David helped me stand. He was watching Venna's rampage, lips parted as if he literally couldn't believe it. I wasn't sure I could, either.
Venna shifted and made for a Djinn I knew slightly--she was exotically beautiful, with white hair and eyes that normally glowed a brilliant yellow. She tried to mist away, but Venna was quicker, and sank her claws into the Djinn, who howled in rage and pain.
"We have to stop her," David said. "She'll kill everyone. Everyone."
I scrambled for Venna's bottle and said, firmly, "Venna. Back in the bottle. Back in the bottle. Back in the bottle!" I almost added, Dammit, because she wasn't listening to me... . But then, inevitably, the compulsion set in to obey, and she was dragged away from her victim in a mist of shifting black that oozed slowly back into the glass container.
I jammed the cork in.
There were still ten or so Djinn facing us--no small number, and Ashan could decide to pop back in at any minute. But Venna had bought us just enough time. The Wardens were here.
And they were Earth Wardens, which was good; the radiation in here would fry Weather or Fire Wardens. Two Earth Wardens would be a lot of use.
I wasn't prepared for who they'd be, and it took me a few seconds to recognize the man scrambling down the maze of broken concrete toward us. He--or they--had cleared a tunnel along the way, so I could see faint glimmers of daylight, far above. He was Hispanic, good looking in a tough-guy kind of way, with muscled arms that rippled with flame tattoos.
Like most Earth Wardens, he favored jeans and hiking boots, which served him well here.
Following him was a tall, thin, pale woman with hair as white as the Djinn on whom Venna had just been munching. She had skin to match, coloring that missed albino only by the shade of her eyes, which were an unmistakable shade of green. They weren't a Djinn's eyes, not anymore, but they once had been.
That was Cassiel, the Djinn who'd been locked into human form. And her partner, Luis Rocha.
"Sorry we're late," Rocha said, and jumped down the rest of the way to land with a solid thump next to me. "Madre, you don't go halfway when you blow shit up, do you? There's enough rads burning in here to barbecue lead. We can't stay here long."
"We have to," I said. "How'd you get here?"
"We were close, and Cassiel's hell on wheels with moving fast. Hey, Cass, you remember Joanne?"
Cassiel inclined her head, just a little. She didn't smile, or look at all excited to see me again.
That took a turn for the worse as she looked at her fellow Djinn. "They're hers," Cassiel said. "They won't stop coming for you. They know you hurt her."
"I know that," I snapped. "It was kind of the plan. Here. Rocha, take this. Try to bind one of them."
"Try to what?" He looked shocked, as I pressed a bottle into his hand. "What the hell are you talking about?"
Two Djinn came for us before I could answer. David took one and got body-slammed into a pile of broken rock and bent rebar, and I felt suddenly sick at the damage he was taking, for me. I raised up wind and began whipping it around the chamber, vicious eddies and currents that pulled at the Djinn and flowed through them. Unless they commit completely to human form, Djinn often wear shells--bodies that aren't quite completely stable.
Wind is their enemy, and I shredded several of them apart into vapor. They tried to reform. I kept hitting them with blasts of air.
The ones who'd taken on entirely physical forms came at us in a rush, and I realized, belatedly, that the one who'd been heading for me had disappeared. He'd veered off course, and was lunging for Cassiel, who had grabbed the bottle from Luis's hands.
"Be thou bound to my service," she shouted, and had just enough time to repeat it two times before his fist slammed into her chest. She staggered under the blow, but it was nowhere near as deadly as it could have been, because the Djinn was dissolving into mist when he'd made contact. He siphoned into the bottle, and she corked it and tossed it to Rocha. Then she took a deep breath and grabbed another bottle.
He stared at her with utter disbelief as she bound another Djinn. She shoved that bottle into a pocket and grabbed yet another empty--only that one turned out to already be occupied. Rahel misted out of it--the Rahel I knew--and took a look around at the chaos.
Then she flashed me a reckless, shark-toothed grin and threw herself into the fight.
Cassiel raised an eyebrow and put that bottle in another pocket, and kept on binding Djinn in a terse, methodical way until the only one left was the one David was fighting.
