I was tired from the effort of saying it, and closed my eyes, but the blackness within terrified me, and I opened them again. David was still frowning at me. He began to ask a question, then stopped himself, shook his head, and smoothed my hair again.
"Rest," he said. "I'll try to find a way to help."
I struggled with a pitiful feeling of gratitude, and the ghost of an old, imperious wave of contempt. Contempt for him, for caring for me at all. Contempt for my own appalling weakness.
"Rest," David repeated, and despite everything, I found myself burrowing beneath the warm covers, into the smell of another human's skin, and darkness slipped over my eyes. I didn't want to let go. I fought.
But it won.
I woke up to a woman's voice, dry and lightly amused. "Okay, David, I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for why there's a naked girl in my bed. No, really, I'm sure. And you have about--oh--five seconds to come up with it."
I blinked, turned clumsily in my cocoon of sheets and blankets, and saw the woman standing over me, arms folded. She was tall, slender, with long dark hair and eyes like sapphires. Skin like fine porcelain, lightly dusted with gold.
Even as unfamiliar as I was with the subtleties of human facial expressions, she didn't look happy.
I heard David stir on the other side of the room, where he'd taken a seat in a wing chair. He put aside a book he was holding and stood up to come to the woman and put his arms around her. "Her name is Cassiel. Djinn. She's only here until I can help her get her strength back," he said. "Something happened to her. I can't tell what it was, but I'm trying to find out."
"One of yours?"
"Actually, no. One of Ashan's."
"Ashan's? Oh, that's great. Perfect." With a shock, I realized that the woman must be Joanne Baldwin. I knew who she was, of course. All of the Djinn knew of the Weather Warden, and her love affair with one of the two leaders of the Djinn world. She was both one of the more warily respected of the billions of humans crawling the face of the planet . . . and one of the most hated, in many quarters, including Ashan's. "And why isn't she in his bed, then, instead of mine?"
"Good question," David said. "I don't know. She isn't saying much. She can't."
Joanne wasn't angry, I realized, despite her words. She was looking at me with what I thought was vague kindness. "Cassiel," she said. "David--you're sure she's really a Djinn? I mean--"
That frightened me. How could she not be certain of that? Had I fallen so low that I could be mistaken for a human?
"Old Djinn," I managed to say. "Ashan's."
Her next question came right to me. "I've never met you before, have I?"
"No." Because I had never worn flesh before. Never craved it.
She nodded slowly, and a slight frown grooved itself between her eyebrows. "David says you're hurt." Her blue eyes unfocused, and her black pupils expanded. She was looking into the aetheric, I knew, and seeing my damaged soul. "My God. You really are hurt. Can you draw power at all?"
I managed to shake my head in the negative. Joanne turned to David. "What the hell is that bastard doing, dumping her out here on us? Is he trying to kill her, or just interfere with what we're doing? We need to get out there, dammit! We're supposed to be bait for the Sentinels, not--General Hospital for Wayward Djinn."
They exchanged a look, a long one, that contained information I could not understand. David touched her gently, a stroke of fingers along the skin of her arm.
"I don't know what he intends, but if we can't figure out a way to get her access to the aetheric, this will kill her, no question about it," David said. "She's very weak. She could barely settle into this form. No chance she can shift again, at this point. She's living on whatever she has in reserve right now, and what I try to give her just bleeds away. I think because she's Ashan's creature, I can't really touch her. Not even to save her."
Joanne pulled up a chair and sat, elbows on her knees. She was wearing a close-fitting red top and rough blue woven pants, and there was a glitter of gold on her left hand with a fire-red ruby in its center. "Want me to try?" she asked, cutting her eyes toward David. He crossed his arms, frowning deeply. "C'mon, it's worth a shot. You already tried. Ashan's clearly left the clue phone off the hook. Let me have a go. Better than just letting her up and die on us, right?"
He gave her one sharp nod, but said, "If anything happens, I'm cutting the connection. Careful. Cassiel's strong, and she's not herself."
I wanted to be offended by such presumption from a mere New Djinn--even one such as David--but I couldn't deny the truth. I was not myself. I no longer even knew, truly, what portion of myself I'd lost, or what remained.
