Текст книги "Windfall"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

Соавторы: Rachel Caine
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“You know I can’t talk to you about it.”

“Don’t I have the right to at least try to clear my name?”

“Nobody’s blackened your name,” he said, and crossed his arms. He looked tired.

There was more gray in his hair than I remembered. “Look, yes, there’s talk; there has been talk ever since Bad Bob died. Lots of people think you killed him to shut him up.”

“It was self-defense!” I practically yelled it. He nodded, arms folded; the body language of rejection. “Dammit, John, don’t you believe me? You knew that old bastard! He was a corrupt, scary old man—”

“He was a legend,” John said softly. “You killed a legend. You have to understand that no matter what he was, what bad things he did, nobody’s going to remember that now. What they remember are his accomplishments, not his flaws.”

He stuck a demon down my throat!I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. And it didn’t matter. John was right, Bad Bob was an untouchable saint, and I was the evil, scheming bitch who’d slaughtered a helpless old guy in his own home. No doubt the ParadiseKingdom scheme had been all his; it had all the hallmarks of his style. He’d probably involved a few other Wardens in it, for profit, but he hadn’t included me. He’d known that I would have busted him.

I could practically hear him laughing, out there in hell. I hoped it was extra hot and he was drinking Tabasco sauce to cool off.

“I don’t know anything about this,” I said. John gave me a funny look, then turned to Ella. She shot him another glance back, raised her eyebrows, and nodded toward the other side of the room. John walked silently away. His Djinn was standing there, fixing up a shattered desk with long, smooth strokes of his fingers over wood. Where it had splintered, it fused together seamlessly.

“John can’t say anything about this,” Ella said, “but I’ve only got a couple of years to retirement; I couldn’t give a shit what the Wardens do to me. Petal, claiming ignorance about ParadiseKingdom isn’t going to do you any good. You’d better come up with another story, fast.”

“What? Why?”

She straightened more papers in my file, reached for a bracket, and pushed it through the holes of the folder. Began systematically attaching reports to it.

“ParadiseKingdom’s owned by your boss, Marvin McLarty. Marvelous Marvin. You know, the ‘weatherman.’ ” She paused to give it air quotes and an eyeroll. “So you can’t exactly claim that you don’t have a connection to it. He hired you without an interview. You must have known him before you took the job.”

That bastard. That snake. That… horny, no-good little poodle! I couldn’t believe it. He was too stupid to be venal. Right? Marvelous Marvin, investing in property fraud schemes with Wardens?That meant he knew about them, in the first place… and she was right, I’d sent in a resume, and Marvin had hired me after giving me one look. I’d thought it was, well, for the cheesecake value, and I’m sure that made the deal sweeter for him. But it must have been something more.

Somebody must have told him to do it. Somebody, maybe, who wanted a convenient scapegoat if things got scary for them. Because on paper, I damn sure lookedguilty.

If Marvin was involved with Bad Bob, that explained a lot. His percent accuracy rate, for one thing, which would have been a source of amusement to somebody like Bad Bob. He’d have been able to pull it off, too, without attracting Warden notice. Bad Bob’s rating had been far higher than John Foster’s, and besides, he was a legend. Who questioned a legend?

Bad Bob Biringanine had been willing to sell his ethics and reputation for a nice house, a tidy bank account, and all the comforts of organized crime. But … Marvelous Marvin?Who could take him seriously as a bad guy? And maybe that was precisely the point.

Ella was watching me, waiting for an answer. I didn’t have one.

“Don’t you believe I’m innocent?” I asked her.

“Of course I do, honey. Don’t be ridiculous!” I saw her eyes stay fixed and steady on me, in a way that only happens when the answer is a flat-out lie.

“Even if you did do it, hell, the whole organization’s falling apart. It’s pretty much every woman for herself right now.” She kept staring at me.

And I realized something fairly significant. There was still weather manipulation going on, even with Bad Bob dead. If I took myself out of the equation, there was a pretty limited pool of suspects.

Not John. I shifted my stare to him, watching the way he talked with his Djinn, the way he listened attentively, the way the Djinn moved in such an open, easy fashion. No fear, no guarding, no resistance. John was one of the good guys; I knew it in my heart.

Carol Shearer, whom I hadn’t known well, might have been in it, but I’d never know, would I? Because she was dead, killed in a car accident.

If it hadn’t been Carol…

Why was Ella still looking at me?

“Does John know?” I asked her.

“About… ?”

“Marvin.”

