FOUR
Wind shears and lightning strikes are likely in the Norman area, with a large high-pressure system advancing from the northeast; possible severe weather is likely for this evening. Residents are urged to stay aware of changing weather conditions.
People were talking.
I didn't think they were talking to me. They were talking about . . . about somebody being dead. There was shouting and noise. Metal.
Somebody was saying my name, over and over. I tried to open my eyes, but then I realized I couldn't because they were already open. There was nothing to see, though. Just light. Bright blue-white light.
Was there something wrong with me? I tried to blink my eyes, but nothing seemed to move. If I had something wrong with me, I'd be in pain, wouldn't I?
Maybe I was just tired. I'd been tired for so long.
Maybe now I could sleep.
I wished people would stop talking to me. It was really annoying. And there was something touching me, something hot.
And then there was something cool on my face. Wet and cool.
Water.
The second time was easier. I came almost all the way up from the dark, heard voices, recognized David murmuring something soft and liquid that didn't sound like words, not any words I knew. That was all right. Just the sound of his voice was all I needed.
There was another voice, too. A woman's. I knew it, but . . . but I couldn't remember. Eventually I felt something soft under my head, felt road vibration quivering in my skin, and knew I was lying down in a car. The hard lump of an unfastened seat belt lay under my left hip.
I opened my eyes on a dull carpeted roof the color of nothing, heard the humming of tires on wet road, and smelled-weirdly enough-blueberry muffins. I moved a hand, carefully, and it hurt-hurt everywhere. It felt like every nerve in my body had been mapped in hot wire. There was an aching sore spot on my right foot, another at the top of my head.
No question about it, I was lucky to be alive. If I hadn't been insulated by Delilah's steel frame . . .
My hand was still in the air. I stared at it, baffled, and realized I'd forgotten to let it fall down. Before I could do so, somebody reached back and captured it.
David. He looked back over the passenger seat at me. Dressed again in his road-dude disguise, complete with glasses. No sign of the cuts and scrapes he'd had back at the motel. No sign of any damage to him at all, except in the wounded darkness of his eyes.
"You're okay?" I whispered. My throat hurt like hell, and I was so thirsty, I felt like I'd been freeze-dried. And cold. Very cold. His hand radiated warmth into me.
The Demon Mark moved inside me, just a slight stealthy crawl. I closed my eyes and fought it, but I was so tired, so drained.
It kept moving. I felt David trying to stop it, but he was drained, too. Too tired to save me now. I had to save myself.
I reached down and choked the black terrible thing with as much self-control as I had left in me. It writhed and tried to slither around me, but I held it until it stopped its quivering progress.
"I'm okay," David answered me when I opened my eyes again. "Easy, take it easy. Rest."
"She's awake?" The woman's voice, the one I almost recognized. Spanish accented. Slightly slurred. I squinted, but all I could see in the rearview mirror was a flash of dark eyes. "Mira, Jojo's back among the living."
And then I knew who she was, with a burst of happiness that exploded right out of my core. It hurt to smile. I did it anyway. "Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight ..."
She laughed that silvery laugh I remembered so well, and glanced back from the driver's seat. Still beautiful, Estrella Almondovar, my good friend. At least on that side of her face.
She joined in with me in a duet. "Say a prayer, say a Mass, keep this fire off my ass." It wasn't the way the children's rhyme went, but it was our variation. And she finished by holding up the middle finger on her right hand in the universal screw-you symbol. A tiny flame danced on its tip.
"Chica, you're still crazy," she said. "But then that's why I love you so much."
After my disastrous Yellowstone getting-back-to-nature camping trip, Estrella and I talked every week. I ran up my mom's phone bill to outrageous levels; like the teenager I was, I could talk about nothing for hours, and Star was more than happy to go along with it. She was lonely, and we were soul mates; somehow, we could find a telephone book funny, if we talked about it for more than two minutes.
Star was the only friend I had who understood.
