Gale Force (27 page)

The flashlight played slowly around the room again in a methodical progression, counterclockwise. I was at the nine o’clock position, and I concentrated harder as the light crawled over the detritus in the room, heading my way.

It illuminated something strange; then there was a flash of movement, and then all hell broke loose.

They hadn’t been looking for me. They’d been looking for
Kevin,
and he was on the offensive.

Fire streaked out of his hand in a flat plane, slammed into the two women, and knocked them back. Emily shrieked, but Janette reacted quickly, damping down the flames before they were injured and setting up a glittering shield that splashed Kevin’s assault away in a rolling orange stream. It ignited dry carpeting, brittle walls, and broken furniture in an instant bonfire.

Emily, who could control wood and metal, grabbed an entire tractor’s worth of furniture and slammed it toward Kevin with shocking violence and power. I knew her; she hadn’t been nearly that strong before. Kevin tried to dodge, but there was no way he could win; Janette was lining him up in the crosshairs for her own assault, and he had no way to stop Emily at all.

As Kevin backed toward the wall, he tripped and went down, rolled into a crouch, and instinctively covered his head with both arms as the wall of furniture tumbled toward him.

I put up a wall of power around him, and both Emily’s flood tide of furniture and Janette’s flaming wave broke against it at the same time. Again, I was shocked by the force of what they were wielding; it was all out of proportion to what most Wardens would have used, even in extremity. Kevin was strong, but he couldn’t have equaled even one of them, much less two in direct conflict.

I could. Barely.

I stepped out from behind the table. I considered a snappy announcement of my presence, but really, it wasn’t necessary; both the other Wardens—no, Sentinels—were already turning and looking for me. I felt them lock on and acquire the target, and I shook my hands lightly to loosen myself up.

‘‘One chance to live,’’ I said. ‘‘Where’s Ortega?’’

I couldn’t really tell their expressions, not from across the room, but their body language suggested my sudden appearance wasn’t just a surprise; it was a real shock. If I’d been hoping that would throw them off balance, though, the surprise was mine; Janette hesitated for barely a second before I sensed a surge of power traveling invisibly through the wall next to me, and the paneling around me burst into white-hot flame. I ignored it. Playing their game was a sucker bet, and I needed to get to Kevin before they could separate us and use us against each other.

I gathered up the heat vortex being generated by Janette’s flames and sent it spinning toward both the Sentinels. Neither of them were Weather Wardens, and they weren’t trained on how to defuse such things; instead, they scattered to get out of its way. I kicked off my shoes, picked them up, and did a broken-field sprint across the ballroom toward Kevin. When I reached him, I grabbed him by the collar and yanked him out of the tangle of burning chairs and tables surrounding him. ‘‘Where’s the Djinn?’’ I shouted. Kevin coughed, spat up black, and jerked his chin toward the doorway. ‘‘Ortega! Have you seen him?’’

‘‘Yeah,’’ he said, and coughed again, with deep wracking spasms that made my chest hurt to hear them. ‘‘Outside. They had him.’’

Janette and Emily were standing between me and my goal. Not a good place to be. I began throwing flaming furniture together and rolling it toward them in unwieldy balls, and not even their combined powers could catch it all. One ball got past Janette and plowed into them head-on. They went flying.
Strike!

‘‘Come on,’’ I snapped to Kevin, and went to the first downed Sentinel. Emily. I straddled her as she lay on the floor, and put her down for the count by encasing her in a thick layer of ice, pulling all the water out of the air to do it. The heat would set her free, but not for a while. Maybe not even in time. Gosh, I was going to lose sleep over that one. I have no idea what Kevin did to Janette, but it wasn’t likely to be as merciful. Seeing his smudged, grim face, I had the feeling it was well deserved, too.

We left the ballroom. At the last minute, I damped the fires behind us. Kevin shot me a glance, and I shrugged; I had the desire for bloodshed, but somebody had to set a good example. I knew it wouldn’t be him.

‘‘Where’s Rahel?’’ I asked. The hallway outside was more of the same—dim, cluttered, deserted, smelling of age and mildew.

Kevin coughed again, wiped his mouth on his shirt, and said, ‘‘They figured it out. They have her, too. I couldn’t get to her.’’

