Chill Factor

"You know, there are three kinds of waves associated with earthquakes," I said, in an attempt at nonchalance. "P waves, S waves, L waves. See, the sonic boom is caused by the primary waves-"



"And the ancient Chinese believed it was the dragon shifting in its sleep," David interrupted me. "None of that is very useful right now."



Again, he had a point. "Okay. What if I order you to stop it?" I asked.



David shook his head, looking down at the continued waves moving through the ground. "Power against power. It would only make things worse. I can't oppose him directly."



"So it is Jonathan." As if I had any doubt. We'd been playing keep-away with the state of Nevada for nearly three days, circling around. And every time, there'd been something to stop us. Hail the size of basketballs that I'd barely been able to keep from smashing the Viper into scrap. Lightning storms. Wind walls. You name it, we'd run into it.



And from it.



I'd spent a considerable amount of my time and energy fixing the careful balance of the ecosystem. Kevin/Jonathan didn't seem to give a crap that tossing fireballs at us might seriously screw up the entire matter-and-energy equation, or that whipping up a tornado might rip apart the stability of the weather half a continent away. Kevin I could understand; he was a kid, and kids don't think of consequences. But Jonathan... I knew he had the capacity to balance the scales. He just hadn't.



Hanging in midair wasn't getting us anywhere. I sucked in a deep breath and said, "Plan B, I guess."



"I think we're midway through the alphabet," David replied. "Jo, I really thought we could get through to Las Vegas, but we're not even coming close. Maybe we should-"



"I'm not giving up, so don't even think about saying it."



I couldn't give up. Kevin and Jonathan were a partnership made in hell, and it was my fault. I'd given Kevin the opportunity to do that. Also, I should have been able to stop Kevin from stealing the powers of the most gifted Warden in the world, my friend, Lewis Levander Orwell.



So I was not giving up now. The cost could be incalculable in lives and property, and one of them I knew personally. Lewis would die. He was dying right now, the same way he'd die if somebody came along and ripped important biological parts out of him that his body needed to keep functioning. Lewis was so powerful magically that magic was part of him. He couldn't do without it.



However, the trouble was that Kevin now possessed so much power that David and I-and any other poor, stupid, magically talented idiot trying to make it to Las Vegas-were as obvious and vulnerable as black bugs on a pristine white floor. No place to hide. Nowhere to go, except onward, hoping we'd be able to avoid the giant's crushing power.



We had, so far. But clearly they were just playing with us.



Two



I had a dreadful thought. "Is there anybody else on this road?" Kevin, I knew, wouldn't go out of his way to rack up civilian casualties, but I was far from convinced he'd go out of his way to avoid it, either.



"Not in range. I can dampen the vibrations a little, at the outskirts, and he's focusing it right beneath us. No one's been hurt." The unspoken yet made me wince.



"How long can he keep it up?"



David shot me a look. "You're kidding."



"As long as he wants?"



"Exactly." From the desert-dry tone, David was feeling a little inadequate. "We'll have to wait him out." Again.



"So," I said, and forced a little lightness into my voice, "how will we pass the time?"



David wasn't in the mood for banter. He watched the road writhe like a living thing below us and said, "Catch some rest while you can. I'll keep watch."



Not exactly what I was hoping for, but I got his point. I was tired, and unlike David, I was only human these days.



Not that I was bitter about that, or anything.



Much.



Weather is nothing but the practical application of quantum mechanics. There's no way to make quantum mechanics simple, but ultimately it boils down to the interactions of particles so small they make atoms look big. Everything is divisible by something else, down to particles so small the human mind can't grasp them or even measure them in any way except by the effects they leave behind. Particles behave like waves. Nothing is what it seems.



Controlling quantum interactions is a macro/micro science, or magic, or art-or the true marriage of all of those. When you're controlling the weather, manipulation occurs at subatomic levels, gaining or losing energy, annihilating quarks against antiquarks or protons against antiprotons, and it's both destructive and clean. It can mean the difference between a sunny day and a gentle spring rain, or a thunderstorm and a killer F5 tornado. It can mean flood or drought. Life or death.



