Chill Factor

This wasn't a Djinn anymore; it was a cocoon for a demon. I sensed the Djinn trapped within, but it was failing, dying, being consumed slowly and horribly by the other. It was desperate.

They were both desperate.

Black spots danced madly in my vision. Lack of oxygen. I blinked and tried to remember again how to fix that, but there were too many missing pieces, and it was much too difficult…

The Djinn opened its mouth, and I saw something black move inside it.

Crawling toward me.

I had a helpless, suffocating flashback of coming to on Bad Bob Biringanine's couch, his cold blue eyes on me, a bottle full of demon in his hand. Hold her down, he'd snapped at his Djinn, and pried my mouth open…

Maybe I didn't mind dying so much, but I minded that. Without even a second's thought, I grabbed at the energy around me, channeled it, and slammed it down in a hundred million volts, blue- white plasma, right on top of the thing that had hold of me.

At the last instant, I remembered that if I hit the Djinn, the Djinn was still holding me, and that meant I was going to fry with him. As the particle chains whipped together, as the charge began to flow like liquid through the ripped sky, I jammed together air molecules between us and sent them hurtling toward the Djinn, shoving him away. He wasn't corporeal enough for it to move him far, or misted enough for it to make him disappear, but it gave me a precious foot of space as the sky turned white around me.

The lightning hit the Djinn with the force of a nuclear bomb, shredding it into shadows. I saw it even through closed eyes and covering hands, and then the shock wave hit, knocked me flying, and gravity started to claim me.

The sky was screaming.

I emerged from the clouds, falling like a star. Friction heated my skin, lashed my clothes into shreds around me. I was spinning helplessly, spiraling toward the brilliant spilled jewel box of Las Vegas.

One good thing: plenty of fresh air. I breathed, fast and hard, pumping up the oxygen in my bloodstream, and began working on slowing my fall. My head was clearer. It almost felt like a nightmare, except that nightmares generally didn't come with partial blindness and singed hair. I still saw the afterimages of the flash, the frozen, distorted scream of the demon-infected Djinn.

I hadn't killed it. You don't kill a thing like that, or at least humans don't; David had succeeded in destroying a demon once, but he was a Djinn, and second only to Jonathan in power at the time.

I wasn't slowing much, and the ground looked closer. My skin had gone numb from the cold rushing air. I'd stopped spinning, but I could feel the greedy suck of gravity pulling me down, and no matter how fast I grabbed for air to create a cushion it was too slow.

At this rate, I'd manage to break my fall just enough to die breathing through a tube in ICU.

I went up to the aetheric. Instinct and panic, rather than a conscious plan, like rats climbing the spars of a sinking ship… up there, the demon-infected Djinn was still raging, black and furious, and the whole plane was roiling with power.

Below me there were some brilliant lights-not the neon glare of the strip; the blaze of Wardens, channeling power.

One was an orange torch big enough to light up the entire aetheric… that had to be Kevin. The other was a rich golden color, like summer sun.

Kevin had Lewis's stolen powers, and he could act if he wanted to, but I knew better than to assume he'd save me, even if he understood how. And the other Warden, glittering like summer, wasn't a Weather Warden.

I was so screwed.

I sucked in a deep breath and concentrated, hard, managed to slow my descent enough that it didn't feel like terminal velocity, but when I opened my eyes again I saw that the ground was rushing up, close, God, closer than I'd thought, and there was no way I could stop myself in time.

I wasn't going to hit the street. I was heading for a stretch of desert somewhere near the airport. Dirt and thornbushes and a death that was going to hurt-a lot.

A flash of lightning lit up the patch of pale sand that was going to be my final resting place.

I screamed, threw up my arms in a useless, instinctive move to cover my face, and hit the ground.

It was like hitting a bed full of the softest down feathers. It exploded up in a fluffy cloud, and I sank, slowly.

Drifted. I felt weightless, floating.

I felt oddly giddy, and realized I was holding my breath; my eyes were squeezed tightly shut. When I opened them, I didn't see anything. The air I gasped in tasted dusty.

It was dark.

I reached out and felt loose, drifting particles, fine as talcum, and then there was solid ground under my feet, lifting me up.

I emerged on my feet, borne out of the ground in a shower of powder-fine quicksand.

Oh. The other Warden had been an Earth Warden. Not to mention favorably inclined. I'd have to thank somebody, big-time…

I took one step forward, and keeled over to my hands and knees, coughing and gagging. Somebody patted me helpfully on the back, raising dust clouds.

I looked up to see the face of my savior.

' Marion?'' I paused to cough up some more of the desert. 'Jesus-'

'Breathe,' she advised me.

Marion Bearheart looked pretty much exactly as she had back at the Denny's, before I'd been driven off to die and go to Vegas… even down to the black-fringed jacket. Her hair was still neatly braided, tied off with turquoise- beaded accents. She looked untroubled by the storm, the demon-Djinn howling overhead, or the fact that I'd just plunged a couple of miles straight down, feet first into the ground like the stupidest Acapulco cliff diver ever.

'Thanks,' I finally managed to gasp out, and spat grit. Uck. I so needed a toothbrush. She gave me a faint smile. 'What… how…'

She ignored me, looking up into the clouds. 'Can you stop that thing?'

'Not really.' I wiped my hand across my mouth and struggled up to my feet. Bare feet. Damn. My clothes were in tatters. I looked like a reject from Les Miserables. 'The Djinn up there has a Demon Mark.'

She nodded, as if she already knew that. It was always hard to tell just what Marion knew, because nothing really seemed to surprise her all that much. She took out a bottle from her pocket. It was simple, square, and looked sturdy enough to survive most ordinary disasters. Nice, thick glass. She held it balanced on her palm and looked up into the storm.

'Keep it busy,' she said. 'Keep it off of me if you can. I'll have to get it caged.'

The clouds boiled, as if they sensed what she was about to do. I heard the wind start to howl, and knew it was coming for us. I braced myself, but even so, the sheer fury of the blast that hit me almost knocked me over; Marion 's fringed coat flapped and belled, and her braid frayed into waving strands of gray hair. Sand whipped away from me in pale streams, and in the tangled glare of light on the other side of the fence, where Las Vegas really began, I saw streetlights pop and transformers spark.

Keep it off of her? Was she kidding?

I felt the storm turning its attention on us, and shook the residual haze away to focus on the aetheric. I couldn't do much about the Djinn, but I could fight its effects… flip polarities, break up the wind shears. The lightning continued to flare, but I was able to keep it in sheets, high up in the ionosphere.

'Be thou bound to my service!' Marion shouted into the wind.

I felt it coming. 'Hang on!' I screamed, and threw up a wall of still air around the two of us, a lame-ass attempt at a shield that shattered under the fury of the Djinn's attack. Marion clutched the bottle and held on to my arm; I wished there were something nice and solid for me to hold on to, like a mountain, because the gust that hit us even through my buffering knocked us back at least ten feet, lifted us off the ground, and flung us flat on our backs. I immediately scrambled up and grabbed for Marion. She still had the bottle.