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Thin air

Кейн Рэйчел

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

“Now would be a really good time,” I muttered in the general direction of David, hoping he could hear me, but no miracles arrived to scoop me up.

I was going to have to make my miracles myself.

“Hey,” I said. I kept my voice as normal as possible as I stepped away from Paul and began moving toward the Demon and Lewis. “Hey, you. Bitch. You don’t really want him, do you? You just want a big hole ripped open so you can get home. Or bring in a few friends. Whichever.”

She glanced sharply at me, and as our eyes locked I felt that balance under my feet shift again. Violently. Oh, man. It wasn’t just Lewis who was causing this.

It was me. Both of me. We were a destabilizing influence here.

“I’ll do it,” I said. “One tu

“Why should I?” she asked. Reasonable question, delivered in the same reasonable tone I was using. “This way he can’t act against me.”

“This way the two of you will end up ripping the place in half, not opening up a doorway. Not good for either one of you. Come on. I know you like this planet. It’d be a shame to ruin it for everybody.”

She laughed. My laugh. “If you want him, I’ll trade,” she said. “Come here.”

The last thing in the world I wanted was to do it, but I didn’t see much of an alternative. Of course, she might be lying, but I wasn’t a pushover, and if she wanted to hollow me out or kill me, I’d demand a lot of her attention.

And Lewis would break free.

“Don’t you do it,” Paul was muttering at me. “Don’t you fucking dare. I’ll kill you.”

“Line forms to the right.” I smiled at him, just a little, and then walked over to my evil twin.

The static in my head was now white noise, blotting out thought, erasing everything but instinct.

I put my hand over hers, where it held Lewis, and pulled it away.

The second the contact broke, Lewis collapsed. Paul, Kevin, and the other Wardens dashed in and did a combat-style drag on him, all the way to the corner, where the van pulled up. Paul threw Lewis inside, slapped the side of the van, and it sped away.

Clearly Paul wasn’t taking any chances.

Blackness smothered me, thick and more painfully intense than ever before. I barely even noticed, though, because now that I was holding her hand, I saw a network of lights flaring inside of her, rich and complex, like a bright snarled ball that sparked in millions of colors.

Oh.

That was mine. My memories. My lost experience. My past.

And I reached in and took it. Or tried to. I grabbed one end of the memory chain, the Demon grabbed the other, and the race was on.

Light and shadow. Infant memories, indefinite and barely there. Faces. Noise. Colors. Perceptions sharpening as I aged. I sped through it, imprinting it on the area that was dark inside of my own head. I didn’t need training for this; there was only one place this stuff could go, and in only one order. Memory, for me, was a spool, and I unwound it faster and faster, flickering images and impressions that I could examine later, when I got time… My mother crying. Sarah. Disneyland. A storm building, breaking, finding its perfect mate inside of me.

Childhood, so many rich moments, so many terrible things. I aged, changed; the world shifted with me and around me. Boys. Boyfriends. Heartbreak. Always the weather, my perfect enemy, hunting an opportunity to betray and destroy.

Power. Purpose. Training. Princeton.

A younger Lewis taking off my clothes in a basement laboratory, introducing me to a whole new level of pleasure and intensity.

Glass shattering with the force of our power combining as our bodies did.

Lewis gone, spirited away. My life consumed with work, achievement, ambition.

Bad Bob. A Dji

A shattered Dji

A blur of events that I couldn’t even separate, ending in more destruction, more death, my own transformations.

Blue sparklies. A hole in the aetheric. Demons. The fate of the world, again, on our shoulders.

Human again. Faces flashed by at an increasing rate, because I could feel the tension of the Demon on the end of the memory chain, pulling back, and I couldn’t stop now to even try to comprehend what I was seeing.

A glimpse of Jonathan, ageless and cynical and passionate about what he loved.