Thin Air Page 0,24

to him. "Don't. She's okay."

"No," he said. "She's not."

Lewis wasn't letting down his guard. When Cherise looked at me, terrified, he held out a hand toward her, palm out, as if he were warning her to stay away.

"How'd she get in here?"

"I brought her. I know, that was probably stupid, but I couldn't just leave her!" Lewis transferred that X-ray stare to me. I got the impression that he was mortally worried about what he was going to see, but then it must have been better than he expected, because he blinked and seemed to back off from spiritual Defcon One.

"What's happening to her?" I asked.

"What we thought. The Demon used her, and now it's let her go. She's been badly hurt."

"I didn't see any wounds..." There'd been blood on her sweater, but nothing wrong with her skin. As if the bullet holes Lewis had put in her had fully healed.

"This isn't the kind of damage you see outside," he said. "And it's not the kind that heals."

I wasn't sure how much of this Cherise was following; she seemed confused, her eyes flickering back and forth between the two of us. Lewis kept staring at Cherise, frowning, tilting his head first one way, then the other.

"This makes no sense," he muttered, and took a step closer to her. Then another one. "No sense. Why would it go after her? She's not a Warden. No power, nothing like what they're usually drawn toward. She barely shows up on the aetheric even when she's not..." He didn't seem to find a word for it. "Does she remember?"

"Ask her yourself. She's not deaf."

He blinked, as if he'd forgotten she was something more than just a collection of interesting problems, and then hunkered down and started asking Cherise questions. It was a short conversation, since it didn't take too many repetitions of time-delayed "I don't know" before Lewis began seeing the light. The light being, of course, more of a murky, indistinct confusion.

When he was finished, he cast a dark look in my direction and said, "Outside. Now."

I wasn't particularly fond of being ordered around, but I was willing to go along, for now. Seeing as he'd probably saved my life a couple of times already. We squirmed through the narrow tent aperture, I made a joke about birth canals that probably wasn't particularly appropriate, and then we were outside in the cutting, frosty wind. Little miniature tornadoes of blown snow whipped by, ruffling my hair and fanning it in a cold sheet across my face. I folded my arms, put my hands in my armpits, and said, "What? What's wrong?"

Lewis was facing kind of toward me, but mostly away. Like he knew he had to have this conversation but didn't particularly want to. "It's bad," he said. "She may seem okay now, but she's not."

"Then do your voodoo and fix her up," I said. "Make her all-"

"She's dying," he said.

I felt like he'd punched me in the stomach, and for a second or two I was at a loss for words before I rallied. "No, she's not. She's getting better. Look, she nearly froze to death, but she's recovering, and-"

He met my eyes, and the bitter fury rolling in him cut me off cold. "She's dying, Jo," he said. "The stuff that keeps her alive, the...I don't know, the soul, is gutted. Cored out. I can't save her. Once a Demon rips at someone like that, so completely, what's left after it leaves can't sustain itself. She'll just...slow down and die. You saw how hard it is for her to focus. That's only going to get worse. Fast."

"I don't believe in Demons!"

"You should!" he shot back. "You were killed by one!"

I had officially entered la-la land, and obviously it was no longer safe to be traveling on the crazy train with Lewis. Next stop: Lithium City. "I'm not dead," I pointed out to him.

"No, of course you're not..." He stopped himself with an effort, an overwhelming expression of frustration.

"There's got to be something we can do for her," I said. "Something. Anything."

"No. Look, I've seen this before. She'll just fade. Quietly. She'll stop responding to us, and then she'll just...go." For a second there was a sheen like tears in his eyes. I couldn't remember anything about him prior to his finding me in the woods, but I was fairly sure that crying wasn't his usual thing. He'd seen it before. I was guessing it was someone who'd meant something to him.

"So what