Firestorm tww-5 Page 6

  "Okay," I said. I turned back to the woman, who was still giving me the fish eye. "Emily, you think you can make this work because you think you're smarter than the Djinn, or faster, or more powerful. You can't. You all need to unlearn what you know about the Djinn. They're not subservient. They're not stupid. And they're not ours, not anymore."

  The assembled Wardens were whispering to each other. Emily was staring at me. So was Will. I heard my name being passed around, in varying degrees of incredulity. I thought she was dead, someone said, just a little too loudly for comfort.

  "This is stupid," Emily finally said. "Paul, I thought she was out of the Wardens. How does she know anything?"

  "She knows because she was with the Djinn when it happened," Marion said, and rolled closer with a brisk snap of her wrists. "Right?"

  I nodded. "I saw it happen. We've lost control, and as far as I know, we've lost it for good. We need to face that and figure out how to go forward."

  "Forward?" somebody in the crowd yelped. "You've got to be kidding. We need the Djinn!"

  "No, we don't," another person countered sharply. "I barely escaped, and only because mine got distracted. Whatever's happening, we can't risk involvement with the Djinn."

  "Exactly," I said. "We have to rely on ourselves, and each other. Will? You up for the job?"

  He swallowed hard and nodded. "I'll get started."

  "Get some people to help you. Draft them if you have to, and don't be afraid to use Paul's name as a big stick." I waited for some confirmation from Paul; he waved a hand vaguely. I turned to Emily. "You're not going to give this guy any shit, right?"

  She was silent for a few seconds, looking at me, then shrugged. "Not right now. You're right. We need to stop the bleeding, and save the surgery for later."

  I was glad Emily let me push it through, because she'd be a tough opponent. Nothing weak about her, and we needed her on our side.

  There was only one side, right now. The side of survival.

  I faced a crowd of people, and everybody looked tired and harassed and worried. Not the faces of winners. They looked… lost.

  "All right," I said. "Everybody, listen up. We've taken some serious hits, and there's no question, things are desperate. But we are Wardens. Wardens don't run, and they don't abandon their responsibilities. There are six billion people on this planet, and we stand up for them. We need to be strong, focused, and we need to be united. No more backbiting, politics, or ambition. Understood?"

  "Oh, come on! Look around you. It's impossible," someone in the crowd complained. I fixed that area with a stare that, from the way those in its way quailed, might have been Djinn-strength.

  "I was just hanging in midair glowing like a UFO," I said. "Don't tell me about impossible. We're Wardens."

  A ripple of laughter. Some of the tension fled from their faces, and there were a few nods.

  "I need a volunteer to handle cleanup crew," I continued. "Earth Wardens, probably, maybe a couple of Fire Wardens. Get this place back in operation. Everybody else, pick a conference room and get to work triaging the crisis information. Go."

  And amazingly, after a scant second, Emily raised her hand and bellowed, "Right! I need two Earth and one Fire for cleanup!" and the rest of them began milling around and filtering into conference rooms.

  They were actually listening to me.

  I looked at Marion, who was sitting, hands folded in her lap. She inclined her head, very slightly. Under the bruises, she was smiling.

  I said, "Somebody had to."

  "You have a gift for it," she countered. We both looked at Paul.

  He was gone. Sometime during my little speech, he'd walked away. I felt a little stab of regret and worry. I'd taken away Paul's authority again, maybe for good this time, and that was not only unkind, but also deeply unwise.

  "Excuse me?" someone asked from behind me. "Warden Baldwin?"

  I turned to find a petite blond woman standing there. I didn't know her, but she was different from the others in the hallway. There was no worry in her expression, and no exhaustion. Perky, which just seemed strange. There was something else, though, that sent a ripple of unease up my back that exploded in an ice-cold shudder on the back of my neck.

  The woman was just… wrong.

  "Jo!" Marion's warning shout came a second too late.

  The woman had a gun. Must have taken it off one of the guards. Nathan? Janet? One of the many who'd died? And now she raised it and pointed it straight at me. I froze, unbreathing. The muzzle of that damn pistol looked big enough to swallow the sun.

