"Only because I'm at the point of death." He clutched his chest and mimed an elaborate choking. Except it wasn't really funny. He was at the point of death. "Sorry. It's sort of weirdly amusing from this end.

It's the first time in my life you considered me safe to sleep with."

I lowered my gaze to contemplate the practical. As in, shoes. I had the left one on and was toeing the right when I heard a rumble of thunder, and felt the flashover of power. Hot and fast.

I looked up. Lewis was already heading for the windows. "Were we expecting rain?" I asked.

"Not in the forecast."

"That doesn't exactly feel natural. . . ."

I stopped, because he hauled back the curtains, and we both saw it at the same time. There was a storm forming outside. A big G.o.dd.a.m.n storm, purple-black, swelling like a tumor. The anvil cloud stretched dizzyingly high, a gray-white tower thrusting up practically to the troposphere. The amount of power in that monster was growing exponentially.

Worse, it had rotation. Big rotation. I watched the edges that were rapidly expanding to the horizon, counting seconds and cloud motion.

"s.h.i.t," I breathed. "I don't think we'd better plan on walking to the Bellagio."

Lightning laddered down from the ma.s.sive clouds in three or four places, shattering like neon gla.s.s against the ground and buildings. I saw the hot blue flares of transformers bursting somewhere near the edge of the city.

Lewis cursed softly under his breath, then said, "I can't see anything. What is it?" Without his powers, he was barred from the aetheric. I rose up and took a look.

Not good. Not good at all.

"Tell me it's somebody we can stop," he said.

It wasn't. In fact, it wasn't somebody at all.

It was n.o.body.

Weather is mathematical, in a certain very basic sense . . .

warming and cooling the air simply means controlling the speed at which atomic structures vibrate. In any normal situation, no matter how dire, atomic structures vibrate in harmony, in groups, like a grand and glorious choir. In storm situations, there is dissonance.

This was complete and utter noise. There weren't bands of heat and cold; there weren't winds, exactly. Or if there were, they couldn't sustain themselves; they began and died and shifted in the blink of an eye. Hot and cold vibrations were jamming up against each other at the subatomic level, not just as a leading edge of an event, but interwoven.

"What the h.e.l.l ..." I whispered, appalled. This wasn't nature gone crazy. This was nature without any mind at all.

Over at McCarren Airport, a wide-bodied jet angled in for a landing; I saw it seem to stutter as a wind shear hit it. The tail came up; the nose came down.

"No! Jo, do something!" Lewis yelled, and slammed his hand flat against the window.

I threw myself up fast to the aetheric, saw the chaos and destruction raging. I focused on the plane. It was full of terrified screaming people, burning like straw in Oversight; I had to ignore that and try to make sense of what was attacking the area around it.

Chaos. No sense to it at all ...

I felt a harsh ripping flash, and saw particle chains snapping together.

Lightning hit the plane dead-on, frying the electronics with a hard white pop of energy, a fountain on the aetheric that just further contributed to the mania.

I reached out and crammed together a layer of air beneath the plane, forced it to behave like normal air under normal circ.u.mstances. It took a huge amount of effort, and I felt the strain vibrating through me like stretched steel wire. I propped the plane with an updraft, smoothed the air around it, and fought back another wind shear that attacked from the side. The plane was heavy, and the wind kept fighting back, trying to slip away, swirl like a matador's cape. It wanted to rip the wings off of that 737. I forced a straight runway of calm air ahead of the screaming engines.

I was shaking all over. Human bodies couldn't channel this kind of effort, not for long, not without the help of a Djinn, and David wasn't here. Wasn't connected to me.

A little farther, just a little . . .

The plane was a hundred feet off the ground. I felt the air trying to spin apart under the wings and grabbed hold, wove the chains together and forced it to stay connected.

Fifty feet.

Twenty.

"Hold on," Lewis whispered next to me. "You're almost there."

Ten.

Just before the wheels touched tarmac, I felt something give way inside me with a b.l.o.o.d.y rip, and everything fell apart. The plane bounced, landed, skidded, was slammed right and left by wind shears like fists.

I couldn't stop it, but I kept trying, grabbing for control. I fell to my knees, breathing hard, tasting blood in my mouth and seeing bright red spots in front of my eyes.

