Firestorm

'I mean it!' I said to the flicker that was my daughter. 'Stay out of this! Stay with Sarah!' Who, God knew, needed the chaperone.

The flicker moved away from me, but not far. Not far enough. She wasn't minding her mother, clearly; maybe she was under instructions from her father, but I didn't find that too likely. David had been in agreement with me about keeping her out of Ashan's grasp, and yet here she was, hanging about like bait on a hook.

And there was nothing I could do about it.

We stayed high for most of the trip, well above the unsteady clouds; the storms kept forming beneath us, hopscotching across the country. Our passage was causing chaos, no doubt about it, and I had the sick feeling that we were probably causing deaths, as well, but it wouldn't have been better if I'd driven, and it probably would have ended up worse in the end. I couldn't save everyone. Hell, I was no longer sure that I could save anyone.

The speaker gave that distinctive little click, and everyone in the cabin looked up from what they were doing—mostly reading or sleeping. 'Hi, folks. Well, we've run about as far as we can at this altitude, we're going to have to start our descent. As you know, this is going to be rough, so please, try to keep those amusement-park screams to a minimum. It doesn't make us fly with any more confidence. Ah, and Captain Klees would like to remind you that today's movie selection of Die Hard Two is now available on your LCD screens. Ah, hell, that was a joke. It's really Turbulence, followed by Con Air. Anyway, you guys keep cool back there. Let us do the sweating.'

He was off the air about ten seconds when the first shudder came, as the plane began to tilt forward, nose down.

Oh, crap.

We were in for it now.

The shuddering turned into a steady shaking, as if some giant hand had closed around the plane's fragile skin. I swallowed hard and clutched the armrests as outside the pale blue sky went mist gray, and then started a hellish descent toward black. The clouds looked thick enough to walk on. Thick enough to trap us, like spider-webs around a fly. Lightning flashed close, illuminating the interior with a wash of blue-white flame, and in its flare I saw Yves calmly reading his Mother Earth News, legs crossed. I couldn't see anyone else, but I doubted they were all so fatalistic about it. Surely some of them must have been as terrified as I was…

We shuddered and dropped. Free fall. Ten feet or more, and it seemed to take forever. We hit an updraft with a bang and fishtailed, or tried to; I sensed the pilots correcting up front, adjusting the engines. Keeping us intact.

We dropped again, farther this time, and I felt the plane twisting to the left—and then something hit us from the right side, and we rolled.

Screams. Yves dropped his magazine and grabbed for his armrests as everything went sideways; my empty soda can clattered against the cabin wall in a chittering panic, and I heard a crash from below as bags shifted. The roar of the engines shifted, and then the speakers activated again. Copilot Klees made an authentic western-style yee-haw. 'Well, you people are so lucky,' he said, as if flying sideways, staring down at the ground from the side window, was an everyday occurrence. 'You're about to experience the joy of flight all those U.S. Air Force ads talk about. Hope you're all observing the seat belt sign. Three—two—one—'

The plane rolled left. Rolled completely over so that we were hanging upside down, and I had a brief surreal glimpse of my long black hair shuddering in midair like a beaded curtain, and then the world was rolling again, and we came upright again. Steady as a rock once we'd achieved level status.

Maybe people screamed. I don't know—I'm pretty sure I did. I looked over at Yves as I clawed my disordered hair out of my eyes, and his legendary calm was shaken enough for him to cross himself and begin murmuring something I recognized as an Our Father.

We were still descending.

'Hope you enjoyed that,' Klees said. He still sounded absolutely cheerful and unperturbed, as if he did this daily, with two shows in the afternoon. 'If anyone feels the urge to purge, please, avail yourself of the bags. My contract does require me to do cabin cleaning, as well.'

A shaky laugh from someone up front with more intestinal fortitude than me. I was seriously contemplating the aforementioned bag, which looked sturdy and inviting, but I hadn't eaten or drunk enough to need to resort to it. A few grim, sweaty moments, and I was okay.

I grabbed leather as the plane did another unsettling shimmy combined with a bucking motion. Outside the windows, black clouds pressed as close as night. I rested my aching head against the pillowy seat and thought that maybe I ought to try the aetheric again, but I was no longer certain it was a good idea.

Yves took my hand. The warm anchoring of his skin helped keep me from visions of the plane corkscrewing down into the earth and exploding.

I closed my eyes as the plane shuddered and rocked, heeling from one side to the other, slipping violently sideways as if trying to avoid something I couldn't see or sense. My weather senses were overloaded. I was useless up here, with so much happening and focused right on us. If I'd been on the ground, it would have been different, but I felt so helpless up here, so out of control…

The plane leveled out in a sudden lurch, as if it had suddenly hit a patch of glass-smooth air. No turbulence, not even the slightest bounce. I opened my eyes, blinked at Yves, and he raised his eyebrows and gave a Gallic shrug.

'Bathroom,' I said, and unfastened my seat belt, climbed over his knees and hustled for the tiny, cramped stall. It was unoccupied, thank God, and I lunged inside, clicked the latch shut, and leaned over to splash cold water on my face. The urge to vomit was passing. I dampened a paper towel and used it to blot sweat from my face and neck, then leaned over to splash my face again, since it had felt so good the first time.

When I straightened up, there was fog coming out of the air vent over my head. I blinked at it, thinking wildly about James Bond movies and knockout gas, but I didn't smell anything, and I didn't feel any more light-headed than normal.

It continued drifting down from the vent in thick, cloudy streamers, twisting lazily in the air, tangling together into a denser mist as it fell. I stretched out my hand and felt cool moisture on it.

Even though I didn't fly much, I was pretty sure this didn't qualify as normal.

In seconds, the mist had formed a shape, and that definitely wasn't normal. Not even on an airplane full of Wardens.

I felt the hard edge of the sink cabinet digging into my butt, and realized that I was staring when I ought to be fleeing. I reached for the latch on the door—

—and it instantly froze up, covered with ice crystals. When my skin touched it, it burned like liquid nitrogen, and I yelped and flinched backward.

The shape in the fog wasn't male, and it wasn't female. It wasn't anything, really. Soft edges, curves, a genderless oval of face, no features on it.

As I watched, the whole door glittered and glistened with forming ice. No way was I going out that way.

Which was the only way, unless I was brave enough to rip out the chemical toilet and go that direction.

Which I wasn't.

I backed away as far as the tiny bathroom would allow, overbalanced, and sat down hard on the toilet's lid. The fog-shape leaned toward me, and the air around me began to move and breathe in subtle motions, whispering over my skin and combing through my hair, sliding under my clothes to touch me in places where, well, wind just didn't usually go. I controlled the impulse to self-defense. So far, nothing that had happened was life-threatening, just—weird.

'Um—hi?' I ventured. The air around me stirred up, moving faster, ruffling my hair and fluttering my shirt. There was no sense of heat or cold to it; everything was exactly room temperature, passionless and sensation-free. 'Who are you?'

The figure wrapped in fog bent closer, and suddenly I couldn't breathe. No air. Okay, no problem, I was a Weather Warden, I'd dealt with this before…

Only I couldn't. I couldn't get a grip on the air at all. Whatever was facing me had absolute control over my native elements.

As soon as I realized it, the air flooded back in, and I took a grateful gasping breath. 'Right,' I said. 'Oracle. There was a Fire Oracle, so you'd be… Air and Water.'