Kevin closed his eyes for a second, rubbed them, and opened them again. Relief spread across his face, and he shook his head. "Nothing," he said. "Jesus, I'm tired. I thought--it's nothing. I'm okay."
Cherise stepped forward and put her hand against his cheek, one of those loving gestures that I find myself doing to David so often. Kevin relaxed and bent toward her, covering her hand with his. "Well," I said to David, "they've gotten cozy. Not really sure how I feel about that."
He acknowledged it with a nod, but I could tell his mind was elsewhere. Shadows in his eyes, weariness in his face. For the first time, it struck me that every minute he spent in a human body--a real human body, cut off from the Djinn--he was growing older, just as I was. I tried to imagine how it felt for him to have lost so much, to be so alone. I knew how I felt. Surely for him it was millions times worse.
"David." I put a hand on his arm, and got his full focus. "Are you okay? Do you need Lewis to--"
No mistaking the weary twist of his mouth. He hated being dependent on anyone, but he'd have to face facts--he couldn't draw enough power from me to fuel his life well, and Lewis was the best bet. But David didn't like being beholden to the first man I'd ever loved. At all. "I'm fine," he said, voice unnervingly soft and even. "If I have to see him for help, I will."
I didn't believe him, but he wasn't asking me to, in so many words. It was the big lie, and he was asking me not to push it. David wasn't the kind to be reasonable about his limits; after spending millennia without many at all, he was going to crash into human borders pretty hard, and it was going to hurt.
It wasn't the kind of thing he'd thank me for pointing out, either.
"Coordinating," I said, bringing us back to the dark center of things around which our lives revolved now. "He really wanted to stick us with coordinating at headquarters."
That got a smile from him, if a brief one. "It's not going to suit you if we have to do it."
"Speak for yourself, Master of"--I was about to say Djinn but caught myself in time ... ouch--"the obvious. I'm not giving up yet. We'll find a way to get our mojo back. See if we don't."
David drained the rest of his glass and dangled it from his fingers, staring down now into the sparkling waves. "You sure you want it back?"
"Are you kidding me?"
"No," he said, and his voice had that odd, flat, soft inflection again, as if he were pressing all the emotion out of it with great care. "Jo, think about it. We both want to be together, but we've always been of two worlds. I tried to make you part of mine, but that didn't work. This--this is a chance to make me part of yours."
I forgot all about the drink in my hand, the beautiful day, the laughter of Cherise and Kevin standing a few feet away, and fixed him with a disbelieving stare. "David, you're dying. "
"Everyone's dying," he said. "Mortal life is short to someone like me even in the best case.
If I don't--resume my life as a Djinn, I can be a true husband to you. Living a human life."
His eyes finally moved to meet mine. "Giving you human children."
We didn't talk about Imara very often; our Djinn child was a beautiful, complicated gift, but she had never been a baby, never rested in my arms, never taken her first steps. The mothering instinct in me craved more, and he knew that. I'd never said it, but of course he knew.
"David--"
"It's not a good time," he finished for me, and he was right on, even though we no longer shared that deep supernatural bond that had made it so easy for him to read me. "I know.
But there's so little good about all this, Jo. We should take what we can, when we can, for as long as we can."
"I'm not having children just to watch them die, if this turns bad," I said, and somehow managed not to add, again.
Imara's death, before she'd been made an Oracle, was something that would haunt me forever. "We're in trouble. Don't think I haven't noticed."
"You know what I've learned from thousands of years of watching humanity? It's always a bad time." He put his arms around me and held me, and the simple warmth of it made me want to weep. I didn't. It wouldn't do for me to get all girly and soft on him now. "But all the bad times end, too."
"Thus sayeth the dude with a long view."
"Dude?"
"Sorry, it was my bad eighties teen years coming back to haunt me."
He kissed me, as if he couldn't think of any more words. That was okay. It got the point across just fine.
It was very strange to be on the outskirts of the whirl-wind of activity inside the Wardens--a bystander, like Cherise. Someone included me in some of the meetings, out of courtesy, but being outside of the direct flow of crisis information made me feel like I was just holding down a chair at the table. It was, in fact, a literal table, the biggest one on the ship, and it seated about twenty; I supposed they used it for swank corporate meetings on the high seas. Or really large families, with equally large checkbooks. Lewis sat at one end, looking down the long expanse of wood; around it, every chair was filled with some powerful Warden or other.
Except mine and David's, of course. We were just keeping the cushions warm.
We were an hour into the meeting, and what had started out as a grim list of problems had only gotten worse.
"Reports coming in from South America," said Kyril Valotte, an exotic- looking young man who missed being handsome by the narrow set of his eyes. "Earthquakes and lava flows in Venezuela. We've got teams heading there now, but we've also got reports of odd animal attacks in Panama, some kind of disease outbreak in Guatemala... . It's a lot for the Earth team to handle at once."
"I can send four Wardens out of Texas," said the head of the Southwest U.S. region, and made some notes on his map. "Earth Wardens I got. Weather Wardens I need."
"I'll send as many as I can," Kyril said with a nod. "We'll need ground transportation."
I held up my hand. "I'll take it. I can still make phone calls."
They looked up, and I saw the frank confusion in their faces for a second before memory caught up. Then they both just looked uncomfortable. Kyril nodded and murmured something meaninglessly kind. The U.S. Warden--Jerry something?--didn't bother. He just went back to his maps.
There was a lot of that going on. Lower- ranked Wardens came in and out, delivering notes and whispered messages to their bosses, and with each note, the deployments ended up revised. Thankfully, Cherise had come to my rescue with a genuine computer and network uplink, so I was dispatching travel authorizations and setting up rental cars at the speed of--well, not light, but at the speed of whatever satellite I was bouncing my signal from. It was something useful to do, at least.
I was glad, because listening to the trouble was somehow worse than not knowing about it at all.