I fished my cell phone out of my purse and speed-dialed Paul Giancarlo. He didn’t answer. I left a voice-mail, reporting John’s death in as much detail as I dared, and then put in a call to the Wardens Crisis Center and reported that they were officially short a regional officer. The girl on the other end—God, she sounded young—was curt and scared, and I wondered how many calls she’d already had like this. They were clearly in emergency mode already, because the disasters would be coming as storms and earthquakes and wildfires erupted, and there were no high-level, Djinn-armed Wardens to combat them. In fact, today might mark the beginning of the kind of disaster that hadn’t been seen on Earth since the Great Flood. These things built on each other, fed on the energy of each other.
“Dammit,” I whispered, and tossed the cell phone into the passenger seat. The fire department was winding up the emergency, although I was sure that the fire had gone out thanks to Lewis’s intervention and not the hose-and-ladder brigade.
Lewis and the Ma’at were convened in a group near the corner of the parking lot, having some kind of serious huddle. The building’s tenants milled around, looking lost and smoke-stained, a few sucking on oxygen masks, but all in all it was remarkably little destruction.
John was the only casualty.
I didn’t want to think about how close it had come on the roof to being two bodies instead of one. I turned my attention to my brand-new (borrowed) ride instead. The van was so clean it might have been a rental, except for a few lived-in touches like a custom CD holder on the driver’s side.
The mirror showed me an exhausted-looking drowned-rat woman, with dark circles under her eyes and lank, unattractive hair. I wasted a spark of power to dry my hair and clothes. I looked as though I could win a Morticia Addams look-alike contest, but, for once in my life, there were bigger issues than my personal vanity.
I grabbed a Modest Mouse CD from the selection on the visor. The van wasn’t exactly the signature style of Joanne Baldwin, Speed Freak, but at least it was wheels and it would get me back home. I desperately wanted to be home. Maybe David was an Ifrit, maybe my sister was by turns nuts and annoying, but at least it was… home.
It’s all going to be gone soon, something in me whispered. All this around you. The city, the people, the life you know. When Jonathan goes, everything goes. Are you ready for that? Are you ready to stand by and let it happen?
Jonathan was offering to die for David. I was aware that there was some core of stubborn jealousy in me, and that it wasn’t very honorable, but it was more than that holding me back from his solution to the problem. If I released David, if David went after Jonathan and killed him—and by Rahel’s assessment, that was almost certain to happen—then I lost David three times over. First, to being an Ifrit; second, to being the killer of his friend and brother. Last, to becoming what Jonathan was… and I didn’t think that left any room for me.
Well, it’s all about you, isn’t it?
No, it wasn’t, but I had a stake in it. And I couldn’t shake that off.
Jonathan had taken my Djinn-child. I’d thought that was just because he was a cruel bastard, but thinking back on it, maybe he’d just been trying to preserve something of David. Even something of me. He’d known that if I refused to give up David’s bottle, I’d die, and David would be lost to him.
Please, let her be with him. Existing, somehow. Not just…
Not just gone.
In the shelter of the minivan, where nobody could see it happen, I fell apart.
All the fury, all the fear, all the pain came out in sudden, wrenching sobs, in pounding on the steering wheel, in outright screams of rage. This wasn’t right, and it shouldn’t be this way—I hadn’t come this far just to see the world die around me. Or to let David slip into darkness.
Or to lose a child I barely knew.
There’s an answer, I told myself, hands pressing hard enough against my eyes to create white sparks, tears slicking my cheeks in cold sheets. There’s a goddamn answer to this, there has to be.
Lightning shivered overhead, raw and uncontrolled. It hit a transformer across the city and blew it into a blue-white shower of sparks. Several square blocks of lights went out, and overhead, the clouds swirled in from the ocean, carrying the smell of rain and the promise of worse.
I had to get home.
By the time I trudged up the steps to my apartment I was exhausted, stinky, smoke-stained, and dispirited. Now that I was full of borrowed power again, I could sense the incredible roiling of the aetheric, mirrored by the wild fury of the sky overhead. The rain was the least of what was coming. I wondered what Marvelous Marvin would be making of it. Probably churning out revised predictions and ordering Ella to make it happen—not that Ella could, at this stage. Things were far too chaotic for any one Warden to try to influence them.
With John Foster dead, and Ella’s loyalties questionable at best, it left this part of Florida lightly protected. The same was probably true up and down the Eastern seaboard. The Wardens were falling apart, and the Djinn didn’t care about the consequences. And the regular people, the ones the Wardens were sworn to protect? No clue what was coming.
At least I could protect Sarah. That was something, anyway.
I dug my key out of my purse, unlocked the front door, and walked into…
… a stranger’s apartment.
For a brief, surreal moment, I thought I really had walked into the wrong apartment, proving that urban legend that apartment keys work on every lock in the building… but then I recognized little, familiar things. The ding on the wall next to the TV—which was now plasma flat-screen, and the size of a small theater. The pictures on the coffee table of Mom, Sarah, an ancient one of our grandparents—although they were encased in new silver frames, all matching.
One of the rugs on the floor looked familiar. It even had a coffee stain on it from when I’d tripped one morning, half-asleep.
Apart from those touchstones, it was a whole new place.
I stood frozen in shock, eyes wide, and Sarah came bustling breathlessly around the corner, wiping her hands on a towel.
“There you are!” she cried, and threw her arms around me. Then immediately withdrew. “Ugh! You smell awful; where have you been?”
“In a fire,” I said absently. “What the hell… ?”
In typical Sarah fashion, she skipped right over that, whirled away and did an honest-to-God Mary Tyler Moore pirouette in the middle of the living room. “You like it? Tell me you like it!”
I stared at her, trying to work out what she was talking about. None of this was making sense. “Um—”
She beamed. “I had to do something to make up for the burden I’ve been on you. Honestly, you’ve been such a saint these past few days, and I’ve done nothing but mooch off of you.” She looked so bright and shiny, so thrilled. “Chrêtien finally came through with an alimony check; it showed up this morning—of course, the stupid bank won’t cash it, they have to hold it until it clears, but Eamon let me have the cash in the meantime. So I decided to give you a makeover!”
Makeover? I blinked. Not that I was unwilling to go be pampered somewhere, but in the middle of an approaching apocalypse probably wasn’t the best possible time…
Oh. She was talking about the furniture.
“Isn’t it gorgeous? Look, there’s a new sofa, and chairs, and the TV of course, Eamon helped pick that one out—” She grabbed my hand and pulled me through to the bedrooms. Threw open her door. “I got rid of that terrible French Provincial and went for a nice maple… You know, I’ve been watching those home improvement shows on BBC America, they have all the best ideas, don’t you think?