It's a lot of responsibility, and I'm afraid the Wardens don't really take it all that seriously sometimes. We're human, after all. Like everybody else, we've got lives, and families, and all the normal human complement of sins and vices. Hey, nobody likes getting the four a.m. call from the office, especially if it's to fix somebody else's mess.



And sins, yes, we've got plenty of those. Greed, for one. Greed and power have always been really good bedfellows, but greed and magic are the deadliest of evil twins.



I'd had a few brushes with how absolutely power could corrupt. The Wardens were built on solid, idealistic principles, but somewhere along the way some of us-maybe even a lot of us-had lost the mission. There were a few faithful, altruistic ones left (I didn't dare count myself among them).



It's never been my job, or my nature, to worry about whether or not what I was doing was right in the grand scheme of things. I'm a foot soldier. A doer, not a planner. I like being useful and doing my job well, and so far as lasting satisfaction goes, owning a killer wardrobe and bitchin' shoes doesn't hurt.



I never wanted to be in an ethical struggle. It shouldn't be my job to decide who's right, who's wrong, who lives, who dies. It shouldn't be anybody's job, but most especially not mine. I'm not deep. I'm not philosophical. I'm a girl who likes fast cars and fast men and expensive clothes, not necessarily in that order.



But you do the job you're handed.



I couldn't sleep. I mean, could you? Hanging in midair over an earthquake, waiting for the other shoe to drop? Even as exhausted as I was, fear kept me from closing my eyes for more than five seconds at a time.



So we were hanging there, watching the road ripple in the bright merciless sun, when something occurred to me and made me sit up straight, blinking.



"Can I fly this thing?" I asked. As if we weren't already hanging a ton of steel in midair without benefit of an airplane engine. D'oh! "I mean, move the car to another highway. Without them knowing."



That got David's complete attention, with a slight puzzled frown. "It's not exactly built for gliding, but yes, I suppose. Why?"



"Because if you can keep an illusion on the aetheric of us staying here, I can move the car with wind power to another route, and maybe we can gain some time before he figures it out." I hesitated, then asked the question I'd been afraid to put into words. "He could kill us, right? Anytime he wants."



David's eyes were mercilessly clear. "He could try. Eventually, he'd succeed. I can't fight Jonathan power-for-power. But he doesn't want to kill you. If he did, you'd be dead already."



I noticed the change in pronoun. I was the one in danger of dying. The worst that could happen to David was that while the car was being crushed like a beer can and my bones shattered, the bottle in my pocket would break and he would be set free. Jonathan would no doubt consider that a bonus. Which, leaving aside how I felt about David and hoped he felt about me, wasn't an unreasonable point of view. I wasn't exactly comfortable with the whole master-slave dynamic of things, either.



"Can you hold him off?" I asked.



"For a while. If he attacks directly."



"Long enough for me to-"



"Save yourself," David finished. "In a game like this, you're playing Kevin, not Jonathan. I can block Jonathan, but the strategy has to be misdirection, not direct defense. We have to keep moving. If we let them pin us down, we're finished."



I nodded, noting little details: white lines around David's mouth, tension around his eyes. This was hard for him. Very hard. The scope of his friendship with the Djinn named Jonathan stretched back to an age when they were both human and breathing, dying together on a battlefield in the dim mists of prehistory. Saved by a force so primal it could suck the life out of thousands, maybe millions of living things to create a creature like Jonathan-a living, thinking being composed of pure power. Even among the Djinn, he was something special, and that was no small statement.



And now he was on the wrong side. At least, the wrong side of me.



"We can't hurt him," I said. David shot me a surprised glance. "Right?"



"I don't know of much that could. And nothing that you'd want to mess with."



"But he could hurt you."



"He won't."



"He could." The reason he could hurt David was, essentially, me. David had spent his power freely to pull me back from the dead and put me in a Djinn form; he still hadn't entirely recovered from that.



In the tradition of lovers everywhere, we didn't talk about it.



