Heat Stroke (15 page)

Nonono . . .

Lightning hit him, burned the spear to ash, melted metal.

Transforming him in a crucible of pure fire. That wasn't just lightning, not just energy and plasma and science. That was something else.

Pure, implacable
magic.

Someone else on the battlefield crying out, too, crawling through thick bloody mud, a man, just a man—dying already, with a dagger buried in his chest.

Crawling into the fires of life in a useless attempt to save his friend.

There was a feeling of an indrawn breath.

Every creature left in that valley died—sucked instantly dry of life, of breath, of soul. Gone. Empty bodies fell as one, thousands of them, gone. It spread in a ripple of falling corpses and armor in concentric circles from the place that lightning still danced and raged.

It kept spreading. Farther. Shepherds and sheep dying on hills miles away. A village, twenty miles farther. A city of thousands falling limp.

“Stop!” I screamed. But it wasn't going to stop. The raving grief of the world was pouring out, like blood from a heart wound, and it was going to take everything in its madness.

Patrick's hand pressed my shoulder, hard. I heard his deep intake of breath . . .

. . . and saw one man drag another out of the white flare of lightning, far below.

Whole. Unharmed.

No longer men at all.

Djinn.

“ ‘And Jonathan told him, and said, I did but taste a little honey with the end of the rod that was in mine hand, and, lo, I must die,” ' Patrick said softly. “Now you know what it takes to make a Djinn, little bird. The wrath of the world.”

My attention was riveted on the two Djinn below. One was holding the other, staring numbly at the death around them.

Jonathan's eyes were still dark, dark as space. Dark as the day that had birthed him.

David's eyes were as copper as the dagger that had killed him.

He held Jonathan in his arms and wept in the rain, and I knew he was weeping for joy, for sorrow, for guilt because he hadn't pulled his friend out of that fire soon enough to stop all this death.

“You wanted to know about Jonathan,” Patrick continued. “No one ever wakened the Mother before him. Pray no one ever does again.”

He touched me between the eyes, and took it all away.

 

It hadn't been more than a minute. I huddled there on the couch feeling cold in a rain that didn't exist, tingling from the memory of unbelievable power, and clutched the leopard throw in a death grip around my shoulders. Patrick still stood
looking down at me, utterly unaffected by what I'd seen.

“How many?” I whispered. His eyebrows twitched. “How many died?”

“That day?” He shrugged. “Enough to create Jonathan. Enough left over to create David as well. We're born of death, didn't you know that? But so are humans. So is everything. Don't let it get you down, sunshine.”

I just sat and shivered.

Lewis emerged from the back, hesitated over the sight of me all cold and shaken, and gave Patrick a look. Patrick shrugged again. “Jo? You okay?”

“Sure.” I closed my eyes and willed it all away. “Why the hell wouldn't I be?”

Lewis took an uncomfortable perch on the shoe chair. Patrick himself picked a plastic thing in the shape of a hand, wished some kind of alcoholic beverage into his hand, and waited for the show with the genial half-interest of a golf fan at a tennis match.

“Go ahead,” he said. Lewis and I looked at each other. Lewis rolled the bottle between his fingers again, testing it for durability, apparently. “Just do it. It's not that hard.”

I wasn't sure I could do this. I wasn't sure anymore I wanted to do it.
God,
if it took that much power to create a true Djinn, how was this going to help me? How could it help anyone? I squeezed my eyes tight shut again, fighting back tears.

Someone took my hand. Large, blunt, warm fingers. I looked into Patrick's sea blue, tranquil eyes.

“Do you want to die?” he asked me, very softly.
“If you do, stop now, Joanne. Stop before you suffer any longer.”

I thought about David, running through the rain and mud, bleeding out his life, reaching out for something greater than himself. Stopping the greatest power in the world—
of
the world—from consuming life.

That was my heritage.

That was what had given
me
life.

Seemed pretty damn cowardly to give it up without a fight.

“No,” I said. “I'm fine. I'm good. Back off, Santa.”

Patrick smiled and resumed his seat.

Lewis took a deep breath, opened his palm and balanced the open bottle there. “Okay. Ready?”

