Thin Air

So it was all his fault.

At first it had worked just the way he’d wanted. He’d been taught how to set controlled fires to create firebreaks, and he could do it faster and better than the regular firefighters, without any risk of losing control no matter how long the fire line got. He’d done a good job, a really good job, and Cherise had kept him supplied with water and sometimes kisses of congratulations, which had been pretty great. Because she’d asked him to, he’d worked with some crotchety old bastard of an Earth Warden to save some horses who were trapped on the hills, and the light in her eyes as the small herd galloped past them, safe, had been better than any sex he’d ever had.

And then it had all gone bad right around dark. First he’d felt it as an ache in his chest, and he’d thought he’d caught some smoke, but he couldn’t cough it out. There was something wrong with him, and there was something wrong with Cherise, too, and he couldn’t stop it. Couldn’t help her. It was like the whole world was dying around him; he could feel it slipping away, and…then it came back, and things had returned to normal for a few minutes, and he’d held Cherise and told her it was all going to be okay, and that had been a lie.

The fire jumped one of the breaks he’d set, so he went closer to try to stop it before it could leap treetops. He told Cherise to stay back, so he didn’t see it happen, but when he extinguished the flames racing through the dry underbrush, he turned back and…

She was on the ground, and there was a thing, a thing with its hands buried in her chest.

Kevin screamed and threw himself at it, and it batted him away into a tree. He saw blood and stars and felt something wrong with his head, like he’d hit it too hard, and when he got up again Cherise was standing there like nothing had happened.

But it wasn’t Cherise, and that wasn’t her smile, because it wasn’t the sunshine.

It was something else.

“Kevin,” she said, and came toward him. “Honey, it’s okay. It’s all okay. I need you.”

Cherise had known to say that, not the thing inside, and that was what stopped him from backing away. That, and the bleak, black knowledge that nothing ever really worked right for him in the long run. Of course this had to happen.

It always did.

Oh, Kevin, I thought from that separate quiet place where I stood. It doesn’t have to. You have to have faith.

But he wasn’t listening, and anyway, this was already done, already past, and he was giving up because he just thought there wasn’t any real point in trying.

So he didn’t fight when Cherise reached out and put her hands on his head-exactly the way I’d done it when I’d entered his memories-and the Demon began to tu

And from that point on I wasn’t in Kevin’s memories anymore.

I was in hers.

She was cold inside. Ice-cold, all clean logic and calculation, empty of kindness or compassion. She made Eamon, messy and awful as he was, seem like Father Christmas in comparison. She wanted only one thing, and it was the iron-hard central core of who she was: She wanted to go home.

And she would do anything, use anyone, destroy the world to get there.

Starting with Cherise, because she’d been close and vulnerable, but really starting with Kevin, because he was what she needed. Power. Strength. Energy.

She used him like a straw, an empty vessel good for nothing but as a conduit between her and what she craved…raw aetheric energy, the stuff that powered all Wardens. She would have preferred to consume a Dji

She had tried the girl first, but the pathetic meat hadn’t been able to deliver much of a meal; humans barely brushed the aetheric, and so were of little use. But she kept Cherise, aware of the emotions it roused in the boy; the angrier and more afraid he was, the more energy the Demon was able to draw.

It was horrible, and it was cruel, and it interested her for a long time. Too long.

She used Cherise and Kevin to stalk other Wardens. Those she did not bother to control, only to drain and slaughter, but Cherise and Kevin provided her with a self-sustaining well of anguish that she would not easily give up.

And then something happened. Something startling.

There was a shift of energy on the aetheric, titanic in its intensity. It was like some soundless explosion, and everything rippled. The Demon felt it and chased after, not even sure what she was chasing, but there was something floating there in the emptiness, something free and powerful…

She battened on to it and consumed it, mindless in her raging hunger. Back in the forest, Cherise and Kevin fell like abandoned puppets, and the Demon…changed.

She took on form and weight as what she’d eaten took hold of her.

She’d taken my memories, along with a substantial jolt of my power. She’d found the pieces Ashan had ripped away from me in the chapel in Sedona. The Demon didn’t know what had happened to her, didn’t have a sense of self in the same way that a human did. The change was painful for her, startling and-a new emotion-frightening. She no longer wanted only one thing. Memories confused her, made her want more things, made her ache for what she did not understand, had never had, and she couldn’t put it out of her mind because the problem was in her mind.

Never to be corrected, because it had been made part of her, imprinted deep.

My memories had damaged her.

I’d woken up afraid, alone, cold and naked, without any memory of who or what I was; she knew, and she was still afraid, still cold, still naked in her own mind.

Demons could not become human, but now she craved the rest of what I’d once had, and she understood something that, as a Demon, she never could: The Wardens were a force, not individually, but as a group. They could be used. Directed.

Made to do her bidding.

She woke up Cherise and Kevin and sent them in pursuit of the remnants of Joa

I stood silently by as the Demon piloted Cherise and Kevin through the forest, hunting Lewis, hunting me, finding us, pursuing. She used them ruthlessly, but all the while she was learning.

Learning a terrifying amount about how to bend people, how to find their buttons, how to get what she wanted.

Because she knew what she wanted now, and it wasn’t just being me.

She wanted to open a door between worlds and bring other Demons here to nest, feed, and grow into what she had become.

She wasn’t going home.

She was bringing home here.

It was a memory, and I’d seen some shocking things, but a chill still zipped up my back as I saw the Demon step out from behind a tree to face Cherise and Kevin. She was me, or partly me, anyway. Her eyes were black and empty, and she was a cheap plastic doll made in my image.

She had no further use for her toys. They were a liability now, not a help, and she knew they were on the verge of failure. Their deaths didn’t bother her, but she couldn’t take the risk of a tool breaking at a critical moment.

She ripped her awareness out of them as brutally as she’d put it in, and Kevin had fallen, stu

And Kevin hadn’t been able to follow.