Weather Warden - Chill Factor Part 25

Then she pulled up a chair next to me and said, "Nice to know you made it."

"Yeah, likewise." I shot a look at Kevin and Siobhan. "I guess you know Kevin."

She nodded politely to him, as if she weren't planning to get him behind closed doors at her facility and strip him clean of power and potential just as soon as the opportunity presented itself. Kevin didn't move. He was giving both of us his patented bad-boy glower.

Marion dismissed him, and focused her dark eyes on me. "You have it?"

I opened my fist to show her Jonathan's bottle. "I'd like to trade for something more valuable than your word. Not that I don't trust you, but . . . well, I don't trust you."

She removed a hand from her coat pocket and mutely displayed the blue gla.s.s bottle that Yvette Prentiss had used, not so very long ago, to trap a man willing to give up his life for me.

I reached out, slowly, and took the gla.s.s. No stopper in the bottle.

It felt warm. "David," I whispered, and closed my eyes for a second in relief as the connection between us hummed tight between us.

"Right here." I heard a chair sc.r.a.pe, and saw that he'd joined us at the table.

He looked utterly unchanged-auburn-flecked hair worn a little untidily, brown eyes flashing behind round gold-rimmed spectacles.

An old-fashioned olive-drab coat over a faded blue plaid shirt. Blue jeans.

I sucked in a startled breath and felt my eyes sting with tears; the vision of him turned into a colorful blur. A blur that reached across empty s.p.a.ce and cupped my cheek in its hand, and yes, that was his touch, warm and sweet and gentle. I leaned against it, breathing in the smell of old wool and cinnamon, leaves and woodsmoke. "Oh, G.o.d," I whispered, and it sounded like the prayer it was.

He was leaning close; I could feel the aura of him against me, the barely-there touch of his lips against my ear as he whispered, "I've been watching you." The shimmer of heat that ran through me turned me into honey and b.u.t.ter, made me think thoughts that I shouldn't be having in public, much less in front of people who might want to kill me.

"Could've helped me out a little," I said.

"You did fine." He kissed me, and all the thoughts were refined into sheer, unadulterated longing. I wanted him to keep kissing me, forever if that was possible. I couldn't imagine it ending, but of course it did, a slow withdrawal of those soft, delicious lips from mine.

I opened my eyes and looked straight into his, and saw them burning copper and gold, molten with love and longing and power.

This was what I'd been fighting for. What I'd fight for with every breath, every remaining day of my life.

"Anything I can do for you, master?" he whispered to me. "Or to you, anyway?"

I sucked in a superheated breath, trembling, and managed to be practical. "A purse to put this bottle in would be great, actually."

He reached under the table and pulled out a black leather bag, nothing designer-my bad for not specifying properly, really-and he'd thoughtfully included padding material. I slid the bottle inside and zipped it shut, then looped it bandolier-fashion over my head. I was not losing him. Not again. I'd break his bottle when we were out of this mess; I didn't like keeping him prisoner, but right now having David's power amplifying mine might keep us alive.

"Joanne?" Marion's distant voice. I blinked and pulled my attention away from David; it was like ripping off a limb, but I managed. Absence didn't make the heart grow fonder; it created a kind of magnetic lock that didn't seem humanly possible to break.

"Jonathan's bottle, if you please."

Oh. Right.

Jonathan had given up on slot machines and had wandered back.

He was standing behind my chair, and without turning around I knew that he was watching David. I could feel the crackle of power in the air. They weren't speaking, but there was conversation going on.

Levels of power, emotion, give and take.

"Glad to get rid of it," I said sincerely, and held it out for Marion to accept.

Kevin had been waiting, and he took advantage of the chance. He slapped my hand, and the bottle went spinning out of control across the tabletop, skittering and bouncing, straight toward David-who, being Djinn, couldn't physically or aetherically touch it. He reached out for it, but his hand went right through it as if it didn't exist, or he didn't, or some combination of the two; the bottle slid through him and disappeared. I heard the m.u.f.fled thud of it hitting carpet.

"Jump ball," Jonathan murmured, and then turned serious again.

"c.r.a.p."

I felt the surge at almost exactly the same time, and so did David, who threw himself over me. Something was coming. Something big. I could see it blowing up in the aetheric, big as a dragon and twice as fiery-no idea what it was, but it was huge and very, very scary.

"Get down!" Jonathan's voice roared through the casino, supernaturally loud, like an enraged drill instructor on the world's largest loudspeaker, and it wasn't surprising that every single person in sight who wasn't Jonathan dropped to the carpet like they'd been chopped off at the knees. There was some m.u.f.fled screaming, but surprisingly little. I started worming my way across the floor toward where Jonathan's bottle had fallen, but David was in the way, and Kevin was elbow-walking that way, too. I lunged across David at the faint sparkle of gla.s.s in shadow, but I was too late; a hand was there before me.

Siobhan. She grabbed it and stuffed the bottle into the pocket of her jeans.

