Firestorm Page 0,36
she was a Djinn, and she didn't know that kid. It was kind of an academic notion to her, empathy.
I lurched into a run, vaulted over a dismembered quarter panel lying in the way, and made it to the damp grass. My shoes slipped. I sensed the swirling column of the rift in the aetheric, the blood of the earth boiling upward into the sky just a few dozen feet ahead of me, near the little girl. She was staggering toward it.
The lightning chains were clicking into place. I could see it happening, see the aetheric heating up with the potential energy turning to actual...
I tried to break the chains of electrons aligning, but the forces at work were too strong for a single Warden. I hit the little girl and tackled her down to the ground, covering her with my body, and at the last second I lifted myself up on my hands and knees, away from any contact points with her skin.
Grounded four ways.
Lightning slammed into me with a force like nothing else on earth. I'd been struck by it before, but I'd been inhabited by a Demon Mark then, and considerably better protected. This was like being hit in the back by a truck, but before I could register the pain, the rest of it flooded in--power, so much power it was like a small sun channeled through a narrow few nerve channels. Unleashing itself through the circuit of my body.
It lasted only a split second, maybe less, because suddenly I was yanked up, no longer in contact with the ground, rising into the air and looking down on the huddled body of the little girl I'd been trying to protect.
The circuit was broken.
Rahel had me. Her eyes were blazing hot gold, but her face was unreadable, a blank mask of Djinn indifference.
She dropped me, job completed. Life saved.
Halfway to the ground, I felt the suction of that whirling, burning column of power rising out of the earth take hold of me and draw me in.
Oh crap, I thought, and then it was too late. As I twisted in midair, being helplessly reeled in like a fish on a line, I saw her alarmed, surprised face. At least I'd given Rahel a new, exciting experience.
Not much of a comfort, as I was swallowed up in a milk-white flood of power.
It was like being baptized in battery acid. It hurt, oh my God, it hurt, and I tried to scream, but there really didn't seem enough left of me to scream, exactly. I was coming apart, a moth trapped in a nuclear core, and nobody, nobody was coming to rescue me this time.
The pain kept burning until it abruptly just... stopped. I was still trapped in the flood of aetheric power boiling up, and for all I knew, I was being flung miles up into the sky, but I felt no sense of motion.
I opened my eyes and saw paradise, but a paradise that humans were never meant to see, a kind of opalescent waxen beauty that swept, swirled, created, and destroyed. I was in the bloodstream of creation, and it was more beautiful and more terrifying than anything I could have imagined. No wonder human beings counted for little, in the great scheme of the world. The power here--the power that was simply excess energy, bleeding off from the slowly waking entity we called the Mother--was beyond anything we could ever understand or control.
It was kind of a privilege, seeing it as I inevitably exploded into disconnected atoms.
Only I didn't do the exploding thing. I held together and gradually adjusted to the strange pressures and odd lights and disconcerting, slick flows that mimicked glass but felt silky and liquid to the touch. Nothing matched physics as I understood it. It was wildly, insanely strange and mesmerizing.
I must have been the first person to see a Demon Mark in the wild.
It entered the same way I had... passing through the barrier, sucked into the flow. It floated in the streams, a complex and sickening structure that twisted and turned on itself, moving with an eerie kind of life. Lazily bumping from one flow to another. I'd never seen one outside of some kind of container--a bottle, a human body, a Djinn forced to take one into itself. I had no idea they could even exist like this, on their own.
Not good news.
I felt it fix on me with an atavistic shudder of horror.
As I watched, the Demon Mark