Firestorm (29 page)

He shrugged. I went behind the counter and cut myself a slice of coconut meringue pie that looked like just about heaven. I decided against the coffee in favor of a glass of milk. I eased myself into the booth with an annoying squeak of plastic.

If it was a dream, at least I was going to get a piece of pie out of it. And if it wasn't…well, dying on a full stomach sounded like a better idea than the alternatives. I was trembling with fear for David, sick with the knowledge that if he managed to make it back here (
occupied
, what did that mean?) Ashan would have the upper hand in every way.

Ashan took another bite of pie, watching me.

“I see you made sure we had privacy,” I said.

“I felt it best.” Another chilling predator's smile. “I'd hardly want to share you with anyone else.”

From Eamon to this. I was too numbed to be terrified, really; Eamon had done me that favor, at least. Whatever reaction Ashan had been hoping to provoke, this couldn't have been it.

I took a bite of the pie.

If Ashan was disappointed, he hid it well. He continued to nibble and sip without any hint of homicidal intent. Well, okay, hints, but not actions. I could read the desire to kill me in every look and careful, neat motion.

“Where are they?” I asked. “The people who were in here.”

“Still here.” He gestured vaguely. “Out of phase. They won't notice a thing. I've moved us a few seconds back in time, in a kind of bubble. Once we leave, it'll snap back. It's a local phenomenon only.”

That was mildly interesting. “You can do that?”

“Time is my specialty,” he said. “It's an interesting thing, time. Fluid. Very tricky. I don't expect you to understand.”

He was positively chatty. Which was odd. Ashan had always treated me like a cockroach. I couldn't imagine him sitting down to a nice, cozy chat with me over pie and coffee. If there was a single burning flame inside Ashan, it was ambition—cold, ruthless, and all-consuming.

So why was he sitting here making nice with me? Was he waiting for word that David had been hurt? Killed?

If Ashan had hurt him, I was going to find a way to make him pay.

Ashan smiled at me over his forkful of strawberry pie. I smiled back and took a bite of coconut. The meringue melted on my tongue. Even in my numbed, tense state, that was nice.

“So,” Ashan said, and I sensed he was ready to circle around to the point. “What did the Oracle tell you, Joanne?”

“Besides the screaming? Nothing. Good pie, by the way.”

He lost the veneer of affability, and what was left had no interest in dessert. His plate, fork, and mug disappeared. He pressed those large, strong, pale hands palms down on the table. I kept eating, slowly and deliberately. No way was I letting anything this good go to waste. I needed the strength.

“You mock me,” he said. “You are not my equal. You are nothing. You are less than the lower life forms that spawned you.”

“Oh, you smooth talker,” I said. “Careful. You're turning me on.”

I'd surprised him. He was used to people cowering and screaming. Even me. Again, my fresh inoculation of terror from Eamon had done me a strange favor.

Surprise made him thoughtful, not angry. He tilted his head and continued to stare at me. “Why do you say such things to me? Do you want to die?”

“Nope,” I said. “You'll kill me, or you won't. Your petty little political ambitions are not my concern. You want to be the center of the Djinn universe? Fine. Take it up with David. I sleep with him; I don't tell him what to do. Speaking of David, you're not exactly facing off with him hand-to-hand, are you? What's the matter, Ashan? He got you scared?”

Ashan put his hands flat on the table, watching me, and his eyes were the eerie color of deep oceans lit from below. “Do you have any idea how much I want to destroy every cell of your body? Grind you into paste until all that's left of you is fragments of bone and screams?”

My heart hammered faster, but I kept eating. “Poetic. You should write that down.”

I had completely nonplussed him this time. He barked out a dry laugh and sat back. “Do you really think you can defeat me? A weak little creature like you?” I shook my head. His eyes glowed brighter, and the smile grew sharper at the edges. “Perhaps you have finally lost your mind.”

“That's probably it.” I forked up the last delicious bite of my pie, savoring every bit, and washed it down with a prodigious gulp of milk. Now
that
was a snack. “I've gone insane. But at least it came with dessert.”

