Windfall (41 page)

“Good thing for me that I'm not a Warden anymore, then,” I said. “Busy?”

“Not especially.”

“Don't need to, ah, help Lewis . . . ?”

Her eyes flicked briefly to the enormous fireball that surrounded the other two. Inside of it, it looked as though Lewis had Shirl in a choke hold. “I don't believe that will be necessary.”

“Then would you mind—?”

“Not at all.”

The Earth Warden's nerve failed and he bolted. Rahel took him down with one neat jump, carrying him down to the shining, wet pavement, and shoved him flat with a knee in the small of his back. He flailed. It didn't much matter.

“You can let the cougar go now,” she called back to me. “It won't harm you.”

Oh, right, easy for her to say . . . I removed the vacuum from around the cat, and it choked in a fast breath, then another, and bounded up and away. Following the path of the snake. I wished them both luck.

Speaking of which . . . I skinned up my shirt and traced the wounds in my stomach with my fingertips. Blood sheeted wetly down, pink in the rain, but it looked pretty superficial. No guts poking out. Some prime scar material, though. I gulped damp air and tried not to think how close I'd come to being cat chow, and then moved to where Rahel had the Warden in a position of utter helplessness.

I got down on one knee, which was painful, and he turned his head to stare at me. Yep, there was a definite component of demon-shimmer in his eyes. I didn't know if anyone else could have seen it; I was a pretty unique case, having had the Demon Mark and Djinn experiences. It looked like he was in the early stages. Probably wasn't even aware yet how the creature growing inside of him under that mark would be influencing his actions, compromising his judgment.

Eating his power even as it stoked the fire and made him feel more in control.

I couldn't help him with that. He had to help himself, and I was about to take away his only way to do that.

“Hold him,” I said to Rahel. She shifted her weight off the man, but kept him flat with one hand between his shoulder blades.

“Let go!” he yelled. I ignored him and stuck my hand in his right coat pocket. Nothing. The left held a ring of keys. I dropped them on the ground.

“Roll him over,” I said. The Djinn took one arm and flipped him like a pancake, and this time held him down with her palm on his forehead. Paralyzed. She flicked me a look, and I read unease in it. She reached over and sliced open his shirt with one taloned finger, and folded the cloth back to show me the black, slow-moving tattoo of the Demon Mark.

He started screaming. Whatever she was doing to hold him down, the demon didn't like it. His whole body arched in pain, and Rahel's face went blank with concentration.

I ransacked his pants pockets and came up with—of all things—one of those cheap leather lipstick cases, the stiff kind exported from India or China that snap open and have a mirror built in for touchups. No lipstick inside of this one.

This one held some cotton batting and a small perfume sample bottle, open and empty. The plastic snap-in plug was lying next to it.

I reached in and grabbed the cool glass, and felt the world shift in that odd, indefinable way, as if gravity had suddenly taken a left turn.

A Djinn misted out of the dark, staring at me. It began forming into a new appearance, and I realized that I didn't want to see what effect my subconscious was going to have on it (please, God, don't let it look like David . . .). I folded it in my fist and said, “Back in the bottle.”

It disappeared. I took the plug from the cotton in the lipstick case and slid it home in the mouth of the bottle, and felt that connection cut out, except for a low-level hum. Not nearly as strong as David, this one, but then it didn't really matter.

Rahel was watching me with a frown. It's not good when Djinn frown. In general, Djinn shouldn't be annoyed.

“I thought you didn't believe in slavery,” she said. Her cornrows rustled as she cocked her head, and I heard the cold click of beads even over the continuing pounding rain. “Ah. Unless, of course, it's expedient. How human of you.”

“Shut up,” I said. “And thanks for saving my life.”

She shrugged. “I haven't yet.”

And she let go of the Earth Warden.

He came up fast and fighting, and we went back to work.

 

The aftermath was like a war zone, if war zones had spectator sections. The wrecked SUV still smoldered and belched smoke; the whole damn road was buckled and uneven and burned down to the gravel in places. There would be some serious repaving later.

