Because he was in the middle of a war. I did understand. The battling Djinn had disappeared, but the aftereffects of their battle lingered like burned cordite on the raw air. If this was happening all over the world…
“I don’t know how to help him,” I croaked. “I’ve tried. I just don’t understand how to do it.”
I felt his grip on my throat tighten again. He pressed right against me, his thighs against mine, bent over me in a parody of a dance.
“Well, then, you’re no good to me, are you?”
“Wait…” I tried to swallow. Pretty much useless. This was going to hurt so, so badly, if I survived it. “You—you must be able to—”
“If I could fix him, don’t you think I already would have? Do you think this is some kind of game for me, watching him suffer?” No, I didn’t think that. I could see the furious pain in Jonathan’s eyes. “He’s your slave. I can’t touch him until you set him free.”
David. The bottle. Jonathan couldn’t interfere. Those were the rules. I could only imagine how much he hated that, hated mefor being in his way.
I tried to swallow, but his grip was too tight. I could barely choke out the words around the burning pain in my throat. “ I can’t. You know as well as I do that if I let him go now—”
He knew. David would be beyond anyone’s control once I released him from the bottle. Jonathan mightbe able to help him, but first he’d have to catch him, and that might not be possible.
“Help me help him,” I whispered.
Oh, he didn’t like that idea, not at all. I’d never scored high on the list of Jonathan’s favorite people, for a lot of reasons—first, I was human, which was not a selling point; second, my relationship with David, and David’s tenacious commitment to me, had upset the long-standing order of Jonathan’s universe. And as Jonathan was, in Djinn terms, well-nigh as powerful as a god, that wasn’t really a good thing.
It was also very hard to mistake the fact that Jonathan cared for David. A lot.
In deep and eternal ways that stretched back to the days of their making. It didn’t make for a comfortable three-sided relationship.
“Help you?” he repeated. “Oh, I think I’ve helped you just about as much as you deserve, sweetheart. As in, you’re still breathing.”
“Not very well,” I croaked, and flailed a helpless hand toward my aching throat.
Which made his lips twitch in something that wasn’t quite a smile. He let go of me, but he didn’t step back. I slowly braced my hands on the railing and pushed myself back upright, careful to make no sudden movements—not that I could in any way hurt him, of course—and we ended up pressed together, chest to chest. He didn’t care about my personal space.
He stared at me from that very intimate distance. Seen close, those eyes were terrifying indeed… black, shot through with sparks like stars, galaxies burning and dying and being born. Once upon a time, far in the past, he’d been human and a Warden, with the three powers of Earth, Fire, and Weather… like those Lewis possessed these days. I didn’t know much about his human life, only his death; it had caused the Earth herself to wake and grieve. Jonathan had been made a Djinn by the force of that mourning. David, who’d been dragged along with him through those fires of creation, had come out sublimely powerful. Jonathan had come out a whole order of magnitude greater than that, perilously close to godhood.
He was losing that, to Ashan. How in the hell Ashan had the big brass ones to decide he could win in a toe-to-toe dogfight with Jonathan was beyond me, but the fact was, even if Jonathan kicked the crap out of him and all his Djinn followers, it was a war to make the Earth tremble. Nobody would be safe.
Nothing would be sacred.
Jonathan looked into me. It hurt, and I flinched and trembled and wanted desperately to hide in some dark corner, but there was no hiding from this. No defending against it, either. His hands came up and rested on my shoulders, slid up to cup my face between them with burning warmth. The heat of his skin on mine confused me, made me feel odd and disembodied. I wanted to pull away but I had nowhere to go, and besides, I wasn’t sure my body would even listen to any such command.
“Feeling weak?” he asked me, and bent closer. His eyes swallowed the world. “Feeling sick? A little offthese days?”
My lips parted. He was very, very close. So close that if he’d been human, we’d have been engaged.
He turned my head to a slight angle, tilted his own, and put his lips next to my ear. “He’s killing you,” Jonathan whispered. “Can’t you feel it? It’s been going on for a while, a little at a time. He’s eating you from the inside. You don’t think that’s been killing him, too? Destroying him?”
I remembered all of the signs. The weakness. The clumsiness I felt when reaching for power. The gray indistinctness of the aetheric. The overwhelming drag when I tried to call the wind.
“Human power can’t sustain him anymore. He’ll suck you dry. He’s an Ifrit; never mind how he looks when he’s gorged himself on your energy. He can’t help it. He’ll kill you, and once he does that, even if I can get him back, he’ll be a wreck. He’ll recover, but it’ll take too fucking long.”
I felt tears burn hot in my eyes, break free, slide cold down my cheeks. He moved back just an inch, and turned my head again in those large, strong hands to look at me again. His thumbs smoothed the wetness from my skin.
“I don’t care about you,” he continued with soft intensity. “Make no mistake; I’ll rip you apart if I have to, if it comes down to a choice of you or him. But I can’t let him kill you. He’ll be useless to me.”
I flinched. He held me in place. “I don’t know how to fix this,” I said. “I swear, Jonathan. I don’t know!”
“Simple. Go home, get that fucking bottle, smash it, and survive the rest of your pathetic life like everybody else in the human world. You have to let him go. He’s already dead to you.”
“Liar,” I whispered.
And got an evil, beautiful smile in return. “Yeah? If I’m a liar, why can’t you save him now? Why couldn’t you save that sad bastard down there from falling to his death? All in a day’s work for a Warden like you, right? You don’t need me. Go on. Be a hero.”
He let go of me and stepped back, and it was like going from the baking heat of the desert to Antarctica. My body cried out for his warmth, as if he were a drug and I’d developed a lightning-fast addiction. Bastard. He’d done it deliberately.
David was a wonderful, lyric poet of a lover. Jonathan, if he’d ever stoop to anything so intimate with a human, would be a pirate, taking what he fancied and forcing his partner to want it too. All cruel, casual grace and absolute dominance.
I grabbed the rail on either side and sucked in deep, calming breaths. Jonathan folded his arms and watched me as the energy drained away. Spiraled out into the black hole of David’s need.
“Help me,” I said, and God, defeat tasted bitter as poison. “Show me how to stop this.”
“Say the magic word.”
“Please.”
“That’s not the one I was looking for, but I’ll take it.” He reached out and put his hand flat against my chest. Heat spilled into me, intrusive as a stranger’s hands, and I went rigid against the invasion. Not that it mattered. Jonathan could do anything he wanted.
But it was life he was giving me, and I didn’t have the strength to refuse it anyway.
Jonathan watched me surrender to him with those hidden, dark eyes, and gave me a tiny thin slice of a smile. It was almost human. Not kind, but human.
“All right. What I’ve done is create a reservoir of power inside of you. It won’t last long. You need to let him go or you’ll die.”