Chill Factor

to the horizon, counting seconds and cloud motion.

'Shit,' I breathed. 'I don't think we'd better plan on walking to the Bellagio.'

Lightning laddered down from the massive clouds in three or four places, shattering like neon glass against the ground and buildings. I saw the hot blue flares of transformers bursting somewhere near the edge of the city.

Lewis cursed softly under his breath, then said, 'I can't see anything. What is it?' Without his powers, he was barred from the aetheric. I rose up and took a look.

Not good. Not good at all.

'Tell me it's somebody we can stop,' he said.

It wasn't. In fact, it wasn't somebody at all.

It was nobody.

Weather is mathematical, in a certain very basic sense… warming and cooling the air simply means controlling the speed at which atomic structures vibrate. In any normal situation, no matter how dire, atomic structures vibrate in harmony, in groups, like a grand and glorious choir. In storm situations, there is dissonance.

This was complete and utter noise. There weren't bands of heat and cold; there weren't winds, exactly. Or if there were, they couldn't sustain themselves; they began and died and shifted in the blink of an eye. Hot and cold vibrations were jamming up against each other at the subatomic level, not just as a leading edge of an event, but interwoven.

'What the hell…' I whispered, appalled. This wasn't nature gone crazy. This was nature without any mind at all.

Over at McCarren Airport, a wide-bodied jet angled in for a landing; I saw it seem to stutter as a wind shear hit it. The tail came up; the nose came down.

'No! Jo, do something!' Lewis yelled, and slammed his hand flat against the window.

I threw myself up fast to the aetheric, saw the chaos and destruction raging. I focused on the plane. It was full of terrified screaming people, burning like straw in Oversight; I had to ignore that and try to make sense of what was attacking the area around it.

Chaos. No sense to it at all…

I felt a harsh ripping flash, and saw particle chains snapping together.

Lightning hit the plane dead-on, frying the electronics with a hard white pop of energy, a fountain on the aetheric that just further contributed to the mania.

I reached out and crammed together a layer of air beneath the plane, forced it to behave like normal air under normal circumstances. It took a huge amount of effort, and I felt the strain vibrating through me like stretched steel wire. I propped the plane with an updraft, smoothed the air around it, and fought back another wind shear that attacked from the side. The plane was heavy, and the wind kept fighting back, trying to slip away, swirl like a matador's cape. It wanted to rip the wings off of that 737. I forced a straight runway of calm air ahead of the screaming engines.

I was shaking all over. Human bodies couldn't channel this kind of effort, not for long, not without the help of a Djinn, and David wasn't here. Wasn't connected to me.

A little farther, just a little…

The plane was a hundred feet off the ground. I felt the air trying to spin apart under the wings and grabbed hold, wove the chains together and forced it to stay connected.

Fifty feet.

Twenty.

'Hold on,' Lewis whispered next to me. 'You're almost there.'

Ten.

Just before the wheels touched tarmac, I felt something give way inside me with a bloody rip, and everything fell apart. The plane bounced, landed, skidded, was slammed right and left by wind shears like fists.

I couldn't stop it, but I kept trying, grabbing for control. I fell to my knees, breathing hard, tasting blood in my mouth and seeing bright red spots in front of my eyes.

'Jo!' Lewis had hold of me. I struggled to stay out of the dark. 'Let it go! They're down!'

The plane had come to a stop, through a panicked superhuman effort on the part of her pilots.

When I let go, the wind forged itself into a hard edge and came straight for me.

'Lewis!' I yelled, and pulled him down on the carpet, covered him with my body.

The wind shear slammed into the pyramid full force, at least a hundred miles an hour, and the window blew like a bomb. I felt a hot burn across my back, then an ice-cold burst of rain. I rolled off of Lewis and grabbed his arm, pulled him to his feet, and shoved him toward the door.

Before we made it there, another wind shear blasted in, hit me in the back like a freight train, and slammed me down to the carpet. Lewis turned and grabbed for me, but my hand was slick with blood, and the wind shear became a backdraft, sucking me out into the storm.

I felt gravity let go as I spun out of the broken window, hundreds of feet above the Las Vegas streets. The fountains at the Bellagio were still booming, but the water was ripped to mist as soon as it exploded out of the water cannons. I tried to grab control of the winds holding me, but being suspended in midair like Fay Wray in King Kong's hand didn't do a lot for my concentration.

The wind sensed my attempt to manipulate it and dropped me.

Straight down.

I screamed as I hit glass and started to slide down the side of the pyramid. I tried to reach to cushion the fall, but it fought back, flowing away, creating a downdraft that sucked me faster toward the concrete. I flailed at slick glass windows, cold metal, left bloody streaks behind.

This is it. I felt a sick, nauseating terror taking hold, shredding what was left of my magical control. One second closer to the ground. Two. I was going to hit…

I stopped falling with a jerk, like I'd come to the end of a bungee cord, was yanked back upward in a spiraling whirl. The pyramid's glass blurred by, reflecting white streaks of lightning. Rain hit me so hard it felt like strikes of hail, and I couldn't breathe, hadn't taken a breath since I'd begun screaming…

I passed the broken-out window, caught a glimpse of Lewis standing stark-pale, shielding his face against the fierce wind, blood-streaked from flying glass cuts.

He reached out to try to catch me, but it was too late. I felt the hot graze of his fingers against my bare ankle and then I was going up into the storm.

Taken hostage.

EIGHT

I had time to take about six breaths before I was too high up for it to matter, and then the gasping started. The elevator kept rising. I can't breathe… . No, I was breathing, but it wasn't doing any good. Oxygen content too low. I was filling my lungs to no effect. Create oxygen. You can do it. Sure, I could; it was just a matter of forming new molecules out of the available surroundings, but God, I couldn't think, I couldn't…

I just couldn't. For the first time, I found myself unable to do what I knew I had to do.

Which left dying. Normally, that would have been one hell of a motivator, but my brain was fraying into threadbare strands, and I couldn't feel my body anymore. Dying was more like fading. It hardly hurt at all.

Something white exploded through me like a surge from a cattle prod.

No, please, I just want to rest… Tired…

Another white flare, crawling up my spine to catch fire in my brain. Panic. Panic from some part of me buried so deep it couldn't even express itself in words, just flashes.

I opened my eyes.

It had hold of me. It had been a Djinn, once… I could still see the furious liquid-aqua eyes in that distorted, screaming face. Not a Djinn anymore. Not even an Ifrit, which was at least a coherent entity, a being. This was a tumor of magic, cancerously overgrown, swollen with…

… with a black, glowing Mark that burned and rippled on its distended chest.