Windfall tww-4

by Rachel Caine

  Lewis looked smoke-stained, but fine. I took a few steps toward him, winced at the bite of broken glass on my bare feet, and paused to brush them more or less clean and jam on my shoes. When my balance wavered, Lewis was there, a hand steadying my elbow even while his attention was fixed on Ashworth.

  Overhead, the rain slacked off noticeably. Lewis again, setting balances. He wouldn’t just get rid of it, he’d let it wind itself down. I couldn’t feel the energy currents, but I imagined he was grounding it seamlessly through every available safe avenue. He was thorough that way.

  “I couldn’t get to them in time,” he said. “Foster was already dead.”

  “And the Djinn?” Ashworth asked.

  Lewis shook his head. “I don’t know. At best, he was badly wounded. But I don’t think he’s joining Ashan.” Ashworth’s lips tightened and he turned away, cane tapping, to join a knot of umbrellas standing near the fire engine. The Ma’at had come in force, looked like. Not that they’d be a lot of help in a fight.

  None of them were Wardens, per se, except Lewis; they had power, but it wasn’t on the level of someone like John Foster, or even me. Training, not talent.

  Well, maybe today, they were on the level with little old whipped-puppy me.

  Which didn’t make me feel any better.

  “All right?” Lewis was asking me. I looked up to see his dark eyes focused on me.

  “Peachy,” I assured him. There was a quaver in my voice. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Trying to stop the war,” he said, and took advantage of his hold on my elbow to steer me out of the way of some firefighters unrolling more hose. The building was still burning, but not nearly as briskly. I could sense a distant, low thrum of power—Lewis was keeping the blaze tamped down, making it manageable. He could have killed it, I was sure, but Lewis was a subscriber to the philosophy of Ma’at. Everything in balance. He would be working to put all of the power that had just been expended back into some kind of order.

  “What? You’re going to stop the war singlehandedly?”

  “Obviously not.” Lewis got me into a neutral territory, somewhere between the firefighters, the cops, and the Ma’at, and turned me to face him. “Jo, I need you to promise me that you’ll go back to your apartment, pack your bags, and get out of here. Today.”

  “I can’t promise that.” Even though I’d been thinking about it, before my car had been blown up.

  “I need you to do this for me.” His eyes searched my face. “I can’t be worrying about where you are, what’s happening to you.”

  And that lit a fuse on my temper. “I didn’t ask you to be my babysitter, Lewis! I can take care of myself, I always have!”

  “And if you weren’t drained so far that you barely register as a Warden on the aetheric, I’d accept that,” he shot back. “Did David do this to you?”

  I met his eyes and didn’t answer. He shook his head, anger sparking in his eyes, and deliberately looked away.

  “Fine,” he said. “But you can’t let him feed off you like this. He’ll kill both of you.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m serious. You need to let him go. You need to break the bottle.”

  “I know! Jonathan already made it clear, believe me.” I didn’t mention Rahel’s counterargument. I wasn’t sure I wanted him to know I hadn’t decided. “I’m fine, dammit. Don’t worry about me.”

  He let go, reluctantly, and turned away to talk to the Ma’at, who were already signaling him impatiently for a confab.

  That’s when I saw Jonathan standing at the fringes of the crowd, arms folded.

  Jonathan himself, Master of the Djinn Universe, in the flesh. Commander in chief of one side of what might turn out to be a world-ending civil war.

  He was disguised as a regular guy, dressed in black jeans and heavy boots and a brown leather jacket, ball cap pulled down low over his eyes. As with Ashan, the rain bent around him. I didn’t think anybody but me would notice; I doubted anybody but me could see him.

  He was a hundred feet away, and there were dozens of people between us, but I felt the shock as his eyes locked onto me. I felt a burn inside, nothing comfortable, nothing like the connection I felt with David, or the purely heat-driven fizz between me and Lewis.

  It was as if Jonathan owned me, the way I owned David. Was this how it felt for David? Invasive and sickening? As if his every breath depended on mine?