“Oh, sure. That’s why he won’t talk to you. It’s killing him, you know; he wants to believe in you, but… ah, hell, honey, he’s an idealist. You know how John can get. No sense of the real world.”

I decided to jump in the alligator pond. “Well,” I said, lowering my voice to a just-us-girls whisper, “confidentially, I wasn’t in on it. But you know that, right? I mean, Bad Bob told me about it that morning, and I was thinking it over, but I had no idea it was still going on. It is still going on, though. Right?”

She blinked and said, “You don’t think I have anything to do with it, do you?”

I raised my eyebrows.

And, after a split second, she lowered her eyelids and whispered, “Not while he’s here.”

I’m glad I wasn’t quite looking at her; she probably would have read the heartbreak in my eyes. But she didn’t notice. She turned away and finished putting the papers of my file in order, and bent the brackets to hold everything inside, nice and neat. I noticed there were some papers she hadn’t put back. She shifted the stack in my direction with an unmistakable take-them nod.

I felt sick, but managed to hold on to my smile. I collected the papers and stuck them into my purse, trying to look casual about it. Ella watched me with a strange little smile, then winked and turned away to grub in folders again.

We were collaborating.

I pulled in a deep breath and walked over to John and his Djinn. The Djinn focused on me, swept those white-fire eyes over me, and did such an obvious double take it was almost funny. I knew it wasn’t my outfit—it wasn’t that bad—and after the initial confusion I figured out what he was focusing so intently on.

I put a hand over my lower stomach, instinctively, as if I could somehow shield my unborn Djinn child from his stare.

He yanked his gaze back up, and I lifted my chin and dared him to say something.

He just lifted an eyebrow so dryly it almost made me laugh, then turned to John and said, “Will that be all, John?” He had an English accent, very butler-y.

John thanked him politely and poof, we were Djinn-free. I wondered what the Djinn’s name was, but it was impolite to ask. When you met a Warden and a Djinn together, you weren’t supposed to even acknowledge the Djinn.

I don’t think that was etiquette invented by the Djinn.

“I’m sorry, John, but I need to get going,” I said. He nodded and extended a hand for me to shake; I did, and then held on to it. I leaned forward and brushed a kiss across his cheek. He smelled of a dry, astringent cologne and a wisp of tobacco. “Take care,” I said, and dropped my voice to a whisper while I was next to his ear. “Don’t trust anyone. Anyone.”

I didn’t want to point the finger at Ella specifically, not yet, but a general warning never did anyone any harm. He pulled back, frowning, and then composed himself and gave me a placid nod. “You take care, now.”

“You, too,” I said, and made my way through the still-messy room to the Djinn-repaired door.

It hadn’t been a robbery. Somebody had come in here looking for records, and they’d gone through my file like a fine-toothed comb.

It looked like everybody wanted to keep track of me—good guys, bad guys, people I didn’t even recognize as being on one side or the other. Who the hell knew.

I was seriously considering grabbing David’s bottle and my sister, and fleeing the country.

Interlude

On the island, the storm strips hundred-year-old trees bare, then snaps the trunks and throws them with lethal force into every man-made structure in the way. Walls disintegrate. Roofs disappear into a blizzard of broken wood and tile. Even palm fronds become deadly cutting instruments, driven by winds of unimaginable force.

The storm stops, turns, and begins to feed.

Death comes mostly from the storm surge, which creeps up over the land not in a wave but with the constant pace of a pail poured into a tub. Water rises to fill houses in minutes, drowning frantic occupants who can’t flee into the killing winds. Some structures, farther from the shore, begin to shudder and breathe with the storm, walls collapsing outward, then pulling upright again, each vibration shattering more of the foundations.

Men, women, children, and animals are pulled from shelter and swept into the fury, where they’re stripped first of clothes, then of flesh, then shattered into ragged bits.

The carnage is constant and merciless, and the storm feeds, and feeds, and feeds. It has no will to move on from the feast. Even when the island is stripped bare, to the rocks, the winds and waves continue to lash and lick the last fragments of life.

The exposed bedrock blackens. Even the algae die.

When the storm has sucked every breath from a land that once held millions, it buries it under the sea and moves on, searching for its next victim.

This is where I come in.

Chapter Seven

As above, so below. The old saying was holding true today. I got to the security doors of the lobby just as the clouds cut loose and the rain began.

