Chill Factor (20 page)

‘I hardly think that your way—’ Ashworth started in.

‘I hardly think you’re in any position to tell me how this is going to go,’ I said. ‘I’m the only one of you that Jonathan will let get in spitting distance of the kid.’

They all paused, looking at me. I put my hand over the warm spark that lived inside me, over the promise of life that I could use to deliver death.

‘I’m the only one Jonathan won’t kill on sight,’ I said. ‘If I can manage it, I’ll get Jonathan’s bottle and stop this the easy way. If not…’

I looked at Quinn. Quinn nodded.

‘…there’s always the easier way.’

I told them to leave, afterward. Quinn and the rest of the League of Totally Ordinary Gentlemen trooped out. I spent the rest of the night curled up against Lewis’s dreaming heat, listening to the steady, deep, even rhythm of his breathing. Sometime in there I faded into chaotic dreams of fire and flood, earthquake and storm, and me standing naked as the world eroded around me.

I woke up with Lewis spooned close behind me, still asleep but clearly awake in one part of his anatomy. I eased out from under the covers, went into the bathroom, and did the morning business. I struggled with the brush for ten minutes and was rewarded with shining body waves of dark hair that cascaded down past my shoulders.

Couldn’t possibly be a bad day, if my hair cooperated like that.

I contemplated the blue beaded dress, but it was a little formally call-girlish for this early in the a.m. Back into the knit top and short skirt. My legs needed shaving. I attended to that, thanking the Luxor for the gift of personal safety razors, and finished up with a coating of lotion.

As I was smoothing on the last handful across the top of my thigh, I noticed I had company. Lewis was standing there watching me, eyes half-closed but not in the least sleepy. He’d put on his blue jeans, but nothing else…very sexy. I couldn’t help but take in the view.

‘Hey,’ I said, and took my bare foot down from the counter. I hastily wiped the extra lotion across hands and arms and tugged my skirt down to a more modest level. ‘You’re alive.’

‘Barely,’ he agreed, and indicated the toilet. I vacated, closing the door on my way out, and fished my shoes out from under the bed. When he flushed and opened the door again, I was sitting on the bed, waiting. He sat down heavily in a chair and rested his head in his hands. ‘I’m tired, Jo. Really tired.’

‘Yo, boy, join the club.’

‘I’m going to get you killed, you know.’

‘Yeah, well, you look like you’re going to drop dead at any minute, so I’ll try not to hold it against you.’

He wasn’t smiling. ‘You were right. This was my idea. Mine and David’s. We knew you’d never get to Kevin alive…I came up with the idea of stopping your heart temporarily, transporting you past the wards, and reviving you. He didn’t like it much. He liked the idea of sending you in to Jonathan even less.’

I remembered thinking how easy it would be for Jonathan to swat me like a fly. That would put an end to David’s divided loyalties. ‘He found a way to protect me.’ The hot spark tingled under the press of my fingers on my abdomen. ‘We
will
be having a conversation about that later.’

Lewis looked at me through latticed fingers. ‘What?’

‘Nothing.’ I sucked in a breath and let it out. ‘So. Good move, getting me inside, but why didn’t you use your business-suit buddies?’

‘We’ve tried. Kevin’s stopped us cold, and he’s been sucking power at a faster and faster rate. We can’t balance what’s happening anymore. It’s out of control. That’s why we have to do this, Jo. It isn’t that I want—’ He broke off, shook his head roughly. ‘This isn’t what I ever wanted. And using you to do it…’

‘Sucks,’ I said crisply. ‘Well. There you go. Anything else I should know?’

He leant back in his chair and regarded me through bloodshot, half-lidded eyes. ‘Yeah. Djinn are supposed to be returned to the vaults when Wardens die. There’s always been attrition – some bottles breaking, some lost. But two hundred years ago, there were fifteen hundred Djinn known to the Wardens. Do you know how many there are today?’

I frowned at him. ‘No. Why does this matter?’

‘Because there are fewer than six hundred in the vaults and assigned in the field.’

‘How many showed up free?’

