Thin Air

Too good to be true, although it was true at the level most people lived.

But up on the aetheric, it was different. There was a kind of illumination to everything that spun it just slightly toward the positive, and it was easier here than anywhere I’d ever been to move from the real world into Oversight-it happened in an effortless slide.

The veils were definitely thin here.

We parked on a main street next to what looked like the most picturesque town graveyard I’d ever seen, all gracefully sculpted willow trees, manicured grass, artfully aged tombstones. Ethereal. If I had to pick any place to get my bones planted, well, I could certainly do worse.

I tried not to think that it could happen sooner than I thought.

We filed out of the van onto the sidewalk, moved around in the Brownian motion of people who didn’t have any idea where they were going, and Rahel emerged last. She swept us with a look that clearly said, Hopeless, and turned to Lewis. “Perhaps you’d like to deploy them,” she said. “Unless you think they look less suspicious this way.”

I covered a snort of laughter with a cough.

“It’s Joa

I smiled thinly. He smiled back in a way that made me paranoid about just how solid David’s privacy bubble had been on the plane. Surely I was imagining things.

Dear God, let me be imagining things.

“Spread out,” I said. “Rahel, Lewis, maybe you should each take a corner. The rest of you, find someplace to blend.”

There was a general shuffle, and then people broke up to assume their chosen locations. Except for Lewis, who was waiting for something else from me, and Rahel, who just wasn’t going to be given orders by some mere human anyway.

“Where are you going?” Lewis asked. I nodded at the open gates of the cemetery.

“I need to go in there,” I said. “Right?”

He exchanged a glance with Rahel, who inclined her head silently.

“I’ve been here before,” I said. “The other me, she remembers everything, including how to reach the Oracle.”

That made some fierce golden fire light up in Rahel’s eyes, and she looked hard all of a sudden. Cutting edges and slicing angles.

“Is the Demon here?” she asked. “Inside?”

I shook my head. “Not yet. At least, I don’t think so. It doesn’t feel that specific. But she’s got to be close.”

My own voice said, from right behind me, “She is close,” and something hit me with stu

I had nothing. It was the same eerie, dead flatness, so far as access to power went, that I’d experienced in Sedona when I’d tried to fight Ashan. Oh, boy. Not so good, because although my powers were on the wane, my evil twin’s supernatural abilities weren’t.

Because, of course, she was supernatural. Like the Dji

Well, one thing she wasn’t, was immune to a punch.

Lewis stepped up and gave her a solid right cross, snapping her head back with real violence. But even as she staggered backward, I heard Rahel scream, “Lewis, no!” and saw that Evil Twin, who looked more like me than I did with her glossy, sleek hair and vibrant, glittering eyes and perfect skin, had grabbed hold of his wrist.

She yanked him forward, body-to-body, and met his eyes with hers, staring deep.

Rahel paused in the act of moving toward them. I shook the stars and explosions out of my head, trying to see what the hell was happening, and felt Lewis doing the impossible: pulling power in a place where power was locked off tight. Seacasket was a town in the aetheric equivalent of an airless, vacuum-sealed iron vault.

And he was ripping the vault door off its metaphorical hinges, as if it were nothing.

I’d never fully appreciated what Lewis was, and what he could do, until that moment. He wanted her to let him go, and she was either going to do it or be blasted into so many tiny pieces that even a Demon would have a hard time surviving it.

And then I realized why he was reacting so violently. Granted, he wouldn’t want her hands on him, but what he was doing was far, far beyond merely trying to get loose from her hold. No, he was fighting to save himself, because she was trying to take him over, the way she’d grabbed Cherise and Kevin and cored them out to insert her own will, power, and thoughts.

If she could do that to Lewis…

Rahel understood what was happening, but she didn’t act. Perhaps she couldn’t here in this place. The power that Lewis was pulling into himself, using as a shield, was absolutely stu

And still the Demon was eating right through.

There was a slipping sensation under my feet. I can’t describe it any more accurately; it wasn’t an earthquake, because the ground itself didn’t shift. Not a tremor. Not a shudder of any kind.

And yet, something moved.

“No,” Rahel breathed, stricken, and I saw her make some kind of decision.

She broke out of her paralysis, crossed the few steps, and grabbed E.T. by her shiny supernatural hair. For her part, my evil twin wasn’t going down easy; she snarled and twisted around to backhand Rahel, but she didn’t let go of Lewis to do it. His eyes were closed, his face u

When Rahel lunged for her again, my doppelgänger did something that blurred in this reality, blazed up in the aetheric, and slammed the heel of her palm into Rahel’s chest.

Her hand kept going deep into Rahel’s flesh and bone, and I saw a flood of what looked like blue sparks shoot down the Demon’s arm disappearing within Rahel’s body. Rahel’s mouth opened in a soundless scream, and I saw the shadowy presence of her on the aetheric turn smoke gray, then a poisonous shade of pale blue.

Could she possess Rahel?

As the Demon pulled her hand out of Rahel’s chest, a flood of tiny blue sparkles followed, foaming over Rahel’s body in a matter of seconds.

She convulsed and went down. It looked…Oh, God. It looked as if she were melting.

Lewis was still fighting, but whatever power he was using was dangerous in the extreme. I could feel that in the unsteady pitch and wave of the ground-no, not the ground, I realized, because the actual soil wasn’t moving. This was something else.

A stray metal button on the sidewalk rattled, rolled, and suddenly flew straight up in the air to impact a metal street sign. Which was bending as if an invisible wind were pulling at it.

Something was going badly wrong with the Earth’s magnetic field. Whatever power Lewis was using was unbalancing it, and although I had no idea what that meant, it just could not be good.

The other Wardens were converging on the spot, but nobody could do much-I saw Paul ru

“We can’t just stand here!” he screamed back at me. I heard the wail of police cars a few blocks over, and realized with a cold start that the rest of Seacasket, this Norman Rockwell town with a touch of the Gothic, would have just seen a bunch of strangers pile out of a van and some kind of fight. They couldn’t see or feel what was happening all around them, unless they knew where to look.

The Wardens knew, but we couldn’t act.

I felt a displacement of air, heard a faint pop, and looked around to see Ve