by Rachel Caine
I couldn't say no to him, not when he sounded like that. Soft and a little desperate. I stayed where I was. I didn't reach back to him, though every cell in my body screamed for me to do it; I just watched him, until he drew his hand back. He put his elbows on his knees and focused on my face with an intensity I remembered from the first time I'd met him. Had I fallen in love with him right then, at first sight? I'd fallen in lust, for sure. Lust had been no problem at all. Still wasn't. But more than that—and I only realized it now, looking back on it—I'd lost my soul to him somewhere along the way.
And I couldn't regret it. Even now.
His fingers moved together restlessly, as though fighting an urge to reach out to me again. "You're all right?" he asked. "Not hurt?"
"No. I'm all right." Minus a few dozen cuts and bruises and minor aches. Nothing to speak of, really. "What the hell happened?"
His face went still. Masklike, the way Jonathan's had been in the dream. His eyes turned dark and filled with secrets. "Jonathan decided to play god," he said. "He's dead."
I had a sudden, aching suspicion. "Did you kill him?"
The flash of anguish, before he locked it down again, was answer enough. David had been an Ifrit for a time, half alive, preying on Djinn for his life force. Damned and doomed and broken… dead, in every way that mattered. He'd gone after the biggest, brightest power source available to survive, and that had been Jonathan. Driven by the basic instinct to feed, he had turned on his own best friend.
Just the way his best friend intended, the coldhearted, calculating, manipulative bastard.
"David, don't," I said. "You know he wanted to die. He just—used you. Suicide by Ifrit."
"No, it was more than that." He swallowed and looked aside, keeping his thoughts to himself for a few seconds before he continued, "What Jonathan was, is—necessary. Someone needs to stand where he stood. Nature abhors a vacuum." He attempted a smile, but it looked painful. "I was the closest Djinn to him in power, so what he was—it flowed into me. In a real sense, I've become—"
"Jonathan," I supplied.
He looked agonized about that. Guilty. Horrified. "No. Jonathan was… special. I don't think any of us could really take his place and do the things he did. But I've become the conduit, the pipeline from the Mother to the Djinn. The only upside is that I've stopped pulling the life out of you, the way I did when I was an Ifrit. If I'd kept on…"
"You wouldn't have killed me." I wasn't sure of that, but I wanted to be.
"I came damn close." He stared at me, miserable. "Jo. None of us can tell what's coming. I don't know if I can control this. I'm not Jonathan. I'm not capable of—staying apart from her needs, her emotions. And when I fail, we all lose."
Nothing I could say about that wouldn't make him feel worse about it. "Look, you told me on the beach that the Wardens need to stop the Earth from waking up," I said. "That would fix things, right? Give you back free will?"
"No, not really." He was already shaking his head. "We never have completely free will. It's not the way it works."
"Even now that Jonathan's agreement with the Wardens is gone?"
"Even now. We just changed hands, so to speak. Went back to our original master. Mistress. You saw. When it happened—I wasn't prepared to handle it. I didn't know how to try to hold it back, and it spilled through me to the other Djinn."
His eyes had burned bright red, and bright red was not a color I associated with anything good, except in fashion. Having red eyes staring at you was downright terrifying. Still, it hadn't been only the Goth-bright gaze that had unnerved me; it had been the stillness. The sense of David having been emptied out of his own skin, stripped of individual consciousness and responsibility.
"When she's angry," he continued, "when she feels threatened, she can take control of me, and through me, all the others. In a sense, we're her antibodies. And if she wants to destroy you…"
It would be terrifyingly easy for Djinn to do it. They were predatory at the best of times. Given free rein and license to kill? Slaughter. No human could battle them directly for very long, and there damn sure weren't enough Wardens to go around anyway.
"So what are we supposed to do? It's a little late to build a rocket ship and evacuate," I said, "no matter what the science fiction movies like to tell us."
That got a smile. A small one. "Did you know, that's one of the things we love so much about you?"
"What?"
