Firestorm (20 page)

I twisted, formed the handful of fire into a ball, and threw it at the grinning dead thing that had hold of my leg.

It exploded like napalm. The zombie-Warden let go and rolled, fighting an invisible enemy, as the flames fed on what should have been just a blackened shell anyway. What the hell was the fire feeding on? It was as dead as a burned-out match….

The creature—I couldn't even think of it as human anymore—opened its black maw of a mouth and screamed. It was alien. Other. Older.

And then it just—ripped apart. Exploded in pieces of burning meat that flew in every direction. I coughed and gagged as something spattered me, and when I looked back, something silvery blue was clawing its way free of the remains.

Oh shit,
I thought numbly.

Because I was pretty sure that was an adult Demon.

And it was looking straight at me.

There was a sudden blowtorch flare out of the forest, and another human figure staggered out of the inferno. Not burned, though she was smudged dark with smoke and coughing like her lungs might blow out. Emily had looked better. Her clothes were smoldering, but she was keeping it together. Barely.

“Get in the truck!” she screamed. Her eyes skipped right over the glistening twisted form of the Demon, and I realized that she couldn't see it—that Demons, like the dark shadows of Djinn who became Ifrits, weren't visible to normal Wardens. I didn't waste my breath. Emily tried the truck door, found it locked, and cursed breathlessly. She fumbled for keys. I reached in my broken passenger window and unlocked the doors, and we crammed ourselves in. I was sitting on broken glass. Didn't care.

Emily started it up and hit reverse just as a tree began to topple in front of us. She screamed and floored it, and the SUV slalomed, skidded, and grabbed dirt. We rocketed backward. I hoped she was watching behind us, because I was riveted to two things: the torch of a tree that was heading for the roof of the SUV, and the twisted, flickering shadow of the Demon loping after us in pursuit.

“Do something!” Emily yelled at me. She looked scared to death, and she didn't know the half of what I did.

“Do what?” I screamed back, and grabbed for the panic strap as the SUV bounced over rocks. Still moving backward at a speed that no human-operated vehicle was supposed to go, at least in that direction and in the middle of nowhere.

“Anything!”
she roared.

The noise of the tree crashing toward us was lost in the constant deafening train-whistle scream of the fire, but there was no doubt that it was going to hit us. And if the truck was put out of commission…

I sucked in a deep breath of air that was almost too hot to breathe, concentrated, and grabbed the dashboard as I stared at the falling tree.

Come on, come on, come on….
Updrafts. There were plenty of updrafts, no shortage of those, but they were wild and unpredictable, fueled by an incredible outpouring of energy.

I grabbed hold of a rising superheated column of air and wrenched it free of its source, then directed it at an angle at the falling tree. Twenty feet. It was coming for us fast, and no way were we going to clear it in time. Flames all around us. Ten feet. Heading right for the roof of the SUV…

I let the superheated blast of air go, cooled the outer edge, and it hit the tree like a huge blunt object, hammering it off course. Not by much.

The outer blackened pine branches snapped off on my side of the truck, and the trunk crushed the underbrush just a couple of inches to the right of the SUV's hood.

Emily shot me a disbelieving look. I shrugged and took my hands off the dashboard. Left wet, sweaty handprints behind.

I couldn't see the Demon anymore. Wishful thinking made me hope that Demons weren't impervious to fire, but damn, I pretty much knew better than that. Demons were impervious to everything nature or humans could toss their way. They could be contained by Djinn, but destroyed? Probably not, once they'd achieved full form, as this one had.

We were clear of the fire suddenly. Trees swayed around us, uneasy in the looming smoke, but nothing was aflame around us. Emily had, temporarily, outrun the flames.

She slowed the SUV, stopped, and wiped her hands on her filthy pants. She was shaking all over, and black as a coal miner at the end of a shift. Eyes red and bloodshot.

“That,” she said faintly, “was maybe a little too close.”

“A little,” I agreed. “Nice driving.”

“Nice wind management,” she replied, and was overtaken by a series of racking, tearing coughs. Sounded painful. I leaned over, put my hand on her back, and concentrated on the air inside her lungs. I oxygenated it as much as possible, then extended it into a bubble within the cab of the SUV. Couldn't do it for long, because we'd both get high and giggly, but it would help, short-term.

