Firestorm (31 page)

There was a ripple of laughter. Montague came back on. “Strap tight and hang on, people. We'll get you there.”

Radio off. I heard a shift in the idling engine noise, and fumbled for my seat belt. My hands were shaking a little. God, I
hated
flying; I'd done it a few times before, but only when the weather was firmly under Warden control, and only when circumstances required it.

Yves covered my fingers with his and gently held them as the plane taxied out onto the runway and picked up speed. “Relax,” he told me. “They're the best pilots we have. Maybe the best in the world.”

I didn't have to tell him how little that meant, if circumstances turned against us. Yves knew.

The plane lifted off with a bump and a sudden angular thrust of acceleration, and then it got eerily smooth. The force pressed me back into the leather, and I whimpered a little, thinking about the air around us, the fact that we were moving through it and drawing attention to ourselves. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to slow my rapid heartbeat.

“I heard you were—” I looked in time to see Yves's eyebrows doing an interpretive dance. “With a Djinn.”

“Not just any Djinn,” I said. “And yes. His name is David.”

Yves lost his smile. “Something wrong?”

“You could say.” I turned my head away and tried closing my eyes again. It didn't really help. I still saw David's face as the Demon's claws closed around him, that desperate, furious intensity.

He'd used power to break me free of the trap when he should have been using it to fight for his life. My fault.

“Hey.” When I opened my eyes, Yves was holding out a copy of a magazine featuring shiny, glossy people doing stupid things for the cameras. “You used to like these, as I remember.”

I needed to put it away. Bury the pain, and focus on something else. Self-pity wasn't my style.

I forced out a smile as though at gunpoint, took the magazine, and flipped it open to the first photo page. “Oh my God,” I said, and pointed to the unzipped mini-skirt and white stirrup leggings that the misguided pop star was wearing with low-heeled pumps. “Tell me that's not a sign of the end of the world.”

Yves chuckled, shrugged, and opened his magazine:
Mother Earth News.
I wondered if he knew how funny that was.

For the first hour, at least, the trip was uneventful. Self-pity lingered, but Yves had succeeded in distracting me. The magazine's outrageous fashion mistakes occupied my mind, and I was almost feeling normal when something cold pressed against my arm.

I yelped and tossed the magazine into the air.

It was Cherise, with a can of soda. She offered it again. I took it, and she perched on the air of the empty seat across from me. “You okay?” she asked, and popped the top on her own can.

“Sure,” I lied. “Why?”

She looked me over. “Jo, honey, you look pretty good, but don't kid a kidder. I saw what you looked like on the way to New York, and I'm pretty sure you've been through hell since then.” She sipped daintily at the sweat-beaded can. Moisture dripped onto her lime-green raw silk capri pants, and she frowned at it, then found a napkin and wrapped the can.

I considered my answer carefully. “Um…yeah. I'm okay. I—you know how Earth Wardens can heal people? Has Kevin told you—?” She nodded. “Well, I got healed up, so I'm more or less okay. Just tired.” And discouraged, and scared out of my mind. But other than that? Peachy.

She nodded again, looking down, and then suddenly those sky-blue eyes locked on mine. “I got a phone call. From your sister.”

“What?”
I didn't mean to yell it. It rang around the interior of the plane, bringing everyone to sharp attention. Even Yves, normally the least excitable of people, put his magazine down to look at me. “Sorry. Sorry, guys.” I lowered my voice and bent closer to Cherise. “You got a call from Sarah? When?”

“A couple of hours ago. She couldn't get through to you this morning. She sounded—” Cherise's face turned just a bit pinker. “Okay, this is going to sound bad and all, but does she do anything? Heroin, maybe?”

“No,” I said. I felt sick to my stomach, and it wasn't the altitude, or the overly sweet soda I was automatically sipping. “No, not Sarah.”

Compassion didn't come naturally to Cherise; it made her look too young. “Sweetie, the family's usually the last to know. Listen, she sounded really spaced. Orbital. She said to tell you that she was okay, and that everything was going to be fine. She'd met somebody in Las Vegas. I asked her where she was staying, but she said not to worry about it.”

