Firestorm (6 page)

“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 nose. 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?”

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
.”