It was closed.
Open it, Patrick whispered.
I couldn't. If I did, it would rip in half again, I'd kill the world …
Trust me.
I wanted to weep, but my aetheric form wasn't suited to the job. I jabbed my fingers forward, deep into the scar, and felt it … give. Suction on the other side. Cold, eerie suction that was completely alien to anything I'd known … even the chaos swirling up here.
The blue sparklies began flowing up. They marched out of my body, down my arm, into my hand, and flooded through the bridge of my fingers into that other place, that other reality.
When I was sure they were all gone, to the last little Tinkerbelle glow, I pulled my hand back. A single blue mote floated in the air for an instant, and died.
The black scar stayed closed.
And I felt whatever had sustained me start to give way.
Oh crap. Action, and reaction. It existed even here, in this place. The power that had sustained me was giving way, and I was falling.
Hard.
I crashed through barriers that ripped and scraped and tore. It felt like smashing through increasingly thick panes of glass. Gathering speed, plummeting and screaming … straight through the familiar glow of the aetheric …
… into my body, where I arrived with a devastatingly hard jerk that made me conk my head into the scuffed linoleum hard enough to see stars.
I looked up at Tom Cruise's toothy smile, and promptly passed out.
###
I came to with Ed sitting on the stool, watching me. I was on the cot in the back room. The storage area had the sharp, clean smell of Lysol, with an undercurrent of dust. I sneezed, whimpered at the strain on my aching body, and curled over on my side. I brushed my hair back with a shaking hand.
Ed didn't say a word. He was looking at me, but I wasn't seeing anything in his eyes. Just … blankness.
"Hey," I croaked.
He blinked. "You're alive."
"Seems like." I checked the color of my skin. Still its normal color. My heart was beating. Apparently, I hadn't joined the ranks of the vampires, or the zombies, or whatever else Israel had been. Speaking of …
"Your brother?"
Ed cleared his throat. "He's dead."
"You're sure."
He nodded. "He — yeah. I'm sure." That spoke volumes I didn't want to read. I closed my eyes and rolled back over flat, and tried sitting up. I managed it. It wasn't a happy process. "You okay?"
"Yeah." I had no idea, but even if I wasn't, there was nothing Ed from Mart's Texaco could do about it. I needed Earth Warden help, or Djinn help, or both. Or maybe I just needed sleep and rest. Peace and quiet and a stop to the demands of the universe that I keep on fighting.
Ed dug in his pocket and counted out five hundred dollars in twenties. I sat in silence, watching him, my lips slightly parted but no words finding their way out. He put the pile of money in my lap and stood up.
"Get a hot dog and a soda to go," he said. "On me."
"But — "
"I want you gone," he said, and there was naked fury in his blue eyes now, an unreasonable anger that had nothing to do with me. I understood that. I'd come to town, and his brother was dead. Even if one had little to do with the other, he'd want me gone.
It was how I'd been with Rahel in the car. All that suppressed terror and fury and grief finding a target.
And he was right to blame me, after all. The blue sparklies had been my doing. Maybe his initial accident had been fate, but the rest had been me.
I crumpled the money in a fist, thought about refusing it, but I couldn't deny that I needed the help.
"Thanks," I said softly.
He didn't look at me again, even when I insisted on paying for the hot dog and soda. Just rang up the sale and stood mutely to the side, staring at the floor, while I walked out into the hot Arizona morning. I slid on sunglasses and breathed in the crisp, clean air. It smelled like fresh sage and the hot metallic stench of gas and oil. My Viper was parked around the side.
When started the car, I looked in the rear view mirror. Ed was standing out front.
Why? I had to ask myself. Why did I stop here? Of all the places I could have picked … why here?
It might have been Rahel's doing, but I doubted it. Truth was, I'd have ended up here somehow. Power called to power. Fate had plans for me, and there was no use at all in fighting it.
I had a long, long way to go to find that peace and quiet I'd been craving.
I waved at Ed, pulled out onto the freeway, and headed for parts unknown.