Diplomatic of him to include them both. David looked across at Ashan and made a very polite nod that I was sure cost him some pride. Ashan lifted his chin to its maximum angle of arrogance.
“In normal course, this could be allowed to happen,” he said. “But it was not triggered by natural forces, and so it should be corrected before so much of the field is broken that the change is inevitable. It causes the Mother discomfort if the change happens too quickly.”
He hated talking to us. Hated the whole idea that we would have any part in this at all. Which, hey, I didn’t much like the thought of working side by side with him, either. I had no idea what it was really costing David to do it, but I knew it wasn’t easy.
“Why aren’t we sticking these freaks in bottles?” one of the less intelligent Wardens yelled from somewhere in the back. “Murdering bastards!”
Lewis didn’t let anger slip free very often-he was mostly of the “irony is the best policy” school of thought-but there was no mistaking the steel in his voice this time. “Shut up, or you’re dealing with me,” he snapped. The silence that fell afterward stretched for long enough to make his point before he continued. “Let me get something completely clear. The Djinn aren’t our slaves, and they aren’t our pets. They’re our partners in this, and they ought to be our partners in everything we do. If they struck out at us in a rage, they were acting in defense of themselves and the Earth.” Well, not quite. Ashan had also been conducting his own campaign against David for control of the Djinn, but Lewis was right, in the main. “We oppressed them for thousands of years. We forced them to do things that none of us wants to think about or acknowledge. We sealed them in bottles with Demons. Think about it. They came after us, and we damn well deserved it.”
Another uproar, this one composed of a whole lot of variations of oh-no-you-don’ts. Lewis waited it out, stone-faced, arms folded. Yeah, that had gone over well.
Two of the Wardens got up and tried to storm out of the room. I don’t think so, I thought furiously, and created an invisible shield of hardened air around the door. The first rebel hit it and bounced off…an Earth Warden, big and burly in a lumberjack kind of way. The second, however, was a Weather Warden. Sarah Crossman, from Iowa. Decent enough person, but hidebound. She lost her temper and tried to pry at the hold I had over it.
And the fragile, highly undependable hold I had over my own temper broke. It sounded like shattering glass, which made sense, because somehow the air pressure in the room had dropped, along with the temperature, and the cloudy windows way up at the top of the room (because the other, alternative use for this place was basketball) blew out in a spray of powdered glass. People screamed, and wind whipped in uncontrollable currents.
And then everything went very, very still as Lewis grabbed hold of the air and took control from me. The door that Sarah Crossman was pulling on suddenly opened, smacking her in the face and sending her reeling backward.
Lewis said, “If you want to go, go. But if you leave this room, you’re out of the Wardens. And I’ll see to it that your powers will be neutered.”
There was an audible gasp from the Warden side of the room, and both of the groups of Djinn smiled ever so slowly. The Ma’at exchanged uneasy glances.
“You can’t do that!” Ah, it was my old friend Emily, from Maine; I hadn’t seen her since Eamon had drugged her and abducted me out of the cab of her truck. Good times. She was a solid, blocky woman, prone to clunky shoes and flannel shirts and mulish expressions. “You can’t force us to agree with you!”
“It ain’t a democracy, Auntie Em,” Paul noted dryly. “I think he can. You don’t like it, just let me know what time’s good for that clinic appointment.”
“Don’t you threaten-”
I slammed the Manolo down hard on the table, “Emily! I will personally make sure you end up strapped to a gurney. And I won’t be nearly as nice about it as Lewis; you can bet your ass on that! Now sit down!”
Silence. Most people in the room knew pieces and hints of what had happened to me in the last week, and more than a few had heard some version of a story that I’d had a daughter, and lost her in a Djinn attack. It wasn’t wrong in the main, just fuzzy in the particulars.
The thing was, I wasn’t seen as entirely sane, so nobody really wanted to cross me. I could only imagine that I looked just as ragged-edged as the stories indicated. That, combined with such a spectacular loss of control, suggested that a certain amount of caution might be in order.
Things were very, very still. Lewis was looking at me. So was everyone else.
“Jo.” David’s very quiet voice next to me. I felt the pressure of his hand on my shoulder, then the friction of his fingertips stroking my hair. He wasn’t using magic of any kind, except the whisper that was always present between us. “Easy.”
He was right. There was emotion boiling up in me, and I couldn’t afford it, not here. Not now. I pulled myself sharply back with a flinch that I was sure was visible.
David slowly settled back in his chair, still watching me with total, gentle attention.
Lewis had started talking again. “I think we’re agreed that since this isn’t the natural time for this magnetic flip to begin, we should counter it while we still have the chance. Now, the Ma’at have developed a whole new way of looking at the manipulation of power on the aetheric plane, and there’s a lot we can-”
“Who are these people? Why were they operating in secret?” demanded a Warden from the floor, who was too angry to let a little thing like my mood swings stop him.
“They were formed to try to undo some of the damage the Wardens were doing to the environment,” Lewis said. “They never interfered directly with us.”
“No, but they were undermining us! No wonder our success rate kept getting worse! Lives were lost!”
Lewis kept the microphone, despite impatient waves from Myron to pass it back. “The Wardens’ success rate was getting worse because we were undermining one another,” he said. “Among other things. You know there were a lot of things wrong in the organization, including Wardens selling out innocent people for profit.” He wasn’t pulling any punches. So far as I knew, nobody had ever put it that baldly, at least outside of very private, hush-hush conversations at the highest levels. “Demon Marks have subverted key members. Senior Wardens have taken kickbacks from criminal organizations. Wardens at all levels are guilty of outright murder. So let’s not pretend that anybody in this room has a monopoly on being right.”
That last word fell into a vast, ringing silence. Somebody shifted uneasily in a folding chair, waking a squeal of metal like worn-out brakes.
“I’m not making accusations,” Lewis said. “I’m stating facts. These things happened. And they’re not going to happen anymore.”
“Or?” someone stage-muttered. It might have even been from the Ma’at.
Lewis smiled slowly. I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the receiving end of that one. “They’re not…going…to happen…anymore,” he repeated very softly, and held the entire room’s stare. The place had gone very quiet, and the air was crackling with potential energy. “We’re not going to be the bad guys. The Ma’at have things to teach us. We probably have a few things to teach them, too. Now. Everybody choose.”
One Warden stood up and walked out, not bothering to mitigate the shriek of metal chair over bare floor. We all winced, even the Djinn. The door banged shut behind his grand exit.
I didn’t try to stop him. Besides, I’d already blown out the windows. Not much of a big gesture left to make.
“One down,” Lewis said, unruffled. “Anybody else want to join him and stop wasting our time?”