Firestorm Page 0,30

road in a spray of gravel, emergency flashers clicking. I settled myself comfortably in the bucket seat and let myself go up to the world above, where the landscape washed away into a surreal swirl of fog and color. Brilliant, up here, and a unique bird's eye view of a gorgeous city. Wow. New York was charged with human purpose, driven by the engine of energy transforming and growing and changing, by passions and hopes and dreams and tragedies. I couldn't see as much detail as I'd once been able to, when I'd been a Djinn, but the city was still magnificent and mesmerizing, and it was tough as hell to look away.

I forced myself to focus on the job at hand, and turned my attention upward, to the disturbance.

The force patterns up there slipped like oil in water, incandescent and rainbow-colored. Beautiful, in their own way. Scary as hell, the way they were blending and morphing and whipping together. When lines of force connected, I saw the ultraviolet zaps of enormous power being channeled.

As I reached out to try to build a stable channel for it, I felt something... notice. That was the most skin-crawling sensation I'd ever had in my weather career, a shock to the system as extreme and terrifying as channeling lightning, if lightning had a brain and an intent. Something was watching me. Something big. The Mother? Was that what it was like?...

I lost control of the chains. They broke into random turning particles again, a soup of energy boiling over. I wanted to reach out again, but something was holding me back... my own fear. I was a tiny little field mouse, and there was a huge eagle shadow overhead, just waiting for me to make a move. If I tried to run, I'd die--crushed, devoured, destroyed.

Something in the real world brushed my hand, then gripped it tight. I opened my eyes, surprised, and saw that I had a passenger in the car, though the doors were still locked.

David was back, and he wasn't disguised as human at all; in fact, if anything, he looked more Djinn than ever before. A whole lot of sleek gold skin on display, because he was wearing only a pair of tight leather pants and an open leather jacket, with no shirt beneath. His hair was longer, down nearly to his shoulders, and it held a vivid, metallic shine. His eyes were their own light sources. I stared at them, fascinated; they were the color of new pennies on the edge of melting in a blast furnace.

His hand was hot enough to be uncomfortable against my skin.

"I came to warn you," he said. He was in my space, very dose. I felt the longing in him, the shivering attraction that had gripped me from the very beginning. "You have to stop."

"Stop what?"

"Trying to fix this. It can't be fixed."

"You know me better than that. Or at least, I hope you do. And by the way, what's with the bad-boy makeover?"

He brushed hair back from my face. Where his fingers touched, I burned. Figuratively as well as literally. "You don't like it?" "The leather? Um..." I'd have to have been blind and insane not to like it, not to mention hormonally bankrupt. "Looks good on you."

"Not as good as you would."

Oh God. My pulse started fluttering and racing, and as if his heat had crawled inside me, I started a bonfire of my own. At least half my mind--the smart half--was screaming that there wasn't time for flirting around just now. Not now. And not in a confined space with a Djinn who might just flip out and kill me.

I wasn't sure that sex with him in this state wouldn't kill me, anyway.

"You look good enough to eat." He licked his lips. There was something incandescent going on in his eyes, so bright, I couldn't look for long. It was as if he were staring at my naked soul.

"Um--David--" His hand slid down the curve of my cheek, traced my chin, and then his fingers trailed down the line of my throat. His index finger explored the notch of my collarbone, and then dipped lower. He hooked it in the neck of my shirt and pulled. I swayed toward him. "What are you doing?"

"Don't you know?" he asked.

Oh boy. The energy piling up and swirling overhead. The hot crackle between us. The heat of his skin, the restless flare inside me. The sense of something...

Something present, up there.

Something vast,