shoulders, and it held a vivid, metallic shine. His eyes were their own light sources. I stared at them, fascinated; they were the color of new pennies on the edge of melting in a blast furnace.

  His hand was hot enough to be uncomfortable against my skin.

  "I came to warn you," he said. He was in my space, very dose. I felt the longing in him, the shivering attraction that had gripped me from the very beginning. "You have to stop. "

  "Stop what?"

  "Trying to fix this. It can't be fixed. "

  "You know me better than that. Or at least, I hope you do. And by the way, what's with the bad-boy makeover?"

  He brushed hair back from my face. Where his fingers touched, I burned. Figuratively as well as literally. "You don't like it?" "The leather? Um. . . " I'd have to have been blind and insane not to like it, not to mention hormonally bankrupt. "Looks good on you. "

  "Not as good as you would. "

  Oh God. My pulse started fluttering and racing, and as if his heat had crawled inside me, I started a bonfire of my own. At least half my mind--the smart half--was screaming that there wasn't time for flirting around just now. Not now. And not in a confined space with a Djinn who might just flip out and kill me.

  I wasn't sure that sex with him in this state wouldn't kill me, anyway.

  "You look good enough to eat. " He licked his lips. There was something incandescent going on in his eyes, so bright, I couldn't look for long. It was as if he were staring at my naked soul.

  "Um--David--" His hand slid down the curve of my cheek, traced my chin, and then his fingers trailed down the line of my throat. His index finger explored the notch of my collarbone, and then dipped lower. He hooked it in the neck of my shirt and pulled. I swayed toward him. "What are you doing?"

  "Don't you know?" he asked.

  Oh boy. The energy piling up and swirling overhead. The hot crackle between us. The heat of his skin, the restless flare inside me. The sense of something. . .

  Something present, up there.

  Something vast, and beyond my understanding.

  He leaned forward, and his lips touched mine. Liquid silk, warm and soft and insistent. Whatever defenses I had, they didn't exist against him; I could feel all my resolve evaporating like ice under a summer sun. His hands seemed to be everywhere, soft little touches on my face, my neck, my arms, sliding up under my shirt, thumbs tracing the undersides of my breasts. . .

  I think my mind whited out for a while. When it returned from its sensory vacation, I was back against the driver's side window, braced, with my knees up and apart, and David was kneeling between my parted thighs, and I had no idea how that had happened. The rational part of my brain insisted that this was not the time or place but then his hand glided warm up my inner thigh and slid inside my panties, and I gasped into the hot cavern of his mouth, and my clutching fingers sank into the lapels of his leather jacket to pull him closer.

  Overhead, lightning cracked the sky, blue white. Hotter than the surface of the sun. It raced from horizon to horizon, split into a million sizzling tributaries. It covered the entire bowl of the sky, as if the whole thing had shattered.

  The pulse of power that shot through me was nearly as shocking as the visual. Power echoing from the sky, to David, into me.

  "Whoa! Hang on," I blurted. He pulled back, and in a way that was worse, because now I could look at him, and damn, the ruffled hair, the kiss-swollen lips, the golden skin flushed with peach. . . He could single-handedly destroy the entire concept of celibacy, worldwide.

  "Stop?" he asked. He took my hands and pressed them flat against his naked chest, under the leather jacket. Solid, velvet-soft skin. Real as it could possibly come. "You don't want to stop. You want to go, and go, and go. " I scrambled for sanity. "This isn't exactly the right place--"

  "If you're worried about people seeing us, they won't. " he said, and his fingers were at the bottom of my knit shirt, yanking it up. Stroking flesh. I was having serious problems getting my breath, especially when he leaned closer, and I couldn't stop myself from pressing back against him. We were still dressed--barely--but I was certainly in a compromised position. My skirt was already so far up, it might as well have been a belt, and he was one fast tug on my panties away from having me. Being a Djinn, he didn't even have to struggle to peel those leather pants off. He could just will them to disappear.

  And oh, I wanted them gone. I couldn't keep my hands off him, and there was such an intensely powerful sensation, stroking my fingers down the tight leather pants and feeling him respond. . .

  The sky turned white overhead as lightning laddered across, a hissing curtain of force traveling nowhere. The air smelled acrid and tasted of tinfoil. Wouldn't be long now. It would find a ground target. . .

  Oh, crap.

  I marshaled what was left of my dignity, pushed David back--not so far as all that--and when he tried to lean in again, got my bent leg in between us, my foot on his chest to hold him in place. "No," I panted. "David, you told me not to trust you. And this--this isn't like you. I don't think you're--yourself. " Not that the whole new David didn't have some really, really good qualities.

  "I'm more than myself. Better. " He grabbed my ankle, wrenched my foot to one side, and lunged forward to pin me hard against the door, knees apart. Vulnerable. He was far stronger than a man, not that male strength wasn't usually enough for something like this. "You don't know what this is like, Jo, having this, being this close to her--feeling every breath of the world flowing through you--every heartbeat pounding inside--" He was babbling. Quivering. "It's new. I'm new. "

  "I like the old David," I said shakily. "Can I have him back, please?"

  He froze, leaning against the glass with a hand on either side of my head. Bronze eyes swirling, inhuman, unreadable. I could barely breathe. If David wanted to take me, it wasn't like I could say no; it wasn't like anyone had any control over what the Djinn did, maybe not even the
Djinn themselves anymore. And oh God, I understood what was driving him. There was wildness in the air, wild power coursing through the sky and, for all I knew, through the ground, as well. This was the consciousness of the planet, slowly coming back to itself. A living world, an organism and a consciousness so huge that the rest of us were just dust mites crawling along its skin.

