For answer, the Djinn nodded toward a spot on the carpet--a relatively clean one. A pile of clothing materialized there--white shirt, sturdy pants that looked suspiciously like I remembered the drapes to be. My own shoes, recovered and cleaned. Plain white bra and panties and socks.
Djinn couldn't create out of thin air, but they could recycle. He'd used the raw material of extra sheets, the curtains, towels, whatever textile was around, and he'd managed to produce a decent attempt at a wardrobe. Clean and dry, if not stylish.
I struggled into it fast. It fit, of course. Djinn tailoring always fit. I tied my hair back with a stray scrap of fabric blowing in the dirt and started to follow the Djinn out of the rubble.
"Jo?" Cherise called. I looked back. She was sitting up, cradling the fretful boy in her lap.
She looked huge-eyed and emotionally shattered, but at least she was physically okay. For now. "I want to go with you."
"No. If you put any weight on those legs right now, they could break again. They need at least an hour to finish building the seal in the break. That's as fast as I can do it."
"Okay." She swallowed, but didn't look away. "I want to see him buried. Please. Take me with you."
I hesitated, then nodded. "I'll send the Djinn back for you," I said. "Wait here, okay? I promise, it'll only be a few minutes."
She didn't like it, but I think she saw that there was no way I could carry her myself, physically or with any kind of magical power. If I pulled power from the world around me again, it'd be a case of diminishing returns and a harder crash once it was over. I couldn't afford it.
Not knowing that this was far from the end.
I found the Djinn easily enough; he'd left a lighted trail of orange light through the trees.
He hadn't gone too far in, but far enough that I lost sight of the road and the wrecked motel. In here, among the pines, things were hushed. The air smelled sweet and heavy, crisp with the smell of the needles.
Untouched.
The Djinn had dug a grave--six feet deep, wider than needed--beneath a particularly impressive branching tree. Kevin's body lay wrapped in a simple white sheet from the motel, and he no longer looked like the boy I'd known, or the man I'd wished he'd had a chance to become. He looked ... empty, rendered pale and sexless by the shroud. I wasn't sure I wanted Cherise to see him like this, but I'd promised.
"I'll get him in," I said. "Go get Cherise and the kid. Don't let her walk yet."
The Djinn nodded and misted away. I stood there looking at Kevin for a moment, then hopped down into the damp hole in the earth, reached up, and rippled the ground to move him toward me and onto a hardened cushion of air. I floated him down into my arms, and lowered him the last bit on my own. He still felt heavy. Somehow, I'd expected him to be lighter now.
I leaned over and kissed his lips gently. "I'm so sorry," I said. "Find peace, Kevin. I've never known anybody who needed it more, and deserved it more."
That didn't seem to be enough, but I couldn't think of anything else to say.
I levitated myself up on a heated column of rising air and stepped off at ground level, just in time to see the Djinn arrive back at a run with Cherise and the boy in his arms. They looked like toys, the casual way he balanced them, but I knew he wouldn't drop them. No chance.
He looked around, then formed a plain wooden chair that was the same color and texture as the trees around us. Fallen wood, probably, reshaped for the purpose. He lowered her into it and came to stand next to me.
"He did a lot of things he probably regretted," David said. "But he tried to do good. That counts."
"He died trying to save us," I said. "That counts for everything."
We linked hands. It didn't feel like David, but that didn't matter right now. I just wanted to feel a touch, anyone's touch, to remind me I wasn't all alone in this. I felt a breath of relief pass over me that made me feel a little weak. I wish you were with me, I whispered, deep inside.
And I heard his whisper back, along that golden cord that bound us on the aetheric plane.
I am with you, he said. Always.
Together, we filled in the hole. Apart from the singing of birds in the trees, the busy rustle of animals carrying on their lives, there wasn't any sound. When I looked at Cherise, she was silently crying. The boy was staring at us in confusion, about to break into wails of disapproval for all this craziness, but not sure if he should.
We smoothed the dirt on top of Kevin's grave, and I sent a pulse through the Earth, bidding the seeds to grow. Grass and flowers, pushing up green and fresh.
