Firestorm (5 page)

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

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

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

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

“Are you working for them?”

“What?”

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

“Paul—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I slowly put up my hands.

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

“Glad your priorities are straight.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was asleep so fast, I had no time to realize it was happening, falling into a soft-edged darkness that wrapped warm around me, falling without fear and without limit…

…and then, without any sense of transition, I was sitting in a nice, comfortable living room with a fire roaring in the hearth. Curled up like a cat on a soft cotton-covered sofa, my head against the pillowed armrest, covered with the same blanket I'd been using in the infirmary.

“Hey, kid,” said a low voice. I blinked and focused across the room.

“Jonathan?” I asked, and slowly sat up. “Am I—? Aren't you—?”

“Dead?” the mack daddy of the Djinn supplied, and popped the tops on two brown, label-free bottles of beer. He held one up, and it floated toward me. Heavier than I expected. I nearly fumbled the bottle when I grabbed it out of the air. Cold. It felt heavy and real.

“Aren't you? Dead?” I asked.

“Yeah, well. Kinda.”

I blinked again and sipped the beer. Seemed like the thing to do. Jonathan looked exactly the same as he had last time I'd seen him: human, tall and lean and whipcord-strong. Tanned. He was wearing khaki pants and a loose off-white T-shirt, not tucked in, and his booted feet were crossed at the ankles. He sipped his beer, unsmiling.

I put my bottle down on the polished wooden coffee table after shoving aside issues of magazines in languages that I didn't recognize to make room for it. “You're dead,” I repeated. “So why are you in my dream?”

He raised the bill of his olive drab ball cap with one finger. “Good question. Morbid, isn't it?”

“What?”

“Dreaming about dead people. Creepy. You ever see a therapist about that?”

“I'm not—” Even in dreams, I couldn't win an argument with him. Even when he was dead. “What are you doing here?”

Jonathan took off his cap, tossed it toward a coat-tree (and missed), and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. He met my stare. That was a frightening thing. Dream or not, he had the exact same eyes—dark, lightless, limitless, filled with an infinity of things I could never understand in my short human lifetime. Stars were born and died in those eyes. “I think the real question is, what are
you
doing here? This is the end of the world, kiddo. Or the beginning. Tough to tell the difference. It's all one big turning circle, and where we are depends on who we are.”

I clutched the blanket closer. “I—don't understand.”

“Yeah, didn't figure you would. But I thought I'd give it a shot.” He took another swig of beer, but those inhuman eyes never left me. “Take a look outside.”

I rose, dragging the blanket with me wrapped around my shoulders like a bulky shawl. Not that I wanted to get up from that obscenely comfortable couch, but this was a dream, and I was going to do just what he wanted me to do. No real will of my own. My hand reached out for the drapery pull, and I yanked, and the heavy maroon curtains slid back, revealing…

A big field of nodding yellow flowers. Blue sky. A few clouds drifting lazily over the horizon.

I turned to look at him, a question on my face.

“Keep looking,” he said. “Little more to the picture than meets the eye.”

I narrowed my eyes, and it was like going up in to the aetheric, only I never left my body; the horizon zoomed toward me, clarifying itself as it came. What looked like a shadowy mountain range resolved into something else entirely.

Death.

I was looking at the skeletal remains of a city. Whatever skyline shape had once made it memorable was gone, so I didn't know if I was looking at Paris or New York or Dallas; it was a twisted bare mass of metal now, corroding and twisting together, being beaten down by the gentle, remorseless rain and wind. That was how the planet triumphed, in the end. With patience. With stillness.

Without mercy.

“You're getting there,” he said. “Closer.”

And he was closer, too—across the room and standing right behind me. His hands closed on my upper arms, holding me in place against him. I didn't want to see, but it came to me anyway.

Bones. So many bones, sinking deeper into the hungry ground. Flesh liquefying and returning to the soil, bones taking longer to flake away into bleached splinters.

Bones were all that was left of humanity, I knew that. I could sense that. Nothing remained. Not a city untouched, not a family huddled in a cave, waiting out the disaster. We'd been completely, utterly removed from the Earth.

“You see?” Jonathan's voice rasped, soft as velvet against my ear. I could feel the warm whisper of his breath stirring my hair. “It's like bowling. When the match is over, you have to return the rented shoes. Sorry, kid. Game over.”

Six billion lives, snuffed out. I wanted to fall to my knees, but Jonathan was holding me up. There was a certain lazy cruelty in the way his fingers dug into my skin.

“Don't go all weak on me now,” he scolded me. “Bones and dust. That the way you want it?”

“No,” I said, and firmed up my knees and spine.
Weak?
I wasn't weak, and I wouldn't let him see me that way. “So you tell me, how do I stop it?”

“What makes you think it's your job to stop anything?”

I shook free of his hands and whirled to face him. My fists clenched at my sides.
“Because you brought me here!”

His face smoothed out, became as rigid and emotionless as a leather mask. Those eyes, God, those
eyes
. Fury and power and anguish, all together.

“I didn't bring you here,” he said. “You think you're Miss Special Destiny of the year?”

“No,” I shot back, furious. “And I don't damn well
want
to be, any more than you wanted to be—whatever the hell you are. But sometimes there isn't a choice. Right?”

“Careful. You might accidentally make some sense. Ruin your reputation.”

“You are
infuriating!
”

“Yep,” he agreed. “It's been said.”

