by Rachel Caine
She was still trying to mumble a command. I grabbed her shirt, tore it, and stuffed the blood-spattered satin in her mouth.
Jonathan hadn’t moved.
His bottle was clenched in her right fist. While she battered at me with her left, I grabbed hold and smashed her right hand painfully back into the metal shelves. I saw blood and didn’t let that stop me. I did it again. Her fingers loosened.
I grabbed for the bottle, but she clung to it like an octopus. She yanked my hair hard enough to bring tears to my eyes, then spat the gag out of her mouth to yell, “I order you to—”
Panic gave me the strength of at least two, if not ten. I grabbed her right hand again, took hold of her index finger, and snapped it in two with a brisk, crackling sound.
She interrupted her command with a shriek.
The bottle rolled free. I grabbed for it, but she caught me with a wild swinging left hook, and tossed me off of her in a heap.
“Bitch!” she panted. Red blood drooled from her cut lip, and she looked savage, utterly crazed. “I’m going to make you suffer—”
She devolved into cursing, scrambled after the bottle. I tackled her and pulled her back.
Right about that time, Lewis collapsed face forward on the floor. He was still holding David’s bottle. He flipped over on his back, stared blankly up at the light fixtures in the ceiling, and rolled over again to crawl his way toward the half-open door.
I saw Kevin’s limp body take in a shuddering, unaided breath.
He raised his head, and I was frozen by what I saw in his eyes… It was confused, painful and full of rage.
Lewis had healed him. What that had cost I couldn’t imagine… to Lewis, or to Kevin. The fury in the kid was like nothing sane.
He lunged forward at the same time as Yvette for Jonathan’s bottle, and got there first.
I saw the shift in Jonathan instantly as his loyalty shifted from mother to son.
Yvette pushed herself away and got to her feet, backing up as far as the room would let her. Kevin and Jonathan were between her and the door.
“Don’t,” she said, and wiped blood from her face with the back of her hand. “Sweetie, don’t do this. You know you don’t want to—”
“You,” Kevin said tightly, and looked at Jonathan. “Kill Yvette. Now.”
Jonathan didn’t hesitate. He leaped like a cat, cleared me as I rolled into a ball and covered myself, and on the way formed steel-hard claws from the tips of his fingers.
I felt a hot spray of blood on my face, and gagged on the taste. Oh God, oh God… not that she hadn’t deserved it, but…
Kevin was watching his stepmother die with a blank, intense stare. When it was over, when the blood stopped and Jonathan stepped back with the claws red-misting away, Kevin transferred that stare to me.
God, those eyes. So empty. It was like looking into a grave.
“You left me,” he said. “I told you to come back. I screamed for you.”
I didn’t dare answer. Or move.
“You said you wouldn’t let anything happen to me,” he whispered. “I don’t like liars.”
He had my bottle. He dug it out of his pocket and held it in his left hand—such a small thing, to rule everything about me, life and death—and smiled at me and said, “I want you to burn. Burn yourself alive. Burn until I get tired of hearing you scream.”
I felt a flash of pure, nauseating fear, waited for the compulsion to take over, but…
… nothing happened.
I slowly uncoiled from my protective ball. Kevin looked furious. “Did you hear me? I said burn, you bitch!”
I got up, flexed my right hand. It hurt. There were cuts in my skin from Yvette’s teeth when I’d punched her.
“Sorry,” I said, with a kind of slow wonder. “Don’t think that works anymore.”
I looked up and saw David’s face touched by the same sense of intense, odd awareness.
“You’re alive,” he whispered. “You’re… human.”
And then his expression changed to utter horror, and he started to batter at the barrier between us.
I was human, and I was trapped in here with Kevin and the most powerful Djinn in the universe, who was completely under Kevin’s control.
Trapped with a kid who’d just killed his stepmother without blinking.
Kevin echoed David’s whisper. “Human?” I didn’t like the hard, wet shine in his eyes. “Good. Maybe you can hurt the way you let me hurt.”
Lewis crawled over the threshold of the barrier, dragging David’s bottle with him. David reached down and pulled him out of the way, crouched down and exchanged a look with him.
