Windfall

Chapter Seven

As above, so below. The old saying was holding true today. I got to the security doors of the lobby just as the clouds cut loose and the rain began.

Florida rain is like a faucet—two speeds, flood and stop. The setting was definitely on flood this morning. I stood at the glass and looked out at the thick gray wall of water—couldn’t really make out the parking lot behind it—and looked down at my shoes. They weren’t rain-appropriate, but then the rest of the outfit wasn’t exactly going to be repelling a lot of water, either.

At least it’s just rain, I told myself. Could be worse…

And right on cue, a white stab of lightning split the sky outside, close enough that I didn’t need Warden senses to register the power jolt. I felt it sweep over my skin and draw every tiny hair to shivering attention.

The thunder that followed shook the glass and set off a howling chorus of car alarms.

The next strike was about fifty feet away from me, right outside in the parking lot, and it came as a fork of blue-white light reaching down and grounding itself in one of the cars. What the hell… ? It shouldn’t have done that.

There were lots of taller objects to draw it, but then lightning was whimsical that way. And vicious.

I jumped back from the glass and slapped my hands over my ears as the thunder exploded, and couldn’t see a damn thing for the overloaded white-hot afterburn on my retinas. I blinked fiercely as I waited for my eyes to return to normal and cursed my lack of strength as oversight would have been a real asset at the moment. Except that I was too weak to get to it, and it was only as the thunder died to an ominous, continuing growl that I realized the car that had taken the brunt of that lightning bolt had been midnight blue, lean, and sleek.

In other words, it had been Mona. My car.

“Oh, damn,” I whispered, and blinked faster. Not that I could really see anything through the incredibly dense rain out there. No, wait, I could. There was something flickering orange out there, barely visible…

My car was on freaking fire.

“Joanne!” John Foster, breathless, came pelting up behind me, grabbed me, and threw me to the floor. He landed on top of me, and while I was busy registering the unique ways a marble floor didn’t make for a comfortable landing area, something outside exploded.

Not lightning. Something more man-made.

The explosion blew in the windows in a bright-edged shower, and the rain followed, pounding in before the glass even hit the marble. I smelled burning plastic and metal and tried to get up, but John held me down with an elbow across my shoulders. He was breathing hard. I could feel his heart pounding against my back.

“Let go!” I yelled. “Dammit! John! Let go!”

He finally did, rolling off in a crunch of glass, and as I flipped over I saw that he’d sustained some cuts, but not a lot. So far, we’d been lucky.

“You all right?” he asked. I nodded. “Come with me.”

He scrambled up to his feet and held out his hand. I looked back at the parking lot, or at least what I could see of it; there was an unholy bonfire out there, consuming at least three cars.

The center of it was the blackened shell of the Viper formerly known as Mona, who wouldn’t be taking me on any more fast drives, ever again. I gulped and clutched my purse tight and took John’s hand.

He led me out of the lobby, past the arriving cluster of alarmed tenants and late-breaking security personnel, to the stairwell. He hit the stairs running, tasseled loafers pounding, and I had to hustle to keep up. John had been working out, or else adrenaline was a wonderful fitness drug.

We ran full speed up seven floors, all the way to the top of the building, to the door that was marked ROOF ACCESS, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. And I was very thankful when we slowed down at the top, because my shoes were not of the cross-training persuasion, but then he grabbed me and towed me toward the exit.

“John!” I yelled, and yanked him to a stop before he could stiff-arm the ALARMWILLSOUND crossbar. “John, wait! What’s going on?”

“You were right about the Djinn!” he yelled back. “We have to go, now! They’re coming!”

Oh, crap.

He broke free and hit the door release. An alarm added its shriek to the general confusion—the fire alarms were going off, too, and I wondered if the fire had spread somehow from the parking lot to the building—and as the door opened out onto the roof, rain and wind shouldered through the opening to hit us like linebackers. I staggered, but John reached back and grabbed my wrist and dragged me outside into the chaos of the downpour.

“John!” I screamed, over the continuing roll of thunder. “It’s not safe out here! The lightning—”

“Shut up; I’ll take care of the lightning!” And he could. John was a highly competent Weather Warden in his own right. Even as he finished saying it, I felt a ripple over my skin, and my blunted Warden senses registered something whipping through the aetheric at us like a striking snake…

John let go of me, turned, and focused his attention on a thick silver stanchion fixed to a corner of the roof.

Lightning hissed down. I could feel it struggling to reach us, fighting…

And then turning to hit the stanchion. The building’s lightning protection system bled it off into the ground through a network of inlaid wiring. I could feel the heat of it blast over me from where I stood.

But I also felt how close it had been. Something was directing that lightning.

Controlling it. Something a great deal stronger than John Foster.

He knew it, too; I saw it in the fixed, desperate set of his expression. “Come on!” John was tugging me onward, to a second concrete bunker on top of the roof.

The door was propped open. He grabbed it just as another flash of lightning came out of nowhere, streaking for us. John wasn’t ready, I knew it—he’d just spent a tremendous amount of energy redirecting that first bolt, and this one was just as big, if not bigger. And it was obviously bent on getting us.

What I had to throw into the pot barely qualified as power at all, but I did it, reaching out and trying to grab hold of the enormous burst of energy that was coming toward us. Electrons were shifting, jittering, realigning into polarities to create a path. All I had to do was snap a few… and I couldn’t do it. As fast as I broke the chain, it whipped back at us, those tiny molecular polarities spinning and locking faster than I could even read their force structure. Rain lashed, and a gust of wind howled over us in a scream of rage. I felt John desperately working to save us, and more power pouring in from outside trying to save us, but it was no good. The bolt was going to hit us dead on, and we were out of time. Whatever had hold of this storm wasn’t going to be denied.

I dived one way, knowing it wouldn’t do any good; John dived the other.

I hit and rolled, and saw the lightning spear straight into John’s chest.

“No!” Maybe I screamed it, maybe I didn’t; whatever sound I made was lost in the massive rush of energy that slammed into his flesh. In its burst of brilliant light, I saw John’s diamond-eyed Djinn standing nearby in the shadows, still and quiet, watching his master die. No expression on his face at all.

He didn’t move to help.

John, cut off from the Wardens network, had never heard the instructions to give his Djinn a preemptive command to defend him. He’d never really understood the danger. And if he had, he probably wouldn’t have believed it.

John dropped without a sound the second the lightning crackled and sizzled out.

I couldn’t see for long, agonizing seconds, so I fumbled my way over gravel and tar to take him in my arms. He was burning hot. As my vision cleared I saw that there were black burns at the top of his head, on the palms of his hands, and that his pants were riddled with sizzling, smoking holes. His shoes were melted to his feet.

I burned my fingers trying to check his pulse, but it was silent. His heart had taken a full jolt, and his nervous system was fried beyond repair.

The Djinn left the shadows and walked over to where I was huddled in the cold, pounding rain with John’s weight across my lap.

“You could have done something,” I said numbly. “Why didn’t you do something? He was your friend!”

He looked down at me. Rain didn’t touch him, just misted away an inch from his form. He was changing already, shifting from that quiet, unassuming young man John’s will had imposed on him to a larger, stronger body. His hair lightened from brown to white, rippling with subtle undertones of color like an opal.

Albino-pale skin. The down-home shirt and blue jeans transformed to rich, pale silk and velvet. He looked elegant and merciless and slightly barbaric.

“He wasn’t my friend,” the Djinn said. “A master can’t be friends with a slave. There’s no trust without equality.”

