Firestorm

angle at the falling tree. Twenty feet. It was coming for us fast, and no way were we going to clear it in time. Flames all around us. Ten feet. Heading right for the roof of the SUV…

I let the superheated blast of air go, cooled the outer edge, and it hit the tree like a huge blunt object, hammering it off course. Not by much.

The outer blackened pine branches snapped off on my side of the truck, and the trunk crushed the underbrush just a couple of inches to the right of the SUV's hood.

Emily shot me a disbelieving look. I shrugged and took my hands off the dashboard. Left wet, sweaty handprints behind.

I couldn't see the Demon anymore. Wishful thinking made me hope that Demons weren't impervious to fire, but damn, I pretty much knew better than that. Demons were impervious to everything nature or humans could toss their way. They could be contained by Djinn, but destroyed? Probably not, once they'd achieved full form, as this one had.

We were clear of the fire suddenly. Trees swayed around us, uneasy in the looming smoke, but nothing was aflame around us. Emily had, temporarily, outrun the flames.

She slowed the SUV, stopped, and wiped her hands on her filthy pants. She was shaking all over, and black as a coal miner at the end of a shift. Eyes red and bloodshot.

'That,' she said faintly, 'was maybe a little too close.'

'A little,' I agreed. 'Nice driving.'

'Nice wind management,' she replied, and was overtaken by a series of racking, tearing coughs. Sounded painful. I leaned over, put my hand on her back, and concentrated on the air inside her lungs. I oxygenated it as much as possible, then extended it into a bubble within the cab of the SUV. Couldn't do it for long, because we'd both get high and giggly, but it would help, short-term.

'What the hell just happened?' I asked, in between gasps. Emily put the SUV in gear and managed— somehow—to turn it around on the narrow road so we could drive forward instead of backward. Smoke was thick and acrid around us, blowing our direction.

'Something's working against us,' Emily said grimly. 'Don't know what it is. I thought it was another group of Wardens, but now I don't know. It's not just the typical crap you get in wildfires. You know what I'm talking about?'

I did. Wildfires were dangerous in and of themselves; they hardly needed any villains to come add complications. I still vividly remembered the big Yellowstone fire that had claimed so many lives among the Wardens, several years back… the one that had destroyed Star both physically and mentally. That hadn't been anything but the nature of fire and the cruel purpose of the earth.

I had a good idea of who had been messing with the fire here: a Demon Mark-ridden Warden. And that made sense of why the Djinn had elected to stay away. The hatching of a full-blown Demon out of its human carapace was nothing they'd want to be around. David had fought a full-grown Demon, once upon a time, and I had to assume he'd won, but it couldn't have been an easy fight.

Out of nowhere, I remembered David telling me, We are made of fire. He'd meant Djinn, of course, and he wasn't exactly being literal, but it made me wonder. Djinn reacted to light and heat, to the transformation of energy. I wondered if Demons were the same. If they were drawn to these kinds of events to help them—hatch. If so, there might be more of them out there—Wardens with Demon Marks, moving mindlessly toward something that would finish the process of incubation. Probably they wouldn't even understand why. I remembered how it had felt when my own Demon Mark began to manifest itself in a big way… I'd been euphoric, almost godlike. No thought for consequences. And no sense of self-preservation, really.

I started to tell Emily about it, but then I realized that it wouldn't do any good. Even if she believed me— which was doubtful—there wasn't anything she could do about it. We were on our own out here in the wild Canadian wilderness, apparently. I missed Marion. She'd know, if anybody did, how much trouble we were all in right now.

Emily got us back to a logging road, then out to a paved two-lane road. There were police barricades flashing in the distance. She slowed and pulled over to the narrow shoulder.

'We need more Wardens,' she said. 'Weather and Fire. Think you can get us anything?'

'No idea. I'll try.' I pulled out my cell phone and dialed up the hotline number. Busy. I reconsidered, dialed Paul's personal number.

Busy.

Marion's rang, though. She answered without her typical calm assurance; in fact, she sounded downright sharp. 'Joanne?'

'Yeah.'

'Where are you?'

'Wildfire across the border in Canada,' I said. 'Long story. Look, there's a desperate need for—'

'I know,' she cut me off. 'We've got wildfires breaking out everywhere, and damn few Fire Wardens left to fight it. There's not much I can do for you guys. Do the best you can. Let it burn, if you have to.'

I cradled the phone against my chest and looked at Emily's grimy face. 'Where's this thing heading?'

Under the black oily veil of smoke, she looked troubled. 'Ultimately? I'd have to say it's making a beeline for Montreal. But one thing's for sure, it'll take out every town on the way, too. Five thousand, ten thousand homes at a chunk. If this thing isn't stopped…'

I got back on the phone. 'No go on the hands-off, Marion. We need to find a way to firebreak this thing.'

'I'll get Weather on it,' she sighed. It was clearly not a new refrain. 'See what you can do from there. And Jo?'

'Yeah?'

'Lewis says that there's a hurricane brewing just past Jamaica. If it forms and comes inland, we could be looking at another very bad time in Florida. There's another one right behind it that looks like it could veer to hit the Gulf Coast, or South America.'

'Is there anything that isn't going crazy?'

'No,' she said flatly. 'Large cave-in in Kentucky, several hundred miners and tourists trapped in the region. Most of our Earth Wardens are converging on that, but we've got warning signs all up and down the Cascadia subduction again.'

'So. This would be the end of the world, then.'

'We're keeping hitching posts handy for the Four Horsemen. Any luck on the Djinn front?'

'Some,' I lied. Didn't seem much point in adding my bad news to the pile. 'I'm working on it.'

'Then you'd better quit screwing around with the fire and get the Djinn back on our side,' she said grimly. 'While we've still got enough of us alive to make it matter.'

I hung up, took in a deep breath or two, and turned back to Emily. 'Right,' I said. 'Let's get back to work.'

There was a ranger station seven miles down another logging road—abandoned, since the rangers were out doing fire spotting, and had field radios with them. Emily and I commandeered the radio that had been left behind —a huge old clunker of a thing, and proof positive that upgrades weren't high on the federal budget triage scale. I tried to figure out the ancient technology. Seemed simple enough. I spun the dials to the right frequency—the Wardens' emergency frequency—and clicked the old-fashioned button on the old-fashioned microphone.

Now, if I could only remember all the codes…

'Violet-violet-violet,' I said. 'Anyone reading? Respond.'

Static. White noise. I looked over at Emily, who was washing her filthy face in the sink; she needed more than a little soap to get clean, but that did a fair job. She only looked like a chimney sweep now, instead of a smoke eater. As she scrubbed a second time, I clicked the button again. 'Violet-violet-violet,' I repeated. 'Respond, please.'

This time, I got a sharp metallic click, and a tinny voice that sounded about twelve years old saying, 'Hang on!'

Not exactly the approved format for responding to emergency calls, but I understood. It wasn't shaping up to be a normal day anywhere in the world, but least of all in the Warden Crisis Center.

I waited. The voice came back, eventually, right about the time Emily finished her third ablution. 'Name and location,' it said. Not the same voice. This one was male, authoritative, and familiar.