I was watching the ongoing battle of the Wardens when I felt the first stirring of... awareness. It was not so much something seen as felt... the power that was consuming Portland, that mindless beast seemed to pause and look. I felt the impact of its stare, like clouds over the face of the sun. All of the aetheric seemed to dim and go quiet.
It was looking at us.
I did not dare to move, not even to drift down into my body. There was a sense of a vast, predatory interest focused on us, and any tiny mistake could bring disaster.
The flames in Portland faltered and began to fall silent, but the energy behind them did not fall away; no, it gathered itself, a beast tensing to spring.
We were too close.
Freezing like prey wouldn't save us, I realized. I dropped back into my body with a breathless, icy rush, lunged forward to brace myself against the dashboard of the van, and gasped out, "Turn! Get off this road!"
"What?" Luis asked. "Jesus, Cass, what is it?"
"Get off the road. Do it now!"
"Chica, there's nowhere to go!"
"Turn around!" My shout must have conveyed the true depths of my alarm, because he didn't hesitate anymore. Luis hit the brakes, brought the van into a shuddering, tire-burning slide. Momentum threatened to tip us, but he controlled it somehow and accelerated into the drift. The tires caught traction, and suddenly we jerked forward, heading back the way we'd come.
"Faster!" I yelled. "Get us off this road!"
Luis didn't ask any more questions, just pressed the accelerator to the floor. When the van responded sluggishly, I felt him working the engine with Earth power, opening up clogged valves to pull more power out of the churning metal parts.
It wasn't going to be enough.
I could see it now, through the back window--a blazing arrow of power coming behind us, like liquid sunlight flowing down the road. The trees on either side were igniting into brilliant orange. Everything it touched died.
And it was going to catch us.
"Stop," Isabel said.
"Can't do that," Luis said. "Cass is right. We can't fight this."
"You can't run fast enough," she said. She sounded scared, but certain. "Cassie, we need him."
She was talking about Rashid, but Rashid would be of no real help to us; he might possibly be able to preserve our lives, but this power would simply drown us, consume us, and even a Djinn's power was limited by his master's endurance. Sooner or later, he would lose that battle, and we would be dissolved, digested, gone.
The benefit for Rashid would be that the glass of his bottle wouldn't last, either; he'd be free again, free to join the crusade against the hunted remains of humanity. Though I wondered whether he would take quite so much joy in it as others.
"Cassie!" she shouted. We had seconds, if that. She was right. There was nothing else we could do, not against this vast force of nature that rolled toward us.
I lunged over the seat, into the back of the van, thumping down next to Esmeralda, who was staring out the window with a grim, silent concentration that was not quite fear and not quite delight. An uneasy mix of the two. "Beautiful," she said. "Death's really beautiful, you know."
"Shut up," I said, and ripped open the saddlebag of the Victory, parked beside her coils. Her rattle stirred with a dry hiss, but I kicked it out of the way and grabbed Rashid's bottle. I ripped the foam stopper out. "Rashid! You're called!"
He could have dawdled; any enterprising Djinn could have used delay to his advantage, especially one with a grudge, but instead he was instantaneously crouched in front of me, silver eyes gleaming, naked indigo body coiled almost as sinuously as Esmeralda's reptilian form. His teeth glittered as his lips cut in a smile. "What will you?" he asked me.
"Take us safely to the Wardens in Seattle," I said. "Now."
"You forgot to say painlessly," he said.
Too late.
Rashid wasn't one of the Djinn capable of transporting humans cleanly through the aetheric.... That was a skill only a very few possessed, and those who did hardly ever bothered to use it. What he could do, however, was pick up the entire van and move it at speed the mechanical beast was never meant to achieve--speed that flattened me back against the van's wall, drove the scream back into my chest. Bones creaked under the strain, and my cuts reopened, sending red trickles rippling not down, but up and back, driven by the incredible force of our passage.
It took seconds, but it felt like an eternity, trapped and terrified. When it passed, it did so suddenly, a deceleration that sent me slamming with stunning force against the metal van doors at the end, with a hail of unsecured metal tools around me. Rashid was kind enough to ensure that I wasn't killed by them, but he didn't bother with minor injuries--more cuts and bruises to add to my collection.
Esmeralda fared better, but only because she'd coiled herself tightly and wedged herself between the van's driver's seat and the bolted racks of tools. Even then, as my vision cleared, I saw that her nose was bleeding, and so were her ears. Even her eyes had turned ruddy in the whites.
I fumbled for the van's door and tumbled out onto a cold, hard surface--and almost off the edge of a roof twenty stories high. I caught myself in time, just barely, and slowly edged backward.
The van was precariously on the edge, well off the center of a yellow painted circle that was, I suddenly realized, meant for helicopters. The paint on the van had blistered and peeled away in places, and as I watched, it settled slowly down as all four tires deflated.
The driver's side door opened, and Luis fell out. Luckily, he was not so close to the edge of the roof as I'd been. He flopped over on his back, staring up at the sky, gasping hoarsely. Like Esmeralda, his face was gory with blood from ruptured blood vessels, and he coughed and spat up more red, then groaned.
