Life narrowed and became one foot in front of the other again, one step at a time. Her higher thought processes took a hike. Even the babbler fell silent. She blew up the inflatable pool until she was dizzy, put it in the backyard in the corner near a shady tree, and yanked the old leaky hose over to add water to it. Not much. Enough for them to splash and have fun, but a small enough amount so that the sun could warm it quickly.

She put towels and sunscreen at one end of the table, and gave Chloe the task of ripping the packaging off the plastic water toys and stacking them in the red bucket. Chloe set to work with single-minded intensity. Grace turned her increasingly cloudy attention to lunch. A hot meal, dammit. Nothing fancy; they didn’t have anything fancy in the house. Simple comfort food.

What did they have to work with? She started grabbing things out of the cupboard. Egg noodles. Mushroom soup. Tuna. Great, a tuna casserole. Quick to throw together, easy to bake, and maybe she could sneak some peas past the food Nazi in Chloe’s head. That girl, that girl.

Chloe sang under her breath. Max scuttled around on the kitchen floor, dragging his love object/baby blanket along with him. Grace blanched noodles, threw everything together in a bowl, splashed some milk into it.

All her thoughts bled together in a jumbled mishmash.

Khalil’s hands. His mouth, working her with such gentle urgency. His presence, everywhere.

What was she forgetting?

Gram, swimming beside her in the dark sea. You’re almost out of tuna.

Was that actually what Gram had said? Tuna? Or time?

Gram really would have liked the kitchen ghosts, but they were loud today and restless. Chloe was loud too and getting louder, her singing escalating up the music scale.

Phaedra, screaming. That fragile, rare connection.

Grace filled the casserole dish. Set the mixing bowl in the sink, and filled it with water to wash later. Forgetting something. Oh, duh. She hadn’t turned on the oven yet. Good thing the air-conditioners were on. Otherwise the old oven would heat the house up terribly.

She had left her body when Khalil made love to her. Not figuratively. She really had left her body.

That was unusual.

You left your body once tonight, the goddess had said in her dream. You can do it again if you want to badly enough.

She needed to remember that. It might have meaning.

Forgetting. Dammit, the oven. Food would help to clear her head. Then she would take the kids out to play in the pool. She turned the oven on and pulled out a chair to sit down with a sense of relief. Soon the next step would be to eat something. That one was easy.

Don’t stay in the house when you bake the casserole.

Grace smiled as she remembered seeing Gram, even if it had been just a dream.

Actually, the house did get pretty hot when the oven was on, even with the air-conditioning working. She looked into Chloe’s agonized face. She would never get the little girl to eat, unless they went outside first.

She asked, “Do you want to play in the pool while lunch cooks?”

“Yes!” Chloe screamed. She hit a perfect high C, which was like a needle going into the brain. She grabbed the bucket’s handle and raced out the back door.

Grace and Max looked at each other. “Come on, you too, little man,” she told him. She scooped him up, grabbed the towels and the sunscreen, and went outside too. She stripped Chloe down to her panties, left Max in diaper and diaper cover, liberally sprayed both of them with sunscreen and then sprayed herself. The kids went into the pool with the toys, while she eased down onto a towel.

She could actually relax for ten minutes or so while the oven preheated. Yowzer.

Max’s wonder and Chloe’s delight were a joy to watch. Grace let her mind fill with clouds as she watched them play in the pool. She caught herself up with a jerk as she almost fell asleep. Ugh, dammit, not when the baby was in the water. He was only sitting in a couple of inches, but still.

Time to put the casserole in the oven. But not without the baby.

She stood first and pulled him out of the pool. Max, who was normally so placid and easygoing and an all-around cool guy, stiffened in outrage and yelled. “Whoa,” she said. “It’ll only be for a minute, buddy.”

Unfortunately he didn’t have the language to understand, but he did have object permanence, and he had developed some mad love for that little pool. He kicked and screamed. The sound scraped against her already abused eardrums. She said loudly to Chloe, “We’ll be right back.”

