Текст книги "Windfall"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

Соавторы: Rachel Caine
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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

“I’m not running,” Alice said. “You started the fight. You should be prepared to carry it all the way.”

“I am.”

“Then leave the man out of it. He doesn’t matter.”

“Of course he matters!” Prada gave her a contemptuous look. The Warden’s feet slipped, and he flailed for balance, anchored by Prada’s ruthless grip. The crowd of spectators who’d gathered gasped. A trucker leaned out the door of his semi, open-mouthed.

I didn’t have a lot of time. I could hear the wail of sirens approaching; the cops would be here soon, and God only knew what that would mean.

Alice folded her hands together and watched. Wind ruffled her cornsilk-smooth hair, fluttered the sky blue dress and white pinafore. She was straight out of Lewis Carroll, but when I focused on the adult strength in that child’s face, I could see something older, stronger, and far scarier than anything out of the Looking Glass.

Prada had made her angry. That was probably a really, really stupid move.

“That guy’s gonna jump,” Cherise murmured softly from behind me. “Oh my God. Oh my God…”

The four other Djinn—had to be allies of Prada—were stalking closer. Alice suddenly made her move, lashing out with an explosive flare of power. It hit Prada, looped around her, and attempted to jerk her and her hostage off of the railing and onto the relative safety of the bridge, but it backfired. Prada, straining to counter it, nearly went over instead. Alice immediately dropped the attack when the Warden screamed in panic.

With all the power she had, she was helpless to do anything without endangering innocent lives. She needed help.

I had no idea whether Alice was on the right or wrong side in this, but at least she wasn’t the one holding a guy over a three-story drop.

I considered my options, and decided on something relatively risky. Djinn are, essentially, vapor in their atomic structure; they can increase their weight and give themselves the corresponding mass, but just now I figured that Prada was more interested in keeping her balance than having true human form. A human appearance was doing the job, for her purposes. She didn’t need the actual reality.

All I needed to do was hit her from behind with a powerful wind gust, enough to break her grip on the guy she was holding, and at the same time tip him backward and encourage him to hop down onto the concrete again.

Simple. Relatively elegant. And a hell of a lot better than waiting for the Djinn Deathmatch to turn up a winner.

I closed my eyes, took a fast, deep breath, and reached out for control of the air around me.

And missed.

I gasped and reached farther, stretched. Felt a faint stirring come to me. A stiff breeze. Nothing nearly strong enough. Oh my God… I felt clumsy, drugged, imprecise. Horribly impaired. I fought my way up onto the aetheric, feeling like I was swimming against a flood tide, and when I arrived everything was gray, dimmed, distant. Gray as ash.

It was like what had happened to me over breakfast with Sarah and Eamon, only far worse.

I buckled down and went deep, all the way deep, into reserves I hadn’t called on since I’d survived the Demon Mark. Pulled energy out of my cells to fire the furnace of power inside. Pulled every scrap of power I had and threw it into the mix…

And it wasn’t enough. I could bring the wind but I couldn’t control it. It would be worse than useless, it would hit with the force of a tornado and swirl uncontrollably, throw the man’s fragile human body onto the concrete and that would be my fault…

Prada sensed I was doing something. She snarled and extended her free hand toward me, talons outstretched and gleaming, and it was déjà vu all over again.

I could feel her reaching into my chest to take hold of my pounding heart. She wouldn’t even have to work hard to kill me; it would be a simple matter of disrupting the electrical impulses running through nerves, just a quick jolt …

“David!” I yelped. I didn’t mean to; I knew better, dammit, but I was scared and there was a Warden who was going to die because I wasn’t strong enough…

“David? Where?” Cherise, distracted from the drama for a second, stared at me.

“Who, the guy up on the rail? That’s not David, is—”

I felt the warm surge of power, flaring to a white-hot snap, and David came from out of nowhere between parked cars, olive drab coat belling around him in the wind. Auburn and gold and fire in flesh. Moving faster than human flesh could manage. Nobody standing around watching the action even glanced at him. To their eyes, he didn’t even exist.

The other four Djinn in the crowd froze, staring. And as one, took a step backward.

Prada hissed and instantly transferred her attack to him, which was a mistake; it brought him to a stop, all right, but only because he wanted to get a good, hard look at her. He looked tired, so horribly tired, but he dismissed whatever she was trying to do to him with a negligent shake of his head. He looked at the man on the railing, then the cops. Took it in, in a single comprehensive glance.

