Firestorm (7 page)

Finally, we were getting somewhere. “And how exactly do I do that?” He opened his mouth, then shut it again. No answer. “David, half an answer is worse than none. Tell me.”

“I hate putting you at risk like this.”

“Dammit, how could I be more at risk? I saw—” I stopped, because I intuitively knew I shouldn't tell David about the dream. At best, he'd dismiss it. At worst, it would raise false hopes that Jonathan was…somewhere out there. “I'm a Warden, and I'm on the front lines already. At least give me the tools to get the job done.”

His head jerked up, and he fixed on me with such intensity that I flinched, a little. “I'm not sure it won't kill you.”

“Well,” I said after a shaky second of a pause, “that's a ‘been there, done that' situation, and anyway it's not your choice to make, is it?”

And that was a
long
second of pause, from both of us. Precarious and painful.

“No,” he finally admitted, and squeezed his eyes closed as he thought about it. “All right. I can't tell you
how
to do it—I'm not even sure how Jonathan did it, in the first place. But I can tell you
where
.” He made a visible decision and opened his eyes. They were glowing now, Djinn-bronze flecked with ruddy amber. “You've been there once already. Seacasket.”

“Seacasket?” I tried to remember…and then I did, with a chilling rush of pain and panic.

Once upon a time, I had been a Djinn, and I had been sent to Seacasket by my master (if you could call a punk like Kevin a master, which was a stretch) to destroy the town. In fire.

David had stopped me that time. And somehow, Kevin's stepmonster Yvette had known that he would. It had been the trap she set for him, to get him back in her power.

“Seacasket's special,” I said. “Yvette knew.”

He nodded. “It's a—thin space in the aetheric. One of two or three places in this country where a human might be able to reach one of the Oracles.”

“Oracles?” I'd never heard of Oracles, other than the ancient Greek kind. Or the software company. From the regretful look that flashed across his face, it wasn't something
any
human had probably heard before. Or that the Djinn ever intended we would.

“They don't exist here, on this plane. They're—different. And Jo, they're dangerous. Very dangerous, even to Djinn. I—can't imagine how dangerous they'd be to a human, even if you can get one to allow you contact. Which isn't likely.”

“Can't you—I don't know, introduce me?”

“It doesn't work that way,” he said. “I wish to heaven it did, because this would already be finished and I'd have done this for you. The way I'm connected is subordinate. The Djinn are part of the body, not apart from it. Oracles…” He was out of words, and he shrugged. “There's no way to describe this, really. It's not a human thing.”

I let out a slow breath. “Okay. Leaving all that on the table, is there anything you can do about all of the—the chaos out there? Weather, fire, earthquakes?…”

“I'll do what I can.” David leaned forward and extended his hand again. This time, I took it. His skin was firm and hot and smooth, and my skin remembered it all too vividly. He was astonishingly tactile, always touching, and even as I thought it his fingers moved to my wrist, tracing my pulse. “I want to protect you. I want that with everything in me. The idea of sending you into danger without me…it terrifies me. You know that, right?”

My heart began to pound. I wanted to forget all of this. The wreckage outside of the infirmary door, the dead Wardens, the destroyed agreement with the Djinn, the upcoming end of the world.
The future of bones.

I wanted him to keep on touching me, always.

“Jonathan always thought it was a kind of insanity, Djinn loving humans,” David murmured. “Maybe he was right. We have to face losing what we love so often, and the urge to keep you out of danger is…overpowering, sometimes. But now
I'm
the danger. And the truth is, you can't really trust me, from this point on. Promise me you'll be careful of me.”

“David—”

“I mean it, Jo. Promise me. I love you, I adore you, and you really can't trust me right now.”

His hand tightened on mine. Our fingers twined, and he leaned closer and fitted his lips to mine.

Hot and sweet and damp, anguished and wonderful. I let go of his hand and wrapped my arms around his neck, buried my fingers in the warm living fire of his hair, and deepened the kiss. Willing him to be with me, to make this world be something it wasn't.

He made a sound in his throat, torture and despair and arousal all at once, and his hands fitted themselves around my waist and slid me off the bed and onto his lap. My chest pressed to his, every point of contact a bonfire. Our bodies, beyond our control, moved against each other, sliding, pressing, sweet wonderful friction that reminded us what we wanted, what we
needed
. For the first time in months, we were both healthy, both whole, both…

…both too aware of what this might cost us in the end.

I don't know which of us broke the kiss, but it ended, and we pressed our foreheads together and breathed each other's air without speaking for a long time, our bodies tensed and trembling, on the edge of burning.

“You're right,” I finally whispered. My lips tasted of him. “I can't trust you. I damn sure can't trust myself when I'm with you.”

He smoothed my hair back with both hands. “Good girl.” He kissed me again, softly. “Smart girl. Remember that.”

And then he lifted me, effortlessly, and set me on my feet. I got the impression he was about to leave, and panicked just a little. “Wait! Um…Seacasket. I'm not sure I can find it again.”