"Your stories. You remake the world with stories. I don't think you understand how powerful that is, Jo."
"A story isn't going to fix this."
The smile died. "No, you're right about that."
"Then tell me what to do."
"No."
"No?"
"You have to understand—"
"Well, I don't. I don't understand."
"You're being obstinate."
"I'm being accurate! Dammit, David, why is everything such a riddle with you guys? Why can't you just come right out and—"
"—tell you how to destroy the Djinn?" he asked, and arched his eyebrows. "Sorry, but I'm not quite ready to sacrifice my people to save all of yours. I'm trying to find a way that it doesn't come down to that choice. That's what Jonathan left me. Responsibility. It sucks, but that's the way it is."
I swallowed my comeback, because there was real suffering in his eyes. "So what can I do?" I asked. "I can't just wait around for the final epic battle and make popcorn."
Another smile, this one stronger and warmer. "You never could, you know. Always in motion."
"Damn straight. Basic principles of physics. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest. Things in motion require less effort to overcome resistance."
"I love your mind."
"Is that all?" I arched my eyebrows back at him, and his eyes sparked bronze.
He smiled, and then the smile slowly faded. "We can't do this."
Damn. The warmth inside me, barely felt, began to fade. "Why not?"
"Because it's dangerous. You begin to trust me; I begin to think you can trust me. That's a very bad idea." He stood up. "I shouldn't have come here."
"Then why did you?" I demanded, out of patience. "Dammit, don't come here and look—look all perfectly hot and good enough to lick—don't just show up and tell me that I can't trust you, because I do trust you, I always have, even when I didn't have any reason to do it! Don't do this to us! It hurts!"
My vehemence shook him. He honestly didn't expect that outburst—I could see it in the way he drew back inside himself, watching me. The bronze glints died in his eyes, forced back. He looked like a man. A tired, vulnerable, sorrowful man. "I want to help," he said.
"Well, pony up, cowboy! Now's the time!"
"All right." He closed his eyes, as if he couldn't stand to look at me while he said it. "You can't cut the Djinn off from the Mother. Oh, there's a way, but if you do, you only guarantee your own destruction. The Earth would go mad. It wouldn't just be humanity being wiped away, it would be every living thing in the world. She would just—reset the game and start over. What you have to do is become… Jonathan. Become the conduit for humanity, to her."
Finally, we were getting somewhere. "And how exactly do I do that?" He opened his mouth, then shut it again. No answer. "David, half an answer is worse than none. Tell me."
"I hate putting you at risk like this."
"Dammit, how could I be more at risk? I saw—" I stopped, because I intuitively knew I shouldn't tell David about the dream. At best, he'd dismiss it. At worst, it would raise false hopes that Jonathan was… somewhere out there. "I'm a Warden, and I'm on the front lines already. At least give me the tools to get the job done."
His head jerked up, and he fixed on me with such intensity that I flinched, a little. "I'm not sure it won't kill you."
"Well," I said after a shaky second of a pause, "that's a 'been there, done that' situation, and anyway it's not your choice to make, is it?"
And that was a long second of pause, from bo
th of us. Precarious and painful.
"No," he finally admitted, and squeezed his eyes closed as he thought about it. "All right. I can't tell you how to do it—I'm not even sure how Jonathan did it, in the first place. But I can tell you where." He made a visible decision and opened his eyes. They were glowing now, Djinn-bronze flecked with ruddy amber. "You've been there once already. Seacasket."
"Seacasket?" I tried to remember… and then I did, with a chilling rush of pain and panic.
Once upon a time, I had been a Djinn, and I had been sent to Seacasket by my master (if you could call a punk like Kevin a master, which was a stretch) to destroy the town. In fire.
David had stopped me that time. And somehow, Kevin's stepmonster Yvette had known that he would. It had been the trap she set for him, to get him back in her power.
"Seacasket's special," I said. "Yvette knew."
He nodded. "It's a—thin space in the aetheric. One of two or three places in this country where a human might be able to reach one of the Oracles."
