Which left me, and Lewis, and maybe Patrick. And any other Djinn we could convince to take a look.
“Clearly,” I said as Lewis and Patrick and I compared notes, “this stuff’s not natural to our planes of existence. Can you see it?”
I’d directed the question to Lewis, and he indicated a no. “Everything looks normal up on the aetheric.”
“Yeah. That’s what bugs me. Because it doesn’t look at all normal to me.” I couldn’t sit still; I got up and paced, wished I had on something besides blue denim and work boots, because this was a situation that screamed for bitchen black leather and tight boots. These boots are made for walkin‘… “The stuff’s like evil pollen. Who knew it could sift through three planes of existence and end up here so fast?”
“Unless it’s been coming through the rift for a while,” Lewis said. “That’s possible. The fact that you just now saw it might have nothing to do with it, really. If it’s something subtle and largely undetectable, we could have a problem that’s been slowly getting worse.”
“It’s not pollen,” Patrick said. He was in the far corner of the living room now, straightening a Monet landscape under the recessed lights. “From your description, it’s more like radiation. You said that David tried to seal some in an energy bubble?”
“Yeah. Didn’t work.”
“That’s very interesting,” Patrick said, and stepped back to admire the Monet from a distance. “That means that the normal aetheric barriers can’t stop it, because they’re all energy-based. This… coldlight, for lack of a better word… seems very dangerous indeed.”
Lewis looked up from his contemplation of the carpet. “We don’t even know that it is dangerous.”
“It issues from a hole into the Void where demons lie,” Patrick pointed out. “It’s rare that something of that pedigree turns out to be happy fairy dust.”
“Not that I doubt you, but are you sure it’s not just that you’re not used to your new senses yet?” Lewis asked me. Which was, actually, not a stupid question at all.
“I don’t know,” I said, with a great deal less arrogance and a great deal more honesty than I usually had. “Ask him, he’s got a few centuries on me.”
Patrick was rambling the apartment again, looking lost and morose; he was milking it, of course. Not like he couldn’t have fixed everything back the way it was, if he’d wanted. Maybe he was adjusting to it. “What?” he asked, although I knew he’d been listening to every word. We’d been a lot more interesting than the stacked bowl of Chinese ornamental balls on the coffee table. “Bother. I can’t give an opinion until I’ve had a look.”
“Then come on.” I held out my hand. He ignored that, put his arm around me, and copped a feel. Which, thankfully, was a little insulated by the sensible denim that Lewis had chosen for me to wear. I moved his hand without more than a sidelong look, and up and away we went.
Well, Patrick said, in the way Djinn have of communicating up there in the aetheric, that’s different.
We hung there for a while, watching the storm rotating and building while the fragile milk-glass bursts of power came from all sides, like flashbulbs going off around a celebrity. Wardens at work. They looked weirdly anemic to me, now, but I could feel the hot blue pulse of other Djinn focusing and defining that force, putting it to precision work.
The only trouble was that there was nothing to fix here—nothing that could be fixed. The storm was slowly building. I’d already tried all the traditional stuff—disrupting the convection engine that was feeding the process; adding cooling layers underneath to isolate the updrafts; bringing in strong dry winds to shred the structure of the thing.
Nothing worked. And the Wardens who were trying it now were clearly singing from the same choir book, so we were going to be well into the second verse soon which would be, in the immortal words of Herman’s Hermits, the same as the first.
Look, I said to Patrick, braced for it, and trailed a very small part of myself through the mist.
A blue, sparkling pocket galaxy flared where I touched. I shook myself—how was it possible for my flesh to creep when I didn’t even have a body? — and watched the shining stuff float free like a festive, toxic cloud. Patrick’s low, pulsing aura backed hastily away from it.
What the hell is it? I asked him. I got a hot orange pulse of alarm in response. Okay, were there actual words with that?
Not ones I’d care to repeat in English, he sent back. I suppose the nearest equivalent would be, I haven’t the vaguest fucking idea. Nor do I have any desire to. And I’m leaving before I have a much closer acquaintance with it. I suggest you get your ass out of here as well. Now.