Текст книги "Firestorm"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

Соавторы: Rachel Caine
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I looked up at him, and was caught by the intent focus of his eyes.

"I don't care how into him you are, you be careful of this Djinn of yours," Paul said. "Don't trust him."

"Funny," I said, and opened the office door to leave. "He said pretty much the same thing himself."

The last time I'd seen Lewis, back in Florida, he hadn't been alone, and so it didn't come as that much of a surprise to run into his traveling companion out in the hallway.

Kevin Prentiss had started out a dangerous, disaffected kid with a grudge and a rogue Djinn, and had ended up a surprisingly solid citizen, at least so long as Lewis exerted a good influence on him. Lewis had appointed himself Kevin's guardian and mentor. I wasn't too shocked by that, either; he'd always been the kind to take on wounded birds and outlaws. But it was still a pretty brave thing to do, considering that Kevin's last official guardian had ended up really, really dead, and Kevin hadn't been all that sorry about it, either.

Not that I could blame Kevin. I couldn't even begin to imagine what kind of terrible life the kid—seventeen, maybe?—had had with the psychopathic Yvette before David and I had come along to receive a short, radioactive burst of that horror.

Still, the first thing I thought when I saw Kevin was that I'd never seen him smiling before, at least not like that. It was a full, charming, sweet kind of smile, one that lit up his eyes and changed his normally surly expression into something that would melt the heart of any teen angel. Oh, he still looked slacker-chic, all longish tangled hair and sallow skin and slouching body language.

But that smile.

One instant later, the smile made sense, because Cherise was with him.

She looked freshly scrubbed, and she was restored to her usual glossy perfection—hair artlessly tousled (but perfectly ordered), makeup flawless. She wore a tight little top that showed off a tanned midriff, and low-rise jeans that were so low, she ought to be handing out referrals to her bikini waxer. A real pocket-size bombshell, from her head to her newly enameled toenails.

Kevin was—of course—enthralled. Cherise didn't seem to mind that, but frankly, I didn't understand why. Kevin was a bad boy, just not in the generally accepted attractive way. He was trouble in faded baggy jeans, with slouched shoulders and an attitude that sneered in the face of authority. Okay, so that was exactly what most girls Cherise's age—younger than mine, okay?—found sexy. But still. Kevin? Cherise could have literally any guy she wanted. I was perplexed by her sudden turnaround on the issue of quality date material.

And then I thought, She wanted to get back in the door. Being with Kevin did the job nicely, because he wasn't accustomed to taking no for an answer, and besides, he had the long arm of Lewis to back him up.

Lord, I hoped she wasn't quite that manipulative, to come on to a guy just to get an invitation back in through the front door, but I wouldn't put it past her…

Or myself, come to think of it.

"Hello, Kevin," I said with a reasonable degree of welcome in my voice. The sweetly angelic smile twisted in on itself.

"Hey," Kevin mumbled at the floor. "Seen Lewis around?"

"Yeah, he's in there. He'll be out in a minute." I couldn't bring myself to the point of small talk. I mean, I appreciated that Kevin was a complete and total jerk sometimes, but it was hard to get over having been his Djinn. Even that, I could have gotten over, if it hadn't been for the stupid French maid outfits he'd forced me to wear, the better to ogle me by.

He must have taken my silence for accusation, and looked up to glare. "Lewis brought me. I didn't just show up or anything."

"I'm glad he did. We need you here," I said. I meant it. Kevin had a pretty impressive talent, when he wasn't trying to be a jerk about it, and we couldn't afford to be choosing only the nice people with good personalities.

Lewis, who'd come up behind me, nodded. I could see his face out of the corner of my eye. He was standing just a little too close, and I could feel the feedback burn of our powers responding. He didn't move away. "Kev, they could use you in the last conference room. They're talking about fire control. You can help." He looked at Cherise, glanced over to me. "And—you can—?"

"Cater," she said brightly. "Gotta feed all these people. Bottled water, coffee, sodas, ice—I'm hell on wheels with logistics. Um, as long as somebody has a credit card to use. Any volunteers? I'm looking for something with a platinum limit…"

"Cherise," I said, and reached out to take her hand. "You really don't need to be here. You should go home. I mean it. Everything's okay."

She studied me for a long few seconds. "I never knew you were so good a liar," she said. "Everything's not okay. Kevin told me. I saw a lot of it for myself anyway. Things are all screwed up, and you people are the ones who can set them right again. I want to help."

