Then they could--and probably would--kill us just for the principle of the thing. The absolute last thing the Djinn wanted was Wardens getting their hands on bottles again. The cooperation the Djinn had originally given, thousands of years ago, had come back to bite them in a big, big way; many of them, David included, had suffered through centuries (or even millennia) of harsh servitude at the hands of Warden masters.
They'd kill to prevent it from happening again, and now Cassiel, Luis and I were a big risk to them.
"One problem at a time," I said. "Let's get the hell out. Any ideas where to go?"
Rocha shrugged. "It's all pretty much apocalyptic, so take your pick. We were going to head to Sedona."
Fate seemed to want me to go there, but Imara had very clearly said don't. I couldn't understand why, but I was willing to take it on faith; my daughter had risked a lot to come help me here, even for a few minutes. I didn't want to put her in even more danger.
"David?" I looked at him for a suggestion, and he smiled a little.
"Trouble finds us," he said. "Let's head for where the Wardens are gathering. That's where they can use us, and the Djinn you claimed."
He was hiding it well, but I could tell that he hated the whole claiming thing even more than Cassiel. He was angry with himself, because he'd been the one to think of it. The one to find the bottles and deliver them.
He could rationalize it, but he'd never be able to excuse it. I knew David way too well. Like me, he took on too much and felt too much. His predecessor as Conduit for the Djinn, Jonathan, would have been able to shrug it off as necessary, and that would have been the end of the story. Not David.
I ached for him, but in this, I agreed with my imaginary Jonathan: it was necessary. We'd release them as soon as we could, but for now, it was the only way to keep any balance to this fight.
Cassiel picked up her backpack, and we ran for the vehicles. The ground was pitted and treacherous from the blast, but we made good time and got to the fence just as David blew it open for us. David and I piled into the car, and found--to neither of our surprise--the Djinn avatar sitting at the wheel, ready to go. Cassiel and Luis mounted the motorcycle; interestingly, she was the one driving. I wondered how that negotiation had gone.
"Drive," David told the Djinn, and no sooner had he spoken than the engine fired up and the car leaped forward, spitting sand as it dug in and raced for the road. We hit asphalt a few seconds later, and when I looked back I saw the motorcycle turning in behind us.
"Whitney!"
"You rang, boss?" She sounded just the same as before, amused and none too concerned with our lives. "That was a rock-stupid thing to do, you know. And now I'm stuck back being the damn Conduit, because you went and got yourself claimed. Again."
"It was that or end up on the Mother's chain," David said. "I'll take a slightly limited version of freedom."
"You'd better hope it's slightly limited." Whitney's voice cooled, and all of a sudden her rich Southern accent dropped completely away. "Let me make it clear, both of you: I'm not standing for Djinn being stuck in bottles. I know why you did it, but it's filthy betrayal and I'm going to see you burn for it. Understand?"
"Of course," David said. "I need you keeping a look-out for Djinn coming in for us."
"Maybe," Whitney said. "And maybe I'll just think about it, boss man."
That didn't sound good. Whitney was crazy but consistent, and if she meant what she said, we had a fifty-fifty chance of her just washing her hands of us and letting the Djinn in without a fight.
Granted, we had resources, but I didn't like losing Whitney's support. We were in enough trouble as it was.
"Please," I said. "It's my responsibility, Whit. Take it out on me if you have to."
Whitney made a sound that I found particularly irritating. "Oh, I will," she said, and the Southern accent crept back into her voice. "Believe me."
"Whitney," David said. "Hide us. Now."
"Oh, all right." I felt something pass over us, like a shimmer of heat, and I knew that she'd done as he asked. From now on, we were traveling unseen by anyone without Warden powers--and probably by most who actually had them. It wouldn't fool someone of Lewis's quality, but it would serve to get us past any roadblocks, helicopters, and sharp-eyed patrols.
We zoomed past a road five miles out where several shining military-style vehicles were parked in neat lines. I got a flash of Dr. Reid's face as he spoke to a group of people. He'd done it. He'd evacuated the compound.
