I stopped struggling. Erik let me down enough that my toes touched the ground. "It's Star," I said. "She's turned on us. We have to stop her."
Her eyes widened. "Joanne, I expected something a little better from you than turning on the only friend you have left. Star's the one who told us you were coming. She wants you to get help. Accusing her won't make things any better."
She slid her eyes past me to Erik. "Put her in the truck."
Struggling didn't do anything but make him squeeze harder and cut off half my air; I was reduced to kicking and screaming like a scared kid. Marion opened the back door of the Nissan, and I got my feet set on either side of the opening and pushed, hard.
Shirl, who'd come up on the other side of the truck, leaned over and touched my foot. It burned. I yelled, kicked out, and caught her right in the face with a snap that sent her rolling. Marion went after her. Erik staggered as a fresh gust of wind hit him squarely in the back.
I reached for that wind, whipped it around me like a cloak, and lifted me and Erik off the ground. He squawked like a chicken, and his grip loosened; I twisted the wind faster, spinning us in midair, and he let go to flail for balance he'd never get. Higher. Higher. Marion was reaching up toward us, but whatever magic she was summoning was no use; with the storm coming, there was so much potential in the air, so much power, it was as natural to me as breathing to counter her.
I split the mini-funnel into halves, stabilized myself in midair, and let Erik continue to turn and flail.
Faster. The bastard had almost crushed my ribs. Faster. He was just a blur of flesh and cloth, screaming.
With just a little more, I could rip that cloth away, strip him naked, then begin to peel that pale flesh down to red meat and bone. . . .
Jesus. I flinched because somewhere in me, something was licking its lips at the taste of that fear, that blood.
I let Erik drop into a heap on the concrete and held myself suspended ten feet above Marion's head, looking down. Shirl called fire, but Marion stopped her before the wind could whip it out of control.
"Your move," I called down. The wind blew cold and harsh around me, black as night, streaming with power. It was sickeningly easy. I'd never felt so powerful, not even with a borrowed Djinn at my command. No wonder Bad Bob had let himself be consumed by this thing; it felt so ... damn . . . good.
Marion knew better than to start a war here, next to a town full of innocent lives. So did I.
That didn't mean we wouldn't do it.
She slowly lowered her hands to her sides and gave me one short, sharp nod.
"You know I could blow you away, don't you?" I asked. She looked ready to bite the head off a nail, but she nodded to that, too. "You know I have the power to bury the three of you right here."
"Do or don't, it's your choice."
I was sick of everybody preaching to me about choices. "No more fucking around, Marion. Don't try to smile to my face and stab me in the back, because I promise you, I'll hurt you. Now, I'm going after Star. You can either come along and help me get her, or you can get in that canary-yellow piece of crap and go home. But you are not taking me with you."
Her eyes were ice, ice cold. "It seems I was wrong about you. I thought you would do the right thing."
"Well, it's all in the perspective." I waited, hovering, while she thought about it. "What if I can provide proof that Star's corrupted?"
"Then I'll take steps."
We kept up the standoff for another few minutes, and then Marion nodded. Just once.
"Follow me," I said. "Don't get in my way."
She bundled Shirl and Erik into the Nissan, then climbed up into the driver's seat. I lowered myself to a level where I could see her through the window. Somewhere about half a mile away, a fork of lightning blazed through the sky. Sensitized as I was right now to the power, I felt it go through me like a rolling wave of orgasm. She must have read that in me, because for the first time-ever-I saw a flicker of fear in Marion's eyes.
"Try to keep up," I said. I touched down on the concrete and let the wind slip from my control; it raged in a mini-tornado through the parking lot, slamming parked cars, scudding trash, kicking loose stones like a spoiled brat.
I stayed cool until I got in the Viper and then sat there, shaking, and felt the Demon Mark uncoiling and stretching inside me.
"I won't be like that," I promised myself. But I already was. I'd hurt Erik, I'd thought seriously about killing him. It was only a matter of degrees now, of those slow descending steps to becoming what Bad Bob had been.
A monster.
