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 cantrust 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 dotrust 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 longsecond of pause, from both 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 howto 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 anyhuman 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?…"