Lewis looked like himself. Always. He had a powerful aura, but the essence of him never changed, and that was both impressive and a bit on the scary side.
Speech wasn’t possible on the aetheric—after all, no lips, tongues, teeth, or lungs—but the Wardens had developed their own methods of communication, mostly hand signals. I grabbed my team members’ attention and arrowed up, fast and high, getting above the towering storm. It was like taking a glass elevator past a vertical oil spill. Nasty, and shiver-inducing. We went up almost ten miles into the atmosphere and leveled out at the top, where the storm formed a smooth dome. This was where the intake/exhaust process went on, dragging in warm air, cycling it down through the eye, breathing it out.
It was a living thing, after all, however strange it might be to our senses and logic.
The aura colors of the storm hadn’t changed significantly from my first impressions—dark, shot through with photonegative spots and shapes, with livid purple around the edges. I didn’t see any sign of that poisonous, otherworldly green that I’d glimpsed, though.
Good.
I felt a shudder running through the aetheric—a thicker atmosphere than the regular physical world, almost like matter caught in a phase transition from gas to liquid. Few things in the real world could stay at that balance point, but I’d always thought the aetheric was nothing
but
that—a place where everything, always, was transitional.
The shudder that ran through the aetheric came from the Djinn grabbing the storm and pulling it to a violent halt.
It fought them almost instantly, twisting, slashing back with waves of power. This was the dangerous part; if the forces got too far out of balance, things would happen that none of us could anticipate or control. We were dealing with the power of several nuclear bombs. Not the sort of thing where you want to apologize for a mistake to whatever survivors are left wandering around
.
I signaled my team, and we took the express elevator back down, plunging through the storm and into the thick black water beneath it. The area directly beneath it was devoid of life; the residents of the sea that normally thronged the area had prudently departed. Good. I didn’t want to be responsible for any massive fish kills, anyway.
My team—good people all—spread themselves out in an approximate rough circle near the edges of the storm’s fury, and each of us concentrated on a pie-shaped wedge of the water—not that water was static, of course, which was what made this so difficult. Water, like air, was always in motion. Unlike air, it had real density, and it took a lot more effort to really make a change in it on the molecular level.
Ten degrees.
Thanks for nothing, Lewis.
I’d pushed my section down a solid eight degrees, but I could sense that there were massive imbalances emerging from the change. Some of the others were having trouble managing the temperature shift at all. Nobody had hit the ten-degree mark. To make matters worse, power was collecting in odd places, like pockets of gas in a mine. That was the risk of working with multiple Wardens.
I think I sensed trouble coming—an oddly thick ripple in the aetheric, maybe—and then I saw one of my Wardens spin helplessly out of position, losing control of her weather working. She vanished into the heart of the storm, and I felt her screaming.
Then I felt her stop.
Something was attacking us.
The fragile balances that the Wardens had built—layers of control, of forces, of risk—began to shatter like a glass tower in an earthquake. I desperately struggled to hold on to what we’d achieved. More Wardens were being attacked around me by invisible forces—battered the same way I had been earlier, but with far deadlier results. I could sense terrible things happening, but I had to hold on.
Hold on.
The strain increased. I was strong, but this was too much for any one Warden to hold on to . . . and then the storm ripped free of the Djinn holding it and began to move.
No way I could stay with it as it roared closer, heading for the
Grand Paradise
.
Something grabbed me as I faltered, but instead of bracing me, it dragged me backward, away from the fight. Up. Out.
I was just far enough away to survive what happened next.
The storm pulsed and shifted into that poisonous green color, shot through with drifting flecks of red and jagged cutting edges of black.
The power that the Wardens had been manipulating
exploded
in a brilliant burst of light, and I felt it rip through me, flaying apart my aetheric body. I re-formed, slowly and painfully, and fell with unbalanced speed back into my own body.
