Heat Stroke (32 page)

“At Jonathan's house.”

He looked ill. “They'll destroy her.”

“Actually, they've got bigger problems to worry about just now. Like me.” I left him and moved around to the front of the couch.

Yep. There he was, my teen Nero-in-training, crashed out in a sprawl on the leather couch, mouth gaping to show poor dental hygiene. He was snoring.

Also smiling.

I leaned over and whispered, “Kevin? Wake up.”

No response. Damn. I'd drawn on his own power to put him in this trance. Was it something I could snap him out of? I hadn't been thinking that far ahead, I had to admit. I reached out, grabbed, and shook him. His oily hair flopped back and forth, and he snorkled a breath. His eyelids fluttered.

Nothing.

“Kevin!” I screamed, and shook him again. “Damn, what do I have to do? Wake up!”

He mumbled something, smacked at me ineffectually with a clumsy hand, and tried to turn over.

I grabbed him and kissed him. After the first few slack seconds, I felt him kiss me back.

Ewwwwwwww.Not that boys his age were great kissers in general, but he had a
lot
to learn.
No
style points. I broke free before the wiggling worm of his tongue got too far into my mouth and shook him again, for emphasis.

His eyes were open, but cloudy. Cleaned up, he probably wouldn't be half bad, but the fact was he wasn't cleaned up, or even clean. The body odor alone made me think of places without running water or inside plumbing.

“Wha?” The word was garbled, but still semicoherent. I yanked him up by the grimy T-shirt to a sitting position. “ . . . gone.”

“Shut up and listen,” I said. “I need your help.”

“. . . help?” He blinked slowly, like an owl. His pupils were way too large. “Why?”

“Philosophy some other time. Just repeat what I say. Got it?”

“Repeat.”

“Very good.” I resisted the urge to pat him on the
head, mostly because I really didn't want to get greasy. “I order you to destroy the storm.”

“Mmmm?” His eyes were glazing over. I pinched him hard enough to make a welt, and he yelped and cleared up. “What?”

“I order you to destroy the storm. Say it.”

Oops. I'd woken him up too much. “Why?” The vague look was vanishing like snow under an Arizona summer sun. “You. You . . . you tricked me.”

“Just say it.”

“Or?” His jaw hardened as muscles clenched. He was willing himself awake, and all of the nice happy thoughts he'd been dreaming were slipping away. “You'll put me to sleep again?” I'd liked him better asleep. Who wouldn't? “No.
I'm
your, ah, master. You do what
I
say.”

“Then tell me to destroy the storm.”

His eyes narrowed behind the pretty, girl-length lashes. “Why should I? What's in it for me?”

“Oh, I don't know . . . survival? Can't you
feel
this?” But then I realized that of course he couldn't; for him, like for most people, the storm was just a storm. Bad, yes. A killer. But not sentient, not rabid and scenting fresh meat. Not
alive
. His talent was fire. “Shit.
Please,
Kevin. Do one decent thing in your life. I'm begging you. Let me do this.”

He kept staring at me for a few seconds. My bottle was clenched in his fist, my soul in his control, and the lives of thousands hanging in the balance.

“Fine,” he finally said. “Go destroy the damn storm.”

I was almost out of there when he added, “And take me with you.”

 

I materialized back in the lobby at the Secretariat tower to find it mostly deserted. Martin Oliver was still there; so were some of the security guards. Earth Wardens were shouting to each other over the steady shriek of wind, and a continuous silver curtain of rain was slicing in through broken windows. Everyone on the east side of the building was out, now. The storm had been continuing its grenade attack. The marble was a minefield of ice and glass shards, water, and blood.

Kevin was whooping in my ear. He liked aetheric travel a little too much, even with the smothering blanket of coldlight—
ah, that's right,
I remembered, he couldn't see it. None of them could.

“That is so
cool
!” he crowed, and did a spastic little dance on the slippery floor. He stopped, stared around. “Jeez. You weren't kidding.”