"Jo!" Lewis had hold of me. I struggled to stay out of the dark. "Let it go! They're down!"

The plane had come to a stop, through a panicked superhuman effort on the part of her pilots.

When I let go, the wind forged itself into a hard edge and came straight for me.

"Lewis!" I yelled, and pulled him down on the carpet, covered him with my body.

The wind shear slammed into the pyramid full force, at least a hundred miles an hour, and the window blew like a bomb. I felt a hot burn across my back, then an ice-cold burst of rain. I rolled off of Lewis and grabbed his arm, pulled him to his feet, and shoved him toward the door.

Before we made it there, another wind shear blasted in, hit me in the back like a freight train, and slammed me down to the carpet.

Lewis turned and grabbed for me, but my hand was slick with blood, and the wind shear became a backdraft, sucking me out into the storm.

I felt gravity let go as I spun out of the broken window, hundreds of feet above the Las Vegas streets. The fountains at the Bellagio were still booming, but the water was ripped to mist as soon as it exploded out of the water cannons. I tried to grab control of the winds holding me, but being suspended in midair like Fay Wray in King Kong's hand didn't do a lot for my concentration.

The wind sensed my attempt to manipulate it and dropped me.

Straight down.

I screamed as I hit gla.s.s and started to slide down the side of the pyramid. I tried to reach to cushion the fall, but it fought back, flowing away, creating a downdraft that sucked me faster toward the concrete. I flailed at slick gla.s.s windows, cold metal, left b.l.o.o.d.y streaks behind.

This is it. I felt a sick, nauseating terror taking hold, shredding what was left of my magical control. One second closer to the ground.

Two. I was going to hit...

I stopped falling with a jerk, like I'd come to the end of a bungee cord, was yanked back upward in a spiraling whirl. The pyramid's gla.s.s blurred by, reflecting white streaks of lightning. Rain hit me so hard it felt like strikes of hail, and I couldn't breathe, hadn't taken a breath since I'd begun screaming. . . .

I pa.s.sed the broken-out window, caught a glimpse of Lewis standing stark-pale, shielding his face against the fierce wind, blood- streaked from flying gla.s.s cuts.

He reached out to try to catch me, but it was too late. I felt the hot graze of his fingers against my bare ankle and then I was going up into the storm.

Taken hostage.

EIGHT.

I had time to take about six breaths before I was too high up for it to matter, and then the gasping started. The elevator kept rising. I can't breathe. . . . No, I was breathing, but it wasn't doing any good.

Oxygen content too low. I was filling my lungs to no effect. Create oxygen. You can do it. Sure, I could; it was just a matter of forming new molecules out of the available surroundings, but G.o.d, I couldn't think, I couldn't . . .

I just couldn't. For the first time, I found myself unable to do what I knew I had to do.

Which left dying. Normally, that would have been one h.e.l.l of a motivator, but my brain was fraying into threadbare strands, and I couldn't feel my body anymore. Dying was more like fading. It hardly hurt at all.

Something white exploded through me like a surge from a cattle prod.

No, please, I just want to rest. . . . Tired . . .

Another white flare, crawling up my spine to catch fire in my brain. Panic. Panic from some part of me buried so deep it couldn't even express itself in words, just flashes.

I opened my eyes.

It had hold of me. It had been a Djinn, once . . . I could still see the furious liquid-aqua eyes in that distorted, screaming face. Not a Djinn anymore. Not even an Ifrit, which was at least a coherent ent.i.ty, a being. This was a tumor of magic, cancerously overgrown, swollen with . . .

. . . with a black, glowing Mark that burned and rippled on its distended chest.

This wasn't a Djinn anymore; it was a coc.o.o.n for a demon. I sensed the Djinn trapped within, but it was failing, dying, being consumed slowly and horribly by the other. It was desperate.

They were both desperate.

Black spots danced madly in my vision. Lack of oxygen. I blinked and tried to remember again how to fix that, but there were too many missing pieces, and it was much too difficult. . . .

The Djinn opened its mouth, and I saw something black move inside it.

Crawling toward me.

