Thin Air Page 0,15

it out-my chest was a little bit larger than Lewis's, and shoving my way through the opening in the rock was panic-inducing. I thought for a few seconds that I'd be stuck, but then my flailing right hand found something to hold, and I pulled myself all the way through...

...into fairyland.

"Careful," Lewis said, and pointed up when I started to straighten. Stalactites, dripping frozen from the roof in needle-sharp limestone. I gulped and ducked, following him as he crouched against the wall. There was a pool of dark, perfectly still water in front of us, and the cave was cool and silent. Not warm, but not freezing, either. The only sounds were ones we made-shuffling on the rock, chattering teeth, the drips my soaked clothes made pattering on the floor.

"I can't make a fire," Lewis said. "Too dangerous in an enclosed space. Not sure I can manage the carbon monoxide." He sounded mortally tired, but he opened the backpack he'd dumped on the floor-how the hell had he had the presence of mind to hang on to it through all that?-and dug out some packages. He threw two of them toward me, and I saw they were some kind of silvery thermal blankets. "These work better if you get undressed. Your clothes are too wet. It'll just-"

If he was waiting for me to have an attack of modesty, he was sorely disappointed. "Whatever," I said, and began unbuttoning. The drag of wet clothes was making me nuts, and the cold had driven deep enough into me to make me uncaring about things like strangers watching me undress. Or maybe I was normally immune to that kind of thing. Hard to tell. I only knew that I didn't feel inhibited with him. Boy, and didn't that open up a ten-gallon drum of worms?

Lewis politely faced away while I skinned out of the sopping-wet pants. I decided to leave on the underwear, and wrapped myself up in crinkling silver foil. My skin felt like cold, wet plastic. "So," I said through chattering teeth. "What the hell just happened?"

He glanced over his shoulder at me, saw I was more or less decent, and fussed with his own crackling thermal sheets to avoid answering. Or at least, that was how it looked. I waited. Eventually Lewis said, "Those two weren't right. They weren't themselves."

"No kidding," I said. I was feeling the cold now like sharp needles all over, and shivering violently. "There was something else, too."

"What else?" He paused, staring at me. "What did you see?"

I didn't want to tell him, exactly. "Nothing definite. Kind of a shadow." A shadow that kind of looked like me. No, I didn't want to say that.

Lewis looked like he felt sicker than ever, but he nodded. "I was afraid of that."

"Afraid of what?"

His sigh echoed cool from the stone. "There's a Demon after you. And we have no way to fight it."

"Demon," I repeated. "Okay. Sure. Right. Whatever."

That definitely told me just exactly what was going on.

I was taking a walking tour of Hell, and my Virgil was insane.

I tried to avoid discussing the whole Demon thing under the grounds that, hey, keep your delusions to yourself, but Lewis kept on talking.

"They don't come from Hell," he said very earnestly, which only made him seem even nuttier. "At least, not as I understand it. They're not from this plane of existence. They come from somewhere else. They're drawn here to our world because of power; they need to feed on the aetheric, and the best way they can do that is to grab hold of a Warden, because we're the equivalent of a straw to them-they can pull power through us. The more power they draw, the more dangerous they get."

We'd been talking for a while. I wasn't exactly believing in the whole Demon idea, but he was scarily matter-of-fact about the whole thing, and besides, I'd seen a few impossible things in the past couple of days. Including, well, him.

But really. Demons? How was that right?

I took a deep breath, put my doubts aside, and said, "So isn't there some kind of, I don't know, spell or something? Pentagrams? Holy water?"

"The only way we've ever found to stop a Demon, a full-grown Demon, is a Djinn," Lewis said slowly. "The Djinn and Demons are pretty evenly matched."

Great. David was coming back, right? Problem solved. Lewis must have seen it in my face, because he shook his head. "Not that easy," he said. "Any Djinn that engages