I leaned forward, pressing the cold soda can against my forehead, fighting not to laugh. Or cry. “Yes. Thanks, Cher. That's Sarah all over, isn't it? Rescue her from one madman, she's off to find the next one—”

“She's not okay, is she?”

“No,” I murmured. “I doubt she is. I really doubt she's going to be, either.”

“She's not with what's-his-name anymore?”

“Eamon? No.”

“Too bad,” Cherise sighed. “Damn, he was cute. I
loved
his accent.”

“He was an asshole, Cher.”

“They're all assholes. But it's not every day that you find one that's really decorative.”

“He tried to kill me,” I snapped. “More than once.”

She froze, deer in the headlights. Amazed. And then her face just filled with delight. “Oh my
God
! You go, Jo! That's so cool!”

“What?” There were times when I really didn't get life on Planet Cherise.

“You're still here,” she said simply, and grinned at me with the unbroken enthusiasm of the truly weird.

I hugged her. Hard. “Staying here, too,” I said.

“Oh, you'd better. You owe me for scratches on the Mustang.”

She moved away, back to her seat. The gap between her white tank top and the green capri pants showed flawless tanned skin, and a tattoo of a big-headed space alien flashing the peace sign as she bent over to move something out of her way. Probably Kevin's feet. He was snoring.

He stopped snoring as the plane shuddered.

“Damn,” Yves said quietly. “Here I was starting to think we'd make it without this.”

Turbulence. The plane shuddered again, then dropped, a free fall that seemed to last forever. Outside, clouds were swirling. It was hard to get any sense of what was happening, but I could feel the hot energy consolidating itself out there.

Something had sensed me. A storm, maybe, one big enough to gather some elemental sentience. Or something else, and worse, like one of Ashan's Warden-killing Djinn. This would be a prime target. That was why I hadn't wanted to have others on the plane. My life—sure, I'll risk it. But there were a lot of lives at stake here. And I was the point of danger.

“Everybody hang on!” I yelled. Lightning flashed outside the windows, and I felt the plane powering up. They were going to try to get above it, looked like. Good strategy. The only problem was that the storm was going to chase them. “Yves, switch with me.”

We unbuckled and fumbled across each other, mumbling politenesses; he was dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a colorful dashiki-style shirt in yellow, blue, and orange patterns. A blaze of brightness in a world that was rapidly turning the color of ashes outside. I settled in his empty chair and buckled in, clutched the armrests, and looked out the window.

I didn't really need the view, but it helped; sometimes, focus could be achieved better with a visual cue. I filled up my lungs, let it out, filled them again, and allowed myself to drift free.

I got battered immediately by currents of force on the way up to the aetheric. It was a war zone, with silent colorful explosions of power snapping and popping in a hundred places at once. The cloudscape roiled, black in places, red in others, everything unstable and bizarre. I spotted an area that had taken on the silvery overlay I knew was going to be a huge problem, and concentrated on it. As I did, I felt myself joined by someone else who boosted my concentration and power, bracing me when I faltered. The power signature felt familiar, but I couldn't stop to wonder about it. I just worked, fast and frantic, trying to make sure the space around our airplane remained relatively disaster-free as our pilots arrowed for the safety of the higher sky.

On the mortal level, the turbulence shook us hard, and then the engines howled louder and suddenly, the ride was glass-smooth again. I gasped in air, feeling the shift on the aetheric at the same time, and recognized the power that had helped me.

Imara. My daughter was with me—not physically, not on the plane, but she was watching over me.

“No,” I whispered. My breath fogged the glass of the plane's window on the inside as mist beaded on it outside. “No, stay with Sarah. Stay out of this.”

Words wouldn't do on the aetheric level, but she understood what I was saying, I think. I felt a pulse of reassurance from her, from that shadowy flicker of presence; I couldn't see her at all clearly, just as I couldn't see any of the Djinn (or Ifrit, for that matter) while we were on the aetheric plane.

“I mean it!” I said to the flicker that was my daughter. “Stay out of this! Stay with Sarah!” Who, God knew, needed the chaperone.

