David took my hand in his, and Rahel turned to face us. Pieces of the mall were falling apart behind her, smashing and shattering. Choking dust and smoke flooded the hall, and the neon lights--no, all the lights--went out.
We were going to die in the dark.
I could still see Rahel's eyes in the dim glow of the distant skylights overhead--unblinking and predatory, the eyes of something with no purpose but destruction.
She'd lost herself to the madness of Mother Earth, who was lashing out against what had hurt her, with no rational thought. There was nothing David or I could do to reach her. I thought about Rahel lying in the hospital bunk on board the ship, and I felt tears burn in my eyes that weren't due to the smoke and dust. I'd thought we'd lose her then, but at least she would have died as herself.
I wished I was dying as myself. My old self. That would have been ... better.
Rahel's lambent eyes blinked.
She didn't fry us.
"David?" I whispered. "Is that her, or--?"
"I don't know," he whispered back.
Whatever internal battle went on, Rahel lost it. She raised her hand, palm out, and I knew we were going out not in a blaze of glory, but just in a blaze.
Fire streaked at her from her left and slammed into her with overwhelming force, knocking her sideways and to the floor. In the sudden lurid light, I saw that Kevin was turned on his stomach, still flat on the floor, but holding up a hand and burning the holy hell out of the Djinn. She flailed, trying to get up; he kept up the attack, not letting her get her balance or counterattack.
"He can't," David said. "He can't do that!"
"What, act like a flipping idiot? He does it all the time!" I yanked on David's arm, trying to get him to move with me. "We need cover--come on!"
"No, he can't do that," David said, and I watched as Kevin continued to pour more and more power through his body, crushing Rahel down. "Jo--"
I knew, in a blinding flash, what he meant. Oh crap. No freaking way.
It made a weird kind of sense, but ...
Kevin surged to his feet, and his eyes flared into colors that shouldn't have been possible in a human. Hot, fluorescent green. He bared his teeth and walked toward Rahel, pummeling her now with massive pieces of concrete he levitated up from the wreckage.
"You think you can take me, bitch?" he said, and laughed. It rolled through the devastation like thunder. "You think you can hurt us? Think again!"
Something in Kevin had woken up. Something terrible and powerful and raw.
And it wasn't just Warden powers, no matter how powerful; there was something else inside him.
Djinn powers. David's powers.
"Can he kill her?" I asked. David was shuddering slightly now, taking in the full extent of what had happened. "David! Can he?"
"Yes," he said, in a faint, distant voice. "If he doesn't stop."
I let go of David's hand and lunged forward, vaulting over the debris, ignoring the resulting scrapes and bruises and cuts as I scrambled toward Kevin.
And when I got there, I slapped him across the face. Hard.
Kevin blinked, shocked, and turned those eerie Djinn-green eyes on me.
Then he backhanded me ten feet across the floor.
"Hey!" Cherise yelped, and stepped in front of him as he tried to come after me. "Enough! What are you doing?"
Cherise brought him back to himself, enough that he dropped his attack against me and looked back at Rahel, who was buried under a mess of rubble, motionless. When he blinked this time, his eyes faded back to their normal color, and he staggered and almost fell. I rolled slowly to my feet, feeling every twinge myself. I'd been lucky he hadn't shattered bones. If there had been a wall in the way, I'd be drowning in blood.
David was picking his way slowly toward me. I motioned for him to stop, and looked at Kevin and Cherise. "We have to go," I said. "Now."
They both nodded, clearly not sure what the hell was going on anyway.
We left Rahel where she lay--alive, I presumed, though she wasn't stirring--and our bruised little band of heroes limped out into the parking lot of the mall.
Which no longer looked like a parking lot.
Cars were twisted and smashed, rolled over on their sides and tops, some torn into scrap.
People wandered helplessly, looking shell-shocked and confused. One woman, clearly not thinking at all, kept pointing her key-chain remote at one wreck after another, trying to identify her own car, as if it would matter.
