Firestorm tww-5 Page 9

  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 moment, 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 seem 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.