"Hey. This particular Djinn wasn't trying to kill the institution."
They exchanged the kind of look reserved for respected adversaries, and went to their separate corners, metaphorically. In actuality, the van wasn't that big.
"I should help the driver," Rahel said, and moved up a row to lean over to touch him on the shoulder. She didn't speak, though, that I could see. I wondered what kind of "help" she was providing, and decided that maybe sometimes it was just better not to ask.
"It's the town," Lewis said, following my gaze. "I've tried to send Wardens here for more than six months. They never make it within twenty miles before they turn around."
"That bad?" I asked.
"No. They just forget where they're going. It's part of the protections the Djinn put in place ages ago." He nodded toward Rahel. "She's navigating for him."
The closer we got, the stranger the weather seemed. It had been cold and windy in Newark, with that chilly, damp edge that could only mean snow on the way. But as we moved toward Seacasket, everything went quiet, smooth as glass. Like weather simply didn't exist, or was artificially flattened out to some even balance.
I put my hand up against the van's window. Cool, but not frigid outside. The clouds had swirled away, and the sunshine seemed brighter than it should. The fall colors were gorgeous, and the leaves fluttered in a very slight, decorative breeze.
We passed a sign that announced we were entering the historic town of Seacasket, and I felt a shudder go through every one of us-not a reaction to what we were reading, but something else. Some force dragging over us like a curtain.
Rahel continued to sit quietly, communing with the van driver, as we drove through town. I stared out at what looked like a normal place, normal buildings, normal people. It looked too normal, in fact, a Norman Rockwell perfection that existed all too rarely in reality. Kids in this town would be happy and well-adjusted, with just enough spice of harmless rebellion for flavor. Adults would be content and well-grounded, going about their productive and busy lives. Crime would be low. Lawns would be perennially neat.
Too good to be true, although it was true at the level most people lived.
But up on the aetheric, it was different. There was a kind of illumination to everything that spun it just slightly toward the positive, and it was easier here than anywhere I'd ever been to move from the real world into Oversight-it happened in an effortless slide.
The veils were definitely thin here.
We parked on a main street next to what looked like the most picturesque town graveyard I'd ever seen, all gracefully sculpted willow trees, manicured grass, artfully aged tombstones. Ethereal. If I had to pick any place to get my bones planted, well, I could certainly do worse.
I tried not to think that it could happen sooner than I thought.
We filed out of the van onto the sidewalk, moved around in the Brownian motion of people who didn't have any idea where they were going, and Rahel emerged last. She swept us with a look that clearly said, Hopeless, and turned to Lewis. "Perhaps you'd like to deploy them," she said. "Unless you think they look less suspicious this way."
I covered a snort of laughter with a cough.
"It's Joanne's show," he said, which made the laugh on me. "We're here for muscle, not brains."
I smiled thinly. He smiled back in a way that made me paranoid about just how solid David's privacy bubble had been on the plane. Surely I was imagining things.
Dear God, let me be imagining things.
"Spread out," I said. "Rahel, Lewis, maybe you should each take a corner. The rest of you, find someplace to blend."
There was a general shuffle, and then people broke up to assume their chosen locations. Except for Lewis, who was waiting for something else from me, and Rahel, who just wasn't going to be given orders by some mere human anyway.
"Where are you going?" Lewis asked. I nodded at the open gates of the cemetery.
"I need to go in there," I said. "Right?"
He exchanged a glance with Rahel, who inclined her head silently.
"I've been here before," I said. "The other me, she remembers everything, including how to reach the Oracle."
That made some fierce golden fire light up in Rahel's eyes, and she looked hard all of a sudden. Cutting edges and slicing angles.
"Is the Demon here?" she asked. "Inside?"
I shook my head. "Not yet. At least, I don't think so. It doesn't feel that specific. But she's got to be close."
My own voice said, from right behind me, "She is close," and something hit me with stunning force. I was tossed forward and collided with the stately brick wall. I somehow managed to get my arms in front of me, which resulted in some bad bruises but no broken bones, and tried to summon powers to fight.