  “I warned you,” Jonathan said, and the bill of that ball cap dipped just a fraction.

  Time stopped. Raindrops froze into glittering silver threads around me.

  I was in Jonathan’s world now.

  He walked through the silent landscape, moving around statues of humans in his way, breaking rain into fragments against that invisible shield he carried with him.

  “I can’t do what you want,” I said when he stopped just three steps away. My words sounded weirdly flat in the still, dead air. “If I let him go, he’ll come after you, and that’ll be the end, won’t it? The end of everything. You’re important. That’s what Rahel’s been trying to tell me from the first time I met you. You’re the key to everything. Without you—”

  He cut me off by sticking an accusatory finger in my face. “I told you what would happen. I told you, Joanne. Is this a habit with you, courting death? Because it’s getting old. You’re carrying around a kid, you know. Could devote a little thought to that while you’re walking over the cliff and mooning about your undying love.”

  “It’s not about me. It’s you. I can’t let David come after you, and he will if I break the bottle.”

  “Dammit!” His flare of fury was scary. It evaporated rain in a pulsing circle for about fifty feet in every direction. I felt my skin take on an instant burn. “Are you always this stupid, or is it a special feature just for me? Break the damn bottle, Joanne!”

  “No.”

  “Not even to save yourself and the kid.”

  “No.”

  “Not even to save David.”

  Because that’s what all this was about, I suddenly realized. Not the world, not the war, not me. David. His constant and pure devotion to David, who’d been his friend since the world was younger than I could even imagine.

  Who’d died in his arms, as a human.

  “Because I can save him,” Jonathan said. “I know how.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and locked stares with him. “I know, too. You die, he lives. And where does that leave the rest of us?”

  Galaxies in his eyes. A vast and endless power, but it wasn’t his own. He was a conduit. A window to something larger than any of us, Djinn or human.

  “He takes my place,” Jonathan said. “He lives. You live. The baby lives. He’s strong enough to take Ashan. I’m too damn tired for this; I’ve been running the show for too long. I’ve made too many mistakes, and we need a fresh start.”

  Oh, God. It wasn’t Ashan suddenly deciding to rebel on his own… Ashan had just picked up on something else: Jonathan’s weakness, if you could describe somebody like him as weak. He just didn’t want to go on anymore.

  “No,” I said again. “You can’t do this. I’m sorry, but you’re just going to have to gut it out and stop Ashan and put everything back the way it was. I’m not helping you commit suicide by David.”

  He looked at me for a long time, in that still silent place where time didn’t exist. And I felt something like a shiver run through the world.

  He raised his head toward the sky for a second, listening, and then shook his head again.

  “That your final answer?” he asked.

  Something about his expression almost made me change my mind, but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t let his need and his despair drive the game. This was too important.

  “That’s it,” I said. “I’m not letting David go.”

  “You’ll kill him. And he’ll destroy you.”

  “So be it. Now go do your job and get things done. The world’s more important than me and David, and
dammit, it’s more important than your death wish!”

  He hated me. I felt it, strong as acid poured in an open wound.

  “All I have to do is kill you,” he said. It was barely a whisper. “You know that, right? You die, the baby dies, and I can still do exactly what I want. Everybody wins but you.”

  For a breathless second I thought he was going to do it. I could feel the impulse firing in him, could see the way it would happen—his hands around my head, turning with shocking strength, my spine snapping with the crisp sound of crumpled paper. The work of less than a second.

  I remembered Quinn, helpless on the ground, coughing up blood. Terror in his eyes, at the end. Jonathan hadn’t even hesitated.

  “I know,” I said. “Butch up and do it, if you’re going to. Don’t keep me in suspense.”

  He stared at me for a second, eyes wild and dark, and then smiled.

  Smiled.

  He reached out, pulled a fingertip slowly down the line of my cheek, and walked away. Hands in his pockets. Raindrops shattering in his wake.

  And then time slammed back in a fevered rush, and the world moved.

  He was gone.

  And something was very, very, very wrong with me.