"You're not—look, this isn't about you. It's just that you don't have the kind of skills that this needs to—"

"Give me a credit card and phone line, I'll show you some skills. Step off my thing." She stared me right down, turned to Lewis, and gave him the same treatment. "Wow, you guys just don't get it, do you? This isn't your planet. It's ourplanet. And you may be all kick-ass powerful superheroes, but that doesn't mean you don't need our help. Well, my help, anyway. Because I amthe goddess of getting food delivered, and don't you forget it."

Lewis quirked an eyebrow and half a smile, and looked at me. I shrugged. "Girl's got a point," I said. "Maybe we need somebody with a little… practical perspective."

Kevin shot Cherise a thumbs-up. "Hey, let me know when you get the munchies ready. I could eat."

She made a shooing motion. Kevin ambled off in the direction Lewis had indicated… slowly enough to assert his independence, of course. He really was a gifted kid. I couldn't exactly call him a goodkid. Maybe he'd turn out all right—he certainly had been given the chances. But I couldn't quite get the memories out of my head of what he'd been like when he'd had power over me. What he'd been like when he'd had power over his stepmother.

He'd liked using it. Dangerous, for a Warden.

I nudged Lewis with an elbow once Kevin was out of earshot. "You're keeping tabs on Teen Psycho, right?"

"He's not that bad."

"Lewis…"

"Yes, I'm keeping tabs on him." He sounded resigned. "Somebody needs to. Listen, I hate to rush you, but I can handle things here. What do you need?"

"Need?…"

"To make it to Seacasket and check things out." He gave me that not-smile smile. "Fast car?"

"Oh, you think? Maybe I can borrow Cherise's. She's got a cherry Mustang that pretty much rips up the road… Well, it used to be cherry. I think the last drive put a few dents in it."

"No need to do that," he said, and dug in the pocket of his blue jeans for a set of keys that he flung my direction. I caught them out of the air.

"This better not be an SUV," I warned. Because Lewis had an affinity for that sort of thing. I was an onroad kind of girl.

He flashed me a full grin this time. "How about a vintage SS Camaro? Midnight blue and black? I bought it in Jersey just for you. Somehow, I just knew you were going to need wheels."

My heart skipped a beat.

Chapter Three

He wasn't kidding about the car. It was pretty much the Holy Grail of cars, and I had the keys.

It was parked in the secured, bomb-hardened garage downstairs—the one reserved for only the most senior diplomats and Warden staffers. Well, what with the death and destruction, there were bound to be plenty of parking spots open. It had a fabulous exotic gleam under the overhead lights, a polished sapphire hiding unsuccessfully in a field of pebbles. The conservatively styled BMWs and Infinitis looked drab in contrast, though somebody had spiced up his love life with one of those kicky little BMW Z4 Roadsters in sleek, polished silver. Very James Bond.

I ran a hand reverently over the Camaro's silky finish. It was a 1969 model, a V8 with a 396 engine—a big, boxy car, nothing really elegant about it, none of that designed-in-a-wind-tunnel slickness of newer cars. I opened the door and popped the hood, leaned in for a look, and felt my heart give that extra-double-thump reserved for true automotive love.

It wasn't just a COPO—a Central Office Production Order model, which would have been cool enough. No, it was one of the rarest of the rare: a 9560 with an all-aluminum ZL-1 427. The lightest, quickest, fastest Camaro ever made. Also, the rarest and most valuable. I winced to think how much cash Lewis had laid out for this beauty. It was in perfect condition, maintained with loving care. Not so much as a scratch.

I almost hated to be taking it out into the field, where things were bound to get ugly… but then again, it might just save my life. Speed counted.

I closed the hood and stood there for a moment, hand on the smooth finish, feeling the latent power of the car. It wasn't a replacement for my beloved, lost vintage Mustang, but that would be like saying that Secretariat wasn't a replacement for Man O' War. It was a thoroughbred, born to run.

And… Lewis had bought it for me.

Huh.

I wasn't sure I liked the implications—a guy buying you a car is at least as significant as him buying you a ring, and maybe more so in my slightly skewed worldview—but then again, I needed fast transportation.

A moral quandry. I hated those. And no question, the Camaro was seductive. I could always return it, I told myself. Sell it. Pay him back later. I didn't have to think of it as some kind of down payment for something more… intimate.

