He hated me. I felt it, strong as acid poured in an open wound.
“All I have to do is kill you,” he said. It was barely a whisper. “You know that, right? You die, the baby dies, and I can still do exactly what I want. Everybody wins but you.”
For a breathless second I thought he was going to do it. I could feel the impulse firing in him, could see the way it would happen—his hands around my head, turning with shocking strength, my spine snapping with the crisp sound of crumpled paper. The work of less than a second.
I remembered Quinn, helpless on the ground, coughing up blood. Terror in his eyes, at the end. Jonathan hadn’t even hesitated.
“I know,” I said. “Butch up and do it, if you’re going to. Don’t keep me in suspense.”
He stared at me for a second, eyes wild and dark, and then smiled.
Smiled.
He reached out, pulled a fingertip slowly down the line of my cheek, and walked away. Hands in his pockets. Raindrops shattering in his wake.
And then time slammed back in a fevered rush, and the world moved.
He was gone.
And something was very, very, very wrong with me.
I cried out, wrapped my hands over my stomach, and felt the sudden emptiness inside. The spark was gone, the potential, the child that David had put inside of me.
I felt the last of the energy Jonathan had given me leak out. My vision went gray and blurry, and I felt my knees give way.
Falling.
Too much effort to breathe. Nothing left inside to live on. I was a black hole, empty and alone and dying in the rain.
David. I couldn’t even call him. And if he came, it would only be more death, faster death, no comfort and no love in it.
Warm arms scooped me up. Fingers slid from my arm down to clasp my limp hand, and as the world telescoped to a black pinpoint I felt a warm pulse of power go through my skin, my bones, my body. Hot as the sun, liquid and silky and rich.
It wasn’t enough.
My eyes were still open, and a little color swam out of the gray, but I couldn’t focus, couldn’t blink. Lewis was bent over me. He looked pale and desperate. He cupped my face in his hands, watching my eyes, and then ripped open my shirt and put his hands on my stomach, right where the worst of the emptiness hid itself.
That sensation came again, a slow and deliberate wave rippling through me to pool like hot molten gold somewhere just below my navel.
It drained away.
I was going, just… going.
“Oh no you don’t,” Lewis grated, and I felt him breathing into my open mouth, his life pouring into mine with such power and fury that the emptiness couldn’t keep up with it. That was David, that emptiness. That was how I would die, sucked into that darkness, and he’d still be trapped and alone, forever a creature driven by hunger and unable to stop feeding…
I didn’t want this to end in nightmare.
I couldn’t let it end that way.
I breathed.
Lewis was still bent over me, panting, shaking, and I saw the golden light still spilling out of his fingers into my stomach. A thick stream of life.
I knocked his hand away, and he leaned back and braced himself unsteadily on wet pavement. Head down. Gasping for air as if he’d been drowning.
I was almost sure he had been. I’d nearly taken him down with me.
“Dammit,” he said furiously. “What is it with you and dying, anyway? Can’t you get a new hobby?”
“Shut up.” I meant it to be defiant, but it came out a bare, shaken whisper. I curled on my side, pummeled by rain, chilled to the bone, but with a rich, golden warmth somewhere deep inside to sustain me. His gift, like Jonathan’s, but unlike Jonathan’s it was a human sort of power, and my body was already accepting it. Renewing itself.
I let my breath slide out in a sigh, staring at him, and saw Lewis’s narrow pupils expand into huge, black rings.
Felt the feedback begin to build between us.
The pulse beat faster, pulling me like the tide.
I closed my eyes and drifted up to the aetheric. It felt effortless and elegant and perfectly controlled.
“What happened?” Lewis asked.
“Jonathan,” I murmured. He kidnapped my child. I couldn’t say it out loud, couldn’t begin to explain all of what I’d realized while lying here in the rain, and certainly not to Lewis. “He’s not going to fight. Ashan’s going to win.”
Lewis sucked in a very sharp breath, as if he knew implications to that I couldn’t imagine. “That can’t happen.”
“Well, it’s going to happen, so you’d better make a plan.”
“Joanne, there is no plan for that.” He looked miserable, suddenly—tired, soaked to the bone, chilled. “If we lose Jonathan, we lose everything. He’s like the keystone in the arch. Take him away—”
“Everything collapses,” I finished, and slowly found the strength to sit up, then mutely extended my hand to him. He brought me to my feet. All my parts seemed to be working more or less correctly. “You told me to go. Where can I go that will be safe from that?”
His cold lips pressed against my forehead for a second. “Nowhere. Just—I don’t know. I’ll try to find him, talk to him. Meanwhile, just go home. Use what I gave you for defense only. Your body needs time to replenish itself.” His voice sounded rough and silken, and I tried to keep my breathing slow. Nothing I could do about my heartrate, which spiked like crazy. “Stay alive for me.”
“I’ll try,” I said. My own voice sounded about half an octave lower than normal.
I cleared my throat and opened my eyes to look at him. “Thank you.”
He half turned, then whipped back, grabbed me, and kissed me.
I mean, kissed me. This wasn’t some peck-on-the-cheek, let’s-be-friends gesture, this was hot and damp and desperate, and wow. After the first shocked instant I came to my senses and put hands on his chest to shove hard enough to break the suction and back him off a couple of steps.
We didn’t say anything. There really wasn’t anything we could say. He wasn’t going to apologize.
I wasn’t sure I wanted him to try. It was a kind of good-bye, and both of us knew it.
That, more than anything else, told me how near to the end of the world we were coming.
He walked over to the Ma’at and bent his head to listen to what Charles Ashworth had to say to him, which looked like plenty, most of it probably having to do with the inadvisability of getting involved with me. So I walked over to join them.
“Seeing as the lightning kind of trashed my ride, I need transportation,” I said. “Or at least the loan of a car.”
Ashworth, who probably had a fleet of them, frowned at me, then nodded to one of his flunkies, a crew-cut young woman dressed in a sharp-looking tailored suit and shoes I was almost certain were from Stuart Weitzman’s new fall collection.
I was surprised to see he was hiring the fashion-enabled. He didn’t really seem all that hip to me.
She tossed over a set of keys, looking grumpy. “Don’t dent it,” she said.
“I’m offended.” I scanned the undamaged cars in the lot. I was hoping for the honey of a BMW sport coupe parked near the street, but her ride turned out to be something else.
Oh, dear God.
Even considering the hell my life had descended to, I didn’t think I was really prepared, at this point in my life, to be driving a minivan.
Jonathan had left me for dead. That meant he probably wouldn’t be coming back at me, looking for revenge—at least, not for a while. And I didn’t get the sense that it was cruelty on his part… just an iron-hard kind of indifference.
I’d ceased to be useful to him for what mattered, and he wasn’t going to waste his time.
I climbed in the minivan, which was exactly the size of a small yacht, and started it up. Not a high-performance engine. I sat back in the captain’s chair and let cool air blow on my face and dripping hair for a minute while I tried hard not to think about what had happened on the roof.