Fighting Fate: Book 2 of the Warrior Chronicles (40 page)

“Wenkermann!” I balled up the ruined pages and tossed them into a recycling bucket ten feet away, hitting it dead center. “Don’t you dare shut me out. This is serious. The Mayan Doom—”

The door slapped open. “I said
no
. Since you have trouble with that word, let me use another one. Suspend. As in, if I hear another word about any Mayan Doom, you’re suspended.”

I stopped breathing. “You can’t—”

“You want me to use another word? Like fired?”

Air exploded from my lungs along with every Joule of body heat. “I don’t—”

“Then don’t. Listen to me, Jones. You are not, under any circumstances, to call a jinni. You are not to ask anyone for the secret. In fact if I even hear a
whisper
of you and jinn in the same sentence you are fired. Is that clear?”

“Yes.” All too.

He raised his voice to carry to the rest of the cubicle farm, where the handful of wizards too junior to escape the holiday ghost town were heads-down pretending to work. “Calling a jinni is fucking dangerous, people. I hear anybody in my office has tried, they’re fired. You—” he poked a stiff finger at me “—have too much time on your hands if you think anything is happening at midnight besides the Maya starting a new calendar.”

“And the Ball dropping,” I said automatically.

“What?” He bit the word off. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Should have kept my mouth shut. But having started I bulled on. “At midnight. You said nothing’s happening but a new Mayan calendar, but the Times Square Ball is dropping too. That’s why the public has glommed onto Midnight EST as The Time. Why it’s vital to nip this in the next four hours. Once midnight passes we’re safe but—”

“Rein it in, Jones! You are over-the-top catastrophizing. Obviously you need some real work to keep you busy. I’m assigning you to the karmic math project, effective immediately. One helper. And listen up—any work outside normal hours
will not be paid
.”

“Chief, no. Not FKME.” Should definitely have kept the old trap door shut.

Project FKME, full title Project to Facilitate Karmic Mathematics Education, was originally designed to help adults understand karmic math. It had turned into the mindless job of taking spreadsheets and kerchunking out stupidly simple graphs. Insert a UC after the F and you’ll get the picture of what we all thought of FKME. “I have way too much to do. You can’t—”

“Fight me on this, Jones, and I’ll take away the helper. Dismissed.”
Bang
.

** Rafe **

Today was Rafe’s birthday. His human birthday, his three thousand nine hundredth…and some-odd. He’d lost track of the years but marked each anyway.

Trying to remember his humanity. There was a losing battle.

Around him swirled millions of stars, diamonds sparkling in the black velvet of space’s infinite night. The glittering dance of spangled dust and gas was a ballet that had lured many a jinni to stare upon its beauty forever.

Rafe had promised himself he’d never be one of them. That he’d never lose himself in the stars, never forget Earth’s people.

That he’d never be like his father.

But it was so long ago. The centuries had taken their toll. He stopped visiting except once each earth year, but even then the visit was rote, memory’s husk of an increasingly barren promise.

Until
she
was born.

She was so…human. Toddling into trouble, into scrapes and bruises, but always dusting herself off, laughing, and toddling on. Later she was running headlong into trouble but still always laughing, dusting off, moving.

Today he was strangely eager. Eager to scale down, to bend his eye toward the small dull rock of his birth. To see her.

He shifted focus. Well, imagine that. She was in trouble again.

The whole planet is in trouble
. The voice shimmered from the depths of space, like a cell phone that had the stars as relay towers.
Destruction threatens your home
.

“Jibril.” Rafe bowed low at the voice. As old and vast as Rafe was, Jibril was greater by far. He’d sacrificed himself to save humanity and had passed to a plane so high he could no longer descend to the physical. Even maintaining his presence here on the ethereal was hard for him, like fitting a lion in a shoebox.

But Jibril was right. Humanity vibrated a sick, washed-out brown on the ethereal. Rafe frowned. “What’s wrong with them?”

I’m not sure. From here I can only see the sickness. The result.

“The cause must be on the physical plane. I’ll have to descend.”

How will you do that? A physical cause usually has a specific location. Unless you’re called by a physical being, you could end up anywhere.

“Then I’ll just have to make sure I’m called, won’t I?”

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