Firestorm Page 0,122
on his side, still screaming. Something different about him now. He was weeping, gagging on every breath.
Not a Djinn at all now. Just a man. Human.
Cast out from the angels.
... what was a Djinn?
I'd known his name once, hadn't I? And this place, I knew it, too... there was a haunting feeling of d�j� vu, but I couldn't remember...
Couldn't remember.
There was a popping sound, like thin glass dropped on stone, and without any more warning than that a naked man was lying on the floor near the altar. Golden skin, auburn hair. When his eyes opened, they were the color of melting brass, fierce and hot and inhuman.
I flinched and scrambled out of his way. Toward the other man, who was at least human.
"No--" The metallic one reached out, trying to grab hold of me, and I pulled away. "Jo, what's happened to--?"
I had no idea who he was, but he frightened me. Scenes flickered in front of my eyes, people I didn't know, a life I'd never lived. Terrifyingly vivid, but they had nothing to do with me, did they? I didn't know these people, these places. I didn't know... it was all so confusing...
The gray-haired man screamed and charged up from the floor, hands outstretched for my throat.
The woman on the bench turned her head toward me and made the tiniest gesture, the smallest little lift of a finger, and I was spinning into the darkness.
My last sight was of the auburn-haired man lunging for me, trying to hold on. There was torment on his face, and for a second... for a second I thought I knew him.
Then I was gone.
Chapter Eleven
I was lying on something cold and wet, and I was naked and shivering. Afraid. Something was very, very wrong with me.
I reflexively curled in on myself, protecting as much of myself as I could, as awareness of the world washed over me in hot, pulsing waves.
Biting, frigid wind. Ice-cold sleet trailing languid fingers over my bare skin. I forced my eyes open and saw my arm lying on the ground in front of my eyes, hand outstretched, and my skin was a pallid, blue-tinged white, red at the fingertips. Frostbite.
I ached all over, so fiercely that I felt tears well up in my eyes. And I felt empty, cored out and thrown out like an old orange peel.
I forced myself to look beyond my own hand, and saw that I was lying in a mound of cold, slimy leaf-litter. Overhead, fall-colored trees swayed and scratched the sky, and what little could be seen between the skeletal branches was gray, flocked with low clouds. The air tasted thin in my mouth.
I tried to think where I was, how I'd gotten here, but it was a blank. Worse, it terrified me to even try to think of it. I shuddered with more than the cold, gasping, and squeezed my eyes shut again.
Get up, I told myself. Up. I'd die if I stayed here, naked and freezing. But when I tried to uncurl myself from the embryonic position I'd assumed, I couldn't get anything to work right. My muscles jittered and spasmed and protested wildly, and the best I managed was to roll myself up to my hands and knees and not quite fall flat on my face again.
I heard a voice yelling somewhere off in the woods. Sticks cracking, as something large moved through the underbrush. Run! something told me, and I was immediately drenched in cold terror. I lunged up to my feet, biting back a shriek of agony as muscles trembled and threatened to tear. I fell against the rough bark of a tree and clung to it as cramps rippled through my back and legs, like giant hands giving me the worst massage in the world. I saw sparks and stars, bit my lip until I tasted blood. My hair was blowing wildly in the wind where it wasn't stuck to my damp, cold skin or matted with mud and leaves.
I let go of the tree and lurched away. My legs didn't want to move, but I forced them, one step at a time. My arms were wrapped around my breasts to preserve a warmth that I couldn't find, either within me or without.
My feet were too cold to feel pain, but when I looked back I saw I was leaving smears of blood behind on the fallen leaves. Cuts had already opened on the soles.
I kept moving. It was more of a lurching