by Rachel Caine
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 was Ashan, 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 humans rank higher than Djinn? Things are perverted in this world, little girl, and they have been ever since Jonathan gave 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, any power, 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 very frightening.
“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, o
nly 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.
I kicked off my shoes, stuck them in the purse still hanging from my shoulder, and began running down the steps as fast as I could go. On the fifth floor I ran into refugees. Shit. There were tenants still in the building. I abandoned my escape attempt and banged through the fire door, running from office to office rattling doorknobs and yelling for people to get the hell out. A cube farm on the fourth floor yielded up four people wearing headphones, oblivious to everything; I yanked them bodily out of their ergonomic chairs and sent them running for the stairwell. I interrupted a courting couple in a supply closet on the third floor; they ran for the exits still fastening up clothes.
Ella was nowhere to be found. I wondered if she’d had advance warning of the attack, and if so, whose side she was on. If she’d left John to die, it damn sure wasn’t my side.
The cops were just pulling up in the parking lot, along with the fire department, when the evacuees began pouring screaming out of the building.
Chaos. I left with them, got into the parking lot, and whirled to shield my eyes from the rain and get a look at what was ha
ppening on the roof.
The roof was on fire. Figures struggling in the flames. One hell of a fight going on up there, and a continuous roar of thunder as lightning struck again, and again, and again…
As I watched, the roof collapsed into the seventh floor, and a huge roar of hissing flames shot up into the sky.
“No!” I screamed and lunged for the door. Arms wrapped around me from behind and held me still. I kicked and struggled, but they were strong arms, and besides, I wasn’t at my best. I twisted enough to catch a glimpse of who was holding me, and felt the fight go out of my tense muscles.
I didn’t know the burly guy who was giving me the modified Heimlich, but I knew the natty old man standing next to him, neatly covered from the rain by a black umbrella. His name was Charles Ashworth II, and he was one of the senior members of the Ma’at. He was flawlessly dressed in a gray Italian suit, a fine white shirt, a blue silk tie. Conservative, that was Ashworth… he reminded me of a bitter, old version of Ashan, actually. He still had an I-smell-something-rotten expression that betrayed exactly what he thought about the world in general, and me in particular.
“Let go,” he ordered, and Burly Guy loosened his arms. “Don’t be stupid, woman. You’re not a Fire Warden. You can’t run into a burning building. Lewis, on the other hand, can no doubt stroll out without any problem at all.”
He had a point. I resented it. “What are you doing here?”
Ashworth nodded toward the building. “Helping him.”
“Helping him do what, exactly?”
“None of your concern.” Ashworth tapped his black-and-silver cane on the pavement for emphasis. “You’re neither needed nor wanted here, Miss Baldwin. I suggest you go back to your duties, presuming you have them. The Wardens seem to need all the help they can get these days.”
He sounded pretty smug about it. I wanted to slug him, remembering John Foster’s simple, quiet commitment to the work. His courage. His grace under fire.
Before I could suggest any anatomically impossible sexual actions to him, a figure came walking out of the billowing chaos of the side fire escape door.