them. As we came closer to Seattle, we’d start drawing unwelcome attention; Isabel’s bright power would ensure that we couldn’t pass completely unnoticed. Even Luis had an impressive presence on the aetheric, though Iz’s light effectively hid his, and I presumed mine as well.
I was watching the ongoing battle of the Wardens when I felt the first stirring of… awareness. It was not so much something seen as felt… the power that was consuming Portland, that mindless beast seemed to pause and look. I felt the impact of its stare, like clouds over the face of the sun. All of the aetheric seemed to dim and go quiet.
It was looking at us.
I did not dare to move, not even to drift down into my body. There was a sense of a vast, predatory interest focused on us, and any tiny mistake could bring disaster.
The flames in Portland faltered and began to fall silent, but the energy behind them did not fall away; no, it gathered itself, a beast tensing to spring.
We were too close.
Freezing like prey wouldn’t save us, I realized. I dropped back into my body with a breathless, icy rush, lunged forward to brace myself against the dashboard of the van, and gasped out, “Turn! Get off this road!”
“What?” Luis asked. “Jesus, Cass, what is it?”
“Get off the road. Do it now!”
“
“Turn around!” My shout must have conveyed the true depths of my alarm, because he didn’t hesitate anymore. Luis hit the brakes, brought the van into a shuddering, tire-burning slide. Momentum threatened to tip us, but he controlled it somehow and accelerated into the drift. The tires caught traction, and suddenly we jerked forward, heading back the way we’d come.
“Faster!” I yelled. “Get us off this road!”
Luis didn’t ask any more questions, just pressed the accelerator to the floor. When the van responded sluggishly, I felt him working the engine with Earth power, opening up clogged valves to pull more power out of the churning metal parts.
It wasn’t going to be enough.
I could see it now, through the back window—a blazing arrow of power coming behind us, like liquid sunlight flowing down the road. The trees on either side were igniting into brilliant orange. Everything it touched died.
And it was going to catch us.
“Stop,” Isabel said.
“Can’t do that,” Luis said. “Cass is right. We can’t fight this.”
“You can’t run fast enough,” she said. She sounded scared, but certain. “Cassie, we need him.”
She was talking about Rashid, but Rashid would be of no real help to us; he might possibly be able to preserve our lives, but this power would simply drown us, consume us, and even a Djinn’s power was limited by his master’s endurance. Sooner or later, he would lose that battle, and we would be dissolved, digested, gone.
The benefit for Rashid would be that the glass of his bottle wouldn’t last, either; he’d be free again, free to join the crusade against the hunted remains of humanity. Though I wondered whether he would take quite so much joy in it as others.
“Cassie!” she shouted. We had seconds, if that. She was right. There was nothing else we could do, not against this vast force of nature that rolled toward us.
I lunged over the seat, into the back of the van, thumping down next to Esmeralda, who was staring out the window with a grim, silent concentration that was not quite fear and not quite delight. An uneasy mix of the two. “Beautiful,” she said. “Death’s really beautiful, you know.”
“Shut up,” I said, and ripped open the saddlebag of the Victory, parked beside her coils. Her rattle stirred with a dry hiss, but I kicked it out of the way and grabbed Rashid’s bottle. I ripped the foam stopper out. “Rashid! You’re called!”
He could have dawdled; any enterprising Djinn could have used delay to his advantage, especially one with a grudge, but instead he was instantaneously crouched in front of me, silver eyes gleaming, naked indigo body coiled almost as sinuously as Esmeralda’s reptilian form. His teeth glittered as his lips cut in a smile. “What will you?” he asked me.
“Take us safely to the Wardens in Seattle,” I said. “Now.”
“You forgot to say painlessly,” he said.
Too late.
Rashid wasn’t one of the Djinn capable of transporting humans cleanly through the aetheric.… That was a skill only a very few possessed, and those who did hardly ever bothered to use it. What he could do, however, was pick up the entire van and move it at speed the mechanical beast was never meant to achieve—speed that flattened me back against the van’s wall, drove the scream back into my chest. Bones creaked under the strain, and my cuts reopened, sending red trickles rippling not down, but up and back, driven by the incredible force of our passage.
It took seconds, but it felt like an eternity, trapped and terrified. When it passed, it did so suddenly, a deceleration that sent me slamming with stunning force against the metal van doors at the end, with a hail of unsecured metal tools around me. Rashid was kind enough to ensure that I wasn’t killed by them, but he didn’t bother with minor injuries—more cuts and bruises to add to my collection.
Esmeralda fared better, but only because she’d coiled herself tightly and wedged herself between the van’s driver’s seat and the bolted racks of tools. Even then, as my vision cleared, I saw that her nose was bleeding, and so were her ears. Even her eyes had turned ruddy in the whites.
I fumbled for the van’s door and tumbled out onto a cold, hard surface—and almost off the edge of a roof twenty stories high. I caught myself in time, just barely, and slowly edged backward.
The van was precariously on the edge, well off the center of a yellow painted circle that was, I suddenly realized, meant for helicopters. The paint on the van had blistered and peeled away in places, and as I watched, it settled slowly down as all four tires deflated.
The driver’s side door opened, and Luis fell out. Luckily, he was not so close to the edge of the roof as I’d been. He flopped over on his back, staring up at the sky, gasping hoarsely. Like Esmeralda, his face was gory with blood from ruptured blood vessels, and he coughed and spat up more red, then groaned.
“Ibby,” I whispered. I managed to scramble upright, clinging a moment to the van’s open back door, and then felt my way around to the passenger side.
Isabel lay across the seat, eyes tightly shut. Her face was paper white, and her nose was still bleeding. I fumbled in the glove compartment and found a box of tissues; I grabbed a handful and used them to mop the blood from her face. Her eyes fluttered open, and she took the tissues and pressed them to her nose herself.
We didn’t speak. I smoothed her hair with one trembling hand and realized that I was still holding Rashid’s bottle in the other, uncorked.
Rashid was standing just at the edge of the roof, balanced on his bare toes, staring down. He still hadn’t bothered with clothing, and now he turned and faced me, hands on his hips. “No gratitude?” he asked. “I suppose I deserve that. But you’re safe, and the Wardens are on the floors below. On their way to you now.” In a sudden rush, he was standing at the van’s door, leaning in on me. His eyes had gone from silver to an even more unsettling steel color. “A word of advice, Cassiel: You’ve woken a devil, and it will come for you. The Wardens won’t welcome you.”
“In the bottle,” I said. “Now.”
He grinned at me in a way that made me think of the amusement of cannibals, and vanished in a puff of soft blue smoke. Theatrical now. But not a liar, I thought.
I’d lost the foam sponge, but Esmeralda held it up as she leaned over the seat to look at Isabel. I nodded thanks and squeezed it into the neck of the bottle as Esmeralda asked, “How is she?”
I didn’t need to answer. Isabel gave us a thumbs-up gesture, took the tissues from her nose, and sniffled cautiously.
“I think it’s stopped,” she said, and sat up. “Yeah, it’s stopped. Es? Are you okay?”
“Five by five,” Esmeralda said. “Your uncle don’t look so good.”
Luis was still lying on his back, staring at the cloudy sky. I took more tissues from the box and went to sit next to him. As he wiped the blood from his face, he said, “Next time, tell me about the goddamn Djinn in the
