Heat Stroke

Three

Nobody had much to say, after Jonathan made it clear the tennis match was over and the subject was closed. Neither of us had come right out and said what we were thinking, which was good; I wasn’t sure I wanted all of these extremely powerful and extremely arrogant creatures to take offense at me. Especially not Ashan, who looked like he could bore a hole in titanium with a sideways glance. There was already an overload of mumbling and fiercely predatory looks toward me. I wished Rahel would show up; she was at least marginally congenial to me. Even Patrick would be welcome right about now, and not because I wanted to body-slam him into the wall; he’d been through this process before me, and survived it. The world had survived. The Djinn had survived. I needed to find out how, and I was pretty sure I couldn’t.

My fault. This is my fault. I couldn’t keep it from running through my head. Why hadn’t David told me? Why had he never even let on? Had he even known?

Of course he knew. It occurred to me, late and cruelly, that the reason Jonathan had kept him here had been to try to find a way to close the rift without killing him, or me. I’d thought it was a punishment, but it had been Jonathan’s way of trying save us both. He and David had been working on a way to stop it.

Oh, God. I’d misunderstood so much.

Something changed in the room, a kind of stillness. Jonathan waved people away from the center space, turned, and glanced at me. Apparently, I was the only one who didn’t get it. “Incoming,” he said.

Rahel materialized in the space left open.

She was covered in roiling blue specks. Djinn shouted and stampeded backwards as the sparks began to fly up and out, looking for other hosts; Jonathan moved forward.

Before he got there, Rahel’s yellow eyes went blank, and she collapsed in slow motion down to the rug. She was closest to me; I didn’t think, I just reached down for her.

My hands sank into her, wrist deep. Not that she was misted—that would have been better, oh God, far better. No, what I sunk into was flesh the consistency of warm butter, bathed in blood and melting muscle. I hit the relative hardness of bone but it was melting, too, dissolving like wax in the sun.

She was trying to say something to me. Her lips were whispering, anyway. I yanked my hands back, trembling, and stared at the smeared warm mess clinging to my skin. Her open eyes flared from a violent storm-black to a pallid blue, shifting colors like a wildly spinning prism.

“Joanne!” Jonathan snapped. He dropped to his knees next to her, extended one hand over her body, and reached out to me with the other. “Get your ass back. She’s contaminated.”

I could see the energy spilling out of his outstretched hand, golden white and so intense that it seemed to warp space around it. Pure life energy, keyed to the magic of the earth. Healing energy. David had said that Jonathan was the strongest of the Djinn; I hadn’t quite believed it, until now. He was doing this even here, cut off from everything… That was the legacy of his birth, his connection to the Mother. Of all the Djinn, he was the only one with power of his own.

And it didn’t matter. The damage just kept getting worse—flesh slipping from muscle, muscle dissolving to mush. The soft-focus gleam of bone beneath.

She cried out, once, and I felt her agony vibrating through the aetheric. I forced myself to look at her in Oversight; she was crawling with those blue specks, and they were alive, moving, eating.

She was being devoured. But they’d been all over me, all over David, they hadn’t hurt us, God, what the hell…

“Stop it,” Ashan said. His voice was raw, colorless. “It’s done. You can’t save her.”

Jonathan ignored him, ignored everything. He was focused on Rahel, fiercely intense, and the power flowing out of him just kept increasing. I felt it like a pressure against my skin, saw others shying away from it.

Rahel’s skin continued to slough away, revealing soft wet masses of tissue. The skin misted as it fell away. Slowly, layer by layer, the muscle began to peel back as well. Jonathan kept trying, uselessly and furiously, to keep her together.

“Stop,” I said, feeling the words turn in my throat like razors. “Please. He’s right, you’re just making it worse. Let go.”

His face was pallid and damp with strain, and his eyes were glittering with frustration, but he released the energy and dropped his hand back to his side. He didn’t move, though. I don’t even know if he could move, by then. I felt the energy flow shut down and watched as Rahel’s body melted away into a fetid, oily mist.

Gone.

She was still screaming when she vanished.

“Is she dead?” I blurted. Nobody answered. I don’t think they could. I had a cold flash of certainty that it was worse than that, far worse, out there on the aetheric. It was a horrible way to go. No wonder Jonathan had shut Ashan down so hard on the very idea of just letting Djinn stay trapped there. It was unforgivable.

What about David? I closed my eyes and reached for that silver link between us. It was faint and thin, but it was there. Unbroken.

Blue specks crawled up my arms.

“Joanne!” Jonathan’s voice again, too loud, ringing inside my head. I blinked away blue sparks to stare up at him. “Shit. I told you to stay back!”

Funny that this didn’t hurt. It had hurt Rahel, I’d felt it shaking the fabric of the world, it hurt her so much. I could still feel her agony resonating in waves across the room.

Jonathan reached out for me, but I just stepped away. Instinct, I guess.

Because it didn’t hurt.

I opened my eyes again and saw the most amazing thing.

Sparks. Blue swarmed out of the air, onto my skin, and vanished. The things that had eaten Rahel couldn’t hurt me.

Jonathan stopped, staring at me. I sighed, watched the last of the coldlight sizzle into emptiness, and wondered what had him looking so pale and confused.

“I’m okay,” I said. I thought he was worried about me.

Pallor faded to stretched white on his face and clenched fists. His eyes looked dark and blind.

“Jonathan?”

“Little trouble here,” he said.

I extended a hand toward him…

… and he lit up like a Christmas tree with crawling blue light. Oh God! The other Djinn backed away, viscerally terrified, as he wavered and fell backwards against a wall. Closed his eyes. “Shit,” he said. “Guess I’m not immune after all.”

Instinct. I grabbed for him as he started to slide down.

The sparks whirled out, climbed my arms, circled me in a storm of blue. Rahel’s grisly dissolution ran red in front of my eyes, and I swore I wasn’t going to let that happen, not to him, not now…

I sucked the sparks in, laid them thick on my skin, and consciously opened myself to them. I opened my squeezed-shut eyes and watched the light show as the sparkles glittered, peaceful and serene on my skin, then faded out into nothing.

I’m made of this. That was why they couldn’t hurt me. I was just taking in more of what had formed me in the first place.

Jonathan sat where he was, watching, too. His dark eyes shifted to meet mine.

“Thanks,” he said.

I nodded. “Favor for a favor. We need to get David back. Now.”

“I know,” he said. He sounded tired. “You look like hell.”

“Funny, I don’t feel…” Oh. Yes I did, actually. There went gravity again, twisting all out of shape. This time, I didn’t mistake it for coldlight or anything but what it was: somebody trying to call me. That fishhook sensation pulled at me, painful and undeniable. Not Jonathan, this time. And this wasn’t a call to safety, either.

Jonathan held on to me while I fought the pull. I felt his will settle over me like a soft, smothering blanket, and the summoning pull was lost in the weight.

“Tired,” I whispered. He already knew that. He was lifting me again in his arms as all the other Djinn murmured to each other, as Ashan stared at me with those cold blue-green eyes.

Back to the bedroom.

The soft feather pillow.

The frosted-coal shadow of the Ifrit, watching.

I slept.

The next day—if days had any meaning here— dawned just as bright and sunny and peaceful as all days did in Jonathan’s little kingdom.

I woke up to find the man himself sitting in a chair watching me. The Ifrit was gone.

“Wow,” I said. “This is getting familiar.”

“Don’t wear it out.”

“The bed or my welcome?”

He ignored what was admittedly a pretty weak comeback. “So. How you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“Good.” I wasn’t sure what he wanted, and I had the impression he wasn’t either, really. He got up to walk around the room, long strides that didn’t quite rise to the level of pacing. More like a stroll, with purpose. “About the rift up there.”

“What about it?” All my fight drained away at the bare mention of it. I couldn’t help but remember the red, tearing agony of Rahel dissolving into mush, or the hundreds of others who were suffering somewhere out there, where I couldn’t see them.

“You think it’s your fault,” he said. “Crap. What happened was David’s choice, not yours… and he had no way of knowing this would happen. Hell, even I didn’t understand what was going on until too late to do anything about it. Once I did, he wanted to go fix things.”

“But?”

“But by then I knew it was too dangerous, and then he went tearing off after you when you got—” He waved a hand, didn’t bother to finish the sentence. “He’s not exactly what you might call big-picture when it comes to personal sacrifice.”

“Neither am I. Neither are you.” He gave me a slight nod to acknowledge the point. “You should’ve told me about the rift. Or at least about how badly things were screwed up because I was brought back.”

He shrugged, a simple economical straight-up-and-down movement of his shoulder blades. No particular emotion in it. “Things screw up all the time. Hey. You gotta love the excitement. Granted, this is a lot more exciting than usual… but you stay alive as long as I have, you learn to take these things in stride. The Djinn have faced worse.”

I stared up at the shadows on the ceiling. “How much worse?”

“Hard to tell until it’s over.”

I pulled in a deep breath. Funny, I didn’t need it, but it still seemed to calm me. Some human habits were persistent. “How’s everybody else?”

“Sleeping,” he said, and nodded toward the far wall. “Lots of guest rooms. We run a topflight refugee camp around here.” He gave me a thin, almost human smile, but it didn’t last. “I never thought I’d like you, but you turned out okay. ‘Gut shortage.’ That was pretty good.”

“Yeah, sorry about that. I got carried away.”

“No, you’re right. One thing Djinn are scared of, it’s death. Their own, not anybody else’s. It makes us cowards. Look at me! I’ve been sitting here in this house for so long I don’t even know what it’s like out there.”

“I do,” I said. “You’re better off in here.”

“Not for much longer,” he said. He held out his hand, palm up, as if he was offering something to me. I looked at it, puzzled, and felt a sudden stab of alarm as a single cool blue spark ignited in his aura. “They’re coming in. I can’t keep them out, I can only slow them down. It’s going to be one giant blue snow globe in here soon. And even though I’m resistant to them, I’m not immune.” He stood up, swiped imaginary dust from his pants, and gestured at me. “So, you gonna take the day off, or are you getting your ass out of bed?”

