Free Firestorm by Rachel Caine

was about to leave, and panicked just a little. “Wait! Um…Seacasket. I’m not sure I can find it again.”
    â€œMapQuest,” he said. “The modern world is full of conveniences even the Djinn can’t match.”
    â€œDo I—?” I bit my lip, and then continued. “Do I go alone? Or am I going to have to fight my way through some kind of honor guard?”
    â€œTake Imara,” he said. His smile turned breathtakingly sweet. “She’s astonishing, isn’t she? Our child? I wish you could see her the way I do, Jo, she’s—a miracle.”
    Oh, I agreed. With all my heart. “I don’t want to take her with me if there’s going to be any danger—”
    â€œI have faith in you to keep her safe.”
    â€œDavid, she’s two days old !”
    â€œWhat she is can’t be measured in days, or years, or centuries,” he said. “She’ll be fine. Just—take care of yourself. You’re the one I’m worried about.”
    A slow, warm pressure of his lips on mine, and then he was gone. Not a magic-sparkle slow-fade gone, but a blip, he-was-never-there gone. Except for the manic damn-I’ve-been-kissed-good tingle of my mouth and the racing of my pulse and general state of trembling throughout my body, I might have thought it was all another dream.
    I walked over to the mirror. I looked like hell, but my eyes were clear and shining and my lips had a ripe, bee-stung redness.
    Doesn’t get much more real than that.
    He was right: I really couldn’t trust him. Should never ever trust him again. But that wasn’t, and never would be, my instinct, and he knew it. He was my true fatal flaw, and maybe I was his, as well.
    I hoped that wasn’t going to end up destroying us both, and our child with us.
    If I was inclined to mope about it, I didn’t have time. There was a rattle at the locked infirmary door, and Nathan, the security guard, looked in and jerked his head at me.
    â€œYou’re wanted,” he said. “Move it.”
    I cast one last look at the empty chair where David had been, and followed Nathan out.
    Â 
    The infirmary was relatively soundproofed, as I discovered when I went out into the hall; there was a riot outside. People yelling, screaming at each other. Tempers flaring. There were more people crammed in than there’d been before, and everybody looked stressed and confused. There were arguments raging from room to room; some idiot was yelling in the hallway that we had to uncork the Djinn still imprisoned in the vault several stories below, under the theory that we could be prepared to give them ironclad orders to protect the building and the remaining Wardens at all costs. Someone else was making the case against it, but I could tell popular sentiment was building for the supposedly simple solution.
    Paul had given up, evidently. He was sitting whey-faced in a chair in the North America conference room, eyes shut. Marion was vainly shouting for order, but since she was in a wheelchair, it was hard for her to make an impression.
    I went for the floor show.
    I levitated myself four feet up off the stained carpet, dangerously close to the ceiling, reached deep for power, and felt it respond to me with an ease and warmth I hadn’t felt in…a very long time. Since before my battle with Bad Bob Biringanine, in fact.
    I let the power crackle around me, building up in potential energy in the air, and most of those around me noticed and backed off.
    Making light—cold light, light without heat—is the biggest trick in the book when it comes to my variety of powers. Light has heat as a natural by-product of the energy release that creates it, so I had to balance the radiation with rapid dispersal throughout a complicated matrix of atoms.
    I got brighter, and still brighter, until I was glowing like a girl-shaped chandelier, hovering in the hallway. Conversation stopped. In the