Heat Stroke (21 page)

“Better,” Yvette approved. “You have good taste.”

“Thank you,” I said. Pretty much meaning
fuck you,
but without the actual words.

“What's your name?”

Since she wasn't my master, and it wasn't a Rule-of-Three question anyway, there was no reason for me to tell the truth. “Lilith,” I said. Sounded exotic and faintly evil.
Hi, I'm Lilith, I'll be your evil servant today.
Yeah, I liked it.

“Lilith,” she repeated. She did the walking-around thing again, checking me out. “You'll do.”

“For what, exactly?” I asked. She looked shocked. Apparently, Djinn were not quite so aggressive in her experience. “Who are you?”

She wasn't going to answer questions from the help. She glared at Kevin, evidently blaming him for my bad attitude, and said, “You understand what to do?”

“Yeah,” he said, and looked as resentful as I felt. “I get it.”

“Don't screw it up.”

“I won't.”

“You know how important this is.” God, she was picking at him like a scab. She'd probably say that she was just reinforcing the point, but I saw the light in her eyes. She just plain enjoyed making him squirm. It was an uncomfortable sort of fascination.

Kevin, of course, got defensive. “I got it, already! Jeez, Mom! Take a pill!” I almost felt sorry for the kid. Messy, hormonally overloaded, unattractive, burdened with a stepmom from Hell . . .

And then I remembered him checking me out like some fifty-year-old drunk in a strip club, and the impulse toward sympathy went away.

“Okay.” Kevin took a deep breath, clenched his fists, and said, “Yo. I want you to do something.”

I was unimpressed by the buildup.

“I want you to cause a really big fire in—” He shot a look at mom, who was staring at him like a harpy ready to pounce. “—in a town called Seacasket, Maine.”

What the hell . . . ? Didn't matter. I could already feel the circuits kicking in, the Djinn hardwiring powering up. “Yeah, sure, okay.” I was already figuring all the ways I could stretch that one. A really big, pretty, contained fire that didn't burn anything. Spectacular, not dangerous.

Yvette made a frustrated sound in the back of her throat that sounded like a purr, and addressed herself directly to him. “The whole town. Destroy everything and everyone in it.”

“Uh, yeah. What she said,” he said to me. He didn't sound enthusiastic. “Big fire. Destroy the town and everybody in it. Now. Uh, and you can do that misty thing to get there.”

The part of me that couldn't be controlled was already reaching out for power, tapping into Kevin's potential, drawing it down into me in a rich blood-tide flood. God, it was so
strong
 . . . I'd thought it was just Lewis that had this much power, but to find it in someone like
Kevin
 . . . it was incredible. Immeasurable.

And I was about to use it to roast an entire town alive.
Oh God, no.

“Go,” Kevin said, and waved his hand around awkwardly. “Do what I told you.”

To my utter horror, I found I couldn't stop myself.
I was already misting out. Kevin, the Martha-Stewart-perfect room, Yvette . . . all fading into nothing.

He hadn't told me to travel the aetheric, so I stayed in mist form, moving as slowly as real-world physics would allow. I was a hot storm rolling through clouds and sky, burning with purpose, out of control, and lives were going to be lost when I arrived, no question about it.

I had to think of a way to stop this.
How?
I wasn't in control of it, not at all. It was controlling me, I was just the conduit through which the power would flow. Fine, if I was a circuit, maybe there was a way to insulate myself. Muffle the damage I was going to do. How?
Think, dammit!
All that training in weather, and none of it was any help at all now . . .

Or was it?

I reached out and grabbed a spangled net of storm energy from the sea and dragged it behind me like a train on a wedding dress as I arrowed past, heading for Seacasket, Maine.

I knew, without having to ask why, that there were 1,372 people in Seacasket. Not to mention pets, farm animals, birds, insects, plants, all the things that made up the ecosphere, that made life possible and desirable.

I had to find a way to save them.

