Chill Factor (21 page)

I passed the broken-out window, caught a glimpse of Lewis standing stark-pale, shielding his
face against the fierce wind, blood-streaked from flying glass cuts.

He reached out to try to catch me, but it was too late. I felt the hot graze of his fingers against my bare ankle and then I was going up into the storm.

Taken hostage.

I had time to take about six breaths before I was too high up for it to matter, and then the gasping started. The elevator kept rising.
I can’t breathe
… No, I was breathing, but it wasn’t doing any good. Oxygen content too low. I was filling my lungs to no effect.
Create oxygen. You can do it
. Sure, I could; it was just a matter of forming new molecules out of the available surroundings, but God, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t…

I just couldn’t. For the first time, I found myself unable to do what I knew I had to do.

Which left dying. Normally, that would have been one hell of a motivator, but my brain was fraying into threadbare strands, and I couldn’t feel my body anymore. Dying was more like fading. It hardly hurt at all.

Something white exploded through me like a surge from a cattle prod.

No, please, I just want to rest… Tired…

Another white flare, crawling up my spine to catch fire in my brain. Panic. Panic from some part of me buried so deep it couldn’t even express itself in words, just flashes.

I opened my eyes.

It had hold of me. It had been a Djinn, once…I could still see the furious liquid-aqua eyes in that distorted, screaming face. Not a Djinn anymore. Not even an Ifrit, which was at least a coherent entity, a being. This was a tumour of magic, cancerously overgrown, swollen with…

…with a black, glowing Mark that burnt and rippled on its distended chest.

This wasn’t a Djinn anymore; it was a cocoon for a demon. I sensed the Djinn trapped within, but it was failing, dying, being consumed slowly and horribly by the
other
. It was desperate.

They were both desperate.

Black spots danced madly in my vision. Lack of oxygen. I blinked and tried to remember again how to fix that, but there were too many missing pieces, and it was much too difficult…

The Djinn opened its mouth, and I saw something black move inside it.

Crawling towards me.

I had a helpless, suffocating flashback of coming to on Bad Bob Biringanine’s couch, his cold blue eyes on me, a bottle full of demon in his hand.
Hold her down
, he’d snapped at his
Djinn, and pried my mouth open…

Maybe I didn’t mind dying so much, but I minded
that
. Without even a second’s thought, I grabbed at the energy around me, channelled it, and slammed it down in a hundred million volts, blue-white plasma, right on top of the thing that had hold of me.

At the last instant, I remembered that if I hit the Djinn, the Djinn was still holding
me
, and that meant I was going to fry with him. As the particle chains whipped together, as the charge began to flow like liquid through the ripped sky, I jammed together air molecules between us and sent them hurtling towards the Djinn, shoving him away. He wasn’t corporeal enough for it to move him far, or misted enough for it to make him disappear, but it gave me a precious foot of space as the sky turned white around me.

The lightning hit the Djinn with the force of a nuclear bomb, shredding it into shadows. I saw it even through closed eyes and covering hands, and then the shock wave hit, knocked me flying, and gravity started to claim me.

The sky was screaming.

I emerged from the clouds, falling like a star. Friction heated my skin, lashed my clothes into shreds around me. I was spinning helplessly, spiralling towards the brilliant spilt jewel box of Las Vegas.

One good thing: plenty of fresh air. I breathed, fast and hard, pumping up the oxygen in my bloodstream, and began working on slowing my fall. My head was clearer. It almost felt like a nightmare, except that nightmares generally didn’t come with partial blindness and singed hair. I still saw the after-images of the flash, the frozen, distorted scream of the demon-infected Djinn.

I hadn’t killed it. You don’t kill a thing like that, or at least humans don’t; David had succeeded in destroying a demon once, but he was a Djinn, and second only to Jonathan in power at the time.

I wasn’t slowing much, and the ground looked closer. My skin had gone numb from the cold rushing air. I’d stopped spinning, but I could feel the greedy suck of gravity pulling me down, and no matter how fast I grabbed for air to create a cushion it was too slow.

At this rate, I’d manage to break my fall just enough to die breathing through a tube in ICU.