Then again, the Camaro conjured up those kinds of thoughts, all on its own. It just had that kind of aura. Sweaty bodies and smothered cries. Somebody had gotten lucky in this car a lot.

Dammit. I opened the door and slid inside. It was as perfectly maintained inside as out. Not a speck of trash or dust in it. I closed my eyes and went up into Oversight to take a walk around it, aetherically speaking.

Oh, God, it glowed. There was power in this machine. It was infused with love and dreams. In the act of creation, humans gave things a kind of reality on the aetheric, even though there was no life in inanimate objects per se. Every caring act of maintenance, every brush of the cloth on the dash or the chamois over the finish had rubbed a kind of power into this car along with polish.

I'd never seen anything like it. I wondered briefly how it would have looked to my eyes if I'd still been a Djinn; I'd have been able to unroll its past like a carpet, if I'd wanted. As it was, I was willing to bet this was a one-owner car, until now.

And that answered the question of why Lewis had bought it, too. Things like this, infused with this much power and substance, were rare and precious. It would have drawn him to it.

I let out a long, pleased sigh and inserted the key in the ignition. The engine fired up with a low, raw growl, then purred so smoothly that the tiny fine vibration under my body was almost unnoticeable.

"God, you're beautiful," I said, and ran my hand around the steering wheel. Adding my emotion to what armored the car. "And you know it, don't you, baby? You know it."

I shifted gears, and it responded perfectly to me. We eased up parking levels, to the secured gate, where my ID was checked by a uniformed security guard, and then I was out. Bright—though unfocused and cloudy—day outside, and my eyes were unprepared to deal with it; I hunted in the glove box and discovered an ancient, still-cool pair of Ray-Bans that cut the glare to something less nuclear.

It wasn't a short drive to Maine, and I didn't have a lot of time to waste.

Time. Right. I felt a pulse of alarm, remembering Eamon's two-day deadline, but I couldn't do anything about that; I couldn't even begin to try. I pictured Sarah, crying and afraid, hurting. I had to believe that he wouldn't hurt her. After all, I'd seen him with her, and I knew that on some level, Eamon did care for her. He wouldn't torment her to make a point unless I was there to witness it.

It was all no good without an audience.

I hoped.

Even with the dark thoughts, it felt good to be in the world again, and moving under my own control. I didn't think I could stand to be trapped inside the headquarters building for long, cut off from the hum of the wind and the whisper of the sea.

Okay, so New York hummed more from traffic and whispered more of sirens, but it still felt good.

The Camaro prowled through traffic like a big, dangerous beast… not feline, the way it was built. More wolf than cat. It turned heads, except for the cabdrivers, who ignored me to the point that I had to look sharp not to add yellow paint to the Camaro's shiny finish. I couldn't afford to go up into Oversight, not in heavy traffic, but I could sense an electric crackle in the air, potential energy heavy as impending rain, but without the healing moisture. That was going to ground itself soon, and in a particularly ugly manner, if something wasn't done.

Well, the good side of things was that I no longer had to worry about other Wardens second-guessing me when it came to things like this, and for the first time in a long time, I was at full power. So as I hit the bridge and sent the Camaro loping over the water, I concentrated on reading the systems swirling overhead. They were huge, invisible tornadoes of power. Unstable. Charges clicking together in chains, whipping wildly, then breaking when the stresses got too great. This was a reaction problem. The Wardens were concentrating their forces on handling a myriad of disasters; there were bound to be consequences.

And here was a big one.

The sky was surly overhead, soggy with thick, darkening clouds that blew in from the sea. The water under the bridge heaved and breathed on its own, a secret life most of the millions in the city would never even sense, much less understand. Water had memory, of a kind. Blood had DNA, and water had a similar structure that existed only on the aetheric plane. That DNA had been badly damaged over the years, but it still purified itself, renewed itself, struggled continually against the assaults of mankind to corrupt it.

We were damn lucky, the human race. Damn lucky that the earth's systems protected us as a side effect of its own survival mechanism, because we damn sure weren't smart enough to do it for ourselves.

I considered what to do about all that restless energy upstairs. Lightning would be the most logical plan, but it was risky; it was notoriously difficult to control lightning, and discharging it around the city could cause blackouts. Blackouts caused panics. Panics caused deaths. Deaths were, after all, what I was in this to try to avoid.