Chloe nodded without looking up. Grace walked toward the house while she tried to control Max’s chunky, protesting body. She couldn’t even hear herself think, let alone figure out why all the ghosts of the old women rushed at her, their indistinct, transparent forms loud with distress—

You’re going the wrong way.

Which was ridiculous. That was from her dream. She was only going to the kitchen.

The wrong way.

Confused, she stopped, looking down at Max’s reddened little face while she tried to sort through the clouds of hungry tiredness in her head.

Wrong.

An enormous, invisible fist punched her. She lost her hold on Max and slammed into the ground. The back of the house disappeared in a rolling ball of flame that blew out an inferno of boiling heat. She thought there was sound too, a gigantic roar, but maybe that was all inside her head.

Max.

Oh gods, she had dropped the baby.

With an immense effort she rolled onto her stomach, looking for him. He lay on his stomach too and pushed himself up on stiffened arms. He looked utterly panicked, his mouth wide open and his face purpled as he screamed.

She came up on all fours and lunged for him. Burning pain flared in her knee. She snatched him close and ran her hands down his arms and legs then clenched him tightly, twisting to put her back between him and the ferocious blaze.

Chloe. Grace looked for her. The swimming pool was thirty feet or so farther away from the house. Chloe sat frozen in the water, clutching her bucket. She stared at the fire, her face contorted. Grace couldn’t hear anything aside from the gigantic roar, but she could clearly read the little girl’s lips.

“I need my mommy! I need my mommy!”

Grace fumbled. There had to be a connection somewhere in her ringing head. She swept out with her mind, did a wide, blind scoop, and yanked with all of her strength.

That was when the earthquake hit Louisville.

Nineteen

A supernova blasted toward Grace. The sense of oncoming destruction blocked out everything else. She huddled around Max, trying to cover him with her body.

Later she would find out that her property was the epicenter of an earthquake that registered 5.8 on the Richter scale. She never even felt it. Nearby streetlamps warped and bent like they were sticks made of soft wax, trees fell, the cavern caved in and her car was thrown to the street, where the pavement buckled. Luckily, the surrounding area was not as developed as more urban areas and damage was minimal, although a roof and part of a stone wall collapsed at a nearby cemetery. And it was luck, not intention: that was how out of control Khalil had been.

Instead of destruction, what she felt was a gentle black smoke that swirled around the yard, blanketing her and the kids. It blocked out all the heat and noise. At the same time Khalil covered the burning house with Power. The fire died with an eerie suddenness.

Grace gripped Max in one arm and glanced around, dazed, as she tried to scoot awkwardly toward Chloe, hampered by having only one free hand and her goddamn useless knee.

Strong arms lifted her and Max. She blinked as Khalil formed around them. His expression was stark and shaken. Her gaze lowered to his moving lips. She made out his words. “Stop. I’ve got you.”

“Chloe,” she said. She couldn’t hear herself speak, and the only way she could control her dizziness was by tilting her head. She tried to say Chloe’s name again. With both her and Max in his arms, Khalil spun toward the swimming pool.

He froze, staring.

A Djinn was wrapped around a sobbing Chloe, the presence so gossamer thin she was transparent. It was Phaedra. When Grace called Khalil, she must have pulled both connections by accident.

Max’s body was rigid and shaking in her arms. She turned her attention to him. He was still screaming with such lusty energy his face was a darkened red.

She decided right then and there that screaming was awesome. Screaming meant you were alive. If you had the strength to scream, hopefully you had the strength to recover. But still.

“We need a doctor,” she said to Khalil.

He looked at her again, a sparkling crisis in his eyes, while his jaw flexed.

She was making sound when she talked, wasn’t she? She put more force into the next words. “A pediatrician. Tell them it’s an emergency.”

His Power flared. A strange Djinn appeared. Khalil said something in a sharp whip of a voice that she heard as if from a distance. After one wide-eyed glance around, the Djinn nodded and whisked away.

Oh, good. That meant a doctor would be coming. She looked at Max again. He wasn’t bleeding. That had to be good too. She had no idea what to do for him. There were classes for that sort of thing, what were they called? Whatever they were, she should take some. Her head was pounding, her ears hurt, and her skin and knee felt like they were on fire.