"Ibby," I whispered. I managed to scramble upright, clinging a moment to the van's open back door, and then felt my way around to the passenger side.
Isabel lay across the seat, eyes tightly shut. Her face was paper white, and her nose was still bleeding. I fumbled in the glove compartment and found a box of tissues; I grabbed a handful and used them to mop the blood from her face. Her eyes fluttered open, and she took the tissues and pressed them to her nose herself.
We didn't speak. I smoothed her hair with one trembling hand and realized that I was still holding Rashid's bottle in the other, uncorked.
Rashid was standing just at the edge of the roof, balanced on his bare toes, staring down. He still hadn't bothered with clothing, and now he turned and faced me, hands on his hips. "No gratitude?" he asked. "I suppose I deserve that. But you're safe, and the Wardens are on the floors below. On their way to you now." In a sudden rush, he was standing at the van's door, leaning in on me. His eyes had gone from silver to an even more unsettling steel color. "A word of advice, Cassiel: You've woken a devil, and it will come for you. The Wardens won't welcome you."
"In the bottle," I said. "Now."
He grinned at me in a way that made me think of the amusement of cannibals, and vanished in a puff of soft blue smoke. Theatrical now. But not a liar, I thought.
I'd lost the foam sponge, but Esmeralda held it up as she leaned over the seat to look at Isabel. I nodded thanks and squeezed it into the neck of the bottle as Esmeralda asked, "How is she?"
I didn't need to answer. Isabel gave us a thumbs-up gesture, took the tissues from her nose, and sniffled cautiously.
"I think it's stopped," she said, and sat up. "Yeah, it's stopped. Es? Are you okay?"
"Five by five," Esmeralda said. "Your uncle don't look so good."
Luis was still lying on his back, staring at the cloudy sky. I took more tissues from the box and went to sit next to him. As he wiped the blood from his face, he said, "Next time, tell me about the goddamn Djinn in the goddamn bottle before you pull that shit." He sounded tired, but oddly calm. "Good call, though. We weren't going to make it. If ever there was a time for a panic button, that was it. How'd you get him?"
I
shrugged. Every muscle in my body ached now, as if it had been stretched on a rack. "Luck," I said. "And I think he let me, in a way. Rashid isn't one who's been longing for the end of the human race. In a strange sort of way, I think he likes you humans."
"You're one of us," Luis pointed out. "Which you keep forgetting, by the way. Doesn't make me feel better about our future."
"We don't have one," I said. "Any of us."
"Ouch." He rolled over on his side, then up to his feet, with an assist from me. "Damn, that feels about as good as I expected it would. What the hell did he do?"
"I think it's best we don't ask in detail. The Wardens are on the way--"
I was wrong, I realized, as the door on the other side of the roof banged open, and a stream of people poured out. Some were regular humans dressed in military uniforms and carrying weapons; some were unarmed, but far from regular. Power glimmered around them, even to the human eye. There were five Wardens, by the time they'd all arranged themselves around us, and an equal number of armed military personnel.
One of the Wardens stepped forward: male, older than Luis, with short black hair graying at the temples and a whippet-thin build. He had an unusual face, I thought--handsome, but with a strangely ironic twist, and very dark eyes. There was something very strong about him, and very dangerous. "Luis Rocha," he said, and turned that stare on me for a second. "Cassiel."
"Pleased to meet you," Luis said. He was leaning on me, but now he straightened and centered himself. "That's my niece Isabel in the van. And her friend Esmeralda."
The Warden inclined his head just a touch, not so much agreement as acknowledgment. "I'm Brennan," he said. "Nice parking job. Want to tell me exactly how you managed that? Because I'm pretty sure that only a Djinn could have blasted through our defenses and landed you so neat and pretty on our roof. Twenty-two floors up."
"I'm a Djinn," I said.
"Was," he corrected, and extended his hand. "Hand it over."
"What?"
"The bottle you used to get here," he said. "Hand it over, or you're going to get to street level without the benefit of the elevator." Brennan was, I realized, a Weather Warden, and a powerful one. I felt a sudden, damp gust of air slam against me--a bully's warning shove.
"I'm disappointed," Luis said. "Considering you've got all those shiny guns."
Brennan snorted. "Yes, Bre'r Rabbit, I'm going to walk you into the briar patch," he said. "Threatening Earth Wardens with guns. That's a winning strategy." He sounded genuinely amused, but in the next snap of a second, that was utterly gone. "Hand it over, or I'll hand you over to gravity, and I assure you, she isn't as kind as I am."
I smiled thinly. "No."
He cocked an eyebrow. "Excuse me, I think I heard you say no. I must have been wrong about that because--" Suddenly, the wind's shove turned into a persistent, strong push that, despite my efforts to stabilize, moved both Luis and me back over the roof toward the edge; not quite over, but the distance was halved before he finished his sentence. "Because that would really be very sad. I'd have a moment."
"So would I," Isabel said. I hadn't seen her get out of the van, but she was now standing on the other side and facing Brennan from that angle. "And you wouldn't like that, Mr. Brennan."
