He didn’t let go. When I opened my eyes he was crouched on top of me; black edges and angles, hunger and an absence of everything I knew as human, a Djinn emptied of all that made him part of the world…
And then, he flickered and became flesh, bone, blood, heartbeat, real. Djinn in human form. Copper-bright hair, burning eyes, skin like burnished gold.
“Oh, God,” he murmured, and staggered back from me, clothes forming around him—blue jeans, open flannel shirt, his olive drab coat. “I didn’t mean to—Jo—”
“Where are you?” It was all I could do to form the words; he’d taken so much energy from me that I felt oddly slow, as if there wasn’t enough current left in my cells to drive the process of life and thought again. “Tell me.”
He reached down and lifted me in his arms, buried his face in the curve of my neck. He felt blazing hot, powered by my stolen life. I felt his agonized scream shiver through me. I stilled him by clumsily putting a hand on his face. “David, tell me where you are.”
He was weeping. Weeping. Human tears from inhuman eyes, a kind of despair I’d never seen in him before, a trapped and hunted fury. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I told you to stop me, I told you—”
“Hey! Put her down!”
I blinked and saw the dump whirl around me as David turned, still holding me.
Sarah was standing about ten feet away, holding—what the hell was that? A frying pan? Yep, a huge iron skillet. It must have weighed twenty pounds. Her arms were trembling with the effort of keeping it held at threat level.
“I mean it!” she yelled, and took another step toward us. “Put my sister down right now or it’s batter up!”
“It’s okay,” I said, and felt the world start to gray out. I held on with an effort. “Sarah, no. This is David.”
She looked confused. Her knuckles whitened around the skillet.
“Boyfriend,” I managed.
“Oh.” She swallowed, dropped the skillet with a clang of metal, and scrubbed her fingers against her filthy blue jeans. “Um, sorry. But—Jo? Are you okay?”
“She fell,” David said. He sounded shaken. When I looked up at him I saw that he’d formed glasses, and his eyes were fading to human brown. He still looked way too gorgeous to be real, but maybe that was just my prejudice. “I’ll carry her out.”
“Sorry,” I whispered, and put my arms around his neck. His strength and warmth folded around me, sheltering and protecting. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”
“I know.” He touched his lips to my hair, then my forehead. “I wish you didn’t. I wish I could make this—stop. If I didn’t love you, wasn’t part of you, I couldn’t do this to you…”
“David, tell me where you are!”
He tried to tell me. His mouth opened, but nothing came out. He shook his head in frustration and tightened his hold on me as he made his way over the mountains of sharp metal and broken furniture, heading for the metal steps back up to the parking lot.
“Please. No, wait—I need to get your bottle, we can’t just leave it here—David, I’m ordering you, tell me where it is!”
He brushed my lips with a kiss, something gentle and very sad. “It won’t work,” he said. “You’re not my master anymore.”
And that was when I realized that I didn’t feel the draw anymore—the connection of master to Djinn.
Somebody else had his bottle.
“Who—”
Overhead, black clouds rumbled. I felt a breeze ruffle my hair. David moved faster, effortlessly graceful. No longer trying to look all that human. I remembered how he’d been on the overpass, all that unnatural balance and weird, fey control. He took the metal steps two at a time.
Sarah was still struggling along in his wake.
David carried me to the minivan and put me in the passenger seat, one hand dragging warm down the curve of my cheek as he settled my head against the cushions. A flash of lightning lit him blue on one side while the floodlights washed him white on the other.
“Don’t look for me,” he said. “It’s better that you don’t. You’re not safe with me now.”
He kissed me. Baby-soft lips, damp and silken and hot. I tasted peaches and cinnamon and power.
When he tried to pull back, I held on, holding the kiss, deepening it, demanding. Drinking a little bit of my power back from him.
Enough to make me a Warden again, even though not much of one.
He faded and cooled as I did it, but not quite enough to slide back into Ifrit-state. But he would. As the power faded, he’d revert.
But for now, at least, we were balanced. The connection—and it was a different one than we’d had as master and Djinn—worked both ways.
“You didn’t have to answer when I called,” I said, and touched the side of his face, then tangled my hands in the soft strands of his hair. “If I’m not your master—”
“I’ll always be yours,” he interrupted. “Always. The bottle doesn’t matter.” His forehead pressed against mine, and his breath pulsed warm on my skin. “Don’t you understand that yet?”
Another flash of lightning blinded me. When I opened my eyes, my hands were empty, and David was gone. I didn’t cry. I felt too numbed and empty to cry.
Sarah lunged over the top of the metal steps from the junkpile, panting, flushed, thoroughly filthy. She grabbed the open door and looked inside, then met my eyes. Hers were anime-wide.
“Where’d he come from? Wait… where’d he go?”
I just shook my head. Sarah stared at me for a long, considered second, and then shut the door and climbed into the driver’s seat. The engine started with a roar, and she began piloting the Good Ship Minivan out of the dump.
“He’s a Djinn,” I said wearily, and leaned my head against the glass. “Magic’s real. I control the weather. He’s an immortal creature made out of fire, and he grants wishes. I was getting around to telling you.”
Silence. Sarah hit the brakes hard enough to jerk, and for a few long seconds we just sat there, idling, until the first fat drops of rain began pelting the van with hard, resonant thumps.
“Well,” she finally said, “at least he’s cute. Are you insane?”
I sighed. “Oh, I so wish I was.”
We drove home. I felt exhausted and sick and sore, and refused Sarah’s multiple offers of visits to the local emergency room or mental health center, no matter how rich, cute, and single the doctors might be. I showered away the dump under the new high-pressure massaging bath nozzle—not all of Sarah’s upgrades were objectionable—and crawled into my brand-new bed, too tired to wonder what I was going to do in the morning about all my various enemies, crises, and wars.
David was, at least, not buried under half a ton of garbage at the dump, or at least I didn’t think he was. That was about as much of a victory as I could aspire to for one day.
In retrospect, if I’d had half a brain in my head, I’d have never shut my eyes.
Interlude
As the storm destroys the island that men called Atlantis, as it strips it bare and devours every fragment of life before sinking the bare rocks under the waves—something strange happens. The explosion of death-energy from the destruction is so huge that, to balance the scales, five hundred Djinn snap into existence, each holding some small measure of the life of that lost, beautiful land. Lost and alone, newborn.
Powerful, and afraid.
The storm doesn’t see them as fuel for its fires, and turns north, toward a rich, green land full of energy, full of life, full of fragile things that it can grind apart in its fury.
And this is when it becomes my story, and my mistake. I can’t stop it. The Djinn can’t stop it, even with the addition of the Five Hundred; the storm is a natural thing, and we can’t fight manifestations of the Mother nearly so well as we fight each other, or things in the world of man.
The end of the world is on us. We argue, the Djinn. Some of us try to turn the storm aside, but it’s too much for us.