I stretched my arms and reached out until I felt I might unravel and break and be swept away. I tasted blood and felt my body starving for air and dying inside as its energy poured out onto the wind, screaming. I tried to do what I'd done a thousand times before, and alter the temperature of the air at the subatomic level, creating friction and lift and heat and wind.
For the first time... I failed.
I felt David break first with a bright, hot, shattering pop, and the black drag on my power fell away. The rebound slammed into me with stunning force, knocking me backward, and then I lunged for the railing again and saw David let go of the Warden.
Who fell, screaming, to his death.
There was nothing I could do. Nothing.
I screamed and covered my eyes from the sickening sight of his body crushing on pavement, his blood splattering in an arc as his skull shattered.
I felt his life snap like his bones.
David froze in midair, fixed in place, eyes dark and strange, body transforming from the fire of the Djinn to the black coal shadows of the Ifrit.
"Oh God..." It wasn't stopping. I felt every bit of energy being sucked out of me; the life, the heat, the baby oh God not the baby you can't David...
I felt everything around just... suspend. In some odd way, I kept on... outside of time, of life, of breath. It felt like being a Djinn, or at least what I remembered of it. Except I could feel some core of me screaming and coming apart under the strain. I wasn't healed.
Time had stopped. Pain hadn't.
Someone had intervened.
I heard the scrape of shoes on the asphalt behind me.
I turned and looked, gasping for breath, and saw Jonathan walking toward me through a flash-frozen world. People were locked in midstep, midword, midgasp.
He and I were the only things moving.
Unlike most Djinn, Jonathan-the most powerful of them all-looked human.
Middle-aged, with graying short hair. A runner's build, all angles and strength.
Black eyes, and a face that could be friendly or impassive or cruel, depending on the mood and the light. Just another guy.
And yet, he was so far from human he made David look like the boy next door.
"You have to help me," I began. I should have known that the sound of my voice would piss him off.
He walked right up to me, grabbed me by the throat, and shoved me against the rail so hard that my back bent painfully over open air.
"You're lucky," he said in a whiskey-rough growl, "that I'm in a good mood."
And then he looked over my shoulder at the frozen, twisted shape of David, stopped in midtransformation. The shocking ruin of the Warden's body on the pavement below. Jonathan's face lost all semblance of humanity, all expression.
There was a sense, even more than before, of some vast and terrible power stirring around him.
Even the wind was utterly silent, as if afraid to draw his attention.
"Jonathan-" I began hoarsely.
"Joanne," he interrupted, and it was a low purr, full of darkness and menace, "you just don't seem to listen. I told you to fix David. Doesn't look fixed to me. In fact..." His hand tightened convulsively around my throat and rattled me for emphasis. I gagged for breath. "In fact, he looks one hell of a lot worse than the last time I saw him. Not surprising that I'm very disappointed."
There was absolutely no mistaking the fury in him, even though it was cloaked behind a good-looking face and eyes that had all of the charm and warmth of black holes.
"I don't have time for this crap," he said, and turned those eyes back to meet mine. And oh, God, the rage simmered, red flashing points in black. Ready to break free. Ready to rip apart me, this bridge, the city, the world. He was that powerful. I could feel it rising off of him like heat from a lava flow. "I let you have your stupid little games and your stupid little romance, and it's destroying him. I don't have time for this. I need him back. Right now. This isn't some goddamn game I'm playing, do you understand that?"
Because he was in the middle of a war. I did understand. The battling Djinn had disappeared, but the aftereffects of their battle lingered like burned cordite on the raw air. If this was happening all over the world...
"I don't know how to help him," I croaked. "I've tried. I just don't understand how to do it."
I felt his grip on my throat tighten again. He pressed right against me, his thighs against mine, bent over me in a parody of a dance.
"Well, then, you're no good to me, are you?"
"Wait..." I tried to swallow. Pretty much useless. This was going to hurt so, so badly, if I survived it. "You-you must be able to-"
"If I could fix him, don't you think I already would have? Do you think this is some kind of game for me, watching him suffer?" No, I didn't think that. I could see the furious pain in Jonathan's eyes. "He's your slave. I can't touch him until you set him free."
David. The bottle. Jonathan couldn't interfere. Those were the rules. I could only imagine how much he hated that, hated me for being in his way.
I tried to swallow, but his grip was too tight. I could barely choke out the words around the burning pain in my throat. "I can't. You know as well as I do that if I let him go now-"
He knew. David would be beyond anyone's control once I released him from the bottle. Jonathan might be able to help him, but first he'd have to catch him, and that might not be possible.
