He gave me a furious look, and I saw the sparks of fire and gold blaze up in his eyes. Truly a Djinn, in that moment, with his skin shading to metallic bronze. “Don’t die,” he said flatly. “Promise me.”
“I promise,” I said. “Get out of here. I’ll wait.”
He kissed me, and it was a hungry, desperate kind of kiss that left my whole body tingling and alive, my lips sunburned with the force of his emotion. My husband. I touched his cheek and said, “I will always love you, David.”
He kissed my palm. “There is no force in creation that will keep me away. You know that.”
“I know.”
“Then wait for me.”
He turned, fury in his movements, and threw his arms around Cassiel.
Then he launched himself up off the roof, into the air, and began to fly.
Rahel watched him go, then turned her attention to me. “Until later, my sistah.” She blew me a kiss, put her arms around Luis, and purred, “Well, this is certainly an upgrade from my last passenger.” I had to laugh at the discomfort on his face, and then she flexed her knees and they were gone, too.
Another monster scrambled over the edge of the roof.
Time to go to work.
David didn’t come back.
Neither did Rahel.
I paced myself, there on that smoke-stained roof, under the glare of the Vegas sun. I had my pack, and in it was food and water, which I gulped down as the chimeras kept coming, and coming, and coming. Mother Earth must have run out of bears and mountain lions, because around noon, a new breed came scuttling over the horizon and attacked the building.
And these used to be human.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing at first, because my brain refused to process the information. It was too disturbing, too sickening. I had to face it once the first of them scaled the wall, way too quickly, and used its human hands to pull itself up over the lip and its scorpion’s feet to race toward me. The human face on the thing had rolling eyes and a lolling, foaming mouth, but being driven mad clearly hadn’t affected its razor-sharp reflexes. I dropped the juice box I was sucking on and pulled down lightning—overkill, but this thing was completely disturbing, and my skin crawled with the idea it could even exist in the same time and space with me.
I zapped it into a blackened mess when it was still fifteen feet away. My ears rang with the blast, and I felt singed and disoriented, but oddly better for ridding the world of it.
That was before I heard the clattering, and realized that there were a lot of these monsters, and they were climbing in steady, relentless streams. As I watched, stomach dropping, I saw that two more had already cleared the ledge on one side, and at least three on the other. At least the damn bear/lion creatures had been slower.
The roof wasn’t going to work any longer.
I started fires around the roof line to give myself a little time as I stuffed things back into my bag. The fire should have slowed them down, and maybe it did, for all of fifteen seconds or so, but then they ran shrieking—human shrieks—through the walls of flame and came straight for me with those deadly stingers upraised and ready.
No time for anything fancy. I had to evacuate.
I levitated myself up on a strong updraft, and—apprehensively—over the flames and the struggling, snapping chimeras that were swarming up the building. This wasn’t something even most hard-core Weather Wardens were good at doing; short bursts of this kind of thing were fine, but if I faded now, I’d be dropping myself into a boiling mass of these things at the base of the wall. I had to keep going. I had to hope that it would take them time to realize I was gone and to find me.
Personal levitation is exhausting, sweaty work, and my pack quickly felt like it increased in weight from ten pounds to fifty, to a hundred. I breathed in ragged, gasping breaths, holding diamond-hard focus on keeping the forces in delicate balance as I sped along, skimming over the desert at the speed of maybe thirty miles per hour. Not exactly fast, but I didn’t dare push faster. Every bit of forward motion I added made it harder to compensate on all the other, constantly shifting energies. I’d never done this for longer than a minute, at best.
I held it for almost fifteen minutes before my concentration snapped, and I tumbled out of the sky toward a razor-sharp stand of brush cactus. At the last second, I altered course and landed in sand instead, and hit the ground running. It was good I did, because when I looked back I saw that my footprints were filling up with something dark.
Fire ants. My very touch on the ground was bringing them boiling to the surface.
Not just fire ants, either. The desert’s defenses were on high alert, and I had to dodge swarms of smaller, nonchimeraed scorpions as well as some tarantulas crawling out of their holes ahead of me. Running was not my best sport, and broken-field running even less so, but I didn’t have a choice. When I reached out with Earth powers to try to clear my way, it only made things worse, as if the entire wildlife was sensitized to the presence of a Warden in their midst.
My breath was burning in my lungs, and I knew I’d have to stop soon, or at least slow down. But I wasn’t sure how I could, considering the fierce antibody reaction to my passage. Not only that, but as I looked back over my shoulder I saw movement about a thousand feet behind me. Chimeras, and they were catching up.
Las Vegas was a long, long way off. It looked drab and overbuilt in the desert shimmer. I realized that no planes were flying in or out, and although there was a road up ahead, about a half a mile out, there were no cars on it. It was eerily quiet.
No sound except for the overhead shriek of hunting birds, which made me realize how vulnerable I was to attack from that avenue. I didn’t want to have to kill more birds. I didn’t want to kill anything, except maybe those awful chimeras, but I didn’t think I was going to have a choice. Mother Earth had declared war, and I was going to have to fight back, hard.
Except that I wasn’t sure anything I had would really keep me alive for long.
I put on a burst of speed, pulled from Earth power, and outpaced the scuttling pursuers, heading for the road. Not that the road was safe, given that it had already eaten my damn car, but it was flat and clear of fire ant burrows, at least.
What it wasn’t clear of were hornets. They boiled up out of nowhere from the side of the road, a bomber squadron of inch-long furious insects, and headed straight for me as soon as my feet hit the asphalt. I gasped and instinctively swatted at them with a blast of air, driving them back as I kicked my run into even higher gear. I was dripping with sweat now, gasping like a fish out of water, but I couldn’t slow down. I could hear the relentless buzz of the insects zipping closer.
I came to a sudden halt, closed my eyes, and formed a hard shell of air around my body. The bugs hit the windshield with vicious force, leaving gruesome splatters, and those that didn’t die immediately jabbed their stingers into the barrier, over and over, trying to get to me with their last breath. A few, warier than the others, backed off and circled, looking for an opening.
I couldn’t wait forever.
I dropped the shell and ran for it, and the remaining hornets dashed in pursuit. The first one came close enough to smash with another gust of air that sent it tumbling, stunned or dead, to the gravel shoulder of the road. My legs felt like lead now, and my muscles were starting to wobble uncertainly as the stress and lack of oxygen took their toll.
The first hornet got me, and it felt like being hit with a bullet. A bullet dipped in acid. I yelped, slapped a hand down on my arm, and felt the insect’s body squash under the slap. The sting hurt, and then began to burn. I gritted my teeth and stopped again, pulling down my windshield. Three more hornets met their gooey death, leaving only two who were smarter than that, or slower.