The flicker moved away from me, but not far. Not far enough. She wasn't minding her mother, clearly; maybe she was under instructions from her father, but I didn't find that too likely. David had been in agreement with me about keeping her out of Ashan's grasp, and yet here she was, hanging about like bait on a hook.

And there was
nothing
I could do about it.

 

We stayed high for most of the trip, well above the unsteady clouds; the storms kept forming beneath us, hopscotching across the country. Our passage was causing chaos, no doubt about it, and I had the sick feeling that we were probably causing deaths, as well, but it wouldn't have been better if I'd driven, and it probably would have ended up worse in the end. I couldn't save everyone. Hell, I was no longer sure that I could save anyone.

The speaker gave that distinctive little click, and everyone in the cabin looked up from what they were doing—mostly reading or sleeping. “Hi, folks. Well, we've run about as far as we can at this altitude, we're going to have to start our descent. As you know, this is going to be rough, so please, try to keep those amusement park screams to a minimum. It doesn't make us fly with any more confidence. Ah, and Captain Klees would like to remind you that today's movie selection of
Die Hard Two
is now available on your LCD screens. Ah, hell, that was a joke. It's really
Turbulence
, followed by
Con Air.
Anyway, you guys keep cool back there. Let us do the sweating.”

He was off the air about ten seconds when the first shudder came, as the plane began to tilt forward, nose down.

Oh, crap.

We were in for it now.

The shuddering turned into a steady shaking, as if some giant hand had closed around the plane's fragile skin. I swallowed hard and clutched the armrests as outside the pale blue sky went mist gray, and then started a hellish descent toward black. The clouds looked thick enough to walk on. Thick enough to trap us, like spiderwebs around a fly. Lightning flashed close, illuminating the interior with a wash of blue-white flame, and in its flare I saw Yves calmly reading his
Mother Earth News
, legs crossed. I couldn't see anyone else, but I doubted they were all so fatalistic about it. Surely some of them must have been as terrified as I was….

We shuddered and dropped. Free fall. Ten feet or more, and it seemed to take forever. We hit an updraft with a bang and fishtailed, or tried to; I sensed the pilots correcting up front, adjusting the engines. Keeping us intact.

We dropped again, farther this time, and I felt the plane twisting to the left—and then something hit us from the right side, and we rolled.

Screams. Yves dropped his magazine and grabbed for his armrests as everything went sideways; my empty soda can clattered against the cabin wall in a chittering panic, and I heard a crash from below as bags shifted. The roar of the engines shifted, and then the speakers activated again. Copilot Klees made an authentic western-style
yee-haw
. “Well, you people are
so
lucky,” he said, as if flying sideways, staring down at the ground from the side window, was an everyday occurrence. “You're about to experience the joy of flight all those U.S. Air Force ads talk about. Hope you're all observing the seat belt sign. Three—two—one—”

The plane rolled left. Rolled completely over so that we were hanging upside down, and I had a brief surreal glimpse of my long black hair shuddering in midair like a beaded curtain, and then the world was rolling again, and we came upright again. Steady as a rock once we'd achieved level status.

Maybe people screamed. I don't know—I'm pretty sure I did. I looked over at Yves as I clawed my disordered hair out of my eyes, and his legendary calm was shaken enough for him to cross himself and begin murmuring something I recognized as an Our Father.

We were still descending.

“Hope you enjoyed that,” Klees said. He still sounded absolutely cheerful and unperturbed, as if he did this daily, with two shows in the afternoon. “If anyone feels the urge to purge, please, avail yourself of the bags. My contract does require me to do cabin cleaning, as well.”

A shaky laugh from someone up front with more intestinal fortitude than me. I was seriously contemplating the aforementioned bag, which looked sturdy and inviting, but I hadn't eaten or drunk enough to need to resort to it. A few grim, sweaty moments, and I was okay.

I grabbed leather as the plane did another unsettling shimmy combined with a bucking motion. Outside the windows, black clouds pressed as close as night. I rested my aching head against the pillowy seat and thought that maybe I ought to try the aetheric again, but I was no longer certain it was a good idea.