"Help me help him," I whispered.
Oh, he didn't like that idea, not at all. I'd never scored high on the list of Jonathan's favorite people, for a lot of reasons-first, I was human, which was not a selling point; second, my relationship with David, and David's tenacious commitment to me, had upset the long-standing order of Jonathan's universe. And as Jonathan was, in Djinn terms, well-nigh as powerful as a god, that wasn't really a good thing.
It was also very hard to mistake the fact that Jonathan cared for David. A lot.
In deep and eternal ways that stretched back to the days of their making. It didn't make for a comfortable three-sided relationship.
"Help you?" he repeated. "Oh, I think I've helped you just about as much as you deserve, sweetheart. As in, you're still breathing."
"Not very well," I croaked, and flailed a helpless hand toward my aching throat.
Which made his lips twitch in something that wasn't quite a smile. He let go of me, but he didn't step back. I slowly braced my hands on the railing and pushed myself back upright, careful to make no sudden movements-not that I could in any way hurt him, of course-and we ended up pressed together, chest to chest. He didn't care about my personal space.
He stared at me from that very intimate distance. Seen close, those eyes were terrifying indeed... black, shot through with sparks like stars, galaxies burning and dying and being born. Once upon a time, far in the past, he'd been human and a Warden, with the three powers of Earth, Fire, and Weather... like those Lewis possessed these days. I didn't know much about his human life, only his death; it had caused the Earth herself to wake and grieve. Jonathan had been made a Djinn by the force of that mourning. David, who'd been dragged along with him through those fires of creation, had come out sublimely powerful. Jonathan had come out a whole order of magnitude greater than that, perilously close to godhood.
He was losing that, to Ashan. How in the hell Ashan had the big brass ones to decide he could win in a toe-to-toe dogfight with Jonathan was beyond me, but the fact was, even if Jonathan kicked the crap out of him and all his Djinn followers, it was a war to make the Earth tremble. Nobody would be safe.
Nothing would be sacred.
Jonathan looked into me. It hurt, and I flinched and trembled and wanted desperately to hide in some dark corner, but there was no hiding from this. No defending against it, either. His hands came up and rested on my shoulders, slid up to cup my face between them with burning warmth. The heat of his skin on mine confused me, made me feel odd and disembodied. I wanted to pull away but I had nowhere to go, and besides, I wasn't sure my body would even listen to any such command.
"Feeling weak?" he asked me, and bent closer. His eyes swallowed the world. "Feeling sick? A little off these days?"
My lips parted. He was very, very close. So close that if he'd been human, we'd have been engaged.
He turned my head to a slight angle, tilted his own, and put his lips next to my ear. "He's killing you," Jonathan whispered. "Can't you feel it? It's been going on for a while, a little at a time. He's eating you from the inside. You don't think that's been killing him, too? Destroying him?"
I remembered all of the signs. The weakness. The clumsiness I felt when reaching for power. The gray indistinctness of the aetheric. The overwhelming drag when I tried to call the wind.
"Human power can't sustain him anymore. He'll suck you dry. He's an Ifrit; never mind how he looks when he's gorged himself on your energy. He can't help it. He'll kill you, and once he does that, even if I can get him back, he'll be a wreck. He'll recover, but it'll take too fucking long."
I felt tears burn hot in my eyes, break free, slide cold down my cheeks. He moved back just an inch, and turned my head again in those large, strong hands to look at me again. His thumbs smoothed the wetness from my skin.
"I don't care about you," he continued with soft intensity. "Make no mistake; I'll rip you apart if I have to, if it comes down to a choice of you or him. But I can't let him kill you. He'll be useless to me."
I flinched. He held me in place. "I don't know how to fix this," I said. "I swear, Jonathan. I don't know!"
"Simple. Go home, get that fucking bottle, smash it, and survive the rest of your pathetic life like everybody else in the human world. You have to let him go. He's already dead to you."
"Liar," I whispered.
And got an evil, beautiful smile in return. "Yeah? If I'm a liar, why can't you save him now? Why couldn't you save that sad bastard down there from falling to his death? All in a day's work for a Warden like you, right? You don't need me. Go on. Be a hero."
He let go of me and stepped back, and it was like going from the baking heat of the desert to Antarctica. My body cried out for his warmth, as if he were a drug and I'd developed a lightning-fast addiction. Bastard. He'd done it deliberately.
David was a wonderful, lyric poet of a lover. Jonathan, if he'd ever stoop to anything so intimate with a human, would be a pirate, taking what he fancied and forcing his partner to want it too. All cruel, casual grace and absolute dominance.
