the best of friends. Especially not where you're concerned. If he knew I'd just spent the night here-"
"Hey! Nothing happened!"
"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 goddamn 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.
"Shit," I breathed. "I don't think we'd better plan on walking to the Bellagio."
Lightning laddered down from the massive clouds in three or four places, shattering like neon glass 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 nobody.
Chapter Nineteen
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 hell..." 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 circumstances. 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,"