Gale Force

Chapter Twelve

None of the Djinn knew him, not even Venna, when I insisted that she be summoned from whatever beach resort Ashan had decided to take his people to for the duration of the crisis. I wasn’t sure that Venna would come, but she’d always been her own master, and that hadn’t changed just because Ashan thought it had. He might be her Conduit, but he’d never own her.

Venna, dressed in her vintage Alice outfit, paced slowly in front of the wall and Ortega’s body, studying him closely. It was eerie, seeing that kind of detachment packaged in the body of a little girl who almost radiated innocence.

She and David were the only ones allowed near the body at all. The entire room had been cordoned off in space-age-looking shielding, and all of the rest of us were being thoroughly checked out by a radiation team. Not surprisingly, we’d all gotten a dose. “Not that it’s as unusual as people think it is,” said the Chatty Cathy in the hazmat suit who was drawing my blood. “The average American gets about three hundred fifty millirems a year, just from the environment. Hey, want to know the weird part? Forty millirems of that comes out of our own bodies. We’re little fusion reactors, you know. Potassium-40 in the brain, Carbon-14 in the liver.” She was chatty because she was scared, though her hands were steady enough. She must have realized it, because she sent me an apologetic glance through the plastic visor of her space suit. “Sorry. I jabber when I’m nervous. This is just—well. They don’t exactly train you for this at NEST school.”

I wondered what the government had been told, or was telling them; the whole thing was founded on need-to-know, and I doubted even this woman had a clue. There were some FBI agents stalking the scene in their trademark dark windbreakers, talking into cell phones. Lots of cops. Fire department.

And reporters. Lots of reporters, a cresting wave of them held back by a sandbar of uniformed police around the perimeter. I could hear the dull thud of news helicopters overhead. No doubt we were in heavy rotation on all the news channels.

In the shielded room, Alice finished her inspection of Ortega and came out. The NEST doctor working on me muttered something under her breath, but she kept her eyes down and focused on what she was doing. Keep on living in denial, I thought. Safer that way, lady.

Venna came up to my side and stared at the needle in my arm. “What is she doing?”

“Taking blood.”

“Is she going to give it back?”

“Venna, what did you sense in there?”

“He is not a Djinn,” she said. There was no doubt in her voice at all. “I don’t know what he is. Or was.”

“He was a Djinn,” I said. Venna slowly shook her head. “Venna, that was Ortega. You know Ortega; you remember him—”

Another slow shake of her head. It was exactly the same response I’d gotten from David, and from two other Djinn he’d summoned. None of them recognized Ortega at all. They didn’t classify him as human; they didn’t classify him as anything. Certainly, not anyone.

I thought with a sudden hot pang of the Miami estate, all that fascinating, rich chaos that Ortega had surrounded himself with. I’d barely met him, but I was the only one who could mourn him.

“Never mind. Thanks for the help,” I sighed to Venna, who cut her eyes sharply toward the doctor, who was withdrawing the needle and applying a bandage to the bend of my arm. “You know about Rahel?”

“That your enemies have her? Yes.” Venna continued to stare at the doctor, to the extent that the poor woman fumbled the tube she was holding, but caught it on the way to the floor. “I do care, you know. But this is a mess humans made, and humans must correct. Ashan won’t interfere. He won’t want me to interfere, either.”

“Venna,” I said, “that’s Bad Bob Biringanine in charge of the Sentinels. You know what he did to Djinn before. You think he’s going to be any better now? Any kinder? You can’t stick your heads in the sand and pretend like you don’t live here, too, as if you’re not at risk. Rahel’s proof of that.”

No answer. She transferred her unblinking stare to me, which at least enabled the doc to make a confused, nervous getaway.

“There’s a book,” I said. “The kind of book Star had. You know the one. And Bad Bob has it.”

Her eyes went black. Storm black. She didn’t move, but there was something entirely different about her, suddenly.

I held myself very, very still.

“A book of the Ancestors?” she asked. I nodded. I was very careful about that, too. “Then he has power he should not have. Like Star.”

“Does that change anything?”

She never blinked, and her eyes stayed black. “I don’t know,” she said. “I will find out.”