‘Maybe three hundred of them. Now, there will be losses. Bottles get buried, sunk in the ocean, there’s predation by the Ifrit. Even then, there have to be a lot missing, and most of them have disappeared in the last six years. I think that’s why
Jonathan’s resorted to this. He either believes we’re behind it, or that we don’t care.’

‘So somebody’s stealing from the
Wardens
? And they don’t know?’

‘They suspect.’ Lewis rubbed his face as if he were trying to rub away exhaustion. ‘Marion’s been investigating. I helped her for a while. It all comes back here. To Las Vegas, or nearby. We can’t find the bottles, since they don’t show up on the aetheric, but there’s this sense of…’ He hunted for the word. ‘
Evil
. Jonathan manipulated the kid into bringing him here. He’s looking for the same thing we are. He’s just more ruthless about finding it.’

‘So our enemy isn’t Kevin.’

He shook his head. ‘Make no mistake, it is. Kevin’s out of control, and Jonathan doesn’t care what kind of damage the kid does, so long as he’s left free to do what he likes. In fact, Jonathan’s using the kid as a conduit. It all comes down to the kid. We have to stop him.’

‘And the missing Djinn?’

‘One thing at a time.’

I nodded. ‘OK. How do I get over to the Bellagio?’

He gave me a genuinely sweet smile. ‘Nice day for a walk, or so I hear.’

‘You’re coming with?’

‘I’m not letting you out of my sight.’ When I raised my eyebrows silently, he echoed the gesture.
‘David will kill me if I let something happen to you.’

I cleared my threat. ‘Yeah…speaking of…is he…’

‘Around?’ Lewis’s smile turned positively cruel. ‘You’d know more about that than I would. We work together, sometimes – doesn’t mean we’re the best of friends. Especially not where you’re concerned. If he knew I’d just spent the night here—’

‘Hey! Nothing happened!’

‘Only because I’m at the point of death.’ He clutched his chest and mimed an elaborate choking. Except it wasn’t really funny. He
was
at the point of death. ‘Sorry. It’s sort of weirdly amusing from this end. It’s the first time in my life you considered me safe to sleep with.’

I lowered my gaze to contemplate the practical. As in, shoes. I had the left one on and was toeing the right when I heard a rumble of thunder, and felt the flashover of power. Hot and fast.

I looked up. Lewis was already heading for the windows. ‘Were we expecting rain?’ I asked.

‘Not in the forecast.’

‘That doesn’t exactly feel natural…’

I stopped, because he hauled back the curtains, and we both saw it at the same time. There was a storm forming outside. A
big
goddamn storm, purple-black, swelling like a tumour. The anvil cloud stretched dizzyingly high, a grey-white tower
thrusting up practically to the troposphere. The amount of power in that monster was growing exponentially.

Worse, it had rotation.
Big
rotation. I watched the edges that were rapidly expanding to the horizon, counting seconds and cloud motion.

‘Shit,’ I breathed. ‘I don’t think we’d better plan on walking to the Bellagio.’

Lightning laddered down from the massive clouds in three or four places, shattering like neon glass against the ground and buildings. I saw the hot blue flares of transformers bursting somewhere near the edge of the city.

Lewis cursed softly under his breath, then said, ‘I can’t
see
anything. What is it?’ Without his powers, he was barred from the aetheric. I rose up and took a look.

Not good. Not good at all.

‘Tell me it’s somebody we can stop,’ he said.

It wasn’t. In fact, it wasn’t
somebody
at all.

It was
nobody
.

Weather is mathematical, in a certain very basic sense…warming and cooling the air simply means controlling the speed at which atomic structures vibrate. In any normal situation, no matter how dire, atomic structures vibrate in harmony, in groups, like a grand and glorious choir. In storm situations, there is dissonance.

This was complete and utter noise. There weren’t
bands of heat and cold; there weren’t
winds
, exactly. Or if there were, they couldn’t sustain themselves; they began and died and shifted in the blink of an eye. Hot and cold vibrations were jamming up against each other at the subatomic level, not just as a leading edge of an event, but interwoven.