“What the hell just happened?” I asked, in between gasps. Emily put the SUV in gear and managed—somehow—to turn it around on the narrow road so we could drive forward instead of backward. Smoke was thick and acrid around us, blowing our direction.

“Something's working against us,” Emily said grimly. “Don't know what it is. I thought it was another group of Wardens, but now I don't know. It's not just the typical crap you get in wildfires. You know what I'm talking about?”

I did. Wildfires were dangerous in and of themselves; they hardly needed any villains to come add complications. I still vividly remembered the big Yellowstone fire that had claimed so many lives among the Wardens, several years back…the one that had destroyed Star both physically and mentally. That hadn't been anything but the nature of fire and the cruel purpose of the earth.

I had a good idea of who had been messing with the fire here: a Demon Mark–ridden Warden. And that made sense of why the Djinn had elected to stay away. The hatching of a full-blown Demon out of its human carapace was nothing they'd want to be around. David had fought a full-grown Demon, once upon a time, and I had to assume he'd won, but it couldn't have been an easy fight.

Out of nowhere, I remembered David telling me,
We are made of fire.
He'd meant Djinn, of course, and he wasn't exactly being literal, but it made me wonder. Djinn reacted to light and heat, to the transformation of energy. I wondered if Demons were the same. If they were drawn to these kinds of events to help them—hatch. If so, there might be more of them out there—Wardens with Demon Marks, moving mindlessly toward something that would finish the process of incubation. Probably they wouldn't even understand why. I remembered how it had felt when my own Demon Mark began to manifest itself in a big way…I'd been euphoric, almost godlike. No thought for consequences. And no sense of self-preservation, really.

I started to tell Emily about it, but then I realized that it wouldn't do any good. Even if she believed me—which was doubtful—there wasn't anything she could do about it. We were on our own out here in the wild Canadian wilderness, apparently. I missed Marion. She'd know, if anybody did, how much trouble we were all in right now.

Emily got us back to a logging road, then out to a paved two-lane road. There were police barricades flashing in the distance. She slowed and pulled over to the narrow shoulder.

“We need more Wardens,” she said. “Weather and Fire. Think you can get us anything?”

“No idea. I'll try.” I pulled out my cell phone and dialed up the hotline number. Busy. I reconsidered, dialed Paul's personal number.

Busy.

Marion's rang, though. She answered without her typical calm assurance; in fact, she sounded downright sharp. “Joanne?”

“Yeah.”

“Where are you?”

“Wildfire across the border in Canada,” I said. “Long story. Look, there's a desperate need for—”

“I know,” she cut me off. “We've got wildfires breaking out everywhere, and damn few Fire Wardens left to fight it. There's not much I can do for you guys. Do the best you can. Let it burn, if you have to.”

I cradled the phone against my chest and looked at Emily's grimy face. “Where's this thing heading?”

Under the black oily veil of smoke, she looked troubled. “Ultimately? I'd have to say it's making a beeline for Montreal. But one thing's for sure, it'll take out every town on the way, too. Five thousand, ten thousand homes at a chunk. If this thing isn't stopped…”

I got back on the phone. “No go on the hands-off, Marion. We need to find a way to firebreak this thing.”

“I'll get Weather on it,” she sighed. It was clearly not a new refrain. “See what you can do from there. And Jo?”

“Yeah?”

“Lewis says that there's a hurricane brewing just past Jamaica. If it forms and comes inland, we could be looking at another very bad time in Florida. There's another one right behind it that looks like it could veer to hit the Gulf Coast, or South America.”

“Is there anything that isn't going crazy?”

“No,” she said flatly. “Large cave-in in Kentucky, several hundred miners and tourists trapped in the region. Most of our Earth Wardens are converging on that, but we've got warning signs all up and down the Cascadia subduction again.”

“So. This would be the end of the world, then.”

“We're keeping hitching posts handy for the Four Horsemen. Any luck on the Djinn front?”

“Some,” I lied. Didn't seem much point in adding my bad news to the pile. “I'm working on it.”

“Then you'd better quit screwing around with the fire and get the Djinn back on our side,” she said grimly. “While we've still got enough of us alive to make it matter.”

I hung up, took in a deep breath or two, and turned back to Emily.

“Right,” I said. “Let's get back to work.”