I went up to the aetheric. Instinct and panic, rather than a conscious plan, like rats climbing the spars of a sinking ship…up there, the demon-infected Djinn was still raging, black and furious, and the whole plane was roiling with power.

Below me there were some brilliant lights – not the neon glare of the strip; the blaze of Wardens, channelling power.

One was an orange torch big enough to light up
the entire aetheric…that had to be Kevin. The other was a rich golden colour, like summer sun.

Kevin had Lewis’s stolen powers, and he could act if he wanted to, but I knew better than to assume he’d save me, even if he understood how. And the other Warden, glittering like summer, wasn’t a Weather Warden.

I was so screwed.

I sucked in a deep breath and concentrated,
hard
, managed to slow my descent enough that it didn’t feel like terminal velocity, but when I opened my eyes again I saw that the ground was rushing up, close, God, closer than I’d thought, and there was no way I could stop myself in time.

I wasn’t going to hit the street. I was heading for a stretch of desert somewhere near the airport. Dirt and thorn bushes and a death that was going to hurt – a lot.

A flash of lightning lit up the patch of pale sand that was going to be my final resting place.

I screamed, threw up my arms in a useless, instinctive move to cover my face, and hit the ground.

It was like hitting a bed full of the softest down feathers. It exploded up in a fluffy cloud, and I sank, slowly.

Drifted. I felt weightless, floating.

I felt oddly giddy, and realised I was holding my
breath; my eyes were squeezed tightly shut. When I opened them, I didn’t see anything. The air I gasped in tasted dusty.

It was dark.

I reached out and felt loose, drifting particles, fine as talcum, and then there was solid ground under my feet, lifting me up.

I emerged on my feet, borne out of the ground in a shower of powder-fine quicksand.

Oh. The other Warden had been an Earth Warden. Not to mention favourably inclined. I’d have to thank somebody, big-time…

I took one step forward, and keeled over to my hands and knees, coughing and gagging. Somebody patted me helpfully on the back, raising dust clouds.

I looked up to see the face of my saviour.

‘Marion?’ I paused to cough up some more of the desert. ‘Jesus—’

‘Breathe,’ she advised me.

Marion Bearheart looked pretty much exactly as she had back at the Denny’s, before I’d been driven off to die and go to Vegas…even down to the black-fringed jacket. Her hair was still neatly braided, tied off with turquoise-beaded accents. She looked untroubled by the storm, the demon-Djinn howling overhead, or the fact that I’d just plunged a couple of miles straight down, feet first into the ground like the stupidest Acapulco cliff diver ever.

‘Thanks,’ I finally managed to gasp out, and spat grit.
Uck
. I
so
needed a toothbrush. She gave me a faint smile. ‘What…how…’

She ignored me, looking up into the clouds. ‘Can you stop that thing?’

‘Not really.’ I wiped my hand across my mouth and struggled up to my feet. Bare feet.
Damn
. My clothes were in tatters. I looked like a reject from
Les Misérables
. ‘The Djinn up there has a Demon Mark.’

She nodded, as if she already knew that. It was always hard to tell just what Marion knew, because nothing really seemed to surprise her all that much. She took out a bottle from her pocket. It was simple, square, and looked sturdy enough to survive most ordinary disasters. Nice, thick glass. She held it balanced on her palm and looked up into the storm.

‘Keep it busy,’ she said. ‘Keep it off of me if you can. I’ll have to get it caged.’

The clouds boiled, as if they sensed what she was about to do. I heard the wind start to howl, and knew it was coming for us. I braced myself, but even so, the sheer fury of the blast that hit me almost knocked me over; Marion’s fringed coat flapped and belled, and her braid frayed into waving strands of grey hair. Sand whipped away from me in pale streams, and in the tangled glare of light on the other side of the fence, where Las Vegas
really began, I saw street lights pop and transformers spark.

Keep it off of her? Was she
kidding
?

I felt the storm turning its attention on us, and shook the residual haze away to focus on the aetheric. I couldn’t do much about the Djinn, but I could fight its effects…flip polarities, break up the wind shears. The lightning continued to flare, but I was able to keep it in sheets, high up in the ionosphere.

‘Be thou bound to my service!’ Marion shouted into the wind.