‘What the
hell
…’ I whispered, appalled. This wasn’t nature gone crazy. This was nature without any mind at all.

Over at McCarren Airport, a wide-bodied jet angled in for a landing; I saw it seem to stutter as a wind shear hit it. The tail came up; the nose came down.

‘No! Jo, do something!’ Lewis yelled, and slammed his hand flat against the window.

I threw myself up fast to the aetheric, saw the chaos and destruction raging. I focused on the plane. It was full of terrified screaming people, burning like straw in Oversight; I had to ignore that and try to make sense of what was attacking the area around it.

Chaos. No sense to it at all…

I felt a harsh ripping flash, and saw particle chains snapping together.

Lightning hit the plane dead-on, frying the electronics with a hard white
pop
of energy, a fountain on the aetheric that just further contributed to the mania.

I reached out and crammed together a layer of air beneath the plane, forced it to behave like normal air under normal circumstances. It took a huge amount of effort, and I felt the strain vibrating through me like stretched steel wire. I propped the plane with an updraft, smoothed the air around it, and fought back another wind shear that attacked from the side. The plane was heavy, and the wind kept fighting back, trying to slip away, swirl like a matador’s cape. It
wanted
to rip the wings off of that 737. I forced a straight runway of calm air ahead of the screaming engines.

I was shaking all over. Human bodies couldn’t channel this kind of effort, not for long, not without the help of a Djinn, and David wasn’t here. Wasn’t connected to me.

A little farther, just a little…

The plane was a hundred feet off the ground. I felt the air trying to spin apart under the wings and grabbed hold, wove the chains together and forced it to stay connected.

Fifty feet.

Twenty.

‘Hold on,’ Lewis whispered next to me. ‘You’re almost there.’

Ten.

Just before the wheels touched tarmac, I felt something give way inside me with a bloody rip,
and everything fell apart. The plane bounced, landed, skidded, was slammed right and left by wind shears like fists.

I couldn’t stop it, but I kept trying, grabbing for control. I fell to my knees, breathing hard, tasting blood in my mouth and seeing bright red spots in front of my eyes.

‘Jo!’ Lewis had hold of me. I struggled to stay out of the dark. ‘Let it go! They’re down!’

The plane had come to a stop, through a panicked superhuman effort on the part of her pilots.

When I let go, the wind forged itself into a hard edge and came straight for
me
.

‘Lewis!’ I yelled, and pulled him down on the carpet, covered him with my body.

The wind shear slammed into the pyramid full force, at least a hundred miles an hour, and the window blew like a bomb. I felt a hot burn across my back, then an ice-cold burst of rain. I rolled off of Lewis and grabbed his arm, pulled him to his feet, and shoved him towards the door.

Before we made it there, another wind shear blasted in, hit me in the back like a freight train, and slammed me down to the carpet. Lewis turned and grabbed for me, but my hand was slick with blood, and the wind shear became a back-draft, sucking me out into the storm.

I felt gravity let go as I spun out of the broken
window, hundreds of feet above the Las Vegas streets. The fountains at the Bellagio were still booming, but the water was ripped to mist as soon as it exploded out of the water cannons. I tried to grab control of the winds holding me, but being suspended in mid-air like Fay Wray in King Kong’s hand didn’t do a lot for my concentration.

The wind sensed my attempt to manipulate it and dropped me.

Straight down.

I screamed as I hit glass and started to slide down the side of the pyramid. I tried to reach to cushion the fall, but it fought back, flowing away, creating a downdraft that sucked me faster towards the concrete. I flailed at slick glass windows, cold metal, left bloody streaks behind.

This is it.
I felt a sick, nauseating terror taking hold, shredding what was left of my magical control. One second closer to the ground. Two. I was going to hit…

I stopped falling with a jerk, like I’d come to the end of a bungee cord, was yanked back upward in a spiralling whirl. The pyramid’s glass blurred by, reflecting white streaks of lightning. Rain hit me so hard it felt like strikes of hail, and I couldn’t breathe, hadn’t taken a breath since I’d begun screaming…