Windfall

Chapter Five

I dropped straight down, sliding through slippery, frictionless sand, arriving on a solid surface with a bone-jarring thump that transmitted through my legs, up my spine, and exploded in my skull like a grenade. I pitched forward and reached out blindly, felt something like stone under my hands. Bedrock. I’d fallen a long way. Lucky I hadn’t broken anything.

Hands grabbed my shoulders, jerked me backward, off balance. I flailed and screamed, caught myself, and whirled around, striking blind. I connected with flesh hard enough to get another shock wave up through bone. The hands holding me let go, accompanied by the soundtrack of a grunt.

It was black as pitch in this hole under the ground. Not good for me. I’d had bad things happen in a cave; I wasn’t comfortable in caves, and I could feel the tense freakout potential in my guts.

Calm. I had to stay calm.

I was facing someone with Earth powers, that much was obvious; it took a pretty special talent to suck someone through the beach and into a cave, especially since Fort Lauderdale wasn’t exactly known for caves in the first place.

I felt like a powdered doughnut. I’d been nicely sweated from my beachside run, and the fine-textured sand coated me in a gritty layer that wasn’t going to come off without benefit of a shower and a washcloth.

Oh, someone was going to pay.

First things first: I wasn’t about to do this in the dark. I needed light, and I was flashlight-free. However, even though I wasn’t a Fire Warden, the basic principle of making fire wasn’t beyond my powers; I’d created hard-shelled little bubbles of oxygen before and ignited them. A shake-n-bake lamp.

When I reached to do that very simple thing—disengaging the O₂ molecules from the long chemical chain of breathable atmosphere and segregating them together inside a vacuum—it was like trying to do microsurgery with oven mitts. Under anesthesia. I fumbled it, felt the air go wrong and stale around me.

Yeah. I wasn’t up to doing even the simple things. Great news. I decided I’d better stick to feeling my way through the problem.

Said problem was large, human, and coming at me again. I felt something brush me and instinctively ducked; fingernails grazed my cheek. Not talons, so this wasn’t a Djinn—not that I’d really thought it was; they weren’t usually so sneaky or so subtle. And they didn’t smell like fear and sweat.

I moved back, got a wall against my back, and swept my foot out in a roundhouse kick. It connected solidly with someone who oofed and tumbled. Bull’s-eye.

I was feeling nicely ferocious when blinding light suddenly erupted, and I had to flinch backward with my eyes covered.

“For God’s sake, Jo, stop!”

The voice was Lewis’s. I peeked through my fingers and saw that the dazzle was a plain old garden-variety flashlight. He tilted it slightly, and the backwash of light gave me the long, tanned features of Lewis’s face—only not relaxed and gentle as I was used to seeing. He looked seriously tense.

And there was blood on his cheek. Fresh blood. More splattering his shirt.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

“It isn’t my blood,” he said. “I need your help. Come on.”

“With what?” Because it wasn’t going to be easy explaining to Lewis that my help would be strictly of the moral-support variety, at the moment.

“Kevin,” he said, and turned away, already moving to focus the flashlight on … Kevin Prentiss’s thin, acne-bubbled face. The kid who had once been the bane of my existence, not to mention my master when I was a Djinn, hadn’t changed much—still greasy, still dressed in floppy, oversized jeans with too many pockets and chains, and a black, sloppy T-shirt that needed at least one more spin cycle. He’d taken on a decidedly goth look since last I’d seen him in Nevada; the nose piercing was new, and so was the pentagram around his neck. He still looked like a wannabe badass. Only with Kevin, it was a mistake to underestimate him. He had the capacity to be a genuinely scary badass, and I’d seen him do it. I didn’t want to witness it in close quarters, underground.

And then I realized that Kevin wasn’t sitting on the ground, back to the wall, because he was being a sulky little bastard, although that wasn’t beyond him; he was pale, leaning, and breathing in shallow gasps.

Hard to tell against the black, but it looked as if the front of his shirt was wet. I didn’t think he’d taken a splash in the surf.

“They came after us,” Lewis said. “Wardens. I got us hidden, but I didn’t know the boy had been hit until we were already down here. I can’t leave him.”

“Why?” It was mean, but hell, Kevin deserved it. “All right, fine. He needs medical help, I get it. Let’s get him out of here.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

He sent me a look, then nodded at the cave around us. I realized—belatedly—that the hard-packed walls were really just packed, sculpted sand. Sand being held together by his willpower. Yep, Lewis had hollowed himself a secret hideout, which was pretty damn cool, but the idea that the whole thing could collapse in on us at any moment didn’t exactly make me glow with confidence.

“I need your help,” he said. “Actually, I need David’s help. I can’t do everything at once. He can hold back the sand while I treat the wound…”

Oh, shit. “Um… I can’t do that.”

Lewis’s expression turned even more tense, which really wasn’t good. “Jo, I just need to borrow him. I won’t keep him.”

“I can’t.”

“I need him.”

“He’s not—he’s not well, Lewis. He’s—”

“Jo! The kid’s going to die!”

I sucked in a deep breath. “I’m not calling David. What’s Plan B?”

For a second I saw sheer fury erupt in him, which was pretty frightening, considering he was the human equivalent of what Jonathan was in the Djinn world—a near-perfect repository of power—but it wasn’t like Lewis to lash out with it. He pulled it all back inside and closed his eyes for a second, and when his voice came, it was low and quiet. “Plan B consists of me watching him slowly bleed to death,” he said. “I don’t like Plan B. Look, Jo, healing is the hardest of everything I do. I can’t do it and hold this place together at the same time. It takes precision. I need help.”

“Fine. Just lift me back up, I call an ambulance, we get him out of here. Regular, mundane medical treatment. It does work, you know.”

