When I looked over, the dying chimera was being torn apart by its kin. Ugh. I just love nature.
"There's more coming," Rahel said quietly. She had dropped all hint of being amused now, though to her all this was still a highly academic exercise. "I would suggest you find a way out."
My car was roof-deep in the road out there, and I didn't think it was ever coming out, or that it would be in any way drivable if somehow it did. It was for damn sure that three of us wouldn't fit on the motorcycle, and even two wouldn't survive these things--these chimeras--which would rip anyone apart in seconds once they were at ground level. Even Cassiel. Two Djinn couldn't carry three of us to safety without taking us through the aetheric, which would likely kill us anyway.
"Right," I said. "Rahel, take Rocha. David, take Cassiel. Get them out of here. Take them all the way to Vegas if you have to. David, you can come back for me. I can hold out." I was the logical one to remain; my combination of powers was something that outclassed Luis Rocha's not inconsiderable talents, and even Cassiel's, which was limited by her connection to him. I could pull Earth, Fire, and Weather to defend myself, and now that I knew these things were killable, I felt confident I could hold out.
David looked as if he wanted very, very badly to say no, several times, loudly, but he knew I was right. Luis and Cassiel were vulnerable here, and they'd saved our lives before. They deserved our help now.
He gave me a furious look, and I saw the sparks of fire and gold blaze up in his eyes. Truly a Djinn, in that moment, with his skin shading to metallic bronze. "Don't die," he said flatly.
"Promise me."
"I promise," I said. "Get out of here. I'll wait."
He kissed me, and it was a hungry, desperate kind of kiss that left my whole body tingling and alive, my lips sunburned with the force of his emotion. My husband. I touched his cheek and said, "I will always love you, David."
He kissed my palm. "There is no force in creation that will keep me away. You know that."
"I know."
"Then wait for me."
He turned, fury in his movements, and threw his arms around Cassiel.
Then he launched himself up off the roof, into the air, and began to fly.
Rahel watched him go, then turned her attention to me. "Until later, my sistah." She blew me a kiss, put her arms around Luis, and purred, "Well, this is certainly an upgrade from my last passenger." I had to laugh at the discomfort on his face, and then she flexed her knees and they were gone, too.
Another monster scrambled over the edge of the roof.
Time to go to work.
David didn't come back.
Neither did Rahel.
I paced myself, there on that smoke-stained roof, under the glare of the Vegas sun. I had my pack, and in it was food and water, which I gulped down as the chimeras kept coming, and coming, and coming. Mother Earth must have run out of bears and mountain lions, because around noon, a new breed came scuttling over the horizon and attacked the building.
And these used to be human.
I couldn't believe what I was seeing at first, because my brain refused to process the information. It was too disturbing, too sickening. I had to face it once the first of them scaled the wall, way
too quickly, and used its human hands to pull itself up over the lip and its scorpion's feet to race toward me. The human face on the thing had rolling eyes and a lolling, foaming mouth, but being driven mad clearly hadn't affected its razor-sharp reflexes. I dropped the juice box I was sucking on and pulled down lightning--overkill, but this thing was completely disturbing, and my skin crawled with the idea it could even exist in the same time and space with me.
I zapped it into a blackened mess when it was still fifteen feet away. My ears rang with the blast, and I felt singed and disoriented, but oddly better for ridding the world of it.
That was before I heard the clattering, and realized that there were a lot of these monsters, and they were climbing in steady, relentless streams. As I watched, stomach dropping, I saw that two more had already cleared the ledge on one side, and at least three on the other. At least the damn bear/lion creatures had been slower.
The roof wasn't going to work any longer.
I started fires around the roof line to give myself a little time as I stuffed things back into my bag. The fire should have slowed them down, and maybe it did, for all of fifteen seconds or so, but then they ran shrieking--human
shrieks--through the walls of flame and came straight for me with those deadly stingers upraised and ready.
No time for anything fancy. I had to evacuate.
