by Rachel Caine
Until she was willing to settle for that kind of existence, just to stay with him?
No. No, no, no, never, and David wouldn’t stand for it.
“Rahel!” I screamed it at the top of my lungs. “Rahel, where the hell are you? Get your ass back here, I need you now!”
A flash of lightning illuminated the beach, a long blue-white streak that raced across the sky and shattered into forks that stretched across half the horizon.
Spectacular.
Those clouds hugging the ocean looked larger.
In the next hyperactinic flash, I saw someone coming out of the water. Tall, perfect carriage, dark skin glistening with water drops. Rahel was as magnificent as a sea goddess, and her eyes were burning so brightly they were like suns.
She came out of the curl of a wave and collapsed to her hands and knees on wet sand. Her body was solid to the knees, swirling fog below. Barely coherent. She looked like shit—beaten, exhausted, ripped, and bloodied. The blood was metaphorical for her. She hadn’t become human; she’d just become unable to repair damage to a physical avatar.
Rahel hadn’t flounced off in a fit of pique and stayed away deliberately; she’d probably meant to come back and help. But the dramatic gesture got interrupted along the way by a serious fight. The kind you came out of injured, or dead.
Rahel was as tough as any of the Djinn. She’d lose in a dogfight with Ashan, Jonathan, or David, but she should have held her own against anyone else. Unless … unless it was Ashan she’d gone up against.
Or Jonathan.
Either way, not good news right now.
I crawled toward her. She looked up, expression turning hard, and I stopped.
“They’re coming,” she said. “I couldn’t hold them back. Be ready.”
“Who?”
Too late to matter. I could sense it coming in the real world, in the aetheric, even blinded and weak as I was. A gigantic disturbance, headed this way.
Out in the darkness, I saw shapes moving. Indistinct, but definite.
“Joanne Baldwin,” one of them said. “Stand up.”
Sounded human. With a gigantic effort—and I wasn’t sure how many more of those I could even stand to attempt—I went up into Oversight and saw at least ten flares of power gathering around me and Rahel. Wardens. Holy shit. How many had Paul sent to put me into custody? How hard did he really think I could fight?
“They don’t want you,” Rahel said. “They’re after him. Lewis.”
On the grand, sliding scale of things, that wasn’t the best news I’d ever heard.
“Who am I talking to?” I asked hoarsely, and managed to get to my feet. Ow. Ow ow ow. I wanted to dance around in pain, but stillness was required right now.
Stillness, and a really good poker face.
Someone summoned fire, a brilliant orange bonfire that hovered over her palm. In its reflected light I saw Shirl. Goth black, sloppily cut hair, too many piercings in awkward places. Tattoos crawling her bare arms. She didn’t look any happier to see me now than she had driving along the coast to accuse me of weather-related murder.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked her.
“None of your business,” Shirl snapped back. “You’re not even a Warden anymore. Stay out of it.”
Rahel wasn’t getting up to her feet, but she pulled into a crouch next to me.
Intimidating. I approved. From the uneasy glance Shirl gave her, it worked.
“By order of the Wardens, I’m here to take Lewis Levander Orwell into custody,”
Shirl said. “And you need to get the hell out of the way, Joanne. You’re on shaky enough ground as it is. You really don’t want to give us more reason to come after you, too.”
Which might have been meant to be funny, considering the sandpit I’d been trapped in. If so, Shirl’s sense of humor needed work. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. “Lewis isn’t here. You’re going to want to move along, guys. I’m here with a cop, and he’s kind of grumpy, if you know what I mean. So, unless you want to do your intimidating from the inside of a jail—”
She threw the fire at me. I mean, fastball-speed. It hissed past my face and out into the ocean, where it impacted a building wave and instantly vaporized the top half into superheated steam. “I’m not playing with you, bitch,” Shirl said. “That’s where everybody else goes wrong. They let you talk. You have one chance to tell me where he is, or I swear the next one burns right through your stomach.”
My plan to scare her into leaving wasn’t going quite as well as I’d hoped.