Florida rain is like a faucet—two speeds, flood and stop. The setting was definitely on flood this morning. I stood at the glass and looked out at the thick gray wall of water—couldn’t really make out the parking lot behind it—and looked down at my shoes. They weren’t rain-appropriate, but then the rest of the outfit wasn’t exactly going to be repelling a lot of water, either.

At least it’s just rain, I told myself. Could be worse…

And right on cue, a white stab of lightning split the sky outside, close enough that I didn’t need Warden senses to register the power jolt. I felt it sweep over my skin and draw every tiny hair to shivering attention.

The thunder that followed shook the glass and set off a howling chorus of car alarms.

The next strike was about fifty feet away from me, right outside in the parking lot, and it came as a fork of blue-white light reaching down and grounding itself in one of the cars. What the hell… ?It shouldn’t have done that.

There were lots of taller objects to draw it, but then lightning was whimsical that way. And vicious.

I jumped back from the glass and slapped my hands over my ears as the thunder exploded, and couldn’t see a damn thing for the overloaded white-hot afterburn on my retinas. I blinked fiercely as I waited for my eyes to return to normal and cursed my lack of strength as oversight would have been a real asset at the moment. Except that I was too weak to get to it, and it was only as the thunder died to an ominous, continuing growl that I realized the car that had taken the brunt of that lightning bolt had been midnight blue, lean, and sleek.

In other words, it had been Mona. Mycar.

“Oh, damn,” I whispered, and blinked faster. Not that I could really see anything through the incredibly dense rain out there. No, wait, I could. There was something flickering orange out there, barely visible…

My car was on freaking fire.

“Joanne!” John Foster, breathless, came pelting up behind me, grabbed me, and threw me to the floor. He landed on top of me, and while I was busy registering the unique ways a marble floor didn’t make for a comfortable landing area, something outside exploded.

Not lightning. Something more man-made.

The explosion blew in the windows in a bright-edged shower, and the rain followed, pounding in before the glass even hit the marble. I smelled burning plastic and metal and tried to get up, but John held me down with an elbow across my shoulders. He was breathing hard. I could feel his heart pounding against my back.

“Let go!” I yelled. “Dammit! John! Let go!”

He finally did, rolling off in a crunch of glass, and as I flipped over I saw that he’d sustained some cuts, but not a lot. So far, we’d been lucky.

“You all right?” he asked. I nodded. “Come with me.”

He scrambled up to his feet and held out his hand. I looked back at the parking lot, or at least what I could see of it; there was an unholy bonfire out there, consuming at least three cars.

The center of it was the blackened shell of the Viper formerly known as Mona, who wouldn’t be taking me on any more fast drives, ever again. I gulped and clutched my purse tight and took John’s hand.

He led me out of the lobby, past the arriving cluster of alarmed tenants and late-breaking security personnel, to the stairwell. He hit the stairs running, tasseled loafers pounding, and I had to hustle to keep up. John had been working out, or else adrenaline was a wonderful fitness drug.

We ran full speed up seven floors, all the way to the top of the building, to the door that was marked ROOF ACCESS, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. And I was very thankful when we slowed down at the top, because my shoes were not of the cross-training persuasion, but then he grabbed me and towed me toward the exit.

“John!” I yelled, and yanked him to a stop before he could stiff-arm the ALARMWILLSOUND crossbar. “John, wait! What’s going on?”

“You were right about the Djinn!” he yelled back. “We have to go, now!They’re coming!”

Oh, crap.

He broke free and hit the door release. An alarm added its shriek to the general confusion—the fire alarms were going off, too, and I wondered if the fire had spread somehow from the parking lot to the building—and as the door opened out onto the roof, rain and wind shouldered through the opening to hit us like linebackers. I staggered, but John reached back and grabbed my wrist and dragged me outside into the chaos of the downpour.

“John!” I screamed, over the continuing roll of thunder. “It’s not safe out here! The lightning—”

“Shut up; I’ll take care of the lightning!” And he could. John was a highly competent Weather Warden in his own right. Even as he finished saying it, I felt a ripple over my skin, and my blunted Warden senses registered something whipping through the aetheric at us like a striking snake…

John let go of me, turned, and focused his attention on a thick silver stanchion fixed to a corner of the roof.

Lightning hissed down. I could feel it struggling to reach us, fighting…

And then turning to hit the stanchion. The building’s lightning protection system bled it off into the ground through a network of inlaid wiring. I could feel the heat of it blast over me from where I stood.

But I also felt how close it had been. Something was directing that lightning.

Controlling it. Something a great deal stronger than John Foster.

