Firestorm

Low-lying clouds.

I snapped the structure of my air chute together, and jerked to a sudden, neck-wrenching stop that turned into a slow downward spiral as the air chute's molecules—held together by desperate force of will—began to warm from the friction and spin apart.

I was still going too fast.

And there were power lines coming up.

I let the chute collapse in on itself while I was still twenty feet up, tucked and hoped breathlessly that the mud down there would be soft enough to prevent any serious injuries.

I don't remember hitting the ground, only blinking water out of my eyes and staring up at the low, angry clouds, which glowed with continued frantic flashes of lightning.

I raised my right hand and stared at it. No sign of the Demon Mark, though in all the confusion it could be just a stealthy creep away…

'Mom?' Imara's face appeared over mine, ghost-pale, eyes as reflective as a cat's. 'Please say something.'

'Stay still.' Another voice, this one male and as familiar to me as breathing. 'You've got some broken ribs. I'll have to fix them, and it's going to hurt.'

I blinked rain out of my eyes and turned my head. David was crouched down next to me, rain slicking down his auburn hair and running in rivulets down his glasses. He looked miserable. Poor thing.

'Demon Mark,' I said.

'I think she hit her head,' Imara said anxiously.

'No, she didn't,' David said, and reached over to wipe mud from my face with a gentle hand. 'You're in shock, Jo.'

I shook my head, spraying mud and water like an impatient sheepdog. 'No! It was feeding off the power geyser. I got it out of there, but it's still around. Watch yourselves.' Nothing Demon Marks loved more than a warm Djinn, and so far as I knew, once Djinn were infected, there was no way to cure them. 'Get out of here.'

David said, 'Imara, go.'

'But—'

'Did you hear me?' His voice was level as a steel bar. She stared at him, then at me, and then misted away.

'You, too,' I said. 'Get the hell away from here. Go.'

'In a minute. First, you need some help.'

I nodded, or tried to. The mud around me was cold and gelatinous, and I spared a single thought for just how trashed my clothes were. And my shoes. What had happened to my shoes? Oh man. I'd loved those shoes.

I was focusing on that when David took hold of my shattered arm and pulled, and the universe whited out into a featureless landscape, then went completely black.

Somebody had put my shirt back on. I hoped it was David. It was nice to think of him dressing me. Nicer to think of him undressing me, though…

I opened my eyes to road noise and vibration, and the pleasant daydream of David's hands on me faded away. My whole body felt like a fresh bruise. The side of my head was pressed against cool glass, and I had a wicked drool issue going on; I raised a hand, wiped my chin, and blinked away dizziness.

I was in the Camaro, and we were hauling ass for… somewhere. The road was dark, only a couple of headlights racing through the gloom and the wavering dashed yellow stripe to guide us. If there was moonlight, it was behind clouds. I could still feel energy rumbling in the atmosphere.

'What?…' I twisted in my seat—which was, fortunately, the passenger side—and looked at the driver. 'Imara!'

My daughter—disorientation still followed the thought—glanced at me. She looked pale in the dashboard lights. 'I was starting to worry.'

'Where's—?'

'Father? He was with us for a while, but he had to go. Djinn business. I think it was about the Demon Marks.' Like her father, she had the trick of driving without paying the slightest attention to the road, and kept staring right at me. 'Are you better?'

I didn't feel better. No, I felt like I'd been boiled, steamed, deboned, and thrown out of a plane at thirty thousand feet. With a collapsing parachute. David had healed my broken bones, but the remainder of it was my problem. 'Peachy,' I lied. 'How long have I been out?'

It took her a second, juggling the human concept of time in her head. 'Four hours, I think. You hit the ground hard. Father did what he could to help you. He wasn't sure it would be enough.' Her hands kept steering the car accurately, even while we took a curve. 'Are you sure you're all right?'

Something came to me, a little late. 'And how exactly do you know how to drive a car?'

Imara blinked a little and shrugged to show she didn't understand the question.

'Kid, you've been alive for, what, a couple of days? Did you just wake up knowing everything that you need to know? How does that work?'

Another helpless lift of her shoulders. 'I don't know. If I had to guess, I'd say I know everything my parents knew. So I benefit from your life, and Father's. It saves time.'

I remembered Jonathan sending me to Patrick, the only other Djinn who'd really had to learn how to become one from scratch—who'd been brought over from human by another Djinn, rather than created the old-fashioned way, out of apocalypse and death. I'd had to take baby steps, learning how to use what I'd been given, because David hadn't been able to transfer that life experience to me the way he had done with Imara.

But the idea that your daughter knows everything you knew? Not very comforting. There were plenty of moments in my life that I'd just as soon not share with my offspring…

I pulled myself away from that, pressed my hand to my aching head, and asked, 'Where are you heading?'

'Maine?…'

David had set her on the road to Seacasket, at least. And apparently global positioning was one of the things that she'd inherited from him.

I nodded and tried stretching. It didn't feel great. 'What about the accident? Was everybody all right?'

'Accident?' She was either playing dumb, or all that carnage and twisted metal had meant little to her.

'There was a wreck—there was a—' A little girl. Wandering, bloodied, scared. I'd been trying to save her, hadn't I? My memory was fuzzy, tied up with images that didn't make any sense of opalescent swirls and burning and falling…

'I don't know,' she confessed, and chewed her lip. I knew that gesture. It had taken me dedication to get over the same one. She was my kid, all right. 'I didn't know it was important or I would have paid more attention.'

'Not important?' I let that out, accusation-flavored, before I could stop myself. Imara turned her attention back to the road. Not to focus on her driving, just to avoid my censure.

And then she deliberately turned back, eyes level and completely alien. 'I should have paid more attention, but you should leave that behind you now. What Father's asking you to do is more important, and you can't be distracted by individual lives now.' She shook her head. 'It's also very, very dangerous, what he's asking of you. I don't like it.'

'I just got my synapses fried in a lightning strike, and then I fell out of the sky. Dangerous is sort of a sliding scale with me.'

'Mom!' She sounded distressed. Angry. 'Please understand: Whatever you've faced before, this is different, and you need to stay focused on the goal. I know that's hard for you, but if you worry about saving every individual, you'll lose them all. Let other people do their part. This is Djinn work, and it isn't the kind of thing humans are built to do.'

By my very nature, I wasn't good at taking in the big picture; for me, the whole world was that lost, scared little girl wandering in a field. Those college boys trapped in their wrecked truck. The world revealed itself to me one person at a time.

But I took in a deep breath and nodded. 'Right. I'm focused. How much longer—?'