I felt that I was losing more of myself with every beat of my all-too-human heart.
Joanne took a deep breath, reached out, and folded her long, carefully manicured fingers around my strange pale ones.
And power snapped a connection tight between us, like lightning leaping to ground, and I felt my whole body convulse with the impact. Such power, rolling like red-hot lava through veins and nerves, feeding and filling the dark hollows of my bones. I almost wept in relief, so strong was it, so great was my need, and I greedily pulled power from her vast, rich store, bathing in it, glorying in it. . . . . . . Until a sharp, heavy, black force slammed between us, and the flow of energy disappeared.
David stood between us, and he pushed me back down, one hand solidly on my chest. He held me on the bed as I struggled, panting, but his attention was on Joanne Baldwin. She was standing against the far wall, and the chair in which she'd been sitting was lying overturned on the floor. As I watched, she slid slowly down the wall and hid her face in shaking hands.
"Jo?" David sounded alarmed and angry. "Are you all right?"
She waved vaguely without looking up. "Okay," she said. "Give me a minute. Not fun."
He pulled in a breath and turned his focus back to me. "Be still," he snapped, and I stopped struggling, suddenly aware how desperate I seemed--how primeval--and of the anger in his eyes. I stilled myself, except for fast, panting breaths, and nodded to let him know I had control of myself again. He reluctantly let me go. I sat up, but slowly, making no sudden moves to trigger his defenses.
"I'm sorry," I said, forming the words more easily now. "I did not mean to hurt her."
"Well, that makes it all better," Joanne said, and groaned. "And also, by the way, ow. Crap, that hurt." Her blue eyes were bloodshot and vague, as if she'd taken a blow to the head. "Right. Maybe I'm not cut out for being Florence Nightingale to the Djinn."
I felt better. Steadier, if nowhere near normal. At least my human form seemed to be working properly--that was a start. I pushed the covers back and swung my legs off the bed, but it took a long, agonizing moment before I could drag myself upright and find my balance.
David didn't help me. In fact, both he and Joanne kept a wary, watchful distance.
"She's stuck in that form?" Joanne said.
"As far as I can tell." He was looking at me with a kind of clinical interest, and I put one foot carefully in front of the other, taking my first trembling steps as a human, until I arrived at the mirror on the closet door.
Tall, this body. Thin. For a female form, it was narrow, barely rounded at the breast and hip. Long arms and legs, all of my skin very pale. My hair was a white puffball around my head, frail and ethereal, and my eyes . . . . . . My eyes were the cool green of arctic ice. No shine of Djinn to them, despite the color. I had no power to spare for that sort of display.
"Too bad, really," Joanne said as she levered herself back to her feet, staggering only a little. "Because I'm pretty sure the albino look will limit your fashion choices. And it does make you stand out. Then again, there's always spray tanning."
This was the form I'd chosen, out of instinct. It must have had some truth to it. I shrugged, watching the play of muscles beneath the flawless white skin.
David cocked his head, watching me as I inspected my new body.
&n
bsp; Joanne noticed. "Uh, honey? Unless you're planning to start stuffing dollars in her nonexistent G-string, a robe might be nice."
He smiled, and retrieved a garment from the back of her closet door. It was a long, pale pink fall of silken cloth, and it settled cold against my skin but began to warm almost immediately. My first clothing. The color reminded me of disjointed things: primroses in the spring, cherry blossoms fluttering in the wind, sunrise. And it reminded me most strongly of the shifting, ethereal colors of a Djinn's aura on the aetheric, so pale as to be transparent.
I smoothed the fabric, belted it, and looked up at the two of them. David had moved to Joanne's side, both of them staring at me with identical expressions that were not quite welcoming, not quite mistrustful. Cautious. "Thank you," I said. "I am better now."
I had not, in a thousand years, said a word of gratitude to a New Djinn, let alone to a human. Humans were lesser beings, and I felt nothing for them but contempt, when I bothered to feel anything for them at all.