I had already formed clothes under the sheet—the same denim and boots as before. One nice thing about being a Djinn—dress and bounce out of bed, no rework on the hair or makeup necessary. Although the hair was still displaying that annoying tendency to curl. I straightened it again as I asked, “What now?”

“You said it. We need David.”

“I’ll go.”

“You’re in thrall,” he said. “If your little jerk of a master finds out you’re where he can reach you, he’ll get you back and dressed like a pinup fantasy girl in ten seconds flat.”

“Ugh. Don’t remind me.”

“Oh, I don’t know, the French Maid outfit was a little—” He held up a hand to forestall my protest. “Never mind. Point is, if you go outside of the barrier he’ll be able to get you back.”

“He’s probably still asleep.”

“He is.” Jonathan nodded. “Problem is that he was calling for you in his sleep. And if you go outside this house, you won’t be able to resist.”

“I still want to go. If I get taken, so be it. I manipulated the kid once, I can do it again.”

“You’d better hope so. Well, you’re not going alone. This is too important to screw up.” He folded his hands together behind his back, stopped pacing, and faced me in a parade rest posture. “I’m going with you.”

I managed a weak smile. “Yay, Team Us?”

“Yeah, well, I could have patches made, but it seems excessive.” We exchanged another long few seconds of eye-locked silence. I was worrying about how many Djinn had already told me that Jonathan never left his house. David had seemed pretty adamant about it. This wasn’t any little excursion, and suddenly I didn’t think I was ready to be bodyguard to the God of My Existence. Plus, what had he just said? Resistant, not immune. I didn’t want the responsibility for ending a life with the length and depth of Jonathan’s.

Jonathan must have read my mind. “This is going to be hard, you know. Getting David back. She wants him bad.”

No answer to that except the obvious. “So do I.” I saw the flash in his eyes, and amended it. “We.”

His ghost-smile manifested again. “Then let’s go get him.”

The cord binding me to David had shrunk to a thin, barely perceptible thread. Worse, it was shaking. I could feel the tension in it. No telling how strong it was, how much strain it could stand, but I had the distinct feeling that it was close to the breaking point.

And my time was almost up, anyway. On so many levels.

“You understand what we have to do,” Jonathan said. “Travel in the aetheric’s too damn dangerous. Just skim the surface, stay as close as you can to the thread. I’ll be right behind you.”

We hadn’t told anybody else except—at Jonathan’s insistence—that creepy gray-suited Ashan. “You’re sure about him?” I’d asked out of the side of my mouth, as the door shut behind him and locked me and Jonathan in what looked like a study. He liked fishing, I gathered. Lots of books on the subject, and some big mounted piscine specimens frozen in midthrash on the walls.

“Ashan?” Jonathan finished writing something down, reached in a desk drawer and took out a seal that looked massive and antique. He brought it gently down on the paper. When he took it away, there was a glowing design in the paper, nothing I could read or even vaguely recognize. “Kind of an asshole, I know, but he’s reliable. Anything ever happens to me, he gets the big chair.”

“Not David?”

“Not anymore.” The tone was so colorless I knew there was pain behind it. “You’re good to go?”

“Ready.” I wasn’t, really, but there didn’t seem to be any really good choices, otherwise. Jonathan put the paper on top of his desk, turned to me and gave me an after you Alphonse gesture.

I took a deep breath and flowed to mist.

In Oversight, the thread stretched out toward the horizon, thin and glittering and still somehow alive. I touched it, wrapped myself around it and started winding around it like a vine snake. Moving fast, but staying in the physical plane. The thread had aetheric properties, which worried me; I couldn’t stop to help Jonathan if he got badly infected. I couldn’t be sure, but I wasn’t seeing any blue sparkle, other than a stray particle here and there. So far the connection looked clean.

The thread traveled through Jonathan’s house, straight out through the roaring blaze in the fireplace. I didn’t dare phase out completely, but I tried a moderated waveform to travel on, to avoid the fire. If it was a real fire at all. Nothing around here was what it seemed, especially not Jonathan. He didn’t feel like a Djinn at all, especially now that we were both in an incorporeal state. He felt… hotter. Stronger. More present, somehow.

My waveform skirted perilously close to a place I didn’t want to go. I saw blue sparks dancing close, and dropped back down. Jonathan’s place was still relatively spark-free, at least so far. I wondered if his defenses were good enough to protect all of the Djinn who’d taken refuge in there. He hadn’t seemed all that positive in his outlook. It’s going to be one giant blue snow globe in here soon.

Even as I watched, a single blue spark flared against my aura, then two more, drifting gently and then falling away. The stuff was getting through, after all, just very very slowly.

I flashed through a barely seen crisscross of bricks and mortar, winding along the silver thrumming thread as fast as I could. I moved out of the darkness, into what felt like sunlight. I soaked up the wild, undirected energy gratefully; without David’s infusions of blood-rich power, I was rapidly getting tired.

I looked behind me on the thread—directed my awareness, actually—and sensed that Jonathan was still with me, whispering his way along with every evidence of perfect ease. Well, well. I wasn’t overly surprised. I didn’t imagine there was much that Jonathan couldn’t do, if he really wanted to. Except that this might be the first time in a long time that he’d left his… sanctuary, and there might be a learning curve for him out here in the real world…

Wham!

It was like hitting the Great Wall of China in a bullet train. I stopped, stunned into silence and nearly into unconsciousness. My mist form spread out into an uncoordinated cloud, then slowly, slowly formed itself back around the thread.

Whoops. Found the barrier. Damn. How had Sara gotten around it, when she’d brought me in at hyperspeed?

And why did the thread go right on through it?

No help for it; I had to get really thin. If the thread could pass through, I could slide myself along the thread through the barrier—theoretically. All I had to do was, ah, become the thread, right? Yeah. Be one with the thread.

Another blue fleck touched me and flared like a star. I was out of time. If Jonathan’s hideout was being invaded, there couldn’t be too many safe places left. I hoped whatever other Wardens were left had sense enough to keep their Djinn safely in their bottles, but the Free Djinn… they had no such protection. Just crawling inside some old Jim Beam container wouldn’t do it; it wasn’t the bottle that made the difference, it was magic. Without the magic, glass was just glass.

David. I sent it along the thread, because the barrier was holding. I wasn’t getting through. No response. I directed my attention backwards. Jonathan, can you drop this thing long enough for us to get through?

No, he sent back. It’s the only thing standing between them and what’s out there.

Any hints?

Try harder.

Yeah, that was good. Try harder.

I felt a giant-sized shove in the back, and grabbed on to the thread for dear life as it began to move. Slowly. Pulling through the barrier one torturous, tiny jerk at a time.

I thought it would scrape me right off, that wall of power. I compressed myself, spread thinner, thinner, almost to nothing.

A sense of being dragged through thick, quick-setting cement. Of intense, murderous pressure.

Pop.

Free. I arrowed along the thread fast, driven by the force of the pull, with the close-following shadow of Jonathan sailing in my wake. The distant sunrise on the horizon grew brighter. Hotter. Closer. I could sense David now, but he felt… different. Muted.

I didn’t slow down.

I tumbled back into human form, all arms and legs and curling hair, hit the ground awkwardly and went to hands and knees. I was suddenly grateful for my newly demure clothing choices. What looked awkward in blue jeans would have looked downright kinky in a leather miniskirt and lime green Manolos.

Especially in a grungy city alleyway.

I’d expected to materialize in Yvette’s perfectly kept living room, but no such luck—on my hands and knees in garbage, looking up at a grungy guy dressed in geologic layers of oily, tattered clothes, a bottle of Thunderbird halfway to his lips. He stared at me without any real comprehension.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.” I climbed up to my feet and wiped crud from my hands. “How you doing?”

He gestured vaguely with the bottle. As answers went, it was perfectly understandable.

“Yeah, me, too,” I said. “So. Where am I?”

He blinked at me, then grinned. “Here.”

A perfectly Zen response. I gave up on the Dalai Lama and looked around for Jonathan. He was standing farther down near the mouth of the alley, staring out; I picked my way around overturned trash cans, piles of crap, and a particularly feral-looking cat with a rat in its jaws.

“I guess you were on target,” Jonathan said, and nodded out at the street. I focused past the swarming cars and ceaseless stream of pedestrians. On the other side of the street rose a stubby-looking tower, part of a complex that I knew all too well. “The good news is, at least we know where he is.”

We were looking at the bad news.

The UN Building.

It was the World Headquarters of the Wardens Association.

Technically speaking, the UN Building isn’t. It’s a compound of four interconnected structures— General Assembly, Secretariat, Conference, and Library. I had a nodding acquaintance with the place, which was better than about 95 percent of the other Wardens could claim; I’d been to closed meetings in the Conference building, and the Wardens Association offices in the Secretariat tower. (By New York standards, it wasn’t much of a tower, really. Thirty-nine floors. Hardly worth the nomenclature.)

Jonathan and I ate hot dogs from a sidewalk cafe and examined the problem as the sun slipped toward the horizon in smoky, obscured glory. Traffic continued to be heavy, dominated by yellow cabs; the entire block had become a secured no-parking zone, with sharp-eyed security personnel stationed at discreet but effective intervals. None of whom noticed us, of course. All part of that Djinn mystique.

I finally took a break from consuming preservatives to inquire if we had an actual plan in the offing.

Jonathan tossed back the last mouthful of a giant-sized cup of industrial-strength black coffee. He was loving the cuisine, which I guess was a break from home-cooked meals back at Rancho Impenetrable. “Best I can figure, your pals at the Wardens Association actually got off their asses for once and did the right thing. Rounded up Yvette, confiscated David’s bottle—with him in it. Lewis must have gotten caught up in the raid.”