He knew it, too; I saw it in the fixed, desperate set of his expression. “Come on!” John was tugging me onward, to a second concrete bunker on top of the roof.

The door was propped open. He grabbed it just as another flash of lightning came out of nowhere, streaking for us. John wasn’t ready, I knew it—he’d just spent a tremendous amount of energy redirecting that first bolt, and this one was just as big, if not bigger. And it was obviously bent on getting us.

What I had to throw into the pot barely qualified as power at all, but I did it, reaching out and trying to grab hold of the enormous burst of energy that was coming toward us. Electrons were shifting, jittering, realigning into polarities to create a path. All I had to do was snap a few… and I couldn’t do it. As fast as I broke the chain, it whipped back at us, those tiny molecular polarities spinning and locking faster than I could even read their force structure. Rain lashed, and a gust of wind howled over us in a scream of rage. I felt John desperately working to save us, and more power pouring in from outside trying to save us, but it was no good. The bolt was going to hit us dead on, and we were out of time. Whatever had hold of this storm wasn’t going to be denied.

I dived one way, knowing it wouldn’t do any good; John dived the other.

I hit and rolled, and saw the lightning spear straight into John’s chest.

“No!” Maybe I screamed it, maybe I didn’t; whatever sound I made was lost in the massive rush of energy that slammed into his flesh. In its burst of brilliant light, I saw John’s diamond-eyed Djinn standing nearby in the shadows, still and quiet, watching his master die. No expression on his face at all.

He didn’t move to help.

John, cut off from the Wardens network, had never heard the instructions to give his Djinn a preemptive command to defend him. He’d never really understood the danger. And if he had, he probably wouldn’t have believed it.

John dropped without a sound the second the lightning crackled and sizzled out.

I couldn’t see for long, agonizing seconds, so I fumbled my way over gravel and tar to take him in my arms. He was burning hot. As my vision cleared I saw that there were black burns at the top of his head, on the palms of his hands, and that his pants were riddled with sizzling, smoking holes. His shoes were melted to his feet.

I burned my fingers trying to check his pulse, but it was silent. His heart had taken a full jolt, and his nervous system was fried beyond repair.

The Djinn left the shadows and walked over to where I was huddled in the cold, pounding rain with John’s weight across my lap.

“You could have done something,” I said numbly. “Why didn’t you do something? He was your friend!”

He looked down at me. Rain didn’t touch him, just misted away an inch from his form. He was changing already, shifting from that quiet, unassuming young man John’s will had imposed on him to a larger, stronger body. His hair lightened from brown to white, rippling with subtle undertones of color like an opal.

Albino-pale skin. The down-home shirt and blue jeans transformed to rich, pale silk and velvet. He looked elegant and merciless and slightly barbaric.

“He wasn’t my friend,” the Djinn said. “A master can’t be friends with a slave. There’s no trust without equality.”

I choked on the taste of cold rain and burned flesh in my mouth. I wanted to weep, because the Djinn was right. No equality. Just because we were fond of the Djinn didn’t make them friends. Just because we loved them…

What had I done when I’d taken David as my servant? Had it destroyed the trust we’d had? How long would it take for that betrayal to soak into him, to erode his love for me, to turn it toxic?

Maybe the flaws that made him an Ifrit had started here, in me.

“You’re free now,” said a voice from behind me. I gasped and turned, blinking rain out of my eyes. It sounded like Ashan, and yes, it wasAshan, natty and businessman-perfect in his gray suit and chilly tie. His eyes had gone the color of the storm. Not a drop was touching him, of course. He walked forward, and where he walked, the rain just… vanished. He came to a halt a few feet from me, but he wasn’t paying the least attention to me, or the dead man in my arms.

His focus was all on the other Djinn.

“You bastard,” I said, and his eyes cut to me and shut me up. Instantly. With the unmistakable impression that I was one single heartbeat away from joining John in the heavenly choir.

“I’m not talking to you,” he said. “Shut up, meat.”

“Are you addressing me?” the other Djinn asked. He still had a British accent, clipped and precise and very old-school, which went very oddly with the barbaric splendor of his albino rock-star look.

“Of course. I came to give you the opportunity to join us.”

“Fortuitous timing.”

Ashan’s smile was cold and heartless. “Isn’t it just?”

The other Djinn smiled in return. Not a comforting sight. “I find myself free for the first time in memory. Why should I give up that freedom to another master, even one so… important as you?”

Ashan nudged John’s body carefully with the toe of his elegantly polished shoe.

