Total Eclipse (35 page)

“Absolutely,” I said. “Although I plan on three days of spa treatments, with mud baths and all-day massages. So probably after that.”

It got a twitch of a smile out of him before he looked at Lewis, and Venna standing so small and delicate beside him. He said, “Ashan?”

Venna looked down. “Gone,” she said. “I grieve that it was necessary, but he was mad with power. He twisted nature. It can’t be done, no matter his motives.”

Venna had described Ashan as her brother, and from the pain that I saw in her, I believed it. What she’d done would be a long time healing, I thought, if it ever did.

“You’re the Conduit.”

“Yes,” she said, just as quietly. “Not by my choice. But I am the logical replacement.”

“Can you reach her?” David asked. I knew by
her
he meant Mother Earth. Venna slowly shook her head.

“Not while I am bound,” she said. “And once I am free, I become hers. Maybe without Ashan’s anger driving her she will be calmer, but the damage has been done. We have to find a way to speak to her before it’s too late.”

“We’ll do it,” I said. “David and I will go to Imara. She’ll let us in; she has to. And once we’re in, we can reach the Mother through her.”

Venna studied me with eerily calm eyes. “That will kill you, you know. You’re not strong enough.”

“I’ve done it before.”

“When she was sleeping. She’s not sleeping anymore.” The matter-of-fact way she said it made me pause. “You die, and David becomes hers. It’s what will happen. Imara knows. That’s why she kept you away.”

Venna had a turn for prophecy, too, and that chilled me deep. “But she’ll let us in.”

“Yes,” she said. “She’s your child. She’ll let you in.”

“Then we have to try it.” I turned to David, but he didn’t look nearly as convinced. He was looking past me, at Venna.

No . . . not at Venna after all.

At
Lewis.

Lewis wouldn’t return the stare; he looked at the floor, deliberately avoiding any kind of contact. I wondered why, until Venna turned to Lewis, adding her stare to David’s. “She will talk to you,” Venna said.

“Lewis?” I blurted. “Why?”

Lewis let out a sigh, and now he did look up, troubled and very tired. “Because I’m the first triple-threat Warden born with that configuration in generations, and I may be the most powerful one since Jonathan walked the Earth.” He was right. A triple-threat Warden—one who could wield all three powers with equal strength—was extremely rare. So rare, in fact, that the Wardens themselves had tried to capture and study him, in hopes of figuring out how to artificially create the condition in others. Lewis had spent his time as a lab rat, and as a fugitive; he’d been a thief, a con man, a hero, a leader, and a ruthless general.

“Before you go,” David said slowly, “you should know the truth about Jonathan.”

That came out of left field. Jonathan had been the leader of the Djinn for countless ages, and he’d been David’s friend and brother in arms—maybe more, for all I knew. I had only met the Big Grand Poobah a few times, and he’d spooked me, in general, more than Venna. I knew Jonathan had been born human, and Warden; he’d become a warrior general, and died in battle, with David, on a field full of slaughter. His death had sparked the Mother to create the first of the New Djinn: Jonathan, formed out of the death of so many.

David had been brought with him, because Jonathan had refused to let him go.

What else could there be to know?

Venna suddenly glanced away from all of us, as if listening to a sound that didn’t register to me at all. “We’ll discuss it later,” she said. “Time to fight now.”

Lewis jerked upright and hit the door running into the main room. Venna blipped out and probably materialized ahead of him.

I looked wordlessly at David, and he took my hands and held them.

“I hate him,” he said. “I hate that he left you out there alone. Whatever comes, I’ll never forgive him for that.”

“Amen,” I said. “But let’s live through this first, okay?”

He gave me a smile and kissed me, and we went to join the fight.

 

At first glance, it looked like nothing was happening. Lewis was standing at the table that I assumed doubled as the Warden War Room. Venna snatched up Cassiel’s bag (without permission) and began flitting from Warden to Warden—literally, buzzing in and out of reality faster than a hummingbird—and opening the bag so they could take the Djinn bottles inside. Seeing that Venna herself couldn’t touch them, that was a pretty good compromise. She ran out of bottles after twelve people, but I could see at a glance in Oversight that her evaluation of who were the most powerful was dead-on.

