Firestorm (13 page)

Without warning, I fetched up against something cool and unyielding, and slapped my hand against it in frustration. I felt it give, and slapped harder. My palm stung from the impact, but it pushed at least two or three inches in.

I'd found the way out.

I concentrated all my will, all my force, and kicked.

Half of me slid through the barrier, instantly and bitterly cold and wet; I screamed in frustration, because I had no leverage to get the rest of me through. I wiggled. That gained me maybe an inch. Two inches. I pulled harder, and my left hand, and the bundle of the shirt, tumbled out into the thin, wind-whipped air.

The Demon Mark went insane when its food supply cut off, and the shirt might as well not have been there. It seethed right through the fabric with lightning speed and wrapped tentacles around my hand.

I screamed and reached for power, but what I had was useless for fighting something like this. I remembered how it felt—the sickening, invasive throb of the thing squirming down my throat. The agony as it set up its tentacles buried deep inside, feeding from me and pumping up my body's production of power, until my body simply couldn't survive.

No. Never. I don't mind dying, but I'm not dying of this.

I grabbed it with my bare right hand and threw it. Tried to, anyway, but it stuck to my skin, pulsing, changing, shifting. Crawling and writhing.

I screamed again, soundlessly, trying desperately to shake it off. I could feel it testing layers of skin, trying to find a way in. It could burrow, of course, but it was lazy and fat. It wanted an easier path.

I'm not going to make it.

“We are sealing the break!” a voice shouted, startlingly close to my ear, and I felt something haul at me with so much strength, I felt tendons creak in my joints. I slid greasily the rest of the way through the barrier, still frantically trying to scrape the Demon Mark off my hand.

Whoever had done me the favor of pulling me free let go as soon as I was out of the milky column of power. Might have been Rahel; it was hard to tell because the night was a muddle of rain, lightning, thick spongy cumulonimbus clouds piled into an iron-colored anvil.

I hung there for an instant, and then I felt gravity take hold. I fell like Wile E. Coyote holding an ACME anvil, flailing, screaming, my hair snapping like a wet black banner behind me. I couldn't tell how far the ground was, but if the clouds were cumulonimbus, I was probably at least thirty thousand feet up. I tried to take a breath and got nothing but sharp, empty-tasting air. Too thin to sustain me. I shut out the sickening sense of the falling, the growing terror of the Demon Mark still trying to enter my body, and focused hard on gathering the available oxygen into a cushion around me. Tricky, when you're falling. You have to match the rate of descent at a molecular level, and that's not as easy as it sounds.

I scraped together enough for a breath. Not enough to cushion my fall, and I was still accelerating. I knew enough about terminal velocity not to want to experience it firsthand.

I was enveloped by a chilly mist as I entered the cloud base, and was buffeted by increasingly strong winds as the atmosphere thickened around me. I spread out my arms and legs, trying to slow myself as much as possible, and started the hard work of creating a parachute. Oh, it's theoretically possible. We'd talked about it once in a long-ago classroom, and it hadn't seemed so tough back then, when I was younger and not free-falling out of the sky.

I hoped these weren't low-lying clouds. If they were, by the time I had visibility, it might be too late…but deploying my “parachute” too early would be just as bad, because the turbulence would start to rip into it as soon as I created the complex structure of fixed molecules. Theoretically, the technique I was going to use would allow the air itself to form into flexible material, and act like a gliding parachute.

Theoretically.

I gasped in another shallow breath of air and saw my left hand in another white-hot flash of lightning. The Demon Mark was still clinging to it, wet and black, seeping slowly into my flesh through the pores. Once it was under my skin, it could go anywhere. Sink its tentacles into my brain and lungs and heart. Embed itself so thoroughly that even trying to remove it would mean madness and death.

I glimpsed something shining through the clouds to my right, flaring aetheric-hot, then ice-cold; the column of power was smaller, but it was still fountaining up into the stratosphere. I slid that direction by folding my right arm in, a kind of Superman one-fisted attitude. Good thing I'd done skydiving once or twice in the past. At the time, it had just been for fun, but at least I remembered the basics of maneuvering in free fall.