“Not great,” I said.

“Not really.” He took a bite of hot dog. “You and I can’t get into the vault where he’s being kept. No Djinn can; we need a human for that, one with access. Problem is there aren’t a whole lot of those falling off of trees. And once we’re in the building, we’re going to be at some pretty serious risk.”

I put my hand on his arm and checked him for coldlight. He was lightly coated in it. I drew it to me, into me, left him clean and uncontaminated. He gave me a slow, half-lidded smile in response. Dimples. I’d never noticed them before. He probably didn’t show them to just anybody.

“I’m fine,” he said. “You?”

“Good.” I licked relish from my fingertips and examined the Secretariat in Oversight. It was rich in history, of course, but there was one floor in particular that radiated into the power spectrum. The Wardens floor. Not just the residue of all of the powerful that had come and gone through those doors, either; this was here-and-now kind of energy, being radiated at an intense level. “Lots going on,” I observed.

“It’s a busy day.” Laconic understatement from the master, as usual. I’d like to see what actually panics you, I thought, and then instantly knew that I didn’t. No way in hell. “Storm rolling in.”

I could feel charged fury in the air, particles churning and forming patterns and being flung apart by ever-expanding forces. The storm was out of control in the Atlantic, and heading this way. I turned out toward the sea and closed my eyes, drinking in the thick warm breeze, the muttering echoes of what was shaping up to be one hell of an early hurricane. At its present rate of growth, it was liable to come charging in to port packing wind speeds fast enough to blow the windows out of every shining building in its path. Experts said you couldn’t bring down one of these skyscrapers with a storm, but they’d never seen the kind of power that was boiling out there.

Few people had, and lived to tell about it.

“Can’t you do anything about that?” I asked. I felt genuinely spooked, every nerve stroked to a trembling edge by the touch of that wind.

“That? Sure.” Nothing happened. I looked over at him, but he was still focused on the building. “What, you mean now?”

“It’ll be a little late after it blows through here and Manhattan becomes the world’s biggest junk shop.”

His dark eyes flashed toward the horizon, then back to me. “I’m keeping it out to sea. Considering it’s not the only damn thing going wrong, I think that’s about the best I can do right now. Unless you think it’s okay to turn the entire five-state area around Yellowstone into charcoal. Didn’t anybody ever tell you that it’s all about balance?”

Balance was great in theory. Not so great when you were having to make choices that would inevitably cost lives. I wasn’t feeling up to godhood. “What about California? Or are you just calling it a loss and hoping Disneyland will set up an undersea kingdom park off the. west coast of Nevada?”

“Atlantis once had the best beaches.” He shrugged. “Coastline changes are a matter of perspective. But no, actually. Lewis took care of that one. The earthquake’s off.”

One crisis down. And speaking of Lewis… I turned back to the building and studied it again, reading energy signatures. Ah. Of course.

“They’ve got him,” I said. “The Wardens. Lewis is in there.”

“Yeah, I know.” Jonathan crumpled the cup and tried for a three-pointer in a trash can at least twenty feet away. Naturally, he made it. “Considering that he’s the only person who ever successfully stole from the Wardens’ vault before, I was considering that a point in our favor. That is, if we can trust him.”

“Yes.” I didn’t hesitate. “Look, in all the time I’ve known him, Lewis has always been about the greater good. It’s one of the reasons the Wardens want him so badly. First, he’s so damn powerful that he can make things happen on a massive scale; second, they’d just like it a whole lot better if he was somewhere they could control him. Because they can’t count on him doing things the way they want him to all the time.”

Lewis had never been ambitious, but if he’d wanted to, he could have snapped his fingers and made things happen in the ranks of the Wardens. For one thing, he could do the work of about a hundred of them, all by himself, and do it with compassion and control. Power like that, he didn’t need the approval of the Senior Wardens, or the Council, or any damn body. He was of the live-and-let-live school of thought. Too bad the Wardens didn’t feel the same way. They’d been afraid of him since the first day they’d realized what he was, and they couldn’t be any less worried about him now.

Especially since he was bad-ass enough that he’d voluntarily given up three Djinn, just to make a point.

Something about the pulse and color shift of that brilliant aura I was watching made me remember how I’d last seen him, at Patrick’s apartment. “I think he might be hurt,” I said. I remembered Kevin kicking him in the head. “Maybe badly hurt.” Paul had said as much. Lewis had shown up at his house looking for information about Yvette—he’d remembered enough to know who had me, apparently. That still didn’t mean he’d been functioning at peak efficiency. If he’d tangled with Yvette…

“Hurt I can fix.” Jonathan stretched, working out the kinks, and pulled a dull green baseball cap from his back pocket. He tugged it in place, one hand on the bill, one on the back. “Ready?”

I looked down at myself and changed into business-ready mode. A black peachskin pantsuit was appropriate anywhere, even inside the UN Building. “Do we have a plan?”

“You distract ‘em, I get Lewis to open the vault, we boost David’s bottle. Outta there.”

“Hell of a plan,” I commented dryly. It scared the hell out of me, actually.

His eyes were as hard as frozen flint, and the soft evening light did nothing to make him look any less frightening. He looked serious. “It’ll do. Move.”

We strolled right past security. I was reminded of the Empire State Building, and surprised myself by missing Rahel intensely; I had liked her. A lot. And it’s my fault she’s… What? Gone? Dead? Discorporated? The Djinn Formerly Known As…? I remembered her skin sloughing away, and couldn’t control a sick tremor. The coldlight was intense now, up in the aetheric. Like a constant blizzard. Any Djinn— except, presumably, me or David—who went up there was doomed. Even Jonathan.

The Wardens Association floor required a card key for the elevator, which I didn’t have, but it didn’t seem to be any big deal for Jonathan; he just put his finger over the slot and got the green light and a lit-up button. The elevator was showing its age, and the trip was slower than usual. We didn’t talk, just waited in that pocket-universe silence that people inhabit in elevators, until the door chimed and rolled back on a long, straight hallway lit with featureless pale squares of indirect lighting.

The Hall of Fame. Important-looking heavy plaques recognizing Wardens for achievement above and beyond. They stretched in a row all the way to the end, most of them black-bordered to indicate posthumous awards. The place smelled of artificial vanilla, wood, and the faintest hint of flop sweat; it was a bad day at the office for everyone there. Except the Earth Wardens, presumably, who at least had the comfort of knowing Hollywood wasn’t going to become a new coral reef.

The place was buzzing with activity. From a human perspective, it looked like any other busy New York office—smartly dressed people walking with purpose from one room to another, talking tensely to each other or cell phones, carrying reams of paper or folders or computers. No Djinn in attendance. I could see why, as I walked through the halls and dodged around unwary staffers; I was trailing blue glitter like Pinocchio’s fairy.

It came to me finally that I was alone. I looked back, but Jonathan had vanished. Poof. Apparently that was part of the plan I wasn’t privy to, up front.

I paused in the doorway of a huge round conference room and saw close to twenty of the most powerful Wardens in the world clustered there while a War Room map showed detailed schematics of weather patterns, real-time satellite imagery, infrared scans of the planet’s surface to pinpoint hot spots. Yellowstone looked like a whiteout, but it wasn’t the only one; there were fires raging in India, in Africa, and in Chile.

Paul Giancarlo was there, looking tired and stressed; he was arguing softly with somebody I didn’t recognize, gesturing at the weather map and the Doppler radar display. From the hand gestures, I figured he was talking about the massive potential for hail. He was right, if that was where he was going; I could sense the ice forming up in the highest levels of the atmosphere, thick and gray and heavy. Freight-train winds intercepted the ice on the way down, added moisture, tossed it back up to freeze again.

New York City was going to be pelted with a disaster of biblical proportions. This would make baseball-sized hail look like Styrofoam. I had power, but not much, and certainly not enough to disrupt a process with this kind of momentum behind it. There were thirty or forty Wardens still working on it, I sensed. But none of them had Djinn.

And none of them were going to be able to stop it. Not singly, not collectively. It was simply too big, and had too much control of its own destiny. Lewis could stop it, but even then, it would be a tough battle.

Paul’s eyes swept over me without pausing as he turned away from the heated debate; his weightlifter-dense muscles were tensed under the soft cotton of his shirt. His tie was loose, his sleeves rolled up. I could feel the anger coming off of him, the metal-sharp smell of sweat.

He knew they were losing.

I wanted to say something to him, anything, but I didn’t have the time and it was too much of a risk. I backed out of the doorway and continued down the hall.

Sandwiched between the main conference room and a smaller one just as frantically occupied was a recessed alcove with a bubbling fountain and a whole lot of names inscribed in marble.

The roll of the dead. I paused for a few seconds to look over the names.

Yes, at the bottom, sharp and new-cut: Robert Biringanine. Estrella Almondovar. Joanne Baldwin. There was something really final about seeing that. What was the old saying? It was set in stone. In a way, it was even more final than a coffin.

“Move,” a voice at my side whispered. I looked up to find that Jonathan had popped back out of whatever hole he’d gone into; he tugged my elbow in a way that definitely discouraged memory-laning. I walked with him down to the end, where the hallway split off into a T-intersection. We had to dodge an oblivious gopher with two overfull cups of coffee and a wildly scared look in his eyes; trainee, I judged, who was probably going to be begging for an assignment somewhere safe and peaceful, like Omaha, when this was all over. The building seemed to shudder underfoot, and I heard glass rattling in the windows.

The storm was starting to roll in.

“Can’t hold it,” Jonathan said. His lips were tense, white rimmed, and set in a straight hard line. “Faster we can do this, the better for everybody.”

As if to underscore the point, thunder boomed outside, unbelievably loud. This monster had come roaring in fast—too fast for natural forces to be the only thing going on. The blue sparklies were busy little critters.

