Thin Air (31 page)

And then I realized why he was reacting so violently. Granted, he wouldn't want her hands on him, but what he was doing was far, far beyond merely trying to get loose from her hold. No, he was fighting to save himself, because she was
trying to take him over
, the way she'd grabbed Cherise and Kevin and cored them out to insert her own will, power, and thoughts.

If she could do that to
Lewis
…

Rahel understood what was happening, but she didn't act. Perhaps she couldn't here in this place. The power that Lewis was pulling into himself, using as a shield, was absolutely stunning in its intensity, as if the entire Earth were rising up through him in his defense.

And still the Demon was eating right through.

There was a slipping sensation under my feet. I can't describe it any more accurately; it wasn't an earthquake, because the ground itself didn't shift. Not a tremor. Not a shudder of any kind.

And yet, something
moved.

“No,” Rahel breathed, stricken, and I saw her make some kind of decision.

She broke out of her paralysis, crossed the few steps, and grabbed E.T. by her shiny supernatural hair. For her part, my evil twin wasn't going down easy; she snarled and twisted around to backhand Rahel, but she didn't let go of Lewis to do it. His eyes were closed, his face unnaturally still, as if he were in tranquil meditation. I'd seen this before. I could almost remember….

When Rahel lunged for her again, my doppelgänger did something that blurred in this reality, blazed up in the aetheric, and slammed the heel of her palm into Rahel's chest.

Her hand kept going deep into Rahel's flesh and bone, and I saw a flood of what looked like blue sparks shoot down the Demon's arm disappearing within Rahel's body. Rahel's mouth opened in a soundless scream, and I saw the shadowy presence of her on the aetheric turn smoke gray, then a poisonous shade of pale blue.

Could she possess
Rahel
?

As the Demon pulled her hand out of Rahel's chest, a flood of tiny blue sparkles followed, foaming over Rahel's body in a matter of seconds.

She convulsed and went down. It looked…Oh, God. It looked as if she were
melting.

Lewis was still fighting, but whatever power he was using was dangerous in the extreme. I could feel that in the unsteady pitch and wave of the ground—no, not the
ground
, I realized, because the actual soil wasn't moving. This was something else.

A stray metal button on the sidewalk rattled, rolled, and suddenly flew straight up in the air to impact a metal street sign. Which was bending as if an invisible wind were pulling at it.

Something was going badly wrong with the Earth's magnetic field. Whatever power Lewis was using was unbalancing it, and although I had no idea what that meant, it just could
not
be good.

The other Wardens were converging on the spot, but nobody could do much—I saw Paul running to grab Lewis and bodychecked him on the way. “No!” I yelled. “She'll take you! Don't touch either one of them!”

“We can't just
stand
here!” he screamed back at me. I heard the wail of police cars a few blocks over, and realized with a cold start that the rest of Seacasket, this Norman Rockwell town with a touch of the Gothic, would have just seen a bunch of strangers pile out of a van and some kind of fight. They couldn't see or feel what was happening all around them, unless they knew where to look.

The Wardens knew, but we couldn't
act.

I felt a displacement of air, heard a faint
pop
, and looked around to see Venna standing there. She didn't even glance toward me; she ran to Rahel, scooped her up, and vanished midstep. Taking her somewhere she could be helped, I hoped, but I couldn't know.

“Now would be a really good time,” I muttered in the general direction of David, hoping he could hear me, but no miracles arrived to scoop
me
up.

I was going to have to make my miracles myself.

“Hey,” I said. I kept my voice as normal as possible as I stepped away from Paul and began moving toward the Demon and Lewis. “Hey, you. Bitch. You don't really want him, do you? You just want a big hole ripped open so you can get home. Or bring in a few friends. Whichever.”

She glanced sharply at me, and as our eyes locked I felt that balance under my feet shift again. Violently.
Oh, man.
It wasn't just Lewis who was causing this.

It was me. Both of me. We were a destabilizing influence here.