I wondered, not for the first time, what Djinn saw when they studied a scene like that. The surface? The glowing furious tangle of human emotions? The energies we exerted, even unconsciously, on the world around us?

Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been pretty. I saw faint lines groove themselves around his mouth and eyes.

His eyes turned to hot, molten metal, and his skin took on a hard shine. Getting ready for battle. He looked at Prada, who returned the glance with level calm.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked.

“I don’t answer to you,” she replied. “You betrayed us. Turned your back on us.”

David turned to Alice, who raised pale eyebrows. “It’s begun,” she said. “It’s spreading like a disease. A Free Djinn kills a master, sets loose a slave, who frees another, who frees another.”

He looked appalled. “Jonathan ordered this?”

“Of course not.” Alice’s cornflower blue eyes fixed on Prada again, unblinking.

“Ashan killed her master for her, in return for her loyalty.”

Prada echoed, sarcastically, “My master.” It was a curse, loaded with acid and venom. “He didn’t deserve to lick my shoes. I broke no laws. I never touched him.”

“What about him?” David said, and nodded at the Warden she was jerking around on the railing. “What has he done to you to deserve this?”

Prada’s elegant lips compressed into a hard line. “They all deserve this.”

“Oh, that’s where we differ,” he said. “They don’t. Let him go. If you do, I swear that I’ll protect you if Alice makes a move against you.”

“David,” Alice said, and there was a warning in it. “I’m here on Jonathan’s orders.” He ignored it.

“I’ll protect you,” he repeated. “Let him go.”

Prada bared perfectly white, shark-sharp teeth. She looked, if possible, even more feverish. “You’re Jonathan’s creature,” she said. “You always have been. He and his creatures don’t command me, not anymore.”

David looked—well, shocked. As if she’d just told him the Earth was a pancake carried on the back of a turtle. “What do you mean?”

“I follow the one who knows that humans are our enemies,” Prada said. “The one who understands that our enslavement must end, regardless of the cost. I follow Ashan.”

Oh, shit.

I was looking at a civil war. Playing out right here, messily, in the human world—Djinn Lord Jonathan and his second lieutenant (now that David was incapacitated) Ashan had had some kind of falling out. The Djinn were splitting into sides. Ashan hated humans—I knew, I’d met him, back when I’d been a Djinn.

Jonathan didn’t hate humans, but he didn’t love us, either. We were just an annoyance and, at best, he wouldn’t actively exterminate us. Allowing us to die was another thing entirely.

David was the only Djinn I’d ever met who seemed to really care one way or another about the fate of humanity as a whole, and David was nowhere near powerful enough to be in the middle of this. Not these days. If the other Djinn were wary of him, it was only because they knew him from the old days.

They couldn’t yet see the damage that had been done to him.

He didn’t lookimpaired, though, not at the moment. The wind ruffled his bronze-struck hair, and the light in his eyes was like an open flame. More Djinn than I’d seen him in a long time. Less human.

He turned slightly and shifted his gaze to me, and I felt that connection between us pull as tight as a belaying rope. I was his support, his rock. And he was in free fall now, burning through his fragile resources at a terrifying pace.

I have to try to stop this, I felt him say across that silent, secret link. Hold on. This may hurt.

He wasn’t kidding. Suddenly the drain between us—the one-way flow cascading from me into him—opened up to become a torrent, and damn, it didn’t just hurt, it felt as if my guts were being ripped out and scrubbed with steel wool. I must have looked like hell, because Cherise called my name and I felt her grab me by the shoulders. I couldn’t pull my eyes away from what was happening in the Bermuda triangle of the three Djinn standing in front of me, and the four moving into position to attack David from behind.

Whatever was about to happen, it was going to happen now.

David started walking forward. Prada’s eyes—burning ruby red now—followed him, but she didn’t move. Still caught in her iron-hard grip, the Warden watched tensely, too. Helpless to affect any outcome. He wasn’t a Weather Warden, I could sense that much, and I doubted he was an Earth power. Probably Fire, which wouldn’t do him a damn bit of good right now.

Poor bastard. He’d spent his life thinking that he was a pinnacle of power in the world, and he was getting a hard lesson about where he really stood in the great scheme of things.

David reached the railing. Prada didn’t make a move. David considered the metal for a second, then hopped up with a fluid, catlike movement, and began walking the thin, slick curve. He was smooth and careless about it, as if it were solid ground. No hesitation. No human awkwardness. It was as if gravity was just another rule to break for him. Even the gusts of wind didn’t have any effect except to whip the tail of his coat out to the side as he covered the rest of the distance toward Prada and the Warden.

