by Rachel Caine
The Earth Warden held my eyes and said, “You’ll see us again.”
“Count on it.”
They turned as a unit and walked away, into the darkness.
Silence, and the rising shriek of ambulance and rescue on the way. I became aware of just how much my feet hurt—as if I’d taken a five-mile firewalk—and that there was a glassy ache in my knees, and my head hurt.
And I wanted, desperately, to cry because I had blood all over me and David was gone. As if he’d never even existed. And I didn’t think he was coming back this time.
This had turned out to be one hell of a jog.
It was a long night. Kevin went to the Emergency Room, who diagnosed anemia and said he was running a quart low on blood despite the healing David and Lewis had put into him. We spent most of the wee hours watching blood drip from a bag into his veins. Rodriguez kept his mouth shut about the whole standoff issue, mostly because he couldn’t understand what had happened enough to try to explain it, and none of us were talking. Lewis stayed close to me, whether looking for protection or offering me his own was not clear.
We managed, somehow, to avoid the press, who were scurrying all over the story of sinkholes on the beach. IS YOUR CHILD SAFE? Film at eleven… by the time we made it back to my apartment, I realized that my life was well and truly out of control. Bad enough there was the whole job situation, but now there was Sarah and her boyfriend, and Lewis, and Kevin, and the Djinn War, and a cop from Las Vegas who was turning out to be kind of cool, actually.
And my feet hurt like hell.
Rodriguez insisted on coming in and checking out the apartment. Eamon and Sarah were not in immediate view, but her bedroom door was closed. I didn’t, ah, inquire.
“Right,” I said, and looked at my little flock. “Kevin, Lewis—sit down before you fall down.”
Lewis was already lowering himself to the couch, but he shot me a grateful look.
Rodriguez leaned against the door, arms folded, and frowned at me. Kevin, who should have been out on his feet from the painkillers, shuffled around the apartment, ragged black jean hems dragging the carpet, and fondled my stuff. Ah, yes. I remembered his great respect for personal boundaries. Even his brush with death hadn’t dampened his enthusiasm for that.
I sucked in a pained breath as I put my feet up on a battered hassock and let myself relax, just a little, for the first time in hours. “I don’t suppose you have anyplace to go,” I said to Lewis. Who shook his head. “Fine. You’re staying here. Kevin, you too. Um…”
Detective Rodriguez arched his eyebrows. “I have accommodations.” Yeah, the White Van Hilton.
“Thank you,” I said.
“For leaving?” He sounded amused.
“For staying when you didn’t have to. When things didn’t make any sense.”
He shrugged and gave me a wintry smile. “I’m just saving my interrogation for later. Tonight, I’m just having a drink and trying not to think about it.”
“Good plan,” Lewis said. “I could use a beer.”
I took the hint, went into the kitchen, and popped two Michelob Lights, carried them out along with a Coca-Cola, which I handed to Kevin. Who gave me a filthy look.
“Underage,” I said. “And way too unpredictable to give beer to, anyway. And do we need to talk about painkillers and alcohol?”
He kept glaring.
“Take it as a compliment that I don’t still want you dead.”
He didn’t, but he drank the Coke anyway. I held up another Michelob for Rodriguez’s inspection; he accepted without a word. I went for a glass of white wine. Sarah had left a bottle chilling in the fridge.
“So,” I said, and sat down on the floor to mournfully consider my aching, pink feet. “How screwed are we, exactly?”
Lewis tipped back the beer bottle. His throat worked. He considered everything carefully before he said, “If we were any more screwed, we’d be having a cigarette and enjoying the afterglow.”
Rodriguez choked on his beer. Nice to know he had a sense of humor. I’d been starting to wonder.
“Why are they after you? No, wait, back up. Who are they?”
“Wardens.”
“Yeah, obviously. But… ?” Lewis pressed the cold bottle to his forehead and cast a quick look at Rodriguez. I shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. I’m telling him everything. No way around it at this point; besides, he’s Quinn’s old partner. He should know the truth.”
