Windfall (15 page)

“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
look
impaired, 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 . . .