Heat Stroke (28 page)

“What part of
shut up
was unclear to you?”

I returned the stare, full force. Since last he'd intimidated me, I'd had the hard-core lesson in How To Be
A Djinn, and the whole god-of-your-new-existence routine wasn't going to cut it anymore. “Answer the question. Was it a Djinn who did it?”

“Oh, we are
so
going to talk about this later,” he said.

“I'll take that as a yes. I'm just going on magical theory, here . . .” Because unlike the Djinn, I'd actually had class time learning about all of the physics of the stuff, the rules, and the various consequences. “ . . . but it seems to me that whoever ripped it open would have a pretty good idea of how to close it. Since he must have known what he was doing. I mean, the thing was pretty well camouflaged when I got there. Discreet, you know?”

I had him. He blinked.

“Or was that stating the obvious?” I asked, and tilted my head to the side.

Neurosurgery. Without anesthetic. With a dull butter knife.

“We can't ask the one who opened it,” he said.

“Because?”

The argument had taken on a tennis-match quality. The room full of Djinn was just watching us, shifting from one to the other, eyes avid. Rooting against me, no doubt. I didn't care. There was only one opponent who mattered.

“Because he's not here.” Jonathan's fierce eyes were absolutely fiery. “Drop it already.”

I might have been slow on the uptake, but I finally got it.
David.
I know it registered on my face, because I felt it like an earthquake inside.
David opened the rift . . .

“Why?” I whispered. “Why in God's name would he . . .”

Jonathan gave me a pitying look, like I was the stupidest creature in the universe. Which, at that moment, I supposed I was. “For love,” he said. “Why else?”

David had opened the rift when he'd made me a Djinn.
You've broken laws.
Rahel had said that, and I hadn't listened. Jonathan himself had tried to tell me how serious it was, what we'd done.

David had opened the rift, and drawn on something on the other side when he brought me back to life.

It was our fault the Djinn were dying.

T
HREE

Nobody had much to say, after Jonathan made it clear the tennis match was over and the subject was closed. Neither of us had come right out and said what we were thinking, which was good; I wasn't sure I wanted all of these extremely powerful and extremely arrogant creatures to take offense at me. Especially not Ashan, who looked like he could bore a hole in titanium with a sideways glance. There was already an overload of mumbling and fiercely predatory looks toward me. I wished Rahel would show up; she was at least marginally congenial to me. Even Patrick would be welcome right about now, and not because I wanted to body-slam him into the wall; he'd been through this process before me, and survived it. The world had survived. The Djinn had survived. I needed to find out how, and I was pretty sure I couldn't.

My fault. This is my fault.
I couldn't keep it from running through my head. Why hadn't David told me? Why had he never even let on? Had he even
known
?

Of course he knew. It occurred to me, late and
cruelly, that the reason Jonathan had kept him here had been to try to find a way to close the rift without killing him, or me. I'd thought it was a punishment, but it had been Jonathan's way of trying save us both. He and David had been working on a way to stop it.

Oh,
God.
I'd misunderstood so much.

Something changed in the room, a kind of stillness. Jonathan waved people away from the center space, turned, and glanced at me. Apparently, I was the only one who didn't get it. “Incoming,” he said.

Rahel materialized in the space left open.

She was covered in roiling blue specks. Djinn shouted and stampeded backwards as the sparks began to fly up and out, looking for other hosts; Jonathan moved forward.

Before he got there, Rahel's yellow eyes went blank, and she collapsed in slow motion down to the rug. She was closest to me; I didn't think, I just reached down for her.

My hands sank into her, wrist deep. Not that she was misted—that would have been better, oh God, far better. No, what I sunk into was flesh the consistency of warm butter, bathed in blood and melting muscle. I hit the relative hardness of bone but it was melting, too, dissolving like wax in the sun.

She was trying to say something to me. Her lips were whispering, anyway. I yanked my hands back, trembling, and stared at the smeared warm mess clinging to my skin. Her open eyes flared from a violent storm–black to a pallid blue, shifting colors like a wildly spinning prism.

“Joanne!” Jonathan snapped. He dropped to his
knees next to her, extended one hand over her body, and reached out to me with the other. “Get your ass back. She's contaminated.”

