Thin Air

level of pleasure and intensity.

Glass shattering with the force of our power combining as our bodies did.

Lewis gone, spirited away. My life consumed with work, achievement, ambition.

Bad Bob. A Djinn holding me down, choking me with a Demon Mark, forcing me to face my own fears and mortality at the same time. Bad Bob died; I lived, crawling away from the wreckage of the fight.

A shattered Djinn bottle. Bad Bob’s slave freed. My quest for Lewis. Meeting a stranger on the road, a vagabond named David I couldn’t quite resist.

A blur of events that I couldn’t even separate, ending in more destruction, more death, my own transformations.

Blue sparklies. A hole in the aetheric. Demons. The fate of the world, again, on our shoulders.

Human again. Faces flashed by at an increasing rate, because I could feel the tension of the Demon on the end of the memory chain, pulling back, and I couldn’t stop now to even try to comprehend what I was seeing.

A glimpse of Jonathan, ageless and cynical and passionate about what he loved.

Fighting for my survival in a flood, and rising in the arms of my lover above the foaming, deadly currents.

The Mother of Storms taking notice, at last, and coming to end the cycle of violence.

Imara conceived. Imara born. Imara-

The memory chain shattered into a million crystalline fragments, and I lost my hold.

It all started to go away. I was losing it. No!

The Demon didn’t waste time with my trauma. She cut to the chase and plunged her hand into my chest, just like she’d done with Rahel.

If she couldn’t be me, then she was going to damn sure make sure I wouldn’t be, either.

The sensation that raced through me was horrifying. I’d been through bad stuff; this was beyond. I’d felt it through Kevin’s memories, and it was even worse this time, because there was no escape.

She simply bored her way through me, ripping apart whatever she didn’t need, and I felt my connection to the aetheric suddenly cutting off. It was like the sun disappearing during a total eclipse, and something in me screamed, trapped and terrified and suffering.

It couldn’t live that way for long. I couldn’t.

Although I felt like there was less and less of an I. It was draining away from me, like sand out of a broken glass, slow but inexorable. I was losing my childhood again. My mother’s face was fading away. I lost the memory of my first date, and the nervous excitement of buying my prom dress, and the scratchy elegance of the corsage my date had bought me. I lost the memory of his name, too.

Evil Twin didn’t care about my troubles. She let go of me, but I didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Hair blew across my face, obscuring my view of her, but it didn’t matter. She could see. I didn’t need to, because now I was fully, completely under her control. I couldn’t fight, because I needed every ounce of strength to slow down the steady erosion of my past.

She was simply going to drain me dry, and then I’d be gone. Erased. Finito.

The Wardens were circling us, trying to decide which one was the good Joanne, which the bad; the problem was that the deck was now stacked, and they were screwed no matter what choice they made. Kevin and Cherise were hanging back, watching with identical expressions of sick horror; more than anyone else, they understood what was happening to me. Not that they could help me.

Not that anyone could.

The Demon accessed my Warden powers, blew a hole through the peaceful, artificial shield of Seacasket, and accessed a huge draw of power from the aetheric. She used me to do it. My control shattered, and the memories dissolved faster.

I lost my college years. I lost Lewis, swept away in a tide of oncoming darkness.

I felt the clouds gathering overhead, a soft gray pressure turning rapidly dark, and under the Demon’s direction I rubbed air molecules together, creating friction, heat, driving the engine of a tiny but incredibly concentrated storm. Not my choice, but definitely my fault. The storm broke with a snap of lightning, and drenched a square-block area of sidewalk, catching nearly every Warden in its path.

As soon as they were standing in a thin layer of water, she forced me to slam a lightning bolt down and electrified the whole block.

The Wardens went down like ten pins in a bowling alley, many stunned, a few maybe even dead. I wanted to stop. I wanted to scream.

Instead I turned and walked, under the Demon’s control, into the gates of the Seacasket cemetery.

“There used to be guards here,” E.T. said, as if we hadn’t just lashed out against everything I knew and loved. As if I weren’t dying as quickly as she was coming alive. We were strolling along the path like two sisters, hand in hand. “There were Djinn guards. You remember?”

It was a new memory, not yet pulled apart by the ongoing destruction. I remembered. They’d nearly killed me and Imara. Ashan had been here, too.

“I won’t let you win,” I said. I couldn’t stop her, and she knew it, but she at least allowed me the fantasy of saying it. “You don’t have to do it this way. If you want to go home, we’ll find a way to send you home. But you’re not killing the Oracle. You’re not ripping open any doorways. If I don’t stop you, the Wardens will. The Djinn will.”

“And yet,” she said, with the same cockeyed smile I’d felt on my own face so often, “that’s exactly what I’m going to do. And you’re going to help me, until I don’t need you anymore.”

Gravel crunched under my shoes. Part of me was shrieking in agony, battering at the container that she’d stuffed it into. “I’m fading,” I said. I couldn’t even work up emotion about it, because she controlled my body, even down to the endocrine level. “No good to you if I’m dead. Slow down.”

“You’ll last long enough.” She shrugged. “I need you, because I won’t be able to open the door, not alone-the Oracle will know me for what I really am. I could have used the combined power of the Wardens to blast it open, but you’ve ruined that for me. Now only a Djinn will do-or someone who’s been one before. You.”

We passed some leaning, picturesque headstones. A cracked marble bench. A tree that showed evidence of having sustained some fight damage in the past.

And we arrived at the mausoleum.

“No,” I said. My body couldn’t hear me. It was following a completely different set of instructions as my arm lifted, touched the marble door, and then reached for the inset metal knob. “No. No, no, no!” Memories flared, burned, and dissolved. Bad Bob. Storms. My car spinning out on the road. The Djinn-hot flash of David’s eyes. Lying in his arms, gasping.

My time was running out.

I traced the roots of my power to where E.T. had placed a black stranglehold on them. I couldn’t free myself-no chance in hell-but I could focus on one tiny opening. It was like breaking the pinkie finger of someone choking you-possible, but of doubtful use.

I did it anyway. I focused everything I had, all three forms of power, through the lens of my desperation, and came out with a white-hot stream of pure energy that burned a hole straight through the black cage holding me prisoner.

Something reached through to me. It came in a slow, warm flood, like syrup…the thick, condensed power of the Earth. It was trying to reach me.

Not enough. I couldn’t use it; the opening was too narrow, the cage too confining. No leverage. I screamed inside, trying to cling to the last memories as my hand turned the doorknob, and I fell into another place, one with no up, no down, just stone and an ever-blazing fire too hot and brilliant to approach…