I levitated myself up on a strong updraft, and--apprehensively--over the flames and the struggling, snapping chimeras that were swarming up the building. This wasn't something even most hard-core Weather Wardens were good at doing; short bursts of this kind of thing were fine, but if I faded now, I'd be dropping myself into a boiling mass of these things at the base of the wall. I had to keep going. I had to hope that it would take them time to realize I was gone and to find me.
Personal levitation is exhausting, sweaty work, and my pack quickly felt like it increased in weight from ten pounds to fifty, to a hundred. I breathed in ragged, gasping breaths, holding diamond-hard focus on keeping the forces in delicate balance as I sped along, skimming over the desert at the speed of maybe thirty miles per hour. Not exactly fast, but I didn't dare push faster. Every bit of forward motion I added made it harder to compensate on all the other, constantly shifting energies. I'd never done this for longer than a minute, at best.
I held it for almost fifteen minutes before my concentration snapped, and I tumbled out of the sky toward a razor-sharp stand of brush cactus. At the last second, I altered course and landed in sand instead, and hit the ground running. It was good I did, because when I looked back I saw that my footprints were filling up with something dark.
Fire ants. My very touch on the ground was bringing them boiling to the surface.
Not just fire ants, either. The desert's defenses were on high alert, and I had to dodge swarms of smaller, nonchimeraed scorpions as well as some tarantulas crawling out of their holes ahead of me. Running was not my best sport, and broken-field running even less so, but I didn't have a choice. When I reached out with Earth powers to try to clear my way, it only made things worse, as if the entire wildlife was sensitized to the presence of a Warden in their midst.
My breath was burning in my lungs, and I knew I'd have to stop soon, or at least slow down.
But I wasn't sure how I could, considering the fierce antibody reaction to my passage. Not only that, but as I looked back over my shoulder I saw movement about a thousand feet behind me. Chimeras, and they were catching up.
Las Vegas was a long, long way off. It looked drab and overbuilt in the desert shimmer. I realized that no planes were flying in or out, and although there was a road up ahead, about a half a mile out, there were no cars on it. It was eerily quiet.
No sound except for the overhead shriek of hunting birds, which made me realize how vulnerable I was to attack from that avenue. I didn't want to have to kill more birds. I didn't want to kill anything
, except maybe those awful chimeras, but I didn't think I was going to have a choice.
Mother Earth had declared war, and I was going to have to fight back, hard.
Except that I wasn't sure anything I had would really keep me alive for long.
I put on a burst of speed, pulled from Earth power, and outpaced the scuttling pursuers, heading for the road. Not that the road was safe, given that it had already eaten my damn car
, but it was flat and clear of fire ant burrows, at least.
What it wasn't
clear of were hornets. They boiled up out of nowhere from the side of the road, a bomber squadron of inch-long furious insects, and headed straight for me as soon as my feet hit the asphalt. I gasped and instinctively swatted at them with a blast of air, driving them back as I kicked my run into even higher gear. I was dripping with sweat now, gasping like a fish out of water, but I couldn't slow down. I could hear the relentless buzz of the insects zipping closer.
I came to a sudden halt, closed my eyes, and formed a hard shell of air around my body.
The bugs hit the windshield with vicious force, leaving gruesome splatters, and those that didn't die immediately jabbed their stingers into the barrier, over and over, trying to get to me with their last breath. A few, warier than the others, backed off and circled, looking for an opening.
I couldn't wait forever.
I dropped the shell and ran for it, and the remaining hornets dashed in pursuit. The first one came close enough to smash with another gust of air that sent it tumbling, stunned or dead, to the gravel shoulder of the road. My legs felt like lead now, and my muscles were starting to wobble uncertainly as the stress and lack of oxygen took their toll.
The first hornet got me, and it felt like being hit with a bullet. A bullet dipped in acid. I yelped, slapped a hand down on my arm, and felt the insect's body squash under the slap.
The sting hurt, and then began to burn. I gritted my teeth and stopped again, pulling down my windshield. Three more hornets met their gooey death, leaving only two who were smarter than that, or slower.