"Oracles?" I'd never heard of Oracles, other than the ancient Greek kind. Or the software company. From the regretful look that flashed across his face, it wasn't something any human had probably heard before. Or that the Djinn ever intended we would.
"They don't exist here, on this plane. They're—different. And Jo, they're dangerous. Very dangerous, even to Djinn. I—can't imagine how dangerous they'd be to a human, even if you can get one to allow you contact. Which isn't likely."
"Can't you—I don't know, introduce me?"
"It doesn't work that way," he said. "I wish to heaven it did, because this would already be finished and I'd have done this for you. The way I'm connected is subordinate. The Djinn are part of the body, not apart from it. Oracles…" He was out of words, and he shrugged. "There's no way to describe this, really. It's not a human thing."
I let out a slow breath. "Okay. Leaving all that on the table, is there anything you can do about all of the—the chaos out there? Weather, fire, earthquakes?…"
"I'll do what I can." David leaned forward and extended his hand again. This time, I took it. His skin was firm and hot and smooth, and my skin remembered it all too vividly. He was astonishingly tactile, always touching, and even as I thought it his fingers moved to my wrist, tracing my pulse. "I want to protect you. I want that with everything in me. The idea of sending you into danger without me… it terrifies me. You know that, right?"
My heart began to pound. I wanted to forget all of this. The wreckage outside of the infirmary door, the dead Wardens, the destroyed agreement with the Djinn, the upcoming end of the world. The future of bones.
I wanted him to keep on touching me, always.
"Jonathan always thought it was a kind of insanity, Djinn loving humans," David murmured. "Maybe he was right. We have to face losing what we love so often, and the urge to keep you out of danger is… overpowering, sometimes. But now I'm the danger. And the truth is, you can't really trust me, from this point on. Promise me you'll be careful of me."
"David—"
"I mean it, Jo. Promise me. I love you, I adore you, and you really can't trust me right now."
His hand tightened on mine. Our fingers twined, and he leaned closer and fitted his lips to mine.
Hot and sweet and damp, anguished and wonderful. I let go of his hand and wrapped my arms around his neck, buried my fingers in the warm living fire of his hair, and deepened the kiss. Willing him to be with me, to make this world be something it wasn't.
He made a sound in his throat, torture and despair and arousal all at once, and his hands fitted themselves around my waist and slid me off the bed and onto his lap. My chest pressed to his, every point of contact a bonfire. Our bodies, beyond our control, moved against each other, sliding, pressing, sweet wonderful friction that reminded us what we wanted, what we needed. For the first time in months, we were both healthy, both whole, both…
… both too aware of what this might cost us in the end.
I don't know which of us broke the kiss, but it ended, and we pressed our foreheads together and breathed each other's air without speaking for a long time, our bodies tensed and trembling, on the edge of burning.
"You're right," I finally whispered. My lips tasted of him. "I can't trust you. I damn sure can't trust myself when I'm with you."
He smoothed my hair back with both hands. "Good girl." He kissed me again, softly. "Smart girl. Remember that."
And then he lifted me, effortlessly, and set me on my feet. I got the impression he was about to leave, and panicked just a little. "Wait! Um… Seacasket. I'm not sure I can find it again."
"MapQuest," he said. "The modern world is full of conveniences even the Djinn can't match."
"Do I—?" I bit my lip, and then continued. "Do I go alone? Or am I going to have to fight my way through some kind of honor guard?"
"Take Imara," he said. His smile turned breathtakingly sweet. "She's astonishing, isn't she? Our child? I wish you could see her the way I do, Jo, she's—a miracle."
Oh, I agreed. With all my heart. "I don't want to take her with me if there's going to be any danger—"
"I have faith in you to keep her safe."
"David, she's two days old!"
"What she is can't be measured in days, or years, or centuries," he said. "She'll be fine. Just—take care of yourself. You're the one I'm worried about."
