Thin Air (Weather Warden #6)

Because it was my daughter. My Imara, the Imara of the memories I'd gotten from Cherise and Eamon. And yet...not her at all.

Not until she smiled, and shattered my heart into a million pieces.

"Oh," I whispered, and felt my knees go weak. "Oh, my God..." I didn't know what to say, how to feel. There was this storm of emotion inside of me, overwhelming in its pressure, and I wanted to laugh and cry and scream and, like Ashan, get down on my knees in gratitude and supplication. But I wasn't Ashan, and I didn't. I braced myself with both hands on the back of a pew and stared at her until my eyes burned.

She didn't speak.

"Imara?" I asked. My throat felt raw, and I could barely recognize my own voice. "Are you...?" Alive? All right? I didn't even know what to ask.

Venna said, "The old Oracle was dying after the Demon wounded her. The Mother made a new Oracle in her place from the energy that was lost. I didn't know it would be Imara." Venna sounded very quiet, very small. "Does it help?"

Help? My daughter was there, smiling at me. How could it not help? I swallowed. "Can she...can she hear me?"

"Not the way you think. She hears who you are, though. And she knows."

"Knows what?" I felt a bizarre mixture of pain and grief and anger fizzing up inside, overwhelming the relief.

"Everything," Venna said soberly. "She knows you still love her."

There was something about Imara that kept me from rushing to her, touching her, babbling out everything I felt. Something...other.

But that look, that smile...those were pure love.

"It's why you could do what you did on the beach, when you made the Earth obey you," Venna said. "And how you can touch people's memories. Because through her, you touch the Earth. You've got all three channels now. Earth, Fire, Weather. You're like Lewis."

She didn't look particularly happy about it. Imara's smile faded, and she looked down at Ashan, cowering near her feet. Her eyes shifted color to a molten bronze.

I didn't need words to understand that look, and it chilled me.

If Venna noticed, she didn't mention it. She was frowning now, looking as disturbed as I'd ever seen her. "This isn't going to work."

"What? What do you mean?" For a terrifying second I thought she was talking about Imara, that there was something wrong, but no; Venna looked too calm, too still.

"She's new," Venna said, and rested her hands, palm down, on her thighs. "She hasn't come into her full power yet. And that means she can't help Ashan-even if she wants to."

I doubted sincerely that what Imara had on her mind for Ashan could go by the description of help.

"So that's it?" I asked. "We just give up?"

Venna threw me an all-too-human look of exasperation. "No," she said. "We take him to another Oracle, that's all. I'll-take him out of here."

I didn't watch how she did it, but I heard Ashan scrambling, and heard him cry out, once. Then they were gone, and the door shut behind them.

I didn't take my eyes off my daughter, the Oracle.

"Can you hear me?" I asked. "Imara?"

Her eyes slowly swirled back to that lovely shade of gold, but she didn't smile this time.

I waited, but the candles began to dim, slowly winking out one by one. While I could still see her, I said, "Please say something. Please, baby. I need to know that you're okay."

She was just a dim shadow against the deeper shadows, a glimmer of gold eyes in the dark, when she whispered, "Hang in there, Mom. I love you."

And then she was gone.

I sat down hard on the pew, put my face in my hands, and prayed. Not to my daughter. Not to the Earth, whoever that was.

I prayed to God, whose chapel it was. Who'd built this glittering, beautiful, hurtful world with all its magic and deadly sharp edges. I needed a higher power to get me through the rest of this, because I didn't think I could do it by myself.

I don't know if He answered, exactly, but after a few minutes I felt a kind of peace inside, a stillness, and an acceptance.

My child wasn't suffering, and she wasn't totally beyond my reach.

Maybe that was enough.

I scrubbed my face clean of tears, got up, and went to find Venna.

Venna had Ashan-actually, he was on his knees, and she had one hand on his shoulder. It didn't look like restraint, exactly, but I was sure it was. He looked worse in the merciless glare of the motion-activated spotlights on the concrete stairs-bleached, grimy, with an unpleasant light of madness lurking in those blue eyes.

