I felt the storm shift its attention, responding instinctively to the lash of power.
Oh boy, I thought. It was like being caught in the full glare of the biggest spotlight in the world. With a big target painted on your chest.
The storm lobbed a twenty-pound piece of ice sideways, into the windows.
“Down!” I screamed, and leaped. Djinn defiance of gravity let me carry the leap the last ten feet, and gave me enough momentum to impact hard against Martin Oliver and topple both of us back behind the desk, onto a bruising hard floor.
The window shattered with so much force that fragments flew past to embed themselves in the teakwood wall behind the desk. Some of them were bloody. I shoved Martin down when he tried to get up and risked sticking my head up. Wind was screaming through the jagged hole in the window. It instantly jerked my hair back straight as a flag.
There were at least twenty people down, some moving, some not. There was a lot of blood, more leaking out over the marble floor with every faltering heartbeat. The noncombatants, mostly UN staffers and delegates who’d gotten caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, screamed and jammed up against the exits. Marion was already heading toward the wounded against the tide of panic. As an Earth Warden, she’d be of a lot more use than anything I could do. Some of them could still be saved. She was the one to do it.
“Baldwin.” The name snapped my head around, and I was blinded by my wind-whipped hair until I clawed it back and held it fisted in my left hand. Martin Oliver had gotten to his feet and was staring at me with intense, grave concentration. “Joanne Baldwin?”
I didn’t have time for long explanations. “In the flesh.” More or less, but it didn’t seem the time to spill that particular bean. “Sorry about that, sir.”
He rejected the apology with a sharp hand movement. “Can you do anything about that?”
He gestured out at the monster looming gray-green outside. It was firing off lightning bolts every few seconds, and thunder was a continuous subsonic rumble. What could I do about it? What had he been smoking? And then I remembered. I’d been told before that I had more power than Bad Bob Biringanine, who had once faced down a certain hurricane by the name of Andrew and killed it before it claimed even more lives. Not that I’d ever believed such a thing… and yet Martin Oliver, one bad-ass Weather Warden in his own right, was looking at me as if I was the hope of the world.
And I had to say, regretfully, “No, sir. Sorry.”
Maybe in my human days—maybe—but not now, at the ragged end of my Djinn powers and enslaved to a…
… I had an idea.
I held up a finger. “Be right back.”
Now that I knew the coldlight wasn’t damaging to me, I could travel fast. I rose up into the aetheric, was instantly smothered by a whirling hungry blizzard of the stuff, but I didn’t need sight to feel where I was going, not in this case. Homing instinct.
I flew.
The glitter clung to me, built up like a thick snow coating, but I refused to let it slow me down. I didn’t see or sense any other presences up on the aetheric, but if there were any, they’d have been blue snowmen like me, masked from contact. Any Djinn still trapped here were probably frozen solid—if not frozen dead. Damn.
I collided with something. Not anything solid— that wasn’t possible, on the aetheric plane—but the pulling confusion was just as surprising and upsetting. I drifted, shook off as much coldlight as I could, and tried to see what it was that I’d hit. I had to wipe off sparkles like ice on a windshield, but I finally realized that I’d found a Djinn. Which one, I couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter.
I grabbed hold and towed it with me, fast, bucking the glitter headwind as fast as I could, and then falling, with a shocking sense of gravity, into…
… Patrick’s apartment. It was just as I’d left it. Sedate, well furnished, kind of pallid in a Better Homes and Gardenskind of way.
Blood dried to a dull brown mat on the neutral carpet where Lewis had been taken down.
I looked over at the Djinn I’d brought with me as his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed in slow motion to the floor.
I’d brought Patrick home.
Even though there was no time, I couldn’t leave him like this, with the coldlight eating its way through him like worms on speed. He was already screaming, skin bubbling and beginning to slough. I grabbed hold—tried not to think about the slick, greasy feel of his flesh—and called all of the coldlight to me. It spiraled eagerly, abandoning the feast and climbing my arms in a blue-white frenzy.
“Nice doggies,” I murmured, and as soon as I was sure I had enough of them, I went across the room and shook them off in a flurry of disappointed critters. They dropped into the carpet like invisible fleas. They’d eventually make their way back to whatever victim was handy, but with any luck, Patrick would survive. At least as long as any of the rest of us would.
“Sara?” Patrick’s eyes were open, blue and blind. His glasses were gone. I went back to him, got on my knees, and leaned over him. He slowly focused on me, and went pale. “Oh. You.”
“Yeah. Nice of you to remember. By the way, this whole slavery thing… it’s working out just great.” I resisted the urge to punch him while he was down.
His gaze sharpened. “You’re still alive.”
“Surprised?”
That woke up a weak smile. “Pleased, actually. Help me up.” He held out his hand. I stared at it for a second, then took it. Warm skin, as human and real as my own. Whether or not it was as human and real as an actual living person was something else entirely. Patrick heaved himself to his feet, staggered drunkenly and used me as a cane for a few seconds. “Ugh. I see you haven’t changed your mind about the room.”
“Yeah, well, I admit, the retro trashy look had its charms, but right at the moment I’m more concerned with saving some lives.” I pointed up. Even inside of his apartment, I could hear the thunder and feel the electric snap of the lightning strikes. “Gotta go.”
“Yes,” he agreed. He looked at me very seriously for a few seconds. “Where is Sara?”
“At Jonathan’s house.”
He looked ill. “They’ll destroy her.”
“Actually, they’ve got bigger problems to worry about just now. Like me.” I left him and moved around to the front of the couch.
Yep. There he was, my teen Nero-in-training, crashed out in a sprawl on the leather couch, mouth gaping to show poor dental hygiene. He was snoring.
Also smiling.
I leaned over and whispered, “Kevin? Wake up.”
No response. Damn. I’d drawn on his own power to put him in this trance. Was it something I could snap him out of? I hadn’t been thinking that far ahead, I had to admit. I reached out, grabbed, and shook him. His oily hair flopped back and forth, and he snorkled a breath. His eyelids fluttered.
Nothing.
“Kevin!” I screamed, and shook him again. “Damn, what do I have to do? Wake up!”
He mumbled something, smacked at me ineffectually with a clumsy hand, and tried to turn over.
I grabbed him and kissed him. After the first few slack seconds, I felt him kiss me back.
Ewwwwwwww. Not that boys his age were great kissers in general, but he had a lotto learn. Nostyle points. I broke free before the wiggling worm of his tongue got too far into my mouth and shook him again, for emphasis.
His eyes were open, but cloudy. Cleaned up, he probably wouldn’t be half bad, but the fact was he wasn’t cleaned up, or even clean. The body odor alone made me think of places without running water or inside plumbing.