Relax, Patrick's whisper said. You know what to do.
I didn't. I hated it when ghosts tried to shine me on. But he was right about the first part, anyway … and I slowly opened my eyes and parted my lips and took in a deep breath.
The blue sparklies swarmed into my mouth, down my throat in a brilliant frenzy, and I felt them burrow cold inside of me. Pinpricks of ice, weighting me down. Making me heavy and slow and stupid. I wanted to lie down next to Israel's limp, cold body, but I didn't want to die like this, locked in some smelly old refrigerator in some tiny, out-of-the way gas station. Dying unremarked and alone.
I had my standards, and having a box of Popsicles for a headstone was right out.
I staggered out into the store, grabbed onto the counter, and held myself up with an effort. Tell me! I screamed inside. Damn you, Patrick, tell me what to do!
He was quiet. Damn Djinn. Never around when you really needed them …
I don't remember falling, but I was on the floor, staring up at a rack of magazines. Tom Cruise was on two of them. That seemed unfair, somehow, but at least I had an audience for my swan song now, even if it was two-dimensional.
No. No, I wasn't going to die like this. Ugh. Just no. If I didn't die at the Bellagio, I damn sure wasn't buying the farm at Mart's Texaco. It lacked dignity.
Do you really think they want to be here? Patrick asked me. He sounded bored and disinterested and out of patience with me. They're far from home. And scared. For heaven's sake, think, woman. Use that brain that came in that lovely body.
Oh.
I looked up, on the aetheric plane. It was like looking up through a skyscraper made of glass … so many levels, so many realities, each one purer and more precise. Colder. Clearer. Humans — even Wardens — couldn't go beyond the aetheric, which was the plane above our own mortal world. Djinn could. They could travel up at least four levels at will, higher if they concentrated hard.
I'd been a Djinn. Could I still …?
No choice but to try. I took in a deep breath, down on the mortal plane, and thought myself higher. My spirit began to rise, shimmering with cold blue light … up … I felt the tug as I passed through the top of the aetheric and up into the plane above, a Djinn place, not meant for humans. It dragged at me, as if the air was thicker.
Everything was a confusion of light, odd shapes, subtle warps of reality.
I kept rising.
The second barrier was harder, and I slipped through slowly, torturously. Squeezing through. Beyond, the lights had a harsh, cold clarity that terrified me. Nothing seemed right. I felt breathless and scared, and I was no longer in control of how fast I was going up. I wasn't rising anymore, I was being thrown. Propelled.
The pressure was intense. It was more like diving into the ocean than rising into the aetheric levels.
The blue sparklies were jittering madly all through my body. I could almost feel them adding their own fuel to my progress, even as they ate away at the center of my power. Cannibals and predators, mindlessly and furiously destroying their own would-be savior.
Faster. Higher. More pressure, a denser barrier that felt as if it was scraping layers of skin and muscle off of my mortal body when I passed through it. But I couldn't stop. I didn't dare look at what was around me; there were things here, intelligences vast and cold that had never bothered with humans. I didn't want to attract their attention. It would be the end of whatever passed for my sanity.
I ran into the last barrier, and stopped. Stuck. Battering at the slick cold ceiling like a drowning victim under the ice. The blue sparklies in my body were ripping me apart in their desire to push me through, but it felt impenetrable, no way I could slide through …
If I wasn't willing to die at Mart's Texaco, I didn't want it to end here, either. I extended my hands and pressed them flat against the barrier and pushed. Hard. With all the power in me.
Something broke free, as if I'd tapped into a well long covered over, and I felt a flood of hot, raw energy spill into me.
My fingers slid through. My wrists. My arms, compressed almost to the breaking point. It didn't just hurt, it was like being crushed between two plates of glass — sheer agony. I felt as two-dimensional as Tom Cruise on a magazine cover, and a lot less glossy.
I popped free with an audible snap and drifted at the top of the world, nauseatingly free.
I opened my eyes, then quickly squeezed them shut. Even as a Djinn, this had been impossible to decipher; human eyes had no frame of reference for anything. It was just blind, cold chaos. And I was lost in it.
But luckily, Israel's fairies weren't.
They dragged my body to a point that looked almost black in the swirling fury, and without any direction from me, my arm extended and my fingertips touched the scar.
It was closed.
Open it, Patrick whispered.
I couldn't. If I did, it would rip in half again, I'd kill the world …
Trust me.
I wanted to weep, but my aetheric form wasn't suited to the job. I jabbed my fingers forward, deep into the scar, and felt it … give. Suction on the other side. Cold, eerie suction that was completely alien to anything I'd known … even the chaos swirling up here.
The blue sparklies began flowing up. They marched out of my body, down my arm, into my hand, and flooded through the bridge of my fingers into that other place, that other reality.
When I was sure they were all gone, to the last little Tinkerbelle glow, I pulled my hand back. A single blue mote floated in the air for an instant, and died.
The black scar stayed closed.
And I felt whatever had sustained me start to give way.
Oh crap. Action, and reaction. It existed even here, in this place. The power that had sustained me was giving way, and I was falling.
Hard.
I crashed through barriers that ripped and scraped and tore. It felt like smashing through increasingly thick panes of glass. Gathering speed, plummeting and screaming … straight through the familiar glow of the aetheric …
… into my body, where I arrived with a devastatingly hard jerk that made me conk my head into the scuffed linoleum hard enough to see stars.
I looked up at Tom Cruise's toothy smile, and promptly passed out.
###
I came to with Ed sitting on the stool, watching me. I was on the cot in the back room. The storage area had the sharp, clean smell of Lysol, with an undercurrent of dust. I sneezed, whimpered at the strain on my aching body, and curled over on my side. I brushed my hair back with a shaking hand.
Ed didn't say a word. He was looking at me, but I wasn't seeing anything in his eyes. Just … blankness.
"Hey," I croaked.
He blinked. "You're alive."
"Seems like." I checked the color of my skin. Still its normal color. My heart was beating. Apparently, I hadn't joined the ranks of the vampires, or the zombies, or whatever else Israel had been. Speaking of …
"Your brother?"
Ed cleared his throat. "He's dead."
"You're sure."
He nodded. "He — yeah. I'm sure." That spoke volumes I didn't want to read. I closed my eyes and rolled back over flat, and tried sitting up. I managed it. It wasn't a happy process. "You okay?"
"Yeah." I had no idea, but even if I wasn't, there was nothing Ed from Mart's Texaco could do about it. I needed Earth Warden help, or Djinn help, or both. Or maybe I just needed sleep and rest. Peace and quiet and a stop to the demands of the universe that I keep on fighting.
Ed dug in his pocket and counted out five hundred dollars in twenties. I sat in silence, watching him, my lips slightly parted but no words finding their way out. He put the pile of money in my lap and stood up.