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Heat Stroke(29)

By:Rachel Caine


And then I saw it. Definitely not human. Black, fluid, like an spilled shadow, a stain on the world. Rahel was trying to hold it, but it slid away from her like oil, oozing past her, flowing toward me.

“Go up!” she shouted to me, and her talons changed colors from neon orange-yellow-blue to diamond, and she slashed at the thing between us, tearing deeply. I heard it scream in a high, metallic, screeching voice. “Idiot! Go up!”

She meant up to the aetheric. I let go of my human form and went instantly into fog, vapor, mist… into nothing that could be gotten hold of. But that meant I went up into the next plane of existence, and there, the battle was really going on.

Rahel—fog and fire in the aetheric, a bright glowing ghost—was inside of a black, crackling cage of fire. As I watched, she howled and slashed at it, but the wounds she made faded within seconds.

It was… it was eating her. Consuming her, bleeding off power, feeding it through that cage of fire and into something else, something that I couldn’t even see for the darkness. God. The thing was looking at me, not at her. I could feel its hunger vibrating the world between us.

I didn’t think. I just reached out and grabbed hold of that black cage of fire. I guess I intended to rip a hole in it big enough for Rahel to escape, but that wasn’t what happened. The second I touched it, it bonded to me, made me a circuit in that huge flow of current. I was locked in place.

“Joanne!” Rahel shouted, and I felt her reach through the bars that separated us and touch me. “Draw on David! Fight!”

I didn’t have a choice. The sensation of being sucked dry was so overwhelmingly revolting that I would have used anything, anybody to pull away. I grabbed hold of that silvery cord that connected me to David and felt power cascade into me, heady, brilliant, hot, pure. It was like introducing a circuit breaker into the flow. The cage around Rahel fell apart into writhing black spikes of energy, and I reached to pull her free. When I touched her, I left silvery contrails of power behind. She grabbed hold and dragged me down, through aetheric, rocketing back into the real world. We slammed back into the elevator cage with enough force to rock it on its cables, and Rahel didn’t waste any time with niceties; she took over for me, creating flesh and form in less than a flicker of a second, and when I opened my eyes her neon yellow ones were staring into mine from less than a foot away.

“What the hell was—”

“Hold on!” she shouted, interrupting me, and I felt the power surge around us. Not from her, not from me, from that thing.

I didn’t think, I reacted. I reached out and slapped it down, hard. The resulting concussion of force erupted in sparks and blue-white flashes as energy turned to electricity, seeking the ground.

Ah, this was something I could handle. I reached out on the subatomic level and quickly dispersed the field, bleeding it off into a million tiny jolts through the steel frame of the building. All over the place, people would be picking up static charges from carpet, shocking themselves on doorknobs, feeling prickles on the backs of their necks.

“No!” Rahel said, and grabbed me by the shoulders. “We can’t fight here! Too close!”

Not that we had any choice. The thing was still coming at us, hard and fast, and I ignored her to reach out through the aetheric and read what was going on.

It had control of the air. I couldn’t tell what it meant to do, but something bad was a good bet. Air’s heavy—it weighs several pounds per square inch. Increasing density can crush a human—or even a humanoid—body like an empty beer can.

I blocked, drawing heavy oxygen out of the elevator cage and slamming it together in a tightly packed ball between my spread hands. Rahel backed away, looking down at the swirling gray-blue mass I was holding. Her eyes went wide.

I set it on fire with a spark from the electricity still crackling around in the air, and wrapped the whole thing in a shell of carbon dioxide, and lifted that bowling-ball-sized inferno in one hand and held it there. Hell in a bottle.

“Bring it on!” I yelled to the empty air. Voices didn’t carry in the altered atmosphere, but it didn’t matter, I knew it was getting the point. “Get your ass out here, you coward! Show yourself!”

The elevator shuddered to a halt.

Something black manifested itself in the corner as a shadow, then a stain, then an oil-slick presence.

It wasn’t a Djinn. I didn’t know what it was, but evidently Rahel did. She lifted her left hand and pointed it at the thing, and her fingers sprouted claws again—long, wickedly pointed things that gleamed harsh crystal in the overhead lights.

“Ifrit,” she hissed. She looked savage. “Leave this place.”