Chill Factor

principles, but somewhere along the way some of us-maybe even a lot of us-had lost the mission. There were a few faithful, altruistic ones left (I didn't dare count myself among them).

It's never been my job, or my nature, to worry about whether or not what I was doing was right in the grand scheme of things. I'm a foot soldier. A doer, not a planner. I like being useful and doing my job well, and so far as lasting satisfaction goes, owning a killer wardrobe and bitchin' shoes doesn't hurt.

I never wanted to be in an ethical struggle. It shouldn't be my job to decide who's right, who's wrong, who lives, who dies. It shouldn't be anybody's job, but most especially not mine. I'm not deep. I'm not philosophical. I'm a girl who likes fast cars and fast men and expensive clothes, not necessarily in that order.

But you do the job you're handed.

I couldn't sleep. I mean, could you? Hanging in midair over an earthquake, waiting for the other shoe to drop? Even as exhausted as I was, fear kept me from closing my eyes for more than five seconds at a time.

So we were hanging there, watching the road ripple in the bright merciless sun, when something occurred to me and made me sit up straight, blinking.

'Can I fly this thing?' I asked. As if we weren't already hanging a ton of steel in midair without benefit of an airplane engine. D'oh! 'I mean, move the car to another highway. Without them knowing.'

That got David's complete attention, with a slight puzzled frown. 'It's not exactly built for gliding, but yes, I suppose. Why?'

'Because if you can keep an illusion on the aetheric of us staying here, I can move the car with wind power to another route, and maybe we can gain some time before he figures it out.' I hesitated, then asked the question I'd been afraid to put into words. 'He could kill us, right? Anytime he wants.'

David's eyes were mercilessly clear. 'He could try. Eventually, he'd succeed. I can't fight Jonathan power-for- power. But he doesn't want to kill you. If he did, you'd be dead already.'

I noticed the change in pronoun. I was the one in danger of dying. The worst that could happen to David was that while the car was being crushed like a beer can and my bones shattered, the bottle in my pocket would break and he would be set free. Jonathan would no doubt consider that a bonus. Which, leaving aside how I felt about David and hoped he felt about me, wasn't an unreasonable point of view. I wasn't exactly comfortable with the whole master-slave dynamic of things, either.

'Can you hold him off?' I asked.

'For a while. If he attacks directly.'

'Long enough for me to-'

'Save yourself,' David finished. 'In a game like this, you're playing Kevin, not Jonathan. I can block Jonathan, but the strategy has to be misdirection, not direct defense. We have to keep moving. If we let them pin us down, we're finished.'

I nodded, noting little details: white lines around David's mouth, tension around his eyes. This was hard for him. Very hard. The scope of his friendship with the Djinn named Jonathan stretched back to an age when they were both human and breathing, dying together on a battlefield in the dim mists of prehistory. Saved by a force so primal it could suck the life out of thousands, maybe millions of living things to create a creature like Jonathan-a living, thinking being composed of pure power. Even among the Djinn, he was something special, and that was no small statement.

And now he was on the wrong side. At least, the wrong side of me.

'We can't hurt him,' I said. David shot me a surprised glance. 'Right?'

'I don't know of much that could. And nothing that you'd want to mess with.'

'But he could hurt you.'

'He won't.'

'He could.' The reason he could hurt David was, essentially, me. David had spent his power freely to pull me back from the dead and put me in a Djinn form; he still hadn't entirely recovered from that.

In the tradition of lovers everywhere, we didn't talk about it.

David shrugged, glanced down at the undulating I-70, and said, 'We'd better get moving, if we're going to move. It's just a matter of time before it occurs to Kevin to order Jonathan to swat us down.'

That was the saving grace of all this-we had the power of a nuclear weapon in the hands of a petulant child, but at least he wasn't what you might call a great thinker. Jonathan, though bound to serve him, wasn't bound to give him advice, and so far hadn't taken it upon himself to act as general in this fight. Thank God.

I nodded, took in a breath, and shut my eyes. Drifted out of my body and up to the higher plane of existence we among the Wardens knew as the aetheric level… the plane where the physical dropped away, and only the energies of the world were displayed. Human senses could see only certain spectrums; when I'd been a Djinn, the aetheric had shown me a hell of a lot more, and deeper, but I was trying to be satisfied with what I had.

Just now, the aetheric was showing the road below me lit up like a giant glowing runway, glittering with power that three-D'ed down below the surface deep into bedrock. The little idiot was destabilizing the whole region. I couldn't stop him; my powers related to wind and water, not earth. Somebody else would have to balance those scales. In fact, somebody's cell phone in the Warden's organization was probably ringing right now.

Time to make the kind of trouble that was my specialty. I reached out into the still, arid air, went high, carbonated air molecules in one place and stilled them in another. The by-product of that is heat. That's all wind is, the interaction of hot and cold, of hot air rising and colder air rushing to fill the void that nature really does abhor. I rolled down the car window and felt the first freshening breeze blow warm against my cheek; a little more energy and the breeze became a stiff wind. I felt the car rock lightly.

'Get ready,' I said aloud. 'I'm going to have to push pretty hard.'

'He won't know we're moving,' David promised.

I increased the range of heat, focusing the power of the sun in a massive surge, and saw the wind shear building up on the aetheric. It came boiling at us in an invisible, syrup-thick wave.

It hit Mona broadside, spun us around, and then we were moving.

I yelped, tightened my grip on the steering wheel, and felt the sickening sense of falling for a full two seconds before we steadied out again, moving fast. I stretched myself farther on the aetheric, spinning atoms, holding chains of force together. This thing was as slick and slippery as glass.

To magical eyes, the halogen-bright glow of the car stayed where we'd been. It was a complicated illusion, requiring massive amounts of directed power that had to be hidden and buried in the natural processes occurring around us; I could feel that power pouring out of me like blood from an open wound. David was amplifying and redirecting it, but it was at a huge cost to both of us.

'How long?' I managed to stammer, and held out my hand. He grabbed hold. His skin was fever-hot.

'Half an hour, maybe,' he replied. No sign of strain in his voice, but I felt a fine vibration through his skin, felt it in the bond between us. 'Don't worry about that. Worry about the wind.'

He was right. The kind of power I was using was treacherous, all too easy to go wrong. Wind has a kind of intelligence-slow, instinctual, but predatory. The stronger the wind, the more cunningly it can manifest, which is why working with major weather systems is reserved for the most powerful of Wardens. It's not just physics. It's lion taming.

And I could feel this particular lion starting to lick its chops in anticipation.

Below us, the Utah desert moved in lazy, deceptively gentle increments. We were traveling through the sky at better than a hundred miles an hour-slow for a plane, but dangerously fast for the air currents I was handling. David was holding Mona steady. I hoped he also had a little attention to spare to keep us unnoticed from the ground; seeing a Dodge Viper do a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in the desert sky might be a little hard to explain, even for UFO nuts.

I spotted a small, likely looking back road at the edge of the horizon, and concentrated hard on slowing us down. That involved a risky and complicated series of adjustments-cooling the air behind us, warming the air in front, creating a collision of forces that would stall out the wind shear. Luckily, there wasn't enough moisture in the air to have to worry about creating a storm. I had to bleed off the buildup of energy as well, because that had to go somewhere, and leaving it roaming around looking for a place to discharge was a rookie's mistake. I crawled it over