Thin Air Page 0,73

and if Venna was right, I was in real jeopardy of losing whatever was left. To a Demon, wearing my face. "What's your name?" I asked.

"Jamie," she yelled. "Jamie Rae King."

"Weather?"

"Yes, ma'am." She looked cautious, and she kept flicking looks at her partner. "That's Stan. He's Earth."

"Hey, Stan," I said.

"Hey." He nodded, and the wet sand suddenly went soft under my feet and dragged me down to my knees, trapping me. "Sorry, ma'am. But we've got orders."

Venna, who'd been oblivious to that point, turned to face him, and I saw Stan gulp. I was busy trying to pull my legs out of the sand, but it was no good; the stuff was like cement, set around my feet to hold me in place. He was good at this kind of thing, obviously. "Stan," Venna purred. Not a drop of rain had touched her, of course; it just slid off in a silvery curtain about four inches from her body. "You don't want to do that."

"No," he panted. "Probably don't. But I don't have a lot of choices. You're Djinn, right?"

She didn't answer, but then again, she didn't really have to. She walked up to him, a force of nature packaged in a pinafore, and put her small hand flat on his chest.

She blew him twenty feet. Stan impacted the wet beach, rolled, and flopped to a limp stop. He groaned and tried to get up, but she held up a finger.

One finger.

And he shuddered and went flat.

"Hey!" I yelled at her over the boom of thunder. I was soaked to the skin, shivering, and more than a little scared by the fact that Jamie Rae was standing there looking from me to Venna as if trying to decide which of us to put the smackdown on first. "Leave him alone!"

"Oh, relax; he's not dead," Venna said impatiently. "I didn't break him." She turned to Jamie Rae. "You want to stop trying to do that."

Whatever Jamie was doing-and in the chaos of the storm that was quickly getting worse, I couldn't tell-she kept doing it, because Venna looked frustrated and annoyed, and flicked her fingers in Jamie Rae's direction.

Bang. She went down, coldcocked. I felt bad about that. She and Stan didn't seem like bad types, comparatively speaking.

At least they weren't trying to bring down a building.

"We should hurry," Venna said, and glanced at the sand where I was buried knee-deep. It let loose, spilling me to my hands and knees, and I climbed out of the resulting hole. "Focus now. You know what to do?"

I nodded, and followed her into the aetheric. In Oversight the storm was a glittering layered network of tight-spinning forces. I couldn't see Venna clearly, but I could see what she was doing, and it was amazing. My attempts to help were clumsy by comparison; I could see her reaching to slightly alter the magnetic force of one part of the storm, and what that did to the direction and speed of the wind. See it...not necessarily do it. Or even control it. But I could feel it coursing through me like a continuous warm pulse, pounding harder and louder with every beat.

It was intoxicating. Freeing. I heard myself laugh, and reached out to touch a glittering chain of molecules. Lightning sparked through the net and flashed in my eyes down in the real world.

It was like playing God. Beautiful and terrifying.

The first lightning strike hit the roof, and the concussion was so intense at this close range that I went temporarily deaf and blind, and every hair follicle on my body seemed to rise in the electrical aura. When it passed, I barely had time to draw a breath before the next bolt hit steel, and then a third. Hammer of the gods.

When the wind hit the smoking, glowing structure, spinning down in a dark spiral from the low-hanging clouds, the metal just collapsed in on itself like a dropped Tinkertoy model, and the whole beach seemed to vibrate from the impact. Fire licked and hissed as some of the more flammable components caught, but it wasn't likely to spread; the rain was intense, and concentrated right on the worst of it.

Venna hadn't moved. She was smiling slightly, and when she looked at me she said, "Now you have to balance it."

"What?" I yelled over the roar of thunder and pounding, wind-driven surf. I stumbled toward her and swiped wet hair back from my face. "Balance what?"

"The scales," Venna said. "Make it all go away,