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 realized 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 favorably 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 savior.
" 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 Miserables. "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 gray 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 streetlights 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 minitornado 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-colored clouds, stained by sodium and neon, began to shift and break against each other.
"You okay?" I asked her. My legs were shaking, and I realized 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 she 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 neutralized. Soon."
She didn't look up to it; that was certain. I held her dark eyes for a few seconds.