Текст книги "Firestorm"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

Соавторы: Rachel Caine
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Chapter Two

I spent some time in lockup lying on a clean hospital bed, humming popular songs, and trying to imagine what the new Wardens seal should look like. I was currently going with a shiny circular motif, with the new motto of We're So Screwedrunning around the outer edge, featuring a graphic of a nuclear mushroom cloud in the center. A gold seal, probably. Gold goes with everything, even an apocalypse.

Bored with mental graphic design, I got up and wandered around, taking stock. The infirmary was mysteriously intact. Crisp, clean, no sign of struggles. Maybe it had been empty. Djinn wouldn't have wasted time vandalizing; they'd been out for blood, and they were nothing if not focused on the mission.

Which would have been removing any humans who might pose a genuine threat to them later. I wondered if it had been David's bunch, acting under the red-eyed influence of the Earth. Or if it had been Ashan's little merry band, coming after Wardens just on general principles.

Either one would have been horrific, in these close quarters. I didn't want to imagine it, but the images kept springing up when I closed my eyes.

Eventually, not even fevered imagination could hold off exhaustion, and I surrendered to a need to be horizontal. I pulled a waffle-weave cotton blanket up over my aching body and wished—again—for a shower. I was too tired even to take off my shoes, much less undress, although these clothes needed to be burned, not just laundered. I stank to high heaven, and was ruining a perfectly good bed, but as soon as I closed my eyes, all those concerns slid away like oil off Teflon.

I was asleep so fast, I had no time to realize it was happening, falling into a soft-edged darkness that wrapped warm around me, falling without fear and without limit…

… and then, without any sense of transition, I was sitting in a nice, comfortable living room with a fire roaring in the hearth. Curled up like a cat on a soft cotton-covered sofa, my head against the pillowed armrest, covered with the same blanket I'd been using in the infirmary.

"Hey, kid," said a low voice. I blinked and focused across the room.

"Jonathan?" I asked, and slowly sat up. "Am I—? Aren't you—?"

"Dead?" the mack daddy of the Djinn supplied, and popped the tops on two brown, label-free bottles of beer. He held one up, and it floated toward me. Heavier than I expected. I nearly fumbled the bottle when I grabbed it out of the air. Cold. It felt heavy and real.

"Aren't you? Dead?" I asked.

"Yeah, well. Kinda."

I blinked again and sipped the beer. Seemed like the thing to do. Jonathan looked exactly the same as he had last time I'd seen him: human, tall and lean and whipcord-strong. Tanned. He was wearing khaki pants and a loose off-white T-shirt, not tucked in, and his booted feet were crossed at the ankles. He sipped his beer, unsmiling.

I put my bottle down on the polished wooden coffee table after shoving aside issues of magazines in languages that I didn't recognize to make room for it. "You're dead," I repeated. "So why are you in my dream?"

He raised the bill of his olive drab ball cap with one finger. "Good question. Morbid, isn't it?"

"What?"

"Dreaming about dead people. Creepy. You ever see a therapist about that?"

"I'm not—" Even in dreams, I couldn't win an argument with him. Even when he was dead. "What are you doing here?"

Jonathan took off his cap, tossed it toward a coat-tree (and missed), and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. He met my stare. That was a frightening thing. Dream or not, he had the exact same eyes—dark, lightless, limitless, filled with an infinity of things I could never understand in my short human lifetime. Stars were born and died in those eyes. "I think the real question is, what are youdoing here? This is the end of the world, kiddo. Or the beginning. Tough to tell the difference. It's all one big turning circle, and where we are depends on who we are."

I clutched the blanket closer. "I—don't understand."

"Yeah, didn't figure you would. But I thought I'd give it a shot." He took another swig of beer, but those inhuman eyes never left me. "Take a look outside."

I rose, dragging the blanket with me wrapped around my shoulders like a bulky shawl. Not that I wanted to get up from that obscenely comfortable couch, but this was a dream, and I was going to do just what he wanted me to do. No real will of my own. My hand reached out for the drapery pull, and I yanked, and the heavy maroon curtains slid back, revealing…

A big field of nodding yellow flowers. Blue sky. A few clouds drifting lazily over the horizon.

I turned to look at him, a question on my face.

"Keep looking," he said. "Little more to the picture than meets the eye."

I narrowed my eyes, and it was like going up in to the aetheric, only I never left my body; the horizon zoomed toward me, clarifying itself as it came. What looked like a shadowy mountain range resolved into something else entirely.