“I'll do it,” I said. “One tunnel into the void, coming up. Just back off and let him go.”

“Why should I?” she asked. Reasonable question, delivered in the same reasonable tone I was using. “This way he can't act against me.”

“This way the two of you will end up ripping the place in
half
, not opening up a doorway. Not good for either one of you. Come on. I know you like this planet. It'd be a shame to ruin it for everybody.”

She laughed. My laugh. “If you want him, I'll trade,” she said. “Come here.”

The last thing in the world I wanted was to do it, but I didn't see much of an alternative. Of course, she might be lying, but I wasn't a pushover, and if she wanted to hollow me out or kill me, I'd demand a lot of her attention.

And Lewis would break free.

“Don't you do it,” Paul was muttering at me. “Don't you fucking dare. I'll kill you.”

“Line forms to the right.” I smiled at him, just a little, and then walked over to my evil twin.

The static in my head was now white noise, blotting out thought, erasing everything but instinct.

I put my hand over hers, where it held Lewis, and pulled it away.

The second the contact broke, Lewis collapsed. Paul, Kevin, and the other Wardens dashed in and did a combat-style drag on him, all the way to the corner, where the van pulled up. Paul threw Lewis inside, slapped the side of the van, and it sped away.

Clearly Paul wasn't taking any chances.

Blackness smothered me, thick and more painfully intense than ever before. I barely even noticed, though, because now that I was holding her hand, I saw a network of lights flaring inside of her, rich and complex, like a bright snarled ball that sparked in millions of colors.

Oh.

That was
mine.
My memories. My lost experience. My
past.

And I reached in and took it. Or tried to. I grabbed one end of the memory chain, the Demon grabbed the other, and the race was on.

Light and shadow. Infant memories, indefinite and barely there. Faces. Noise. Colors. Perceptions sharpening as I aged. I sped through it, imprinting it on the area that was dark inside of my own head. I didn't need training for this; there was only one place this stuff could go, and in only one order. Memory, for me, was a spool, and I unwound it faster and faster, flickering images and impressions that I could examine later, when I got time….
My mother crying. Sarah. Disneyland. A storm building, breaking, finding its perfect mate inside of me.

Childhood, so many rich moments, so many terrible things. I aged, changed; the world shifted with me and around me. Boys. Boyfriends. Heartbreak. Always the weather, my perfect enemy, hunting an opportunity to betray and destroy.

Power. Purpose. Training. Princeton.

A younger Lewis taking off my clothes in a basement laboratory, introducing me to a whole new level of pleasure and intensity.

Glass shattering with the force of our power combining as our bodies did.

Lewis gone, spirited away. My life consumed with work, achievement, ambition.

Bad Bob. A Djinn holding me down, choking me with a Demon Mark, forcing me to face my own fears and mortality at the same time. Bad Bob died; I lived, crawling away from the wreckage of the fight.

A shattered Djinn bottle. Bad Bob's slave freed. My quest for Lewis. Meeting a stranger on the road, a vagabond named David I couldn't quite resist.

A blur of events that I couldn't even separate, ending in more destruction, more death, my own transformations.

Blue sparklies. A hole in the aetheric. Demons. The fate of the world, again, on our shoulders.

Human again. Faces flashed by at an increasing rate, because I could feel the tension of the Demon on the end of the memory chain, pulling back, and I couldn't stop now to even try to comprehend what I was seeing.

A glimpse of Jonathan, ageless and cynical and passionate about what he loved.

Fighting for my survival in a flood, and rising in the arms of my lover above the foaming, deadly currents.

The Mother of Storms taking notice, at last, and coming to end the cycle of violence.

Imara conceived. Imara born. Imara—

The memory chain shattered into a million crystalline fragments, and I lost my hold.

It all started to go away. I was losing it.
No!

The Demon didn't waste time with my trauma. She cut to the chase and plunged her hand into my chest, just like she'd done with Rahel.

If she couldn't
be
me, then she was going to damn sure make sure I wouldn't be, either.