That sounded ominous. She blipped away before I could ask how she intended to go about doing that, and I didn’t think any amount of calling her name was going to get her back. Not now.

David was still in the shielded room. He was studying Ortega, the way someone might a fascinating abstract sculpture, trying to find meaning in random patterns. I tapped on the window and got his attention; he shook his head, as if he was trying to clear it, and came through the decontamination door. One of the NEST members tried to lecture him about procedures, but he ignored it and came directly to me.

“Radiation,” I reminded him.

“I shed it in the room,” he said. “How about you? How do you feel?” Oh, the joys of being Djinn . . . I wondered how much of the toxic stuff I had crawling through my cells right now. Too much, almost certainly. The Earth Wardens had done their work, so I was probably going to feel sick, but not drop dead.

Probably.

“Fantastic,” I said sourly. “Do you recognize him at all?”

David’s head shake was just as certain, and just as regretful about it, as Venna’s had been. I could see how frustrated he was, how baffled by his inability to comprehend what was in front of him, and it scared me, too. He was one of the most powerful entities on the face of the Earth. He shouldn’t have this kind of blind spot.

I was trying not to think about it as an Achilles’ heel, but that was getting more difficult all the time, especially when the whole thing ran through my head and the person imprisoned on that wall and impaled by the black spear was David, not Ortega.

They wouldn’t know him, I thought, with a sickening drop of my stomach. Venna, Rahel, all the Djinn— they’d just stare at his body and not know who the hell they were looking at. They wouldn’t even remember him at all.

Of all the possible ways to destroy someone, that had to be the worst.

It reminded me, with a sudden snap, of how Ashan had tried to destroy me, not so long ago—on the day that my daughter had died. He’d tried to strip away not just my life, but the memory of my life. He’d been stopped midslaughter, which was why I was still around, but there was something fundamentally similar about what Ashan had done, and what was happening now, to the Djinn.

The Mother had intervened to stop him—but, I thought, that had mostly been because he’d done it on the grounds of the chapel in Sedona, on what was, for them, holy ground. The same kind of protection might not apply for David out here.

The answer was in the book. It had to be in the book.

“David—” I chose my words very carefully, remembering Venna’s extreme reaction. “The book, the one that we looked at earlier—”

He raised his eyes to meet mine, and I saw surprise in them. “The Ancestor Scriptures.”

“You remember them.”

“Of course I remember them.”

“And what about where we left them?”

“In a vault,” he said promptly. “Locked up.”

“Where was the vault?”

He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. For a second he looked baffled, then angry, then blank. “I don’t know,” he said. “How can I not know?”

“David, what did the book say about Unmaking?”

His pupils expanded, black devouring bronze.

“Don’t say that.” His words had the ring of command, but I was no Djinn.

“You have to listen to me. I think that all this is connected to—”

He grabbed me by the arm. “Don’t say it. Don’t.”

“David, stop it!” I yanked free. He hadn’t used Djinn strength on me, but plain old human strength was enough to piss me off. I didn’t like being grabbed, not in that way, and he knew it. “It’s connected to what Ashan did when he messed with our reality, to try to erase me from the world. Bad Bob reappeared about the same time. This weapon, the thing they’re using, it’s a tool of Unmaking; that’s what they’re calling it—”

His eyes flared black, like Venna’s. “Stop,” he growled.

“It’s killing you, and you can’t even see it. You can’t see those you lose. It’s just destroying you.”

He spun around and stalked away, fury in every sinuous movement. He knew, somewhere deep down, but there was something in Djinn DNA that kept him from acknowledging any of it.

The secret was in that damned book, which I couldn’t read without major consequences. I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist its pull.

Lewis was watching us from the back of the room, having completed his own blood donations; he looked tired, but alert. “Everything okay?” he asked.

“Do you think Rahel is okay?” I shot back, and saw the flinch. “Sorry. I know you—care for her.” I wasn’t exactly sure what that entailed, between Lewis and Rahel; I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d been casual lovers. Rahel wasn’t the type to fall in love, and Lewis . . . Lewis already had, with the wrong person.

“He hasn’t hurt her yet,” David said. He had his back to us, but he was listening. “They’re hiding their tracks, but the connection is still there. I can trace her as long as they hold her.”