“I want to talk to Marion,” I said, and was surprised my voice stayed steady.
“Denied. Marion’s busy.” Shirl sounded way too smug about that. Marion was probably under house arrest after protesting too much, or flat-out refusing the order. “Last chance. Produce Lewis, or we’ll go through you.”
“Then let me talk to Paul!”
Her smile was utterly sinister. “Talk all you want. Paul’s irrelevant. We’re on the front lines out here, and we’re going to defend ourselves, with or without permission.”
“Defend yourselves against what?”
She must have remembered that she didn’t want to talk, because her arm drew back, and plasma burned toward me. I dodged. It followed. Not as fast as the previous pitch, but then, I didn’t think she meant it to be; she was playing with me. The plasma moved in mirror jerks with me, tagging me and cutting me off at every turn. I was tired and weak and clumsy with pain, and when I finally overbalanced on the soft sand and fell backward, the burning, incandescent globe dipped toward me and hovered just inches above my heaving chest. Hot enough to give me third-degree burns and make my jog bra start to char.
I dug my fingers into the sand and grabbed handfuls, trying to resist the sick urge to destroy David to save my own life.
Rahel lunged forward with a snarl, reached out with one taloned hand, and batted the fireball away. Right back at Shirl, who ducked. It hit someone else, who screamed in high-voiced agony, and Shirl turned to put out the resulting fiery chaos. Rahel grabbed my arm.
“Run,” she ordered roughly. “They’ll kill you. They’ve already killed others.”
She launched herself up in a graceful, feline leap and landed on Shirl, who screamed. Fire erupted. I saw Rahel’s neon yellow clothes burst into flame.
I flipped over and crawled to the hole. I felt the sand under my knees shift. Oh God. Lewis was losing it. The tunnel was collapsing. Sand was falling in on them.
There was nothing I could do.
Another flash of lightning streaked overhead, reflecting white on waves, showing a freeze-frame of the other Wardens converging around Shirl and Rahel. Rahel was going to lose. She didn’t have the wattage necessary to stop all of them, not alone, not as a Free-range Djinn.
“Hey!” A deep-voiced yell from a couple of sand dunes over. “What’s going on over there? You kids stop that!”
“Help!” I screamed. “Get help!”
The pompous jerk—and I was never so happy to hear one in my life—sounded even more self-righteous. And a little alarmed. “I tell you, I’m calling the cops! You clear out of here while you’ve still got the chance!”
“Yes, you idiot, call the cops! And the paramedics! Help!”
I was dimly aware of Detective Rodriguez racing back along the beach, some kind of rope slung over his shoulder, but I felt it in my bones, it was too late. All too late.
Rahel and Shirl were a bonfire rolling on the sand. Fire and blood and fury.
The sand heaved and collapsed in on itself, dropping me suddenly a good five feet. I slid down an instantly made dune.
The cave had collapsed.
Lewis was dying down there. “No!” I screamed, and started digging. It was useless. It’d take hours to move all this sand; no way they could survive down there.
I only had one option. Just one.
“David!” I yelled. “David, I need you!”
I felt the connec
tion snap taut between us. Waiting for the command. One precious heartbeat went by. Two.
“David—”
Rodriguez skidded to a stop next to me and slapped the rope down on the sand.
“Where’s the hole?”
“Collapsed,” I gasped. “Oh, God—David, get them out, get Lewis and Kevin out of there—”
I felt the draw of power dig deep into me, sucking out what little I had left, and the pull was agonizing. I moaned and wrapped my arms around my stomach. It felt as if my guts might literally be ripped out and dragged through the sand like some biological lifeline.
Rodriguez abandoned the effort at rescue and turned toward the Wardens, and the struggle. His gun came out of its holster under his hooded jacket.
“Police,” he yelled. “Everybody freeze now.”
Most of them did, realizing that they weren’t exactly operating undercover;
Rahel vanished in a wisp of smoke, and Shirl was left lying on the sand, whimpering. Alive, but battered and scorched. One of the other Wardens knelt down next to her and put a hand on her arm to still her—Earth Warden, I had no doubt. I felt the surge go through the aetheric as he pumped healing power into her body.
