by Rachel Caine
David. The bottle. Jonathan couldn’t interfere. Those were the rules. I could only imagine how much he hated that, hated me for being in his way.
I tried to swallow, but his grip was too tight. I could barely choke out the words around the burning pain in my throat. “I can’t. You know as well as I do that if I let him go now—”
He knew. David would be beyond anyone’s control once I released him from the bottle. Jonathan might be able to help him, but first he’d have to catch him, and that might not be possible.
“Help me help him,” I whispered.
Oh, he didn’t like that idea, not at all. I’d never scored high on the list of Jonathan’s favorite people, for a lot of reasons—first, I was human, which was not a selling point; second, my relationship with David, and David’s tenacious commitment to me, had upset the long-standing order of Jonathan’s universe. And as Jonathan was, in Djinn terms, well-nigh as powerful as a god, that wasn’t really a good thing.
It was also very hard to mistake the fact that Jonathan cared for David. A lot.
In deep and eternal ways that stretched back to the days of their making. It didn’t make for a comfortable three-sided relationship.
“Help you?” he repeated. “Oh, I think I’ve helped you just about as much as you deserve, sweetheart. As in, you’re still breathing.”
“Not very well,” I croaked, and flailed a helpless hand toward my aching throat.
Which made his lips twitch in something that wasn’t quite a smile. He let go of me, but he didn’t step back. I slowly braced my hands on the railing and pushed myself back upright, careful to make no sudden movements—not that I could in any way hurt him, of course—and we ended up pressed together, chest to chest. He didn’t care about my personal space.
He stared at me from that very intimate distance. Seen close, those eyes were terrifying indeed… black, shot through with sparks like stars, galaxies burning and dying and being born. Once upon a time, far in the past, he’d been human and a Warden, with the three powers of Earth, Fire, and Weather… like those Lewis possessed these days. I didn’t know much about his human life, only his death; it had caused the Earth herself to wake and grieve. Jonathan had been made a Djinn by the force of that mourning. David, who’d been dragged along with him through those fires of creation, had come out sublimely powerful. Jonathan had come out a whole order of magnitude greater than that, perilously close to godhood.
He was losing that, to Ashan. How in the hell Ashan had the big brass ones to decide he could win in a toe-to-toe dogfight with Jonathan was beyond me, but the fact was, even if Jonathan kicked the crap out of him and all his Djinn followers, it was a war to make the Earth tremble. Nobody would be safe.
Nothing would be sacred.
Jonathan looked into me. It hurt, and I flinched and trembled and wanted desperately to hide in some dark corner, but there was no hiding from this. No defending against it, either. His hands came up and rested on my shoulders, slid up to cup my face between them with burning warmth. The heat of his skin on mine confused me, made me feel odd and disembodied. I wanted to pull away but I had nowhere to go, and besides, I wasn’t sure my body would even listen to any such command.
“Feeling weak?” he asked me, and bent closer. His eyes swallowed the world. “Feeling sick? A little off these days?”
My lips parted. He was very, very close. So close that if he’d been human, we’d have been engaged.
He turned my head to a slight angle, tilted his own, and put his lips next to my ear. “He’s killing you,” Jonathan whispered. “Can’t you feel it? It’s been going on for a while, a little at a time. He’s eating you from the inside. You don’t think that’s been killing him, too? Destroying him?”
I remembered all of the signs. The weakness. The clumsiness I felt when reaching for power. The gray indistinctness of the aetheric. The overwhelming drag when I tried to call the wind.
“Human power can’t sustain him anymore. He’ll suck you dry. He’s an Ifrit; never mind how he looks when he’s gorged himself on your energy. He can’t help it. He’ll kill you, and once he does that, even if I can get him back, he’ll be a wreck. He’ll recover, but it’ll take too fucking long.”
I felt tears burn hot in my eyes, break free, slide cold down my cheeks. He moved back just an inch, and turned my head again in those large, strong hands to look at me again. His thumbs smoothed the wetness from my skin.
