I jumped down from the packed earth ledge into the pit, braced myself with one hand on the wall, and started carefully picking my way over the junk pile. It was dangerous. Sharp corners and nails and jagged metal. Glass. Broken mirrors.
The place was a tetanus shot waiting to happen.
Even though I was completely focused on the mission at hand, my eyes kept focusing on interesting bits of garbage. A broken, tiger-maple chest that looked antique. A massive, carved teak table that was magnificently in one piece and probably would be until the sun consumed the earth, as hard as teak was—I couldn’t believe somebody had actually moved it in the first place. It made me exhausted just looking at it.
I tripped over a big, dented brass pot and nearly fell into a steel cabinet, but managed to brace myself. I looked over my shoulder to make sure Sarah was okay.
She was picking her way slowly behind me, testing every step twice before putting her weight on anything, one hand always outstretched to catch herself.
The other held a flashlight in a death grip, not that she really needed it yet.
The face mask and cherry pink top made quite a fashion statement.
I climbed a small, slippery hill of appliances—somebody had thrown out a gigantic Maytag washer—and saw something that might have been the leg of a French Provincial nightstand. I reached for it and yanked; it was a slender, delicately curved leg, freshly broken off, with faded gilt on white.
Definitely from Sarah’s room. Or, okay, somebody else with the bad taste to have French Provincial bedroom furniture. But I doubted there’d be two of us contributing to the city dump on the same afternoon.
“It’s somewhere around here!” I yelled. She nodded breathlessly and climbed up to join me. She found the first piece of my bedroom suite—the headboard—and yelled in triumph as if she’d discovered King Tut’s tomb. I scrambled over to haul it to the side. Underneath was a broken drawer from my dresser. Empty.
We worked silently, panting, sweating, as night brushed closer and darker. Alarms sounded the everybody out, along with loudspeaker announcements. Floodlights snapped on, harsh and white, throwing everything into alien relief.
“We’ll never find it!” Sarah wailed. She straightened up, yanked down her mask, and wiped her streaming forehead with the back of her forearm. Dirt smudged her face in a circle around the mask, and her normally cute hair was plastered lankly around her skull. Her desire to please had ebbed into pure, disgusted exhaustion. “Dammit, Jo, just forget about it, would you? What was it, cocaine? Jesus! Bill me for it!”
I yanked a shattered television aside—yes, that was mine; I remembered it with a lurch of affection because I’d bought that crappy little thing with my own hard-earned money at a yard sale—and uncovered another dresser drawer. Blank, except for a coating of liner paper. I kicked it out of the way with unnecessary violence.
“It wasn’t cocaine, you idiot!” I yelled back, and felt my hands curling into fists at my sides. “Maybe that’s your lifestyle of the rich and blameless, but—”
“Hey! I’m hip-deep in garbage trying to help you, you know—”
“Excuse me, but you showed up begging me for help, if I remember! And all you’ve done is cost me money and fuck up my life!”
I didn’t mean to say that… exactly. But it was true. I watched Sarah’s flushed face drain of color and bit back an impulse to apologize.
“Fine,” she said, with unnatural control. “I thought I was doing something nice for you, Joanne. I took the little bit of money I got from my deadbeat bastard of an abusive husband and I spent it on you to make up for imposing on you. I’m sorry that it interfered with your stupid bottle collection!”
She turned and scrambled away, graceless and angry.
“Hey!” I yelled.
“Fuck off!” she yelled back, and kept going. “Find it yourself!”
Fine. Whatever. My back hurt, my head ached, I was sweaty and exhausted and I could hear—and feel—a black ugly mutter of thunder out to sea. The vultures were coming home to roost.
And I had to find David’s bottle. I just had to. It couldn’t end this way.
I uncovered the shattered shell of my dresser. It was too big to move. I cried for a little while, tears soaking into the gauze mask, and then grabbed hold and kicked the damn thing with my hiking boots until it splintered into pieces small enough to drag out of the way.
As the last one came free, I saw the nightstand, and it was all in one piece.
I gave a wordless, breathless yell, and hauled it out of the heap of junk it was buried in, leaned it against a rusted-out harvest gold washing machine, and slowly opened the drawer.
It was full of stuff. Old lotion bottles with half a handful left in each one.
My out-of-date sale catalogs.
A zippered bag full of foam cushioning.
I grabbed it, hugged it like a little girl reunited with her favorite stuffed animal, and unzipped it with shaking gloved fingers.
There was nothing inside.
Nothing.
I screamed, bit my lip, and forced myself to do things slowly. One piece at a time, taken out, examined, and tossed aside. Foam padding last.
It wasn’t there.
David’s bottle wasn’t fucking there.
In the dark, under the glare of the floodlights, I saw the cold green gleam of eyes out in the dark. Rats? Cats? They winked on and off in the shadows, too cautious to come near me, but too close for comfort.
One of those legendary giant cockroaches crawled out of the heap and began trundling like a shiny brown bus over heaps of metal.
The bottle wasn’t in the drawer, and it wasn’t in the bag where it was supposed to be. Night was falling. I couldn’t do this once the floodlights shut off, and tomorrow another layer of junk would arrive and bury any chance I had…
I had to do it. “David,” I said, and closed my eyes. “David, come to me. David, come to me. David, come to me.” Rule of three. Even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t refuse to obey that, not even as an Ifrit, so long as he was bound to a bottle. I had to know if the bottle was intact, at least. If David was still bound.
Out in the shadows, something moved. It was unsettlingly like that giant cockroach, the way it caught the floodlights in shiny angles and sharp points.
Skin like coal. Nothing human about it.
“David?” I whispered.
The Ifrit stood there, motionless. I got nothing from it. No sense of connection, no sense of it even existing beyond the evidence of my eyes.
If he’d come when I called, he was still bound to the bottle. Worst possible news. I felt tears burning in my eyes again. “God, no. David, I’m so sorry. I’m going to find you. There’s got to be a way to make this right, to make this—”
He moved. Quicker than a Djinn, scarier, he was touching-close in less time than it took my nerves to fire an impulse to scream. His black-clawed hands slashed through me and plunged into…
… into that golden reservoir of power that Lewis had given me.
Why? How? Ifrits couldn’t feed on humans, not even Wardens, they couldn’t…
He was. “No!” I screamed, and tried to back up. I tripped and went down, felt something slash my shoulder, took a sharp angle hard in the back. The impact stunned the breath out of me and made me go momentarily hazy.