Firestorm

pin me hard against the door, knees apart. Vulnerable. He was far stronger than a man, not that male strength wasn't usually enough for something like this. 'You don't know what this is like, Jo, having this, being this close to her—feeling every breath of the world flowing through you—every heartbeat pounding inside—' He was babbling. Quivering. 'It's new. I'm new.'

'I like the old David,' I said shakily. 'Can I have him back, please?'

He froze, leaning against the glass with a hand on either side of my head. Bronze eyes swirling, inhuman, unreadable. I could barely breathe. If David wanted to take me, it wasn't like I could say no; it wasn't like anyone had any control over what the Djinn did, maybe not even the Djinn themselves anymore. And oh God, I understood what was driving him. There was wildness in the air, wild power coursing through the sky and, for all I knew, through the ground, as well. This was the consciousness of the planet, slowly coming back to itself. A living world, an organism and a consciousness so huge that the rest of us were just dust mites crawling along its skin.

Desperation was driving him. Desperation and intoxication and the need to feel.

I could see a pulse racing under his skin, feel the vibration of his aching, near-painful need. It was echoing inside me, every thundering heartbeat.

I dared an indrawn breath. 'David, if you love me, back off.'

He leaned away, and then shifted abruptly into a sitting position, braced on the far side of the car against the passenger window. No mistaking, in that position, that those leather pants were very tight and he was, as the artists like to say, in a state of interest.

But he was sitting on the other side of the car.

And his hands were shaking.

When he finally spoke, so was his voice. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'This is—it's—she's never felt like this before. It's—I don't know how to—' Apparently, it was indescribable, because he just shook his head in frustration and looked away. 'It influences us. Seduces us. Makes us—'

'Crazy? Horny? Aggressive?'

The relieved smile he gave me was pure vintage David. 'Yes.'

'I like to know what I'm dealing with. And dammit, I don't like seeing you lose control.'

'I wouldn't be over on this side of the car if I wasn't in control.' Yeah, maybe… barely. I could feel the tension humming inside him, a coiled spring begging to unwind. He let out a long breath and deliberately flexed his hands, then laid them on his knees. 'Thank you for reminding me.'

'Is she awake?'

He parted his lips, not in answer but in surprise. Some of the fog left his eyes, and sanity came back. The bronze swirl muted to a soft brown, sparked with metallic highlights. 'Ah,' he finally said. 'No. Not exactly. But she's—in the process of waking up. And the feelings are especially powerful right now.'

'Like a hypnagogic orgasm,' I said. He blinked. 'The kind you have right when you're in that gray area between waking and sleeping. Really… deep.'

'Hypnagogic,' he repeated. 'Have I told you recently how much you baffle me?'

'No. You were too busy trying to feel me up.'

'Sorry.'

'Don't be.'

David lost the slight smile he'd managed to acquire. 'The problem is, I can't tell when it's me, or when it's her driving me. This is—difficult.'

'You were going to say 'hard,' weren't you?'

'No.'

'Liar.'

'Stop distracting me.'

He was right. It wasn't a good time to be distracting him, especially not if his self-control was all that stood between the impulses he was receiving and the rest of the Djinn. That thought sobered me considerably. 'Sorry,' I said meekly. I slowly got my legs folded into something like propriety and curled them around to put my feet on the floor. Another lightning bolt unzipped the sky overhead, broad as a superhighway—this one didn't fork. It was like a solid cable of light and power overhead. Forget about the surface of the sun, that had about as much heat in it as the entire nuclear core. If it had hit a plane, there'd have been nothing left but a floating smear of ash and some raining molten metal.

'I need to do something about that,' I said.

'Not a good idea.'

'Maybe not, but I have to try something. This system's highly unstable and dangerous.'

'It's still not a good idea.'

'Right. Can you help me?'

He was working on staying human, I could tell that; his instincts were driving him in all different directions, trying to rip him apart. I watched his bare chest fill and empty of air he probably didn't even need, mesmerized by the play of light on muscles. In the next flash of lightning, he looked almost as he had the first time I'd met him. In a heartbeat, his clothes re-formed from black leather into blue jeans and a gray T-shirt, with an open blue checked shirt on top. Hiking boots. His habitual olive drab ankle-length coat.

And glasses. Round John Lennon glasses that caught the flare in flat white circles, hiding his eyes completely.

'I'll try,' he said faintly. 'I'm not Jonathan. I can't—I don't have the experience to handle this kind of thing.'

'I doubt Jonathan would have had the experience to handle this, either. You're doing fine, David. Just fine.' I had no idea if it was true, but I wanted it to be. I reached out to him. He took my hand. His skin wasn't so burning- hot—more of a muted warmth, like someone who'd just come in out of the summer sun.

'I can feel them.' He cocked his head to the side, as if listening to something beyond the constant, restless rumble of thunder. 'The Djinn. It's like being the hub at the center of a huge wheel, all of them connected—pulling at me. No wonder Jonathan kept himself apart. It must have been easier that way.'

Fascinating as that was, I had more practical concerns. 'Can you help me bleed off some of this energy?' I made a vague gesture up at the sky just as another painful burst of lightning exploded, racing spidery legs overhead.

He took a deep breath, nodded, and twined his fingers with mine. 'Ready?'

I nodded and let go, to drift up into Oversight. David washed into an almost invisible shimmer of light and heat—the Djinn didn't show up well in the aetheric, not to human eyes, anyway. The fairyland glow of the city behind the car was different up here, but no less intense, but what dwarfed it—what dwarfed everything—was the looming power in the sky. It was weather, and yet… not. The swirls and frantic updrafts were caused by the power, not spawning it, and while there were fronts forming and storms on the horizon, it wasn't the engine driving this particular machine. There was something going on that wasn't immediately obvious, and it wasn't the work of any Warden, no matter how ambitious or misguided.

I reached out to try to stabilize the system.

Too late.

Lightning exploded, down in the real world, expending immense power upward, and slamming it down like a pile driver into the ground on the other end. There was so much energy involved that it literally knocked me for a loop in the aetheric. The roar in the physical world was devastatingly, deafeningly huge.

I felt the pulse of alarm from David, and saw something happen on the aetheric that I'd never witnessed. Never heard of, either.

An enormous column of energy erupted up from the ground in a thick, milk-white stream, heading for the sky.

What the hell was that?

I stared at it, stricken, and willed myself to move closer. Movement happens fast on the aetheric, unless you're careful, and I wasn't careful enough. I zipped forward, realized that I was moving too fast and the stream was closer—and larger—than I'd thought, and fought to slow myself down.

That should have been easy. It wasn't.