part to shut the hell up.
That annoying, shrill voice of reason. Fighting Demon Marks was
Nobody but me, anyway.
I took a quick poll. The vote was two to one, bravery to self-preservation. I really needed to work on evening that one up, one of these days.
I needed a way to trap the Demon Mark. I had nothing on me… nothing but my clothes, my shoes.
Well, anything was better than nothing.
I breathlessly stripped off my shirt, braced myself, and began swimming slowly toward the floating Demon Mark.
It got uglier the closer I came, the kind of ugly that made my stomach twist and quiver, and my whole body shake violently. It didn't seem to notice me at all. It was at least twice as large as it had been when I'd seen it enter the barrier, pulsating with an unclean hunger. At this rate, it'd be knitting little Demon booties in just a couple of minutes.
Oh, I really didn't want to do this.
I threw my shirt out like a net, covered the twisting shape of the Demon Mark, and yanked the sleeves together in a knot. It wouldn't hold the thing long—maybe not at all. I began swimming for all I was worth, heading for what I thought was the nearest way out, though everything looked the same now, disorienting and endless. I kicked grimly. At least I could breathe, though the intoxicating, slightly sweet smell of this place made my head spin.
I glanced back at the shirt I was towing. The Demon Mark's black tentacles flowed out of the seams, testing its prison. It was content to stay there for now, because it was still feeding. That complacency wouldn't last.
Without warning, I fetched up against something cool and unyielding, and slapped my hand against it in frustration. I felt it give, and slapped harder. My palm stung from the impact, but it pushed at least two or three inches in.
I'd found the way out.
I concentrated all my will, all my force, and kicked.
Half of me slid through the barrier, instantly and bitterly cold and wet; I screamed in frustration, because I had no leverage to get the rest of me through. I wiggled. That gained me maybe an inch. Two inches. I pulled harder, and my left hand, and the bundle of the shirt, tumbled out into the thin, wind-whipped air.
The Demon Mark went insane when its food supply cut off, and the shirt might as well not have been there.
It seethed right through the fabric with lightning speed and wrapped tentacles around my hand.
I screamed and reached for power, but what I had was useless for fighting something like this. I remembered how it felt—the sickening, invasive throb of the thing squirming down my throat. The agony as it set up its tentacles buried deep inside, feeding from me and pumping up my body's production of power, until my body simply couldn't survive.
I grabbed it with my bare right hand and threw it. Tried to, anyway, but it stuck to my skin, pulsing, changing, shifting. Crawling and writhing.
I screamed again, soundlessly, trying desperately to shake it off. I could feel it testing layers of skin, trying to find a way in. It could burrow, of course, but it was lazy and fat. It wanted an easier path.
'We are sealing the break!' a voice shouted, startlingly close to my ear, and I felt something haul at me with so much strength, I felt tendons creak in my joints. I slid greasily the rest of the way through the barrier, still frantically trying to scrape the Demon Mark off my hand.
Whoever had done me the favor of pulling me free let go as soon as I was out of the milky column of power. Might have been Rahel; it was hard to tell because the night was a muddle of rain, lightning, thick spongy cumulonimbus clouds piled into an iron-colored anvil.
I hung there for an instant, and then I felt gravity take hold. I fell like Wile E. Coyote holding an ACME anvil, flailing, screaming, my hair snapping like a wet black banner behind me. I couldn't tell how far the ground was, but if the clouds were cumulonimbus, I was probably at least thirty thousand feet up. I tried to take a breath and got nothing but sharp, empty-tasting air. Too thin to sustain me. I shut out the sickening sense of the falling, the growing terror of the Demon Mark still trying to enter my body, and focused hard on gathering the available oxygen into a cushion around me. Tricky, when you're falling. You have to match the rate of descent at a molecular level, and that's not as easy as it sounds.
I scraped together enough for a breath. Not enough to cushion my fall, and I was still accelerating. I knew enough about terminal velocity not to want to experience it firsthand.
I was enveloped by a chilly mist as I entered the cloud base, and was buffeted by increasingly strong winds as the atmosphere thickened around me. I spread out my arms and legs, trying to slow myself as much as possible, and started the hard work of creating a parachute. Oh, it's theoretically possible. We'd talked about it once in a long-ago classroom, and it hadn't seemed so tough back then, when I was younger and not free-falling out of the sky.
I hoped these weren't low-lying clouds. If they were, by the time I had visibility, it might be too late… but deploying my 'parachute' too early would be just as bad, because the turbulence would start to rip into it as soon as I created the complex structure of fixed molecules. Theoretically, the technique I was going to use would allow the air itself to form into flexible material, and act like a gliding parachute.
Theoretically.
I gasped in another shallow breath of air and saw my left hand in another white-hot flash of lightning. The Demon Mark was still clinging to it, wet and black, seeping slowly into my flesh through the pores. Once it was under my skin, it could go anywhere. Sink its tentacles into my brain and lungs and heart. Embed itself so thoroughly that even trying to remove it would mean madness and death.
I glimpsed something shining through the clouds to my right, flaring aetheric-hot, then ice-cold; the column of power was smaller, but it was still fountaining up into the stratosphere. I slid that direction by folding my right arm in, a kind of Superman one-fisted attitude. Good thing I'd done skydiving once or twice in the past. At the time, it had just been for fun, but at least I remembered the basics of maneuvering in free fall.
I spread-eagled again when I got close to the column. The last thing I wanted was to fall in there again. I extended my Demon Marked right hand toward the flow, enough so that it could feel the tantalizing warmth.
It stirred and unraveled in a lazy black twist, long and sinuous. The battering of the air didn't seem to affect it at all. It unwrapped itself smoothly from my outstretched, trembling arm and reached out toward the column of power, which had started to fade and was coming in pulses like irregular heartbeats. Rahel—or whatever Djinn had saved me—had been as good as her word. The break between the worlds was starting to seal.
Timing was everything. If I waited too long, the Demon Mark would be drawn back through the barrier. If I broke off too soon, it would simply wrap around my hand again, and I could kiss my ass good-bye.
Problem was, I didn't control the timing. I just had to hope that I could sense the second that the column started to shut down.
The Demon Mark hesitated, torn between the fast-unraveling aetheric updraft and the less powerful but more certain warmth of my body.
I felt a sudden icy sensation sweep across me, and thought,
It went for the column… and as it stretched its black tentacles out, the geyser gave one last, brilliant pulse, and died.
The Djinn had been successful. The energy buffet was closed… and I was now the only Happy Meal available.
I curled myself into a ball and dropped, thinning the air ahead of me to make it a quicker descent.
When I uncurled again, heart hammering wildly, I broke through the bottom of the cloud cover and