  And she fired.

  I felt it happening in slow motion—the hammer striking the cartridge, the blooming flare of explosion inside the metal jacket…

  I felt it. The same way I usually felt the flare of lightning bursting out of the sky, or the swirl of air and water.

  I not only felt it, but I could… touch it.

  It didn't take much, just a whisper, and I killed the spark before it ignited the powder in the cartridge.

  Click.

  My would-be assassin looked baffled, then angry, and pulled the trigger again, with the same results. I smiled thinly at her, reached out, and took the pistol away. While I was doing that, Nathan, the tall security guard, pelted breathlessly around the corner. I emptied the clip out of the gun—well, it always looked cool in the movies—and Nathan took it away from me the way you'd take a semiautomatic away from a teething baby.

  He also took possession of the Warden, and handcuffed her.

  She still had that same eerily calm, predatory light in her eyes, and she hadn't taken her eyes off me. I recognized that starvation in her. I'd had it eating through my own veins not so very long ago.

  I was staring at her, wondering how to go about handling this particular problem, when an arrival at the end of the hallway stole my thunder. Heads popped out of conference rooms, and whispers flew down the hall, contagious as the flu. "Lewis!"

  Well, well, well… Elvis was back in the building.

  Lewis Levander Orwell wasn't looking his best, but then, who was? Rough and tired, but intact except for some livid dry cuts and scrapes that looked suspiciously like road rash, as if he'd gotten dragged over asphalt. At least a three-day growth of beard. Still, much improved from the last time I'd seen him. There was a palpable sense of relief as he walked down the hall toward us, a feeling that at last, stability had arrived. Lewis had that effect. He was, without question, the most powerful living Warden, and he was the proverbial triple threat—weather, fire, and earth powers, all in one package.

  He didn't look like the big head cheese, really—tall, long arms and legs, a kind of lanky grace and an ironic smile, brown hair that badly needed a trim, a worn pair of close-fitting blue jeans and a loose flannel shirt folded up to expose the aforementioned cuts and road burns, and corded, sinewy arms. Hiking boots. Competence and authority in a handy carrying case.

  A little like Jonathan, now that I thought about it.

  He gave me a bare, welcoming nod, and took a good look at the imprisoned Warden, whose eyes had started glowing even more brightly at the sight of him.

  "Hey, Joanne." He nodded to me. "What have we here?"

  "Guess," I sighed.

  Lewis always did have an economy of words. He reached over and yanked down the collar of her shirt.

  It was only a glimpse, but I saw it—a black tangled mass that writhed just under her skin, and then burrowed deeper, hiding from view.

  Demon Mark.

  I had an instant nauseating sense-memory of how that felt. How seductively warm it could feel. How the power of it pulsed so brightly in your veins. You felt like you could do anything with one of those, and sometimes, you really could.

  I couldn't save her. So far as I knew, there was no way to save any of them.

  "Marion," Lewis said. "Got anything in this building that will hold somebody with a Demon Mark?"

  He didn't trouble to keep his voice down, and it sent shock wav
es through the assembled Wardens. Demon Marks, like Free Djinn, weren't supposed to exist. Hell, even if they did exist, they were supposed to be dealt with quickly and quietly, off behind the curtains.

  "There's a secured cell two floors down," she said. "We usually augment it with Djinn guards, but—"

  "Yeah, that's not going to happen." Lewis's eyes assessed those standing around, lightning-quick, and he pointed at Nathan and two other Wardens. "You three. Go with Marion. Get her secured. Marion, we'll talk later about what we can do for her." He watched as the parade organized itself, then put his lips close to my ear and said, "Come with me. We need to talk. Privately."

  I stepped back and nodded, then led him around wreckage and repairs and down around the corner, to an office that had remained mostly intact. There was a junior-level Warden working on forecast maps. I evicted her with a significant nod of my head, and closed the door behind her, then turned to face Lewis.

  "Senior management?" he asked.

  "Mostly dead," I said. "Paul's on the walking wounded list; Marion isn't even that good. Morale's in the toilet, of course. I haven't seen any other faces I recognize from the higher ranks." I stopped and looked straight into his eyes. "We're in big-ass trouble, Lewis."