  I cried out, wrapped my hands over my stomach, and felt the sudden emptiness inside. The spark was gone, the potential, the child that David had put inside of me.

  I felt the last of the energy Jonathan had given me leak out. My vision went gray and blurry, and I felt my knees give way.

  Falling.

  Too much effort to breathe. Nothing left inside to live on. I was a black hole, empty and alone and dying in the rain.

  David. I couldn’t even call him. And if he came, it would only be more death, faster death, no comfort and no love in it.

  Warm arms scooped me up. Fingers slid from my arm down to clasp my limp hand, and as the world telescoped to a black pinpoint I felt a warm pulse of power go through my skin, my bones, my body. Hot as the sun, liquid and silky and rich.

  It wasn’t enough.

  My eyes were still open, and a little color swam out of the gray, but I couldn’t focus, couldn’t blink. Lewis was bent over me. He looked pale and desperate. He cupped my face in his hands, watching my eyes, and then ripped open my shirt and put his hands on my stomach, right where the worst of the emptiness hid itself.

  That sensation came again, a slow and deliberate wave rippling through me to pool like hot molten gold somewhere just below my navel.

  It drained away.

  I was going, just… going.

  “Oh no you don’t,” Lewis grated, and I felt him breathing into my open mouth, his life pouring into mine with such power and fury that the emptiness couldn’t keep up with it. That was David, that emptiness. That was how I would die, sucked into that darkness, and he’d still be trapped and alone, forever a creature driven by hunger and unable to stop feeding…

  I didn’t want this to end in nightmare.

  I couldn’t let it end that way.

  I breathed.

  Lewis was still bent over me, panting, shaking, and I saw the golden light still spilling out of his fingers into my stomach. A thick stream of life.

  I knocked his hand away, and he leaned back and braced himself unsteadily on wet pavement. Head down. Gasping for air as if he’d been drowning.

  I was almost sure he had been. I’d nearly taken him down with me.

  “Dammit,” he said furiously. “What is it with you and dying, anyway? Can’t you get a new hobby?”

  “Shut up.” I meant it to be defiant, but it came out a bare, shaken whisper. I curled on my side, pummeled by rain, chilled to the bone, but with a rich, golden warmth somewhere deep inside to sustain me. His gift, like Jonathan’s, but unlike Jonathan’s it was a human sort of power, and my body was already accepting it. Renewing itself.

  I let my breath slide out in a sigh, staring at him, and saw Lewis’s narrow pupils expand into huge, black rings.

  Felt the feedback begin to build between us.

  The pulse beat faster, pulling me like the tide.

  I closed my eyes and drifted up to the aetheric. It felt effortless and elegant and perfectly controlled.

  “What happened?” Lewis asked.

  “Jonathan,” I murmured. He kidnapped my child. I couldn’t say it out loud, couldn’t begin to explain all of what I’d realized while lying here in the rain, and certainly not to Lewis. “He’s not going to fight. Ashan’s going to win.”

  Lewis sucked in a very sharp breath, as if he knew implications to that I couldn’t imagine. “That can’t happen.”

  “Well, it’s going to happen, so you’d better make a plan.”

  “Joanne, there is no plan for that.” He looked miserable, suddenly—tired, soaked to the bone, chilled. “If we lose Jonathan, we lose everything. He’s like the keystone in the arch. Take him away—”

  “Everything collapses,” I finished, and slowly found the strength to sit up, then mutely extended my hand to him. He brought me to my feet. All my parts seemed to be working more or less correctly. “You told me to go. Where can I go that will be safe from that?”

  His cold lips pressed against my forehead for a second. “Nowhere. Just—I don’t know. I’ll try to find him, talk to him. Meanwhile, just go home. Use what I gave you for defense only. Your body needs time to replenish itself.” His voice sounded rough and silken, and I tried to keep my breathing slow. Nothing I could do about my heartrate, which spiked like crazy. “Stay alive for me.”

  “I’ll try,” I said. My own voice sounded about half an octave lower than normal.

  I cleared my throat and opened my eyes to look at him. “Thank you.”

