Total Eclipse

Whitney was silent for a second, then I felt the Djinn braking the vehicle, whipping it around in a tight turn, and heading back. “You need to know when to let it go, Joanne. You really do.” Thirty seconds later, he pulled the Mustang to a stop. The old man was feebly moving, trying to pick himself up, but he wasn’t able to do much. I bailed out and ran to his side. He was in his seven-ties, maybe into his eighties, with a tight cap of silver/ gray curls over a face of great dignity—a patriarch, for sure. African American, and he’d probably been tall and broad in his younger days, but now he was lighter and more stooped, and I was able to help him up to a sitting position. More car doors slammed. The others were joining me.

“Hi,” I said. “My name’s Joanne. You looked like you needed some help.”

He nodded breathlessly. He was wheezing, and his hands trembled badly. “I saw the devil,” he said. “Back there on the road. It was killing people.”

I exchanged a look with David, and knew he was thinking exactly what I was—Djinn.

“I’m not supposed to be driving, but I had to get Mindy out of there. The whole place was going crazy. I just started feeling sick. My chest hurts.” His face was taking on an ominous gray color, and he made a pained expression and grabbed for his arm. “Damn.”

He was having a heart attack.

“Sir, what’s your name?” I asked. “Sir?”

“George,” he finally panted. “George Templin Bassey.”

“Nice to meet you, George. I’m going to help you lie down, okay? You take slow, deep breaths. That’s right, slow, deep breaths.” I sat back on my heels and looked at Kevin, then Cherise. “One of you is going to have to try to help him.”

“How?” Cherise asked. She looked scared, and I didn’t blame her. This was a fairly significant amount of responsibility to be dumping on someone.

“If you’ve got my powers, you’ve also got Earth Warden powers,” I said. “That means healing. George here needs your help. I’ll walk you through it, okay? Kevin, he said something about Mindy. See if there’s anybody else in the car.”

Kevin opened the car door and peered in, and almost got his face chewed off by a squat, ferocious English bulldog, who lunged off the floorboard at him with furious, deep-chested barks. Kevin slammed the door again. The bulldog continued to glare and bark. “Uh, yeah, found Mindy, I guess. She’s a charmer. Looks okay, if you like fangs.”

Under other circumstances, I’d have laughed. Kevin had been fine with fighting toe to toe with a particularly dangerous Djinn, but give him an angry dog, and he was just like anybody else. That was refreshing.

I pushed away that momentary pulse of amusement and focused back on Cherise, who was staring at George with wide eyes.

“Okay, ready?” I asked. She shook her head. “Yes, you are. Give me your hand.”

I thought for a second Cherise was going to revert to a second-grader and hold her hands against her chest, but finally she stretched one arm out, and I took hold and guided her to place her palm on George’s forehead. He was moaning softly, and he really didn’t look good. “I need you to feel the ground under us,” I said. “It’s full of energy. It feels like honey, or syrup—something slow and golden, okay? Can you feel that?”

Cherise squeezed her eyes shut, and finally nodded. “It’s not very strong,” she said doubtfully. She was right. It was my weakest specialty, generally. “What do I do?”

“Imagine pulling that up into your body. Once you get it started, it’ll just flow on its own.” God, I realized I hated being a teacher. So much easier to do it than to say it. Words were so clumsy for this kind of thing. If I could just show her . . .

The frown deepened on her face, then cleared. “Oh. Oh, right, I get it. That feels weird. Good, but weird.”

“Weirder than getting hit by lightning?”

“That felt great!”

We were wandering off topic, and poor George was looking more than a little spooked. “Well, this will, too. Now, I want you to just let that power move into your hand, your fingers, your palm. Then let it flow from you to George. Don’t try to direct it. Just let it flow.”

I remembered learning this, in fast, terse lessons from other Wardens who hadn’t had the time to teach me all the proper techniques. Being a late bloomer meant I’d missed all the classical education, but I had a good working knowledge of down-and-dirty first aid. One of the key things Lewis had taught me was that if you don’t know how to do fine control with Earth power, don’t try. There’s a certain instinct to it that pulls the power to where it’s needed most. Bodies want to heal. All we have to do is help them.

“It’s going in,” Cherise said. I couldn’t see a thing, but Kevin was watching in fascination, eyes gone wide and unfocused as he followed along in the aetheric. “I think it’s working. I can see it in his blood. It’s moving— there’s some kind of a block. I think I can—”

“No!” both David and I said at the same time. I kept going. “No, I told you, let the power work. Don’t try to direct it!”

From the look on her face, she was trying, but she’d already made the mistake, and I could see it in George’s choked gasps. Wielding Earth power is like working with nanotechnology—you have to be able to make controlled, very slight adjustments at a microscopic level. It’s not brute force.

Cherise cried out, and George arched his back. His eyes rolled back in his head. “I tore it!” she yelled frantically. “I tore something, it’s all bleeding out—”

Kevin reached out and added his hand on top of Cher’s, and even as magically blinded as I was, I felt the power flooding out of him. His eyes sparked and changed, and George’s labored breathing suddenly and dramatically eased.

“Oh,” Cherise said, in a very small voice. “Like that. I see.”

Kevin sat back, staring at her with those glittering, powerful eyes, and he said, “Do you? Because you almost killed this guy because you were stupid. She told you not to do that. You blew out an artery, for God’s sake!”

Cherise went white, clearly horrified and shocked as Kevin turned on her. It wasn’t him, I realized; it was the fact that with David’s power, he was seeing way too much. He saw Cherise’s secret delight in having power, finally—something that as a Warden he’d probably never have picked up, but it reminded him of someone else.

It reminded him of his stepmother, I realized. Yvette. He’d seen her turn into a predatory monster, driven by that same kind of excitement and ambition. What he saw in Cherise was the opposite of Yvette Prentiss . . . a woman without any of that power, without any desire to have it or use it.

He was hating her right now, and she could tell.

“Hey,” I said, and put my hands on their shoulders. “Good work. He seems better. George, are you feeling better?”

He nodded, but he looked scared. Well, I’d have been right there with him, if I’d had two amateur psychic surgeons rummaging around in my innards. “Who the hell are you people? You with the government?” He was feeling better, because I heard suspicion kick in.

“In a way,” I said. “Kevin, how’s the patch? Solid?”

“It’ll hold,” he said. “He had a blocked artery. It’s clear now. He’ll be okay.”

“Kev—,” Cher said anxiously. He stood up and walked away, head down, hands in his pockets. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to do it!”

“Give him a minute,” I said. “Cher, he’s used to the other you. The one without powers. He’s never trusted other Wardens, not any of us, not deep down. He hates feeling that way about you, too. Understand?”

She didn’t, really, but she blinked back tears and acted like she did. We got Mr. Bassey on his feet, had him walk around a little, and then put him back in his car. Mindy was extremely excited by this, and obviously protective; she stood with her stubby little legs on his and growled at us through the window.

“Do you have someplace safe to go?” I asked George, as he started up his car. He looked at me like I might have been completely insane.

“I’m going to the church,” he said. “Devil’s walking the streets, and I don’t know what you people are. Church is the only place I’ll feel safe.”

I nodded. “Be safe.”