Lewis and I were leaning against the Jeep, gasping for air and trying not to moan. Much.
“You okay?” he asked me at last, and put that warm hand on the back of my neck.
I managed to nod. “No, you’re not. You’re too weak. Again.”
“I’m all right.”
“Bullshit.” He looked like hell; he was one to talk. Burned, blistered, ragged, suffering in his eyes. And a bone-deep weariness, too. He’d been running hard for a long time, and today was just another one of those days. He didn’t push the subject, though; he looked over at Rahel, then out toward the sea. “You feel that?”
“Yeah.” I sucked in a deep breath. “It’s bad. Maybe as bad as Andrew back in ’92.”
“Worse,” he said succinctly. “This is bigger and stronger.”
Worse than a Category Five. That wasn’t good news, clearly. “So? What do we do?”
“ Youdo nothing. Jo, you’re like a wet rag; there’s nothing you can contribute. You need to get the hell out of here, I told you before. Fighting will get you killed.”
I swept him with a look. Burns, bloody wounds, and all. “Is this the last of them? The ones looking to take you out?”
“Probably not.”
“And whoshould be running?”
He smiled. It was just a little smile, tired and sweet, but it went through me like an arrow. “How’s David?”
I turned away, all the light going out inside. “I don’t know. I don’t know where he is. Things are…” I took a deep breath and said it, just said it. “I lost him. I lost the bottle.” God, it hurt. I couldn’t imagine that anything could ever hurt worse.
I could feel Lewis staring at the back of my head for a long few heartbeats, and then the Jeep’s weight shifted as he pushed off.
When I turned, he was stalking through the pouring rain to where Cherise, Kevin, and Rahel were.
Okay, what did I say?
He grabbed Kevin by the collar and yanked him bodily out from under the plastic poncho. Cherise yelped and flinched, and Kevin yelled, and Lewis dragged him, stumbling, by the front of his greasy-looking T-shirt back over to me.
“Give it back,” he said. Kevin flailed until Lewis shook him, hard. “I’m not fucking around with you, kid. Give her back the bottle.”
“What the hell… ?” I blurted, amazed, and then I remembered something Detective Rodriguez had said, in the surveillance van. The kid who was in your apartment last night ripped off some cash from the flour jar in your kitchen.Kevin had ransacked his way through the apartment, hadn’t he? And if anybody knew about the value of Djinn bottles…
I’d never even thought about it. I was too stunned to be angry.
Kevin looked pale, panicked, and stubborn. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man!”
Oh, wait, the stun was wearing off now. Yep, anger was coming on strong. I shoved Lewis out of the way and grabbed the kid’s skinny, strong arms, shoving him back against the Jeep. “Don’t bullshit me, Kevin! Did you call him out? Did you try to use him?” Kevin didn’t say anything, just looked at me. Pale as skim milk, and just about as appetizing. “Dammit, say something!Is David all right?”
Kevin licked his already wet lips, averted his eyes, and mumbled, “Not my fault. He asked me to do it.”
I felt shock slip over me in a cold wave. “Excuse me?”
“I was just looking around. He—he appeared in the room and he told me to take the bottle.”
“He couldn’t tell you where it was, you asshole!” Djinn rules, although I’d seen Jonathan break them once. I’d asked David point-blank where his bottle was, and he couldn’t tell me…
… or, I realized with a sinking feeling close to despair, he didn’t wantto tell me.
“He didn’t have to say anything,” Kevin was explaining. “He just stood there, you know, next to the nightstand. It was kinda obvious.”
I tried to say something—what, I don’t know—but it didn’t make sense when it got to my lips. I just stood there, staring at Kevin’s blank eyes.
“Look, he didn’t want you to get hurt anymore,” Kevin said. “He thought—if I held on to the bottle for a while—maybe you could get stronger. I was supposed to give him back, later. When things got better.”
I felt my knees go weak. My stomach hurt where the cat had clawed me, my head hurt, my knees hurt; God, my heart was breaking. “He wanted to leave me.”
Lewis put his hands on my shoulders. “I think he was trying to save your life, Jo.”
“Bullshit. B ullshit!”I was suddenly furious. “This is—you guys just— men!You don’t make decisions for me, got it? I’m not some fragile little flower! I have a life, and it’s my life, and if I want to—”
“Throw it away?” Lewis interjected helpfully.
Okay, he had a point. I didn’t let it bother me. “Hey, I grubbed around at the dump looking for him! Hello! Leave a damn note if you’re stealing my boyfriend!”
And I realized that Kevin hadn’t answered my original question. His eyes were still frightened and blank.
“Oh God,” I said. “Did you use him? Kevin, did you call him out of the bottle and use him?”
He nodded. Rain dripped in silver strings from his lank hair to patter onto his soaked T-shirt. He was shivering. We were all likely to get hypothermia out there if we weren’t careful.
“Is he—”
“He’s gone,” Kevin said. It sounded hard and harsh, and I could tell he didn’t want to say it. “Sorry, but it’s like the bottle’s empty. He’s just—gone, he just screamed and he, you know… blipped out. I kept calling, but he wouldn’t come back. He couldn’t. I needed him, Jo, I’m sorry but I had to do it, Lewis was in trouble and—”
I knew. I’d done the same thing, hadn’t I? I’d called David even when I knew it was killing both of us.
And now I knew why Kevin hadn’t waded into the fight with his usual teen-angst enthusiasm. He couldn’t. Like me, he’d been drained of power. And it hadn’t been enough.
If he couldn’t sense David in the bottle, it was because David was an Ifrit.
Maybe he was in the bottle, maybe he wasn’t; Kevin probably hadn’t thought to order him back inside and seal it up. To him, David had just vanished without a trace.
I couldn’t help but feel a sick certainty that this time he wouldn’t be coming back.
I still had hopes, until Kevin dug the blue glass bottle out of his bag and put it into my hands, but it was no more mystical than grabbing an empty jar out of the kitchen cabinet. No sense of connection. It was an empty bottle, and God,I couldn’t feel David’s presence at all.
I couldn’t even feel him draining me, and that had at least been something, before.
“Back in the bottle, David,” I said, and waited a second before I slammed the rubber stopper home into the open mouth. I wrapped the bottle in a spare towel from the back of the Jeep, then buried it in my purse with the lipstick case and the Djinn sealed inside.
“Um,” Kevin said hesitantly, “are we—are you—”
“Do I want to kill your punk ass? You betcha.” My hands were shaking, and not from the chill. “I don’t care what David said, you didn’t have any right to do this. No right, do you understand?”
He nodded. He looked sullen and miserable, a combination only possible in teenagers.
“You evertouch anything I own again, and I swear to God, Kevin, you’ll wish I’d torched your ass in Vegas.”
“Like I don’t wish it already,” he muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He gave me a blank, militant stare. I threw Lewis a furious look.