Thin Air

He smiled thinly. "You don't." His eyes were bright-not Djinn bright, which was a whole order of magnitude weirder, but plenty bright enough to indicate crazy. "I'll freely give you my memories, meat. I want you to know everything. It would please me if you went to your death remembering every painful second of what I did to her."



I thought longingly about the Taser, then deliberately relaxed. "Can't you shut him up?" I asked Venna.



She glanced over the seat at Ashan. "I don't like to keep him unconscious all the time. It's not good for him."



"Like I care."



Venna giggled. I nearly drove off the road. "Sorry," she immediately said, subdued. "Was that wrong? I don't usually try to laugh. I never was human, you know. I never learned."



"Really? What a shock, you seem like such a regular kid." I checked the map. We were making good time, and the lodge that Venna had indicated was our stopping point for the day was only about an hour's drive down the road.



I was starting to feel pretty good about the possibilities when I felt the engine give the tiniest little hitch.



"No," I whispered.



There it was again. Stronger. It sent a shudder through the car.



"No!"



The third time, the whole engine seized up with a clatter of valves. Great. "Venna! Little help!"



But she wasn't looking at me. I wasn't even sure if she'd realized we were coasting to a stop at the side of the road.



"She's found you," said Ashan, and smiled coldly. "They may kill me, but I think they'll kill you, too. And that would be worth my death."



"Venna!" I pumped my foot on the gas, but it was stupid; the car wasn't going anywhere, not without supernatural repairs. "Dammit-"



"He's right," Venna said. Her voice sounded colorless, emotionless, but there was a bright spark of fear in her eyes. "David broke my shields. He must know I was hiding you. They're coming, and they'll kill Ashan. I can't risk that."



I couldn't help but think that it was the threat to Ashan that got her interested, but I didn't have time to think about it; something happened to the car's engine, and it choked, growled, and caught fire again. The car leaped forward. I hastily shifted gears to accommodate.



"Maybe we should talk-" I began.



"No! Drive!" Some invisible force slammed the gas pedal down, and I struggled with the steering wheel as the tires screamed, propelling us down the road at a terrifying rate of speed. "Don't slow down!"



"I'm sorry," Ashan was saying. I had no idea if he was sorry he was in the car, sorry we were all going to die, sorry that he'd done what he'd done to Imara, and to me. Or just a sorry excuse for a human being. It didn't really matter, and I could barely hear him over the shriek of tires on the curve. The Camaro was drifting over the line. I fought the wheel and got her straight by sheer force. Come on, baby. Work with me.



I didn't know what was chasing us, but whatever it was, it was scary enough to panic one badass Djinn, and one who at least used to be.



Sounded good enough for me to panic, too.



I loved driving fast, but this was a little too fast, on a road that snaked like a car commercial and featured oncoming tractor trailers loaded down with raw lumber and giant tree trunks. Venna didn't enhance my ability to keep my cool; she continued to put the mystical hammer down on the Camaro while looking steadily out the rear of the car.



Leaving me with the not very enviable task of steering in overdrive.



"Slow down!" I yelled at her, and tried to downshift. The gear knob didn't budge. I yanked at it anyway. The clutch pedal didn't respond, either, even when I jammed it to the floor. Ditto, brakes. In desperation I yanked the emergency brake, but it flopped uselessly.



"If we slow down, you die," Venna said. She sounded unnaturally calm. I was glad I was too busy to see her face. "So does Ashan."



"News flash: If we don't slow down I'm going to die, and ruin a perfectly beautiful car!" I shot back. I nearly bit my tongue off as the Camaro hit a patch of ice, tires broke traction, and the whole thing started going sideways with a vengeance. "Shit!" I'd heard somewhere that these days, that was most often a person's last word. I didn't want it to be mine, and I fought the skid, begging the car to find some traction.



It did. The tires caught, squealed, bit, and slewed us back in the opposite direction just in time to avoid an oncoming RV. I kept the Camaro off of the steep, narrow shoulder, sprayed gravel, and managed to point it in the right direction.