“I don’t care about you,” he continued with soft intensity. “Make no mistake; I’ll rip you apart if I have to, if it comes down to a choice of you or him. But I can’t let him kill you. He’ll be useless to me.”
I flinched. He held me in place. “I don’t know how to fix this,” I said. “I swear, Jonathan. I don’t know!”
“Simple. Go home, get that fucking bottle, smash it, and survive the rest of your pathetic life like everybody else in the human world. You have to let him go. He’s already dead to you.”
“Liar,” I whispered.
And got an evil, beautiful smile in return. “Yeah? If I’m a liar, why can’t you save him now? Why couldn’t you save that sad bastard down there from falling to his death? All in a day’s work for a Warden like you, right? You don’t need me. Go on. Be a hero.”
He let go of me and stepped back, and it was like going from the baking heat of the desert to Antarctica. My body cried out for his warmth, as if he were a drug and I’d developed a lightning-fast addiction. Bastard. He’d done it deliberately.
David was a wonderful, lyric poet of a lover. Jonathan, if he’d ever stoop to anything so intimate with a human, would be a pirate, taking what he fancied and forcing his partner to want it too. All cruel, casual grace and absolute dominance.
I grabbed the rail on either side and sucked in deep, calming breaths. Jonathan folded his arms and watched me as the energy drained away. Spiraled out into the black hole of David’s need.
“Help me,” I said, and God, defeat tasted bitter as poison. “Show me how to stop this.”
“Say the magic word.”
“Please.”
“That’s not the one I was looking for, but I’ll take it.” He reached out and put his hand flat against my chest. Heat spilled into me, intrusive as a stranger’s hands, and I went rigid against the invasion. Not that it mattered. Jonathan could do anything he wanted.
But it was life he was giving me, and I didn’t have the strength to refuse it anyway.
Jonathan watched me surrender to him with those hidden, dark eyes, and gave me a tiny thin slice of a smile. It was almost human. Not kind, but human.
“All right. What I’ve done is create a reservoir of power inside of you. It won’t last long. You need to let him go or you’ll die.”
“If I do, how do you know you can stop him from coming after you?” Because David would be drawn to power, sure as a Demon.
“I can take care of myself,” he said offhandedly. “We’re done. Might want to hold on to something.”
He let his hand fall back to his side.
Behind me, power exploded. The flash burned through me like a shock wave, and wind came in its wake, raging and furious at being held back; it nearly knocked me over, and Jonathan reached out to steady me as my hair blew straight toward him, long and tattered as a battle flag. Through the waving curtain of my blowing hair, I saw Jonathan give me another very small, cynical smile.
And then he looked past me and I saw pain in his expression. He said something, but it wasn’t in human language; it was the bright and singing tongue of Djinn.
A prayer, a curse, a lament…
I sensed a black presence behind me in the air.
David was transforming into something terrible, something with cutting edges and hunger for a heart.
When I tried to turn around to see, Jonathan held me in place and shook his head. “Don’t look.”
It was bad enough seeing the devastation in his eyes. I was watching the end of a friendship that wasn’t supposed to
have an ending… something time itself was supposed to respect. I did this. No, we did this, David and I, together.
Love, I was starting to realize, was beautiful, but it was also ruthlessly selfish.
I touched Jonathan and felt fire, not flesh; it burned me with wild and intimate fury, but I didn’t let go. “Jonathan…”
“I have to go,” he said, and I heard that edge of grief in his voice again, liquid and molten with pain. “He’ll kill me if I stay here. Or worse. I’ll kill him. He’s too hungry right now. Remember what I said. You don’t have much time—just get it done.”
He let go of my arm and stepped back. My hair obscured my vision again, and I reached up to shove it out of the way as I whirled to see what he was looking at.
David was gone. In his place was a black, twisted shadow of a thing, angles and glittering edges and nothing remotely human to it. An Ifrit.
It touched down on the bridge’s surface and stalked toward us, fixed on power.
Fixed on Jonathan.
“No!” I screamed, and threw myself in David’s path, but he went through me as if I were smoke, lunged with diamond-bright claws outstretched…
And Jonathan vanished before they could touch him.
