Chill Factor Page 0,5

he wants."

David's eyes were mercilessly clear. "He could try. Eventually, he'd succeed. I can't fight Jonathan power-for-power. But he doesn't want to kill you. If he did, you'd be dead already."

I noticed the change in pronoun. I was the one in danger of dying. The worst that could happen to David was that while the car was being crushed like a beer can and my bones shattered, the bottle in my pocket would break and he would be set free. Jonathan would no doubt consider that a bonus. Which, leaving aside how I felt about David and hoped he felt about me, wasn't an unreasonable point of view. I wasn't exactly comfortable with the whole master-slave dynamic of things, either.

"Can you hold him off?" I asked.

"For a while. If he attacks directly."

"Long enough for me to-"

"Save yourself," David finished. "In a game like this, you're playing Kevin, not Jonathan. I can block Jonathan, but the strategy has to be misdirection, not direct defense. We have to keep moving. If we let them pin us down, we're finished."

I nodded, noting little details: white lines around David's mouth, tension around his eyes. This was hard for him. Very hard. The scope of his friendship with the Djinn named Jonathan stretched back to an age when they were both human and breathing, dying together on a battlefield in the dim mists of prehistory. Saved by a force so primal it could suck the life out of thousands, maybe millions of living things to create a creature like Jonathan-a living, thinking being composed of pure power. Even among the Djinn, he was something special, and that was no small statement.

And now he was on the wrong side. At least, the wrong side of me.

"We can't hurt him," I said. David shot me a surprised glance. "Right?"

"I don't know of much that could. And nothing that you'd want to mess with."

"But he could hurt you."

"He won't."

"He could." The reason he could hurt David was, essentially, me. David had spent his power freely to pull me back from the dead and put me in a Djinn form; he still hadn't entirely recovered from that.

In the tradition of lovers everywhere, we didn't talk about it.

David shrugged, glanced down at the undulating I-70, and said, "We'd better get moving, if we're going to move. It's just a matter of time before it occurs to Kevin to order Jonathan to swat us down."

That was the saving grace of all this-we had the power of a nuclear weapon in the hands of a petulant child, but at least he wasn't what you might call a great thinker. Jonathan, though bound to serve him, wasn't bound to give him advice, and so far hadn't taken it upon himself to act as general in this fight. Thank God.

"Chill Factor"

I nodded, took in a breath, and shut my eyes. Drifted out of my body and up to the higher plane of existence we among the Wardens knew as the aetheric level... the plane where the physical dropped away, and only the energies of the world were displayed. Human senses could see only certain spectrums; when I'd been a Djinn, the aetheric had shown me a hell of a lot more, and deeper, but I was trying to be satisfied with what I had.

Just now, the aetheric was showing the road below me lit up like a giant glowing runway, glittering with power that three-D'ed down below the surface deep into bedrock. The little idiot was destabilizing the whole region. I couldn't stop him; my powers related to wind and water, not earth. Somebody else would have to balance those scales. In fact, somebody's cell phone in the Warden's organization was probably ringing right now.

Time to make the kind of trouble that was my specialty. I reached out into the still, arid air, went high, carbonated air molecules in one place and stilled them in another. The by-product of that is heat. That's all wind is, the interaction of hot and cold, of hot air rising and colder air rushing to fill the void that nature really does abhor. I rolled down the car window and felt the first freshening breeze blow warm against my cheek; a little more energy and the breeze became a stiff wind. I felt the car rock lightly.

"Get ready," I said aloud. "I'm going to have to push pretty hard."

"He won't know we're moving," David promised.

I increased the range of heat, focusing the power of the sun in a