I could see the energy spilling out of his outstretched hand, golden white and so intense that it seemed to warp space around it. Pure life energy, keyed to the magic of the earth. Healing energy. David had said that Jonathan was the strongest of the Djinn; I hadn't quite believed it, until now. He was doing this even here, cut off from everything . . . That was the legacy of his birth, his connection to the Mother. Of all the Djinn, he was the only one with power of his own.

And it didn't matter. The damage just kept getting worse—flesh slipping from muscle, muscle dissolving to mush. The soft-focus gleam of bone beneath.

She cried out, once, and I felt her agony vibrating through the aetheric. I forced myself to look at her in Oversight; she was crawling with those blue specks, and they were
alive,
moving, eating.

She was being devoured. But they'd been all over me, all over David, they hadn't hurt us, God, what the hell . . .

“Stop it,” Ashan said. His voice was raw, colorless. “It's done. You can't save her.”

Jonathan ignored him, ignored everything. He was focused on Rahel, fiercely intense, and the power flowing out of him just kept increasing. I felt it like a pressure against my skin, saw others shying away from it.

Rahel's skin continued to slough away, revealing soft wet masses of tissue. The skin misted as it fell away. Slowly, layer by layer, the muscle began to
peel back as well. Jonathan kept trying, uselessly and furiously, to keep her together.

“Stop,” I said, feeling the words turn in my throat like razors. “Please. He's right, you're just making it worse. Let go.”

His face was pallid and damp with strain, and his eyes were glittering with frustration, but he released the energy and dropped his hand back to his side. He didn't move, though. I don't even know if he
could
move, by then. I felt the energy flow shut down and watched as Rahel's body melted away into a fetid, oily mist.

Gone.

She was still screaming when she vanished.

“Is she dead?” I blurted. Nobody answered. I don't think they could. I had a cold flash of certainty that it was worse than that, far worse, out there on the aetheric. It was a horrible way to go. No wonder Jonathan had shut Ashan down so hard on the very idea of just letting Djinn stay trapped there. It was unforgivable.

What about David? I closed my eyes and reached for that silver link between us. It was faint and thin, but it was there. Unbroken.

Blue specks crawled up my arms.

“Joanne!” Jonathan's voice again, too loud, ringing inside my head. I blinked away blue sparks to stare up at him. “Shit. I
told
you to stay back!”

Funny that this didn't hurt. It had hurt Rahel, I'd felt it shaking the fabric of the world, it hurt her so much. I could still feel her agony resonating in waves across the room.

Jonathan reached out for me, but I just stepped away. Instinct, I guess.

Because it didn't hurt.

I opened my eyes again and saw the most amazing thing.

Sparks. Blue swarmed out of the air, onto my skin, and
vanished.
The things that had eaten Rahel couldn't hurt me.

Jonathan stopped, staring at me. I sighed, watched the last of the coldlight sizzle into emptiness, and wondered what had him looking so pale and confused.

“I'm okay,” I said. I thought he was worried about me.

Pallor faded to stretched white on his face and clenched fists. His eyes looked dark and blind.

“Jonathan?”

“Little trouble here,” he said.

I extended a hand toward him . . .

. . . and he lit up like a Christmas tree with crawling blue light.
Oh God!
The other Djinn backed away, viscerally terrified, as he wavered and fell backwards against a wall. Closed his eyes. “Shit,” he said. “Guess I'm not immune after all.”

Instinct. I grabbed for him as he started to slide down.

The sparks whirled out, climbed my arms, circled me in a storm of blue. Rahel's grisly dissolution ran red in front of my eyes, and I swore I wasn't going to let that happen, not to
him,
not now . . .

I sucked the sparks in, laid them thick on my skin, and consciously opened myself to them. I opened my
squeezed-shut eyes and watched the light show as the sparkles glittered, peaceful and serene on my skin, then faded out into nothing.

I'm made of this.
That was why they couldn't hurt me. I was just taking in more of what had formed me in the first place.

Jonathan sat where he was, watching, too. His dark eyes shifted to meet mine.

“Thanks,” he said.

I nodded. “Favor for a favor. We need to get David back.
Now.”

“I know,” he said. He sounded tired. “You look like hell.”

“Funny, I don't feel . . .” Oh. Yes I did, actually. There went gravity again, twisting all out of shape. This time, I didn't mistake it for coldlight or anything but what it was: somebody trying to call me. That fishhook sensation pulled at me, painful and undeniable. Not Jonathan, this time. And this wasn't a call to safety, either.

Jonathan held on to me while I fought the pull. I felt his will settle over me like a soft, smothering blanket, and the summoning pull was lost in the weight.