Then Khalil knelt, and Chloe was there, still sobbing and wrapped in towel, and he simply enfolded them all. Grace leaned against him while she wrapped her arms around the children, and Khalil put his face in her hair. She thought he and Phaedra said things to each other, but she wasn’t sure, because it was such a strain to focus on anything, so she just concentrated on holding those poor, scared babies.

Black clouds like smoke filled her head, or maybe it was the dark sea. This time the vision came to her so softly, it was as if she fell into a dream.

She was surrounded with people.

Petra touched her hand and looked at her with such gratitude. Thank you for looking after them.

Of course, Grace said. What else would I do?

Gram smiled proudly and said, I knew you would figure it out.

Then a strange, angry man told her, Check the insurance again. I would never fall asleep at the wheel.

Grace stared. She recognized him from photographs in the newspaper. He was the independent trucker who crossed the meridian line and caused the head-on collision. But that’s what I was told.

It’s a lie.

The trucker faded back into the sea, and suddenly the world snapped back into place. Khalil knelt in front of her. He cupped her face, handling her with a tense care that was in sharp contrast to the banked violence of emotion in his elegant face. She startled badly when she realized the kids were no longer on her lap. She grabbed his wrists.

He shook one of his hands free to hold a vial up to her mouth. She watched his lips as he said, “Drink it.”

She could feel the magic in the vial even in her dizzy confusion. It was a “cure-all” healing potion, expensive and rare. When she opened her mouth to ask where the kids went and how he had gotten the potion, he tilted the precious contents of the vial between her open lips, and she had no choice but to swallow.

An intense golden glow filled her body and drove back the dark sea. The Power from the potion pulsed in her skin, her knee and her head. Khalil wrapped an arm around her shoulders and nudged the rim of another vial between her lips. “Drink another one,” he said.

By that time her dizziness had lessened, and she heard him for real. She didn’t waste time on asking how he had gotten them or how much they cost. Instead she drank, and that time the Power in the potion blew away the clouds in her head. She said, “The kids.”

“Right over there.”

She looked where Khalil pointed. Somehow the backyard had filled up with people. Max was lying on a stretcher, attended by a man and a woman, EMT equipment on the ground nearby. Chloe sat on another stretcher, wrapped in a blanket. She was being examined by another man. Four Djinn stood nearby, watching the EMTs alertly.

Power swirled behind her. She glanced over her shoulder. At least two other Djinn were in the blackened wreckage that had been the back of the house, although they weren’t in physical form. As she turned back to face Khalil she caught sight of a seventh Djinn, who wore the form of a muscular ebony-skinned male. He stared fixedly at her.

Whatever was up with that particular Djinn, it was definitely not her problem. She had enough on her plate at the moment, thank you. She turned away from the puzzle. As she focused on Khalil again, he said, “The kids are all right.”

“Are you sure?”

His jaw was clenched, diamond eyes filled with radiant wetness. She put a hand to his face, and he snatched her to him so tightly she grunted. “Yes,” he said hoarsely. “You’re all going to be all right. But gods damn, you almost weren’t. Gods damn, I saw my daughter. I talked to Phaedra. She said you healed her.”

“I didn’t heal her. I just showed her who she used to be.” She leaned against him, resting her head on his chest. “She made the choice, and—I don’t know what else to call it—she repatterned or realigned herself. I didn’t mean to call her when I called for you. I just couldn’t tell what I was doing. My head was all f**ked up.”

“The EMT said you had a concussion, and Max probably did too.” Khalil ran a finger lightly down the bare skin of her arm, and his mouth twisted in a quick sharp spasm. “And first-degree burns. A pediatrician is with him now.”

Grace glanced gratefully over at the people working to help the children. She said, “Phaedra looked so threadbare after she changed, I was really worried about her. She said she needed to rest. Is she still here?”

“As soon as other help came, she left. She needs time, maybe a lot of time, and nourishment, and I don’t think she can ever be quite the same as she was. But her essence is true again, not warped. She made a connection with you, and she answered it.” He glared. “You were supposed to call me if she showed up again.”