He steepled his fingers into long, strong columns of flesh and bone. It reminded me of Eamon, fingertips touching his lips, watching me in the motel room. I felt a bolt of sheer terror flash through me, and it made me flinch; that was bad. Numbness was good. Numbness was my only real defense right now.

I compensated the only way I knew how: with sarcasm. “What are you going to do, Ashan? Glare me to death?”

I'd goaded him a little too far. He reached across the table, knocking my plate off in a wobbling arc to the floor, and grabbed my wrist. He pinned it to the table with crushing force. Probably wasn't even an effort for him to break my bones, shatter the table beneath, bring down the entire restaurant, for that matter. But I just sat still, watching him. Unresisting.

And he didn't exert any more force than he had to, to hold me still.

Like Eamon.

“What do you want?” I asked him breathlessly. “You keep coming after me.
What do I have that you want?
”

There was a flash of loathing in his eyes so extreme that I swallowed. “You are of no interest to me at all. You are less than what crawls in the dirt.”

I realized something terribly important. Ashan didn't
want
to be here. He really didn't, and it wasn't about me. He was just dicking around with me out of some obscure desire to play with his food, like a giant tomcat.

“Let go,” I said. He did. I boggled, but covered it quickly. No sense in letting him know that I was lost, too. “What do you want to know, Ashan?”

“What did the Oracle say to you?”

“Nothing.”

“You lie.” His hands were flat on the table again, and if anything his eyes were even brighter, incandescently bright in the darkened corner. “What did the creature say to you?”

“Look,” I said quietly. “I don't know what you want, but I can only tell you what I know. Which is nothing. The Oracle screamed, and—” I realized what he was getting at. The Oracle hadn't told me, but Ashan had told me himself, with all his paranoia.

He'd had something to do with the Demon Mark breaking through the defenses to get to the Oracle. Maybe he'd even done it himself.

He must have seen that I'd figured it out, because he backhanded me.

I saw it coming, and I was able to turn my face with the smack, but even so, it knocked me into the wall. My head impacted wood with a crack, and I felt a hot wave of sickness crawl over me. It didn't hurt immediately, but I had an instant conviction that it was going to hurt later. For now, there was just a high-pitched ringing in my head, and a fire-hot throb on my right temple.

Ashan was standing up. I was about to be ripped to pieces, I could feel it in the raw fury boiling off him. He reached out…

And David caught his hand.

They didn't speak. David just stared at him, face set. He looked hard—as hard as the Djinn facing him. Fire and ashes, neither one of them human.

Ashan smiled. “Took you long enough,” he said. “I thought I might have to make her scream more to get your attention.”

“You're a fool,” David said. “And you're the second fool who's tried this in less than a day. You have no idea—”

He stopped talking, and slowly turned his head off to the side, staring into shadows.

“Fool, you were saying?” Ashan asked. He was still smiling. I liked that smile even less the longer it stayed. “I'm not so much of one. Though clearly you are, since you continue to come running at her beck and call, even without the bottle forcing you to her will.”

“What have you done?” David let go of Ashan's wrist. “Ashan—”

“What was necessary,” he said. “We were gods once. We were worshipped. And we will be again.”

“Yessssss,” whispered a new voice. If it could be called a voice. It was more like flesh being dragged over sandpaper. “Godsssssssssss.”

And an adult Demon stepped out of the shadows.

It could have been the same one who'd chased me in the forest; all I could identify about it was its wrongness, its essentially
alienness.
The geometry of the thing didn't make sense. Skin that wasn't skin. Terribly wrong, misshapen, bleeding light and shadow like a drug-induced nightmare.

It was speaking.

David took a soundless step back, mouth open, eyes wide. Astonished, for a split second, and then the true horror of the situation snapped in for all of us.

Ashan was in league with the Demon. Betraying the Djinn themselves. Betraying the Mother.

His betrayal of humanity was nothing compared with that.

David lunged for me, and
threw
me over the back of the booth to slide down the lunch counter. I tipped over and slammed to the tile floor on my hands and knees. He didn't have to tell me to get out. I got the message, loud and clear. I scrambled up and ran full speed for the glass doors.

