Windfall

“Can you make fire?” It was Kevin’s native power, and he’d always been strong in it. Plus, fire was one of the easiest of the states of energy to manipulate, so long as it didn’t get large enough to develop any kind of sentience.

He nodded. “Stupid, though. No ventilation. Kill us all. Lewis said there’s a limited supply of air in here.”

“Trust me. I’ll get us air.”

He made a weak, theatrical, one-handed gesture at the sand behind me, and presto, a fire exploded into red-yellow-orange glory. Burning up the limited oxygen we had available.

My turn. Concentrate, I ordered myself, and shut my eyes.

Air molecules, turning and burning and twisting apart. Being destroyed and reformed. Heat shimmering as the air column rose toward the sand ceiling. I could still see the pale smear overhead where the sand itself was partly porous—the trap door where Lewis had pulled me down. It was gradually trickling down and sagging in on itself. I could see glimpses of black sky overhead. The heat would help speed that process, open the hole further. Widen the air molecules between the grains of sand.

You can do this. You have to do this.

I’d done it before. It was a party trick, something Wardens did to amuse each other during boring patches. Fire and air, interacting. I could do it in my sleep.

Usually.

I took a deep breath and threw everything I had into the effort, and stepped up on top of the fire.

The air cushion felt squishy and unsteady, like a waterbed. Not at all the firm platform it should have been. And it was warm. Verging on, well, hot. And these were not shoes I wanted melted.

I exerted pressure on the hardened layer of air under my feet to pull it tighter together. This would never work unless the heat could push against it…

I started rising. Slowly. I opened my eyes and gasped as the fire’s energy started cooking through my ru

Hang on.

Up. Slowly. Dammit, a year ago I’d have done this in five seconds flat.

The heat was intense now, and I was sure my shoes were melting. I smelled burning rubber. Maybe something else, something worth panicking over.

The sky crawled slowly closer, the walls of the sand pit shifting and sagging around me. The thing was starting to lose its coherence. If I didn’t do this right, if I didn’t get help, Kevin and Lewis were going to be buried alive…

I realized I was panting, partly from the relentless pressure of the heat, partly from the pain that was quickly turning to agony. It felt as if flames were licking the backs of my calves. The air under my feet softened like pudding, threatening to drop me the seven feet I’d traveled back down into the flames.

I sank my teeth into my lip, raised my hands to the sky, and chilled the air above me. Blew the molecules far apart, slowed their movement, dropped the temperature at least twenty degrees. Easy stuff. Child’s play. I could barely manage it, and when I did, it felt as if I were seconds from an aneurysm.

Intense pain in my head, shortness of breath. I tasted blood in the back of my throat.

I rose faster. Faster.

I didn’t dare look down because I knew my feet were burning now, dear God, it felt as if the flesh was already roasted off and now the muscles were cooking, but if that were true then I wouldn’t feel anything once the nerves died…

Hang on. Hang on. Hang on.

I clung to the vision of Kevin’s parchment-pale face, of the blood pouring out of his side, and then, suddenly, my face was passing ground level and I was out.

I pitched forward, pushed with the last of my strength, rolled and kept on rolling until I splashed into a shockingly cold surf. A wave curled over me and I heard a hiss as my smoking shoes hit water.

I breathed liquid, coughed, choked, tasted salt and decay, and rested my face on cold, wet sand with a relief so intense it felt like orgasm.

“Son of a bitch!” A pair of hands rolled me over on my back, and I blinked and focused on the barely visible glimmer of Armando Rodriguez’s face. For the first time, he had an easily readable expression: shocked. “What the hell was that?”

Like I could explain. I coughed salt, gagged water, and croaked, “Two people down there in the hole; one’s hurt bad. Get help, now.”

He had a gun in his hand, which wasn’t useful. He put it away and came up with a cell phone, dialed, and gave the rescue bulletin.

“Get an ambulance,” I added. He nodded and kept talking.

I squirmed up to a sitting position and peeled my melted jogging shoes off of my feet. They were pink and tender, but not Cajun-fried.

God, that was going to hurt tomorrow.

“We can’t wait,” I said. “Find some rope, blankets we can tie together, anything. Run!”

He raced back the way we’d come, heading for the glow of headlights that marked the three kids tailgating on some unlucky parent’s SUV. I squirmed back over to the hole. It was widening.

“Kevin!” I yelled. “Help’s on the way!”

No answer. I scrambled back from the hole and looked around. Rodriguez was MIA.

I couldn’t see anybody else on the murky stretch of beach. Time was ru

Call David, my worst angels whispered in my ear. Call him. You fixed him before. You can fix him again. Ashan wasn’t even hurt all that badly. Was this how it had started for Patrick and his Ifrit love? One little concession at a time, until he was killing his own kind to give her one more small slice of life?

Until she was willing to settle for that kind of existence, just to stay with him?

No. No, no, no, never, and David wouldn’t stand for it.

“Rahel!” I screamed it at the top of my lungs. “Rahel, where the hell are you? Get your ass back here, I need you now!”

A flash of lightning illuminated the beach, a long blue-white streak that raced across the sky and shattered into forks that stretched across half the horizon.

Spectacular.

Those clouds hugging the ocean looked larger.

In the next hyperactinic flash, I saw someone coming out of the water. Tall, perfect carriage, dark skin glistening with water drops. Rahel was as magnificent as a sea goddess, and her eyes were burning so brightly they were like suns.

She came out of the curl of a wave and collapsed to her hands and knees on wet sand. Her body was solid to the knees, swirling fog below. Barely coherent. She looked like shit—beaten, exhausted, ripped, and bloodied. The blood was metaphorical for her. She hadn’t become human; she’d just become unable to repair damage to a physical avatar.

Rahel hadn’t flounced off in a fit of pique and stayed away deliberately; she’d probably meant to come back and help. But the dramatic gesture got interrupted along the way by a serious fight. The kind you came out of injured, or dead.

Rahel was as tough as any of the Dji

Or Jonathan.

Either way, not good news right now.

I crawled toward her. She looked up, expression turning hard, and I stopped.

“They’re coming,” she said. “I couldn’t hold them back. Be ready.”

“Who?”

Too late to matter. I could sense it coming in the real world, in the aetheric, even blinded and weak as I was. A gigantic disturbance, headed this way.

Out in the darkness, I saw shapes moving. Indistinct, but definite.

“Joa

Sounded human. With a gigantic effort—and I wasn’t sure how many more of those I could even stand to attempt—I went up into Oversight and saw at least ten flares of power gathering around me and Rahel. Wardens. Holy shit. How many had Paul sent to put me into custody? How hard did he really think I could fight?