Luis finally decided to join in, and bound that one.
Silence.
I dropped to my knees again, shaking and sweaty, coated in my own drying blood, and I realized the enormity of what we'd just done. We'd enslaved the most powerful of the Djinn, and if anything was going to make the rest of them come screaming after us, that was it. Well, Lewis had wanted me to be bait. I didn't think he'd expected me to achieve it on this level of success.
"What did we just do?" Luis asked nobody in particular. "Fuck."
"We did what we had to do, to survive," Cassiel said, in her cool, uninflected way. "But we won't survive long if we don't leave this place. The radiation is too high even for Earth Wardens."
I nodded, and climbed painfully to my feet. I needn't have bothered; David swept me up in a carry position, and I reflexively threw my arms around his neck for balance. "You're hurt," I said. "Let me walk."
"I'm not the one wearing the entire contents of my veins as body makeup," he said grimly.
"Shut up, Jo. Let me help you."
Feeling him against me was better than morphine, and I couldn't find it in myself to argue with him, not now. God, I didn't realize how much I'd missed him when he'd been gone. A voice on the radio, a presence in an avatar--those things weren't David. This was David.
"Don't ever do anything this stupid again," he told me, as Cassiel led the way up the treacherous rocky tunnel. I rested my head on his shoulder and sighed.
"If I had a nickel for every time somebody said that ..."
"Jo, I'm serious. I'm not letting you die for them. Let him die for the Wardens for a change." By him he meant Lewis. There was more than a bite of anger and jealousy in there. Although he and Lewis had always been friends, they were also always rivals. Frenemies? "This is out of control. I'm sorry I had to do that."
"Do what?"
"Bring the bottles." He looked at me bleakly. "The last thing I wanted was to enslave my people, again."
"Starting with yourself."
"It was the only way I could come here and protect you. If you hadn't claimed me, I'd have been one of them. I'd have come after you, and you know I couldn't live with that.
Not if I--" He didn't want to say it. We climbed in silence. It was a brutal angle, and uneven footing, and I was pretty sure that I'd never have been able to manage it on my own after all. Even David slipped from time to time, and Cassiel and Rocha were helping each other along.
I looked back over my shoulder, but there was no sign of the Djinn following along, other than Rahel, standing at the bottom of the tunnel. "Rahel?" I called.
She shook her head. "I'm not walking," she called up, and clicked her long fingernails together. "See you on top."
She misted away.
Man, I wished I could do that--although I felt the burn inside me as she pulled power from me, just as David had to do to continue this grueling climb. He probably would have preferred to blip out, too, but he couldn't take me with him, and I could tell he wasn't about to leave me on my own, even with two other Wardens to help.
We didn't speak the rest of the way, but I took huge comfort in just being with him. For now, at least.
We arrived at the top, and Luis Rocha collapsed toward the ground in a fluid crouch when he got there, breathing hard. Cassiel, who was only lightly winded--the bitch--settled down next to him. "Damn," Rocha wheezed. "Next time remind me to angle my tunnels better."
"You were in a hurry," Cassiel said, as if all this was the most normal thing in the world.
She began taking bottles out of her pockets and setting them out in front of her. Luis added his, and I gave up all of mine except for the one that contained Venna. There was no way I was risking her getting out, not until we had some way to control her.
I looked around. The buildings were toast, shattered and leveled, and black smoke still poured out of some of the holes that were left. I'd done a good job of directing the initial damage from the blast; pretty much the entire compound was gone, but only inside the fence. Even the guard towers seemed to still be okay, although I wouldn't go climbing them without good reason. A gleaming Harley-Davidson motorcycle was parked just outside of the fence, as was the Boss, which no longer gleamed; it was covered in layers of grit and grime. As dusty as it was, it could have been there for years.
I saw no signs of anyone else. I guessed that Dr. Reid had finally come down on my side, and hustled the skeleton crew off the base and into total evac mode. Good. I would have shouldered the burden, but I was so, so glad I didn't have to do it.