So. My intake meeting happened, Princeton happened, graduation happened (and wasn't that something, but that's a story for later). Fast-forward to 1999, and my rotation as a Staff Warden on the Help Desk. We call it something more official than that, of course-the Crisis Center Support System-but really, it's a Help Desk, just like ones computer departments all over the world have in place, and for much the same reasons. When things go wrong for the Association, they go wrong in a big way, and communication is everything because the aetheric doesn't carry sound for shit. Everybody gets a turn in the hot seat at the Help Desk, which is run 24/7 with a minimum of twenty staffers, who are empowered to do everything from troubleshooting to calling National Wardens out of bed in the middle of the night.
About six days into my tour, I got a phone call from- who else?-Star. There was a wildfire out of control in Yellowstone, and the Regional Warden was on vacation; Estrella and her boss felt that it was serious enough to escalate it and get specialty teams on the job. A Yellowstone fire is no laughing matter. It's one of the richest natural preserves left in the United States, and it's also a sinkhole of random energy; put the two together, add any kind of instability, and you get disaster.
We laughed, we chatted, we talked. Two friends catching up on time lost. She wasn't really worried.
Except it got worse. I could tell that from the tone of her voice. It changed from light to businesslike to dead serious as she fed me map coordinates, burn rates, wind speeds, all the alchemical elements that went into making up a disaster.
"Got it," I said, typing the last of the data into the system. There was a dull sound in the background, like airplane noise. "Hey, you want to turn the stereo down? It's getting a little loud on this end."
She coughed. Dry coughs at first, but they raised goose bumps on my arms. "No can do, babe. Guess you'll just have to yell."
"Is that the fire?" Close enough to roar like that? Oh, God. I knew that Estrella was calling from a Ranger Station somewhere near the edge of the blaze. As a Fire Warden, she had to be close to work her magic-not like Weather Wardens, who can manage things from miles or even countries distant. Fire was too interactive. It required real risk on the part of those who engaged with it. But I'd never imagined how close, or how much risk.
"That or somebody's throwing one hell of a barbecue." She started coughing. Thick, choking coughs. I was sitting in a Situation Room on the nineteenth floor of the Association offices in Chicago, and I could still hear the crackle of the fire; it wasn't just close, it was right there. All around her. "Aw, shit."
"What?"
More coughing. When it stopped, I heard the sound of things bumping, crashing. "It's blocking the front. Hang on, I'm going for the back door."
"Estrella?" No answer. I could hear her hoarse, heavy breathing, could almost taste the smoke.
"Bastard's cut me off," she said at last. I could tell from the shaking in her voice that she was really scared this time. "Hey, Jojo? This is really getting screwed up. I need out of here. 'Cause I don't look good in black, know what I'm saying?"
I was already typing in alerts, ringing pagers and cell phones with the necessary codes to let people know the situation. Within ten minutes, there'd be a Situation Team convened, with Weather and Fire Wardens, maybe even Earth Wardens to help organize the rescue of trapped animals and energize the forest itself to fight the fire. But that wasn't going to help Estrella.
"Can you make a path through?" I asked. I could hear things popping loudly in the background, like gunshots. "Jesus, what is that? Is somebody shooting?"
"No, it's the trees. Trees exploding. Sap boils-" She coughed again, deep aching coughs that made my chest hurt in sympathy. "Shit! Can't do it. Too hot. Can't get the fire down long enough to get out. Dammit. I'm toast." Her laugh was rich and thick with phlegm. "Burnt toast."
"Hold on," I said. I pulled up the Wardens Map, overlaid Fire Wardens on top of it and got Estrella's location. Once I had it firmly fixed in my mind, I went up into Oversight. My body receded and I flew straight up, arrowing as fast as I could through gray ghostly layers of concrete and steel and wiring, up into hot summer air, up higher where the layers cooled and storms were born. There was disturbance up here, caused by temperature shifts. I oriented myself and moved toward Yellowstone. As I did, I had to buck the currents; force lines were vibrating, bending under the strain. A lot of heat being generated up there. Pushing hard, I flew against the currents until I could see the whole of Yellowstone laid out in front of me.