So it cost me to speak the words, and I still felt a core of anger that I had been brought so low. I knew she heard the resonance of it. The arrogance. But is it arrogance if one is truly superior?
"Don't thank me yet. You're feeling better, but that's not going to last," Joanne said. "The power you pulled from me is going to dry up on you, and it'll go faster the more you try to use your powers. Best I can tell, you can't access the aetheric at all yourself; you can only do it when touching a human. A Warden." Her eyes grew narrow and very dark. "Which makes you a kind of Ifrit. One who preys on humans instead of other Djinn. I can't even tell you how much that doesn't make me happy."
Ifrit. It was the dark dream of all Djinn, that existence--too damaged to be healed, yet existing nevertheless. Endlessly consuming the power and vital essences of other Djinn to survive. I wasn't an Ifrit, not quite, but she was right. . . . It was a close thing. And Wardens were vulnerable to me.
Wardens, I realized with a startled flash, were food.
It required some kind of statement. Some promise. "I will not prey on you," I said, and somehow it sounded, to my ears, as if I found the whole concept distasteful. "You need not fear me."
"Oh, I don't," Joanne said, and crossed her arms. "If I feared you, believe me, this would be a very different conversation. But I'm not letting you wander off to grab a snack off any Warden who crosses your path, either. What you did to me would have killed most of them."
I felt my whole body stiffen, and power tingled in my fingertips. I wondered if my eyes had taken on that metallic shine, like David's. "How will you stop me?" I asked, very softly. "I will not be caged. Nor bottled, Warden. My kind has seen quite enough of that."
I had never in my life been a slave to the humans. Unlike many of my fellows, who had been tricked or suborned into service by the Wardens over many thousands of years, I had never been captured, never made their property. I had no love of mortals, and no fear of them, either. And I would not ever be owned.
We stood there, the three of us, in a peculiar triangle, in such a human-seeming, normal home. David, fierce and powerful, but with little hold over me because I was a different kind of Djinn altogether. Joanne, just as fierce, but fragile and mortal, therefore of no more consequence to me than any of her kind.
But . . . what was I?
I didn't know. I was neither human, nor was I Djinn, and it terrified me. I said, very quietly, "Where can I go? If not here, where?"
Even to my ears, it sounded strangely empty and weak. Joanne exchanged a long look with David, some silent communication in their own language I couldn't share.
"She's got a point," he said.
Joanne sighed. "You can stay," she said. "For a couple of days, no more. But one wrong move, Cassiel, and you're going to wish we'd let you dry up and fade away."
Chapter 2
THE REST OF the day passed. I learned more of my human body, and the more I learned, the less I liked. Its machinery was too fragile and required too much maintenance. Food. Breathing. Finally, sleeping. The humiliating process of waste elimination was enough to make me wish fondly for oblivion.
Joanne, distantly compassionate through this, assured me that I would soon adjust. And I did, out of necessity. By the next day, I even began to enjoy some of the tastes of the food and drink she offered me, and learn which were better avoided. Coffee was strongly flavored and good. Garlic was not, until she showed me that it was best used to season other things and not eaten in large pieces. (I tried seasoning my food with coffee, but the results were disappointing.)
Ice cream was a revelation. For the first time in human form, I experienced a warm rush of something that I identified as real pleasure. It must have shown plainly in my expression, because Joanne, seated across from me at the kitchen table, smiled and pointed a spoon at the round container, still frosted and smoking lightly in the warmth of the room.
"Ben and Jerry's," she said. "I figured if anything could teach you to smile, it'd be New York Super Fudge Chunk."
Had I smiled? Surely not. I gazed at her, feeling my brows pull together in what I'd learned was a forbidding expression, and took another spoonful of the frozen chocolate dessert.
"It's not bad," I said, trying my best to sound indifferent. I spoiled it by closing my eyes to savor the creamy goodness as the ice cream melted in my mouth.
"This is a good sign," Joanne said. "If you didn't like chocolate, I might have to write you off as a lost cause."
I opened my eyes to gaze at her. "Would you?"
She licked the spoon. "For real?"
"Would you consider me a lost cause? Do you?" It was an important question, and I felt I deserved the answer.
