Gale Force (28 page)

‘‘My son, you’ve really learned how to operate in the subzero, haven’t you? Well, very fine, but we both know that despite this very pretty shell, what’s inside is no more human than that.’’ He jerked his head toward Ortega’s body. ‘‘Probably a whole lot less human, actually. She’s a wild one, isn’t she?’’

Rahel was playing Cherise for all she was worth, and it broke my heart to see my friend so scared, shaking, and crying. ‘‘Please,’’ she choked, ‘‘I don’t know who you think I am, but I’m not—’’

‘‘You’re a Djinn,’’ Bad Bob cut in. ‘‘Show me.
Show me now,
or I use this.’’ He still had the spear in his other hand, and he raised it, prepared to thrust it into her guts.

Lewis let out a low, almost inaudible moan.

Rahel flowed out of her disguise, dark and commanding and imperious, but still restrained by the black ropes. Her eyes snapped violent yellow sparks as she struggled to get free. She subsided, panting, dreadlocks wild around her hawk-sharp face.

‘‘That’s better,’’ Bad Bob said. ‘‘Do tell David that we’ll be in touch, Jo. If he wants to stop me from continuing to kill his people, he should consider giving himself up to us. Very soon.’’

The Sentinels crowded around him. Bad Bob grabbed Rahel, and each of them touched the black surface . . . and vanished. All of them together, Rahel included.

He’d taken her.

Kevin collapsed against one of the left-standing structural walls, gagging for breath. He looked terrible. I must have looked a hell of a lot worse, because Lewis took one look at me, gestured, and suddenly there were two Earth Wardens at my side, pouring warm, sticky power into me like syrup.

I felt a rush of
presence
around me as I started to fall, and David’s arms caught me and held me close. ‘‘Oh God,’’ he whispered against my hair. ‘‘Are you
crazy
? What were you trying to do?’’

‘‘Save you,’’ I whispered back. ‘‘Always.’’ I wanted to tell him that everything was all right here, too, in this warm, soft place I’d reached where nothing hurt. But I couldn’t stay in that place, even though it was so tempting to just give up and let shock take over.

Instead, I forced my legs to stiffen, and I pulled away from him. David let me go. He saw what was in my face, and he let me go.

I walked toward Ortega. When Lewis tried to stop me, I shook him off. When he tried again, I hit him with a lightning bolt. I was insane, but not quite that insane; I pulled the charge at the last moment, feeding just enough through him to knock him back a step.

Ortega was dead. His eyes had gone black, burned and lifeless, and his skin was a dull, dusty gray, as if he’d turned to stone. David joined me, standing close but not touching.

‘‘It’s not your fault,’’ I told David. I could only imagine that he was thinking about ordering Ortega to come here, because he’d known there was a chance. . . .

But that wasn’t what he was thinking at all. David cocked his head slowly to one side, staring at the dead Djinn, and asked, very quietly, ‘‘Who is he?’’

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 any
one
.

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.’’