It was hard to see her look so helpless.
Lewis looked almost as bad—worn down and fighting to keep himself together. I met his eyes, which were bloodshot and fever bright. “Go to bed,” I told him. “I’ll stay with them for a while.”
“And do what?” he snapped, which hurt; I saw the flare of panic in his face, quickly tamped down. He hadn’t meant to say it, though of course he’d been thinking it. They were all thinking it. “Sorry, Jo. I mean—”
“I know what you mean,” I said softly. “But the fact is that you’re just as handicapped as I am right now, and you’re punishing yourself by wearing yourself down to nothing. Lewis, you can’t. You can’t. When we get out of this, the Wardens will need you more than ever. You can’t be running on fumes when the rest of them need you. This is going to get a lot worse. We both know it.”
I could see that he wanted to tell me not to preach to him, but he bit his tongue this time. He knew I was right (not that it would stop him from arguing), and on some level, he was aware that he was hurting himself as punishment. Like me, he felt that he deserved it.
He looked down at Venna. I saw it in his face, all that weariness, that guilt, and a fair amount of bitter self-loathing.
“Lewis.” I drew his gaze and held it again. “Go to bed. Go.”
He finally nodded, rose—had to steady himself against the wall—and left. I looked around the room, with its sterile high-tech beds and medical facilities that could do nothing about the problem we were facing. Every bed was filled by a Djinn.
And every Djinn was, to a greater or lesser extent, dying.
The Djinn Rahel—a New Djinn, and one of the oldest friends I had among their kind—turned her head slightly to look toward me. Rahel had always seemed invincible, like Venna—polished, wildly beautiful, with her elaborately cornrowed ebony hair and lustrous dark skin, and eyes that glowed as if backlit by amber.
Now she seemed so diminished. So fragile. Her eyes were still amber, but pale, faded, and . . . frightened. She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to. I patted Venna’s hand, then got up and went to Rahel’s side. I put the back of my hand against her forehead. She felt hot and dry, consumed by some bonfire inside.
“Well,” she whispered with a shadow of her old, cocky charm, “isn’t this peculiar? The lamb caring for the wolf.”
“You’ve never been the wolf, Rahel.”
“Ah, sistah, you don’t know me at all.” She heaved a slow, whispering sigh. “I have played at being a friend to you, but I’m nothing but a wolf. We all are, even your sweet David. Djinn are born because we are too ruthless to accept our own deaths as humans do. It suits us ill to face such an end as this.”
“It’s not the end.”
“I think it could be,” she said, and closed her eyes. “I think it will be. And so I will tell you something I’ve never told you, Joanne Baldwin.”
I swallowed hard. “What?”
Her lips took on the ghost of a smile. “I am glad that we have been friends. You remind me of someone I knew long ago. My cousin, in breathing days. You have her soul. And I am glad to have looked on that brightness again.”
“Stop it,” I said, my voice unsteady. “Just stop it. You’re not going to die, Rahel. You can’t.”
“All things can. All things should, in the end.” She didn’t sound angry about it, or sad, or afraid. She just sounded resigned. “The world is changing. That is not a bad thing, you know. Just different.”
Maybe she had the perspective of millennia, but I didn’t, and I was sick and tired of things being changed. I wanted it all to go back to the way it was.
I wanted peace.
But I didn’t say anything else to her, and she lapsed into a quiet, waiting stillness, conserving her energy. The room was eerily silent, all those immortal creatures counting the minutes until they ceased.
And it was my fault.
I put my head down on the crisp, clean sheets next to Rahel’s hand, and silently wept.
I felt a hand touch my hair, and thought at first that it was Rahel. But no; her hand was still exactly where it had been, limp and unmoving on the covers. I took in a deep breath and sat up, swiping at my eyes and sniffling.
David looked down at me, and for a moment we didn’t say anything at all. He looked almost as bad as the Djinn lying in the beds, although he’d been spared that particular fate; his decline was slower, more insidious.
There was still a connection between us despite the hit we’d taken when Bad Bob had done his worst at the end. Our powers were gone, and David was trapped in mortal flesh, but on some level he was able to bleed off just a little power from me. Enough to survive, at least temporarily.
The difference was that when we sailed out of the black corner, the Djinn would get better. David wouldn’t get his powers back that way. Neither of us would. And if he couldn’t reconnect to the aetheric, he would get weaker.
I read the misery and concern in his eyes, and took his hand in mine. Touching flesh would have to do; we couldn’t touch in all those familiar supernatural ways. It felt oddly remote and clumsy.
“You okay?” he asked me.
I nodded. “As long as you’re here. You?”
That won me a faint smile from him, and a widening of those honey brown eyes. He was still beautiful, even contained in human form. He’d lost that glowing, powerful edge, but what was left was pure David. As time went on, I had the sense that I was seeing the David he’d once been—a friend, a lover, a warrior in days that had come and gone well before any history we knew.
Not a good Djinn, but a good man.
Still, he hadn’t been just a man in so, so long. And I wondered whether he could go back to being just that, just human, without dying inside of regrets.
David’s smile faded as he looked at Rahel, replaced by that intense focus I knew so well. He didn’t speak, but I knew how deeply he was feeling his own helplessness. I was feeling exactly the same thing. I leaned my cheek against his warm, strong hand, and his thumb gently stroked my cheekbone.
Small comforts.
“Lewis left you alone here?”
Yeah, there was no part of that that didn’t sound accusatory toward Lewis. “I made him leave. He was exhausted,” I said. “And there’s nothing he can do except what I’m doing. What you’re doing.”
“Stand here and watch my brothers and sisters die?” He paused, shut his eyes for a second, and then said, “That sounded bitter, didn’t it?” I measured off an inch of air between my thumb and forefinger. He sighed. “I feel that there ought to be something. Something we can think of, do, try.”
“We have, we did, and we will. But we’re not exactly at the top of our game, honey.”
“I don’t know what this game is,” David said softly. “I don’t like the rules. And I don’t like the stakes.”
“Well, at least you have a good partner,” I said. “Later, we can kick ass at table tennis, too.”
He bent and kissed me—not a long kiss, not a passionate one, but one of those sweet and lingering sorts of promises that comes from deep, deep down. Passion we had, but we also had something else. Something more.
Something that mattered to me more than my own life. I’m not going to lose him, too, I told myself. I wondered whether that panic and determination showed in my face. I hoped not.
Just as David was pulling up a chair next to me at Rahel’s bedside, the door to the ship’s hospital opened, and Cherise staggered in, burdened by a tray so huge that it should have come with wheels and its own parade clowns. She was a tiny little thing, drop-dead gorgeous even under the ridiculously stressful conditions. Somehow she’d found the time to shower, make her hair shampoo-commercial shiny and full of body, and scrounge up clean, attractive sexy-girl clothes, which today included shorts and a striped shirt—a look I was sure I couldn’t have pulled off without looking like a very sad Old Navy reject. She had no makeup on, but then again, Cherise didn’t really need any. She had that kind of skin.