It was our mutual curse, seemed like. Being strong.
“Somebody pulled me out,” I said. “Was it David?”
Cherise’s thumb rubbed lightly over my knuckles, and she squeezed my fingers. “I don’t know. He’s not so sharey right now.” Even Cher’s usual defiant good cheer was gone, replaced by a sobriety that was new to me. “You just sit and rest.”
“The storm—”
“It’s moved off to the west,” she said, which surprised me. “At least, that’s what the bridge crew told me.”
“You were on the bridge?”
She raised an eyebrow, and an echo of the old Cherise came bouncing back. “Honey, there are men in uniform on the bridge.” She let it fade again. “It looks like we’re in the clear. For a while, anyway. Let yourself recover a little.”
I nodded, still feeling numb, and for no apparent reason, burst into tears. Cherise rubbed my back and murmured things that I didn’t hear, a comforting sound like rain on the window. I wasn’t the only person having a breakdown. At least three of the other Wardens had already been removed from the room, unable to stop crying and shaking.
“You should go lie down,” Cherise said. “Nothing you can do here, babe.”
She was right, but with Lewis flat on his back, the Wardens needed a leader, and by default I was it. I wiped my eyes, took a deep breath, and shook my head. I unwrapped the blanket and stood up.
Cherise took my arm, balancing me on my feet before stepping away and letting me go it on my own.
I found a knot of uniformed crew members outside in the theater lobby, whispering together. They fell silent when they spotted me—fear, or respect, I couldn’t tell and didn’t care. I suspected my blue eyes held something terrible, because none of them would look at me directly.
“What can we do, miss?”
“Body bags,” I said. “I assume you have some on board. I’ll also need some medical assistance, as we have some very traumatized people. Bring tranquilizers.”
They all exchanged startled glances. One of the female stewards nodded and stepped away to a phone. The response time for the medical staff was impressive, but then again, it wasn’t like they had lots to occupy them right now. I followed the gurneys, doctors, and nurses into the theater, and went to consult with the next most senior Warden in the room.
That was a Fire Warden named Brett Jones. Brett was a big man, solid; I’d heard he played professional football, once upon a time, but he’d taken retirement before it had left him too busted up. He nodded when I approached him. The Fire Warden contingent of our little war party had been kept out of danger so far, but I could see that the losses had affected him just as deeply as they had me.
“What went wrong, Jo?” he asked. He sat me down next to him, angling to face me as much as a man that big could in theater chairs. “Nobody can give me a decent explanation of what went on up there.”
“I’m not sure I can, either,” I said. “There’s something on the aetheric. I can’t see it, but I can feel it, and it can hurt us. That’s how it started. Then the storm itself—it was like it converted our power into something else. It changed, Brett. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I have,” said a childlike third voice, and we both looked up to see the Djinn Venna leaning over a seat in the next row, staring at us with unearthly calm blue eyes. “Do you want to know what it is?”
We exchanged looks. “Uh, if you don’t mind?” Brett said. He knew what Venna was, and he was nervous. So was I, but for different reasons.
Venna’s small, pointed face screwed up into a frown. “If I minded, why would I have offered?”
“Forget it, Ven. Tell us.”
The frown smoothed out into a bland mask. “You shouldn’t order me, you know.”
I felt a savage bite of anger. “It’s been a bad day. And I’m not too concerned about your fragile Djinn feelings right now. You’ll live.”
From the disbelieving stare Brett was giving me, I could tell he couldn’t quite grasp that I was sassing a supernatural time bomb of power this way, but I really didn’t care. Venna wasn’t going to hurt us, and I didn’t want to play ego games.
She let it pass. “A long time ago, there was a thing that happened. It doesn’t matter what it was, but it left a kind of scar between the highest plane of our existence and another place. A bad place.”
“The place where Demons dwell,” I said. “Right?”
“Oh no,” she replied. “Much worse than that. The Demons love aetheric energy, but really all they want is to eat their fill and go back where they belong. No, this is a place the Demons fear. We don’t know what lives there, but it came through, once.”
“Came through,” Brett repeated. “What happened when it did?”
“The universe died,” Venna said. “I told you it was a long time ago.”
I stared at her, speechless. So did Brett. So did everyone else within earshot of this bizarre conversation.
She tilted her small head sideways. “What?”
“Um—even you can’t be that old, Venna.”
“I’m not. I read about it.”
“Where? At the Djinn Bookmobile?”
“Of course not.” She kicked her feet, just like a regular kid at the movies. “In the stars. In the dirt. In the water. It’s all around us. You can’t see it?” She answered her own question with a shake of her head. “Of course you can’t. Even most of the Djinn can’t see back that far. What we are wasn’t always this, you know. Everything in the universe recycles. Universes expand, contract, explode again. But this wasn’t from our universe. It was bad.”
“I’m—not sure how this is going to help us,” Brett said.
I was. “You’re saying that what’s on the aetheric, what took over the storm, it’s what came through last time?”
“No. I’m saying that it started this way, before. With the storm, and the power, and the ghosts.”
“Ghosts.” It was my turn to repeat her words. “On the aetheric.”
“You can’t see them, can you?”
“What kind of ghosts?”
“I can’t see them either,” Venna said, “but they’re angry. They don’t like Wardens.”
“Do they like the Djinn?”
“They don’t notice us, really. At least, not so far.”
This was interesting, but it wasn’t getting us where I needed to be. “Venna, I need a way to stop this. Is Bad Bob behind it?”
“He was,” she said, and her eyes went unfocused and distant. “He opened the door, but he’s not interested in what’s coming through. Chaos is what he wants. It’s what he’s getting.” She snapped back to focus with such suddenness that I flinched. “You can stop it, but not if he keeps the gate open. You need to stop him, and then you can worry about the rest.”
“What about the storm?”
“You can’t hurt it. You can only survive it.”
Kind of like this day. “Venna,” I said, and looked right into her eyes. Not a comfortable experience, really. “Can you kill Bad Bob for me?”
She considered the question for a long, silent moment. “No,” she said. “I could hurt him, but he could hurt me just as much. His power cancels mine in many ways, and I think he might just be worse than I am.”
“You mean he could kill you.”
“No, he probably couldn’t. But I wouldn’t like what was left of me, in the end, if I won.” She said it without much emphasis—just a calm assessment of her chances, nothing to be afraid of. “It’s better if you do it, anyway. Humans. You don’t have the same vulnerabilities that we do.”
It was very odd to hear a Djinn talk about human strengths instead of considering us slightly less useful than a soiled tissue.
Of course, she ruined it by adding, “And you’re much more easily replaced.”
Lovely. “Does he have any vulnerabilities?”
“Of course. He can still die,” she said. “He can still feel pain. Part of him is still human. A small part, but it remains, and it feels things the way humans do. The way you do.”