“Not yet. Keep going.”
Not good. The clicking was already frantic. What did that mean for all those people driving by? Were they sick? Dying?
“Pull in up ahead,” Silverton said, and pointed off to the right. I bumped up a ramp into a deserted parking area—some kind of office building, marked as condemned. I barely paid attention. My gaze was fixed on Silverton as he compared maps, looked at the GPS, and used colored pens to mark our position. He shut off the Geiger counter, which was a storm of constant, nervous clicking, and got out of the car. I unbuckled my safety belt and hurried after him, grabbing the heavy duffel bag from the back. He paced the parking lot, prowling like a cat, and finally headed off across the asphalt toward the building.
It didn’t look like much: three stories, mostly built of concrete slabs, with a few cheerless windows. The style looked vaguely 1970s, one of those designs of the future that had never really caught on. I’d always wondered why, in the future, people never seemed to appreciate things like plants, carpet, and comfortably padded furniture. I just knew that the offices inside this building would have hard plastic chairs and concrete floors and earth-toned macramé wall hangings.
Well, it would have, except that this building was long abandoned. Some of the higher windows were broken out; the lower ones were boarded up with warping plywood. A sign on the door announced NO TRESPASSING, in uneven Day-Glo letters.
Silverton, however, wasn’t about to be warned off. He walked up to the double glass doors and, without hesitation, yanked. Nothing happened. They were locked.
I cleared my throat. “Maybe we should—”
Apparently, the end of that sentence was break in, because Silverton exerted a pulse of Earth power, and the lock made a little metallic snapping sound, and the glass doors shivered and sagged open. He shot me a look. “You were saying?”
“Just wondering if we ought to alert the bail bonds-man now, or wait until they let us have our one phone call,” I said. “Don’t mind me. I’m fine.” Well, I wasn’t, really. “Are we radioactive?”
Silverton raised his eyebrows. “Well, yes. Did the clicking not tip you off?” He didn’t wait for my answer, which would not have been helpful anyway; he swung the door open, and a wave of eau-de-abandoned-building swarmed over me. Old paper, turning to dust. Mold. Stale, still air. A faintly unpleasant undertone of sewer problems, too.
Oh man. This was looking less like a good plan all the time. I had not worn the right shoes for tramping through sewer water. In fact, I didn’t own the right shoes for that, and hoped I never would. Still, not cool to abandon the contractor you’ve hired to solve the problem.
So when Silverton strode on, into a dim entry hall, I followed.
Silverton was much better prepped than I’d thought; that even extended to flashlights, big heavy ones that would double as clubs in an emergency. I was glad, because I could hear scuttling somewhere upstairs. I know—big, bad Earth Warden afraid of things that scuttle. But it’s all context. I’m fine with Nature’s way, as long as Nature keeps it out of my way.
I cautiously split my attention between the real world—which was full of hazardous broken furniture, moldering carpet, and dangling wires—and the aetheric. The spirit world was tinted bloodred here, and it felt hot . . . oven-hot. I didn’t like it. Things had happened in this place, bad things. Their ghosts still hung around, joyless and draining. Workplace shooting, maybe. Or something equally horrible. Emotion stained this place, even over and above whatever our radioactive target might prove to be.
Silverton reached the end of the hallway and turned a slow circle, then pointed at a dented metal door that said MAINTENANCE ONLY. It was locked. He did the trick again, and beyond was a pitch darkness that made my skin crawl. The flashlights weren’t making a dent, really.
“Allow me,” I said, and twisted a small thread of Fire into a wick, then set it alight inside a bubble of air. I levitated it into the room ahead of us and turned up the brightness until the flickering magic lantern revealed rusted metal steps, going down, and mold-streaked concrete walls. “You’re sure about this?”
“You want to get to it; we go down there,” Silverton said. “Tell you what—makes you feel any better, I’ll let you go first.”
It didn’t, but I was probably the best equipped to deal with any hostile force that popped up out of the darkness. Damn, I hated being competent sometimes. “How radioactive are we, exactly?”
“On a scale from one to ten?” Silverton asked cheerily. “Dead, ma’am. Or we would be, if we weren’t Earth Wardens. Got some natural immunity against that kind of thing.”
“Some?”
“The longer we stay, the worse off we are,” he pointed out. Right. I was taking the lead. Fantastic.
I stepped onto the rusting metal, heard something creak, and hastily pushed my awareness down through the stairs, checking for structural integrity. They’d hold, thankfully, but just to be sure I added a little stiffener at the welded joints.
Twenty-two steps later, I arrived at the basement level, where the building’s power plant was contained. At least that was what I assumed it was: a huge block of metal, dented and rusted, with inert panels of darkenedindicators. I summoned the floating light closer as I walked around it.
“Should be close,” Silverton said. In the dark, his voice sounded like the whisper of a ghost. And there were ghosts down here; I could feel their presence on the aetheric. People had definitely died hard in this place. Enough of them could have spawned a New Djinn. Nobody knew where the Old Djinn, the ones from the dawn of time, had come from, but the newer ones were born out of enough energy being set free at the same time. Disasters and mass killings were particularly prone to it.
I kept looking into Oversight and templated it across the real world as I eased around the generator. Whatever this thing was, it ought to be right there . . . and it was.
It was a severed head.
I screamed and recoiled—reflex—and slammed into Silverton’s hard chest. He steadied me, moved me out of the way, and crouched down to stare at the dead, still face.
“That’s a Djinn,” he said softly.
“Can’t be.” I was getting control of myself again, willing myself back to some kind of mental balance. My heart was still thumping like a speed-metal drummer, but my hands were only shaking a little. “Djinn don’t die. Not like that. And they don’t leave corpses when they do.”
“This one did,” Silverton said. “Recognize him?”
I didn’t. I didn’t want to, either. “How can you cut the head off a Djinn?”
“You can’t.” Silverton reached out and touched the head. It wobbled backward a little, but didn’t roll. “He’s buried in the concrete up to the neck.”
Okay, that was—if possible—even creepier. “What about the black thing? Is it him?”
“No,” Silverton said. “It’s inside him. We have to get him out.”
He put both hands flat on the floor, on either side of the Djinn’s head, and the concrete began to liquefy. Silverton reached into the wet concrete and gave me a glance. “Grab his other arm.”
Last thing I wanted to do, but I did it. I reached down into the cool, wet cement and found something that felt more like flesh than liquid, and pulled. Silverton matched me, and we stood and walked backward, still pulling.
The Djinn’s body slipped free, covered from the neck down in a gray, dripping mass. He was naked, and he looked very, very . . . human. The only way I could tell that he wasn’t entirely human was the gauzy signature on the aetheric, barely perceptible now that we had him free of the ground.
Silverton was right. The black knife was inside him, driven in like a spike. This close on the aetheric it looked even deadlier than before. Glittering, sharp, lethal.