I hit them and bounced.

No time for pain or confusion. I whirled around, grabbed a chair, and whacked the hell out of the glass. Again. And again. The chair came apart on the fourth try in a clatter of loosened screws and aluminum framing.

“An old trick of Jonathan's,” Ashan said. “Freezing time makes a good refuge. Or prison.”

David was backing away from the Demon, but it was coming, and I didn't think he could stop it. Not with Ashan on its side. He reversed course and lunged, grabbed the Demon by one misshapen limb, and slingshotted it into Ashan.

Who staggered and screamed as the Demon's claws ripped into him for support. I felt that popping in my ears again, painful and deafening, and David spun toward me to scream, “Now!”

I yanked open the door. “Come on!”

He tried to reach me.

The Demon was faster. Horribly fast, faster than anything I'd ever seen. It moved in a blur, and then it stopped in the next fraction of a second, and it had him. Its claws wrapped around him, growing to the size of knives…of swords…

They punched through his flesh and skewered him in a cage of black steel.

“No!” I screamed.

He reached out with one hand, and I thought he was reaching for me, but then the wind hit me with brutal force, driving me back through the open door.

Outside.

Thunder cracked overhead, and the door snapped shut, almost ripping the skin of my arm with its force. I grabbed the handle and pulled. Tried harder. Tried until I was panting and shaking with effort.

Lightning flared again, and on the other side of the glass I saw a nightmarish vision of Ashan moving toward David, who was slumped in the Demon's claws.

There was a tremendous crash, like the biggest glass pane in the world shattering under a hammer. The door suddenly gave under my pull, and I staggered backward, whipped by the wind, soaked by blowing rain, and lunged back inside the diner. I had just enough time to take in a breath, and something
awful
went wrong inside me. It felt as if along the way, every cell in my body turned inside out, ripped itself apart, mutated, exploded, and then reformed in a shaky configuration likely to melt at any moment.

I coughed. The breath I'd inhaled felt stale, minutes old. Filthy with toxins. My stomach rolled. There was a sense of a rubber band snapping against my skin, and suddenly a roar of voices, rattle of dishes and glasses and mugs, of footsteps, of cloth rustling, and everything seemed out of focus and nauseatingly loud.

“Sweetie?” A hand under my elbow, a kind woman's voice in my ear. “Sweetie, are you okay?”

That snap had been Ashan letting go of the time he'd kept frozen. Everything had lurched forward, including me. The diner looked completely normal—patrons chewing and talking, waitstaff pouring coffee, cooks serving up behind the gleaming steel counters.

I stared at the bare spot of floor where David had been, shuddering. Water pattered off me in a continuous rain.

They were gone.
David
was gone. With him out of commission—I couldn't think he was dead, I couldn't—there was nothing standing in Ashan's way.

Nothing but me.

I straightened up and reached for power. It came in a welcome hot blast of air, drying the moisture from my hair and body. I didn't even try to hide it. The pink-uniformed waitress backed away from me, eyes wide, as I formed the moisture into a tight-packed gray ball, like a round cloud, and pitched it at the nearest industrial sink. It broke into a splash and swirled away.

“Wait!” she yelped as I headed back for the door again. I didn't.

I needed to get to Sedona, and I was going to make it happen.

 

Driving was out of the question, even in the Camaro. It would mean hauling ass into Ohio and Indiana and all the way down to good old Tulsa, Oklahoma…and from there, it would be a mere nine hundred miles or so to Sedona.

I didn't have the time.

I called Lewis. This time, I got him on the first try, and without preliminaries, I said, “I need the company jet. Right now.”

There was a brief hesitation, and when he responded I heard a smile in his voice. Not much of a smile, granted. “You want the keys to the Jag, too?”

“I need to get from Boston to Sedona, and I don't have the time to waste taking the scenic route. Send the damn plane, Lewis.”

The smile was no longer in evidence. His voice got lower, tenser. “Jo, tell me you're kidding.”