“No. Just get it over with.”

“Be thou bound to my service,” he said. I was expecting something portentous in his tone, but this was an off-the-cuff style, so portent-free he could have been ordering pizza. I didn't feel any different. I made a little
come on
gesture with my hand. “Be thou bound to my service.”

Patrick leaned forward on the arm—thumb?—of the plastic chair, and I wondered how it would feel to sit in a chair that was shaped like a hand. Like having your ass grabbed by a giant, maybe.

“Be thou bound to my service,” Lewis finished, and something changed.

It wasn't immediately evident to me what it was. I mean, yes, I
knew,
but it started at some cellular level and worked its way up. Fast. I felt odd, then I felt weird, then I felt out-and-out funky.

And then I came apart in a silent explosion, mist swirling, and somehow I could still see, but not with human eyes, and not in the human wavelength . . . not on the aetheric level, but definitely accessing some of that plane to do what I was doing.

And then the wave crested, and I felt myself being turned inside out, torn apart, remade . . . reborn.

Into myself. Only . . . different. Better. Faster. Stronger.

Dissolving.

“Hey!” I yelped, but by that time my body had given up the flesh. I was a thin gray mist, moving faster, being sucked in by a gravitational force so huge I might as well have been a dust speck moving toward a black hole.

Which was the little perfume bottle in Lewis's hand. I plunged into that tiny, tight container, squeezed like Concentrate of Djinn, and no matter how hard I tried to leak back out again, it wasn't happening.

Shock was being replaced by an all-over warm feeling of fury. Man, I didn't like this. I
so
didn't like this.

Lewis said, after what seemed like half a millennia, “Come out, Jo.”

And the negative pressure holding me in the bottle eased. Bam, just like that. I blew out of there fast, swirled around him like a cloud of angry bees, and folded myself back down into flesh again.

It took some concentration, but this time I managed to do it pretty fast—just a fraction of a second between skin and clothes. Kind of like one of those tip-the-pen-the-clothes-come-off sort of things. Lewis
looked a little surprised, and then he looked a little smirky, and then a second later he remembered he was a gentleman and pretended he hadn't seen a thing.

“You okay?” he asked. I looked down at myself and was relieved to find I was still pretty much the same person, only I'd acquired a more down-home wardrobe of blue jeans, sturdy shoes and a denim shirt. Work Djinn. I was ready to fetch and haul out on the construction site.

“I'm good,” I said absently. I was busy trying to reset the outfit to something less—literally—blue collar, but unfortunately that now seemed to be outside of my control. Lewis's doing, whether he knew it or not. Great. At least I knew what turned him on, now. Sturdy women in sensible shoes.

“You okay?”

“You just asked me that.” I looked up at him, puzzled.

He gave me a little tilted half-smile. “Exactly. You okay?”

Oh. Rule of three. I felt the compulsion kick in, and heard my mouth say, “Hell no, you idiot, I'm not all right! I died less than a week ago, David's being held prisoner by some bad-ass Djinn with delusions of godhood, and I just got my butt stuffed into a bottle! By you!
With crappy clothes!
”

He heaved a big sigh of relief. “You're okay.”

“Sure. Fine. Whatever. Let's do this thing.” I was more than a little unnerved, because I damn sure hadn't meant to say any of that. Well, okay, maybe the part about crappy clothes, but the rest of it was dealing-with-it stuff. So the compulsion thing
actually worked. Interesting. “Give me an order. Something small.”

“What's the use of that?” Patrick asked. I'd forgotten all about him, but there he was, still sitting on the hand, arms folded, watching me with those crystal blue eyes and bad-Santa leer. He'd seen the same flash-peek-show that Lewis had, he just in no way imagined himself a gentleman. “If you're going to do it, do something productive. Let her really get her feet wet.”

Lewis considered that for a few seconds, then waved a hand around vaguely at Patrick's porno theater–circus tent apartment. “Okay. Redecorate this place.”

Patrick came up off the hand like he'd been goosed, but it was too late.

Talk about something
happening.

