It had felt deeply surreal to be signing a credit card slip while the world was in the throes of chaos, but I supposed one way or another, I’d be paying off my debts.
Cherise looked tired and pale, and from the way she was whimpering in her sleep, she had bad dreams. I reached back and smoothed her hair until the whimpering went away. Baby Tommy seemed to have adapted much more easily; he’d taken to Cherise quickly, and he was a happy kid, smiling and burbling most of the time. From the way he filled his diapers, he was healthy enough. I would have felt better having him checked out by an honest-to-goodness Earth Warden or, at the very least, a pediatrician, but for now, we were all doing okay. Cherise was out of the braces. Her legs had healed straight, and although she continued to be weak and tired, she was recovering remarkably well from having just about died. The jury was still out on how she was going to deal with Kevin’s death, long term.
If we had any long term, of course.
Up ahead, traffic was snarled, again. As we got into more civilized areas, it was perversely harder to get around these days, what with people frantically trying to get to their survivalist mountain hideouts, or to their relatives, or just to the store to stock up on emergency batteries. We were coming into Amarillo—not exactly a major metropolitan area, but busier than the deserted Texas Panhandle highway had been. The air was dry and stable overhead, and the landscape was mostly flat and scrubby, with tough vegetation. Very different from the trees where we’d left Kevin.
I hoped I wouldn’t end up dying somewhere without trees. I liked trees.
Even the Djinn’s prodigious driving skills couldn’t cope with the jam of traffic, and pretty soon we were cooling our engine at an idle, watching brake lights. Funny; this type of backup on the East Coast would have been a howling chorus of impatient horns sounding. Not here in the Southwest. People just . . . waited, listening to their music or talk radio, poking at their hair, arguing with whoever was in the car along with them. Or with themselves, apparently. I didn’t hear a single angry honk.
“This is restful,” I said, to nobody in particular. The Djinn wasn’t exactly chatty company. Cherise was asleep. The radio stayed quiet, not falling for my opening gambit. “David? Do you think we should stop?”
“You all need rest,” he said. “I’ll find you a place to stay for a few hours, and someplace to eat.”
That sounded heavenly. Not that I couldn’t sleep in the car and eat bagged food, but stretching out on real sheets was better than sex right now. The mere thought of fresh food made me salivate.
“We should probably push on,” I said, being the brave little toaster. “It’s only about another ten hours to Sedona, and that’s not counting the bat out of hell multiplier.”
“You’d get there exhausted,” he said. “It’s been hard, and it’s going to get worse, I think. You need to rest while you can.” He spoke with authority, and I remembered that in his brief human life he’d been a soldier. He’d been used to exhaustion, to snatching what little rest and relief he could in between fighting for his life.
I gave in. Truthfully, it had been a token protest anyway, and Imara’s inexplicable warning had made me worried. My daughter, like David, had a much wider view of things than I ever could. What if we were making things worse instead of better? What if we were actually forcing the battle instead of preventing it?
I couldn’t think straight anymore. I’d been holding back emotions for a while now, but there’s one thing about emotions: they never really go away if they’re strong. You can bury them, but like a vampire they keep lurching back up. I knew that I was still numb about the loss of Kevin, but it was going to come out, and probably soon. I’d rather suffer through that in private, lying in a bed and hugging a pillow. It wouldn’t help Cherise to see me lose it.
I’d put him in the ground myself. I’d felt the unmistakable absence in him, the void where his life had been.
No, I didn’t want to remember how it had felt to hold his empty shell, or how he’d looked so pale, bound up in that cheap motel sheet—but the image wouldn’t go away.
With a shocking intensity, that mental picture suddenly shifted, and it was Lewis’s face pale and still, it was Lewis lying in my arms as I abandoned him to the dirt—alone, cold, unmarked. I almost gasped out loud with the emotion that brought rolling through me, and rested my burning forehead against the glass as I squeezed my eyes shut. No. No, that’s not going to happen.
David and I had our powers back. Cherise had survived. We’d saved some lives along the way. We were winning, dammit. I couldn’t get spooked now. I couldn’t lose focus. That was another good reason to recharge. When I was in the throes of exhaustion, it was far too easy to let things overwhelm me, even the unlikely threats. I lost all ability to filter.
While I was thinking, David had been acting, and I felt the Mustang suddenly leap forward. I looked up and saw we were hurtling straight for the back of a stopped eighteen-wheel truck . . . and then the car lurched sideways with a scream of tires, jumped over a curb, and bumped down on the other side, onto an off ramp. Free of the traffic block, we rocketed down the access road toward a nice, neat- looking, moderately priced hotel/ motel.
We passed it. I looked back as it receded into the distance and said, “Uh, that one would have been okay—”
“No, it wouldn’t have been, sugar.” Whitney’s accent never failed to make me want to roll my eyes. She could not have been more annoying about how thick she laid it on. “You’re going to have company coming soon. Won’t do to put you up someplace that’s going to just come down on you. Again.” She sounded utterly certain of herself, and casual about the threat, too. Lovely.
“What kind of company?”
“The kind you don’t want to stand up to, not that you could. You remember little Venna.”
Ouch. Venna was the very last Djinn I’d want to have on my tail right now—even worse than Rahel. Venna was impossibly strong, and she was clever, too. Great friend, awesomely bad enemy. I thought about that little girl, the image of innocence, with those ghostly white eyes like I’d seen in Rahel.
I shuddered. “Where can we go?”
“I’m working on that,” Whitney said. “I’m taking over the car now.”
We blurred past a lot of inviting-looking roadside inns, took some turns, and ended up on the northeast side of town, as best I could tell. Businesses of any kind thinned out and stopped.
Wherever she was taking us, it wasn’t going to be the Hilton.
The car slowed and stopped in the middle of nowhere. I could see a faint smudge on the horizon off the black-top to the right, but I couldn’t tell what it was.
“Uh, Whitney? Hello?”
Nothing. No answer from her, or from David. I tried poking the Djinn, but it just sat there, inert and hot to the touch. It was like poking a bag of especially firm rubber.
Cherise yawned and sat up, rubbing her eyes. Tommy woke up with a grouchy grumble, turned his face toward her neck as she lifted him up, and promptly fell asleep again draped all over her. She patted his back, smiled a little, and then looked at me. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, obviously nothing, because we’re just sitting here. Why are we just sitting here?”
“Because David and Whitney are arguing about it,” I said. I just knew that was the case, and I knew that it indicated a potentially major problem. “Whitney says Venna is headed this way. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but maybe she’s on our trail, too. Either way, it’s not good news.”
Cherise shuddered. “Ouch. Okay, got it—crisis imminent. Again—we’re sitting. Why are we sitting?”