Windfall tww-4

by Rachel Caine

  I opened the bedside drawer and took David’s bottle from its case. It gleamed blue and solid and cold to the touch, but it was just a bottle, no sense of him in it or around it. I didn’t know if he was in there. Didn’t know if he was suffering. Didn’t know if he even remembered who I was.

  I took hold of it and thought about how easy it would be, really. A quick, hard swing at the wooden nightstand.

  I’d promised Jonathan that I’d set David free, but if I did that, it was like giving up hope. Giving up everything. I didn’t think Jonathan could save him, and while I might not be able to either, at least David wouldn’t get any worse inside the bottle. If I did set him free, he might complete the transformation to Ifrit. He’d almost certainly start preying on the most powerful source around—and that meant Jonathan.

  But most importantly, I might lose him for good this time.

  Jonathan’s artificial life support was still going strong. I had time left.

  I couldn’t do it. Not yet.

  I curled up with his bottle held close and cried until I fell into an exhausted gray twilight sleep.

  Dreaming.

  The mountaintop was familiar. I’d been here before… a small, flat space of empty rock, surrounded by the sky. Far below, canyons cut deep into the earth.

  Dry, for the moment, but I knew how fast they could fill and flood. Water was the most treacherous of the elements.

  I was sitting cross-legged, warmed by the sun, wearing something white and sheer that barely qualified as fabric, much less cover… ceremonial more than functional.

  There was no sound in my dream but the dull whispering rush of the wind. The breathing of the world.

  I felt a warm hand touch my hair and fingers sink deep into the soft mass. Where they touched, curls straightened and fell into silk-smooth order.

  “Don’t turn around,” David’s voice whispered in my ear. I shivered and felt him hot against my back, hard muscle and soft flesh. As real and honest and desirable as anything I’d ever known. “You have to be careful now, Jo. I can’t protect you—”

  “Just stay with me,” I said. “You can do that, can’t you? Just stay.”

  His hands moved down to my shoulders and bunched gauze-thin fabric, then slid it free to drift away from my skin. “If I do that, you’ll die.”

  “I’ll find a way.”

  His kiss burned hot on the side of my neck. “I know you’ll try. But you have to promise me that when the time comes, you’ll make the right choice. You’ll let go.”

  I had a nightmarishly slow vision of David’s hands opening, of the Warden sliding loose and falling to his death. Only this time it was me falling, screaming, reaching out.

  I was toppling over the edge of the mountain, toward the currents below.

  David grabbed me around the waist and held on.

  “Don’t let me hurt you,” he whispered, and his voice was shaking with strain, vulnerable with need. “Stop me. Please, Jo, you have to stop me, I can’t do it myself…”

  I looked down to where his arms were around me, his hands touching me.

  Black, twisted Ifrit hands. Angles and claws and hunger.

  “Please,” he whispered against my skin, and he sounded so desperate, so lost.

  “Please, Jo. Let me go.”

  “I can’t,” I said numbly.

  “Let me go or let me have what I need! I can’t—I can’t—” He exploded into a black, oily mist, howling, and was gone.

  I collapsed forward, the white gauze drifting over me in the relentless, murmuring wind, and screamed out loud, until I woke up.

  My sister was home. I could hear her moving around out there in the living room, humming something bright and happy. Probably something classical; Sarah always had been more cultured than I was, from the early days when she’d looked forward to piano lessons and I’d cut them to go chase baseballs out on the corner lot. I didn’t hear Eamon’s voice. I realized I was still holding David’s bottle in a death grip, in both hands, and put it back in the padded case in the nightstand.

  You promised, a little voice whispered in the back of my mind.

  I had. But I wasn’t ready.

  I closed the nightstand drawer, shuffled into the bathroom, and winced at the glare of the bright, unflattering Hollywood lighting. I looked like crap… swollen eyes and bedhead. I struggled through combing the tangles out, got my hair more or less straight, and decided to leave the eyes as is, except for a quick application of Visine. I tossed on a crop top and tight low-rise jeans (artfully, though not intentionally, bleached in a random pattern, thanks to an accident with the Clorox Fairy) and walked out barefooted into the rest of my world.