Lewis shook his head, watching Kevin’s shuddering breaths. Kevin seemed to not be hearing us. “He’s got a torn artery,” he said. “I’m holding it shut, but between that and keeping this cave open I’m at the limit. You’ll need to get yourself out.”

Something occurred to me. “Where’s Rahel? Why isn’t Rahel helping you do this?”

Another flare of anger in his face. He didn’t bother to hide the edge in his voice. “Rahel doesn’t think he’s worth saving,” he said. “She also thinks she has better things to do. She left. Jo, I wasn’t kidding. I need David. Please.”

Cell phone. I dug it out and checked for reception.

Uh-oh. A couple of dozen feet of sand resulted in a flashing NO SIGNAL. “Um … the answer’s still no. Look, if I call wind down here—”

“You’ll kill us.”

“Right. Bad idea. Water… right, will kill us. Lewis, you called the wrong girl. I’ve got nothing.”

“You’ve got a Djinn!”

“No I don’t!” I yelled back. “I’ve got an Ifrit, dammit, and I’m not fucking calling him, so you need to get your head together! Tell me what I can do!”

“Nothing,” Lewis snapped. “Thanks for dropping in.”

“Guess I’m fucked, then,” Kevin whispered, and opened his eyes. Not by much.

They were vague and unfocused; I guessed that Lewis was also doing some kind of pain blocking. I crouched down next to the kid, feeling a strain in my knees.

Nothing like landing flat-footed after a ten-foot fall to really limber up the joints.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“Like you’d care,” Kevin shot back. It was half reflex, I could see that. His heart really wasn’t in the whole dystopian thing today, and he looked scared.

Really, really scared. “You dropped me like a bag of trash when you got what you wanted. Went back to your nice life. Hey, Jo, how’s that going for you?”

I didn’t want to debate how playing Stupid Weather Girl on an off-brand TV station could constitute nice life. “If you were trying to get attention, there were easier ways of doing it,” I said. He flipped me off. Clumsily. It was actually kind of cute. He had funky shadows on his cheeks, and I realized two things: one, he was wearing black liner—definitely gone to the goth side—and two, it had smeared down his face.

Kevin had been crying.

I felt my heart, which had started to take a clue to ease up on the pounding, start thumping faster again. Kevin was short of breath, and his lips looked slightly blue. “Damn, Lewis, I’m all screwed up inside. It feels—”

“Easy,” Lewis murmured, and got down on one knee beside him to move up the hem of his none-too-clean long-sleeved T-shirt. It advertised some undead band with an umlaut in its name and a zombie graphic, but the real horror was underneath—a long, deep slice in his side, gaping wide and welling a constant, slow pulse of blood. He’d lost a lot of the stuff, and most of it was smeared and spotted on his skin in damp, tie-dyed patterns.

Lewis put his fingers around the wound in a rough circle, bent his head, and concentrated. Kevin shuddered and grabbed convulsively for my hand; I let him have it without protest. He was strong, but not as strong as he should have been.

The bleeding slowed to a trickle again. Kevin choked, coughed, and swallowed convulsively. Trying not to throw up, I guessed.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” Kevin’s hand was shaking, and so was his voice. “We were asking around about the Djinn, and Lewis was teaching me stuff. Everybody was kinda—cool, you know? They didn’t hate me or anything. The old guys, the Ma’at, they even said I could help people. I—I was trying—”

“Kevin, what happened?”

“Somebody tried to kill us.”

“You and Lewis?”

“Yeah.” He wiped his face with his free hand, smearing his eyeliner into a sad-clown mask. On his other side, Lewis was a frozen statue, unmoving, doing whatever it was that Earth Wardens do when they fight for a life in jeopardy. I had no doubt it was a terrible strain on both of them; Kevin would rather have died than let me see him weak like this. “Fucking assholes. We weren’t hurting anybody.”

I had a really bad feeling. “Was it the Wardens?”

He nodded.

“Anybody I know?”

He tried to shrug, one of those liquid up-and-down expressions of boredom that teenagers must have invented in the dawn of evolution. He only managed a weak imitation, though. He became even more pale from the effort, and glanced down at the exposed mess of the wound in his side.

It was bleeding again. Not much, but a steady trickle. As I watched, the trickle ran a little bit faster.

“Kevin,” I said to distract him. Kevin’s panic couldn’t do anything but make Lewis’s job harder. “You said it was the Wardens. Tell me what they looked like.”

“You know some bitch with punk piercings and some guy looks like a lumberjack?”

“Maybe.” I thought fast. It could be Shirl and Erik, who had come after me during my first hellride across the country, when I’d been heading for what I thought was a safe haven, and Star. They were on Marion Bearheart’s staff, but I couldn’t see Marion authorizing a hit squad for Kevin, not now. Not after what had happened in Las Vegas. “Where did this happen? Vegas?”

“No, here. Me and Lewis were up the coast, checking out some ruined hotel where we heard some Djinn were fighting. They came at us—” He stopped and gulped. “Oh, shit. I’m gonna die, right?”

I wanted to reach over and put my arms around him. It was manifestly a bad idea for so, so many reasons.

“You’re not going to die,” I promised him. I risked a look down at the wound, and Jesus, was I wrong? Was it bleeding more, not less? Lewis was locked in silence, concentrating. Trying to heal, or at least keep things at a rough status quo.

He wasn’t going to be able to lift me out of here, and he couldn’t do this alone. The wound was too deep, and he was having to split too much of his power off to keep the cave intact.

None of which I could help with.

“Oh, damn,” Kevin whispered. His breath hissed in, caught, and I saw his face grow paler. “You know, this is actually a lot worse than it looks.” He was trying to joke about it. That broke my heart. He was too young for this. Too young for a lot of the things that had been done to him during his short life, and way too young for some of what he’d done to others. Kevin was a freak and a killer and a surly little bastard, but he hadn’t exactly been born lucky.

