Cape Storm Page 0,16

glittering, powerful forms, shifting from the limitations of the physical to the more metaphorical shapes we registered on higher planes. I never knew what I looked like - none of us did - but I watched Henry Jellico morph from a mild little man into a bulky, muscular warrior who'd have been at home in World of Warcraft swinging a barbarian axe

.Some Wardens didn't even keep human shapes; Greta Van Der Waal became a shining white dog that bounded and leaped through the clouds. We all had our fantasies, our true natures, and we couldn't really control how others saw us.

Lewis looked like himself. Always. He had a powerful aura, but the essence of him never changed, and that was both impressive and a bit on the scary side.

Speech wasn't possible on the aetheric - after all, no lips, tongues, teeth, or lungs - but the Wardens had developed their own methods of communication, mostly hand signals. I grabbed my team members' attention and arrowed up, fast and high, getting above the towering storm. It was like taking a glass elevator past a vertical oil spill. Nasty, and shiver-inducing. We went up almost ten miles into the atmosphere and leveled out at the top, where the storm formed a smooth dome. This was where the intake/exhaust process went on, dragging in warm air, cycling it down through the eye, breathing it out.

It was a living thing, after all, however strange it might be to our senses and logic.

The aura colors of the storm hadn't changed significantly from my first impressions - dark, shot through with photonegative spots and shapes, with livid purple around the edges. I didn't see any sign of that poisonous, otherworldly green that I'd glimpsed, though.

Good.

I felt a shudder running through the aetheric - a thicker atmosphere than the regular physical world, almost like matter caught in a phase transition from gas to liquid. Few things in the real world could stay at that balance point, but I'd always thought the aetheric was nothing but that - a place where everything, always, was transitional.

The shudder that ran through the aetheric came from the Djinn grabbing the storm and pulling it to a violent halt.

It fought them almost instantly, twisting, slashing back with waves of power. This was the dangerous part; if the forces got too far out of balance, things would happen that none of us could anticipate or control. We were dealing with the power of several nuclear bombs.

Not the sort of thing where you want to apologize for a mistake to whatever survivors are left wandering around .

I signaled my team, and we took the express elevator back down, plunging through the storm and into the thick black water beneath it. The area directly beneath it was devoid of life; the residents of the sea that normally thronged the area had prudently departed.

Good. I didn't want to be responsible for any massive fish kills, anyway.

My team - good people all - spread themselves out in an approximate rough circle near the edges of the storm's fury, and each of us concentrated on a pie-shaped wedge of the water - not that water was static, of course, which was what made this so difficult. Water, like air, was always in motion. Unlike air, it had real density, and it took a lot more effort to really make a change in it on the molecular level.

Ten degrees.Thanks for nothing, Lewis.

I'd pushed my section down a solid eight degrees, but I could sense that there were massive imbalances emerging from the change. Some of the others were having trouble managing the temperature shift at all. Nobody had hit the ten-degree mark. To make matters worse, power was collecting in odd places, like pockets of gas in a mine. That was the risk of working with multiple Wardens.

I think I sensed trouble coming - an oddly thick ripple in the aetheric, maybe - and then I saw one of my Wardens spin helplessly out of position, losing control of her weather working. She vanished into the heart of the storm, and I felt her screaming.

Then I felt her stop.

Something was attacking us.

The fragile balances that the Wardens had built - layers of control, of forces, of risk -

began to shatter like a glass tower in an earthquake. I desperately struggled to hold on to what we'd achieved. More Wardens were being attacked around me by invisible forces -

battered the same way I had been earlier, but with