Joanne's clear blue eyes studied me unblinkingly as she cleaned the spoon. "Yeah," she said. "Sorry, but I do. If you hang on to being a Djinn, you're never going to make it as a human. I've been there. I know what it feels like, being so close to God and then ending up back here. At least I wasn't born to it, though. You were. So you'd better make your peace and move on, or sooner or later, it'll kill you."
"Or you will," I said.
She tilted her head slightly to the side. It might have been an acknowledgment. It might have simply been an attempt to get to the last bit of chocolate on the spoon.
"We need to get you out of here," she said finally, and I sensed the subject was closed. "There are things going on here in the mortal world. David and me, we're--" She looked for a moment completely blank. "Okay, I have no idea how to explain to you what's going on around here, except that people are out to get us."
I took a spoonful of ice cream. "Is that not usual?" I had heard it from Ashan many times.
"Well, yeah, kinda. But this time--" She shook her head, eyes gone distant and a little dark. "This time David's in real danger. Tell me, do you know anything about antimatter?"
I didn't know the word. I frowned at her. "The anti of matter? Is that not--nothing?"
"You'd think," she said. "But no. It's the opposite of matter. It destroys it."
"Such a thing cannot exist here." Not in any level of the aetheric that I knew.
"Well, it can, so long as it's contained in something else. But yeah, I get your point." Joanne waved that away with her spoon. "The thing is, we're in the middle of something, and it's very big. The Djinn--they're not being a lot of help. Not even David's folks. I was hoping you could tell me something."
"I know nothing," I said. That was all too true. "You think this antimatter could harm David?" Such a thing seemed impossible. It took another Djinn, or something equivalent in power, to inflict pain on him.
"I think it could destroy him," Joanne said soberly. "And I don't know how to stop it. Yet."
I felt a surge of energy like a close strike of lightning, and came instantly to my feet, spinning to face the doorway. Joanne didn't. She continued to sit, calmly digging her spoon into the ice cream and taking another bite.
But I sensed that under the calm, she was tense and watchful. r />
"Visitors usually knock," she said. "Cassiel? This a friend of yours? Because if he is, we're really going to have to talk about boundaries."
The Djinn who stood in the doorway was, in fact, familiar to me, although I wasn't sure that the human terms of friend and foe really applied. Bordan was . . . less well-disposed to me than many. He'd taken on human form, that of a young man with jet-black hair and eyes as dark as oil, but with a blue sheen that gave him an eerie, unsettling stare. He'd chosen skin of a rich, satin gold, and clothed himself in black. So very different from the Djinn I knew, and yet . . . the same. A physical manifestation of all that he was. I could not possibly have mistaken him.
Even though we had rarely been allied, seeing the cold contempt in his human-form eyes was a shock.
He gave me only that single, searing glance, and then he angled toward Joanne, pointedly excluding me.
"Where is David?" Bordan asked. It was clear he wanted nothing to do with Joanne, either--but she was preferable to dealing with me.
I could tell from her smile she read the subtext just as well. "He's out," she said. "Want a cup of coffee while you wait? Some ice cream? Mmmm, Ben and Jerry's? C'mon. Even Djinn have to love a little frozen dessert now and then."
He didn't dignify that with an answer. He simply stood, silent and motionless, staring at her. No human could outstare a Djinn, but Joanne tried. It was an impressive effort. I supposed the fact that she'd actually been one, at least for a short period, had given her a certain immunity.
"Right," she finally said. "So, you're here to take your little lost sheep back where she belongs?"
He looked revolted. "Cassiel? We do not want her back. Do as you wish with her."
I had never been an enemy of Bordan, but at that moment, I felt rage slowly building. "I will not be given," I said. "I am not property."
Bordan didn't even accord me the respect of having heard my words. "She is no longer one of us. No longer Djinn."
"She's dying," Joanne said. "Did you know that?"
"It's her choice." Bordan's eyes flickered for a moment into the blue of a gas flame. "She knows how to gain Ashan's favor. If she does the thing he asks of her, she will be welcome among us again."