Chill Factor (31 page)

I could feel the vibration in the canyon walls. The breeze was picking up speed.
Climb!
The air in the canyon was unstable, already swirling. Trying to control it was a sucker bet.

I climbed another three feet, painfully achieved.

‘Give it up,’ Quinn said from somewhere way up
there, hundreds of feet above. ‘You know how this goes. A flash flood rips through these canyons, it pulverises boulders, rips up trees like kindling. You won’t even be a little bitty scrap of skin by the time it dumps you out in the river. Maybe you won’t even have time to drown. Would that make you feel any better?’

Two more feet. My sweating toes slipped, then my left hand; I bit back a scream of rage and reached again. Pulled. Felt the burning tear in my triceps grow stronger.

A whip of wind lashed my hair back, and I heard the low grumble.

‘Holy shit,’ Quinn said. ‘Looks like a real gully washer, there. Sorry. Want me to shoot you, put you out of your misery?’

‘Fuck you,’ I gasped, and lurched another two feet higher. I glanced down. I was maybe ten feet up now, enough to make me dizzy but no way enough to save me. The low grumbling sound was getting louder, and the wind stiffer. It smelt like wet sand and death. Nothing clean about the water hurtling down the canyon towards me. It had started out as a flood at least half a mile back, maybe more, picking up speed and debris by sweeping the canyons. Foaming and raging like a sea, taking with it birds, rabbits, snakes, people, cars, anything in its path.

It was coming fast.

‘
Sure
you don’t want me to shoot you? ‘Cause if you’re waiting on your friends, they’re a little busy. Jonathan’s helping out with that.’

I lunged upward. My fingers were bloody, the nails ripped off at the quick, and my shoulders and arms were trembling. I flailed for a right handhold, found one and shifted my weight…

…and the shale under my fingers shattered like glass.

I screamed, clung to my left handhold, and felt my shoulder pop hot as a gunshot. The wind turned cold, flapped my hair like a flag, and when I reached up again for a grip my bloody left hand slipped. I scrabbled like a doomed cartoon character, managed to find something to cling to, and hung there, trembling.

No way could I get high enough. It was going to lick me off the wall.

I turned my face towards the first damp breath as the roar burst open. The flood was rounding the corner up ahead. It was a wall of black, of mist and foam and death, thirty feet high. I saw the bloody, torn hindquarters of a cow being tossed on the leading edge.

I felt my fingers slip again, and there was no point in trying to stop it this time.

As the wall of water slammed into me like a speeding truck, I let myself fall.

What are you most afraid of?

Drowning.

That wasn’t actually true, after all. It hurt, but what hurt worse was the knowledge that Quinn was going to get away. He was going to take Jonathan’s bottle and he was going to get in his SUV and go bouncing across the desert, and if there was revenge to be had, it wouldn’t be had by me, and
dammit
, I couldn’t let myself go down like this. I couldn’t. I’d survived him before, in the dark, when there was no hope.

I felt something warm move inside of me.

I might let you kill me, you bastard, but you will
not kill my daughter.

The current had knocked me fuzzy and grey, but the real problem was the debris churning in the water with me, and the impacts with canyon walls that were going to rip me limb from limb. I had seconds left, maybe less. The water was moving so fast that the walls were a blur sweeping past, and all I could do was try to stay on top of the roiling cold surge. Swimming was stupid. I focused on the water itself, but it was driven by so much force and so much chaos that I couldn’t grip anything, couldn’t hold it…

Ma’at
.

It wasn’t about gripping and holding.

It was about removing the need for the water to move at all.

I took a deep, scared breath and ducked under the surface. It was almost black, laden with silt and debris, and the silk of the water swallowed me whole.

I left myself go. Drifting. Listening to the water’s heart.

Letting it flow through me like a river. Surfing with it, undulating. Finding the frequency of the water and creating the countervibration, exactly opposite.

Waves began to still instead of amplify. Surges became still patches.

Slowing.

