Rachel Caine - Thin Air

When I focused past the wreckage, I forgot to breathe, because the Camaro hadn’t taken the brunt of the brute-force attack…and it hadn’t exactly been a surgical strike. It was like a bomb made of air had exploded, and the Camaro had been ground zero. The indescribable sound I’d heard had been the howling wind slamming into old-growth trees and snapping them off their bases, or uprooting them completely to crash into their neighbors.

It was a veritable crop circle of downed trees.

I tried to sit up, and something in my back lodged a loud protest. I groaned, told it to shut up, and compromised by rolling over on my side. No sign of Venna or Ashan. No sign of anybody, actually. Just me, a bunch of killed trees, and the dead Camaro puffing black smoke into the empty sky.

“Venna?” My voice sounded thin. I tried again, but it didn’t work any better. Mindful of my back pain, I rolled to my hands and knees, then got to my feet. Gonna be sore in the morning , I thought crazily.

Somebody had destroyed almost a quarter mile of forest to try to kill me. Being sore was the least of my problems, and if Venna hadn’t acted as my Djinn air bag…

I wondered if Ashan was still in the twisted wreckage of the car.

“Venna?”

A car topped the ridge, heading toward the devastated area. No, a truck, an SUV, and there was another one behind it. It was moving slowly because of the debris, but steadily enough. I didn’t want any Good Samaritans right now; I wasn’t sure I could protect them against whatever had just put the unholy smackdown on me. No, actually I was sure…I was sure I couldn’t. My heart sank as I saw it was a family, and they slowed radically as they got close to the crash scene.

“Keep going!” I yelled as the father rolled down his window. I forced myself to get up to my hands and knees, then to my feet. I managed not to black out doing it. “I’m fine! Don’t stop; it’s not safe!”

He seemed like a nice enough guy, but he had kids in the back of his truck, and a wife who looked hugely pregnant, and I did not want their lives on my conscience. “I’ll call nine-one-one!” he yelled. I waved frantically, trying to shoo them on by sheer force of will, and it seemed to work.

He negotiated his way around the maze of downed trees and got the hell out.

I remembered there’d been a second SUV behind it, and turned to look.

It had stopped about fifty feet away-a large black SUV, tinted windows, very classy. I thought I saw something shimmer on the paint, and blinked, then went into the aetheric and saw a stylized sun symbol on the door not visible to the naked human eye. It was where an official seal would have been for a government vehicle.

Wardens.

I backed up out of the center of the road and looked around for some kind of cover, but of course there wasn’t any. I didn’t feel like cowering in a ditch, especially when they’d undoubtedly already spotted me. Maybe they’re friendly , I thought.

Yeah, and maybe the next Djinn I met was going to look just like Brad Pitt and grant me three wishes, too.

The SUV eased forward very slowly. It crunched to a stop a few dozen feet away and idled its engine. Nobody got out. I couldn’t see inside. I felt an odd sensation, as if every hair on my body were stirring-static electricity, maybe.

“Let’s get this over with,” I muttered. “What’re you going to do, stare me to death?”

The driver’s side of the SUV opened, and David got out. He looked fantastically good to me in that moment, and I let out a sigh of relief and took a step toward him…

And stopped, because there was no welcome in his face. Nothing but blank fury.

“David?”

I felt the energy gathering above me, and flung up a hand to catch it before it could form itself into a deadly strike. I wasn’t sure what he’d intended, but the devastation around me was proof that somebody had removed the safety switches on this game. I let the power bleed harmlessly off in a thousand smaller tendrils that manifested in gusts of wind, blowing my hair across my face, then switching directions and streaming it back like a flag.

“Give up,” David said flatly. “You don’t have a choice.”

“David, you don’t understand-”

This time I wasn’t quick enough to stop him. The aftermath of the lightning strike left me blinking, half-blind, concussed, and with an ache on my right side that felt suspiciously like first-degree burns. I smelled something burning, feared it was me, and rolled, trying to smother the flames.

When I writhed around to try to spot what David was doing, he was just…standing there. Watching me. I couldn’t read his expression, but he wasn’t exactly racing to my rescue.

There were other people climbing out of the SUV. I recognized only one of them: Lewis. My onetime savior looked like he was badly regretting that decision. I stared at him, trying to guess what he was thinking, but like David, he’d closed himself off.

Neither of them liked being here; that was all I could tell.

And both of them were more than prepared to kill.

“Guys,” I said, and held out my hands, palms open and out, showing that I had nothing up my tattered, smoking sleeves. “There’s no need for this. I was coming to you, okay? I wasn’t running. I’m not going to run. And by the way, you owe me for a really nice car.”

I was standing up to them because, hey, not like I had a choice, anyway. There were four Wardens and one Djinn, and any one of them could have probably taken me down without breaking a nail, even if I hadn’t been knocked half-silly by the crash and the lightning bolt.

“Down on your knees,” Lewis said. “Do it. If I have to ask again, we’ll kill you and get it over with.”

Lewis had a gun in his hand. Not one to neglect the merely mortal advantages, apparently, and that just gave them another way to bring me down if all the mystical mojo failed to work. If Venna was biding her time, she was biding a little too long. I had to choose.

I held up my hands in an attitude of surrender and, wincing, got down on my knees. I laced my hands behind my head.

Lewis exchanged a glance with David. Clearly they were the two alphas in the pack; the other Wardens were along for the ride. Although it wouldn’t do me any favors to assume they weren’t capable in their own right, especially since they’d taken up positions surrounding me. “Facedown,” Lewis said. “Hands behind your back.”

“Dammit, road oil is never coming out of these pants,” I said. “Lewis, it’s me. Joanne. What the hell are you doing?”

“Correcting a mistake,” he said. “Down or die. Your choice.”

Well, when he put it that way…I pitched forward to my hands and knees, lowered myself to the gritty, oily road, and put my hands behind my back.

Somebody-not Lewis and not David-was on me instantly, digging a sharp knee into the small of my back and ignoring my yelp of protest. Plastic zip-ties slipped around my wrists and hissed tight.

“You didn’t make a mistake,” I said. I couldn’t see Lewis or David. I couldn’t see anybody, since my hair had fallen across my eyes. I was blind and helpless, and I could feel something closing in around me on the aetheric, something like a smothering coating of plastic, sealing me off from access to the powers that I was about to be driven to use. “No! Wait, listen to me! You didn’t make a mistake, Lewis; it’s me ! She’s lying to you; don’t you understand? She’s…”

The wind blew my hair away from my eyes, and I saw her. The other me. She’d left the SUV, and she was standing next to David like she belonged there.

It was a good thing I’d had a lot of recent experience seeing myself from the outside, because it allowed me to get over the shock fast. Yeah, that was me, down to the last well-dressed detail. David, or someone who’d cared, had gotten her a nice flare-legged pantsuit with a fitted jacket, something that hugged her body and made her look tall, lean, elegant, and businesslike. In short, she looked like she belonged. Like she was more than capable of handling whatever needed to be handled.