Maybe I could draw power from the fire itself, sort of a cannibalistic loop? No—when I tried to grab hold and suck it back into me, I couldn’t find a grip. It thrashed away from me like a writhing snake.
I couldn’t keep this up forever. The storm was running on its own now, but I needed to keep control of it. Unchecked, the tornado could do as much damage as the fire, and that really would be my fault, in a whole new ugly way. The winds in the tornado wall were reaching speeds of about 250 miles per hour, a solidly terrifying F4. That wasn’t my doing, of course. Truth is, once you get the forces of nature going, they don’t need a lot of tender loving care. I had to conserve my strength to try to stop things, not keep them going.
Somebody was tugging at my black peachskin coat, trying to get my attention. I tumbled out of Oversight and felt my body starting to mist; I pulled myself together and turned to look over my shoulder.
Two kids and a dog. All equally scared. The little girl, red-faced, was crying big crystal tears and clinging to her brother; he was all of ten, struggling to be brave and hold on to both little sister and a wiggling, whining beagle.
“Lady?” he asked. His voice was high and trembling, pure as the tones of an angel. “Help?”
He was so damn polite about it, with death whirling a couple of hundred feet overhead, with the bank burning like a bonfire three blocks away. People in the Starbucks across the street were screaming and cowering behind the counter with the baristas.
I put my arms around the three of them and pulled them close, sheltered them with my body as the fire overhead fought the suction of the wind to come down like a burning blanket.
The compulsion wasn’t going to stop. It would go on until I couldn’t keep control of the tornado. I’d created twice the disaster instead of averting the one. The fire would come, and then the tornado would kill whatever survived.
The hair prickled on the back of my neck.
Something big… a white surge of power sweeping through, clearing out the fire, breaking the processes I’d set up inside the storm. It rolled like a glittering razor-edged sea.
It tasted familiar. No, it was as familiar as the power humming inside my own body because it was the same damn thing.
It was David.
I raised my head slowly as the silence fell, that hot green silence like the one before the tornado’s freight-train rush… the fire at the bank building flared once, blue-white, and vanished into a hiss of smoke. The streamers of flame winked out.
David was standing across the street in front of the Starbucks, copper-brushed hair catching light like silk. He was in his traveling clothes—blue shirt, blue jeans, olive drab wool coat that belled with the wind.
He looked so tired. So horribly tired. And there were crawling blue sparks all over him, too. Glittering in a barely visible umbilical between us.
“Joanne,” he whispered. I felt his voice, even from so far away, like breath on my skin.
I didn’t say anything out loud—couldn’t—but I felt the compulsion rising up again, felt the fire sucking energy and pouring it into a manifestation that glittered and grew above my head. A snowball on fire. A boulder. A sun. The light from it was so bright it bleached the town to gray-white shadow.
Stop me, I begged him. I knew he could hear me, vibating through the connection between us. Kill me if you have to. Cut the cord.
He looked up, at the growing ball of destruction flaming in the sky, and then back at me. I didn’t have to tell him I couldn’t stop. He knew. He understood.
I looked at him in Oversight and saw him outlined in pale, shimmering orange, a color that felt like suffering, weakness, approaching death. When I extended my hand toward him, I could see the same color drifting around me.
This was killing both of us. I was draining my master Kevin at the same time, three of us going down…
Stop me, I said again. The silver rope binding us together was pale now, pulsing in time with our shared heartbeats. God, David, please, I don’t know how…
I know, he said. She just wanted to get my attention.
I didn’t see him move, but he was suddenly there, tackling me violently backwards to the ground, away from the children and the wildly yapping beagle. Overhead, the sun exploded into a white-hot fury, but I didn’t see, couldn’t see, because we were falling through the ground and into the aetheric, racing back along the invisible path I’d taken to get here. No! I battered at him, tried to get free, tried to warn him that he was killing us both. He didn’t respond. Faster. Faster. The whole thing was a blur of lights, color, motion, whispers, screams…
… and the two of us fell with a hard thump onto the pale champagne carpet of Yvette Prentiss’s living room. Before I could even register where we were, David was already rolling away, reaching for the open perfume vial that lay on the table, but before he could reach it Kevin’s grubby hand snatched it up.