Thin Air

feet damp and firm. It would have been a nice day, except for all the chaos and mayhem.

“Eamon?” I asked, as we achieved the top of the hill. “He’s alive?”

“Oh, yes,” Venna said. “You saved him. I suppose that makes you happy.” She sounded mystified about it. Well, I was a little mystified about it, too. “It was good you told them he was crazy. That’ll take time for him to convince them he’s not, but then they’ll be looking for you.”

“So, bus?” I asked. A well-dressed anchorwoman-well dressed from the waist up, anyway, wearing blue jeans and sneakers below-was sprinting up the road, with her heavyset cameraman puffing behind her. “Anytime would be good.”

“You don’t need a bus.” She pointed. “That’s your car.”

Parked next to the side of the road sat…a gleaming, midnight blue dream of a car. I blinked. “What the hell is that?”

“It’s a Camaro,” she said. “Nineteen sixty-nine. V-eight with an all-aluminum ZL-one four twenty-seven.” She said it as if she were reciting it out of a book. “Lewis gave it to you.”

I turned to stare at her. “Lewis gave me this. Lewis gave me a car.” She nodded. “And…I took it?” She nodded again. “Oh, boy.”

“You needed a car,” she said. “He just thought you should have a nice one.”

“When did this happen?”

“Just before-” She stopped herself, frowned, and edited. “Before you lost your memory. You drove it on the East Coast. You took a plane from there to Arizona, so it’s been sitting in a parking lot, waiting for you.”

“And you…had it driven here?” We were at the car now, and I ran my hand lightly over the immaculate, polished finish. Not so much as a bug splatter on its surface anywhere. “You get it detailed, too?”

Venna shrugged and opened the passenger-side door to climb in. She looked more little-girl than ever once she was inside, with her feet dangling off the floor. Somebody had installed after-market seat belts; she gravely hooked hers, although I figured there was little chance of a Djinn being injured in a collision. Still playing the daughter role, evidently.

I wondered if my real daughter had ever been in this car. I could almost imagine her sitting there…

“Better hurry,” Venna said. I blinked, looked back, and saw that the newsanchor was hauling ass toward the car, already shouting breathless questions.

I got in and turned the key that was already in the ignition.

Peeling out and spraying gravel wasn’t a skill I’d lost with my memory.

It didn’t give me much comfort when I looked in my rearview mirror and found a white van pulling out of a parking lot and quietly, tenaciously following.

“I need a plan,” I said to Venna. She stared out the window, kicking her feet, and didn’t respond. “Venna, I need to get my memory back. No more screwing around. Tell me how I can do that.”

“You can’t,” she said simply. “Your memory belongs to her now. And you don’t want to try to get it back. She’ll kill you. The only way to make this right is to get Ashan to go back to the Oracle.”

We were about fifteen minutes out from the beach, and I was just driving, with no clear idea of where we were heading. The steady rumble of the car gave me a feeling of being in control at last, and I thought that I might be happy if I could just drive forever. Or at least, until my problems went away.

The white van, for instance. It didn’t seem inclined to vanish on my say-so, however. It kept a steady three-car distance from me, not really hiding, but not really making itself known, either. Too far back for me to catch sight of the driver.

“Ashan has my memories.”

“No. He…” Venna searched for words for a second. “He tore them from you. Threw them away, made them excess energy. It put you adrift in the universe, and when the Demon found your memories, it knocked things out of balance. I think only Ashan can fix that.”

“But Ashan…he’s not a Djinn, right?”

“No,” she said. “Not anymore.” For a brief second Venna’s expression revealed something that physically hurt, a kind of anguish that I could barely comprehend. “He was one of the first, you know. One of the oldest. But he just couldn’t understand that the Mother loves you, too.”

“Me?” I asked, startled.

“Humans. Maybe not as much as she loves us, because she understands us a little better. But she’s fond of you, too, in a way.” She shrugged. “He blames you. You made her understand that humans weren’t intending to hurt her.”

“I did.”

“Yes. You.”

“And by Mother, you mean…”

“Earth,” she said. “Mother Earth, of course.”

I decided to stick to driving. “Where am I going?” I asked. “If we’re heading for Ashan?”

“I have him safe.” Venna took a map out of the glove compartment, unfolded it, and traced a line with her fingertip. Where she touched it, a route lit up. I glanced over. We were going to take I-8 to Arizona, apparently. “It’s about eight hours. Well, the way you drive, six.”

“Was that a joke?”

Venna shook her head. Apparently it was an expectation.

“What do we do when we get there?” I asked. “I’m not killing anybody, Venna.”

“I wouldn’t let you,” she said. “Although if you knew Ashan, you’d probably want to… What do you want me to do about the man following us?”

“You noticed.” She gave a little snort of agreement. I supposed it wasn’t exactly beyond her capabilities. “Do you know who it is?”

“Yes,” she said. I waited. She waited right back.

I gave her a hard look. Which was just a little bit hilarious, admittedly; I was giving her a hard look? As far as I could tell, Venna could pretty much destroy me any day of the week, and twice at matinees. “Just tell me!”

“I don’t have to,” she said. “You’ll have to stop soon. When you do, you’ll find out.”

She seemed smug about it. I gave her another completely ineffective glare, and checked my gas gauge. Still nearly full. Why in the world would I have to stop…?

The back left tire blew out with a jolt and a sound like a brick slapping the undercarriage of the car, and I cursed, fought the wheel, and limped the Camaro over to the shoulder of the road. The uneven thump thump thump made it clear that we weren’t going to do any quick getaways.

“Fix it,” I said to Venna. She smoothed her palms over her blue jeans. Was there a way to be beyond smug? “Come on, Venna. Be a pal.”

“You have a spare tire,” she said. “I’ll wait here.”

I cursed under my breath, opened the door, popped the trunk, and unloaded the jack, spare tire, and other various roadside disaster tools. I was evidently no stranger to mechanical work, but I wasn’t in the mood, dammit. I had the lug nuts loosened in record time, but as I was jacking up the car with vicious jerks of the handle, I saw a sparkle of glass behind us, and the white van glided over the hill…slowing down.

Shit.

“Hey, Venna?” I said. She looked out of the window at me. “Little help?”

She rolled up the window.

“Perfect.” I sighed. “Just perfect.” I went back to cranking the jack, grimly focused on the job at hand but keeping at least half of my attention-the paranoid half-on the van as it crawled and crunched its way slowly toward me. The brakes squealed slightly as it stopped.

I couldn’t see a damn thing through the tinted windows, and I was suddenly very glad of the tire iron in my hand.

And then the doors on both sides of the van opened at once, and people got out. The woman was young, toned, and well coiffed. She had a microphone. Behind her, in a flying wedge, came a fat guy with a camera and a skinny guy with a boom microphone.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, and stared, paralyzed, while they moved