Rachel Caine - Thin Air

Something flashed in his expression, and I braced myself. “Just one problem, love,” he said. “I don’t have a suitcase of money. Sarah does, and she got it by selling you far, far down the river. She’s driving off with cash and a car, and leaving the two of us to finish each other. Not bad for a helpless little drug-addled waif, eh?”

I felt stunned, and a little sick. The hit man , I thought. The hit man who’d been waiting outside the jail. Was that possible? Would she really sell my life like that? For money ?

Eamon took another step toward me, and I snapped my attention back to the present. “Put down the knife, Eamon.”

He looked at it, turning it in his long, sensitive fingers like he’d never seen it before. “Ah,” he said. “But that would mean I wouldn’t have any fun at all. And I’d so hate to disappoint dear Sarah by not living down to her expectations. She does need to understand that there are limits to my patience, and you’re just the way to show her.”

And he lunged for me, knife out.

I blew him backward, and I didn’t even know how I’d done it, except that I’d reached for something , and something had responded.

I didn’t blow him far, and he snarled, and he came back for me, and I knew if he came within slashing distance my ass was dead.

So I made the sand melt under his feet, like the Wardens had done to me when they’d been trying to trap me, and Eamon plunged without a sound below the surface.

Venna, who’d been ignoring me through all this, whirled around, lips parted, eyes blazing. “Look at you,” she said. “ Look at you. So pretty. So bright. So strange .”

I had no idea what she was talking about, because I was trying to figure out what I’d done. I’d meant to trap Eamon’s legs, the way I’d been restrained, but instead…Where the hell was he? “Eamon?” I asked, and took a step forward. “Eamon, are you all right?”

The sand eroded under my feet. I yelped and jumped back.

Whatever I’d done, it was still spreading.

The sand sagged where I was standing, and I continued a slow, uncertain retreat. “Um…Venna? What’s happening?”

She was still staring at me, with a light in her eyes that was creepily close to rapture. “It’s you,” she said. “You’re happening.”

“Not helpful!” I tried to figure out how to make sand sticky again. That seemed to be not quite as instinctual as making it slippery and talcum powdery. “How do I stop this?”

“Let him die,” she said. “It’s the best thing, really.”

And she skipped away.

What the hell…?

I had bigger issues: Namely, I was killing a guy, probably, and whatever chain reaction I’d set in motion looked likely to collapse the entire beach, the cliff, maybe the whole California coastline before I could get it under control. And I had no idea what I was doing.

But somebody did.

I circled around the spreading pit of quicksand and vaulted over the low rocks. Jamie Rae and Stan, my friendly neighborhood Warden cops, were stretched out on the sand, carefully arranged to look like they were napping. Jamie Rae murmured something in her sleep and burrowed closer to Stan. Cozy.

“Hey!” I said, and grabbed Stan’s arm, hauling him up. His eyes tried to open, then fluttered shut. He wasn’t quite deadweight, but damn close. “Stan, wake up. Wake up ! Warden emergency! Yo!”

I slapped him. That made his eyelids flutter some more, and when I went to hit him again he clumsily parried. My third attempt was met with a fairly precise interception, and Stan finally focused on me.

“You,” he mumbled. He sounded drugged and loopy. Great. Just what I didn’t need. “Thought you were going to kill us. Dangerous.”

“Yeah, well, you’re right about the dangerous part,” I said. “Hurry.”

I dragged him to his feet, leaving Jamie Rae to whimper in dreamy frustration at the loss of his warm, solid body, and pulled him around the rocks. It had been less than a minute, but the sinkhole was growing. Fast. It was already at least ten feet in diameter, and as I watched, part of the rock wall sagged with a groaning sound.

“Oh, crap,” Stan said. “What did you do?”

“Hell if I know. Do something!”

He tried. I could feel the surges of energy radiating out of him, plunging deep into the earth. Trying to reinforce the erosion. Trying to stop what was spreading like some virulent plague through the beach.

“There’s a guy in there!” I said, and pointed at the center of the depression. “Can you get him out?”

Stan cast me a wordless look of horror.

“Please?” I asked, because even if it was Eamon, there was something far too horrible about choking to death in a pit of talcum powder. Maybe he deserved it. No, I’d been in his head-I knew he deserved it-but I didn’t want to be the one dispensing justice.

“I’ll need your help,” he said. “Just relax. I’ll show you.” He put a hand on the back of my neck, and through the connection I felt something warm moving through my body. I remembered what it had felt like when Lewis had healed me-not too different. I held still for it, tried to relax as instructed, and concentrated all my energy on the idea of saving Eamon’s life.

The pit of sand rolled, as if a miniature fault line had shifted beneath it, and began to fill in, or rise up-it was hard to identify what was happening. But it was happening quietly. Nobody on the beach, not even the news crews, had paid any attention to us so far.

That changed when Eamon emerged from the sand, a limp body lying curled in on himself and flour white with fine dust. His eyes were tightly shut.

He wasn’t breathing.

I exchanged a quick glance with Stan; he let go of me and nodded, as if he understood what I intended to do. I stepped out onto the treacherous sand. It shifted-more than it should have-more like tiny balls of slick ice than gritty grains. I fought for balance, windmilling my arms like a tightrope walker, and slowly moved forward. My shoes kept sinking-not enough to stop me, but enough to make me sweat. Stan hadn’t fixed things so much as temporarily stopped their disintegration, and I wasn’t at all sure how long he could hold on. A look over my shoulder told me that he was sweating bullets and trembling-not exactly a vote of confidence. “Hurry?” he not quite begged. I took a deep breath and crossed in four quick, sinking steps to Eamon, grabbed him by the shoulders, and started dragging.

One problem. With every backward step my feet went deeper into the sand. “Stan!” I snapped. I took a firmer grip under Eamon’s limp arms and heaved hard, fighting my way through the rapidly softening sand. “Hold it together!”

Which wasn’t really fair. It wasn’t his fault in the first place; he was just trying to clean up my mess. But right at the moment the price of failure would be a little out of my budget.

The news crews were paying attention now, running toward us with lights and cameras, shouting questions. That drew the attention of some firefighters and cops.

The term media circus doesn’t really do justice to that moment when the clowns start rolling out of the tiny little car, does it?

Luckily I didn’t have to decide whether or not I had the ethical strength to give Eamon the kiss of life. After the firefighters formed a human chain and pulled us out of the mysteriously formed pit of dry quicksand, the paramedics pounced, did some paramedic-y things, and got him breathing, choking, and swearing again. He looked like he’d taken a bath in flour-dusty white except for his bloodshot, furious eyes and the blood caking his mouth and nose. He started raving, but he shut up quickly enough when he realized our little feud was no longer private.