I choked on the taste of cold rain and burned flesh in my mouth. I wanted to weep, because the Djinn was right. No equality. Just because we were fond of the Djinn didn’t make them friends. Just because we loved them…

What had I done when I’d taken David as my servant? Had it destroyed the trust we’d had? How long would it take for that betrayal to soak into him, to erode his love for me, to turn it toxic?

Maybe the flaws that made him an Ifrit had started here, in me.

“You’re free now,” said a voice from behind me. I gasped and turned, blinking rain out of my eyes. It sounded like Ashan, and yes, it was Ashan, natty and businessman-perfect in his gray suit and chilly tie. His eyes had gone the color of the storm. Not a drop was touching him, of course. He walked forward, and where he walked, the rain just… vanished. He came to a halt a few feet from me, but he wasn’t paying the least attention to me, or the dead man in my arms.

His focus was all on the other Djinn.

“You bastard,” I said, and his eyes cut to me and shut me up. Instantly. With the unmistakable impression that I was one single heartbeat away from joining John in the heavenly choir.

“I’m not talking to you,” he said. “Shut up, meat.”

“Are you addressing me?” the other Djinn asked. He still had a British accent, clipped and precise and very old-school, which went very oddly with the barbaric splendor of his albino rock-star look.

“Of course. I came to give you the opportunity to join us.”

“Fortuitous timing.”

Ashan’s smile was cold and heartless. “Isn’t it just?”

The other Djinn smiled in return. Not a comforting sight. “I find myself free for the first time in memory. Why should I give up that freedom to another master, even one so… important as you?”

Ashan nudged John’s body carefully with the toe of his elegantly polished shoe.

No giveaway misting at the knees for Ashan. He was the Dress For Success poster child of the new age.

“Well, first, I’m the one who granted you freedom by killing this,” he said.

“It’s not freedom if I exchange one form of slavery for another.” The Djinn shrugged. “Not very appealing, I must say. And what would Jonathan think about it?”

“Jonathan?” Ashan put all his contempt into it. “Do you really want to be on the side of the one who made us slaves in the first place?”

I was shivering, cold, drenched, and numbed, but that still made me blink.

“What?” I didn’t meant to say it out loud, but when you hear something like that, well, the question naturally blurts itself out.

This time, Ashan decided I was worthy of an answer. “You didn’t think this master-slave relationship was the natural order, did you? Did you really believe that humans rank higher than Djinn? Things are perverted in this world, little girl, and they have been ever since Jonathan gave the Wardens power over us.”

“When—how long—”

“Yesterday,” the other Djinn said quietly. “To us, it was yesterday.”

I wasn’t going to get an answer to that one, I could tell; Ashan had made his point, and I was no longer relevant except as something to nod toward when he wanted to drive home contempt.

“You can’t want to follow Jonathan,” Ashan said. The other Djinn met his eyes.

Thunder rolled overhead, and they both waited out the roar. “If you follow me, you can free others.”

“You mean kill,” the Djinn said calmly. “Kill Wardens.”

“Exactly.” A full, sharp-toothed wolf’s smile. “Come on, don’t tell me you don’t want to. You can start with this one, if you’re interested. Believe me, she’s got it coming.”

The Djinn turned diamond-white eyes to stare at me. I gulped air and frantically rummaged the cupboards of my bare inner storehouse for power, any power, that might be strong enough to defend me against him. What Jonathan had gifted me with was definitely burning down to its embers. I’d used up everything I had, except for what I was living on, and that couldn’t last.

The Djinn shook his head, smiled a little, and said, “I won’t fight for Jonathan. But I won’t kill for you, Ashan; like us, the Wardens exist for a reason.”

“So you’ll do what? Live as a rogue? An outcast?” Ashan sneered at the whole idea, and took a step forward. I felt tension snap tight between them. “Better off dead, I’d say.”

Behind him, the stairwell door swung open. Silently. Nobody was touching it. A flash of lightning revealed a man standing there, tall and lean, hands at his sides.

Lewis’s face was hard, expressionless, and very frightening.

“Leave him alone,” he said, and stepped out into the rain. Unlike the Djinn, he didn’t try to hide from it, and he didn’t do any flashy redirection of energy.

The water pounded over him, soaking his hair flat to his head, saturating his flannel shirt, T-shirt, and jeans in seconds.

He just didn’t care.

Ashan turned to face him. I felt the crackle of power notch up—not like lightning. This was something else. Something… bigger. A little like the resonance that occurred between me and Lewis when things got a little close, only this was dissonance, disharmony, a jagged and cutting chaos.

“He has a choice,” Lewis said. “He can join you, he can join Jonathan, or he can help the Ma’at put all this right again. Restore the balance of things. Stop the violence and the killing. Because this has to stop, Ashan, before everything goes to hell.”

“You mean, everything in the human world.”

“No. I mean everything. Djinn live here, too. And up there.” Lewis indicated the aetheric, somehow, with a jerk of his chin. “If you’re in this world, you’re part of it. There’s no escaping it. Maybe you think you’re here to be gods, but you’re not, no more than we are. We’re all subordinate to something else.”

“Well, maybe you are,” Ashan said, and checked the line of his suit jacket with a casual flick of his fingers. “I have to tell you, I don’t intend to be subordinate to anything or anyone. Ever again.”

“That includes Jonathan, I suppose.”

“It definitely includes Jonathan.”

“Have you happened to mention that to him? Because I don’t see the scars. I think you’ve been avoiding him since you decided on this little rebellion of yours.”

Ashan’s smile was thin, bloodless, and unamused. “I didn’t come here to trade witty remarks with you, human. Go away.”

“Fine. All us humans will just—”

“Not this one. This one’s mine.” Ashan reached out and grabbed me by the shoulder, and boy, it hurt. First of all, his hands were like forged iron.

Second, they weren’t really flesh, not as I could understand it—not the kind of flesh that David always wore, or even Jonathan. Ashan was just an illusion, and what was underneath was sharp and hurtful and cold.

I wanted him to stop touching me, but when I tried to yank away, it was like trying to pull back from an industrial vise.

Lewis went very, very still. Oh, boy. This wasn’t going to end well, and I really didn’t want to be in the middle. Lewis had tons of power, rarely used;

Earth was his weakest, Weather his strongest. He hadn’t been able to work miracles against tons of sand and a dying boy, but here, on this playing field …

He just might be equal to a Djinn.

“Let go,” Lewis said.

Ashan actually grinned. It wasn’t his best expression, but it was certainly one of the most human I’d ever seen on him. Not to mention one of the scariest. The rain hitting me turned from ice-cold to blood-warm to scalding-hot in seconds, thanks to the sudden ramp-up of power igniting the air around us.

“Lewis—” I didn’t get the chance to finish the warning because Ashan, without the slightest hint he was going to act, tried to set Lewis on fire.

Lewis batted away the attack without effort. I’d been burning the last of my power to reach Oversight when it happened, so I’d seen it… a white-hot burst of power arrowing for him, encircling him in a bubble of energy, pressing inward… and dissolving at a single touch of his hand. The energy went chaotic, bouncing back at Ashan, vectoring away to slam into other things, like the swirling fury of the storm, which sucked it up and let loose with another fusillade of lightning bolts overhead.

Lewis had barely even moved. Because he was always so careful with his power, such a good steward of it, it was easy to forget that he was, without question, the most powerful Warden breathing. He rarely lost his temper or acted without thought for the consequences… unlike me. But when he did…

“Ashan,” he said, and his voice had gone into a velvet-deep growl range that made me shiver deep inside, “the next Warden you hurt gets you destroyed so completely that no one will remember you ever existed. And I mean that.”

Ashan stared at him. Lewis stared back, unmoving, dripping with rain and fiercely elemental.

As if he was made of the elements he controlled.

