Firestorm

black hair and fair skin. 'You have such interesting pets. Not very polite, though.'

She looked at the power lines she held, and hissed to them in a scary-sounding lullaby. They tried to lunge for me again. I sucked in a breath and stepped back; Rahel didn't seem inclined to let them go, but with Djinn, well, you really never could tell. She might find it funny.

'They need training,' she continued, and without any warning, the current cut off in both, and they went heavy and limp in her hands. She let them smack down to the roadway next to her very lovely shoes—Casadei animal-print pumps. Too nice for the current conditions. 'Do you ever draw a normal breath?'

'Bite me,' I said. I felt giddy and slightly intoxicated. Too much happening, too fast.

She smiled. 'Not hungry. A simple thanks will do.'

'What are you doing here?'

'I told you. David's orders.' She looked around at the wreckage as she dusted her hands. 'He had to leave. You present too much of a distraction at the moment, and he felt a need to concentrate. I give you no guarantees that I will be here for long, or that my presence will be especially helpful to you. Did David not tell you that we were no longer to be trusted?'

'And yet, here you are, saving my ass,' I pointed out.

She shrugged. It had the grace of water flowing over stone, utterly inhuman in the arrangement of her muscles, the way she used them. Rahel was, in some ways, the least human of all the Djinn I'd met.

And in some other ways, one of the most.

'One must pass the time,' she said. 'Eternity is long, and there are so few truly interesting people.'

I started to say something about helping me get the wounded out of the cars, but then her head snapped around so fast that beads clacked in her hair, and her birdlike eyes fixed on something off to her left, in the darkness of the grassy median.

Another white-hot spidering of lightning overhead showed me what she was looking at.

There was a child out there. Bloody. Wandering around all alone. She couldn't have been more than five—a cute little thing, long brown hair, clutching a stuffed animal of some kind.

I sensed the lightning gathering itself.

Rahel said nothing. She was tense, but at rest. She could move faster than I could, but I saw no indications she was thinking about doing so.

After all, she was a Djinn, and she didn't know that kid. It was kind of an academic notion to her, empathy.

I lurched into a run, vaulted over a dismembered quarter panel lying in the way, and made it to the damp grass. My shoes slipped. I sensed the swirling column of the rift in the aetheric, the blood of the earth boiling upward into the sky just a few dozen feet ahead of me, near the little girl. She was staggering toward it.

The lightning chains were clicking into place. I could see it happening, see the aetheric heating up with the potential energy turning to actual…

I tried to break the chains of electrons aligning, but the forces at work were too strong for a single Warden.

I hit the little girl and tackled her down to the ground, covering her with my body, and at the last second I lifted myself up on my hands and knees, away from any contact points with her skin.

Grounded four ways.

Lightning slammed into me with a force like nothing else on earth. I'd been struck by it before, but I'd been inhabited by a Demon Mark then, and considerably better protected. This was like being hit in the back by a truck, but before I could register the pain, the rest of it flooded in—power, so much power it was like a small sun channeled through a narrow few nerve channels. Unleashing itself through the circuit of my body.

It lasted only a split second, maybe less, because suddenly I was yanked up, no longer in contact with the ground, rising into the air and looking down on the huddled body of the little girl I'd been trying to protect.

The circuit was broken.

Rahel had me. Her eyes were blazing hot gold, but her face was unreadable, a blank mask of Djinn indifference.

She dropped me, job completed. Life saved.

Halfway to the ground, I felt the suction of that whirling, burning column of power rising out of the earth take hold of me and draw me in.

Oh crap, I thought, and then it was too late. As I twisted in midair, being helplessly reeled in like a fish on a line, I saw her alarmed, surprised face. At least I'd given Rahel a new, exciting experience.

Not much of a comfort, as I was swallowed up in a milk-white flood of power.

It was like being baptized in battery acid. It hurt, oh my God, it hurt, and I tried to scream, but there really didn't seem enough left of me to scream, exactly. I was coming apart, a moth trapped in a nuclear core, and nobody, nobody was coming to rescue me this time.

The pain kept burning until it abruptly just… stopped. I was still trapped in the flood of aetheric power boiling up, and for all I knew, I was being flung miles up into the sky, but I felt no sense of motion.

I opened my eyes and saw paradise, but a paradise that humans were never meant to see, a kind of opalescent waxen beauty that swept, swirled, created, and destroyed. I was in the bloodstream of creation, and it was more beautiful and more terrifying than anything I could have imagined. No wonder human beings counted for little, in the great scheme of the world. The power here—the power that was simply excess energy, bleeding off from the slowly waking entity we called the Mother—was beyond anything we could ever understand or control.

It was kind of a privilege, seeing it as I inevitably exploded into disconnected atoms.

Only I didn't do the exploding thing. I held together and gradually adjusted to the strange pressures and odd lights and disconcerting, slick flows that mimicked glass but felt silky and liquid to the touch. Nothing matched physics as I understood it. It was wildly, insanely strange and mesmerizing.

I must have been the first person to see a Demon Mark in the wild.

It entered the same way I had… passing through the barrier, sucked into the flow. It floated in the streams, a complex and sickening structure that twisted and turned on itself, moving with an eerie kind of life. Lazily bumping from one flow to another. I'd never seen one outside of some kind of container—a bottle, a human body, a Djinn forced to take one into itself. I had no idea they could even exist like this, on their own.

Not good news.

I felt it fix on me with an atavistic shudder of horror.

As I watched, the Demon Mark was growing larger, sucking in energy and power from the aetheric flow, like a tick hitting an artery. I didn't dare hope that it would gorge until it exploded, though. Something far, far worse would happen; I just knew it would. Nothing good ever happened to me with a Demon Mark around.

It occurred to me that there was a reason the Demon Mark might come swimming in here… This stuff was blood, in a sense. Lifeblood, pure, the real deal.

The blood of the Earth itself.

When these parasites were out in the regular world, they'd latch on to anything with a trace of power, trying to stay alive—Wardens and Djinn. But because we weren't the pure stuff, they inevitably mutated and destroyed us in the process of creating an adult Demon.

Wonderful. I'd worked out the biology of the Demon Mark. That was helpful.

Not.

It drifted my way.

I screamed like a little girl and started to head blindly away from the twisting, misshapen thing. Trying to move through this gray fog of power was like swimming through gelatin. God, I hated those monsters, hated them with a sweating, blinding passion that owed nothing at all to logic. It wasn't coming after me, not this time. It had found its own, personal paradise. Right?

Right.

Well, then, fine and dandy. I could just leave it to munch, and go on about my business…

No. I couldn't. If a Demon Mark was capable of hatching an adult Demon out of the imperfect fuel of a human or Djinn, then what was it going to create out of this stuff? I couldn't even bear to imagine. You have to get it out of here, some part of me said. The other part—overwhelmingly the majority—told the first