There were at least twenty people down, some moving, some not. There was a lot of blood, more leaking out over the marble floor with every faltering heartbeat. The noncombatants, mostly UN staffers and delegates who’d gotten caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, screamed and jammed up against the exits. Marion was already heading toward the wounded against the tide of panic. As an Earth Warden, she’d be of a lot more use than anything I could do. Some of them could still be saved. She was the one to do it.
“Baldwin.” The name snapped my head around, and I was blinded by my wind-whipped hair until I clawed it back and held it fisted in my left hand. Martin Oliver had gotten to his feet and was staring at me with intense, grave concentration. “Joanne Baldwin?”
I didn’t have time for long explanations. “In the flesh.” More or less, but it didn’t seem the time to spill that particular bean. “Sorry about that, sir.”
He rejected the apology with a sharp hand movement. “Can you do anything about that?”
He gestured out at the monster looming gray-green outside. It was firing off lightning bolts every few seconds, and thunder was a continuous subsonic rumble. What could I do about it? What had he been smoking? And then I remembered. I’d been told before that I had more power than Bad Bob Biringanine, who had once faced down a certain hurricane by the name of Andrew and killed it before it claimed even more lives. Not that I’d ever believed such a thing… and yet Martin Oliver, one bad-ass Weather Warden in his own right, was looking at me as if I was the hope of the world.
And I had to say, regretfully, “No, sir. Sorry.”
Maybe in my human days—maybe—but not now, at the ragged end of my Djinn powers and enslaved to a…
… I had an idea.
I held up a finger. “Be right back.”
Now that I knew the coldlight wasn’t damaging to me, I could travel fast. I rose up into the aetheric, was instantly smothered by a whirling hungry blizzard of the stuff, but I didn’t need sight to feel where I was going, not in this case. Homing instinct.
I flew.
The glitter clung to me, built up like a thick snow coating, but I refused to let it slow me down. I didn’t see or sense any other presences up on the aetheric, but if there were any, they’d have been blue snowmen like me, masked from contact. Any Djinn still trapped here were probably frozen solid—if not frozen dead. Damn.
I collided with something. Not anything solid— that wasn’t possible, on the aetheric plane—but the pulling confusion was just as surprising and upsetting. I drifted, shook off as much coldlight as I could, and tried to see what it was that I’d hit. I had to wipe off sparkles like ice on a windshield, but I finally realized that I’d found a Djinn. Which one, I couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter.
I grabbed hold and towed it with me, fast, bucking the glitter headwind as fast as I could, and then falling, with a shocking sense of gravity, into…
… Patrick’s apartment. It was just as I’d left it. Sedate, well furnished, kind of pallid in a Better Homes and Gardens kind of way.
Blood dried to a dull brown mat on the neutral carpet where Lewis had been taken down.
I looked over at the Djinn I’d brought with me as his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed in slow motion to the floor.
I’d brought Patrick home.
Even though there was no time, I couldn’t leave him like this, with the coldlight eating its way through him like worms on speed. He was already screaming, skin bubbling and beginning to slough. I grabbed hold—tried not to think about the slick, greasy feel of his flesh—and called all of the coldlight to me. It spiraled eagerly, abandoning the feast and climbing my arms in a blue-white frenzy.
“Nice doggies,” I murmured, and as soon as I was sure I had enough of them, I went across the room and shook them off in a flurry of disappointed critters. They dropped into the carpet like invisible fleas. They’d eventually make their way back to whatever victim was handy, but with any luck, Patrick would survive. At least as long as any of the rest of us would.
“Sara?” Patrick’s eyes were open, blue and blind. His glasses were gone. I went back to him, got on my knees, and leaned over him. He slowly focused on me, and went pale. “Oh. You.”
“Yeah. Nice of you to remember. By the way, this whole slavery thing… it’s working out just great.” I resisted the urge to punch him while he was down.
His gaze sharpened. “You’re still alive.”
“Surprised?”
That woke up a weak smile. “Pleased, actually. Help me up.” He held out his hand. I stared at it for a second, then took it. Warm skin, as human and real as my own. Whether or not it was as human and real as an actual living person was something else entirely. Patrick heaved himself to his feet, staggered drunkenly and used me as a cane for a few seconds. “Ugh. I see you haven’t changed your mind about the room.”