Firestorm

'Not just him. I'll destroy every one of the Wardens. If you think to play the game with me, you need to know the stakes. Lives will be lost. I will see to it.'

'You already did,' I spat back. 'Hundreds of Wardens are dead. Tens of thousands are in danger, or dying, and for every Warden that dies, more get put in jeopardy. I know what I'm playing for, Ashan. And you're not going to threaten me into giving up.'

I expected him to laugh and bluster—I mean, good villains did, right?—but he just looked at me, and when his comeback came, it was slow and deliberate and scary. 'No,' he said. 'I have never known you to respond to threats against yourself. Or the world at large. And you're quite right about David and his self-sacrifice.'

He was looking behind me. I know, I know, it's the oldest trick in the book, but I didn't think that he was all that up on strategy.

I glanced back. Imara was out of the car and standing mute and somehow limp a few feet away. As if she were unconscious, being held up by an invisible hand at the back of her neck. Her head lolled forward, then back, as if someone had tugged hard on her hair.

Her eyes were empty, flat silver.

I turned back to Ashan. His were the same color.

'She's mine,' he said. 'Until you take her away. Mine to use. Mine to kill, if I want. You can accept your own death. So far as I can tell, you seem to actively seek it out. And like most of humanity, the plight of the distant and faceless doesn't move you. But your daughter is in my hand, Joanne. And I think that means something more.'

I swallowed hard. He was right, of course. Every cell in my body screamed at me to do something, anything, to save my daughter. She was part of me, and I wanted to protect her so badly, it was tearing me to pieces. Ashan might not have human ancestry in his background, but he knew what we feared.

'It does,' I said softly. My eyes filled up with tears suddenly—hot, hard, aching tears that seemed to pour right up from my heart. 'I love my daughter more than my life. But I'm going, Ashan. You do whatever you have to do, but I'm going. I have to.'

I got back in the car. I could barely see it for the tears, but somehow I kept myself from sobbing. The wet trails on my face where they'd streamed felt cold in the sudden blast of the air conditioner as I turned the key and started up the roadster.

Ashan was still watching me, with my daughter clutched in one hand like a broken marionette. I couldn't tell what he was thinking. Hell, I could barely tell what I was thinking.

I took a deep, damp gulp of air, pressed the clutch, and put the car in first gear. The engine shifted to a low purring growl, and the car eased forward with a crunch of gravel.

Ashan didn't move. He was ten feet away, with Imara. Around him, I sensed the other Djinn, his twenty companions, the faithful or faithless, depending which side you came down on in this struggle. I could almost see their calm faces, their inhuman eyes.

A jolt of lightning joined sky and earth behind Ashan, a pale pink-and-purple line that unraveled into dozens of thin strings on the way. Beautiful. Alien. Powerful. Terrifying.

I don't know why I said it, but I whispered, 'Please.' It was a sacred prayer, as much as a request.

And then I hit the gas.

At the last minute, he stepped aside as graceful as a matador, using my child for a cape.

I hit the freeway and shifted gears while my soul burned and crumbled into ruins.

When you give up everything—and I mean everything—there's this eerie sense of calm that comes over you. I didn't have David; I knew now that I couldn't have him. Whatever Ashan had done to him, it was thorough enough that he couldn't be my personal lifesaving God-in-a-bottle anymore. No power on earth could have held him back from coming to Imara's defense, if he'd been able to break free. Ashan had him, and now he had my daughter, too. I'd abdicated the one responsibility that should have been impossible for me to give up: motherhood. I'd turned my back on my own child. I'd let myself count her as a cost of doing business.

It felt like Pompeü on volcano day, and all I could taste was ashes.

I let him have my daughter.

I could hear Lewis's warm, dispassionate voice telling me that I'd made the right choice, the only choice, but it didn't matter. It's written in our DNA somewhere: our children first, the rest of the world second. I couldn't believe I'd done it. Couldn't believe I was that much of a monster.

Ashan was going to kill her, and I was going to let him, and that tore my heart to bloody shreds. I hated this. I hated being strong. I hated understanding that this was the cost of things.

Please. I said it again, with all my heart and soul, letting it fill me up in prayer and desperation. Please God, take care of her. I don't know how you fit into all this— I don't know whether you're in everything or nothing, whether you're an absentee landlord or watching the flight of every bumblebee. But I beg you, don't let my daughter pay the price. Please. I don't care what it costs, but please, find a way…

God must hate our me-me-me whining; like kids sent off to college, we call only when we need a favor. I wasn't sure if I'd built up any credit in the Bank of Miracles. Probably not, given my history, but maybe the Bank of Mercy didn't have such strict lending rules.

I wiped my eyes and opened up the roadster down the clean, straight road. It seemed to go on forever, and then I took the indicated turnoff, AZ-179, to make the last leg of the journey.

It was beautiful. Really, searingly beautiful, even with the gray cotton of cloud cover obscuring that burnished blue sky—the rocks were ancient and powerfully sculpted, and it was a landscape to conjure the old, old gods of the empty spaces. The road looked alien and out of place here. I was no Earth Warden, but even I could feel the power that whispered through the air and ground; this was a place where the skin between the real and aetheric was paper-thin. No wonder New Agers flocked here, not to mention the religious of all faiths and sects. It had a purity that I'd never felt before, not even in other desert spots.

The clouds, already thinning, broke into haze by the time I reached the town of Oak Creek, which according to the rental agency map was just outside of Sedona proper. Behind them was that limitless sky, the bright unblinking stare of the sun.

It occurred to me, rather stupidly late, that I had no street address for the Oracle, and now, with Imara gone (my heart dried up and died at the thought of that, and I felt another flood of tears burn my eyes) I didn't have a native guide, either. AH I had was instinct, and not much of that.

Well, the last Oracle was an Earth spirit, so I didn't figure to find it hanging out at the Old Navy store, but that left a lot of territory.

I kept going, absent any reason to do anything else. Oak Creek passed in a blur of houses and xeriscaped yards, businesses and cars, and was swallowed up again by the desert that outwaited everything. The silence took over again. The sky brightened, and my hands shook on the steering wheel. I kept expecting Ashan to smite me with righteous fury, but he hadn't made a move. I wondered why. Maybe he was still trying to figure out why I'd abandoned my daughter to die…

I shook my head violently to clear it of the images.

The sun was molten out here, pouring energy in syrupy waves, and the ground soaked it up. Shadows were sharply drawn and as cold as black holes where they fell. The flora was angular and beautiful in its austerity, and it passed by in a continuous roll until I topped a rise and saw Sedona up ahead.

At the same instant, I felt the same artificial sense of calm and steadiness here that I'd felt in Seacasket. I was in the right place, all right.

I just didn't know where to go from here.

The sense of panic started to set in when I passed the town limits, because I really didn't know. I suppose I was expecting some kind of magic guidance—a flashing sign that said this way to the oracle to save the world! Not that I'd expect anything so crass in this place. Maybe a discreet, hand-carved art nouveau plaque in native woods.

I pulled in at a gas station, trembling all over, and consulted the map again. Nothing. No helpful Djinn- induced sparks of light. No oracle marked on it, with a pointing arrow. I'd come all this way, given up my daughter, and for what?

Easy, I told myself when I felt the shaking start to get too bad. You can do this. Ashan wouldn't have tried to stop you if there hadn't been a way to get it done.

Logical, but not comforting. Hell, Ashan might have been trying to stop me just for the pure joy of seeing me