Shivering clumps of people were huddling for comfort. Nobody was screaming now. It was too overwhelming, and there was nowhere to go. The woods beyond us were on fire, and smoke darkened the sky. So did roiling black clouds, streaming in from the south.
"My God," Kevin breathed. It sounded like a prayer--which was new, coming from him. "It's really happening, isn't it?"
The Mustang was sitting right where we'd left it. The Djinn was sitting motionless behind the wheel, like some crash test dummy. His head swiveled to regard us as we got near. "Get in," he said.
I didn't. I didn't trust the Djinn anymore, after what I'd seen of the Air Oracle, not to mention Rahel. Still ... his eyes weren't that tell-tale shining white, and he'd managed to keep the car safe in the middle of a truly world-class disaster scene.
"Get in," he repeated, and I heard that odd chorusing effect in his voice again, as if more than one person was speaking through him. "Lord, you people are so hard to save."
The voice had shifted again, one taking prominence--a honey-dark voice with a Southern accent. Female. I knew it, but I couldn't exactly place it. "Who--who am I talking to?"
"Who did you think you'd be talking to, sugar?" the Djinn mouthpiece said, and all of the doors blew open on the car, inviting us inside. "Who's still locked up like that damn genie in a bottle that all the stories talk about?"
David smiled in pure, wild relief. "Whitney," he said. "It's Whitney."
Kevin and Cherise looked at us both like we'd gone insane. "That guy is talking like a girl,"
Kevin pointed out. "Like a Southern belle."
"More like down-South trailer--"
"Hey," the Djinn said, annoyance curdling the honey in her voice. "This is my long-distance call, children. Don't waste my minutes. Now get in the car, please."
"She's okay," David said. "Get in."
And we did, although none of us except David felt a hundred percent good about it, I thought. As soon as we were strapped in, the Djinn's out-of-character voice said, "Y'all hold on now. This is going to get real interesting." She said it with all the vowels.
Int-er-est-ing.
I gulped as I felt the car lurch, and then it rocketed straight up, twenty feet in the air, and zoomed like a jet over the wrecks in the parking lot. Well, more like a sustained, long jump, maybe, because as we reached the road the trajectory sharpened, and we thumped down on the pavement in the first open space available.
The Djinn hit the gas and started his Jeff Gordon impersonation again.
"Whitney is the Djinn I left behind as insurance when we sailed out," David said. "Sealed up in a pocket universe at Jonathan's house, away from everything. She was my backup as Conduit."
"Still am, sugar," Whitney said. This time, her voice came out of the radio, which was only about half as weird as when it was coming out of the male Djinn. "And I'm just about the only damn help you've got, so be grateful. I can't believe you stuck me with this job."
"Not intentionally," David said, and winced as I prodded his wounded side. "Believe me, I'd rather have my powers back."
Neither of us mentioned the big, stinky elephant in the car, which was Kevin, sitting in the backseat, looking shaken and deeply disturbed. Kevin, who had somehow acquired powers he shouldn't have had.
Like Cherise.
Surprisingly, it was Kevin who interrupted the pregnant pause. "I don't want it," he blurted. He looked green, and I wondered if he was about to get sick all over us. He swallowed twice, and finally seemed to get himself together. "I want to give it back to you. Whatever the hell that is."
"Don't think it works that way," Whitney's voice said, briefly snowed by static midway through. The tuner slid to another station, and she came through more clearly. "If it wasn't you, it'd be somebody else. Maybe somebody not as ready."
"What are you talking about? And where are you taking us?"
"If I told you, you wouldn't believe me," Whitney said. "Told you, you were going to regret making me do this, boss man."
"Whitney, just--" David made a frustrated little gesture. "Get on with it. I'm bleeding."
"Bet that's new for you," she said, about as sympathetic as a shark. Talk about your steel magnolias.
