At least it’s just rain, I told myself. Could be worse…
And right on cue, a white stab of lightning split the sky outside, close enough that I didn’t need Warden senses to register the power jolt. I felt it sweep over my skin and draw every tiny hair to shivering attention.
The thunder that followed shook the glass and set off a howling chorus of car alarms.
The next strike was about fifty feet away from me, right outside in the parking lot, and it came as a fork of blue-white light reaching down and grounding itself in one of the cars. What the hell… ? It shouldn’t have done that.
There were lots of taller objects to draw it, but then lightning was whimsical that way. And vicious.
I jumped back from the glass and slapped my hands over my ears as the thunder exploded, and couldn’t see a damn thing for the overloaded white-hot afterburn on my retinas. I blinked fiercely as I waited for my eyes to return to normal and cursed my lack of strength as oversight would have been a real asset at the moment. Except that I was too weak to get to it, and it was only as the thunder died to an ominous, continuing growl that I realized the car that had taken the brunt of that lightning bolt had been midnight blue, lean, and sleek.
In other words, it had been Mona. My car.
“Oh, damn,” I whispered, and blinked faster. Not that I could really see anything through the incredibly dense rain out there. No, wait, I could. There was something flickering orange out there, barely visible…
My car was on freaking fire.
“Joanne!” John Foster, breathless, came pelting up behind me, grabbed me, and threw me to the floor. He landed on top of me, and while I was busy registering the unique ways a marble floor didn’t make for a comfortable landing area, something outside exploded.
Not lightning. Something more man-made.
The explosion blew in the windows in a bright-edged shower, and the rain followed, pounding in before the glass even hit the marble. I smelled burning plastic and metal and tried to get up, but John held me down with an elbow across my shoulders. He was breathing hard. I could feel his heart pounding against my back.
“Let go!” I yelled. “Dammit! John! Let go!”
He finally did, rolling off in a crunch of glass, and as I flipped over I saw that he’d sustained some cuts, but not a lot. So far, we’d been lucky.
“You all right?” he asked. I nodded. “Come with me.”
He scrambled up to his feet and held out his hand. I looked back at the parking lot, or at least what I could see of it; there was an unholy bonfire out there, consuming at least three cars.
The center of it was the blackened shell of the Viper formerly known as Mona, who wouldn’t be taking me on any more fast drives, ever again. I gulped and clutched my purse tight and took John’s hand.
He led me out of the lobby, past the arriving cluster of alarmed tenants and late-breaking security personnel, to the stairwell. He hit the stairs running, tasseled loafers pounding, and I had to hustle to keep up. John had been working out, or else adrenaline was a wonderful fitness drug.
We ran full speed up seven floors, all the way to the top of the building, to the door that was marked ROOF ACCESS, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. And I was very thankful when we slowed down at the top, because my shoes were not of the cross-training persuasion, but then he grabbed me and towed me toward the exit.
“John!” I yelled, and yanked him to a stop before he could stiff-arm the ALARMWILLSOUND crossbar. “John, wait! What’s going on?”
“You were right about the Djinn!” he yelled back. “We have to go, now! They’re coming!”
Oh, crap.
He broke free and hit the door release. An alarm added its shriek to the general confusion—the fire alarms were going off, too, and I wondered if the fire had spread somehow from the parking lot to the building—and as the door opened out onto the roof, rain and wind shouldered through the opening to hit us like linebackers. I staggered, but John reached back and grabbed my wrist and dragged me outside into the chaos of the downpour.
“John!” I screamed, over the continuing roll of thunder. “It’s not safe out here! The lightning—”
“Shut up; I’ll take care of the lightning!” And he could. John was a highly competent Weather Warden in his own right. Even as he finished saying it, I felt a ripple over my skin, and my blunted Warden senses registered something whipping through the aetheric at us like a striking snake…
John let go of me, turned, and focused his attention on a thick silver stanchion fixed to a corner of the roof.
Lightning hissed down. I could feel it struggling to reach us, fighting…
And then turning to hit the stanchion. The building’s lightning protection system bled it off into the ground through a network of inlaid wiring. I could feel the heat of it blast over me from where I stood.
But I also felt how close it had been. Something was directing that lightning.
Controlling it. Something a great deal stronger than John Foster.
He knew it, too; I saw it in the fixed, desperate set of his expression. “Come on!” John was tugging me onward, to a second concrete bunker on top of the roof.
The door was propped open. He grabbed it just as another flash of lightning came out of nowhere, streaking for us. John wasn’t ready, I knew it—he’d just spent a tremendous amount of energy redirecting that first bolt, and this one was just as big, if not bigger. And it was obviously bent on getting us.
What I had to throw into the pot barely qualified as power at all, but I did it, reaching out and trying to grab hold of the enormous burst of energy that was coming toward us. Electrons were shifting, jittering, realigning into polarities to create a path. All I had to do was snap a few… and I couldn’t do it. As fast as I broke the chain, it whipped back at us, those tiny molecular polarities spinning and locking faster than I could even read their force structure. Rain lashed, and a gust of wind howled over us in a scream of rage. I felt John desperately working to save us, and more power pouring in from outside trying to save us, but it was no good. The bolt was going to hit us dead on, and we were out of time. Whatever had hold of this storm wasn’t going to be denied.
I dived one way, knowing it wouldn’t do any good; John dived the other.
I hit and rolled, and saw the lightning spear straight into John’s chest.
“No!” Maybe I screamed it, maybe I didn’t; whatever sound I made was lost in the massive rush of energy that slammed into his flesh. In its burst of brilliant light, I saw John’s diamond-eyed Djinn standing nearby in the shadows, still and quiet, watching his master die. No expression on his face at all.
He didn’t move to help.
John, cut off from the Wardens network, had never heard the instructions to give his Djinn a preemptive command to defend him. He’d never really understood the danger. And if he had, he probably wouldn’t have believed it.
John dropped without a sound the second the lightning crackled and sizzled out.
I couldn’t see for long, agonizing seconds, so I fumbled my way over gravel and tar to take him in my arms. He was burning hot. As my vision cleared I saw that there were black burns at the top of his head, on the palms of his hands, and that his pants were riddled with sizzling, smoking holes. His shoes were melted to his feet.
I burned my fingers trying to check his pulse, but it was silent. His heart had taken a full jolt, and his nervous system was fried beyond repair.
The Djinn left the shadows and walked over to where I was huddled in the cold, pounding rain with John’s weight across my lap.