Thin Air

She frowned. “Was it? I didn’t mean it to be.”

I resisted the urge to explain sarcasm to her. Barely. “What about memories? Are you going to give me his since he’s human?”

She looked away. “Do you think you want them?”

“Just the ones about me.”

This time, she looked at me straight on. “Do you really want them?”

I realized then what I was asking for. Not just memories of me as Ashan saw me, but the things Ashan might have done to me. To other people I loved.

To my daughter.

I cleared my throat. “Let me think about it.”

She nodded. From the backseat Ashan said, in a low, harsh voice that didn’t sound like it got much use, “You can’t be saved, you know. Whether you die today or in fifty years, you still die.”

Cheery little fella. “I’ll take surviving the fifty years, if I have a choice.”

He smiled thinly. “You don’t.” His eyes were bright-not Djinn bright, which was a whole order of magnitude weirder, but plenty bright enough to indicate crazy. “I’ll freely give you my memories, meat. I want you to know everything. It would please me if you went to your death remembering every painful second of what I did to her.”

I thought longingly about the Taser, then deliberately relaxed. “Can’t you shut him up?” I asked Venna.

She glanced over the seat at Ashan. “I don’t like to keep him unconscious all the time. It’s not good for him.”

“Like I care.”

Venna giggled. I nearly drove off the road. “Sorry,” she immediately said, subdued. “Was that wrong? I don’t usually try to laugh. I never was human, you know. I never learned.”

“Really? What a shock, you seem like such a regular kid.” I checked the map. We were making good time, and the lodge that Venna had indicated was our stopping point for the day was only about an hour’s drive down the road.

I was starting to feel pretty good about the possibilities when I felt the engine give the tiniest little hitch.

“No,” I whispered.

There it was again. Stronger. It sent a shudder through the car.

“No!”

The third time, the whole engine seized up with a clatter of valves. Great. “Venna! Little help!”

But she wasn’t looking at me. I wasn’t even sure if she’d realized we were coasting to a stop at the side of the road.

“She’s found you,” said Ashan, and smiled coldly. “They may kill me, but I think they’ll kill you, too. And that would be worth my death.”

“Venna!” I pumped my foot on the gas, but it was stupid; the car wasn’t going anywhere, not without supernatural repairs. “Dammit-”

“He’s right,” Venna said. Her voice sounded colorless, emotionless, but there was a bright spark of fear in her eyes. “David broke my shields. He must know I was hiding you. They’re coming, and they’ll kill Ashan. I can’t risk that.”

I couldn’t help but think that it was the threat to Ashan that got her interested, but I didn’t have time to think about it; something happened to the car’s engine, and it choked, growled, and caught fire again. The car leaped forward. I hastily shifted gears to accommodate.

“Maybe we should talk-” I began.

“No! Drive!” Some invisible force slammed the gas pedal down, and I struggled with the steering wheel as the tires screamed, propelling us down the road at a terrifying rate of speed. “Don’t slow down!”

“I’m sorry,” Ashan was saying. I had no idea if he was sorry he was in the car, sorry we were all going to die, sorry that he’d done what he’d done to Imara, and to me. Or just a sorry excuse for a human being. It didn’t really matter, and I could barely hear him over the shriek of tires on the curve. The Camaro was drifting over the line. I fought the wheel and got her straight by sheer force. Come on, baby. Work with me.

I didn’t know what was chasing us, but whatever it was, it was scary enough to panic one badass Djinn, and one who at least used to be.

Sounded good enough for me to panic, too.

I loved driving fast, but this was a little too fast, on a road that snaked like a car commercial and featured oncoming tractor trailers loaded down with raw lumber and giant tree trunks. Venna didn’t enhance my ability to keep my cool; she continued to put the mystical hammer down on the Camaro while looking steadily out the rear of the car.

Leaving me with the not very enviable task of steering in overdrive.

“Slow down!” I yelled at her, and tried to downshift. The gear knob didn’t budge. I yanked at it anyway. The clutch pedal didn’t respond, either, even when I jammed it to the floor. Ditto, brakes. In desperation I yanked the emergency brake, but it flopped uselessly.

“If we slow down, you die,” Venna said. She sounded unnaturally calm. I was glad I was too busy to see her face. “So does Ashan.”

“News flash: If we don’t slow down I’m going to die, and ruin a perfectly beautiful car!” I shot back. I nearly bit my tongue off as the Camaro hit a patch of ice, tires broke traction, and the whole thing started going sideways with a vengeance. “Shit!” I’d heard somewhere that these days, that was most often a person’s last word. I didn’t want it to be mine, and I fought the skid, begging the car to find some traction.

It did. The tires caught, squealed, bit, and slewed us back in the opposite direction just in time to avoid an oncoming RV. I kept the Camaro off of the steep, narrow shoulder, sprayed gravel, and managed to point it in the right direction.

Another truck barreled past us, buffeting us in its wake. Busy road.

“Venna!” I yelled. “Plan B! Because plan A’s not working!”

The engine seized up again. It was catastrophic, a crunching grind of metal followed by the sound of parts coming off, breaking loose, and ripping apart everything in their path. Steam erupted in a white cloud from beneath the hood, and no amount of magical gas pedal pressing was going to get us moving again. Not unless Venna was one hell of a roadside mechanic.

The car lurched, clunking metal, and slowed drastically.

We coasted, moving more and more slowly, and I found a slightly wider spot on the shoulder that would double as an emergency breakdown lane, flipped the hazard lights, and hit the brakes-which, finally, worked.

The road, which had been choked with traffic a few seconds ago, seemed quiet now. The last eighteen-wheeler was disappearing over the ridge, grinding gears, and there didn’t seem to be anybody else in view. I was having trouble getting my breath, and I was shaking in reaction to the adrenaline rush.

“Venna, what the hell-” I began, but I didn’t even make it to the end of the sentence.

“Get down!” She reached over, grabbed my head, and forced me sideways across the seat, with the safety belt digging into my neck nearly to the choking point.

I forgot to complain about the discomfort of that, though, because I started to feel it, too. A disturbance in the aetheric, one even somebody like me, who was all but a novice, could feel.

There was a sound. I’m not sure what it was like, because there was nothing in my mind I could equate it to; it was a chaos of sharp snapping sounds, thunderous crashes, howls, screams…

Venna threw herself on top of me just before a wall of wind hit the car and flipped it, end over end, through the air.

I blacked out when the car slammed into the ground, which was probably lucky. When I woke up I was out of the wreck, lying on the cold gravel shoulder of the road, and there was a smoking heap of metal a dozen feet away that wasn’t immediately recognizable as anything like a motorized vehicle. Certainly not the lovely, gleaming car