I grabbed the rail on either side and sucked in deep, calming breaths. Jonathan folded his arms and watched me as the energy drained away. Spiraled out into the black hole of David's need.
"Help me," I said, and God, defeat tasted bitter as poison. "Show me how to stop this."
"Say the magic word."
"Please."
"That's not the one I was looking for, but I'll take it." He reached out and put his hand flat against my chest. Heat spilled into me, intrusive as a stranger's hands, and I went rigid against the invasion. Not that it mattered. Jonathan could do anything he wanted.
But it was life he was giving me, and I didn't have the strength to refuse it anyway.
Jonathan watched me surrender to him with those hidden, dark eyes, and gave me a tiny thin slice of a smile. It was almost human. Not kind, but human.
"All right. What I've done is create a reservoir of power inside of you. It won't last long. You need to let him go or you'll die."
"If I do, how do you know you can stop him from coming after you?" Because David would be drawn to power, sure as a Demon.
"I can take care of myself," he said offhandedly. "We're done. Might want to hold on to something."
He let his hand fall back to his side.
Behind me, power exploded. The flash burned through me like a shock wave, and wind came in its wake, raging and furious at being held back; it nearly knocked me over, and Jonathan reached out to steady me as my hair blew straight toward him, long and tattered as a battle flag. Through the waving curtain of my blowing hair, I saw Jonathan give me another very small, cynical smile.
And then he looked past me and I saw pain in his expression. He said something, but it wasn't in human language; it was the bright and singing tongue of Djinn.
A prayer, a curse, a lament...
I sensed a black presence behind me in the air.
David was transforming into something terrible, something with cutting edges and hunger for a heart.
When I tried to turn around to see, Jonathan held me in place and shook his head. "Don't look."
It was bad enough seeing the devastation in his eyes. I was watching the end of a friendship that wasn't supposed to have an ending... something time itself was supposed to respect. I did this. No, we did this, David and I, together.
Love, I was starting to realize, was beautiful, but it was also ruthlessly selfish.
I touched Jonathan and felt fire, not flesh; it burned me with wild and intimate fury, but I didn't let go. "Jonathan..."
"I have to go," he said, and I heard that edge of grief in his voice again, liquid and molten with pain. "He'll kill me if I stay here. Or worse. I'll kill him. He's too hungry right now. Remember what I said. You don't have much time-just get it done."
He let go of my arm and stepped back. My hair obscured my vision again, and I reached up to shove it out of the way as I whirled to see what he was looking at.
David was gone. In his place was a black, twisted shadow of a thing, angles and glittering edges and nothing remotely human to it. An Ifrit.
It touched down on the bridge's surface and stalked toward us, fixed on power.
Fixed on Jonathan.
"No!" I screamed, and threw myself in David's path, but he went through me as if I were smoke, lunged with diamond-bright claws outstretched...
And Jonathan vanished before they could touch him.
David misted out a few seconds later. Chasing after that bright, shining ghost.
I was alone.
Well, except for the onlookers who were suddenly coming to realize that something weird had happened. But not exactly what, or who was responsible.
The cops arrived. I was hustled off to stand beside a police cruiser. Nobody knew what to ask, because no one understood what had just happened; all I had to do was be just as clueless. Pretty easy, actually. I wasn't faking the shock and trauma. The questions they tried to frame were just as vague as my answers, so in the end the cops just gave it up and accepted the whole thing as a suicide.
I wished I could see it that way, but I couldn't stop crying. I couldn't help but replay the terror in the Warden's eyes as he'd reached out to me, or the scream that had ripped out of him when David let him go.
My fault.
I'd never even found out his name.
Eventually, the cops remanded me to the custody of Cherise, who had been standing at the barricades looking anxious and dumbstruck and more than a little freaked out for some time. She didn't say a word. She grabbed my hand and towed me off toward the Mustang, this time pulled over to the breakdown lane, and got me well out of the way before turning on me.
"What the fuck was that?" she yelled over the resumed din of traffic, honking horns, and the wind. "Joanne! What in the hell did you think you were doing?"
I couldn't answer. I didn't have the strength. I just looked at her, walked around to the passenger side and got in the car. Cherise continued to berate me and pepper me with questions, which made no more sense than the ones the cops had managed to put together. I ignored her.
David was gone. I couldn't feel him anymore. I shut my eyes and remembered that back in Las Vegas, when I'd held the bottle of another Djinn turned Ifrit, I hadn't been able to sense any connection to her either... but she'd obeyed my commands. At least, the most important one.