Chill Factor (Weather Warden #3)

Unfortunately, the wind didn't like the idea of slowing down.

"Shit," I whispered, and reached deeper, trying to grab hold of the fast-moving molecules. Hot processes were always more difficult to stop, things moving too fast, on too big a scale. I steadied myself, listened for the tone of the wind, and spread myself out on the aetheric. It was like becoming the wind, like melting into it. Once I was inside of it, I could slow it down...

And then David said sharply, "Hold on."

It hit us from behind, a shockingly powerful slam like a giant's palm on the bumper. I bit back a scream and felt the car shoot forward, faster, starting to tumble out of control. Fuck! That was the wind, hitting back. I'd given it too much energy to work with. Behind us, the energy was starting to spiral in on itself. I saw the sand begin to rise up, painting the outlines of the biggest damn dust devil I'd ever seen. Not a tornado, not in the traditional sense, but up high where we were, it was far more powerful than down on the ground.

I felt strength flooding back into me as David stopped his draw. I snapped into the aetheric to gather up the shattering chains of control. It was like playing marbles with a dump truck, chaos dancing in gleeful abandon. I can't. Panic threatened to overwhelm me, make me lose what control I had.

And then I felt him, on the aetheric, wrapping himself around me, supporting me, steadying me. You can, he whispered through that silent, strong connection between us. Trust yourself.

And something inside me went still, and the chaos no longer looked like chaos. There were patterns, beautiful sparkling patterns, life, life everywhere, in the wind, in the ground, in me, in David.

There was no chaos. For an instant I saw it, knew it on a level that only the true Djinn could perceive, and I reached out and took control.

And the wind obeyed. Tamed its fury with a sigh, dropped its coating of dust, coiled around us like a pet.

Mona touched down gently on hot asphalt that shimmered off into the distance like a black mirage.

I opened my eyes, blinked away the lingering euphoria, and felt Mona's engine still purring and trembling through the grip of my hand on her steering wheel. I was holding on to David, or he was holding on to me, or we were holding on to each other.

I had to let go to ease Mona back into gear. My hand shook violently on the gearshift, but I just held on until the shakes went away.

He'd just shown me how the Djinn see the world. A sight I'd had, and lost.

I hadn't realized until this moment how deeply I mourned it.

We played cat and mouse with earthquakes all the way to the Nevada state line. I could only imagine how nuts it was making the normal world, not to mention the poor Earth Wardens who were supposed to be keeping the world safe for regular folks; my cell phone kept ringing, but I didn't have the time or energy to answer it. The caller was Paul Giancarlo, who was temporarily acting National Warden for the U.S. -our previous fearless leader having been corpsified in the line of duty just about a week ago. Another thing I hadn't been able to stop, even as a Djinn. I could only imagine how worried Paul was, but it wouldn't reassure him to hear my status reports. His Djinn would tell him we were alive. That was about all the good news there was.

"Highway Six," I said. I was shuffling maps, which was something I could do while David drove. He wasn't as good a driver as I was, but I tried not to hold that against him. He was holding Mona to the road, and we were burning rubber, trying to get as far as we could before Kevin and Jonathan locked onto us again. I knew that anytime now, Kevin would just lose patience with the game and say something unequivocal, like, Smash that car into junk, right now. At which point it would be Jonathan versus David, in the battle for my life, with the winner a foregone conclusion.

"Highway Six turns into Highway Fifty," I said, following the route with my finger. "Loneliest road in America." Which was all to the good, for us; I didn't want to be on a congested highway with the wrath of Jonathan coming down on me. "Unfortunately, it doesn't take us where we need to go. On the upside, maybe that means they won't come after us for a while. I don't know about you, but this crap is getting ridiculous."

He made a noise that could have been either agreement or indigestion, except that I didn't think Djinn could get indigestion.

"It also means we could pull over for the night," I said slowly. I'd lost count of how many hours we'd been in the car. The little sleep I'd been able to catch had left me grainy-eyed, subject to nervous caffeine-sponsored tremors, and having post-traumatic stress flashbacks to the last soft mattress I'd slept on. Of course, that had been a hospital bed, and I'd been recovering from a gunshot wound to the back. Hence, the PTSD.