  Desperation was driving him. Desperation and intoxication and the need to feel.

  I could see a pulse racing under his skin, feel the vibration of his aching, near-painful need. It was echoing inside me, every thundering heartbeat.

  I dared an indrawn breath. "David, if you love me, back off. "

  He leaned away, and then shifted abruptly into a sitting position, braced on the far side of the car against the passenger window. No mistaking, in that position, that those leather pants were very tight and he was, as the artists like to say, in a state of interest.

  But he was sitting on the other side of the car.

  And his hands were shaking.

  When he finally spoke, so was his voice. "I'm sorry," he said. "This is--it's--she's never felt like this before. It's--I don't know how to--" Apparently, it was indescribable, because he just shook his head in frustration and looked away. "It influences us. Seduces us. Makes us--"

  "Crazy? Horny? Aggressive?"

  The relieved smile he gave me was pure vintage David. "Yes. "

  "I like to know what I'm dealing with. And dammit, I don't like seeing you lose control. "

  "I wouldn't be over on this side of the car if I wasn't in control. " Yeah, maybe. . . barely. I could feel the tension humming inside him, a coiled spring begging to unwind. He let out a long breath and deliberately flexed his hands, then laid them on his knees. "Thank you for reminding me. "

  "Is she awake?"

  He parted his lips, not in answer but in surprise. Some of the fog left his eyes, and sanity came back. The bronze swirl muted to a soft brown, sparked with metallic highlights. "Ah," he finally said. "No. Not exactly. But she's--in the process of waking up. And the feelings are especially powerful right now. "

  "Like a hypnagogic orgasm," I said. He blinked. "The kind you have right when you're in that gray area between waking and sleeping. Really. . . deep. "

  "Hypnagogic," he repeated. "Have I told you recently how much you baffle me?"

  "No. You were too busy trying to feel me up. "

  "Sorry. "

  "Don't be. "

  David lost the slight smile he'd managed to acquire. "The problem is, I can't tell when it's me, or when it's her driving me. This is--difficult. "

  "You were going to say 'hard,' weren't you?"

  "No. "

  "Liar. "

  "Stop distracting me. "

  He was right. It wasn't a good time to be distracting him, especially not if his self-control was all that stood between the impulses he was receiving and the rest of the Djinn. That thought sobered me considerably. "Sorry," I said meekly. I slowly got my legs folded into something like propriety and curled them around to put my feet on the floor. Another lightning bolt unzipped the sky overhead, broad as a superhighway--this one didn't fork. It was like a solid cable of light and power overhead. Forget about the surface of the sun, that had about as much heat in it as the entire nuclear core. If it had hit a plane, there'd have been nothing left but a floating smear of ash and some raining molten metal.

  "I need to do something about that," I said.

  "Not a good idea. "

  "Maybe not, but I have to try something. This system's highly unstable and dangerous. " "It's still not a good idea. "

  "Right. Can you help me?"

  He was working on staying human, I could tell that; his instincts were driving him in all different directions, trying to rip him apart. I watched his bare chest fill and empty of air he probably didn't even need, mesmerized by the play of light on muscles. In the next flash of lightning, he looked almost as he had the first time I'd met him. In a heartbeat, his clothes re-formed from black leather into blue jeans and a gray T-shirt, with an open blue checked shirt on top. Hiking boots. His habitual olive drab ankle-length coat.

  And glasses. Round John Lennon glasses that caught the flare in flat white circles, hiding his eyes completely.

  "I'll try," he said faintly. "I'm not Jonathan. I can't--I don't have the experience to handle this kind of thing. "

  "I doubt Jonathan would have had the experience to handle this, either. You're doing fine, David. Just fine. " I had no idea if it was true, but I wanted it to be. I reached out to him. He took my hand. His skin wasn't so burning-hot--more of a muted warmth, like someone who'd just come in out of the summer sun.

  "I can feel them. " He cocked his head to the side, as if listening to something beyond the constant, restless rumble of thunder. "The Djinn. It's like being the hub at the center of a huge wheel, all of them connected--pulling at me. No wonder Jonathan kept himself apart. It must have been easier that way. "

  Fascinating as that was, I had more practical concerns. "Can you help me bleed off some of this energy?" I made a vague gesture up at the sky just as another painful burst of lightning exploded, racing spidery legs overhead.

  He took a deep breath, nodded, and twined his fingers with mine. "Ready?"

  I nodded and let go, to drift up into Oversight. David washed into an almost invisible shimmer of light and heat--the Djinn didn't show up well in the aetheric, not to human eyes, anyway. The fairyland glow of the city behind the car was different up here, but no less intense, but what dwarfed it--what dwarfed everything--was the looming power in the sky. It was weather, and yet. . . not. The swirls and frantic updrafts were caused by the power, not spawning it, and while there were fronts forming and storms on the horizon, it wasn't the engine driving this particular machine. There was something going on that wasn't immediately obvious, and it wasn't the work of any Warden, no matter how ambitious or misguided.

  I reached out to try to stabilize the system.

  Too late.

  Lightning exploded, down in the real world, expending immense power upward, and slamming it down like a pile driver into the ground on the other end. There was so much energy involved that it literally knocked me for a loop in the aetheric. The roar in the physical world was devastatingly, deafeningly huge.

  I felt the pulse of alarm from David, and saw something happen on the aetheric that I'd never witnessed. Never heard of, either.

  An enormous column of energy erupted up from the ground in a thick, milk-white stream, heading for the sky. What the hell was that?

