Total Eclipse

“This is restful,” I said, to nobody in particular. The Djinn wasn’t exactly chatty company. Cherise was asleep. The radio stayed quiet, not falling for my opening gambit. “David? Do you think we should stop?”

“You all need rest,” he said. “I’ll find you a place to stay for a few hours, and someplace to eat.”

That sounded heavenly. Not that I couldn’t sleep in the car and eat bagged food, but stretching out on real sheets was better than sex right now. The mere thought of fresh food made me salivate.

“We should probably push on,” I said, being the brave little toaster. “It’s only about another ten hours to Sedona, and that’s not counting the bat out of hell multiplier.”

“You’d get there exhausted,” he said. “It’s been hard, and it’s going to get worse, I think. You need to rest while you can.” He spoke with authority, and I remembered that in his brief human life he’d been a soldier. He’d been used to exhaustion, to snatching what little rest and relief he could in between fighting for his life.

I gave in. Truthfully, it had been a token protest anyway, and Imara’s inexplicable warning had made me worried. My daughter, like David, had a much wider view of things than I ever could. What if we were making things worse instead of better? What if we were actually forcing the battle instead of preventing it?

I couldn’t think straight anymore. I’d been holding back emotions for a while now, but there’s one thing about emotions: they never really go away if they’re strong. You can bury them, but like a vampire they keep lurching back up. I knew that I was still numb about the loss of Kevin, but it was going to come out, and probably soon. I’d rather suffer through that in private, lying in a bed and hugging a pillow. It wouldn’t help Cherise to see me lose it.

I’d put him in the ground myself. I’d felt the unmistakable absence in him, the void where his life had been.

No, I didn’t want to remember how it had felt to hold his empty shell, or how he’d looked so pale, bound up in that cheap motel sheet—but the image wouldn’t go away.

With a shocking intensity, that mental picture suddenly shifted, and it was Lewis’s face pale and still, it was Lewis lying in my arms as I abandoned him to the dirt—alone, cold, unmarked. I almost gasped out loud with the emotion that brought rolling through me, and rested my burning forehead against the glass as I squeezed my eyes shut. No. No, that’s not going to happen.

David and I had our powers back. Cherise had survived. We’d saved some lives along the way. We were winning, dammit. I couldn’t get spooked now. I couldn’t lose focus. That was another good reason to recharge. When I was in the throes of exhaustion, it was far too easy to let things overwhelm me, even the unlikely threats. I lost all ability to filter.

While I was thinking, David had been acting, and I felt the Mustang suddenly leap forward. I looked up and saw we were hurtling straight for the back of a stopped eighteen-wheel truck . . . and then the car lurched sideways with a scream of tires, jumped over a curb, and bumped down on the other side, onto an off ramp. Free of the traffic block, we rocketed down the access road toward a nice, neat- looking, moderately priced hotel/ motel.

We passed it. I looked back as it receded into the distance and said, “Uh, that one would have been okay —”

“No, it wouldn’t have been, sugar.” Whitney’s accent never failed to make me want to roll my eyes. She could not have been more annoying about how thick she laid it on. “You’re going to have company coming soon. Won’t do to put you up someplace that’s going to just come down on you. Again.” She sounded utterly certain of herself, and casual about the threat, too. Lovely.

“What kind of company?”

“The kind you don’t want to stand up to, not that you could. You remember little Venna.”

Ouch. Venna was the very last Djinn I’d want to have on my tail right now—even worse than Rahel. Venna was impossibly strong, and she was clever, too. Great friend, awesomely bad enemy. I thought about that little girl, the image of innocence, with those ghostly white eyes like I’d seen in Rahel.

I shuddered. “Where can we go?”

“I’m working on that,” Whitney said. “I’m taking over the car now.”

We blurred past a lot of inviting-looking roadside inns, took some turns, and ended up on the northeast side of town, as best I could tell. Businesses of any kind thinned out and stopped.

Wherever she was taking us, it wasn’t going to be the Hilton.

The car slowed and stopped in the middle of nowhere. I could see a faint smudge on the horizon off the black-top to the right, but I couldn’t tell what it was.

“Uh, Whitney? Hello?”

Nothing. No answer from her, or from David. I tried poking the Djinn, but it just sat there, inert and hot to the touch. It was like poking a bag of especially firm rubber.

Cherise yawned and sat up, rubbing her eyes. Tommy woke up with a grouchy grumble, turned his face toward her neck as she lifted him up, and promptly fell asleep again draped all over her. She patted his back, smiled a little, and then looked at me. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, obviously nothing, because we’re just sitting here. Why are we just sitting here?”

“Because David and Whitney are arguing about it,” I said. I just knew that was the case, and I knew that it indicated a potentially major problem. “Whitney says Venna is headed this way. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but maybe she’s on our trail, too. Either way, it’s not good news.”

Cherise shuddered. “Ouch. Okay, got it—crisis imminent. Again—we’re sitting. Why are we sitting?”

“Because running off without a plan is an even worse idea,” David’s voice said, coming from the radio.

Whitney’s voice, at the same time, came from the Djinn. “You’re not thinking straight about this, boss man. You try to run them, she’ll catch up. You try to hide them in the middle of all those people, she’ll just mow down everybody in her way. This is your only real shot at keeping them alive, and you know it.”

“This is the opposite of keeping them alive!” David snapped back.

“I hate it when Mommy and Daddy fight,” Cher said, with just enough sarcasm to cut through. “We’re not just pieces getting pushed around on a board, you know. Tell us what’s going on.”

David got there first. “She wants to take you to a nuclear weapons assembly plant.”

I think Cherise and I both said it at the same time. “What?” I think we were both pretty restrained about it, really.

“That’s it up ahead,” David said. “It’s not a good idea. It’s so easy for Venna to destroy not just that place but everybody in this part of the state, given all that raw material to work with.”

“I know that,” Whitney snapped. “But it’s also one of the only places we can lock off against her, not just with wards and shields, but with lead-lined concrete and bunkers designed to withstand nuclear attacks. Best possible place to hide them, especially if we can erase their traces on the aetheric.”

Wow, Whit must have been upset, because she’d lost most of her Gone with the Wind accent. And she used bigger words.

“It’s too dangerous,” David said flatly. “No. We go on. I’m sorry, Jo, but if we keep moving we can stay ahead of Venna.”

“Venna can materialize any place she wants, and you know it,” I said. “How exactly do we stay ahead of her?”

“We’re shielding you. She can’t know exactly where you are.”

“But she can narrow the area. And like Whitney said, anybody standing around us is collateral damage.”

He fell silent, which indicated that my logic was, sadly, unassailable. I deeply wanted that little oasis of a working roadside inn, a meal with cooked food and actual silverware, but I understood the risks, and they were far too high—not for the three of us, but for everybody who had nothing to do with it.

“Is she really looking for us?”

“We think so,” Whitney said. David said nothing, which I took for unwilling assent. “She’s not the only one. There are at least four Djinn quartering the country. She just happens to be the one in this area. They’re looking for signs, and ignoring the other Wardens.”

Mother Earth must have really been pissed about me kicking Rahel’s ass. Not good news.