The frosted-coal shadow of the Ifrit, watching.
I slept.
The next day—if days had any meaning here— dawned just as bright and sunny and peaceful as all days did in Jonathan’s little kingdom.
I woke up to find the man himself sitting in a chair watching me. The Ifrit was gone.
“Wow,” I said. “This is getting familiar.”
“Don’t wear it out.”
“The bed or my welcome?”
He ignored what was admittedly a pretty weak comeback. “So. How you feeling?”
“Fine.”
“Good.” I wasn’t sure what he wanted, and I had the impression he wasn’t either, really. He got up to walk around the room, long strides that didn’t quite rise to the level of pacing. More like a stroll, with purpose. “About the rift up there.”
“What about it?” All my fight drained away at the bare mention of it. I couldn’t help but remember the red, tearing agony of Rahel dissolving into mush, or the hundreds of others who were suffering somewhere out there, where I couldn’t see them.
“You think it’s your fault,” he said. “Crap. What happened was David’s choice, not yours… and he had no way of knowing this would happen. Hell, even I didn’t understand what was going on until too late to do anything about it. Once I did, he wanted to go fix things.”
“But?”
“But by then I knew it was too dangerous, and then he went tearing off after you when you got—” He waved a hand, didn’t bother to finish the sentence. “He’s not exactly what you might call big-picture when it comes to personal sacrifice.”
“Neither am I. Neither are you.” He gave me a slight nod to acknowledge the point. “You should’ve told me about the rift. Or at least about how badly things were screwed up because I was brought back.”
He shrugged, a simple economical straight-up-and-down movement of his shoulder blades. No particular emotion in it. “Things screw up all the time. Hey. You gotta love the excitement. Granted, this is a lot more exciting than usual… but you stay alive as long as I have, you learn to take these things in stride. The Djinn have faced worse.”
I stared up at the shadows on the ceiling. “How much worse?”
“Hard to tell until it’s over.”
I pulled in a deep breath. Funny, I didn’t need it, but it still seemed to calm me. Some human habits were persistent. “How’s everybody else?”
“Sleeping,” he said, and nodded toward the far wall. “Lots of guest rooms. We run a topflight refugee camp around here.” He gave me a thin, almost human smile, but it didn’t last. “ Inever thought I’d like you, but you turned out okay. ‘Gut shortage.’ That was pretty good.”
“Yeah, sorry about that. I got carried away.”
“No, you’re right. One thing Djinn are scared of, it’s death. Their own, not anybody else’s. It makes us cowards. Look at me! I’ve been sitting here in this house for so long I don’t even know what it’s like out there.”
“I do,” I said. “You’re better off in here.”
“Not for much longer,” he said. He held out his hand, palm up, as if he was offering something to me. I looked at it, puzzled, and felt a sudden stab of alarm as a single cool blue spark ignited in his aura. “They’re coming in. I can’t keep them out, I can only slow them down. It’s going to be one giant blue snow globe in here soon. And even though I’m resistant to them, I’m not immune.” He stood up, swiped imaginary dust from his pants, and gestured at me. “So, you gonna take the day off, or are you getting your ass out of bed?”
I had already formed clothes under the sheet—the same denim and boots as before. One nice thing about being a Djinn—dress and bounce out of bed, no rework on the hair or makeup necessary. Although the hair was still displaying that annoying tendency to curl. I straightened it again as I asked, “What now?”
“You said it. We need David.”
“I’ll go.”
“You’re in thrall,” he said. “If your little jerk of a master finds out you’re where he can reach you, he’ll get you back and dressed like a pinup fantasy girl in ten seconds flat.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me.”
“Oh, I don’t know, the French Maid outfit was a little—” He held up a hand to forestall my protest. “Never mind. Point is, if you go outside of the barrier he’ll be able to get you back.”
“He’s probably still asleep.”
“He is.” Jonathan nodded. “Problem is that he was calling for you in his sleep. And if you go outside this house, you won’t be able to resist.”
“I still want to go. If I get taken, so be it. I manipulated the kid once, I can do it again.”
“You’d better hope so. Well, you’re not going alone. This is too important to screw up.” He folded his hands together behind his back, stopped pacing, and faced me in a parade rest posture. “I’m going with you.”
I managed a weak smile. “Yay, Team Us?”
“Yeah, well, I could have patches made, but it seems excessive.” We exchanged another long few seconds of eye-locked silence. I was worrying about how many Djinn had already told me that Jonathan never left his house. David had seemed pretty adamant about it. This wasn’t any little excursion, and suddenly I didn’t think I was ready to be bodyguard to the God of My Existence. Plus, what had he just said? Resistant, not immune. I didn’t want the responsibility for ending a life with the length and depth of Jonathan’s.
Jonathan must have read my mind. “This is going to be hard, you know. Getting David back. She wants him bad.”
No answer to that except the obvious. “So do I.” I saw the flash in his eyes, and amended it. “We.”
His ghost-smile manifested again. “Then let’s go get him.”
The cord binding me to David had shrunk to a thin, barely perceptible thread. Worse, it was shaking. I could feel the tension in it. No telling how strong it was, how much strain it could stand, but I had the distinct feeling that it was close to the breaking point.
And my time was almost up, anyway. On so many levels.
“You understand what we have to do,” Jonathan said. “Travel in the aetheric’s too damn dangerous. Just skim the surface, stay as close as you can to the thread. I’ll be right behind you.”
We hadn’t told anybody else except—at Jonathan’s insistence—that creepy gray-suited Ashan. “You’re sure about him?” I’d asked out of the side of my mouth, as the door shut behind him and locked me and Jonathan in what looked like a study. He liked fishing, I gathered. Lots of books on the subject, and some big mounted piscine specimens frozen in midthrash on the walls.
“Ashan?” Jonathan finished writing something down, reached in a desk drawer and took out a seal that looked massive and antique. He brought it gently down on the paper. When he took it away, there was a glowing design in the paper, nothing I could read or even vaguely recognize. “Kind of an asshole, I know, but he’s reliable. Anything ever happens to me, he gets the big chair.”
“Not David?”
“Not anymore.” The tone was so colorless I knew there was pain behind it. “You’re good to go?”
“Ready.” I wasn’t, really, but there didn’t seem to be any really good choices, otherwise. Jonathan put the paper on top of his desk, turned to me and gave me an after you Alphonsegesture.
I took a deep breath and flowed to mist.
In Oversight, the thread stretched out toward the horizon, thin and glittering and still somehow alive. I touched it, wrapped myself around it and started winding around it like a vine snake. Moving fast, but staying in the physical plane. The thread had aetheric properties, which worried me; I couldn’t stop to help Jonathan if he got badly infected. I couldn’t be sure, but I wasn’t seeing any blue sparkle, other than a stray particle here and there. So far the connection looked clean.
The thread traveled through Jonathan’s house, straight out through the roaring blaze in the fireplace. I didn’t dare phase out completely, but I tried a moderated waveform to travel on, to avoid the fire. If it was a real fire at all. Nothing around here was what it seemed, especially not Jonathan. He didn’t feel like a Djinn at all, especially now that we were both in an incorporeal state. He felt… hotter. Stronger. More present, somehow.