With all the power she had, she was helpless to do anything without endangering innocent lives. She needed help.
I had no idea whether Alice was on the right or wrong side in this, but at least she wasn’t the one holding a guy over a three-story drop.
I considered my options, and decided on something relatively risky. Djinn are, essentially, vapor in their atomic structure; they can increase their weight and give themselves the corresponding mass, but just now I figured that Prada was more interested in keeping her balance than having true human form. A human appearance was doing the job, for her purposes. She didn’t need the actual reality.
All I needed to do was hit her from behind with a powerful wind gust, enough to break her grip on the guy she was holding, and at the same time tip him backward and encourage him to hop down onto the concrete again.
Simple. Relatively elegant. And a hell of a lot better than waiting for the Djinn Deathmatch to turn up a winner.
I closed my eyes, took a fast, deep breath, and reached out for control of the air around me.
And missed.
I gasped and reached farther, stretched. Felt a faint stirring come to me. A stiff breeze. Nothing nearly strong enough. Oh my God… I felt clumsy, drugged, imprecise. Horribly impaired. I fought my way up onto the aetheric, feeling like I was swimming against a flood tide, and when I arrived everything was gray, dimmed, distant. Gray as ash.
It was like what had happened to me over breakfast with Sarah and Eamon, only far worse.
I buckled down and went deep, all the way deep, into reserves I hadn’t called on since I’d survived the Demon Mark. Pulled energy out of my cells to fire the furnace of power inside. Pulled every scrap of power I had and threw it into the mix…
And it wasn’t enough. I could bring the wind but I couldn’t control it. It would be worse than useless, it would hit with the force of a tornado and swirl uncontrollably, throw the man’s fragile human body onto the concrete and that would be my fault…
Prada sensed I was doing something. She snarled and extended her free hand toward me, talons outstretched and gleaming, and it was déjà vu all over again.
I could feel her reaching into my chest to take hold of my pounding heart. She wouldn’t even have to work hard to kill me; it would be a simple matter of disrupting the electrical impulses running through nerves, just a quick jolt …
“David!” I yelped. I didn’t mean to; I knew better, dammit, but I was scared and there was a Warden who was going to die because I wasn’t strong enough…
“David? Where?” Cherise, distracted from the drama for a second, stared at me.
“Who, the guy up on the rail? That’s not David, is—”
I felt the warm surge of power, flaring to a white-hot snap, and David came from out of nowhere between parked cars, olive drab coat belling around him in the wind. Auburn and gold and fire in flesh. Moving faster than human flesh could manage. Nobody standing around watching the action even glanced at him. To their eyes, he didn’t even exist.
The other four Djinn in the crowd froze, staring. And as one, took a step backward.
Prada hissed and instantly transferred her attack to him, which was a mistake; it brought him to a stop, all right, but only because he wanted to get a good, hard look at her. He looked tired, so horribly tired, but he dismissed whatever she was trying to do to him with a negligent shake of his head. He looked at the man on the railing, then the cops. Took it in, in a single comprehensive glance.
I wondered, not for the first time, what Djinn saw when they studied a scene like that. The surface? The glowing furious tangle of human emotions? The energies we exerted, even unconsciously, on the world around us?
Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been pretty. I saw faint lines groove themselves around his mouth and eyes.
His eyes turned to hot, molten metal, and his skin took on a hard shine. Getting ready for battle. He looked at Prada, who returned the glance with level calm.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked.
“I don’t answer to you,” she replied. “You betrayed us. Turned your back on us.”
David turned to Alice, who raised pale eyebrows. “It’s begun,” she said. “It’s spreading like a disease. A Free Djinn kills a master, sets loose a slave, who frees another, who frees another.”
He looked appalled. “Jonathan ordered this?”
“Of course not.” Alice’s cornflower blue eyes fixed on Prada again, unblinking.
“Ashan killed her master for her, in return for her loyalty.”
Prada echoed, sarcastically, “My master.” It was a curse, loaded with acid and venom. “He didn’t deserve to lick my shoes. I broke no laws. I never touched him.”
“What about him?” David said, and nodded at the Warden she was jerking around on the railing. “What has he done to you to deserve this?”
Prada’s elegant lips compressed into a hard line. “They all deserve this.”
“Oh, that’s where we differ,” he said. “They don’t. Let him go. If you do, I swear that I’ll protect you if Alice makes a move against you.”
“David,” Alice said, and there was a warning in it. “I’m here on Jonathan’s orders.” He ignored it.
“I’ll protect you,” he repeated. “Let him go.”
Prada bared perfectly white, shark-sharp teeth. She looked, if possible, even more feverish. “You’re Jonathan’s creature,” she said. “You always have been. He and his creatures don’t command me, not anymore.”
David looked—well, shocked. As if she’d just told him the Earth was a pancake carried on the back of a turtle. “What do you mean?”
“I follow the one who knows that humans are our enemies,” Prada said. “The one who understands that our enslavement must end, regardless of the cost. I follow Ashan.”
Oh, shit.
I was looking at a civil war. Playing out right here, messily, in the human world—Djinn Lord Jonathan and his second lieutenant (now that David was incapacitated) Ashan had had some kind of falling out. The Djinn were splitting into sides. Ashan hated humans—I knew, I’d met him, back when I’d been a Djinn.
Jonathan didn’t hate humans, but he didn’t love us, either. We were just an annoyance and, at best, he wouldn’t actively exterminate us. Allowing us to die was another thing entirely.
David was the only Djinn I’d ever met who seemed to really care one way or another about the fate of humanity as a whole, and David was nowhere near powerful enough to be in the middle of this. Not these days. If the other Djinn were wary of him, it was only because they knew him from the old days.
They couldn’t yet see the damage that had been done to him.
He didn’t lookimpaired, though, not at the moment. The wind ruffled his bronze-struck hair, and the light in his eyes was like an open flame. More Djinn than I’d seen him in a long time. Less human.
He turned slightly and shifted his gaze to me, and I felt that connection between us pull as tight as a belaying rope. I was his support, his rock. And he was in free fall now, burning through his fragile resources at a terrifying pace.
I have to try to stop this, I felt him say across that silent, secret link. Hold on. This may hurt.
He wasn’t kidding. Suddenly the drain between us—the one-way flow cascading from me into him—opened up to become a torrent, and damn, it didn’t just hurt, it felt as if my guts were being ripped out and scrubbed with steel wool. I must have looked like hell, because Cherise called my name and I felt her grab me by the shoulders. I couldn’t pull my eyes away from what was happening in the Bermuda triangle of the three Djinn standing in front of me, and the four moving into position to attack David from behind.
Whatever was about to happen, it was going to happen now.
David started walking forward. Prada’s eyes—burning ruby red now—followed him, but she didn’t move. Still caught in her iron-hard grip, the Warden watched tensely, too. Helpless to affect any outcome. He wasn’t a Weather Warden, I could sense that much, and I doubted he was an Earth power. Probably Fire, which wouldn’t do him a damn bit of good right now.