Thin Air

“Oh, relax; he’s not dead,” Ve

Whatever Jamie was doing-and in the chaos of the storm that was quickly getting worse, I couldn’t tell-she kept doing it, because Ve

Bang. She went down, coldcocked. I felt bad about that. She and Stan didn’t seem like bad types, comparatively speaking.

At least they weren’t trying to bring down a building.

“We should hurry,” Ve

I nodded, and followed her into the aetheric. In Oversight the storm was a glittering layered network of tight-spi

It was intoxicating. Freeing. I heard myself laugh, and reached out to touch a glittering chain of molecules. Lightning sparked through the net and flashed in my eyes down in the real world.

It was like playing God. Beautiful and terrifying.

The first lightning strike hit the roof, and the concussion was so intense at this close range that I went temporarily deaf and blind, and every hair follicle on my body seemed to rise in the electrical aura. When it passed, I barely had time to draw a breath before the next bolt hit steel, and then a third. Hammer of the gods.

When the wind hit the smoking, glowing structure, spi

Ve

“What?” I yelled over the roar of thunder and pounding, wind-driven surf. I stumbled toward her and swiped wet hair back from my face. “Balance what?”

“The scales,” Ve

“You mean it’s not over?”

Ve

I had no idea what she meant, but Ve

I turned my attention to the storm.

“The Wardens teach you to do this from science,” she said very softly; I didn’t know how it was possible to hear her over the wind, but she came through as if it were a still, silent day. “Science can fail you. Learn to listen to it. Sing to it. It doesn’t have to be your enemy. Even predators can be pets.”

I struggled to make sense out of what I was seeing. So much detail, so much data, all in spectra the human eye wasn’t meant to see, much less understand. I can’t do this. It’s too big. It’s too much.

I took a deep breath, stretched my hands out to either side, and stepped into the heart of the storm.

It hurt. Not only physically, though the windblown sand and debris lashed at me like a dozen whips. It got inside my head, and howled, and I flailed blindly for something I could touch, could control, could stop…

And then, when I opened my eyes on the aetheric, it all made sense. The swirling chaos became a shifting puzzle of infinite intricacy, and where the pieces met, sparks hissed through the dark, bright as New Year’s fireworks lighting the sky. I reached out and moved two of the pieces apart; the spark leaped and died in midair. I tried it again and again, until the grand, gorgeous pattern of the air was whisper-quiet, glowing in peaceful shifting colors.

When I blinked and fell back into the real world, I could see the stars.

Ve

So now I was guilty of some kind of supernatural sabotage, at the very least, but I figured it probably boiled down to plain old insurance fraud. Something simple and skanky, something with an immediate financial benefit for Eamon, of course.

But hey, at least I’d learned a useful skill.

“Astonishing,” Eamon murmured, looking at the wreckage and all of the emergency crews swarming around the scene in the predawn light. We were sitting on the low rock wall-Eamon, Ve

Didn’t seem prudent to mention her.

“Complete destruction,” Eamon said, and seemed utterly satisfied. “You are a one-woman wrecking crew, love.”

“Thanks,” I said with an ice edge of chill. “We done now?”

“Done?” His eyes were preoccupied, and it took him a second to pull his attention away from the human aftermath on the beach to focus on me completely. “Ah, yes. I did say that I wanted only this one thing from you, didn’t I?”

Bad feeling bad feeling bad feeling. “That’s what you said.”

“I don’t think that will be possible after all,” Eamon said, and smiled just a bit. Just enough to keep me from killing him. “This is the start of a beautiful and very profitable relationship, Jo. After I marry your sister-”

“After you what?” I blurted. “Time-out! Nobody’s getting married. Especially not to you.”

Sarah didn’t even look up to meet my fierce stare. Haggard and strung out, but my sister, dammit. My family. “You can’t tell me what to do,” she said.

“Sarah, wake up! He’s a criminal! And he’s a murderer!”

“Yeah, well, what about you?” she flung back. “You think you’re not guilty of things? You think you aren’t just as bad? Don’t you dare lecture me!”

“Keep your voice down!”

“Or what? You’ll call the cops? Go right ahead, Jo; they’re right over there!”

Sure enough, two uniformed cops standing next to their cruiser were looking in our direction. I swallowed and tried to moderate my own voice to something in the range of reasonable. “Sarah, you do not want to jump into this. Really. You don’t know this man. You don’t know what he’s capable of doing.”

Eamon took her hand. His long, lovely fingers curled around hers, and then he kissed her fingers, staring at me with bright, challenging eyes the whole time. “She’s not jumping into anything,” he murmured. “And really, Joa

“You want to use her,” I said. “You want to threaten her to get me to do whatever you want. Trust you to find a way to make money off of disaster.”

He made a tsking sound. “Construction companies, insurance companies, cleanup crews, police, fire, ambulance, paramedics, hospitals, doctors, funeral parlors, coffin makers…all those people make money off of disaster. And thousands more. I’m merely a novice.”

“You want to cause them!”

“Don’t be so negative,” he said. “Freak accidents happen. No reason not to arrange them to our benefit once in a while.”