Heat Stroke

Patrick looked no more like Santa Claus than I did, when I examined him with those senses. No, he was big, tough, cold, and more than a little puzzled.

“Interesting,” he said, and took up another palmful of sugar. This time he made an Andes mint, complete with wrapper. He offered it to me. “How did you know to do that?”

“Transmutation,” I said, still lying flat on the over-colored carpet. I lifted my hands and looked at them, flexed a muscle that existed only in the aetheric. Silver-tipped claws, as delicate as frost, slid from my fingertips. “You said she was hungry. I fed her.”

“Yes,” he agreed softly, with a doubting undertone of wonder. “So you did.”

I took the mint, unwrapped it, and let it dissolve into a sweet edge of mint in my mouth. Taste was different now. Brighter. Sharper. The shiny green paper of the wrapper had a texture to it like nothing I’d ever felt before.

“So,” he said as I savored the taste. “Round Two?”

I’d just almost died, and for some reason I couldn’t stop a giggle that worked its way all the way up from my guts.

“Sure,” I said in between helpless bursts of laughter. “Bring it on.”

Round Two was a disaster. I got my ass kicked. Painfully. This time I ended up lying full length on the banana yellow couch, sobbing for breath, too exhausted to even begin to count the ways I hurt.

Patrick bustled around providing fresh drinks. Unless he wanted to use mine as a topical ninety proof antiseptic, I wasn’t interested.

“Now,” he said briskly, and sat back in the red velvet chair. It was shaped like a platform shoe. Looked like something out of JCPe

I groaned. “Excuse the hell out of me.”

“For heaven’s sake, child, just fix it.”

I looked at him blankly. He reached over, took my wrist, and smoothed a finger gently over one of the gaping cuts. It zipped shut, faded, and disappeared. Blood along with it.

“There,” he said. “You do the rest.”

Not, of course, as simple as it sounded. I managed, knitting back flesh and muscle, blood vessels and nerves. The outfit repairs were easy, by comparison. I finally managed to sit up, kick off the shoes, and put my bare feet up on the tacky chrome and glass coffee table.

“Better,” Patrick murmured. “Now. Ifrits. They can be formed two ways. One is a human failing to make the transition to life as a Dji

I froze in the act of wiggling my toes. “I thought Dji

“True, in much the same way that energy is never lost. But we can be transmuted, like anything else. Humans never die either, in the strictest sense of the word; they’re transmuted into base materials. Recycled.”

Ashes to ashes, I thought. Great. Nobody had bothered to mention this in the recruitment brochure.

“If a Dji

“How often—”

“—do Dji

“Not people,” I corrected, and got another shrug.

“Potato, potahto. You need to get over your human limits, my sweet.” He was one to talk. Busy checking out the line of my leg all the way up to the leather skirt.

“How long do I have to do this?”

“What?”

“Fight your Ifrit?”

He smiled, tinkled ice in a tumbler full of gold liquor that hadn’t been in his hand two seconds ago, and those ocean-deep eyes looked terminally amused. “Is that what you’ve been doing?”

I let my head drop back against the yellow leather of the couch and stared at the pornographic Michelangelo ceiling. In this version, God was a very naughty fellow. “God,” I said to Him. “Why did You have to make me a Dji

Patrick sighed. “I’ve been teaching you a great many things, and you’re too smart not to know it. Using your senses effectively, thinking like a Dji

In which case, the Ifrit was feeling pretty beat to hell, too. That was nice.

Patrick took a deep gulp of his whisky—if that’s what it was—and said, “Now I think it’s time for something a little different.”

“Yeah?” I was no longer giving him the benefit of the doubt. “Is it going to hurt?”

“Unquestionably.”

“Do I get chocolate when it’s over?”

“Perhaps.” His round Santa face expressed his delight. “Let’s take a trip.”

“I’d like to rest first, if you don’t—”

He did, apparently, because whoosh, I was no longer on the couch, I was being dragged up into the aetheric at a rate equaled only by spacecraft leaving orbit. I yelped—incorporeally—and grabbed a tighter hold of Patrick’s essence as we shot up, up, watching his building miniaturize, then New York City shrink into a colorful little candyland, then the world curve off into a beautiful blue-green marble below us. Space was a vast black presence around us, cold and crushing, shot through with the icy sheen of stars. We were hanging at the very edge of where we could go, where the bonds of earth were weakest. Escape velocity.

Do you know what happens if Wardens go farther? Patrick asked. I almost forgot to answer. The world was so beautiful, edged in blues and greens, reds and golds, sparkling with power and life energy. She was magnificent. Alive. Sentient. I could sense her from here, a vast and slow consciousness that was only now begi

And still, they required every ounce of strength the Wardens Association possessed to keep the human race alive and kicking—and unaware of the danger.

Do you know what happens if Wardens go farther? Patrick asked again. I scrambled to remember. It wasn’t a Dji

We die, I said. In general, human beings could strap on a spacesuit and ride rockets to the stars. Wardens were too tightly bound to the planet. The farther we got from the nurturing heartbeat of our world, the weaker we became. It worked that way on the aetheric plane, too. This was the outer limit of our survival.

You are no longer a Warden, my little blossom.