That made me feel better, and also, oddly, very tired. Maybe the anxiety had been keeping me alert, but now I felt like I was dropping fast toward exhaustion. Not too surprising. It had been a big afternoon, what with nuclear explosions and getting shot and bleeding out.
I must have yawned, because David smiled and pulled me close. He felt better than one of those memory foam mattresses.
"Do you want to sleep somewhere more comfortable?" he asked, and touched his lips gently to the skin just beneath my ear. I couldn't work up much in the way of sexual excitement, but I shivered a little and gave him a weary smile of my own.
"I'm going to dream about hotels. Fancy ones, with the nice fluffy bathrobes and slippers and expensive soaps. None of this window-unit air conditioner crap." I stopped and thought about it for a second. "Does that sound self-absorbed, given the ending of the world and all?"
"Maybe a little," he said. "But I understand. And I wish I could give it to you. The best I can do is the backseat, for now."
I sighed. "That'll do."
And truthfully, a fabulous hotel would have been wasted on me, because after I'd climbed over the seat and pulled David's warm, long coat over me, I was asleep before a mile passed under the fast-turning wheels.
I'd like to say I didn't dream, but I did. It was vivid, and shocking, and it felt, well, real.
It felt like I'd stepped out of a dark place and into a bright, harsh sun, and I raised my hand to block out the glare. Only it wasn't the sun at all.
It was a giant, vaguely man-shaped form stalking toward me, and everything it touched in its way--rock, trees, fleeing animals, a car full of people--burst into instant and immediate conflagration. It was the Fire Oracle, but pulled out of his hidden sanctuary and made subject to the will of the Mother.
It was burning everything.
I watched from my frozen, helpless spot as it stalked toward a town in the tree-lined valley below me. That was when I got a sense of scale, and realized that this glowing, terrifying creature was towering hundreds of feet in the air, taller than any building in the modest downtown. I could hear the screaming coming up out of the town, like birds sounding an alert. I could see tiny forms of people running, but there was nowhere to hide.
The Oracle walked, and everything, everything
turned to slag and ashes. It left behind nothing alive. This was what the Djinn and the Wardens had feared for so many thousands of years.
The extinction, without mercy, of the entire human race, done systematically and thoroughly.
I was watching tens of thousands of lives end, and I knew it would happen over and over and over, and it was so neat, so clean. Nothing left to bury. The charred land would heal itself, as it so often did; nature would take over the abandoned ground. Animals would return, free from being hunted out of existence by humans.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, and turned to face ... myself. No, it was my daughter, Imara.
She looked haunted, the way her father did. The way my own face appeared now, seeing this horror unfolding in front of me.
Imara's face was mine, but her eyes were different, more like David's. She was dressed as she was when I'd seen her in Sedona, in a dress made of shifting red sand. It flowed around her, constantly in motion, and flashes of her bare skin showed through. It might have seemed somehow flirtatious, but instead, it was stunningly beautiful. There was a peace and power that radiated from her the same way that heat radiated from the Fire Oracle, or menace from the Air Oracle.
She silently put her arms around me, and I felt the sand move around both of us, whispering secrets.
"Baby," I said, and felt the hot pressure of tears. "Oh, sweetheart. Thank you. I wanted to see you."
"I know. I wanted to see you, too."
I looked back over my shoulder. The town was still dissolving in flames and screams, and my entire body ached with the intensity of the horror I felt. Imara's arms tightened around me.
"No, Mom, don't try. You can't stop it. You can't help it. This is why it's so important for me to stay where I am, and not let anybody close. I know you didn't mean to do it, but you breached the Fire Oracle's barrier when you broke out of there. You weakened it. And once you did, the Mother's influence got through to him. He lost himself. That's why I need you to stay away from Sedona, and I'm so sorry--I know that sounds terrible, and I wish--I wish--" Imara took in a deep breath. "I wish I could keep you safe with me. But I can't."