Death.

I was looking at the skeletal remains of a city. Whatever skyline shape had once made it memorable was gone, so I didn't know if I was looking at Paris or New York or Dallas; it was a twisted bare mass of metal now, corroding and twisting together, being beaten down by the gentle, remorseless rain and wind. That was how the planet triumphed, in the end. With patience. With stillness.

Without mercy.

"You're getting there," he said. "Closer."

And he was closer, too—across the room and standing right behind me. His hands closed on my upper arms, holding me in place against him. I didn't want to see, but it came to me anyway.

Bones. So many bones, sinking deeper into the hungry ground. Flesh liquefying and returning to the soil, bones taking longer to flake away into bleached splinters.

Bones were all that was left of humanity, I knew that. I could sense that. Nothing remained. Not a city untouched, not a family huddled in a cave, waiting out the disaster. We'd been completely, utterly removed from the Earth.

"You see?" Jonathan's voice rasped, soft as velvet against my ear. I could feel the warm whisper of his breath stirring my hair. "It's like bowling. When the match is over, you have to return the rented shoes. Sorry, kid. Game over."

Six billion lives, snuffed out. I wanted to fall to my knees, but Jonathan was holding me up. There was a certain lazy cruelty in the way his fingers dug into my skin.

"Don't go all weak on me now," he scolded me. "Bones and dust. That the way you want it?"

"No," I said, and firmed up my knees and spine. Weak? I wasn't weak, and I wouldn't let him see me that way. "So you tell me, how do I stop it?"

"What makes you think it's your job to stop anything?"

I shook free of his hands and whirled to face him. My fists clenched at my sides. " Because you brought me here!"

His face smoothed out, became as rigid and emotionless as a leather mask. Those eyes, God, those eyes. Fury and power and anguish, all together.

"I didn't bring you here," he said. "You think you're Miss Special Destiny of the year?"

"No," I shot back, furious. "And I don't damn well wantto be, any more than you wanted to be—whatever the hell you are. But sometimes there isn't a choice. Right?"

"Careful. You might accidentally make some sense. Ruin your reputation."

"You are infuriating!"

"Yep," he agreed. "It's been said."

Arguing with him was getting me exactly nothing. I controlled my temper with a tremendous effort of will. "So how do we stop this?" Because I was not going to sit by and let a future roll toward us that contained six billion corpses turning to petroleum under the ground.

"That's the funny thing," Jonathan said, and stepped back. He tugged his cap more firmly in place, one hand at the back, one on the bill. "You want to survive, you need to convince Her that you're worth the favor."

"How?" I practically yelled it.

"You'll know it when you see it. But first you have to get yourself to the right place."

"Which is?"

"Someplace you've already been," he said. "Once. Neat little place, kinda quaint. You'll think of it."

"Don't do that. Don't go all vague on me just when I need—"

"Not my business to save your ass," he pointed out. "Hell, I'm kinda dead anyway. Not my problem. And you look so cute with your face all red."

"Jonathan—" I was all out of smart-ass. " Please."

He cupped an ear toward me.

"Please," I repeated. "Do you want me to beg?"

"Well, it'd be nice, but… nah. Can you sing?"

"What?"

"Sing. Notes. Usually up and down, unless you're into that rap thing, which"—he eyed me—"I wouldn't recommend. A little too much vanilla in the ice, if you know what I mean."

"Believe me, I have no ideawhat you mean!"

He sighed. "Humans. No sense of what's going on around them…"

He stopped in midcondescension. His face went blank again, but not as if he was trying to conceal anything this time—more as though he was entirely focused on something beyond the two of us.

There was a sound. It started as a kind of moaning, like a breeze beyond the window. It got louder. Stronger. Became an eerie tangle of whispers.

No, not whispers. Something… musical.

I reached for the latch on the window, suddenly desperate to hear what it was. Jonathan clapped his hands down over mine, hard. "No," he said grimly. "Do it and you're dead."

I fought him. I had to open the window. I had to know. I could feel it coming, and oh it was glorious and terrible and beautiful as liquid fire, and it was going to burn me to ash where I stood with the fire of creation and joy. Spirit moving upon the earth…

I clawed at the window latch, got hold of it, and yanked up.

Stuck. I screamed and battered at the window glass, but it didn't break, didn't even rattle…

Jonathan muttered what might have been a curse, if I'd understood Djinn, and he spun me around to face him. The whole house around us was moving, breathing. Seduced by the power of the song outside. Longing to join with it, lose itself in that joyous, terrifying chorus.

