Windfall

That was all it took.

A black blur that Eamon couldn't see, and suddenly Valentine was falling, screaming, ripping at the black shadow that formed over and around him. It was a nightmare to watch. David had changed into something more horrible than I could stand to see, and something that even my eyes wouldn't properly focus... I caught hints of sharp edges and teeth and claws, of insectile thrashing limbs. I stumbled off to the side, well away from them, until my hip banged painfully into Eamon's desk.

Eamon was thrown. "Valentine! Kill her!"

Valentine wasn't in any shape to obey commands. He was down flat on his face, screaming, and the Ifrit's claws were ripping him apart into mist.

Killing him.

Devouring him.

Eamon hadn't expected this, and for a long moment he was frozen, staring at his Djinn dying on the floor, bottle still held useless in his hand.

I called lightning and zapped him. Not fatally, because I didn't have it in me, but he screamed and jerked and slid bonelessly off the arm of the couch into a twisted pile on the carpet.

The bottle rolled free. The gun bounced under the couch.

The Ifrit finished its meal and began its transformation, taking on weight and shape and human form.

A trembling, naked human form.

David fell to his hands and knees, gagging, gasping, and collapsed on his side, his back to me. I stared at the beautiful long slide of his back and wanted so badly to run to him and stroke his hair, cover him in kisses, and hold him close and swear that I'd never let this happen again, never...

He turned his head and looked at me, and what was in his eyes burned me to ash.

Nobody, human or Djinn, should live with that kind of guilt and horror. That much longing.

"Let me go," he whispered. "I love you, but please, you have to let me go."

I knew he was right. And it was the only time possible I had left to do it.

I hardly felt the bottle shatter as I slammed it against the desktop. Even the slashes in my hand hardly registered. That kind of pain was nothing, it was insignificant against the bonfire burning in my soul.

I felt him leave me, a sudden cutting of the cord, an irrevocable loss that left me empty inside.

He stood up, clothing himself as he moved. Faded, loose khaki pants. A well-worn blue shirt. The olive drab coat swirling around him, brushing the tops of his boots.

He was warmth and fire and everything I had ever wanted in my life.

He fitted his large, square hands around my shoulders, slid them silently up to my face, and pulled me into a kiss. His breath shuddered into my mouth, and I felt his whole body trembling.

"I knew it had to be this way," he whispered. "I'm so sorry, Jo. I'm so-I can't stay in this form for long. I have to go."

"Go," I said. "I'll be fine."

One last kiss, this one fierce and devouring, and in the middle of it he turned to mist and faded away.

I cried out and lurched forward, reaching with a bloody hand for nothing.

At the other end of the room, a window blew out in a silver spray of glass, and buried shrapnel in the wall above the couch.

I gasped and lunged forward, nearly tripping over Eamon, who was moving weakly, and grabbed Sarah to pull her upright. She couldn't walk, but she mumbled, something about Eamon; I slung her arm across my shoulder and half walked, half dragged her to the door.

As we reached the safety of the hall, another window let loose with the sound of a bomb exploding. Oh God. The whole building was shaking.

I dragged Sarah to the stairwell and leaned her against the wall, then ran back to get Eamon. I just couldn't leave him there, helpless, to get shredded, no matter what he'd done. He might deserve to die, but this would be a kind of death I wouldn't wish on anyone.

I pelted in and was blinded for a second by a blaze of lightning that hit close enough to make the hair on my arms tremble. Eamon was still slumped on the floor, bleeding already from a dozen deep cuts; I grabbed him under the arms and pulled, groaning with the strain in my back, across wet carpet and wedges of glittering glass. He twisted around, trying to help or fight; I screamed at him to stop and kept hauling.

Somehow, I wasn't really sure how, I got him into the stairwell and rolled him onto his bleeding back on the concrete. Sarah was on the steps, clinging to the railing, looking pale and vague-eyed and in danger of tumbling; I left Eamon there and jumped over him to catch her when she stumbled. "You're on your own!"

I yelled back at him as he reached slowly for the handrail to pull himself up to a sitting position.

I put my arm around Sarah's waist to guide her down the steps.

It was a long, long, long way to the bottom. One torturous step at a time.

Sarah's bare feet were scratched and bleeding by the time we made it, and she was more or less coherent.