“No,” I said. I was boiling over with power now, rich red power that pulsed in time with my fast, adrenalized heartbeats. “Stay here.” I walked over to the nearest broken window.

“Baldwin!” Martin Oliver yelled. I looked back at him and let my eyes flare silver. For the first time that I could remember, he looked outright surprised, but he recovered in seconds. “Be careful.”

I raised a hand in thanks, or farewell, or whatever, and stepped out into the storm.

Different now than it had been, back in my just-plain-girl days. The storm was a delicate latticework of interconnecting forces, with the coldlight swarming around it like a bloodstream, feeding it, insulating it, holding it together. I didn't get a sense that the
light itself was hostile—just mindlessly opportunistic. The storm was alive, therefore it was capable of being parasitized. Eventually, the coldlight would probably grow out of control and consume too much energy and start the chain reaction that would remove the threat—but I had no idea how long that would take. Too long, probably. No way could I count on it to happen in time.

I spread my arms and rose into the clouds, trailing blue sparks like a comet trail. Where I went, the coldlight flocked. The storm sensed me immediately, and recognized a threat; lightning began to stab through me, millions of volts of electricity attempting to explode every cell in my body. I bled the charge off, used it to draw in more coldlight. An ever-increasing spiral of blue, with me at the center.

Up, climbing the sheer gray tower of the anvil cloud. Up into the cold, the thin air, the mesosphere, where if the storm could be said to have a heart, the heart resided.

The storm responded by battering me with ice and more lightning. Plasma balls formed white-hot and flung themselves at me, but the command Kevin had given me was utterly straightforward and the power being pulled out of him was staggering. I just flicked the St. Elmo's fire away, bent lightning bolts at right angles, and reached for the vulnerable beating heart of the beast.

A scream stopped me. A piercing, panicked cry that went right through me like a sword thrust.

My master's voice. “Come back! Oh God, come back
now!
Right now!” Kevin sounded scared—worse than scared, horrified.

I could have gone, but I didn't have to. I had the choice, because I hadn't fulfilled the first command he'd given me; the two commands effectively canceled each other.

Free will. Go back and baby-sit Kevin, or kill this thing and save thousands—maybe tens of thousands . . .

I didn't think there was a choice. I ignored the screaming—even though it continued, sawing right through me, body and soul—and focused on the storm instead.

I reached in and grabbed the core process that was at the center of the giant. It wasn't much, really; some overexcited molecules, a pattern of reflecting and replicating waveforms that perfectly reinforced each other. The tough part wasn't disrupting it, it was finding it and reaching it.

The Wardens couldn't see it, because it was built out of nothing but coldlight.

I reached in and took hold of it, drew the sparks to me, and consumed them the way they consumed others.
We are all born from death.
Patrick had told me that. I hadn't realized he'd meant it literally.

The winds continued to blow, but the waveforms fragmented and began to cancel each other instead of resonating. Clouds began to break apart instead of pull inward. Temperatures began to cool here, warm there, chaos theory taking over.

It would storm for a while, but it was just another freak weather story now, one of those things that would play on CNN and the Weather Channel for the next few days, and be forgotten by everybody
except a few cab drivers and weather conspiracy nuts who believed the CIA was behind it all. Rain, hail, lightning. The usual stuff.

I let the power of it soak into me, reviving me, and then slowly drifted back down toward the UN Building. It was hard to see through the swirling, choking mass of coldlight that was being pulled toward me but I could see the place needed about a hundred new windows. The people weren't so lucky. As I folded back into flesh, blood, bone, and all the necessary fabric accessories, I saw that there were still a lot of people down on a floor that was awash with inches of rainwater. There had been blood, but it had been diluted and flushed by the storm; now that the rain was abating, some of the wounded were leaking red puddles.

Some, more ominously, were not.

I completed the transformation back into human form, felt my hair fall silky and straight over my shoulders, and for the first time thought,
I have it right. Finally.

And then I realized what I was looking at. I'd left Marion, Martin Oliver, and a few other Wardens tending to the wounded, trying to get them to safety . . . and there was nobody moving now.

Instead, there were more bodies.