I spread-eagled again when I got close to the column. The last thing I wanted was to fall in there again. I extended my Demon Marked right hand toward the flow, enough so that it could feel the tantalizing warmth.

Go on. Go for it.

It stirred and unraveled in a lazy black twist, long and sinuous. The battering of the air didn't seem to affect it at all. It unwrapped itself smoothly from my outstretched, trembling arm and reached out toward the column of power, which had started to fade and was coming in pulses like irregular heartbeats. Rahel—or whatever Djinn had saved me—had been as good as her word. The break between the worlds was starting to seal.

Timing was everything. If I waited too long, the Demon Mark would be drawn back through the barrier. If I broke off too soon, it would simply wrap around my hand again, and I could kiss my ass good-bye.

Problem was, I didn't control the timing. I just had to hope that I could sense the second that the column started to shut down.

The Demon Mark hesitated, torn between the fast-unraveling aetheric updraft and the less powerful but more certain warmth of my body.

I felt a sudden icy sensation sweep across me, and thought,
now
, and shook my hand violently. The Demon Mark broke free, and it had to make a choice.

It went for the column…and a sit stretched its black tentacles out, the geyser gave one last, brilliant pulse, and died.

The Djinn had been successful. The energy buffet was closed…and I was now the only Happy Meal available.

I curled myself into a ball and dropped, thinning the air ahead of me to make it a quicker descent.

When I uncurled again, heart hammering wildly, I broke through the bottom of the cloud cover and
Oh, crap.

Low-lying clouds.

I snapped the structure of my air chute together, and jerked to a sudden, neck-wrenching stop that turned into a slow downward spiral as the air chute's molecules—held together by desperate force of will—began to warm from the friction and spin apart.

I was still going too fast.

And there were power lines coming up.

I let the chute collapse in on itself while I was still twenty feet up, tucked and hoped breathlessly that the mud down there would be soft enough to prevent any serious injuries.

I don't remember hitting the ground, only blinking water out of my eyes and staring up at the low, angry clouds, which glowed with continued frantic flashes of lightning.

I raised my right hand and stared at it. No sign of the Demon Mark, though in all the confusion it could be just a stealthy creep away….

“Mom?” Imara's face appeared over mine, ghost-pale, eyes as reflective as a cat's. “Please say something.”

“Stay still.” Another voice, this one male and as familiar to me as breathing. “You've got some broken ribs. I'll have to fix them, and it's going to hurt.”

I blinked rain out of my eyes and turned my head. David was crouched down next to me, rain slicking down his auburn hair and running in rivulets down his glasses. He looked miserable. Poor thing.

“Demon Mark,” I said.

“I think she hit her head,” Imara said anxiously.

“No, she didn't,” David said, and reached over to wipe mud from my face with a gentle hand. “You're in shock, Jo.”

I shook my head, spraying mud and water like an impatient sheepdog. “No! It was feeding off the power geyser. I got it out of there, but it's still around. Watch yourselves.” Nothing Demon Marks loved more than a warm Djinn, and so far as I knew, once Djinn were infected, there was no way to cure them. “Get out of here.”

David said, “Imara, go.”

“But—”

“Did you hear me?” His voice was level as a steel bar. She stared at him, then at me, and then misted away.

“You, too,” I said. “Get the hell away from here. Go.”

“In a minute. First, you need some help.”

I nodded, or tried to. The mud around me was cold and gelatinous, and I spared a single thought for just how trashed my clothes were. And my shoes. What had happened to my shoes? Oh man. I'd loved those shoes.

I was focusing on that when David took hold of my shattered arm and pulled, and the universe whited out into a featureless landscape, then went completely black.

 

Somebody had put my shirt back on. I hoped it was David. It was nice to think of him dressing me. Nicer to think of him undressing me, though….