  I stared at it, stricken, and willed myself to move closer. Movement happens fast on the aetheric, unless you're careful, and I wasn't careful enough. I zipped forward, realized that I was moving too fast and the stream was closer--and larger--than I'd thought, and fought to slow myself down.

  That should have been easy. It wasn't.

  I could feel the suction. This thing was moving, and I mean fast as a freight train. It looked stable, but it was really a wildly speeding column of energy erupting up from the ground and fountaining into the sky, an uncontrolled bleed as if the plane of existence itself had popped a blood vessel.

  I dropped back into my body, hurtling out of the sky at a disorienting speed, landed in flesh and jerked from the psychic impact. It didn't hurt so much as leave me reeling. David's grip on my hand steadied me. I opened my eyes and looked at him. "You saw it?" I asked. He nodded. "What is it?"

  "There's too much aetheric power in the ground," he said. "It's not the only fissure that's opening. Just the closest. "

  "What do I do to stop it?"

  He looked grim as he said, "I don't think you can. "

  "And?. . . "

  "And bad things are going to happen," he said. "Very bad things. Look, this problem is too big for the Wardens. Too big for the Djinn, for that matter. You have to accept that you can't--"

  "No. I don't accept that.
What, you want me to just shrug and say, Oh well, some casualties are expected? You know me better than that! David, tell me what I can do!"

  He hesitated. And he might have persuaded me that there really wasn't anything to do, that there were some things beyond my control, but right about then a lightning bolt shattered the sky and struck a light pole about fifty feet away, across the road.

  The actinic flash seared across my retinas, even though I squeezed my eyes shut and turned my face away, huddling against the car door; I felt David fling himself forward, and then his hot-metal weight covered me.

  I didn't need protecting, but it was nice that he had the instinct.

  When he let me up, I blinked back Day-Glo smears and looked around.

  The metal light pole was half melted, and it was tipping over with majestic slowness. A tree falling in the forest. I yelled and pointed. It picked up speed, groaning, and slammed down across the road with a heavy glass-breaking thump, trailing hot wires that hissed and jumped.

  Missed us by ten feet.

  The traffic was relatively light, but hardly nonexistent; an SUV squealed brakes and skidded sideways, banging into the fallen pole. Then a car hit it. Then another.

  Then a minivan plowed full force into the snarl of metal.

  "Oh my God," I whispered, and fumbled for my door latch. I made it out of the Camaro and stumbled across wet gravel to the road. It was littered with hot glints of broken glass, and power lines were sliding wildly over the crushed metal. The minivan barely even looked like a vehicle, and it was about the size of a Volkswagen, postimpact. Somebody's engine was still running, and a radio was blaring. Liquids dripped.

  "Help me," I said, and looked around for David.

  He was gone.

  I couldn't believe it, honestly couldn't. He'd left me? In the middle of this, when people needed help? What the hell?. . .

  No time to waste in thinking about it. I climbed over a crushed bumper and got to the window of the SUV. Two college-age boys in there, steroid-pumped, looking dazed.

  "You guys okay?"

  Their air bags had deployed, and they both had bloody noses, but they seemed all right. One of them gave me a wordless, shaky thumbs-up as he unbuckled his seat belt.

  "Get out of your car and off to the side of the road," I said. "Watch the power lines, they're live. "

  I moved on to the next car. A woman, unconscious. I watched the snaking power lines nervously; they were coming closer, and I knew how these things went. Power calls to power. Sooner or later, they'd be drawn to me. I could control fire, but I wasn't exactly skilled at it yet, and this was hardly the final exam I wanted. Power lines were notoriously difficult to deal with, because of the continuous stream of energy.

  I put that problem aside and concentrated on the woman in the car. Hard to tell what was the bigger risk--leaving her in the car or moving her. If she had any kind of spinal injury. . .

  I made the hard decision and left her where she was. Somebody was screaming for help in the minivan.

  The power lines suddenly swerved, blindly seeking me. I danced back out of the way, watching them the way a snake charmer watches a cobra, and edged around to the back bumper of the wreck of the van. I tried the door. Locked, or jammed. The back window was broken. I leaned in to have a look.

  There was a man in the driver's side, looking limp and at the very least dead to the world, if not dead in fact. The woman next to him was the one doing the screaming. She was pinned; I could see that even from the back. The dashboard had deformed and locked her into the seat like the safety bar on a particularly scary amusement park ride. Broken bones, no question about it, and a lot of blood.

  No way I could get her out alone.

  I eased around the wreck to the passenger side and slid along the crumpled metal, watching my feet--not so much for the glass and metal as for the power lines, which had whipped craftily out of sight.

  "Hey," I said, and risked a look into the shattered passenger window at the woman trapped there. She was middle-aged, pleasantly plump, and under normal circumstances she might have been pretty; stress and injury had reduced her face to a mask of blood and terror. She was whimpering softly, no longer screaming. Her eyes flew open and fixed on me. One pupil was larger than the other.

  "Help my daughter," she said. "Help my little girl. "

  I hadn't seen any kids in my quick survey. "In the back?" I asked. She nodded. "Okay. You hang on. Help is coming. " I had to assume it was; when everybody over the age of ten had a cell phone, the 911 operators had probably been flooded with calls.

  I tried to see into the back, but it was an inky mess, no sign of life. I needed the Jaws of Life or something. Not that I knew what I was going to do when I found her. . .

  A slender black shape hissed from the shadows under the van and struck at my feet. I screamed and skipped backward, and the power line rolled and writhed at the limit of its leash. Wanting me. Wanting to ground through my flesh.