David misted out a few seconds later. Chasing after that bright, shining ghost.
I was alone.
Well, except for the onlookers who were suddenly coming to realize that something weird had happened. But not exactly what, or who was responsible.
The cops arrived. I was hustled off to stand beside a police cruiser. Nobody knew what to ask, because no one understood what had just happened; all I had to do was be just as clueless. Pretty easy, actually. I wasn’t faking the shock and trauma. The questions they tried to frame were just as vague as my answers, so in the end the cops just gave it up and accepted the whole thing as a suicide.
I wished I could see it that way, but I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t help but replay the terror in the Warden’s eyes as he’d reached out to me, or the scream that had ripped out of him when David let him go.
My fault.
I’d never even found out his name.
Eventually, the cops remanded me to the custody of Cherise, who had been standing at the barricades looking anxious and dumbstruck and more than a little freaked out for some time. She didn’t say a word. She grabbed my hand and towed me off toward the Mustang, this time pulled over to the breakdown lane, and got me well out of the way before turning on me.
“What the fuck was that?” she yelled over the resumed din of traffic, honking horns, and the wind. “Joanne! What in the hell did you think you were doing?”
I couldn’t answer. I didn’t have the strength. I just looked at her, walked around to the passenger side and got in the car. Cherise continued to berate me and pepper me with questions, which made no more sense than the ones the cops had managed to put together. I ignored her.
David was gone. I couldn’t feel him anymore. I shut my eyes and remembered that back in Las Vegas, when I’d held the bottle of another Djinn turned Ifrit, I hadn’t been able to sense any connection to her either… but she’d obeyed my commands. At least, the most important one.
Without opening my eyes, I whispered, “David. Get back in the bottle, now.”
I had no way of knowing if he had. Hopefully it would give Jonathan some space.
Maybe David would even recover a bit. Maybe, maybe, maybe… everything was so screwed up. I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes until I saw stars.
The warmth in me felt foreign, like artificial life support. Jonathan had warned me it wouldn’t last. How long did I have to find an answer, one that wouldn’t destroy David in the process?
Cherise was saying something about us being so fired; we were the better part of an hour overdue for the shoot, of course, not that I cared. I just wanted to go home. I felt the thrum of the engine as she started up the Mustang, but then she slammed it back into park and reached over and grabbed me by the shoulder.
I looked at her. She was the picture of astonishment, from her raised shaped eyebrows to the shiny, lip-glossed O of her mouth.
“What?” I asked.
For answer, she shoved me forward and put her hand on my naked back.
“Hey!”
“Joanne,” she said, and slapped me lightly there, several times. “Your burn. It’s gone.”
A parting gift from Jonathan. For completely different reasons than her subsequent declaration of a miracle, I found that more unbelievable than anything else.
I wanted to go home. Cherise flatly refused to turn the car around, since we were so close to our destination. “If I’m going to get my ass fired, I want them to do it to my face,” she said grimly, and hit the gas to power us around the fast-moving traffic and down the off-ramp.
The shoot was being staged in a used-car lot. Of course. Some sort of promo tie-in with the local junker dealership. Cherise shrieked the Mustang to a sliding stop in a convenient space and eyed the salespeople mistrustfully as they appeared like—well, like magic.
“Nobody touches my car,” she said to the Alpha Marketer, a big ex-football-type guy with a flattop haircut and that I’ll-make-you-a-great-deal gleam in his eye. He grinned and gave her the thumbs-up. “And save it, gorgeous, I’m not in the market.” Maybe not for a car, but her eyes skimmed him up and down, giving him the Male Blue Book rating. It must have come out a ka-ching, because Cherise came out with one of her famous smiles. “Watch it for me?”
“Absolutely,” he said, and handed her his card. “Anything you need, you come straight to me.”
She slipped it in her back pocket with a wink, and hustled me up to the cluster of people near the main building. I went, barely aware of moving. I just wanted to collapse in a heap and cry.
