I felt David began to rise up through the aetheric. Leaving without me.
Yvette laid a hand on Lewis, and it was like watching a roach crawl across the face of the Mona Lisa.
He formed the word with his lips, silently, where she couldn’t see. Still holding my eyes prisoner. Go.
He’d die if I left him. Hell, he’d probably die if I didn’t leave him, but at least he wouldn’t die alone, unwitnessed…
I felt the cord between myself and David stretch and grow thin under the strain.
Yvette’s hand slid insinuatingly along Lewis’s sweat-damp neck as he poured his concentration into keeping her last victim breathing.
Go.
Lewis didn’t have my bottle. He couldn’t command me. With Kevin all but dead, nobody else could, either.
I whispered, at a pitch I knew only he could hear, I love you.
And I shot up like a burning arrow into the aetheric, mourning.
I found David one level above the aetheric. No words. We melted, merged, our auras shifting and blending. I remembered what he’d told me once about making love as a gas, and felt a smile bloom sad and warm inside. Even in the disembodied state, he was as familiar to me as my human heartbeat had once been, and just as necessary.
Jo… Awhisper through the empty spaces, a caress without skin or body or words. The purest form of love I had ever felt. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t let you die, but I didn’t want to die, either. And that’s the only way to make a Djinn. Through sacrifice. I tried to cheat. This is what comes out of it.
He could feel the mourning in me, and the guilt, and the horrible weight of responsibility. His touch made it easier. Nothing could make it easy.
He was already moving again, rising, driven by the compulsion Lewis had placed on him to close the rift. So long as he was moving up, I knew Lewis was still alive. There was that, at least.
I went with him. The coldlight was almost solid now, energy made matter. The image came to me that it was antibodies, that we were the invaders here, and this excess of them meant the universe was sick, maybe dying.
Up. I don’t know if there were other Djinn there, because all I could see was coldlight, a continuous blizzard of sparks surrounding us like a hot blue shell. I kept bleeding them off of David. They rolled harmlessly off of me.
Up.
We slowed and stopped, and although I couldn’t see anything I knew we’d arrived. David’s compulsion would have delivered us to the right place. When I stretched out my senses I could feel the rift, turning slowly like a slow-motion whirlpool as it sucked the coldlight from the demon reality into ours.
Get back, David said, and gently tried to push me away. I clung harder. Jo, you have to get back now. I need to do this alone.
“No.” I didn’t even know if I could do it, or how stupid an idea it was, but I formed flesh. I was surprised it was even possible here, in this place, but I took on weight and dimension and artificial life. No air to breathe, but that didn’t matter, not for a short while; I could manufacture an atmosphere good enough to sustain me for a while, out of the same primal material I’d just formed my body from.
A hot sirocco of wind whipped through the nothingness, blowing back my straight black hair, whispering close over my skin.
Hands closed around my shoulders from behind. They slid up my neck and combed hair away from my skin, and I shivered at the kiss that burned right at the juncture of my neck and collarbone.
“ Jo.” His whisper was as rough and unsteady as his fingers. “I thought I’d never see you again. Not in any way that mattered.”
I turned. David was back to myDavid, hair slightly too long for neatness, warm copper eyes, kissable lips. I wrapped my arms around him and held him. There was too much tension in his body, but it felt right. At last. The coldlight was a continuous white-noise hiss of blue against the bubble I’d formed around us, but it didn’t matter just now. I wanted to stay in his embrace forever.
And I couldn’t. I knew I couldn’t. Too high a price for that.
He kissed me, gentle and slow and warm, and the taste of him nearly made me weep. He cupped my face in both hands, and as he pulled back his eyes were luminous with peace.
“It’s okay,” he said, and drew his thumbs over my lips in a caress that was as intimate as anything I’d ever felt. “Jonathan knew. One of us has to go. I’ve had my time.”
“Wrong,” I corrected him, and put all my strength into a shove that sent him stumbling backwards. “I’m giving you mine.”
I dove straight at the whirlpool.
David’s scream followed me in, but it was too late, too late to even wonder what the hell I was thinking, because I felt the darkness on the other side of the rift and with it, a visceral surge of panic, and knew this was going to hurt, badly.
And then I hit the paper-thin cut between the worlds, and stuck there with an impact that shredded me back into mist. Pieces of me began to be sucked away, through that rift, and I had to fight to hold on against the intense black pressure.
Where the pieces of me went through, the rift sealed.
Oh God.
I understood now. I understood why Jonathan had been so reluctant to send David to do this, because he’d known what had to be done. The only thing that could seal this thing was my blood, or David’s, because we’d birthed this thing, like some distorted child.
I let go. Let go of everything—all the fear, the pain, the anguish, the guilt. I felt the cord back to David break with a high, thin singing sound like a snapped wire, and his presence vanished from my mind.
I was alone.
I let go and let the Void have me, as much of me as it needed to seal the hole between our two worlds. It was like bleeding to death—a slow, cold unraveling, a sense of being lost one drop at a time. There was pain, but the pain didn’t matter.
What mattered was that I sensed the rift drawing together, healing.
The flow of coldlight at the rift slowed, stopped. It drifted in a sparkling blue weightless dance around me.
What was left of me.
I felt the rift seal shut with a kind of vacuum seal thump, and instantly the coldlight glowed white-hot around me, bright and brilliant as a million stars exploding, and faded off into darkness. It couldn’t exist here without the rift, just as I couldn’t exist without the umbilical to David.
There was not much left of me. Just enough to remember who I was, what I’d been. Faces in my memory, but I didn’t know them anymore. It was all falling away.
Falling like snow into the dark.
The snow turned to light. Sunlight. I was standing in a meadow full of grass that was too green to be real, and there was a woman walking toward me through flame red flowers. Her white gown shifted in a wind that didn’t stir the fields.
White hair like a cloud. Eyes the color of deepest amethyst. Beautiful and cool and peaceful.
“Sara.” I didn’t know where the name came from. “I’m dead, you know.”
She reached out toward me. “No,” she said, and caressed the satin of my hair. “No, my sweet. Not yet. There is a part of you that remains. Humans are like that.”
I remembered a coal black hunger, ice-edged shadows. “Ifrit?” I whispered.
“You would be,” she said. “But there is another way. And perhaps we owe that to you.”
“We?”
When she pulled back, I saw she wasn’t alone. There was a man with her, big and muscular, running a little to fat, with a Scandinavian-blond unruly shock of hair and eyes as blue as a Caribbean sea. I knew him, and didn’t know him. He smiled at me, very slightly, and I saw pain in it. And courage.
“I’ve lived too long,” Sara said. “I’ve stolen life from others. Patrick betrayed you to buy it for me. There is no honor in what I’ve become.”
I didn’t understand. The wind that rippled Sara’s dress touched my face, combed cool fingers through my hair. It was gentle and beautiful and peaceful, and I knew it wanted to take me with it, into the dark.