Was that a good thing, or a bad thing? I thought about the trap Bad Bob had laid this time around. He’d known—because of Paul, oh God, Paul, you fool—that Kevin and Rahel had been planted to spy on him. Surely he was assuming that David could sense and track Rahel’s position, too.

Surely he would just lay another trap.

Depressing as that was, we’d won a kind of victory here. Yes, Ortega was dead, but so was Paul; not only that, but the Sentinels had been forced to regroup and retreat. The current count was twelve dead in total.

Problem was, all of them were Wardens. And it was impossible to tell which of them had been Sentinels, except for anecdotal information about which side they’d been fighting for. I was sure about Paul, Emily, and Janette. The rest . . .

Once again, we just didn’t know who our enemies really were.

Lewis stood up and walked to where David was standing, facing the window. Facing Ortega’s desiccated body. “We can’t follow them,” he said. “They’ve got weapons that can destroy the Djinn, and we don’t know what they’re planning. Let’s talk to Kevin. Maybe he’s got some information we don’t.”

That was coolly logical, something that neither David nor I seemed capable of being at the moment. David nodded, and the three of us left the treatment area.

Or tried, anyway. An FBI agent got in our way. She was a tall woman, curved but in that I-work-out kind of way. Feathered dark hair around a heart-shaped face. Cool, impartial green eyes.

“Sorry,” she said. “Nobody moves. We haven’t finished our interrogations yet.”

David was likely to just walk over her, in the mood he was in, and that would at the very least lead to a confrontation we didn’t need. I looked over at Lewis, who sighed and dug something out of the back pocket of his jeans. “Right,” he said. “All-access pass.”

He held it up. I couldn’t see what it said, but the woman’s eyes widened, and she took a step back. I got the impression she hadn’t done that in a while.

“Yes sir,” she said. “Sorry. And they are—”

“With me,” Lewis said. “Thanks for your vigilance, but it’s not necessary, Agent. We’re the good guys.”

She looked as if she sincerely doubted that, but she didn’t say anything, just moved out of the way with a be-my-guest motion. Then she went to tell her boss, a tall gray-haired man. Cover your ass. It was the absolute code of any governmental agency, no matter how well-intentioned.

“This,” Lewis said, “is a cluster fuck.” He was looking at the parking lot, which was littered with burned-out, crushed vehicles, downed trees, fragments of glass and metal. The hotel, which had luckily been scheduled for demolition anyway, was partially destroyed, whether by us or by the Sentinels it was impossible to say. At a certain point, it really didn’t much matter.

The news media was out in a huge, baying pack. I tried to count the number of satellite trucks, but my head hurt. I was sure that a fair number of those photo and video lenses were being pointed in our direction, though, and remembered the reporter from Fort Lauderdale. Man, wouldn’t she feel vindicated? She now officially had a scoop.

“How much did they get?” I asked.

“Oh, everything. Tornadoes forming out of nowhere. Cars bursting into flame and exploding. Trees getting thrown. Buildings disintegrating.” Lewis’s shoulders twitched, then straightened. “The FBI wants me to give a statement. Something along the lines of, we’re a secret government agency; we’d tell you but we’d have to kill you, blah blah. They’d like me to tie it to terrorists.”

I stared at him. “And what are you going to do?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know yet.”

“You really think this is a good time to lie?”

“Well, I don’t think it’s exactly a good time to tell the truth.” He glanced at David, whose eyes seemed to be fading back to a more normal color. “I’ll leave the Djinn out of it, if you’d like.”

“That’s kind of you, but I think we’d better tell everything if we tell anything,” David said. “Let’s talk to Kevin. We don’t have a lot of time.”

Kevin was sitting with his least favorite people. Well, that probably wasn’t fair; he didn’t like anybody, so most people were his least favorite people, but he reserved a special kind of dislike for the Ma’at. I wasn’t really sure why, except that in general, the leadership of the Ma’at was pretty unlikable.

Two of them were flanking him: Charles Spenser Ashworth II and Myron Lazlo. Talk about the Old Boy Network . . . they weren’t just in it, they’d laid the original cable. Lazlo had dressed down for his public appearance; he normally liked subtle, tailored suits that reeked old money, but he’d deigned to wear what I supposed was his “field outfit”—khaki slacks, a cotton shirt open at the neck, and a sport coat that undoubtedly cost nearly as much as the sports car he’d probably arrived in.