“I’m not glad to hear that, because it looks pretty damn bad,” I said. “But you’ve got Lewis. And nobody can do this better.”

It occurred to me that there actually was something I could do, albeit not on a mystical level. I took a look at what I was wearing—nothing I could use to wad up without revealing a hell of a lot more than was really PC. “Lewis. Lewis! I need your shirt.”

I tugged on his shoulder, dragging the fabric half off; he shifted to accommodate me, letting me pull the blood-spattered flannel off of him to reveal a bare chest, lean arms, and abs that, if we’d been in better circumstances, I’d have taken the time to admire the washboardiness of.

“Dear Penthouse,” Kevin whispered. “I never thought this would happen to me …”

“Shut up, already.” I folded Lewis’s shirt up into a clumsy pad, and pressed it hard against the open wound, or as much of it as I could reach around Lewis’s hand. That got a gasp and a shudder, and a parchment pallor I didn’t like very much.

Kevin slipped into unconsciousness.

“Lewis. Lewis! How bad is it? Really?”

His tired brown eyes opened and focused slowly on me. “Fatal if I don’t keep on it. There’s a major artery severed. I’m doing what I can to keep it clamped, but …”

But he couldn’t keep it up forever. That kind of thing took a hell of a lot of concentration. “Can you heal him?”

“No. Too much damage.”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked, as calmly as possible.

He didn’t answer. His eyes drifted closed.

“Lewis?”

No response. I reached over and tapped his face lightly, got a flicker of his eyelids and then a slow return. I repeated the question.

“Get help,” he said. “Find a way. If you don’t…”

He didn’t go on. He wasn’t unconscious—if he’d passed out, Kevin would have bled out in thick, pumping bursts. Instead, the bleeding slowed to a warm trickle against my hands and the already-soaked pad of the shirt. Lewis had gone deeper into trance to try to keep things locked down.

I took Lewis’s hand and moved it to press down on the bandage. He took over the pressure.

“Hey,” Kevin whispered. Awake again. He stared at me with wide, bloodshot eyes. He smelled strongly of stale, unwashed clothes, and faintly of the green, earthy aroma of pot. Lewis, I thought, you suck as a guardian. Not that I’d have been any better. “What are you going to do?”

“Can you make fire?” It was Kevin’s native power, and he’d always been strong in it. Plus, fire was one of the easiest of the states of energy to manipulate, so long as it didn’t get large enough to develop any kind of sentience.

He nodded. “Stupid, though. No ventilation. Kill us all. Lewis said there’s a limited supply of air in here.”

“Trust me. I’ll get us air.”

He made a weak, theatrical, one-handed gesture at the sand behind me, and presto, a fire exploded into red-yellow-orange glory. Burning up the limited oxygen we had available.

My turn. Concentrate, I ordered myself, and shut my eyes.

Air molecules, turning and burning and twisting apart. Being destroyed and reformed. Heat shimmering as the air column rose toward the sand ceiling. I could still see the pale smear overhead where the sand itself was partly porous—the trap door where Lewis had pulled me down. It was gradually trickling down and sagging in on itself. I could see glimpses of black sky overhead. The heat would help speed that process, open the hole further. Widen the air molecules between the grains of sand.

You can do this. You have to do this.

I’d done it before. It was a party trick, something Wardens did to amuse each other during boring patches. Fire and air, interacting. I could do it in my sleep.

Usually.

I took a deep breath and threw everything I had into the effort, and stepped up on top of the fire.

The air cushion felt squishy and unsteady, like a waterbed. Not at all the firm platform it should have been. And it was warm. Verging on, well, hot. And these were not shoes I wanted melted.

I exerted pressure on the hardened layer of air under my feet to pull it tighter together. This would never work unless the heat could push against it…

I started rising. Slowly. I opened my eyes and gasped as the fire’s energy started cooking through my running shoes, blinked away tears, and bit my lip.

Hang on.

Up. Slowly. Dammit, a year ago I’d have done this in five seconds flat.

The heat was intense now, and I was sure my shoes were melting. I smelled burning rubber. Maybe something else, something worth panicking over.

The sky crawled slowly closer, the walls of the sand pit shifting and sagging around me. The thing was starting to lose its coherence. If I didn’t do this right, if I didn’t get help, Kevin and Lewis were going to be buried alive…

I realized I was panting, partly from the relentless pressure of the heat, partly from the pain that was quickly turning to agony. It felt as if flames were licking the backs of my calves. The air under my feet softened like pudding, threatening to drop me the seven feet I’d traveled back down into the flames.

I sank my teeth into my lip, raised my hands to the sky, and chilled the air above me. Blew the molecules far apart, slowed their movement, dropped the temperature at least twenty degrees. Easy stuff. Child’s play. I could barely manage it, and when I did, it felt as if I were seconds from an aneurysm.

Intense pain in my head, shortness of breath. I tasted blood in the back of my throat.

I rose faster. Faster.

I didn’t dare look down because I knew my feet were burning now, dear God, it felt as if the flesh was already roasted off and now the muscles were cooking, but if that were true then I wouldn’t feel anything once the nerves died…

Hang on. Hang on. Hang on.

I clung to the vision of Kevin’s parchment-pale face, of the blood pouring out of his side, and then, suddenly, my face was passing ground level and I was out.

I pitched forward, pushed with the last of my strength, rolled and kept on rolling until I splashed into a shockingly cold surf. A wave curled over me and I heard a hiss as my smoking shoes hit water.

I breathed liquid, coughed, choked, tasted salt and decay, and rested my face on cold, wet sand with a relief so intense it felt like orgasm.