Marvelous Marvin was not in a good mood. He was pacing, face flushed under the pancake, snapping off orders to some poor intern who looked anemic, asexual, and on the verge of giving notice—or possibly expiring of an asthmatic fit. Marvin still had his makeup napkin tucked into his collar. It was not a humorous sight.
The camera crew was lolling around, looking happy as clams. As well they should be, at fifty bucks an hour or more each. One was catching a light nap in a portable chair with a sunshade.
“You!” Marvin bit off as he caught sight of us. “You are fired, get me? Fired! Both of you!”
I mustered up some sense of responsibility. “It’s not Cherise’s fault,” I said dully. No, it was my fault. I kept replaying the Warden’s fall, his impact on the concrete. He’d been young. Too young to die like that, caught in the middle of something he couldn’t understand.
“I wasn’t talking to her, and anyway, I don’t give a shit whose fault it was, you’re both fired! Look, I can get pretty girls twelve to a dollar out there on a beach; I don’t need you two with your prima donna attitudes…”
“Hold up,” said the director, who was watching a portable TV in the shadow of a minivan with the channel logo painted on the side. “Come here, Jo.”
I came. Cherise came with.
The director—Rob—pointed at the screen as he took a bite of his cheese sandwich.
“Is that you?” He looked up at me as his finger touched a tiny, foreshortened figure on the screen.
“Yeah, that’s her,” Cherise jumped in when I stayed quiet. On the screen, the Djinn didn’t show up—just us humans. The Warden on the railing fought for his life, flailing against the air. “God, Rob, she tried to save that guy. She really did.”
He turned his attention back to the footage. I closed my eyes when I saw the Warden’s feet slip off the railing for the fatal plunge, but not before I saw myself lunge forward. Didn’t seem like I’d reacted all that quickly, but there it was, in grainy news footage. It looked as if I’d been trying to grab his hands or something.
“Jesus,” Rob said quietly. “Joanne, I’m sorry. This is terrible.” He thought about it for a few seconds, then raised his voice. “Yo! Doug! Cha
nge of plans! Let’s get back to the station right now. Get on the phone to—what channel is this?—Channel Four—and get whatever raw footage they have. Feature story. Get Joanne and Cherise on camera with—who’s up?—yeah, Flint, and do the standup with them on the bridge, if you can. If not, studio. We need to get this now.”
Marvin had followed us. He ripped the makeup napkin theatrically out of his collar. “What are you talking about?” he thundered.
Rob glanced up at him, then back down at the screen. “Sorry, Marvin. I’m scrubbing the promo.”
“You can’t do that!”
Rob tapped his baseball cap. It was dark blue, and it said in big, white, embroidered letters, NEWS DIRECTOR. “I believe I can, actually.”
Marvin turned and stalked away, tossing the balled-up napkin at his intern, who fumbled it and had to chase it under a freshly polished Toyota.
“You want me to get into the Sunny Suit for the interview?” I asked bitterly.
Rob looked up and met my eyes. His were gray, sharply intelligent, and utterly calculating.
“From now on, you don’t wear the Sunny Suit. Somebody else does,” he said. “Maybe Marvin.”
In spite of everything—even the crushing uncertainty and grief of not knowing where David was, what was happening to him, the guilt and shock and horror—that made me smile.
Cherise cocked an eyebrow. “What about me?” she asked. Rob gave her a more guarded look. “I’m not fired, right? So, are you going to need me today?”
“Just for the interview, Cherise. But you’ll get the full appearance fee for the promo.”
She nodded soberly, took a long look at me, and reached behind Rob and took his navy blue windbreaker off the back of his chair to drape it around my shoulders.
I was shivering. Delayed shock. Outright fear.
I needed to get home.
The interview took hours.
By the time I staggered in, it was late afternoon, and I was absolutely exhausted. No sign of Sarah, which was lucky; the last thing I wanted to do was put up with my sister’s cheery enthusiasm about her new beau right now.
I shed purse and shoes and stripped off clothes as soon as I’d slammed the bedroom door shut, threw on my warmest and most comfortable bathrobe, and curled up on my bed, pillow in my lap.