"Oh, it's just Brennan," he said. "You're a cutie, aren't you? Don't." Once again, his voice went from warm and oddly gentle to utterly cold in the whiplash space of an instant. "If you think you're going to whip up a little fiery surprise for me, I wouldn't. See Miss Walinsky, there?" He nodded to a slight young woman in a violently purple hoodie, with blue streaks in her hair and a ring through her nose. "Miss Walinsky makes your normal firestarters look like wet rags. I don't think either one of you wants to be getting into it. Portland already burned. We're trying to keep that kind of behavior to a minimum here, so put a cork in it. So to speak."
He returned his attention to me and held out his hand again. He didn't need to speak.
And neither did I. I was an arm's length from the edge, and now I took a giant step toward it, and held the bottle out, dangling it carelessly from two fingers over the drop. "I think we have room for negotiation," I said. "Don't we, Brennan? And the next time you threaten that child, I'll take it out of you in flesh."
His face went still and his eyes went empty, and for a second I couldn't tell what he was doing or thinking. Then it was as if he flipped a switch, and he was all smiles. The hand lowered back to his side. "That would be interesting," he said. "But let's put a pin in that for now, shall we? Why don't we get in out of the cold and have a nice, comfortable discussion? Always nice to see more Wardens. We damn well need the help. Okay, everybody stand down. Down. We're all friends here."
I sincerely doubted that, but he made gestures, and the armed military were the first to head back through the roof door. Then one by one the other Wardens followed. Miss Walinsky, I noticed, went next to last, and Brennan slowly backed up toward the exit while still carefully watching us. The pressure of wind against my body faltered, and stopped; I hadn't even realized how much there had been until he released it. For a Weather Warden, he had an impressive amount of power and control.
"Come on down," he said. "We've got coffee. And I promise, no more strong-arm tactics."
This wasn't because he had a moral aversion to them, I thought; it was because he was smart, and flexible, and he knew they wouldn't work. Not with me.
I exchanged a look with my partner, and Luis shrugged, then winced from the twinges in his strained muscles. "Unless we want to live up here, no point in hanging around," he said. "You realize he's going to try to commandeer that bottle for the cause, right?"
"Of course," I said. "I'd do the same in his place. But it's not going to happen. The Wardens don't do well with Djinn. They never have. And I'm not betraying Rashid to their tender mercies."
"Well, there's one good thing," Luis said, and put his arm around Isabel as she came to join us. The van shifted on its flat tires, groaning, as Esmeralda slithered her way out as well. "We're not on our own anymore. And there's coffee. I don't know about you, but I could use some of that."
I agreed about the coffee, at least.
In fact, the coffee was excellent, but as Luis murmured to me, it was Seattle; hardly extraordinary, given their obsession with caffeinated drinks, that they knew how to properly make it. I sipped a cup and let the warmth soak into my abused body; I was Warden enough to ensure that there were no subtle chemicals included to, say, put me to sleep in order to liberate Rashid's bottle. And Brennan, at least, wasn't stupid enough to try that.
Instead, he was trying persuasion. And logic.
"Look, we're happy you're here," he said as we took seats in what had once been some sort of corporate conference room; the chairs were opulent leather, the table large enough to seat thirty in comfort, and the lights were controlled from a remote that he operated with apparent expertise. On the far wall, a flat-screen television was tuned to a twenty-four-hour news channel. Both the chaotic footage and the scrawling text below reported mounting death tolls from the ongoing disasters around the country and the world. "As you can see, we need all the Warden power we can get."
I remembered the still, breathless morning, and my conviction that it was the last peace the human race would know.
It was a pity I'd been right.
Esmeralda had declined to come with us; she'd ignored the shocked looks of the Wardens, and the outright white-knuckled fear of the military, and slithered into an office. She ordered food, a lot of it, and water, and slammed the door. I wasn't expecting her to join the conversation anytime soon.
Isabel was with us, and the look she gave Brennan was unsettling. She didn't like him much, and I supposed that was Brennan's own fault, really--nevertheless, it was a pity. We needed to work together, and his actions had made that more difficult.
"Yeah, we were heading to join up with you," Luis said. "I got a call from Warden HQ. They wanted to divert us to the mine problem."
"A
h," Brennan said. He sounded more subdued than he had before. "They got split off from us heading out of Portland. Going into the tunnels was the only way they could get away, but once they were in, there was no getting out. Their Earth Warden was killed, and without him, they're stuck. They're alive, but they need help, and we need them."
"So you won't mind if we go on and do that, then."
"Not at all, but before you do, let's talk about--"
"We're not talking about the bottle," I interrupted. "Because it stays with me. There's no point in discussing it."
Brennan settled back in his chair, dark eyes fixed on me. "You want to explain to me exactly how you managed to get a Djinn in a bottle? Because that trick stopped working some time ago, as far as I was aware. Not that I'd test it out."
I stared at him, expressionless, until I knew I'd made him uncomfortable (though he was better at most in hiding it), then said, "All you need do is wait for a Djinn to try to kill you, have a bottle ready, and be able to hold him off long enough to repeat the ritual three times. Of course, your chances are somewhat slim."