The spectator section was composed of Cherise and Kevin and Rahel, who were over by the Mustang. Cherise and Kevin were sitting on the trunk, huddled together under a yellow rain poncho held like a tent. Rahel paced back and forth, oblivious to the rain, casting looks out to the east, toward the ocean. Her eyes were glowing so brightly that they were like miniature suns.

Shirl and the Earth Warden—I still didn't know his name—were unconscious in the Jeep, restrained with good old-fashioned duct tape. Lewis had also done some fancy Earth-power thing that lowered their metabolisms. He could keep them in a sleep state for hours, maybe days, if he didn't have better things to do.

Lewis and I were leaning against the Jeep, gasping for air and trying not to moan. Much.

“You okay?” he asked me at last, and put that warm hand on the back of my neck. I managed to nod. “No, you're not. You're too weak. Again.”

“I'm all right.”

“Bullshit.” He looked like hell; he was one to talk. Burned, blistered, ragged, suffering in his eyes. And a bone-deep weariness, too. He'd been running hard for a long time, and today was just another one of those days. He didn't push the subject, though; he looked over at Rahel, then out toward the sea. “You feel that?”

“Yeah.” I sucked in a deep breath. “It's bad. Maybe as bad as Andrew back in '92.”

“Worse,” he said succinctly. “This is bigger and stronger.”

Worse than a Category Five. That wasn't good news, clearly. “So? What do we do?”

“
You
do nothing. Jo, you're like a wet rag; there's nothing you can contribute. You need to get the hell out of here, I told you before. Fighting will get you killed.”

I swept him with a look. Burns, bloody wounds, and all. “Is this the last of them? The ones looking to take you out?”

“Probably not.”

“And
who
should be running?”

He smiled. It was just a little smile, tired and sweet, but it went through me like an arrow. “How's David?”

I turned away, all the light going out inside. “I don't know. I don't know where he is. Things are . . .” I took a deep breath and said it, just said it. “I lost him. I lost the bottle.” God, it hurt. I couldn't imagine that anything could ever hurt worse.

I could feel Lewis staring at the back of my head for a long few heartbeats, and then the Jeep's weight shifted as he pushed off.

When I turned, he was stalking through the pouring rain to where Cherise, Kevin, and Rahel were.

Okay, what did I say?

He grabbed Kevin by the collar and yanked him bodily out from under the plastic poncho. Cherise yelped and flinched, and Kevin yelled, and Lewis dragged him, stumbling, by the front of his greasy-looking T-shirt back over to me.

“Give it back,” he said. Kevin flailed until Lewis shook him, hard. “I'm not fucking around with you, kid.
Give her back the bottle.
”

“What the hell . . . ?” I blurted, amazed, and then I remembered something Detective Rodriguez had said, in the surveillance van.
The kid who was in your apartment last night ripped off some cash from the flour jar in your kitchen.
Kevin had ransacked his way through the apartment, hadn't he? And if anybody knew about the value of Djinn bottles . . .

I'd never even thought about it. I was too stunned to be angry.

Kevin looked pale, panicked, and stubborn. “I don't know what you're talking about, man!”

Oh, wait, the stun was wearing off now. Yep, anger was coming on strong. I shoved Lewis out of the way and grabbed the kid's skinny, strong arms, shoving him back against the Jeep. “Don't bullshit me, Kevin! Did you call him out? Did you try to use him?” Kevin didn't say anything, just looked at me. Pale as skim milk, and just about as appetizing. “Dammit,
say something
! Is David all right?”

Kevin licked his already wet lips, averted his eyes, and mumbled, “Not my fault. He asked me to do it.”

I felt shock slip over me in a cold wave. “Excuse me?”

“I was just looking around. He—he appeared in the room and he told me to take the bottle.”

“He couldn't tell you
where it was,
you asshole!” Djinn rules, although I'd seen Jonathan break them once. I'd asked David point-blank where his bottle was, and he couldn't tell me . . .

. . . or, I realized with a sinking feeling close to despair, he didn't
want
to tell me.

“He didn't have to say anything,” Kevin was explaining. “He just stood there, you know, next to the nightstand. It was kinda obvious.”