Then again, there was going to be lightning, sooner or later, and it was going to be worse if nobody controlled its strikes.

I drove for two hours. That sounds like a respectable driving distance, especially in the horsepower-rich Camaro, but unfortunately, traffic wasn't exactly cooperative. Two hours later, I was still within sight of the city. I'd hoped to be well out of range before the prickling at the back of my neck told me that something had to be done, because then it would have been someone else's responsibility. I'd been hoping that some Good Warden Samaritan would jump in and have at it, but no such luck… not that I blamed the folks back at Warden HQ. They had something of a full plate at the moment.

I signaled and pulled over to the side of the road in a spray of gravel, emergency flashers clicking. I settled myself comfortably in the bucket seat and let myself go up to the world above, where the landscape washed away into a surreal swirl of fog and color. Brilliant, up here, and a unique bird's eye view of a gorgeous city. Wow. New York was charged with human purpose, driven by the engine of energy transforming and growing and changing, by passions and hopes and dreams and tragedies. I couldn't see as much detail as I'd once been able to, when I'd been a Djinn, but the city was still magnificent and mesmerizing, and it was tough as hell to look away.

I forced myself to focus on the job at hand, and turned my attention upward, to the disturbance.

The force patterns up there slipped like oil in water, incandescent and rainbow-colored. Beautiful, in their own way. Scary as hell, the way they were blending and morphing and whipping together. When lines of force connected, I saw the ultraviolet zaps of enormous power being channeled.

As I reached out to try to build a stable channel for it, I felt something… notice. That was the most skin-crawling sensation I'd ever had in my weather career, a shock to the system as extreme and terrifying as channeling lightning, if lightning had a brain and an intent. Somethingwas watching me. Something big. The Mother? Was that what it was like?…

I lost control of the chains. They broke into random turning particles again, a soup of energy boiling over. I wanted to reach out again, but something was holding me back… my own fear. I was a tiny little field mouse, and there was a huge eagle shadow overhead, just waiting for me to make a move. If I tried to run, I'd die—crushed, devoured, destroyed.

Something in the real world brushed my hand, then gripped it tight. I opened my eyes, surprised, and saw that I had a passenger in the car, though the doors were still locked.

David was back, and he wasn't disguised as human at all; in fact, if anything, he looked more Djinn than ever before. A whole lot of sleek gold skin on display, because he was wearing only a pair of tight leather pants and an open leather jacket, with no shirt beneath. His hair was longer, down nearly to his shoulders, and it held a vivid, metallic shine. His eyes were their own light sources. I stared at them, fascinated; they were the color of new pennies on the edge of melting in a blast furnace.

His hand was hot enough to be uncomfortable against my skin.

"I came to warn you," he said. He was in my space, very dose. I felt the longing in him, the shivering attraction that had gripped me from the very beginning. "You have to stop."

"Stop what?"

"Trying to fix this. It can't be fixed."

"You know me better than that. Or at least, I hope you do. And by the way, what's with the bad-boy makeover?"

He brushed hair back from my face. Where his fingers touched, I burned. Figuratively as well as literally. "You don't like it?"

"The leather? Um…" I'd have to have been blind and insane not to like it, not to mention hormonally bankrupt. "Looks good on you."

"Not as good as you would."

Oh God. My pulse started fluttering and racing, and as if his heat had crawled inside me, I started a bonfire of my own. At least half my mind—the smart half—was screaming that there wasn't time for flirting around just now. Not now. And not in a confined space with a Djinn who might just flip out and kill me.

I wasn't sure that sex with him in this state wouldn't kill me, anyway.

"You look good enough to eat." He licked his lips. There was something incandescent going on in his eyes, so bright, I couldn't look for long. It was as if he were staring at my naked soul.

"Um—David—" His hand slid down the curve of my cheek, traced my chin, and then his fingers trailed down the line of my throat. His index finger explored the notch of my collarbone, and then dipped lower. He hooked it in the neck of my shirt and pulled. I swayed toward him. "What are you doing?"

"Don't you know?" he asked.

Oh boy. The energy piling up and swirling overhead. The hot crackle between us. The heat of his skin, the restless flare inside me. The sense of something…

Something present, up there.

Something vast, and beyond my understanding.