A slow, warm pressure of his lips on mine, and then he was gone. Not a magic-sparkle slow-fade gone, but a blip, he-was-never-there gone. Except for the manic damn-I've-been-kissed-good tingle of my mouth and the racing of my pulse and general state of trembling throughout my body, I might have thought it was all another dream.
I walked over to the mirror. I looked like hell, but my eyes were clear and shining and my lips had a ripe, bee-stung redness.
Doesn't get much more real than that.
He was right: I really couldn't trust him. Should never ever trust him again. But that wasn't, and never would be, my instinct, and he knew it. He was my true fatal flaw, and maybe I was his, as well.
I hoped that wasn't going to end up destroying us both, and our child with us.
If I was inclined to mope about it, I didn't have time. There was a rattle at the locked infirmary door, and Nathan, the security guard, looked in and jerked his head at me.
"You're wanted," he said. "Move it."
I cast one last look at the empty chair where David had been, and followed Nathan out.
The infirmary was relatively soundproofed, as I discovered when I went out into the hall; there was a riot outside. People yelling, screaming at each other. Tempers flaring. There were more people crammed in than there'd been before, and everybody looked stressed and confused. There were arguments raging from room to room; some idiot was yelling in the hallway that we had to uncork the Djinn still imprisoned in the vault several stories below, under the theory that we could be prepared to give them ironclad orders to protect the building and the remaining Wardens at all costs. Someone else was making the case against it, but I could tell popular sentiment was building for the supposedly simple solution.
Paul had given up, evidently. He was sitting whey-faced in a chair in the North America conference room, eyes shut. Marion was vainly shouting for order, but since she was in a wheelchair, it was hard for her to make an impression.
I went for the floor show.
I levitated myself four feet up off the stained carpet, dangerously close to the ceiling, reached deep for power, and felt it respond to me with an ease and warmth I hadn't felt in… a very long time. Since before my battle with Bad Bob Biringanine, in fact.
I let the power crackle around me, building up in potential energy in the air, and most of those around me noticed and backed off.
Making light—cold light, light without heat—is the biggest trick in the book when it comes to my variety of powers. Light has heat as a natural by-product of the energy release that creates it, so I had to balance the radiati
on with rapid dispersal throughout a complicated matrix of atoms.
I got brighter, and still brighter, until I was glowing like a girl-shaped chandelier, hovering in the hallway. Conversation stopped. In the brilliant white light, they all looked stark and surprised, and to a Warden they flinched when I released a pulse of energy that flared out in a circle like a strobe going off.
I let the glow die down slowly and touched my feet back on the carpet.
"Right," I said. "Let's quit freaking and start working, all right?"
Nobody spoke. Dozens of faces, and they were all turned to me—young Wardens barely out of college, old gray-haired ones who'd been handling the business of earth and fire and weather for three-quarters of their long lives. They were tough, or they were damn lucky, every single one of them.
And most important, they were what we had.
I pointed to the Warden who'd been arguing against opening the bottles—a slender little African American guy, about thirty, with a receding hairline and bookish wire-rimmed spectacles. "What's your name?" I asked. He didn't look at all familiar.
"Will," he said. "William Sebhatu."
"Will, I'm putting you in charge of the Djinn issue," I said. "You need to get every single Djinn bottle, empty or sealed, make an inventory, and put everything in the vault. And then you seal the vault and you make damn sure that nobody, and I mean nobody, opens up any bottles. Got it?"
"Wait a minute!" That was Will's debating opponent, a big-boned woman with a horse face and bitter-almond eyes. "You can't just make a decision like that! Who the hell do you think you are? You're not even a Warden anymore!" I remembered her. Emily, a double threat—an Earth and Fire Warden out of Canada. She was blunt, but she was good at her job; she also had a reputation for being pushy.
"Back off," Paul said wearily from his chair in the conference room. His voice echoed through the silence. "She's one of us. Hell, she may be the only one who knows enough to get us through the day." He sounded defeated. I didn't care for that. I hadn't meant to take away his authority—at least, not permanently—but Paul wasn't acting like a guy who could shoulder the burden anymore. "Jo, do your stuff."