“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 lattes. There were a couple of kids running down the sidewalk chasing a runaway 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.