Power slammed into me—rich, thick, golden, unstoppable. Lewis's potential. I now had access to everything Lewis had, everything he was, everything he could be. The amount of energy stored in him was unbelievable—enough to destroy cities, level mountains, reshape the face of the earth.

It was more than enough to do a
Trading Spaces
on Patrick's apartment.

I started at one end and swept through it like a color-coordinating storm. The carpet morphed into a neat champagne beige. The walls turned light cream. The statues disappeared altogether in a swirl of mingled body parts, gone to bad-plaster heaven.

The porn tribute to Michelangelo was replaced by a nice mullioned ceiling, with gold accents. I added
a wine red accent wall and replaced a black velvet painting of a pneumatic-breasted naked girl with a Mondrian. I didn't think I'd just stolen an original, but hey, I was new at it.

Furniture. The banana couch turned to dark leather, butter soft, with manly little brass studs on the legs. Lewis's platform shoe chair became a matching armchair.

I made Patrick's plastic hand chair disappear completely, along with the tacky chrome coffee table.

“Stop!” Patrick sounded absolutely horrified. “What are you
doing
?”

“Public service,” I said, and added a nice brick fireplace with an art-deco brass screen. And a little china vase holding matches next to it. I turned to Lewis. “Any special requests?”

He was squinty-eyed with glee. Truthfully, so was I. Damn, this was
fun
 . . . unlimited power crackling at my fingertips. I could do anything.
Anything.

“I think she's got the hang of it,” Lewis said to Patrick.

Patrick walked helplessly in circles, not knowing which way to stare; every new revelation brought an additional flinch of despair. I fought the urge to spitefully add a copy of
Great Homes
to the new deco-styled cherry wood table because no, that would just be rubbing it in. “Yes. I think . . . she might have.”

Lewis retrieved the plastic stopper on the little perfume bottle and dumped both bottle and stopper into the pocket of his blue jeans. “Are you ready?” he asked me.

I was still on a redecorating high. “Are you
kidding?” I couldn't control the laugh that bubbled up out of me, fierce and hot with delight. “Show me the problem. Damn, this is good!”

I felt him rise up. Since he was human, he didn't disappear in the real world; his body just stayed there, temporarily vacant. I rose with him, noting with interest the silvery cord that connected him back to his flesh, and emerged into the negative-space glittering fairyland that was the aetheric plane. It got more beautiful every time I visited, I discovered. Maybe my Djinn eyes were still adjusting, but whatever caused it, the colors were stronger this time, the glitter and shimmer and depth of them more intense. Lewis had an aura like milk glass, cool at the moment but far stronger than anything I'd seen on a human before. Not like a Djinn aura, either. Something . . . unique.

Human voices didn't carry well up here, so he touched me and pointed. I grabbed on to him—he was still solid here, and more or less the same in form—and we began to move across the landscape, heading up and at an angle to the right.

Way
up.
Way, way
up. The earth curved away beneath us at the edges, pearl-bright and beautiful, misted in clouds. He kept pulling me. I felt what little resistance there was to aetheric travel—and there had to be some, for reasons of not-so-simple physics—begin to lessen. We were reaching the edges of where it was safe for a Warden to go.

I let go of him and hovered next to him. He lifted his hand again and pointed. This time I could feel the force of will that went with it, the compulsion that would guide me to the destination.

Way the hell out there. Farther than even Patrick had taken me.

Into someplace that, in this reality, wasn't even really space.

I had no choice, I found; I was already moving. I felt Lewis's hand touch me one last time, gently, as I darted away, swimming like a fast, elegant mermaid through that sea of increasingly thin resistance.

I set myself to glide the rest of the way, and before long I saw it. Not so much a presence as an absence; space out here was big and empty and a kind of neutral gray, shot here and there with fleeting speckles of power being transferred from one place to another. I braked myself, spreading thin against the barely felt touch of the sun, and hovered, considering the problem. The Void didn't manifest itself here, on this plane. I'd have to go up to see it.

Up from the aetheric are other levels, but David had already warned me not to go exploring on my own without a guide; David, however, was nowhere to be seen. And I had a compulsion.