I jerked, gasped, and almost fell off the edge of the stage. David had me by the arms, and he dragged me backward into his embrace. He was seated on the stage, and I fell weakly against his chest. I felt broken inside, shredded, unable to think or feel.
My eyes focused slowly, and my hearing told me that people were shouting. Screaming.
Earth Wardens were arriving in the theater, summoned by emergency signal, and they were dragging limp Weather Wardens out of their seats and laying them flat for treatment. Lewis was already down there, holding Henry Jellico in his arms, pressing his palm to Henry’s pale, high forehead. Henry was completely still. Lewis was gasping, shuddering, barely holding himself together.
“What happened?” I whispered. David’s arms tightened around me.
“Don’t try to move,” he said. “You can’t help them.”
“But—” I tried to get my body under control, but it was like swimming through syrup. Slow and cold and clumsy. “They’re—”
“Dying,” David said. His voice was low and hushed, and very gentle. “Most of them are dying, and there’s nothing you can do to help that now.”
“No!” This time I put real effort into the struggle. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t David’s strength holding me back—it was my own weakness. I collapsed against him again, sweating and shaking, and watched as my fellow Wardens slipped away into the dark.
I’d been right. Bad Bob knew us.
In one stroke, he’d chopped down a significant number of the Wardens who could have posed a threat to him.
And I had no idea how he’d done it.
In the end, more than half of the Weather Wardens couldn’t be saved. They’d been the closest to that blast of power, or they’d been drawn into the storm’s hungry maw. Their aetheric forms had been completely destroyed, and there was no soul to come back into the bodies they’d left behind. Without that, the body stuttered and died, and there was nothing any Earth Warden, however powerful, could do to stop it.
That didn’t mean Lewis didn’t try with every last ounce of courage he had left before he collapsed and had to be carried away.
It was a dark, silent place after that.
I sat there numbed, watching as the dead were lined up on the stage. Most of my water team had caught the blast, or been spun into the center of the storm by invisible attacks. Henry’s team, which had been mirrored above, had been a little luckier, but not that much.
It was a devastating blow.
“Sons of bitches were waiting for us,” I whispered. I didn’t feel as shaky now, but I was still cold and weak. Someone had done me the kindness of wrapping me tightly in a thick thermal blanket, and my body heat was slowly coming back.
Cherise was holding my hand. I don’t know who’d called her, but she’d appeared before David had let go of me, and I hadn’t been left without human contact since. I wondered if they were afraid I would just dissolve without it, like those poor bastards we’d just led to their deaths.
David had gone to see to Lewis, though I doubted that there was much that could be done for him, either. He was strong. He would survive.
It was our mutual curse, seemed like. Being strong.
“Somebody pulled me out,” I said. “Was it David?”
Cherise’s thumb rubbed lightly over my knuckles, and she squeezed my fingers. “I don’t know. He’s not so sharey right now.” Even Cher’s usual defiant good cheer was gone, replaced by a sobriety that was new to me. “You just sit and rest.”
“The storm—”
“It’s moved off to the west,” she said, which surprised me. “At least, that’s what the bridge crew told me.”
“You were on the bridge?”
She raised an eyebrow, and an echo of the old Cherise came bouncing back. “Honey, there are
men in uniform
on the bridge.” She let it fade again. “It looks like we’re in the clear. For a while, anyway. Let yourself recover a little.”
I nodded, still feeling numb, and for no apparent reason, burst into tears. Cherise rubbed my back and murmured things that I didn’t hear, a comforting sound like rain on the window. I wasn’t the only person having a breakdown. At least three of the other Wardens had already been removed from the room, unable to stop crying and shaking.
“You should go lie down,” Cherise said. “Nothing you can do here, babe.”
She was right, but with Lewis flat on his back, the Wardens needed a leader, and by default I was it. I wiped my eyes, took a deep breath, and shook my head. I unwrapped the blanket and stood up.
Cherise took my arm, balancing me on my feet before stepping away and letting me go it on my own.
