Firestorm (5) by Caine Rachel

Author:Caine, Rachel [Caine, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fantasy, Contemporary, Fiction
ISBN: 9781101128800
Publisher: Roc
Published: 2006-09-05T07:00:00+00:00

SIX

There was a sudden blowtorch flare out of the forest, and another human figure staggered out of the inferno. Not burned, though she was smudged dark with smoke and coughing like her lungs might blow out. Emily had looked better. Her clothes were smoldering, but she was keeping it together. Barely.

“Get in the truck!” she screamed. Her eyes skipped right over the glistening twisted form of the Demon, and I realized that she couldn’t see it—that Demons, like the dark shadows of Djinn who became Ifrits, weren’t visible to normal Wardens. I didn’t waste my breath. Emily tried the truck door, found it locked, and cursed breathlessly. She fumbled for keys. I reached in my broken passenger window and unlocked the doors, and we crammed ourselves in. I was sitting on broken glass. Didn’t care.

Emily started it up and hit reverse just as a tree began to topple in front of us. She screamed and floored it, and the SUV slalomed, skidded, and grabbed dirt. We rocketed backward. I hoped she was watching behind us, because I was riveted to two things: the torch of a tree that was heading for the roof of the SUV, and the twisted, flickering shadow of the Demon loping after us in pursuit.

“Do something!” Emily yelled at me. She looked scared to death, and she didn’t know the half of what I did.

“Do what?” I screamed back, and grabbed for the panic strap as the SUV bounced over rocks. Still moving backward at a speed that no human-operated vehicle was supposed to go, at least in that direction and in the middle of nowhere.

“Anything!” she roared.

The noise of the tree crashing toward us was lost in the constant deafening train-whistle scream of the fire, but there was no doubt that it was going to hit us. And if the truck was put out of commission…

I sucked in a deep breath of air that was almost too hot to breathe, concentrated, and grabbed the dashboard as I stared at the falling tree.

Come on, come on, come on…. Updrafts. There were plenty of updrafts, no shortage of those, but they were wild and unpredictable, fueled by an incredible outpouring of energy.

I grabbed hold of a rising superheated column of air and wrenched it free of its source, then directed it at an angle at the falling tree. Twenty feet. It was coming for us fast, and no way were we going to clear it in time. Flames all around us. Ten feet. Heading right for the roof of the SUV…

I let the superheated blast of air go, cooled the outer edge, and it hit the tree like a huge blunt object, hammering it off course. Not by much.

The outer blackened pine branches snapped off on my side of the truck, and the trunk crushed the underbrush just a couple of inches to the right of the SUV’s hood.

Emily shot me a disbelieving look. I shrugged and took my hands off the dashboard. Left wet, sweaty handprints behind.

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