Rachel Caine: Heat Stroke

Humans displayed as flickering ghosts, pale and transparent; some glowed hotter than others, and those, I understood, were probably Wardens. People with power over the various elements. Hundreds of thousands of them crowded the place in confusing eddies, drifting and pulsing, combining, melting into each other, giving and taking. I was watching the entire flow of life on the spiritual plane.

It was breathtaking. Humbling.

Circling in and around them were the multilayered fogs of Djinn. I couldn’t really focus on them—they tended to disappear when I tried to zoom in—but I had the unnerving sensation of them being everywhere. Jeez , I breathed, virtually speaking. How many of them—us—are there ?

He didn’t answer me, which was odd; I couldn’t see his face, of course, but I had the sense somehow that his attention had shifted away from me. Watching… focused somewhere else.

What the hell is that ? he asked absently.

What?

He stretched out a—hand? — and brushed it through empty air. I didn’t see anything. No, wait, I did… just the faintest glimmer of light. You know that cold phosphorescence that fish have, in the deepest black of the ocean? A kind of cold light, in tiny little blue specks.

It was like that. An insubstantial fairy glitter of blue, few and far between.

And I felt a sudden rush of tension from him. Can you see that ?

Sure. What is it?

I don’t know . From the tone behind that, he obviously hadn’t run across anything like it before, and it was worrying him. I can’t feel it .

I reached out and experimentally tried it, too. Where I touched, there was a phantom coldlight sparkle, just a few tiny lights firing. Huh. I don’t feel anything .

Exactly. Energy is being expended, or it wouldn’t show up as light. Yet we don’t feel it.

That’s … I tried a half dozen thoughts on for size and discarded most… interesting ?

Yes . Interesting-bad, I presumed, from his tone. He did something I didn’t quite see, created a clear bubble of energy. Inside of it, some of those coldlight sparkles twinkled like fireflies. He studied it, moving closer. Shit !

The fireflies had flown through the globe like it didn’t even exist. David pulled back, took me with him, to a healthy distance. The sparkles faded into darkness.

Are they still there ? I asked.

Don’t know . He didn’t seem inclined to check, either. That shouldn’t happen .

What?

Any of that.

Oh . I waited for inspiration. Nothing arrived. What now ?

We leave , he said, and I felt a sudden hard tug that, if I’d still been flesh, would have tipped me off balance. As it was, it felt like the fog that made me up flew apart and settled back together.

Had I thought we were moving fast before? No. We dropped out of the sky, heading straight back down at supersonic jet speeds, and I couldn’t control a squeak of alarm. Not that impact with anything would hurt me, in my present state, but instincts are hard to overcome.

David braked us with professional ease, and we drifted the last two feet down to the bed.

This was where being a Djinn really differed from my experience as a human. I’d walked the aetheric before—lots—as a Warden, but I’d always had a body to anchor myself to. The Djinn didn’t have that. Their— our —bodies are made of potential energy, so it required a state change to enter the real world again.

It took me a couple of minutes to figure out how to do that. I understood how; that was knowledge that seemed to come as standard equipment with entering the Djinn lifestyle. What I didn’t quite have yet was the muscle memory, the instinctive control. Like a baby learning to walk.

I built myself from the inside out. Cell by cell. Bones, complete to the delicate honeycombed structure of the marrow; then a complex interweaving of nerves and muscles and blood vessels, organs, tissue; then, finally, I wrapped it all in skin and stretched.

Ah. Not bad.

When I opened my eyes, David looked deeply unsettled.

“What?”

“You have… no idea how that looks,” he said.

“Yeah, well, it’s pretty damn weird from this side, too—Crap!” I dragged a handful of my hair closer to look at it. “That’s not right.”

My hair had always been straight. Dark, straight, worn long. For some bizarro reason, I was now blessed with curls.

“No, I like it.” He wrapped a curl around his finger and brushed it with his thumb. “Think of it as an unexpected appointment at the salon. Look, we’ll get into the finer points of personal grooming later. I need to find out more about what’s going on up there.”

“With the sparklies. Yeah, they looked real dangerous.”

He frowned at me. “They shouldn’t even exist. That’s dangerous enough for me.”

“So? What’s the plan, Sherlock? We stick them in a test tube and start experimenting?”

He stepped away from me and turned to pace the room restlessly. He was no longer entirely comfortable, I could see that; in addition to the change in body language, he’d put on a pair of blue jeans and a loose, worn gray T-shirt with the logo of some university faded almost to invisibility. As I watched, he formed a blue-and-white checked shirt, buttoned halfway.

No shoes, yet. He wasn’t quite ready to go. “I have to talk to someone,” he said. “Can I trust you to stay here for a while?”

“Can’t I go with you?”

He focused on me for a second, then moved his gaze away. “No. That wouldn’t be—a good idea.”

“Who are you going to see?”

“You don’t need to know.”

Okay, this was starting to piss me off. “Sorry, is my new Djinn name Mushroom ? Because I don’t like being kept in the dark and fed bullshit, David. Just so you know.”

I expected him to snap a comeback, but instead he smiled and paused in his pacing. “Are we having our first quarrel?”

“No, I recall a hotel room back in Oklahoma where you tried to make me claim you as a Djinn slave. That was our first quarrel.” It had been a doozy. The apology sex had been even better.

“Right.” He locked his hands behind his back and wandered to the windows to look out. “Something’s wrong up there. I don’t know what it is, or what caused it. I don’t even know if it’s dangerous, but… it doesn’t feel right. And that’s as much as I know, Jo. I need to ask around, see if anybody else has noticed anything. This could be very important.”

“Or it could be leftovers from the big New Year’s Eve party up on the aetheric.”

He shrugged and folded his arms across his chest as he stared out. “As party favors go, those are pretty persistent.”

He really was worried. I sat down on the bed and pulled a sheet over myself, kind of a wrinkled toga, nothing elegant but at least a covering. “So go, then,” I said. “If it’s that important.”

He turned to look at me, and I read a flash of gratitude, just before the phone rang.

We froze. His copper eyes swirled darker.

“Wrong number?” I asked.

“Let’s find out.” He crossed to it, picked up the elegant little handset, and angled to watch me. “Hello?”

Not a wrong number. His expression went blank and stiff.

“Not over the phone,” he said. “We need to do this in person. Where do you want to meet?” Another pause. “Yes,” he said. Pause. “I know where it is. Yes.”

He hung up. In the same motion, his favorite olive drab wool coat formed around him, long and deceptively elegant. When he turned to look down at me, he’d also added the round disguising glasses that I remembered so well from the first time we’d met. They made his angular face look gentle, and behind them his eyes had gone a warm brown instead of Djinn copper.