"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
As the storm nears its first brush with land, it's almost unrecognizable from the soft, pale breeze born off the coast of Africa. It stretches hundreds of miles across, thickly armored in electric gray arcs of clouds. It carries inside of it the energy of the sun, stored in the form of tightly packed moisture that continues to rise and fall, condense and shred, and every transfer bleeds more fury into the system.
Dangerous, but not lethal. When it breaks, it will dump torrential rains and heavy winds, but it's still just a storm.
But as it nears the first of several islands in its way, a one-in-a-billion confluence of events comes together, as an ocean current winding its way north to south is warmed by just the right angle of the sun. Its temperature rises by four degrees.
Just four.
Just at the right time.
The storm passes over the current, and bumps into the sudden warm wall of rising moisture. Something alchemical happens, deep within the clouds; a certain critical mass of moisture and temperature and energy, and the storm begins its relentless suicidal course.
The last small variable in the equation is a random brisk wind spinning off the Cape. It collides with the storm's far perimeter and slides along, and because it is cooler it drags the storm with it.
The storm begins to turn. The storm has rotation. It has mass. It has a gigantic energy source, self-sustaining. It has taken a huge leap, grown explosively and deepened in its menace, and it is no longer a child.
It is now a full-fledged hurricane; and it is still growing.
FOUR
In retrospect, snarling, "Over my dead body!" probably wasn't the smartest thing to say to a Djinn willing to take on Jonathan in a straight-up dogfight for control of the Djinn world.
I never said I was smart. But at least you can't call me a coward.
Ashan reached out to grab me, but his hand never reached me; Rahel lunged past me in a flash of neon gold and flung herself on him like a tiger, ripping and snarling. Ashan, taken by surprise, fell back a few steps...
... off the balcony.
He didn't fall. He floated, looking surprised and annoyed and a little bit pissed-off, and yanked a handful of Rahel's cornrowed hair to get her off of him. His strength was incredible. I knew how tough Rahel was, and the ease with which he slung her around and threw her in a violent, swinging arc that ended in a crushing impact with the ground thirty feet below, and with at least four rows of cars on her way into the parking lot. Rahel hit the ground, rolled, and came up fluidly to her hands and knees, looking for all the world like one of those clawed raptors from the dinosaur movies.
She vaulted up to the roof of the white van, where Detective Rodriguez might have noticed a slight weight displacement but wouldn't have seen a thing even if he'd looked out. She ran the length of it, then planted her feet and arced gracefully up into the air, heading straight for Ashan...
... who knocked her out of the air as easily as Babe Ruth swinging for the bleachers.
I could feel the disordered currents of energy in the air around me. The Djinn were causing instability, and dammit, there was nothing I could do about it.
Whatever damage had been done to my powers when I'd overextended and David had ... changed... wasn't fixing itself, and the energy Jonathan had thrust into me wasn't made for weather work.
Rahel flew bonelessly through the air, crashed to the pavement of the parking lot, and rolled about fifteen feet, arms and legs flopping.
And then she vanished into mist.
Poof.
Ashan turned his attention back to me.
I gulped and stood up, backing away. Not a lot of escape opportunities on the balcony.
"You know what I want," Ashan said, and held out his hand. His fingernails gleamed a kind of opal-silver in the twilight, and his eyes were as bright as moons. He might have been wearing a designer suit, but he was no kind of human. "Get the bottle."
"You can't even touch the bottle," I said. I meant it to come out cool and logical, but it sounded shaky. "Djinn can't-"
"Little girl, don't presume to tell me what Djinn can or can't do," he interrupted in a voice so low and cold that I felt ice form along my backbone. "I said get it."
"Or?"
"You don't want to test me." He took a measured step forward. I felt the ozone crackling in the air, felt the menace in the clouds overhead. Wispy things, but firming up as the disruptions in the aetheric mirrored themselves into the physical world... whipping, uncontrolled winds in the mesosphere; cold spots; a streak of heat from Ashan that cut through weather patterns like a spearhead.
I could feel the electricity in the air trying to find a way to ground itself.
He could fry me right here on the patio, and with my powers currently registering somewhere from zero to dead, I couldn't even defend myself. "David is fond of humans. I'm not. I don't care if I level this entire building to make my point."
"Djinn," I said, and forced a grin. "No sense of proportion."
I didn't see him move, but I felt the blow-hard enough to temporarily white out my nervous system and send me reeling to slam back against stucco and brick. I'd missed the plate-glass doors, at least. That was a relief. When sensation came flooding back, it brought with it a tide of stinging-hot ache along the side of my face. It had been an open-handed slap, but damn, he hadn't pulled it. I put my hand to my cheek and felt heat. My eyes were watering.
Ashan took another step forward. "I'm not interested in how clever you imagine yourself to be, and if you think your human body interests me, you're deluded," he said. "I only find it interesting in how many creative ways I might be able to take it apart. Now, go and get the bottle."
He couldn't touch the bottle. He couldn't take it away from me. Even Jonathan hadn't been able to do that. Was it a bluff? Or did he just want to know where it was?
I slipped open the sliding glass door and backed inside, then slammed it shut.
For all the good it would do, of course. Outside, Ashan stood silhouetted against the failing twilight, gray as a dead man, with those eyes swirling cold and silver.
"Hey," Sarah said. She was still deep in her culinary trance, doing something now involving bread and the oven. The kitchen smelled like rosemary and olive oil and roasting chicken. Heaven. I wished I could appreciate it; I was shaking, shaken, and scared. I watched her slide the tray into the slot and close the oven door, then strip off oven mitts and turn toward me with a smile. "It's nice out there, isn't it? Kind of peaceful. Maybe we can have dinner out there..."
"Yeah," I said. "Great. Okay." What a horrible idea. I started to move past her to the bedroom.
She reached out and grabbed my arms, pulling me to a stop. Her frown creased into faint lines. "Jo? What happened to your face?"
"Um..." I was drawing a blank. "I tripped."
"Tripped?"
"It's nothing, Sarah." I tried to pull free. My sister was stronger than she looked.
"Bullshit, nothing. You look spooked, Jo. Is it that guy? That van guy?" Now she looked angry as well. "Dammit... I'm calling the police. Right now."
"No! No, look, it's nothing like that-" This was all getting way too complicated. I yanked free of her grip. She lunged for the phone. I grabbed it away from her and slammed it down hard on the table. "Sarah! It's my business, all right? And the guy in the van is a cop!"
She stared at me, astonished. "He's what?"
"A cop." I had trouble controlling my breathing. Panic was getting the better of me. "I had some trouble in Las Vegas a couple of months ago. It's temporary."
"Jesus Christ, what did you do? Kill somebody?"
"Do I look like a murderer to you? You're my sister! You're supposed to believe in me!"
I hadn't answered the question, but luckily I'd hit the right guilt buttons. "Jo ..." Sarah flapped her manicured hands helplessly. "Fine. All right. I believe you. But why is he following you?"