I waved my hand through the air and watched it collect an insubstantial weight of blue fairy dust. I crushed it into nothing, but that didn’t matter; it was a constant blizzard even here. The aetheric would be choked with it. No. We couldn’t leave that way.
I caught sight of a familiar face in the crowd, and went cold. Marion Bearheart was here—had just made it in before the lockdown, by the look of it. Her brown suede jacket was spattered with dark drops, and water caught the light in tiny glints in her gray-and-black hair. She looked grim and haunted, arms folded over her chest. She was listening to an earnest stream of dialogue from Martin Oliver, who even now looked like the nattiest, most in-control man on the face of the world. He wasn’t in control of much, today, but I still wouldn’t have wanted to cross him. He reminded me of somebody… Ashan, Jonathan’s chief rival back in the Djinn bubble. The same kind of severe, uncompromising confidence, and a kind of elegant, almost sexual grace.
I remembered, out of nowhere, a conversation I’d had back in college about a man I’d been thinking of dating. Describe him, my best friend had said. I’d giggled and said, He’s sweet. And she’d looked at me very seriously, taken my hands, and said, Corazon, sweet men are only sexy until you realize that they’re too weak to hurt you. I hadn’t agreed with her—still didn’t, in some ways—but there was no denying that dangerous men had a visceral attraction.
The woman who’d said that was on the Wardens’ wall of the dead. Like me. I hadn’t even had time to mourn her. I didn’t even really know if I should, and that was the worst of it.
Marion’s cool, strong gaze swept my direction. I quickly put out the don’t-notice-me vibe. She scanned right past me, frowned, and turned to someone at her elbow. I focused on her lips. She was asking if he sensed anything strange. He shook his head, but she didn’t look convinced.
Man, we needed to get the hell out of here. And I needed to get down to the vault.
A huge, rolling crash of thunder like the world’s largest pane of glass dropped from ten thousand feet made everybody in the room flinch and duck. Most clapped hands over their ears. Some, like Marion, turned toward the big picture windows, and the sharp white crack of lightning lit up their strained faces.
I heard the dull thump of the first of the hail hitting the street outside. Ice exploded like a bomb, scattering frozen white shrapnel for twenty feet. Before the debris had rolled to a stop, another piece of football-sized hail crashed down onto the roof of a yellow cab speeding by. It ripped a hole right through the steel.
The storm had shaken loose of any semblance of control, and now it had a target: the only people who had a hope in hell of stopping it.
Us.
I felt it drawing in, focusing around the building, and it was a sense so suffocatingly strong that I wanted to gag. Even as a Djinn, this was oppressive; I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to a Warden. I didn’t need to imagine it, actually, all I had to do was look around. They were scared. Scared out of their minds.
“Down to the shelter!” That was Martin Oliver, who’d climbed on top of the security desk to address the crowd of several hundred milling around the lobby. “Everybody! Quickly!” Even now, he looked controlled and calm. No wonder he was the guy in charge.
Security started directing people toward a gray door marked with a bomb shelter symbol; the crush got intense, quickly. I noticed that Martin hadn’t joined the stampede. In fact, he stayed where he was, on top of the security desk, staring out at the street as rain started lashing the windows in thick, lightning-shot streaks.
More hail was crashing down. Cars had stopped moving out on the road, and drivers were abandoning their vehicles to run into any available cover. I felt power stirring, and knew what he was trying to do: cover the potential victims as they scrambled for shelter. I reached out and did what I could, which wasn’t much; I was feeling weaker all the time, and the connection to David had shrunk to a tiny filament, sparkling silver but feeding me nothing but a trickle of power.
I felt the storm shift its attention, responding instinctively to the lash of power.
Oh boy, I thought. It was like being caught in the full glare of the biggest spotlight in the world. With a big target painted on your chest.
The storm lobbed a twenty-pound piece of ice sideways, into the windows.
“Down!” I screamed, and leaped. Djinn defiance of gravity let me carry the leap the last ten feet, and gave me enough momentum to impact hard against Martin Oliver and topple both of us back behind the desk, onto a bruising hard floor.
The window shattered with so much force that fragments flew past to embed themselves in the teakwood wall behind the desk. Some of them were bloody. I shoved Martin down when he tried to get up and risked sticking my head up. Wind was screaming through the jagged hole in the window. It instantly jerked my hair back straight as a flag.