Firestorm Page 0,108

matter, one way or another? Dammit. No signal on the cell phone. I had no way to contact Lewis until I got to the next town.

Or I could turn around, go back to Phoenix... It hit me in a sudden rush of comprehension. I was meant to turn back, wasn't I? There was a reason Imara had appeared here, now. She was a vivid, unmissable distraction, an emotional roadblock I couldn't help but consider.

I turned off the engine of the roadster, set the brake, and stepped out onto the crisp gravel of the roadside. The wind was cool and cutting, sharp with the scent of rain in an area that had little of that kind of thing in the normal course of events. I breathed deeper and got an aroma of wet sage. "You might as well come out. I know you're here."

Ashan was as gray as the clouds, and he seemed to just appear out of them, gliding down like some Hong Kong wire artist, landing with perfect poise and walking toward me without hesitation. A perfectly tailored suit around a perfectly proportioned body. Expensive, shined shoes that disdained little things like rain and wet sand. Ashan was twenty feet away, then ten, then five, and he wasn't slowing down.

"You bastard," I said, and I called the wind. It came as if it was waiting, as if it was more than willing. A hard wall of air hit him hard, shoved him back on his heels and dragged him ten feet. He stayed upright, staring at me with fierce colorless eyes. "You did this to my daughter."

He shrugged. "Don't take that tone with me. I could have ripped her into nothing. She's barely Djinn, and yet she's inherited all your arrogance."

He waved a hand. That was all it took to turn the wind around, and it hit me with the force of a sandblaster, driving me back against the car. I instinctively shielded my eyes and gasped for breath as pressure tried to compress me flat. He was playing with me. If Ashan really wanted to, he'd introduce my ribs to my backbone with shattering force and leave me a ruptured bag of meat.

The pressure slacked off enough for me to catch my breath. "How long have you been planning to destroy the Wardens?"

"Not the Wardens," he corrected. "Humans. You're killing us. Draining us of magic, and life. Your kind are a revolting perversion of the Djinn, and you think you are the lords of creation. We are better than you. We were first."

"Some of you were. Some of you came from humans," I said. "That must really piss you off. I mean, how does the inferior create the superior? By your logic, it can't happen. But it does, Ashan. It happens all the time."

"No," he said sharply. "Mongrels came from you, creatures like Jonathan and David. Heavy with humanity. I am not like them. My brothers and sisters are not like them."

I'd forgotten, but David had made that clear, once upon a time: there were Djinn who were created from humans, like the five hundred born out of the destruction of Atlantis, or like Jonathan and David on the battlefield. And then there were the--nobility, if that was the right term. The pure. The ones who'd been spawned directly from the Earth itself.

Ashan, of course, was one of them. And it appeared he had a whole political party behind him, because I could feel the power crackling around him, the hissing presence of others who didn't choose to show themselves.

Who stood between me and the next--the last--Oracle.

"Turn around," he said. "Turn around and go. Die with your people when the Demon turns her mad and wipes your corruption from her skin." "If you put a Demon Mark into an Oracle, how do you know it won't destroy you?"

"It won't," he said. "We are eternal."

"I thought you said we were killing you. Humans. You can't have it both ways, you know. Eternal, not eternal--"

"I control the Demons."

"Sure you do. Ashan, you really have mastered all the basic skills of a bad guy, including arrogance and cluelessness. I'm proud of you. Now, if you can just make an empty, impotent threat--"

"Shut up or I'll destroy you!" he roared, right on cue. Oh, he was mad. Really mad. I'd succeeded in royally teeing off the second most powerful Djinn in the world, and all his invisible allies, when I was all that stood between humanity and destruction.

"Do it," I said quietly,