rolling it again back over on its tires. I squirmed out the broken window and ignored the hot drag of glass splinters against my skin, slithered out, and fell onto hot sand. The Seville was still moving, blasted by the jet stream, and I cowered as it was pushed over me. I hit it again with a gust, this one more than a hundred miles an hour, and it flipped up in the air and spun like I'd shot it out of a cannon. It traveled about twenty-five feet before slamming back down on its tires on top of a saguaro cactus.
"Chill Factor"
I killed the wind and realized that something had happened to me. A numb feeling in my leg. I twisted around and looked, and saw a piece of shiny metal embedded in the back of my thigh, big as a flatiron, sharp as a knife. I went light-headed and gray, looked away and breathed deep.
That was when I realized that it wasn't over.
Out in the distance, something terrible was happening. A growing roar of power, thundering out of control; he'd done this, or I had, or both of us had sparked it like a match in a powder keg. I reached for the wind but couldn't grab it; it was slick as glass, moving too fast, too full of its own fury.
A smear on the horizon.
An ominous layer of haze.
A wave of brown, turning black. Breaking like surf. Birds were flying frantically south ahead of it, but I could see the wave overtaking them. I'd heard stories of black rollers from the dust bowl, but I'd never actually seen one; it was terrifying, awesome, uncontrollable. A sea of darkness blotting out the sun as it came, a horizontal tornado of lethal force. It was picking up everything in its path-cactus, tumbleweeds, fences, barbed wire, the shredded remains of animals unfortunate enough to be caught in its path.
Coming right at me.
I screamed and tried to grab for it again, but it was too much, too big; it would take a vast power sourced in Djinn to handle this thing.
Think. No time to run; it was almost on me. If I stayed where I was, it would strip the flesh off my bones, scour me dead. The wind wall inside the thing had to be upward of 150 miles per hour, maybe higher.
I did the only thing I could think of. I created a cushion of hardened air over me, locked the molecules tightly together, sealed myself in a bubble, and prayed.
The black roller roared across asphalt. I watched it strip a Joshua tree out of the earth, shred it into toothpicks, and fling it up into the impenetrable darkness. Lightning flared blue inside the darkness, static electricity flaring off of every surface capable of carrying a charge, crawling eerily on the breaking edge of the wave, flaring in hot blue lines along the telephone wires. A frantically flapping hawk disappeared in an explosion of shredded feathers.
I watched the sun disappear behind that black storm front, and closed my eyes.
Sound came distantly. Inside my hardened bubble it was one long, inhuman scream, like metal being tortured. I was afraid to open my eyes, but I knew the sand around me was gone, scoured down to hard-packed earth, eroded in patches down to bedrock. Dear God, please.. .
I felt a sting of hot sand spurt against my face. Static electricity zapped at me, burning; I smelled the hot snap of it everywhere around me. I struggled to hold on to the matrix protecting me, but the howling monster outside was so strong, so incredibly strong... I couldn't hold it. Couldn't... the pressure of the black roller was breaking down the bubble of air that was all that stood between me and being flayed alive.
I curled up tight, gasping in stale breaths, resisting the urge to add my scream to that of the insane wind out there. When I risked a look, I saw a black snake of razor wire flailing over me, held back from my skin by millimeters.
Another white-hot burst of sand broke through the shield, this one near my knees. I struggled to seal it, but the air was coming loose from its matrix, molecules spinning out of control; there were fiery strikes everywhere now, burning...
And then the shield weakened, and I was on fire.
It lasted for only a few seconds, but the pain was intense, disorienting. I couldn't breathe. Instinct wouldn't let me open my mouth or eyes.