The running battle of attrition went on for another half mile. I smashed one more hornet, but the other two harassed me, flying in with vicious darting motions. I crushed another one when it landed on me, luckily before it drove home its stinger.
The sole survivor dive-bombed me relentlessly, and score two more stings before I finally managed to kill him, too.
I windmilled to a gasping, gagging stop on the hot asphalt, barely able to keep upright. My left arm, where the first sting had landed, felt hot and swollen; so did the back of my neck and my leg, where the others had scored hits. But I wasn’t going to die of that.
No sign of the chimeras behind me.
No new threat racing up out of the desert to confront me.
There was even a cool breeze ruffling my hair, and I lifted my chin, grateful for anything that lessened the misery I was in . . . and then my eyes snapped open, and I saw the dust devil dancing out there in the desert, a sinuous rope shape made visible with all of the sand it was sucking up. It was mesmerizing to watch as it twisted, bent, and got darker.
I dropped down into a crouch, hardened the air again, and covered my head with my hands as the dust devil—no, dust tornado—raced toward me with the fury of a freight train. It hissed at first, and then, once it was on me, the hiss rose to a blinding roar. I could feel the sand scouring over the shell that protected me, and the heat increased. I couldn’t stay in the shell long without making it gas-permeable, but that meant opening myself to the dust storm. I’d suffocate, one way or the other. My only hope was to disrupt the dust devil’s delicate, powerful structure.
And I probably would have done that fairly easily, if it hadn’t been for the fact that a chimera slammed into the shell around me, and when I opened my eyes I found myself face to face with the lolling, foaming mouth and rolling eyes of a madman. His hands scrabbled at the surface, and I saw that the sand was ripping at him viciously. I’d seen a man stripped of skin once, in a storm like this, and as I saw the first raw patches appear on his body, I felt my stomach clench in nausea.
I couldn’t help him, whoever he’d once been. He was gone. And this thing that wanted to take a piece out of me wasn’t in any way human.
The scorpion tail drove down, hit the hard shell around me, and snapped its stinger off. The chimera howled and lost its footing. The dust devil blew it away into a maelstrom of sand and debris, and I concentrated on Oversight, examining the structure of the twister hovering over me. It was a perfect little engine of destruction—colder air whipping down and heating itself as it moved faster and faster in its spiral, then the hot air blasting up like a furnace through the center of the devil to the sky, where it cooled and spiraled back down. A perfect marvel of physics.
But this one—this one was no accident of nature. This one was being held together by an iron will, and when I tried to break it, it was like hitting a bank vault door with a toy hammer. Someone wanted to kill me, badly.
And I thought I knew who it was.
I kept the shield in place and straightened up. I started at a walk, well aware that I was going to exhaust the oxygen content of the air in this shell in less than a minute once I started running.
The dust devil stayed on top of me, blinding me, slamming me with debris and scouring sand that whipped at killing speeds. I broke into a jog. It paced me.
I kicked it to a run, lungs burning from more than effort now. I could feel my energy dropping, and the danger was that as I used up my available air I was going to start losing focus. Losing focus meant losing the protection of the windshield, and that meant I’d die.
No. There had to be a way. There had to be.
I realized that I was breathing too hard, and getting too little. That hadn’t taken long. A headache was already starting to form, and my legs were informing me that any step now might be the last I was going to take.
I dropped the shield, sucked in a dust-laden breath, closed my eyes, and dropped flat on the hot pavement. The dust devil screamed as it closed over me, clearly sensing triumph, and I tried not to scream as it battered me with raw fury.
When I’d hyperventilated enough, I put the shield back in place and ran on. I’d only gotten a few steps when the dizziness started. I couldn’t keep this up.
I crouched down again, grabbed my pack and opened it, groped inside, and found the one Djinn bottle I’d kept with me.
I thumbed off the cork.
A rush of black mist, and hidden in it I saw sharp angles and edges and alien geometries. Venna, in the form of an Ifrit. I’d never understood how much Ifrits really comprehended—not much, in all probability—but this was one moment when her needs and mine aligned perfectly.
“Ashan,” I gasped, and spat out a mouthful of sticky dirt. “He’s out there. Go get him.”
I couldn’t tell if she knew what I was saying, or if she sensed his presence, but she let out a shriek that vibrated at the very limits of my hearing, and disappeared.
Seconds later the dust devil collapsed in a confusion of sand and clattering license plates, barbed wire, and pieces of broken brush. Its demise left drifts of brown sand and chips of red sandstone littering the road in concentric circles around me.
I dropped the shield and spent the next several seconds just breathing. My whole body was shaking with effort, and sitting down seemed to be the only thing to do, really.
Down the road, about a hundred yards away, Ashan was screaming. Venna had battened on him, and sunk sharp, angular spikes into his pseudobody. When he tried to mist away, she only consumed faster.
I coughed and tasted blood. The bottle was in my hand, and the cork was dangling, ready to be slammed back in place. All I had to do was recall Venna before it was too late.
Ashan screamed, and screamed, and screamed, and I didn’t call Venna back to the bottle until his pale, shrieking face had dissolved into bloody mist, and had been absorbed into her twisted, nightmarish alien form.
It broke up into mist, too—black, greasy mist that turned gray, then white, and reformed around the body of a small girl in a pinafore dress, crumpled on the pavement.
“Venna!” I could barely stand, but somehow I managed to run to her side. Her eyes were open and blank. I touched her face, and she felt cold. “Venna, can you hear me?” I wasn’t sure that she would be stable in this form; sometimes Ifrits used up their energy and reverted to the primitive form.
But not Venna. She lay there, broken and defenseless, and when I saw her finally blink it brought tears to my eyes.
She didn’t get up. I pulled her into my lap and held her, and she felt like a child, like any child. Her arms slowly rose and went around me, and I felt her body start to shake.
I realized after a few more seconds that she was speaking, very softly. Her voice was a thin, anxious thread. “I didn’t want this. He was my brother; I didn’t want this. . . .”
Ashan was dead, killed in one of the only ways possible for a Djinn. She’d ripped away his life energy to save herself, and—as a byproduct—me. I couldn’t feel nearly as bad about that as she did, but I didn’t have to gloat, and I didn’t. I just held her and rocked her gently. Even Djinn need help, from time to time, and I was glad to give it.
Until I looked back, and saw more chimeras coming.
“Ven,” I said then, and nudged her head off my shoulder. “Venna.”
Her eyes cleared a little, and she regained some of the distance and poise that I was used to seeing in her. “Joanne,” she said. “You put me in a bottle.” That was a dangerous thing for her to be realizing right now.
“I had to,” I said. “You were Ifrit. You could have killed David.”