Arguing with him was getting me exactly nothing. I controlled my temper with a tremendous effort of will. “So how do we stop this?” Because I was not going to sit by and let a future roll toward us that contained six billion corpses turning to petroleum under the ground.

“That's the funny thing,” Jonathan said, and stepped back. He tugged his cap more firmly in place, one hand at the back, one on the bill. “You want to survive, you need to convince Her that you're worth the favor.”

“How?” I practically yelled it.

“You'll know it when you see it. But first you have to get yourself to the right place.”

“Which is?”

“Someplace you've already been,” he said. “Once. Neat little place, kinda quaint. You'll think of it.”

“Don't do that. Don't go all vague on me just when I need—”

“Not my business to save your ass,” he pointed out. “Hell, I'm kinda dead anyway. Not my problem. And you look so cute with your face all red.”

“Jonathan—” I was all out of smart-ass.
“Please.”

He cupped an ear toward me.

“Please,” I repeated. “Do you want me to beg?”

“Well, it'd be nice, but…nah. Can you sing?”

“What?”

“Sing. Notes. Usually up and down, unless you're into that rap thing, which”—he eyed me—“I wouldn't recommend. A little too much vanilla in the ice, if you know what I mean.”

“Believe me, I have no
idea
what you mean!”

He sighed. “Humans. No sense of what's going on around them…”

He stopped in midcondescension. His face went blank again, but not as if he was trying to conceal anything this time—more as though he was entirely focused on something beyond the two of us.

There was a sound. It started as a kind of moaning, like a breeze beyond the window. It got louder. Stronger. Became an eerie tangle of whispers.

No, not whispers. Something…musical.

I reached for the latch on the window, suddenly desperate to hear what it was. Jonathan clapped his hands down over mine, hard. “No,” he said grimly. “Do it and you're dead.”

I fought him. I had to open the window. I had to
know
. I could feel it coming, and oh it was glorious and terrible and beautiful as liquid fire, and it was going to burn me to ash where I stood with the fire of creation and joy.
Spirit moving upon the earth…

I clawed at the window latch, got hold of it, and yanked up.

Stuck. I screamed and battered at the window glass, but it didn't break, didn't even rattle….

Jonathan muttered what might have been a curse, if I'd understood Djinn, and he spun me around to face him. The whole house around us was moving, breathing. Seduced by the power of the song outside. Longing to join with it, lose itself in that joyous, terrifying chorus.

Pieces of it were whirling away. Jonathan stayed focused on my face. “You've got to leave,” he said.

“Am I going to see you again?” I asked, weirdly calm now, drugged by the
sound
. He smiled slightly and touched his fingertips to the tip of my chin.

“Didn't see me this time,” he said, and without any warning at all, gave me a right cross that snapped my head back with overwhelming force. Pain blocked out even the screaming of that
song….

I sailed backward into the dark, falling, lost in shrieking winds and wind that grabbed and tore at me….

The song turned into a shrill ringing in my ears.

I jerked awake on the bed in the infirmary, felt my heart racing uncontrollably, and fumbled for the clock on the table next to me. Its reassuring green glow told me that I'd been asleep for exactly six hours.

I sank back with a sigh, cradling the clock and hitting the buttons, and then realized that it wasn't the alarm going off. It was my cell phone shrilling for attention. Damn. I needed to go with a much more amusing ringtone.

I fumbled it out of my purse and flipped it open. “Yeah?” I sounded as drugged and disoriented as I felt.

“You stupid
slag
.” I knew that rich tenor voice, sharpened now with anger. “You called the police on me.”

I flopped back into the comfort of the pillow and threw an arm over my eyes. “Yes, Eamon, I called the police on you. You threatened my life, tried to kill me, and abducted my sister—”

“I saved your bloody life!” He sounded livid. I could almost see the veins pulsing in his neck. “I could've left you out in that hurricane to die, you know. I put myself out for you!”

“Yeah, you're a prince—Please tell me you're not, by the way. I mean, my opinion of British royalty isn't that high, but—”

“Shut it,” he snarled. “Alerting the local constabulary isn't going to get your sister back.”

“Can make your life damn inconvenient, though, I'll bet.”

Silence. I could hear him breathing. I could picture him standing there, phone gripped in those long pianist's fingers. The inner Eamon didn't match the sensitive hands, though he could pretend with the best of them. Deep down, he wasn't elegant, and he wasn't cultured. He was a total bastard, and the fact that my sister had been enthralled with him—and might still be, for all I knew—made me feel more than a little nauseated.

“Look,” I said. “I know that you expect me to be your costar in this little drama you're playing, but I'm busy. Get to the point, Eamon. You going to kill me? Come on and get in line. I haven't got time to screw around with you.”

Silence, for a long few beats, and then, “Is there a problem?” he asked. Which wasn't what I'd expected.

“Why do you care?”

“Because—” He paused for several long beats. “Because what I want from you is a Djinn. If there's anything happening that affects that goal, I need to know.”

“You have no idea how much I wish I'd given you one back home, and gotten you the hell out of our lives,” I said. I remembered the bloodstains in the conference room. Not that I wished dismemberment on anyone, but with Eamon my moral high ground was somewhere about the elevation of a sand dune, and eroding fast. “The situation has changed. I can't get my hands on a Djinn anymore. No one can.”

“Won't, you mean.”

“I don't have time to explain it to you, but even if I gave you a Djinn bottle, it wouldn't do you any good. The—the master agreement's been broken. They don't obey us anymore. And they damn sure wouldn't obey you.”