 

It felt like a long time, but it could have only been a few hours at most between leaving the Prentiss house and landing at the corner of Davis and Cunningham, right next to a sign that said
SEACASKET CHAMBER OF COMMERCE WELCOMES YOU
, decorated with
the seal of the Rotary Club and logos for Hardee's and McDonald's. A smaller sign below read
HOME OF THE CRIMSON PIRATES
,
STATE CHAMPIONS LADIES BASKETBALL
1998.

Seacasket, for all its rural sensibility, had a Starbucks directly across the street from me. There were five or six people in there, sitting at tiny uncomfortable tables sipping mochas or cappuccinos or half-caff skim deluxe grande lattés. There were a couple of kids running down the sidewalk chasing a run-away beagle puppy, and a few cars driving by, people talking, laughing, oblivious to the death I was bringing with me.

No. No no no no.

I tried. I tried with all my might to stop it, but my hands went out, and the power that I'd sucked out of Kevin, that rich textured power that filled me to bursting, it shot up into a hot dome over the town.

No!

I couldn't stop it, but I could try to mitigate it. At the same time as that compulsive part of me started authoring destruction, the other part of me—the part that was still partially free, at least—started desperately weaving together the wind. Not enough time for this, not nearly enough; weatherworking required subtlety, delicacy, like neurosurgery. This was more like a battlefield amputation, with the patient alive and screaming. I increased the density of the air, heated it faster than a microwave oven, created a corresponding cold front and slammed the two together.

Instant chaos. Overhead, beyond the hot fury of fire that was gathering over the town, I saw clouds
exploding in blue and black mushrooms. Silent, but incredibly powerful. I watched it in Oversight as the cotton white anvil cloud boiled up, and up, and up, hot air struggling to climb over cold, water molecules slamming together in so much violence that the energy generated exploded outward in waves. The collisions sparked even more motion, forced expansion against the unmoving wall of the low pressure system.

Go, go, go!
I was begging it to move faster, even though it was the fastest I'd ever built anything like this—fifteen seconds, from clear sky to first pale pink flash of lightning.

I wasn't looking for rain, though. Rain wouldn't even begin to derail the firestorm I was about to unleash on this place. It would instantly evaporate into steam, and for all I knew, kill even more people. The kind of power I was carrying wasn't something that could be put out with a fire hose, anyway.

The kids on the street stopped, looking up, open-mouthed with amazement. The dog started yapping.

Thunder boomed like cannon. It rattled glass in windows. Two car alarms shrieked in fright, and I felt the pressure of bad weather building, hot and still and green.
Yes.

I couldn't hold the fire. It was coming down, an acid rain of napalm from the sky. It hit the tallest building in sight—a bank, maybe—and draped it in orange-red streamers that exploded white-hot when it found something to feed on. Seven floors above the street, hell had descended. I could feel people screaming, feel the pulse of their terror, and I
couldn't stop it.

Fire crawled lazily over the building, dripping in hot strings from windows. Burning the place from the outside in, from the top down.
Get out. Get the hell out, now!
Because that place would be an inferno in minutes. Could I do something else,
anything
?

I looked down at myself and saw that I was surrounded by a thick, sparkling layer of blue. Coldlight, moving over me like a crawling blanket. Oh God. What in the hell was it doing to me? I couldn't
feel
it. Couldn't feel it at all.

I stared blindly up into the storm, willing it, begging it to do what I needed it to do.

And something answered. It was raw and primitive and barely more than an instinct, Mother Nature twitching in a nightmare. The blast of energy broke over me like a drowning wave, and I went to my knees, still staring up at the arching, strangely beautiful firefall that was going to destroy this place.

And then the tornado formed above it.

It started small, an indrawn breath of the storm, a tentative wisp of vapor like a tongue tasting the air. I fed it energy.
Come on, baby. Live. Work for me.
It pulled in strength, drove down in a black twisting rope toward the tasty, tempting energy buffet that was the firedome.

It connected, swelled, and took on a roaring, freight-train stability.

Nothing can resist that force when it gets going. Especially not fire, which is nothing but energy given plasmatic form; it's just food for the process. A stream of fire broke free of the dome and spiraled up inside the tornado like a gas flame into a lantern.