It was boiling. Not in the physical sense, but in the aetheric; something had gotten the land stirred up, all right, and the turbulent, angry pulses were enough to make me want to drop back into my safe, secure little cubicle far from the danger. Fires were combusting everywhere.... It didn't take much, in such an angry mood, for a forest to start self-immolating.
I pinpointed Estrella's location-she was broadcasting desperately in the aetheric-and went up, way up, until daylight gave way to twilight, which gave way to the false night of the highest levels of the mesosphere. Fifty thousand feet above it, the disturbance was more like a gentle current; I could start to manipulate things to my advantage.
Within a minute, I had formed a cold arctic-fed breeze by tunneling a channel for it through the superheated Yellowstone air. When I had it flowing where I wanted it, I let it collide head-on with a column of heat, controlled the agitation of the molecules to keep it localized, and dropped halfway back into my body in Chicago.
"Star, listen to me, I'm about to drop a very heavy cloudburst right on top of you, understand? It'll hold the fire down long enough for you to make a hole and get out of there. Star?"
Her croak barely sounded human. It was hard to make anything out over the roar of the fire. "Fucked up, Jojo. Damn. We all fucked up."
"Star, stay with me. Hey, you remember the rhyme? Star light, star bright-"
"You crazy?" A bare whisper of air.
I kept going. "First star I see tonight-come on, you know this one. . . ." It was hard, so hard to move the clouds into the right position. I could feel her there, reaching out to me. I could feel the despair and fear. "Wish I may-wish I might-"
I flipped the switch on the storm, and I heard the roar of rain pour down. I hoped the hiss I heard was steam, not fire.
And then I heard Estrella laughing. "Say a prayer, say a Mass . . . keep this fire off my ass!" She collapsed into a coughing fit. Then whooped.
I let myself relax. Fatal mistake. I felt-heard-saw the aetheric boiling back, rebounding at us like a snapped rubber band. "No, Star, listen, don't yell, run! Now!"
She didn't hear me. She was still whooping in celebration.
The line went dead.
I sat tensely, answering lines and connecting up Wardens with each other-it was a big coordinated response, and my little cloudburst ended up as the anchor point for six other Wardens to form a true stormfront, driving down temperatures and dumping nature's fire extinguisher at volumes rarely seen in this country. Meanwhile, the Earth Wardens were trying their best to protect fleeing animals and build up earthen firebreaks, and the Fire Wardens . . . Well, you can guess the hell they were in.
Six minutes later, I had an incoming line light up, and a brisk British voice said, "You're looking for a Fire Warden coming out, right?"
"Estrella Almondovar," I said. "Did you get her?"
A brief, pregnant pause. "Got her. We have one of the best Earth specialists with her right now, seeing to her."
"How bad-?"
"Bad," he said flatly. "Third degree burns over thirty percent of her body. Lucky."
"Lucky?"
"Twenty Fire Wardens in the Park today," he said. "Sixteen dead so far."
Say a prayer, say a Mass, keep this fire off my ass. You did it, chica. Otherwise, I'd be a pile of ash in hell.
It was the first thing she'd said to me when she'd gotten healthy enough to call from rehab. I'd held her hand that day in the hospital when Marion had broken the news to her that her powers had been shattered, that she'd never again be able to control fire. She still had her life. After a fashion, she had her health. After everything the Earth Wardens and doctors could do for her, she even had a passable face.
I'd never shaken the feeling that I should have done more and done better. And yet Star had never complained, never second-guessed, never blamed me. I only, ever, blamed myself.
I must have fallen asleep again. When I woke up, we were still driving, and Estrella was singing under her breath to a Madonna song. She couldn't carry a tune worth a damn.
I realized-finally-that we were back in the Land Rover. No wonder I could stretch out in the backseat. "Hey," I croaked. "Water?"
