Oh.
It was the nameless Djinn who’d been chauffeuring us around the country. The vessel. The avatar.
And now, it said, with my own voice, “Stay away from my mother, you bastards!”
Imara. My daughter, the Earth Oracle. Like David, she couldn’t leave her own personal stronghold, where she was holding out against the madness of the Djinn . . . but she’d found a way to remote-pilot the avatar, the same way David and Whitney had done.
“Imara?” I blurted. “What are you doing?”
“Saving your life, I think. Honestly, do you ever stop doing insane things? What were you thinking?” The Djinn glanced over his shoulder, and in his expression I saw my daughter’s harassed shadow. “You shouldn’t be here. I can’t believe you walked into this with your eyes open.”
“Would you feel better if I’d blundered into it stupidly?”
“Maybe I would.” Imara snapped the Djinn’s head back around as Ashan walked forward, and I felt the energy change, grow darker. Ashan had killed my daughter, in her original Djinn form. She hadn’t forgotten that, not at all. “Back off.”
He didn’t seem to even hear her, or care that there was any kind of obstacle standing in his way. When he got within reach of the Djinn, Ashan simply reached out and pushed, and the Djinn went flying, off balance and overmatched. The only comfort I took was that Imara herself wasn’t being hurt. She was safe, somewhere else.
Ashan was looking every bit the vicious, smooth businessman he’d always appeared to me. He’d always been partial to well-tailored suits, and this one was gray, matched to an off-white shirt and sky-blue tie. His physical form had no more personality to it than a store mannequin.
He reached me, not seeming to hurry at all, and grabbed me around the throat. He did that alien head-tilt thing, just like Venna, as if trying to decide exactly what type of pond scum I might be, and—still holding my throat—turned and dragged me toward the others. Venna had gotten up and was engaged in mortal combat with the Djinn avatar, who was doing his—her?—level best to keep the kid away from my back.
But my dangers were also right in front of me, and there were a lot of them.
Ashan pulled me into the middle of the Djinn, then turned and stared right into my eyes.
“Tell us why,” he said. “Why you did this.”
“I needed to get your attention,” I wheezed, around his iron grip. “I think I have it now.”
“You do.” Ashan’s smile was as artificial and cold as the rest of him, and just as assured. “You will regret it.”
“Oh, sweetie, so ahead of you on that one. Let me go or I’ll bleed all over you.”
“Promise?” His smile widened. “Maybe soon we’ll let you die. Would you like that?”
I had my hands free, so I shot him a finger. “Not as much as I’d like to watch you try it.” It was getting harder to talk around his kung- fu grip, and I wasn’t sure that last smart-ass remark came out as anything but garbled chokes. Ashan liked to play with his food. I thought that as long as I was giving back, he wouldn’t move on to the next phase of agony.
Maybe.
The avatar had lost his battle with Venna. That didn’t surprise me much, but it did alarm me. It meant that Imara was playing hurt, or handicapped. Normally, she could have wiped the floor with any Djinn who got in her way, but now the avatar was down, battered and hurt, and Venna was stepping calmly over the body to get to me.
The beaten Djinn avatar rolled over and up to its feet, but it wasn’t in any shape to come at Venna again on my behalf.
The Djinn looked past Venna, at me, and I saw my daughter’s torment in those strange eyes. “Mom,” she said softly. “Get ready. He’s coming.”
Ashan’s hand gripped tighter, bending cartilage in my throat, and what little air I was gasping in cut off. I flailed at him, and it made no difference. None at all.
It never occurred to me to wonder who he was, until a shadow formed in the corner of my eye, and David walked out of it, carrying a . . . box?
I was clearly hallucinating. Oxygen deprivation.
David put the box down, lunged forward, and grabbed Ashan’s arm.
And broke it.
Ashan yelled in surprise and let go of me as he stared down at the dangling odd angle of his forearm, then caught hold of it with his left and snapped it back into a straight line, reconstructing the damage—but it gave David time to grab me and pull me away from Ashan.
David’s eyes were molten bronze, blazing so hot I could feel the feverish intensity behind them. He glanced at me once, a frantic, horrified look, and then put his attention on Venna, who was shrieking toward us like something out of a first-rate horror movie.
He slammed her back, into the Djinn avatar, who in turn slung her hard into a wall and pinned her there.
“No time,” David gasped. He was trembling now, and I could feel the fear in him. “Jo, in the box. You know what to do. I—”
He cried out, fell to his knees, and I watched the David I knew disappear. He fought it, oh God he fought it with everything in him, but he was a Djinn, and a Conduit, and he couldn’t hold back.
I watched his eyes turn pale, then white.
Panic drove me to follow his orders. I could lose myself; I could stand that. I couldn’t see him reduced to a puppet, something used to hurt me. He wouldn’t survive that. God, why had he done this? He’d been safe!
I ripped back the top of the box and found . . . bottles. Lots of bottles, all with corks in the tops.
It came to me in a blinding rush what he wanted me to do.
I grabbed the first one I could reach, popped the cork with my thumb, and focused on David as the Mother took possession of him.
“Be thou bound to my service!” I yelled, and didn’t dare stop for a breath. “Be thou bound to my service! Be thou bound to my service!” As incantations go, it wasn’t much—I spit the words out so fast that they were almost incomprehensible, and for a terrible second I thought I’d rushed too much . . . that it wouldn’t work at all.
It felt like the entire Djinn world took in a collective breath, and I knew I had only a few seconds to live. They wouldn’t be playing with me anymore now. Not anymore.
David screamed—an inhuman scream, torment and fury—and dissolved into mist.
Venna, behind me, broke free of the avatar and lunged for me. If she could force me to break the bottle before I corked it, he’d go free.
I hung on to the slippery glass like grim death, and corked it. I hadn’t waited for the mist to flow inside, but I hadn’t really needed to; it was the corking that mattered, and suddenly I felt a complex network of power snap into place between me and David, overlaying the bonds we already had.
Now all I had to do was release him.
Venna hit me like a freight train just as I thumbed out the cork, and I was smashed against the floor. Somehow, I managed to cradle the bottle against breakage, and I curled in on myself, holding it, keeping it safe.
The Djinn piled on me, and I knew, as I felt unnaturally hot, strong hands take hold of parts of my body, that I’d be ripped to pieces.
David reformed in the middle of the Djinn and fought them off. That sounds simple. It wasn’t. His eyes blazed bronze again, and I could see the focus and fear on his face as he stood over me and wreaked damage on his fellow Djinn. It allowed me the space to crawl away, inching along over broken concrete and steel to where he’d left the box.
The avatar was there, holding bottles with the corks already out. He passed me one, and I focused on Venna, who was ripping at David like a wild animal. She’d kill him, and me, if she wasn’t stopped. “Be thou bound to my service. Be thou bound to my service. Be thou bound to my service.”
I got all three iterations out before Venna reached me, and she shrieked and disappeared. I hadn’t been at all sure that it would work on the Old Djinn; I’d suspected it wouldn’t. But maybe, somewhere out there, somebody liked me after all, despite the evidence to the contrary.