I had a helpless, suffocating flashback of coming to on Bad Bob Biringanine's couch, his cold blue eyes on me, a bottle full of demon in his hand. Hold her down, he'd snapped at his Djinn, and pried my mouth open. . . .

Maybe I didn't mind dying so much, but I minded that. Without even a second's thought, I grabbed at the energy around me, channeled it, and slammed it down in a hundred million volts, blue- white plasma, right on top of the thing that had hold of me.

At the last instant, I remembered that if I hit the Djinn, the Djinn was still holding me, and that meant I was going to fry with him. As the particle chains whipped together, as the charge began to flow like liquid through the ripped sky, I jammed together air molecules between us and sent them hurtling toward the Djinn, shoving him away. He wasn't corporeal enough for it to move him far, or misted enough for it to make him disappear, but it gave me a precious foot of s.p.a.ce as the sky turned white around me.

The lightning hit the Djinn with the force of a nuclear bomb, shredding it into shadows. I saw it even through closed eyes and covering hands, and then the shock wave hit, knocked me flying, and gravity started to claim me.

The sky was screaming.

I emerged from the clouds, falling like a star. Friction heated my skin, lashed my clothes into shreds around me. I was spinning helplessly, spiraling toward the brilliant spilled jewel box of Las Vegas.

One good thing: plenty of fresh air. I breathed, fast and hard, pumping up the oxygen in my bloodstream, and began working on slowing my fall. My head was clearer. It almost felt like a nightmare, except that nightmares generally didn't come with partial blindness and singed hair. I still saw the afterimages of the flash, the frozen, distorted scream of the demon-infected Djinn.

I hadn't killed it. You don't kill a thing like that, or at least humans don't; David had succeeded in destroying a demon once, but he was a Djinn, and second only to Jonathan in power at the time.

I wasn't slowing much, and the ground looked closer. My skin had gone numb from the cold rushing air. I'd stopped spinning, but I could feel the greedy suck of gravity pulling me down, and no matter how fast I grabbed for air to create a cushion it was too slow.

At this rate, I'd manage to break my fall just enough to die breathing through a tube in ICU.

I went up to the aetheric. Instinct and panic, rather than a conscious plan, like rats climbing the spars of a sinking ship ... up there, the demon-infected Djinn was still raging, black and furious, and the whole plane was roiling with power.

Below me there were some brilliant lights-not the neon glare of the strip; the blaze of Wardens, channeling power.

One was an orange torch big enough to light up the entire aetheric . . . that had to be Kevin. The other was a rich golden color, like summer sun.

Kevin had Lewis's stolen powers, and he could act if he wanted to, but I knew better than to a.s.sume he'd save me, even if he understood how. And the other Warden, glittering like summer, wasn't a Weather Warden.

I was so screwed.

I sucked in a deep breath and concentrated, hard, managed to slow my descent enough that it didn't feel like terminal velocity, but when I opened my eyes again I saw that the ground was rushing up, close, G.o.d, closer than I'd thought, and there was no way I could stop myself in time.

I wasn't going to hit the street. I was heading for a stretch of desert somewhere near the airport. Dirt and thornbushes and a death that was going to hurt-a lot.

A flash of lightning lit up the patch of pale sand that was going to be my final resting place.

I screamed, threw up my arms in a useless, instinctive move to cover my face, and hit the ground.

It was like hitting a bed full of the softest down feathers. It exploded up in a fluffy cloud, and I sank, slowly.

Drifted. I felt weightless, floating.

I felt oddly giddy, and realized I was holding my breath; my eyes were squeezed tightly shut. When I opened them, I didn't see anything. The air I gasped in tasted dusty.

It was dark.

I reached out and felt loose, drifting particles, fine as talc.u.m, and then there was solid ground under my feet, lifting me up.

I emerged on my feet, borne out of the ground in a shower of powder-fine quicksand.

Oh. The other Warden had been an Earth Warden. Not to mention favorably inclined. I'd have to thank somebody, big-time. . . .

I took one step forward, and keeled over to my hands and knees, coughing and gagging. Somebody patted me helpfully on the back, raising dust clouds.

I looked up to see the face of my savior.

"Marion?"' I paused to cough up some more of the desert. "Jesus- ".