I felt it coming. ‘Hang on!’ I screamed, and threw up a wall of still air around the two of us, a lame-ass attempt at a shield that shattered under the fury of the Djinn’s attack. Marion clutched the bottle and held on to my arm; I wished there were something nice and solid for
me
to hold on to, like a mountain, because the gust that hit us even through my buffering knocked us back at least ten feet, lifted us off the ground, and flung us flat on our backs. I immediately scrambled up and grabbed for Marion. She still had the bottle.

‘Be thou bound to’ – the wind hit us again, lashing, and I felt the hot ozone burn of a lightning strike trying to form. I focused hard on it. Marion swallowed a mouthful of wind and choked out – ‘my service!’

Hurry the hell up
, I thought, but I didn’t have
enough time to say it, because a face roared down from the circling clouds and headed straight for me, accompanied by a curtain of sideways-blown rain that felt like tiny silver nails on my cold skin.

It opened its mouth, and I saw the demon in it, staring out, hungry for warm, fresh screams. I had another flashback to the black, slick taste of a demon squirming down my throat, burning itself into my flesh.
Never again
.

The Djinn whirled in the wind, picking up a lethal dose of rocks, sand, thorn-spiked branches, tin cans.

It was going to strip the skin right off of us.

I hit it with the strength of panic, compressing air molecules and freezing the rain, blowing it backward and into a shredding mini-tornado that trapped the Djinn inside.

‘Finish!’ I screamed. I didn’t know if Marion could even hear me; I couldn’t see her, in the confused darkness with my hair whipping wildly over my eyes.

Whether she could hear me or not, I definitely heard her.

‘Be thou bound to my service!’

It rang out, loud and clear, and there was a sudden sense of indrawn breath and a pressure drop so sharp it made my ears pop, and in a last, blue-white flash of lightning, I saw blackness streaming into the mouth of the bottle in Marion’s hand.

She slammed the cork down and collapsed to her knees, breathing in convulsive gasps. There was blood trickling from the corner of her mouth, and as she slipped the bottle into her coat pocket, she hugged her right arm close to her ribs.

The wind blew on for another few seconds, then faltered and began to calm down. Overhead, the bruise-coloured clouds, stained by sodium and neon, began to shift and break against each other.

‘You OK?’ I asked her. My legs were shaking, and I realised how cold I was. My heart galloped on, ignoring the message my brain was sending about the danger being over. Hearts are funny that way.
Prove it
, it was saying.

‘Yes,’ she said. She sounded faint and exhausted.

She had reason, I supposed – she hadn’t been blown a couple of miles up and tossed straight down, but she definitely had carried her weight. Not to mention saved my ass from pancaking on the desert floor. ‘Broken rib, I think. It’ll mend. The boy did this, you know. Broke the bottle, freed the Demon Marked Djinn. He has to be stopped.’

I extended a hand. She needed a lot of help getting up. With her hair blown into a wild tangle, she looked much less like the intimidating Marion I knew and feared.

‘How did you get here?’ I asked. The faint smile
he gave me had a tinge of pain to it.

‘Never mind that now.’ She probed her side, and winced. ‘You need to get moving. They’ll be looking for you, and I’d rather not take on anyone else just now, if you don’t mind. If you’re going to stay here, we could use your help. The boy needs to be neutralised. Soon.’

She didn’t look up to it; that was certain. I held her dark eyes for a few seconds.

‘I’m going there now. Listen, if I leave you here, will you be OK?’

The smile etched deeper and spawned little lines of amusement at the corners of her eyes. ‘Joanne, I’ve survived far worse than you. And I’m not so old as all that.’

To prove it, she pulled free of my grip and straightened up. It almost looked credible. Overhead, the clouds scudded fast, moving south, as the wind pushed and searched for its path.

Moonlight wandered through a slit in the clouds, and bathed us in a circle of silver.

‘Get moving. I’ll see you later,’ Marion said, and turned and walked away into the desert.

I limped barefooted through sand, wincing at the rocks and stabbing thorns, and came up against an eight-foot razor-wire-topped cyclone fence.

‘Great.’ I sighed.

I was
really
starting to miss being a Djinn.