I found a knot of uniformed crew members outside in the theater lobby, whispering together. They fell silent when they spotted me—fear, or respect, I couldn’t tell and didn’t care. I suspected my blue eyes held something terrible, because none of them would look at me directly.
“What can we do, miss?”
“Body bags,” I said. “I assume you have some on board. I’ll also need some medical assistance, as we have some very traumatized people. Bring tranquilizers.”
They all exchanged startled glances. One of the female stewards nodded and stepped away to a phone. The response time for the medical staff was impressive, but then again, it wasn’t like they had lots to occupy them right now. I followed the gurneys, doctors, and nurses into the theater, and went to consult with the next most senior Warden in the room.
That was a Fire Warden named Brett Jones. Brett was a big man, solid; I’d heard he played professional football, once upon a time, but he’d taken retirement before it had left him too busted up. He nodded when I approached him. The Fire Warden contingent of our little war party had been kept out of danger so far, but I could see that the losses had affected him just as deeply as they had me.
“What went wrong, Jo?” he asked. He sat me down next to him, angling to face me as much as a man that big could in theater chairs. “Nobody can give me a decent explanation of what went on up there.”
“I’m not sure I can, either,” I said. “There’s something on the aetheric. I can’t see it, but I can feel it, and it can hurt us. That’s how it started. Then the storm itself—it was like it converted our power into something else. It
changed,
Brett. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I have,” said a childlike third voice, and we both looked up to see the Djinn Venna leaning over a seat in the next row, staring at us with unearthly calm blue eyes. “Do you want to know what it is?”
We exchanged looks. “Uh, if you don’t mind?” Brett said. He knew what Venna was, and he was nervous. So was I, but for different reasons.
Venna’s small, pointed face screwed up into a frown. “If I minded, why would I have offered?”
“Forget it, Ven. Tell us.”
The frown smoothed out into a bland mask. “You shouldn’t order me, you know.”
I felt a savage bite of anger. “It’s been a bad day. And I’m not too concerned about your fragile Djinn feelings right now. You’ll live.”
From the disbelieving stare Brett was giving me, I could tell he couldn’t quite grasp that I was sassing a supernatural time bomb of power this way, but I really didn’t care. Venna wasn’t going to hurt us, and I didn’t want to play ego games.
She let it pass. “A long time ago, there was a thing that happened. It doesn’t matter what it was, but it left a kind of scar between the highest plane of our existence and another place. A bad place.”
“The place where Demons dwell,” I said. “Right?”
“Oh no,” she replied. “Much worse than that. The Demons love aetheric energy, but really all they want is to eat their fill and go back where they belong. No, this is a place the Demons fear. We don’t know what lives there, but it came through, once.”
“Came through,” Brett repeated. “What happened when it did?”
“The universe died,” Venna said. “I told you it was a long time ago.”
I stared at her, speechless. So did Brett. So did everyone else within earshot of this bizarre conversation.
She tilted her small head sideways. “What?”
“Um—even
you
can’t be that old, Venna.”
“I’m not. I read about it.”
“Where? At the Djinn Bookmobile?”
“Of course not.” She kicked her feet, just like a regular kid at the movies. “In the stars. In the dirt. In the water. It’s all around us. You can’t see it?” She answered her own question with a shake of her head. “Of course you can’t. Even most of the Djinn can’t see back that far. What we are wasn’t always
this,
you know. Everything in the universe recycles. Universes expand, contract, explode again. But this wasn’t from our universe. It was bad.”
“I’m—not sure how this is going to help us,” Brett said.
I was. “You’re saying that what’s on the aetheric, what took over the storm, it’s what came through last time?”
“No. I’m saying that it
started
this way, before. With the storm, and the power, and the ghosts.”
“Ghosts.” It was my turn to repeat her words. “On the aetheric.”
“You can’t see them, can you?”
“What kind of ghosts?”
“I can’t see them either,” Venna said, “but they’re angry. They don’t like Wardens.”
“Do they like the Djinn?”