It was the single most inhuman thing I’d ever seen him do.

David was still two or three steps away when Prada let out a high-pitched shriek like ripping metal, and let go of her hostage. David lunged forward, but he was too late. The man windmilled for a fraction of a second, and then his head and shoulders leaned back, and his battered cross-trainers slipped off the slick metal of the railing.

And then he was gone. Heading for a fast, ugly death.

“David! Do something!” I screamed. Everybody else was screaming, too, but David heard me; he turned his head, and even at this distance I saw the hot orange flare of his eyes. As alien as the perfect balance he demonstrated up there on the railing. I saw the doubt in his face, but he didn’t argue, and he didn’t hesitate. Without a sound, he spread his arms and jumped off the overpass.

Graceful as a plummeting angel.

At the same moment, Alice moved forward in a blur, launched herself up and out, and took Prada in a flying tackle out into space. The other four Djinn launched after her like a pack of wolves. They were a snarling, snapping, furious bundle of power, and I heard Prada howl in fury and pain a second before they all disappeared with a snap so loud it was like a thunderclap. Gone.

I lunged forward, gasping, and if there were people in my way I didn’t care.

They moved, or I moved them. I banged hard into the railing, hot metal digging into my stomach, both hands reaching down as if I could somehow grab hold, do something.

Anything.

“David!” I screamed.

I didn’t see anyone down below. The cops had arrived on the street below, a sea of flashing lights and upturned faces. No sign of David. No sign of the Warden.

Movement in the deep shadows of the overpass drew my frantic eyes. They were hanging in midair. David had hold of the man. The two of them were suspended, turning slowly and eerily in the wind. A silent ballet.

Nobody else could see them, I realized. Just me.

I felt sick and cold and terribly, terribly weak, and realized that the flow of energy from me to David had gotten bigger. Wider. Deeper. As if we’d broken open some dam between us, and there was no stopping the torrent until the reservoir was dry.

“Oh God,” I whispered. I could literally feel my life running out.

He looked up, and I was struck by the white pallor of his face, the bitter darkness of his eyes. “I can’t,” he said. I could hear him, even across the distance, as if he were speaking right next to me. “Jo, I’m killing you.”

“Put him down first.”

He tried. I felt him start to move but then he lost control, and it was free fall. He managed to brake, but it wasn’t going to hold, and then he was going to plummet. I had about three seconds to act.

I wasn’t a magician, able to suspend the laws of gravity at will. I had power, yes, but it was best used on the massive scale if I had to move fast, turning forces that measured in the millions of volts. Power that could destroy, but rarely heal. To grab the Warden required pinpoint control of very treacherous forces, precisely balanced winds from at least three quarters, and an exact command of how much force was being exerted on fragile human flesh at any given instant.

David was a bright spark, fading. Between us was a black bridge, a fast-flowing river of energy going out of me, into him. Being devoured.

I stretched my arms and reached out until I felt I might unravel and break and be swept away. I tasted blood and felt my body starving for air and dying inside as its energy poured out onto the wind, screaming. I tried to do what I’d done a thousand times before, and alter the temperature of the air at the subatomic level, creating friction and lift and heat and wind.

For the first time… I failed.

I felt David break first with a bright, hot, shattering pop, and the black drag on my power fell away. The rebound slammed into me with stunning force, knocking me backward, and then I lunged for the railing again and saw David let go of the Warden.

Who fell, screaming, to his death.

There was nothing I could do. Nothing.

I screamed and covered my eyes from the sickening sight of his body crushing on pavement, his blood splattering in an arc as his skull shattered.

I felt his life snap like his bones.

David froze in midair, fixed in place, eyes dark and strange, body transforming from the fire of the Djinn to the black coal shadows of the Ifrit.

“Oh God…” It wasn’t stopping. I felt every bit of energy being sucked out of me; the life, the heat, the baby oh God not the baby you can’t David…

I felt everything around just… suspend. In some odd way, I kept on… outside of time, of life, of breath. It felt like being a Djinn, or at least what I remembered of it. Except I could feel some core of me screaming and coming apart under the strain. I wasn’t healed.

Time had stopped. Pain hadn’t.

Someone had intervened.

I heard the scrape of shoes on the asphalt behind me.