“You aren’t eternal,” Lewis said, and there was something in his words that sounded not quite human in its depth and power. “You were born into this world, and you can die in it. You’ve got no place to run.”

“A human can’t threaten…”

“I’m talking to you as someone who can hear the whisper of the Mother as she sleeps. Do you really think that makes me human?”

Ashan’s teal eyes flared gray for a second, then darkened again. Not quite under control.“The Mother doesn’t talk to meat.”

“She talks to Wardens like me. Wardens who hold all the keys to power. You should remember that. You were around when Jonathan died as a human.”

Ashan’s iron-cold grip on me suddenly relaxed, and I overbalanced pulling away from him. Lewis helped me up. I felt cold and shaky and unreasonably weak, as if the Djinn had been sucking something out of me I couldn’t afford to lose.

Strength. Independence. Hope.

Lewis’s touch brought all of that rushing back. Especially the independence part, which made me immediately pull away from his support. “I’m fine,” I said.

His dark eyes flicked to me and were momentarily just a man’s again, harassed and short-tempered. “I can take care of myself.”

“I know,” he said. “Go. Somebody will meet you downstairs.”

I couldn’t seem to make myself move. Raindrops were pattering and pooling in John Foster’s open eyes. “Ashan killed John. Why?”

“Because he could,” Lewis said grimly. “Because John had something he wanted.”

For a blind second I thought he meant me, but Lewis was looking past me, at the albino, opal-haired rock-’n’-roll Djinn.

“Recruits,” Lewis finished. “Right, Ashan? You need cannon fodder. Djinn to toss into Jonathan’s path to slow him down, because he’s coming for you, and when he finds you it’s not going to be a pretty sight.”

The other Djinn looked at Ashan and tilted his head to one side. No expression on his face, but I had the sense of a razor-sharp mind at work. Ashan was a user, no question of that. And surely the other Djinn, who had a lot more experience of him than I did, had to know it.

“Go downstairs,” Lewis said to me.

“Not without you.”

Lewis let out a breathless, near-silent laugh. “Believe me, I’m right behind you. Most of that was bluff.”

The albino Djinn took a sudden, pantherlike step forward, hand raised. Ashan fell back, assuming a defensive position.

Lewis urged me in the direction of the stairwell. “Don’t wait. Get out of the building. I can’t guarantee it won’t come down if this turns violent.”

“Lewis—”

He didn’t waste time arguing, just extended his hand toward me. I felt a burst of wind hit me, precisely in my midsection, knocking me back five steps to bounce against the stairwell railing, and the door slammed to cut us off.

Something hit the roof outside with enough force to shudder the whole building.

I saw dust sift down from the ceiling and heard an inhuman groan go through the place as concrete and steel shifted.

I kicked off my shoes, stuck them in the purse still hanging from my shoulder, and began running down the steps as fast as I could go. On the fifth floor I ran into refugees. Shit. There were tenants still in the building. I abandoned my escape attempt and banged through the fire door, running from office to office rattling doorknobs and yelling for people to get the hell out. A cube farm on the fourth floor yielded up four people wearing headphones, oblivious to everything; I yanked them bodily out of their ergonomic chairs and sent them running for the stairwell. I interrupted a courting couple in a supply closet on the third floor; they ran for the exits still fastening up clothes.

Ella was nowhere to be found. I wondered if she’d had advance warning of the attack, and if so, whose side she was on. If she’d left John to die, it damn sure wasn’t my side.

The cops were just pulling up in the parking lot, along with the fire department, when the evacuees began pouring screaming out of the building.

Chaos. I left with them, got into the parking lot, and whirled to shield my eyes from the rain and get a look at what was happening on the roof.

The roof was on fire. Figures struggling in the flames. One hell of a fight going on up there, and a continuous roar of thunder as lightning struck again, and again, and again…

As I watched, the roof collapsed into the seventh floor, and a huge roar of hissing flames shot up into the sky.

“No!” I screamed and lunged for the door. Arms wrapped around me from behind and held me still. I kicked and struggled, but they were strong arms, and besides, I wasn’t at my best. I twisted enough to catch a glimpse of who was holding me, and felt the fight go out of my tense muscles.

I didn’t know the burly guy who was giving me the modified Heimlich, but I knew the natty old man standing next to him, neatly covered from the rain by a black umbrella. His name was Charles Ashworth II, and he was one of the senior members of the Ma’at. He was flawlessly dressed in a gray Italian suit, a fine white shirt, a blue silk tie. Conservative, that was Ashworth… he reminded me of a bitter, old version of Ashan, actually. He still had an I-smell-something-rotten expression that betrayed exactly what he thought about the world in general, and me in particular.

“Let go,” he ordered, and Burly Guy loosened his arms. “Don’t be stupid, woman. You’re not a Fire Warden. You can’t run into a burning building. Lewis, on the other hand, can no doubt stroll out without any problem at all.”

He had a point. I resented it. “What are you doing here?”

Ashworth nodded toward the building. “Helping him.”

“Helping him do what, exactly?”

“None of your concern.” Ashworth tapped his black-and-silver cane on the pavement for emphasis. “You’re neither needed nor wanted here, Miss Baldwin. I suggest you go back to your duties, presuming you have them. The Wardens seem to need all the help they can get these days.”

He sounded pretty smug about it. I wanted to slug him, remembering John Foster’s simple, quiet commitment to the work. His courage. His grace under fire.

Before I could suggest any anatomically impossible sexual actions to him, a figure came walking out of the billowing chaos of the side fire escape door.

Lewis looked smoke-stained, but fine. I took a few steps toward him, winced at the bite of broken glass on my bare feet, and paused to brush them more or less clean and jam on my shoes. When my balance wavered, Lewis was there, a hand steadying my elbow even while his attention was fixed on Ashworth.

Overhead, the rain slacked off noticeably. Lewis again, setting balances. He wouldn’t just get rid of it, he’d let it wind itself down. I couldn’t feel the energy currents, but I imagined he was grounding it seamlessly through every available safe avenue. He was thorough that way.

“I couldn’t get to them in time,” he said. “Foster was already dead.”

“And the Djinn?” Ashworth asked.

Lewis shook his head. “I don’t know. At best, he was badly wounded. But I don’t think he’s joining Ashan.” Ashworth’s lips tightened and he turned away, cane tapping, to join a knot of umbrellas standing near the fire engine. The Ma’at had come in force, looked like. Not that they’d be a lot of help in a fight.

None of them were Wardens, per se, except Lewis; they had power, but it wasn’t on the level of someone like John Foster, or even me. Training, not talent.

Well, maybe today, they were on the level with little old whipped-puppy me.

Which didn’t make me feel any better.

“All right?” Lewis was asking me. I looked up to see his dark eyes focused on me.

“Peachy,” I assured him. There was a quaver in my voice. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Trying to stop the war,” he said, and took advantage of his hold on my elbow to steer me out of the way of some firefighters unrolling more hose. The building was still burning, but not nearly as briskly. I could sense a distant, low thrum of power—Lewis was keeping the blaze tamped down, making it manageable. He could have killed it, I was sure, but Lewis was a subscriber to the philosophy of Ma’at. Everything in balance. He would be working to put all of the power that had just been expended back into some kind of order.

“What? You’re going to stop the war singlehandedly?”

“Obviously not.” Lewis got me into a neutral territory, somewhere between the firefighters, the cops, and the Ma’at, and turned me to face him. “Jo, I need you to promise me that you’ll go back to your apartment, pack your bags, and get out of here. Today.”

“I can’t promise that.” Even though I’d been thinking about it, before my car had been blown up.

