Firestorm Page 0,12

when I reached the splintered doorway, and saw something that I'd never really seen before in a group of Wardens: fear. And they were right to be afraid. In all the history of the Wardens, stretching through the ages, nobody had ever faced what we were facing: a planet that was about to wake up and kill us, and Djinn who were going to be more than happy to help.

I wondered if this was how the dinosaurs had felt, watching that bright meteor streak toward the ground.

Chapter Two

I spent some time in lockup lying on a clean hospital bed, humming popular songs, and trying to imagine what the new Wardens seal should look like. I was currently going with a shiny circular motif, with the new motto of We're So Screwed running around the outer edge, featuring a graphic of a nuclear mushroom cloud in the center. A gold seal, probably. Gold goes with everything, even an apocalypse.

Bored with mental graphic design, I got up and wandered around, taking stock. The infirmary was mysteriously intact. Crisp, clean, no sign of struggles. Maybe it had been empty. Djinn wouldn't have wasted time vandalizing; they'd been out for blood, and they were nothing if not focused on the mission.

Which would have been removing any humans who might pose a genuine threat to them later. I wondered if it had been David's bunch, acting under the red-eyed influence of the Earth. Or if it had been Ashan's little merry band, coming after Wardens just on general principles.

Either one would have been horrific, in these close quarters. I didn't want to imagine it, but the images kept springing up when I closed my eyes.

Eventually, not even fevered imagination could hold off exhaustion, and I surrendered to a need to be horizontal. I pulled a waffle-weave cotton blanket up over my aching body and wished--again--for a shower. I was too tired even to take off my shoes, much less undress, although these clothes needed to be burned, not just laundered. I stank to high heaven, and was ruining a perfectly good bed, but as soon as I closed my eyes, all those concerns slid away like oil off Teflon.

I was asleep so fast, I had no time to realize it was happening, falling into a soft-edged darkness that wrapped warm around me, falling without fear and without limit...

... and then, without any sense of transition, I was sitting in a nice, comfortable living room with a fire roaring in the hearth. Curled up like a cat on a soft cotton-covered sofa, my head against the pillowed armrest, covered with the same blanket I'd been using in the infirmary.

"Hey, kid," said a low voice. I blinked and focused across the room.

"Jonathan?" I asked, and slowly sat up. "Am I--? Aren't you--?"

"Dead?" the mack daddy of the Djinn supplied, and popped the tops on two brown, label-free bottles of beer. He held one up, and it floated toward me. Heavier than I expected. I nearly fumbled the bottle when I grabbed it out of the air. Cold. It felt heavy and real.

"Aren't you? Dead?" I asked. "Yeah, well. Kinda."

I blinked again and sipped the beer. Seemed like the thing to do. Jonathan looked exactly the same as he had last time I'd seen him: human, tall and lean and whipcord-strong. Tanned. He was wearing khaki pants and a loose off-white T-shirt, not tucked in, and his booted feet were crossed at the ankles. He sipped his beer, unsmiling.

I put my bottle down on the polished wooden coffee table after shoving aside issues of magazines in languages that I didn't recognize to make room for it. "You're dead," I repeated. "So why are you in my dream?"

He raised the bill of his olive drab ball cap with one finger. "Good question. Morbid, isn't it?"

"What?"

"Dreaming about dead people. Creepy. You ever see a therapist about that?"

"I'm not--" Even in dreams, I couldn't win an argument with him. Even when he was dead. "What are you doing here?"

Jonathan took off his cap, tossed it toward a coat-tree (and missed), and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. He met my stare. That was a frightening thing. Dream or not, he had the exact same eyes--dark, lightless, limitless, filled with an infinity of things I could never understand in my short human lifetime. Stars were born and died in those eyes. "I think the real question is, what are you doing here? This is the end of the world,