Ill Wind (19 page)

He tried to pry my mouth open. I fought back with every muscle in my body, desperate to get him off me,
away,
because I could feel it in him now, a black cold hunger devouring him from inside.

“Dammit!” He backed off, blue eyes glittering with rage, and reached out for a bottle of wine—very old, with a flaking, yellowed label and a cork that looked fossilized. He worked the cork out of it, set the bottle on the floor, and said, “I need you.”

In the movies they always show Djinn coming out of the bottle in a puff of smoke, but that rarely happens, unless the Djinn is a traditionalist with a sense of humor. Bad Bob's Djinn just appeared—
blip
—without any dramatics at all. I've always wondered how Djinn decide how to look, and why they always seem to look so nearly human; this one was nearer than most. He looked like an accountant. Suit, straight black tie, pin-striped shirt. Young, but ancient around the eyes. The eyes, of course, gave him away: a kind of phosphorescent green that caught daylight the way a cat's eyes reflect at night.

“Sir?” he asked. He didn't even look at me.

“Hold her down,” Bad Bob said. “Don't kill her like you did the last one. It's hard enough to find a match, you know.”

The Djinn leaned over and put his hand on my forehead. Instantly, gravity tripled and pinned me down; made it an effort to drag in a breath, much less fight. I wanted to say something, but I knew it wouldn't do any good; Bad Bob wasn't listening, and his Djinn couldn't do anything against his orders.
Don't kill her like you did the last one.
His Djinn didn't want the Demon moved. Maybe, if I could think fast enough, I could get his help. . . .

“Open her mouth,” Bad Bob said. The Djinn laid one fingertip on my lips, and even though I clenched my jaw muscles, I felt it all slipping away, felt my lips parting.
Oh, God, no.
Maybe I imagined it, but the Djinn's touch seemed to make it less painful, less horrific.
Help me. Please stop this.
But if he could, or if he even wanted to, there was no sign of it in those inhuman green eyes, clear as emeralds. I felt gray
edging in around the knife-sharp spike of fear, the desperate desire to
get away
. Maybe I could pass out. I wanted to pass out. Anything not to feel this.

The Djinn's touch burned. My lips slid open, and cool air hit the back of my throat with drowning force.

Bad Bob bent over and touched his lips to mine. Not a deep kiss, just a touch. Just enough to create the bridge of flesh. He tasted of booze and stank of fear, and I tried to scream. . . .

Too late.

I felt it squirming in my mouth, shooting tendrils down my throat, invading me in a way that even the worst rape couldn't equal—it was inside me, ripping furiously through my flesh, looking for a place to hide. I tried to scream, tried to vomit, tried to
die,
but it just kept going, down my throat, burning in my chest, squirming and moving through me like a hand until it closed into a fist around my heart.

The pain was so bad, I left my body and escaped into Oversight, and that was when I saw the Demon Mark for the first time. A black nest of tendrils writhing around the core of my magic, my life, feeding. The last of it slid out of Bad Bob and left him shining and clear of taint.

And utterly devoid of power. He'd carried it for so long that it had eaten away the power he'd started with. He was an empty shell of a man whose heart continued to beat, but I felt the horrible hollow space where this
thing
had been.

And then his heart jumped, shuddered, and froze in his chest. His face took on a dull sheen of surprise.

Can't die with this thing inside me.

Oh, God, no. This couldn't be happening.

I felt the particles charging around me, and it reminded me suddenly of Lewis, turning his bloodied face to me, holding out his hand for power. Because it was power forming around me, funneling
through
me. Taking the last of the energy that kept Bad Bob alive. I could
taste
the drowning blackness of his despair, the wailing terror of his death. The Demon Mark sucked it down and began to taste what was inside me, too, and the sensation was so bitterly wrong that I couldn't help but fight back. It was as instinctive as gagging.

I reached for power, and it came, a rolling white wave through Oversight, circling me like a tornado. It would wreak havoc on the real world, but I didn't have a choice. Every cell in my body, real or aetheric, was screaming to get that
thing
out of me.