I tried to say something—what, I don't know—but it didn't make sense when it got to my lips. I just stood there, staring at Kevin's blank eyes.

“Look, he didn't want you to get hurt anymore,” Kevin said. “He thought—if I held on to the bottle for a while—maybe you could get stronger. I was supposed to give him back, later. When things got better.”

I felt my knees go weak. My stomach hurt where the cat had clawed me, my head hurt, my knees hurt; God, my heart was breaking. “He wanted to leave me.”

Lewis put his hands on my shoulders. “I think he was trying to save your life, Jo.”

“Bullshit.
Bullshit!
” I was suddenly furious. “This is—you guys just—
men!
You don't make decisions for me, got it? I'm not some fragile little flower! I have a life, and it's
my
life, and if I want to—”

“Throw it away?” Lewis interjected helpfully.

Okay, he had a point. I didn't let it bother me. “Hey, I grubbed around at the
dump
looking for him! Hello!
Leave a damn note if you're stealing my boyfriend!
”

And I realized that Kevin hadn't answered my original question. His eyes were still frightened and blank.

“Oh God,” I said. “Did you use him? Kevin, did you call him out of the bottle and use him?”

He nodded. Rain dripped in silver strings from his lank hair to patter onto his soaked T-shirt. He was shivering. We were all likely to get hypothermia out there if we weren't careful.

“Is he—”

“He's gone,” Kevin said. It sounded hard and harsh, and I could tell he didn't want to say it. “Sorry, but it's like the bottle's empty. He's just—gone, he just screamed and he, you know . . . blipped out. I kept calling, but he wouldn't come back. He couldn't. I needed him, Jo, I'm sorry but I had to do it, Lewis was in trouble and—”

I knew. I'd done the same thing, hadn't I? I'd called David even when I knew it was killing both of us.

And now I knew why Kevin hadn't waded into the fight with his usual teen-angst enthusiasm. He couldn't. Like me, he'd been drained of power. And it hadn't been enough.

If he couldn't sense David in the bottle, it was because David was an Ifrit. Maybe he was in the bottle, maybe he wasn't; Kevin probably hadn't thought to order him back inside and seal it up. To him, David had just vanished without a trace.

I couldn't help but feel a sick certainty that this time he wouldn't be coming back.

 

I still had hopes, until Kevin dug the blue glass bottle out of his bag and put it into my hands, but it was no more mystical than grabbing an empty jar out of the kitchen cabinet. No sense of connection. It was an empty bottle, and
God,
I couldn't feel David's presence at all.

I couldn't even feel him draining me, and that had at least been something, before.

“Back in the bottle, David,” I said, and waited a second before I slammed the rubber stopper home into the open mouth. I wrapped the bottle in a spare towel from the back of the Jeep, then buried it in my purse with the lipstick case and the Djinn sealed inside.

“Um,” Kevin said hesitantly, “are we—are you—”

“Do I want to kill your punk ass? You betcha.” My hands were shaking, and not from the chill. “I don't care what David said, you didn't have any right to do this. No
right,
do you understand?”

He nodded. He looked sullen and miserable, a combination only possible in teenagers.

“You
ever
touch anything I own again, and I swear to God, Kevin, you'll wish I'd torched your ass in Vegas.”

“Like I don't wish it already,” he muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing.” He gave me a blank, militant stare. I threw Lewis a furious look.

He shrugged.

I growled in frustration. “I have to get back to Fort Lauderdale.”

It wasn't like me to run out, not when the storm of the century was building up force out there off the coast and roaring our way. He raised his eyebrows. “I thought I'd have to get Rahel to haul you out of here kicking and screaming,” he said. “And you didn't come chasing all the way out here to find me, flattering as it might be, did you? What's wrong?”

I told him about Eamon and Sarah, and watched his eyes go lightless and angry. If it had been me, I'd have dropped everything to go to his aid, but I knew not to expect the same in return. Lewis was a big-picture guy.

“I can't,” he said finally. Regretfully. “I'm sorry. This thing—” He nodded out at the black void on the east horizon. “One life saved might mean thousands lost. I have to stay here.”