Chill Factor

Lazlo realized it first. He grabbed my elbow, hustled me over to Kevin, and said, 'Take his hand.'

'What? No!' Kevin yanked free. His eyes were huge and panicked. 'You're not fucking with me, man! You'll kill me!'

'Kevin, shut up and do it.' When I reached for his hand, he gave it to me in the form of a punch. It landed solidly in my solar plexus. I felt breath evacuate as if I'd been vacuum-sealed, and croaked for air as I doubled over.

But I grabbed his fist and held it in both hands, tightly. Death grip. Lazlo, bless him, held on to the kid's other arm. Once gravity and leverage were on our side, I transferred my grip to Kevin's shoulder to keep him down.

'Let me go, you fucking bitch!' He was screaming it now, writhing, trying to get away. I felt the air curdling. He was lashing out with powers, too panicked to do something targeted, but he could cause a lot of damage even unfocused if we let him. I sharpened my hold on my own energies, began to weight the air around him to damp down the chaos he was causing…

… and Myron Lazlo said, 'No, Joanne. That isn't how we do things. Let him try.'

'He isn't just going to try,' I gasped breathlessly.

Tough to talk when my diaphragm didn't want to pull in air. 'He's going to make what happened at the Bellagio happen here, don't you get it? Only worse!'

'I know.' Lazlo closed his eyes. His face went serene. Not empty, just… peaceful. Behind him, Ashworth laid a hand on Lazlo's blue-suited shoulder, and then there were more of them, forming a human chain that matched the Djinn's across the room. Two circles of power.

Balancing.

What the Ma'at were putting out wasn't energy; it was absence. Where the Wardens concentrated on the subatomic world, manipulating molecules, adjusting the vibration speed and makeup to rebuild the world in our image, the Ma'at went deeper. I couldn't see how, until I let myself go still and quiet with them.

Kevin's energy raged like a forest fire on the aetheric, power enough to destroy the city, level forests, break the land into rubble. And power moves.

But the Ma'at surrounded it. Contained it.

Negated it.

'For every action, reaction,' Lazlo murmured. 'For every vibration, a cancellation. We don't seek to win the struggle. We seek to stop the game.'

I remembered the card game. The cards floating over the table. Even as it formed in my head, I heard Lazlo sigh. 'You see power where no power exists. We didn't float the cards. We simply negated the forces that acted on them to make them fall.'

Kevin, furious, screaming, red-faced, tried to rip the walls of the room apart by digging deep into the bedrock below the hotel. He didn't care anymore who he hurt. Maybe he never had.

My instinct was to act, to do something, but I waited, watching.

Marion's hand slipped over my shoulder in a warm, gentle touch, and when I looked at her I saw tears in her eyes.

'I see,' she said. 'I see what to do. All this time we destroyed them, and we could have saved them…' She was talking about the Wardens she'd been ordered to neuter-or kill. This was a revelation for her, and it couldn't possibly be a happy one.

The Ma'at, in their quiet, invisible way, focused their powers to still the vibrations. It was a basic principle of wave motion; hit the right frequency, and the wave disappears. At a molecular level, everything resonates at specific speeds, to specific notes.

Even the earth.

Even Kevin.

The Ma'at didn't fight what he did; they fought what he was, at the source… stilling him, quieting him.

Stopping him, as a mother's hand stills a child's lips.

Kevin wasn't screaming anymore, I realized, and I looked down. His tear-streaked face was open and vulnerable. Defenses gone. I felt him trying to get beyond his own skin; he had Lewis's earth powers, and that meant that if he wasn't particular about how he used it, he could easily blow my heart open or crush my brain into jelly inside my skull. The temptation to do something, anything to protect myself was almost overwhelming, but I had to trust Lazlo. The best I could understand it, if I introduced a chaotic vibration into what the Ma'at were laying down around him, it would destroy any chance of success.

Boy, Kevin wanted me dead. Really, really dead. I could feel it coming off of him in red waves, see it like a poisonous cloud curling around him on the aetheric.

The cool whisper of the Ma'at was keeping that in check. It was a little like a piece of Saran Wrap holding back a heavyweight boxer's punch. I tried not to let the analogy make me nervous.

'Now,' Lazlo breathed. 'Take her hand.'

Her, who?

I looked down.

Alice. Her innocent smile clashed with the vastness of the power I sensed in her. She was old, this little one. Far up on the Djinn scale of People You Don't Want to Mess With.

I extended my hand. She wrapped her small fingers around it.

We completed the two halves of the pattern.

Yin and yang.

Human and Djinn.

Positive and negative.

On the aetheric, the pattern swirled, lit up in glorious glowing color, and it was breathtaking. Complex and graceful as a sand painting, each piece in exactly the right place. I watched the colors race around… green for earth, blue for air and water, red for fire, sparking off of each human they touched, then shading subtly lighter as they moved through the chain of Djinn, gathering strength…

… to cascade through Rachel's touch into Lewis. A rainbow of light, turning brilliant white as it coiled inside of him. His body-a failing ruin of shadow and darkness-took on form and color. Not healed-that would take time-but no longer destroying itself.

No longer dying.

Let him keep what he is. I heard that through the clasp of hands, felt it move through us like a breath. Human and Djinn, formed into one living, thinking thing. Lewis was part of that. So was Kevin. There was a bright red bonfire burning inside of him-his natural powers, the ones that the Wardens expected Marion to rip away from him. It could be done now, without risk. Even without risk to Kevin, for that matter. He'd survive it. We'd all see to that.

But that was Lewis's voice, whispering, Let him keep what he is. Because he understood, maybe better than anyone, that Kevin couldn't live without that touch of fire in his soul. He wasn't demanding, or ordering. The Ma'at was a strange kind of democracy-the exact opposite of the Wardens, which was (for good or bad) an association of independents. In this formation, this… symbolic machine… we debated in silence, on the strength of emotion and feeling rather than words or logic. We argued from our souls.

And, in the end, we knew what we had to do.

Marion took her hand off of my shoulder, and the pattern dissolved into silence. Into forty-odd human and Djinn, each with their own agendas, their own hates, loves, needs. Each separate and apart, as the Wardens were separate and apart.

That was why the Wardens had never truly succeeded. They couldn't. They didn't understand.

This was power.

Kevin burst into tears.

I left my hand on him, not to hold him down, but to give him comfort.

'You hurt me,' he was whispering. 'She's dead, and you hurt me. Siobhan's dead. I couldn't protect her.'

He kept crying, rocking back and forth. His whole body was shaking. I looked across at Marion, whose face was luminous and calm again.