Restored to life, health, as she must have known him.
Sara lay unmoving beside him, amethyst eyes still open. He reached out to touch her face…
… and that ivory skin cracked, turned to powder, and began to flake away.
A sloughing of skin, for what was underneath.
The soft black shadow of an Ifrit rose out of the pale ruin of the Djinn known as Sara, and the man reached out to it, but it flinched away. Hissing.
He filled his hands with dust and looked at David with tears streaming down his face. No words for it. No help for it.
David said, in a voice gone rough and strange with grief, “I pray you are worth this gift, Patrick.”
This time, Patrick found his voice.
He screamed.
I woke up the next day to the smell of bacon and orange juice, and fresh-ground coffee. There was still a bowl of sugar sitting on the coffee table next to me. I felt hungover from the dream… memory?… nightmare?… and looking around me, I kept seeing that spare stone room, that skull-thin face breathing its last, the unearthly beauty and grace turned to something ugly and twisted.
He’d kept her with him all this time—or she’d haunted him. Impossible to tell how the feelings ran without asking, and I doubted Patrick would have anything revealing to say. He’d left that devastated, screaming moment behind centuries ago. The Patrick of today was cold, savvy, and controlled.
And yet, the sliding, everpresent shadow of the Ifrit who’d been Sara had another story to tell, didn’t it? A story of love, longing, honor, sacrifice, tragedy? Did she still love him so much? Rahel said that Ifrit survived by eating other Djinn. And yet Sara remained here, and hadn’t done Patrick too much damage.
I refused to think too long about thatrelationship, especially before food.
Patrick had been kind enough to take off my shoes and put a tacky leopard-spotted cotton throw rug over me. I kept it draped over my shoulders and shuffled barefoot toward the kitchen; I was seriously thinking about changing my clothes to something that would be easier to fight in, since Patrick’s coaching style evidently owed a lot to the world of professional wrestling. Maybe Spandex and a cute little domino mask. They could call me The Nutcracker.
Breakfast was sitting on the table, perfectly displayed like a cereal commercial. Serving suggestion. There were even fresh daisies in a vase in the center of the table. Of course, the kitschy Elvis plates and Hello Kitty mugs weren’t quite what Better Homes and Gardenshad in mind, but still, he’d made an effort.
“Patrick?”
No answer. I sat myself down and took a bite of bacon and eggs. They were wonderfully fresh, warm, just right. The bacon was crisp without being burned. The orange juice was pulpy and tart. Coffee—in the Hello! Kitty mug—was as black as sin and twice as sweet.
The condemned woman ate a hearty breakfast.
I was just polishing off the last bite of English muffin when I felt the unmistakable gust of power that accompanies major mojo being worked, and Patrick walked in dressed in an utterly unmentionable bathrobe. I was pretty sure that Disney wouldn’t have approved of what their cartoon characters were doing on that dark blue satin background.
On the other hand, I was really glad he had on the bathrobe.
He walked over to the table, took a seat, unfolded a morning paper, and peered at me over the tops of his glasses. “Sleep well?”
“Fine line between unconscious and resting,” I said. “I think it was on the wrong side of unconscious.”
“Ah.” He rattled the paper. “Have you seen the headlines?”
He turned the page to face me.
There was a picture of storm surge on the Florida coastline wiping out houses wholesale. The headline read STORM OF THE NEW CENTURY? I sucked in my breath hard, then let it out slowly.
“My doing?” I asked.
He gave me an impish smile. “Hardly.” He rustled the paper back around again. “As usual, your friends in the Weather Wardens seem to have everything turned around back asswards. How is it you have all that power and still manage to let thousands die every year from these storms?”
I wasn’t about to get drawn into the traditional branch-of-service argument that almost always erupted between Weather Wardens, Fire Wardens, and Earth Wardens. Patrick had once been a Fire Warden, I remembered. I took a thoughtful bite of bacon. “Um, same way Team Smokey Bear let forest fires eat up half of California last year? That was special.”
He grunted agreement. “Do you think that with a Djinn at your command you could have done better?”
“Sure.” I shrugged and added a little more pepper to my last bite of eggs. “More power. More control.”
“Control comes from Djinn?”
I had to think about that one. “Um, no. Control comes from… the Warden. Power comes from the Djinn.”
“Actually, you’re wrong on both answers. Control and power both come from the Warden. The only thing that a Djinn brings is potential.” He took a sip of coffee, added cream, and stirred. “That’s all we are, you know. Potential energy. Humans are kinetic. They create action and reaction. We are just the medium through which they move.”
Which sounded way Zen to me. “I have no idea what you just said.”
“I know.” He gave me a tiny little quirk of his eyebrows, reached into the pocket of his bathrobe, and brought out a tiny little bottle, about the size of a perfume sample, complete with a plastic capper on the end. He toyed with it between his fingers, tapped it on the table, and thumbed the cap off. I half expected a fellow Djinn to pop out of it.
None did.
“I’d like to explain something to you,” he said. “It may not make much sense to you now, but I think it will later.”
I was feeling generous, what with a nice comforting load of cholesterol and fat making a home in my system… which reminded me, what exactly happened to food, inside a Djinn body? Was it the usual system, or something totally different? Maybe it just vanished into energy, no chemical breakdown necessary. Huh. Good question.
“Shoot,” I said, and took in a mouthful of Florida sunshine in the form of orange juice that tasted fresh squeezed. Energy into fruit into energy. I loved physics.
“I’m not a bad person,” he said. Not looking at me now, just studying the small perfume vial in his thick, perfectly manicured fingers. “Tragically selfish as a man, but I suppose that’s far from unusual. I lived a good life. And I loved one woman more than life itself. More than my own honor.”
I remembered the dream. “Sara,” I said. I caught a quick flash of ocean-rich eyes, quickly turned away again.
“She was… astonishing. There are Warden laws, you know, that forbid Djinn from serving their masters… in that way.” For a guy with a living room that would have made Bob Guccione blanch, he was charmingly indirect when it came to words. “And an honorable master should never require it. But we—it wasn’t a command, or obedience. It was…” He shook his head. “It was a long time ago.”
I sensed the cold shadow in the corner of the kitchen. Yes, there she was, the blackened ghost of Sara, the Ifrit that roamed eternity looking for a way to heal its damage. It wasn’t moving. I could feel its attention fixed on Patrick, and remembered the dream-Sara’s intense, powerful love.
“You loved her,” I said. “She loved you.”
“It’s why the laws exist. So that it won’t happen again.” Patrick shook his head and peered up at me again, eyes pellucid and untroubled behind the half-glasses. “I want her back, you see. She’s half my soul. I want Sara to live.”
He was trying to tell me something, I just couldn’t figure out what it was. But the orange juice was curdling in my stomach. “Patrick…”
“I don’t think you’re going to make it,” he said, almost kindly. “I wish there was a way I could help you, Joanne, but the truth is that like me, you should have died as a human. There’s no way for him to save you except the way Sara saved me, and the cost is too high.”