  Which was in surprisingly good order.

  Sarah was cooking. She had fresh, bright vegetables laid out on the kitchen counter and was whaling away with a gleaming oversized knife. Behind her, a pan simmered with a pool of oil. She looked up at me and froze in midaria, then forced a smile and went on with her chopping.

  “Hey,” I said, and sat at the kitchen table, staring at my hands.

  “Hey, yourself.” She did something in my peripheral vision, and then a glass of wine appeared on the table in front of me. White wine, silvering the outside of the glass with chill. “Will that help?”

  “Help what?” I sipped the wine. It was good, light and fruity with a kick at the end. Dry finish.

  “Whatever the problem is.”

  I sighed. “It’s more of a rotgut-whiskey-out-of-a-paper-bag problem than a fine pinot grigio problem.”

  “Oh.” She retreated to her vegetables again. “You’ve been dead to the world all day, you know. Eamon’s coming over for dinner; I hope that’s all right. I was hoping your, ah, friend could join us. David. The musician.”

  Oh, God, it hurt. I took another gulp of wine to dull the knife-sharp pain.

  “He’s touring.”

  “Oh. Too bad.” She shrugged and kept on with food prep. “Well, there’s plenty. I’m making chicken primavera. I hope you like it.”

  As I had no opinion, I didn’t answer, just sipped wine and stared out the patio doors. The ocean rolled in from the horizon, and it was a beautiful twilight out there. We didn’t face the sunset, but the faint orange tinge was in the air and reflected off the sheer, glassy points of the waves. The sky had turned a rich, endless blue, edging toward black.

  I’d been asleep a while, but it felt as if I hadn’t rested in days. Everything felt sharp and fragile and not quite right.

  I let it fade into white noise as Sarah scraped meticulously dismembered vegetables from cutting board to bowl. She left the veggies and checked a stock pot on the stove, which sent out an aroma of chicken and herbs when she lifted the lid. I didn’t remember owning a stock pot. It looked new. Like the gleaming chef-quality knives. I couldn’t remember if I’d gotten my credit card back. That worried me, in a distant sort of otherworldly way.

  She kept talking about my neighbors, whom I guess she’d spent the morning chatting up. I failed to follow, but it didn’t really matter; she was babbling with an edge of nervousness, the standard Sarah tactic when she was trying not to think about something else. I remembered her doing this in high school, getting ready for dates with Really Cute Boys. She was nervous about Eamon.

  “… don’t you think?” she finished, and began draining the chicken. She saved the stock, I noticed. The better to boil the pasta.

  “Absolutely,” I said. I had no idea what the question was, but she beamed happily at the answer.

  “I thought so. Hey, give me a hand with this, would you?” She was struggling with the weight of the stock pot. I got up and grabbed one of the side handles, and a hot pad—those were new, too—and helped out. She flashed me a grin that faded when I didn’t grin back. We drained the chicken in silence. The stock pot, refurnished with broth, went back on the burner and got a new load of pasta.

  Sarah dumped chicken and veggies into the oil-prepped pan to sauté.

  “Is it David?
” she asked as she expertly stirred and adjusted the heat. I blinked and looked at her. “Did you have a fight?”

  “No.” There was no easy answer. She took it for the avoidance it was and concentrated on her cooking.

  I’d turned off the phone before collapsing on the bed this afternoon; I wandered over to the wireless base and saw that there were messages. I picked up the cordless and punched buttons.

  “Would you like to own your own home? Rates today are…” Erase.

  “Hot singles are looking for you!” Erase.

  A brief moment of silence, and then the recording said, “Be on your balcony in thirty seconds. I’ll be waiting.”

  I knew the rich, ever-so-slightly inhuman female voice. And that wasn’t a recording. Not exactly.