“Son of a bitch!” A pair of hands rolled me over on my back, and I blinked and focused on the barely visible glimmer of Armando Rodriguez’s face. For the first time, he had an easily readable expression: shocked. “What the hell was that?”

Like I could explain. I coughed salt, gagged water, and croaked, “Two people down there in the hole; one’s hurt bad. Get help, now.”

He had a gun in his hand, which wasn’t useful. He put it away and came up with a cell phone, dialed, and gave the rescue bulletin.

“Get an ambulance,” I added. He nodded and kept talking.

I squirmed up to a sitting position and peeled my melted jogging shoes off of my feet. They were pink and tender, but not Cajun-fried.

God, that was going to hurt tomorrow.

“We can’t wait,” I said. “Find some rope, blankets we can tie together, anything. Run!”

He raced back the way we’d come, heading for the glow of headlights that marked the three kids tailgating on some unlucky parent’s SUV. I squirmed back over to the hole. It was widening.

“Kevin!” I yelled. “Help’s on the way!”

No answer. I scrambled back from the hole and looked around. Rodriguez was MIA.

I couldn’t see anybody else on the murky stretch of beach. Time was running out.

Call David, my worst angels whispered in my ear. Call him. You fixed him before. You can fix him again. Ashan wasn’t even hurt all that badly. Was this how it had started for Patrick and his Ifrit love? One little concession at a time, until he was killing his own kind to give her one more small slice of life?

Until she was willing to settle for that kind of existence, just to stay with him?

No. No, no, no, never, and David wouldn’t stand for it.

“Rahel!” I screamed it at the top of my lungs. “Rahel, where the hell are you? Get your ass back here, I need you now!”

A flash of lightning illuminated the beach, a long blue-white streak that raced across the sky and shattered into forks that stretched across half the horizon.

Spectacular.

Those clouds hugging the ocean looked larger.

In the next hyperactinic flash, I saw someone coming out of the water. Tall, perfect carriage, dark skin glistening with water drops. Rahel was as magnificent as a sea goddess, and her eyes were burning so brightly they were like suns.

She came out of the curl of a wave and collapsed to her hands and knees on wet sand. Her body was solid to the knees, swirling fog below. Barely coherent. She looked like shit—beaten, exhausted, ripped, and bloodied. The blood was metaphorical for her. She hadn’t become human; she’d just become unable to repair damage to a physical avatar.

Rahel hadn’t flounced off in a fit of pique and stayed away deliberately; she’d probably meant to come back and help. But the dramatic gesture got interrupted along the way by a serious fight. The kind you came out of injured, or dead.

Rahel was as tough as any of the Djinn. She’d lose in a dogfight with Ashan, Jonathan, or David, but she should have held her own against anyone else. Unless … unless it was Ashan she’d gone up against.

Or Jonathan.

Either way, not good news right now.

I crawled toward her. She looked up, expression turning hard, and I stopped.

“They’re coming,” she said. “I couldn’t hold them back. Be ready.”

“Who?”

Too late to matter. I could sense it coming in the real world, in the aetheric, even blinded and weak as I was. A gigantic disturbance, headed this way.

Out in the darkness, I saw shapes moving. Indistinct, but definite.

“Joanne Baldwin,” one of them said. “Stand up.”

Sounded human. With a gigantic effort—and I wasn’t sure how many more of those I could even stand to attempt—I went up into Oversight and saw at least ten flares of power gathering around me and Rahel. Wardens. Holy shit. How many had Paul sent to put me into custody? How hard did he really think I could fight?

“They don’t want you,” Rahel said. “They’re after him. Lewis.”

On the grand, sliding scale of things, that wasn’t the best news I’d ever heard.

“Who am I talking to?” I asked hoarsely, and managed to get to my feet. Ow. Ow ow ow. I wanted to dance around in pain, but stillness was required right now.

Stillness, and a really good poker face.

Someone summoned fire, a brilliant orange bonfire that hovered over her palm. In its reflected light I saw Shirl. Goth black, sloppily cut hair, too many piercings in awkward places. Tattoos crawling her bare arms. She didn’t look any happier to see me now than she had driving along the coast to accuse me of weather-related murder.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked her.

“None of your business,” Shirl snapped back. “You’re not even a Warden anymore. Stay out of it.”

Rahel wasn’t getting up to her feet, but she pulled into a crouch next to me.

Intimidating. I approved. From the uneasy glance Shirl gave her, it worked.

“By order of the Wardens, I’m here to take Lewis Levander Orwell into custody,”

Shirl said. “And you need to get the hell out of the way, Joanne. You’re on shaky enough ground as it is. You really don’t want to give us more reason to come after you, too.”

Which might have been meant to be funny, considering the sandpit I’d been trapped in. If so, Shirl’s sense of humor needed work. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. “Lewis isn’t here. You’re going to want to move along, guys. I’m here with a cop, and he’s kind of grumpy, if you know what I mean. So, unless you want to do your intimidating from the inside of a jail—”

She threw the fire at me. I mean, fastball-speed. It hissed past my face and out into the ocean, where it impacted a building wave and instantly vaporized the top half into superheated steam. “I’m not playing with you, bitch,” Shirl said. “That’s where everybody else goes wrong. They let you talk. You have one chance to tell me where he is, or I swear the next one burns right through your stomach.”

My plan to scare her into leaving wasn’t going quite as well as I’d hoped.

“I want to talk to Marion,” I said, and was surprised my voice stayed steady.

“Denied. Marion’s busy.” Shirl sounded way too smug about that. Marion was probably under house arrest after protesting too much, or flat-out refusing the order. “Last chance. Produce Lewis, or we’ll go through you.”