I turned and looked, gasping for breath, and saw Jonathan walking toward me through a flash-frozen world. People were locked in midstep, midword, midgasp.

He and I were the only things moving.

Unlike most Djinn, Jonathan—the most powerful of them all—looked human.

Middle-aged, with graying short hair. A runner’s build, all angles and strength.

Black eyes, and a face that could be friendly or impassive or cruel, depending on the mood and the light. Just another guy.

And yet, he was so far from human he made David look like the boy next door.

“You have to help me,” I began. I should have known that the sound of my voice would piss him off.

He walked right up to me, grabbed me by the throat, and shoved me against the rail so hard that my back bent painfully over open air.

“You’re lucky,” he said in a whiskey-rough growl, “that I’m in a good mood.”

And then he looked over my shoulder at the frozen, twisted shape of David, stopped in midtransformation. The shocking ruin of the Warden’s body on the pavement below. Jonathan’s face lost all semblance of humanity, all expression.

There was a sense, even more than before, of some vast and terrible power stirring around him.

Even the wind was utterly silent, as if afraid to draw his attention.

“Jonathan—” I began hoarsely.

“Joanne,” he interrupted, and it was a low purr, full of darkness and menace, “you just don’t seem to listen. I told you to fix David. Doesn’t look fixed to me. In fact…” His hand tightened convulsively around my throat and rattled me for emphasis. I gagged for breath. “In fact, he looks one hell of a lot worse than the last time I saw him. Not surprising that I’m very disappointed.”

There was absolutely no mistaking the fury in him, even though it was cloaked behind a good-looking face and eyes that had all of the charm and warmth of black holes.

“I don’t have time for this crap,” he said, and turned those eyes back to meet mine. And oh, God, the rage simmered, red flashing points in black. Ready to break free. Ready to rip apart me, this bridge, the city, the world. He was that powerful. I could feel it rising off of him like heat from a lava flow. “I let you have your stupid little games and your stupid little romance, and it’s destroying him. I don’t have time for this. I need him back. Right now.This isn’t some goddamn game I’m playing, do you understand that?”

Because he was in the middle of a war. I did understand. The battling Djinn had disappeared, but the aftereffects of their battle lingered like burned cordite on the raw air. If this was happening all over the world…

“I don’t know how to help him,” I croaked. “I’ve tried. I just don’t understand how to do it.”

I felt his grip on my throat tighten again. He pressed right against me, his thighs against mine, bent over me in a parody of a dance.

“Well, then, you’re no good to me, are you?”

“Wait…” I tried to swallow. Pretty much useless. This was going to hurt so, so badly, if I survived it. “You—you must be able to—”

“If I could fix him, don’t you think I already would have? Do you think this is some kind of game for me, watching him suffer?” No, I didn’t think that. I could see the furious pain in Jonathan’s eyes. “He’s your slave. I can’t touch him until you set him free.”

David. The bottle. Jonathan couldn’t interfere. Those were the rules. I could only imagine how much he hated that, hated mefor being in his way.

I tried to swallow, but his grip was too tight. I could barely choke out the words around the burning pain in my throat. “ I can’t. You know as well as I do that if I let him go now—”

He knew. David would be beyond anyone’s control once I released him from the bottle. Jonathan mightbe able to help him, but first he’d have to catch him, and that might not be possible.

“Help me help him,” I whispered.

Oh, he didn’t like that idea, not at all. I’d never scored high on the list of Jonathan’s favorite people, for a lot of reasons—first, I was human, which was not a selling point; second, my relationship with David, and David’s tenacious commitment to me, had upset the long-standing order of Jonathan’s universe. And as Jonathan was, in Djinn terms, well-nigh as powerful as a god, that wasn’t really a good thing.

It was also very hard to mistake the fact that Jonathan cared for David. A lot.

In deep and eternal ways that stretched back to the days of their making. It didn’t make for a comfortable three-sided relationship.

“Help you?” he repeated. “Oh, I think I’ve helped you just about as much as you deserve, sweetheart. As in, you’re still breathing.”

“Not very well,” I croaked, and flailed a helpless hand toward my aching throat.

Which made his lips twitch in something that wasn’t quite a smile. He let go of me, but he didn’t step back. I slowly braced my hands on the railing and pushed myself back upright, careful to make no sudden movements—not that I could in any way hurt him, of course—and we ended up pressed together, chest to chest. He didn’t care about my personal space.