Pieces of it were whirling away. Jonathan stayed focused on my face. "You've got to leave," he said.

"Am I going to see you again?" I asked, weirdly calm now, drugged by the sound. He smiled slightly and touched his fingertips to the tip of my chin.

"Didn't see me this time," he said, and without any warning at all, gave me a right cross that snapped my head back with overwhelming force. Pain blocked out even the screaming of that song.. . .

I sailed backward into the dark, falling, lost in shrieking winds and wind that grabbed and tore at me…

The song turned into a shrill ringing in my ears.

I jerked awake on the bed in the infirmary, felt my heart racing uncontrollably, and fumbled for the clock on the table next to me. Its reassuring green glow told me that I'd been asleep for exactly six hours.

I sank back with a sigh, cradling the clock and hitting the buttons, and then realized that it wasn't the alarm going off. It was my cell phone shrilling for attention. Damn. I needed to go with a much more amusing ringtone.

I fumbled it out of my purse and flipped it open. "Yeah?" I sounded as drugged and disoriented as I felt.

"You stupid slag." I knew that rich tenor voice, sharpened now with anger. "You called the police on me."

I flopped back into the comfort of the pillow and threw an arm over my eyes. "Yes, Eamon, I called the police on you. You threatened my life, tried to kill me, and abducted my sister—"

"I saved your bloody life!" He sounded livid. I could almost see the veins pulsing in his neck. "I could've left you out in that hurricane to die, you know. I put myself out for you!"

"Yeah, you're a prince—Please tell me you're not, by the way. I mean, my opinion of British royalty isn't that high, but—"

"Shut it," he snarled. "Alerting the local constabulary isn't going to get your sister back."

"Can make your life damn inconvenient, though, I'll bet."

Silence. I could hear him breathing. I could picture him standing there, phone gripped in those long pianist's fingers. The inner Eamon didn't match the sensitive hands, though he could pretend with the best of them.

Deep down, he wasn't elegant, and he wasn't cultured. He was a total bastard, and the fact that my sister had been enthralled with him—and might still be, for all I knew—made me feel more than a little nauseated.

"Look," I said. "I know that you expect me to be your costar in this little drama you're playing, but I'm busy. Get to the point, Eamon. You going to kill me? Come on and get in line. I haven't got time to screw around with you."

Silence, for a long few beats, and then, "Is there a problem?" he asked. Which wasn't what I'd expected.

"Why do you care?"

"Because—" He paused for several long beats. "Because what I want from you is a Djinn. If there's anything happening that affects that goal, I need to know."

"You have no idea how much I wish I'd given you one back home, and gotten you the hell out of our lives," I said. I remembered the bloodstains in the conference room. Not that I wished dismemberment on anyone, but with Eamon my moral high ground was somewhere about the elevation of a sand dune, and eroding fast. "The situation has changed. I can't get my hands on a Djinn anymore. No one can."

"Won't, you mean."

"I don't have time to explain it to you, but even if I gave you a Djinn bottle, it wouldn't do you any good. The—the master agreement's been broken. They don't obey us anymore. And they damn sure wouldn't obey you."

"I see," he said slowly. "That's… very unfortunate. For your sister, at any rate."

"Where's Sarah? If you've hurt her—"

"Don't be ridiculous. Why would I hurt lovely Sarah?" That sly hint of amusement was back in his voice. "Much more rewarding to play along with her fantasies. You'd be amazed what kind of thing that woman gets up to in the privacy of her—"

"Shut up!" I shouted it, heard my heart thudding in my ears, and forced myself to relax. He liked sticking in the knife. It was part of his game. No matter what he said, I'd seen the way he'd touched her, and his hands didn't lie about that, at least. He was gentle with her. Gentler than he had any reason to be. It was even possible he really liked her, as much as he liked anyone. "Look, just let her go. There's no reason to keep her. I already told you, I can't give you a Djinn. Please. Just—let her go."

"Are you completely sure you can't give me what I want? Because if you are, there's no reason for me not to put a bullet in the head of your beautiful sister, pose her in a compromising position for the delight of the tabloid media, and be on my merry way." He listened to my furious silence. I could feel a grin coming off the phone, like radiant heat. "I was thinking something from the oeuvre of the Hillside Strangler. Nothing like the classics."

