Firestorm (15 page)

Imara's steps slowed and stopped, and I stopped with her. She was staring at the ground, and as I watched, she lowered herself to a kneeling position on the gravel, both hands upraised, palms up.

“Imara?” No answer. “Imara, where do I go?”

She was lost in prayer, or whatever it was. I waited for a few seconds, then looked around. Up ahead, there was a big white mausoleum. The name over the lintel read
GRAYSON
. The doors were shut.

I took a couple of steps toward it, gravel crunching briskly.

Imara's voice froze me.
“Don't move!”

I teetered, then caught my balance and glanced around. There was nobody else in evidence. Just us, the squirrels, and some scolding birds who didn't think this was an appropriate place for us to be strolling.

“What is it?” I asked, trying not to move my lips. And then I realized that there were two Djinn standing, very silently, watching me. They blended in so perfectly, they'd been in plain sight the entire time…. One was as pale as marble, with flowing white hair, dressed in shades of white and gray—an angel off its marble headstone, only with eyes the color of rubies. The other one was standing under a tree, and maybe I was crazy, but I could have sworn that her skin was dappled in camouflage patterns that moved and shifted with the wind.

As if they'd gotten the same message, both the Djinn started moving toward me. Ruby-red eyes gleaming.

Imara swung her head to stare fiercely at me. “Mom, dammit, if you're going, go!”

She put her hand in the small of my back and shoved. I lunged forward, off-balance, and then broke into a sprint. I dodged right, but the camouflage Djinn sprang forward like a tiger, snarling, and caught me with a backhanded blow across the face.

It was like slamming full speed into a metal bar. I staggered and went down, my head full of pain and fury, and some instinct made me roll out of the way just as a clawed hand slashed at my midsection.

“Mom!”

A blur hit the Djinn and rolled it away, snarling and clawing. Imara. I got to one knee, swaying, then fought my way upright. I tasted blood and spat out a mouthful on the cheerful green grass.

A heavy gray hand fell on my shoulder and spun me around. Up close, the tombstone-angel Djinn looked utterly terrifying. Remorseless, remote, and deadly.

It carried a dagger. Not metal…it didn't flash in the sunlight as it lifted toward me. Some kind of stone. I screamed and backpedaled, summoning up a burst of wind to smack the thing in the chest.

It was a Djinn. It should have been thrown back, because Djinn are essentially air…only the air didn't come at my command. I could feel it
trying
to, but there was something else holding it in place. Something far, far larger than I was.

Imara was right. Running was a really good plan.

I was disoriented, but survival was a great motivator; I dodged through the tombstones, moving as fast as I could. Leaping over what I couldn't avoid. The iron-bar fence was ahead of me, topped with Gothic triangular spikes; no way was I vaulting that thing. I couldn't count on the wind to give me any lift, either. I had to make it to the gates.

It occurred to me that the Djinn were
playing
with me. Robbed of my Warden powers, I didn't have any reasonable way to fight. Imara was running interference, but I could tell at a glance that she was overmatched with a single opponent, much less two.

The Djinn were determined to drive us out of the cemetery, which meant that this was the place I needed to be.

I headed for the gates at a dead sprint, reversed in a spray of gravel, and yelled, “Imara! I need a path!”

She was neck-deep in tiger-fighting, but she ripped free, flashed across the grass, and tackled the tombstone-angel Djinn into the trees. The tiger-Djinn was momentarily occupied with getting up.

I had a clear white gravel path leading to the center of the cemetery, and I took it at a pace that would have clocked in respectably at the Olympics. Panic and raw determination gave me wings, and I flashed past the tiger-Djinn. It grabbed a handful of my hair, but not enough to stop me; I sobbed breathlessly at the agony as it ripped loose from my scalp, and I hit the doors of the mausoleum hard.

They opened, spilling me inside.

I continued to fall forward.

Kept on falling.