The running battle of attrition went on for another half mile. I smashed one more hornet, but the other two harassed me, flying in with vicious darting motions. I crushed another one when it landed on me, luckily before it drove home its stinger.
The sole survivor dive-bombed me relentlessly, and score two more stings before I finally managed to kill him, too.
I windmilled to a gasping, gagging stop on the hot asphalt, barely able to keep upright. My left arm, where the first sting had landed, felt hot and swollen; so did the back of my neck and my leg, where the others had scored hits. But I wasn't going to die of that.
No sign of the chimeras behind me.
No new threat racing up out of the desert to confront me.
There was even a cool breeze ruffling my hair, and I lifted my chin, grateful for anything that lessened the misery I was in ... and then my eyes snapped open, and I saw the dust devil dancing out there in the desert, a sinuous rope shape made visible with all of the sand it was sucking up. It was mesmerizing to watch as it twisted, bent, and got darker.
I dropped down into a crouch, hardened the air again, and covered my head with my hands as the dust devil--no, dust tornado
--raced toward me with the fury of a freight train. It hissed at first, and then, once it was on me, the hiss rose to a blinding roar. I could feel the sand scouring over the shell that protected me, and the heat increased. I couldn't stay in the shell long without making it gas-permeable, but that meant opening myself to the dust storm. I'd suffocate, one way or the other. My only hope was to disrupt the dust devil's delicate, powerful structure.
And I probably would have done that fairly easily, if it hadn't been for the fact that a chimera slammed into the shell around me, and when I opened my eyes I found myself face to face with the lolling, foaming mouth and rolling eyes of a madman. His hands scrabbled at the surface, and I saw that the sand was ripping at him viciously. I'd seen a man stripped of skin once, in a storm like this, and as I saw the first raw patches appear on his body, I felt my stomach clench in nausea.
I couldn't help him, whoever he'd once been. He was gone. And this thing that wanted to take a piece out of me wasn't in any way human.
The scorpion tail drove down, hit the hard shell around me, and snapped its stinger off.
The chimera howled and lost its footing. The dust devil blew it away into a maelstrom of sand and debris, and I concentrated on Oversight, examining the structure of the twister hovering over me. It was a perfect little engine of destruction--colder air whipping down and heating itself as it moved faster and faster in its spiral, then the hot air blasting up like a furnace through the center of the devil to the sky, where it cooled and spiraled back down. A perfect marvel of physics.
But this one--this one was no accident of nature. This one was being held together by an iron will, and when I tried to break it, it was like hitting a bank vault door with a toy hammer. Someone wanted to kill me, badly.
And I thought I knew who it was.
I kept the shield in place and straightened up. I started at a walk, well aware that I was going to exhaust the oxygen content of the air in this shell in less than a minute once I started running.
The dust devil stayed on top of me, blinding me, slamming me with debris and scouring sand that whipped at killing speeds. I broke into a jog. It paced me.
I kicked it to a run, lungs burning from more than effort now. I could feel my energy dropping, and the danger was that as I used up my available air I was going to start losing focus. Losing focus meant losing the protection of the windshield, and that meant I'd die.
No.
There had to be a way. There had to be.
I realized that I was breathing too hard, and getting too little. That hadn't taken long. A headache was already starting to form, and my legs were informing me that any step now might be the last I was going to take.
I dropped the shield, sucked in a dust-laden breath, closed my eyes, and dropped flat on the hot pavement. The dust devil screamed as it closed over me, clearly sensing triumph, and I tried not to scream as it battered me with raw fury.
When I'd hyperventilated enough, I put the shield back in place and ran on. I'd only gotten a few steps when the dizziness started. I couldn't keep this up.
I crouched down again, grabbed my pack and opened it, groped inside, and found the one Djinn bottle I'd kept with me.
I thumbed off the cork.
A rush of black mist, and hidden in it I saw sharp angles and edges and alien geometries.
Venna, in the form of an Ifrit. I'd never understood how much Ifrits really comprehended--not much, in all probability--but this was one moment when her needs and mine aligned perfectly.