“Tired,” I whispered. He already knew that. He was lifting me again in his arms as all the other Djinn murmured to each other, as Ashan stared at me with those cold blue-green eyes.

Back to the bedroom.

The soft feather pillow.

The frosted-coal shadow of the Ifrit, watching.

I slept.

 

The next day—if days had any meaning here—dawned just as bright and sunny and peaceful as all days did in Jonathan's little kingdom.

I woke up to find the man himself sitting in a chair watching me. The Ifrit was gone.

“Wow,” I said. “This is getting familiar.”

“Don't wear it out.”

“The bed or my welcome?”

He ignored what was admittedly a pretty weak comeback. “So. How you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“Good.” I wasn't sure what he wanted, and I had the impression he wasn't either, really. He got up to walk around the room, long strides that didn't quite rise to the level of pacing. More like a stroll, with purpose. “About the rift up there.”

“What about it?” All my fight drained away at the bare mention of it. I couldn't help but remember the red, tearing agony of Rahel dissolving into mush, or the hundreds of others who were suffering somewhere out there, where I couldn't see them.

“You think it's your fault,” he said. “Crap. What happened was David's choice, not yours . . . and he had no way of knowing this would happen. Hell, even I didn't understand what was going on until too late to do anything about it. Once I did, he wanted to go fix things.”

“But?”

“But by then I knew it was too dangerous, and then he went tearing off after you when you got—” He waved a hand, didn't bother to finish the sentence. “He's not exactly what you might call big-picture when it comes to personal sacrifice.”

“Neither am I. Neither are you.” He gave me a slight nod to acknowledge the point. “You should've told me about the rift. Or at least about how badly things were screwed up because I was brought back.”

He shrugged, a simple economical straight-up-and-down movement of his shoulder blades. No particular emotion in it. “Things screw up all the time. Hey. You gotta love the excitement. Granted, this is a lot more exciting than usual . . . but you stay alive as long as I have, you learn to take these things in stride. The Djinn have faced worse.”

I stared up at the shadows on the ceiling. “How much worse?”

“Hard to tell until it's over.”

I pulled in a deep breath. Funny, I didn't need it, but it still seemed to calm me. Some human habits were persistent. “How's everybody else?”

“Sleeping,” he said, and nodded toward the far wall. “Lots of guest rooms. We run a topflight refugee camp around here.” He gave me a thin, almost human smile, but it didn't last. “I never thought I'd like you, but you turned out okay. ‘Gut shortage.' That was pretty good.”

“Yeah, sorry about that. I got carried away.”

“No, you're right. One thing Djinn are scared of, it's death. Their own, not anybody else's. It makes us cowards. Look at me! I've been sitting here in this house for so long I don't even know what it's like out there.”

“I do,” I said. “You're better off in here.”

“Not for much longer,” he said. He held out his hand, palm up, as if he was offering something to
me. I looked at it, puzzled, and felt a sudden stab of alarm as a single cool blue spark ignited in his aura. “They're coming in. I can't keep them out, I can only slow them down. It's going to be one giant blue snow globe in here soon. And even though I'm resistant to them, I'm not immune.” He stood up, swiped imaginary dust from his pants, and gestured at me. “So, you gonna take the day off, or are you getting your ass out of bed?”

I had already formed clothes under the sheet—the same denim and boots as before. One nice thing about being a Djinn—dress and bounce out of bed, no rework on the hair or makeup necessary. Although the hair was still displaying that annoying tendency to curl. I straightened it again as I asked, “What now?”

“You said it. We need David.”

“I'll go.”

“You're in thrall,” he said. “If your little jerk of a master finds out you're where he can reach you, he'll get you back and dressed like a pinup fantasy girl in ten seconds flat.”

“Ugh. Don't remind me.”

“Oh, I don't know, the French Maid outfit was a little—” He held up a hand to forestall my protest. “Never mind. Point is, if you go outside of the barrier he'll be able to get you back.”

“He's probably still asleep.”

“He is.” Jonathan nodded. “Problem is that he was calling for you in his sleep. And if you go outside this house, you won't be able to resist.”

“I still want to go. If I get taken, so be it. I manipulated the kid once, I can do it again.”

“You'd better hope so. Well, you're not going alone. This is too important to screw up.” He folded his hands together behind his back, stopped pacing, and faced me in a parade rest posture. “I'm going with you.”