 

There was a ranger station seven miles down another logging road—abandoned, since the rangers were out doing fire spotting, and had field radios with them. Emily and I commandeered the radio that had been left behind—a huge old clunker of a thing, and proof positive that upgrades weren't high on the federal budget triage scale. I tried to figure out the ancient technology. Seemed simple enough. I spun the dials to the right frequency—the Wardens' emergency frequency—and clicked the old-fashioned button on the old-fashioned microphone.

Now, if I could only remember all the codes…

“Violet-violet-violet,” I said. “Anyone reading? Respond.”

Static. White noise. I looked over at Emily, who was washing her filthy face in the sink; she needed more than a little soap to get clean, but that did a fair job. She only looked like a chimney sweep now, instead of a smoke eater. As she scrubbed a second time, I clicked the button again. “Violet-violet-violet,” I repeated. “Respond, please.”

This time, I got a sharp metallic click, and a tinny voice that sounded about twelve years old saying, “Hang on!”

Not exactly the approved format for responding to emergency calls, but I understood. It wasn't shaping up to be a normal day anywhere in the world, but least of all in the Warden Crisis Center.

I waited. The voice came back, eventually, right about the time Emily finished her third ablution. “Name and location,” it said. Not the same voice. This one was male, authoritative, and familiar.

“Hey, Paul,” I said. “It's Joanne. They've got you answering phones?”

“I've got damn graduate students answering the phone. You wouldn't even believe the magnitude of the trouble we're in. Where are you?”

“I'm up at the Canada fire, with Emily. Who else is up here?”

“Canada? Fuck if I know. Hang on, let me check.” He clicked off. I knew how the Crisis Center worked—there'd be a huge write on–wipe off board with events and Wardens assigned—usually. Today, who knew. I had the feeling that it was all just happening too fast. “Yeah. Jo, Emily's Earth and Fire—you've got a second Fire Warden located about eleven miles away from your current position, on the other side of the fire. Gary Omah. He's not real high on the scale, by the way. Not a lot of heavyweights left up there.”

“I don't think we can count on Gary Omah,” I sighed. “Who else?”

“Weather Warden out of Nova Scotia. That's what I've got for you.”

“Who is she?”

“Janelle Bright.”

I didn't know her, but that wasn't unusual; she was probably young, and probably lower level. Those seemed to be the survivors, so far. Probably because they hadn't earned any Djinn, and hadn't encountered any along the way. Also, Nova Scotia wasn't exactly the crossroads of the world. She'd probably be safe enough, if she didn't make a target of herself.

But then again, there were no longer any guarantees of anything, were there?

“Okay,” I said, and then remembered to click the button. “Right, Paul, I'm going to organize this one, okay?”

“Fine by me. We're up to our necks around here. You're senior on the ground pretty much wherever you go right now. Take charge.”

Now
that
was a really scary thought. It told me more than a Weather Channel documentary just how much trouble we were in.

I glanced over at Emily. “Um, Paul? One other thing.”

“Please, let it be something fluffy and happy.”

“Not so much. Demon.”

“What?”

“There's a Demon loose. I saw it break out of a dying Warden—Gary Omah, I'm presuming. It tried—” I swallowed hard and kept my voice even with an effort, because the crispy zombie flashbacks weren't easy to suppress. “It tried to get to me, but I managed to fight it off.”

Paul was quiet for so long, I thought I was having a conversation with static, and then he said, “I can't spare anybody else to help you.”

“Make it happen, Paul. I
need someone.
”

He put me on hold. Mercifully, there was no annoying music, it was just straight static. I listened to white noise and thought about Gary Omah, wondered how he'd come in contact with a Demon Mark, wondered whether taking it on had been his own choice or an infection that had happened against his will. I couldn't afford to agonize over Gary, though. If he was the blackened, hollowed-out corpse I'd met in the forest, then he was better off dead, and I had bigger problems.

Paul came back on the line. “Paul, I need—”

He interrupted me by covering the phone and bellowing, “You! Yeah, you in the fucking yellow! I told you, get those people over to the
west
side of the thing, do you understand me?
West!
” The muffling came off the phone, not that it had concealed much. “Shit. I've gotta go. Do your best. I've got to go be the first officer of the goddamn
Hindenburg
.” He was trying to sound light, but somewhere underneath I could tell he was genuinely, grimly terrified. “At least Lewis is the one wearing the shiny hat.”