The result was unholy. Beautiful, terrifying, like
nothing that most human beings had ever seen or would ever want to . . . a storm shot through with crawling, vivid orange as the fire struggled to keep its cohesion. The tornado sucked up the thick, clinging plasma like Jell-O through a straw.

The firedome broke apart. Individual napalm-hot streams fell like ribbons on the town, but the majority of it was drawn into the tornado and spewed out in a fading glow above the anvil cloud, where the thin atmosphere of the mesosphere starved it of fuel. The rapid cooling would help feed the engine of the tornado, as air sank and was drawn back into the express-elevator rush of the spiral.

The compulsive part of me was still trying to fulfill my master's command, which meant I kept forming fire up there in the sky, trying to put the dome back together. The tornado kept vacuuming it safely away. It occurred to me with a cold shock to wonder how long the compulsion would make me do this. I could feel my fuel tanks edging down toward empty. The energy output was enormous, and I couldn't even draw strength from the sun, because I'd created an instant overcast.

Maybe I could draw power from the fire itself, sort of a cannibalistic loop? No—when I tried to grab hold and suck it back into me, I couldn't find a grip. It thrashed away from me like a writhing snake.

I couldn't keep this up forever. The storm was running on its own now, but I needed to keep control of it. Unchecked, the tornado could do as much damage as the fire, and that really
would
be my fault, in a whole new ugly way. The winds in the tornado wall were reaching speeds of about 250 miles per
hour, a solidly terrifying F4. That wasn't my doing, of course. Truth is, once you get the forces of nature going, they don't need a lot of tender loving care. I had to conserve my strength to try to
stop
things, not keep them going.

Somebody was tugging at my black peachskin coat, trying to get my attention. I tumbled out of Oversight and felt my body starting to mist; I pulled myself together and turned to look over my shoulder.

Two kids and a dog. All equally scared. The little girl, red-faced, was crying big crystal tears and clinging to her brother; he was all of ten, struggling to be brave and hold on to both little sister and a wiggling, whining beagle.

“Lady?” he asked. His voice was high and trembling, pure as the tones of an angel. “Help?”

He was so damn polite about it, with death whirling a couple of hundred feet overhead, with the bank burning like a bonfire three blocks away. People in the Starbucks across the street were screaming and cowering behind the counter with the baristas.

I put my arms around the three of them and pulled them close, sheltered them with my body as the fire overhead fought the suction of the wind to come down like a burning blanket.

The compulsion wasn't going to stop. It would go on until I couldn't keep control of the tornado. I'd created twice the disaster instead of averting the one. The fire would come, and then the tornado would kill whatever survived.

The hair prickled on the back of my neck.

Something big . . . a white surge of power sweeping through, clearing out the fire, breaking the
processes I'd set up inside the storm. It rolled like a glittering razor-edged sea.

It tasted familiar. No, it
was
as familiar as the power humming inside my own body because it was the same damn thing.

It was David.

I raised my head slowly as the silence fell, that hot green silence like the one before the tornado's freight-train rush . . . the fire at the bank building flared once, blue-white, and vanished into a hiss of smoke. The streamers of flame winked out.

David was standing across the street in front of the Starbucks, copper-brushed hair catching light like silk. He was in his traveling clothes—blue shirt, blue jeans, olive drab wool coat that belled with the wind.

He looked so tired. So horribly tired. And there were crawling blue sparks all over him, too. Glittering in a barely visible umbilical between us.

“Joanne,” he whispered. I felt his voice, even from so far away, like breath on my skin.

I didn't say anything out loud—couldn't—but I felt the compulsion rising up again, felt the fire sucking energy and pouring it into a manifestation that glittered and grew above my head. A snowball on fire. A boulder. A sun. The light from it was so bright it bleached the town to gray-white shadow.

Stop me,
I begged him. I knew he could hear me, vibating through the connection between us.
Kill me if you have to. Cut the cord.

He looked up, at the growing ball of destruction flaming in the sky, and then back at me. I didn't have to tell him I couldn't stop. He knew. He understood.