“Then let me talk to Paul!”

Her smile was utterly sinister. “Talk all you want. Paul’s irrelevant. We’re on the front lines out here, and we’re going to defend ourselves, with or without permission.”

“Defend yourselves against what?”

She must have remembered that she didn’t want to talk, because her arm drew back, and plasma burned toward me. I dodged. It followed. Not as fast as the previous pitch, but then, I didn’t think she meant it to be; she was playing with me. The plasma moved in mirror jerks with me, tagging me and cutting me off at every turn. I was tired and weak and clumsy with pain, and when I finally overbalanced on the soft sand and fell backward, the burning, incandescent globe dipped toward me and hovered just inches above my heaving chest. Hot enough to give me third-degree burns and make my jog bra start to char.

I dug my fingers into the sand and grabbed handfuls, trying to resist the sick urge to destroy David to save my own life.

Rahel lunged forward with a snarl, reached out with one taloned hand, and batted the fireball away. Right back at Shirl, who ducked. It hit someone else, who screamed in high-voiced agony, and Shirl turned to put out the resulting fiery chaos. Rahel grabbed my arm.

“Run,” she ordered roughly. “They’ll kill you. They’ve already killed others.”

She launched herself up in a graceful, feline leap and landed on Shirl, who screamed. Fire erupted. I saw Rahel’s neon yellow clothes burst into flame.

I flipped over and crawled to the hole. I felt the sand under my knees shift. Oh God. Lewis was losing it. The tunnel was collapsing. Sand was falling in on them.

There was nothing I could do.

Another flash of lightning streaked overhead, reflecting white on waves, showing a freeze-frame of the other Wardens converging around Shirl and Rahel. Rahel was going to lose. She didn’t have the wattage necessary to stop all of them, not alone, not as a Free-range Djinn.

“Hey!” A deep-voiced yell from a couple of sand dunes over. “What’s going on over there? You kids stop that!”

“Help!” I screamed. “Get help!”

The pompous jerk—and I was never so happy to hear one in my life—sounded even more self-righteous. And a little alarmed. “I tell you, I’m calling the cops! You clear out of here while you’ve still got the chance!”

“Yes, you idiot, call the cops! And the paramedics! Help!”

I was dimly aware of Detective Rodriguez racing back along the beach, some kind of rope slung over his shoulder, but I felt it in my bones, it was too late. All too late.

Rahel and Shirl were a bonfire rolling on the sand. Fire and blood and fury.

The sand heaved and collapsed in on itself, dropping me suddenly a good five feet. I slid down an instantly made dune.

The cave had collapsed.

Lewis was dying down there. “No!” I screamed, and started digging. It was useless. It’d take hours to move all this sand; no way they could survive down there.

I only had one option. Just one.

“David!” I yelled. “David, I need you!”

I felt the connection snap taut between us. Waiting for the command. One precious heartbeat went by. Two.

“David—”

Rodriguez skidded to a stop next to me and slapped the rope down on the sand.

“Where’s the hole?”

“Collapsed,” I gasped. “Oh, God—David, get them out, get Lewis and Kevin out of there—”

I felt the draw of power dig deep into me, sucking out what little I had left, and the pull was agonizing. I moaned and wrapped my arms around my stomach. It felt as if my guts might literally be ripped out and dragged through the sand like some biological lifeline.

Rodriguez abandoned the effort at rescue and turned toward the Wardens, and the struggle. His gun came out of its holster under his hooded jacket.

“Police,” he yelled. “Everybody freeze now.”

Most of them did, realizing that they weren’t exactly operating undercover;

Rahel vanished in a wisp of smoke, and Shirl was left lying on the sand, whimpering. Alive, but battered and scorched. One of the other Wardens knelt down next to her and put a hand on her arm to still her—Earth Warden, I had no doubt. I felt the surge go through the aetheric as he pumped healing power into her body.

The connection between me and David stretched thinner, thinner, cutting like razor wire. I held back a cry, squeezed my eyes shut and ratcheted in wet, painful breaths.

“Did you get them?” I whispered.

I felt something hum along the connection, something powerful and intense.

Affirmation and love, condensed emotion that was too deep and powerful to grasp all at once. As if he’d sent me everything he felt in a frantic, desperate burst, like a submarine going down and transmitting one last, despairing SOS as it went into the dark.

A hand broke out of the sand on the beach, clawed and flailing. I yelled wordlessly and grabbed for it, dragged until my muscles popped.

Lewis slid free of the clinging sand. His face broke the surface with a gasp, and he started coughing, choking, spitting.

He was holding on to Kevin. As soon as he was free I let go of him and lunged forward to grab Kevin’s wrist as Lewis hauled. The boy’s arm slowly slid free, then the curve of his shoulder. Sand fell in a thick cascade from his bent head.

He didn’t gasp for breath, because he wasn’t breathing.

I choked back a curse and got behind him, grabbed him under the armpits, and pulled like a stevedore, every muscle in my body straining. He finally pulled free. Sand clotted thickly around the open wound on his side, but it wasn’t gushing blood anymore. I wasn’t sure if that was good news, or just the worst possible news. Because you don’t bleed when you’re dead; you leak.

In the white-hot light of another lightning strike I saw that Kevin’s eyes were shut, his face still.

He definitely wasn’t breathing.

Lewis joined me in pulling, and we put the boy down on his back. I bent over him and put my ear to his mouth and nose, listening.

Nothing. Not a single whisper.

“You’re not dying on me, you jerk,” I told him, and pulled down on his chin to open his mouth. When I fitted my lips over his, I tasted grit and fear. I breathed into him. I didn’t have anything left in the way of power, or I’d have superoxygenated his lungs, but simple human methods were all I had left.

