I think I knew, somewhere deep inside, what he was about to say, but there was no way to stop him. No way any of us could have stopped him.
Kevin pointed at Lewis and said, “Give me all his power. I want it all.”
A clear, unequivocal command, one Jonathan wouldn’t have any choice but to follow.
Lewis cried out, arched forward, and a river of white light flooded out of him, slammed across the empty space and into Kevin’s narrow T-shirt-clad chest. David, still held by the previous command, couldn’t act, and this was so far outside of my area of expertise that there was nothing I could even think to say, much less do.
Lewis went utterly limp. Unconscious. Out of the fight. Which meant that David was powerless.
Kevin opened his eyes, and smiled. Smiled. Flexed his arms like a weightlifter striking a pose.
“Kevin, don’t do this. You can’t hide,” I said. My voice was shaking. I gathered Lewis’s limp body in my arms and felt how hot he was, how fragile. How human. Like me. “Kevin, they’ll never forgive you for this. Humans or Djinn. They’ll hunt you down. They’ll destroy you.”
He lowered his arms and looked like a sixteen-year-old kid again, scrawny, nervous, arrogant. “Yeah? Well, you tell them, they try it, I’ll kick all their asses. Count on it.”
I just shook my head. He didn’t know. He didn’t understand.
Kevin snapped his fingers at Jonathan. “Now. Today. Take me to Vegas. We’ve got some fun to be having.”
“Stop him!” I pleaded with David. He looked stunned, angry, and completely baffled.
“I can’t. Lewis—” He looked down at the man I held in my arms. “It’s gone. All his power. There’s nothing to draw from.”
Too late, anyway. A sensation of rushing wind, and Jonathan and Kevin were gone.
“Can you track them?” I asked. David crouched down next to me and nodded. “Oh, God, David… can you fightthem?”
“Not alone,” he said. “Not like this.”
I closed my eyes and looked inside myself, felt the warm red swell of power. I’d been put back into human form with all my potential included, which meant that maybe I was the only one qualified to do this thing. The only one with enough raw energy.
But I had to do something I’d sworn I never would. And no matter what anybody said, it would change things. Forever.
As always, David knew me. He said quietly, “You know you have to.”
I took the bottle from Lewis’s limp fingers, and felt the sudden rush of strength, the giddy sensation of David’s allegiance transferring itself to me.
He looked at me with those copper eyes, smiled so warmly I felt the embrace of the sun fold around me, and said, “It’s about damn time. What took you so long?”
My lips parted as I felt the two halves of us knit together in a partnership like nothing I’d ever felt in my life. Equals. There was nothing subservient about the Djinn, not like this… He was me, part of me, more than me. And I was more than him.
I gently eased Lewis down to the carpet and stood up to face David. He reached out, put his hands on my shoulders and slid them up to gently cradle my face. Thumbs traced my lips and left a memory of fire. He was so damn beautiful it made me want to explode.
“We’ll do this together,” he said, and kissed me. A long, sweet kiss that fired me deep inside, a pilot light kicking in with enough force to make my knees go weak.
“Yeah,” I murmured into his open mouth. “Can we win?”
His smile was a warm ghost against my lips. “Don’t know. But it’s going be one hell of a good fight.”
I was warned by the clatter of metal and the creak of a heavy door at the far end of the hallway, but there was no point in getting flustered by the fact that the Wardens had finally dug themselves out of their chaos and come looking. “Freeze!” somebody roared with the authority of a man with a big gun. I wasn’t worried. I’d faced down worse.
I opened my mouth to give David my first command…
… and I heard a loud boom, loud as the world, saw David’s pupils expand in shock, felt my body jerk hard against him.
Oh, shit, I thought.
They’d just shot me in the back.
I had time for one last command. David was already readying himself for battle, for killing, for more death.
“Back in the bottle,” I whispered, tasted blood, and saw David’s eyes go even wider in anguish as the wind sucked him down, into the bottle.
I was crying when I slammed the stopper in place, and curled up on the ground, gasping for breath against the growing, howling pain with his bottle held in both hands, against my heart.
Some shadows leaned over me.
Darkness.
I woke up slowly, to the beeping of machines and the dull mutter of voices.
I opened my eyes and focused slowly on the man who was sitting next to me, his large hand wrapped around mine.
“Jo?”
Not David’s voice, not his touch. Dots of light swirled and settled into the haggard outline of Lewis’s face. Pallid, lined, textured by at least a day’s unshaven growth of beard. Greasy hair.
“You look like shit,” I whispered, and his dry lips cracked into a smile. He was wearing a hospital gown, one of those designs that flatters nobody. So was I. There were tubes tethering my arms, and a dull ache in my lower back.
It came back to me in flashes, pieces. David’s eyes. The sound of the gun. Don’t hurt them. That brought a surge of adrenaline that forced back drugged calm. “David—oh God please tell me they didn’t take him—”
Lewis reached out, opened a drawer in a stand next to the bed, and took out a blue glass bottle. He handed it to me. It was stoppered.
“He’s fine. I…” Lewis wavered and licked his lips. “I kept him safe for you.”
“Some asshole shot me.”
“They didn’t know. All they knew was that there were dead Wardens, and the vault was breached. They couldn’t know.”
I made a not-convinced noise. “Hurts.”
“I know.” He reached out and traced the curve of my cheek with his fingers. “You’ve been out for two days.”
Time delay before the dread set in. Two days? Two fucking days? I struggled to sit up, but drugs and Lewis and weakness kept me down. “Kevin—he took Jonathan—”
“I know.” Lewis’s voice had that silvery calm that Martin Oliver had been so famous for. “Jo, it’s okay. We’ve got teams on his trail. We’ll find him.”
“ Notokay!” Lewis didn’t understand. Couldn’tunderstand. He didn’t know what Jonathan was. What Kevin had at his command. The powers of the strongest Warden in the world, plus the monstrous power of the single greatest Djinn… They’d sent teams? They might as well have sent packs of Girl Scouts. “Got to go. Get after him.”
His strong hands pushed me back. “You’re not going anywhere for a while.”
I clenched my fingers around David’s bottle and, before he could stop me, dragged the rubber stopper out of the mouth.
Zero to sixty. David was there instantly, fast as thought, staring down at me from the other side of the bed. Still trapped in that instant of panic and fury, thinking I was dying.
His hot-penny eyes flashed to Lewis, to me, and then he reached down and gathered me up into his arms.
I hadn’t known how cold I was until I fell into his warmth.
David was whispering words, but I didn’t know them—languages long dead, but the music was universal. Love, and fear, and sheer relief. He kissed me, kissed me hard, and I let myself melt into him.
When he pulled back, I realized that Lewis was talking. Urgently. “David, you can’t be here. They don’t know about you. You have to leave this to the Wardens now. She’s getting the best of care—”
“Quiet.” David hissed it, and when I looked up I saw the two of them exchanging a full-force stare. “ Leave. You can’t do anything for her.”