Coherent enough to turn in my arms and look back up the stairs and mumble, "But Eamon..."

"Eamon can go to hell," I said grimly. "Come on. We need to get out of here."

She didn't want to, but I wasn't going to take any crap from Sarah, not now. And not over her abusive psycho boyfriend.

We banged through the door to the stairs into the lobby...

... and into a group of men standing there looking at the touch screen, just the way I'd done earlier. Rescue! I thought in relief, just for a second, and then I realized that these guys weren't exactly dressed like they were public servants on patrol. Three of them looked tough as hell-tattooed, greasy, muscled up past any sensible point of no return.

The fourth one had on a Burberry trench coat that had gone from taupe to chocolate from the force of the rain, and under that a half-soaked hand-tailored suit with a silk tie. I felt sorry for the shoes, which surely looked Italian and not hurricane-safe. He had an expensive haircut even the rain couldn't dampen, a dark mustache, and a cruel twist to his mouth.

He took one look at me, nodded to his Muscle Squad, and they rushed me. Sarah went flying. One of them knotted a big, tattooed hand in her hair and dragged her upright; she wasn't medicated enough not to scream. I didn't fight. I knew I didn't have much of a chance, especially when the Suit pulled out a gun that looked remarkably similar to the one Eamon had been using upstairs. Apparently it was a model much favored by sleazebags.

I wasn't really scared anymore. The kind of day I'd had, adrenaline starts running low after a while. I just stared at him, dumbfounded, and he stared back with lightless dark eyes.

"You're the one," he said. "You're the one who killed Quinn. Drake said you'd be coming. Nice to know I don't have to cut his tongue out for lying to me."

Eamon had sold me out. I don't know why that didn't surprise me.

He walked up to me and shoved the gun under my chin. "I am Eladio Delgado, and you have something I want."

I shut my eyes and thought, Here we go again.

INTERLUDE

I'm still sitting on the beach when the storm makes landfall. It closes around me like a black fist, trying to crush me as it's crushing the things born of man all around me-boats shattered into splinters, buildings ripped from foundations, metal twisted and bones crushed.

It can't touch me.

I stand up and walk into the storm surge; it foams around my feet, then my knees, then my thighs... not that I have any of those things, really, they're just markers, symbols of what I am. Or was.

I stand in the storm and I listen to it, because it's talking. Not talking in mathematics and physics, the way the Wardens measure things, but in symbols and poetry and the music of a broken heart. It's the mourning of the Earth, this storm. It's the scream of a wounded creature that can't heal.

It's part of me.

As I'm standing there, listening, I feel David's presence slide into the world next to me, and a complex web of energy clicks together. Fulfilling me, and finishing me.

He says, "I don't want it to be this way. Jonathan, please, don't let it be this way."

"I don't have a choice," I tell him, and turn to look at him. She's done him damage, his human girl. Not really human anymore, although I guess she doesn't know that. David's barely Djinn anymore, sliding on that fragile slope back into the dark.

"You have to stop this," he says. He's talking about the storm, of course. But he doesn't really know what he's talking about.

I shrug. "I already stopped it once. Look how that turned out." In the distance, I can feel Ashan and the others waiting, hearing the song of the storm, responding to its call. They're coming for me, and together they're strong enough to take me. I know Rahel is coming, and Alice, and dozens more, and if they get here in time it'll be a pitched battle and the world will bleed. Not be destroyed, because the Earth is tougher than that, older, harder. But everything on it is, in one way or another, fragile.

Life is fragile.

David's eyes are flickering copper, then black, then copper, then black. He is trying desperately to hang on.

"Jonathan, don't do this. You don't have to do this."

"I do," I say, "because I love you, brother."

And I turn and walk into the storm.

I feel him change, behind me, and even over the burning wail of the storm I hear his scream of mortal agony as he changes, as he loses control of who and what he is.

This is how it has to be, I think, just before the Ifrit sinks its talons into my back.

And it hurts just about as much as I expected it to.



NINE






Well, both Eamon and Detective Rodriguez had point-blank warned me that I'd better watch my back. Of course, Eamon had then proceeded to stick a knife in, but that was just his way. At least he'd warned me first.

The cold metal of the gun barrel under my chin made a pretty dramatic statement as to my new friend's intentions. He wasn't the subtle, sinister type like Eamon; he was more like me. Just state your business and get it done.