I let the Viper fold me in its muscular strength; Mona was willing to run, and I was willing to let her. The first heavy drops of rain were falling around us as I sped out of the gas station, followed by the Day-Glo Nissan Xterra. We roared up the access ramp and hit I-35, heading for the heart of Oklahoma City.
The storm was fast becoming a problem.
I watched it flowing toward me. The clouds had turned darker, edged with gray green; the light looked different seen through them. Lightning was a constant, hidden flicker somewhere up in the anvil cloud forming at the leading edge. It looked deceptively compact, but I knew it went up into the sky for thirty, forty, fifty thousand feet, a massive, boiling pressure cooker of force and power. Two miles after I left Norman, rain began lashing the road in sheets. Mona's windshield wipers worked on full speed just to keep the lane markers visible; lucky for me, there was no traffic except for the dimly seen SUV behind me. We were the only fools stupid enough to be driving.
Now that it was here, the green-and-gray pinwheel hanging so close over my head, I thought in a strange sort of way that I recognized it. It had a personality, this storm. A kind of surly intelligence. I had the sick feeling-and it was probably true-that this was the storm born of seeds I'd scattered on the coast of Florida in my fight with Bad Bob. Whether it came from me or had been birthed from the bloody womb of Mother Earth, this storm was now waking up to its own power and presence. Sentient. Able to control itself, alter its course, make decisions about how much damage to inflict, and where. There was no longer anybody manipulating the aetheric to control it; in fact, I could see lines of force constantly jabbing at it from a hundred different Weather Wardens, all trying to disrupt its patterns and all failing.
The more I looked at it, the more familiarity I felt. This was my storm. Created from my meddling. Fed by my reckless use of power. Dragged here by my subconscious, or my bad luck.
Overhead, the storm shifted and rumbled, and I felt it focus on me. Fine. At least this was an enemy I understood. One I could fight. I looked into its black, furious heart. I opened my mouth and screamed at it. No words, nothing but a tortured howl of agony. Come on, you bastard. Come and take your best shot.
When I stopped, there was silence. The storm muttered to itself and kept its own wary counsel; I'd surprised it, at least, even if I hadn't scared it.
I couldn't stop the storm without pulling power through my Demon Mark, and that would increase its rate of growth and burn away at what was left of my soul. Then again, I couldn't go back through the storm without it striking me with all its power and fury.
It was standing between me and Oklahoma City now. Between me and Star, me and David.
The storm stared at me. I stared back.
I pulled Mona off the road and got out of the car.
The Nissan ghosted to a caution-yellow stop behind me.
"Fuck you," I said, staring up at this child of my power. "Let's go to war."
It started small. They always do. Just a breeze against my overheated face, tugging at the hem of my shirt and ruffling my sleeves. Combing through my hair like cold, unfeeling fingers.
Marion got out of the SUV behind me. I didn't turn around. "Better take cover," I said. Maybe she did; maybe she didn't. It wasn't something I could spare attention to check.
Overhead, the storm's rotation sped up. Clouds swirled and blended together. They spawned cone-shaped formations that twisted and turned on their own. Counterclockwise, all storms turn counterclockwise on this side of the world. The colors were incredible, gray and green and heart's-night black. Flashes of livid purple and pink from lightning discharging point to point across the sky.
I waited.
The wind snapped my hair back like a battle flag, even with a drenching rain; I used enough power to clear a bell of stillness around myself and immediately drew a lightning strike. I diffused it down into the ground and felt no more than a tingle, and the subtle, stealthy movements of the Demon Mark under my skin.
I told it to shut up. It was going to get a lot worse before it got better.
When the hail started-golf balls smashing out of the sky to shatter on the road around me at first-I extended my protection over the Viper, too; no point in winning the war and being stuck thumbing for a ride. The hail pounded harder, like white rain, growing into fist-size misshapen chunks that exploded like bombs when they hit. Ice shrapnel sliced through my clothes, cold and then hot as blood began to run. Hundreds of tiny cuts. I strengthened the shield around me, but it wasn't going to be easy to keep all of it out.