Even so, Charles Ashworth’s outfit made Lazlo look cheap.

Both of them were older than the pharaohs, and twice as stern, both in looks and in attitude. Yeah, I liked them just as much as Kevin did.

I thought it was just about the first time I’d ever seen actual relief on the kid’s face as he spotted me.

“About time,” he said. “Who put me in fucking detention with the Mummy Twins?”

I had to admit, that made me smile. The Ma’at had taken a lot of their iconography for their organization from the Egyptians, and it was no accident they’d made their headquarters at the Luxor in Las Vegas. I suppose they could have made a case for Memphis as well, but where else do you get a real live pyramid for a clubhouse?

“I did,” Lewis said. “Thanks, gentlemen.”

The gentlemen in question glared and, in Lazlo’s case, gave him a well-I-never patrician huff. “We are not your staff,” Ashworth snapped. “Do you have any idea what kind of imbalance this little fracas has caused? Oh, of course you do. You’re supposed to be preventing this kind of thing, you know. Protecting people, not putting them in danger. Isn’t that the Warden credo?”

He said Warden as if it were an epithet, which it practically was, for the Ma’at. They looked on themselves as the accountants of the aetheric; they were concerned about balance, always balance. Important, yes, but even supernatural double-entry bookkeeping was still bookkeeping, and I couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for their way of doing things.

“The credo of every one of us is to stop Bad Bob Biringanine from screwing things up any worse than he already has,” Lewis said. “I’ll expect your support.”

He sent them on their way with a jerk of his head. He was probably the only person in the world they’d have taken that kind of treatment from, another mystery of Lewis Levander Orwell. He had an impressive presence, but not that impressive—generally. And yet we all jumped when he snapped his fingers.

Kevin stayed where he was, slouched in the plastic chair, as the two older men vacated. I settled in on one side, Lewis on the other. David paced. It was what David did, at times like these. He looked preoccupied, and I knew that he was tracking Rahel, trying to find out everything about what the Sentinels were doing.

“You saw Paul, right?” Kevin asked. He kept his head down, and addressed the question toward the tops of his dirty Nikes. “Bastard sold us out.”

“I know,” I said. My whole heart hurt, and I hadn’t allowed myself to really feel it yet, the depth of Paul’s betrayal. Things he’d said came back to me—his refusal to disagree with the Sentinels, his reluctance about my relationship with David, and the wedding. For Paul, it had been a matter of us versus them. He had never really understood, deep down, that Djinn and the Wardens were the same. Different points on the same scale.

Sometimes I despaired for the human race.

“I think they bought the cover at first,” Kevin was saying. “They had us in a room for almost a day, talking to us. All about how the Djinn had always been dangerous, and we’d been stupid to ever open ourselves up to them.” His bitter eyes followed David. “Can’t say I ever really disagreed with that. Made a lot of sense to me.”

“That’s why you were perfect,” Lewis said. “How’d Rahel do?”

“Fine. If I hadn’t known she wasn’t human, I’d never have figured it out. She was—” Kevin’s throat worked nervously, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing. “She was really good at being Cherise.” And I couldn’t imagine Kevin had been able to really play along too well, but that might have been okay. After all, he was socially awkward at the best of times.

“When did Paul show up?” I asked.

“About an hour ago,” Kevin said. “That was when they cut us off. Tried to make it seem like they were just testing us, but Rahel knew Paul was in the building, she told me. She knew he’d sell us out.”

“Didn’t she try to get the two of you out?”

“Yeah.” Kevin’s voice faltered. “I made her stop.”

Silence. I looked at Kevin’s hands. They were tightly bound up together, trembling.

“Why?” Lewis asked the question I wanted to, in a voice far more gentle than I could have. “What happened?”

“There was this girl. I didn’t know—she might have been one of them, I don’t know. But they said—they said they were going to kill her if we tried to leave. I had to—” Kevin squeezed his eyes shut. “Christ. I should have just let Rahel get out of here.”