I respected that.

"I don't have Quinn's stash," I said flatly. No point in doing the I-don't-know-what-you're-talking-about tango. "It blew up with his truck out in the desert, and I've told this story about five times in the past week so excuse me if I don't go over it again except to say, sorry, you're out of luck."

I really was out of adrenaline. My pulse stayed steady, even when he jammed the gun harder into the soft skin under my throat. It made me want to gag. I opened my eyes and looked at him, and close up, he made Quinn look warm and puppy-friendly. Stone-cold killer, this guy. I could feel the lost lives crowding around him like smoke.

"Then I don't need you," he said, "and you need to be taught a lesson, bitch."

"You think you have time?" I shot back. "We're in a little bit of trouble here, in case you haven't noticed. Unless you came in a Sherman tank, I think you may have a little trouble making your escape after-"

Windows blew at the far end of the lobby, and wind screamed in, flapping Delgado's coat in ways Burberry never intended. One of his musclemen rapped something out fast in Spanish, too fast for me to catch. I wanted to turn my head and see what was happening to Sarah, because she was quiet again, and I was worried.

"My friend reminds me that we have a plane to catch in Miami," Delgado said.

"And the roads are very bad. So I don't have time for you or your bullshit. Do you have my stuff? Yes or no."

I kept holding the stare. "No."

"You have anything I might be interested in?"

"No."

"Too bad." He shrugged and put the gun back in his pocket. "Take them outside. You know what to do."

His guys didn't hesitate. My feet scrabbled for purchase on the floor, but they just lifted me up by the elbows as he stepped away, and carried me like a paper doll toward the big, thick glass doors. There was some discussion about how to open them, given the wind pressure. They finally decided on the one on the right. When they opened it, the hurricane blast caught it, slammed it back, and shattered it into safety-glass fragments against the stone wall. The metal backstop had been ripped totally out of the concrete.

"Wait!" I screamed. It didn't matter, and in the next second the two men carrying me had me outside and whatever noise I made was drowned out by the piercing, constant shriek of the storm as it crept ashore.

We weren't anywhere near the worst of the storm yet, and the wreckage was awesome. The two musclemen were having a time of it, shuffling along hunched against the wind; they got to one of two giant palm trees that were bending and thrashing like rubber toys and threw me up against the rough trunk, facing out.

I saw Sarah out of the corner of my watering eye, joining me. Our fingers instantly locked together.

Muscleman number one grabbed a roll of duct tape out of his jacket pocket and started wrapping it around me, Sarah, the tree trunk. Tough, sticky tape binding my hands together, then looping over my knees, my hips, my breasts, my shoulders, my neck.

Same with Sarah. We were duct-taped to the tree, facing the storm. The rain hit like needles, agonizing and unstoppable. I had no leverage, and I knew Sarah couldn't do anything, groggy as she was.

Muscleman grinned at us, wrinkling his tattoos, and he and his cronies shuffled off to join Big Boss Delgado inside his huge black Hummer. Which, if you didn't have a Sherman tank, was probably the best idea for a storm like this.

Delgado didn't even turn to look at us as they drove away. He was already on his cell phone, punching numbers. We were yesterday's to-do list.

I couldn't get my breath. The wind was pummeling us hard, in bruising gusts that were going to turn bone-breaking before long. My skin already felt as if it were being burned off with a soldering iron from the constant impact of the rain-water torture in fast-forward.

I screamed in rage and tried to draw power. I got a weak stir of response, but nothing that could counter the awesome power of this storm, nothing that could break duct tape. It was resistant to water. Over time, it might weaken enough for me to break free, but they'd done a damn good job of making sure I didn't have any stress points to work on.

I heard more windows blow out over the scream of the wind. I tasted salt and blood, gasped for breath, and closed my eyes against the relentless, pounding rain.

Sarah was screaming. I could hear her in the brief lulls before the next waves of gusts. Delgado hadn't wasted a bullet on us, but he'd executed us in fine style. If we were lucky, we'd pass out from the pain before debris started hitting us and slicing us apart, one piece at a time-or blown sand began to blast our skin off, layer by layer. We might suffocate from the pressure of the wind on our chests, since we couldn't move to relieve it.

But we were already dead. We were just going to take a long time getting to the end of it.

I summoned up enough breath to scream, "David!"