The connection between me and David stretched thinner, thinner, cutting like razor wire. I held back a cry, squeezed my eyes shut and ratcheted in wet, painful breaths.
“Did you get them?” I whispered.
I felt something hum along the connection, something powerful and intense.
Affirmation and love, condensed emotion that was too deep and powerful to grasp all at once. As if he’d sent me everything he felt in a frantic, desperate burst, like a submarine going down and transmitting one last, despairing SOS as it went into the dark.
A hand broke out of the sand on the beach, clawed and flailing. I yelled wordlessly and grabbed for it, dragged until my muscles popped.
Lewis slid free of the clinging sand. His face broke the surface with a gasp, and he started coughing, choking, spitting.
He was holding on to Kevin. As soon as he was free I let go of him and lunged forward to grab Kevin’s wrist as Lewis hauled. The boy’s arm slowly slid free, then the curve of his shoulder. Sand fell in a thick cascade from his bent head.
He didn’t gasp for breath, because he wasn’t breathing.
I choked back a curse and got behind him, grabbed him under the armpits, and pulled like a stevedore, every muscle in my body straining. He finally pulled free. Sand clotted thickly around the open wound on his side, but it wasn’t gushing blood anymore. I wasn’t sure if that was good news, or just the worst possible news. Because you don’t bleed when you’re dead; you leak.
In the white-hot light of another lightning strike I saw that Kevin’s eyes were shut, his face still.
He definitely wasn’t breathing.
Lewis joined me in pulling, and we put the boy down on his back. I bent over him and put my ear to his mouth and nose, listening.
Nothing. Not a single whisper.
“You’re not dying on me, you jerk,” I told him, and pulled down on his chin to open his mouth. When I fitted my lips over his, I tasted grit and fear. I breathed into him. I didn’t have anything left in the way of power, or I’d have superoxygenated his lungs, but simple human methods were all I had left.
I pressed my ear to his chest and heard a faint, fluttering heartbeat.
Breathed for him again. Waited. Breathed. Waited. Saw stars and felt like I might pass out from the exertion.
I felt his chest suddenly convulse under my hand and grab in a breath on its own.
“Dammit!” Lewis rasped, and I looked up to see that the wound in Kevin’s side had begun pumping out blood in high-velocity jets. I clamped my hands down on it. Lewis put his hands over mine, and I felt the power cascade in. Hot and burning and pure as liquid gold… and not enough. Not for an injury of this magnitude.
“I need another healer!” I yelled at the knot of people standing with their hands up, under Rodriguez’s attention. “One of you, get over here! Now!”
None of them moved. None of them. I looked up, desperate, and in the next flash of lightning I saw something terrible on their faces. My friends and colleagues, my fellow guardians of the human race.
They just didn’t give a crap.
Two forms appeared out of the darkness next to me. David, his long coat swirling in the ocean wind, his eyes blazing. Face pale and focused, as if he were holding to this form with his last strength.
Rahel, battered and ragged and bloody, limping. Holding David’s shoulder for support.
“Help me,” I said.
David collapsed to his knees opposite me, on the other side of Kevin’s limp form, and put his hand over mine. His skin was burning hot, enough to make me wince, and his eyes met mine for a long second.
He smiled. It was a terribly weary smile, sweet and defeated and full of indescribable pain.
“Don’t forget me,” David said, and I felt the spark travel through his hand, into mine, into Lewis. Everything he had left. Everything he’d taken from Ashan, and from me. A needle-bright surge of pure healing power, drawn not from me but from that last, tightly defended core of what made David who he was.
Like the spark of life he’d put inside of me, our child, formed of the union of our power.
I heard Rahel’s protest rip the night in half, a high, wailing shriek like the grieving of angels.
The wound in Kevin’s side stopped bleeding.
David distorted, blackened, turned Ifrit. Rahel, closest to him, stumbled backward as the creature’s blunt, razor-angled face turned toward her, like a lion scenting prey. She was too weak. He’d destroy her.
