Thin Air (23 page)

Venna shook her head. Apparently it was an expectation.

“What do we do when we get there?” I asked. “I'm not killing anybody, Venna.”

“I wouldn't let you,” she said. “Although if you knew Ashan, you'd probably want to…. What do you want me to do about the man following us?”

“You noticed.” She gave a little snort of agreement. I supposed it wasn't exactly beyond her capabilities. “Do you know who it is?”

“Yes,” she said. I waited. She waited right back.

I gave her a hard look. Which was just a little bit hilarious, admittedly; I was giving
her
a hard look? As far as I could tell, Venna could pretty much destroy me any day of the week, and twice at matinees. “Just tell me!”

“I don't have to,” she said. “You'll have to stop soon. When you do, you'll find out.”

She seemed smug about it. I gave her another completely ineffective glare, and checked my gas gauge. Still nearly full. Why in the world would I have to stop…?

The back left tire blew out with a jolt and a sound like a brick slapping the undercarriage of the car, and I cursed, fought the wheel, and limped the Camaro over to the shoulder of the road. The uneven
thump thump thump
made it clear that we weren't going to do any quick getaways.

“Fix it,” I said to Venna. She smoothed her palms over her blue jeans. Was there a way to be beyond smug? “Come on, Venna. Be a pal.”

“You have a spare tire,” she said. “I'll wait here.”

I cursed under my breath, opened the door, popped the trunk, and unloaded the jack, spare tire, and other various roadside disaster tools. I was evidently no stranger to mechanical work, but I wasn't in the mood, dammit. I had the lug nuts loosened in record time, but as I was jacking up the car with vicious jerks of the handle, I saw a sparkle of glass behind us, and the white van glided over the hill…slowing down.

Shit.

“Hey, Venna?” I said. She looked out of the window at me. “Little help?”

She rolled up the window.

“Perfect.” I sighed. “Just perfect.” I went back to cranking the jack, grimly focused on the job at hand but keeping at least half of my attention—the paranoid half—on the van as it crawled and crunched its way slowly toward me. The brakes squealed slightly as it stopped.

I couldn't see a damn thing through the tinted windows, and I was suddenly very glad of the tire iron in my hand.

And then the doors on both sides of the van opened at once, and people got out. The woman was young, toned, and well coiffed. She had a microphone. Behind her, in a flying wedge, came a fat guy with a camera and a skinny guy with a boom microphone.

“You've
got
to be kidding me,” I said, and stared, paralyzed, while they moved purposefully in my direction. “Holy crap.”

“Joanne Baldwin?” The reporter got out in front, framed the two-shot, and made sure her best side was to the camera. “My name is Sylvia Simons, and I'm an investigative reporter for—”

My paralysis snapped, replaced by a quivering all-over tremor.
She knew my name.

“I don't care who you're with,” I interrupted, and started pumping the jack again. The tire crept upward, cleared the asphalt, and I repurposed the jack to start removing the lugs. “Get lost.”

“Ma'am, do you have any comment about what happened back there on the beach?”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” I said. “And I don't know any Joanne Baldwin. You've got the wrong—”

“I interviewed your sister a few weeks ago. She gave us a photo,” Sylvia Simons interrupted, and held out a picture of me and Sarah, which had been removed from its frame. We looked happy and stupid. I still felt stupid, but I certainly wasn't very happy. “She told us that you're a member of an organization called the Wardens. Can you tell me something about that?”

“No,” I said. Four lug nuts off. I kept moving, careless of the grease and grime on my hands or what was getting on my clothes.

“My understanding is that you have some kind of responsibility for protecting the general public from natural disasters,” Simons continued. Lug nut five came off, then six, and I slid the tire free with a screech of metal and let it thump down on the road between us. I wiped sweat from my forehead and ignored her as she leaned closer. “She claimed it was magic. Care to tell us exactly what that means? We'll get the information some other way if you don't, but this is your chance to tell your side of the story….”