He stared at me from that very intimate distance. Seen close, those eyes were terrifying indeed… black, shot through with sparks like stars, galaxies burning and dying and being born. Once upon a time, far in the past, he’d been human and a Warden, with the three powers of Earth, Fire, and Weather… like those Lewis possessed these days. I didn’t know much about his human life, only his death; it had caused the Earth herself to wake and grieve. Jonathan had been made a Djinn by the force of that mourning. David, who’d been dragged along with him through those fires of creation, had come out sublimely powerful. Jonathan had come out a whole order of magnitude greater than that, perilously close to godhood.

He was losing that, to Ashan. How in the hell Ashan had the big brass ones to decide he could win in a toe-to-toe dogfight with Jonathan was beyond me, but the fact was, even if Jonathan kicked the crap out of him and all his Djinn followers, it was a war to make the Earth tremble. Nobody would be safe.

Nothing would be sacred.

Jonathan looked into me. It hurt, and I flinched and trembled and wanted desperately to hide in some dark corner, but there was no hiding from this. No defending against it, either. His hands came up and rested on my shoulders, slid up to cup my face between them with burning warmth. The heat of his skin on mine confused me, made me feel odd and disembodied. I wanted to pull away but I had nowhere to go, and besides, I wasn’t sure my body would even listen to any such command.

“Feeling weak?” he asked me, and bent closer. His eyes swallowed the world. “Feeling sick? A little offthese days?”

My lips parted. He was very, very close. So close that if he’d been human, we’d have been engaged.

He turned my head to a slight angle, tilted his own, and put his lips next to my ear. “He’s killing you,” Jonathan whispered. “Can’t you feel it? It’s been going on for a while, a little at a time. He’s eating you from the inside. You don’t think that’s been killing him, too? Destroying him?”

I remembered all of the signs. The weakness. The clumsiness I felt when reaching for power. The gray indistinctness of the aetheric. The overwhelming drag when I tried to call the wind.

“Human power can’t sustain him anymore. He’ll suck you dry. He’s an Ifrit; never mind how he looks when he’s gorged himself on your energy. He can’t help it. He’ll kill you, and once he does that, even if I can get him back, he’ll be a wreck. He’ll recover, but it’ll take too fucking long.”

I felt tears burn hot in my eyes, break free, slide cold down my cheeks. He moved back just an inch, and turned my head again in those large, strong hands to look at me again. His thumbs smoothed the wetness from my skin.

“I don’t care about you,” he continued with soft intensity. “Make no mistake; I’ll rip you apart if I have to, if it comes down to a choice of you or him. But I can’t let him kill you. He’ll be useless to me.”

I flinched. He held me in place. “I don’t know how to fix this,” I said. “I swear, Jonathan. I don’t know!”

“Simple. Go home, get that fucking bottle, smash it, and survive the rest of your pathetic life like everybody else in the human world. You have to let him go. He’s already dead to you.”

“Liar,” I whispered.

And got an evil, beautiful smile in return. “Yeah? If I’m a liar, why can’t you save him now? Why couldn’t you save that sad bastard down there from falling to his death? All in a day’s work for a Warden like you, right? You don’t need me. Go on. Be a hero.”

He let go of me and stepped back, and it was like going from the baking heat of the desert to Antarctica. My body cried out for his warmth, as if he were a drug and I’d developed a lightning-fast addiction. Bastard. He’d done it deliberately.

David was a wonderful, lyric poet of a lover. Jonathan, if he’d ever stoop to anything so intimate with a human, would be a pirate, taking what he fancied and forcing his partner to want it too. All cruel, casual grace and absolute dominance.

I grabbed the rail on either side and sucked in deep, calming breaths. Jonathan folded his arms and watched me as the energy drained away. Spiraled out into the black hole of David’s need.

“Help me,” I said, and God, defeat tasted bitter as poison. “Show me how to stop this.”

“Say the magic word.”

“Please.”

“That’s not the one I was looking for, but I’ll take it.” He reached out and put his hand flat against my chest. Heat spilled into me, intrusive as a stranger’s hands, and I went rigid against the invasion. Not that it mattered. Jonathan could do anything he wanted.

But it was life he was giving me, and I didn’t have the strength to refuse it anyway.

Jonathan watched me surrender to him with those hidden, dark eyes, and gave me a tiny thin slice of a smile. It was almost human. Not kind, but human.

“All right. What I’ve done is create a reservoir of power inside of you. It won’t last long. You need to let him go or you’ll die.”