I skidded to a stop next to a crumpled form in rain-soaked brown suede. Marion's hair looked dark and thin, pounded by the storm's violence; she was still and quiet and pale. I checked her pulse and found her heart beating, though slowly. Martin Oliver was down, too, all his grace and fearless strength
stripped away. His shirt was soaked through pink, and underneath there was a raw, four-inch-long tear through his sternum. Glass. He'd been skewered.

He didn't have a pulse at all. Just a vast, echoing silence.

I looked up as lightning flashed white, smelled hot ozone and cooling blood, and realized that someone was missing, someone I'd left behind.

Kevin.

I misted and felt that gravitational tug, down and to the left—he was still in the UN Building, but somewhere at least a level below. I sank through concrete, steel, cold empty space, more concrete and steel . . .

. . . to a hallway that lit up in Oversight like Broadway.
Lots
of power rattling around in here, wild and barely contained; the place was a blizzard of sparkles. The barely felt tug of Kevin's presence led me down through the deserted corridor, around a corner, and I saw a sudden flare of auras ahead, so bright they even punched through the curtain of glitter. I pulled back, still in mist form, and tried to get a sense of where I was and what was going on.

Kevin was definitely up ahead. So was Lewis. I couldn't tell if Jonathan was there or not, Djinn auras were all over the place, like wildfire . . .

Where the
hell
was I? I slowly misted forward again, found a convenient recessed doorway, and came down into skin to take a look.

At the end of the hall was a huge shiny door, like the kind you see in the movies when there's something
really
cool to steal. It was standing half-open.
There was a body lying a couple of feet away, human, bleeding hideously into the carpet from what looked like a fatal slash to the throat. The security guard was still breathing, but just barely . . . As I watched, his eyes glazed over, and the last whisper rattled out of his throat.

I heard voices, and carefully moved out of the cover of the doorway, hugging the wall. Whoever was there, they were inside the vault.

Lewis's voice. “—don't have to do this. Let him go.” Lewis sounded calm, but I felt the effort underneath it. Something bad was going on, something worse than the head injuries I knew he'd already sustained. I could feel the pulse of his distress, mental and physical, across the empty space separating us.

I advanced slowly, one step at a time, wondering where the hell Jonathan was, where David was, what had gone so wrong about all of this. I couldn't believe Kevin had killed the people upstairs, or taken out the dead guard on the carpet. Then again, maybe I was underestimating his capacity for desperation, or fury . . .

By moving all the way to the right side of the hall, I could see a slice of the interior, beyond the open door.

There were more unmoving figures in there, down on the ground. One wore a UN Security blazer. I extended my senses and found they were both dead.

Lewis was standing, utterly still, with his hand wrapped around a blue glass bottle. It was still stoppered.
David
 . . . Across from him, Kevin was on his
knees, being held there by a hand around his throat. He looked unconscious. At the very least, he was too scared to fight.

The hand that held him was big, square, and covered with blood.

I moved forward, trying to get in, and came right up against a barrier, like a thick pane of glass. A Djinn barrier. I'd have to be in a bottle to pass through it, and once inside . . .
shit
. My bottle must be on the other side, with Kevin. Probably stuffed in his pants pockets, along with his condoms.

“Please,” Lewis said, and worked the glass bottle nervously against his pants leg. He looked awful. Bruises covered half his face like an elaborate tribal tattoo—courtesy of Kevin's kicks in the head—and where he wasn't bruised he was pale, with a sick oatmeal tinge. “You have a choice. Don't choose to do this. There's no going back.”

“There never is.” The hand holding Kevin was a man's, right down to the hair on the wrist and the big, blunt fingers, but the voice was a woman's, and it issued from somewhere on the other side, where I couldn't see. I didn't need to. I knew who she was, that voice was never going to leave my nightmares.
Yvette.
Of course . . . if Lewis had been there, they would have confiscated David's bottle and taken Yvette in for interrogation, too. Which meant that somewhere in the confusion upstairs, she'd escaped and come down here to rifle the vault for her favorite slave.