“I need you to do this for me.” His eyes searched my face. “I can’t be worrying about where you are, what’s happening to you.”

And that lit a fuse on my temper. “I didn’t ask you to be my babysitter, Lewis! I can take care of myself, I always have!”

“And if you weren’t drained so far that you barely register as a Warden on the aetheric, I’d accept that,” he shot back. “Did David do this to you?”

I met his eyes and didn’t answer. He shook his head, anger sparking in his eyes, and deliberately looked away.

“Fine,” he said. “But you can’t let him feed off you like this. He’ll kill both of you.”

“I know.”

“I’m serious. You need to let him go. You need to break the bottle.”

“I know! Jonathan already made it clear, believe me.” I didn’t mention Rahel’s counterargument. I wasn’t sure I wanted him to know I hadn’t decided. “I’m fine, dammit. Don’t worry about me.”

He let go, reluctantly, and turned away to talk to the Ma’at, who were already signaling him impatiently for a confab.

That’s when I saw Jonathan standing at the fringes of the crowd, arms folded.

Jonathan himself, Master of the Djinn Universe, in the flesh. Commander in chief of one side of what might turn out to be a world-ending civil war.

He was disguised as a regular guy, dressed in black jeans and heavy boots and a brown leather jacket, ball cap pulled down low over his eyes. As with Ashan, the rain bent around him. I didn’t think anybody but me would notice; I doubted anybody but me could see him.

He was a hundred feet away, and there were dozens of people between us, but I felt the shock as his eyes locked onto me. I felt a burn inside, nothing comfortable, nothing like the connection I felt with David, or the purely heat-driven fizz between me and Lewis.

It was as if Jonathan owned me, the way I owned David. Was this how it felt for David? Invasive and sickening? As if his every breath depended on mine?

“I warned you,” Jonathan said, and the bill of that ball cap dipped just a fraction.

Time stopped. Raindrops froze into glittering silver threads around me.

I was in Jonathan’s world now.

He walked through the silent landscape, moving around statues of humans in his way, breaking rain into fragments against that invisible shield he carried with him.

“I can’t do what you want,” I said when he stopped just three steps away. My words sounded weirdly flat in the still, dead air. “If I let him go, he’ll come after you, and that’ll be the end, won’t it? The end of everything. You’re important. That’s what Rahel’s been trying to tell me from the first time I met you. You’re the key to everything. Without you—”

He cut me off by sticking an accusatory finger in my face. “I told you what would happen. I told you, Joanne. Is this a habit with you, courting death? Because it’s getting old. You’re carrying around a kid, you know. Could devote a little thought to that while you’re walking over the cliff and mooning about your undying love.”

“It’s not about me. It’s you. I can’t let David come after you, and he will if I break the bottle.”

“Dammit!” His flare of fury was scary. It evaporated rain in a pulsing circle for about fifty feet in every direction. I felt my skin take on an instant burn. “Are you always this stupid, or is it a special feature just for me? Break the damn bottle, Joanne!”

“No.”

“Not even to save yourself and the kid.”

“No.”

“Not even to save David.”

Because that’s what all this was about, I suddenly realized. Not the world, not the war, not me. David. His constant and pure devotion to David, who’d been his friend since the world was younger than I could even imagine.

Who’d died in his arms, as a human.

“Because I can save him,” Jonathan said. “I know how.”

“Yeah,” I said, and locked stares with him. “I know, too. You die, he lives. And where does that leave the rest of us?”

Galaxies in his eyes. A vast and endless power, but it wasn’t his own. He was a conduit. A window to something larger than any of us, Djinn or human.

“He takes my place,” Jonathan said. “He lives. You live. The baby lives. He’s strong enough to take Ashan. I’m too damn tired for this; I’ve been running the show for too long. I’ve made too many mistakes, and we need a fresh start.”

Oh, God. It wasn’t Ashan suddenly deciding to rebel on his own… Ashan had just picked up on something else: Jonathan’s weakness, if you could describe somebody like him as weak. He just didn’t want to go on anymore.

“No,” I said again. “You can’t do this. I’m sorry, but you’re just going to have to gut it out and stop Ashan and put everything back the way it was. I’m not helping you commit suicide by David.”

He looked at me for a long time, in that still silent place where time didn’t exist. And I felt something like a shiver run through the world.

He raised his head toward the sky for a second, listening, and then shook his head again.

“That your final answer?” he asked.

Something about his expression almost made me change my mind, but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t let his need and his despair drive the game. This was too important.

“That’s it,” I said. “I’m not letting David go.”

“You’ll kill him. And he’ll destroy you.”

“So be it. Now go do your job and get things done. The world’s more important than me and David, and dammit, it’s more important than your death wish!”

He hated me. I felt it, strong as acid poured in an open wound.

“All I have to do is kill you,” he said. It was barely a whisper. “You know that, right? You die, the baby dies, and I can still do exactly what I want. Everybody wins but you.”

For a breathless second I thought he was going to do it. I could feel the impulse firing in him, could see the way it would happen—his hands around my head, turning with shocking strength, my spine snapping with the crisp sound of crumpled paper. The work of less than a second.

I remembered Quinn, helpless on the ground, coughing up blood. Terror in his eyes, at the end. Jonathan hadn’t even hesitated.

“I know,” I said. “Butch up and do it, if you’re going to. Don’t keep me in suspense.”

He stared at me for a second, eyes wild and dark, and then smiled.

Smiled.

He reached out, pulled a fingertip slowly down the line of my cheek, and walked away. Hands in his pockets. Raindrops shattering in his wake.

And then time slammed back in a fevered rush, and the world moved.

He was gone.

And something was very, very, very wrong with me.

I cried out, wrapped my hands over my stomach, and felt the sudden emptiness inside. The spark was gone, the potential, the child that David had put inside of me.

I felt the last of the energy Jonathan had given me leak out. My vision went gray and blurry, and I felt my knees give way.

Falling.

Too much effort to breathe. Nothing left inside to live on. I was a black hole, empty and alone and dying in the rain.

David. I couldn’t even call him. And if he came, it would only be more death, faster death, no comfort and no love in it.

Warm arms scooped me up. Fingers slid from my arm down to clasp my limp hand, and as the world telescoped to a black pinpoint I felt a warm pulse of power go through my skin, my bones, my body. Hot as the sun, liquid and silky and rich.

It wasn’t enough.

My eyes were still open, and a little color swam out of the gray, but I couldn’t focus, couldn’t blink. Lewis was bent over me. He looked pale and desperate. He cupped my face in his hands, watching my eyes, and then ripped open my shirt and put his hands on my stomach, right where the worst of the emptiness hid itself.

That sensation came again, a slow and deliberate wave rippling through me to pool like hot molten gold somewhere just below my navel.

It drained away.

I was going, just… going.

“Oh no you don’t,” Lewis grated, and I felt him breathing into my open mouth, his life pouring into mine with such power and fury that the emptiness couldn’t keep up with it. That was David, that emptiness. That was how I would die, sucked into that darkness, and he’d still be trapped and alone, forever a creature driven by hunger and unable to stop feeding…

I didn’t want this to end in nightmare.

I couldn’t let it end that way.

I breathed.

Lewis was still bent over me, panting, shaking, and I saw the golden light still spilling out of his fingers into my stomach. A thick stream of life.

I knocked his hand away, and he leaned back and braced himself unsteadily on wet pavement. Head down. Gasping for air as if he’d been drowning.

I was almost sure he had been. I’d nearly taken him down with me.

“Dammit,” he said furiously. “What is it with you and dying, anyway? Can’t you get a new hobby?”