"We could stop," David agreed. Nothing in his voice. Not looking at me for a long beat, and then cutting his eyes over at the last second. "You should rest."

"Start fresh in the morning."

"There's nothing more we can do now."

"Probably true. Wouldn't hurt to catch some sleep while I can."

We were both quiet for a few seconds, and then I let out a slow, tired breath. "I can't. I can't just sleep while they're out there doing God only knows what, to God only knows who..." We hadn't been able to see anything beyond the wall of Jonathan's power. For all I knew, they'd turned Las Vegas into one giant beach party, like eternal spring break. That would be about Kevin's speed.

"We would've heard if there had been anything spectacular," he pointed out. "There's been nothing on the radio so far; it's business as usual for the regular mortals out there. And even if Kevin is doing something, you can't stop it by burning yourself out like this."

"David, they've killed Wardens." At last count, while I'd been lazing around in my hospital bed, two Wardens and their Djinn had gone into the no-man's-land around Las Vegas, and hadn't returned. Plus, there'd been no contact from either the Wind or Fire Warden in Nevada. The Earth Warden, probably feeling like the only target left on the shooting range, was justifiably nervous. "Jesus, I can't just... relax!"

David's voice was low, warm, and gentle. "I know." And he reached out with one hand and brushed his fingertips against my skin. "Sleep now." And before I could protest, I was gone.

My dreams were haunted.

I was standing in the desert, staring off to a limitless flat horizon. Sand drifted lazily around, but I couldn't feel any wind... couldn't feel anything.

No, that wasn't right. I could sense the external pressure of the breeze against my skin, feel it ruffling my hair... but I couldn't feel it. Not inside.

I had no sense of the weather at all.

Blind. I was blind. Panic ripped through me, and it felt both overwhelming and weirdly unreal, the way things do in dreams... intense and disconnected.

This is what is.

But it wasn't. I was a Warden; I had powers; I was alive and kicking despite the odds.

This is what is coming.

"It's beautiful," a voice said. I turned my head, and there was a woman standing next to me-tall, glorious, with waves of white-gold hair and amethyst eyes. Her pale, diaphanous robes whipped in the wind I couldn't feel, and she raised her face to the sun and drank it in like a happy child.

I knew her. She'd saved my life not so very long ago, just before she'd given up her own existence, damaged and flawed as it was. She'd once been a Djinn like David, but her love for a human had undone her. Made her into an Ifrit, a creature built of shadows, manifesting in its Djinn form only when it had drawn enough power out of another. Ifrits were vampires at best. Cannibals at worst.

She'd clung to that half-life for hundreds of years, to stay with the one she loved. And she'd given it up for me.

I still didn't really know why.

"Hey, Sara," I said, like seeing her was the most normal thing in the world. She didn't open her eyes, but her smile deepened and a dimple appeared on her cheek. "Where are we?"

"At the end of the world," she said, and took my hand. Her skin was Djinn-hot, pale and perfect as ivory. "Where all the rivers run."

There weren't any rivers. I pointed it out. Her Mona Lisa smile didn't diminish.

"Figure of speech, love," she said. "For now... how is David?"

"I burn for him all the time," I said, in the obscure honesty of dreams. "If I lose him I'll die."

"You won't."

"I will." Just the idea of it brought on a massive, black wave of grief that threatened to cripple me. Sara squeezed my hand, as if she knew, as if she could feel what I felt. I gulped down a hot, acid breath. "Where's Patrick?"

"Here."

"Where?"

"Close your eyes."

I did, and instantly I was in the aetheric, or the dream-aetheric, anyway. And it wasn't Sara holding my hand. The Djinn who did was drawn in shades of power, lines of tragedy, but there were ice-cool blues and greens shimmering around his aura. An aurora borealis of peace.