In Oversight, just about every doorway glowed, due to the accretion of years of Wardens working here. Some were flickering madly, like magic lanterns in a high wind. One near the middle glowed especially brightly, and the power spilling out had a dense, almost gravitational feel to it.

Definitely Lewis, behind that door. I waited for Jonathan to make the next move, but he just put a hand on my arm and pulled me out of the way of another fast-moving clique of Wardens rushing to do damage control. Some of them looked white faced, on the very edge of panic. The pallid smell of L’Air du Temps mingled with the sharp organic aroma of fear.

Distraction, Jonathan said. Keep them looking at you. Do whatever you have to, but keep their attention for at least five minutes. That should give me enough time to get Lewis and get to the vault.

I nodded and opened the door. In the space of three seconds, I moderated my eyes to a demure dove gray, and replaced my black conservative pant-suit with my distraction outfit.

Thank you, Kevin Prentiss, for being such an inspirational little jerk.

French Maid outfit, a handful of colorful balloons, Shirley Temple hair, and a big fake smile. I strolled into the room and found it was an infirmary, full of sterile white room dividers and one occupied bed at the far end, with three people clustered around it.

My high heels clopped loudly on the linoleum, and one of the people leaned out of the range of the curtains to take a look. He stopped, did a double take, and gave me the full-body X-ray scan. A middle-aged man, definitely not immune to the outfit.

“Hi!” I said brightly. “I’m here to deliver a birthday wish—”

“What the hell?” Another man popped out, this one white coated and with a disapproving frown that said doctor. I didn’t know him, but then I’d never spent any time in this particular part of the Association. “How’d you get in here?”

I smiled at him and launched into a rousing rendition of Marilyn Monroe’s version of “Happy Birthday,” complete with the appropriate wiggles and breathy laughs, cozying up to the first man. He looked appreciative, if a little dazed. The doctor just looked apoplectic, and started to turn away to duck back behind the curtains.

I grabbed him and sat him down in a chair, straddled him, and began to do my very best impersonation of a lap dancer. Doctor he might be, but he was definitely a guy. And he was finding it hard to keep professional detachment in the face of my, ah, assets.

I finally attracted the attention of the third person, female, who resembled Nurse Ratched but had a far more generous sense of humor. She had a malicious glint in her eye that convinced me the doctor wasn’t the most popular of all the guys on staff.

I presented the doc with the balloons and gave him a big lipstick-heavy kiss.

“Not my birthday,” he finally managed to rumble. “Ahem.”

I stretched it as long as I could, then gave him another kiss, waved good-bye to the audience, and got a weak-wristed wave from the Warden, nothing from the woman, who was still laughing too hard. I clopped out again, swinging the big bow on the back of the apron with as much vigor as possible to hold their attention.

As soon as the door clicked shut, I misted away. I hadn’t seen or felt Jonathan taking Lewis out; I just had to hope he’d managed it. I sped down the hall, past the fountain and my memorial inscription, past all of the heavy weight of the past, hit the floor running in my black pantsuit and conservatively straight hair. I wasn’t trying to hide now, and startled staffers moved out of my way. “Hold the elevator!” I yelled, and slid in behind two Wardens in suits and red power ties. We all exchanged weary smiles. I pushed the button for the ground floor.

Nothing happened. No lights. Crap. I didn’t have a badge. The security not only wouldn’t let me on the floor without a card key, it wouldn’t let me off, either. I patted my pockets, looked bothered, and one of the nice gentlemen—neither of whom was heading to the ground—badged for me and pressed the button.

Nice people make things so much easier.

We stopped on the thirty-seventh floor, let one guy out, and were on the way back down again when the elevator shuddered to a sudden, teeth-rattling halt.

“What the—” the remaining Warden said, frowning, and pushed buttons.

A recessed speaker came alive in the wall. “The building is now under a security alert. Please be patient. The elevators will restart momentarily.”

He slumped against the wall. “Great. Again.”

“Happens a lot?” I asked.

He nodded, gave me a sideways look, and then a full smile, with teeth. “Sign of the times, you know how it is. So. Visiting?”

“From Iowa,” I said. “Des Moines office.”

“Not a great time to be here, huh? What with the weather.”

“Yeah, I thought it looked bad. Actually, I’m Earth, so any storm looks bad to me,” I said, and returned the smile tooth for tooth. “You know, Earth… corn, peas, wheat… breadbasket of the USA?”

“Huh. Would have taken you for a weather girl. Stormy eyes.” Ah, romantic weather talk. In the old days, it might have even gotten him somewhere. “My name’s Ron.”

I said the first thing that popped into my head. “Gidget.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Whoa.” Ron had dark thick hair, cut short, and eyes of no particularly interesting shade, but he knew how to focus. “You in for meetings?”

“Actually, just finished. I’m on my way to the airport.” Lying wasn’t just fun, it was a way to lay false trails. With any luck, they’d be chasing an Earth Warden named Gidget all the way to Des Moines for the next few hours. “They’re sending me out to the fire. Maybe I can do some good with animal rescue.”

Ron looked dubious. “I wouldn’t be trying to go anywhere, in weather like this. I’d just stick around, if I were you. We have a pretty secure storm facility. It doubles as a nuclear shelter, so I’m assuming it’ll hold off a tornado if it has to.”

“Tornado?” I repeated, and tried to look like a dumb Iowan girl. “You’re kidding, right?”

“There’s a lot of disturbance in the aetheric. You didn’t know?”

“Well, sure. I just figured it was—” I made a vague gesture. Let him fill in the rest.

“Ah. Yeah. You must’ve heard we caught him.” When I stared at him, unmoving, he added the rest. “You know. Lewis. Lewis Orwell?”

“Really?” I tried to sound impressed, and not ready to backhand him into next week for the way-too-satisfied tone he was taking. “Was he here in the city?”

“Close by. New Jersey, as it turned out. All these years, looking for him, and he was right across the state line. Funny how things turn out.” Ron nodded sagaciously. “They think he’s behind this stuff.”

“What?” I didn’t have to feign shock on that one.

“Sure. You think it’s an accident that they get their hands on him, and all hell breaks loose on not one but three fronts? They’ve got the West Coast problem under control, but we’re going to take a real beating from this storm. Not to mention those poor bastards out in Yellowstone.” He leaned closer. “They think he might have some kind of Demon Mark. Anyway, they’re getting Marion Bearheart in here. I figure they’re going to try to, you know—” He made a yanking-up-by-the-roots gesture. I literally staggered, caught by sick surprise.

“They’re going to neuter him?”

He looked surprised at my reaction. “Well, not… actually… I meant they were going to, you know, close off his connections. Make sure he couldn’t do something like this again.”

I’d known perfectly well what he’d meant. Neutering was the right word for it. Castration. Ripping out the heart and soul of who he was. It was as horribly malicious as throwing acid on the Mona Lisa—Lewis was a treasure, a once-in-a-thousand-years goddamn gift.

They could not do this to him. I wouldn’t let them.

I forced a smile. “You’re on Marion’s staff?”

“Afraid so.” Ron tried for a sheepish little-boy cute look. It almost worked. “I’m just in training, though. No way they’d let me even in the same room for a procedure like that. They’re waiting for at least four other Senior Wardens before they even try anything.”

I smiled, nodded, and wished to hell that the elevator would start. Not that I couldn’t mist out and get away, but I couldn’t do it with Ron staring at me, not if I wanted to have any kind of chance for a clean escape. God, Jonathan, you’d better have him. I’d tear this building down one steel I beam at a time if I had to, to make sure that they didn’t carry through on their threats.

No wonder Lewis had been so paranoid all these years, running for his life. I’d have been catatonic, if I’d known what was waiting for me back here among my so-called peers.

Just as I was starting to wonder whether to seduce Ron or knock him out, the elevator jerked again and started sliding down. Fast. A red light on the panel read security lockdown.

“They’re sending us to the ground floor,” Ron said. “Looks like they’ll be searching everybody.”

“Fun.” I rocked back and forth on my low-heeled shoes, ready for fight or flight, but when the elevator doors opened a navy sports coat type with the UN emblem over his vest pocket waved me impatiently out, along with Ron. I followed his pointing finger. It looked like a mob scene, which was great for fading away. You’re never more alone than in a crowd of strangers. All Wardens, even better.

“Hey!” Ron was trying to keep up with me as I slipped between people, heading for the sealed and guarded exits. “Um, Gidget! Wait up!”

I stepped behind two particularly bulky women who looked like they might have been part of a Russian delegation, and disappeared.

Jonathan? I sent silently. No answer. Earth to Jonathan! Dammit, you’d better be there!

Crap. Getting Lewis out of here without taking him through the aetheric was going to be next to impossible, but we had to find a way. We couldn’t chance leaving him here.

I waved my hand through the air and watched it collect an insubstantial weight of blue fairy dust. I crushed it into nothing, but that didn’t matter; it was a constant blizzard even here. The aetheric would be choked with it. No. We couldn’t leave that way.

I caught sight of a familiar face in the crowd, and went cold. Marion Bearheart was here—had just made it in before the lockdown, by the look of it. Her brown suede jacket was spattered with dark drops, and water caught the light in tiny glints in her gray-and-black hair. She looked grim and haunted, arms folded over her chest. She was listening to an earnest stream of dialogue from Martin Oliver, who even now looked like the nattiest, most in-control man on the face of the world. He wasn’t in control of much, today, but I still wouldn’t have wanted to cross him. He reminded me of somebody… Ashan, Jonathan’s chief rival back in the Djinn bubble. The same kind of severe, uncompromising confidence, and a kind of elegant, almost sexual grace.

I remembered, out of nowhere, a conversation I’d had back in college about a man I’d been thinking of dating. Describe him, my best friend had said. I’d giggled and said, He’s sweet. And she’d looked at me very seriously, taken my hands, and said, Corazon, sweet men are only sexy until you realize that they’re too weak to hurt you. I hadn’t agreed with her—still didn’t, in some ways—but there was no denying that dangerous men had a visceral attraction.