Crap.
I put the other tire on and began replacing lug nuts. “I don't have a side,” I said, “and there isn't any story. Leave me alone.”

I could tell they weren't going to. They'd been digging, and struck gold. Sarah had dropped the dime and taken the money after ensuring that the white van and the reporters knew to keep on my trail. And maybe she'd called somebody else, too. Somebody who'd dispatched a killer to silence me before I could talk. That way she'd have the money from the reporters free and clear, and no Wardens after her.

“Tell you what,” I said, spinning lug nuts down with both hands. I didn't look at the reporter directly, wary of being even more on-camera. “If you turn around and leave now, nothing's going to happen to your nice digital equipment.”

Simons made a surprised face, and looked at the camera as if she wanted to be sure it caught her amazement. “Are you threatening us, Ms. Baldwin?”

“Nope.” I finished finger-tightening the nuts, and released the jack to let the car settle back on four tires. I began applying the tire iron to finish the job of making the wheel road ready. “But things do happen.”

And right then, things did happen. The camera guy said, “What the…?” and a whisper of smoke suddenly oozed out of three or four places in his equipment. I heard a cooking sound from inside the electronics.

Nice.
I sure did enjoy some things about being a Fire Warden.

“What's wrong?” Simons asked, and moved toward him. Together, with the sound guy craning in for a look, they reviewed the damage. Which, I could have told them, was catastrophic. Yay, me.

I shoved the old flat tire and all the equipment in the trunk, slammed it, and said, “I think the phrase I'm searching for here is ‘no comment.'”

Simons stared at me with a grim, set expression as I got in the Camaro and headed off down the road.

When the van tried to follow, its engine blew in a spectacular white cloud of steam.

“I should be ashamed. That,” I said to Venna, “was really low. Then again, blowing out my tire was pretty low in the first place, Venna. Shame on you.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “But you needed to know. So you won't trust your sister again.”

“No,” I said grimly. “I don't think I will.”

 

Driving is therapy for me. Interesting thing to discover about yourself…There was something hypnotic about the road, the freedom, the feeling of being in control and having a direction. I drove fast, but not recklessly, and if Venna had anything to say, she said it to herself.

I had a lot of time to think. After a couple of hours of that, I said, “Venna. Why haven't you given me
your
memories?”

She raised her eyebrows. Pint-sized haughtiness. She was still wearing the blue jeans and pink shirt; I was getting used to the less formal look, but I didn't let it fool me. There was nothing informal about Venna.

“You couldn't handle it,” she said. “Djinn memory isn't the same as human. We see things differently. We see time differently. It wouldn't make sense to you, the way human memories do.”

“But…you can become human, right?”

“We can take human form. That doesn't mean we become human. Not really.”

So even though David had fathered a child with me, he hadn't been…human. Not inside. Comforting thought.

I edged a bit more speed out of the accelerator. “You said David would be on her side, not mine. Are you guessing, or do you know that?”

She didn't answer me.

In a way, I supposed, that was answer enough.

 

The countryside began feeling weirdly familiar. If I'd put together the pieces properly, Sedona had been the last place I'd been seen before my absence from the world, followed by my appearance, naked and memory-free, in the forest. I felt like I
ought
to remember it.

I was, quite simply, too tired. Sedona had motels, and I had cash, and although Venna was contemptuous of the whole idea, I checked myself in for the day, took a long, hot bath, and crawled into a clean bed for eight blissful hours. When I got up, the sun had already set.

Venna was watching a game show, something loud that seemed to involve people shouting at briefcases. She was cross-legged on the end of the bed, her chin resting on her fists, and she was absolutely enraptured.

“Well,” I said as I zipped up my black jeans, “I guess now I know who the target audience is for reality TV.”

If I hadn't known better, I'd have thought she was embarrassed. She slid off the bed, and the TV flicked off without her hand coming anywhere near a remote control. She folded her arms. “Are you done sleeping?” she asked.

“Obviously, yes.”

