Rachel Caine - Chill Factor

"How many showed up free?"

"Maybe three hundred of them. Now, there will be losses. Bottles get buried, sunk in the ocean, there's predation by the Ifrit. Even then, there have to be a lot missing, and most of them have disappeared in the last six years. I think that's why Jonathan's resorted to this. He either believes we're behind it, or that we don't care."

"So somebody's stealing from the Wardens ! And they don't know?"

"They suspect." Lewis rubbed his face as if he were trying to rub away exhaustion. " Marion 's been investigating. I helped her for a while. It all comes back here. To Las Vegas, or nearby. We can't find the bottles, since they don't show up on the aetheric, but there's this sense of…" He hunted for the word. " Evil . Jonathan manipulated the kid into bringing him here. He's looking for the same thing we are. He's just more ruthless about finding it."

"So our enemy isn't Kevin."

He shook his head. "Make no mistake, it is. Kevin's out of control, and Jonathan doesn't care what kind of damage the kid does, so long as he's left free to do what he likes. In fact, Jonathan's using the kid as a conduit. It all comes down to the kid. We have to stop him."

"And the missing Djinn?"

"One thing at a time."

I nodded. "Okay. How do I get over to the Bellagio?"

He gave me a genuinely sweet smile. "Nice day for a walk, or so I hear."

"You're coming with?"

"I'm not letting you out of my sight." When I raised my eyebrows silently, he did echoed the gesture. "David will kill me if I let something happen to you."

I cleared my threat. "Yeah… speaking of… is he…"

"Around?" Lewis's smile turned positively cruel. "You'd know more about that than I would. We work together, sometimes-doesn't mean we're the best of friends. Especially not where you're concerned. If he knew I'd just spent the night here-"

"Hey! Nothing happened!"

"Only because I'm at the point of death." He clutched his chest and mimed an elaborate choking. Except it wasn't really funny. He was at the point of death. "Sorry. It's sort of weirdly amusing from this end. It's the first time in my life you considered me safe to sleep with."

I lowered my gaze to contemplate the practical. As in, shoes. I had the left one on and was toeing the right when I heard a rumble of thunder, and felt the flashover of power. Hot and fast.

I looked up. Lewis was already heading for the windows. "Were we expecting rain?" I asked.

"Not in the forecast."

"That doesn't exactly feel natural…"

I stopped, because he hauled back the curtains, and we both saw it at the same time. There was a storm forming outside. A big goddamn storm, purple-black, swelling like a tumor. The anvil cloud stretched dizzyingly high, a gray-white tower thrusting up practically to the troposphere. The amount of power in that monster was growing exponentially.

Worse, it had rotation. Big rotation. I watched the edges that were rapidly expanding to the horizon, counting seconds and cloud motion.

"Shit," I breathed. "I don't think we'd better plan on walking to the Bellagio."

Lightning laddered down from the massive clouds in three or four places, shattering like neon glass against the ground and buildings. I saw the hot blue flares of transformers bursting somewhere near the edge of the city.

Lewis cursed softly under his breath, then said, "I can't see anything. What is it?" Without his powers, he was barred from the aetheric. I rose up and took a look.

Not good. Not good at all.

"Tell me it's somebody we can stop," he said.

It wasn't. In fact, it wasn't somebody at all.

It was nobody .

Weather is mathematical, in a certain very basic sense… warming and cooling the air simply means controlling the speed at which atomic structures vibrate. In any normal situation, no matter how dire, atomic structures vibrate in harmony, in groups, like a grand and glorious choir. In storm situations, there is dissonance.

This was complete and utter noise. There weren't bands of heat and cold; there weren't winds , exactly. Or if there were, they couldn't sustain themselves; they began and died and shifted in the blink of an eye. Hot and cold vibrations were jamming up against each other at the subatomic level, not just as a leading edge of an event, but interwoven.

"What the hell …" I whispered, appalled. This wasn't nature gone crazy. This was nature without any mind at all.

Over at McCarren Airport, a wide-bodied jet angled in for a landing; I saw it seem to stutter as a wind shear hit it. The tail came up; the nose came down.

"No! Jo, do something!" Lewis yelled, and slammed his hand flat against the window.

I threw myself up fast to the aetheric, saw the chaos and destruction raging. I focused on the plane. It was full of terrified screaming people, burning like straw in Oversight; I had to ignore that and try to make sense of what was attacking the area around it.

Chaos. No sense to it at all…

I felt a harsh ripping flash, and saw particle chains snapping together.

Lightning hit the plane dead-on, frying the electronics with a hard white pop of energy, a fountain on the aetheric that just further contributed to the mania.

I reached out and crammed together a layer of air beneath the plane, forced it to behave like normal air under normal circumstances. It took a huge amount of effort, and I felt the strain vibrating through me like stretched steel wire. I propped the plane with an updraft, smoothed the air around it, and fought back another wind shear that attacked from the side. The plane was heavy, and the wind kept fighting back, trying to slip away, swirl like a matador's cape. It wanted to rip the wings off of that 737. I forced a straight runway of calm air ahead of the screaming engines.

I was shaking all over. Human bodies couldn't channel this kind of effort, not for long, not without the help of a Djinn, and David wasn't here. Wasn't connected to me.

A little farther, just a little…

The plane was a hundred feet off the ground. I felt the air trying to spin apart under the wings and grabbed hold, wove the chains together and forced it to stay connected.

Fifty feet.

Twenty.

"Hold on," Lewis whispered next to me. "You're almost there."

Ten.

Just before the wheels touched tarmac, I felt something give way inside me with a bloody rip, and everything fell apart. The plane bounced, landed, skidded, was slammed right and left by wind shears like fists.

I couldn't stop it, but I kept trying, grabbing for control. I fell to my knees, breathing hard, tasting blood in my mouth and seeing bright red spots in front of my eyes.

"Jo!" Lewis had hold of me. I struggled to stay out of the dark. "Let it go! They're down!"

The plane had come to a stop, through a panicked superhuman effort on the part of her pilots.

When I let go, the wind forged itself into a hard edge and came straight for me .

"Lewis!" I yelled, and pulled him down on the carpet, covered him with my body.

The wind shear slammed into the pyramid full force, at least a hundred miles an hour, and the window blew like a bomb. I felt a hot burn across my back, then an ice-cold burst of rain. I rolled off of Lewis and grabbed his arm, pulled him to his feet, and shoved him toward the door.

Before we made it there, another wind shear blasted in, hit me in the back like a freight train, and slammed me down to the carpet. Lewis turned and grabbed for me, but my hand was slick with blood, and the wind shear became a backdraft, sucking me out into the storm.

I felt gravity let go as I spun out of the broken window, hundreds of feet above the Las Vegas streets. The fountains at the Bellagio were still booming, but the water was ripped to mist as soon as it exploded out of the water cannons. I tried to grab control of the winds holding me, but being suspended in midair like Fay Wray in King Kong's hand didn't do a lot for my concentration.