“No.” My breath felt thick and stale in my lungs already, as if I was gone and didn’t know it. “David-”
That smile was definitely mine, right down to the lopsided twist at the corner of her lips. “He won’t know. Nobody will know, because I won’t be pretending-I’ll be you. Completely.”
I fell backward as her fingers moved toward me; I rolled over and used the cold metal bars of the hospital bed to pull myself to a sitting position. I lashed out with Earth powers, feeling for the cold, solid structure and heating it at the atomic level; the metal sagged, turned liquid, and hit the floor with a hiss.
I rolled off the edge of the bed, avoided the molten mess, and backed away. I was in a corner, and the Demon was between me and the door. My head felt like I’d slammed it in a door a couple of times, and my whole body seemed cold, on the verge of giving up.
The building was made of concrete and metal and wood, and under normal circumstances that might have posed a problem, but I was beyond panic, and I was beyond controlling the surging, deadly flow of the Earth power in my body. I lashed out and felt the concrete soften. I liquefied the metal struts in the wall, and blew a hole in it with a compressed ram of air that manifested so suddenly it made my ears pop from the pressure.
The wall collapsed in a hail of debris and sparks, and I stumbled over it, barefoot and dazed. All I wanted was to get away, to get to Lewis and find some kind of protection if nothing else…
Lewis wasn’t in the next room. Dr. Lee, two nurses, one security guard who fumbled for his sidearm at the sight of me. I must have been pretty scary; he took his time.
And then the other me stepped through the rubble behind me, and I saw Dr. Lee and the others perceive, if not comprehend, the impossible.
My double made an annoyed sound. “Now you’ve done it.”
I didn’t know what she was going to do before I felt the balance of power in the room tilt-tilt drastically-and before I could even try to grab for it everybody in the next room exploded into flames, screaming. Dr. Lee. The nurses. The armed security guard, who whirled in a confused blur of combustion, trying to smother the blaze. I stared numbly at them, unable to react for a second, and then grabbed the oxygen from around their bodies to smother the fire. They dropped, but only one was still screaming. Even though I’d reacted, it hadn’t been fast enough; they were badly burned, maybe dying.
I whirled to look at the Demon, but there was no sign of her. I could feel her, though. She was here, somewhere just out of sight. I felt the sick surge in my chest, and knew she was very close.
I couldn’t do anything for the victims. I ran for the door, sobbing for breath, and clawed it open. Beyond was the waiting room, empty of everyone. I heard alarms screaming, and as I got my bearings I heard a door open to my right.
Kevin looked out.
“Inside!” I screamed, and reached out with a blast of hardened air to push him back, grab the door, and slam it shut. I melted the lock, too. “Don’t come near me!” I kept replaying it in my head, those startled people turning toward me, then the flames…that had been my fault. I hadn’t realized how ruthless she was.
I couldn’t take the chance she’d hurt someone else.
I heard Lewis’s voice, and the temptation to run toward him was very strong, but I thought about what could happen. I can’t. I can’t risk him. I need to get out of here, now.
I felt the blackness pressing in again, close and thick, and stumbled drunkenly against a coffee table. I looked down at it, picked it up on a cushion of air, and hurled it full force against the plate glass window on the other side of the room.
It bounced off. Hardened glass.
I forced myself to think. Even hardened glass was silica, and silica was something Earth Wardens could manipulate. I started to unravel its chemical structure, returning it to its base elements. Given time, I’d have just dissolved it into a pile of sand, but that wasn’t fast enough. As soon as I got the process fully started, I launched the coffee table at it again with the force of a battering ram, and this time, the whole window shattered with a tremendous crash.
I scrambled up, heedless of the broken shards, and was just about to jump when something hit me with tremendous force, right in the back, and slammed me face-first into the ground outside. I tried to roll over, but it felt like a freight train was parked on my back.
That was it. I was about to die. I decided to commemorate it by cursing the Demon’s heritage, its hygiene, its sexual habits…
And then a very soft, high-pitched voice, right next to my ear, said, “I’m trying to save your life. Please shut up now.”
I stopped, astonished, and realized that the way I was lying, I ought to be able to see my right hand. It was lying right in front of my face…but it wasn’t there. I wiggled my fingers experimentally and clenched my fist. I could feel the play of muscle, but there was nothing there.
I’d gone invisible.
“What the hell…?” That earned me a thump on the back of the head. “Ow! Who the hell are you?” Someone, obviously, with the ability to turn me completely invisible. The scary thing was that it didn’t really narrow down my choices.
“Quiet!” the voice hissed, and I obeyed, because I felt the Demon close, very close. The blackness swept over me like gravity, as if I were going to be pulled into her and destroyed, smashed apart at the cellular level.
And then it faded again, slowly, leaving me weak and sick and somehow…less.
I found myself being yanked upright by some tremendous force, and held there when my knees wobbled. I couldn’t see anything near me, but then, when I looked down, I couldn’t see myself, either.
“Hold on,” the voice said. “This is going to hurt.”
She wasn’t kidding. Heat swept over me, and then a feeling of being instantly flash-frozen, and then every nerve in my body screamed as one…
…and then I was on my knees in deep, soft carpeting the exact color of caramel.
I pitched forward, face-first, and tried to scream, because whatever had just happened to me was wrong even by the considerably liberal standards of wrongness I was getting used to.
I couldn’t make a sound.
I watched as my body started to come out of its invisibility, growing shadows first, then a kind of translucent reality, and then I was flesh and blood again.
And I could scream, but this time, I managed to lock it in my throat and moderate it to a helpless sort of whimper.
My benefactor-if you could call her that-walked around to face me. I looked up. Not far up, because she was only about four feet tall, cute as a button, a perfect little blond girl with inhumanly blue eyes and an outfit straight out of Alice in Wonderland, complete with patent leather Mary Janes.
“You can get up now,” she said. “I don’t think you’re hurt.”
Not hurt? She had to be kidding. I rolled slowly on my side and worked my way up to a sitting position, bracing myself with my arms. Standing up was not on the menu, not yet.
“What-” My voice was a hoarse croak; I cleared my throat and tried again. “What the hell did you do to me? Who-?”
“My name is Venna,” she said. “I’m Djinn.”
No freakin’ kidding. I stared at her mutely, and she folded her hands over the front of her white pinafore and stared right back without blinking.
“You don’t remember me,” she said. Not a question. “You used to call me Alice. You could call me that again, if you like.” She said it with the generosity of a noble dispensing a penny to a peasant. I just kept on staring. Why I’d know her as Alice was pretty self-evident, given her appearance. I was waiting for the Red Queen and the Mad Hatter to join the party. “I had to take you away. You couldn’t fight her. She was taking you apart, and if I hadn’t stopped you, you’d be dead now.”