The woman who’d said that was on the Wardens’ wall of the dead. Like me. I hadn’t even had time to mourn her. I didn’t even really know if I should, and that was the worst of it.

Marion’s cool, strong gaze swept my direction. I quickly put out the don’t-notice-me vibe. She scanned right past me, frowned, and turned to someone at her elbow. I focused on her lips. She was asking if he sensed anything strange. He shook his head, but she didn’t look convinced.

Man, we needed to get the hell out of here. And I needed to get down to the vault.

A huge, rolling crash of thunder like the world’s largest pane of glass dropped from ten thousand feet made everybody in the room flinch and duck. Most clapped hands over their ears. Some, like Marion, turned toward the big picture windows, and the sharp white crack of lightning lit up their strained faces.

I heard the dull thump of the first of the hail hitting the street outside. Ice exploded like a bomb, scattering frozen white shrapnel for twenty feet. Before the debris had rolled to a stop, another piece of football-sized hail crashed down onto the roof of a yellow cab speeding by. It ripped a hole right through the steel.

The storm had shaken loose of any semblance of control, and now it had a target: the only people who had a hope in hell of stopping it.

Us.

I felt it drawing in, focusing around the building, and it was a sense so suffocatingly strong that I wanted to gag. Even as a Djinn, this was oppressive; I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to a Warden. I didn’t need to imagine it, actually, all I had to do was look around. They were scared. Scared out of their minds.

“Down to the shelter!” That was Martin Oliver, who’d climbed on top of the security desk to address the crowd of several hundred milling around the lobby. “Everybody! Quickly!” Even now, he looked controlled and calm. No wonder he was the guy in charge.

Security started directing people toward a gray door marked with a bomb shelter symbol; the crush got intense, quickly. I noticed that Martin hadn’t joined the stampede. In fact, he stayed where he was, on top of the security desk, staring out at the street as rain started lashing the windows in thick, lightning-shot streaks.

More hail was crashing down. Cars had stopped moving out on the road, and drivers were abandoning their vehicles to run into any available cover. I felt power stirring, and knew what he was trying to do: cover the potential victims as they scrambled for shelter. I reached out and did what I could, which wasn’t much; I was feeling weaker all the time, and the connection to David had shrunk to a tiny filament, sparkling silver but feeding me nothing but a trickle of power.

I felt the storm shift its attention, responding instinctively to the lash of power.

Oh boy, I thought. It was like being caught in the full glare of the biggest spotlight in the world. With a big target painted on your chest.

The storm lobbed a twenty-pound piece of ice sideways, into the windows.

“Down!” I screamed, and leaped. Djinn defiance of gravity let me carry the leap the last ten feet, and gave me enough momentum to impact hard against Martin Oliver and topple both of us back behind the desk, onto a bruising hard floor.

The window shattered with so much force that fragments flew past to embed themselves in the teakwood wall behind the desk. Some of them were bloody. I shoved Martin down when he tried to get up and risked sticking my head up. Wind was screaming through the jagged hole in the window. It instantly jerked my hair back straight as a flag.

There were at least twenty people down, some moving, some not. There was a lot of blood, more leaking out over the marble floor with every faltering heartbeat. The noncombatants, mostly UN staffers and delegates who’d gotten caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, screamed and jammed up against the exits. Marion was already heading toward the wounded against the tide of panic. As an Earth Warden, she’d be of a lot more use than anything I could do. Some of them could still be saved. She was the one to do it.

“Baldwin.” The name snapped my head around, and I was blinded by my wind-whipped hair until I clawed it back and held it fisted in my left hand. Martin Oliver had gotten to his feet and was staring at me with intense, grave concentration. “Joanne Baldwin?”

I didn’t have time for long explanations. “In the flesh.” More or less, but it didn’t seem the time to spill that particular bean. “Sorry about that, sir.”

He rejected the apology with a sharp hand movement. “Can you do anything about that?”

He gestured out at the monster looming gray-green outside. It was firing off lightning bolts every few seconds, and thunder was a continuous subsonic rumble. What could I do about it? What had he been smoking? And then I remembered. I’d been told before that I had more power than Bad Bob Biringanine, who had once faced down a certain hurricane by the name of Andrew and killed it before it claimed even more lives. Not that I’d ever believed such a thing… and yet Martin Oliver, one bad-ass Weather Warden in his own right, was looking at me as if I was the hope of the world.

And I had to say, regretfully, “No, sir. Sorry.”

Maybe in my human days—maybe—but not now, at the ragged end of my Djinn powers and enslaved to a…

… I had an idea.

I held up a finger. “Be right back.”

Now that I knew the coldlight wasn’t damaging to me, I could travel fast. I rose up into the aetheric, was instantly smothered by a whirling hungry blizzard of the stuff, but I didn’t need sight to feel where I was going, not in this case. Homing instinct.

I flew.

The glitter clung to me, built up like a thick snow coating, but I refused to let it slow me down. I didn’t see or sense any other presences up on the aetheric, but if there were any, they’d have been blue snowmen like me, masked from contact. Any Djinn still trapped here were probably frozen solid—if not frozen dead. Damn.

I collided with something. Not anything solid— that wasn’t possible, on the aetheric plane—but the pulling confusion was just as surprising and upsetting. I drifted, shook off as much coldlight as I could, and tried to see what it was that I’d hit. I had to wipe off sparkles like ice on a windshield, but I finally realized that I’d found a Djinn. Which one, I couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter.

I grabbed hold and towed it with me, fast, bucking the glitter headwind as fast as I could, and then falling, with a shocking sense of gravity, into…

… Patrick’s apartment. It was just as I’d left it. Sedate, well furnished, kind of pallid in a Better Homes and Gardens kind of way.

Blood dried to a dull brown mat on the neutral carpet where Lewis had been taken down.

I looked over at the Djinn I’d brought with me as his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed in slow motion to the floor.

I’d brought Patrick home.

Even though there was no time, I couldn’t leave him like this, with the coldlight eating its way through him like worms on speed. He was already screaming, skin bubbling and beginning to slough. I grabbed hold—tried not to think about the slick, greasy feel of his flesh—and called all of the coldlight to me. It spiraled eagerly, abandoning the feast and climbing my arms in a blue-white frenzy.

“Nice doggies,” I murmured, and as soon as I was sure I had enough of them, I went across the room and shook them off in a flurry of disappointed critters. They dropped into the carpet like invisible fleas. They’d eventually make their way back to whatever victim was handy, but with any luck, Patrick would survive. At least as long as any of the rest of us would.

“Sara?” Patrick’s eyes were open, blue and blind. His glasses were gone. I went back to him, got on my knees, and leaned over him. He slowly focused on me, and went pale. “Oh. You.”

“Yeah. Nice of you to remember. By the way, this whole slavery thing… it’s working out just great.” I resisted the urge to punch him while he was down.

His gaze sharpened. “You’re still alive.”

“Surprised?”

That woke up a weak smile. “Pleased, actually. Help me up.” He held out his hand. I stared at it for a second, then took it. Warm skin, as human and real as my own. Whether or not it was as human and real as an actual living person was something else entirely. Patrick heaved himself to his feet, staggered drunkenly and used me as a cane for a few seconds. “Ugh. I see you haven’t changed your mind about the room.”

“Yeah, well, I admit, the retro trashy look had its charms, but right at the moment I’m more concerned with saving some lives.” I pointed up. Even inside of his apartment, I could hear the thunder and feel the electric snap of the lightning strikes. “Gotta go.”

“Yes,” he agreed. He looked at me very seriously for a few seconds. “Where is Sara?”

“At Jonathan’s house.”

He looked ill. “They’ll destroy her.”

“Actually, they’ve got bigger problems to worry about just now. Like me.” I left him and moved around to the front of the couch.

Yep. There he was, my teen Nero-in-training, crashed out in a sprawl on the leather couch, mouth gaping to show poor dental hygiene. He was snoring.

Also smiling.

I leaned over and whispered, “Kevin? Wake up.”

No response. Damn. I’d drawn on his own power to put him in this trance. Was it something I could snap him out of? I hadn’t been thinking that far ahead, I had to admit. I reached out, grabbed, and shook him. His oily hair flopped back and forth, and he snorkled a breath. His eyelids fluttered.

Nothing.

“Kevin!” I screamed, and shook him again. “Damn, what do I have to do? Wake up!”

He mumbled something, smacked at me ineffectually with a clumsy hand, and tried to turn over.

I grabbed him and kissed him. After the first few slack seconds, I felt him kiss me back.

Ewwwwwwww. Not that boys his age were great kissers in general, but he had a lot to learn. No style points. I broke free before the wiggling worm of his tongue got too far into my mouth and shook him again, for emphasis.

His eyes were open, but cloudy. Cleaned up, he probably wouldn’t be half bad, but the fact was he wasn’t cleaned up, or even clean. The body odor alone made me think of places without running water or inside plumbing.

“Wha?” The word was garbled, but still semicoherent. I yanked him up by the grimy T-shirt to a sitting position. “… gone.”

“Shut up and listen,” I said. “I need your help.”

“… help?” He blinked slowly, like an owl. His pupils were way too large. “Why?”

“Philosophy some other time. Just repeat what I say. Got it?”

“Repeat.”

“Very good.” I resisted the urge to pat him on the head, mostly because I really didn’t want to get greasy. “I order you to destroy the storm.”

“Mmmm?” His eyes were glazing over. I pinched him hard enough to make a welt, and he yelped and cleared up. “What?”

“I order you to destroy the storm. Say it.”

Oops. I’d woken him up too much. “Why?” The vague look was vanishing like snow under an Arizona summer sun. “You. You… you tricked me.”

“Just say it.”