No way was it this far to the floor…

I opened my eyes and looked. I was floating in midair, or falling, or something—I
felt
like I was falling, but then that abruptly fixed itself, and my feet settled onto the ground. Or what felt like ground. There was no sky, no ground, and every side of the room looked exactly the same. It was dim, gray, and lit by what looked like a firepit in the center.

Nothing else.

I waited, heart hammering, for some kind of a response. For the Djinn outside to come howling in here and chop me to screaming pieces.

Outside, I heard nothing. An ominous nothing.

This place had a sense of energy in it, something primal and deep. I tried going up to the aetheric to take a look, and for a second I thought that I'd just simply failed, because everything looked just the same.

Then I realized that the
room
hadn't changed, but that
I
was drawn in typical glowing aetheric shades and shadows. The room was somehow real on the aetheric plane, too.

I'd never seen anything like that, outside of the house where Jonathan had lived out on the edges of nowhere and nothing.

I felt a hot surge of anguish, thinking of Imara potentially fighting for her life outside, while I waited in here for…for what? What made me think the Oracle would even notice me, much less deign to talk to me?

Something floated lazily at the corner of my eye, a barely seen shadow, and I turned my head, frowning.

The Demon Mark.

It had followed me.

I backed off, terrified, trying to think of a single thing I could do. Nothing came to mind. It had me cornered. There was no place to run, and certainly no place to hide, unless I planned to jump into the fire….

The Demon Mark floated toward me, then veered suddenly off target and plunged headlong into the fire.

I heard the fire
scream.

I took a big step back from the open pit, heart racing. The fire blazed up a little, flickering red and orange. No discernible source. It looked, smelled, and radiated warmth like a genuine flame.

What had I done? Oh, my God…the fire. The fire was the Oracle, and I'd brought the Demon Mark right to it.

The screaming ratcheted up to a level that made me clap my hands over my ears. I blinked away tears. The incredible, heartrending
pain
in the sound…The Oracle was in trouble. Serious trouble. I had no idea what to do. I'd temporarily stymied the Demon Mark once, but twice was pushing it, and there was no handy geyser of power around for me to use as bait. The Oracle was the most powerful thing in the room.

The fire suddenly blazed up and out, fanning my face with heat; I scrambled backward and got to my feet. As I hovered there, torn between a total lack of options, a hand reached out of the center of the flame, and flailed on the stone floor. Groping for my help. It wasn't human, exactly—it was molten, white-hot, with curved talons instead of fingernails. Where it touched the floor, stone smoked and melted. Claws left inch-deep channels in the softening granite.

The screaming ate at my soul. I had to do something.
Anything.

The hand flailed again, fingers opening and closing in agony. It was a stupid thing to do, but I couldn't stand being the cause of this. I dropped to my knees, sucked in a steadying breath, and tried to remember what Lewis had shown me back at the Wardens' offices.

And then, before I could think of the ten thousand reasons to stop, I reached out and grabbed the wrist of that flaming, white-hot hand. The hand instantly twisted, and closed around my forearm. Talons dug in, cruelly sharp and hot as acid. I hauled, hard, and felt something pulling back, trying to yank me inside that searing fire. I could smell the greasy stink of hair starting to fry. My hair.
God,
I hated fire.

I pulled harder, with every muscle in my body, and I got the Oracle's head and shoulders out of the bonfire. It was human
ish
, if not human in form. Broad, strong shoulders. Skin—if you could call it skin—that had the burnished metallic look of a statue, but throbbed with living, swirling patterns of heat. Tongues of flame rose off of his back, his outstretched arms…

When he lifted his head, still screaming, I saw the Demon Mark, flailing away on the surface of his molten skin. Trying to eat through and devour him. The Mark was turning restlessly, twisting. Where it touched him, I could see a hideous blackened patch. It seemed to be spreading. The thing was toxic to him.

If he was connected to the Mother—connected directly, in a way we mere humans weren't, and more than the average Djinn—how much more damage would this do once it got into her bloodstream? I had a sudden, sickening comprehension of just how good a deed I'd done earlier in evicting the Demon Mark from the geyser of power outside of New York.

Until I'd screwed it up here.

