Firestorm (4 page)

I focused on the two guards and tried for a wan, friendly smile. “Okay, no problem, right? Djinn's in the bottle. You guys know me. Joanne Baldwin? Weather Warden? I'm here to see Paul Giancarlo.”

Whether it was my name or Paul's, something made the two guards exchange a look and relax. They didn't holster their weapons, but they didn't look actively menacing anymore, either. And they pointed the barrels vaguely toward the floor.

“Baldwin,” the man repeated. “Right. We've been expecting you.” He was a tall fellow, thin without being skinny. The physique of a basketball player under the wool jacket, white shirt, and conservative tie. “Follow us,” he said, and turned to walk down the hallway.

I shrugged and followed, Cherise obediently hurrying along with me. I hoped I hadn't dragged her into the middle of something really, really bad. I had to believe the Wardens wouldn't hurt her. They treated normal people with kind, despotic benevolence.

They only ate their own.

Well, even if they tossed her out on her ear, she'd be okay. Cherise would survive. She was the kind of girl who could stand on a New York sidewalk looking helpless, and in under thirty seconds, a dozen guys would dash to the rescue.

We went to the back elevators, which were operated by key card; my minders kept exchanging significant glances, but I didn't think I had much to fear from them. Wardens were never really unarmed, of course, and for the first time in a long time, I was feeling strong and confident. If this turned into a straight-out fight, I was willing and able to oblige. Provided I could get Cherise out of the line of fire—and in Warden terms, that was literal.

The elevator rose up smoothly and deposited us with a muted ding at our destination. The doors opened…

…on a floor I didn't recognize. One that looked like it was under construction, only construction would have been orderly, at least. No, this was under
de
struction. Paneling in splinters, pictures reduced to smashed frames and piles of glittering glass. Puddles of dark liquid that I really didn't want to examine too closely in the emergency lighting. I'd been to this place recently, and I hardly recognized it at all. It had been a hallowed, hushed center of power.

Now it was the gruesome aftermath of a war zone.

“Oh my God,” Cherise murmured behind me, and edged carefully around a pile of splinters and glass that had once, I remembered, been a huge photo of the senior management of the Wardens.

“Watch your step,” our male guard said, and ducked under some low-hanging grids dangling from cables. “We're remodeling.”

The dry gallows humor didn't thaw out the cold shock in my stomach. “What the hell happened?”

The woman shot me one of those looks. The kind a mother uses when she's out of patience with a child's bullshit. “Guess,” she snapped.

It hit me with a vengeance. They'd had a visit from some very motivated Djinn. Hence, the panic over Imara.

I kept my mouth shut as we moved slowly around obstructions to the conference room about halfway down the hall. On the way, I spotted the big marble shrine to Wardens who'd died in the line of duty. It was only lightly chipped, and my name was still on it. I supposed, with all of the furor of the last few months, they hadn't gotten around to chiseling off the writing. Or maybe they just figured my death was inevitable, and why waste the effort….

“In here,” the guy said, and pointed through the open conference room door. I say “open,” but it was more of a “missing.” Sharp fresh-bent hinges sticking out from the wall, no sign of the doors themselves.

The room was lit with emergency lanterns and chemical lights, the kind the Wardens recommended for use in hurricanes and tornadoes. It gave everything a post-apocalyptic glow—splintered heavy furniture, a blizzard of paper scattered over the floor, dark splashes on the shredded carpet.

The surviving Wardens were gathered around the splintered conference table. I counted heads. Nineteen. I made an even twenty.

I remembered the hundreds of Wardens who could have been here,
should
have been here, and felt a sick jolt in the pit of my stomach.

“Jo.” Paul Giancarlo—my old friend and mentor—looked as bad as the room. He was a big guy, well muscled, but he was looking terrifyingly banged up as he limped toward me. I met him halfway in a hug that was careful on my part, desperate on his. He was bandaged around the head, dark hair sticking up in thick unruly clumps on top, and his skin was pasty yellow. He had Technicolor bruises over half his face. “Thank God you're okay.”

His pupils were hugely dilated. Pain medication. He was doped to the gills.