“Good. It's such a waste of good time.” She moved the curtain aside and looked out. “We should go.”

We pulled out of the parking lot and cruised slowly through town. Venna navigated, my very own supernatural GPS, pointing me through the streets until I was thoroughly lost. Sedona looked pretty much like any other town—maybe a little funkier, with more New Age shops and Southwest architecture, but McDonald's looked the same. So did Starbucks.

“Are we close?” I asked. I was still tired, but it was a pleasant kind of tired, and for the first time in a long time I felt like I was going into trouble with a clear mind. The road vibration was almost as good as a massage.

“That way.” Venna pointed. I didn't ask questions. We made turns, crawled along a road that led into the hills, and eventually stopped in a parking lot at the foot of a bluff whose definitions were lost in the growing darkness.

The sign said,
CHAPEL OF THE HOLY CROSS
.

Venna said, very quietly, “We're here.”

“Where's Ashan?”

“Safe,” she said. “I'll bring him here when we're ready. If he panics, he can be hard to control.”

A Djinn—well, former Djinn—who had panic attacks. That was a new one. I parked the Camaro in a convenient spot, killed the engine, and sat listening to the metal tick as it cooled. Outside, there was a living silence that pressed heavily against the car windows.

I didn't like it here.

“This is hard for you,” Venna said. “Yes?”

“Yes.”

She turned those blue, blue eyes on me and said, “Do you know why?”

I silently shook my head. I didn't think I wanted to know.

We got out of the car and walked to a steep set of concrete stairs leading up into the dark. Motion-sensitive lights bathed the steps dusty white, a startling contrast to the reddish rocks. I put my foot on the first one, and suddenly I couldn't breathe. Couldn't move.

Venna took my hand. “I know,” she said quietly. “This place remembers. It remembers everything.” She put her head down, as if there were things she didn't want to see. I could understand that. I could feel it brushing at the edges of my consciousness, and without meaning to I drifted up into the aetheric….

And I saw chaos.

Raw fury. Horror. Anguish. An abiding, keening grief that had reduced this place, on the aetheric level, to a black hole of emotion.

“My God,” I whispered numbly. “What did this?”

Venna glanced up at me, then back down. “You did,” she said. “David did. We all did. When she died—”

She shut up, fast, but not before I put the pieces together. “Imara,” I said. “Imara died here.”

“I'm sorry,” she whispered. “We didn't know what to do. She was part human, and that part couldn't be saved. He tried, after you were…after you disappeared.”

“David tried to save her.”

Venna bit her lip and nodded. She looked genuinely distressed. No wonder there was so much pain here, so much grief. David's agony, staining this place like ink.

Maybe mine, too.

“We'd better go,” she said, and took my hand. Hers felt warm, childlike, human. “It'll be better at the top.”

It wasn't exactly easy ascending those stairs; I felt as if I were moving through the same quicksand I'd fought through back on the beach. The handrail felt sticky. I looked at my hand, almost sure I'd see bloodstains, but no…nothing. Up above, stars were twinkling in the dark blue sky; there was still a band of pale blue toward the horizon, shot through with threads of red and gold. Beautiful.

There seemed to be a thousand steps, and every one of them a sacrifice.

When we made it to the landing I was gasping for breath and shaking; Venna let go of my hand and moved to the door of the chapel, which was closed and had a sign on the front that gave the hours it was open—which didn't include the hour of now.

That didn't seem to matter to Venna, who simply pulled, and the door opened with a faint
snick
. The puff of air from the darkened interior smelled of incense and cedar, a timeless scent that carried none of the horror present outside.

Except for the flicker of a couple of red candles here and there, it was quite dark inside; the dim, fading sunset showed a small chamber, inked in shadow at the corners, with a few plain wood pews facing the huge expanse of glass windows. It was breathtaking, and it was, without a doubt, a holy kind of place.

Venna held the door for me, and locked it once we were inside. The place looked empty.

“I thought you said—”