I opened my eyes and bobbed up to grab another breath, and saw that the flood was still fast but no longer the roaring monster it had been. I could try to swim, at least. Stay ahead of the heavier debris, ride the crest of the—

There was a boulder straight ahead, jammed in a narrow part of the canyon, and I was heading straight for it.

Five seconds left.

Two.

Oh, God
…

I felt myself lifting on the surge of the wave, and waited for the fall, the impact, the end.

I kept rising.

Rising out of the water.

Someone was holding me from behind, arms
clasped around me under my breasts, and I felt a wild and burning heat that turned water between us to steam.

‘Rahel?’ I asked, and turned to look.

Not Rahel.

It was David.

He smiled at me with so much love and relief that it broke my heart, and said, ‘You think I’d let you go, after all this?’

I cried out and turned in the circle of his arms, and held him as we floated over the foaming, churning flood.

At the top of the canyon we had a welcoming committee. It consisted of Rahel, Lewis, and Marion. Rahel, of course, was spotless; Marion and Lewis were sweaty and dirty and breathless.

We touched down, and I winced at the burn of hundred-degree sand on my bare feet, but then David was collapsing in my arms and I forgot all about the discomfort. My shoulders couldn’t take the strain. I had to let him fall.

‘David?’ I hovered anxiously over him. His eyes were flickering copper, turning brown. ‘David—’

‘He’s too weak,’ Lewis said, and fumbled the blue glass bottle out from his pocket. ‘David, back in the bottle.’

He faded into mist. I rounded on Lewis in a fury, but he held up a hand to stop me. ‘If we leave him
out, he’ll fade again. The bottle is all that’s keeping him alive right now. Djinn life support.’

‘And you called him out?’ I didn’t know what made me more angry. ‘Do me a favour – don’t help, OK?’

‘I was supposed to let you get smashed to pieces?’

‘You were supposed to take down Quinn!’ I yelled. ‘Did you?’

They looked anywhere but me. Rahel said, ‘We will.’

‘We will,’ I mocked. ‘Yeah, fine, whatever. Just let me find him and do this thing.’ I staggered when I tried to get up. Marion took my arm and hauled me upright, frowning.

‘You’re in no shape to take on anything more dangerous than a week in bed,’ she said. ‘You’ve torn muscles, damaged your shoulder—’

‘I don’t care.’ I bit the words off furiously and wiped wet hair back from my face, wishing that I were still a Djinn so I could clean myself up and smite somebody with a truly righteous amount of smiting. ‘He’s got Jonathan, and he’s got God knows how many bottles, and he’s not getting out of this without a fight, and where exactly is Kevin?’

I ran it all together, alarm sharpening my voice, and saw Marion and Lewis look around in shock.

‘He was right here,’ Marion began, but I wasn’t watching her. I was caught by Rahel’s expression. Alone among us, she wasn’t surprised by his absence.

‘Let him do this,’ she said. ‘It’s his right.’

‘Do
what
?’

She shrugged. I shook free of Marion’s hold and turned around, looking down the edge of the canyon. It couldn’t be that far, a few sand dunes in the way, maybe a thousand yards of desert in the way…

Something blew up out there.

Something very, very big.

The shock wave rippled over me, and the noise whited out my eardrums; a fireball the size of a blimp rose up into the air, curling in on itself in reds and crimsons and ropes of hot yellow, in waves of smoke like tattered silk.

A shattered metal frame rose up off the ground, powered by another explosion. The massive steel monster, turning end over end, sailing out over the canyon and dropping down to smash into the foaming water with a hiss of superheated steam.

‘That was a Hummer,’ I said numbly.

‘And I think that was Kevin,’ Lewis said.

The kid had finally found a decent use for his powers over fire.

Then we were running.

The explosion had left a crater the size of a meteor strike, black in the centre. Sand had turned to glass.