I pressed my ear to his chest and heard a faint, fluttering heartbeat.

Breathed for him again. Waited. Breathed. Waited. Saw stars and felt like I might pass out from the exertion.

I felt his chest suddenly convulse under my hand and grab in a breath on its own.

“Dammit!” Lewis rasped, and I looked up to see that the wound in Kevin’s side had begun pumping out blood in high-velocity jets. I clamped my hands down on it. Lewis put his hands over mine, and I felt the power cascade in. Hot and burning and pure as liquid gold… and not enough. Not for an injury of this magnitude.

“I need another healer!” I yelled at the knot of people standing with their hands up, under Rodriguez’s attention. “One of you, get over here! Now!”

None of them moved. None of them. I looked up, desperate, and in the next flash of lightning I saw something terrible on their faces. My friends and colleagues, my fellow guardians of the human race.

They just didn’t give a crap.

Two forms appeared out of the darkness next to me. David, his long coat swirling in the ocean wind, his eyes blazing. Face pale and focused, as if he were holding to this form with his last strength.

Rahel, battered and ragged and bloody, limping. Holding David’s shoulder for support.

“Help me,” I said.

David collapsed to his knees opposite me, on the other side of Kevin’s limp form, and put his hand over mine. His skin was burning hot, enough to make me wince, and his eyes met mine for a long second.

He smiled. It was a terribly weary smile, sweet and defeated and full of indescribable pain.

“Don’t forget me,” David said, and I felt the spark travel through his hand, into mine, into Lewis. Everything he had left. Everything he’d taken from Ashan, and from me. A needle-bright surge of pure healing power, drawn not from me but from that last, tightly defended core of what made David who he was.

Like the spark of life he’d put inside of me, our child, formed of the union of our power.

I heard Rahel’s protest rip the night in half, a high, wailing shriek like the grieving of angels.

The wound in Kevin’s side stopped bleeding.

David distorted, blackened, turned Ifrit. Rahel, closest to him, stumbled backward as the creature’s blunt, razor-angled face turned toward her, like a lion scenting prey. She was too weak. He’d destroy her.

As if he knew that—could he know that?—he whirled and lunged for a Djinn barely visible as mist in the darkness. One of the Wardens’ personal stash. It gave out a high, thin shriek of panic as the Ifrit latched on and began to feed.

Rahel, reprieved, lost no time in vanishing.

I moved my hand, carefully. No spurting blood, though I was pretty much soaking in it. There was a massive open wound, and it would make a huge scar that would be a great conversation starter from now on, but Kevin wasn’t in danger of dying.

At least, not from that.

The Wardens weren’t reacting to the Ifrit in their midst, and I finally remembered that they couldn’t actually see him. Only Djinn—or someone like me, with Djinn Emeritus status—could see what was happening. David—the Ifrit—had the Djinn down on the sand, and his black talons were deep into its chest, sucking out power and life.

I might want that to happen, but I couldn’t let it happen. Not if I wanted to sleep nights.

“David, get back in the bottle,” I said, and watched as he misted away into a black, howling whisper.

The moon slid free of the cloud layer on the horizon and gilded everything silver.

“Okay, again: What the fuck is going on?” Detective Rodriguez demanded. He was saying it in a loud voice, as if he’d been asking it for a while. I stared at him, then at Lewis, who maintained pressure on Kevin’s wound and gave me a vintage don’t-look-at-me shrug. “Who are these people?”

“Trouble,” I said. “Shoot anybody who comes near this guy. They’re trying to kill him.”

That, he could understand. “Do I want to know why?”

“Not—exactly. Look, I’ll tell you. Just not now, okay?”

Rodriguez settled in next to Kevin, who was breathing more steadily now, color returning to his face. I stood up and walked toward the Wardens, who were regrouping from their confusion in various stages of defiance.

Shirl was still down. I stared at the Earth Warden who was next to her. Didn’t recognize him, but he looked earnest and well scrubbed, in a Fortune 500 kind of way.

“You come after him again, you deal with me,” I said flatly. “Lewis and Kevin are under my protection. And I swear, next time, I won’t call off my Djinn. If you want to make this war, fine. I’m ready. Better bring along body bags.”

He opened his mouth, then shut it. Jerked his head at two of the others standing there, and they got Shirl up and into a fireman’s carry over the bulkiest Warden’s shoulder.

“What about him?” the Earth Warden asked. He had a nice voice, vaguely Canadian, and there was an off-kilter tilt to one of his eyes that made him seem sly. He nodded at Detective Rodriguez.

“What about him?”

“We shouldn’t leave a witness.”

I was dumbfounded. Was he actually saying… ?

Yes. He actually was.

“Over my dead body,” I said flatly. I must have looked like it would be tough to achieve, because he took a step backward. “Get it straight, assholes. Wardens don’t kill people.”

Some of them looked away. Some didn’t. I felt a familiar prickle along my spine.

If I could see the Ifrit, I wondered, could I see Demon Marks? Humans couldn’t, generally, but if I could, I could check out these guys and see if they were under the evil influence. Not that any of these guys, male or female, were likely to bare any chests if I asked.

Lewis joined me, standing at my side. No words. Just a hell of a lot of strength, unmistakable, shivering the air like a quiver of heat. He looked grim and exhausted and haunted, but not weak. Not at all.

And then, unexpectedly, Kevin woke up.

“Yeah,” he croaked faintly. “You want a fight, bring it on, buttwipes.” He accompanied all that with the kind of inept theatrical gesture associated with bad magicians, kind of an awkward, limp-wristed wave. I winced.

“Yeah, thanks, kid,” I said. “Just rest, okay?… Anyway. Hit the road, all of you. You’re done here.”

