Thin Air (33 page)

“
You
have a message.” David looked wary. Worried.

“Through the Air Oracle,” Ashan replied. “We will no longer be one. You may have the New Djinn, but I will command the Old Ones. Two conduits.”

David's glow cooled. It was a slow process, but definite, and when it was over he stood there looking at Ashan with an odd, vulnerable intensity I didn't really understand.

“I see,” he said. “You mean to destroy us.”

“No. I merely mean to protect those of my own kind,” Ashan said. “We will not fight you, nor the humans, unless attacked. If the Mother asks, we will answer. But we will have nothing to do with mortals. If you and yours choose to do so, that's your affair, but no agreements you make will bind us.”

“You're leaving,” David said, and frowned.

“Not quite yet,” Ashan said, and looked down at his feet. No, at the ground. And I felt that strange slip-sliding again, the rapid movement of the planet's magnetic force. I heard a distant hum of metal trembling, and felt the metal parts on my clothing, like zippers, pull just slightly away from me. “The magnetic field is shifting.”

“It can't be. It's not time,” David said, but like Ashan he was staring down, and I sensed it was more of a pro forma objection than a real argument. “Jonathan had plans for handling this.”

“Yes,” Ashan said. “And we will need all of our strength to carry them out. Get the New Djinn. Gather the Wardens and the Ma'at. Get them here soon.”

“Here?” David asked. They were suddenly talking reasonably, two professionals approaching a problem. They'd blown past the personal—that Ashan was a conniving, evil bastard who'd killed my child and tried to kill me—and gone straight to the job at hand with dizzying speed. I couldn't keep up with the shifting currents.

Venna sent me a pitying look that indicated she knew that feeling all too well.

“It should be here. Sacred space.” Ashan said, and tugged on Venna's hand. She looked up at him and smiled, and that smile was pure pleasure. “This will be our place. Held by the Old Ones.”

“
Here
won't work unless you release the shields that keep us from touching the aetheric,” I pointed out. “And…unless you're willing to let us mere mortals enter.”

I got a glare. Ashan was angry at the reminder. Wardens weren't meant to be here. It was, for him, an offense that one had ever stepped onto the sacred ground.

He wasn't the only one, I sensed. There was a definite energy coming from the crowd, and it wasn't good, and most of it was directed toward me. I suspected a lecture on tolerance and the evils of bigotry wasn't really going to be all that well received, so I kept my mouth shut and let Ashan think about it.

“Yes,” he finally said. “We'll lower them. Bring them here. Bring everyone here.”

David nodded, took my hand, and walked me through the crowd of Djinn—who silently moved aside, although some of them, staring at me, looked like they were holding ancient grudges. I was the Wardens personified, at the moment, and burning in effigy was a tradition going back to when my people were just a gleam in Mother Earth's eye.

I held my silence until we reached the cemetery gates. Miraculously, the Djinn held their peace. I couldn't tell that David was worried until we reached the relative safety outside on the sidewalk, where the other Wardens were clustered around, some still shaking off the stun effects, and then he let out a breath that told me everything about how he'd been feeling.

“What the hell was
that
?” I asked. He didn't meet my eyes.

“That was a coup,” he said, “and Ashan has effectively been declared the leader of more than half of the Djinn. The Old Ones outnumber my…I guess you'd call it my generation—and they're more powerful. When Jonathan was in charge that balance of power evened out, but I'm not Jonathan.” He shook his head slowly. “Not even close. I don't know what it will mean.”

I wanted to ask him harder questions, but the Wardens weren't letting us have a moment; everybody was talking at once. Paul had grabbed my arm and was trying to hustle me to the van, Kevin and Cherise were blabbing at us, someone was urgently talking on the cell phone, and David…well, David clearly was willing to let me get dragged off if it meant he didn't have to undergo twenty questions.

I felt the slippery sensation again, heard Paul saying something about magnetic surges as polarities threatened to shift, and the cell phone that the Warden—I knew him now, his name was Otombo; he was a Fire Warden out of Arkansas—the cell phone suddenly let out an earsplitting shriek and exploded into sparks. Otombo winced and dropped the useless piece of equipment. It let out a thin, whiny sound of electronic distress, and a tiny wisp of smoke curled up from the speaker.

“Cell phones off!
Off!
” Paul bellowed. He was right; it was the only way to save them. People patted their pockets, a couple of women pawed through purses, and most got their phones shut off before anything happened. I heard the electronic wail from another quarter, and a French-Canadian curse.
Oops.

“What the
hell
is going on around here?” Paul demanded—from me, of course. I looked over my shoulder at David. He was staring back at the cemetery, no particular expression on his face.

