Wardens.
I backed up out of the center of the road and looked around for some kind of cover, but of course there wasn’t any. I didn’t feel like cowering in a ditch, especially when they’d undoubtedly already spotted me. Maybe they’re friendly, I thought.
Yeah, and maybe the next Djinn I met was going to look just like Brad Pitt and grant me three wishes, too.
The SUV eased forward very slowly. It crunched to a stop a few dozen feet away and idled its engine. Nobody got out. I couldn’t see inside. I felt an odd sensation, as if every hair on my body were stirring-static electricity, maybe.
“Let’s get this over with,” I muttered. “What’re you going to do, stare me to death?”
The driver’s side of the SUV opened, and David got out. He looked fantastically good to me in that moment, and I let out a sigh of relief and took a step toward him…
And stopped, because there was no welcome in his face. Nothing but blank fury.
“David?”
I felt the energy gathering above me, and flung up a hand to catch it before it could form itself into a deadly strike. I wasn’t sure what he’d intended, but the devastation around me was proof that somebody had removed the safety switches on this game. I let the power bleed harmlessly off in a thousand smaller tendrils that manifested in gusts of wind, blowing my hair across my face, then switching directions and streaming it back like a flag.
“Give up,” David said flatly. “You don’t have a choice.”
“David, you don’t understand-”
This time I wasn’t quick enough to stop him. The aftermath of the lightning strike left me blinking, half-blind, concussed, and with an ache on my right side that felt suspiciously like first-degree burns. I smelled something burning, feared it was me, and rolled, trying to smother the flames.
When I writhed around to try to spot what David was doing, he was just…standing there. Watching me. I couldn’t read his expression, but he wasn’t exactly racing to my rescue.
There were other people climbing out of the SUV. I recognized only one of them: Lewis. My onetime savior looked like he was badly regretting that decision. I stared at him, trying to guess what he was thinking, but like David, he’d closed himself off.
Neither of them liked being here; that was all I could tell.
And both of them were more than prepared to kill.
THIRTEEN
“Guys,” I said, and held out my hands, palms open and out, showing that I had nothing up my tattered, smoking sleeves. “There’s no need for this. I was coming to you, okay? I wasn’t running. I’m not going to run. And by the way, you owe me for a really nice car.”
I was standing up to them because, hey, not like I had a choice, anyway. There were four Wardens and one Djinn, and any one of them could have probably taken me down without breaking a nail, even if I hadn’t been knocked half-silly by the crash and the lightning bolt.
“Down on your knees,” Lewis said. “Do it. If I have to ask again, we’ll kill you and get it over with.”
Lewis had a gun in his hand. Not one to neglect the merely mortal advantages, apparently, and that just gave them another way to bring me down if all the mystical mojo failed to work. If Venna was biding her time, she was biding a little too long. I had to choose.
I held up my hands in an attitude of surrender and, wincing, got down on my knees. I laced my hands behind my head.
Lewis exchanged a glance with David. Clearly they were the two alphas in the pack; the other Wardens were along for the ride. Although it wouldn’t do me any favors to assume they weren’t capable in their own right, especially since they’d taken up positions surrounding me. “Facedown,” Lewis said. “Hands behind your back.”
“Dammit, road oil is never coming out of these pants,” I said. “Lewis, it’s me. Joanne. What the hell are you doing?”
“Correcting a mistake,” he said. “Down or die. Your choice.”
Well, when he put it that way…I pitched forward to my hands and knees, lowered myself to the gritty, oily road, and put my hands behind my back.
Somebody-not Lewis and not David-was on me instantly, digging a sharp knee into the small of my back and ignoring my yelp of protest. Plastic zip-ties slipped around my wrists and hissed tight.
“You didn’t make a mistake,” I said. I couldn’t see Lewis or David. I couldn’t see anybody, since my hair had fallen across my eyes. I was blind and helpless, and I could feel something closing in around me on the aetheric, something like a smothering coating of plastic, sealing me off from access to the powers that I was about to be driven to use. “No! Wait, listen to me! You didn’t make a mistake, Lewis; it’s me! She’s lying to you; don’t you understand? She’s…”
The wind blew my hair away from my eyes, and I saw her. The other me. She’d left the SUV, and she was standing next to David like she belonged there.
It was a good thing I’d had a lot of recent experience seeing myself from the outside, because it allowed me to get over the shock fast. Yeah, that was me, down to the last well-dressed detail. David, or someone who’d cared, had gotten her a nice flare-legged pantsuit with a fitted jacket, something that hugged her body and made her look tall, lean, elegant, and businesslike. In short, she looked like she belonged. Like she was more than capable of handling whatever needed to be handled.
Me, I was a cheap fax copy, grubby and soiled with road dirt and smoke. And I’d lost a shoe.
“I can’t believe you got her,” she said. “She must be planning something. She shouldn’t be this easy to catch.”
David took her hand. The Demon exchanged a look with him and smiled. It was my smile, dammit. And my love in her eyes. She’d taken it. She was using me just as much as she was using him.
“We got lucky,” David said. “We’re even luckier that Venna decided to cut her losses. Although why she’d be helping a Demon…”
“She wasn’t!” I yelled. They ignored me.
“I want you out of here,” David said to the other me. “I’m not taking any chances. Not again.” I hated the way he leaned into her space, the way his lips brushed the shining curtain of her hair. The way his hands curled around hers, so gently and protectively. “Take the truck back to the lodge and wait there.”
“David, she’s a liar!” I said. “So, Fake Joanne, what’s next? You can’t control David, can you? He’s too powerful. So maybe you find a way to hurt him so badly one of the other Djinn has to take over, one you can subvert. Got to be a weak one in the bunch, right?”
She watched me with steady, familiar eyes. She looked completely real. Completely me. “I’d never hurt David. The fact you think I would just proves who you are.”
“You’d never hurt David unless you know you could get away with it.” I panted. “Look, what do you really want? My life? Well, you can’t have it, so just hand over the clothes and stop using my face and move on.” Toward the end I sounded-and felt-savage. Like I could rip her head off with my bare hands for what she was doing to me. All I wanted to do was live, and she’d taken that away.
She stared at me for a few more seconds, and there was something like pity in her face. There but for the grace of God… I knew what she was thinking. It made my stomach hurt with the intensity of my fury. “Say something,” I said.
“Why?” she asked. “What’s to say? You tried to steal my life away, and you’ve failed. Game over.”
I turned to David, willing him to believe me. “David, if you kill me, she wins. The Demon wins.”