Heat Stroke

Patrick was rambling the apartment again, looking lost and morose; he was milking it, of course. Not like he couldn’t have fixed everything back the way it was, if he’d wanted. Maybe he was adjusting to it. “What?” he asked, although I knew he’d been listening to every word. We’d been a lot more interesting than the stacked bowl of Chinese ornamental balls on the coffee table. “Bother. I can’t give an opinion until I’ve had a look.”

“Then come on.” I held out my hand. He ignored that, put his arm around me, and copped a feel. Which, thankfully, was a little insulated by the sensible denim that Lewis had chosen for me to wear. I moved his hand without more than a sidelong look, and up and away we went.

Well, Patrick said, in the way Dji

We hung there for a while, watching the storm rotating and building while the fragile milk-glass bursts of power came from all sides, like flashbulbs going off around a celebrity. Wardens at work. They looked weirdly anemic to me, now, but I could feel the hot blue pulse of other Dji

The only trouble was that there was nothing to fix here—nothing that could be fixed. The storm was slowly building. I’d already tried all the traditional stuff—disrupting the convection engine that was feeding the process; adding cooling layers underneath to isolate the updrafts; bringing in strong dry winds to shred the structure of the thing.

Nothing worked. And the Wardens who were trying it now were clearly singing from the same choir book, so we were going to be well into the second verse soon which would be, in the immortal words of Herman’s Hermits, the same as the first.

Look, I said to Patrick, braced for it, and trailed a very small part of myself through the mist.

A blue, sparkling pocket galaxy flared where I touched. I shook myself—how was it possible for my flesh to creep when I didn’t even have a body? — and watched the shining stuff float free like a festive, toxic cloud. Patrick’s low, pulsing aura backed hastily away from it.

What the hell is it? I asked him. I got a hot orange pulse of alarm in response. Okay, were there actual words with that?

Not ones I’d care to repeat in English, he sent back. I suppose the nearest equivalent would be, I haven’t the vaguest fucking idea. Nor do I have any desire to. And I’m leaving before I have a much closer acquaintance with it. I suggest you get your ass out of here as well. Now.

He vanished instantly. Talk about bugging out— he wasted no time at all. I’d never seen a Dji

I bugged out right on his tail, and followed the contrail back home. We touched down into the newly renovated apartment at the same time, and this time I managed the reconstitution without any R rating. Once I thought of it as math—higher math, but still math—all I had to do was expand the equation of me to include the outfit. Better still, it was simple to vary it. Change a variable, here and there, and you get something suitable for wearing to a star-spangled party. Or a bag lady convention.

The one thing I could not seem to get right—still— was hair. Well, I’d never been a wizard at it in my mortal life, either. Maybe I was just destined to be curly.

Patrick wasn’t thinking about my hair; he was thinking about what he’d seen and backed hastily away from. He pointed a shaking finger at me, couldn’t think of anything to say, and swung around on Lewis, who had arrested a restless pacing to stare at the two of us.

“You!” Patrick snapped. “If you’d just left well enough alone…”

Lewis made no reply. He just resumed pacing.

“How did this get to be Lewis’s fault?” I blurted, and then wished I hadn’t. I mean, obviously, it got to be his fault because he’d ordered me to meddle. Dammit. “Cancel that. What I meant was, what do we do now?”

“Yell for help. Loudly. Repeatedly.” Patrick walked over to the telephone—a tasteful cream-colored unobtrusive one, to replace the Harley-Davidson model he’d been using before—and started dialing. “And then take a very long vacation, someplace else.”

Which I didn’t think would do a damn bit of good, because if this stuff had seeped down this far, it had probably contaminated the higher levels, too. Unless he meant Aruba, which was probably not glitter-free either, but still very nice this time of year.

“I’ll tell the Wardens,” Lewis said. “But I’d like to do it in person. Jo—?”

“Who are you calling?” I asked Patrick, since Lewis hadn’t phrased it in the form of an order and was probably too polite to do it for at least another five minutes. Patrick finished dialing a number that was too long to be to any country on Earth. He didn’t speak, just hung up the phone. I understood instinctively what he’d been doing—not dialing a phone, in any real way, but using the metaphorical human device to send a message through the aetheric, a kind of sympathetic magic. I even knew who he was calling. “Oh, God, you’re calling Jonathan.”

“Who won’t show his face,” Patrick said, with a bitter-lemon twist of his lips that made me wonder just how comfortable that relationship was. “He doesn’t leave his house.”

“Why?”

“Because it doesn’t exist on any of the planes. It’s a kind of…” Patrick paused for thought. “Bubble, I suppose you’d say. It’s for all of our protection. If Jonathan was ever claimed, the consequences… Let’s say they wouldn’t be good. Not good at all.”

So maybe Jonathan’s plush little refuge wasn’t by his choice. Which made me wonder just who really was in charge, among my new friends and family. Politics. Still hate ‘em. Dji

Ten seconds or less later, I felt a kind of shift in the room, like some balance of energy had tipped. It was subtle, but it made me wonder…

… and then Rahel walked out of the master bedroom, examining her talons with a critical, casual grace. She looked up, acknowledged Patrick with a fast, white glint of teeth in her dark-ski

“Love the makeover,” she said. “Since I doubt you grew any taste since last I saw you, I imagine Sistah Snow was behind it. Yes?”

Her smile faded fast when we started talking. A quick trip to the aetheric to show her the contamination, and back down to reality to see Rahel’s completely u

“I’m sorry,” I said. It was totally inadequate.

She didn’t blink. “Not your fault,” she said, which was not at all what I expected to hear. “This is something I have never seen, either. I would have done the same, if I had been given the same order. With perhaps exactly the same result.”

“So what do we do?” Lewis asked.

A short, pregnant silence. Her stare didn’t seem quite so menacing, but it was still as intense as a laser.

“I think,” she said slowly, and transferred the gaze to Lewis, “that perhaps I should consult with Jonathan and find a way to make this right. You stay here. The fewer who travel the aetheric, the better, until we know what the consequences might be.”

“I’ll go,” I said.

Rahel looked at me sharply, and unpleasant recognition dawned in cat-bright eyes. “Ah,” she said. “I did not see it at first, because it changed you very little. But still you’re claimed, aren’t you? And chained.”

“It’s not so bad,” I said. “All the buildup, I was expecting something a lot worse.”

“A good master makes a good servant.” She leaned on the word servant with a heavy weight of disdain. “I don’t think this is at all wise. Lewis, you should know better.”