… And the car’s wheels sank into the road, as if into heavy mud. Luis was also trapped. David pulled him out, but not without difficulty.
I abandoned the bike, which was too heavy to maneuver without power, and ran for Joanne’s side of the car, which was already sunken too deeply for her to open the door. I reached in the window and grabbed her. Pulling her out and carrying her was no easy matter; she was tall and not excessively thin, and the road was attempting to suck me down with all its might. I focused all my earth-derived powers to try to hold it back, and managed—just barely—to stumble my way through the black muck and make it to the harder gravel on the roadway.
Something was very wrong here.
I tried automatically to shift my vision into the aetheric spectrums, and suddenly felt claustrophobic, not free… because it was as if night had fallen there on the aetheric plane, where there was not, had never been, true darkness. I saw David stumble and fall, and I understood why; no Djinn could function with that crippling shock. Even human as I was now, I felt the impact of it, the horror. It was utterly, completely wrong.
I knew something cruel and terrible was happening, something potentially fatal for us all, and the fear sharpened as I heard David whisper to Joanne, “Kill him.”
Luis was the only other male present, and he held up both hands in surrender as Joanne looked at him with dark, almost feral eyes. “He’s not talking about me! I’m not doing it!”
I realized it in the same moment that Joanne did. “The Djinn who was driving your car,” I said.
“He wasn’t a Djinn,” she said. “He was just a shell. Burned out. No will of his own… an avatar…”
“Not anymore,” I said. “Something’s filled him. Something else.”
“Who, the devil?” Rocha asked. “’Cause this doesn’t feel so great, and I can’t see a thing on the aetheric. Cass?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Careful. I hear wings.”
We had only that single second before the eagle attacked again—not me this time, but Luis. He raised his right arm instinctively to protect his eyes, and I saw the claws sink in and rip free in bloody sprays. It clawed the arm aside, and snapped for his eyes.
I lunged for it. The aetheric might have gone blind, but there was still power in the earth around us, and I poured it into the feathered, strong body of the bird as I touched it and drew it close to my chest. “Hush,” I whispered to it, and stroked its beautiful, glossy feathers as sleep took hold. “Hush, I won’t hurt you, child of the skies.” I pulled off the backpack and put it aside. My leather jacket, even shredded down the front, made an effective restraint when I stripped it off and tied the sleeves around the sleeping bird; it wouldn’t keep him trapped long once he woke, but it seemed safer for him than leaving him unprotected and limp. I put him down carefully and said, “We need shelter. There were more on the way.…” I paused, because my motorcycle, which I’d carefully parked off the road, tipped over with a sudden crash, and began sinking into the softened asphalt. I couldn’t completely abandon it, poor thing, any more than I could the eagle; I grabbed the handlebar and levered it back upright, slimed with melted road tar, and wheeled it out into the dense sand. It was likely no better, but at least it wouldn’t suffer the indignity of Joanne’s Mustang, which was now being crushed, consumed and destroyed somewhere beneath that simmering tarry surface.
I pulled the straps of the backpack on over my sleeveless pale pink tank top. The weight of the bottles was surprisingly light, but then again, they were empty of contents. Just full of power.
“Get everybody in the hotel!” Luis called to me. He was helping Joanne guide David toward the derelict building, and I ran after them, well aware that the night was full of danger, and how vulnerable we were running blind in the aetheric as well as the shadows of reality.
By the time I joined them, David had single-handedly ripped the boards from the front doors, snapped the lock, and levered open the entrance. Luis and Joanne were already inside the lobby, and David nodded for me to follow them. He sealed up the doors with a crash as he stepped in. It wasn’t merely locked; he’d woven the wood itself together into one solid structure.
The lobby reeked of smoke, mold, and the uneasily lingering ghosts of sweat, sex, and desperation. Never one of the showplaces of the town, the materials had been drab and cheap to begin with; destruction had rendered it oddly antique, though I was certain it could not be more than a few years old. Black colonies of mold swarmed the walls and spilled in clumps on the carpeting, and I was doubting sincerely that this was any place to stage our defense, save that it was the only shelter we could reach. It was too large, too porous—even with Djinn at our disposal.
“I think I lost money here once,” Luis said. “Didn’t really look all that much better then. I’ll bet the drinks were stronger, though.”
“Oh, you know they took the liquor with them when they left.” Joanne sighed. “Liquor and cash. And frankly, a big-screen plasma isn’t going to be much good to us in the current circumstances. Not even with free HBO.”
She sounded cheerful, but with a bright edge of mania; Joanne, like the rest of us, had been pushed too close to the edge, and was all too aware of the drop looming below. Still, she was smiling. I was far from sure that I had the same grace within me. I worried that we’d not get out of here alive. I worried what Isabel was doing, and who had charge of her—and I prayed it wasn’t Shinju or Esmeralda. I worried about… everyone.
Including Luis. He was holding together, but there were only so many shocks any of us could take before coming apart, however temporarily. He seemed stolid, but I remembered the ashen certainty I’d seen in him of the fate of humanity. How long before he, too, would lose faith?
Joanne led the way across the destruction and into a back room, which was less affected by smoke, mold, and general neglect; it had a small kitchenette, tables, couches, and bathroom areas beyond. A room for the staff, not guests; the furnishings here were even cheaper and more utilitarian than outside.
Luxurious, under the current circumstances, though I could imagine staff members grumbling about its Spartan pleasures.
As Luis and I helped David—still shaken and blinded by the disruption of the aetheric, as a human would be by a sudden loss of gravity—into a chair, Joanne turned to additional defenses. She called up power and began to melt the metal edges of the door and frame into a sturdy, permanent seal; it took a while and some fine concentration to create a solid barrier. Joanne finally let out a heavy sigh, rubbed her forehead, and must have realized that she was still holding a pistol in a tight, white-knuckled grip. “Probably not going to do much good anyway,” she said, when she saw me watching.
“Maybe not,” I agreed. “But we can ill afford to reject any line of defense.”
She nodded and stuck it in the waistband of her pants, and I made way for her as she came to David’s side. She took his hand, and his fixed stare slowly focused on her face. I turned away to give them privacy, and saw someone standing in the shadows.
Gold eyes gleaming.
Rahel, who must have been listening to Joanne and David’s exchange, because she said softly, “David was right about the aetheric.” Joanne responded instantly, summoning a handful of fire as she spun to face the potential threat, then held it at the sight of the Djinn. “I was following. I hit… something. I had to take physical form to get this far, and I don’t think I can reach much of my power. It’s as if we’re in…”
“In a black corner,” David finished, when she hesitated. “But only at half the strength of a natural-developing one. It feels artificial. Imposed.”
I had never experienced one in physical form, and on the aetheric black corners—which occurred naturally, but with utmost rarity—were easy to see and easier to avoid, unless they formed around you. If this was how it felt at half strength, I never wanted to be trapped in one at full power; when I reached for the aetheric, I felt as if I was suffocating on darkness, and although I could reach my power, it felt muffled, tenuous, vulnerable. It would be worse for the full Djinn, of course. Much worse.