I let go and stepped back, and our fingers wrapped tight. He wasn't Lewis, and our various powers didn't amplify and rebound; I felt little to nothing from him, hardly even a whisper. Drugs could do that, but this was something else. He'd drained himself to dangerous levels. I knew how that felt. I'd done it myself, more than once.

“I wish I could say the same about you,” I said, and his big hand tightened around mine. “Paul. What happened here?”

“They went crazy,” he said, and closed his eyes for a second. “What the hell do you think? Not a damn thing we could do, except try to keep them off of us. Too many Wardens died. Way too many.”

I felt cold, imagining it. Djinn were like tigers, I'd always thought: beautiful and sleek and deadly when out of control. And this had definitely been way out of control. I remembered David, back on the beach in Florida—David, who would never have willingly hurt me—coming for me with his eyes glowing red. I'd have died there, if it hadn't been for Imara. And that had been open ground. In an enclosed space like this, no place to run…

“We couldn't stop them,” Paul finished softly. “We lost—” He looked momentarily stunned, trying to recall a number.

Down the table, a quiet voice supplied, “At least thirty. We're lucky we have as many here as we do.”

“Lucky?” A half-whisper from a battered young man I didn't recognize, with the solid hum of energy that usually tokened an Earth power. “What part of that was lucky, man? I saw people—I saw friends just ripped in half—”

Paul sighed. “Yeah, kid, I know. Easy. We're going to get through this, okay? Jo, this is pretty much everybody we could pull in that we could reach. Got more on the way, but it's going to take some time to figure out who's still alive and able to help. Plus, we can't yank everybody out. We need them on the ground, especially now.” His gaze fell randomly on Cherise, and stayed. “Who's this?”

“Cherise. She's a friend.” After a hesitation, I had to clarify, “Not a Warden.”

He looked completely pissed off. “What are we running here? A tour group? Get her the hell out of here!”

I looked at Cherise. She was dead scared and didn't know where to look but she especially didn't want to look at the puddles of dried blood on the carpet or the silent, staring faces of the Wardens. “Cher, why don't you wait in the hall?”

“Hell no,” she said. “I've been to the movies. No way am I splitting up in the scary place. C'mon, Jo, I want to stay with you. Please?”

She had a point. No telling what kind of dangers were still lurking around the corner. I turned back to Paul. “She stays,” I said. He glowered. “Paul, she stays. We don't have time to screw around with who's allowed in the cool kids' room when the house is on fire, right? Just pretend she's an intern or something.”

That wouldn't be too hard. Cherise was looking more and more like an out-of-her-depth undergrad.

“So what do we know?” I asked, and slid into an empty chair. Cherise hastily took the one next to me. I scanned faces around the room and saw about twelve I recognized. Way too many were missing. I had to hope they were still somewhere out there, doing their jobs. I exchanged quick nods with the people I knew.

“We started losing contact with Wardens all over the country about three days ago. Started with just a few, but it spread like wildfire,” a lean, weathered woman of about forty said. “It took us a while to understand that they were being attacked by Djinn. No survivors until they came after Marion.”

I glanced down the table into shadows, alarmed. I'd seen Marion…Yes, there she was, half-hidden near the end. Marion was an Earth Warden, and her skill was healing, but self-healing was a chancy undertaking at the best of times. She looked terrible. I exchanged another nod with her.

“Marion, I'm so sorry. Your Djinn—?” I didn't know how to finish that question, because Marion and I knew things about each other that really weren't suited to sharing with a table full of strangers. Such as, I knew that Marion had taken enormous risks to recover her lost Djinn, not so very long ago, and it hadn't been out of selfless duty; she and her Djinn were lovers. That fell under the “forbidden tragic love” section of the Warden code, even under normal circumstances; I just didn't know for certain how tragic it had turned out this time.

She took me off the hook. “My Djinn helped me take out the two who came to—to
free
him. Then he asked me to put him back into his bottle. I did, and sealed it.”

“First good advice we had,” Paul said. “We've been getting hold of every Warden we can find and telling them the same thing. Get your Djinn safe and seal the bottles until we know what the hell's going on. You got anything, Jo?”