They both looked at me.
Lewis drew in a painful, hitching breath, and said, “Do whatever you have to do, David, but get her out of here. Do it now.”
David blew through the barrier like it wasn’t even there, slammed into Kevin from behind and sent him flying. Kevin, off balance, tripped over Yvette’s bloody corpse and into the rows of shelves that were still trembling from their last hard slam.
They tipped.
Black-sealed bottles fell. Some broke, hitting metal edges or each other, and even though I couldn’t see any Djinn I could feel them, swirling like a hot wet storm in the room.
David grabbed me. He pulled me past Kevin, who was still squirming to get up. I tried to slow down, because I had the opportunity to grab Jonathan’s bottle, but David’s imperative was clear. Get me out. Don’t stop for anything.
He shoved me forward, and I passed the barrier just a heartbeat ahead of him.
That was enough. His command was fulfilled, and the barrier slammed in place, knocking him backward. I reached out and touched him, but I couldn’t pull him through, couldn’t drag him to safety…
Kevin rolled over, still clutching Jonathan’s bottle, and yelled, “You! Kill him!”
“David, come here!” Lewis yelled, virtually at the same second. The barrier dissolved. David lunged through.
Jonathan grabbed, and missed.
Something was happening inside the vault. I couldn’t see it, not with human eyes, but when I used Oversight it looked like hell in there—tortured, writhing bodies, Djinn fighting each other on the aetheric, Kevin and Jonathan blazing like a white star in the center. I felt a chill of premonition and turned to Lewis, who was propped against the wall, looking worse than I’d ever seen him.
“I can’t,” he whispered, even though I hadn’t asked. “I’ve got nothing.”
If he had nothing left, David had nothing. We all watched as the black-sealed Djinn, free of their captivity, started manifesting in the real world.
Nightmares. They looked horribly disfigured, half demon, and they made a terrible sawing noise like metal tearing. Screams. A kind of scream I never wanted to hear again.
“Get out of there!” I blurted, and held out my hand to Kevin. “You have to get out, Kevin! Please! You don’t know what you’re doing!”
He could have. All he had to do was walk two feet forward, take my hand. Make the choice.
There was such a horror of devastation in his eyes. A dawning awareness that what he’d done had consequences, had a kind of history that was never going to let him go. Sin is like a stalker— you may learn to ignore it, but you can never hide from it.
He took one step, stopped, and gave me the emptiest smile I had ever seen. He said, “Concerned about me now? Too late, Joanne. I’m not gonna be anybody’s bitch anymore. Not hers, not yours… I’m gonna have power. So much power none of you can do anything to stop me.”
He looked past me, to Lewis. “You’re that guy. The one she was so afraid of. The one with the big mojo.”
Lewis didn’t blink. “Maybe.”
“Huh.” Kevin swept him up and down with a look. “No shit. Thanks, man. For saving my life.”
“You didn’t have to pay me back by killing her.”
Kevin’s face flushed a dull, mutinous red. “You don’t know anything about it.” He turned
to Jonathan. “Can you get me out of here?”
Jonathan’s eyebrows quirked over his empty stare. “Where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere.” Kevin, under the stress of the moment, was forgetting the rules. He looked at Jonathan, who stared back, waiting. “Anywhere but here!”
“You have to be specific,” Jonathan said. And, as Kevin’s mouth started to shape something—something I was pretty sure would have been home—Jonathan said, “Might as well make it someplace fun. Disneyworld. Las Vegas. Something—”
“Vegas!” Kevin crowed. He looked pleased with himself for seizing on it. “Hell yeah. Definitely Vegas.”
Jonathan, I thought, what the hell are you doing? He could have detailed the kid to death, could have asked him to define his designation down to a few square inches of ground, but I could see that he’d gotten what he wanted. “You have to order me,” he reminded.
“Oh, right. Uh, take me to Las Vegas—Wait!” Kevin threw up a hand. “What the hell are these things?”
He was looking at the barely visible Djinn swirling in the air. Jonathan didn’t shift his gaze. Probably didn’t want to look at them for long. I wouldn’t have.
