And that lit a fuse on my temper. “I didn’t ask you to be my babysitter, Lewis! I can take care of myself, I always have!”
“And if you weren’t drained so far that you barely register as a Warden on the aetheric, I’d accept that,” he shot back. “Did David do this to you?”
I met his eyes and didn’t answer. He shook his head, anger sparking in his eyes, and deliberately looked away.
“Fine,” he said. “But you can’t let him feed off you like this. He’ll kill both of you.”
“I know.”
“I’m serious. You need to let him go. You need to break the bottle.”
“I know!Jonathan already made it clear, believe me.” I didn’t mention Rahel’s counterargument. I wasn’t sure I wanted him to know I hadn’t decided. “I’m fine, dammit. Don’t worry about me.”
He let go, reluctantly, and turned away to talk to the Ma’at, who were already signaling him impatiently for a confab.
That’s when I saw Jonathan standing at the fringes of the crowd, arms folded.
Jonathan himself, Master of the Djinn Universe, in the flesh. Commander in chief of one side of what might turn out to be a world-ending civil war.
He was disguised as a regular guy, dressed in black jeans and heavy boots and a brown leather jacket, ball cap pulled down low over his eyes. As with Ashan, the rain bent around him. I didn’t think anybody but me would notice; I doubted anybody but me could see him.
He was a hundred feet away, and there were dozens of people between us, but I felt the shock as his eyes locked onto me. I felt a burn inside, nothing comfortable, nothing like the connection I felt with David, or the purely heat-driven fizz between me and Lewis.
It was as if Jonathan ownedme, the way I owned David. Was this how it felt for David? Invasive and sickening? As if his every breath depended on mine?
“I warned you,” Jonathan said, and the bill of that ball cap dipped just a fraction.
Time stopped. Raindrops froze into glittering silver threads around me.
I was in Jonathan’s world now.
He walked through the silent landscape, moving around statues of humans in his way, breaking rain into fragments against that invisible shield he carried with him.
“I can’t do what you want,” I said when he stopped just three steps away. My words sounded weirdly flat in the still, dead air. “If I let him go, he’ll come after you, and that’ll be the end, won’t it? The end of everything. You’re important. That’s what Rahel’s been trying to tell me from the first time I met you. You’re the key to everything. Without you—”
He cut me off by sticking an accusatory finger in my face. “I told you what would happen. I toldyou, Joanne. Is this a habit with you, courting death? Because it’s getting old. You’re carrying around a kid, you know. Could devote a little thought to that while you’re walking over the cliff and mooning about your undying love.”
“It’s not about me. It’s you. I can’t let David come after you, and he will if I break the bottle.”
“Dammit!” His flare of fury was scary. It evaporated rain in a pulsing circle for about fifty feet in every direction. I felt my skin take on an instant burn. “Are you always this stupid, or is it a special feature just for me? Break the damn bottle, Joanne!”
“No.”
“Not even to save yourself and the kid.”
“No.”
“Not even to save David.”
Because that’s what all this was about, I suddenly realized. Not the world, not the war, not me. David. His constant and pure devotion to David, who’d been his friend since the world was younger than I could even imagine.
Who’d died in his arms, as a human.
“Because I can save him,” Jonathan said. “I know how.”
“Yeah,” I said, and locked stares with him. “I know, too. You die, he lives. And where does that leave the rest of us?”
Galaxies in his eyes. A vast and endless power, but it wasn’t his own. He was a conduit. A window to something larger than any of us, Djinn or human.
“He takes my place,” Jonathan said. “He lives. You live. The baby lives. He’s strong enough to take Ashan. I’m too damn tired for this; I’ve been running the show for too long. I’ve made too many mistakes, and we need a fresh start.”
Oh, God. It wasn’t Ashan suddenly deciding to rebel on his own… Ashan had just picked up on something else: Jonathan’s weakness, if you could describe somebody like him as weak. He just didn’t want to go on anymore.
“No,” I said again. “You can’t do this. I’m sorry, but you’re just going to have to gut it out and stop Ashan and put everything back the way it was. I’m not helping you commit suicide by David.”
He looked at me for a long time, in that still silent place where time didn’t exist. And I felt something like a shiver run through the world.
He raised his head toward the sky for a second, listening, and then shook his head again.
“That your final answer?” he asked.
Something about his expression almost made me change my mind, but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t let his need and his despair drive the game. This was too important.
“That’s it,” I said. “I’m not letting David go.”
“You’ll kill him. And he’ll destroy you.”
“So be it. Now go do your job and get things done. The world’s more important than me and David, and dammit, it’s more important than your death wish!”
He hated me. I felt it, strong as acid poured in an open wound.
“All I have to do is kill you,” he said. It was barely a whisper. “You know that, right? You die, the baby dies, and I can still do exactly what I want. Everybody wins but you.”
For a breathless second I thought he was going to do it. I could feel the impulse firing in him, could see the way it would happen—his hands around my head, turning with shocking strength, my spine snapping with the crisp sound of crumpled paper. The work of less than a second.
I remembered Quinn, helpless on the ground, coughing up blood. Terror in his eyes, at the end. Jonathan hadn’t even hesitated.
“I know,” I said. “Butch up and do it, if you’re going to. Don’t keep me in suspense.”
He stared at me for a second, eyes wild and dark, and then smiled.
Smiled.
He reached out, pulled a fingertip slowly down the line of my cheek, and walked away. Hands in his pockets. Raindrops shattering in his wake.
And then time slammed back in a fevered rush, and the world moved.
He was gone.
And something was very, very, very wrong with me.
I cried out, wrapped my hands over my stomach, and felt the sudden emptiness inside. The spark was gone, the potential, the childthat David had put inside of me.
I felt the last of the energy Jonathan had given me leak out. My vision went gray and blurry, and I felt my knees give way.
Falling.
Too much effort to breathe. Nothing left inside to live on. I was a black hole, empty and alone and dying in the rain.
David. I couldn’t even call him. And if he came, it would only be more death, faster death, no comfort and no love in it.
Warm arms scooped me up. Fingers slid from my arm down to clasp my limp hand, and as the world telescoped to a black pinpoint I felt a warm pulse of power go through my skin, my bones, my body. Hot as the sun, liquid and silky and rich.
It wasn’t enough.
My eyes were still open, and a little color swam out of the gray, but I couldn’t focus, couldn’t blink. Lewis was bent over me. He looked pale and desperate. He cupped my face in his hands, watching my eyes, and then ripped open my shirt and put his hands on my stomach, right where the worst of the emptiness hid itself.
That sensation came again, a slow and deliberate wave rippling through me to pool like hot molten gold somewhere just below my navel.
It drained away.