“If I do, how do you know you can stop him from coming after you?” Because David would be drawn to power, sure as a Demon.

“I can take care of myself,” he said offhandedly. “We’re done. Might want to hold on to something.”

He let his hand fall back to his side.

Behind me, power exploded. The flash burned through me like a shock wave, and wind came in its wake, raging and furious at being held back; it nearly knocked me over, and Jonathan reached out to steady me as my hair blew straight toward him, long and tattered as a battle flag. Through the waving curtain of my blowing hair, I saw Jonathan give me another very small, cynical smile.

And then he looked past me and I saw pain in his expression. He said something, but it wasn’t in human language; it was the bright and singing tongue of Djinn.

A prayer, a curse, a lament…

I sensed a black presence behind me in the air.

David was transforming into something terrible, something with cutting edges and hunger for a heart.

When I tried to turn around to see, Jonathan held me in place and shook his head. “Don’t look.”

It was bad enough seeing the devastation in his eyes. I was watching the end of a friendship that wasn’t supposed to have an ending… something time itself was supposed to respect. I did this. No, we did this, David and I, together.

Love, I was starting to realize, was beautiful, but it was also ruthlessly selfish.

I touched Jonathan and felt fire, not flesh; it burned me with wild and intimate fury, but I didn’t let go. “Jonathan…”

“I have to go,” he said, and I heard that edge of grief in his voice again, liquid and molten with pain. “He’ll kill me if I stay here. Or worse. I’ll kill him. He’s too hungry right now. Remember what I said. You don’t have much time—just get it done.”

He let go of my arm and stepped back. My hair obscured my vision again, and I reached up to shove it out of the way as I whirled to see what he was looking at.

David was gone. In his place was a black, twisted shadow of a thing, angles and glittering edges and nothing remotely human to it. An Ifrit.

It touched down on the bridge’s surface and stalked toward us, fixed on power.

Fixed on Jonathan.

“No!” I screamed, and threw myself in David’s path, but he went through me as if I were smoke, lunged with diamond-bright claws outstretched…

And Jonathan vanished before they could touch him.

David misted out a few seconds later. Chasing after that bright, shining ghost.

I was alone.

Well, except for the onlookers who were suddenly coming to realize that somethingweird had happened. But not exactly what, or who was responsible.

The cops arrived. I was hustled off to stand beside a police cruiser. Nobody knew what to ask, because no one understood what had just happened; all I had to do was be just as clueless. Pretty easy, actually. I wasn’t faking the shock and trauma. The questions they tried to frame were just as vague as my answers, so in the end the cops just gave it up and accepted the whole thing as a suicide.

I wished I could see it that way, but I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t help but replay the terror in the Warden’s eyes as he’d reached out to me, or the scream that had ripped out of him when David let him go.

My fault.

I’d never even found out his name.

Eventually, the cops remanded me to the custody of Cherise, who had been standing at the barricades looking anxious and dumbstruck and more than a little freaked out for some time. She didn’t say a word. She grabbed my hand and towed me off toward the Mustang, this time pulled over to the breakdown lane, and got me well out of the way before turning on me.

“What the fuck was that?” she yelled over the resumed din of traffic, honking horns, and the wind. “Joanne! What in the hell did you think you were doing?”

I couldn’t answer. I didn’t have the strength. I just looked at her, walked around to the passenger side and got in the car. Cherise continued to berate me and pepper me with questions, which made no more sense than the ones the cops had managed to put together. I ignored her.

David was gone. I couldn’t feel him anymore. I shut my eyes and remembered that back in Las Vegas, when I’d held the bottle of another Djinn turned Ifrit, I hadn’t been able to sense any connection to her either… but she’d obeyed my commands. At least, the most important one.

Without opening my eyes, I whispered, “David. Get back in the bottle, now.”

I had no way of knowing if he had. Hopefully it would give Jonathan some space.

Maybe David would even recover a bit. Maybe, maybe, maybe… everything was so screwed up. I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes until I saw stars.

The warmth in me felt foreign, like artificial life support. Jonathan had warned me it wouldn’t last. How long did I have to find an answer, one that wouldn’t destroy David in the process?

Cherise was saying something about us being so fired; we were the better part of an hour overdue for the shoot, of course, not that I cared. I just wanted to go home. I felt the thrum of the engine as she started up the Mustang, but then she slammed it back into park and reached over and grabbed me by the shoulder.