Emily, who could control wood and metal, grabbed an entire tractor’s worth of furniture and slammed it toward Kevin with shocking violence and power. I knew her; she hadn’t been nearly that strong before. Kevin tried to dodge, but there was no way he could win; Janette was lining him up in the crosshairs for her own assault, and he had no way to stop Emily at all.
As Kevin backed toward the wall, he tripped and went down, rolled into a crouch, and instinctively covered his head with both arms as the wall of furniture tumbled toward him.
I put up a wall of power around him, and both Emily’s flood tide of furniture and Janette’s flaming wave broke against it at the same time. Again, I was shocked by the force of what they were wielding; it was all out of proportion to what most Wardens would have used, even in extremity. Kevin was strong, but he couldn’t have equaled even one of them, much less two in direct conflict.
I could. Barely.
I stepped out from behind the table. I considered a snappy announcement of my presence, but really, it wasn’t necessary; both the other Wardens—no, Sentinels—were already turning and looking for me. I felt them lock on and acquire the target, and I shook my hands lightly to loosen myself up.
“One chance to live,” I said. “Where’s Ortega?”
I couldn’t really tell their expressions, not from across the room, but their body language suggested my sudden appearance wasn’t just a surprise; it was a real shock. If I’d been hoping that would throw them off balance, though, the surprise was mine; Janette hesitated for barely a second before I sensed a surge of power traveling invisibly through the wall next to me, and the paneling around me burst into white-hot flame. I ignored it. Playing their game was a sucker bet, and I needed to get to Kevin before they could separate us and use us against each other.
I gathered up the heat vortex being generated by Janette’s flames and sent it spinning toward both the Sentinels. Neither of them were Weather Wardens, and they weren’t trained on how to defuse such things; instead, they scattered to get out of its way. I kicked off my shoes, picked them up, and did a broken-field sprint across the ballroom toward Kevin. When I reached him, I grabbed him by the collar and yanked him out of the tangle of burning chairs and tables surrounding him. “Where’s the Djinn?” I shouted. Kevin coughed, spat up black, and jerked his chin toward the doorway. “Ortega! Have you seen him?”
“Yeah,” he said, and coughed again, with deep wracking spasms that made my chest hurt to hear them. “Outside. They had him.”
Janette and Emily were standing between me and my goal. Not a good place to be. I began throwing flaming furniture together and rolling it toward them in unwieldy balls, and not even their combined powers could catch it all. One ball got past Janette and plowed into them head-on. They went flying. Strike!
“Come on,” I snapped to Kevin, and went to the first downed Sentinel. Emily. I straddled her as she lay on the floor, and put her down for the count by encasing her in a thick layer of ice, pulling all the water out of the air to do it. The heat would set her free, but not for a while. Maybe not even in time. Gosh, I was going to lose sleep over that one. I have no idea what Kevin did to Janette, but it wasn’t likely to be as merciful. Seeing his smudged, grim face, I had the feeling it was well deserved, too.
We left the ballroom. At the last minute, I damped the fires behind us. Kevin shot me a glance, and I shrugged; I had the desire for bloodshed, but somebody had to set a good example. I knew it wouldn’t be him.
“Where’s Rahel?” I asked. The hallway outside was more of the same—dim, cluttered, deserted, smelling of age and mildew.
Kevin coughed again, wiped his mouth on his shirt, and said, “They figured it out. They have her, too. I couldn’t get to her.”
“Do they know—”
“Fuck yes, they know! We were sold out. They were buying it right up until about an hour ago, and then everything went crazy. . . .”
I wanted to hear it, but the anxiety building in me wouldn’t stop clanging its warning bell. “We’ve got to find Ortega, now. Go that way. If you spot him, yell.”
But in the end, I was the one who found him.
They’d posed him carefully, the Sentinels, just as they had the Djinn I’d helped discover before. Someone—one of the Earth Wardens—had looped whorls of living wood, thick and stronger than iron, around his arms and legs, pinning him in midair against the wall.
He’d been helpless. However they’d managed it, they’d taken away his defenses, and they’d done it so fast, so horribly fast. . . .
“Jo?” Kevin’s hoarse pant came from behind me. I was standing very still, not blinking, not looking away. “Jesus.”
We couldn’t get to him. There were too many Sentinels between us and Ortega. Six at least that I could see.
I’d expected to see Bad Bob Biringanine, so the sight of him shocked me less than it had a right to.
He looked exactly as I remembered him—white hair, fair Irish skin turned ruddy on the cheeks and nose, fierce blue eyes.
He smiled when he saw me. It was the same cynical, sweet expression that I remembered so well.
And then he turned to the man standing next to him and said something. The man’s back was to me, but I knew already, before he turned. Before I saw his face and knew how badly screwed we were.
Paul Giancarlo, my trusted friend, was with the Sentinels.
I saw the terrible guilt in his eyes, but there was something else, too. A fanatical light that I’d never truly recognized before. He was hurt, I thought. He was hurt by the Djinn. He was in charge while they destroyed the Warden headquarters. He saw people die, people he liked. People he loved.
Bad Bob had preyed on him as surely as he had all these others. He’d made them victims all over again. Worse—he’d made them victimizers.
“Jo,” Paul said. “Christ, what are you doing here? Get out!”
“You want me to send David instead?” I glared at him. “Paul, there’s not enough what the hell in the world for this!”
He clenched his fists, and I saw the muscles in his jaw tense and jump. He’d always looked a bit thuggish, but never more than when he was truly angry. “If we get David, it’s over. It’s done. No more bloodshed, ” he said. “If we have to go through all the Djinn, how much suffering is that? Come on, Jo. You know they can’t be trusted. You know!”
“Apparently I can trust them more than I can trust you,” I said.
“Ah, reunions,” Bad Bob said. He reached down and flipped open the lid on a black box on the floor, something like what Heather the scientist had used to carry her radioactive materials when she’d done her show-and-tell at Warden HQ. “Stop it, you two. You’re making me all teary-eyed. Next thing you know we’ll all be group-hugging and braiding each others’ hair.”
Nothing seemed very real to me, and yet was simultaneously very, very clear. I could see every single line of wood grain, every strand of Ortega’s hair where it drifted in the subtle breezes of the hallway.
I could see everything.
A black spear rose of its own accord from the box that Bad Bob had opened. This was no shard; it must have been at least six feet long, glittering and lethal. It slowly turned, and I had the horrifying idea that it was aware, that it was seeking out its victim. It was nothing on the aetheric, an absence of all things around it, just a black hole that could never be filled.