Another truck barreled past us, buffeting us in its wake. Busy road.



"Venna!" I yelled. "Plan B! Because plan A's not working!"



The engine seized up again. It was catastrophic, a crunching grind of metal followed by the sound of parts coming off, breaking loose, and ripping apart everything in their path. Steam erupted in a white cloud from beneath the hood, and no amount of magical gas pedal pressing was going to get us moving again. Not unless Venna was one hell of a roadside mechanic.



The car lurched, clunking metal, and slowed drastically.



We coasted, moving more and more slowly, and I found a slightly wider spot on the shoulder that would double as an emergency breakdown lane, flipped the hazard lights, and hit the brakes-which, finally, worked.



The road, which had been choked with traffic a few seconds ago, seemed quiet now. The last eighteen-wheeler was disappearing over the ridge, grinding gears, and there didn't seem to be anybody else in view. I was having trouble getting my breath, and I was shaking in reaction to the adrenaline rush.



"Venna, what the hell-" I began, but I didn't even make it to the end of the sentence.



"Get down!" She reached over, grabbed my head, and forced me sideways across the seat, with the safety belt digging into my neck nearly to the choking point.



I forgot to complain about the discomfort of that, though, because I started to feel it, too. A disturbance in the aetheric, one even somebody like me, who was all but a novice, could feel.



There was a sound. I'm not sure what it was like, because there was nothing in my mind I could equate it to; it was a chaos of sharp snapping sounds, thunderous crashes, howls, screams...



Venna threw herself on top of me just before a wall of wind hit the car and flipped it, end over end, through the air.



I blacked out when the car slammed into the ground, which was probably lucky. When I woke up I was out of the wreck, lying on the cold gravel shoulder of the road, and there was a smoking heap of metal a dozen feet away that wasn't immediately recognizable as anything like a motorized vehicle. Certainly not the lovely, gleaming car that I'd been driving. But I saw a glint of unblemished midnight blue paint, and felt a mournful stab of anguish. The poor Camaro wasn't coming back from that with a little body work, even if there'd been a way to save the engine.



When I focused past the wreckage, I forgot to breathe, because the Camaro hadn't taken the brunt of the brute-force attack...and it hadn't exactly been a surgical strike. It was like a bomb made of air had exploded, and the Camaro had been ground zero. The indescribable sound I'd heard had been the howling wind slamming into old-growth trees and snapping them off their bases, or uprooting them completely to crash into their neighbors.



It was a veritable crop circle of downed trees.



I tried to sit up, and something in my back lodged a loud protest. I groaned, told it to shut up, and compromised by rolling over on my side. No sign of Venna or Ashan. No sign of anybody, actually. Just me, a bunch of killed trees, and the dead Camaro puffing black smoke into the empty sky.



"Venna?" My voice sounded thin. I tried again, but it didn't work any better. Mindful of my back pain, I rolled to my hands and knees, then got to my feet. Gonna be sore in the morning, I thought crazily.



Somebody had destroyed almost a quarter mile of forest to try to kill me. Being sore was the least of my problems, and if Venna hadn't acted as my Djinn air bag...



I wondered if Ashan was still in the twisted wreckage of the car.



"Venna?"



A car topped the ridge, heading toward the devastated area. No, a truck, an SUV, and there was another one behind it. It was moving slowly because of the debris, but steadily enough. I didn't want any Good Samaritans right now; I wasn't sure I could protect them against whatever had just put the unholy smackdown on me. No, actually I was sure...I was sure I couldn't. My heart sank as I saw it was a family, and they slowed radically as they got close to the crash scene.



"Keep going!" I yelled as the father rolled down his window. I forced myself to get up to my hands and knees, then to my feet. I managed not to black out doing it. "I'm fine! Don't stop; it's not safe!"



He seemed like a nice enough guy, but he had kids in the back of his truck, and a wife who looked hugely pregnant, and I did not want their lives on my conscience. "I'll call nine-one-one!" he yelled. I waved frantically, trying to shoo them on by sheer force of will, and it seemed to work.