No giveaway misting at the knees for Ashan. He was the Dress For Success poster child of the new age.

“Well, first, I’m the one who granted you freedom by killing this,” he said.

“It’s not freedom if I exchange one form of slavery for another.” The Djinn shrugged. “Not very appealing, I must say. And what would Jonathan think about it?”

“Jonathan?” Ashan put all his contempt into it. “Do you really want to be on the side of the one who made us slaves in the first place?”

I was shivering, cold, drenched, and numbed, but that still made me blink.

“What?” I didn’t meant to say it out loud, but when you hear something like that, well, the question naturally blurts itself out.

This time, Ashan decided I was worthy of an answer. “You didn’t think this master-slave relationship was the natural order, did you? Did you really believe that humansrank higher than Djinn? Things are perverted in this world, little girl, and they have been ever since Jonathangave the Wardens power over us.”

“When—how long—”

“Yesterday,” the other Djinn said quietly. “To us, it was yesterday.”

I wasn’t going to get an answer to that one, I could tell; Ashan had made his point, and I was no longer relevant except as something to nod toward when he wanted to drive home contempt.

“You can’t want to follow Jonathan,” Ashan said. The other Djinn met his eyes.

Thunder rolled overhead, and they both waited out the roar. “If you follow me, you can free others.”

“You mean kill,” the Djinn said calmly. “Kill Wardens.”

“Exactly.” A full, sharp-toothed wolf’s smile. “Come on, don’t tell me you don’t want to. You can start with this one, if you’re interested. Believe me, she’s got it coming.”

The Djinn turned diamond-white eyes to stare at me. I gulped air and frantically rummaged the cupboards of my bare inner storehouse for power, anypower, that might be strong enough to defend me against him. What Jonathan had gifted me with was definitely burning down to its embers. I’d used up everything I had, except for what I was living on, and that couldn’t last.

The Djinn shook his head, smiled a little, and said, “I won’t fight for Jonathan. But I won’t kill for you, Ashan; like us, the Wardens exist for a reason.”

“So you’ll do what? Live as a rogue? An outcast?” Ashan sneered at the whole idea, and took a step forward. I felt tension snap tight between them. “Better off dead, I’d say.”

Behind him, the stairwell door swung open. Silently. Nobody was touching it. A flash of lightning revealed a man standing there, tall and lean, hands at his sides.

Lewis’s face was hard, expressionless, and veryfrightening.

“Leave him alone,” he said, and stepped out into the rain. Unlike the Djinn, he didn’t try to hide from it, and he didn’t do any flashy redirection of energy.

The water pounded over him, soaking his hair flat to his head, saturating his flannel shirt, T-shirt, and jeans in seconds.

He just didn’t care.

Ashan turned to face him. I felt the crackle of power notch up—not like lightning. This was something else. Something… bigger. A little like the resonance that occurred between me and Lewis when things got a little close, only this was dissonance, disharmony, a jagged and cutting chaos.

“He has a choice,” Lewis said. “He can join you, he can join Jonathan, or he can help the Ma’at put all this right again. Restore the balance of things. Stop the violence and the killing. Because this has to stop, Ashan, before everything goes to hell.”

“You mean, everything in the human world.”

“No. I mean everything. Djinn live here, too. And up there.” Lewis indicated the aetheric, somehow, with a jerk of his chin. “If you’re in this world, you’re part of it. There’s no escaping it. Maybe you think you’re here to be gods, but you’re not, no more than we are. We’re all subordinate to something else.”

“Well, maybe you are,” Ashan said, and checked the line of his suit jacket with a casual flick of his fingers. “I have to tell you, I don’t intend to be subordinate to anything or anyone. Ever again.”

“That includes Jonathan, I suppose.”

“It definitely includes Jonathan.”

“Have you happened to mention that to him? Because I don’t see the scars. I think you’ve been avoiding him since you decided on this little rebellion of yours.”

Ashan’s smile was thin, bloodless, and unamused. “I didn’t come here to trade witty remarks with you, human. Go away.”

“Fine. All us humans will just—”

“Not this one. This one’s mine.” Ashan reached out and grabbed me by the shoulder, and boy, it hurt. First of all, his hands were like forged iron.

Second, they weren’t really flesh, not as I could understand it—not the kind of flesh that David always wore, or even Jonathan. Ashan was just an illusion, and what was underneath was sharp and hurtful and cold.

I wanted him to stop touching me, but when I tried to yank away, it was like trying to pull back from an industrial vise.