In the real world, the dome house literally exploded. Glass blew out from the windows in a pulverized mist. Wind tore through the room at speeds impossible to withstand and shredded wood to splinters, plastic to shards. The terra-cotta warrior exploded into dust. Charged particles glittered and flashed and rolled like crystal waves around me, storm-ready. So much potential energy, my hair lifted and crackled with it, on the verge of burning. Every circuit in the house blew, frying electronics, starting fires in the walls. In Oversight, the power draw flared photonegative, out of control, and ice crystals began to form around minute particles of dust in the swirling air of the living room.

Outside, steaming hail the size of baseballs, soccer balls, hit the beach; I heard the hard, brittle impacts all over the house. Temperatures soared, then dropped, as
pressure rose. Outside, over the sea, clouds massed with incredible speed, darkened, began a lowering rotation.

Bad Bob fell to the floor, a lifeless lump of flesh, already being torn apart by the forces in the room. By my own power, out of control.

His Djinn disappeared into the maelstrom, and I saw the wine bottle picked up by the wind and hurtled against the far wall with so much force, it literally vanished into crystals no larger than sand.

The leather couch I was still lying on was blown back with a tidal force of wind, and I rolled over debris. Shards of glass everywhere; I barely noticed the cuts, but I managed to get my fingers around a sharp needle-edged piece and slashed at the ropes that held my hands until they parted with a moist snap. It hurt, but my standards of pain had changed; a little flesh-and-blood agony was nothing to worry about.

I scrambled until I found a wall at my back. Lightning flashed, and I could feel the thing feeding inside me, out of control; greedy little bastard sucking down every mote of energy. It fed off storms. It fed off the power burning inside me.

I had to shut it off. Somehow, I had to reach down into that—
thing
—and force it to obey. It was growing inside me, growing angles and cutting edges; it would burst out of me like some evil child and then . . . and then . . .

Something warm and gentle touched the back of my neck.
Breathe,
a voice whispered inside me. Under my skin.
Child of air, breathe in your strength.

I gasped in a breath. Another. The air felt warm, smelled faintly of ozone.

The Demon is of the darkness. Use your light.

I opened my eyes and there, in front of me, was the Djinn. Bad Bob's Djinn. He was a column of living fire, a pair of golden eyes, something wonderful and terrible at the same time.

Breathe in your strength,
it said again, and when I inhaled, I felt the fire go into me, burning like raw lava down my throat, into the darkness.

Now go.

I was outside in the rain, in the cold, with my arms wrapped around my body, shivering. The surf pounded the dome house, sucked at it like a tasty treat. Overhead, the eye of the storm whirled and stared down on me.

Inside me, the Demon Mark shuddered and went quiet.

I breathed out mist and steam, and around me the energy levels faded. Lightning flashed, hit close, and I felt the burn of ozone on my flesh like the heat of a distant cold sun.

And then I slammed back down,
hard,
into reality. Cold, wet, windy reality, the storm screaming over tortured waves, the stench of burning and dead things and my sweat. There was
something inside me,
stuck inside me. I ripped open my shirt, expecting to find—something—some horrible black tangle under the skin. There was only a faint, intricate black scorch mark. I touched it, trembling, and felt the
thing
underneath stretch and murmur in its sleep.

I went to my knees, hard, and threw up.

I don't know how long I was there, huddled near the ruins of Bad Bob's house, but I felt the Wardens when they arrived—Janice Langstrom, Bad Bob's
exec, and Ulrike Kohl. Ulrike concentrated on the storm raging out at sea, but I could have told her it was useless; the storm was mine, keyed to me, born of my fury. All she could do was tame it down to a sullen retreat.

It was Janice who found me. “Joanne?” We knew each other. Not well, but enough for nodding acquaintance. I let her help me up to my feet and pulled the tattered halves of my blouse together, more out of an instinctive desire for her not to see the Mark than any impulse to modesty. “Oh, my God! What happened here?”

I opened my mouth to tell her . . . and then didn't. I couldn't even begin. Something in me—that wily, scared-to-death primitive part of my brain—told me that if I said anything about the Demon Mark, I could kiss my ass good-bye.

I just shivered.

She searched my face, her frown deepening; she was an older woman, younger than Bad Bob but not by much. Moderately powerful. Extremely perceptive.

