Firestorm

Not good news.

I felt it fix on me with an atavistic shudder of horror.

As I watched, the Demon Mark was growing larger, sucking in energy and power from the aetheric flow, like a tick hitting an artery. I didn't dare hope that it would gorge until it exploded, though. Something far, far worse would happen; I just knew it would. Nothing good ever happened to me with a Demon Mark around.

It occurred to me that there was a reason the Demon Mark might come swimming in here… This stuff was blood, in a sense. Lifeblood, pure, the real deal.

The blood of the Earth itself.

When these parasites were out in the regular world, they'd latch on to anything with a trace of power, trying to stay alive—Wardens and Dji

Wonderful. I'd worked out the biology of the Demon Mark. That was helpful.

Not.

It drifted my way.

I screamed like a little girl and started to head blindly away from the twisting, misshapen thing. Trying to move through this gray fog of power was like swimming through gelatin. God, I hated those monsters, hated them with a sweating, blinding passion that owed nothing at all to logic. It wasn't coming after me, not this time. It had found its own, personal paradise. Right?

Right.

Well, then, fine and dandy. I could just leave it to munch, and go on about my business…

No. I couldn't. If a Demon Mark was capable of hatching an adult Demon out of the imperfect fuel of a human or Dji

That a

Nobody but me, anyway.

I took a quick poll. The vote was two to one, bravery to self-preservation. I really needed to work on evening that one up, one of these days.

I needed a way to trap the Demon Mark. I had nothing on me… nothing but my clothes, my shoes.

Well, anything was better than nothing.

I breathlessly stripped off my shirt, braced myself, and began swimming slowly toward the floating Demon Mark.

It got uglier the closer I came, the kind of ugly that made my stomach twist and quiver, and my whole body shake violently. It didn't seem to notice me at all. It was at least twice as large as it had been when I'd seen it enter the barrier, pulsating with an unclean hunger. At this rate, it'd be knitting little Demon booties in just a couple of minutes.

Oh, I really didn't want to do this.

I threw my shirt out like a net, covered the twisting shape of the Demon Mark, and yanked the sleeves together in a knot. It wouldn't hold the thing long—maybe not at all. I began swimming for all I was worth, heading for what I thought was the nearest way out, though everything looked the same now, disorienting and endless. I kicked grimly. At least I could breathe, though the intoxicating, slightly sweet smell of this place made my head spin.

I glanced back at the shirt I was towing. The Demon Mark's black tentacles flowed out of the seams, testing its prison. It was content to stay there for now, because it was still feeding. That complacency wouldn't last.

Without warning, I fetched up against something cool and unyielding, and slapped my hand against it in frustration. I felt it give, and slapped harder. My palm stung from the impact, but it pushed at least two or three inches in.

I'd found the way out.

I concentrated all my will, all my force, and kicked.

Half of me slid through the barrier, instantly and bitterly cold and wet; I screamed in frustration, because I had no leverage to get the rest of me through. I wiggled. That gained me maybe an inch. Two inches. I pulled harder, and my left hand, and the bundle of the shirt, tumbled out into the thin, wind-whipped air.

The Demon Mark went insane when its food supply cut off, and the shirt might as well not have been there.

It seethed right through the fabric with lightning speed and wrapped tentacles around my hand.

I screamed and reached for power, but what I had was useless for fighting something like this. I remembered how it felt—the sickening, invasive throb of the thing squirming down my throat. The agony as it set up its tentacles buried deep inside, feeding from me and pumping up my body's production of power, until my body simply couldn't survive.

No. Never. I don't mind dying, but I'm not dying of this.

I grabbed it with my bare right hand and threw it. Tried to, anyway, but it stuck to my skin, pulsing, changing, shifting. Crawling and writhing.

I screamed again, soundlessly, trying desperately to shake it off. I could feel it testing layers of skin, trying to find a way in. It could burrow, of course, but it was lazy and fat. It wanted an easier path.

I'm not going to make it.

"We are sealing the break!" a voice shouted, startlingly close to my ear, and I felt something haul at me with so much strength, I felt tendons creak in my joints. I slid greasily the rest of the way through the barrier, still frantically trying to scrape the Demon Mark off my hand.

Whoever had done me the favor of pulling me free let go as soon as I was out of the milky column of power. Might have been Rahel; it was hard to tell because the night was a muddle of rain, lightning, thick spongy cumulonimbus clouds piled into an iron-colored anvil.

I hung there for an instant, and then I felt gravity take hold. I fell like Wile E. Coyote holding an ACME anvil, flailing, screaming, my hair snapping like a wet black ba

I scraped together enough for a breath. Not enough to cushion my fall, and I was still accelerating. I knew enough about terminal velocity not to want to experience it firsthand.

I was enveloped by a chilly mist as I entered the cloud base, and was buffeted by increasingly strong winds as the atmosphere thickened around me. I spread out my arms and legs, trying to slow myself as much as possible, and started the hard work of creating a parachute. Oh, it's theoretically possible. We'd talked about it once in a long-ago classroom, and it hadn't seemed so tough back then, when I was younger and not free-falling out of the sky.

I hoped these weren't low-lying clouds. If they were, by the time I had visibility, it might be too late… but deploying my "parachute" too early would be just as bad, because the turbulence would start to rip into it as soon as I created the complex structure of fixed molecules. Theoretically, the technique I was going to use would allow the air itself to form into flexible material, and act like a gliding parachute.

Theoretically.

I gasped in another shallow breath of air and saw my left hand in another white-hot flash of lightning. The Demon Mark was still clinging to it, wet and black, seeping slowly into my flesh through the pores. Once it was under my skin, it could go anywhere. Sink its tentacles into my brain and lungs and heart. Embed itself so thoroughly that even trying to remove it would mean madness and death.