Ill Wind Page 0,77

to a bone-crunching halt.

Every window on this side of the hotel had shattered, and the glittering, slicing fragments were hurtling toward me.

Toward a family of four clinging to the door of a red minivan down the row.

Toward a pregnant woman huddling out in the open, caught between rows of cars.

Toward David.

I threw myself up into Oversight and grabbed for what I could reach, which wasn't much; this was brute-force stuff, and my enemy already had control of just about everything there was to use. I grabbed air and forced molecules to move, move, never mind the chaos factors that introduced; that wall of broken glass was going to shred us all to hamburger if I didn't.

I jammed on the car brakes, abandoned the idea of retreat, and focused everything I had on the moment. I superheated the air and released it in a hard, fast, focused pulse. It didn't have to be much, just enough to disrupt the wind for a fraction of a second; glass is too heavy to continue at right angles to gravity without a clear kinetic force acting on it.

My microburst-five hundred yards wide-blew into the opposing wind-wall and shattered the momentum, and for a second there was a haze there of power meeting power, glass turning over and over like windblown confetti, and then the shards rained down to the asphalt with a sound like a hundred bags of dimes breaking open. The hurricane attack started up again, but it was too late; glass isn't easy to get airborne once it's on the ground.

I realized I could no longer see David. God, I'd been too late, too late to keep the glass from hitting him-he was down somewhere, between the cars, down and slashed to ribbons-

The passenger door yanked open, and David threw himself in, bare-chested and bleeding. "I told you to go!" he shouted. I jammed Delilah back in gear, popped the clutch, and squealed rubber in a turn that any stunt driver would have been proud of. We screeched around the corner, heading for the street-

-and almost crashed headfirst into a Winnebago blocking the exit. I jerked the wheel and got us around it, barely, registering the shocked faces of Ma and Pa Retirement as the Mustang roared past.

Hair on the back of my neck hissed and prickled, and I knew it was coming again, could feel those ions turning and connecting overhead. Not just one lightning bolt this time, but hundreds, thousands, a sky full of falling razor blades, and I couldn't stop all of them. People were going to die.

"David!" I screamed. He grabbed my hand, and I smelled the actinic charge in the air, heard the hissing sizzle of it overhead. That power had to discharge, needed to discharge, and it was going to go somewhere fast and hard. It would settle for anything that would form a satisfactory current. Buildings . . . trees . . . flesh and blood and bone.

I felt David's strength pouring into me. Not the same magnitude as what I'd felt from other Djinn, but then David's strength wasn't fully sourced until he was bound.

No time to plan, no time to do anything but what I knew, at heart, was right.

I built an invisible road for the power to discharge, working fast, touching and turning polarities a billion atoms at a time. I'd never worked on such a scale before, but I had to reach, and reach, and reach without stopping to doubt myself. I stretched myself over the aetheric as thin as a spiderweb, armoring the innocent, leaving a clear and unmistakable path for the strike to follow. A lightning rod with a silver ground wire unreeling back to me.

It had to be back to me. It was the direction all the power was being pushed, anyway.

David felt it. "No! What are you doing?"

"Not now," I snapped, and felt the Mark wake and move inside me. I tightened my grip on David's hand. "Keep it still!"

I felt warmth pulse through his flesh and into mine, strike deep. The writhing inside me went quiet.

The last chains of power snapped together. In Oversight, the silver line went white-hot with potential.

"Hold on," I whispered, and closed my eyes.

The lightning flashed blue white, brighter and hotter than the sun-silent, because sound would come later. I opened my mouth to gasp and tasted the bitter tang