Detective Rodriguez stood up and joined me on the other side. The sound of his gun slide ratcheting was very loud, even over the continuous roar of the surf.

They might have decided I was no threat, that they could take Kevin, that an unpowered cop with a handgun was chicken feed. But up on the coast highway, flashing lights began to paint the sky, and sirens howled.

Cavalry on the way, and they didn’t seem to have the appetite for a full-scale battle that involved the rest of the non-Warden world.

The Earth Warden held my eyes and said, “You’ll see us again.”

“Count on it.”

They turned as a unit and walked away, into the darkness.

Silence, and the rising shriek of ambulance and rescue on the way. I became aware of just how much my feet hurt—as if I’d taken a five-mile firewalk—and that there was a glassy ache in my knees, and my head hurt.

And I wanted, desperately, to cry because I had blood all over me and David was gone. As if he’d never even existed. And I didn’t think he was coming back this time.

This had turned out to be one hell of a jog.

It was a long night. Kevin went to the Emergency Room, who diagnosed anemia and said he was running a quart low on blood despite the healing David and Lewis had put into him. We spent most of the wee hours watching blood drip from a bag into his veins. Rodriguez kept his mouth shut about the whole standoff issue, mostly because he couldn’t understand what had happened enough to try to explain it, and none of us were talking. Lewis stayed close to me, whether looking for protection or offering me his own was not clear.

We managed, somehow, to avoid the press, who were scurrying all over the story of sinkholes on the beach. IS YOUR CHILD SAFE? Film at eleven… by the time we made it back to my apartment, I realized that my life was well and truly out of control. Bad enough there was the whole job situation, but now there was Sarah and her boyfriend, and Lewis, and Kevin, and the Djinn War, and a cop from Las Vegas who was turning out to be kind of cool, actually.

And my feet hurt like hell.

Rodriguez insisted on coming in and checking out the apartment. Eamon and Sarah were not in immediate view, but her bedroom door was closed. I didn’t, ah, inquire.

“Right,” I said, and looked at my little flock. “Kevin, Lewis—sit down before you fall down.”

Lewis was already lowering himself to the couch, but he shot me a grateful look.

Rodriguez leaned against the door, arms folded, and frowned at me. Kevin, who should have been out on his feet from the painkillers, shuffled around the apartment, ragged black jean hems dragging the carpet, and fondled my stuff. Ah, yes. I remembered his great respect for personal boundaries. Even his brush with death hadn’t dampened his enthusiasm for that.

I sucked in a pained breath as I put my feet up on a battered hassock and let myself relax, just a little, for the first time in hours. “I don’t suppose you have anyplace to go,” I said to Lewis. Who shook his head. “Fine. You’re staying here. Kevin, you too. Um…”

Detective Rodriguez arched his eyebrows. “I have accommodations.” Yeah, the White Van Hilton.

“Thank you,” I said.

“For leaving?” He sounded amused.

“For staying when you didn’t have to. When things didn’t make any sense.”

He shrugged and gave me a wintry smile. “I’m just saving my interrogation for later. Tonight, I’m just having a drink and trying not to think about it.”

“Good plan,” Lewis said. “I could use a beer.”

I took the hint, went into the kitchen, and popped two Michelob Lights, carried them out along with a Coca-Cola, which I handed to Kevin. Who gave me a filthy look.

“Underage,” I said. “And way too unpredictable to give beer to, anyway. And do we need to talk about painkillers and alcohol?”

He kept glaring.

“Take it as a compliment that I don’t still want you dead.”

He didn’t, but he drank the Coke anyway. I held up another Michelob for Rodriguez’s inspection; he accepted without a word. I went for a glass of white wine. Sarah had left a bottle chilling in the fridge.

“So,” I said, and sat down on the floor to mournfully consider my aching, pink feet. “How screwed are we, exactly?”

Lewis tipped back the beer bottle. His throat worked. He considered everything carefully before he said, “If we were any more screwed, we’d be having a cigarette and enjoying the afterglow.”

Rodriguez choked on his beer. Nice to know he had a sense of humor. I’d been starting to wonder.

“Why are they after you? No, wait, back up. Who are they?”

“Wardens.”

“Yeah, obviously. But… ?” Lewis pressed the cold bottle to his forehead and cast a quick look at Rodriguez. I shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. I’m telling him everything. No way around it at this point; besides, he’s Quinn’s old partner. He should know the truth.”

“The whole truth?”

“Yep.”

Lewis shook his head, obviously not convinced of my sanity, but let it go. Got back on the subject. “The Wardens are breaking apart. I knew it was coming; they just don’t have enough structure left to keep it in place. They’re breaking into factions. This one caught the rumors about the Djinn turning on their masters, and most of them sealed their Djinn bottles and stuck them in vaults, safety deposit boxes, whatever was convenient. And then they came after me.”

“Why the hell would they come after you?”

“They’ve been told that I’m on a crusade to free all the Djinn.”

I looked at him for a second. “Hmmm. Are you?”

“Separate issue.” Oh, boy.

“Lewis—”

“Drop it, Jo.”

“Okay, fine, so you’ve been preaching freedom for all Djinn, the Djinn suddenly start turning on their masters, the Wardens start coming after you.” It made an unpleasant amount of sense. “It’s Ashan’s group that’s behind this.”

“Yep.”

“And I think some of those Wardens may be…”

“Demon-marked? Makes sense, they’re certainly powerful enough. Rahel’s been trying to keep them off my back, but they’re like wolves. I can’t shake them for long. It’s going to come down to killing, sooner or later.” He seemed depressed by that.

“One of them—Shirl—she was a protégée of Marion’s,” I said. “I’ll call Paul, find out if Marion still has some kind of control over things…”

“Marion’s in the hospital,” Lewis said flatly. “She was hurt. Car accident. I just heard from Paul an hour ago.”