  Damn, that had been too close.

  Just as I thought it, I sensed another surge, this one coming from my right, and catapulted up into Oversight. The lines looked like neon whips up there, and there were at least four of them writhing around me. Struggling to reach me. I edged left. One rolled to cut me off, then lunged.

  Nowhere to go. If I tried to run, I was dead. If I stayed where I was. . .

  I tried, hopelessly, to break the flood of power through the metal, but I was out of my element. Badly. Worse, every elemental control I did have would make things worse.

  I jumped. The power line hissed over the pavement under my feet, swung wide, and just as I thumped down again, coiled over on itself and came back at me.

  No way I was going to avoid it twice.

  I jumped anyway, and knew instantly that it wasn't going to work; I'd timed it too early, it wasn't moving so fast, and I was going to come down with both feet right on top of high voltage.

  Except that I didn't.

  I didn't come down at all. I hovered.

  Good move, I told myself, and then realized that I hadn't actually done the deed. Somebody else was holding me up and moving me back out of the danger zone. I was lowered gently back to clear pavement.

  A Djinn walked around in front of me and inclined her head in a delicate cold click of beads. She was tall, dark-skinned, with hair in delicate and elaborate corn-rows. Neon yellow clothes and matching fingernails. Eyes as hot and predatory as a hawk's.

  "Rahel," I breathed. "Thanks. "

  "Don't thank me. " She said. "David's orders. "

  The power lines struck for me again.

  She grabbed them in midair and held them. They writhed and hissed their fury, but she didn't seem to be putting forth much of an effort to keep hold. No lightweight, Rahel. And sometimes, as much as Djinn can be, she was my friend.

  "Snow White," she said, and smiled. That had been her nickname for me from early on, a reference to my black hair and fair skin. "You have such interesting pets. Not very polite, though. "

  She looked at the power lines she held, and hissed to them in a scary-sounding lullaby. They tried to lunge for me again. I sucked in a breath and stepped back; Rahel didn't seem inclined to let them go, but with Djinn, well, you really never could tell. She might find it funny.

  "They need training," she continued, and without any warning, the current cut off in both, and they went heavy and limp in her hands. She let them smack down to the roadway next to her very lovely shoes--Casadei animal-print pumps. Too nice for the current conditions. "Do you ever draw a normal breath?"

  "Bite me," I said. I felt giddy and slightly intoxicated. Too much happening, too fast.

  She smiled. "Not hungry. A simple thanks will do. "

  "What are you doing here?"

  "I told you. David's orders. " She looked around at the wreckage as she dusted her hands. "He had to leave. You present too much of a distraction at the m
oment, and he felt a need to concentrate. I give you no guarantees that I will be here for long, or that my presence will be especially helpful to you. Did David not tell you that we were no longer to be trusted?"

  "And yet, here you are, saving my ass," I pointed out.

  She shrugged. It had the grace of water flowing over stone, utterly inhuman in the arrangement of her muscles, the way she used them. Rahel was, in some ways, the least human of all the Djinn I'd met.

  And in some other ways, one of the most.

  "One must pass the time," she said. "Eternity is long, and there are so few truly interesting people. "

  I started to say something about helping me get the wounded out of the cars, but then her head snapped around so fast that beads clacked in her hair, and her birdlike eyes fixed on something off to her left, in the darkness of the grassy median.

  Another white-hot spidering of lightning overhead showed me what she was looking at.

  There was a child out there. Bloody. Wandering around all alone. She couldn't have been more than five--a cute little thing, long brown hair, clutching a stuffed animal of some kind.

  I sensed the lightning gathering itself.

  Rahel said nothing. She was tense, but at rest. She could move faster than I could, but I saw no indications she was thinking about doing so.

  After all, she was a Djinn, and she didn't know that kid. It was kind of an academic notion to her, empathy.

  I lurched into a run, vaulted over a dismembered quarter panel lying in the way, and made it to the damp grass. My shoes slipped. I sensed the swirling column of the rift in the aetheric, the blood of the earth boiling upward into the sky just a few dozen feet ahead of me, near the little girl. She was staggering toward it.

  The lightning chains were clicking into place. I could see it happening, see the aetheric heating up with the potential energy turning to actual. . .

  I tried to break the chains of electrons aligning, but the forces at work were too strong for a single Warden. I hit the little girl and tackled her down to the ground, covering her with my body, and at the last second I lifted myself up on my hands and knees, away from any contact points with her skin.

  Grounded four ways.

  Lightning slammed into me with a force like nothing else on earth. I'd been struck by it before, but I'd been inhabited by a Demon Mark then, and considerably better protected. This was like being hit in the back by a truck, but before I could register the pain, the rest of it flooded in--power, so much power it was like a small sun channeled through a narrow few nerve channels. Unleashing itself through the circuit of my body.

  It lasted only a split second, maybe less, because suddenly I was yanked up, no longer in contact with the ground, rising into the air and looking down on the huddled body of the little girl I'd been trying to protect.

  The circuit was broken.

  Rahel had me. Her eyes were blazing hot gold, but her face was unreadable, a blank mask of Djinn indifference.

  She dropped me, job completed. Life saved.

  Halfway to the ground, I felt the suction of that whirling, burning column of power rising out of the earth take hold of me and draw me in.

  Oh crap, I thought, and then it was too late. As I twisted in midair, being helplessly reeled in like a fish on a line, I saw her alarmed, surprised face. At least I'd given Rahel a new, exciting experience.