“That storm has your smell all over it,” she said, and her grip on my arm tightened. “Where is he? Where's Bob?”

I didn't answer. I saw the blooming of anger in her cool gray eyes, and then there was a wind-torn shout from the ruins of Bad Bob's house, and Ulrike staggered out.

“He's dead!” she screamed.

Cold gray eyes snapped back to me and narrowed. The grip on my arm was as tight as a vise. “You killed him?” she asked, and didn't wait for the answer. “
You killed him!
”

She shoved me backwards. I felt energy gathering
around her, phasing in blacks and reds. No, I couldn't fight her. Couldn't fight anyone.

I couldn't control this thing inside me, and it
wanted
to fight.

I reached out and physically shoved her, and ran like the Demon itself was after me.

Miraculously, Delilah was still untouched, up on the road. I jumped in, started her up, and hit the gas, spinning tires and leaving a scream behind as Ulrike and Janice pelted out after me, both yelling.

I had killed Bad Bob. Bad Bob was a legend, and I was the one who'd called the storm. The Wardens wouldn't listen to what I had to say; if they could sense this
thing
inside me, they'd cut me apart to destroy it.

I had to get rid of it. Bad Bob had passed it to me. The idea of passing it on made me sick. Everything I'd ever read about Demon Marks had the same grim message attached: no way to get it out of you once it was in, except by giving it to some other poor bastard, the way Bad Bob had given it to me. God, no.

I can't afford to put my Djinn out of commission with this thing,
he'd said.

I could give it to a Djinn. Only I didn't have one, did I? Bad Bob's Djinn was gone. That meant I had to find one.

It all came together in a brilliant flash in my head.

Lewis. I could get one from Lewis.

 

It was dead silent in the Land Rover when I finished. David wasn't looking at me. He wasn't looking anywhere, exactly, just staring straight ahead. I couldn't tell what he was thinking.

“Now you know,” I said. “You know what you're risking just being around me. Because I swear to God, David, I can't have this thing get loose again the way it did on the beach. I'll kill myself first.”

“No!” He lunged at me, and I almost ran the truck off the road. He held up his hands, more to stop himself than to reassure me. “You can't. Listen to me, you
cannot
die with this thing in you.”

“Well, I can't let it just destroy everything, either! I have to control it, or get rid of it. Or die.”

David sucked down a deep breath. “If you die with the Mark, the Demon will tear itself from your body, and it will walk the aetheric. If that happens, the destruction you saw before will be
nothing
next to what it can accomplish in its aetheric form. It will take more power than all of you have to stop it then.”

“Well, I'm not just passing it on to somebody like the goddamn herpes virus.” He was watching me with that creepy intensity again. “What?”

“Give it to me,” he said. “Say the words, bind me, and give it to me. You can. You have to.”

“No!” The idea gave me chills. Worse than chills. I had no idea what the Demon Mark would do to a Djinn, but I had no doubt that if the Mark fed off power, it would find an all-you-can-eat smorgas-board inside a Djinn.

“It can't overcome me,” he said. “It'll be trapped inside of me, forever.”

“It'll destroy you!”

“No worse than it will you, in time,” he said. “I can be contained. Once I'm sealed inside a bottle and
put back in the vault, I'm no danger to anyone. You—”

“No!” I shouted, and slammed my hands on the steering wheel like I wanted to beat sense into him. “No, dammit, I said
no!
”

David was so very reasonable, so convincing. “I'm what you were looking for. I'm a Djinn, Joanne. I'm your way out.”

I felt tears burning in my eyes, couldn't get my breath around the lump of distress in my throat.
God,
no. Yes, it was what I wanted, and I couldn't do it.
Couldn't.
There had to be something else, some other way. . . .

“I'll find Lewis,” I whispered. My head was pounding from the force of my misery. I wanted to cry, or scream, or just whimper. “He'll know what to do.”

“Why?” David's voice was so soft, so reasonable.

I felt a surge of absolute panic, because I realized . . . realized I didn't know. Why
would
he know any better than I did? Lewis was more powerful, all right—more powerful than anybody. That didn't mean he could save me, except by presenting me with the same choice I had right now. Destroying someone else. A Djinn, maybe, but in every way that mattered, a real person.