“MapQuest,” he said. “The modern world is full of conveniences even the Djinn can't match.”

“Do I—?” I bit my lip, and then continued. “Do I go alone? Or am I going to have to fight my way through some kind of honor guard?”

“Take Imara,” he said. His smile turned breathtakingly sweet. “She's astonishing, isn't she? Our child? I wish you could see her the way I do, Jo, she's—a miracle.”

Oh, I agreed. With all my heart. “I don't want to take her with me if there's going to be any danger—”

“I have faith in you to keep her safe.”

“David, she's
two days old
!”

“What she is can't be measured in days, or years, or centuries,” he said. “She'll be fine. Just—take care of yourself. You're the one I'm worried about.”

A slow, warm pressure of his lips on mine, and then he was gone. Not a magic-sparkle slow-fade gone, but a blip, he-was-never-there gone. Except for the manic damn-I've-been-kissed-good tingle of my mouth and the racing of my pulse and general state of trembling throughout my body, I might have thought it was all another dream.

I walked over to the mirror. I looked like hell, but my eyes were clear and shining and my lips had a ripe, bee-stung redness.

Doesn't get much more real than that.

He was right: I really couldn't trust him. Should never
ever
trust him again. But that wasn't, and never would be, my instinct, and he knew it. He was my true fatal flaw, and maybe I was his, as well.

I hoped that wasn't going to end up destroying us both, and our child with us.

If I was inclined to mope about it, I didn't have time. There was a rattle at the locked infirmary door, and Nathan, the security guard, looked in and jerked his head at me.

“You're wanted,” he said. “Move it.”

I cast one last look at the empty chair where David had been, and followed Nathan out.

 

The infirmary was relatively soundproofed, as I discovered when I went out into the hall; there was a riot outside. People yelling, screaming at each other. Tempers flaring. There were more people crammed in than there'd been before, and everybody looked stressed and confused. There were arguments raging from room to room; some idiot was yelling in the hallway that we had to uncork the Djinn still imprisoned in the vault several stories below, under the theory that we could be prepared to give them ironclad orders to protect the building and the remaining Wardens at all costs. Someone else was making the case against it, but I could tell popular sentiment was building for the supposedly simple solution.

Paul had given up, evidently. He was sitting whey-faced in a chair in the North America conference room, eyes shut. Marion was vainly shouting for order, but since she was in a wheelchair, it was hard for her to make an impression.

I went for the floor show.

I levitated myself four feet up off the stained carpet, dangerously close to the ceiling, reached deep for power, and felt it respond to me with an ease and warmth I hadn't felt in…a very long time. Since before my battle with Bad Bob Biringanine, in fact.

I let the power crackle around me, building up in potential energy in the air, and most of those around me noticed and backed off.

Making light—cold light, light without heat—is the biggest trick in the book when it comes to my variety of powers. Light has heat as a natural by-product of the energy release that creates it, so I had to balance the radiation with rapid dispersal throughout a complicated matrix of atoms.

I got brighter, and still brighter, until I was glowing like a girl-shaped chandelier, hovering in the hallway. Conversation stopped. In the brilliant white light, they all looked stark and surprised, and to a Warden they flinched when I released a pulse of energy that flared out in a circle like a strobe going off.

I let the glow die down slowly and touched my feet back on the carpet.

“Right,” I said. “Let's quit freaking and start working, all right?”

Nobody spoke. Dozens of faces, and they were all turned to me—young Wardens barely out of college, old gray-haired ones who'd been handling the business of earth and fire and weather for three-quarters of their long lives. They were tough, or they were damn lucky, every single one of them.

And most important, they were what we had.

I pointed to the Warden who'd been arguing against opening the bottles—a slender little African American guy, about thirty, with a receding hairline and bookish wire-rimmed spectacles. “What's your name?” I asked. He didn't look at all familiar.

“Will,” he said. “William Sebhatu.”

“Will, I'm putting you in charge of the Djinn issue,” I said. “You need to get every single Djinn bottle, empty or sealed, make an inventory, and put everything in the vault. And then you seal the vault and you make damn sure that nobody, and I mean nobody, opens up any bottles. Got it?”

“Wait a minute!” That was Will's debating opponent, a big-boned woman with a horse face and bitter-almond eyes. “You can't just make a decision like that! Who the hell do you think you are? You're not even a Warden anymore!” I remembered her. Emily, a double threat—an Earth and Fire Warden out of Canada. She was blunt, but she was good at her job; she also had a reputation for being pushy.

“Back off,” Paul said wearily from his chair in the conference room. His voice echoed through the silence. “She's one of us. Hell, she may be the only one who knows enough to get us through the day.” He sounded defeated. I didn't care for that. I hadn't meant to take away his authority—at least, not permanently—but Paul wasn't acting like a guy who could shoulder the burden anymore. “Jo, do your stuff.”

“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?”