"Is all this happening now?" I asked. The smoke and flame and screams kept rising, and now I started dreading the moment when the screaming would stop. "Is this a dream, or is this really happening?"
"Mom--"
"Tell me."
Imara looked at me with pity in her eyes, and said, "It's why the Wardens needed you to distract those of the Djinn you could. And you did; you took out some key players. But it's not going to be enough."
My fists clenched, and my nails dug in deep enough to burn and cut. "The Wardens have to do something!"
"They are. But this isn't something Wardens can fight. It isn't even something the Djinn can fight, although if you command them, they'll try. Elemental powers are walking the planet now, and there's no reasoning with them. No clever tricks or last-minute reprieves.
The game's over. Humans have lost." She said it so gently, and with so much compassion; I knew she'd lost her humanity when Ashan had killed her, but I liked to think that through me, she retained some memory of it. Some sense of the magnitude of what was happening right in front of us.
But what I saw in her was a distance that I couldn't cross anymore. She was part of the Earth, and the Earth had rejected my species as flawed and failed. So no matter how much Imara still felt for me, she couldn't bring herself to feel it for all those suffering and dying below us.
I swallowed a hard lump in my throat and managed to ask, "Then why are you here?"
"Because I can help you, Mom," my daughter said. "I can help you become something else."
"A Djinn? Been there, done that, not doing it again. I'm human. I like being human."
"But you'll be alone. The only human left. I can keep you safe, but only you. No one else. Is that what you want?"
"No," I said, and then said it more loudly, because the screaming down there was drilling into my head like a vicious power drill. "No! Dammit, Imara, you have to help us!"
"I'd like to," she said, and it sounded genuine. "I wish I could. But I don't have any way to do that, and even if I did, maybe it's for the best, Mom. Maybe this is what needs to happen, so things can start over. Cleanly."
"I don't believe that." I backed away from her and stood several feet away, fists clenched. "I will never believe that."
"When things die, you have to let them go," Imara whispered, and I saw eternity in her eyes. "You let me go, didn't you? You accepted it. You have to accept this, too."
I couldn't even speak. My mouth had gone dry, my throat tight, and all I could manage was a violent shake of my head.
Imara sighed and folded her hands together. "I'm sorry," she said. "Now I have to go."
"You saved my life! You can save theirs, too!"
"I did," she said. "But life isn't a permanent condition. You know that."
And the sand hissed up over her, whipped into a blinding ball, and then it blew apart in all directions, stinging my skin as it landed.
Imara was gone.
I looked down at the valley. The Oracle was reaching the far edge of what remained of the town. There was a large building there. I could just make out the word HOSPITAL in lights at the top before the power failed.
I grabbed hold of a tree that fluttered its leaves in the hot wind, and watched with dry, aching eyes as the building melted and burned. I thought about the patients in their beds, the babies in their cribs, the doctors and nurses staying at their posts despite the destruction coming at them.
Then I held up my arms and summoned storms. Not the carefully constructed sort that Wardens are supposed to wield, oh no. I slammed together air and water with careless disregard for the balance, the consequences, for anything that I'd ever been taught. I needed rain, a lot of rain, and I needed it fast.
I put together one mother of a hurricane, and I did it in under ten minutes. The clouds were thick and black and stuffed with death, and I unleashed it right over the Fire Oracle as it reached the borders of the town. Water poured down with a vengeance, and I saw steam rising from the Oracle's body. The destruction of the town cooled, but the Oracle kept burning, and burning, and burning, no matter how much rain I threw at him.
Then the Oracle turned and looked at me, really saw me, and I woke up as suddenly as if someone had slapped me across the face. I jerked upright, and realized I wasn't standing halfway across the country watching that terrible march; I was in the backseat of the Mustang. I was sweaty, hot, fevered, and scared, and fumbled for some of the supplies that Cherise and I had bought what seemed liked ages ago. Water. I needed water.