The second story seemed to run only along the front of the building; the back was two stories high, piled with rolled carpets. He flew up under the rafters, pulled a couple of carpets down, dropped them in front of the open bay. A palpable cloud of dust and mold blew up into his face, deceptively rich and golden in the backscatter afternoon light. J. J. felt his nose twitch. I stay here long, it’s gonna mean one major asthma attack.

He went storming into the front, screaming like a madman. Clerks in fezzes and a couple of customers browsing at carpets stacked on big tables looked up in alarm.

“Out! Out!” he screamed. “Crazy Jewboy alert! Out!

Aaauuuughhh!”

With a quick puff of flame he melted the iron bars out of the upper half of the door that separated the area behind the counter from the display floor. A second blast burned through the waist-high wooden lower half. J. J. stepped through.

Once again the language barrier had been surmounted. Customers and clerks went flying out of the building like frightened pigeons from a church, one bold soul pausing long enough to make a sign to ward the evil eye before he fled.

Working with wild energy – he had a higher metabolism than a nat, to go with his hyper disposition – J. J. began pulling carpets off the tables and dumping them on the scuffed wood floor.

After a moment he heard the expected challenge from outside: “I know you’re in there, J. J. Come out with your hands on your head.”

“With my hands on my head?” he shouted back. “What, you think I’m in here with a Saturday Night Special in an ankle holster?”

“You know what I mean, J. J. This can go easy, or it can go hard.”

He mouthed the words along with her: This can go easy, or it can go hard, “You’ve been watching too many movies, babe.” He began to strew the office area with ledger books. “This isn’t Lethal Weapon III.”

“Hear the sirens? The Greek police will be here in a few minutes. I promise you, J. J., it’ll be a lot easier on you if you come with me instead of waiting for them to take you.”

He didn’t doubt that for a minute; he bet these Athenian cops didn’t catch little red-haired Jewish boys with tight dancer’s butts any too often. He could not in any event afford to play a waiting game with her – when you only exist for an hour at a time, time is never on your side.

But he figured that the daughter of the late Vernon Carlysle, literally groomed to acehood from the cradle and at the moment trying to hold her own with a couple of jocks from DEA, would have her own brand of machismo.

“What, you need the natives to make the collar for you? Is big bad J. J. Flash, Esquire too much for the spoiled little rich girl to handle on her own? Your daddy would be so disappointed.”

The flyspecked glass and wrought-iron bars of a front window sublimated away before a roaring gout of flame. If you can’t stand the heat, babe, stay out of the kitchen!”

Silence. He stood behind the counter, drumming his fingers nervously on the top, scored in unreadable doodles by the penknives of bored clerks. That damned wind power of hers was too much for him; if she didn’t rise to his taunts, he was going to be in a cold, wet place in one hell of a hurry.

“All right, J. J.” From the back of the building. “Just you and me. I’ll show you what this spoiled little rich girl does to male-chauvinist assholes like you.”

He turned with what he hoped was a sufficiently psycho snarl and blasted a fire-jet at her through the door. She dodged, laughing that snotty little-girl laugh.

The carpets he’d sprawled in front of the loading door caught fire. The dry wool blazed up nicely.

“You’ll have to do better than that, J. J.,” she called, tauntingly. “What was that about heat?”

“Here.” He popped around the door, blasted for the voice. She stood there in the open and didn’t even bother to move as her windblast knocked the fire-pulse aside.

“Come on, J. J.,” she urged. There were spots of color high on her cheeks, he could see even in the dust) smoky gloom. “Hit me with your best shot.”

He did, giving her two quick blasts, almost white-hot. She deflected them without effort. A buffet of wind sent him sprawling back through the narrow office into the front room.

She stalked through the door with the feral grace of a leopard. The flames behind her made the tips of her light brown hair a fiery corona like the sun at eclipse.

He felt a whirlwind surrounding him, gathering velocity. “Had enough, J. J.?” Mistral purred. “Or do I have to hurt you?”

He blasted fire at her, two-handed. She ducked behind the counter. The whirlwind continued to pick up strength; she didn’t need to see him, just the air above his head.

“Honey,” he said in a quiet voice that barely carried through the roar of flames from the warehouse area, “that partition is wood.”

Without giving her time to digest that, he stood and spread his arms. Flame sprayed from both hands. The scattered carpets exploded in fire.

The whirlwind plucked at him with afrit arms. He wrenched himself away, stumbled through the front door, turned to torch the wooden posts holding up the porch.

Yellow flames were vomiting out the front windows now. The carpet store was going up nicely.

“I’m trapped!” Mistral cried. He heard a panic crescendo in the voice. It wasn’t so superior and self-assured now.

“That’s what I meant about heat, babe,” J. J. called.

“You’re just going to leave me to burn?”

He had to hand it to her – her voice strained, but didn’t quite crack. “No. You should be able to blow out the flames, if you work hard enough.”

He glanced back over his shoulder. A white Toyota Land Cruiser with a flashing blue light on top was bouncing up the road. More police vehicles wailed behind.

“If not, help is on the way. Ciao, babe.”

Mark’s Roach Motel pen~ was near the top of a hill in a part of town he couldn’t pronounce. J. J. Flash couldn’t either. He trudged up the hill with his head down, feeling wrung out. Flying and fire-shooting really took it out of you. Also he was beat to shit. Going ’round and ’round with Mistral’s ace power made him feel as if he’d been for a blender ride.

His hour was almost up. He was starving, and when he made the transition he didn’t come with money in his pockets, otherwise it would have been souvlaki time once he ditched Mistral. Mark was going to have a king-hell case of the munchies when he got back.

The locals gave him odd looks and plenty of sea room as he passed. Everybody knew foreigners were crazy, especially Americans, but the red-and-orange jogging outfit did tend to set him even further apart. But he was a lot less conspicuous arriving on his red Adidas than he would have been if he’d flown in.

Not that it mattered. The bad guys knew Mark and his friends were in Athens now. That meant the time had come not to be in Athens anymore.

As if cued by the thought, a voice called out behind him: “Flash! J. J. Flash!”

He turned. The man who called himself Randall Bullock was walking up the street toward Mark’s pension, wearing khaki pants and an Indiana Jones leather jacket.

“Jesus Christ! Can’t you assholes give me any peace?” He chased Bullock into an ouzo stand with a roaring jet of flame from his hand and took to the air.

He had to recover the extra powders. Mark had blown almost his entire roll to stockpile them, and J. J. was not about to leave them behind.

He streaked up toward the window of his flat. The key was in the pants of his Mark-form. Somehow he wasn’t worried about getting in.

And if the local heat had the flat staked out inside… he’d just show them what heat was all about.