“Trust me, if Rahel hadn’t thought it was important to stay, you’d have been yanked out whether you wanted it or not.” Lewis glanced at David, who was still pacing, but listening to every word. “Then what happened?”

“They had this stuff. Black stuff. I guess it was like—like the stuff you found.” Antimatter. I nodded. “They tied Rahel up with it, and she couldn’t move. I know she tried to get away, but she couldn’t; she was able to make enough noise that I could run. I was looking for a way out when you showed up.” He nodded at me. “I should have—”

Kevin stopped. I knew that feeling, all too well. I wanted to help him, but I knew it was something that he had to deal with himself. No platitude was going to help, no matter how sincere.

“Kevin.” I took one of his hands and drew it out of its tight ball; it stayed tense in mine, trembling, ready to yank away at a second’s notice. “Before Paul showed up, they may have told you some things. Something that could help us.”

He was already shaking his head. “I’d have said if they spilled their guts, okay? But they didn’t. They just talked about what a bitch you were, and how you were willing to fuck over the Wardens for your boyfriend. . . .”

“Finally, someone you could agree with,” I said. He shot me a covert look, almost hidden by his dangling, shaggy hair.

“No,” he said, “I don’t. Not after I saw what they wanted to do.”

I felt a shiver crawl hand-over-hand up the bones of my spine. “What did you see?”

“They were going to torture him,” Kevin said, glancing up at David, then away. “Make him tell everything about the Djinn. About the Oracles. About how to destroy them.”

“They really are crazy,” Lewis said grimly. “Destroying the Djinn and the Oracles would destroy us. There’s no way humanity, or anything else alive on this planet, would survive a catastrophe like that.”

We thought of it at the same time, our gazes locking over the top of Kevin’s bowed head. David must have as well, because he spun toward us.

“He knows that,” I said. “Bad Bob knows that. He’s not stupid enough to assume anything else. So why would he want to destroy the human race?”

“You know,” David said.

“It’s not Bad Bob,” I said. “Is it?”

“No,” Lewis agreed. “I think it’s a Demon wearing his skin.”

Unfortunately, I had way too much personal experience with Demons. Most recently, I’d seen the damage they could do once they took on a human form. I thought the Wardens had been pretty successful about purging anyone from their ranks who carried a Demon Mark—a larval form of a Demon that granted the carrier more-than-normal strength and energy, almost like having a secret Djinn under your control. But you could carry a Demon Mark only so long before it began to corrupt you from within, and if you wanted to survive, you had to get rid of it by passing it to someone else.

Someone else more powerful, because the Demon Mark was only attracted to power. It traded up.

I’d been the unfortunate recipient of such a thing, at Bad Bob’s hands. I hadn’t understood, at the time, that he’d been paying me a kind of backhanded compliment. . . . I hadn’t known, then, how really strong I was.

He had. He’d chosen me for just that reason.

It had killed him in leaving his body—he’d waited too long, hung on to his power until it was nested deep inside. I thought about his cold body lying in a grave somewhere, and wondered if his flesh was still there, peaceful and empty. Maybe what was walking around right now was Bad Bob reanimated; maybe it was just a semblance, like the one Rahel had worn to play Cherise. Either way, it wasn’t Bad Bob on the inside. Couldn’t be. But if it was a full-grown, fully formed Demon, it had powers I couldn’t begin to understand.

“The antimatter,” I said. “The Demon produces it, secretes it, something like that. That’s why there’s no machinery, no plant they’ve had to set up. That’s why we couldn’t find any kind of permanent base for the Sentinels—they don’t need a plant, not even a hidden one. Because he just . . . makes it.” Like sweat, or blood, or other bodily fluids. It was the very essence of why the Demon didn’t belong here; it literally destroyed the world around it, just by being. The human shell kept it contained, like a space suit insulating an astronaut from the cold of space.

If it left that shell . . .

I remembered what Jerome Silverton had said about the black shard we’d found embedded in the dead Djinn. One kilogram of antimatter annihilating itself is supposed to produce about 180 petajoules of energy. The spear I’d seen Bad Bob use to kill Ortega had been at least five times the size of the shard we’d originally found. Catastrophic would be charitable.