  "No kidding." He leaned against the desk and folded his arms, looking down. Hiding whatever he was thinking. "You know about Jonathan?"

  "Imara and David say he's dead."

  "Imara?" Lewis looked up, curious.

  "Ah—long story. Short version, she's my daughter. Mine and David's."

  His lips parted, and his eyes widened, and I had the rare pleasure of seeing Lewis Orwell rendered… speechless. For a moment, anyway. "That's—surprising," he said, finally. "Congratulations. Where is she?"

  "Safe, I hope. Away from here, anyway; the Wardens were a little trigger-happy, and even if it isn't too likely they could hurt her, I didn't really want to put it to the test. She's—" Precious. Special. Unique. Strange. Amazing. "She's my kid. Okay, she looks like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, but…"

  He blinked. "I thought you said she was a kid?"

  "Don't ask me how Djinn biology works. First she's a gleam in her father's eye; then she's borrowing my clothes."

  He made a low-throated sound of amusement. "So in other words, it's been a busy couple of days."

  I gestured around at the wreckage in the office, piled like driftwood in the corners. By extension, at the chaos swirling around in the world. "You could say."

  "Come here."

  I frowned, but took a step closer. He reached out and took my hand, then pulled me into a body-to-body hug. I relaxed against him, letting the comfort of his warmth sink deep. He needed a shower. Hell, so did I. We were well beyond little things like that. After a few seconds, I felt the surge of power building between us… a cell-deep vibration, like calling to like. We had harmonics, we always did have, and the one time we'd allowed it to build out of control, we'd called up storms and shattered windows.

  It built so fast, it was breathtaking. Glass and steel rattled around us. I took control of myself and stepped back, breaking the circuit. I glimpsed something wild and a little desperate in Lewis's eyes, quickly covered.

  "Did you feel that?" he asked. "Looks like we're getting stronger."

  "Just the two of us?"

  "No idea, I'm afraid; I could feel it happening to me, but I've always been kind of the far end of the curve." That wasn't ego, just fact. "Still, nothing's what it was yesterday. Not the Djinn, and not us. Maybe in breaking the contract, Jonathan reset some kind of equilibrium. Maybe the Wardens were originally a lot stronger on their own. It could be that we've been bleeding off some of our own power to feed the Djinn."

  Interesting notion. "So maybe we don't need the Djinn after all, if this keeps up."

  "Oh, I wouldn't go that far." He was still watching me. Warm brown eyes, always fired with a little bit of amusement. "It's also possible that maybe you and I are a little more connected to the source."

  "Meaning?"

  He stretched out a palm, and a tiny flame flickered into life, lemon-pale and growing redder as I watched.

  Redder and larger. Lewis wasn't watching this minor miracle; he was watching me, still with that sly bit of amusement lighting his eyes.

  And then he pitched the softball-size ball of fire straight at me. Not a girly pitch, either. He put some English behind it.

  I yelped, ducked, and felt the heat singe my hair as the fireball streaked past me. It hit the wall, bounced, landed in a pile of scattered papers, and ignited.

  "Shit! What the hell are you doing?" I yelled, and without even thinking about it, felt blindly for the structure of the fire. Delicate as glass, strong as steel, but fragile.

  I put it out. Not even a wisp of smoke to show it ever existed.

  I rounded on Lewis, shocked and furious; he had his arms crossed, leaning back against the desk, and he was… grinning.

  "What the hell was that?" I demanded.

  For answer, he extended his hand again and called another tongue of flame. "Put it out," he said.

  "You put it out! This is a nonsmoking building!"

  "You're missing my point."

  "No, I'm not! You're trying to make me—" I stuttered to a stop, because I realized what he was trying to do. Or, more accurately, trying to demonstrate. Hey, I never said I wasn't a little thick. "Oh."

  I extended my hand, cupped it over his, and felt the fire's warmth spill over me. Fire is a kind of fluid, when all is said and done: plasma dynamics. It flowed over my skin, persistent and gentle, and when I opened my palm, it was burning there. A steady tongue of flame like a pilot light, red and gold and blue.