  Not much of a comfort, as I was swallowed up in a milk-white flood of power.

  It was like being baptized in battery acid. It hurt, oh my God, it hurt, and I tried to scream, but there really didn't seem enough left of me to scream, exactly. I was coming apart, a moth trapped in a nuclear core, and nobody, nobody was coming to rescue me this time.

  The pain kept burning until it abruptly just. . . stopped. I was still trapped in the flood of aetheric power boiling up, and for all I knew, I was being flung miles up into the sky, but I felt no sense of motion.

  I opened my eyes and saw paradise, but a paradise that humans were never meant to see, a kind of opalescent waxen beauty that swept, swirled, created, and destroyed. I was in the bloodstream of creation, and it was more beautiful and more terrifying than anything I could have imagined. No wonder human beings counted for little, in the great scheme of the world. The power here--the power that was simply excess energy, bleeding off from the slowly waking entity we called the Mother--was beyond anything we could ever understand or control.

  It was kind of a privilege, seeing it as I inevitably exploded into disconnected atoms.

  Only I didn't do the exploding thing. I held together and gradually adjusted to the strange pressures and odd lights and disconcerting, slick flows that mimicked glass but felt silky and liquid to the touch. Nothing matched physics as I understood it. It was wildly, insanely strange and mesmerizing.

  I must have been the first person to see a Demon Mark in the wild.

  It entered the same way I had. . . passing through the barrier, sucked into the flow. It floated in the streams, a complex and sickening structure that twisted and turned on itself, moving with an eerie kind of life. Lazily bumping from one flow to another. I'd never seen one outside of some kind of container--a bottle, a human body, a Djinn forced to take one into itself. I had no idea they could even exist like this, on their own.

  Not good news.

  I felt it fix on me with an atavistic shudder of horror.

  As I watched, the Demon Mark was growing larger, sucking in energy and power from the aetheric flow, like a tick hitting an artery. I didn't dare hope that it would gorge until it exploded, though. Something far, far worse would happen; I just knew it would. Nothing good ever happened to me with a Demon Mark around.

  It occurred to me that there was a reason the Demon Mark might come swimming in here. . . This stuff was blood, in a sense. Lifeblood, pure, the real deal.

  The blood of the Earth itself.

  When these parasites were out in the regular world, they'd latch on to anything with a trace of power, trying to stay alive--Wardens and Djinn. But because we weren't the pure stuff, they inevitably mutated and destroyed us in the process of creating an adult Demon.

  Wonderful. I'd worked out the biology of the Demon Mark. That was helpful.

  Not.

  It drifted my way.

  I screamed like a little girl and started to head blindly away from the twisting, misshapen thing. Trying to move through this gray fog of power was like swimming through gelatin. God, I hated those monsters, hated them with a sweating, blinding passion that owed nothing at all to logic. It wasn't coming after me, not this time. It had found its own, personal paradise. Right?

  Right.

  Well, then, fine and dandy. I could just leave it to munch, and go on about my business. . .

  No. I couldn't. If a Demon Mark was capable of hatching an adult Demon out of the imperfect fuel of a human or Djinn, then what was it going to create out of this stuff? I couldn't even bear to imagine. You have to get it out of here, some part of me said. The other part--overwhelmingly the majority--told the first part to shut the hell up. What happens if it stays? If it feeds? If it swims down instead of up, gets into the--the bloodstream?

  That annoying, shrill voice of reason. Fighting Demon Marks was not my mission. It wasn't my fault I'd stumbled onto this problem. Nobody would blame me if I turned tail and ran.

  Nobody but me, anyway.

  I took a quick poll. The vote was two to one, bravery to self-preservation. I really needed to work on evening that one up, one of these days.

  I needed a way to trap the Demon Mark. I had nothing on me. . . nothing but my clothes, my shoes.

  Well, anything was better than nothing. I breathlessly stripped off my shirt, braced myself, and began swimming slowly toward the floating Demon Mark.

  It got uglier the closer I came, the kind of ugly that made my stomach twist and quiver, and my whole body shake violently. It didn't see
m to notice me at all. It was at least twice as large as it had been when I'd seen it enter the barrier, pulsating with an unclean hunger. At this rate, it'd be knitting little Demon booties in just a couple of minutes.

  Oh, I really didn't want to do this.

  I threw my shirt out like a net, covered the twisting shape of the Demon Mark, and yanked the sleeves together in a knot. It wouldn't hold the thing long--maybe not at all. I began swimming for all I was worth, heading for what I thought was the nearest way out, though everything looked the same now, disorienting and endless. I kicked grimly. At least I could breathe, though the intoxicating, slightly sweet smell of this place made my head spin.

  I glanced back at the shirt I was towing. The Demon Mark's black tentacles flowed out of the seams, testing its prison. It was content to stay there for now, because it was still feeding. That complacency wouldn't last.

  Without warning, I fetched up against something cool and unyielding, and slapped my hand against it in frustration. I felt it give, and slapped harder. My palm stung from the impact, but it pushed at least two or three inches in.

  I'd found the way out.

  I concentrated all my will, all my force, and kicked.

  Half of me slid through the barrier, instantly and bitterly cold and wet; I screamed in frustration, because I had no leverage to get the rest of me through. I wiggled. That gained me maybe an inch. Two inches. I pulled harder, and my left hand, and the bundle of the shirt, tumbled out into the thin, wind-whipped air.

  The Demon Mark went insane when its food supply cut off, and the shirt might as well not have been there.

  It seethed right through the fabric with lightning speed and wrapped tentacles around my hand.

