She laughed, long and loud, and then said, “I think I like you.”
Right about then, David blipped in on the passenger seat of the car.
“The guy on the road?” I asked.
“Safe in the hands of emergency help,” he said. “He’s stable. You blew out her tires?”
“Had to try something. Are you ready to spank this little brat before she gets somebody killed?”
“I’d better let you do it. You’d accuse me of enjoying it too much.”
David knew me all too well, and it made me laugh as I pressed the accelerator and gained ground on our fleeing Djinn.
She was trying all kinds of tricks now, including forming new tires out of random shreds of rubber left on the side of the road by other luckless drivers, but David was focused entirely on undoing whatever she was up to, and I was completely locked into the car, the acceleration, the chase. Overhead, the weather darkened, and clouds formed to block out the hot sun. We were going to get rain, as a consequence of my actions, but it was a good rain. A washing shower, not a flood.
Suddenly, the Bugatti stopped. I could see it now, the silvery gleam of it unreal against the violent greens and dull browns of the swamp, like some crash-landed alien spacecraft. “What’s she doing?” I asked.
“She,” said my radio, “is thanking you very much for completely following the script, sugar. Hang on, now. It’s going to get interesting.”
And then everything changed, completely, because Whitney was not an idiot, a compulsive thief, or a sociopath after all—or if she was those last two things, she certainly wasn’t the first. Because Whitney had been taking us somewhere, and we had just arrived.
I coasted the Viper to a stop behind the tire-less Bugatti—the shreds of rubber had fallen apart again—and David and I jumped out to check inside. No sign of Whitney. David turned in a circle, scanning, and then pointed off into the swamp. “There,” he said. “She’s there.”
It’s useful to have a Djinn along for a run through the Everglades … there’s no good footing, but plenty of stinging, biting, and eating things to take an interest in your passage. I was an Earth Warden in addition to my Weather and Fire powers, but Earth was definitely my weakest skill set, and I was relieved I didn’t have to manage it on the run. David simply created a firm, dry path out of the swamp, straight as an arrow, and made sure that any creatures with an eye to taking offense at our passage were kept otherwise occupied. I saw a couple of alligators eyeing us coldly from the water, but they stayed as motionless as floating logs. The hot, humid air felt like running a treadmill in a sauna, and I was soaked with sweat and gasping for breath in a humiliatingly short time.
We ran into Whitney about five seconds before I was sure I would drop of heat stroke and exhaustion, and I bent over, bracing myself on my knees, gasping and coughing. Whitney, of course, looked perfect. She was still wearing the diamond bikini, which just could
Whitney put her hands on her barely clad sparkly hips, and gave me a superior look that made me want to throw up on her high-heeled shoes. “Sweetie, you’re gonna want to pace yourself,” she said. “We ain’t there yet.”
“Where?” It came out as a cross between a howl and a whine, which wasn’t very heroic, and I blamed it on the urge to vomit. I swallowed, straightened up, and clawed hair away from my damp face to try again. “Where are we going?”
“There.” Whitney nodded.
“I don’t see anything.”
“You will.”
David, who’d been about to say something that I was fairly sure would scorch Whitney’s exposed buttocks good, checked himself and spun around, staring upward. I didn’t know why, but then I heard it.
The abused whine of jet engines, getting louder.
David shouted something in a language that I didn’t recognize, but there was no mistaking the command in it, and Whitney lifted her hands to the sky along with him.
A four-engine jet burst out of the clouds, trailing smoke and fire from one wing. Way too low for where it was, which was miles from any decent airport capable of handling an emergency landing. It was an enormous plane, and as I launched myself up into Oversight I saw the black buzzing cloud surrounding it.
Impending death. Terror. The fear of more than three hundred souls, all preparing for the end.
The two Djinn were grabbing hold of the plane, straightening its flight, and I warmed air beneath its swept- back wings, trying to provide lift. It was a huge, ungainly weight without the right balance of physics to support it, and I could sense the terrified but determined pilots trying everything they could to keep it in the air.
“Clear a landing strip!” I yelled to David. “We can’t keep it up!”
He and Whitney had already determined that. Whitney kept her arms up, channeling power to the plane, but pieces were breaking off of it now as the structural flaws began to shatter along fault lines. One of the engines imploded, streaming metal and fire that plunged down toward us. Whitney didn’t flinch, so neither did I. I felt the impact of the twisted metal like a physical shock as it slammed into the water not ten feet from us, sending a tsunami of muddy green toward us. I didn’t bother to stop it. We had more important things to do than stay pretty.
David’s power was breathtaking and precise, and he wielded it quickly—dangerous, for a Djinn, because like Wardens, they had to be concerned with balance. He formed a solid pack of earth, a berm that ran straight through the Everglades, and knocked down enough of the cypress growth to provide a window for the plane’s wings.
“Coming down!” Whitney yelled, and I felt the hot burn of the exhaust as the jet roared right over our heads, so close that I swear I could count the treads on the landing gear, which was winching its way down. The plane wavered, slipped sideways, and Whitney and I clasped hands instinctively and merged our powers, applying force to the side that needed it, bringing the jet back into a semistable glide.
Twenty feet.
Ten.
The tires hit the packed earth with more force than normal, and I saw one of them blow out in a mist of rubber and smoke. David flung out a hand and kept that side of the plane up as the pilots applied brakes.
Whitney and I changed the thickness of the air flowing along the flaps, adding to the drag, burning off speed at about twice the normal rate, until the plane was coasting, then a smoking, scarred wreck sitting motionless on the makeshift runway.
Whitney took a deep breath and closed her eyes, and the doors on the plane popped open. Yellow emergency chutes deployed. I could hear screaming from inside, but there was also shouting, people imposing order onto chaos.
I turned toward Whitney. “How did you know?”
She opened those eerie purple eyes, and for a second, I saw the woman she’d once been … infinitely tired, frightened, and burdened under all that glitter and gleam. “Once you’ve died that way, you know it’s coming,” she said. “It’s just how it is.”
I said, “I thought you died alone.”
Whitney studied me for a few silent seconds, then nodded. “I did,” she said. “I was in a plane that went down in the water. I lived. I lived a long, long time. And nobody found me. Nobody ever will.” I was still holding her hand. She glanced down at our linked fingers. “This don’t make us engaged, you know.”
I let go, feeling a little off balance after all of this craziness. It wasn’t often that someone threw me, but Whitney had, in every possible sense. She wasn’t at all what I’d expected.
“Why didn’t you just tell us about this, if you knew it was coming?”
She shrugged, which set off lots of glittering waves from the diamonds. “What kind of fun is that? I got you here, didn’t I? I just did it my own way.”
“Your way is insane. Go do something useful,” David told her. “Send up a flare for the emergency rescue parties. They’ll be on the way by now.”
She gave him a smart little military salute, which was
“Wait!” I said. “The guy you threw in our way on the road. Who was he? Why did you do that?”
She glanced back at the plane. Smoke blew away from the fuselage, and I saw a long, ragged hole, with the