David shrugged, glanced down at the undulating I-70, and said, "We'd better get moving, if we're going to move. It's just a matter of time before it occurs to Kevin to order Jonathan to swat us down."



That was the saving grace of all this-we had the power of a nuclear weapon in the hands of a petulant child, but at least he wasn't what you might call a great thinker. Jonathan, though bound to serve him, wasn't bound to give him advice, and so far hadn't taken it upon himself to act as general in this fight. Thank God.



I nodded, took in a breath, and shut my eyes. Drifted out of my body and up to the higher plane of existence we among the Wardens knew as the aetheric level... the plane where the physical dropped away, and only the energies of the world were displayed. Human senses could see only certain spectrums; when I'd been a Djinn, the aetheric had shown me a hell of a lot more, and deeper, but I was trying to be satisfied with what I had.



Just now, the aetheric was showing the road below me lit up like a giant glowing runway, glittering with power that three-D'ed down below the surface deep into bedrock. The little idiot was destabilizing the whole region. I couldn't stop him; my powers related to wind and water, not earth. Somebody else would have to balance those scales. In fact, somebody's cell phone in the Warden's organization was probably ringing right now.



Time to make the kind of trouble that was my specialty. I reached out into the still, arid air, went high, carbonated air molecules in one place and stilled them in another. The by-product of that is heat. That's all wind is, the interaction of hot and cold, of hot air rising and colder air rushing to fill the void that nature really does abhor. I rolled down the car window and felt the first freshening breeze blow warm against my cheek; a little more energy and the breeze became a stiff wind. I felt the car rock lightly.



"Get ready," I said aloud. "I'm going to have to push pretty hard."



"He won't know we're moving," David promised.



I increased the range of heat, focusing the power of the sun in a massive surge, and saw the wind shear building up on the aetheric. It came boiling at us in an invisible, syrup-thick wave.



It hit Mona broadside, spun us around, and then we were moving.



I yelped, tightened my grip on the steering wheel, and felt the sickening sense of falling for a full two seconds before we steadied out again, moving fast. I stretched myself farther on the aetheric, spinning atoms, holding chains of force together. This thing was as slick and slippery as glass.



To magical eyes, the halogen-bright glow of the car stayed where we'd been. It was a complicated illusion, requiring massive amounts of directed power that had to be hidden and buried in the natural processes occurring around us; I could feel that power pouring out of me like blood from an open wound. David was amplifying and redirecting it, but it was at a huge cost to both of us.



"How long?" I managed to stammer, and held out my hand. He grabbed hold. His skin was fever-hot.



"Half an hour, maybe," he replied. No sign of strain in his voice, but I felt a fine vibration through his skin, felt it in the bond between us. "Don't worry about that. Worry about the wind."



He was right. The kind of power I was using was treacherous, all too easy to go wrong. Wind has a kind of intelligence-slow, instinctual, but predatory. The stronger the wind, the more cunningly it can manifest, which is why working with major weather systems is reserved for the most powerful of Wardens. It's not just physics. It's lion taming.



And I could feel this particular lion starting to lick its chops in anticipation.



Below us, the Utah desert moved in lazy, deceptively gentle increments. We were traveling through the sky at better than a hundred miles an hour-slow for a plane, but dangerously fast for the air currents I was handling. David was holding Mona steady. I hoped he also had a little attention to spare to keep us unnoticed from the ground; seeing a Dodge Viper do a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in the desert sky might be a little hard to explain, even for UFO nuts.



I spotted a small, likely looking back road at the edge of the horizon, and concentrated hard on slowing us down. That involved a risky and complicated series of adjustments-cooling the air behind us, warming the air in front, creating a collision of forces that would stall out the wind shear. Luckily, there wasn't enough moisture in the air to have to worry about creating a storm. I had to bleed off the buildup of energy as well, because that had to go somewhere, and leaving it roaming around looking for a place to discharge was a rookie's mistake. I crawled it over telephone lines in bursts of blue plasma to discharge it into the earth.