  I screamed and reached for power, but what I had was useless for fighting something like this. I remembered how it felt--the sickening, invasive throb of the thing squirming down my throat. The agony as it set up its tentacles buried deep inside, feeding from me and pumping up my body's production of power, until my body simply couldn't survive.

  No. Never. I don't mind dying, but I'm not dying of this.

  I grabbed it with my bare right hand and threw it. Tried to, anyway, but it stuck to my skin, pulsing, changing, shifting. Crawling and writhing.

  I screamed again, soundlessly, trying desperately to shake it off. I could feel it testing layers of skin, trying to find a way in. It could burrow, of course, but it was lazy and fat. It wanted an easier path.

  I'm not going to make it.

  "We are sealing the break!" a voice shouted, startlingly close to my ear, and I felt something haul at me with so much strength, I felt tendons creak in my joints. I slid greasily the rest of the way through the barrier, still frantically trying to scrape the Demon Mark off my hand.

  Whoever had done me the favor of pulling me free let go as soon as I was out of the milky column of power. Might have been Rahel; it was hard to tell because the night was a muddle of rain, lightning, thick spongy cumulonimbus clouds piled into an iron-colored anvil.

  I hung there for an instant, and then I felt gravity take hold. I fell like Wile E. Coyote holding an ACME anvil, flailing, screaming, my hair snapping like a wet black banner behind me. I couldn't tell how far the ground was, but if the clouds were cumulonimbus, I was probably at least thirty thousand feet up. I tried to take a breath and got nothing but sharp, empty-tasting air. Too thin to sustain me. I shut out the sickening sense of the falling, the growing terror of the Demon Mark still trying to enter my body, and focused hard on gathering the available oxygen into a cushion around me. Tricky, when you're falling. You have to match the rate of descent at a molecular level, and that's not as easy as it sounds.

  I scraped together enough for a breath. Not enough to cushion my fall, and I was still accelerating. I knew enough about terminal velocity not to want to experience it firsthand.

  I was enveloped by a chilly mist as I entered the cloud base, and was buffeted by increasingly strong winds as the atmosphere thickened around me. I spread out my arms and legs, trying to slow myself as much as possible, and started the hard work of creating a parachute. Oh, it's theoretically possible. We'd talked about it once in a long-ago classroom, and it hadn't seemed so tough back then, when I was younger and not free-falling out of the sky.

  I hoped these weren't low-lying clouds. If they were, by the time I had visibility, it might be too late. . . but deploying my "parachute" too early would be just as bad, because the turbulence would start to rip into it as soon as I created the complex structure of fixed molecules. Theoretically, the technique I was going to use would allow the air itself to form into flexible material, and act like a gliding parachute.

  Theoretically.

  I gasped in another shallow breath of air and saw my left hand in another white-hot flash of lightning. The Demon Mark was still clinging to it, wet and black, seeping slowly into my flesh through the pores. Once it was under my skin, it could go anywhere. Sink its tentacles into my brain and lungs and heart. Embed itself so thoroughly that even trying to remove it would mean madness and death.

  I glimpsed something shining through the clouds to my right, flaring aetheric-hot, then ice-cold; the column of power was smaller, but it was still fountaining up into the stratosphere. I slid that direction by folding my right arm in, a kind of Superman one-fisted attitude. Good thing I'd done skydiving once or twice in the past. At the time, it had just been for fun, but at least I remembered the basics of maneuvering in free fall.

  I spread-eagled again when I got close to the column. The last thing I wanted was to fall in there again. I extended my Demon Marked right hand toward the flow, enough so that it could feel the tantalizing warmth.

  Go on. Go for it.

  It stirred and unraveled in a lazy black twist, long and sinuous. The battering of the air didn't seem to affect it at all. It unwrapped itself smoothly from my outstretched, trembling arm and reached out toward the column of power, which had started to fade and was coming in pulses like irregular heartbeats. Rahel--or whatever Djinn had saved me--had been as good as her word. The break between the worlds was starting to seal. Timing was everything. If I waited too long, the Demon Mark would be drawn back through the barrier. If I broke off too soon, it would simply wrap around my hand again, and I could kiss my ass good-bye.

  Problem was, I didn't control the timing. I just had to hope that I could sense the second that the column started to shut down.

  The Demon Mark hesitated, torn between the fast-unraveling aetheric updraft and the less powerful but more certain warmth of my body.

  I felt a sudden icy sensation sweep across me, and thought, now, and shook my hand violently. The Demon Mark broke free, and it had to make a choice.

  It went for the column. . . and as it stretched its black tentacles out, the geyser gave one last, brilliant pulse, and died.

  The Djinn had been successful. The energy buffet was closed. . . and I was now the only Happy Meal available.

  I curled myself into a ball and dropped, thinning the air ahead of me to make it a quicker descent.

  When I uncurled again, heart hammering wildly, I broke through the bottom of the cloud cover and Oh, crap.

  Low-lying clouds.

  I snapped the structure of my air chute together, and jerked to a sudden, neck-wrenching stop that turned into a slow downward spiral as the air chute's molecules--held together by desperate force of will--began to warm from the friction and spin apart.

  I was still going too fast.

  And there were power lines coming up.

  I let the chute collapse in on itself while I was still twenty feet up, tucked and hoped breathlessly that the mud down there would be soft enough to prevent any serious injuries.

  I don't remember hitting the ground, only blinking water out of my eyes and staring up at the low, angry clouds, which glowed with continued frantic flashes of lightning.

  I raised my right h
and and stared at it. No sign of the Demon Mark, though in all the confusion it could be just a stealthy creep away. . .

