“Let go!” I yelled. “Dammit! John! Let go!”
He finally did, rolling off in a crunch of glass, and as I flipped over I saw that he’d sustained some cuts, but not a lot. So far, we’d been lucky.
“You all right?” he asked. I nodded. “Come with me.”
He scrambled up to his feet and held out his hand. I looked back at the parking lot, or at least what I could see of it; there was an unholy bonfire out there, consuming at least three cars.
The center of it was the blackened shell of the Viper formerly known as Mona, who wouldn’t be taking me on any more fast drives, ever again. I gulped and clutched my purse tight and took John’s hand.
He led me out of the lobby, past the arriving cluster of alarmed tenants and late-breaking security personnel, to the stairwell. He hit the stairs running, tasseled loafers pounding, and I had to hustle to keep up. John had been working out, or else adrenaline was a wonderful fitness drug.
We ran full speed up seven floors, all the way to the top of the building, to the door that was marked ROOF ACCESS, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. And I was very thankful when we slowed down at the top, because my shoes were not of the cross-training persuasion, but then he grabbed me and towed me toward the exit.
“John!” I yelled, and yanked him to a stop before he could stiff-arm the ALARMWILLSOUND crossbar. “John, wait! What’s going on?”
“You were right about the Djinn!” he yelled back. “We have to go, now!They’re coming!”
Oh, crap.
He broke free and hit the door release. An alarm added its shriek to the general confusion—the fire alarms were going off, too, and I wondered if the fire had spread somehow from the parking lot to the building—and as the door opened out onto the roof, rain and wind shouldered through the opening to hit us like linebackers. I staggered, but John reached back and grabbed my wrist and dragged me outside into the chaos of the downpour.
“John!” I screamed, over the continuing roll of thunder. “It’s not safe out here! The lightning—”
“Shut up; I’ll take care of the lightning!” And he could. John was a highly competent Weather Warden in his own right. Even as he finished saying it, I felt a ripple over my skin, and my blunted Warden senses registered something whipping through the aetheric at us like a striking snake…
John let go of me, turned, and focused his attention on a thick silver stanchion fixed to a corner of the roof.
Lightning hissed down. I could feel it struggling to reach us, fighting…
And then turning to hit the stanchion. The building’s lightning protection system bled it off into the ground through a network of inlaid wiring. I could feel the heat of it blast over me from where I stood.
But I also felt how close it had been. Something was directing that lightning.
Controlling it. Something a great deal stronger than John Foster.
He knew it, too; I saw it in the fixed, desperate set of his expression. “Come on!” John was tugging me onward, to a second concrete bunker on top of the roof.
The door was propped open. He grabbed it just as another flash of lightning came out of nowhere, streaking for us. John wasn’t ready, I knew it—he’d just spent a tremendous amount of energy redirecting that first bolt, and this one was just as big, if not bigger. And it was obviously bent on getting us.
What I had to throw into the pot barely qualified as power at all, but I did it, reaching out and trying to grab hold of the enormous burst of energy that was coming toward us. Electrons were shifting, jittering, realigning into polarities to create a path. All I had to do was snap a few… and I couldn’t do it. As fast as I broke the chain, it whipped back at us, those tiny molecular polarities spinning and locking faster than I could even read their force structure. Rain lashed, and a gust of wind howled over us in a scream of rage. I felt John desperately working to save us, and more power pouring in from outside trying to save us, but it was no good. The bolt was going to hit us dead on, and we were out of time. Whatever had hold of this storm wasn’t going to be denied.
I dived one way, knowing it wouldn’t do any good; John dived the other.
I hit and rolled, and saw the lightning spear straight into John’s chest.
“No!” Maybe I screamed it, maybe I didn’t; whatever sound I made was lost in the massive rush of energy that slammed into his flesh. In its burst of brilliant light, I saw John’s diamond-eyed Djinn standing nearby in the shadows, still and quiet, watching his master die. No expression on his face at all.
He didn’t move to help.
John, cut off from the Wardens network, had never heard the instructions to give his Djinn a preemptive command to defend him. He’d never really understood the danger. And if he had, he probably wouldn’t have believed it.
John dropped without a sound the second the lightning crackled and sizzled out.
I couldn’t see for long, agonizing seconds, so I fumbled my way over gravel and tar to take him in my arms. He was burning hot. As my vision cleared I saw that there were black burns at the top of his head, on the palms of his hands, and that his pants were riddled with sizzling, smoking holes. His shoes were melted to his feet.
I burned my fingers trying to check his pulse, but it was silent. His heart had taken a full jolt, and his nervous system was fried beyond repair.
The Djinn left the shadows and walked over to where I was huddled in the cold, pounding rain with John’s weight across my lap.
“You could have done something,” I said numbly. “Why didn’t you do something? He was your friend!”
He looked down at me. Rain didn’t touch him, just misted away an inch from his form. He was changing already, shifting from that quiet, unassuming young man John’s will had imposed on him to a larger, stronger body. His hair lightened from brown to white, rippling with subtle undertones of color like an opal.
Albino-pale skin. The down-home shirt and blue jeans transformed to rich, pale silk and velvet. He looked elegant and merciless and slightly barbaric.
“He wasn’t my friend,” the Djinn said. “A master can’t be friends with a slave. There’s no trust without equality.”
I choked on the taste of cold rain and burned flesh in my mouth. I wanted to weep, because the Djinn was right. No equality. Just because we were fond of the Djinn didn’t make them friends. Just because we loved them…
What had I done when I’d taken David as my servant? Had it destroyed the trust we’d had? How long would it take for that betrayal to soak into him, to erode his love for me, to turn it toxic?
Maybe the flaws that made him an Ifrit had started here, in me.
“You’re free now,” said a voice from behind me. I gasped and turned, blinking rain out of my eyes. It sounded like Ashan, and yes, it wasAshan, natty and businessman-perfect in his gray suit and chilly tie. His eyes had gone the color of the storm. Not a drop was touching him, of course. He walked forward, and where he walked, the rain just… vanished. He came to a halt a few feet from me, but he wasn’t paying the least attention to me, or the dead man in my arms.
His focus was all on the other Djinn.
“You bastard,” I said, and his eyes cut to me and shut me up. Instantly. With the unmistakable impression that I was one single heartbeat away from joining John in the heavenly choir.
“I’m not talking to you,” he said. “Shut up, meat.”
“Are you addressing me?” the other Djinn asked. He still had a British accent, clipped and precise and very old-school, which went very oddly with the barbaric splendor of his albino rock-star look.
“Of course. I came to give you the opportunity to join us.”
“Fortuitous timing.”
Ashan’s smile was cold and heartless. “Isn’t it just?”
The other Djinn smiled in return. Not a comforting sight. “I find myself free for the first time in memory. Why should I give up that freedom to another master, even one so… important as you?”
Ashan nudged John’s body carefully with the toe of his elegantly polished shoe.