He leaned forward, and his lips touched mine. Liquid silk, warm and soft and insistent. Whatever defenses I had, they didn't exist against him; I could feel all my resolve evaporating like ice under a summer sun. His hands seemed to be everywhere, soft little touches on my face, my neck, my arms, sliding up under my shirt, thumbs tracing the undersides of my breasts…

I think my mind whited out for a while. When it returned from its sensory vacation, I was back against the driver's side window, braced, with my knees up and apart, and David was kneeling between my parted thighs, and I had noidea how that had happened. The rational part of my brain insisted that this was not the time or placebut then his hand glided warm up my inner thigh and slid inside my panties, and I gasped into the hot cavern of his mouth, and my clutching fingers sank into the lapels of his leather jacket to pull him closer.

Overhead, lightning cracked the sky, blue white. Hotter than the surface of the sun. It raced from horizon to horizon, split into a million sizzling tributaries. It covered the entire bowl of the sky, as if the whole thing had shattered.

The pulse of power that shot through me was nearly as shocking as the visual. Power echoing from the sky, to David, into me.

"Whoa! Hang on," I blurted. He pulled back, and in a way that was worse, because now I could look at him, and damn, the ruffled hair, the kiss-swollen lips, the golden skin flushed with peach… He could single-handedly destroy the entire concept of celibacy, worldwide.

"Stop?" he asked. He took my hands and pressed them flat against his naked chest, under the leather jacket. Solid, velvet-soft skin. Real as it could possibly come. "You don't want to stop. You want to go, and go, and go."

I scrambled for sanity. "This isn't exactly the right place—"

"If you're worried about people seeing us, they won't." he said, and his fingers were at the bottom of my knit shirt, yanking it up. Stroking flesh. I was having serious problems getting my breath, especially when he leaned closer, and I couldn't stop myself from pressing back against him. We were still dressed—barely—but I was certainly in a compromised position. My skirt was already so far up, it might as well have been a belt, and he was one fast tug on my panties away from having me. Being a Djinn, he didn't even have to struggle to peel those leather pants off. He could just will them to disappear.

And oh, I wantedthem gone. I couldn't keep my hands off him, and there was such an intensely powerful sensation, stroking my fingers down the tight leather pants and feeling him respond…

The sky turned white overhead as lightning laddered across, a hissing curtain of force traveling nowhere. The air smelled acrid and tasted of tinfoil. Wouldn't be long now. It would find a ground target…

Oh, crap.

I marshaled what was left of my dignity, pushed David back—not so far as all that—and when he tried to lean in again, got my bent leg in between us, my foot on his chest to hold him in place. "No," I panted. "David, you told me not to trust you. And this—this isn't like you. I don't think you're—yourself." Not that the whole new David didn't have some really, really good qualities.

"I'm more than myself. Better." He grabbed my ankle, wrenched my foot to one side, and lunged forward to pin me hard against the door, knees apart. Vulnerable. He was far stronger than a man, not that male strength wasn't usually enough for something like this. "You don't know what this is like, Jo, having this, being this close to her—feeling every breath of the world flowing through you—every heartbeat pounding inside—" He was babbling. Quivering. "It's new. I'mnew."

"I like the old David," I said shakily. "Can I have him back, please?"

He froze, leaning against the glass with a hand on either side of my head. Bronze eyes swirling, inhuman, unreadable. I could barely breathe. If David wanted to take me, it wasn't like I could say no; it wasn't like anyone had any control over what the Djinn did, maybe not even the Djinn themselves anymore. And oh God, I understood what was driving him. There was wildness in the air, wild power coursing through the sky and, for all I knew, through the ground, as well. This was the consciousness of the planet, slowly coming back to itself. A living world, an organism and a consciousness so huge that the rest of us were just dust mites crawling along its skin.

Desperation was driving him. Desperation and intoxication and the need to feel.

I could see a pulse racing under his skin, feel the vibration of his aching, near-painful need. It was echoing inside me, every thundering heartbeat.

I dared an indrawn breath. "David, if you love me, back off."

He leaned away, and then shifted abruptly into a sitting position, braced on the far side of the car against the passenger window. No mistaking, in that position, that those leather pants were very tight and he was, as the artists like to say, in a state of interest.

But he was sitting on the other side of the car.

And his hands were shaking.

When he finally spoke, so was his voice. "I'm sorry," he said. "This is—it's—she's never felt like this before. It's—I don't know how to—" Apparently, it was indescribable, because he just shook his head in frustration and looked away. "It influences us. Seduces us. Makes us—"

"Crazy? Horny? Aggressive?"

