It was also hard. The stuff kept slipping under my touch, trying to writhe away. Definitely not just some hole in space. This thing was alive, and it didn’t like me. I persisted. It resisted. Little by little, I gained on it.
I was almost done when it gave one last, convulsive twist, turned, and jumped right out of the fabric of space and tore into me.
If it had been the normal world I’d have stumbled backwards, screamed, and tried to slap the thing off of me; it was definitely, horribly alive. What was worse, I couldn’t even really sense it. If I lost sight of it…
I wrapped both hands around it—or what passed for hand-equivalents here—and began to squeeze. All of Lewis’s potential flooded into me, concentrated into my grip and gave it world-crushing strength.
I felt the thing give with a hot little pop. It dissolved into a rain of silvery light, cold and glittering and totally undetectable as soon as it passed beyond my aura.
I’d seen that stuff before. Where?… with David. On the aetheric level. He’d thought it was odd then.
Now I knew where it had come from.
The rip tore open again and started whirling widdershins again. Oh man… that hadn’t gone well. As I brushed my hand over the surface I saw that sparkle again, saw the fireflies leaping out, away, into the primal essence of the universe.
This was really, really not good. And now I had ripple effects to deal with from the rip coming open again. That had sent shock waves of power throughout the planes—I’d felt it myself, like a sonic boom in my soul.
I left that plane and took the express down, and I didn’t like what I was seeing. Swirling clouds of silver fog on the next level. Hot invisible winds that stank of sulfur on the next.
In the aetheric, power was swirling like dust caught on the leading edge of a storm. I dropped back down next to Lewis, who was busy trying to get control of the thing—not a task for one Warden, no matter how powerful—and I quickly reached out to amplify what he was doing, pulling back waves of charged particles, changing the frequencies of vibrating and propagating wave forms. I started negative canceling waves to try to flatten out the effects, and felt Lewis’s burst of affirmation. Yes! We did it together, leveling, smoothing, pouring figurative oil on the literal waters.
I took hold of Lewis and pulled him down to the real-world level again. He thumped back into his body with a little plucked-string sound that was probably audible only on levels a Djinn could hear. I did the hi-I’m-naked-no-I’m-not thing again, wishing Patrick weren’t so intensely scoping me out, and realized I had my hand flat against Lewis’s chest. Mmm. The crisp, cool feel of his cotton shirt under my skin, the warm tingle of body underneath…
If I thought I’d been flying high after the decorating, I was definitely pulling g-forces now. My whole body was humming and vibrating, like it had just been through the best sex of its life.
“Wow,” I said involuntarily, and then blushed and dropped my hand and stepped back. “Um… did we…”
“Afraid not,” Lewis said. Was that a nice flush to his cheeks? Sure looked like it. “The rip’s still there, I can feel it. Now we’ve got other problems to take care of.”
“The waves?” I wasn’t talking about the ocean, but the aetheric; he got the reference.
“There’s a pretty severe widespread disturbance, and it’s running through all the manifestations. There’s stress under the tectonic plates in California. There’s a supercell forming out in the Atlantic. There’s a forest fire starting in Yellowstone.” That gave me a hot twitch of memory. Yellowstone was very sensitive to powerful forces, and once it got going, even the combined might of the Fire Wardens was only going to slow it down. Having emergencies manifest in three different ways would split the ability of the Wardens to act effectively—the Earth Wardens couldn’t get in to help the Fire Wardens contain any blaze; the Weather Wardens couldn’t help dump water to slow it down. If each of them had their own separate but equal crisis…
He gave me a very direct look. “I promised you it would be one favor. Not two.” He took the empty bottle out of his pocket and held it up. “I’ll keep my word.”
“I know.” I did. Lewis wasn’t a saint, thank God, but he was definitely a man of ethics and honor. “I’m releasing you from it. Not only did I not close the rip, I think I might have made it worse. Besides, you need me for this. There’s something majorly weird about this.”
He bent his head, an old-fashioned gesture of salute and gratitude. It occurred to me, late and strangely, that he had no alter ego presence in Oversight. Lewis was Lewis, whatever set of eyes I used to look at him. I was used to seeing humans as they thought of themselves—a plain girl as a ravishing beauty, a corporate-type guy as a knight in shining armor. But Lewis didn’t have any illusions, or any false fronts. He just was.