My waveform skirted perilously close to a place I didn’t want to go. I saw blue sparks dancing close, and dropped back down. Jonathan’s place was still relatively spark-free, at least so far. I wondered if his defenses were good enough to protect all of the Djinn who’d taken refuge in there. He hadn’t seemed all that positive in his outlook. It’s going to be one giant blue snow globe in here soon.
Even as I watched, a single blue spark flared against my aura, then two more, drifting gently and then falling away. The stuff was getting through, after all, just very very slowly.
I flashed through a barely seen crisscross of bricks and mortar, winding along the silver thrumming thread as fast as I could. I moved out of the darkness, into what felt like sunlight. I soaked up the wild, undirected energy gratefully; without David’s infusions of blood-rich power, I was rapidly getting tired.
I looked behind me on the thread—directed my awareness, actually—and sensed that Jonathan was still with me, whispering his way along with every evidence of perfect ease. Well, well. I wasn’t overly surprised. I didn’t imagine there was much that Jonathan couldn’t do, if he really wanted to. Except that this might be the first time in a long time that he’d left his… sanctuary, and there might be a learning curve for him out here in the real world…
Wham!
It was like hitting the Great Wall of China in a bullet train. I stopped, stunned into silence and nearly into unconsciousness. My mist form spread out into an uncoordinated cloud, then slowly, slowly formed itself back around the thread.
Whoops. Found the barrier. Damn. How had Sara gotten around it, when she’d brought me in at hyperspeed?
And why did the thread go right on through it?
No help for it; I had to get reallythin. If the thread could pass through, I could slide myself along the thread through the barrier—theoretically. All I had to do was, ah, become the thread, right? Yeah. Be one with the thread.
Another blue fleck touched me and flared like a star. I was out of time. If Jonathan’s hideout was being invaded, there couldn’t be too many safe places left. I hoped whatever other Wardens were left had sense enough to keep their Djinn safely in their bottles, but the Free Djinn… they had no such protection. Just crawling inside some old Jim Beam container wouldn’t do it; it wasn’t the bottle that made the difference, it was magic. Without the magic, glass was just glass.
David. I sent it along the thread, because the barrier was holding. I wasn’t getting through. No response. I directed my attention backwards. Jonathan, can you drop this thing long enough for us to get through?
No, he sent back. It’s the only thing standing between them and what’s out there.
Any hints?
Try harder.
Yeah, that was good. Try harder.
I felt a giant-sized shove in the back, and grabbed on to the thread for dear life as it began to move. Slowly. Pulling through the barrier one torturous, tiny jerk at a time.
I thought it would scrape me right off, that wall of power. I compressed myself, spread thinner, thinner, almost to nothing.
A sense of being dragged through thick, quick-setting cement. Of intense, murderous pressure.
Pop.
Free. I arrowed along the thread fast, driven by the force of the pull, with the close-following shadow of Jonathan sailing in my wake. The distant sunrise on the horizon grew brighter. Hotter. Closer. I could sense David now, but he felt… different. Muted.
I didn’t slow down.
I tumbled back into human form, all arms and legs and curling hair, hit the ground awkwardly and went to hands and knees. I was suddenly grateful for my newly demure clothing choices. What looked awkward in blue jeans would have looked downright kinky in a leather miniskirt and lime green Manolos.
Especially in a grungy city alleyway.
I’d expected to materialize in Yvette’s perfectly kept living room, but no such luck—on my hands and knees in garbage, looking up at a grungy guy dressed in geologic layers of oily, tattered clothes, a bottle of Thunderbird halfway to his lips. He stared at me without any real comprehension.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.” I climbed up to my feet and wiped crud from my hands. “How you doing?”
He gestured vaguely with the bottle. As answers went, it was perfectly understandable.
“Yeah, me, too,” I said. “So. Where am I?”
He blinked at me, then grinned. “Here.”
A perfectly Zen response. I gave up on the Dalai Lama and looked around for Jonathan. He was standing farther down near the mouth of the alley, staring out; I picked my way around overturned trash cans, piles of crap, and a particularly feral-looking cat with a rat in its jaws.
“I guess you were on target,” Jonathan said, and nodded out at the street. I focused past the swarming cars and ceaseless stream of pedestrians. On the other side of the street rose a stubby-looking tower, part of a complex that I knew all too well. “The good news is, at least we know where he is.”
We were looking at the bad news.
The UN Building.
It was the World Headquarters of the Wardens Association.
Technically speaking, the UN Building isn’t. It’s a compound of four interconnected structures— General Assembly, Secretariat, Conference, and Library. I had a nodding acquaintance with the place, which was better than about 95 percent of the other Wardens could claim; I’d been to closed meetings in the Conference building, and the Wardens Association offices in the Secretariat tower. (By New York standards, it wasn’t much of a tower, really. Thirty-nine floors. Hardly worth the nomenclature.)
Jonathan and I ate hot dogs from a sidewalk cafe and examined the problem as the sun slipped toward the horizon in smoky, obscured glory. Traffic continued to be heavy, dominated by yellow cabs; the entire block had become a secured no-parking zone, with sharp-eyed security personnel stationed at discreet but effective intervals. None of whom noticed us, of course. All part of that Djinn mystique.
I finally took a break from consuming preservatives to inquire if we had an actual plan in the offing.
Jonathan tossed back the last mouthful of a giant-sized cup of industrial-strength black coffee. He was loving the cuisine, which I guess was a break from home-cooked meals back at Rancho Impenetrable. “Best I can figure, your pals at the Wardens Association actually got off their asses for once and did the right thing. Rounded up Yvette, confiscated David’s bottle—with him in it. Lewis must have gotten caught up in the raid.”
“Not great,” I said.
“Not really.” He took a bite of hot dog. “You and I can’t get into the vault where he’s being kept. No Djinn can; we need a human for that, one with access. Problem is there aren’t a whole lot of those falling off of trees. And once we’re in the building, we’re going to be at some pretty serious risk.”
I put my hand on his arm and checked him for coldlight. He was lightly coated in it. I drew it to me, into me, left him clean and uncontaminated. He gave me a slow, half-lidded smile in response. Dimples. I’d never noticed them before. He probably didn’t show them to just anybody.
“I’m fine,” he said. “You?”
“Good.” I licked relish from my fingertips and examined the Secretariat in Oversight. It was rich in history, of course, but there was one floor in particular that radiated into the power spectrum. The Wardens floor. Not just the residue of all of the powerful that had come and gone through those doors, either; this was here-and-now kind of energy, being radiated at an intense level. “Lots going on,” I observed.