Firestorm Page 0,35

been too close.

Just as I thought it, I sensed another surge, this one coming from my right, and catapulted up into Oversight. The lines looked like neon whips up there, and there were at least four of them writhing around me. Struggling to reach me. I edged left. One rolled to cut me off, then lunged.

Nowhere to go. If I tried to run, I was dead. If I stayed where I was...

I tried, hopelessly, to break the flood of power through the metal, but I was out of my element. Badly. Worse, every elemental control I did have would make things worse.

I jumped. The power line hissed over the pavement under my feet, swung wide, and just as I thumped down again, coiled over on itself and came back at me.

No way I was going to avoid it twice.

I jumped anyway, and knew instantly that it wasn't going to work; I'd timed it too early, it wasn't moving so fast, and I was going to come down with both feet right on top of high voltage.

Except that I didn't.

I didn't come down at all. I hovered.

Good move, I told myself, and then realized that I hadn't actually done the deed. Somebody else was holding me up and moving me back out of the danger zone. I was lowered gently back to clear pavement.

A Djinn walked around in front of me and inclined her head in a delicate cold click of beads. She was tall, dark-skinned, with hair in delicate and elaborate corn-rows. Neon yellow clothes and matching fingernails. Eyes as hot and predatory as a hawk's.

"Rahel," I breathed. "Thanks."

"Don't thank me." She said. "David's orders."

The power lines struck for me again.

She grabbed them in midair and held them. They writhed and hissed their fury, but she didn't seem to be putting forth much of an effort to keep hold. No lightweight, Rahel. And sometimes, as much as Djinn can be, she was my friend.

"Snow White," she said, and smiled. That had been her nickname for me from early on, a reference to my black hair and fair skin. "You have such interesting pets. Not very polite, though."

She looked at the power lines she held, and hissed to them in a scary-sounding lullaby. They tried to lunge for me again. I sucked in a breath and stepped back; Rahel didn't seem inclined to let them go, but with Djinn, well, you really never could tell. She might find it funny.

"They need training," she continued, and without any warning, the current cut off in both, and they went heavy and limp in her hands. She let them smack down to the roadway next to her very lovely shoes--Casadei animal-print pumps. Too nice for the current conditions. "Do you ever draw a normal breath?"

"Bite me," I said. I felt giddy and slightly intoxicated. Too much happening, too fast.

She smiled. "Not hungry. A simple thanks will do."

"What are you doing here?"

"I told you. David's orders." She looked around at the wreckage as she dusted her hands. "He had to leave. You present too much of a distraction at the moment, and he felt a need to concentrate. I give you no guarantees that I will be here for long, or that my presence will be especially helpful to you. Did David not tell you that we were no longer to be trusted?"

"And yet, here you are, saving my ass," I pointed out.

She shrugged. It had the grace of water flowing over stone, utterly inhuman in the arrangement of her muscles, the way she used them. Rahel was, in some ways, the least human of all the Djinn I'd met.

And in some other ways, one of the most.

"One must pass the time," she said. "Eternity is long, and there are so few truly interesting people."

I started to say something about helping me get the wounded out of the cars, but then her head snapped around so fast that beads clacked in her hair, and her birdlike eyes fixed on something off to her left, in the darkness of the grassy median.

Another white-hot spidering of lightning overhead showed me what she was looking at.

There was a child out there. Bloody. Wandering around all alone. She couldn't have been more than five--a cute little thing, long brown hair, clutching a stuffed animal of some kind.

I sensed the lightning gathering itself.

Rahel said nothing. She was tense, but at rest. She could move faster than I could, but I saw no indications she was thinking about doing so.

After all,