Somehow, I wasn't surprised. "Oh," I said. "There you are. Hey, Patrick." Not that it was possible to talk on the aetheric plane, as such, but my dream, my rules. Patrick's form turned toward me, and somehow it overlaid itself with the semblance of humanity he'd worn for more than three hundred years... a big man with an energetic explosion of white-blond hair, eyes as bitter and intoxicating as absinthe. Santa Claus, but the kind who'd drop presents on the ground to look up women's skirts as he bent over.

"I've missed you," he said, and an incorporeal hand grabbed my ass.

"Wrong! Wrong touching!" I yelped, and jumped away. He grinned like a naughty schoolboy.

"Can't blame me for trying."

"You're dead," I accused him. "Shouldn't you be giving up bad habits?"

"Seems a bit late to reform. So. You're here to ask what you should do."

"No, I'm having a dream."

"Are you?" He folded his arms across his chest. It made for a weird overlay; it was like seeing a two-dimensional paper cutout held in front of a glowing angel. "You should turn around and go back, love. Can't fight this battle. It's like a wildfire. Even the densest Fire Warden knows that sometimes you have to let the flame burn itself out."

"This kid's going to kill people, Patrick. I can't let that happen."

He reached out and thumped me on the forehead. It hurt. "Ow!" I opened my eyes, and suddenly I was looking at Sara again, beautiful sunlit Sara, who was just putting her hand back at her side. No longer smiling.

"It's raining," she said, and turned away from me. A gust blew her dress back into a set of wings that shimmered in the light.

It wasn't raining. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, not a drop of water anywhere.

She was facing west. Far to the horizon, I saw a tiny smudge of black, a miniature lick of flame that might have been lightning.

It started as a whisper, grew to a mutter, then a rumbling thunder like a million horses running in panic.

And then the flood came in a midnight wave, thundering down canyons below us. It was a thick, muddy wave with a crown of black mist, churning with the smashed remains of homes and businesses and corpses. It was vast, and it was sweeping the human world clean. Nothing could escape it. It slammed into the mountain where we stood, and I felt the world shudder. A cold, wet sigh spread over me, and then the wave split and went around us, thundering past and down, down into the black chasm of infinity.

"Where all the rivers run," Sara said. Her eyes were terribly sad, terribly lethal. "Go home, child. Don't come here to die."

The spot on my forehead where she-or Patrick- had thumped me flashed white-hot, burning, and then I felt myself losing my balance.

Screaming.

Falling toward the churning, foaming, stinking flood of death below.

I jerked back away to the smell of ozone, and the prickly-sharp presence of a close lightning strike. David was still driving, but the sky had turned dark gray. There was a thick purple-black center to the clouds that told me trouble was coming, even without the benefit of using Oversight to look up on the aetheric. Rain lashed the road in thick silver waves. I glanced down reflexively at the speedometer, and found that we were still blazing along at nearly a hundred miles an hour.

The hair standing up on the back of my neck wasn't just from the lightning strike.

I turned my head and worked out a painful kink, ran my fingers through my hair (or tried to; it needed some major shampoo and a monster-class conditioner), and tried to swallow the cotton-mouth I'd acquired during the nap. More lightning flashed on the horizon, blue-white with a delicate fringe of pink. It shattered into ribbons, striking four or five targets at once. The words of an elder Warden came to me: If you're close enough to see it, you're close enough to worry.

David said, "I think we should stop for a while." He gave me a quick, impersonal once-over. "A meal, a shower, a good night's sleep. Doctor's orders."

"There's a difference between being a doctor and playing doctor, you know." Reflex banter. I wasn't trying to argue against it; the dream had knocked all the fight out of me. It had, in its extremely obscure way, been trying to tell me something. Not surprising that I'd dream about Patrick and Sara, the two who'd given up their existence to bring me back to the mortal world... but I could do with a lot less vague prophecy. How come the sage advice never came in plain language, anyway?

David nodded at a blaze of green neon up ahead. "I'm pulling in."

The chiaroscuro blur resolved into a Holiday Inn, and as another bolt of lightning tore its way out of the heavens and into the earth, resetting the delicate polarity of the battery of life, I realized that I hadn't even asked the logical question.