"Would you like to own your own home? Rates today are..." Erase.
"Hot singles are looking for you!" Erase.
A brief moment of silence, and then the recording said, "Be on your balcony in thirty seconds. I'll be waiting."
I knew the rich, ever-so-slightly inhuman female voice. And that wasn't a recording. Not exactly.
I put the phone down, walked over to the plate-glass window and looked out. No one out there. But I knew better than to think I could avoid this, even if I wanted to; the Djinn Rahel wasn't the kind of girl you could avoid for long. I opened the sliding glass door and stepped out into the cooling breeze. As I rumbled the door shut again, I felt... something. A little stirring inside, a slight chill on the back of my neck.
When I turned around, Rahel was seated at my wrought-iron caf� table, legs crossed, inspecting her taloned fingernails. They were bright gold. The pantsuit she was wearing matched, and under it she wore a purple shirt the color of old royalty. Her skin gleamed dark and sleek in the failing light, and as she turned her head to look at me I saw the hawk-bright flash of her golden eyes.
"Snow White," she greeted me, and clicked her fingernails together lightly. They made a metallic chime. "Miss me?"
I sat down in the other delicate little caf� chair and folded my hands on the warm wrought iron table. "Like the bubonic plague."
She folded a graceful, deadly hand over where her heart would be if she'd actually had one. "I'm devastated. My happiness is shattered."
"To what do I owe this pleasure?"
"Ah, is it one?"
"Just say whatever you've come to say." I said it in a flat tone, tired of the banter already and just wanting to crawl back in bed and avoid reality for another few hours. Avoid the choice I knew I had to make. Which wasn't even really a choice.
Rahel leaned forward and rested her elbows on the wrought iron. Those alien, bird-bright eyes studied me without any trace of mercy or humor.
"You're dying," she said. "Broken inside. I see that Jonathan has given you time, but you'd best not waste it, sistah. Things are happening too quickly."
"David's an Ifrit," I said suddenly. I remembered seeing it happen to Rahel-who, so far as I knew, was the first Djinn to ever recover from it. And she'd done it by sapping the power of the second-most-powerful Djinn in the world... David ... and by a unique confluence of events that included human death and intervention by the Ma'at in an extraordinary cooperation of human and Djinn.
"I need the Ma'at," I said. "I need them to fix David."
Rahel was regarding me with those steady, predatory eyes. In the dying daylight, they looked surreally brilliant, powered by something other than reflected energy. She drummed her long, sharp fingernails on iron, and the chime woke a shiver up and down my spine.
"The Ma'at won't come. The Free Djinn have affairs of their own to attend to, and even if we did come, we would not be enough. David is too powerful. He'd drain the life from all of us, and it would accomplish nothing."
"Jonathan wants me to-"
She held up her hand. "I don't care what Jonathan wants."
This was new. And unsettling. Rahel had always been fanatically in the Jonathan camp; I understood there were cults of personality within the Djinn world, if not outright political parties, but I'd never thought of her as changeable in her allegiances. She was for Jonathan. Period.
She continued, "If you let David free now, he will hunt, and he will destroy. I was dangerous, when I was an Ifrit. He will be deadly, and if he goes after Jonathan, Jonathan will not act to stop him as he should. Do you understand?"
I did, I thought. I'd felt the voracious hunger in David, the need to survive. I knew he'd have died rather than even consider feeding on Jonathan, in saner days, but what was happening to him had no relation to sanity. Not as I understood it.
"If you keep him in the bottle, he'll drain you dry," Rahel whispered softly. "But it will end there. He will be trapped in the glass."
"But he's not draining me now!"
She merely looked at me for so long I felt a sick gravitational shift inside my stomach.
"He is?"
"Ifrits can feed on humans," she said. "But only on Wardens. And there is something within you that is not human that attracts him as well."
The baby. Oh, God, the baby.
"You want me to voluntarily let him kill me," I said. "Me and the baby. To save Jonathan."
"You must," Rahel said. "You know what's happening; you feel it already. Djinn are fighting. Killing. Dying. Madness is taking us, and there will be no safety without Jonathan. No sanity in anything, including the human world. Do you understand this?"
I shook my head. Not so much from ignorance as exhaustion. "You're asking me to sacrifice my life and my child. Don't you understand what that does to him if he's left standing after that?"
"Yes. Even so, even if it destroys him forever, it must be so. There has not been a war among the Djinn for thousands of years, but this-it's coming. We can't stop it. Some want to pull away from humans, from the world. Some want to stay. Some feel it is our duty, however distasteful, to save humanity from itself."
"Gee," I said. "Don't put yourselves out."
She gave me a cool look. "There have been blows exchanged that cannot be taken back. I fear for us. And you. This is darkness, my friend. And I never thought I would see it again."
"Jonathan knows that if I don't break the bottle, there's no bringing David back."
Rahel didn't answer, exactly. She etched sharp lines into the metal of the table, eyes hooded and unreadable. "He thinks he knows the outcome of things," she said. "I think he sees what he wishes to see. He believes he can master David, even as an Ifrit. I don't believe he can. But as much as he wishes to save David, he is thinking of your child, as well. He wishes to save all of you, if he can."
"And you don't. You want us to die for the sake of damage control. What am I supposed to say to that, Rahel?"
Rahel opened her elegantly glossed lips to reply, but before she could I felt a sudden hard surge of power up on the aetheric, and a male voice from behind me said, "I can solve all of your problems. Give David to me."
Ashan. Tall, broad-shouldered, a sharp face that tended toward the brutal even while it was elegantly sculpted. He was a study in grays... silvered hair, a gray suit, a teal-colored tie that matched his eyes. Rahel's fashion sense was neon-bright; he was like moonlight to her sun. Cold and contained and rigid, and nothing of humanity about him at all, despite appearances.
Rahel threw back her chair in a shriek of metal on concrete and hissed at him, eyes flaring gold. Ashan just stared at her. He looked breathtakingly violent, one second from murder, even though all he did was stand there.
I was looking at the embodiment of the war Rahel had been talking about, and I was the chosen battleground.
"Still campaigning for your master?" he asked. Not directed at me; I didn't matter to him at all. I was human, expendable meat. "Time's up, Rahel. Are you staying with him? The old guard's changing. You don't want to be stupid about this. I've got a place for you at my side."
She didn't answer. Didn't need to. Her defensive crouch was answer enough.
"It's a small army you've put together," Ashan said. "Small, and weak. You stink of humans, Rahel. Don't you want to wash yourself clean of them? Them and all of the filth that we've wallowed in these thousands of years while Jonathan watched his plans rot and die?"
"I'm clean enough," she said, "and I don't answer to you."
"Not yet," he agreed, and turned those eerie eyes on me. "I don't know why Jonathan hasn't killed you, human, but if you get in my way, I won't hesitate. You know that."
I dug my fingernails into my palms and slowly nodded.
"Now be a good girl and go get the bottle for me," he said. "I want David. Now."
INTERLUDE