He'd killed my daughter. And if he'd gotten his way, she'd have been completely dead, not sitting in there in the chapel, elevated to some level I couldn't understand. In a very real way, he'd still taken her away; Imara the Oracle wasn't Imara at all, not the way I'd known her.

You never knew her at all, some cold part of me said. You never had a past; you never had a daughter. Remember?

That was the point. I didn't remember. And Ashan had done that to me.

Miles to go before I could see that put right.

"So," I said. "Where now?"

I'd expected her to hesitate, but instead, Venna promptly said, "Seacasket."

"Pardon?"

"It's in New Jersey."

I hadn't forgotten geography. New Jersey was a long way from Arizona. A long, long way.

"We should go," Venna said. "I can drive when you get tired."

Yeah, like I was going to let a kid behind the wheel of that car. Even a many-centuries-old kid. "One other thing," I said, and pointed a thumb at Ashan. "He needs a bath. I'm not smelling him all the way to the East Coast."

Ashan shot to his feet, running like a rabbit for the rocks, not the stairs. "Hey!"

He slammed face-first into an invisible wall, staggered back, and whirled to face us. Venna had broken his nose, and it was streaming blood. Not a good look for him. When he tried to come at me, Venna stopped him again with just as much force.

"Ashan," she said to him. "You know you can't fight me. I'll just keep on hurting you."

He tried it again, as if he hadn't heard her, and I winced this time at the sound of flesh and bone hitting the barrier. "He's trying to make you hurt him," I said. "He wants you to kill him."

Venna blinked. "That's odd."

"That's human. And kind of crazy."

"I will never understand mortals," she said, sounding aggrieved. "How do I stop him without hurting him?"

"Let me handle it."

This time, when he lunged at us, I took the Taser out of my purse, switched it on, and zapped the holy living shit out of him. Ashan convulsed and went down. I crouched next to him. His eyes were unfocused, and there was blood dripping from his chin in a gory mess. "Ashan. Can you hear me?"

He could. He just didn't answer. I could tell from the immediate flicker of rage in him that I had his attention. The shock had incapacitated him, but it hadn't done much to make him like me any better.

"Venna's going to keep you from doing any damage to me, or yourself," I said. "Right, Ven?" She gave me a look that could have doubled as a crematorium. "Sorry. Venna."

"Yes." She wasn't forgiving me anytime soon for an attempt at a pet name; that was clear from her tone. "Up, Ashan."

At first he couldn't get up, and then it was clear he didn't want to. The smile Venna gave him was evil enough to haunt a serial killer's nightmares.

"If you don't," she said, "then I'll make you, brother."

Brother? I didn't know if that was literal or figurative, but either way, it worked; Ashan climbed silently to his feet and walked down the steps without trying to run, pitch headlong to his death, or take me with him. I looked back up at the Chapel of the Holy Cross; it was quiet, no signs of life. No sign of my daughter haunting its warm, incense-scented shadows.

I wanted to run back up the steps and throw my arms around her, but somehow I knew that it wasn't the time. Not here. Not now.

Not until this was over.

Venna saw me looking, and said, "We should go."

Ashan coughed, and spit a mouthful of blood at Venna's feet. She raised one eyebrow and made it disappear. Just like that.

I raised the Taser and activated it, letting him get a good look at the jumping spark. "Get in the car, Ashan."

He slid into the backseat. I pointed a finger at Venna. "Watch him," I said.

"Of course." She gave me a cool raise of her eyebrows, as if I were being completely stupid, and climbed in the passenger seat.

I stood there for a few seconds with my hand on the car door, looking up at the chapel. For a second, I thought I saw...something. A flicker of red, a dress fluttering in the wind.

A smile.

"I'll see you soon," I promised her, and got in the driver's seat.