‘‘Do they know—’’

‘‘Fuck
yes,
they know! We were sold out. They were buying it right up until about an hour ago, and then everything went crazy. . . .’’

I wanted to hear it, but the anxiety building in me wouldn’t stop clanging its warning bell. ‘‘We’ve got to find Ortega,
now
. Go that way. If you spot him, yell.’’

But in the end, I was the one who found him.

They’d posed him carefully, the Sentinels, just as they had the Djinn I’d helped discover before. Someone—one of the Earth Wardens—had looped whorls of living wood, thick and stronger than iron, around his arms and legs, pinning him in midair against the wall.

He’d been helpless. However they’d managed it, they’d taken away his defenses, and they’d done it so fast, so horribly fast. . . .

‘‘Jo?’’ Kevin’s hoarse pant came from behind me. I was standing very still, not blinking, not looking away.
‘‘Jesus.’’

We couldn’t get to him. There were too many Sentinels between us and Ortega. Six at least that I could see.

I’d expected to see Bad Bob Biringanine, so the sight of him shocked me less than it had a right to.

He looked exactly as I remembered him—white hair, fair Irish skin turned ruddy on the cheeks and nose, fierce blue eyes.

He smiled when he saw me. It was the same cynical, sweet expression that I remembered so well.

And then he turned to the man standing next to him and said something. The man’s back was to me, but I knew already, before he turned. Before I saw his face and knew how badly screwed we were.

Paul Giancarlo, my trusted friend, was
with the Sentinels
.

I saw the terrible guilt in his eyes, but there was something else, too. A fanatical light that I’d never truly recognized before.
He was hurt,
I thought.
He was hurt by the Djinn. He was in charge while they destroyed the Warden headquarters. He saw people die, people he liked. People he loved.

Bad Bob had preyed on him as surely as he had all these others. He’d made them victims all over again. Worse—he’d made them victimizers.

‘‘Jo,’’ Paul said. ‘‘Christ, what are you
doing
here? Get out!’’

‘‘You want me to send David instead?’’ I glared at him. ‘‘Paul, there’s not enough
what the hell
in the world for this!’’

He clenched his fists, and I saw the muscles in his jaw tense and jump. He’d always looked a bit thuggish, but never more than when he was truly angry. ‘‘If we get David, it’s over. It’s done. No more bloodshed, ’’ he said. ‘‘If we have to go through all the Djinn, how much suffering is that? Come on, Jo. You know they can’t be trusted. You
know
!’’

‘‘Apparently I can trust them more than I can trust you,’’ I said.

‘‘Ah, reunions,’’ Bad Bob said. He reached down and flipped open the lid on a black box on the floor, something like what Heather the scientist had used to carry her radioactive materials when she’d done her show-and-tell at Warden HQ. ‘‘Stop it, you two. You’re making me all teary-eyed. Next thing you know we’ll all be group-hugging and braiding each others’ hair.’’

Nothing seemed very real to me, and yet was simultaneously very, very clear. I could see every single line of wood grain, every strand of Ortega’s hair where it drifted in the subtle breezes of the hallway.

I could see everything.

A black spear rose of its own accord from the box that Bad Bob had opened. This was no shard; it must have been at least six feet long, glittering and lethal. It slowly turned, and I had the horrifying idea that it was
aware,
that it was seeking out its victim. It was nothing on the aetheric, an absence of all things around it, just a black hole that could never be filled.

‘‘Too bad your boyfriend couldn’t be persuaded to make an appearance,’’ Bad Bob said. ‘‘I suppose we’ll just have to perform a small demonstration instead with this unlucky fellow.’’

Paul caught sight of the hovering spear, and his face went an ugly, ragged shade of pale. ‘‘No,’’ he said. ‘‘No, you agreed, only if we could get—’’

The spear oriented itself and launched itself with sudden, horrific violence at Ortega.

I screamed and tried to form a shield in front of him, but the spear—the Unmaking—tore right through as if my power was completely meaningless to it, and buried itself in Ortega’s chest.

The sound he made was like nothing I had ever heard, something I couldn’t bear to hear. It was sheer torment, the sound of a Djinn being pulled apart and feeling every hard second of the process.