I had nothing. It was the same eerie, dead flatness, so far as access to power went, that I'd experienced in Sedona when I'd tried to fight Ashan. Oh, boy. Not so good, because although my powers were on the wane, my evil twin's supernatural abilities weren't.
Because, of course, she was supernatural. Like the Djinn. It was in whatever passed for her DNA.
Well, one thing she wasn't, was immune to a punch.
Lewis stepped up and gave her a solid right cross, snapping her head back with real violence. But even as she staggered backward, I heard Rahel scream, "Lewis, no!" and saw that Evil Twin, who looked more like me than I did with her glossy, sleek hair and vibrant, glittering eyes and perfect skin, had grabbed hold of his wrist.
She yanked him forward, body-to-body, and met his eyes with hers, staring deep.
Rahel paused in the act of moving toward them. I shook the stars and explosions out of my head, trying to see what the hell was happening, and felt Lewis doing the impossible: pulling power in a place where power was locked off tight. Seacasket was a town in the aetheric equivalent of an airless, vacuum-sealed iron vault.
And he was ripping the vault door off its metaphorical hinges, as if it were nothing.
I'd never fully appreciated what Lewis was, and what he could do, until that moment. He wanted her to let him go, and she was either going to do it or be blasted into so many tiny pieces that even a Demon would have a hard time surviving it.
And then I realized why he was reacting so violently. Granted, he wouldn't want her hands on him, but what he was doing was far, far beyond merely trying to get loose from her hold. No, he was fighting to save himself, because she was trying to take him over, the way she'd grabbed Cherise and Kevin and cored them out to insert her own will, power, and thoughts.
If she could do that to Lewis...
Rahel understood what was happening, but she didn't act. Perhaps she couldn't here in this place. The power that Lewis was pulling into himself, using as a shield, was absolutely stunning in its intensity, as if the entire Earth were rising up through him in his defense.
And still the Demon was eating right through.
There was a slipping sensation under my feet. I can't describe it any more accurately; it wasn't an earthquake, because the ground itself didn't shift. Not a tremor. Not a shudder of any kind.
And yet, something moved.
"No," Rahel breathed, stricken, and I saw her make some kind of decision.
She broke out of her paralysis, crossed the few steps, and grabbed E.T. by her shiny supernatural hair. For her part, my evil twin wasn't going down easy; she snarled and twisted around to backhand Rahel, but she didn't let go of Lewis to do it. His eyes were closed, his face unnaturally still, as if he were in tranquil meditation. I'd seen this before. I could almost remember...
When Rahel lunged for her again, my doppelgänger did something that blurred in this reality, blazed up in the aetheric, and slammed the heel of her palm into Rahel's chest.
Her hand kept going deep into Rahel's flesh and bone, and I saw a flood of what looked like blue sparks shoot down the Demon's arm disappearing within Rahel's body. Rahel's mouth opened in a soundless scream, and I saw the shadowy presence of her on the aetheric turn smoke gray, then a poisonous shade of pale blue.
Could she possess Rahel?
As the Demon pulled her hand out of Rahel's chest, a flood of tiny blue sparkles followed, foaming over Rahel's body in a matter of seconds.
She convulsed and went down. It looked...Oh, God. It looked as if she were melting.
Lewis was still fighting, but whatever power he was using was dangerous in the extreme. I could feel that in the unsteady pitch and wave of the ground-no, not the ground, I realized, because the actual soil wasn't moving. This was something else.
A stray metal button on the sidewalk rattled, rolled, and suddenly flew straight up in the air to impact a metal street sign. Which was bending as if an invisible wind were pulling at it.
Something was going badly wrong with the Earth's magnetic field. Whatever power Lewis was using was unbalancing it, and although I had no idea what that meant, it just could not be good.
The other Wardens were converging on the spot, but nobody could do much-I saw Paul running to grab Lewis and bodychecked him on the way. "No!" I yelled. "She'll take you! Don't touch either one of them!"