“Djinn,” he said. “They’re sick.”
“Yeah? Fuck me. Well, let them go, they’re creeping me out.”
“No!” I yelled, and lunged forward. Too late. The barrier holding the Djinn back popped with an almost physical sensation, and the infected, tormented Djinn vanished. Kevin looked around the vault art all of the bottles lining the shelves. The ones on the right were all sizes and shapes, unsealed; the ones on the left were marked in black with the glyph that signified a demon infestation.
He grabbed some of the black-sealed bottles and stuffed them into his baggy pants pockets. “Let’s go,” he said to Jonathan. “Vegas. Move your ass.”
Lewis said, very grimly, “David, stop them from leaving.”
I was looking at David when he said it, and I saw the flicker of agony that crossed his face; Lewis didn’t know what he’d just asked him to do. Fight Jonathan. Fight someone he had loved and respected for a thousand years or more.
Someone he knew he couldn’t beat.
Kevin threw a sideways look at Jonathan, clearly realizing that Vegas, move your ass didn’t qualify as a proper command. Which meant David had the upper hand. “You. Mojo guy. You think you can take me?”
Lewis said, “I didn’t save your life to arm wrestle with you.”
“But you’re strong, right? Stronger than anything?”
“Not anything.”
“But almost anything.” Kevin looked sly, shot a greasy look at Jonathan. “Hey, I’ve got a better idea. We can do Vegas anytime.” He looked over at me, and the craziness in his eyes made me feel weightless and sick. “You should’ve been nicer to me, bitch.”
I think I knew, somewhere deep inside, what he was about to say, but there was no way to stop him. No way any of us could have stopped him.
Kevin pointed at Lewis and said, “Give me all his power. I want it all.”
A clear, unequivocal command, one Jonathan wouldn’t have any choice but to follow.
Lewis cried out, arched forward, and a river of white light flooded out of him, slammed across the empty space and into Kevin’s narrow T-shirt-clad chest. David, still held by the previous command, couldn’t act, and this was so far outside of my area of expertise that there was nothing I could even think to say, much less do.
Lewis went utterly limp. Unconscious. Out of the fight. Which meant that David was powerless.
Kevin opened his eyes, and smiled. Smiled. Flexed his arms like a weightlifter striking a pose.
“Kevin, don’t do this. You can’t hide,” I said. My voice was shaking. I gathered Lewis’s limp body in my arms and felt how hot he was, how fragile. How human. Like me. “Kevin, they’ll never forgive you for this. Humans or Djinn. They’ll hunt you down. They’ll destroy you.”
He lowered his arms and looked like a sixteen-year-old kid again, scrawny, nervous, arrogant. “Yeah? Well, you tell them, they try it, I’ll kick all their asses. Count on it.”
I just shook my head. He didn’t know. He didn’t understand.
Kevin snapped his fingers at Jonathan. “Now. Today. Take me to Vegas. We’ve got some fun to be having.”
“Stop him!” I pleaded with David. He looked stunned, angry, and completely baffled.
“I can’t. Lewis—” He looked down at the man I held in my arms. “It’s gone. All his power. There’s nothing to draw from.”
Too late, anyway. A sensation of rushing wind, and Jonathan and Kevin were gone.
“Can you track them?” I asked. David crouched down next to me and nodded. “Oh, God, David… can you fight them?”
“Not alone,” he said. “Not like this.”
I closed my eyes and looked inside myself, felt the warm red swell of power. I’d been put back into human form with all my potential included, which meant that maybe I was the only one qualified to do this thing. The only one with enough raw energy.
But I had to do something I’d sworn I never would. And no matter what anybody said, it would change things. Forever.
As always, David knew me. He said quietly, “You know you have to.”
I took the bottle from Lewis’s limp fingers, and felt the sudden rush of strength, the giddy sensation of David’s allegiance transferring itself to me.
He looked at me with those copper eyes, smiled so warmly I felt the embrace of the sun fold around me, and said, “It’s about damn time. What took you so long?”
My lips parted as I felt the two halves of us knit together in a partnership like nothing I’d ever felt in my life. Equals. There was nothing subservient about the Djinn, not like this… He was me, part of me, more than me. And I was more than him.
