Heat Stroke

“Jonathan?” Patrick’s thick white eyebrows climbed heavenward. “You realize you’re asking a foolish question?”

“An obvious no.”

The eyebrows compressed again, this time into a frown. “You can know the history of anything and anyone you wish, Joa

He reached out and touched me with one blunt finger, right in the center of my forehead.

It was like being hit by a cement truck at eighty miles an hour, head on.

My head exploded into color, light, chaos, pain, heat, cold, fury. I gasped and struggled to hang on to something, flailed around, found a memory. I grabbed it and held to it with iron strength.

Jonathan, handing me the cold, sweating beer bottle.

Jonathan’s eyes, dark and endless as space, meeting mine for the first time.

There. Patrick’s silent whisper in my head. Go there.

He shoved me, hard, from behind, and I tumbled out of control into chaos.

When I got my footing again—whatever footing consisted of, in this place—I was standing on a raw piece of rock, dizzyingly high up, and an ice-sharp wind blew through me. It caught my long black hair and snapped it back like a battle flag. I was different, here. Snow-pale, dressed in filmy black robes that rose on the wind like a cloud.

I faltered when I realized that I was inches from the drop, that gravity was singing at me like a siren. I dropped down into a crouch and put both hands on the cold stone. Lightning flashed in a hot pastel curtain overhead, and far down below, far down in the mud, men were dying.

I could feel that. Feel every wound, hear every scream, taste every drop of blood being shed.

“ ‘And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul,’ ” Patrick whispered. He was next to me, solid and flaring white-hot. Beside him, behind him, a black ice-edged shadow. “Although this is not that Jonathan, or that David, the verse is still true. If you want to know about Jonathan, you will know it here.”

Here. That was the Ifrit’s silent whisper. I looked down, trembling, wanting desperately to go because there was so much death here, so much pain.

So many dying.

There was one who shone. Glittered with power. Warden. He was tall, spare, moving with grace and speed as he turned and fought against the ones coming at him. The lightning kept calling to him, but he wouldn’t answer. The Earth was calling to him, her voice like thunder, like rivers flowing, like the slow rising cry of mountains.

He wouldn’t answer her.

“Oh God,” I whispered. “He’s like Lewis.”

No, he was more than Lewis. The world itself was wrapped around him, through him, like a lover holding him. Not just a man who controlled the elements, but was loved by them.

Fiercely defended.

Rain sheeted down, silver as tears.

He was rejecting her love, there on the battlefield. He was fighting as a man, not a Warden. Sword in his hand, solid blows of metal on metal, his leather and metal armor taking cut after cut. Blood…

I felt it coming. The world around me felt it coming.

A lunge. A spear angling up, punching past hardened leather and too-soft bronze, ripping…

I cried out. It didn’t matter, the whole world was crying out, the Mother crying out for her dying child, and even though I was at the mountain’s peak, looking down on a struggle of ants, I could see Jonathan, see him struggling to pull the spear out of his chest with both hands, face fierce and bloody with determination.

No no no…

Lightning hit him, burned the spear to ash, melted metal.

Transforming him in a crucible of pure fire. That wasn’t just lightning, not just energy and plasma and science. That was something else.

Pure, implacable magic.

Someone else on the battlefield crying out, too, crawling through thick bloody mud, a man, just a man—dying already, with a dagger buried in his chest.

Crawling into the fires of life in a useless attempt to save his friend.

There was a feeling of an indrawn breath.

Every creature left in that valley died—sucked instantly dry of life, of breath, of soul. Gone. Empty bodies fell as one, thousands of them, gone. It spread in a ripple of falling corpses and armor in concentric circles from the place that lightning still danced and raged.

It kept spreading. Farther. Shepherds and sheep dying on hills miles away. A village, twenty miles farther. A city of thousands falling limp.

“Stop!” I screamed. But it wasn’t going to stop. The raving grief of the world was pouring out, like blood from a heart wound, and it was going to take everything in its madness.

Patrick’s hand pressed my shoulder, hard. I heard his deep intake of breath…

… and saw one man drag another out of the white flare of lightning, far below.

Whole. Unharmed.

No longer men at all.

Dji