“Be careful,” I said in a voice pitched to carry. “Those Djinn may or may not want to follow your orders. Some of them may turn on you, but it’s the best shot we have.”

“They won’t,” Venna and David said, as one, and exchanged a look. Venna continued, “We’ll make sure they don’t. There’s no time for politics now.”

Wow. That was quite a statement, coming from the new head of the Old Djinn. Ashan had been
all
about the politics, and—of course—the superiority and general hatred. But there was a new sheriff in town, tiny as she might be, and I rather enjoyed the idea.

One by one, the Wardens uncorked their bottles. Most looked damned nervous, and I didn’t blame them, but as the Djinn misted into evidence around us, none of them made aggressive movements. They stood, silently waiting, just as Lewis was.

Lewis said, in a faraway kind of voice that told me he’d gone far out on the aetheric, “It’s coming. Get ready.”

I went up with him—not as far up, because I’m not Lewis, and he could, as always, take things further than any other living Warden. I’d never really understood his limitations, but I understood that he had them, and he was more than likely pushing them now.

I didn’t need to soar quite as high as he did, because what was coming for us was perfectly evident, in vivid reds and deadly blacks, poison greens and rotting yellows. It was a tsunami of power rolling through the desert like a wave, sweeping everything ahead of it, and although I didn’t know exactly what it
was
, there was no question of what it
did.

That was the Four Horsemen. That was the Grim Reaper.

That was Death, and it was coming to wipe Las Vegas off the face of the Earth.

I had no idea what our powers could do against it, but I looked at David and said, “Can the Djinn stop it?”

“No,” he said. “Not even the Djinn can do that. But we can hold it back, for a time.”

“Do it,” I said.

He nodded and vanished, and around the room, other Djinn did the same. I went up on the aetheric to watch, and I saw the wave sweep toward the glittering, insane tangle of lights and colors that was Las Vegas—and stop, frozen in its tracks. The Djinn had taken up positions all the way around the perimeter, and as I watched, I saw that while the wave was still seething, bubbling, it was at a standstill.

David misted back in, along with Venna. “It’s not going to hold,” Venna said. “You have less than a day, probably only hours. There are millions here. Once the Djinn fall, there’s nothing to stop it, and they will die. All of them.”

I looked around at the room, at the Wardens in their shell-shocked state. I remembered those insane gamblers still stuck at the slot machines out there in the face of the end of the world as we knew it.

I thought about Cherise, who might already be lost, but would be soon if we didn’t find a way to stop this.

“There’s no more time,” Venna said. “If you want to live, we must go now.”

“It’ll take hours to get to Sedona,” I said. Venna gave me an exasperated look.

“No, it won’t,” she said, and reached out to take my hand, and Lewis’s. “Hold on. I will take you.”

“Wait!” I said, “Imara has a barrier in place! You can’t get through it!”

“She knows we’re coming,” Venna said. “She doesn’t like it, but she knows. It’s her choice whether she destroys us to protect her own existence.”

“You’re gambling on her allowing us entrance.”

Venna smiled. “It’s not a gamble. She’s your daughter.”

She seized our hands, and I had just enough time to anticipate how bad this was going to be. . . .

And then it was much, much worse.

Venna dragged us through the aetheric planes, and my
God
it hurt, like being towed through coils of barbed wire. It seemed that the aetheric itself was burning, aflame with all the growing and intensifying fury and determination, pain and panic. More and more people were realizing that there was no escape, and the pressure was building to fatal levels.

Somehow, we made it through to the other end without losing our lives. Even with Venna, traveling through the aetheric was more of a crap shoot than I liked, and Lewis in particular seemed badly affected by the whole trip. He staggered and sat down, hard, on dry red dirt.

We were in canyons of sandstone, as crimson as the surface of Mars, and overhead the sky was a cool, featureless, unnatural blue.

We were inside Imara’s bubble. As it had been in the Fire Oracle’s area of influence, the world seemed to have been frozen here—I couldn’t see a single living thing moving. No birds, no insects. Not a breath of air. It was eerily silent.