"We can't just stand here!" he screamed back at me. I heard the wail of police cars a few blocks over, and realized with a cold start that the rest of Seacasket, this Norman Rockwell town with a touch of the Gothic, would have just seen a bunch of strangers pile out of a van and some kind of fight. They couldn't see or feel what was happening all around them, unless they knew where to look.
The Wardens knew, but we couldn't act.
I felt a displacement of air, heard a faint pop, and looked around to see Venna standing there. She didn't even glance toward me; she ran to Rahel, scooped her up, and vanished midstep. Taking her somewhere she could be helped, I hoped, but I couldn't know.
"Now would be a really good time," I muttered in the general direction of David, hoping he could hear me, but no miracles arrived to scoop me up.
I was going to have to make my miracles myself.
"Hey," I said. I kept my voice as normal as possible as I stepped away from Paul and began moving toward the Demon and Lewis. "Hey, you. Bitch. You don't really want him, do you? You just want a big hole ripped open so you can get home. Or bring in a few friends. Whichever."
She glanced sharply at me, and as our eyes locked I felt that balance under my feet shift again. Violently. Oh, man. It wasn't just Lewis who was causing this.
It was me. Both of me. We were a destabilizing influence here.
"I'll do it," I said. "One tunnel into the void, coming up. Just back off and let him go."
"Why should I?" she asked. Reasonable question, delivered in the same reasonable tone I was using. "This way he can't act against me."
"This way the two of you will end up ripping the place in half, not opening up a doorway. Not good for either one of you. Come on. I know you like this planet. It'd be a shame to ruin it for everybody."
She laughed. My laugh. "If you want him, I'll trade," she said. "Come here."
The last thing in the world I wanted was to do it, but I didn't see much of an alternative. Of course, she might be lying, but I wasn't a pushover, and if she wanted to hollow me out or kill me, I'd demand a lot of her attention.
And Lewis would break free.
"Don't you do it," Paul was muttering at me. "Don't you fucking dare. I'll kill you."
"Line forms to the right." I smiled at him, just a little, and then walked over to my evil twin.
The static in my head was now white noise, blotting out thought, erasing everything but instinct.
I put my hand over hers, where it held Lewis, and pulled it away.
The second the contact broke, Lewis collapsed. Paul, Kevin, and the other Wardens dashed in and did a combat-style drag on him, all the way to the corner, where the van pulled up. Paul threw Lewis inside, slapped the side of the van, and it sped away.
Clearly Paul wasn't taking any chances.
Blackness smothered me, thick and more painfully intense than ever before. I barely even noticed, though, because now that I was holding her hand, I saw a network of lights flaring inside of her, rich and complex, like a bright snarled ball that sparked in millions of colors.
Oh.
That was mine. My memories. My lost experience. My past.
And I reached in and took it. Or tried to. I grabbed one end of the memory chain, the Demon grabbed the other, and the race was on.
Light and shadow. Infant memories, indefinite and barely there. Faces. Noise. Colors. Perceptions sharpening as I aged. I sped through it, imprinting it on the area that was dark inside of my own head. I didn't need training for this; there was only one place this stuff could go, and in only one order. Memory, for me, was a spool, and I unwound it faster and faster, flickering images and impressions that I could examine later, when I got time... My mother crying. Sarah. Disneyland. A storm building, breaking, finding its perfect mate inside of me.
Childhood, so many rich moments, so many terrible things. I aged, changed; the world shifted with me and around me. Boys. Boyfriends. Heartbreak. Always the weather, my perfect enemy, hunting an opportunity to betray and destroy.
Power. Purpose. Training. Princeton.
A younger Lewis taking off my clothes in a basement laboratory, introducing me to a whole new level of pleasure and intensity.
Glass shattering with the force of our power combining as our bodies did.
Lewis gone, spirited away. My life consumed with work, achievement, ambition.
Bad Bob. A Djinn holding me down, choking me with a Demon Mark, forcing me to face my own fears and mortality at the same time. Bad Bob died; I lived, crawling away from the wreckage of the fight.