We drove out toward the main road, and when I reached an intersection I idled and waited for traffic. Venna seemed lost in thought, but she finally said, "I can conceal us from most, but he is going to be a problem."

"Venna, could you ever once in a while use a name? Would it kill you? He, who? Ashan?"

"David," she said, with a little too much enunciative precision. "He's been looking for you. I can keep him from finding us for now, but I'm not sure I can do it for long. He's very smart."

"He's looking for me?" I felt a surge of gratitude and relief, and then I remembered that it wasn't a good thing. "Oh. Looking for me because he thinks I'm the wrong one. The fake Joanne."

"Yes."

"And where is he?"

She shrugged. "I said I could hide us from him, not keep track of him. It's not that simple. You'd better get going."

"Do you think this is going to work?"

Venna looked suddenly very young, and very uncertain. "I don't know," she said. "It's never been done before. And I didn't expect that the Earth Oracle would be Imara. That complicates things."

I swallowed, suddenly very cold. "What if it doesn't work?"

"Eventually," Venna said, "the Demon will win. And I don't know what will happen then. I really don't."

We looked at each other in silence for a second.

"Go east," she said. "We've got a lot of ground to cover."

I love to drive, but this wasn't driving, it was being trapped in a car with a crazy man (who kept muttering things in a language that I didn't understand), a Djinn who was by turns cute and creepy, and constantly operating under the threat of impending, though nonspecific, doom. It was the Paranoia Ride, which I was sure wasn't going to catch on at Disney World. Venna wasn't exactly comforting company, and Ashan...I hadn't liked him at first sight, I'd begun to hate him when I'd realized what he'd done, and now I outright loathed him. Venna had, at my request, dumped him into a shower at a roadside motel, and I'd bought him some fresh clothes to replace the filthy suit he'd been wearing. Clean, he looked and smelled better.

It didn't help his attitude at all. Venna's calm, menacing presence kept him from trying to bash my head in, but there was nothing she could do to make him any less of an asshole. I couldn't keep him in the trunk; that would be emotionally satisfying, but morally questionable. Still, keeping him in the backseat was no picnic. Every muscle in my body ached with tension, and when I managed to pull over to sleep (catnaps, at best) I woke up more tired than ever. Ashan never stopped watching me. He was crazy as a rat on LSD, and I thought I could understand why; having spent time with Venna, seen how different she was from human, I could imagine the shock of being busted from Djinn back to merely mortal. Be enough to drive anybody mad-and I wasn't convinced that he hadn't been a little mad to start with. If what he'd done to me was, in fact, forbidden, he'd been playing with fire. When the old commercials said, "It's not nice to fool with Mother Nature," they hadn't exactly been kidding around.

I wondered what he'd been like before. Maybe Venna inferred that from my frequent, nervous glances in the rearview mirror, because she said about fourteen hours into the drive, "He didn't hate you at first, you know. You weren't more than an annoyance to him. It was all because of David-Ashan was jealous, and he wanted to be Jonathan's heir. You were David's weakness, so Ashan exploited that, because he wanted to destroy David before he got too powerful."

All politics. "Funny," I said. "It feels personal now."

"Now it is," she agreed. "You're like a virus, you humans. You get under our skins."

"Flattering."

She frowned. "Was it? I didn't mean it to be."

I resisted the urge to explain sarcasm to her. Barely. "What about memories? Are you going to give me his since he's human?"

She looked away. "Do you think you want them?"

"Just the ones about me."

This time, she looked at me straight on. "Do you really want them?"

I realized then what I was asking for. Not just memories of me as Ashan saw me, but the things Ashan might have done to me. To other people I loved.

To my daughter.

I cleared my throat. "Let me think about it."

She nodded. From the backseat Ashan said, in a low, harsh voice that didn't sound like it got much use, "You can't be saved, you know. Whether you die today or in fifty years, you still die."

Cheery little fella. "I'll take surviving the fifty years, if I have a choice."