The sensation that raced through me was horrifying. I'd been through bad stuff; this was
beyond.
I'd felt it through Kevin's memories, and it was even worse this time, because there was no escape.

She simply bored her way through me, ripping apart whatever she didn't need, and I felt my connection to the aetheric suddenly cutting off. It was like the sun disappearing during a total eclipse, and something in me screamed, trapped and terrified and suffering.

It couldn't live that way for long.
I
couldn't.

Although I felt like there was less and less of an
I
. It was draining away from me, like sand out of a broken glass, slow but inexorable. I was losing my childhood again. My mother's face was fading away. I lost the memory of my first date, and the nervous excitement of buying my prom dress, and the scratchy elegance of the corsage my date had bought me. I lost the memory of his name, too.

Evil Twin didn't care about my troubles. She let go of me, but I didn't move. Didn't speak. Hair blew across my face, obscuring my view of her, but it didn't matter. She could see. I didn't need to, because now I was fully, completely under her control. I couldn't fight, because I needed every ounce of strength to slow down the steady erosion of my past.

She was simply going to drain me dry, and then I'd be gone. Erased.
Finito.

The Wardens were circling us, trying to decide which one was the good Joanne, which the bad; the problem was that the deck was now stacked, and they were screwed no matter what choice they made. Kevin and Cherise were hanging back, watching with identical expressions of sick horror; more than anyone else, they understood what was happening to me. Not that they could help me.

Not that anyone could.

The Demon accessed my Warden powers, blew a hole through the peaceful, artificial shield of Seacasket, and accessed a huge draw of power from the aetheric. She used me to do it. My control shattered, and the memories dissolved faster.

I lost my college years. I lost Lewis, swept away in a tide of oncoming darkness.

I felt the clouds gathering overhead, a soft gray pressure turning rapidly dark, and under the Demon's direction I rubbed air molecules together, creating friction, heat, driving the engine of a tiny but incredibly concentrated storm. Not my choice, but definitely my fault. The storm broke with a snap of lightning, and drenched a square-block area of sidewalk, catching nearly every Warden in its path.

As soon as they were standing in a thin layer of water, she forced me to slam a lightning bolt down and electrified the whole block.

The Wardens went down like ten pins in a bowling alley, many stunned, a few maybe even dead. I wanted to stop. I wanted to scream.

Instead I turned and walked, under the Demon's control, into the gates of the Seacasket cemetery.

“There used to be guards here,” E.T. said, as if we hadn't just lashed out against everything I knew and loved. As if I weren't dying as quickly as she was coming alive. We were strolling along the path like two sisters, hand in hand. “There were Djinn guards. You remember?”

It was a new memory, not yet pulled apart by the ongoing destruction. I remembered. They'd nearly killed me and Imara. Ashan had been here, too.

“I won't let you win,” I said. I couldn't stop her, and she knew it, but she at least allowed me the fantasy of saying it. “You don't have to do it this way. If you want to go home, we'll find a way to send you home. But you're not killing the Oracle. You're not ripping open any doorways. If I don't stop you, the Wardens will. The Djinn will.”

“And yet,” she said, with the same cockeyed smile I'd felt on my own face so often, “that's
exactly
what I'm going to do. And you're going to help me, until I don't need you anymore.”

Gravel crunched under my shoes. Part of me was shrieking in agony, battering at the container that she'd stuffed it into. “I'm fading,” I said. I couldn't even work up emotion about it, because she controlled my body, even down to the endocrine level. “No good to you if I'm dead. Slow down.”

“You'll last long enough.” She shrugged. “I need you, because I won't be able to open the door, not alone—the Oracle will know me for what I really am. I could have used the combined power of the Wardens to blast it open, but you've ruined that for me. Now only a Djinn will do—or someone who's been one before. You.”

We passed some leaning, picturesque headstones. A cracked marble bench. A tree that showed evidence of having sustained some fight damage in the past.