“Shut up.” I meant it to be defiant, but it came out a bare, shaken whisper. I curled on my side, pummeled by rain, chilled to the bone, but with a rich, golden warmth somewhere deep inside to sustain me. His gift, like Jonathan’s, but unlike Jonathan’s it was a human sort of power, and my body was already accepting it. Renewing itself.

I let my breath slide out in a sigh, staring at him, and saw Lewis’s narrow pupils expand into huge, black rings.

Felt the feedback begin to build between us.

The pulse beat faster, pulling me like the tide.

I closed my eyes and drifted up to the aetheric. It felt effortless and elegant and perfectly controlled.

“What happened?” Lewis asked.

“Jonathan,” I murmured. He kidnapped my child. I couldn’t say it out loud, couldn’t begin to explain all of what I’d realized while lying here in the rain, and certainly not to Lewis. “He’s not going to fight. Ashan’s going to win.”

Lewis sucked in a very sharp breath, as if he knew implications to that I couldn’t imagine. “That can’t happen.”

“Well, it’s going to happen, so you’d better make a plan.”

“Joanne, there is no plan for that.” He looked miserable, suddenly—tired, soaked to the bone, chilled. “If we lose Jonathan, we lose everything. He’s like the keystone in the arch. Take him away—”

“Everything collapses,” I finished, and slowly found the strength to sit up, then mutely extended my hand to him. He brought me to my feet. All my parts seemed to be working more or less correctly. “You told me to go. Where can I go that will be safe from that?”

His cold lips pressed against my forehead for a second. “Nowhere. Just—I don’t know. I’ll try to find him, talk to him. Meanwhile, just go home. Use what I gave you for defense only. Your body needs time to replenish itself.” His voice sounded rough and silken, and I tried to keep my breathing slow. Nothing I could do about my heartrate, which spiked like crazy. “Stay alive for me.”

“I’ll try,” I said. My own voice sounded about half an octave lower than normal.

I cleared my throat and opened my eyes to look at him. “Thank you.”

He half turned, then whipped back, grabbed me, and kissed me.

I mean, kissed me. This wasn’t some peck-on-the-cheek, let’s-be-friends gesture, this was hot and damp and desperate, and wow. After the first shocked instant I came to my senses and put hands on his chest to shove hard enough to break the suction and back him off a couple of steps.

We didn’t say anything. There really wasn’t anything we could say. He wasn’t going to apologize.

I wasn’t sure I wanted him to try. It was a kind of good-bye, and both of us knew it.

That, more than anything else, told me how near to the end of the world we were coming.

He walked over to the Ma’at and bent his head to listen to what Charles Ashworth had to say to him, which looked like plenty, most of it probably having to do with the inadvisability of getting involved with me. So I walked over to join them.

“Seeing as the lightning kind of trashed my ride, I need transportation,” I said. “Or at least the loan of a car.”

Ashworth, who probably had a fleet of them, frowned at me, then nodded to one of his flunkies, a crew-cut young woman dressed in a sharp-looking tailored suit and shoes I was almost certain were from Stuart Weitzman’s new fall collection.

I was surprised to see he was hiring the fashion-enabled. He didn’t really seem all that hip to me.

She tossed over a set of keys, looking grumpy. “Don’t dent it,” she said.

“I’m offended.” I scanned the undamaged cars in the lot. I was hoping for the honey of a BMW sport coupe parked near the street, but her ride turned out to be something else.

Oh, dear God.

Even considering the hell my life had descended to, I didn’t think I was really prepared, at this point in my life, to be driving a minivan.

Jonathan had left me for dead. That meant he probably wouldn’t be coming back at me, looking for revenge—at least, not for a while. And I didn’t get the sense that it was cruelty on his part… just an iron-hard kind of indifference.

I’d ceased to be useful to him for what mattered, and he wasn’t going to waste his time.

I climbed in the minivan, which was exactly the size of a small yacht, and started it up. Not a high-performance engine. I sat back in the captain’s chair and let cool air blow on my face and dripping hair for a minute while I tried hard not to think about what had happened on the roof.

I fished my cell phone out of my purse and speed-dialed Paul Giancarlo. He didn’t answer. I left a voice-mail, reporting John’s death in as much detail as I dared, and then put in a call to the Wardens Crisis Center and reported that they were officially short a regional officer. The girl on the other end—God, she sounded young—was curt and scared, and I wondered how many calls she’d already had like this. They were clearly in emergency mode already, because the disasters would be coming as storms and earthquakes and wildfires erupted, and there were no high-level, Djinn-armed Wardens to combat them. In fact, today might mark the beginning of the kind of disaster that hadn’t been seen on Earth since the Great Flood. These things built on each other, fed on the energy of each other.

“Dammit,” I whispered, and tossed the cell phone into the passenger seat. The fire department was winding up the emergency, although I was sure that the fire had gone out thanks to Lewis’s intervention and not the hose-and-ladder brigade.

Lewis and the Ma’at were convened in a group near the corner of the parking lot, having some kind of serious huddle. The building’s tenants milled around, looking lost and smoke-stained, a few sucking on oxygen masks, but all in all it was remarkably little destruction.

John was the only casualty.

I didn’t want to think about how close it had come on the roof to being two bodies instead of one. I turned my attention to my brand-new (borrowed) ride instead. The van was so clean it might have been a rental, except for a few lived-in touches like a custom CD holder on the driver’s side.

The mirror showed me an exhausted-looking drowned-rat woman, with dark circles under her eyes and lank, unattractive hair. I wasted a spark of power to dry my hair and clothes. I looked as though I could win a Morticia Addams look-alike contest, but, for once in my life, there were bigger issues than my personal vanity.

I grabbed a Modest Mouse CD from the selection on the visor. The van wasn’t exactly the signature style of Joanne Baldwin, Speed Freak, but at least it was wheels and it would get me back home. I desperately wanted to be home. Maybe David was an Ifrit, maybe my sister was by turns nuts and annoying, but at least it was… home.

It’s all going to be gone soon, something in me whispered. All this around you. The city, the people, the life you know. When Jonathan goes, everything goes. Are you ready for that? Are you ready to stand by and let it happen?

Jonathan was offering to die for David. I was aware that there was some core of stubborn jealousy in me, and that it wasn’t very honorable, but it was more than that holding me back from his solution to the problem. If I released David, if David went after Jonathan and killed him—and by Rahel’s assessment, that was almost certain to happen—then I lost David three times over. First, to being an Ifrit; second, to being the killer of his friend and brother. Last, to becoming what Jonathan was… and I didn’t think that left any room for me.

Well, it’s all about you, isn’t it?

No, it wasn’t, but I had a stake in it. And I couldn’t shake that off.

Jonathan had taken my Djinn-child. I’d thought that was just because he was a cruel bastard, but thinking back on it, maybe he’d just been trying to preserve something of David. Even something of me. He’d known that if I refused to give up David’s bottle, I’d die, and David would be lost to him.

Please, let her be with him. Existing, somehow. Not just…

Not just gone.

In the shelter of the minivan, where nobody could see it happen, I fell apart.

All the fury, all the fear, all the pain came out in sudden, wrenching sobs, in pounding on the steering wheel, in outright screams of rage. This wasn’t right, and it shouldn’t be this way—I hadn’t come this far just to see the world die around me. Or to let David slip into darkness.

Or to lose a child I barely knew.

There’s an answer, I told myself, hands pressing hard enough against my eyes to create white sparks, tears slicking my cheeks in cold sheets. There’s a goddamn answer to this, there has to be.

Lightning shivered overhead, raw and uncontrolled. It hit a transformer across the city and blew it into a blue-white shower of sparks. Several square blocks of lights went out, and overhead, the clouds swirled in from the ocean, carrying the smell of rain and the promise of worse.