Venna said, “I told you she’d let us in.”

“Don’t get cocky,” Lewis said. “She doesn’t have to let us get any closer.”

The floor of the canyon was sand covering a hard-pan surface of bedrock. Whatever river had carved this particular bend was long vanished, and rain was something rarely seen here. The canyons towered the height of four-story buildings over us, built out of layer on layer of reds, oranges, and browns. The ground was like a tree—you could read its history by the rings and layers of its life. The life of this land was long, and hard, and austerely beautiful.

Overhead, the sun was black in the center, rays blazing out in intense bursts from the edges. It was frightening and strange, and I wasn’t sure what I was seeing at first, until Lewis said, hoarsely, “Eclipse.”

“It’s not an eclipse out there,” David said. “Not one scheduled in this part of the world for years to come.”

It didn’t matter. This was Imara’s domain, and she could do anything she wished here. If she wanted to blot out the sun, she could.

I looked up. At the top of the cliffs above us was a harsh glitter of glass windows built into the structure of the rocks. “She’s up there,” I said. “We’re on the wrong side. The stairs are behind it.”

The Chapel of the Holy Cross was built by man, but it had been laid on the template of something that had been there for ages, maybe since the beginning of time. Standing here, I could see through this world and into the next, with Oversight, and the chapel took on huge, shadowy dimensions, filled with power and significance, pain and endurance.

“No time for the stairs,” Venna said, and tried to take our hands. Lewis and I both stepped back. She raised her eyebrows. “What?”

“No more of that,” Lewis said. “We’ve pushed the odds too far already. You’d lose one of us this time.”

“You say you need to go up there,” she pointed out. “What would you like us to do?”

“Carry us,” I said. “Get us to the top, but not through the aetheric. Can you do that?”

She considered it for a few seconds, locking eyes with David in silent communication, and then they both nodded.

“She’s going to try to stop us,” David said. “Whatever you do, don’t let go.”

He put his arms around me, holding me tight against him. I looked over at Lewis and Venna, and burst out laughing. It was ridiculous. He towered over her on approximately the same scale as the cliffs towering over all of us. What was she going to do, hug his knees?

Venna looked vexed, then she simply changed her body, growing, filling out into the size of an adult woman. She kept the pinafore and the blond hair, but when she’d finished, she was Lewis’s height. “There,” she said. “That should do.”

“Talk about
one pill makes you larger
. . . ,” Lewis said, which even now, at the end of the world, made me smile.

Venna wasn’t as amused. “Turn around.”

David and I were face to face, but evidently Venna didn’t feel that close to Lewis. He turned his back to her. She stepped up and fastened her arms around his waist, and without even a pause, she launched herself, and him, into the air. David followed. The shock of being airborne, without any real means of support or propulsion, made the less rational parts of my brain scream in panic, but David and Venna kept rising, steady and controlled, as the cliff’s multicolored shadings flickered by in front of us.

“All right?” David asked me. My hair was blowing in the wind created by our passage, and I pulled it out of my face to nod. He looked grim and focused, probably anticipating the conversation we were about to have with our child. “Almost there.”

Almost being, of course, not quite good enough. I’d noticed the height of the cliffs before we’d taken to the air, and we should have already been to the top. They weren’t
that
tall. But now the cliffs seemed to be stretching themselves taller, and taller, and taller, and we kept rising on and on, racing to get to a point that continued to outpace us.

“Imara!” I yelled. “Imara, stop! Let us in,
please
!”

For a long few seconds, it seemed that she’d keep playing this game until the Djinn ran out of power and plummeted back to the canyon floor, miles below now . . . but she wasn’t cruel, our daughter. Just pissed.

The cliffs stopped rising, and in a matter of seconds we were on the rocks. I tried not to look back at where we’d been. We were far, far too high for comfort.

There were no trails on this side of the chapel, so we had to scramble over ancient ledges and boulders to get to the peak, which rose up in a defiant jut of glass and a simple, elegant cross that buried itself into the rocks.