"Making you just a little irritable?"
"Whitney, I'm going to climb through that radio and kick your ass," I snapped. "He's not the one you ought to be worried about."
She laughed, a rich, whiskey-dark sort of sound. The least likely Djinn I'd ever met, and I'd met some doozies. I guessed that was why she'd made such an impression on David in the first place. Choosing Whitney for his backup as Conduit had been unorthodox, to say the least, and (I suspected) not exactly popular with the few thousand others who probably felt they had a better shot.
But she had qualities; I'd give her that. For one thing, none of the other Djinn would ever be able to get the better of her, because none of them could understand her. There was such a thing as being too human, and Whitney was the poster child.
"You are just full of it, Joanne," she purred. "Nice to know some things just never change. Now, what were we talking about?"
"You said if it wasn't Kevin ..."
"Of course. Ain't that obvious? If it isn't Kevin, it's whoever's standing closest to you two. You didn't really think the law of averages worked that way, that the two people you picked to tag along just happened to end up with your lost powers?"
When she put it like that, I had to admit, it did seem unlikely. There had been lots of people on board the ship, and any one of them could have received the power that had been ripped out of us in the formation of the black corner... . So why had it been the two people closest to us now?
"It's not them," I said slowly, working my way through it. "It's us."
"You're not nearly as silly as you look," Whitney said. "Fact is, whatever happened to you out there, it blew you apart and put you back together again, but somehow your power got left out. It's like a ghost, trailing you around. It'll settle into anybody you spend time with, including those two."
David straightened up, which probably wasn't smart; more blood darkened his shirt, and he pressed a hand to the wound. "Then we can get it back."
"Can't get it back," Whitney said crisply. "Not like you are. You're all locked off, and I have to tell you, you ain't looking too good. Never mind that hole in your side... . You're drying up like a water hole in the Sahara, running out of power. Won't make it all that much farther, you know."
I looked over at David in alarm. His face was set and pale, giving away nothing, but I knew it was true. Whitney wasn't known for her tact, but she wouldn't lie, not about that.
"Nothing I can do about it," he said. "If I can't get my powers back ..."
"Not on your own. But that's why I'm taking you to someplace you can get some help."
"Whitney, you can do it," I said. "You've got the Conduit to the Earth now. You could fix this."
"Could," she agreed blandly. "But my orders were to stay right here, in this cozy little house with the roaring fire where nobody can get at me. And I like it here. You seen what's going on out there? It's messy."
She was hiding out in Jonathan's house, a peculiar little bubble of the aetheric that seemed to float apart from everything else. Time and space didn't really exist there--or at least, they existed only as Jonathan had first created them to be. Which wasn't like anywhere else. The advantage was that anything in that house was protected from the chaos here on Earth.
The downside was that the protection was very specific. Humans couldn't reach the refuge, only Djinn, and only Djinn who were allowed in. David and I were completely out of luck.
"You have to come here," I repeated. "Whitney, he's ..." Dying.
I couldn't really say it. Saying it would make it terrifyingly real. "Please come."
Her radio-wave voice gentled, turned warm and compassionate. "I know," she said. "I know how scared you are. But if I leave here, I'm gone, and you know it. Every Djinn out there is hers now, no thoughts, no personality. They're just lashing out at whatever hurts her. You don't want me out there. I wouldn't help, and I'd be just as lost as the rest of them."
Except, curiously, for the Djinn driving the car. I frowned, staring at him. He turned his head and stared back, not bothering to watch the blurring road. Djinn--they're really not like us. And sometimes it's really, really creepy.
"He's empty," Whitney said. "Something bad happened to him, a long time ago, poor thing.
Mother Earth can't lay a finger on him."
"But you can."
"Well, yeah." Whitney sounded surprised. "You got to know how to do it, that's all."
I decided I really didn't want to know. I was tired, beaten up, filthy, and David was ... was really in need of help. "Where are you taking us?"