He negotiated his way around the maze of downed trees and got the hell out.



I remembered there'd been a second SUV behind it, and turned to look.



It had stopped about fifty feet away-a large black SUV, tinted windows, very classy. I thought I saw something shimmer on the paint, and blinked, then went into the aetheric and saw a stylized sun symbol on the door not visible to the naked human eye. It was where an official seal would have been for a government vehicle.



Wardens.



I backed up out of the center of the road and looked around for some kind of cover, but of course there wasn't any. I didn't feel like cowering in a ditch, especially when they'd undoubtedly already spotted me. Maybe they're friendly, I thought.



Yeah, and maybe the next Djinn I met was going to look just like Brad Pitt and grant me three wishes, too.



The SUV eased forward very slowly. It crunched to a stop a few dozen feet away and idled its engine. Nobody got out. I couldn't see inside. I felt an odd sensation, as if every hair on my body were stirring-static electricity, maybe.



"Let's get this over with," I muttered. "What're you going to do, stare me to death?"



The driver's side of the SUV opened, and David got out. He looked fantastically good to me in that moment, and I let out a sigh of relief and took a step toward him...



And stopped, because there was no welcome in his face. Nothing but blank fury.



"David?"



I felt the energy gathering above me, and flung up a hand to catch it before it could form itself into a deadly strike. I wasn't sure what he'd intended, but the devastation around me was proof that somebody had removed the safety switches on this game. I let the power bleed harmlessly off in a thousand smaller tendrils that manifested in gusts of wind, blowing my hair across my face, then switching directions and streaming it back like a flag.



"Give up," David said flatly. "You don't have a choice."



"David, you don't understand-"



This time I wasn't quick enough to stop him. The aftermath of the lightning strike left me blinking, half-blind, concussed, and with an ache on my right side that felt suspiciously like first-degree burns. I smelled something burning, feared it was me, and rolled, trying to smother the flames.



When I writhed around to try to spot what David was doing, he was just...standing there. Watching me. I couldn't read his expression, but he wasn't exactly racing to my rescue.



There were other people climbing out of the SUV. I recognized only one of them: Lewis. My onetime savior looked like he was badly regretting that decision. I stared at him, trying to guess what he was thinking, but like David, he'd closed himself off.



Neither of them liked being here; that was all I could tell.



And both of them were more than prepared to kill.



Chapter Fourteen



THIRTEEN



"Guys," I said, and held out my hands, palms open and out, showing that I had nothing up my tattered, smoking sleeves. "There's no need for this. I was coming to you, okay? I wasn't running. I'm not going to run. And by the way, you owe me for a really nice car."



I was standing up to them because, hey, not like I had a choice, anyway. There were four Wardens and one Djinn, and any one of them could have probably taken me down without breaking a nail, even if I hadn't been knocked half-silly by the crash and the lightning bolt.



"Down on your knees," Lewis said. "Do it. If I have to ask again, we'll kill you and get it over with."



Lewis had a gun in his hand. Not one to neglect the merely mortal advantages, apparently, and that just gave them another way to bring me down if all the mystical mojo failed to work. If Venna was biding her time, she was biding a little too long. I had to choose.



I held up my hands in an attitude of surrender and, wincing, got down on my knees. I laced my hands behind my head.



Lewis exchanged a glance with David. Clearly they were the two alphas in the pack; the other Wardens were along for the ride. Although it wouldn't do me any favors to assume they weren't capable in their own right, especially since they'd taken up positions surrounding me. "Facedown," Lewis said. "Hands behind your back."



"Dammit, road oil is never coming out of these pants," I said. "Lewis, it's me. Joanne. What the hell are you doing?"



"Correcting a mistake," he said. "Down or die. Your choice."



Well, when he put it that way...I pitched forward to my hands and knees, lowered myself to the gritty, oily road, and put my hands behind my back.



Somebody-not Lewis and not David-was on me instantly, digging a sharp knee into the small of my back and ignoring my yelp of protest. Plastic zip-ties slipped around my wrists and hissed tight.