"You deserved better, Kevin," I said. "You always deserved better than what you got, and I'm sorry."
The Djinn said something, after that--something in warm, liquid syllables, lyrical and lovely that rose and fell in emotional arcs of poetry. When he was done, he bowed his head.
"That was beautiful," Cherise said, even though I knew she hadn't understood it any more than I had.
"It's our prayer for the dead," said David's voice. "Given to those who fall in battle."
When he said our, I sensed that he didn't mean the Djinn. He meant the human he'd once been, living in that long-ago time.
I squeezed his hand. "It is beautiful," I said. "Promise me you'll use it for me if it comes to that."
"No," he said. "I won't. Because I won't be here to do it if you're gone."
We stayed a while longer, but the air was getting cool, and we had miles to go.
The Djinn carried Cherise back to the waiting Mustang, which had only suffered a few scratches and dings out in the parking lot during the general destruction. Good. I'd destroyed way too many automotive works of art in my time. I didn't want to leave the Boss behind, too.
I looked back at the place where Kevin Prentiss had died until it fell away in the rear window, just another wide spot in the road. Nothing special.
It was special now. It always would be, for me.
I waited for the tears, but they stayed where they were, simmering, angry, hungry.
"Floor it," I said to the Djinn, and to David through him. "I want to see our daughter."
He didn't respond, but the Mustang leaped up to a whole new level of fast.
Chapter Eight
Weirdly enough, nothing else was happening in Missouri, or in Oklahoma as we dropped down toward our Arizona destination. Open roads, lots of traffic. Some towns still had power and some sense of normalcy, including--improbably--Oklahoma City.
People were actually going to work.
I supposed that was a good sign; life had to go on, until it became impossible. It was just... strange.
I rose up into the aetheric and found a powerful bunch of Wardens at work--Earth, Fire, and Weather all locked in a tight- knit unit, constantly repelling attacks on any number of levels. They were stretched thin, but coping. I soared up higher into the spirit world, looking at the patterns of lights and color, shadows and twisted representations of the physical world.
Lewis had figured it out. He'd teamed up his people in those triangular bases of power, positioning them at strategic locations. I looked back toward the east, where the chaos had been the worst, and it was dying down. For now, the Wardens were handling it, even against all the odds.
It wasn't a battle we could win, but we could fight to a standstill--for a while.
I spotted Lewis on the aetheric. I'd expected him to be in Seattle, but he was a brilliant, incandescent blaze of power located in Nevada right now. I couldn't imagine what had drawn him there, but it was unmistakably him. And he was still moving, though not as quickly as I was, given the jet-powered chariot skills of the Mustang.
He was going wherever the battle was the fiercest, I thought. As he should.
I cut my grip on the aetheric and dropped back into my body with that familiar, faintly disorienting jolt, then pulled out my cell phone and checked it. The grid was back up, and I speed-dialed Lewis.
No answer. I wanted to tell him about Kevin, but this wasn't something that would be good for voice mail. I'd wait until I could tell him on the phone, or face to face. The news wasn't going to get worse, or better, with time.
I was just hanging up when the phone rang, startling me into a frantic juggling act. When I'd renewed my grip on it, I accepted the call and held the phone to my ear.
Piercing shrieks of static. I yanked the phone away again, no doubt making one of those pained faces, and then carefully eased it back as the feedback diminished into a thick net of noise. The screen said PRIVATE CALLER. I had no idea who it was.
And then I did.
It was me. My voice. And it said, "You need to stop. Stop now."
I took the phone away and looked at it again. Yep, there was a call. Private Caller. And it was my voice.
Saying, again, "Are you listening to me? Don't come here!"
"Excuse me, who am I talking to?" I asked, which was a pretty reasonable question at the moment, if a bit existential. This took talking to myself to a whole new level of weird. Then, belatedly, I got it. "Imara?"
My Djinn daughter had been a virtual clone, down to the voice, although she'd always somehow sounded more sassy to me. Maybe because I wasn't used to being on the receiving end of the sass. "Imara, is that you?"