I started to repeat the question—there had been a lot of cross talk, with the other Wardens all basically asking each other the same thing—but there was no need. David said, “How much do you know about magnetism?”

“Well, if you bang an iron tie-rod on a metal grate, you can make it a magnet,” I said. “I saw it on
MacGyver
.” And I was ridiculously pleased to be remembering it.

He spared me a glance. Not a patient one. “The magnetic field surrounding the Earth is moving,” he said. “Breaking into islands of polarity.”

Sam Otombo nodded. “Yes,” he agreed. He had a faint tropical accent, and his long, clever face was very serious. “The field has been concentrated as we know it, at the poles, for perhaps three quarters of a million years. But there is evidence that it has shifted before, completely flipped from north to south, and this begins with islands of magnetic polarity shift.” He nudged the remains of his cell phone with his foot. “There was speculation that it could affect some types of communications, global positioning satellites…”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You mean north is now
south
?”

“In some places, yes. I mean that if you looked at a compass needle right now, in this place, you probably wouldn't see north,” Otombo corrected. “Anything but. The magnetic field is moving, but it may take hundreds, even thousands of years for it to settle again.”

I was completely lost. They hadn't really covered this in weather school. “Is it dangerous?”

“Long-term, perhaps. We could have increased cosmic radiation. The magnetic field shields us from that at all but the most remote places on Earth.”

David nodded. “You're right that it has happened before, sometimes as often as every few thousand years. But the Djinn and the Wardens have kept the system stable for millennia.”

“Until now,” I said. “Because we're no longer working together to hold it. Right?”

“That's why you have to bring them here, Jo,” he said. “Bring the Wardens. Bring the Ma'at. And hurry.”

Funny, most people wouldn't even know it was a crisis. It didn't have any of the usual signs—no menacing clouds, no tremors in the ground, no forest fires charring acres of homes. This was the quietest, most subtle disaster I'd ever seen. Except for a few cell phones squealing their last, and some random weird magnetic effects, it seemed to go almost unnoticed.

“Yeah, it's definitely weird,” Paul said when I pointed it out as we made phone calls not from mobiles, or from the tricked-out communications van (which had been hastily shut down, just in case), but the old-fashioned way, from a bank of phone booths in a hotel lobby. David had quietly disappeared, I supposed to go try to persuade his fellow Nouveau Djinn to participate. Did even
they
take orders from him these days? Had I really seen him lose his place in the world there in the cemetery?

I hadn't asked him, but surely he was still the conduit of energy for the New Djinn. Through him they were connected to the Mother—that gave him some security.

I hoped.

The list of numbers Paul had handed me included names I recognized, a marvel that I didn't think was going to get old anytime soon. I
liked
recognizing and remembering. It was a real thrill.

Talking to the Ma'at, well, not so much. Charles Spenser Ashworth II, in particular, was a great big pain in the ass. “We're well aware of the magnetic instability,” he told me, in that waspish, precise way he'd once commanded me to tell him the circumstances of his son's death. He'd tortured me when I'd refused to tell him. Okay, that was a memory I could have safely kept buried. “There's nothing to be done about it. The Ma'at don't interfere in the natural order, Ms. Baldwin; you know that to be our guiding principle. If you want to twist nature to your will, then perhaps you should call upon your friends in the Wardens.”

“News flash, Charles: I'm standing with them right now. And we're asking you to help.” I tapped my fingernails on the chromed surface of the pay phone in frustration. “Come on. Come out of the shadows. The Ma'at have a different take on this, and I for one think they ought to be heard before the Wardens and the Djinn decide what to do. Don't you? Don't you want a seat at the big table?”

I'd played directly to his vanity, shamelessly. Ashworth was rich, white, old, and patrician, and he'd never had
anything
but a seat at the big table. Usually red leather, handcrafted. On his own he hadn't manifested enough power to qualify for the Wardens—there were thousands of people every year who were either borderline talented, or just below the line, who were left to go about their lives without Warden interference. Most of them never even knew what they had, or what they could do, and those who did couldn't do much with it. Maybe light some candles without matches, if they were Fire; maybe grow out-of-season plants, if they were Earth. A weak, brief rainstorm, if Weather.

But put those marginal talents together with Djinn who willingly helped channel it, connect it into a series, you got additive power of a unique kind. The Ma'at had been focused on undoing the excesses of the Wardens; they rarely influenced things directly unless forced to it, mostly out of self-defense.

But then, they'd never been asked to step up on the front lines, really. Not until now.

