Thin Air

She didn’t look familiar, but I was getting used to that. I gave Lewis a doubtful look; he wasn’t lowering the gun. “I’m going to ask again,” he said. “How’d you get here? Because the two of you were supposed to be in California, last I heard.”

“You need help.” The girl, again. She sounded young and earnest, and she looked it, too. Underdressed for the weather, and that bothered me. “Lewis, man, put the gun down. You know us!”

“Tell me how you got here.” He cocked the gun with a cold snick of metal.

“You’re crazy,” the boy said flatly. “Yo, Joanne, a little help?”

“Jo,” Lewis said, with an unsettling amount of calm, “he’s right, I do you need your help. I need you to move two steps to your left so that when I shoot these two you don’t slow down my bullets.”

I just stared at him, stunned. There was something cold and implacable in his eyes, and I just didn’t get it. These two didn’t look like dangerous desperadoes. The girl was just damn cute. Young, tanned, toned, beach-bunny perfect. If the boy was with her in a romantic sense, he was definitely dating outside of his weight class, because he was greasy, skinny, sullen, and generally unattractive, unless you went in for that sort of heroin-chic bad-boy vibe. Badass, but probably not bad.

Probably.

“Oh, come on. You really going to shoot me, Lewis?” the boy asked, and stuffed his hands into the pockets of the leather jacket he was wearing. “Because I don’t think you’ve got the stones.”

“Guess again.” Lewis’s aim didn’t waver.

The boy sneered. Really, openly sneered, which isn’t easy to do with a serious weapon aimed at you. “Please. I’m a Fire Warden. I can make sure that gun doesn’t work.”

“You forget,” Lewis said, “I’m a Fire Warden, too.” And he moved the gun about an inch to the left and pulled the trigger. The noise was deafening. I choked on the stench of burned cordite that wafted over me and yelped.

The boy hadn’t flinched. The bullet dug a fresh yellow hole into the tree next to him.

“Please don’t do that,” the girl said, and deliberately stepped out in front of the boy. “Look, we’re just here to help, okay? There’s no need for this.”

“Then tell me how you got here.”

She took a step toward him, hands outstretched. “We don’t have time for this.”

“Cherise, right?” he asked. “Don’t push it, Cherise. I will shoot you.”

“I think you would if you really thought I was dangerous,” she said. “But look at me. How can I be-”

Lewis was totally not above shooting the pretty girl.

And he did, three times, right in the center of her fluffy hot pink sweater.

Cherise rocked back, lips parting, and stared down at the damage to her sweater for a few seconds, and then looked back up at Lewis. “You bastard! That was cashmere!” She lunged at him. He grabbed her by the arm, swung her around her own axis of motion, and slammed her face- first into a tree.

Which did about as much damage as three bullets in the chest, apparently.

And she was my friend? That either kicked ass, or was a big, big problem.

The boy grabbed hold of Lewis, stripped away the gun, and the two of them got down to some serious fighting, only some of which was happening in the real world; I could feel the stinging force of powers being slung back and forth along with punches, but I couldn’t tell who had the upper hand.

Cherise grabbed my arm, locked eyes with me, and panted, “Run! Come on, we have to go, now!”

“But-you were shot-”

She waved that off impatiently. “I’m okay. Come on!”

We ran. The trail was thin, and heavily clogged with debris, but Cherise was fast, and I moved as quickly as I dared, leaping over logs and branches and struggling to keep up. I was cold, very cold, and I couldn’t believe she was this active without at least a coat. But I guessed that if she was bullet-resistant, being immune to the chill wasn’t much of a stretch.

I felt a pulse of energy so strong it knocked me to my knees, and Cherise yelled and dropped flat, and a wave of heat rolled over us, thick and shocking.

A fireball erupted behind us.

“Kevin!” Cherise was up and running back toward the inferno, but she didn’t get far before the flames drove her back. “Kevin!”

She didn’t need to worry. The boy plunged through the flames as if they weren’t even there and doubled over, breathing hard. He wasn’t even singed. “Damn,” he gasped, and coughed. “Ow. That hurt.”

Cherise immediately went to him. “What happened?”

“He went for it,” Kevin said, and braced his hands on his knees. “Damn. I’m sorry, I thought I could contain him, but he-he just-”

It dawned on me that Lewis wasn’t coming out of the fire. “You killed him,” I said numbly. “You killed Lewis.”

Kevin glanced up at me. “He did it himself. I just couldn’t stop him. Look, the dude was going to kill you. We were lucky to get to you in time.”

I wished I’d picked up Lewis’s gun. I felt hot, sick, disoriented, and oddly on the verge of tears. I didn’t know the guy, not really, but…I couldn’t believe what Kevin was saying. Lewis, going to kill me? No. That couldn’t be true.

I needed to think, but I didn’t have time. The fire was spreading. It had already jumped from one winter-dried treetop to another, and there were tendrils of flame and ash falling on us. Kevin might be fireproof, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t.

Cherise yelped as a branch exploded from the heat, spraying us with burning splinters.

I didn’t even plan what happened next. I don’t even know how it happened. I just reached blindly for help, any kind of help.

And it came in a blinding, disorienting flash. Rain, driving down like a firehose to douse me to the skin. Cold water met hungry flames, and the resulting steam flooded the clearing in fog. The rain kept falling, a tap I didn’t know how to turn off. Hell, maybe I’d broken off the knob. The underbrush was still smoking, but the flames were out, and they couldn’t flare up again while the downpour continued.

Kevin looked like a stunned, drowned rat. He stared at me with narrowed eyes, measuring me, while rain beat down on his head and plastered his lank hair to his skull. “You shouldn’t be able to do that,” he said. “How did you…?” Weirdly, I could almost hear another voice overlaying his, a female voice. Not Cherise’s, who was just mutely staring at me.

“How’d you get here?” I yelled over the roar of the rain.

“Not that again!”

“It’s a good question! How the hell did you two find me?” I backed away, and saw Cherise and Kevin exchange a glance. Not one that was particularly reassuring. Man, I wished I’d picked up the gun-not that it had done Lewis a lot of good. But I felt particularly vulnerable right now. “Lewis was going to a lot of trouble because he thought somebody was following. He thought we were in danger.”

“Not from us,” Cherise said, and I almost believed her. She just had that kind of innocent trust-me face.

But I caught Kevin smiling, and my heart went cold.

I backed away a few more steps. Kevin’s smile faded, and Cherise’s blue eyes turned cool and expressionless.

“All right,” she said. “I guess we do this the hard way.”

The downpour was localized around us, but as I reached the margins, fire suddenly flared up. Kevin. I could feel the energy pouring out of him. I held my ground, because running would be damn near suicidal; once I got outside of the downpour’s zone, he could toast me up like a s’more. I wasn’t sure I had a second trick up my wet, dripping sleeve.

Cherise and Kevin didn’t make a move toward me. They just watched me, and I got the strangest feeling, like they were just…there. And not there. Like they weren’t really present anymore.

And then I sensed something else. I couldn’t even put a name to it-big, dark, wrong. Very, very wrong. It wasn’t a real shadow, but I could feel it, spreading over the ground toward me.