  "Mom?" Imara's face appeared over mine, ghost-pale, eyes as reflective as a cat's. "Please say something. "

  "Stay still. " Another voice, this one male and as familiar to me as breathing. "You've got some broken ribs. I'll have to fix them, and it's going to hurt. "

  I blinked rain out of my eyes and turned my head. David was crouched down next to me, rain slicking down his auburn hair and running in rivulets down his glasses. He looked miserable. Poor thing.

  "Demon Mark," I said.

  "I think she hit her head," Imara said anxiously. "No, she didn't," David said, and reached over to wipe mud from my face with a gentle hand. "You're in shock, Jo. "

  I shook my head, spraying mud and water like an impatient sheepdog. "No! It was feeding off the power geyser. I got it out of there, but it's still around. Watch yourselves. " Nothing Demon Marks loved more than a warm Djinn, and so far as I knew, once Djinn were infected, there was no way to cure them. "Get out of here. "

  David said, "Imara, go. "

  "But--"

  "Did you hear me?" His voice was level as a steel bar. She stared at him, then at me, and then misted away.

  "You, too," I said. "Get the hell away from here. Go. "

  "In a minute. First, you need some help. "

  I nodded, or tried to. The mud around me was cold and gelatinous, and I spared a single thought for just how trashed my clothes were. And my shoes. What had happened to my shoes? Oh man. I'd loved those shoes.

  I was focusing on that when David took hold of my shattered arm and pulled, and the universe whited out into a featureless landscape, then went completely black.

  Somebody had put my shirt back on. I hoped it was David. It was nice to think of him dressing me. Nicer to think of him undressing me, though. . .

  I opened my eyes to road noise and vibration, and the pleasant daydream of David's hands on me faded away. My whole body felt like a fresh bruise. The side of my head was pressed against cool glass, and I had a wicked drool issue going on; I raised a hand, wiped my chin, and blinked away dizziness.

  I was in the Camaro, and we were hauling ass for. . . somewhere. The road was dark, only a couple of headlights racing through the gloom and the wavering dashed yellow stripe to guide us. If there was moonlight, it was behind clouds. I could still feel energy rumbling in the atmosphere.

  "What?. . . " I twisted in my seat--which was, fortunately, the passenger side--and looked at the driver. "Imara!"

  My daughter--disorientation still followed the thought--glanced at me. She looked pale in the dashboard lights. "I was starting to worry. "

  "Where's--?"

  "Father? He was with us for a while, but he had to go. Djinn business. I think it was about the Demon Marks. " Like her father, she had the trick of driving without paying the slightest attention to the road, and kept staring right at me. "Are you better?"

  I didn't feel better. No, I felt like I'd been boiled, steamed, deboned, and thrown out of a plane at thirty thousand feet. With a collapsing parachute. David had healed my broken bones, but the remainder of it was my problem. "Peachy," I lied. "How long have I been out?" It took her a second, juggling the human concept of time in her head. "Four hours, I think. You hit the ground hard. Father did what he could to help you. He wasn't sure it would be enough. " Her hands kept steering the car accurately, even while we took a curve. "Are you sure you're all right?"

  Something came to me, a little late. "And how exactly do you know how to drive a car?"

  Imara blinked a little and shrugged to show she didn't understand the question.

  "Kid, you've been alive for, what, a couple of days? Did you just wake up knowing everything that you need to know? How does that work?"

  Another helpless lift of her shoulders. "I don't know. If I had to guess, I'd say I know everything my parents knew. So I benefit from your life, and Father's. It saves time. "

  I remembered Jonathan sending me to Patrick, the only other Djinn who'd really had to learn how to become one from scratch--who'd been brought over from human by another Djinn, rather than created the old-fashioned way, out of apocalypse and death. I'd had to take baby steps, learning how to use what I'd been given, because David hadn't been able to transfer that life experience to me the way he had done with Imara.

  But the idea that your daughter knows everything you knew? Not very comforting. There were plenty of moments in my life that I'd just as soon not share with my offspring. . .

  I pulled myself away from that, pressed my hand to my aching head, and asked, "Where are you heading?"

  "Maine?. . . "

  David had set her on the road to Seacasket, at least. And apparently global positioning was one of the things that she'd inherited from him.

  I nodded and tried stretching. It didn't feel great. "What about the accident? Was everybody all right?"

  "Accident?" She was either playing dumb, or all that carnage and twisted metal had meant little to her.

  "There was a wreck--there was a--" A little girl. Wandering, bloodied, scared. I'd been trying to save her, hadn't I? My memory was fuzzy, tied up with images that didn't make any sense of opalescent swirls and burning and falling. . .

  "I don't know," she confessed, and chewed her lip. I knew that gesture. It had taken me dedication to get over the same one. She was my kid, all right. "I didn't know it was important or I would have paid more attention. "

  "Not important?" I let that out, accusation-flavored, before I could stop myself. Imara turned her attention back to the road. Not to focus on her driving, just to avoid my censure.

  And then she deliberately turned back, eyes level and completely alien. "I should have paid more attention, but you should leave that behind you now. What Father's asking you to do is more important, and you can't be distracted by individual lives now. " She shook her head. "It's also very, very dangerous, what he's asking of you. I don't like it. "

  "I just got my synapses fried in a lightning strike, and then I fell out of the sky. Dangerous is sort of a sliding scale with me. " "Mom!" She sounded distressed. Angry. "Please understand: Whatever you've faced before, this is different, and you need to stay focused on the goal. I know that's hard for you, but if you worry about saving every individual, you'll lose them all. Let other people do their part. This is Djinn work, and it isn't the kind of thing humans are built to do. "

  By my very nature, I wasn't good at taking in the big picture; for me, the whole world was that lost, scared little girl wandering in a field. Those college boys trapped in their wrecked truck. The world revealed itself to me one person at a time.