“What do you want?” Ashworth asked.

“I want you, Lazlo, and everybody else in the Ma'at you can pull to get on a plane and come to Seacasket, New Jersey. The Wardens will meet you and bring you in from the airport. Call the Crisis Center number”—I gave it to him from memory, another thrill—“and tell them who you are and when you're arriving. They'll coordinate.”

Ashworth was silent for a few long seconds, and then said, “We won't do anything contrary to the best interests of the planet. You understand that.”

“Believe me, I wouldn't ask you to. Get moving.”

When I hung up, Paul was hanging up as well. He offered up a big, square hand, and I high-fived it. “Right,” he said. “We got ourselves a party. Before nightfall, there should be about five hundred Wardens here, and however many Ma'at. Throw in the Djinn, and…”

“And you've got a real recipe for disaster,” I said, not feeling so high-five-ish anymore. “This could turn bad so easily.”

“But it won't,” Paul said.

“How do you know?”

He grinned. “Because I'm putting you in charge of it, kiddo.”

 

We took over the Seacasket Civic Center, and we did that mainly with bags of cash, toted in by Warden security representatives in their blazers, shoulder holsters, and intimidating sunglasses. Whatever functions were going on there, we got them postponed, canceled, or moved.

Even though that was the biggest indoor space in town, it wasn't exactly spacious. I'd have rather gathered everybody in the cemetery itself, but Ashan wasn't letting us grubby humans wander around on his sacred ground for longer than he had to.

It was late, I was tired, there wasn't enough coffee, and even the Djinn were crabby. Not a recipe for smooth interspecies relations.

It blew up in amazingly short order, over some dispute over seating arrangements.

I tried to get everyone's attention. It wasn't easy, because there was a whole lot of shouting going on, quite a bit of cursing, and I strongly suspected some hair pulling was involved, over where the Wardens and a few of the Ma'at had gotten in one another's faces to make their points more forcefully.

David had found the time, somehow, to get me a car—a vintage Mustang, unbelievably enough, a cherry red honey of a car that made me practically orgasm with delight at the sight of it—and, of course, a change of clothing. He knew what I liked: a sleek black pantsuit with a close-fitting purple silk shirt. And a fabulous pair of elegant three-inch Manolo Blahnik heels that fit like they'd been made for my feet. (Knowing the Djinn…maybe they had. Maybe Manolo was supernatural. Having worn the shoes, I'd have believed it.)

I slipped the Manolo off of my right foot, stood up, and banged it loudly on the table in front of me. It was a cheap folding table, covered with the ubiquitous white hotel cloth, and it made a nice, satisfying racket.

That didn't do the job. Apparently, Nikita Khrushchev had either had bigger feet or heavier shoes than I did, back when he'd used the same tactic at the UN. I transferred the shoe to assaulting the microphone instead.

In the ensuing silence, as the electronic squealing died down, Lewis, poker-faced, stage-whispered, “You must be desperate to do that to designer shoes.”

“Sit down,” I said to the room at large, “and shut the hell up. Now.” I gave Lewis a look that included him, too. He was unmoved, except for having a very slight crinkle at the corner of his mouth. He thought I was cute when I was mad. David, who had seen me at my worst, was watching me from the other side with much more perspective on the subject, and was consequently less impressed.

The Wardens more or less obeyed, sinking slowly into the folding chairs that had been provided. The Ma'at made a point of
not
, until they got the nod from the head table by Myron Lazlo, who was—along with Charles Spenser Ashworth II, and two or three other really old guys—in charge of that organization. Myron sat on the other side of David, who was at my right elbow, not quite touching. Counting Lewis, and Paul next to him, there were just the five of us at the head table. One step below us, down on the floor, there were round tables draped with well-used cloths, around which sat small groups of the most powerful beings in the world, all keeping to themselves. Tempers were high particularly between the Ma'at, who felt vindicated by being summoned to the meeting, and the Wardens, who felt betrayed by everything they'd ever known. Not to mention that the Wardens were terrified to be trapped in the same room with the Djinn.

The Djinn had taken over the back half of the room, standing in two separate, distinct groups. One group held the New Djinn, like Rahel, Prada, and dozens of others I'd come into contact with over the past couple of years. Marion's tall American Indian Djinn was among them, and he gave me a small nod of acknowledgment when my eyes met his.

The Old Ones, on the other hand, held Djinn like Venna and Ashan, and dozens of badass ancients I didn't recognize at all. They didn't mingle.

“Right,” I said, as chairs scraped on the floors and people settled back in their appropriate armed encampments, metaphorically speaking—or neutral corners, not that I believed for a second that there was such a thing as neutral. “Let's just get through this with a minimum of bloodshed, if possible.”

