Rachel Caine: Firestorm

Oh, I agreed. With all my heart. "I don't want to take her with me if there's going to be any danger—"

"I have faith in you to keep her safe."

"David, she's two days old !"

"What she is can't be measured in days, or years, or centuries," he said. "She'll be fine. Just—take care of yourself. You're the one I'm worried about."

A slow, warm pressure of his lips on mine, and then he was gone. Not a magic-sparkle slow-fade gone, but a blip, he-was-never-there gone. Except for the manic damn-I've-been-kissed-good tingle of my mouth and the racing of my pulse and general state of trembling throughout my body, I might have thought it was all another dream.

I walked over to the mirror. I looked like hell, but my eyes were clear and shining and my lips had a ripe, bee-stung redness.

Doesn't get much more real than that.

He was right: I really couldn't trust him. Should never ever trust him again. But that wasn't, and never would be, my instinct, and he knew it. He was my true fatal flaw, and maybe I was his, as well.

I hoped that wasn't going to end up destroying us both, and our child with us.

If I was inclined to mope about it, I didn't have time. There was a rattle at the locked infirmary door, and Nathan, the security guard, looked in and jerked his head at me.

"You're wanted," he said. "Move it."

I cast one last look at the empty chair where David had been, and followed Nathan out.

The infirmary was relatively soundproofed, as I discovered when I went out into the hall; there was a riot outside. People yelling, screaming at each other. Tempers flaring. There were more people crammed in than there'd been before, and everybody looked stressed and confused. There were arguments raging from room to room; some idiot was yelling in the hallway that we had to uncork the Djinn still imprisoned in the vault several stories below, under the theory that we could be prepared to give them ironclad orders to protect the building and the remaining Wardens at all costs. Someone else was making the case against it, but I could tell popular sentiment was building for the supposedly simple solution.

Paul had given up, evidently. He was sitting whey-faced in a chair in the North America conference room, eyes shut. Marion was vainly shouting for order, but since she was in a wheelchair, it was hard for her to make an impression.

I went for the floor show.

I levitated myself four feet up off the stained carpet, dangerously close to the ceiling, reached deep for power, and felt it respond to me with an ease and warmth I hadn't felt in… a very long time. Since before my battle with Bad Bob Biringanine, in fact.

I let the power crackle around me, building up in potential energy in the air, and most of those around me noticed and backed off.

Making light—cold light, light without heat—is the biggest trick in the book when it comes to my variety of powers. Light has heat as a natural by-product of the energy release that creates it, so I had to balance the radiation with rapid dispersal throughout a complicated matrix of atoms.

I got brighter, and still brighter, until I was glowing like a girl-shaped chandelier, hovering in the hallway. Conversation stopped. In the brilliant white light, they all looked stark and surprised, and to a Warden they flinched when I released a pulse of energy that flared out in a circle like a strobe going off.

I let the glow die down slowly and touched my feet back on the carpet.

"Right," I said. "Let's quit freaking and start working, all right?"

Nobody spoke. Dozens of faces, and they were all turned to me—young Wardens barely out of college, old gray-haired ones who'd been handling the business of earth and fire and weather for three-quarters of their long lives. They were tough, or they were damn lucky, every single one of them.

And most important, they were what we had.

I pointed to the Warden who'd been arguing against opening the bottles—a slender little African American guy, about thirty, with a receding hairline and bookish wire-rimmed spectacles. "What's your name?" I asked. He didn't look at all familiar.

"Will," he said. "William Sebhatu."

"Will, I'm putting you in charge of the Djinn issue," I said. "You need to get every single Djinn bottle, empty or sealed, make an inventory, and put everything in the vault. And then you seal the vault and you make damn sure that nobody, and I mean nobody, opens up any bottles. Got it?"

"Wait a minute!" That was Will's debating opponent, a big-boned woman with a horse face and bitter-almond eyes. "You can't just make a decision like that! Who the hell do you think you are? You're not even a Warden anymore!" I remembered her. Emily, a double threat—an Earth and Fire Warden out of Canada. She was blunt, but she was good at her job; she also had a reputation for being pushy.

"Back off," Paul said wearily from his chair in the conference room. His voice echoed through the silence. "She's one of us. Hell, she may be the only one who knows enough to get us through the day." He sounded defeated. I didn't care for that. I hadn't meant to take away his authority—at least, not permanently—but Paul wasn't acting like a guy who could shoulder the burden anymore. "Jo, do your stuff."

"Okay," I said. I turned back to the woman, who was still giving me the fish eye. "Emily, you think you can make this work because you think you're smarter than the Djinn, or faster, or more powerful. You can't. You all need to unlearn what you know about the Djinn. They're not subservient. They're not stupid. And they're not ours, not anymore."

The assembled Wardens were whispering to each other. Emily was staring at me. So was Will. I heard my name being passed around, in varying degrees of incredulity. I thought she was dead , someone said, just a little too loudly for comfort.

"This is stupid," Emily finally said. "Paul, I thought she was out of the Wardens. How does she know anything?"

"She knows because she was with the Djinn when it happened," Marion said, and rolled closer with a brisk snap of her wrists. "Right?"

I nodded. "I saw it happen. We've lost control, and as far as I know, we've lost it for good. We need to face that and figure out how to go forward."

"Forward?" somebody in the crowd yelped. "You've got to be kidding. We need the Djinn!"

"No, we don't," another person countered sharply. "I barely escaped, and only because mine got distracted. Whatever's happening, we can't risk involvement with the Djinn."

"Exactly," I said. "We have to rely on ourselves, and each other. Will? You up for the job?"

He swallowed hard and nodded. "I'll get started."

"Get some people to help you. Draft them if you have to, and don't be afraid to use Paul's name as a big stick." I waited for some confirmation from Paul; he waved a hand vaguely. I turned to Emily. "You're not going to give this guy any shit, right?"

She was silent for a few seconds, looking at me, then shrugged. "Not right now. You're right. We need to stop the bleeding, and save the surgery for later."

I was glad Emily let me push it through, because she'd be a tough opponent. Nothing weak about her, and we needed her on our side.

There was only one side, right now. The side of survival.

I faced a crowd of people, and everybody looked tired and harassed and worried. Not the faces of winners. They looked… lost.

"All right," I said. "Everybody, listen up. We've taken some serious hits, and there's no question, things are desperate. But we are Wardens . Wardens don't run, and they don't abandon their responsibilities. There are six billion people on this planet, and we stand up for them. We need to be strong, focused, and we need to be united . No more backbiting, politics, or ambition. Understood?"