I had to get home.

By the time I trudged up the steps to my apartment I was exhausted, stinky, smoke-stained, and dispirited. Now that I was full of borrowed power again, I could sense the incredible roiling of the aetheric, mirrored by the wild fury of the sky overhead. The rain was the least of what was coming. I wondered what Marvelous Marvin would be making of it. Probably churning out revised predictions and ordering Ella to make it happen—not that Ella could, at this stage. Things were far too chaotic for any one Warden to try to influence them.

With John Foster dead, and Ella’s loyalties questionable at best, it left this part of Florida lightly protected. The same was probably true up and down the Eastern seaboard. The Wardens were falling apart, and the Djinn didn’t care about the consequences. And the regular people, the ones the Wardens were sworn to protect? No clue what was coming.

At least I could protect Sarah. That was something, anyway.

I dug my key out of my purse, unlocked the front door, and walked into…

… a stranger’s apartment.

For a brief, surreal moment, I thought I really had walked into the wrong apartment, proving that urban legend that apartment keys work on every lock in the building… but then I recognized little, familiar things. The ding on the wall next to the TV—which was now plasma flat-screen, and the size of a small theater. The pictures on the coffee table of Mom, Sarah, an ancient one of our grandparents—although they were encased in new silver frames, all matching.

One of the rugs on the floor looked familiar. It even had a coffee stain on it from when I’d tripped one morning, half-asleep.

Apart from those touchstones, it was a whole new place.

I stood frozen in shock, eyes wide, and Sarah came bustling breathlessly around the corner, wiping her hands on a towel.

“There you are!” she cried, and threw her arms around me. Then immediately withdrew. “Ugh! You smell awful; where have you been?”

“In a fire,” I said absently. “What the hell… ?”

In typical Sarah fashion, she skipped right over that, whirled away and did an honest-to-God Mary Tyler Moore pirouette in the middle of the living room. “You like it? Tell me you like it!”

I stared at her, trying to work out what she was talking about. None of this was making sense. “Um—”

She beamed. “I had to do something to make up for the burden I’ve been on you. Honestly, you’ve been such a saint these past few days, and I’ve done nothing but mooch off of you.” She looked so bright and shiny, so thrilled. “Chrêtien finally came through with an alimony check; it showed up this morning—of course, the stupid bank won’t cash it, they have to hold it until it clears, but Eamon let me have the cash in the meantime. So I decided to give you a makeover!”

Makeover? I blinked. Not that I was unwilling to go be pampered somewhere, but in the middle of an approaching apocalypse probably wasn’t the best possible time…

Oh. She was talking about the furniture.

“Isn’t it gorgeous? Look, there’s a new sofa, and chairs, and the TV of course, Eamon helped pick that one out—” She grabbed my hand and pulled me through to the bedrooms. Threw open her door. “I got rid of that terrible French Provincial and went for a nice maple… You know, I’ve been watching those home improvement shows on BBC America, they have all the best ideas, don’t you think?

It’s just so much fun. Look, see how the maroon pillows complement the sponging on the wall…”

It was all dissolving into nonsense word balloons. Obviously, Sarah had gotten in money, and obviously, she’d been shopping. Her bedroom looked like a showroom in a furniture store, with gleaming, highly polished wood and a lace bedspread over some kind of silky throw. Every detail excruciatingly precise. She must have spent hours with a Feng Shui manual.

“Nice,” I said numbly. “Right, it’s great. Look, I just need to take a shower and lie down for a while…”

“Wait! I’m not done!”

She towed me next door.

My room was… gone. Gutted. There was a new bed, sleek black lacquer and inlaid mother-of-pearl on the headboard in geometric designs. The dumpy dresser was MIA, replaced by something that looked like a giant Chinese apothecary cabinet in the same black lacquer with brass accents. My knickknacks—not that there had been many—were gone, replaced by red temple dogs and jade goddesses.

Very elegant and expensive-looking.

I took it in slowly. My brain had handled too many shocks today. I wasn’t prepared for being the victim on the guerilla warfare version of Trading Spaces. I’d just been nearly killed twice, for God’s sake. I wasn’t ready for redecorating.

“Well?” Sarah asked anxiously. “I know the walls still look plain, but I thought later this week we could go to one of those home stores and get something to sponge-paint with in here—maybe metallic gold, what do you think? And some throw pillows. I didn’t get enough throw pillows.”

My eyes wandered to the bedside table.

It was gone.

Gone.

In its place was a black lacquer stand with one delicate-looking drawer instead of the two large ones I’d had before.

My paralysis broke. I yanked free of Sarah’s hold and lunged for the nightstand, pulled open the drawer and found the familiar collection of junk that tended to congregate in such places. Books. Magazines. A zippered cosmetic case I sincerely hoped she hadn’t opened.

A few things were missing. Some half-empty tubes of hand lotion, for instance.

Some out-of-date sale catalogs.

The case containing David’s bottle.

I turned and looked at her, and whatever was in my expression caused her to fall back a step.

“Where’s the padded case?” I asked.

“What?” She took another step back. I followed, well aware I must have looked dangerous and not caring at all.

“Sarah, I’m not going to ask you again. Where’s the padded case with the damn bottle in it?” I screamed it, lunged at her and shoved her back against the apothecary cabinet. Temple dogs and goddesses rattled nervously behind her.

Sarah’s eyes went wide with panic.

“Case… there’s a case still in there… ?”

“THE OTHER ONE!” I didn’t know I could yell that loudly. Even my own eardrums hurt.

Sarah looked entirely terrified. “Well, um… yes… there was another case… isn’t it in there? You had—um—empty bottles of lotion and stuff—and—did you want to keep them? Why would you want to keep them? Jo, I don’t understand! They weren’t special formulas or anything!”

I wanted to kill her. I found myself hyperventilating, saw spots, and let go before I could act on the impulse. Fought for control.

“Sarah,” I said with utter, merciless precision, “what did you do with the zippered case that was in the bedside table and had a bottle in it?”

She went pale as milk. “I don’t know. Is it important?”

“Yes!”

“Well, I—I—it should be in there, I thought I took everything out… maybe, um, maybe I left it in the old nightstand.”

I didn’t have time. “Where did you put the old furniture?”

She bit her lip. Her hands were twisting each other anxiously. “Um… the furniture guys hauled it off. I paid them extra to take everything to the dump.”

Any second now, I was going to lose control. I reeled unsteadily and ended up sitting on the edge of the bed. It gave with an ease and firmness that spoke of memory foam somewhere in the construction. Sarah had gone all out to make me happy. Except that she’d done the one thing guaranteed to destroy my life.

Maybe the life of every person on the planet, if I stretched things out to their logical conclusion.

I put my head down and forced myself to focus, to be still and calm.

“What did I do?” she asked in a meek, little-girl voice. “Jo, just tell me, what did I do?”

I couldn’t exactly explain that she’d just tossed away the love of my life in a garbage truck. Oh God, David… This was surreal, it was so ridiculous.

Sarah, of course, came to exactly the wrong conclusion. She clapped both hands over her mouth, tears forming in her eyes, and then ventured, “Oh God, Jo… Was it drugs? Are you on drugs? Did I throw away your stash?”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It came out as a kind of mad, despairing burst of sound, and I covered my face with my hands and stood there for a moment, shaking. Dragging in one gulp of air after another.

Sarah’s hand fell on my shoulder, warm but tentative.