"You fucking son of a—"

" I want a Djinn. I don't care about your technical issues. You're thoroughly resourceful when you need to be—I've seen that firsthand. No, your lovely sister stays with me until you come through for me. In the meantime, she suffers whatever I see fit to make her suffer, which I promise you will get progressively worse the longer you take to satisfy me. And if I feel you haven't done your level best to get me what I want, well… you'll follow the breathless coverage about her bad, sad end on the news."

My free hand was in a fist, clenched tight. I didn't remember doing it, and deliberately relaxed until the white knuckles loosened up. "You won't get anything by threatening her. There are other things happening, in case you're not aware. Bad things. I can't just—"

"Yeah," he interrupted. "Dead Wardens littering the landscape, very sad, I'm devastated, et cetera. But in short, bugger your problems, darling, because myproblems are the priority. I'll give you exactly two days to settle your little difficulties and make arrangements to get me what I want, and no tricks, or I swear to you, your sister will notleave a pretty corpse, are we understood?"

"Yes," I said. "Yes, we're understood."

"Then it's been a slice, love, and you watch yourself. Wouldn't want anything to happen to you before I get what I want. Now, if you'll excuse me, I hear the water shutting off in the bath. I have to go do your sister."

He hung up before I could fire off anything I'd regret later. The number was blocked, of course. I sank down on the bed again, exhausted and aching and angry as hell, with nowhere to put all that nervous dread. Not like my sister's life could count for any more than the hundreds of thousands of people who were in danger, or the millions—billions—in the balance if we didn't figure out how to make things right again.

Bones and dust, corpses turning to petroleum. Sunflowers nodding placidly over a graveyard. Had I just been dreaming? Or was Jonathan—the spirit of Jonathan, anyway—trying to tell me something important?

Two days. Not enough time. Not enough time for anything.

I felt tears coming, and choked them back furiously. I was notgoing to let that bastard make me cry, and I was notgoing to think about him standing in that steam-fogged bathroom, wiping beads of water from my sister's naked back while she smiled innocently at him in the mirror.

No, I wasn't going to think about that at all.

Okay, maybe I was.

I curled up on the bed, hurled the alarm clock across the room in a satisfying crunch of plastic, and put my pillow over my head to sob out my fury and pain. That was supposed to be cathartic, but mostly it seemed to result in aching muscles, sinuses packed with fluid, and raw, abused eyeballs.

I needed to blow my nose. When I reached for a tissue from the bedside box, my fumbling fingers met warm flesh, helpfully handing one over.

I lifted my head slowly from the smothering embrace of the pillow, and gasped.

"Aren't you going to take that?" David asked. I looked down. My fingers were clenched on the tissue in his hand, but I hadn't made any move to claim it. I slowly pulled it toward me.

David was sitting in a chair a couple of feet away, watching me with his head tilted a little to one side. His eyes were more brown than bronze, just now, lazy behind the concealing round glasses. Relaxed. He was wearing a familiar outfit of a blue checked shirt and faded jeans and battered hiking boots, and God, he looked good enough to eat. Relief flashed through me like a concentrated burst of lightning, and then recent history caught up to me like the following thunder. I sat up in a hurry, heart thumping so hard, I saw red spots, because my brain finally saw fit to remind me that David, about thirty hours ago, had been intent on killing me.

"Easy," he said, and reached out to draw a fingertip over the tender, sensitive skin on the interior of my right arm. Heat and friction, real as it could get. "It's all right. I'm myself, at least for now. Blow your nose."

He wasn't a dream; he was here. Reallyhere, physically.

I really did need to blow my nose. I did so, in as ladylike a fashion as I could, wishing all the while—mostly stupidly—that I'd had some kind of warning, that I'd been able to shower or to brush my hair or change my clothes or… hell. Anything.

I tossed the tissue at the trash can nearby. He gave my underhanded girly throw an assist with a wave of his finger, not even looking. Two points.

"I didn't know if you were alive," he said softly. "Not at first. I remembered coming after you, on the beach, and then—nothing. I thought I'd hurt you. Killed you."

The look in his eyes—God, it made my heart break. I swung my legs over the side of the bed. We were close enough that our knees brushed.

David leaned forward, moving slowly, the way animal trainers do with skittish creatures, and he slowly extended his hand toward me. Traced the line of my cheek. "I can't stay long," he said quietly. "But I want to try to protect you, as much as I can. Help you. Will you let me?"

