Rachel Caine: Chill Factor

"Here."

"Where?"

"Close your eyes."

I did, and instantly I was in the aetheric, or the dream-aetheric, anyway. And it wasn't Sara holding my hand. The Djinn who did was drawn in shades of power, lines of tragedy, but there were ice-cool blues and greens shimmering around his aura. An aurora borealis of peace.

Somehow, I wasn't surprised. "Oh," I said. "There you are. Hey, Patrick." Not that it was possible to talk on the aetheric plane, as such, but my dream, my rules. Patrick's form turned toward me, and somehow it overlaid itself with the semblance of humanity he'd worn for more than three hundred years… a big man with an energetic explosion of white-blond hair, eyes as bitter and intoxicating as absinthe. Santa Claus, but the kind who'd drop presents on the ground to look up women's skirts as he bent over.

"I've missed you," he said, and an incorporeal hand grabbed my ass.

"Wrong! Wrong touching!" I yelped, and jumped away. He grinned like a naughty schoolboy.

"Can't blame me for trying."

"You're dead," I accused him. "Shouldn't you be giving up bad habits?"

"Seems a bit late to reform. So. You're here to ask what you should do."

"No, I'm having a dream."

"Are you?" He folded his arms across his chest. It made for a weird overlay; it was like seeing a two-dimensional paper cutout held in front of a glowing angel. "You should turn around and go back, love. Can't fight this battle. It's like a wildfire. Even the densest Fire Warden knows that sometimes you have to let the flame burn itself out."

"This kid's going to kill people, Patrick. I can't let that happen."

He reached out and thumped me on the forehead. It hurt. "Ow!" I opened my eyes, and suddenly I was looking at Sara again, beautiful sunlit Sara, who was just putting her hand back at her side. No longer smiling.

"It's raining," she said, and turned away from me. A gust blew her dress back into a set of wings that shimmered in the light.

It wasn't raining. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, not a drop of water anywhere.

She was facing west. Far to the horizon, I saw a tiny smudge of black, a miniature lick of flame that might have been lightning.

It started as a whisper, grew to a mutter, then a rumbling thunder like a million horses running in panic.

And then the flood came in a midnight wave, thundering down canyons below us. It was a thick, muddy wave with a crown of black mist, churning with the smashed remains of homes and businesses and corpses. It was vast, and it was sweeping the human world clean. Nothing could escape it. It slammed into the mountain where we stood, and I felt the world shudder. A cold, wet sigh spread over me, and then the wave split and went around us, thundering past and down, down into the black chasm of infinity.

"Where all the rivers run," Sara said. Her eyes were terribly sad, terribly lethal. "Go home, child. Don't come here to die."

The spot on my forehead where she-or Patrick- had thumped me flashed white-hot, burning, and then I felt myself losing my balance.

Screaming.

Falling toward the churning, foaming, stinking flood of death below.

I jerked back away to the smell of ozone, and the prickly-sharp presence of a close lightning strike. David was still driving, but the sky had turned dark gray. There was a thick purple-black center to the clouds that told me trouble was coming, even without the benefit of using Oversight to look up on the aetheric. Rain lashed the road in thick silver waves. I glanced down reflexively at the speedometer, and found that we were still blazing along at nearly a hundred miles an hour.

The hair standing up on the back of my neck wasn't just from the lightning strike.

I turned my head and worked out a painful kink, ran my fingers through my hair (or tried to; it needed some major shampoo and a monster-class conditioner), and tried to swallow the cotton-mouth I'd acquired during the nap. More lightning flashed on the horizon, blue-white with a delicate fringe of pink. It shattered into ribbons, striking four or five targets at once. The words of an elder Warden came to me: Ifyou're close enough to see it, you're close enough to worry.

David said, "I think we should stop for a while." He gave me a quick, impersonal once-over. "A meal, a shower, a good night's sleep. Doctor's orders."

"There's a difference between being a doctor and playing doctor, you know." Reflex banter. I wasn't trying to argue against it; the dream had knocked all the fight out of me. It had, in its extremely obscure way, been trying to tell me something. Not surprising that I'd dream about Patrick and Sara, the two who'd given up their existence to bring me back to the mortal world… but I could do with a lot less vague prophecy. How come the sage advice never came in plain language, anyway?

David nodded at a blaze of green neon up ahead. "I'm pulling in."

The chiaroscuro blur resolved into a Holiday Inn, and as another bolt of lightning tore its way out of the heavens and into the earth, resetting the delicate polarity of the battery of life, I realized that I hadn't even asked the logical question.

As David turned the ignition off, I turned toward him and said, "Is all this coming for us?"

Another bolt of lightning lit his face ivory, turned his eyes into hot orange-gold flares.

He said, "Isn't it always?"

When I scampered through the pneumatic doors of the Holiday Inn, a rain-lashed, bedraggled mess, I had one of those shivery, disorienting dйjà vu moments. Everybody gets them, and of course the important thing to do is just forget about it and keep moving on.

Except that I took about six steps into the lobby, spotted the faux-rock fountain with its floating rings of silk flowers, and realized it wasn't dйjà vu at all. It was memory.

I really had been here before. Six years ago.

"Crap," I whispered, and fought a deep, clawing instinct to get back in the car and just keep driving. But outside thunder rattled plate glass, and there really wasn't any point in trying to get away from this particular past.

Besides, I don't run from bad memories.

I straightened my back and walked to the front desk. It wasn't quite a sashay, because of the squishing shoes, but I held it together. I didn't recognize the girl behind the desk-staff must have changed over several times since the tight-assed blonde I remembered handing me my last room key. This one-brunette- stopped popping her gum and straightened up, smiling sympathetically.

"Wow," she said. "Real mess out there, huh?"

"No kidding," I said, and wiped strands of hair back from my face. "Hope you have a room available."

"Yep," she said. "Nonsmoking, is that okay?"

"Does it come with a hair dryer?"

"Definitely."

"Perfect."

We did the credit card thing, and she made me a cute little electronic key, and I squished out toward the stairs, past the gently tinkling fountain. No such things as ghosts-at least, I hope there aren't-but I couldn't help but feel a very cold, very real chill as I passed the spot.

Charles Spenser Ashworth III.

Man, I so didn't want to be here. Not now.

David was waiting for me when I unlocked the door to the room. He was dressed in a casual blue-checked flannel shirt, blue jeans, sneakers… his WWI-vintage olive-drab coat was draped over the arm of the chair, and he was kicked back on the bed, lying flat with his hands under his head. I kicked the door shut and stood there staring at him.

Dripping.

Without a word, I went into the bathroom and stripped off my wet clothes, cranked the shower on hot, and had a luxurious, spine-melting wash, with complimentary shampoo and cute little soaps. Two applications of hotel-provided conditioner made it barely possible for me to work the complimentary comb through my uncomplementary hair. Which was curling again, drat it. In my original human incarnation, I'd had glossy, straight, jet-black hair. Since my rebirth, I'd acquired a disturbing tendency to Shirley Temple curls. I used the hair dryer and worked, teeth gritted, until I had everything straightened to my satisfaction.