“The whole truth?”
“Yep.”
Lewis shook his head, obviously not convinced of my sanity, but let it go. Got back on the subject. “The Wardens are breaking apart. I knew it was coming; they just don’t have enough structure left to keep it in place. They’re breaking into factions. This one caught the rumors about the Djinn turning on their masters, and most of them sealed their Djinn bottles and stuck them in vaults, safety deposit boxes, whatever was convenient. And then they came after me.”
“Why the hell would they come after you?”
“They’ve been told that I’m on a crusade to free all the Djinn.”
I looked at him for a second. “Hmmm. Are you?”
“Separate issue.” Oh, boy.
“Lewis—”
“Drop it, Jo.”
“Okay, fine, so you’ve been preaching freedom for all Djinn, the Djinn suddenly start turning on their masters, the Wardens start coming after you.” It made an unpleasant amount of sense. “It’s Ashan’s group that’s behind this.”
“Yep.”
“And I think some of those Wardens may be…”
“Demon-marked? Makes sense, they’re certainly powerful enough. Rahel’s been trying to keep them off my back, but they’re like wolves. I can’t shake them for long. It’s going to come down to killing, sooner or later.” He seemed depressed by that.
“One of them—Shirl—she was a protégée of Marion’s,” I said. “I’ll call Paul, find out if Marion still has some kind of control over things…”
“Marion’s in the hospital,” Lewis said flatly. “She was hurt. Car accident. I just heard from Paul an hour ago.”
I stopped worrying about my feet. “They’re targeting us. This isn’t random.”
“They’re going after the most powerful senior Wardens. That leaves gaps to fill. It’s a coup, or at least they think it is. From Ashan’s perspective, he’s just dismantling the Wardens altogether.”
“What about Paul?”
He shook his head. I tried to stand up and felt my knee give a sharp enough twinge that I had to stay down. I looked over at Kevin, who was fondling my minuscule DVD collection. “Hey. Walking wounded. Put Mel Gibson down and step away.”
“Lethal Weapon rocks.”
“Yes, it does. Go get me the phone.”
“Get it yourself, b—”
“Kevin,” Lewis said softly. “Look at her feet. She can barely walk. Shut up and get the damn phone.”
Kevin flushed—unattractively—and glared at him, but ducked his head and put the DVD back on the shelf. “Where is it?”
I nodded toward the kitchen. Kevin shuffled off in that direction. Lewis’s eyes followed him. “He’s not a terrible kid,” he said. “But he needs somebody to tell him when he’s a fuckup.”
“He should be lying down.”
“Trust me, he will. Right now, he’s scared half to death. Let him walk it off.”
I was afraid that the light in Lewis’s eyes might be fondness. As if he was seeing something of himself in Kevin. Which was ridiculous, of course. Lewis had never been anything like Kevin, in any way.
“Lewis—he’s a sociopath,” I said, “and don’t you forget it, or you’ll end up with a knife between those nice broad shoulders, and I’ll be very sad.”
Rodriguez finished off his beer in one long, expert gulp and said, “Okay, that’s it for me. Entertaining as this little fairy tale is, I’m going to get some rest. Don’t you do anything stupid. I’ll know.”
I had no doubt. He p
robably had motion sensors or something set up, or maybe had hired a second line of private eyes to keep track while he was catching shuteye.
He was the thorough type.
“I won’t go anywhere,” I told him. “Oh, except to work. I’m due at the studio at six.” Which made it barely worth trying to go to bed, at this point.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “you and me, we’re going to sit down. And you’re going to explain this. Right?”
I saw no way around it, really. “Right.”
He nodded, glanced at Lewis by way of a cop’s good-bye, and let himself out.
Tapped the door significantly. Lewis got up to click the dead bolts—both of them—shut. Not that they’d do much good against the Wardens, or the Djinn, of course, but they were symbolic. And hey, there were still mere mortal bad guys out there, too. It would be really embarrassing to be engaged in a battle for the fate of the world and get killed by somebody wanting my crappy little stereo.