I couldn't say no to him, not when he sounded like that. Soft and a little desperate. I stayed where I was. I didn't reach back to him, though every cell in my body screamed for me to do it; I just watched him, until he drew his hand back. He put his elbows on his knees and focused on my face with an intensity I remembered from the first time I'd met him. Had I fallen in love with him right then, at first sight? I'd fallen in lust, for sure. Lust had been no problem at all. Still wasn't. But more than that—and I only realized it now, looking back on it—I'd lost my soul to him somewhere along the way.

And I couldn't regret it. Even now.

His fingers moved together restlessly, as though fighting an urge to reach out to me again. "You're all right?" he asked. "Not hurt?"

"No. I'm all right." Minus a few dozen cuts and bruises and minor aches. Nothing to speak of, really. "What the hell happened?"

His face went still. Masklike, the way Jonathan's had been in the dream. His eyes turned dark and filled with secrets. "Jonathan decided to play god," he said. "He's dead."

I had a sudden, aching suspicion. "Did you kill him?"

The flash of anguish, before he locked it down again, was answer enough. David had been an Ifrit for a time, half alive, preying on Djinn for his life force. Damned and doomed and broken… dead, in every way that mattered. He'd gone after the biggest, brightest power source available to survive, and that had been Jonathan. Driven by the basic instinct to feed, he had turned on his own best friend.

Just the way his best friend intended, the coldhearted, calculating, manipulative bastard.

"David, don't," I said. "You know he wanted to die. He just—used you. Suicide by Ifrit."

"No, it was more than that." He swallowed and looked aside, keeping his thoughts to himself for a few seconds before he continued, "What Jonathan was, is—necessary. Someone needs to stand where he stood. Nature abhors a vacuum." He attempted a smile, but it looked painful. "I was the closest Djinn to him in power, so what he was—it flowed into me. In a real sense, I've become—"

"Jonathan," I supplied.

He looked agonized about that. Guilty. Horrified. "No. Jonathan was… special. I don't think any of us could really take his place and do the things he did. But I've become the conduit, the pipeline from the Mother to the Djinn. The only upside is that I've stopped pulling the life out of you, the way I did when I was an Ifrit. If I'd kept on…"

"You wouldn't have killed me." I wasn't sure of that, but I wanted to be.

"I came damn close." He stared at me, miserable. "Jo. None of us can tell what's coming. I don't know if I can control this. I'm not Jonathan. I'm not capable of—staying apart from her needs, her emotions. And when I fail, we all lose."

Nothing I could say about that wouldn't make him feel worse about it. "Look, you told me on the beach that the Wardens need to stop the Earth from waking up," I said. "That would fix things, right? Give you back free will?"

"No, not really." He was already shaking his head. "We never have completely free will. It's not the way it works."

"Even now that Jonathan's agreement with the Wardens is gone?"

"Even now. We just changed hands, so to speak. Went back to our original master. Mistress. You saw. When it happened—I wasn't prepared to handle it. I didn't know how to try to hold it back, and it spilled through me to the other Djinn."

His eyes had burned bright red, and bright red was not a color I associated with anything good, except in fashion. Having red eyes staring at you was downright terrifying. Still, it hadn't been only the Goth-bright gaze that had unnerved me; it had been the stillness. The sense of David having been emptied out of his own skin, stripped of individual consciousness and responsibility.

"When she's angry," he continued, "when she feels threatened, she can take control of me, and through me, all the others. In a sense, we're her antibodies. And if she wants to destroy you…"

It would be terrifyingly easy for Djinn to do it. They were predatory at the best of times. Given free rein and license to kill? Slaughter. No human could battle them directly for very long, and there damn sure weren't enough Wardens to go around anyway.

"So what are we supposed to do? It's a little late to build a rocket ship and evacuate," I said, "no matter what the science fiction movies like to tell us."

That got a smile. A small one. "Did you know, that's one of the things we love so much about you?"

"What?"

"Your stories. You remake the world with stories. I don't think you understand how powerful that is, Jo."

"A story isn't going to fix this."

The smile died. "No, you're right about that."

"Then tell me what to do."

"No."

"No?"

"You have to understand—"

"Well, I don't. I don't understand."

"You're being obstinate."

"I'm being accurate! Dammit, David, why is everything such a riddle with you guys? Why can't you just come right out and—"

"—tell you how to destroy the Djinn?" he asked, and arched his eyebrows. "Sorry, but I'm not quite ready to sacrifice my people to save all of yours. I'm trying to find a way that it doesn't come down to that choice. That's what Jonathan left me. Responsibility. It sucks, but that's the way it is."

I swallowed my comeback, because there was real suffering in his eyes. "So what can I do?" I asked. "I can't just wait around for the final epic battle and make popcorn."