Lewis went very, very still. Oh, boy. This wasn’t going to end well, and I really didn’t want to be in the middle. Lewis had tons of power, rarely used;

Earth was his weakest, Weather his strongest. He hadn’t been able to work miracles against tons of sand and a dying boy, but here, on this playing field …

He just might be equal to a Djinn.

“Let go,” Lewis said.

Ashan actually grinned. It wasn’t his best expression, but it was certainly one of the most human I’d ever seen on him. Not to mention one of the scariest. The rain hitting me turned from ice-cold to blood-warm to scalding-hot in seconds, thanks to the sudden ramp-up of power igniting the air around us.

“Lewis—” I didn’t get the chance to finish the warning because Ashan, without the slightest hint he was going to act, tried to set Lewis on fire.

Lewis batted away the attack without effort. I’d been burning the last of my power to reach Oversight when it happened, so I’d seen it… a white-hot burst of power arrowing for him, encircling him in a bubble of energy, pressing inward… and dissolving at a single touch of his hand. The energy went chaotic, bouncing back at Ashan, vectoring away to slam into other things, like the swirling fury of the storm, which sucked it up and let loose with another fusillade of lightning bolts overhead.

Lewis had barely even moved. Because he was always so careful with his power, such a good steward of it, it was easy to forget that he was, without question, the most powerful Warden breathing. He rarely lost his temper or acted without thought for the consequences… unlike me. But when he did…

“Ashan,” he said, and his voice had gone into a velvet-deep growl range that made me shiver deep inside, “the next Warden you hurt gets you destroyed so completely that no one will remember you ever existed. And I mean that.”

Ashan stared at him. Lewis stared back, unmoving, dripping with rain and fiercely elemental.

As if he was made of the elements he controlled.

“You aren’t eternal,” Lewis said, and there was something in his words that sounded not quite human in its depth and power. “You were born into this world, and you can die in it. You’ve got no place to run.”

“A human can’t threaten…”

“I’m talking to you as someone who can hear the whisper of the Mother as she sleeps. Do you really think that makes me human?”

Ashan’s teal eyes flared gray for a second, then darkened again. Not quite under control.“The Mother doesn’t talk to meat.”

“She talks to Wardens like me. Wardens who hold all the keys to power. You should remember that. You were around when Jonathan died as a human.”

Ashan’s iron-cold grip on me suddenly relaxed, and I overbalanced pulling away from him. Lewis helped me up. I felt cold and shaky and unreasonably weak, as if the Djinn had been sucking something out of me I couldn’t afford to lose.

Strength. Independence. Hope.

Lewis’s touch brought all of that rushing back. Especially the independence part, which made me immediately pull away from his support. “I’m fine,” I said.

His dark eyes flicked to me and were momentarily just a man’s again, harassed and short-tempered. “I can take care of myself.”

“I know,” he said. “Go. Somebody will meet you downstairs.”

I couldn’t seem to make myself move. Raindrops were pattering and pooling in John Foster’s open eyes. “Ashan killed John. Why?”

“Because he could,” Lewis said grimly. “Because John had something he wanted.”

For a blind second I thought he meant me, but Lewis was looking past me, at the albino, opal-haired rock-’n’-roll Djinn.

“Recruits,” Lewis finished. “Right, Ashan? You need cannon fodder. Djinn to toss into Jonathan’s path to slow him down, because he’s coming for you, and when he finds you it’s not going to be a pretty sight.”

The other Djinn looked at Ashan and tilted his head to one side. No expression on his face, but I had the sense of a razor-sharp mind at work. Ashan was a user, no question of that. And surely the other Djinn, who had a lot more experience of him than I did, had to know it.

“Go downstairs,” Lewis said to me.

“Not without you.”

Lewis let out a breathless, near-silent laugh. “Believe me, I’m right behind you. Most of that was bluff.”

The albino Djinn took a sudden, pantherlike step forward, hand raised. Ashan fell back, assuming a defensive position.

Lewis urged me in the direction of the stairwell. “Don’t wait. Get out of the building. I can’t guarantee it won’t come down if this turns violent.”

“Lewis—”

He didn’t waste time arguing, just extended his hand toward me. I felt a burst of wind hit me, precisely in my midsection, knocking me back five steps to bounce against the stairwell railing, and the door slammed to cut us off.

Something hit the roof outside with enough force to shudder the whole building.

I saw dust sift down from the ceiling and heard an inhuman groan go through the place as concrete and steel shifted.