“Or?” His jaw hardened as muscles clenched. He was willing himself awake, and all of the nice happy thoughts he’d been dreaming were slipping away. “You’ll put me to sleep again?” I’d liked him better asleep. Who wouldn’t? “No. I’m your, ah, master. You do what I say.”

“Then tell me to destroy the storm.”

His eyes narrowed behind the pretty, girl-length lashes. “Why should I? What’s in it for me?”

“Oh, I don’t know… survival? Can’t you feel this?” But then I realized that of course he couldn’t; for him, like for most people, the storm was just a storm. Bad, yes. A killer. But not sentient, not rabid and scenting fresh meat. Not alive. His talent was fire. “Shit. Please, Kevin. Do one decent thing in your life. I’m begging you. Let me do this.”

He kept staring at me for a few seconds. My bottle was clenched in his fist, my soul in his control, and the lives of thousands hanging in the balance.

“Fine,” he finally said. “Go destroy the damn storm.”

I was almost out of there when he added, “And take me with you.”

I materialized back in the lobby at the Secretariat tower to find it mostly deserted. Martin Oliver was still there; so were some of the security guards. Earth Wardens were shouting to each other over the steady shriek of wind, and a continuous silver curtain of rain was slicing in through broken windows. Everyone on the east side of the building was out, now. The storm had been continuing its grenade attack. The marble was a minefield of ice and glass shards, water, and blood.

Kevin was whooping in my ear. He liked aetheric travel a little too much, even with the smothering blanket of coldlight—ah, that’s right, I remembered, he couldn’t see it. None of them could.

“That is so cool!” he crowed, and did a spastic little dance on the slippery floor. He stopped, stared around. “Jeez. You weren’t kidding.”

“No,” I said. I was boiling over with power now, rich red power that pulsed in time with my fast, adrenalized heartbeats. “Stay here.” I walked over to the nearest broken window.

“Baldwin!” Martin Oliver yelled. I looked back at him and let my eyes flare silver. For the first time that I could remember, he looked outright surprised, but he recovered in seconds. “Be careful.”

I raised a hand in thanks, or farewell, or whatever, and stepped out into the storm.

Different now than it had been, back in my just-plain-girl days. The storm was a delicate latticework of interconnecting forces, with the coldlight swarming around it like a bloodstream, feeding it, insulating it, holding it together. I didn’t get a sense that the light itself was hostile—just mindlessly opportunistic. The storm was alive, therefore it was capable of being parasitized. Eventually, the coldlight would probably grow out of control and consume too much energy and start the chain reaction that would remove the threat—but I had no idea how long that would take. Too long, probably. No way could I count on it to happen in time.

I spread my arms and rose into the clouds, trailing blue sparks like a comet trail. Where I went, the cold-light flocked. The storm sensed me immediately, and recognized a threat; lightning began to stab through me, millions of volts of electricity attempting to explode every cell in my body. I bled the charge off, used it to draw in more coldlight. An ever-increasing spiral of blue, with me at the center.

Up, climbing the sheer gray tower of the anvil cloud. Up into the cold, the thin air, the mesosphere, where if the storm could be said to have a heart, the heart resided.

The storm responded by battering me with ice and more lightning. Plasma balls formed white-hot and flung themselves at me, but the command Kevin had given me was utterly straightforward and the power being pulled out of him was staggering. I just flicked the St. Elmo’s fire away, bent lightning bolts at right angles, and reached for the vulnerable beating heart of the beast.

A scream stopped me. A piercing, panicked cry that went right through me like a sword thrust.

My master’s voice. “Come back! Oh God, come back now! Right now!” Kevin sounded scared— worse than scared, horrified.

I could have gone, but I didn’t have to. I had the choice, because I hadn’t fulfilled the first command he’d given me; the two commands effectively canceled each other.

Free will. Go back and baby-sit Kevin, or kill this thing and save thousands—maybe tens of thousands…

I didn’t think there was a choice. I ignored the screaming—even though it continued, sawing right through me, body and soul—and focused on the storm instead.

I reached in and grabbed the core process that was at the center of the giant. It wasn’t much, really; some overexcited molecules, a pattern of reflecting and replicating waveforms that perfectly reinforced each other. The tough part wasn’t disrupting it, it was finding it and reaching it.

The Wardens couldn’t see it, because it was built out of nothing but coldlight.

I reached in and took hold of it, drew the sparks to me, and consumed them the way they consumed others. We are all born from death. Patrick had told me that. I hadn’t realized he’d meant it literally.

The winds continued to blow, but the waveforms fragmented and began to cancel each other instead of resonating. Clouds began to break apart instead of pull inward. Temperatures began to cool here, warm there, chaos theory taking over.

It would storm for a while, but it was just another freak weather story now, one of those things that would play on CNN and the Weather Channel for the next few days, and be forgotten by everybody except a few cab drivers and weather conspiracy nuts who believed the CIA was behind it all. Rain, hail, lightning. The usual stuff.

I let the power of it soak into me, reviving me, and then slowly drifted back down toward the UN Building. It was hard to see through the swirling, choking mass of coldlight that was being pulled toward me but I could see the place needed about a hundred new windows. The people weren’t so lucky. As I folded back into flesh, blood, bone, and all the necessary fabric accessories, I saw that there were still a lot of people down on a floor that was awash with inches of rainwater. There had been blood, but it had been diluted and flushed by the storm; now that the rain was abating, some of the wounded were leaking red puddles.

Some, more ominously, were not.

I completed the transformation back into human form, felt my hair fall silky and straight over my shoulders, and for the first time thought, I have it right. Finally.

And then I realized what I was looking at. I’d left Marion, Martin Oliver, and a few other Wardens tending to the wounded, trying to get them to safety… and there was nobody moving now.

Instead, there were more bodies.

I skidded to a stop next to a crumpled form in rain-soaked brown suede. Marion’s hair looked dark and thin, pounded by the storm’s violence; she was still and quiet and pale. I checked her pulse and found her heart beating, though slowly. Martin Oliver was down, too, all his grace and fearless strength stripped away. His shirt was soaked through pink, and underneath there was a raw, four-inch-long tear through his sternum. Glass. He’d been skewered.

He didn’t have a pulse at all. Just a vast, echoing silence.

I looked up as lightning flashed white, smelled hot ozone and cooling blood, and realized that someone was missing, someone I’d left behind.

Kevin.

I misted and felt that gravitational tug, down and to the left—he was still in the UN Building, but somewhere at least a level below. I sank through concrete, steel, cold empty space, more concrete and steel…

… to a hallway that lit up in Oversight like Broadway. Lots of power rattling around in here, wild and barely contained; the place was a blizzard of sparkles. The barely felt tug of Kevin’s presence led me down through the deserted corridor, around a corner, and I saw a sudden flare of auras ahead, so bright they even punched through the curtain of glitter. I pulled back, still in mist form, and tried to get a sense of where I was and what was going on.

Kevin was definitely up ahead. So was Lewis. I couldn’t tell if Jonathan was there or not, Djinn auras were all over the place, like wildfire…

Where the hell was I? I slowly misted forward again, found a convenient recessed doorway, and came down into skin to take a look.

At the end of the hall was a huge shiny door, like the kind you see in the movies when there’s something really cool to steal. It was standing half-open.

There was a body lying a couple of feet away, human, bleeding hideously into the carpet from what looked like a fatal slash to the throat. The security guard was still breathing, but just barely… As I watched, his eyes glazed over, and the last whisper rattled out of his throat.

I heard voices, and carefully moved out of the cover of the doorway, hugging the wall. Whoever was there, they were inside the vault.

Lewis’s voice. “—don’t have to do this. Let him go.” Lewis sounded calm, but I felt the effort underneath it. Something bad was going on, something worse than the head injuries I knew he’d already sustained. I could feel the pulse of his distress, mental and physical, across the empty space separating us.

I advanced slowly, one step at a time, wondering where the hell Jonathan was, where David was, what had gone so wrong about all of this. I couldn’t believe Kevin had killed the people upstairs, or taken out the dead guard on the carpet. Then again, maybe I was underestimating his capacity for desperation, or fury…

By moving all the way to the right side of the hall, I could see a slice of the interior, beyond the open door.

There were more unmoving figures in there, down on the ground. One wore a UN Security blazer. I extended my senses and found they were both dead.

Lewis was standing, utterly still, with his hand wrapped around a blue glass bottle. It was still stoppered. David… Across from him, Kevin was on his knees, being held there by a hand around his throat. He looked unconscious. At the very least, he was too scared to fight.

The hand that held him was big, square, and covered with blood.

I moved forward, trying to get in, and came right up against a barrier, like a thick pane of glass. A Djinn barrier. I’d have to be in a bottle to pass through it, and once inside… shit. My bottle must be on the other side, with Kevin. Probably stuffed in his pants pockets, along with his condoms.

“Please,” Lewis said, and worked the glass bottle nervously against his pants leg. He looked awful. Bruises covered half his face like an elaborate tribal tattoo—courtesy of Kevin’s kicks in the head—and where he wasn’t bruised he was pale, with a sick oatmeal tinge. “You have a choice. Don’t choose to do this. There’s no going back.”

“There never is.” The hand holding Kevin was a man’s, right down to the hair on the wrist and the big, blunt fingers, but the voice was a woman’s, and it issued from somewhere on the other side, where I couldn’t see. I didn’t need to. I knew who she was, that voice was never going to leave my nightmares. Yvette. Of course… if Lewis had been there, they would have confiscated David’s bottle and taken Yvette in for interrogation, too. Which meant that somewhere in the confusion upstairs, she’d escaped and come down here to rifle the vault for her favorite slave.

Over my not-quite-dead body, bitch. I tried the barrier again, searching for a weakness, but it was slick and perfect. I didn’t think any of them had noticed me. I was staying just out of sight, misting where I had to in order to stay unnoticed. Mist, solid, didn’t matter. I wasn’t getting through to the other side. I’d have to wait for them to come out.

