My fault. This is my fault. I couldn’t keep it from running through my head. Why hadn’t David told me? Why had he never even let on? Had he even known?
Of course he knew. It occurred to me, late and cruelly, that the reason Jonathan had kept him here had been to try to find a way to close the rift without killing him, or me. I’d thought it was a punishment, but it had been Jonathan’s way of trying save us both. He and David had been working on a way to stop it.
Oh, God. I’d misunderstood so much.
Something changed in the room, a kind of stillness. Jonathan waved people away from the center space, turned, and glanced at me. Apparently, I was the only one who didn’t get it. “Incoming,” he said.
Rahel materialized in the space left open.
She was covered in roiling blue specks. Djinn shouted and stampeded backwards as the sparks began to fly up and out, looking for other hosts; Jonathan moved forward.
Before he got there, Rahel’s yellow eyes went blank, and she collapsed in slow motion down to the rug. She was closest to me; I didn’t think, I just reached down for her.
My hands sank into her, wrist deep. Not that she was misted—that would have been better, oh God, far better. No, what I sunk into was flesh the consistency of warm butter, bathed in blood and melting muscle. I hit the relative hardness of bone but it was melting, too, dissolving like wax in the sun.
She was trying to say something to me. Her lips were whispering, anyway. I yanked my hands back, trembling, and stared at the smeared warm mess clinging to my skin. Her open eyes flared from a violent storm-black to a pallid blue, shifting colors like a wildly spinning prism.
“Joanne!” Jonathan snapped. He dropped to his knees next to her, extended one hand over her body, and reached out to me with the other. “Get your ass back. She’s contaminated.”
I could see the energy spilling out of his outstretched hand, golden white and so intense that it seemed to warp space around it. Pure life energy, keyed to the magic of the earth. Healing energy. David had said that Jonathan was the strongest of the Djinn; I hadn’t quite believed it, until now. He was doing this even here, cut off from everything… That was the legacy of his birth, his connection to the Mother. Of all the Djinn, he was the only one with power of his own.
And it didn’t matter. The damage just kept getting worse—flesh slipping from muscle, muscle dissolving to mush. The soft-focus gleam of bone beneath.
She cried out, once, and I felt her agony vibrating through the aetheric. I forced myself to look at her in Oversight; she was crawling with those blue specks, and they were alive, moving, eating.
She was being devoured. But they’d been all over me, all over David, they hadn’t hurt us, God, what the hell…
“Stop it,” Ashan said. His voice was raw, colorless. “It’s done. You can’t save her.”
Jonathan ignored him, ignored everything. He was focused on Rahel, fiercely intense, and the power flowing out of him just kept increasing. I felt it like a pressure against my skin, saw others shying away from it.
Rahel’s skin continued to slough away, revealing soft wet masses of tissue. The skin misted as it fell away. Slowly, layer by layer, the muscle began to peel back as well. Jonathan kept trying, uselessly and furiously, to keep her together.
“Stop,” I said, feeling the words turn in my throat like razors. “Please. He’s right, you’re just making it worse. Let go.”
His face was pallid and damp with strain, and his eyes were glittering with frustration, but he released the energy and dropped his hand back to his side. He didn’t move, though. I don’t even know if he couldmove, by then. I felt the energy flow shut down and watched as Rahel’s body melted away into a fetid, oily mist.
Gone.
She was still screaming when she vanished.
“Is she dead?” I blurted. Nobody answered. I don’t think they could. I had a cold flash of certainty that it was worse than that, far worse, out there on the aetheric. It was a horrible way to go. No wonder Jonathan had shut Ashan down so hard on the very idea of just letting Djinn stay trapped there. It was unforgivable.
What about David? I closed my eyes and reached for that silver link between us. It was faint and thin, but it was there. Unbroken.
Blue specks crawled up my arms.
“Joanne!” Jonathan’s voice again, too loud, ringing inside my head. I blinked away blue sparks to stare up at him. “Shit. I toldyou to stay back!”
Funny that this didn’t hurt. It had hurt Rahel, I’d felt it shaking the fabric of the world, it hurt her so much. I could still feel her agony resonating in waves across the room.
Jonathan reached out for me, but I just stepped away. Instinct, I guess.
Because it didn’t hurt.
I opened my eyes again and saw the most amazing thing.
Sparks. Blue swarmed out of the air, onto my skin, and vanished. The things that had eaten Rahel couldn’t hurt me.
Jonathan stopped, staring at me. I sighed, watched the last of the coldlight sizzle into emptiness, and wondered what had him looking so pale and confused.
“I’m okay,” I said. I thought he was worried about me.
Pallor faded to stretched white on his face and clenched fists. His eyes looked dark and blind.
“Jonathan?”
“Little trouble here,” he said.
I extended a hand toward him…
… and he lit up like a Christmas tree with crawling blue light. Oh God! The other Djinn backed away, viscerally terrified, as he wavered and fell backwards against a wall. Closed his eyes. “Shit,” he said. “Guess I’m not immune after all.”
Instinct. I grabbed for him as he started to slide down.
The sparks whirled out, climbed my arms, circled me in a storm of blue. Rahel’s grisly dissolution ran red in front of my eyes, and I swore I wasn’t going to let that happen, not to him, not now…
I sucked the sparks in, laid them thick on my skin, and consciously opened myself to them. I opened my squeezed-shut eyes and watched the light show as the sparkles glittered, peaceful and serene on my skin, then faded out into nothing.
I’m made of this. That was why they couldn’t hurt me. I was just taking in more of what had formed me in the first place.
Jonathan sat where he was, watching, too. His dark eyes shifted to meet mine.
“Thanks,” he said.
I nodded. “Favor for a favor. We need to get David back. Now.”
“I know,” he said. He sounded tired. “You look like hell.”
“Funny, I don’t feel…” Oh. Yes I did, actually. There went gravity again, twisting all out of shape. This time, I didn’t mistake it for coldlight or anything but what it was: somebody trying to call me. That fishhook sensation pulled at me, painful and undeniable. Not Jonathan, this time. And this wasn’t a call to safety, either.
Jonathan held on to me while I fought the pull. I felt his will settle over me like a soft, smothering blanket, and the summoning pull was lost in the weight.
“Tired,” I whispered. He already knew that. He was lifting me again in his arms as all the other Djinn murmured to each other, as Ashan stared at me with those cold blue-green eyes.
Back to the bedroom.
The soft feather pillow.