The Oracle was looking at me. There was a suggestion of eyes in that heat-blurred face. The scream continued, but there was even more of an edge to it now, as if he was trying to convince me.

Beg me.

I really wasn't the self-sacrificing type. If somebody had told me that I needed to voluntarily take a Demon Mark a year ago to save the world, I'd have burned rubber to get away from the idea. But things had changed.
I
had changed. I had a daughter out there, and people I loved.

I had too much to lose to walk away and save my own skin. And besides, this was my screwup, and I had to make it right.

I reached out and put my hand flat over the Demon Mark. This time, I did it deliberately.

I gagged at the squirming cold touch of it, but I didn't pull away. The flames beating hot against my skin didn't burn me—I hung on to enough of my limited Fire Warden ability to manage that—but I felt the Oracle's claws raking the tender skin of my left forearm. I focused on that pain, clear and pure, and let it flow through me to wall me off from the horrible sensation of the Demon Mark squirming under my fingers.

No way was I more powerful than the Oracle. The Demon Mark ignored me. It always, inevitably went with the bigger bonfire….

I was going to have to do this the hard way.

I gagged at the thought, but I closed my hand into a fist around the Demon Mark—in reality and in the aetheric—and began to pull it off.

It felt cold and slimy as a handful of thrashing worms, and it didn't want to let go. It stretched like rubbery elastic, and then it came loose with a sudden, wet smack in my hands. If I hadn't kept hold of it on the aetheric, it wouldn't have worked. If I hadn't been as strong a power as I was, it wouldn't have worked, either, but the Demon Mark decided to let go of the tough-shelled Oracle in favor of a softer target.

The Oracle collapsed facedown on the floor, and the saw-edged screaming came to a halt. I heard my sobbing breaths echoing in the room, and then fire exploded out around his body in a blinding white blaze, hot enough to singe my hair and drive me all the way back against the cool stone wall. I squeezed my eyes shut because it was getting brighter, and brighter, and I could still see the glow even through my tight-clenched lids. I closed my fist over the nauseatingly eager squirm of the Demon Mark. It was burrowing under my skin, sliding cold through my pores. It was happening faster this time, and the sensation was so horrible that I was weeping, sobbing, shaking with the urge to fling the thing away from me. It was like being stabbed with a wet, slimy knife in exquisitely slow motion.

I had to get rid of this thing, even if it meant losing my hand.

I banged through the door of the mausoleum and stumbled back out into the brilliant sunshine. It felt cold as ice to me, after the heat inside. I kept my fist clenched and staggered out, trying to think of something,
anything
I could do.

Lightning. It's the visual signal of an energy shift between potential and actual energy, with light and heat as the by-products. Billions of electrons have to line up in a chain for lightning to actualize, and because like draws like, a chain forming out of the sky will be drawn to a chain building up out of the ground, and when that last electron snaps into place, and the energy transfers, it has so much power that it can vaporize steel, for a fraction of a second, at least.

It
might
be able to stun, or kill, a Demon Mark…if I could manage a direct hit.

I pushed at the artificial tension holding the sky together overhead. The power controlling it was vast and hard-edged, but fragile. I battered at it with the strength of desperation until I felt it crack, and saw energy flare up among the gathering clouds.

Enough. More than enough.

Oh
God,
this was going to hurt….

In one desperate wrench, I grabbed the Demon Mark, ripped it loose, and threw it on the ground. It seemed unnaturally heavy. It hit the grass and immediately began to scuttle back toward me, moving like a spider on PCP.

It was too close, but I triggered the lightning anyway as the thing leaped for me.

You don't see it, when that kind of power hits that close to you; you feel the overwhelming burn, and for a few seconds afterward, you really can't be sure that the lightning didn't actually hit you, because the coronal effect is so strong.

So it took a few seconds for my mind to fight off the sound, light, and pressure, of the near-miss and reconstruct from the evidence what had happened. There was a tree on fire, five feet away. The top half of it was charred black, and part of it had been blown clean off. Limbs had been blown off and were still flaming on the green, green graves.