She said, in a voice as sweet and hard as petrified honey, “Give me the bottle, Lewis. I might just let you live.”

He kept rubbing the bottle against the side of his leg, and I figured out what he was doing. It had a rubber stopper. He was slowly working it out, giving David a chance to escape. “Tempting.” His voice cracked, and he swallowed hard and wet his lips. “Look, not that I don’t think that as psychos go you’re a really lovely woman, but the last thing I want to do is give you a Djinn. So I think you’d better think about—”

“Kill him,” Yvette said.

The hand holding Kevin clenched, and I heard bone pop with a crunch like glass in plastic. Lewis yelled, stretched out his hand, and white fire flared from him to bathe Kevin as he was allowed to fall limp to the ground. Oh God. His neck, that sound had been the kid’s neck breaking.

I didn’t feel any release. Kevin wasn’t dead. Lewis was keeping him alive, at least for the moment, but Lewis only looked a shade or two better than a corpse himself.

The Djinn who’d just killed Kevin—even if it was happening in slow motion—moved to the side, and I saw his face.

It was Jonathan. He looked blank, hard, as impenetrable as frosted glass. Nothing there of the humor or assurance I’d come to expect… he was wiped clean. Made something else.

He’d been claimed.

Yvette came into view. She didn’t look so fresh, either—bruised along the side of her face, hair disarranged. Her eyes had a werewolf shine, and she no longer was hiding behind that fragile pretty shell. She looked bone hard, tough, and ready to kill. Not that she’d had to get her French-manicured hands dirty. She’d used (oh God) Jonathan for that.

She was holding a small glass bottle in her hands, something all-purpose, cheap but sturdy. Jonathan’s prison. I remembered David telling me that he’d never been claimed. What was it like, to be so powerful, so old, and have to submit to this? I could barely stand it, and I was just days old. For him, it must be like…

… rape, David had said. And it was. Just like that.

“Give it up,” she said to Lewis. “Believe me, he’s not worth it. He’s a cheap, mean, arrogant little son of a bitch, and he’ll never amount to anything. In fact, you’ll probably be better off with him dead. Count on it.”

He didn’t listen, or if he listened, he didn’t stop pouring energy into the boy.

I might have been the only one who noticed the rubber cap of the blue bottle in his hand fall out and bounce away into the shadows… but no, I saw something in Jonathan’s eyes, a shift, a kind of blind focus. He knew.

David was out.

Lewis was panting now, slicked with sweat; he was pouring his life out to keep Kevin alive. And he couldn’t possibly keep it up.

Yvette was moving toward him with that same hunting-tiger grace she’d used against David, and I wanted more than anything in my life to rip my way through this wall, drill diamond-hard claws into her heart and rip it out.

Lewis shifted his gaze and looked right at me. Fierce, utterly committed eyes. My throat went dry.

“Go fix the rift,” he said. It looked like he was talking to me, but I knew he wasn’t. It was a direct order, and it was given to a Djinn who’d just come out of a bottle and was still mist… a Djinn whose bottle he held in his hand.

I felt David began to rise up through the aetheric. Leaving without me.

Yvette laid a hand on Lewis, and it was like watching a roach crawl across the face of the Mona Lisa.

He formed the word with his lips, silently, where she couldn’t see. Still holding my eyes prisoner. Go.

He’d die if I left him. Hell, he’d probably die if I didn’t leave him, but at least he wouldn’t die alone, unwitnessed…

I felt the cord between myself and David stretch and grow thin under the strain.

Yvette’s hand slid insinuatingly along Lewis’s sweat-damp neck as he poured his concentration into keeping her last victim breathing.

Go.

Lewis didn’t have my bottle. He couldn’t command me. With Kevin all but dead, nobody else could, either.

I whispered, at a pitch I knew only he could hear, I love you.

And I shot up like a burning arrow into the aetheric, mourning.

I found David one level above the aetheric. No words. We melted, merged, our auras shifting and blending. I remembered what he’d told me once about making love as a gas, and felt a smile bloom sad and warm inside. Even in the disembodied state, he was as familiar to me as my human heartbeat had once been, and just as necessary.

Jo… A whisper through the empty spaces, a caress without skin or body or words. The purest form of love I had ever felt. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t let you die, but I didn’t want to die, either. And that’s the only way to make a Djinn. Through sacrifice. I tried to cheat. This is what comes out of it.

He could feel the mourning in me, and the guilt, and the horrible weight of responsibility. His touch made it easier. Nothing could make it easy.

He was already moving again, rising, driven by the compulsion Lewis had placed on him to close the rift. So long as he was moving up, I knew Lewis was still alive. There was that, at least.

I went with him. The coldlight was almost solid now, energy made matter. The image came to me that it was antibodies, that we were the invaders here, and this excess of them meant the universe was sick, maybe dying.

Up. I don’t know if there were other Djinn there, because all I could see was coldlight, a continuous blizzard of sparks surrounding us like a hot blue shell. I kept bleeding them off of David. They rolled harmlessly off of me.

Up.

We slowed and stopped, and although I couldn’t see anything I knew we’d arrived. David’s compulsion would have delivered us to the right place. When I stretched out my senses I could feel the rift, turning slowly like a slow-motion whirlpool as it sucked the coldlight from the demon reality into ours.

Get back, David said, and gently tried to push me away. I clung harder. Jo, you have to get back now. I need to do this alone.

“No.” I didn’t even know if I could do it, or how stupid an idea it was, but I formed flesh. I was surprised it was even possible here, in this place, but I took on weight and dimension and artificial life. No air to breathe, but that didn’t matter, not for a short while; I could manufacture an atmosphere good enough to sustain me for a while, out of the same primal material I’d just formed my body from.

A hot sirocco of wind whipped through the nothingness, blowing back my straight black hair, whispering close over my skin.

Hands closed around my shoulders from behind. They slid up my neck and combed hair away from my skin, and I shivered at the kiss that burned right at the juncture of my neck and collarbone.

“Jo.” His whisper was as rough and unsteady as his fingers. “I thought I’d never see you again. Not in any way that mattered.”

I turned. David was back to my David, hair slightly too long for neatness, warm copper eyes, kissable lips. I wrapped my arms around him and held him. There was too much tension in his body, but it felt right. At last. The coldlight was a continuous white-noise hiss of blue against the bubble I’d formed around us, but it didn’t matter just now. I wanted to stay in his embrace forever.

And I couldn’t. I knew I couldn’t. Too high a price for that.

He kissed me, gentle and slow and warm, and the taste of him nearly made me weep. He cupped my face in both hands, and as he pulled back his eyes were luminous with peace.

“It’s okay,” he said, and drew his thumbs over my lips in a caress that was as intimate as anything I’d ever felt. “Jonathan knew. One of us has to go. I’ve had my time.”

“Wrong,” I corrected him, and put all my strength into a shove that sent him stumbling backwards. “I’m giving you mine.”

I dove straight at the whirlpool.

David’s scream followed me in, but it was too late, too late to even wonder what the hell I was thinking, because I felt the darkness on the other side of the rift and with it, a visceral surge of panic, and knew this was going to hurt, badly.

And then I hit the paper-thin cut between the worlds, and stuck there with an impact that shredded me back into mist. Pieces of me began to be sucked away, through that rift, and I had to fight to hold on against the intense black pressure.

Where the pieces of me went through, the rift sealed.

Oh God.

I understood now. I understood why Jonathan had been so reluctant to send David to do this, because he’d known what had to be done. The only thing that could seal this thing was my blood, or David’s, because we’d birthed this thing, like some distorted child.

I let go. Let go of everything—all the fear, the pain, the anguish, the guilt. I felt the cord back to David break with a high, thin singing sound like a snapped wire, and his presence vanished from my mind.

I was alone.

I let go and let the Void have me, as much of me as it needed to seal the hole between our two worlds. It was like bleeding to death—a slow, cold unraveling, a sense of being lost one drop at a time. There was pain, but the pain didn’t matter.

What mattered was that I sensed the rift drawing together, healing.

The flow of coldlight at the rift slowed, stopped. It drifted in a sparkling blue weightless dance around me.

What was left of me.

I felt the rift seal shut with a kind of vacuum seal thump, and instantly the coldlight glowed white-hot around me, bright and brilliant as a million stars exploding, and faded off into darkness. It couldn’t exist here without the rift, just as I couldn’t exist without the umbilical to David.

There was not much left of me. Just enough to remember who I was, what I’d been. Faces in my memory, but I didn’t know them anymore. It was all falling away.

Falling like snow into the dark.

The snow turned to light. Sunlight. I was standing in a meadow full of grass that was too green to be real, and there was a woman walking toward me through flame red flowers. Her white gown shifted in a wind that didn’t stir the fields.

White hair like a cloud. Eyes the color of deepest amethyst. Beautiful and cool and peaceful.

“Sara.” I didn’t know where the name came from. “I’m dead, you know.”

She reached out toward me. “No,” she said, and caressed the satin of my hair. “No, my sweet. Not yet. There is a part of you that remains. Humans are like that.”

I remembered a coal black hunger, ice-edged shadows. “Ifrit?” I whispered.

“You would be,” she said. “But there is another way. And perhaps we owe that to you.”

“We?”

When she pulled back, I saw she wasn’t alone. There was a man with her, big and muscular, running a little to fat, with a Scandinavian-blond unruly shock of hair and eyes as blue as a Caribbean sea. I knew him, and didn’t know him. He smiled at me, very slightly, and I saw pain in it. And courage.

“I’ve lived too long,” Sara said. “I’ve stolen life from others. Patrick betrayed you to buy it for me. There is no honor in what I’ve become.”

I didn’t understand. The wind that rippled Sara’s dress touched my face, combed cool fingers through my hair. It was gentle and beautiful and peaceful, and I knew it wanted to take me with it, into the dark.

“I did this for Patrick. I started the rift. What David did for you only accelerated it. Do you understand?”