Jonathan had turned, watching her with narrow, dark eyes, like a predator about to eat something. I grabbed the girl's wrist. "Siobhan.

He'll kill you. Give it to me!"

She went very pale. She hesitated, then pulled it out of her pocket and handed it over just as Kevin got into position to try to s.n.a.t.c.h it away. We had an undignified little wrestling match, which consisted of me yanking my hands away from his and him trying to pry my fingers open, muttering things about my mother that weren't very complimentary. Siobhan crab-walked backward, away from the fray.

"Quiet!" Jonathan snapped at us. We all froze. Then there was a surprisingly weighty, profound silence. And then there was the faintest tinkle of gla.s.ses on tables, going on for a few delicate seconds.

And then an earthquake hit like a bomb.

Maybe people screamed, I don't know; the first tremor rippled through the floor like a wave through a stormy ocean, and I was tossed sideways, rolled, fetched up against a railing that I grabbed onto for dear life as the building continued to pitch and roll. It was too loud to hear screaming over the jangling of alarms and bells and dying slot machines and breaking gla.s.s and shattering steel.

I had a lot of power. It was all useless. Weather was an ephemeral power; this was something deep, strong, relentless. I caught a flash of someone moving faster, coat flying, and saw David leaping over the rolling, rippling floor to land hard beside me. He threw himself on top of me, smothering my scream-I had been screaming, I realized from the raw ache in my throat-and I felt impacts against his body. Things. .h.i.tting him. Things that would have crushed me.

Even a minor earthquake has a deeply unsettling effect, but a major one, like this, robs you of the ability to do anything but hang on and pray. I prayed, my hand locked a vise around the wrought-iron railing, and I heard David whispering in that liquid language of the Djinn. It might have been a prayer, too, for all I knew.

And then I realized that I had the power to stop it. My left hand, the one not holding on in a death grip, was clutching Jonathan's bottle-which was, thankfully, still intact.

"Get off!" I yelled in David's ear. "Off!"

He rolled away into a fluid, inhuman crouch-the first time I'd really seen him betray his Djinn nature in body language. He was moving like Rahel now, like something built out of alien parts into the semblance of a human body. His eyes were blazing so brightly it was like they'd caught fire.

I held up Jonathan's bottle, coughed against a choking cloud of crumbling dry wall, and yelled, "Jonathan! I command you to stop this earthquake, now!"

He was the only one still upright. Tall, slim, untouched by the shattering concrete and flying debris as the hotel ripped itself apart.

Marion was motionless at his feet. Kevin. Siobhan.

He looked utterly composed as he turned toward me and said, "I can't."

The wave of disbelief almost drowned me. I hadn't left him any room for equivocation; I was holding his d.a.m.n bottle. . . .

He nodded toward it.

"That's not my bottle, kiddo," he said. "Sorry. Nice wording, though. Eight out of ten for style."

I stupidly shook the bottle in my hand-why, I have no idea; trying to make it work?-and before I could get my head around it, the moment was past. Jonathan was doing something. Not what I'd wanted him to do, of course, but something, which was more than the rest of us were capable of trying.

He grabbed Kevin by the scruff of the neck, yanked him to his feet, and yelled something in his ear. Then he grabbed Marion, got her standing, and yelled something to her, too.

Then he steadied the ground under them. I could see it, even in this reality-a golden shimmer, spreading out around him in concentric, growing circles, and inside the gold, a small island of calm. Marion and Kevin were talking, or rather yelling; I couldn't hear a thing. I couldn't even hear David now, who was wrapped around me-he shoved me back into a thick recessed doorway and braced himself there, holding me in. I peered over his shoulder at what was happening.

Marion had taken Kevin's hand. The two of them were facing each other now, and as I watched she went into a trance state, eyes slowly closing. She took the kid with her. As his face went smooth and calm, he looked ten years older and, at the same time, amazingly childlike.

Alight with power.

This was a shallow quake, I knew that much; deeper-seated disturbances usually do less damage, because the energy gets absorbed by the bedrock on the way. Shallow ones are much more dangerous to the surface, and this one was a doozy. No way to objectively measure it by Richter scale standards, but I'd been taught the Mercalli intensity scale, and this was d.a.m.n sure an IX. The damage was being caused by exactly the same things that happen when you drop a stone into a pool of water-waves bouncing back from harder objects, then from other waves of greater intensity.

Energy in dissonance, deflected constantly back against itself. It ripped things apart in its madness.

I felt the shaking and rolling subside to a mere sickening tilt and jerk and shudder. As it did, sounds became clearer again-screaming, crashing, slot machines tipping, walls collapsing.

And in the circle of gold, Marion and Kevin opened their eyes and smiled at each other. Pure smiles of delight and pride.

The shaking stopped. One last sifting of dust from above, and then it was over. What emergency lighting there was flickered on, bathing everything in a sickly halogen glow, but the shadows stayed deep and secret.