I opened my eyes to road noise and vibration, and the pleasant daydream of David's hands on me faded away. My whole body felt like a fresh bruise. The side of my head was pressed against cool glass, and I had a wicked drool issue going on; I raised a hand, wiped my chin, and blinked away dizziness.

I was in the Camaro, and we were hauling ass for…somewhere. The road was dark, only a couple of headlights racing through the gloom and the wavering dashed yellow stripe to guide us. If there was moonlight, it was behind clouds. I could still feel energy rumbling in the atmosphere.

“What?…” I twisted in my seat—which was, fortunately, the passenger side—and looked at the driver. “Imara!”

My daughter—disorientation still followed the thought—glanced at me. She looked pale in the dashboard lights. “I was starting to worry.”

“Where's—?”

“Father? He was with us for a while, but he had to go. Djinn business. I think it was about the Demon Marks.” Like her father, she had the trick of driving without paying the slightest attention to the road, and kept staring right at me. “Are you better?”

I didn't feel better. No, I felt like I'd been boiled, steamed, deboned, and thrown out of a plane at thirty thousand feet. With a collapsing parachute. David had healed my broken bones, but the remainder of it was my problem. “Peachy,” I lied. “How long have I been out?”

It took her a second, juggling the human concept of time in her head. “Four hours, I think. You hit the ground hard. Father did what he could to help you. He wasn't sure it would be enough.” Her hands kept steering the car accurately, even while we took a curve. “Are you sure you're all right?”

Something came to me, a little late. “And how exactly do you know how to drive a car?”

Imara blinked a little and shrugged to show she didn't understand the question.

“Kid, you've been alive for, what, a couple of days? Did you just wake up knowing everything that you need to know? How does that work?”

Another helpless lift of her shoulders. “I don't know. If I had to guess, I'd say I know everything my parents knew. So I benefit from your life, and Father's. It saves time.”

I remembered Jonathan sending me to Patrick, the only other Djinn who'd really had to learn how to become one from scratch—who'd been brought over from human by another Djinn, rather than created the old-fashioned way, out of apocalypse and death. I'd had to take baby steps, learning how to use what I'd been given, because David hadn't been able to transfer that life experience to me the way he had done with Imara.

But the idea that your daughter knows
everything
you knew? Not very comforting. There were plenty of moments in my life that I'd just as soon
not
share with my offspring….

I pulled myself away from that, pressed my hand to my aching head, and asked, “Where are you heading?”

“Maine?…”

David had set her on the road to Seacasket, at least. And apparently global positioning was one of the things that she'd inherited from him.

I nodded and tried stretching. It didn't feel great. “What about the accident? Was everybody all right?”

“Accident?” She was either playing dumb, or all that carnage and twisted metal had meant little to her.

“There was a wreck—there was a—” A little girl. Wandering, bloodied, scared. I'd been trying to save her, hadn't I? My memory was fuzzy, tied up with images that didn't make any sense of opalescent swirls and burning and falling….

“I don't know,” she confessed, and chewed her lip. I knew that gesture. It had taken me dedication to get over the same one. She was my kid, all right. “I didn't know it was important or I would have paid more attention.”

“Not
important
?” I let that out, accusation-flavored, before I could stop myself. Imara turned her attention back to the road. Not to focus on her driving, just to avoid my censure.

And then she deliberately turned back, eyes level and completely alien. “I should have paid more attention, but you should leave that behind you now. What Father's asking you to do is more important, and you can't be distracted by individual lives now.” She shook her head. “It's also very, very dangerous, what he's asking of you. I don't like it.”

“I just got my synapses fried in a lightning strike, and then I fell out of the sky. Dangerous is sort of a sliding scale with me.”

“Mom!” She sounded distressed. Angry. “Please understand: Whatever you've faced before, this is
different
, and you need to stay focused on the goal. I know that's hard for you, but if you worry about saving every individual, you'll lose them all. Let other people do their part. This is Djinn work, and it isn't the kind of thing humans are built to do.”