I was watching Ortega, but I was picturing David writhing on the floor of that room amid the shattered crystal, and dying along with him.

The Unmaking was
burrowing
into him. I could feel it eating at him, could see the color leaching from his skin.

And as it ate him, it grew
larger
.

‘‘Oh God,’’ Kevin said, and I’d never heard him sound like that, so utterly blank and young. As if he’d never seen anything terrible in his life.

On the other side, Paul Giancarlo and most of the others winced and turned away. Some covered their ears. Some looked sick.

Bad Bob continued to smile, utterly unmoved, and all my hate focused to a red pinpoint, right between his crazy blue eyes.

My power wouldn’t work against the Unmaking, but it would damn sure make a dent in
him
.

I called up everything,
everything,
and balled it into a single bright lance of light in my right hand, and slammed it toward Bad Bob Biringanine.

Who kept smiling.

Paul Giancarlo stepped in the way—no, not stepped.
Lurched.
I don’t think he meant to; I don’t think that it was his choice at all. Bad Bob owned the Sentinels, body and soul, and even they probably didn’t understand just how much his creatures they’d become. They’d opened the door to hate and revenge, and the darkness had claimed them. Lee Antonelli had shown me that.

Bad Bob used him as a human shield, because he knew it would hurt me the worst of all.

I didn’t scream, but the anguish must have shown in my face; Paul must have seen it, in that instant before the force I released hit him squarely in the chest.

It was fast, so fast he never blinked as the light hit him and blew out his nervous system, destroyed his brain stem, and dropped him lifeless to the floor.

I’d just
killed my friend
.

Kevin paused, just for a second, eyes wide, and then he attacked when he realized that I wasn’t capable of doing anything else at that moment, too frozen in shock to move or even defend myself. The Sentinels were in confusion; Bad Bob was smiling at me, oblivious to anything but my horror, and the rest of them had no idea what they were supposed to do. Like the Ma’at, they were a collective mass of power, and without a guiding force, they fell apart.

Even so, if it had been just Kevin and me, we’d have been lost. Each of the Sentinels had more power than we did, drawn from that black well of energy the Unmaking created when it destroyed things; they’d have killed us on their own, given time.

They didn’t have time.

An explosion rattled the entire building from outside. I saw a flaming car roll by the doors at the far end of the hall.

The cavalry had arrived with a bang.

I felt the aetheric popping and crackling with the arrival of more Wardens—some on the scene, some pouring power in from remote locations. I heard the sound of fighting from outside, and then something massive crashed against the outer wall, smashing a hole the size of a Buick in the brick, and through it I saw . . . the Apocalypse, or at least, as much as could fit in the parking lot of a condemned motel.

A tornado skimmed past the opening, sucking and howling, sparking lightning against every metallic surface. Cars rolled and disintegrated under the assault, then caught fire as Weather Wardens clashed with Fire. I couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad guys, at least until the rest of the wall came down with a heavy slam, and Lewis walked in over the rubble, leading a small but heavily kick-ass army, and joined me and Kevin.

‘‘Surrender,’’ he said flatly to the group of Sentinels at the end of the hall. ‘‘Do it now and we’ll let you live to see a trial. Otherwise, you get buried today.’’

He meant exactly what he said. Lewis was giving no quarter today, if they pushed him into a showdown. There was no trace of hesitation in him at all.

Bad Bob must have known it. He winked, jolly as a leprechaun, and blew me a kiss. Then he went to Ortega and wrenched the black spear out of him with his bare hands.

As it came out, it grew, adding inches more to its length. With every death it was fed, it grew more malevolently, horribly powerful.

Ortega was a dessicated corpse. A husk.

Bad Bob reached down and yanked up a small female form that lay huddled at his feet, tied with glittering black ropes. Cherise’s big blue eyes were wide under the confusion of blond hair, but the fury in her was all Rahel.

‘‘You don’t want to risk this one, do you?’’ Bad Bob asked, and yanked hard on her hair. ‘‘Come on, Lewis. I know you better than that. You’re one of the good guys!’’

Lewis’s expression didn’t alter by a flicker. ‘‘She’s human. Humans get hurt when Wardens clash; you know that. It’s on your head, not mine.’’