Firestorm

door. Emily promptly scooted over to my side of the car and rattled the handle. Stuck. Stay there, I mouthed. She ignored me, of course. But to be fair, maybe she couldn't see me. The window was fractured into a fine latticework of cracked safety glass.

'Excuse me,' a polite voice said, and before I could flinch, much less grant pardon, I was picked up and set gently off to the side by the big male Djinn, who had dark cocoa skin and black eyes, and a whole lot of long pale hair that was tied into a ponytail at his back. He was dressed in more conventional styles than Angel Djinn—blue jeans, a chambray work shirt in fashionable (and daring) light purple. He misted out at the knees. It didn't seem to bother him.

I stumbled on gravel when he let go of me. He reached over, grabbed the handle of the back door of the SUV, and removed the door, handle and all. He set it gently aside, next to the one Angel had dismembered, and leaned in to grab Emily by the scruff of her shirt. She screamed and fought, but it was a little like a puppy fighting a wolfhound, only not so equal. 'Shhhhh,' he told her, and held a finger to her lips. She went instantly still, and white as bleached paper. 'Good girl.' He set her on the ground and stepped back, still holding her by one arm in case she might decide to sprint for it.

Angel glided back, barely touching the ground. Her feet looked as if they'd never encountered dust, much less rocky, tough ground.

She held her hand over Emily's heart.

Head-tilt. It stayed frozen in one spot for longer than I liked, and then slowly came back upright.

She moved quick as a tiger, fingernails forming into silver claws, and ripped Emily's shirt open over her heart. Not just the shirt. The jog bra was a casualty, and Angel hadn't been too careful about the skin, either.

Under the pale flesh and the claw marks and the vivid red blood, I glimpsed a tangle of black racing out of sight under her skin.

'No,' I whispered. 'Oh, no. How—? When—?' Because I knew for a fact that Emily hadn't been infected when we'd left her house. It had to have happened in the woods, when we'd been separated.

The damn Demon Mark was still following me, and when it hadn't cornered me, it had gone for Emily.

Emily's jaw worked nervously, and she looked at me as she fumbled the shreds of her shirt back together.

'It is early,' Angel said. She was unquestionably the Djinn in charge here. The two who looked like kids—a matched set, boy and girl twins dressed in identical T-shirts and sloppy corduroy pants, with tangled brown hair— looked at her with a kind of unquestioning worship. The polite male Djinn, too. 'Do you want this one?'

She was talking to me. To me. 'Do I—uh—what?'

'Do you want this one?' she asked slowly, sounding out each word with heavy care. When I looked blank, Angel turned to the male Djinn holding Emily's elbow.

'Do you want us to take the Demon out of her,' he translated. 'It's still early. We can do it.'

'Um… will it hurt her?' Stupid question. Of course it would. But it would hurt her a lot worse to keep it. 'Never mind. Yes. If you can.'

He nodded, took a glass bottle from a leather bag at his side, and handed it to Angel. She opened it carefully and held it in her left hand.

'Don't move,' she said to Emily, and plunged her right hand into her chest.

Emily shrieked. I think I must have, too. I know I lunged forward, or tried to, but suddenly there were arms around me from behind, although all the Djinn were in front of me.

'No, love.' David's whisper in my ear. 'This has to be done.'

I spun to look at him. Emily was making terrible, agonizing noises, and there were dead people on the ground, dead people… 'You killed these people?'

He looked tired. Shadows in those normally bright eyes. 'It had to be done.'

'You killed them?'

He shook his head. 'Let's not do this. Not now.'

'Why didn't you want me to stop, if you didn't know this was going on?' But I knew. He must have sensed the lingering presence of my encounters with Demon Marks on me, just as Angel had. He'd been afraid that they'd just assume I was one of the infected. 'God, David, how could you do this? These were Wardens.'

'Wardens have always passed their infections on to Djinn, and we could never fight back. Now we can.'

'So it was them or you. Is that it?'

His eyes held mine, steady. Flecked with amber and full of regret. 'Yes. Them or us. And don't tell me the Wardens haven't done the same. Don't tell me that you wouldn't if it came to it.'

'Slaughter fifteen people like sheep? No, David, I—' Emily's tortured moans suddenly cut off with the sound of flesh hitting the ground. I spun back toward her, and saw her being picked up from her faint by the big male Djinn, who placed her back in the SUV's passenger side. He removed that door, too, and the back one, as well. Evidently, he liked symmetry.

I rushed to her side and pressed my fingers to her throat. A nice, steady pulse. She moaned weakly and opened her eyes. Bloodshot and unfocused, but it looked like she'd live.

'They were on their way to the fire,' David said grimly. 'Fire that would have accelerated the Demon Marks and hatched out more than we could handle at one time. We had to stop them before the Demons emerged, and it was too late to remove them safely. We didn't have a choice.'

'We could have done something!' I shouted, rounding on him. He didn't back up. 'We could have put them in a cell, in a hospital, anything but killing them and tossing them out like yesterday's trash! You don't have the right, David!'

'No!' he shouted back. 'I have the responsibility! Now, if we've taken enough of a guilt trip, I have a fire to stop.'

He whirled and stalked away, coat flapping in the hot wind behind him. I scrambled after, heart pounding in a bloody, loud fury in my ears. I grabbed his arm, felt heavy wool and the flex of muscles, and dragged him to a stop.

'David!'

He turned, and his expression… Ah, God. The agony was heartrending. 'There's nobody else to make these choices. You know.'

I did. I remembered all the times that I'd run screaming from the burden of hard choices. Even this time, I'd let myself get distracted from the mission by the opportunity to earn myself a little feel-good glory. It was Emily's job. It hadn't been mine. I'd come out here with good intentions, and hell lay at the end.

'This whole thing won't stop,' I said. 'It won't stop until we're all dead. Right?'

For answer, he reached out and folded his arms around me, holding me. He smelled of smoke and sweat, real and human, and I wanted nothing but to be somewhere else with him, somewhere free of chaos and responsibility. Somewhere I could hold him against my skin, and we could wash each other clean.

If we could ever be clean again.

'I know you didn't kill them,' I whispered against his neck.

'I'm responsible,' he said again, and his lips touched the sensitive skin below my ear, a delicate benediction. 'That's all you need to know.'

Lewis and Paul would shrug it off; fifteen more dead Wardens? A tragedy, sure, but we'd already lost more than we could count. And Demon-infected Wardens weren't an asset to anyone. I knew all the logical reasons, and none of them touched the black, oily guilt that continued to seep into my heart.

I took a deep breath and pulled back enough to look him in the eyes. 'Where are these things coming from? What do they want?'

For a second he didn't react, and then his pupils narrowed as he comprehended what I was asking. 'The Demon Marks? They're destined to produce adult Demons. They reproduce at will, once they hatch. The Marks—the eggs—are drawn through rips in the aetheric, and they're pulled to the nearest source of power. Djinn or Warden.'

'Is that all?'

'No. They're drawn to us because we're part of her, in greater or lesser measure. What they want—especially the adults—is to get to the Mother.'