Rachel Caine - Firestorm

"Besides the screaming? Nothing. Good pie, by the way."

He lost the veneer of affability, and what was left had no interest in dessert. His plate, fork, and mug disappeared. He pressed those large, strong, pale hands palms down on the table. I kept eating, slowly and deliberately. No way was I letting anything this good go to waste. I needed the strength.

"You mock me," he said. "You are not my equal. You are nothing. You are less than the lower life forms that spawned you."

"Oh, you smooth talker," I said. "Careful. You're turning me on."

I'd surprised him. He was used to people cowering and screaming. Even me. Again, my fresh inoculation of terror from Eamon had done me a strange favor.

Surprise made him thoughtful, not angry. He tilted his head and continued to stare at me. "Why do you say such things to me? Do you want to die?"

"Nope," I said. "You'll kill me, or you won't. Your petty little political ambitions are not my concern. You want to be the center of the Djinn universe? Fine. Take it up with David. I sleep with him; I don't tell him what to do. Speaking of David, you're not exactly facing off with him hand-to-hand, are you? What's the matter, Ashan? He got you scared?"

Ashan put his hands flat on the table, watching me, and his eyes were the eerie color of deep oceans lit from below. "Do you have any idea how much I want to destroy every cell of your body? Grind you into paste until all that's left of you is fragments of bone and screams?"

My heart hammered faster, but I kept eating. "Poetic. You should write that down."

I had completely nonplussed him this time. He barked out a dry laugh and sat back. "Do you really think you can defeat me? A weak little creature like you?" I shook my head. His eyes glowed brighter, and the smile grew sharper at the edges. "Perhaps you have finally lost your mind."

"That's probably it." I forked up the last delicious bite of my pie, savoring every bit, and washed it down with a prodigious gulp of milk. Now that was a snack. "I've gone insane. But at least it came with dessert."

He steepled his fingers into long, strong columns of flesh and bone. It reminded me of Eamon, fingertips touching his lips, watching me in the motel room. I felt a bolt of sheer terror flash through me, and it made me flinch; that was bad. Numbness was good. Numbness was my only real defense right now.

I compensated the only way I knew how: with sarcasm. "What are you going to do, Ashan? Glare me to death?"

I'd goaded him a little too far. He reached across the table, knocking my plate off in a wobbling arc to the floor, and grabbed my wrist. He pinned it to the table with crushing force. Probably wasn't even an effort for him to break my bones, shatter the table beneath, bring down the entire restaurant, for that matter. But I just sat still, watching him. Unresisting.

And he didn't exert any more force than he had to, to hold me still.

Like Eamon.

"What do you want?" I asked him breathlessly.

"You keep coming after me. What do I have that you want ?"

There was a flash of loathing in his eyes so extreme that I swallowed. "You are of no interest to me at all. You are less than what crawls in the dirt."

I realized something terribly important. Ashan didn't want to be here. He really didn't, and it wasn't about me. He was just dicking around with me out of some obscure desire to play with his food, like a giant tomcat.

"Let go," I said. He did. I boggled, but covered it quickly. No sense in letting him know that I was lost, too. "What do you want to know, Ashan?"

"What did the Oracle say to you?"

"Nothing."

"You lie." His hands were flat on the table again, and if anything his eyes were even brighter, incandescently bright in the darkened corner. "What did the creature say to you?"

"Look," I said quietly. "I don't know what you want, but I can only tell you what I know. Which is nothing. The Oracle screamed, and—" I realized what he was getting at. The Oracle hadn't told me, but Ashan had told me himself, with all his paranoia.

He'd had something to do with the Demon Mark breaking through the defenses to get to the Oracle. Maybe he'd even done it himself.

He must have seen that I'd figured it out, because he backhanded me.

I saw it coming, and I was able to turn my face with the smack, but even so, it knocked me into the wall. My head impacted wood with a crack, and I felt a hot wave of sickness crawl over me. It didn't hurt immediately, but I had an instant conviction that it was going to hurt later. For now, there was just a high-pitched ringing in my head, and a fire-hot throb on my right temple.

Ashan was standing up. I was about to be ripped to pieces, I could feel it in the raw fury boiling off him. He reached out…

And David caught his hand.

They didn't speak. David just stared at him, face set. He looked hard—as hard as the Djinn facing him. Fire and ashes, neither one of them human.

Ashan smiled. "Took you long enough," he said. "I thought I might have to make her scream more to get your attention."

"You're a fool," David said. "And you're the second fool who's tried this in less than a day. You have no idea—"

He stopped talking, and slowly turned his head off to the side, staring into shadows.

"Fool, you were saying?" Ashan asked. He was still smiling. I liked that smile even less the longer it stayed. "I'm not so much of one. Though clearly you are, since you continue to come running at her beck and call, even without the bottle forcing you to her will."

"What have you done?" David let go of Ashan's wrist. "Ashan—"

"What was necessary," he said. "We were gods once. We were worshipped. And we will be again."

"Yessssss," whispered a new voice. If it could be called a voice. It was more like flesh being dragged over sandpaper. "Godsssssssssss."

And an adult Demon stepped out of the shadows.

It could have been the same one who'd chased me in the forest; all I could identify about it was its wrongness, its essentially alienness . The geometry of the thing didn't make sense. Skin that wasn't skin. Terribly wrong, misshapen, bleeding light and shadow like a drug-induced nightmare.

It was speaking.

David took a soundless step back, mouth open, eyes wide. Astonished, for a split second, and then the true horror of the situation snapped in for all of us.

Ashan was in league with the Demon. Betraying the Djinn themselves. Betraying the Mother.

His betrayal of humanity was nothing compared with that.

David lunged for me, and threw me over the back of the booth to slide down the lunch counter. I tipped over and slammed to the tile floor on my hands and knees. He didn't have to tell me to get out. I got the message, loud and clear. I scrambled up and ran full speed for the glass doors.

I hit them and bounced.

No time for pain or confusion. I whirled around, grabbed a chair, and whacked the hell out of the glass. Again. And again. The chair came apart on the fourth try in a clatter of loosened screws and aluminum framing.

"An old trick of Jonathan's," Ashan said. "Freezing time makes a good refuge. Or prison."

David was backing away from the Demon, but it was coming, and I didn't think he could stop it. Not with Ashan on its side. He reversed course and lunged, grabbed the Demon by one misshapen limb, and sling-shotted it into Ashan.

Who staggered and screamed as the Demon's claws ripped into him for support. I felt that popping in my ears again, painful and deafening, and David spun toward me to scream, "Now!"

I yanked open the door. "Come on!"

He tried to reach me.

The Demon was faster. Horribly fast, faster than anything I'd ever seen. It moved in a blur, and then it stopped in the next fraction of a second, and it had him. Its claws wrapped around him, growing to the size of knives… of swords…