  He half turned, then whipped back, grabbed me, and kissed me.

  I mean, kissed me. This wasn’t some peck-on-the-cheek, let’s-be-friends gesture, this was hot and damp and desperate, and wow. After the first shocked instant I came to my senses and put hands on his chest to shove hard enough to break the suction and back him off a couple of steps.

  We didn’t say anything. There really wasn’t anything we could say. He wasn’t going to apologize.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted him to try. It was a kind of good-bye, and both of us knew it.

  That, more than anything else, told me how near to the end of the world we were coming.

  He walked over to the Ma’at and bent his head to listen to what Charles Ashworth had to say to him, which looked like plenty, most of it probably having to do with the inadvisability of getting involved with me. So I walked over to join them.

  “Seeing as the lightning kind of trashed my ride, I need transportation,” I said. “Or at least the loan of a car.”

  Ashworth, who probably had a fleet of them, frowned at me, then nodded to one of his flunkies, a crew-cut young woman dressed in a sharp-looking tailored suit and shoes I was almost certain were from Stuart Weitzman’s new fall collection.

  I was surprised to see he was hiring the fashion-enabled. He didn’t really seem all that hip to me.

  She tossed over a set of keys, looking grumpy. “Don’t dent it,” she said.

  “I’m offended.” I scanned the undamaged cars in the lot. I was hoping for the honey of a BMW sport coupe parked near the street, but her ride turned out to be something else.

  Oh, dear God.

  Even considering the hell my life had descended to, I didn’t think I was really prepared, at this point in my life, to be driving a minivan.

  Jonathan had left me for dead. That meant he probably wouldn’t be coming back at me, looking for revenge—at least, not for a while. And I didn’t get the sense that it was cruelty on his part… just an iron-hard kind of indifference.

  I’d ceased to be useful to him for what mattered, and he wasn’t going to waste his time.

  I climbed in the minivan, which was exactly the size of a small yacht, and started it up. Not a high-performance engine. I sat back in the captain’s chair and let cool air blow on my face and drip
ping hair for a minute while I tried hard not to think about what had happened on the roof.

  I fished my cell phone out of my purse and speed-dialed Paul Giancarlo. He didn’t answer. I left a voice-mail, reporting John’s death in as much detail as I dared, and then put in a call to the Wardens Crisis Center and reported that they were officially short a regional officer. The girl on the other end—God, she sounded young—was curt and scared, and I wondered how many calls she’d already had like this. They were clearly in emergency mode already, because the disasters would be coming as storms and earthquakes and wildfires erupted, and there were no high-level, Djinn-armed Wardens to combat them. In fact, today might mark the beginning of the kind of disaster that hadn’t been seen on Earth since the Great Flood. These things built on each other, fed on the energy of each other.

  “Dammit,” I whispered, and tossed the cell phone into the passenger seat. The fire department was winding up the emergency, although I was sure that the fire had gone out thanks to Lewis’s intervention and not the hose-and-ladder brigade.

  Lewis and the Ma’at were convened in a group near the corner of the parking lot, having some kind of serious huddle. The building’s tenants milled around, looking lost and smoke-stained, a few sucking on oxygen masks, but all in all it was remarkably little destruction.

  John was the only casualty.

  I didn’t want to think about how close it had come on the roof to being two bodies instead of one. I turned my attention to my brand-new (borrowed) ride instead. The van was so clean it might have been a rental, except for a few lived-in touches like a custom CD holder on the driver’s side.

  The mirror showed me an exhausted-looking drowned-rat woman, with dark circles under her eyes and lank, unattractive hair. I wasted a spark of power to dry my hair and clothes. I looked as though I could win a Morticia Addams look-alike contest, but, for once in my life, there were bigger issues than my personal vanity.

  I grabbed a Modest Mouse CD from the selection on the visor. The van wasn’t exactly the signature style of Joanne Baldwin, Speed Freak, but at least it was wheels and it would get me back home. I desperately wanted to be home. Maybe David was an Ifrit, maybe my sister was by turns nuts and annoying, but at least it was… home.