Windfall

Interlude

I’m still sitting on the beach when the storm makes landfall. It closes around me like a black fist, trying to crush me as it’s crushing the things born of man all around me—boats shattered into splinters, buildings ripped from foundations, metal twisted and bones crushed.

It can’t touch me.

I stand up and walk into the storm surge; it foams around my feet, then my knees, then my thighs… not that I have any of those things, really, they’re just markers, symbols of what I am. Or was.

I stand in the storm and I listen to it, because it’s talking. Not talking in mathematics and physics, the way the Wardens measure things, but in symbols and poetry and the music of a broken heart. It’s the mourning of the Earth, this storm. It’s the scream of a wounded creature that can’t heal.

It’s part of me.

As I’m standing there, listening, I feel David’s presence slide into the world next to me, and a complex web of energy clicks together. Fulfilling me, and finishing me.

He says, “I don’t want it to be this way. Jonathan, please, don’t let it be this way.”

“I don’t have a choice,” I tell him, and turn to look at him. She’s done him damage, his human girl. Not really human anymore, although I guess she doesn’t know that. David’s barely Djinn anymore, sliding on that fragile slope back into the dark.

“You have to stop this,” he says. He’s talking about the storm, of course. But he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.

I shrug. “I already stopped it once. Look how that turned out.” In the distance, I can feel Ashan and the others waiting, hearing the song of the storm, responding to its call. They’re coming for me, and together they’re strong enough to take me. I know Rahel is coming, and Alice, and dozens more, and if they get here in time it’ll be a pitched battle and the world will bleed. Not be destroyed, because the Earth is tougher than that, older, harder. But everything on it is, in one way or another, fragile.

Life is fragile.

David’s eyes are flickering copper, then black, then copper, then black. He is trying desperately to hang on.

“Jonathan, don’t do this. You don’t have to do this.”

“I do,” I say, “because I love you, brother.”

And I turn and walk into the storm.

I feel him change, behind me, and even over the burning wail of the storm I hear his scream of mortal agony as he changes, as he loses control of who and what he is.

This is how it has to be, I think, just before the Ifrit sinks its talons into my back.

And it hurts just about as much as I expected it to.