Out in the field to my right, dust and grass began to swirl and twist. A delicate streamer of gray shredded off from the clouds above it. Not much force to it yet, barely an FO, hardly more than a dust devil. The storm was testing me.
I chopped through the top of the baby tornado by freezing the air molecules. The sucking updraft lost force, and the dust funnel blew apart.
Round one to me.
I sensed something happening behind me, happening fast. Before I could even turn, I felt the tingle of another lightning bolt coming; I split my focus three ways into protection, diffusion, and moving my body to face whatever this storm was throwing at my back.
Another tornado, this one forming fast and ugly. The full cone was already visible, shivering and dancing through the hard curtain of rain; it was lit from within by an eerie blue-white light. Ball lightning. I felt the hard plasmatic blobs of energy bouncing around inside the wind walls.
Tornadoes are simple, gruesomely effective engines of destruction. They're caused, by the humble updraft-the updraft from hell, driven by wind shear and Earth's own rotation. Imagine a column of air speeding three hundred miles per hour, straight up, blasting up into the mesosphere and erupting like an invisible geyser. As the air turns cold again, it sinks and gets drawn back into the spiral.
Sounds easy. When you're looking at that shifting, screaming wall of destruction heading straight for you, all the knowledge in the world doesn't help you maintain objectivity. This one was already formidably armed with found objects-pieces of wood, twists of wire torn from fence posts, nails, rocks, whipping grasses and abrasive sand. A human body trapped in the wind wall could be sawed apart by all that debris in a matter of seconds.
I went up into Oversight. The storm was gray with pale green, unhealthy light. . . photonegative, full of destructive energy and the instincts to deliver it with maximum damage. It circled up in the mesosphere like a vast clockworks. There were other Wardens there, working, but nobody came near me or offered to link; they were focused on working the weak points of the storm, trying to warm the air at the top and disrupt the engine cycle that was spawning tornadoes.
They wouldn't be successful. This storm had its parameters well under control, and it wasn't going to let us cut off its food supply. We had to be creative about this if we-if I-expected to survive. Truthfully, the rest of the Wardens probably weren't worried about my survival. They wanted to contain the storm where it was, over open country, until it burned itself out. Any risk to me was a bonus.
Another lightning stroke was forming. Instead of diffusing the power, I channeled it, focused, and slammed that white-hot energy directly down into the vulnerable throat of the tornado roaring toward me.
It choked, stuttered, coughed on its own superheated breath. The residual heat on the ground radiated up, disrupting the cooling end of the cycle.
In seconds, the wind wall fell apart and fled back up into the water-heavy clouds, dropping its weapons of opportunity as it went. A thick whip of barbed wire snaked down from the sky and fell almost at my feet.
I grinned up at it and screamed defiance. "That all you got? You think you're going to stop me with that? Please!"
It hit me with more lightning, five times to be exact, one on top of the other. I fumbled the last, and it bled off into me, not enough to fry me but enough to scramble my already-abused nerves. I fell, rolled over on my stomach, and looked up into the heart of my enemy. There were no eyes to this storm, no face, but there was a kind of center . . . the cold still place around which the rest of it rotated and screamed and rattled.
I stayed down, relaxed my body, and again flew up into Oversight. More chains were forming; it sensed weakness and was preparing a massive lightning attack. I snapped the links and drove the polarity back, all the way back, into the center of the storm.
And then I did something that I'd been told never, ever to do.
I reached for the rotation of the storm itself.
It's a funny thing about momentum. It's a force multiplier for objects in motion, like kids on bicycles.
But momentum only aids force when force operates according to logical, controlled rules.
When kids on bikes go too fast, they begin to lose control. Handlebars shake. Wheels wobble. Lines of force operate at angles instead of straight on.
Speed can be the enemy of momentum.
I didn't try to act in opposition to the storm-it would be worse than useless; it would actually add to the fury of the energy circling me. No. I reached for the disturbed, chaotic winds operating at the fringes of the storm and added them to the storm, like a drain sucking in more water. I fed the storm. Pumped energy into it with abandon.