I stopped worrying about my feet. “They’re targeting us. This isn’t random.”

“They’re going after the most powerful senior Wardens. That leaves gaps to fill. It’s a coup, or at least they think it is. From Ashan’s perspective, he’s just dismantling the Wardens altogether.”

“What about Paul?”

He shook his head. I tried to stand up and felt my knee give a sharp enough twinge that I had to stay down. I looked over at Kevin, who was fondling my minuscule DVD collection. “Hey. Walking wounded. Put Mel Gibson down and step away.”

“Lethal Weapon rocks.”

“Yes, it does. Go get me the phone.”

“Get it yourself, b—”

“Kevin,” Lewis said softly. “Look at her feet. She can barely walk. Shut up and get the damn phone.”

Kevin flushed—unattractively—and glared at him, but ducked his head and put the DVD back on the shelf. “Where is it?”

I nodded toward the kitchen. Kevin shuffled off in that direction. Lewis’s eyes followed him. “He’s not a terrible kid,” he said. “But he needs somebody to tell him when he’s a fuckup.”

“He should be lying down.”

“Trust me, he will. Right now, he’s scared half to death. Let him walk it off.”

I was afraid that the light in Lewis’s eyes might be fondness. As if he was seeing something of himself in Kevin. Which was ridiculous, of course. Lewis had never been anything like Kevin, in any way.

“Lewis—he’s a sociopath,” I said, “and don’t you forget it, or you’ll end up with a knife between those nice broad shoulders, and I’ll be very sad.”

Rodriguez finished off his beer in one long, expert gulp and said, “Okay, that’s it for me. Entertaining as this little fairy tale is, I’m going to get some rest. Don’t you do anything stupid. I’ll know.”

I had no doubt. He probably had motion sensors or something set up, or maybe had hired a second line of private eyes to keep track while he was catching shuteye.

He was the thorough type.

“I won’t go anywhere,” I told him. “Oh, except to work. I’m due at the studio at six.” Which made it barely worth trying to go to bed, at this point.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “you and me, we’re going to sit down. And you’re going to explain this. Right?”

I saw no way around it, really. “Right.”

He nodded, glanced at Lewis by way of a cop’s good-bye, and let himself out.

Tapped the door significantly. Lewis got up to click the dead bolts—both of them—shut. Not that they’d do much good against the Wardens, or the Djinn, of course, but they were symbolic. And hey, there were still mere mortal bad guys out there, too. It would be really embarrassing to be engaged in a battle for the fate of the world and get killed by somebody wanting my crappy little stereo.

Kevin wandered back in with the phone, tossed it to me, and said, “Can I get some food?”

“Sure,” I said. He disappeared so fast he might have been Djinn. “No beer or wine!” I yelled after him. Like he’d care what I said.

Lewis turned and sat down on the floor across from me, Indian-style. He reached out and took my foot in his large, warm hands. I sucked in a warning breath.

“Relax,” he said. “Trust me.”

He guided it to his lap, and began to stroke his fingers over the swollen skin.

Where he touched, the hot skin—which had been screaming in agony for hours—began to cool and regain its shape. It was deliciously, amazingly wonderful.

“You should open a spa,” I said, and leaned my head back against the cushions of a chair. He smiled down at my foot as he stroked his fingers across the skin.

“For you, I should open a hospital,” he said. “Jo—somebody helped us down there, in the sand. We were dying, and somebody came.”

I didn’t answer.

“Was it David?”

I felt tears start to burn, and wiped them away with shaking hands. His caress on my burned skin stopped for a second, then resumed.

“I thought I could save him,” I said. “I really thought—”

I couldn’t think about this, couldn’t feel this, couldn’t handle anything right now. The tears were uncontrollable. They hurt. Lewis continued to stroke the burn out of my foot, pressing just hard enough on the instep to work out the ache along the way. Undemanding and unassuming, as ever.

“You’re not losing him,” Lewis said. “You’ll never lose him until he’s dead. Or you are.”

My left foot felt cool and soothed and sated. He gently put it back on the carpet and took my right one. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the sheer animal comfort he was offering me.

“Then it’s already over,” I said softly. “I think he is dead. I think what’s left… oh God, Lewis. You don’t know what they’re like. The Ifrit. You can see who they were, and sometimes they know who they were…”

“Shhhh,” he whispered. “Close your eyes. Don’t think.”

I fell asleep with his fingers slowly, methodically taking away the pain.

When I woke up, I was in bed. Somebody—probably Lewis—had carried me in. I checked: still dressed in the jogging clothes. I felt sand in every fold of skin. I itched all over, and whatever sleep I’d gotten wasn’t nearly enough.

I sat up and pulled David’s bottle out of the nightstand. It was silent and inert, and there was no connection to it. No sense of his presence at all. It was just a container, fragile and limited. Like a human body.

Was that what a Djinn really was? A soul, unhoused? Then what was an Ifrit? What was a Demon? The classes at WardenU. hadn’t exactly prepared me for the big questions. It was a technical school. Philosophy wasn’t considered important to the curriculum.

But now I was starting to wonder if philosophy was what the Wardens were missing, and had been missing all along. The Ma’at might be a bunch of upright assholes, but at least they understood what they were doing, and why. All we did was react. React to this disaster, that crisis. We were the world’s paramedics, and maybe we were spreading as much disease as we were curing.

“I love you,” I whispered to the bottle, and pressed my warm cheek against it. “God, David, I do, I do, I do. Please believe me.”

I fell asleep again with the bottle in my hands, still dressed in my gritty jogging clothes, and dreamed that a dark, jagged shape in the corner, like a broken nightmare, watched me the rest of the night.