  But I took in a deep breath and nodded. "Right. I'm focused. How much longer--?"

  "About seven more hours," Imara said. "I'll stay with you. There are things you can't do on your own. You'll need help. Father said--" She shut up, fast. Father. I wondered if David was as frightened by that as I was by the Mom thing. Or as delighted. Or both. "Is this still strange for you?"

  "What?"

  "Me," she said softly, and turned her attention back to the road. "Human mothers carry their children inside them. They hold them as infants; they teach and guide them. I was born as I am. That's strange, isn't it?"

  She sounded wistful, even sad. I'd been so busy thinking of myself and my reactions to her that I hadn't considered how odd this might be for her, too. That maybe she felt lost in a maze of human feelings she didn't understand. Wasn't even supposed to have, perhaps.

  "Imara," I said. "Pull over. "

  "What?"

  "Please. "

  She coasted the car to a stop on the gravel shoulder, not far from a sign that warned of curves up ahead, and twisted around to face me. It was like looking in a faerie mirror--so similar that it made me shiver somewhere deep inside. There was an indefinable connection between us that I loved and feared in equa
l parts.

  "You look so much like me," I murmured, and took her hands in mine. They felt warm, real, and solidly familiar.

  "I am you," she said. "Most of me. I'm not so much your child as your clone--Djinn DNA doesn't mix well with human. So my flesh is mostly the same as yours, and my--my spirit is Father's. "

  I shivered a little. How was I supposed to feel about that? And what was I supposed to say? "I--"

  "I'm not really Djinn," she said. "You know that, don't you? I can't do the things Father can do. I can't protect you. "

  "Mothers protect children. Not the other way around. "

  She tilted her head a little to the side, regarding me with a tiny little frown. "How can you protect me?"

  Great question. "I won't know until I get there," I said, and impulsively reached up to touch her cheek. "Sweetheart, I'm not going to pretend that you're not stronger than I am, or faster, or smarter, or--anything else that the Djinn part of you can give. But the point is that I'll protect you when I can, and I do not want you to put yourself at risk for me. All right?"

  The frown grooved deeper. "That's not what Father said to do. "

  "Then your dad and I need to have a talk. " What she'd said was making me curious. "When you say you're not fully Djinn--"

  "What are my limits, do you mean?" she asked. I nodded. "Where you're strong--in weather and fire, particularly--I'm strong. I can move the way the Djinn do. But I'm bound to my body in ways they aren't. I can't change my form. I can't use other elements that you can't control, as well. " She continued to watch me carefully. Her voice was matter-of-fact, but I couldn't help but think that David and Jonathan and I had done something terrible, bringing Imara into the world. I couldn't tell if she resented the restrictions her half-blood birth had given her. If she did, that would be one hell of a case of adolescent angst.

  "But," she continued when I didn't jump in, "even so, I am one of the Djinn. They all felt it when I was born. I'm still a part of them, if a small one. "

  I stayed quiet, thinking. She might not have been able to read my mind, but she could easily read my expressions--something I couldn't do to her.

  "You're worried that if you keep me with you, they could trace you through me. A weak link. "

  "A little. With the Djinn so unreliable. . . " I'd seen the Djinn turn on a dime, when the Earth called; even though Imara might seem immune to that, she was clearly a lot more vulnerable than I'd like. And I couldn't hold my own against a full-on Djinn assault, not for more than a few seconds. No human could, if the Djinn unleashed their full potential.

  She inclined her head, just once. A Djinn sort of acknowledgement, fraught with dignity. "I don't think I could protect you against them if they came in force. Do you want me to leave you?"

  "And go where?" I asked.

  "Anywhere. I only just arrived. I haven't even begun to learn about the world for myself. " She smiled, but it felt like bravado to me. My kid was trying to make me feel better about rejecting her.

  "Imara--"

  "No, please don't. I want to help you, but I understand if you can't trust me--you only just met me. You'd be crazy not to be concerned. "

  I wasn't about to break my daughter's heart. Not yet. "Let's take it slow on the assumption of mistrust, okay? I just don't--know you. "

  "But I know you," she replied quietly. "And I can see that it makes you. . . uncomfortable. "

  I let that one pass. "If David can always locate you, I'm guessing you can always locate me, no matter where you are. Right? So it really doesn't matter if you're here, or learning how to spin prayer wheels in Tibet. And I'd rather have you here. Getting to know you. "

  She smiled again. "What if you don't like me?"

  It was a sad, self-mocking smile, and suddenly I wasn't seeing the metallic Djinn eyes, or the eerie copy of my own face; I was seeing a child, and that child hungered for everything that children do: Love, acceptance, protection. A place in the world.

  She took my breath away, made my heart fill up and spill over. "Not like you? Not a chance in hell," I said. My voice was unsteady. "I love you. You're one hell of a great kid. And you're my kid. "

  Her eyes glittered fiercely, and it took me a second to realize that it wasn't magic, only tears.

  "We'd better keep moving," she said, and turned back to start the car. "So what do you think? Breakfast first, or apocalypse?"

  She was starting to inherit my sense of humor, too. Hmmm. Breakfast sounded pretty tempting. Lots more tempting than an apocalypse, anyway.

  Those hardly ever came with coffee.