Quinn was down near the edge of it, bleeding from ears and nose, coughing up mouthfuls of red.
The second I saw him, memory clicked into place: baseball cap, windbreaker, the same lean, whipcord body. Sunglasses hiding his face.

Quinn. Orry. One and the same, not that I’d had any doubt.

Jonathan was standing over him, staring down. When we pelted over the sand towards him, avoiding the burning scraps of what used to be a hugely expensive SUV, I saw Kevin kneeling nearby. He looked…blank. Exhausted. That explosion had taken everything out of him.

No time for him now. I fixed my attention on Jonathan, and held out one hand in a calming motion. ‘Easy. Let’s not get crazy here. We come in peace.’

‘No, you don’t,’ Jonathan said absently.

‘OK, I lied, we don’t. But it looks like Quinn’s not going to make it, so let’s not increase the body count, OK?’

‘I don’t have a choice.’
Ouch
. The bleak fury of that was painful. ‘I thought since he wasn’t a Warden, I’d have more chances. But he’s good. He knew exactly what to say, what to do…’

The first command you give is to restrict them
from using any power without your express order.
The second is to order them to protect your life
unless you expressly countermand it. The third…

I’d told Quinn how to do it. I’d screamed it out in the dark, under his knife.

I’d taught him everything he needed to know.

I’d told all that to the Wardens, of course, during the debriefing, and they’d said,
It doesn’t matter.
He’s not a Warden. He’ll never be able to use the
knowledge.

Except he had, hadn’t he? Quinn was nothing if not ruthless and resourceful.

But I hadn’t told him the most critical things, even so.

‘Can he talk?’ I asked Jonathan. It came out cold and even. Quinn’s eyes rolled towards me, wild and rimmed with white.

‘No.’

‘Then his last commands to you remain in force.’

‘I’m supposed to protect his life,’ Jonathan said. He was watching Quinn, not us, but I knew that he’d have no choice but to act if we moved. ‘The kid was clever. He went for the car, not Quinn. Took the bottles out at the same time. I didn’t have to stop him.’

I felt a flashover of hope, hot as the sun beating down on us. ‘Where’s
your
bottle?’

Jonathan gestured down at the kneeling man. ‘On him. In his jacket pocket.’

I looked at Lewis. He made a little after-you gesture.

I snapped my head around, lifted a hand and gathered the wind like a hard coil, and sent it arrowing for Quinn.

It slammed into him hard. A microburst, containing a wind shear not strong enough to do him any harm – physically – but plenty strong enough for just what it had to do.

Break a bottle in his front jacket pocket.

I felt it pop, like a sudden change in air pressure.

Quinn flopped down on his back, twisting silently in agony. For a few seconds Jonathan didn’t move, and then he slowly bent down and reached in Quinn’s pocket.

He took out a handful of broken glass and sifted it onto the sand.

‘You don’t own me anymore,’ he said, and crouched down next to the dying man. ‘Do you have
any
idea how much this is going to hurt?’

Quinn managed to choke out a few words, after all. ‘…ordered…defend…life…’

‘I didn’t let her kill you,’ Jonathan said, and smiled. It was the most princely, evil smile I could imagine ever seeing. ‘It’ll probably take you days to die. I’ll watch over you the whole time, maybe remind you of all the good things you’ve done in your life. It’s the least I can do.’

Quinn’s eyes widened. Whether it was mercy or luck, something inside his body snapped. Blood gouted out of his mouth and nose, and he arched his back once, for an aching ten long seconds…

Then collapsed.

‘Is he dead?’ I asked quietly.

Jonathan leant over and studied him closely. Then he reached down, hauled him up by the arm, and before anyone could stop him, pitched Quinn limply over the cliff into the swollen, rushing floodwater.

‘Yep,’ he said, and walked away. He called back over his shoulder, ‘I’m going home. Take care of the kid. Keep him out of trouble.’

‘Wait!’ I yelled it, desperately. ‘What about David?’

He stopped walking, but he didn’t turn back. His shoulders tightened, and then slowly relaxed.