I gently eased Lewis down to the carpet and stood up to face David. He reached out, put his hands on my shoulders and slid them up to gently cradle my face. Thumbs traced my lips and left a memory of fire. He was so damn beautiful it made me want to explode.
“We’ll do this together,” he said, and kissed me. A long, sweet kiss that fired me deep inside, a pilot light kicking in with enough force to make my knees go weak.
“Yeah,” I murmured into his open mouth. “Can we win?”
His smile was a warm ghost against my lips. “Don’t know. But it’s going be one hell of a good fight.”
I was warned by the clatter of metal and the creak of a heavy door at the far end of the hallway, but there was no point in getting flustered by the fact that the Wardens had finally dug themselves out of their chaos and come looking. “Freeze!” somebody roared with the authority of a man with a big gun. I wasn’t worried. I’d faced down worse.
I opened my mouth to give David my first command…
… and I heard a loud boom, loud as the world, saw David’s pupils expand in shock, felt my body jerk hard against him.
Oh, shit, I thought.
They’d just shot me in the back.
I had time for one last command. David was already readying himself for battle, for killing, for more death.
“Back in the bottle,” I whispered, tasted blood, and saw David’s eyes go even wider in anguish as the wind sucked him down, into the bottle.
I was crying when I slammed the stopper in place, and curled up on the ground, gasping for breath against the growing, howling pain with his bottle held in both hands, against my heart.
Some shadows leaned over me.
Darkness.
I woke up slowly, to the beeping of machines and the dull mutter of voices.
I opened my eyes and focused slowly on the man who was sitting next to me, his large hand wrapped around mine.
“Jo?”
Not David’s voice, not his touch. Dots of light swirled and settled into the haggard outline of Lewis’s face. Pallid, lined, textured by at least a day’s unshaven growth of beard. Greasy hair.
“You look like shit,” I whispered,
and his dry lips cracked into a smile. He was wearing a hospital gown, one of those designs that flatters nobody. So was I. There were tubes tethering my arms, and a dull ache in my lower back.
It came back to me in flashes, pieces. David’s eyes. The sound of the gun. Don’t hurt them. That brought a surge of adrenaline that forced back drugged calm. “David—oh God please tell me they didn’t take him—”
Lewis reached out, opened a drawer in a stand next to the bed, and took out a blue glass bottle. He handed it to me. It was stoppered.
“He’s fine. I…” Lewis wavered and licked his lips. “I kept him safe for you.”
“Some asshole shot me.”
“They didn’t know. All they knew was that there were dead Wardens, and the vault was breached. They couldn’t know.”
I made a not-convinced noise. “Hurts.”
“I know.” He reached out and traced the curve of my cheek with his fingers. “You’ve been out for two days.”
Time delay before the dread set in. Two days? Two fucking days? I struggled to sit up, but drugs and Lewis and weakness kept me down. “Kevin—he took Jonathan—”
“I know.” Lewis’s voice had that silvery calm that Martin Oliver had been so famous for. “Jo, it’s okay. We’ve got teams on his trail. We’ll find him.”
“Not okay!” Lewis didn’t understand. Couldn’t understand. He didn’t know what Jonathan was. What Kevin had at his command. The powers of the strongest Warden in the world, plus the monstrous power of the single greatest Djinn… They’d sent teams? They might as well have sent packs of Girl Scouts. “Got to go. Get after him.”
His strong hands pushed me back. “You’re not going anywhere for a while.”
I clenched my fingers around David’s bottle and, before he could stop me, dragged the rubber stopper out of the mouth.
Zero to sixty. David was there instantly, fast as thought, staring down at me from the other side of the bed. Still trapped in that instant of panic and fury, thinking I was dying.
His hot-penny eyes flashed to Lewis, to me, and then he reached down and gathered me up into his arms.
I hadn’t known how cold I was until I fell into his warmth.
David was whispering words, but I didn’t know them—languages long dead, but the music was universal. Love, and fear, and sheer relief. He kissed me, kissed me hard, and I let myself melt into him.