The answer drowned in static, and then my--her?--voice came back strong, again. "--have to stay away, Mom, do you understand?"
There was a particularly violent shriek of feedback, and the connection cut off. I was surprised there wasn't smoke curling up out of the receiver, as loud as that had been. I waited, but the phone didn't ring again.
The Djinn behind the wheel--still driving top speed on very treacherous roads--was staring straight at me, not at the road. "Jo?" David's voice, out of the radio. "Jo, was it Imara?"
"Yes. Can you reach her? Is she okay?"
"I can't see her. Like the Fire Oracle, I think she's hidden herself. I'll try to get through."
"Hurry," I said, and chewed my lip nervously. "I think she could be in trouble."
"We're all in trouble," David said, which wasn't the most inspirational speech he'd ever delivered. The radio shut down. The Djinn turned back toward the road.
I turned around to look in the backseat. Cherise was asleep, cuddled up with Tommy in a camouflage-patterned sleeping bag. We'd stopped in at a sports outfitter in Oklahoma City--Muzak still playing over the speakers, although shoppers were noticeably rattled and tense, and buying survival gear instead of lawn games--and stocked up on things like insulating blankets, sturdy boots and clothes, portable shelters, water and survival foods.
Next best thing to Army surplus. And a lot more expensive, since it catered to the weekend wannabe warrior market.
It had felt deeply surreal to be signing a credit card slip while the world was in the throes of chaos, but I supposed one way or another, I'd be paying off my debts.
Cherise looked tired and pale, and from the way she was whimpering in her sleep, she had bad dreams. I reached back and smoothed her hair until the whimpering went away. Baby Tommy seemed to have adapted much more easily; he'd taken to Cherise quickly, and he was a happy kid, smiling and burbling most of the time. From the way he filled his diapers, he was healthy enough. I would have felt better having him checked out by an honest-to-goodness Earth Warden or, at the very least, a pediatrician, but for now, we were all doing okay. Cherise was out of the braces. Her legs had healed straight, and although she continued to be weak and tired, she was recovering remarkably well from having just about died. The jury was still out on how she was going to deal with Kevin's death, long term.
If we had any long term, of course.
Up ahead, traffic was snarled, again. As we got into more civilized areas, it was perversely harder to get around these days, what with people frantically trying to get to their survivalist mountain hideouts, or to their relatives, or just to the store to stock up on emergency batteries. We were coming into Amarillo--not exactly a major metropolitan area, but busier than the deserted Texas Panhandle highway had been. The air was dry and stable overhead, and the landscape was mostly flat and scrubby, with tough vegetation.
Very different from the trees where we'd left Kevin.
I hoped I wouldn't end up dying somewhere without trees. I liked trees.
Even the Djinn's prodigious driving skills couldn't cope with the jam of traffic, and pretty soon we were cooling our engine at an idle, watching brake lights. Funny; this type of backup on the East Coast would have been a howling chorus of impatient horns sounding.
Not here in the Southwest. People just ... waited, listening to their music or talk radio, poking at their hair, arguing with whoever was in the car along with them. Or with themselves, apparently. I didn't hear a single angry honk.
"This is restful," I said, to nobody in particular. The Djinn wasn't exactly chatty company.
Cherise was asleep. The radio stayed quiet, not falling for my opening gambit. "David? Do you think we should stop?"
"You all need rest," he said. "I'll find you a place to stay for a few hours, and someplace to eat."
That sounded heavenly. Not that I couldn't sleep in the car and eat bagged food, but stretching out on real sheets was better than sex right now. The mere thought of fresh food made me salivate.
"We should probably push on," I said, being the brave little toaster. "It's only about another ten hours to Sedona, and that's not counting the bat out of hell multiplier."
"You'd get there exhausted," he said. "It's been hard, and it's going to get worse, I think.
You need to rest while you can." He spoke with authority, and I remembered that in his brief human life he'd been a soldier. He'd been used to exhaustion, to snatching what little rest and relief he could in between fighting for his life.
