by Rachel Caine
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 you doing 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 want to 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 idea what 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 my problems 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 not leave 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 not going to let that bastard make me cry, and I was not going 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 nos
e. 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. Really here, 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?"