Firestorm Page 0,52

pirates were coming ashore.

"Stop," Ashan said, and grabbed me by the hair. I grinned at him. Must have been gruesome, bloody teeth, bloodshot eyes.

"Make me." I flipped electron polarities in the air, turning and turning and turning. Locking the chain in place with a sudden furious surge of energy, grounding energy from the storm clouds. "I don't need David to whip your punk ass."

Lightning hissed up from the ground, down from the clouds, and he was caught in the middle.

Flesh and blood vaporized instantly, along with all of Ashan's nice couture. I was too close. I caught the corona, was blown backward into the mausoleum wall, and ended up on the ground, screaming into a mouthful of grass because my broken arm had just gone up five steps on the ten-point agony scale, to fourteen. Man, I was trashed.

But Ashan was vapor.

That didn't mean he was dead, not at all, just not manifesting properly in human form. Didn't matter much to him, in terms of hurting him in any lasting way, but I was willing to bet that it had stung. He wasn't exactly roaring right back for a rematch. I lifted my head and saw him trying to coalesce out of the mist, and focused the wind into a hard, narrow channel, straight for him. It hit him like a cannon, blasted the mist apart, and this time, he came together more slowly. Hanging back. I didn't bother to get up as his face formed in the fog. Not flesh and bone, more of a ghost-image. Spooky. I sounded a hell of a lot more confident than I felt. "Turn around and leave, Ashan, because I swear, the next thing I hit will mean a lot more to you than your skin."

I sensed his smug disbelief. So I hit the mausoleum with a lightning bolt.

The world went nuts. Really nuts. Winds howling, lightning stabbing all over the sky in an insane display of fury, ground rumbling... hailstones pelted out of the clouds, the size of golf balls. A couple hit me, and if my arm hadn't already been overwhelming me with agony, that would have been serious pain.

Ashan managed to form himself into pseudoflesh--not quite human, for certain, because he was misting out just below the hips into a gray swirl of fog. He still clung to the business suit for the top half.

But he had something to say. His eyes had gone completely dark. Lightless as space.

"You'll die for that. No matter how many friends you have among the Djinn. This is a sacred place."

"Bring 'em on," I said grimly. "Maybe you'd like to explain why you let the Oracle suffer like that. Unless you were just blaming it on poor old humanity. Again." I struggled up to my knees, then somehow to my feet. It was more of a stagger than a graceful rise, but the fact I was standing was pretty much a victory. "Guess what? I talked to her. And now she knows that you've been lying to her, you bastard."

Which was a blatant lie, because I'd gotten zero sense she'd paid the slightest attention to me, but hopefully Ashan couldn't know that. The air was full of threat, his and mine and something else, something vast. I was guessing that Mom was telling us kids to quit, she didn't care who'd started it. Of course, this mom was capable of administering a smack to the bottom that would flatten half the eastern seaboard.

Maybe I'd been a little hasty, using the last lightning strike. But it had been that, or roll over and die, not something I was very good at doing.

Not with my child at stake.

Ashan just... vanished. Not so much a puff of smoke as a wasting away, tatters on the gusting wind. I put my unbroken hand against the wall of the mausoleum and leaned for a few minutes, breathing hard, trying not to faint; my knees buckled a couple of times, but somehow I got upright. The storm was growling overhead, but when I read its pedigree, it was still a punk, not that much of a threat. I'd unsettled it, for certain, and upped it a few degrees on the dangerometer. I needed to smooth it down.

And I'd get around to it. But first, I stumbled across grass, around tilting old headstones, and collapsed next to my daughter, who was lying motionless on the ground.

"Imara?" I reached out and touched her.

My hand went through her. Not in the way that