Kevin wandered back in with the phone, tossed it to me, and said, “Can I get some food?”
“Sure,” I said. He disappeared so fast he might have been Djinn. “No beer or wine!” I yelled after him. Like he’d care what I said.
Lewis turned and sat down on the floor across from me, Indian-style. He reached out and took my foot in his large, warm hands. I sucked in a warning breath.
“Relax,” he said. “Trust me.”
He guided it to his lap, and began to stroke his fingers over the swollen skin.
Where he touched, the hot skin—which had been screaming in agony for hours—began to cool and regain its shape. It was deliciously, amazingly wonderful.
“You should open a spa,” I said, and leaned my head back against the cushions of a chair. He smiled down at my foot as he stroked his fingers across the skin.
“For you, I should open a hospital,” he said. “Jo—somebody helped us down there, in the sand. We were dying, and somebody came.”
I didn’t answer.
“Was it David?”
I felt tears start to burn, and wiped them away with shaking hands. His caress on my burned skin stopped for a second, then resumed.
“I thought I could save him,” I said. “I really thought—”
I couldn’t think about this, couldn’t feel this, couldn’t handle anything right now. The tears were uncontrollable. They hurt. Lewis continued to stroke the burn out of my foot, pressing just hard enough on the instep to work out the ache along the way. Undemanding and unassuming, as ever.
“You’re not losing him,” Lewis said. “You’ll never lose him until he’s dead. Or you are.”
My left foot felt cool and soothed and sated. He gently put it back on the carpet and took my right one. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the sheer animal comfort he was offering me.
“Then it’s already over,” I said softly. “I think he is dead. I think what’s left… oh God, Lewis. You don’t know what they’re like. The Ifrit. You can see who they were, and sometimes they know who they were…”
“Shhhh,” he whispered. “Close your eyes. Don’t think.”
I fell asleep with his fingers slowly, methodically taking away the pain.
When I woke up, I was in bed. Somebody—probably Lewis—had carried me in. I checked: still dressed in the jogging clothes. I felt sand in every fold of skin. I itched all over, and whatever sleep I’d gotten wasn’t nearly enough.
I sat up and pulled David’s bottle out of the nightstand. It was silent and inert, and there was no connection to it. No sense of his presence at all. It was just a container, fragile and limited. Like a human body.
Was that what a Djinn really was? A soul, unhoused? Then what was an Ifrit? What was a Demon? The classes at WardenU. hadn’t exactly prepared me for the big questions. It was a technical school. Philosophy wasn’t considered important to the curriculum.
But now I was starting to wonder if philosophy was what the Wardens were missing, and had been missing all along. The Ma’at might be a bunch of upright assholes, but at least they understood what they were doing, and why. All we did was react. React to this disaster, that crisis. We were the world’s paramedics, and maybe we were spreading as much disease as we were curing.
“I love you,” I whispered to the bottle, and pressed my warm cheek against it. “God, David, I do, I do, I do. Please believe me.”
I fell asleep again with the bottle in my hands, still dressed in my gritty jogging clothes, and dreamed that a dark, jagged shape in the corner, like a broken nightmare, watched me the rest of the night.
Interlude
The storm drives clear skies ahead of it. Warm weather, soft breezes. There is no sense of danger coming, no hint of the chaos moving on the horizon like an invading, destroying army.
The island nation in the way is fat, prosperous, and complacent about its safety. In all of its recorded history, which stretches back a thousand years, it has never been conquered. It is a paradise, a center of trade and culture and learning for half the human world. Its harbors are vast and constantly busy.
It doesn’t matter. Humans have more energy than smaller animals, and the storm craves it.
The storm changes its course, unfurling its killing tentacles toward them.
First warning is the unnaturally clear sky, wrong for the season. Towards evening, the first breezes begin to arrive, and waves come faster, hit harder. A constant roar of surf crashes on high cliffs in explosions of white foam.
