Total Eclipse

the Earth.” He was right. A triple-threat Warden—one who could wield all three powers with equal strength—was extremely rare. So rare, in fact, that the Wardens themselves had tried to capture and study him, in hopes of figuring out how to artificially create the condition in others. Lewis had spent his time as a lab rat, and as a fugitive; he’d been a thief, a con man, a hero, a leader, and a ruthless general.

“Before you go,” David said slowly, “you should know the truth about Jonathan.”

That came out of left field. Jonathan had been the leader of the Djinn for countless ages, and he’d been David’s friend and brother in arms—maybe more, for all I knew. I had only met the Big Grand Poobah a few times, and he’d spooked me, in general, more than Venna. I knew Jonathan had been born human, and Warden; he’d become a warrior general, and died in battle, with David, on a field full of slaughter. His death had sparked the Mother to create the first of the New Djinn: Jonathan, formed out of the death of so many.

David had been brought with him, because Jonathan had refused to let him go.

What else could there be to know?

Venna suddenly glanced away from all of us, as if listening to a sound that didn’t register to me at all. “We’ll discuss it later,” she said. “Time to fight now.”

Lewis jerked upright and hit the door running into the main room. Venna blipped out and probably materialized ahead of him.

I looked wordlessly at David, and he took my hands and held them.

“I hate him,” he said. “I hate that he left you out there alone. Whatever comes, I’ll never forgive him for that.”

“Amen,” I said. “But let’s live through this first, okay?”

He gave me a smile and kissed me, and we went to join the fight.

At first glance, it looked like nothing was happening. Lewis was standing at the table that I assumed doubled as the Warden War Room. Venna snatched up Cassiel’s bag (without permission) and began flitting from Warden to Warden—literally, buzzing in and out of reality faster than a hummingbird—and opening the bag so they could take the Djinn bottles inside. Seeing that Venna herself couldn’t touch them, that was a pretty good compromise. She ran out of bottles after twelve people, but I could see at a glance in Oversight that her evaluation of who were the most powerful was dead-on.

“Be careful,” I said in a voice pitched to carry. “Those Djinn may or may not want to follow your orders. Some of them may turn on you, but it’s the best shot we have.”

“They won’t,” Venna and David said, as one, and exchanged a look. Venna continued, “We’ll make sure they don’t. There’s no time for politics now.”

Wow. That was quite a statement, coming from the new head of the Old Djinn. Ashan had been all about the politics, and—of course—the superiority and general hatred. But there was a new sheriff in town, tiny as she might be, and I rather enjoyed the idea.

One by one, the Wardens uncorked their bottles. Most looked damned nervous, and I didn’t blame them, but as the Djinn misted into evidence around us, none of them made aggressive movements. They stood, silently waiting, just as Lewis was.

Lewis said, in a faraway kind of voice that told me he’d gone far out on the aetheric, “It’s coming. Get ready.”

I went up with him—not as far up, because I’m not Lewis, and he could, as always, take things further than any other living Warden. I’d never really understood his limitations, but I understood that he had them, and he was more than likely pushing them now.

I didn’t need to soar quite as high as he did, because what was coming for us was perfectly evident, in vivid reds and deadly blacks, poison greens and rotting yellows. It was a tsunami of power rolling through the desert like a wave, sweeping everything ahead of it, and although I didn’t know exactly what it was, there was no question of what it did.

That was the Four Horsemen. That was the Grim Reaper.

That was Death, and it was coming to wipe Las Vegas off the face of the Earth.

I had no idea what our powers could do against it, but I looked at David and said, “Can the Djinn stop it?”

“No,” he said. “Not even the Djinn can do that. But we can hold it back, for a time.”

“Do it,” I said.

He nodded and vanished, and around the room, other Djinn did the same. I went up on the aetheric to watch, and I saw the wave sweep toward the glittering, insane tangle of lights and colors that was Las Vegas— and stop, frozen in its tracks. The Djinn had taken up positions all the way around the perimeter, and as I watched, I saw that while the wave was still seething, bubbling, it was at a standstill.

David misted back in, along with Venna. “It’s not going to hold,” Venna said. “You have less than a day, probably only hours. There are millions here. Once the Djinn fall, there’s nothing to stop it, and they will die. All of them.”

I looked around at the room, at the Wardens in their shell-shocked state. I remembered those insane gamblers still stuck at the slot machines out there in the face of the end of the world as we knew it.

I thought about Cherise, who might already be lost, but would be soon if we didn’t find a way to stop this.

“There’s no more time,” Venna said. “If you want to live, we must go now.”

“It’ll take hours to get to Sedona,” I said. Venna gave me an exasperated look.

“No, it won’t,” she said, and reached out to take my hand, and Lewis’s. “Hold on. I will take you.”

“Wait!” I said, “Imara has a barrier in place! You can’t get through it!”

“She knows we’re coming,” Venna said. “She doesn’t like it, but she knows. It’s her choice whether she destroys us to protect her own existence.”

“You’re gambling on her allowing us entrance.”

Venna smiled. “It’s not a gamble. She’s your daughter.”

She seized our hands, and I had just enough time to anticipate how bad this was going to be. . . .

And then it was much, much worse.

Venna dragged us through the aetheric planes, and my God it hurt, like being towed through coils of barbed wire. It seemed that the aetheric itself was burning, aflame with all the growing and intensifying fury and determination, pain and panic. More and more people were realizing that there was no escape, and the pressure was building to fatal levels.

Somehow, we made it through to the other end without losing our lives. Even with Venna, traveling through the aetheric was more of a crap shoot than I liked, and Lewis in particular seemed badly affected by the whole trip. He staggered and sat down, hard, on dry red dirt.

We were in canyons of sandstone, as crimson as the surface of Mars, and overhead the sky was a cool, featureless, unnatural blue.

We were inside Imara’s bubble. As it had been in the Fire Oracle’s area of influence, the world seemed to have been frozen here—I couldn’t see a single living thing moving. No birds, no insects. Not a breath of air. It was eerily silent.

Venna said, “I told you she’d let us in.”

“Don’t get cocky,” Lewis said. “She doesn’t have to let us get any closer.”

The floor of the canyon was sand covering a hard-pan surface of bedrock. Whatever river had carved this particular bend was long vanished, and rain was something rarely seen here. The canyons towered the height of four-story buildings over us, built out of layer on layer of reds, oranges, and browns. The ground was like a tree —you could read its history by the rings and layers of its life. The life of this land was long, and hard, and austerely beautiful.

Overhead, the sun was black in the center, rays blazing out in intense bursts from the edges. It was frightening and strange, and I wasn’t sure what I was seeing at first, until Lewis said, hoarsely, “Eclipse.”

“It’s not an eclipse out there,” David said. “Not one scheduled in this part of the world for years to come.”

It didn’t matter. This was Imara’s domain, and she could do anything she wished here. If she wanted to blot out the sun, she could.