Gone.
The walls went next, unraveling into bricks and beams. I curled up tight on the floor and felt the wind sucking at me, ripping me with teeth made of steel and glass, wood and sharp plastic. It would flay me alive, or pull me into the storm of deadly, grinding debris. The linoleum floor, which was being ripped away around me, was at least under my control; made of largely organic materials, it was something within reach of my Earth powers, and I first rolled and wrapped the thick, flexible coating around my body. It protected me to some extent—enough that I began grabbing and dissolving the other organic debris in the air, especially the cutting and stabbing surfaces, into dust. The wind could still throw me at fatal speed, but at least it couldn’t rip me to pieces quite so easily.
But it had other tricks, this tornado formed—I felt it now—of sheer, volcanic hatred… and as it shredded the coolers at the sides of the store, bodies joined the debris. The wind scoured them apart in seconds, into wet flesh and sharp, flaying bone. It was all organic, all under the domain of my Earth power, but it was too much, too fast, especially now that the storm was mixing so many different kinds of weapons together.
The dead attacked me in the second wave, and I’d already spent what power I had to stop the first assault. The bones stabbed at me like flying knives, and skulls pummeled me with the force of thrown bowling balls. The thick flooring couldn’t protect me completely, or forever, and the tornado seemed to be growing in fury now, focused solely on ripping me to pieces.…
And then something entered the fight, on my side. A brilliant rush of power that threw up walls around me, solid earth and concrete, rigid metal, a berm of safety that gave me relief from the pummeling.
And then, quite suddenly, I felt the back of the tornado snap as the power fueling it withdrew. The wind faltered, scattered in all directions, and bones and ripped flesh and debris rained down on the shelter that covered me.
I couldn’t breathe. The linoleum had wrapped tightly to my body, and the air within the shelter had been exhausted in only a few gasps.
I’d suffocate here, in my safe haven.…
But then the top peeled away with the ease of a can opening, and a face looked down on me. Two faces, actually. One, veiled with a fall of dark hair, was Isabel’s, looking pale and frightened.
The other was indigo blue, silver-eyed, and I felt a surge of frantic panic as I realized that it was Rashid. Rashid, whom I’d imprisoned in a bottle…
… That was now held tightly in Isabel’s hand.
“Get her out,” Isabel ordered. Rashid ripped the shelter further open, took hold of the linoleum, and unrolled me from its stifling embrace. I gagged in dusty breaths and stared at his extended hand for a few seconds before grabbing it.
He lifted me effortlessly out and into a wasteland. A very limited and specific one, covering only the building that had once been Mike’s EZ Stop; there was nothing left but scattered bricks, rubble, and the pulped remains of the dead. Not something I wanted Isabel to witness, but not something I could easily shield her from, either.
Isabel grabbed on to me and hugged me, wordless and shaking. I hugged her back and looked over at Rashid, who inclined his head just a tiny bit.
“You’re sane,” I said.
“Well,” he replied, with a sharp-toothed smile, “that is not a common opinion. But I am no longer a puppet of the Mother’s will. Only of hers.” He cast a dark look at Isabel, and my arms tightened around her in reaction. “You are well aware how I feel about such things.”
“Don’t,” I warned him. “She’s a child.”
“Old enough to hold my bottle,” he said. “Though that was your doing, my sweet dear cousin, sticking me in one. For the second time. There will come a reckoning. Soon.”
“Then reckon with me. Not her. She took possession only to save my life.” I hesitated a moment, then said, “What happened here, in this place?”
He didn’t have to answer me; a captive Djinn could easily use the rules of his confinement to throw endless obstacles in the ways of humans with whom he had issues. I counted it a fairly good sign that he said, “Djinn. Of course. There is an anima here. They waked it and moved on, and it did the rest. And will continue to do so.”
An anima was the spirit of a place, a kind of tiny splinter of the Mother’s consciousness, though it was difficult to tell how linked it was to her, or whether it was its own creature, like the Djinn. Anima were generally benign, though some darker ones gave rise to legends of hauntings.
This one, though, was mad and angry, left to stalk through a dead town and rip apart anything that intruded on its fury. There would be many of these, I realized now… pockets of seeming calm that would lure in the unsuspecting, only to trigger a boundless rage. The Djinn had set traps, knowing that humans would seek safety in places that looked safe, comfortable, normal.
I couldn’t help a shudder. The anima wasn’t dead here, only hurt and waiting. It wouldn’t wish to fight a Djinn, so Rashid’s presence alone saved us… but the next to stop here wouldn’t be as lucky.
Rashid stared with those unsettling eyes and an expression I couldn’t read, then said, “If you’re done with using me, child, you can put your toys away.”
“Oh,” Isabel said softly. “Oh, uh, I don’t know how—”
“I’m hardly likely to tell you.” For all his menacing talk, Rashid was, I thought, showing remarkable restraint. Djinn were naturally inclined to take every advantage to trick their masters, but he was deliberately refraining.
Isabel looked frankly panicked. This was well outside the narrow bounds of her experience, and her hand was shaking. Any Djinn with half an impulse toward freedom could have startled her enough to drop the bottle, shattering it on the rubble and setting its captive free.
But Rashid did not move.
“Find something to put in the opening,” I told Isabel softly. “A cork would be best. Something that fits tightly.” She looked around frantically, while Rashid crossed his arms, rocked back and forth on his heels, and shook his head. She finally held up a triangular cosmetic sponge to me, and I nodded. “Now tell him to go back in the bottle.”
“Go back in the bottle,” she said in a rush, and then her cheeks turned red. “Please?”
“For the Mother’s sake, school her if you want to keep her alive,” Rashid told me, but he disappeared, and I gave the girl another nod.
“Push the sponge in tightly,” I said. She did, and let out a sudden gust of breath. She held the bottle out to me, and I took it. “Good job, Iz. Never forget, a captive Djinn is not your friend, only your tool, and tools can turn in your hand. Don’t use him unless you have no choice.” I gave her an odd look then, and voiced the question that had suddenly come to my mind. “How did you know about the bottle?”
The hot red blush in her cheeks grew stronger, and she looked down. “I thought I’d better get your bike,” she said. “I was putting it in the truck when all this started. I was kind of—looking around.”
“And how did you know what it was?”
She frowned and stared at the bottle in my hand—an ordinary empty beer bottle, somewhat ridiculously sealed with a flare of cosmetic sponge. “Can’t you see it?”
I saw nothing beyond the obvious. “What do you see?”
“Him,” she said. “It’s like a sun inside there. It burns.”
That was… impossible. I stared from the bottle to her, thoughtfully, and then became aware of a sharp ache in my right side. The first of many complaints from a body that had sustained much abuse; it was the first voice of a mob’s roar, all clamoring for attention. I had many cuts, some deep, and more than a few cracked bones and torn muscles.