Firestorm Page 0,66

just happening too fast. "Yeah. Jo, Emily's Earth and Fire--you've got a second Fire Warden located about eleven miles away from your current position, on the other side of the fire. Gary Omah. He's not real high on the scale, by the way. Not a lot of heavyweights left up there."

"I don't think we can count on Gary Omah," I sighed. "Who else?"

"Weather Warden out of Nova Scotia. That's what I've got for you."

"Who is she?"

"Janelle Bright."

I didn't know her, but that wasn't unusual; she was probably young, and probably lower level. Those seemed to be the survivors, so far. Probably because they hadn't earned any Djinn, and hadn't encountered any along the way. Also, Nova Scotia wasn't exactly the crossroads of the world. She'd probably be safe enough, if she didn't make a target of herself.

But then again, there were no longer any guarantees of anything, were there?

"Okay," I said, and then remembered to click the button. "Right, Paul, I'm going to organize this one, okay?"

"Fine by me. We're up to our necks around here. You're senior on the ground pretty much wherever you go right now. Take charge."

Now that was a really scary thought. It told me more than a Weather Channel documentary just how much trouble we were in.

I glanced over at Emily. "Um, Paul? One other thing."

"Please, let it be something fluffy and happy."

"Not so much. Demon."

"What?"

"There's a Demon loose. I saw it break out of a dying Warden--Gary Omah, I'm presuming. It tried--" I swallowed hard and kept my voice even with an effort, because the crispy zombie flashbacks weren't easy to suppress. "It tried to get to me, but I managed to fight it off." Paul was quiet for so long, I thought I was having a conversation with static, and then he said, "I can't spare anybody else to help you."

"Make it happen, Paul. I need someone."

He put me on hold. Mercifully, there was no annoying music, it was just straight static. I listened to white noise and thought about Gary Omah, wondered how he'd come in contact with a Demon Mark, wondered whether taking it on had been his own choice or an infection that had happened against his will. I couldn't afford to agonize over Gary, though. If he was the blackened, hollowed-out corpse I'd met in the forest, then he was better off dead, and I had bigger problems.

Paul came back on the line. "Paul, I need--"

He interrupted me by covering the phone and bellowing, "You! Yeah, you in the fucking yellow! I told you, get those people over to the west side of the thing, do you understand me? West!" The muffling came off the phone, not that it had concealed much. "Shit. I've gotta go. Do your best. I've got to go be the first officer of the goddamn Hindenburg." He was trying to sound light, but somewhere underneath I could tell he was genuinely, grimly terrified. "At least Lewis is the one wearing the shiny hat."

"I know," I said softly. "Keep bailing, buddy."

"Jo, just get the fuck out of there. Do what you've gotta do. We can't save everybody. Not this time."

"I can't just walk away."

"Learn how," he said. "People are dying. People are going to die. It's all just a question of how many, and how bad they go. We need the Djinn back, and we need them now. So you've got to stay focused. Do what you can, but stay on mission."

He clicked off before I could respond. I sat back, looking at Emily; she was staring out the window at the orange-colored distance.

"I can't get anybody besides one Weather Warden out of Nova Scotia," I said. "They're swamped."

She nodded. "We're really fucked, aren't we?" she asked, like it was an academic consideration.

"Not necessarily. All we have to do is pile in the Jeep and leave."

She gave me a bleak, absent smile.

"Yeah," she said. "That's likely."

Of course, we didn't leave. We didn't even discuss it. We just went to work. I spent time up on the aetheric, trying to move weather patterns around and layer cooler air over what was increasingly a troubled system. The fire was generating enormous amounts of heat, and that heat was affecting the already-unstable weather. It kept sliding out of my control, finding ways to twist back like a snake trying to strike. Lightning, for instance. Just when I thought we'd gotten things contained at a reasonable level, the energy began churning around and creating vast random pulses. It had