I stretched my hands flat on the scarred wood surface. “Afraid so. Here's the deal. The Djinn were serving us only because of an agreement made a few thousand years ago between the first Wardens and the most powerful Djinn in the world. His name is—was—Jonathan.”

Silence, and then…“Kind of a modern name, isn't it?” Cherise asked. “Jonathan, I mean. Wouldn't he have an Egyptian name or—”

“Cherise. This is my story. You talk later. The thing is, once Jonathan made the agreement, which was supposed to be temporary, the Wardens didn't keep their end of the bargain. They didn't let the Djinn go once the emergency was past all those thousands of years ago. There was always some disaster or another to serve as an extension on the contract, and then they didn't even bother making up excuses. Some of the Djinn have had enough of waiting for the Wardens to grow a conscience, and the Wardens forgot that any such agreement ever existed. So the Free Djinn—”

That term caused a rustle of throat-clearing and shifting in chairs, and the inevitable interruption. “There aren't any such thing as—” someone began to declare, in much the same way people once insisted the world was flat.

“Yes there are, Rosa.” That was Marion, and her tone was surprisingly sharp, coming from a woman who was normally so level and soothing in manner. But then, we'd all had a damn hard few days. I could see that it might be difficult to suffer fools with the same level of grace she usually displayed.

“Continue,” Paul said, watching me.

I swallowed, wished in vain for a drink of water, and got on with it. “So some of the Free Djinn started killing Wardens, trying to free their brethren, as well. But some didn't agree with that tactic, so there was fighting in the Djinn ranks. Jonathan—” What the hell
had
happened to Jonathan? Something catastrophic. “Jonathan died. And when he died, the agreement between the Djinn and the Wardens, the one that kept them under our command, that went sideways. We don't own the Djinn anymore. Not as of the moment he stopped existing.”

Paul's face went a paler shade of scared. “You mean, they're no longer under our control
at all
?”

“Yes, that's what I mean.”

“Well, that's just great. You drove all the way from Florida to tell me we're dead?”

“You want me to go on, or what?” I glared back. He finally closed his drug-glazed eyes and nodded. “Right. Well, we've always thought we were fighting the planet, one on one. A fair contest. But I have to tell you, it isn't fair, and it isn't even a contest. She hasn't even been
awake
.” Inarticulate noises of protest and denial. I ignored them. “She's not even concentrating on us at all. We're like little mosquitoes she's been swatting in her sleep.”

Paul's face had drained of what little color he had. “Jo—”

“Hang on, I'm still getting to the bad news.” I sucked in a deep breath, then blew it out. “She's starting to wake up. Once she does, she can control the Djinn absolutely, and that means we'll face a thousand times the power we did before. Maybe worse than that. And without any help from the usual sources.”

He looked glassy-eyed. “Was that the bad news? Because for fuck's sake, don't tell me it gets worse than that.”

“Yeah, that was it.”

He didn't say anything. The silence ticked off, one cold second at a time, until Marion murmured, “Then that would be the end of it.”

Paul looked up sharply. “I'm not throwing in the towel, and you're not either,” he snapped. “Jo. What else you got for us? Anything on the plus side?”

“I may—” I edited myself carefully, well aware of the way this might go. “I may know of a Djinn who can still help us.”

“I'm the guy in charge of handing out life preservers on the
Titanic
. Anything you got that can help, let's have it. I mean, we're talking about Band-Aids on a sucking chest wound, but—”

“I don't know if this Djinn has the ability to do much,” I said quickly. It wouldn't do to get anybody's hopes up, and I wasn't even sure where Imara was, or what she was up to. “But I'll check into it. Maybe we can get some intelligence about what's happening to the Djinn without too much risk. Meanwhile, we have to get off our asses. We're powerful in our own right, but we've been relying on the Djinn for too long. You need to get all hands on deck, make them quit playing politics and doing under-the-table deals. Put them to
work
for a change.” I bit my lip, debating, and then continued, “And get the Ma'at on board. The Wardens got lazy, using the Djinn to help them. We have to learn a whole new way of doing things. The Ma'at can help.”