I didn’t. It was all falling away, sliding into the shadows.

“We do the worst things for love,” she whispered. “So Jonathan was created. So David created you. So I created Patrick. And none of us should exist. The balance is gone.”

If balance was required, I was restoring it. Going away…

“Stay,” she said, and touched my face with those cool silver lips. “There is a gift only Patrick and I can give. One last gift, in return for what you have given us.”

Words drifted up from the darkness inside of me. “What have I given you?”

Her smile was beautiful, and sad, and perfect. “A way to be together. And now I offer you the same, my love. Take it.”

She opened her arms. I looked at Patrick. There were tears shining in his eyes, and he backed away. Afraid, after all.

I stepped into Sara’s embrace.

“No,” Patrick gulped, and turned back. He flung his arms around us both and hid his face in the pale lace of Sara’s hair. “Both of us or nothing. As it always was.”

Something wrapped hot around me, like clinging tar, and I thought, I should have said no, but then the pain dug deep and I screamed.

And screamed and screamed and screamed, until the universe exploded in a silent dark pop like a shattering of glass.

It didn’t feel like a gift.

It felt like a betrayal.

When I woke up, someone was holding me in strong, warm arms. I tried to burrow closer and felt the embrace tighten. “Jo?”

I lifted my head and saw that it was David. We were sitting against a wall in a hallway, next to a giant brushed-steel vault door. I felt… empty. Clean, but empty. Exhausted and powerless.

I felt wrong.

He was stroking my hair gently, letting it curl around his fingers. Crap. Curly hair again. Something hadn’t gone right…

“Easy,” he murmured when I tried to get up. He rose to his feet, still holding me, and set me down on shaky legs. “Oh God, Jo. My God. You’re alive.”

Sara. Patrick. It had seemed so real, hurt so much… I drew breath. It felt… wrong. Clumsy. Mechanical. “Maybe.” Memory slammed back with a vengeance and flooded me with alarm. I turned to look inside the vault.

It couldn’t have been the hours it had seemed, up there at the top of the world. It had been seconds, minutes at most.

The confrontation was still going on.

Lewis was still standing, but even as I watched he swayed and collapsed to his knees. The white burn of energy I’d seen him giving to the motionless, broken body of Kevin Prentiss was almost spent, just flickers now, pulsing in time with Lewis’s labored heartbeat.

God, he was dying. I couldn’t believe he’d held on so long, or that Yvette had let him… but then I saw the look on her face as she watched him, and I knew why she’d waited. He was suffering.

She liked that kind of thing too much to stop it prematurely.

Jonathan was more of an absence than a presence in the room—blank, stiff as a statue, no sense of the restless energy and power that had been as much a part of him as the sarcastic half-smile. Yvette could not be allowed to keep him. The damage she could do…

“We have to do something,” I said to David. He reached out, encountered the barrier, and slid his hand along it.

“I can’t.” His voice was rough and low in his throat; he hated being helpless, hated seeing Jonathan reduced to this.

I reached out, and my hand slid past his, into the barrier, through it without pause. I heard his intake of breath, but then I was committed, and I had to move. No time to think about things.

I threw myself forward, onto Yvette.

She was stronger than she looked, and softer. I’d caught her by surprise; she really hadn’t believed any Djinn could get past that barrier. We hit the floor hard enough to make her scream and me gasp for breath, rolled, and fetched up in a tangle against some metal shelves that teetered precariously from the impact.

They were full of bottles.

Full of Djinn bottles.

Every one of them marked with a black seal.

These were the Djinn who’d been infected with Demon Marks, who’d been sealed away, never to be released again, because if a demon ever succeeded in taking over a Djinn, the power of that combination would be—Nobody even wanted to think about it.

It was the equivalent of a room full of nuclear bombs, rocking back and forth over our heads.

Yvette still held Jonathan’s bottle, I hadn’t succeeded in making her drop it. She opened her mouth to scream out a command. I punched her in the face, hard, felt my knuckles explode into white pain when they crushed her lips against her teeth.

“You,” I panted, and punched her again, “don’t say anything.”

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.

When he pulled back, I realized that Lewis was talking. Urgently. “David, you can’t be here. They don’t know about you. You have to leave this to the Wardens now. She’s getting the best of care—”

“Quiet.” David hissed it, and when I looked up I saw the two of them exchanging a full-force stare. “Leave. You can’t do anything for her.”

Lewis’s eyes betrayed him with a flicker, and I remembered that he’d been stripped of power. Emptied. He was no more than any other mortal out there, walking around oblivious. David meant it literally. Lewis couldn’t heal me. Couldn’t do anything but hold my hand.

I couldn’t imagine how that felt, for someone like him who’d held the power of the world inside of him.

“Don’t say that,” I said, and drew David’s eyes back to me. “He’s my friend. Always.”

That eased some of the darkness in Lewis’s eyes, at least. He gave me a very small, pale smile.

“So… as a friend… how much trouble am I in, exactly?”

He started to answer, but in the next few seconds there were footsteps ringing on tile, and then the white curtain around my bed got whipped away in a shriek of metal rings, and an entire delegation was standing there. I was, I realized, in a familiar room. The same one where I’d done the French Maid lap dance for the doctor—who was standing in the corner with his arms folded across his chest, looking none too happy. Next to him was a weary, bleary Paul Giancarlo. Next to him was Marion Bearheart.

David let me go and stood up. Shield and protector. I took his hand and squeezed it lightly. “No,” I said. “Relax, David. Friends.”

I wasn’t sure of that, actually, but a battle wouldn’t do any of us any good. David settled—outwardly— but I felt the tension in his grip on my fingers.

“Friends,” Marion echoed softly. “I see. You assume a lot, Joanne.”

“I assume you wouldn’t have saved me if you didn’t think I was worth the trouble.” It was a long speech. I felt winded at the end of it.

Marion cut a look toward Paul, who slid his hands in his pants pockets and looked secretive. He didn’t volunteer a comment, so she continued. “The boy. Kevin. Do you contend that he was to blame for all of the… chaos?”

Boy, that was a loaded question. “Blame is kind of a broad term. If you’re asking, did he kill people, yes. He did. And he’s got a very powerful Djinn under his control, not to mention a couple of bottles of quarantined ones.” I had to pause for a couple of breaths. The dull ache in my back was blossoming into something hot and immediate. “He was on his way to Las Vegas. You know that?”

Marion nodded. “We know. What we need to know is how powerful is he, exactly? Can you tell us that?”

I could. I wasn’t actually sure if I should. My hesitation made Paul sigh and step forward.

“Jo, dammit, we’ve lost enough people. Not to mention a full fifteen Djinn. Don’t screw around, here. I don’t want a higher body count out of this.”

I felt a headache start pounding between my eyes. “You lost a team already, didn’t you?”

Nobody answered, and then Lewis said, quietly, “Three people. We think they’re dead.”

I sucked in a deep breath—it hurt—and nodded. “You’ll lose more. Pull them back. Track him, don’t try to take him.”

“Somebody has to try,” Marion said grimly.

“Fine. I will.” I struggled to sit up. The doctor and Lewis and David all tried to stop me, but I wasn’t having any. Screw internal damage. I had a fix for that.

“David,” I said. “Heal me.”

I’d never understood what it meant, before, when that command was given. It wasn’t just that the way opened for David to touch that deep well of potential… It was a path that moved both ways, a true and perfect union. Through him, I touched him. And something else. Something even greater.

He looked back at me with a dawning astonishment in his eyes. He reached out to take my other hand, holding both, staring down at me.

And the power that flooded through me, God, unbelievable. I knew it was my own, purified and refined through him, but the richness of it was staggering. There was pain, but more than that, there was pleasure. An amazing amount of it.

I gasped out loud, held on tight, and rode it out. When it subsided to aftershocks, I gasped, “You ever felt that before?”

His smile burned, it was so glorious. “Never.”

“Me neither.” I yanked tubes out of my hand and swung my legs over the side of the bed. People made protests. I ignored them and put my weight on my feet, felt the world go steady and sharp around me. I looked down at my hospital clothes and felt a sad regret for my lost ability to design my own wardrobe. “David? Clothes?”

Dark peachskin suit settled gently over my skin. A silk shirt, sharply tailored. On my feet, lethally beautiful shoes. I glanced up at David, who lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug.

“I learn,” he said. “What now?”

The rest of them were silent. Nobody was trying to stop us. I looked from one of them to the other— Marion, Paul, Lewis—and finally at David.

“Are you ready for this?” I asked him. For answer, he let go of my hand and stepped back, and settled an olive drab ankle-length coat around his shoulders. His copper eyes hid themselves behind human brown, and round spectacles. He looked mild and gentle, except for the strength of his smile.

“I’m ready,” he said. I turned to Paul and held up a hand. He echoed the gesture.

“Las Vegas?” he asked. “Just so I know where to send the body bags.”

“You in charge now?”

“Until things get settled. This place isn’t all that under control right now.”

“You’ll do fine,” I said. “Paul. Keep your people out of my way.”

Marion cleared her throat. “My people will help.”

“Your people will get killed,” I corrected. “This is my fight. Mine and David’s.”

“He’s just a kid,” Lewis said. He hadn’t gotten to his feet. Hadn’t done anything but sit quietly, watching the show. “Go easy.”

I looked at him in Oversight, and saw something terrible. Something I should have known all along.

Lewis was dying. The emptiness inside of him was like cancer, eating away at him; his aura was already pallid, turning necrotic. Kevin had already killed him; Lewis’s body was just still fighting the inevitable. If there was any chance at all to save him, it had to be reclaiming his powers from Kevin.

This had to be done. For him. For Jonathan. Even for Kevin himself.

It just wasn’t going to be as easy as, oh, fighting your average demigod.

“What do you need?” Paul rumbled.

I turned a smile on him, saw him warm in response, and said, “Besides a vacation? I think I need a really fast car.”