Behind the coal black skin and shifting aura like an rainbow oil slick, there was something even darker inside the Ifrit, but soft. Fragile.
On the aetheric, I extended my hand and felt metal claws slide free. They were bright and sharp as starlight, translucent as crystal.
I slapped aside the Ifrit’s tearing attack and plunged those knifelike claws home into its body, not to rip or savage, but to deliver something else.
Light.
Darkness into light.
One thing into another.
Transmutation.
The Ifrit turned pale, translucent, insubstantial, and for a second I heard its cry of joy echo through the aetheric, high and beautiful and strange, and then— pop—it was gone.
And I was lying on the floor of Patrick’s ugly, overdone living room, staring up at a ceiling painted with pornographic renderings in the style of the Sistine Chapel. My Djinn senses were still locked on full, and every damn thing in the place had a history, sweaty and heavy in my head. I wanted to laugh, but I was too tired.
Patrick looked no more like Santa Claus than I did, when I examined him with those senses. No, he was big, tough, cold, and more than a little puzzled.
“Interesting,” he said, and took up another palmful of sugar. This time he made an Andes mint, complete with wrapper. He offered it to me. “How did you know to do that?”
“Transmutation,” I said, still lying flat on the over-colored carpet. I lifted my hands and looked at them, flexed a muscle that existed only in the aetheric. Silver-tipped claws, as delicate as frost, slid from my fingertips. “You said she was hungry. I fed her.”
“Yes,” he agreed softly, with a doubting undertone of wonder. “So you did.”
I took the mint, unwrapped it, and let it dissolve into a sweet edge of mint in my mouth. Taste was different now. Brighter. Sharper. The shiny green paper of the wrapper had a texture to it like nothing I’d ever felt before.
“So,” he said as I savored the taste. “Round Two?”
I’d just almost died, and for some reason I couldn’t stop a giggle that worked its way all the way up from my guts.
“Sure,” I said in between helpless bursts of laughter. “Bring it on.”
Round Two was a disaster. I got my ass kicked. Painfully. This time I ended up lying full length on the banana yellow couch, sobbing for breath, too exhausted to even begin to count the ways I hurt.
Patrick bustled around providing fresh drinks. Unless he wanted to use mine as a topical ninety proof antiseptic, I wasn’t interested.
“Now,” he said briskly, and sat back in the red velvet chair. It was shaped like a platform shoe. Looked like something out of JCPenney’s Nightmare Collection. “Let’s talk about what you did wrong. Ifrits are an expression of energy, just as we are, and therefore your first instinct was correct, you must appease them, not fight them, until you have enough power to—” He stopped the lecture to frown at me. “You’re bleeding all over my couch.”
I groaned. “Excuse the hell out of me.”
“For heaven’s sake, child, just fix it.”
I looked at him blankly. He reached over, took my wrist, and smoothed a finger gently over one of the gaping cuts. It zipped shut, faded, and disappeared. Blood along with it.
“There,” he said. “You do the rest.”
Not, of course, as simple as it sounded. I managed, knitting back flesh and muscle, blood vessels and nerves. The outfit repairs were easy, by comparison. I finally managed to sit up, kick off the shoes, and put my bare feet up on the tacky chrome and glass coffee table.
“Better,” Patrick murmured. “Now. Ifrits. They can be formed two ways. One is a human failing to make the transition to life as a Djinn—which you are in grave danger of doing, my dear. They are also what’s left of Djinn when we—well, I suppose the word is die.”
I froze in the act of wiggling my toes. “I thought Djinn couldn’t die.”
“True, in much the same way that energy is never lost. But we can be transmuted, like anything else. Humans never die either, in the strictest sense of the word; they’re transmuted into base materials. Recycled.”
Ashes to ashes, I thought. Great. Nobody had bothered to mention this in the recruitment brochure.
“If a Djinn is injured badly enough, his or her energy can be broken apart, in which case an Ifrit is formed—they only want to eat, devour other Djinn, and recover their lost energy.” Patrick shrugged. “If they devour enough, theoretically they could become Djinn again, but nobody is inclined to make that sacrifice, I’m afraid.”
“How often—”
“—do Djinn die? Not often. I can only remember it happening three times in the last, oh, four hundred years.” Patrick’s sparkling blue eyes stared off into the distance. “And truthfully, I don’t lose any sleep knowing two of those particular Djinn are gone. Not the best of people.”
“Not people,” I corrected, and got another shrug.
“Potato, potahto. You need to get over your human limits, my sweet.” He was one to talk. Busy checking out the line of my leg all the way up to the leather skirt.
“How long do I have to do this?”
“What?”
“Fight your Ifrit?”
He smiled, tinkled ice in a tumbler full of gold liquor that hadn’t been in his hand two seconds ago, and those ocean-deep eyes looked terminally amused. “Is that what you’ve been doing?”
I let my head drop back against the yellow leather of the couch and stared at the pornographic Michelangelo ceiling. In this version, God was a very naughty fellow. “God,” I said to Him. “Why did You have to make me a Djinn? You couldn’t just make me a stinkbug instead? I’d have been happy as a stinkbug.”
Patrick sighed. “I’ve been teaching you a great many things, and you’re too smart not to know it. Using your senses effectively, thinking like a Djinn, drawing power from the world around you, knowing your form and your energies on an instinctual level. The Ifrit is a means to an end. You didn’t hurt her any more than she actually hurt you.”
In which case, the Ifrit was feeling pretty beat to hell, too. That was nice.
Patrick took a deep gulp of his whisky—if that’s what it was—and said, “Now I think it’s time for something a little different.”
“Yeah?” I was no longer giving him the benefit of the doubt. “Is it going to hurt?”
“Unquestionably.”
“Do I get chocolate when it’s over?”
“Perhaps.” His round Santa face expressed his delight. “Let’s take a trip.”
“I’d like to rest first, if you don’t—”
He did, apparently, because whoosh, I was no longer on the couch, I was being dragged up into the aetheric at a rate equaled only by spacecraft leaving orbit. I yelped—incorporeally—and grabbed a tighter hold of Patrick’s essence as we shot up, up, watching his building miniaturize, then New York City shrink into a colorful little candyland, then the world curve off into a beautiful blue-green marble below us. Space was a vast black presence around us, cold and crushing, shot through with the icy sheen of stars. We were hanging at the very edge of where we could go, where the bonds of earth were weakest. Escape velocity.
Do you know what happens if Wardens go farther? Patrick asked. I almost forgot to answer. The world was so beautiful, edged in blues and greens, reds and golds, sparkling with power and life energy. She was magnificent. Alive. Sentient. I could sense her from here, a vast and slow consciousness that was only now beginning to wonder whether the presence of human beings was a Bad Thing. The storms, earthquakes, fires that had plagued human society in evergrowing ferocity since the Stone Age, those were nothing more than the earth shifting in her sleep, waving away a buzzing fly without ever really coming awake. Trembles of the skin. Involuntary sneezes to expel the intruders.
And still, they required every ounce of strength the Wardens Association possessed to keep the human race alive and kicking—and unaware of the danger.