“I screwed up,” she said. “I get it. I’m sorry. Look, I’ll do whatever I have to do to get it back for you. I’m sorry, believe me, I thought—we thought we were doing something good for you—”

Oh yeah, it was good. I had an apartment full of furniture I didn’t want, the Djinn were at war, Wardens were dying, and my boyfriend had gone out with the trash.

I stood up and walked to the closet.

“Jo? Where—where are you going?”

I didn’t even look back as I pulled out industrial-strength jeans and tossed my hiking boots onto the brand-new bed.

“We,” I corrected her. “We are going dump-diving. Get dressed.”

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a big-city dump at twilight, but it’s definitely an adventure. I’d come prepared for the worst—my trashed-out blue jeans, thick, long-sleeved tee, hiking boots, hair twisted up in a knot, face mask and gloves. Sarah wore brand-new jeans, a delicate pink top, and old tennis shoes. After some top-of-my-voice persuasion, she’d decided against the new, expensive footwear.

At least the rain had stopped. If it had been storming, I don’t think even I could have bullied her into it.

Armed with the name of the furniture company, we arrived at the dump an hour before closing, and tracked the delivery to a huge pit that was earmarked for furniture, appliances, and other large junk. Trucks were still arriving. As we pulled up in the minivan, a commercial truck backed up to the dropoff, sounded a beeping alarm, and tilted its bed slowly into the air.

An avalanche of twisted metal, old, splintered furniture, and busted TVs joined the mass grave.

Sarah was fidgeting before we’d parked the mommy-van. “Oh, my God! Jo, it smells out here!”

“Yes,” I said, and handed her a face mask and gloves. “You’re sure you left it in the drawer of the nightstand?”

“Yes, why?”

“Because otherwise we’re in the other pit. The one with the biodegradable garbage like rotten food and old diapers. And believe me, you’ll like this better.”

She shuddered, pinching her nose shut. “I’m dure.” She sounded like a wacky 1940s comedienne. “Thid id awful!”

“Yeah, no shit. Watch out for rats.”

“Rats?” she squeaked.

“Rats.” I’d had a friend once whose boss had sent her to the dump to retrieve legal papers from a trash bag. I decided not to tell Sarah about the scary cockroaches. “Take the flashlight. It may be dark down there.”

“Dark?” Sarah’s commitment to make things right was rapidly eroding and gaining qualifiers like so long as it’s convenient and so long as I don’t get my hands dirty.

I ignored her, popped the door, and got out. The newer arrivals seemed to be dumped toward the right-hand side, and I scanned the mass of crap to try to spot something familiar. It was like trying to identify pieces of your life after a tornado, the familiar pureed into rubbish. I gulped down a choking sense of panic and kept systematically looking. According to the map they’d given me, the furniture company had dumped in grid E-7. Of course, a map in a dump lacked landmarks, but since the cheerful, flannel-clad guy on duty had said they were currently dumping in E-12, I had a pretty good general range. I scanned junk, which all looked, well, the same, and finally caught a flash of white among all of the gray and brown.

I jumped down from the packed earth ledge into the pit, braced myself with one hand on the wall, and started carefully picking my way over the junk pile. It was dangerous. Sharp corners and nails and jagged metal. Glass. Broken mirrors.

The place was a tetanus shot waiting to happen.

Even though I was completely focused on the mission at hand, my eyes kept focusing on interesting bits of garbage. A broken, tiger-maple chest that looked antique. A massive, carved teak table that was magnificently in one piece and probably would be until the sun consumed the earth, as hard as teak was—I couldn’t believe somebody had actually moved it in the first place. It made me exhausted just looking at it.

I tripped over a big, dented brass pot and nearly fell into a steel cabinet, but managed to brace myself. I looked over my shoulder to make sure Sarah was okay.

She was picking her way slowly behind me, testing every step twice before putting her weight on anything, one hand always outstretched to catch herself.

The other held a flashlight in a death grip, not that she really needed it yet.

The face mask and cherry pink top made quite a fashion statement.

I climbed a small, slippery hill of appliances—somebody had thrown out a gigantic Maytag washer—and saw something that might have been the leg of a French Provincial nightstand. I reached for it and yanked; it was a slender, delicately curved leg, freshly broken off, with faded gilt on white.

Definitely from Sarah’s room. Or, okay, somebody else with the bad taste to have French Provincial bedroom furniture. But I doubted there’d be two of us contributing to the city dump on the same afternoon.

“It’s somewhere around here!” I yelled. She nodded breathlessly and climbed up to join me. She found the first piece of my bedroom suite—the headboard—and yelled in triumph as if she’d discovered King Tut’s tomb. I scrambled over to haul it to the side. Underneath was a broken drawer from my dresser. Empty.

We worked silently, panting, sweating, as night brushed closer and darker. Alarms sounded the everybody out, along with loudspeaker announcements. Floodlights snapped on, harsh and white, throwing everything into alien relief.

“We’ll never find it!” Sarah wailed. She straightened up, yanked down her mask, and wiped her streaming forehead with the back of her forearm. Dirt smudged her face in a circle around the mask, and her normally cute hair was plastered lankly around her skull. Her desire to please had ebbed into pure, disgusted exhaustion. “Dammit, Jo, just forget about it, would you? What was it, cocaine? Jesus! Bill me for it!”

I yanked a shattered television aside—yes, that was mine; I remembered it with a lurch of affection because I’d bought that crappy little thing with my own hard-earned money at a yard sale—and uncovered another dresser drawer. Blank, except for a coating of liner paper. I kicked it out of the way with unnecessary violence.

“It wasn’t cocaine, you idiot!” I yelled back, and felt my hands curling into fists at my sides. “Maybe that’s your lifestyle of the rich and blameless, but—”

“Hey! I’m hip-deep in garbage trying to help you, you know—”

“Excuse me, but you showed up begging me for help, if I remember! And all you’ve done is cost me money and fuck up my life!”

I didn’t mean to say that… exactly. But it was true. I watched Sarah’s flushed face drain of color and bit back an impulse to apologize.

“Fine,” she said, with unnatural control. “I thought I was doing something nice for you, Joanne. I took the little bit of money I got from my deadbeat bastard of an abusive husband and I spent it on you to make up for imposing on you. I’m sorry that it interfered with your stupid bottle collection!”

She turned and scrambled away, graceless and angry.

“Hey!” I yelled.

“Fuck off!” she yelled back, and kept going. “Find it yourself!”

Fine. Whatever. My back hurt, my head ached, I was sweaty and exhausted and I could hear—and feel—a black ugly mutter of thunder out to sea. The vultures were coming home to roost.

And I had to find David’s bottle. I just had to. It couldn’t end this way.

I uncovered the shattered shell of my dresser. It was too big to move. I cried for a little while, tears soaking into the gauze mask, and then grabbed hold and kicked the damn thing with my hiking boots until it splintered into pieces small enough to drag out of the way.

As the last one came free, I saw the nightstand, and it was all in one piece.

I gave a wordless, breathless yell, and hauled it out of the heap of junk it was buried in, leaned it against a rusted-out harvest gold washing machine, and slowly opened the drawer.

It was full of stuff. Old lotion bottles with half a handful left in each one.

My out-of-date sale catalogs.

A zippered bag full of foam cushioning.

I grabbed it, hugged it like a little girl reunited with her favorite stuffed animal, and unzipped it with shaking gloved fingers.

There was nothing inside.

Nothing.

I screamed, bit my lip, and forced myself to do things slowly. One piece at a time, taken out, examined, and tossed aside. Foam padding last.

It wasn’t there.

David’s bottle wasn’t fucking there.

In the dark, under the glare of the floodlights, I saw the cold green gleam of eyes out in the dark. Rats? Cats? They winked on and off in the shadows, too cautious to come near me, but too close for comfort.