The relieved smile he gave me was pure vintage David. "Yes."

"I like to know what I'm dealing with. And dammit, I don'tlike seeing you lose control."

"I wouldn't be over on this side of the car if I wasn't in control." Yeah, maybe… barely. I could feel the tension humming inside him, a coiled spring begging to unwind. He let out a long breath and deliberately flexed his hands, then laid them on his knees. "Thank you for reminding me."

"Is she awake?"

He parted his lips, not in answer but in surprise. Some of the fog left his eyes, and sanity came back. The bronze swirl muted to a soft brown, sparked with metallic highlights. "Ah," he finally said. "No. Not exactly. But she's—in the process of waking up. And the feelings are especially powerful right now."

"Like a hypnagogic orgasm," I said. He blinked. "The kind you have right when you're in that gray area between waking and sleeping. Really… deep."

"Hypnagogic," he repeated. "Have I told you recently how much you baffle me?"

"No. You were too busy trying to feel me up."

"Sorry."

"Don't be."

David lost the slight smile he'd managed to acquire. "The problem is, I can't tell when it's me, or when it's herdriving me. This is—difficult."

"You were going to say 'hard,' weren't you?"

"No."

"Liar."

"Stop distracting me."

He was right. It wasn't a good time to be distracting him, especially not if his self-control was all that stood between the impulses he was receiving and the rest of the Djinn. That thought sobered me considerably. "Sorry," I said meekly. I slowly got my legs folded into something like propriety and curled them around to put my feet on the floor. Another lightning bolt unzipped the sky overhead, broad as a superhighway—this one didn't fork. It was like a solid cable of light and power overhead. Forget about the surface of the sun, that had about as much heat in it as the entire nuclear core. If it had hit a plane, there'd have been nothing left but a floating smear of ash and some raining molten metal.

"I need to do something about that," I said.

"Not a good idea."

"Maybe not, but I have to try something. This system's highly unstable and dangerous."

"It's still not a good idea."

"Right. Can you help me?"

He was working on staying human, I could tell that; his instincts were driving him in all different directions, trying to rip him apart. I watched his bare chest fill and empty of air he probably didn't even need, mesmerized by the play of light on muscles. In the next flash of lightning, he looked almost as he had the first time I'd met him. In a heartbeat, his clothes re-formed from black leather into blue jeans and a gray T-shirt, with an open blue checked shirt on top. Hiking boots. His habitual olive drab ankle-length coat.

And glasses. Round John Lennon glasses that caught the flare in flat white circles, hiding his eyes completely.

"I'll try," he said faintly. "I'm not Jonathan. I can't—I don't have the experience to handle this kind of thing."

"I doubt Jonathan would have had the experience to handle this, either. You're doing fine, David. Just fine." I had no idea if it was true, but I wanted it to be. I reached out to him. He took my hand. His skin wasn't so burning-hot—more of a muted warmth, like someone who'd just come in out of the summer sun.

"I can feel them." He cocked his head to the side, as if listening to something beyond the constant, restless rumble of thunder. "The Djinn. It's like being the hub at the center of a huge wheel, all of them connected—pulling at me. No wonder Jonathan kept himself apart. It must have been easier that way."

Fascinating as that was, I had more practical concerns. "Can you help me bleed off some of this energy?" I made a vague gesture up at the sky just as another painful burst of lightning exploded, racing spidery legs overhead.

He took a deep breath, nodded, and twined his fingers with mine. "Ready?"

I nodded and let go, to drift up into Oversight. David washed into an almost invisible shimmer of light and heat—the Djinn didn't show up well in the aetheric, not to human eyes, anyway. The fairyland glow of the city behind the car was different up here, but no less intense, but what dwarfed it—what dwarfed everything—was the looming power in the sky. It was weather, and yet… not. The swirls and frantic updrafts were caused by the power, not spawning it, and while there were fronts forming and storms on the horizon, it wasn't the engine driving this particular machine. There was something going on that wasn't immediately obvious, and it wasn't the work of any Warden, no matter how ambitious or misguided.

I reached out to try to stabilize the system.

Too late.

Lightning exploded, down in the real world, expending immense power upward, and slamming it down like a pile driver into the ground on the other end. There was so much energy involved that it literally knocked me for a loop in the aetheric. The roar in the physical world was devastatingly, deafeningly huge.