Gale Force

right, edging around another bulwark of stacked cardboard, and led us into what should have been a spacious—no, gracious—room. It was a library, old style, with floor-to-high-ceiling shelves. An honest-to-God rotunda, and a sliding ladder on rails.

He kept books in the library, but it was about five times more books than could safely fit on the shelves. The stacks teetered and leaned everywhere, and of course there were the inevitable boxes. These were labeled, not very helpfully, BOOKS.

Ortega blazed a trail through the maze and brought us to what must have been one of the few open spaces in the entire house. There was a massive podium, all of carved black wood, decorated with leaves and vines, and on it lay a closed, massive book with an iron latch, secured with a simple iron peg. No title was on the worn, pale leather cover.

Ortega stood back and indicated it with one graceful wave. David stepped up to the podium, studying it, and reached out to touch the latch.

It knocked his hand back with a sharp, sizzling zap of power.

“I thought you said it was a copy,” David said, rubbing his fingers against his jeans.

“It is. An exact copy. And I believe I did say it was warded.” Arms folded, Ortega watched with half-closed eyes, looking like nothing so much as an eccentric Buddha.

David nodded, never taking his eyes off the book, and touched the spine. There was no zap this time, but as he moved his fingers toward the pages themselves, I felt the surge of energy building up. He quickly moved back to safer territory.

“Jo,” he said, “give me your hand.”

I did, and he guided it slowly over the leather toward the latch.

No response. I heard Ortega let out a low, quiet breath and say something in a language that might have been an antique form of Spanish, something last heard when the Aztecs were still running their own kingdom.

“I’m okay,” I said when David hesitated, and went the last bit of the way to lay my fingers on the metal.

No shock. The Oracle had protected the book against Djinn, but had never anticipated a human getting hold of it. It reminded me of something, this book. Something . . .

The memory snapped back into focus with an almost physical shock. I’d seen a book like this before, minus the latch, in a bookstore in Oklahoma.

It had possessed the power—or the knowledge, which was the same thing—to enslave Djinn.

I looked at David in alarm. “It’s like Star’s book,” I said. “Right?”

Star had been an old friend of mine, one who’d been badly damaged in the course of duty as a Fire Warden. I hadn’t known how badly damaged, for a long while. She’d had something like this in her possession.

David nodded, confirming my suspicions. There were cinders of gold and bronze in his eyes, sparking and flaring. His skin had gone a darker shade of warm metal at least two shades off from anything human.

“Open it,” he said.

“You’re sure?”

He was. I eased the iron peg out of the loop and folded back the black metal hinged piece, and then it was just a matter of opening the book itself. “What now?” I kept both hands on the book, as if it might try to get away. Ortega, I saw, had moved back, but not far; he had an expression on his face that was half dread, half fascination.

“Open it,” David said. “Turn pages until I tell you to stop, and whatever you do, don’t focus on anything. ”

Easier said than done. Like the book that my old friend Star had used—it seemed so long ago—this one seemed to want to be read. The symbols were incomprehensible, densely printed on the page; I was tempted to look at the thing on the aetheric, but I was also afraid. I had, in my hands, power that was off the scale as humans understood it. It was something that I was never meant to have in my possession; I felt that weight in every cell of my body. It made me wonder why it hadn’t been warded against humans, but then again, it had been the possession of an Oracle. . . . Humans didn’t even figure in their equations. They’d been concerned about the Djinn.

I turned pages, trying to keep my gaze unfocused as I did. The symbols kept attracting me, trying to come clear into focus. I ran lyrics to popular songs through my head, the more annoying the better. I knew—I remembered—that the last version of this thing I’d seen had possessed an eerie kind of pull, and this copy had that in full measure.

After about twenty pages, the book began to whisper. Turn pages. Don’t listen, I told myself. David’s eyes were focused on the book, dark bronze with sparks and flares of gold. He looked completely alien in that moment, more severely lovely than anything in human form had any right to be.

I felt my mouth trying to speak, and I ground my teeth together to keep the words—if they were words— inside. I had no idea what was in this book, but I knew it was raw, undiluted power, and not meant for humans to channel. If the Oracles wouldn’t even let the Djinn have it, it must have been deadly dangerous.

This made me wonder with a prickly unease why the Air Oracle had let Ortega have it. Unless maybe the Air Oracle had an ulterior motive of his own.

“Stop,” David said, and I froze. The page slowly flattened, revealing dense lines of text, all carefully scribed in a language that bore no resemblance to anything I’d ever seen in human writing. “Ortega. Read.”

Ortega took a look, frowning, and his eyes widened. Unlike David’s, they stayed firmly in the range of human colors, and he quickly backed away. “What the hell is that?”

“I think that’s what the Sentinels have found,” David replied, never taking his eyes off the text, as if it were a poisonous serpent poised to strike. “I think it’s the source of their power, and how they plan to strike at us.”

Ortega looked pale now, and deeply troubled. “But—if that’s true, we have no defense.”

“Then we have to come up with one.” David took a thick felt bookmark from a drawer in the podium and slipped it in place between the pages, then nodded for me to close it, which I did, feeling a massive rush of relief. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could have resisted focusing on those words, and repeating the whispered sounds that echoed in my head.

“So, I guess you know that the Sentinels must have a copy,” I said, staring at the closed volume. I carefully flipped the latch back into place and slotted in the iron peg to secure it.

Clearly, it wasn’t what David and Ortega expected me to say, and from their expressions, it hadn’t occurred to them. “Impossible!” Ortega blurted. David didn’t try to deny it; he was already thinking along the same lines I had followed.

“Star had one.” I glanced at David for confirmation, and he gave an unwilling nod. “Do you know what happened to it when she died?”

“I thought it was destroyed,” David said. He looked very troubled. “If it wasn’t . . .”

Ortega was looking, if anything, even more horrified. My voice ran down as I noticed his distress, and I watched as he staggered to a dusty velvet wing chair and dropped into it, rocking back and forth, head in his hands.

David and I exchanged glances, and David went to the other Djinn and crouched down, laying a hand on the man’s knee. “Ortega,” he said, “what is it?”

“It’s my fault,” he said. His voice sounded weak and sick, and pressed thin under the weight of emotion. “I swear to you, I never meant—I thought—I was only curious, you see. You know how curious I am. It’s always been a curse—”

A curse, indeed. David froze for a moment, then bowed his head. His hair brushed forward, hiding his expression in shadow, and he said in an ominously soft voice, “You had it. The other book.”

Ortega nodded convulsively.

“Whom did you trade the book to?”

“A Warden,” Ortega said. His voice was muffled by the hands pressed to his eyes. “He never knew I was Djinn. I swear to you, I never meant—I lied, I didn’t get it from the Air Oracle. I created a copy of the original book—”

“I need this Warden’s name,” David said.

“I never meant for any harm to—”

“The name, Ortega.” I shivered at the tone in his voice; he didn’t often sound like that, but when he did, there was no possibility of argument. He was invoking his right as the Conduit, the Mother’s representative to the