As if he knew that—could he know that?—he whirled and lunged for a Djinn barely visible as mist in the darkness. One of the Wardens’ personal stash. It gave out a high, thin shriek of panic as the Ifrit latched on and began to feed.
Rahel, reprieved, lost no time in vanishing.
I moved my hand, carefully. No spurting blood, though I was pretty much soaking in it. There was a massive open wound, and it would make a huge scar that would be a great conversation starter from now on, but Kevin wasn’t in danger of dying.
At least, not from that.
The Wardens weren’t reacting to the Ifrit in their midst, and I finally remembered that they couldn’t actually see him. Only Djinn—or someone like me, with Djinn Emeritus status—could see what was happening. David—the Ifrit—had the Djinn down on the sand, and his black talons were deep into its chest, sucking out power and life.
I might want that to happen, but I couldn’t let it happen. Not if I wanted to sleep nights.
“David, get back in the bottle,” I said, and watched as he misted away into a black, howling whisper.
The moon slid free of the cloud layer on the horizon and gilded everything silver.
“Okay, again: What the fuck is going on?” Detective Rodriguez demanded. He was saying it in a loud voice, as if he’d been asking it for a while. I stared at him, then at Lewis, who maintained pressure on Kevin’s wound and gave me a vintage don’t-look-at-me shrug. “Who are these people?”
“Trouble,” I said. “Shoot anybody who comes near this guy. They’re trying to kill him.”
That, he could understand. “Do I want to know why?”
“Not—exactly. Look, I’ll tell you. Just not now, okay?”
Rodriguez settled in next to Kevin, who was breathing more steadily now, color returning to his face. I stood up and walked toward the Wardens, who were regrouping from their confusion in various stages of defiance.
Shirl was still down. I stared at the Earth Warden who was next to her. Didn’t recognize him, but he looked earnest and well scrubbed, in a Fortune 500 kind of way.
“You come after him again, you deal with me,” I said flatly. “Lewis and Kevin are under my protection. And I swear, next time, I won’t call off my Djinn. If you want to make this war, fine. I’m ready. Better bring along body bags.”
He opened his mouth, then shut it. Jerked his head at two of the others standing there, and they got Shirl up and into a fireman’s carry over the bulkiest Warden’s shoulder.
“What about him?” the Earth Warden asked. He had a nice voice, vaguely Canadian, and there was an off-kilter tilt to one of his eyes that made him seem sly. He nodded at Detective Rodriguez.
“What about him?”
“We shouldn’t leave a witness.”
I was dumbfounded. Was he actually saying… ?
Yes. He actually was.
“Over my dead body,” I said flatly. I must have looked like it would be tough to achieve, because he took a step backward. “Get it straight, assholes. Wardens don’t kill people.”
Some of them looked away. Some didn’t. I felt a familiar prickle along my spine.
If I could see the Ifrit, I wondered, could I see Demon Marks? Humans couldn’t, generally, but if I could, I could check out these guys and see if they were under the evil influence. Not that any of these guys, male or female, were likely to bare any chests if I asked.
Lewis joined me, standing at my side. No words. Just a hell of a lot of strength, unmistakable, shivering the air like a quiver of heat. He looked grim and exhausted and haunted, but not weak. Not at all.
And then, unexpectedly, Kevin woke up.
“Yeah,” he croaked faintly. “You want a fight, bring it on, buttwipes.” He accompanied all that with the kind of inept theatrical gesture associated with bad magicians, kind of an awkward, limp-wristed wave. I winced.
“Yeah, thanks, kid,” I said. “Just rest, okay?… Anyway. Hit the road, all of you. You’re done here.”
Detective Rodriguez stood up and joined me on the other side. The sound of his gun slide ratcheting was very loud, even over the continuous roar of the surf.
They might have decided I was no threat, that they could take Kevin, that an unpowered cop with a handgun was chicken feed. But up on the coast highway, flashing lights began to paint the sky, and sirens howled.
Cavalry on the way, and they didn’t seem to have the appetite for a full-scale battle that involved the rest of the non-Warden world.