  I put the phone down, walked over to the plate-glass window and looked out. No one out there. But I knew better than to think I could avoid this, even if I wanted to; the Djinn Rahel wasn’t the kind of girl you could avoid for long. I opened the sliding glass door and stepped out into the cooling breeze. As I rumbled the door shut again, I felt… something. A little stirring inside, a slight chill on the back of my neck.

  When I turned around, Rahel was seated at my wrought-iron café table, legs crossed, inspecting her taloned fingernails. They were bright gold. The pantsuit she was wearing matched, and under it she wore a purple shirt the color of old royalty. Her skin gleamed dark and sleek in the failing light, and as she turned her head to look at me I saw the hawk-bright flash of her golden eyes.

  “Snow White,” she greeted me, and clicked her fingernails together lightly. They made a metallic chime. “Miss me?”

  I sat down in the other delicate little café chair and folded my hands on the warm wrought iron table. “Like the bubonic plague.”

  She folded a graceful, deadly hand over where her heart would be if she’d actually had one. “I’m devastated. My happiness is shattered.”

  “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

  “Ah, is it one?”

  “Just say whatever you’ve come to say.” I said it in a flat tone, tired of the banter already and just wanting to crawl back in bed and avoid reality for another few hours. Avoid the choice I knew I had to make. Which wasn’t even really a choice.

  Rahel leaned forward and rested her elbows on the wrought iron. Those alien, bird-bright eyes studied me without any trace of mercy or humor.

  “You’re dying,” she said. “Broken inside. I see that Jonathan has given you time, but you’d best not waste it, sistah. Things are happening too quickly.”

  “David’s an Ifrit,” I said suddenly. I remembered seeing it happen to Rahel—who, so far as I knew, was the first Djinn to ever recover from it. And she’d done it by sapping the power of the second-most-powerful Djinn in the world… David … and by a unique confluence of events that included human death and intervention by the Ma’at in an extraordinary cooperation of human and Djinn.

  “I need the Ma’at,” I said. “I need them to fix David.”

  Rahel was regarding me with those steady, predatory eyes. In the dying daylight, they looked surreally brilliant, powered by something other than reflected energy. She drummed her long, sharp fingernails on iron, and the chime woke a shiver up and down my spine.

  “The Ma’at won’t come. The Free Djinn have affairs of their own to attend to, and even if we did come, we would not be enough. David is too powerful. He’d drain the life from all of us, and it would accomplish nothing.”

  “Jonathan wants me to—”

  She held up her hand. “I don’t care what Jonathan wants.”

  This was new. And unsettling. Rahel had always been fanatically in the Jonathan camp; I understood there were cults of personality within the Djinn world, if not outright political parties, but I’d never thought of her as changeable in her allegiances. She was for Jonathan. Period.

  She continued, “If you let David free now, he will hunt, and he will destroy. I was dangerous, when I was an Ifrit. He will be deadly, and if he goes after Jonathan, Jonathan will not act to stop him as he should. Do you understand?”

  I did, I thought. I’d felt the voracious hunger in David, the need to survive. I knew he’d have died rather than even consider feeding on Jonathan, in saner days, but what was happening to him had no relation to sanity. Not as I understood it.

  “If you keep him in the bottle, he’ll drain you dry,” Rahel whispered softly. “But it will end there. He will be trapped in the glass.”

  “But he’s not draining me now!”

  She merely looked at me for so long I felt a sick gravitational shift inside my stomach.

  “He is?”

  “Ifrits can feed on humans,” she said. “But only on Wardens. And there is something within you that is not human that attracts him as well.”

  The baby. Oh, God, the baby.

  “You want me to voluntarily let him kill me,” I said. “Me and the baby. To save Jonathan.”

  “You must,” Rahel said. “You know what’s happening; you feel it already. Djinn are fighting. Killing. Dying. Madness is taking us, and there will be no safety without Jonathan. No sanity in anything, including the human world. Do you understand this?”

  I shook my head. Not so much from ignorance as exhaustion. “You’re asking me to sacrifice my life and my child. Don’t you understand what that does to him if he’s left standing after that?”