Myron Lazlo took the microphone, frowned at the dent from my shoe, and cleared his throat. He was old enough to have been running a speak-easy during Prohibition, and he liked formality. He did not, therefore, like me all that much. He was wearing a blue suit, a crisp white shirt, and a nice brocade silk tie that looked a little too daring for a dyed-in-the-wool CPA type. Probably a gift from a great-grandchild.

“Before we begin,” he said, “the Ma'at want assurances that this effort is at all necessary.”

“Assurances from whom, exactly?” one of the Wardens on the floor asked in a plummy British accent. “And who the hell are you that we have to explain ourselves to you, mate?”

A growl of agreement swept through the Wardens' side of the room. Lewis gestured for the mike, and Myron passed it back to me. Lewis had recovered from my evil twin's attempt to take him over, but he was well aware that in defending himself, he'd precipitated, or at least hastened, this whole mess. He looked tired, his haircut was at least a month past its expiration date, and he had a wicked five-o'clock shadow thing going. Slumped down in his chair, he was still at least six inches taller than everybody else at the table, including me.

The room went still, waiting to hear Lewis fire back at Myron and defend the Wardens.

It didn't come to me as any surprise when he didn't.

“Myron's right,” Lewis said. His slightly raspy voice was level and calm, and it took away at least half of the impact of what he was saying, so the uproar was mostly confused, shocked whispers rather than full-volume outrage. “Let's ask ourselves first
if
this has to be done, not just
how
.”

The Wardens, in particular, exploded into protest. I used the shoe again, to good effect this time, and made an after-you gesture to Lewis when things had subsided to mutters again. He gave me an entirely insincere gee-thanks look in response. We knew each other so well we could be sarcastic without even speaking.

“I think we should ask the Djinn,” he said. “David? Ashan?”

Diplomatic of him to include them both. David looked across at Ashan and made a very polite nod that I was sure cost him some pride. Ashan lifted his chin to its maximum angle of arrogance.

“In normal course, this could be allowed to happen,” he said. “But it was not triggered by natural forces, and so it should be corrected before so much of the field is broken that the change is inevitable. It causes the Mother discomfort if the change happens too quickly.”

He hated talking to us. Hated the whole idea that we would have any part in this at all. Which, hey, I didn't much like the thought of working side by side with him, either. I had no idea what it was really costing David to do it, but I knew it wasn't easy.

“Why aren't we sticking these freaks in bottles?” one of the less intelligent Wardens yelled from somewhere in the back. “Murdering bastards!”

Lewis didn't let anger slip free very often—he was mostly of the “irony is the best policy” school of thought—but there was no mistaking the steel in his voice this time. “Shut up, or you're dealing with me,” he snapped. The silence that fell afterward stretched for long enough to make his point before he continued. “Let me get something completely clear. The Djinn aren't our slaves, and they aren't our pets. They're our partners in this, and they ought to be our partners in everything we do. If they struck out at us in a rage, they were acting in defense of themselves and the Earth.” Well, not quite. Ashan had also been conducting his own campaign against David for control of the Djinn, but Lewis was right, in the main. “We oppressed them for thousands of years. We forced them to do things that none of us wants to think about or acknowledge. We sealed them in bottles with
Demons
. Think about it. They came after us, and we damn well deserved it.”

Another uproar, this one composed of a whole lot of variations of oh-no-you-don'ts. Lewis waited it out, stone-faced, arms folded. Yeah, that had gone over well.

Two of the Wardens got up and tried to storm out of the room.
I don't think so
, I thought furiously, and created an invisible shield of hardened air around the door. The first rebel hit it and bounced off…an Earth Warden, big and burly in a lumberjack kind of way. The second, however, was a Weather Warden. Sarah Crossman, from Iowa. Decent enough person, but hidebound. She lost her temper and tried to pry at the hold I had over it.

And the fragile, highly undependable hold I had over my own temper broke. It sounded like shattering glass, which made sense, because somehow the air pressure in the room had dropped, along with the temperature, and the cloudy windows way up at the top of the room (because the other, alternative use for this place was basketball) blew out in a spray of powdered glass. People screamed, and wind whipped in uncontrollable currents.

And then everything went very, very still as Lewis grabbed hold of the air and took control from me. The door that Sarah Crossman was pulling on suddenly opened, smacking her in the face and sending her reeling backward.

Lewis said, “If you want to go, go. But if you leave this room, you're out of the Wardens. And I'll see to it that your powers will be neutered.”