"We're not the only ones who were headed this way," Rocha said, and accepted a bottle of water from Cassiel out of the pack she was carrying. I hadn't noticed before, but she was dressed in white motorcycle leathers. They were immaculate, even after all the scrambling around down and up the tunnel. She passed me water as well, and took the last bottle for herself.
It wasn't until the liquid hit my tongue that I realized how incredibly parched I was, and I sucked down the bottle so fast that the plastic crackled in protest. I drained the whole thing in a rush, then had to sit down as it filled my stomach. Right, that was too fast. I kept it down, but it was a struggle.
Once the discomfort faded, I looked down at myself. Ugh. Not pretty. My body was mostly healed, but there was no helping the filthy coating of blood and dirt I was wearing, or the ragged clothes. The lab coat had helped, but it was shredded and so bloodstained I might have been an extra in a chain saw massacre movie. A dead one.
It occurred to me, belatedly, what Rocha was telling us. "Who else is on the way?"
"Cops, fire, every federal agency still in business, probably. Maybe the military. This wasn't some small-time target, you know. It's going to get a lot of attention."
Well, that's what I'd intended--just not from the human world. "So I suppose the smart thing to do is ..."
"Seal up the tunnel, contain the radiation, and get the hell out of Dodge? Yeah. That'd be it." Rocha was taking his time with his water, which I wished I'd done, but he was almost finished. He tipped it back and drained the last mouthful, then tossed it down the tunnel.
"Bad recycler," I said, and tossed mine in with it.
"Jo, you brought down the whole fucking complex. I don't think water bottles really count at this point."
He held out his hand to Cassiel as he stood, and she rose to match him. Their hands linked, and I felt the low hum of power start to build.
"We should help," I said to David. He shook his head.
"No, you need to rest. So do I. Let other people do the work for a while."
Not really my style, but I could see his point. While they were filling in the tunnel--I could feel the rumble under my feet--I rooted around in Cassiel's pack and found another bottle of water. Probably wasteful, but I stripped off the lab coat and then my shirt underneath, which wasn't quite as filthy. I used it as a washcloth to swipe blood and dirt off my face, arms, and hands. Short of calling up a gully-washing rain, there wasn't much I could do to get any cleaner until we reached civilization. Or at least a bathroom.
Dust plumed out of the collapsing tunnel, but we were out of line of the blast, luckily. I felt the long burn of the radiation through the soil, but even that was dialing back to a low background hum as Rocha and Cassiel put their blocks in place. It took about five minutes, and I heard the distant call of sirens in the distance before they were finished.
Funny, I'd have thought it was later--it seemed like days had gone by--but the sun was just now slipping toward the horizon, turning the whole landscape a fierce blood red.
I used the lab coat to wrap up the Djinn bottles, and stuffed them into Cassiel's pack.
"Try not to fall on that," I said. "That would be bad."
She looked at me with those odd green eyes, and cocked an eyebrow. Very Mr. Spock, it seemed to me, although she probably didn't even know what that would mean. As Djinn went, she was very much out of the pop culture loop.
"Do you imagine I like enslaving my own?" she asked. "Having done it, do you think I would like for them to win their freedom and come after me?"
I hadn't really considered it, but Cassiel was a Djinn through and through, in every way except her physiology, which was stone-cold human ... except that she couldn't survive without a Warden partner to replenish her energy stores. She'd never liked people, and she really
had never liked Wardens. So this had been a dramatic step for her to take, and one that indicated how human she was really becoming.
Right now I was pretty sure that she loathed it.
I inclined my head to her without another word, and after a long stare, she looked away, toward the horizon where there was a distant glitter of fast- moving vehicles. "We need to go," she said. "Now. The Djinn will be back on us soon, and we don't need the entanglements with humans."
I thought--but didn't say--that we were actually in a much stronger position now, with all the bottled Djinn at our command. Some of them would be royally pissed, and would do everything in their power to sabotage us, but I thought most of them would understand why we'd done it, and how vital it was for them to put aside their personal issues until we could put Mother Earth back to a sound, restful sleep.