One of those legendary giant cockroaches crawled out of the heap and began trundling like a shiny brown bus over heaps of metal.

The bottle wasn’t in the drawer, and it wasn’t in the bag where it was supposed to be. Night was falling. I couldn’t do this once the floodlights shut off, and tomorrow another layer of junk would arrive and bury any chance I had…

I had to do it. “David,” I said, and closed my eyes. “David, come to me. David, come to me. David, come to me.” Rule of three. Even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t refuse to obey that, not even as an Ifrit, so long as he was bound to a bottle. I had to know if the bottle was intact, at least. If David was still bound.

Out in the shadows, something moved. It was unsettlingly like that giant cockroach, the way it caught the floodlights in shiny angles and sharp points.

Skin like coal. Nothing human about it.

“David?” I whispered.

The Ifrit stood there, motionless. I got nothing from it. No sense of connection, no sense of it even existing beyond the evidence of my eyes.

If he’d come when I called, he was still bound to the bottle. Worst possible news. I felt tears burning in my eyes again. “God, no. David, I’m so sorry. I’m going to find you. There’s got to be a way to make this right, to make this—”

He moved. Quicker than a Djinn, scarier, he was touching-close in less time than it took my nerves to fire an impulse to scream. His black-clawed hands slashed through me and plunged into…

… into that golden reservoir of power that Lewis had given me.

Why? How? Ifrits couldn’t feed on humans, not even Wardens, they couldn’t…

He was. “No!” I screamed, and tried to back up. I tripped and went down, felt something slash my shoulder, took a sharp angle hard in the back. The impact stunned the breath out of me and made me go momentarily hazy.

He didn’t let go. When I opened my eyes he was crouched on top of me; black edges and angles, hunger and an absence of everything I knew as human, a Djinn emptied of all that made him part of the world…

And then, he flickered and became flesh, bone, blood, heartbeat, real. Djinn in human form. Copper-bright hair, burning eyes, skin like burnished gold.

“Oh, God,” he murmured, and staggered back from me, clothes forming around him—blue jeans, open flannel shirt, his olive drab coat. “I didn’t mean to—Jo—”

“Where are you?” It was all I could do to form the words; he’d taken so much energy from me that I felt oddly slow, as if there wasn’t enough current left in my cells to drive the process of life and thought again. “Tell me.”

He reached down and lifted me in his arms, buried his face in the curve of my neck. He felt blazing hot, powered by my stolen life. I felt his agonized scream shiver through me. I stilled him by clumsily putting a hand on his face. “David, tell me where you are.”

He was weeping. Weeping. Human tears from inhuman eyes, a kind of despair I’d never seen in him before, a trapped and hunted fury. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I told you to stop me, I told you—”

“Hey! Put her down!”

I blinked and saw the dump whirl around me as David turned, still holding me.

Sarah was standing about ten feet away, holding—what the hell was that? A frying pan? Yep, a huge iron skillet. It must have weighed twenty pounds. Her arms were trembling with the effort of keeping it held at threat level.

“I mean it!” she yelled, and took another step toward us. “Put my sister down right now or it’s batter up!”

“It’s okay,” I said, and felt the world start to gray out. I held on with an effort. “Sarah, no. This is David.”

She looked confused. Her knuckles whitened around the skillet.

“Boyfriend,” I managed.

“Oh.” She swallowed, dropped the skillet with a clang of metal, and scrubbed her fingers against her filthy blue jeans. “Um, sorry. But—Jo? Are you okay?”

“She fell,” David said. He sounded shaken. When I looked up at him I saw that he’d formed glasses, and his eyes were fading to human brown. He still looked way too gorgeous to be real, but maybe that was just my prejudice. “I’ll carry her out.”

“Sorry,” I whispered, and put my arms around his neck. His strength and warmth folded around me, sheltering and protecting. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

“I know.” He touched his lips to my hair, then my forehead. “I wish you didn’t. I wish I could make this—stop. If I didn’t love you, wasn’t part of you, I couldn’t do this to you…”

“David, tell me where you are!”

He tried to tell me. His mouth opened, but nothing came out. He shook his head in frustration and tightened his hold on me as he made his way over the mountains of sharp metal and broken furniture, heading for the metal steps back up to the parking lot.

“Please. No, wait—I need to get your bottle, we can’t just leave it here—David, I’m ordering you, tell me where it is!”

He brushed my lips with a kiss, something gentle and very sad. “It won’t work,” he said. “You’re not my master anymore.”

And that was when I realized that I didn’t feel the draw anymore—the connection of master to Djinn.

Somebody else had his bottle.

“Who—”

Overhead, black clouds rumbled. I felt a breeze ruffle my hair. David moved faster, effortlessly graceful. No longer trying to look all that human. I remembered how he’d been on the overpass, all that unnatural balance and weird, fey control. He took the metal steps two at a time.

Sarah was still struggling along in his wake.

David carried me to the minivan and put me in the passenger seat, one hand dragging warm down the curve of my cheek as he settled my head against the cushions. A flash of lightning lit him blue on one side while the floodlights washed him white on the other.

“Don’t look for me,” he said. “It’s better that you don’t. You’re not safe with me now.”

He kissed me. Baby-soft lips, damp and silken and hot. I tasted peaches and cinnamon and power.

When he tried to pull back, I held on, holding the kiss, deepening it, demanding. Drinking a little bit of my power back from him.

Enough to make me a Warden again, even though not much of one.

He faded and cooled as I did it, but not quite enough to slide back into Ifrit-state. But he would. As the power faded, he’d revert.

But for now, at least, we were balanced. The connection—and it was a different one than we’d had as master and Djinn—worked both ways.

“You didn’t have to answer when I called,” I said, and touched the side of his face, then tangled my hands in the soft strands of his hair. “If I’m not your master—”

“I’ll always be yours,” he interrupted. “Always. The bottle doesn’t matter.” His forehead pressed against mine, and his breath pulsed warm on my skin. “Don’t you understand that yet?”

Another flash of lightning blinded me. When I opened my eyes, my hands were empty, and David was gone. I didn’t cry. I felt too numbed and empty to cry.

Sarah lunged over the top of the metal steps from the junkpile, panting, flushed, thoroughly filthy. She grabbed the open door and looked inside, then met my eyes. Hers were anime-wide.

“Where’d he come from? Wait… where’d he go?”

I just shook my head. Sarah stared at me for a long, considered second, and then shut the door and climbed into the driver’s seat. The engine started with a roar, and she began piloting the Good Ship Minivan out of the dump.

“He’s a Djinn,” I said wearily, and leaned my head against the glass. “Magic’s real. I control the weather. He’s an immortal creature made out of fire, and he grants wishes. I was getting around to telling you.”

Silence. Sarah hit the brakes hard enough to jerk, and for a few long seconds we just sat there, idling, until the first fat drops of rain began pelting the van with hard, resonant thumps.

“Well,” she finally said, “at least he’s cute. Are you insane?”

I sighed. “Oh, I so wish I was.”

We drove home. I felt exhausted and sick and sore, and refused Sarah’s multiple offers of visits to the local emergency room or mental health center, no matter how rich, cute, and single the doctors might be. I showered away the dump under the new high-pressure massaging bath nozzle—not all of Sarah’s upgrades were objectionable—and crawled into my brand-new bed, too tired to wonder what I was going to do in the morning about all my various enemies, crises, and wars.

David was, at least, not buried under half a ton of garbage at the dump, or at least I didn’t think he was. That was about as much of a victory as I could aspire to for one day.

In retrospect, if I’d had half a brain in my head, I’d have never shut my eyes.