  “Yes. Even so, even if it destroys him forever, it must be so. There has not been a war among the Djinn for thousands of years, but this—it’s coming. We can’t stop it. Some want to pull away from humans, from the world. Some want to stay. Some feel it is our duty, however distasteful, to save humanity from itself.”

  “Gee,” I said. “Don’t put yourselves out.”

  She gave me a cool look. “There have been blows exchanged that cannot be taken back. I fear for us. And you. This is darkness, my friend. And I never thought I would see it again.”

  “Jonathan knows that if I don’t break the bottle, there’s no bringing David back.”

  Rahel didn’t answer, exactly. She etched sharp lines into the metal of the table, eyes hooded and unreadable. “He thinks he knows the outcome of things,” she said. “I think he sees what he wishes to see. He believes he can master David, even as an Ifrit. I don’t believe he can. But as much as he wishes to save David, he is thinking of your child, as well. He wishes to save all of you, if he can.”

  “And you don’t. You want us to die for the sake of damage control. What am I supposed to say to that, Rahel?”

  Rahel opened her elegantly glossed lips to reply, but before she could I felt a sudden hard surge of power up on the aetheric, and a male voice from behind me said, “I can solve all of your problems. Give David to me.”

  Ashan. Tall, broad-shouldered, a sharp face that tended toward the brutal even while it was elegantly sculpted. He was a study in grays… silvered hair, a gray suit, a teal-colored tie that matched his eyes. Rahel’s fashion sense was neon-bright; he was like moonlight to her sun. Cold and contained and rigid, and nothing of humanity about him at all, despite appearances.

  Rahel threw back her chair in a shriek of metal on concrete and hissed at him, eyes flaring gold. Ashan just stared at her. He looked breathtakingly violent, one second from murder, even though all he did was stand there.

  I was looking at the embodiment of the war Rahel had been talking about, and I was the chosen battleground.

  “Still campaigning for your master?” he asked. Not directed at me; I didn’t matter to him at all. I was human, expendable meat. “Time’s up, Rahel. Are you staying with him? The old guard’s changing. You don’t want to be stupid about this. I’ve got a place for you at my side.”

  She didn’t answer. Didn’t need to. Her defensive crouch was answer enough.

  “It’s a small army you’ve put together,” Ashan said. “Small, and weak. You stink of humans, Rahel. Don’t you want to wash yourself clean of them? Them and all of the filt
h that we’ve wallowed in these thousands of years while Jonathan watched his plans rot and die?”

  “I’m clean enough,” she said, “and I don’t answer to you.”

  “Not yet,” he agreed, and turned those eerie eyes on me. “I don’t know why Jonathan hasn’t killed you, human, but if you get in my way, I won’t hesitate. You know that.”

  I dug my fingernails into my palms and slowly nodded.

  “Now be a good girl and go get the bottle for me,” he said. “I want David. Now.”

  Interlude

  As the storm nears its first brush with land, it’s almost unrecognizable from the soft, pale breeze born off the coast of Africa. It stretches hundreds of miles across, thickly armored in electric gray arcs of clouds. It carries inside of it the energy of the sun, stored in the form of tightly packed moisture that continues to rise and fall, condense and shred, and every transfer bleeds more fury into the system.

  Dangerous, but not lethal. When it breaks, it will dump torrential rains and heavy winds, but it’s still just a storm.

  But as it nears the first of several islands in its way, a one-in-a-billion confluence of events comes together, as an ocean current winding its way north to south is warmed by just the right angle of the sun. Its temperature rises by four degrees.

  Just four.

  Just at the right time.

  The storm passes over the current, and bumps into the sudden warm wall of rising moisture. Something alchemical happens, deep within the clouds; a certain critical mass of moisture and temperature and energy, and the storm begins its relentless suicidal course.

  The last small variable in the equation is a random brisk wind spinning off the Cape. It collides with the storm’s far perimeter and slides along, and because it is cooler it drags the storm with it.

  The storm begins to turn. The storm has rotation. It has mass. It has a gigantic energy source, self-sustaining. It has taken a huge leap, grown explosively and deepened in its menace, and it is no longer a child.