It made me sick.
“If you try to stop me leaving, I’ll toss her down the stairs,” he said, and walked to the door. “I can assure you she’ll break her neck at the very least. Maybe if you’re lucky she’ll only be paralyzed and you can be changing her bedpans and apologizing to her the rest of your life.”
I swallowed and somehow managed to get myself to stand still. He looked back on his way out, warning clear in his eyes.
“Two hours, Joanne. No excuses.”
I let him go. Partly, I just didn’t see a way to stop him without risking Sarah’s life; partly, I was just too stunned to cope. It was too much. Just … too much.
I slid back the patio door and walked out into the cool predawn breeze.
Cotton-thick clouds formed a black shield and blotted out every evidence of approaching morning. It was as dark as midnight out here.
The security lights in the parking lot showed Eamon walking calmly to his car.
Sarah looked fragile and small and vulnerable in his arms. He put her in the passenger seat, strapped her in with no evidence of anything but gentleness, and shut the door. He even hesitated to be sure her robe was inside the car first.
He looked up at me for a moment, with no expression that I could read, and then got in and drove away.
I wanted a Djinn, all right.
And when I got my hands on one, Eamon was going to understand just how dangerous screwing with me could be.
I wouldn’t have followed him even if I’d had the skills, mainly because there was no way he wouldn’t notice the great white whale of the minivan trailing him through early-morning traffic. And Eamon, I already knew, had a criminal’s perception about danger. No point in giving him a reason to carry through on threats I was pretty sure he meant.
I needed serious help. With John Foster gone, there was no Warden in town I could turn to for help, and I didn’t have time to apply for any outside assistance. Two hours wouldn’t get anything from Paul. Even if Marion had been inclined to lend a hand, she was out of the picture, recovering in some hospital from what must have been a near-death experience with one of Ashan’s militant Djinn.
My allies—never plentiful—were MIA. I tried making calls, but Lewis wasn’t answering his cell, Rahel didn’t seem inclined to show up at my beck and call, and I knew better than to count on anything but the back of Jonathan’s hand at this point.
David… no. I couldn’t rely on David at all.
It was just me, and time wasn’t on my side. Neither was power. I had enough power to get by, not enough to stage a major confrontation. It would take more than vitamins and protein shakes to bring me back from the kind of energy devastation I’d been through recently… it was going to take time, and rest.
Neither of which I’d had, or was likely to get.
I stood on the balcony, watching the horizon. There was something out there, something big and badass and coming this way, and I could feel it like a storm of needles over my skin. It wasn’t supposed to be there, hadn’t been forecast by any of the normal weather models. It was purely, aetherically magical.
Everything was out of balance, wobbling like a bent wheel, and I didn’t know if it could ever be fixed again… or if it could, what that price would be.
I closed my eyes and went up to the higher plane.
The world dissolved into a map of shadows and lights and fog. My apartment building turned featureless; nobody spent enough time in it to give it character. I soared up, arms outstretched, and watched the city grow smaller under me, consolidating itself into a flickering pattern of energy.
I went higher, until the Earth curved away from me. As high as Wardens could safely go. I felt the drag warning me to stop, and hovered there, staring down at the world’s giant, swirling mass. In Oversight, it wasn’t blue and green and peaceful; it was a mass of shifting colors, bands of energy that moved and twisted, fought and shattered and reformed. That wasn’t just human potential at work. Part of it was Djinn. Part of it came from deeper, stronger places.
The world was fighting. Struggling with itself.
The storm off the coast of Florida was a black hole, a photonegative of a hurricane. Still tightly wound up, clouds just starting to spiral out from that hard center. It felt… old. Ancient. And powerful.
I tore my attention away from it and concentrated on what else I could see.
Djinn were hard to spot; they registered as flickers in the corners of my eyes, if they were bound to service, and as nothing at all if they were Free Djinn and trying to keep out of sight, which most of them would be. Wardens flared here and there like fireworks. Lots of activity throughout North and South America.
The intensity of the flares meant that substantial power was getting expended. I couldn’t help but imagine what that meant. Wardens were being killed, or fighting for their lives at the very least. And there was nothing I could do about that, either. A lot of them would be friends, people I’d met or worked with. Lots of names going up on the memorial wall, if there was a world at the end of this to remember them at all.
I couldn’t see anything that would help me. The closest Warden to me was in the Florida panhandle, and he or she was hard-pressed with some kind of tornadic activity. Besides, from the intensity of the flares, no Djinn were involved.
Somebody has you, I whispered into the fog. Where are you, David? Who found you? Who took you?
Something stirred, creating eddies of power that whispered warm on my skin. I couldn’t see him, but I could feel him. David was still alive. Still barely qualifying as Djinn, hoarding the power he’d taken from me at the dump.
Just tell me, I begged him. Tell me and I’ll come get you.
I wasn’t prepared for something to hit me, but something did, hard, knocking me in a stunned loop on the aetheric. My insubstantial body wavered, and I started to fall back toward reality in an uncontrolled spin. The world spun into a blur, and wham, I hit flesh again with enough of a shock to cause my body to stagger and make painful acquaintance with the stucco wall.
Whoever had David didn’t want me finding him.
I remembered, with a hard shock, that I’d actually seen someone with a Djinn just two nights before. On the beach. One of Shirl’s wolfpack going toe-to-toe with Lewis had been packing a Djinn. The last I’d seen of them, they’d been taking to the hills, but if they were really serious about taking out Lewis …
… then, if I found Lewis, I’d find Shirl. And a Djinn. Right now, any Djinn would do. I wasn’t about to be picky, and somehow, taking a Djinn away from that particular crowd didn’t bother me nearly as much as it probably should have, but then, when it came to people trying to kill the people I loved, my ethics got a little bendy.
I went up on the aetheric level again, this time searching specifically for Lewis. A bright flare of power to the west, maybe an hour down the coast. Where other Wardens showed up in Roman candle spurts, Lewis was a steady, bright torch. He had the ability to disguise himself nearly as well as a Djinn, but he wasn’t currently bothering.
I kept half of my attention in Oversight, grabbed minivan keys and purse, and banged out of the apartment. I didn’t have a lot of time, and God knew the mommy-mobile was hardly power transportation…
When I got to it, I realized that the land yacht was canting sideways, like a ship heeled over on a reef. Eamon had taken the trouble to slash two of my tires before he’d absconded with my sister. Probably had done it while I’d been sleeping. Son of a bitch… !
I grabbed my cell phone and hit speed dial, pacing the parking lot nervously while it rang, and rang, and rang…
Cherise’s sleepy voice finally said, “Oh, you’d better be cute, male, and horny.”
“Shut up. I need you,” I said flatly. “Skip the gloss and get your ass over here.”