Firestorm Page 0,40

glass, and I had a wicked drool issue going on; I raised a hand, wiped my chin, and blinked away dizziness.

I was in the Camaro, and we were hauling ass for... somewhere. The road was dark, only a couple of headlights racing through the gloom and the wavering dashed yellow stripe to guide us. If there was moonlight, it was behind clouds. I could still feel energy rumbling in the atmosphere.

"What?..." I twisted in my seat--which was, fortunately, the passenger side--and looked at the driver. "Imara!"

My daughter--disorientation still followed the thought--glanced at me. She looked pale in the dashboard lights. "I was starting to worry."

"Where's--?"

"Father? He was with us for a while, but he had to go. Djinn business. I think it was about the Demon Marks." Like her father, she had the trick of driving without paying the slightest attention to the road, and kept staring right at me. "Are you better?"

I didn't feel better. No, I felt like I'd been boiled, steamed, deboned, and thrown out of a plane at thirty thousand feet. With a collapsing parachute. David had healed my broken bones, but the remainder of it was my problem. "Peachy," I lied. "How long have I been out?" It took her a second, juggling the human concept of time in her head. "Four hours, I think. You hit the ground hard. Father did what he could to help you. He wasn't sure it would be enough." Her hands kept steering the car accurately, even while we took a curve. "Are you sure you're all right?"

Something came to me, a little late. "And how exactly do you know how to drive a car?"

Imara blinked a little and shrugged to show she didn't understand the question.

"Kid, you've been alive for, what, a couple of days? Did you just wake up knowing everything that you need to know? How does that work?"

Another helpless lift of her shoulders. "I don't know. If I had to guess, I'd say I know everything my parents knew. So I benefit from your life, and Father's. It saves time."

I remembered Jonathan sending me to Patrick, the only other Djinn who'd really had to learn how to become one from scratch--who'd been brought over from human by another Djinn, rather than created the old-fashioned way, out of apocalypse and death. I'd had to take baby steps, learning how to use what I'd been given, because David hadn't been able to transfer that life experience to me the way he had done with Imara.

But the idea that your daughter knows everything you knew? Not very comforting. There were plenty of moments in my life that I'd just as soon not share with my offspring...

I pulled myself away from that, pressed my hand to my aching head, and asked, "Where are you heading?"

"Maine?..."

David had set her on the road to Seacasket, at least. And apparently global positioning was one of the things that she'd inherited from him.

I nodded and tried stretching. It didn't feel great. "What about the accident? Was everybody all right?"

"Accident?" She was either playing dumb, or all that carnage and twisted metal had meant little to her.

"There was a wreck--there was a--" A little girl. Wandering, bloodied, scared. I'd been trying to save her, hadn't I? My memory was fuzzy, tied up with images that didn't make any sense of opalescent swirls and burning and falling...

"I don't know," she confessed, and chewed her lip. I knew that gesture. It had taken me dedication to get over the same one. She was my kid, all right. "I didn't know it was important or I would have paid more attention."

"Not important?" I let that out, accusation-flavored, before I could stop myself. Imara turned her attention back to the road. Not to focus on her driving, just to avoid my censure.

And then she deliberately turned back, eyes level and completely alien. "I should have paid more attention, but you should leave that behind you now. What Father's asking you to do is more important, and you can't be distracted by individual lives now." She shook her head. "It's also very, very dangerous, what he's asking of you. I don't like it."

"I just got my synapses fried in a lightning strike, and then I fell out of the sky. Dangerous is sort of a sliding scale with me." "Mom!" She sounded distressed. Angry. "Please understand: Whatever you've faced before, this is different, and you need to stay focused on the goal. I know that's hard for you, but