In the morning, people gather in the morning’s soft, green-tinted light and find the sea itself boiling in distress where it meets the land. Out toward the far horizon, the storm shows itself in a black line stretching across the curve of the sky. The ocean humps toward them in long, rolling swells, each higher than the last.
The beaches go first, swallowed by wave after wave after wave. There is no alarm, at first. They have seen flooding before. Those living in the valleys and by the sea gather their families and possessions and start a trek inland, whether they will shelter with families or friends.
But the sea keeps rising, and as the storm’s breath begins to blow, they realize that this is no ordinary rain coming to their fair and quiet land.
By the time they ring alarm bells, drawing the people to the temples, to the highest hills, the wind is slashing apart trees and the surge is bringing down everything in its path. They hope for divine intervention, but the wise among them already know the end of the story.
Chapter Six
Two hours? Not enough sleep. Oh, no.
I stumbled up and into the shower, where I finally washed away the blood and sand of the night’s adventures, and realized halfway through that I was still wearing my pull-on jog bra. Ever tried to get one of those off when it’s wet?
Not a pretty picture.
I stumbled comatose out of my bedroom, barely remembering to belt my bathrobe along the way, and started coffee. The asthmatic chug-hiss-chug of the machine echoed through the predawn stillness. Lewis was sprawled out on the floor, wrapped in a blanket. Kevin looked boneless and well rested on the couch. He slept open-mouthed.
War refugees. I felt a prickle along my spine, a dizzying sense that all this was just prelude to something a whole lot worse. I hoped I was wrong.
Not a sound from Sarah’s bedroom. I tapped gently on the closed door, then eased it open.
The two of them were asleep, wrapped tightly around each other. Eamon, in sleep, looked younger and almost angelic, that sharp intelligence missing and a kind of gentleness in its place. His arms were around Sarah. Her back was pressed against his front, and his forehead rested on the disordered silk of her hair.
It looked… sweet. And definitely postcoital.
I shut the door without waking them and went back to stare blankly at the coffeemaker as it peed into the carafe.
A hand on my shoulder made me jump. It was Lewis, yawning, all lean and shirtless and tousled, hair sticking in a dozen directions, eyes heavy-lidded.
“Hey
,” I said, and moved away from him. “I made a big pot.”
“I’m going to need a syringe to inject it directly into my bloodstream.”
“IV kit, third cabinet. Rinse it out when you’re done. I’ll need it later,” I said. My hair was still wet. I leaned over the sink and twisted it into a rope, drizzling out a stream of silver water. Lewis busied himself with coffee cup retrieval, sorted through the thrift-store assortment, and handed me a GOT COFFEE? mug with a pop-eyed, jittery Too Much Coffee Man on it. He took Garfield.
“Did you sleep?” he asked me.
“A little.” I’d dreamed, too. Not good dreams. “I’m sorry I got weepy on you. Bad night.”
“I understand.” He poured himself a cup, mutely offered the same to me, and I nodded. “David doesn’t love you.”
I nearly fumbled the cup he was holding out. “What?”
“David doesn’t love you,” he repeated patiently. “He lives for you. I don’t think you understand the difference. Djinn don’t just love. It isn’t a game to them, and it isn’t something they fall out of when it gets old. That’s why the Wardens have rules about these things. Not just because compelling a Djinn against his or her will is—unsavory—”
I thought of Yvette Prentiss, and her use and abuse of her Djinn. And David.
“It’s rape,” I said. “Might as well call it what it is.”
He nodded, sipped coffee, and continued. “Sex, yes. But I’m talking about love. The rules are there to protect Djinn from their own instincts, as well as from anything humans might force them into. Because when they fall in love, it’s … not on a human scale. And people get hurt. I’m worried, Jo. You and David—I know you love him. But the thing is, it’s the kind of love that can destroy both of you. So be careful.”
If he was trying to scare me, he was doing a good job. “David would never hurt me.”
“He has hurt you.” Steam blurred his expression. “Listen, last night you warned me about Kevin. I have to do the same. I like David, and I respect him, but you have to know who and what he is. His instincts won’t always run in your favor. Just… be careful, will you?”