  I closed my fist around it and put it out, then opened my fingers again and called fire.

  It came without even a hesitation, a flutter and a sense of pleasant warmth on my skin. I stared at it, fascinated, letting it drip from one finger to another, then rolling it back up to my palm.

  "See?" he asked. He sounded smug about it. "You're Water and Fire. Interesting combination. Pretty rare, too, there's been, what? Six or seven in recent history?"

  I looked up at him. "But I never had any power over fire. Never. They tested me."

  "Was that before you died and got yourself reborn?"

  I'd died in a fire, and David had brought me back, as a Djinn. Then Patrick and his lover Sara had given their immortal lives to make me human again, and in his youth, Patrick had been… a Fire Warden.

  I could feel it coursing through me now, a kind of awareness that I'd never noticed before—a sense of the electricity inside the walls, like bright glittering lines. Of static hovering like glitter in the air. Of the aura surrounding Lewis himself, glorious as a rainbow.

  I blinked, and it was gone. Good. I wasn't sure I wanted to live in a world that distracting full-time. "But—why now? I didn't feel this before—?"

  "Maybe it took some time to build the power channels." He said. "Or maybe something else has shifted. Hell, Jo, you just gave birth to a Djinn. Who knows what's changed inside you?"

  Queasy thought. "Um, one little problem. I don't have any formal instruction for fire powers."

  "Consider it on-the-job training. And don't get cocky. You still need a third black belt to land yourself a shot at my title."

  I laughed, and in the next blink, the glitter was back in the world. I stared, mesmerized by his glow, by the revealed glory of the world around me. Beautiful and complex as a machine made of crystal. Was this how Fire Wardens saw everything? No wonder they always looked spaced out…

  "Jo," he said, and drew my eyes back into focus. "We're running out of time."

  I sobered up quickly. "We are," I agreed. "Not to mention manpower. We've lost who-knows-how-many Wardens, and effectively all the Djinn. I hope you're right that we're getting stronger, because we need it—"

  "Damn straight," said a weary voice from the doorway. I turned to see Paul standing there. He walked in and slumped with a sigh in
the nearest unsplintered chair, visibly gathering strength to speak. Dirty pale. "Lewis."

  Lewis nodded silently, clearly worried at Paul's state. "Do you want me to—?"

  Paul waved it aside irritably. "I'll live, and you've got better things to do with your power than heal my boo-boos. Listen, kids, we need to decide some things."

  Lewis glanced at me, then at Paul. "Maybe this isn't the best time."

  "It's the only time," Paul sighed.

  "You need rest—"

  "No. I need to retire," Paul said bluntly. "The thing is, I can't handle this anymore. It's out of control, and I'm not the guy for the job. I couldn't get their attention out there earlier, Jo, and you know it. You did."

  "Not me," I replied, and held up my hands to push the implied offer back his direction. "I can't stay. David gave me some ideas on how we might be able to solve this without a lot of further bloodshed, but I need to do it alone."

  "Yeah? How do you know you can trust him?" Paul demanded.

  I met his eyes and held them. "I know. And I have a plan, which is more than anybody else has right now." Well, more or less. At least, I had a place to start. Didn't seem to be the moment to worry him with details, frankly.

  Paul sighed and turned his gaze to Lewis, who straightened up fast. "Oh, no," Lewis said. "I'm not going to take command. That's your job."

  "Hell, kid, I inherited the damn job, and I never wanted it in the first place. I'm a field guy. Now I'm a field guy treading water. I want you to take it, Lewis. I need you to take it. You're the one guy everybody trusts around here, because you're the one guy who walked away from all this rather than play the games."

  "He's right," I said quietly. "It should be you." I bit my lip, because it felt like being a traitor to say so—a traitor to Paul, who deserved my support even if he didn't want it, and a traitor to Lewis, who patently didn't want the responsibility. Especially not now. "This is what you were born to do, Lewis. We all knew it, right from the start. And—there might be something else."

  "What?" That had both of them looking at me. Paul looked as if he really couldn't stand another dangerous surprise.