Other Wardens noticed what I was doing, and some of them tried to stop me. I shoved them back, hard. One or two had Djinn support, but I had the Mark; the power in me was black and hot and blending with mine to such an extent now that I didn't need a Djinn anymore.
One or two of the other Wardens fell out of Oversight and didn't come back. I didn't let myself wonder what I'd done. The storm was what was important. Spinning it faster, faster, pouring more energy into the sink until it was overflowing.
The storm was rotating, in the physical world, with a speed that was eerie to look at. Tornadoes popped and bubbled all over the underside of it as power struggled to regulate itself; but there was too much, no control, angles of force intersecting and canceling each other out.
Faster. Faster. Faster.
I laughed out loud, looking up at the spinning pin-wheel, and the center of the storm stared furiously back. Lightning was firing so continuously that the whole black-green-purple mass was lit within, pulsing with energy.
Not a single tornado touched the ground. A massive one formed in the air, almost a mile wide, struggling to reach damp earth and rip apart everything in its path. I warmed the air under it so quickly that rain turned to steam.
The storm readied another lightning bolt. The chain of polarity led straight to me, and it was as strong and inflexible as braided cable. No way I could break it.
Let it come, something in me said, something black and hard and riding the edge of my adrenaline. Bathe in the power. It is your right.
The idea was so diverting that I lost my grip on the air below the F5 tornado chewing its way out of the sky. Temperatures dropped.
The tornado hit ground, bounced, ripped up earth and plants and fence and began to roar toward me.
I felt the energy come up through my body. It arched my back, pulled a breathless scream out of my mouth, bathed every cell in my body with pure, primal force.
The thing in me ate it, and I felt it happening to me, felt the Demon change from the tentacled horror into a thing of ice and angles, grating on my bones, barely fitting beneath my skin.
I hardly felt the massive nuclear energy of the burn-off, the energy manifesting in visible light and heat.
I was transformed in the fiery inferno.
Made whole.
When I stood up, my shredded, melted clothes fell away, and I stood pure against the storm.
I stretched out my hand and touched the life inside it, caressed it, tasted the dark furious essence of it. Attuned myself to its vibrations and rhythms, learning it, being the storm.
And then I surrounded it with the enormous strength inside me, and I crushed it.
Twenty feet away, the enormous gnashing strength of the tornado fell in on itself, dead. The storm's energy patterns flared and tore.
In the breathless stillness, I heard myself laughing. Naked, soaking wet, infused with the furious power of the deepest darkness, I still found it funny.
I heard the unnaturally loud grate of footsteps on gravel, and came back to myself. Or what was left of my self now.
"My God," Marion whispered. I turned my head to look at her and saw her flinch. "What you did-"
"Saved our lives," I said. I stood up, looked down at myself, and started feeling the shock take hold. So cold. So many cuts and bruises. I looked like a road map of been there, done that. "Got any clothes I can borrow?"
They didn't want to come near me. Shirl stripped off her flannel shirt, leaving herself the T-shirt; Marion dug a pair of loose blue jeans from a bag in the back of the Xterra. They tossed them to me, along with a pair of mud-caked hot pink Converse high-top sneakers. I pulled everything on without worrying about who was watching me; even Erik wasn't interesting in checking me out, right at the moment.
They hadn't even wanted to touch me. I couldn't say I blamed them.
I looked down at myself when I was finished and decided that I wouldn't win any fashion awards, even at the homeless shelter, but it would do. Good enough to die in, or kill a friend in.
You don't need to look good for that. You just have to look scary.
I'd made it seven miles down the road, almost into the Oklahoma City limits, when I ran into the first obstacle.
Wind wall. It was a ferocious east-to-west current whipping across the road at right angles, like a tornado lying down. It wasn't a natural phenomenon- at least, not anywhere other than high elevations with hair-trigger climates-but it was undeniably powerful; lose control, and the Viper would get slammed into a spin that might well turn into an end-over-end movie stunt, only without the padding and professional stuntmen. I could control a lot of things. Gravity and basic kinetic energy weren't among them.
I had one second to recognize the distortion across the road, one second more to make a decision about what to do. No time to focus or do any delicate manipulation.