The Demon was hunting us. Hunting Djinn, using the Djinn to power the growth of the antimatter weapon. Once it was strong enough, what would he do with it? Where would he—

“The Oracles,” I said. “What if he goes after the Oracles?”

David was already gone when I turned toward him; a blurred motion was all that was left. Imara. My daughter was in Sedona, locked for all time in one location. Unable to flee.

I sat with Lewis, holding Kevin’s shaking hand, and waiting for the end of the world.

The end of the world didn’t come before dinner, anyway.

As the hours went by, the FBI decided they’d have a better chance of containing the situation—ha!—if they ejected those of us not wearing three letters or badges on our outfits. That went for the Wardens, the Ma’at, and would have gone for the Djinn, had any been present. I’d stood witness to the FBI forensic team taking Ortega down from the wall, then interring him in a metal casket that was marked with all kinds of warning signs. Somehow, I felt someone should watch. He’d been a kind man, a peculiar sort of Djinn, and he hadn’t deserved this kind of ending.

Lewis, Kevin, and I were bundled into an FBI helicopter—not my favorite form of transportation— and flown to the Miami field office, where we were left in a severe-looking room for a few more hours.

Dinner was served, and apart from its being warm and edible, I don’t remember much about it. We barely talked. There didn’t seem to be all that much to say.

When David reappeared, he came with reinforcements—six Djinn. One of them was Venna, which made me smile in relief; one was the tough-looking specimen David had identified to me as Roy, when we’d seen him earlier—he’d been Rahel’s hypothetical backup. I wondered where he’d been when he was needed the most.

Zenaya was the third. I didn’t know the other three, but they all had the otherworldly grace and glitter that I associated with the most powerful of the Djinn, Old or New.

“The Oracles are protected,” David said. “Ashan’s taking care of it, and Wardens we trust have been assigned alongside them as backup.”

“He won’t like that,” I noted.

“He doesn’t have to like it. I’ve explained the necessity. ” There was a cold, angry shimmer in David’s eyes, and I wondered exactly how civil that discussion had been. “We intend to go and get Rahel.”

“You can’t,” I said. I was calm about it, and authoritative, but all too aware that David might not be in any mood to listen to reason. “She’s bait. You go charging in there, that’s exactly what they want— especially you, Conduit Boy.”

He didn’t answer me, but he didn’t argue, either. He was biding his time. I knew I couldn’t get him to just stand by and risk Rahel’s life, not under these circumstances. Time was running out. If I wanted to avoid watching David throw his life away, I needed a plan, and a damn good one.

And all of a sudden, looking at him, I had one. Granted, I was operating on little sleep, too much adrenaline, and next to coma-levels of caffeine imbalance,but it sounded good. I bit my lip, running it over in my head, and made a hold on gesture to David as I beckoned Lewis toward a convenient corner of the room.

“What is it?” he asked. He sounded just as stressed as I felt.

“I think I know what will bring them out in the open. We need to get the Sentinels to come after us again, not the other way around. If we allow them to choose the ground—”

“Yeah, I get it. The Djinn don’t even know how much of a disadvantage they have.” Lewis leaned closer. “It’s crazy, isn’t it? Your idea?”

“Pretty damn crazy.”

“Tell.”

I did. Crazy didn’t really exactly cover it, as I listened to the words tumble out of my mouth. Insane, that was closer. Also, stupidly suicidal, but that was par for the course with me. At least it would be consistent.

Lewis stared at me as if he couldn’t quite believe what I’d said, and in truth, I wasn’t sure if I was believing it, either. Then he said, slowly, “It could work. It allows us to assemble all the Wardens in one place, choose the ground, protect the Djinn, offer the Sentinels a target they can’t afford to pass up. . . .”

Oh God, it actually was a good plan. Damn. I’d been half hoping he’d shoot it out of the air. Instead, it looked as if I was going to have to kick my shopping into high gear.

“Right,” I said, and turned to David. “How do you feel about getting married tomorrow?”

I had no idea Djinn could look so blank. Venna turned to David and said, with the perfect blend of alarm and puzzlement, “Are you sure she isn’t insane?”

David continued with the blank look for a few more seconds, and then the light dawned warm in his eyes, and he slowly smiled.

“Actually,” he said, “I’m fairly certain she is, and that is exactly why I’m marrying her.”