“Routine questions, Miss Clark. We just want to be sure we’re aware of any problems that might come up,” I said.
“Such as?”
“Oh, I don’t know . . .Trouble between you and another passenger, maybe a stalker? Business disagreements?”
“Alas, I don’t have that many enemies, Miss Baldwin. I’m sure I’d feel much more important if I did. No, I have no fears, and I’m sure that none of my little party represents any sort of difficulty for you.”
I wished I could figure out what was bothering me. She just didn’t seem . . . right. Was she scared? No, not really, but when I concentrated on her aura, I saw flecks like floating ice. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I was sure that it wasn’t normal.
I let the silence go on too long. “Is that all?” Clark asked, suddenly a good deal less welcoming. “I have a strict meditation schedule. Yoga. It keeps me toned and flexible. I highly recommend it.”
“May I speak with your employees?” I asked her.
“No,” Cynthia Clark said. Just the one word, cold and final. I blinked and glanced at David, who was staring at Clark with very dark eyes. I didn’t know what he was seeing, but it wasn’t good. Not good at all.
Then he looked from Clark to where her two employees stood at the other end of the room.
“Jo,” he said, and touched my shoulder. “You should go.”
“I—What?”
“Now.” The touch turned into a painful squeeze. “Now.”
I stood up, but it was too late. I barely sensed the snap of power coming before it hit me like a pile driver to the chest—not just on the physical plane but on the aetheric, too. I knew this sensation.
It had hit me before. It had killed a whole lot of my friends.
The blitz attack sent me into the air in a tumbling, twisting heap. I flew across the cabin and slammed into the solid wall with a wood-cracking thump. I hardly had time to process the shock of pain before pressure closed around me, deep as the black depths of the ocean, and drove all the air from my lungs. I felt my entire nervous system flickering, overloading, on the verge of burnout. There was an unearthly shrieking roar in my ears, like a mental institution on fire, and everything felt wrong, so wrong.
I fought. I flailed, trying to throw it off, but I couldn’t, because there was nothing to grab hold of. I blinked away darkness and saw David moving like a streak of light toward the two at the far end of the room, but he was too far. It was happening too fast, unbelievably fast. . . .
I was going to die, and he wouldn’t be able to stop it.
You can stop it, Joanne. All you have to do is let go.
The thought bubbled up on some black, greasy tide from the depths of my soul. It was solid as a life preserver in a storm, and I grabbed it, desperate to stop the pain, the shrieking, the sickening and inevitable feeling of every cell in my body being crushed into slime.
You have to let go, it told me. Let go, Joanne. You can save yourself if you choose.
With the weight of mountains on my chest, with my entire body screaming for release, with my bones turning to powder inside and my nervous system frying like a burned-out bulb, I believed it was the only choice.
Then I felt the eager, hot twinge of the black mark on my back, and I knew where that thought was coming from.
No.
Time had proceeded only a tiny fraction of a second. David hadn’t even reached the far end of the room yet, although the Djinn could move at the speed of thought. I was being crushed into greasy paste by a force so vast it felt like Earth herself had landed on me, and the idea of waiting an instant, a single breath, for help was almost impossible.
Save yourself. You can. It’s easy.
Yes. All I had to do was shatter the containment that David had put around the black torch, and it would burn away all my problems.
Forever.
I held on. I don’t know how; it wasn’t inner strength, it wasn’t courage, and it wasn’t anything I could be proud of. Maybe it was just paralyzing terror. The instant passed, and even though I felt death’s breath on my lips, the taste was all that lingered; David reached Cynthia’s personal trainer, and that man—whoever, whatever he was—had no more time for killing me.
I gagged in a trembling breath, rolled on my side, and sobbed in agony. My nerves continued to burn, and the entire circuit board of my brain seemed on the verge of overload. I hadn’t been hurt that suddenly, that deeply, in a long time. The taste of mortality is ash and blood, and I coughed until I could stop gagging on it.
Getting up was like free-climbing the Empire State Building in a hurricane, but I used an overturned table for support until I could feel my legs. They weren’t quite right, somehow. Most of me wasn’t, at that moment. This was going to hurt later. A lot. For a long time.
I forgot all of that when David screamed, “Jo! Cover!”
Fire rolled out from him, blistering white, and I lunged for the sofa, where Cynthia Clark still sat frozen in shock by the explosion of violence. I shoved her down into the cushions and threw myself on top of her. I couldn’t reach the other innocent in the room—her personal assistant—but I extended the fastest, hardest shield of interlocked molecules I could over the woman’s prone body. She’d sensibly dropped to the floor and curled into a ball on the rug.
No time for any other defenses. Whether David had called the fire, or his enemy had, it filled the room like an airburst of napalm. I felt the back of my clothes and my hair smolder, and smelled instant, toxic charring of plastics and carpet and furniture. The flame would have incinerated all three of us if I hadn’t shielded us; mortal flesh would have burned off like flash paper.
It had burned the flesh off of David’s opponent.
The blast flamed out, leaving a thick swirl of smoke, and I raised my head to see my Djinn lover facing a skeletal, blackened thing that was certainly not human, never human—something that should be dead, and yet was still standing. It wasn’t a Demon, though it had some characteristics that reminded me of the way a Demon’s bones curved and spiked.
It looked like it was made of glass. In fact, only the smudges and soot that clung to it made it visible at all. I blinked and clicked into Oversight.
It was invisible on the aetheric.
Ghosts, Venna had named them.
The forerunners of the end of all things.
David let out a wordless roar of fury and fastened his hands around the creature’s throat. He was glowing like liquid gold, dripping with living fire.
But where he touched this thing, his fire went out. And darkness began to creep up his arms. No, not darkness—oh God, I knew what that was.
Ash, and dust.
He was being destroyed, just like the Djinn who’d died in the hallway. The touch of this thing was toxic to them. That Djinn must have come across it somehow, maybe even been sent by Ashan to warn us of the danger—and it had killed her.
It had erased her.
Just as it was trying to do to David.
“Let go!” I shouted, and rolled over the top of the couch to land on my feet. I staggered, but I didn’t have time for weakness. “David, back off!”
David didn’t want to, but he did, breaking away and lunging to his left as I strode forward, gathering up raw power in both hands. As I moved, a silver sword formed in my grip—not metal but ice. Hard as steel, reinforced with a binding that left the cutting edge as thin as a whisper.