Another smile, this one stronger and warmer. "You never could, you know. Always in motion."

"Damn straight. Basic principles of physics. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest. Things in motion require less effort to overcome resistance."

"I love your mind."

"Is that all?" I arched my eyebrows back at him, and his eyes sparked bronze.

He smiled, and then the smile slowly faded. "We can't do this."

Damn. The warmth inside me, barely felt, began to fade. "Why not?"

"Because it's dangerous. You begin to trust me; I begin to think you cantrust me. That's a very bad idea." He stood up. "I shouldn't have come here."

"Then why did you?" I demanded, out of patience. "Dammit, don't come here and look—look all perfectly hot and good enough to lick—don't just show up and tell me that I can't trust you, because I dotrust you, I always have, even when I didn't have any reason to do it! Don't do this to us! It hurts!"

My vehemence shook him. He honestly didn't expect that outburst—I could see it in the way he drew back inside himself, watching me. The bronze glints died in his eyes, forced back. He looked like a man. A tired, vulnerable, sorrowful man. "I want to help," he said.

"Well, pony up, cowboy! Now's the time!"

"All right." He closed his eyes, as if he couldn't stand to look at me while he said it. "You can't cut the Djinn off from the Mother. Oh, there's a way, but if you do, you only guarantee your own destruction. The Earth would go mad. It wouldn't just be humanity being wiped away, it would be every living thing in the world. She would just—reset the game and start over. What you have to do is become… Jonathan. Become the conduit for humanity, to her."

Finally, we were getting somewhere. "And how exactly do I do that?" He opened his mouth, then shut it again. No answer. "David, half an answer is worse than none. Tell me."

"I hate putting you at risk like this."

"Dammit, how could I be more at risk? I saw—" I stopped, because I intuitively knew I shouldn't tell David about the dream. At best, he'd dismiss it. At worst, it would raise false hopes that Jonathan was… somewhere out there. "I'm a Warden, and I'm on the front lines already. At least give me the tools to get the job done."

His head jerked up, and he fixed on me with such intensity that I flinched, a little. "I'm not sure it won't kill you."

"Well," I said after a shaky second of a pause, "that's a 'been there, done that' situation, and anyway it's not your choice to make, is it?"

And that was a longsecond of pause, from both of us. Precarious and painful.

"No," he finally admitted, and squeezed his eyes closed as he thought about it. "All right. I can't tell you howto do it—I'm not even sure how Jonathan did it, in the first place. But I can tell you where." He made a visible decision and opened his eyes. They were glowing now, Djinn-bronze flecked with ruddy amber. "You've been there once already. Seacasket."

"Seacasket?" I tried to remember… and then I did, with a chilling rush of pain and panic.

Once upon a time, I had been a Djinn, and I had been sent to Seacasket by my master (if you could call a punk like Kevin a master, which was a stretch) to destroy the town. In fire.

David had stopped me that time. And somehow, Kevin's stepmonster Yvette had known that he would. It had been the trap she set for him, to get him back in her power.

"Seacasket's special," I said. "Yvette knew."

He nodded. "It's a—thin space in the aetheric. One of two or three places in this country where a human might be able to reach one of the Oracles."

"Oracles?" I'd never heard of Oracles, other than the ancient Greek kind. Or the software company. From the regretful look that flashed across his face, it wasn't something anyhuman had probably heard before. Or that the Djinn ever intended we would.

"They don't exist here, on this plane. They're—different. And Jo, they're dangerous. Very dangerous, even to Djinn. I—can't imagine how dangerous they'd be to a human, even if you can get one to allow you contact. Which isn't likely."

"Can't you—I don't know, introduce me?"

"It doesn't work that way," he said. "I wish to heaven it did, because this would already be finished and I'd have done this for you. The way I'm connected is subordinate. The Djinn are part of the body, not apart from it. Oracles…" He was out of words, and he shrugged. "There's no way to describe this, really. It's not a human thing."

I let out a slow breath. "Okay. Leaving all that on the table, is there anything you can do about all of the—the chaos out there? Weather, fire, earthquakes?…"

"I'll do what I can." David leaned forward and extended his hand again. This time, I took it. His skin was firm and hot and smooth, and my skin remembered it all too vividly. He was astonishingly tactile, always touching, and even as I thought it his fingers moved to my wrist, tracing my pulse. "I want to protect you. I want that with everything in me. The idea of sending you into danger without me… it terrifies me. You know that, right?"