Firestorm

The plane lifted off with a bump and a sudden angular thrust of acceleration, and then it got eerily smooth. The force pressed me back into the leather, and I whimpered a little, thinking about the air around us, the fact that we were moving through it and drawing attention to ourselves. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to slow my rapid heartbeat.

'I heard you were—' I looked in time to see Yves's eyebrows doing an interpretive dance. 'With a Djinn.'

'Not just any Djinn,' I said. 'And yes. His name is David.'

Yves lost his smile. 'Something wrong?'

'You could say.' I turned my head away and tried closing my eyes again. It didn't really help. I still saw David's face as the Demon's claws closed around him, that desperate, furious intensity.

He'd used power to break me free of the trap when he should have been using it to fight for his life. My fault.

'Hey.' When I opened my eyes, Yves was holding out a copy of a magazine featuring shiny, glossy people doing stupid things for the cameras. 'You used to like these, as I remember.'

I needed to put it away. Bury the pain, and focus on something else. Self-pity wasn't my style.

I forced out a smile as though at gunpoint, took the magazine, and flipped it open to the first photo page. 'Oh my God,' I said, and pointed to the unzipped miniskirt and white stirrup leggings that the misguided pop star was wearing with low-heeled pumps. 'Tell me that's not a sign of the end of the world.'

Yves chuckled, shrugged, and opened his magazine: Mother Earth News. I wondered if he knew how funny that was.

For the first hour, at least, the trip was uneventful. Self-pity lingered, but Yves had succeeded in distracting me. The magazine's outrageous fashion mistakes occupied my mind, and I was almost feeling normal when something cold pressed against my arm.

I yelped and tossed the magazine into the air.

It was Cherise, with a can of soda. She offered it again. I took it, and she perched on the air of the empty seat across from me. 'You okay?' she asked, and popped the top on her own can.

'Sure,' I lied. 'Why?'

She looked me over. 'Jo, honey, you look pretty good, but don't kid a kidder. I saw what you looked like on the way to New York, and I'm pretty sure you've been through hell since then.' She sipped daintily at the sweat- beaded can. Moisture dripped onto her lime-green raw silk capri pants, and she frowned at it, then found a napkin and wrapped the can.

I considered my answer carefully. 'Um… yeah. I'm okay. I—you know how Earth Wardens can heal people? Has Kevin told you—?' She nodded. 'Well, I got healed up, so I'm more or less okay. Just tired.' And discouraged, and scared out of my mind. But other than that? Peachy.

She nodded again, looking down, and then suddenly those sky-blue eyes locked on mine. 'I got a phone call. From your sister.'

'What?' I didn't mean to yell it. It rang around the interior of the plane, bringing everyone to sharp attention. Even Yves, normally the least excitable of people, put his magazine down to look at me. 'Sorry. Sorry, guys.' I lowered my voice and bent closer to Cherise. 'You got a call from Sarah? When?'

'A couple of hours ago. She couldn't get through to you this morning. She sounded—' Cherise's face turned just a bit pinker. 'Okay, this is going to sound bad and all, but does she do anything? Heroin, maybe?'

'No,' I said. I felt sick to my stomach, and it wasn't the altitude, or the overly sweet soda I was automatically sipping. 'No, not Sarah.'

Compassion didn't come naturally to Cherise; it made her look too young. 'Sweetie, the family's usually the last to know. Listen, she sounded really spaced. Orbital. She said to tell you that she was okay, and that everything was going to be fine. She'd met somebody in Las Vegas. I asked her where she was staying, but she said not to worry about it.'

I leaned forward, pressing the cold soda can against my forehead, fighting not to laugh. Or cry. 'Yes. Thanks, Cher. That's Sarah all over, isn't it? Rescue her from one madman, she's off to find the next one—'

'She's not okay, is she?'

'No,' I murmured. 'I doubt she is. I really doubt she's going to be, either.'

'She's not with what's-his-name anymore?'

'Eamon? No.'

'Too bad,' Cherise sighed. 'Damn, he was cute. I loved his accent.'

'He was an asshole, Cher.'

'They're all assholes. But it's not every day that you find one that's really decorative.'

'He tried to kill me,' I snapped. 'More than once.'

She froze, deer in the headlights. Amazed. And then her face just filled with delight. 'Oh my God! You go, Jo! That's so cool!'

'What?' There were times when I really didn't get life on Planet Cherise.

'You're still here,' she said simply, and grinned at me with the unbroken enthusiasm of the truly weird.

I hugged her. Hard. 'Staying here, too,' I said.

'Oh, you'd better. You owe me for scratches on the Mustang.'

She moved away, back to her seat. The gap between her white tank top and the green capri pants showed flawless tanned skin, and a tattoo of a big-headed space alien flashing the peace sign as she bent over to move something out of her way. Probably Kevin's feet. He was snoring.

He stopped snoring as the plane shuddered.

'Damn,' Yves said quietly. 'Here I was starting to think we'd make it without this.'

Turbulence. The plane shuddered again, then dropped, a free fall that seemed to last forever. Outside, clouds were swirling. It was hard to get any sense of what was happening, but I could feel the hot energy consolidating itself out there.

Something had sensed me. A storm, maybe, one big enough to gather some elemental sentience. Or something else, and worse, like one of Ashan's Warden-killing Djinn. This would be a prime target. That was why I hadn't wanted to have others on the plane. My life—sure, I'll risk it. But there were a lot of lives at stake here. And I was the point of danger.

'Everybody hang on!' I yelled. Lightning flashed outside the windows, and I felt the plane powering up. They were going to try to get above it, looked like. Good strategy. The only problem was that the storm was going to chase them. 'Yves, switch with me.'

We unbuckled and fumbled across each other, mumbling politenesses; he was dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a colorful dashiki-style shirt in yellow, blue, and orange patterns. A blaze of brightness in a world that was rapidly turning the color of ashes outside. I settled in his empty chair and buckled in, clutched the armrests, and looked out the window.

I didn't really need the view, but it helped; sometimes, focus could be achieved better with a visual cue. I filled up my lungs, let it out, filled them again, and allowed myself to drift free.

I got battered immediately by currents of force on the way up to the aetheric. It was a war zone, with silent colorful explosions of power snapping and popping in a hundred places at once. The cloudscape roiled, black in places, red in others, everything unstable and bizarre. I spotted an area that had taken on the silvery overlay I knew was going to be a huge problem, and concentrated on it. As I did, I felt myself joined by someone else who boosted my concentration and power, bracing me when I faltered. The power signature felt familiar, but I couldn't stop to wonder about it. I just worked, fast and frantic, trying to make sure the space around our airplane remained relatively disaster-free as our pilots arrowed for the safety of the higher sky.

On the mortal level, the turbulence shook us hard, and then the engines howled louder and suddenly, the ride was glass-smooth again. I gasped in air, feeling the shift on the aetheric at the same time, and recognized the power that had helped me.

Imara. My daughter was with me—not physically, not on the plane, but she was watching over me.

'No,' I whispered. My breath fogged the glass of the plane's window on the inside as mist beaded on it outside. 'No, stay with Sarah. Stay out of this.'

Words wouldn't do on the aetheric level, but she understood what I was saying, I think. I felt a pulse of reassurance from her, from that shadowy flicker of presence; I couldn't see her at all clearly, just as I couldn't see any of the Djinn (or Ifrit, for that matter) while we were on the aetheric plane.