With that, and without anybody giving her permission to vacate the bed, she was up and moving, wrapped in a sheet and searching for her clothes. David helped—more afraid that she’d end up dropping the sheet and he’d see more of Cherise than he intended, I think—and once she’d laid her hands on her shorts, shirt, and shoes, there was no stopping her.
Which was all fine with me, actually. I was heartily sick of this room. I dressed quickly. David was hilariously slow; I wondered how often he’d actually had to pull on his own pants in the last few thousand years. Probably zero times.
“Sunshine,” Cherise declared as we followed her out of the medical area and into the more spacious public area of the ship. The utilitarian carpet and walls were replaced by lusher stuff the higher we went, and by the time we could see daylight streaming through windows, we were in posh territory, with fancy sitting rooms and dark wood paneling. And bars. A lot of bars. A few were even serving.
Cherise stopped at one and ordered us all margaritas.
“I don’t think this is the time—,” I said, but she pressed the glass into my hands firmly.
“Sweetie, this is exactly the time to drink,” she said. “We survived, right? We’re heading home? Definitely happy hour, from now until, oh, ever after.” She clinked glasses with me, then David, and led us out a side door onto the deck of the ship. We didn’t much feel like celebrating, but it was tough to resist Cher when she was in a mood like this.
And she was right about taking us outside. It was beautiful.
Hard to believe that we’d spent the last few weeks—no, months? years?—under such strain, facing such dire circumstances. When we’d sailed out of Miami, we’d done it in the teeth of a monstrous storm.
Today the sun was warm and kind, the sky a rich, clean-scrubbed blue. The breeze that blew in off the waves was gentle as it glided over my bare arms. The sea was calm; it glittered in diamond-bright swells, a sparkling fabric unrolled as far as the eye could see.
So beautiful.
David put his arm around me, and we stood there for a moment in silence, staring out at the vista. Cherise leaned on her forearms on the rail, smiling, turning her face up to the sun with an expression of pure delight.
“Cher?”
She turned at the sound of her name, and I glanced back to see Kevin coming at a run from a lower deck, taking the stairs two at a time. My relationship with Kevin—the youngest Warden we had, I believed—was complicated. He was complicated, more than most people I knew: damaged, and dangerous, and unpredictable, but still struggling to find and hold on to that core of goodness that against all odds survived within him. He’d been through a lot, in his—what was it now, nineteen years? He was three years younger than Cherise, which seemed like a lot at their ages. But that didn’t stop him from being head over heels in love with her.
“Hey, Kev,” she said, turning from the rail as he jumped to the top of the steps and lunged to grab her in a hug. She was a very small girl, and he was tall and lanky, putting on more muscle all the time. An odd couple, but also oddly appropriate for each other. Cherise’s unending optimism was something Kevin needed in his life, which had seen way too much darkness. She was laughing in bright, silvery peals as he spun her around in his arms. “Whoa, whoa, easy, don’t make me yak!”
He stopped and let her go, but she didn’t go far—just far enough to kiss him, with authority. David raised his eyebrows a little but said nothing. I wondered what he thought about it. I suspected he was just as wary as I was of Kevin, generally.
“You’re okay?” Kevin asked. “Lewis said—”
“Yeah, look, the Djinn kind of freaked out and there was a thing, but I’m all good now. See?” Cherise did a runway twirl for him. “I’m fine.”
“Yes, you are.”
She made a purring sound low in her throat and arched against him like a cat. “Don’t tease unless you mean it.”
“Oh, I—” Kevin suddenly stopped in midflirt, blinked, and looked at her with a baffled expression. David and I both turned to look at him. Cherise was just as baffled as Kevin, it seemed.
“What?” I asked, because it didn’t seem like Cherise could even remember the word.
Kevin closed his eyes for a second, rubbed them, and opened them again. Relief spread across his face, and he shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “Jesus, I’m tired. I thought—it’s nothing. I’m okay.”
Cherise stepped forward and put her hand against his cheek, one of those loving gestures that I find myself doing to David so often. Kevin relaxed and bent toward her, covering her hand with his. “Well,” I said to David, “they’ve gotten cozy. Not really sure how I feel about that.”
He acknowledged it with a nod, but I could tell his mind was elsewhere. Shadows in his eyes, weariness in his face. For the first time, it struck me that every minute he spent in a human body—a real human body, cut off from the Djinn—he was growing older, just as I was. I tried to imagine how it felt for him to have lost so much, to be so alone. I knew how I felt. Surely for him it was millions times worse.
“David.” I put a hand on his arm, and got his full focus. “Are you okay? Do you need Lewis to—”
No mistaking the weary twist of his mouth. He hated being dependent on anyone, but he’d have to face facts—he couldn’t draw enough power from me to fuel his life well, and Lewis was the best bet. But David didn’t like being beholden to the first man I’d ever loved. At all. “I’m fine,” he said, voice unnervingly soft and even. “If I have to see him for help, I will.”
I didn’t believe him, but he wasn’t asking me to, in so many words. It was the big lie, and he was asking me not to push it. David wasn’t the kind to be reasonable about his limits; after spending millennia without many at all, he was going to crash into human borders pretty hard, and it was going to hurt.
It wasn’t the kind of thing he’d thank me for pointing out, either.
“Coordinating,” I said, bringing us back to the dark center of things around which our lives revolved now. “He really wanted to stick us with coordinating at headquarters.”
That got a smile from him, if a brief one. “It’s not going to suit you if we have to do it.”
“Speak for yourself, Master of”—I was about to say Djinn but caught myself in time . . . ouch—“the obvious. I’m not giving up yet. We’ll find a way to get our mojo back. See if we don’t.”
David drained the rest of his glass and dangled it from his fingers, staring down now into the sparkling waves. “You sure you want it back?”
“Are you kidding me?”
“No,” he said, and his voice had that odd, flat, soft inflection again, as if he were pressing all the emotion out of it with great care. “Jo, think about it. We both want to be together, but we’ve always been of two worlds. I tried to make you part of mine, but that didn’t work. This—this is a chance to make me part of yours.”
I forgot all about the drink in my hand, the beautiful day, the laughter of Cherise and Kevin standing a few feet away, and fixed him with a disbelieving stare. “David, you’re dying.”
“Everyone’s dying,” he said. “Mortal life is short to someone like me even in the best case. If I don’t—resume my life as a Djinn, I can be a true husband to you. Living a human life.” His eyes finally moved to meet mine. “Giving you human children.”
We didn’t talk about Imara very often; our Djinn child was a beautiful, complicated gift, but she had never been a baby, never rested in my arms, never taken her first steps. The mothering instinct in me craved more, and he knew that. I’d never said it, but of course he knew.
“David—”
“It’s not a good time,” he finished for me, and he was right on, even though we no longer shared that deep supernatural bond that had made it so easy for him to read me. “I know. But there’s so little good about all this, Jo. We should take what we can, when we can, for as long as we can.”