"Sorry," Star said cheerfully. "Can't stop yet. We want to make sure they're not on the trail."
"They?"
"You know." She gestured with her left hand, and something about it caught my attention. It was skeletal. Leathery. Scarred. God. I'd forgotten for a second about the damage to her body. "Marion and her merry men. You know they tried to kill you, right?"
I tried sitting up. My body ached like I'd come down with the mother of all flu viruses, but everything seemed to still function right. Toes and fingers wiggled. My nose reported the unpleasant lingering smell of burnt hair.
"You're one lucky girl," Star continued. "My money would've been on that polyester crap you're wearing melting all over you. You got only a couple of spark burns, that's all."
I took a deep breath and asked for the worst of it. "Delilah? My car."
"She's a real fixer-upper. Time to trade up to something made in the last twenty years, I'd say. Hey, what do you think about this one?" Star gestured out at the hood of the Land Rover. "Marion, pretty good taste, eh? I always wanted one of these. Weird that she left the engine running, but our gain."
David was in the passenger seat of the truck. Left the engine running, my ass. I wondered how he'd managed to do it without her noticing.
Then again, I had a better question. And a more pressing one.
"How'd you know where to find me?" I asked. Star grinned and steered around a cattle truck; the smell of scared beeves and cow pies overrode my burned hair, at least for a minute.
"You're kidding, right? I get your message, I see the aetheric get all fucked up, and I think . . . Jojo! And there you were. I got to the parking lot just about the time the freaking sky started falling. Man, that was one big lightning bolt. Biggest I ever saw." Star shook her head. "Like I said, you're lucky."
"You should let me out somewhere," I said. "Ditch the truck before you get home. This is serious, Star, I don't want you in the middle of it."
"Yeah, no kidding it's serious, La Quinta looks like a hurricane hit it." She looked over her shoulder at me. "Yeah? Did it?"
"Sort of." I rested my elbows on the seat backs and leaned closer. "I really don't want you in this."
"Hey, Queen of the Universe, nobody asked what you wanted. I don't ditch the girl that saved my life." She glanced over at David. "Or her verdaderamente lindo boyfriend."
"Star!"
"What? You don't think he's cute?"
"He's sitting right there!"
"And so grateful I am." She flashed him a half-crazy grin, which seemed to have no real effect on David. "Chica, you always did have good taste."
I sighed. No way to reason with her when she was in this kind of take-no-prisoners mood, and besides, it was nice to hear somebody was enjoying themselves at my expense. "Okay, right, he's definitely lindo. Um, where are we, exactly?"
"Exactly?" Star punched the GPS keyboard.
I rolled my eyes. "Come on."
"Aw, you're no fun. Okay, approximately, we're about two hours outside of OKC. Back roads. I didn't want to stop too long, 'cause, you know, you're on the run."
I looked at David, who hadn't said a word. He shrugged. "I didn't think it was worth the argument," he said. "You needed help. She offered. And she said she knew you." And, I sensed, he'd been in no position to refuse. Probably out of it himself. That power surge had been enough to knock the stuffing out of a Djinn as easily as any Warden.
I agreed. "Oh, she knows me. Too well." David didn't look reassured. In fact, now that I was getting a look close-up at his expression, it looked guarded and worried. "It's okay. Star's a friend. A longtime friend."
She muttered something that might have been bet your ass and changed lanes, whipped around two eighteen-wheelers and back before another truck blasted by. Wherever we weren't going, we were getting there awfully fast.
David captured my hand in his. "You okay?"
"You know me, Energizer Bunny." The feel of his skin was distracting. I wanted to feel the rest of it, all over me. "Hungry, though. And I think I mentioned thirsty. And in need of a pit stop, so if you see any convenient gas stations ..."
Star checked the rearview mirror. I got the sense that she was checking out the aetheric, too, in Oversight, but I was too tired to try to rise up there with her; I leaned my cheek against David's shoulder. He felt real, and human, and warmly male. Hard muscles under soft skin.