Marion let go of Kevin's hands and reached up to put her palms on his cheeks. She leaned him closer and kissed his forehead gently as she stroked his oily, tangled hair.

"That was lovely," she said. "Very fine work. I commend you."

Kevin looked rapt. His face was shining and, for once, the light in his eyes wasn't one of greed or fury.

It was something close to love.

"Now we need to help," Marion said. "There are a lot of injured.

Come with me."

She stepped over a chunk of fallen concrete and held out her hand to him.

"Kevin!"

Siobhan's shrill voice. She was getting to her feet- Jonathan not helping-and brushing dust off her shorts. There were b.l.o.o.d.y cuts and sc.r.a.pes on her, but nothing serious, I thought.

She looked royally p.i.s.sed off.

Kevin hesitated, looking back. His fingers were just a couple of inches from Marion's beckoning hand. Go, I begged him. Learn what the real Wardens do. See what a difference you can be in the world.

I wished I'd duct-taped the girl to a chair. Hindsight.

"Kevin," Marion said, in a much more adult tone. Not commanding, not wheedling, just reminding him of what was important.

The light faded out of his face, and he took a step back. "Why should I help them? What'd they ever do for me?"

Marion dropped her hand back to her side, turned, and walked away to kneel by the side of the first person she saw. Marion was an Earth Warden. Healing was so much a part of her that she couldn't deny it, and I could see from the torment in Kevin's face that he was feeling that part of the heritage he'd stolen from Lewis, as well. Earth powers had a h.e.l.l of a lot of strength, but also a carried a great load of compa.s.sion and responsibility.

I watched as Kevin turned back to Siobhan, and I felt myself mourn inside for the lost opportunity.

"Joanne." David's voice drew me back to the here and now, to his body pressed against me in the narrow s.p.a.ce. "Are you hurt?"

I shook my head and saw dust sift off my hair. Sneezed. "Just my image. Go help Marion. Save whoever you can."

He kissed my forehead without comment, and left me. I picked my way across rubble and almost slipped on a wide round plastic tray piled with gla.s.ses; I looked around for the waiter, but he was gone. At least it didn't look like there were too many casualties. Amazing.

Jonathan had righted one of the unsplintered chairs and seated himself, staring out at the mess. I stopped next to him. Siobhan and Kevin were hovering nearby, Siobhan whispering, Kevin listening.

"Not your bottle?" I produced the one I'd been clutching. He shook his head mutely. I took a closer look-not that I'd memorized the one I'd taken from the decanter, but this one did seem different. And I no longer had the sense of Jonathan's presence in me, either. "Then who's got it?"

Jonathan gave me a bleak smile. "You already know who-" He stopped short. Someone was approaching through the rubble, walking with the fluid ease of a tiger. Even through the dust-choked haze, her clothes blazed with color.

Neon yellow.

Rahel sidestepped the wreckage of a slot machine bleeding tokens, and walked toward us. Beautiful as ever, confident and easy.

Smiling.

Her eyes were black. Jet-black, lid to lid.

"c.r.a.p, I don't have time for this. Rahel, dammit-" Jonathan said, and that was all there was time for, because she threw herself on him, turning into angles and glittering coal, a thing made of cutting edges and teeth.

The Ifrit had just found the meal of her life.

I screamed and tried to grab her, but I wasn't a Djinn any longer, even if I still had some kind of Djinn second sight; my hands went through her like a ghost. And through Jonathan, too. He'd become ghostly, trapped in her embrace. They fell and rolled over rubble, fighting and clawing. Jonathan lost his human state and turned to something brilliant and hotly dangerous as a star, but the darkness engulfed that heat.

"David!" I screamed, but I didn't really need to; he was already on the move, leaping over obstacles and landing on the back of the Ifrit.

Taking her sharp-edged head-was that her head?-in his hands and twisting with vicious strength.

She didn't so much turn as just . . . reverse. What he was holding grew teeth, the back of her grew claws and spikes and arms. They pierced him and held him, and I felt the sharp vibration of agony go through me, too. It made me stumble and fall to my knees.

"Rahel, no!" I cried. "Stop! G.o.d, stop!"

She couldn't. She was totally out of control.

There was a sudden odd sense of pressure changing, and my ears responded with a painfully abrupt pop. I lurched forward, falling, and caught myself as I felt David scream. It rang through the aetheric like a shattering bell, and I knew there was no time, no time, he was being torn apart by her hunger. . . .

I had no idea if it would work, could work, but I had to try.

I held out the empty bottle-the decoy bottle-in one shaking fist and yelled out the first iteration of the ritual. "Rahel! Be thou bound to my service!"

The Ifrit turned on me with a roar. David was bleeding. That wasn't real blood, any more than his was a real body; it was a physical representation of an aethereal energy; he could heal himself from anything so long as he had enough power left to form flesh....

But it looked so real. He was pallid, shattered, broken. The copper of his eyes was dying.