“If it helps, think of it as miracles,” Luis said. “That’s what I do. My cousin’s a priest, one of my aunts is a nun, and my mom still drags me to mass every chance she gets. If I thought this power came out of a bad place, I wouldn’t dare be using it.”
It puzzled me, this apparently quite serious discussion of the obvious, but then I thought of Pearl. She was what this woman feared—evil masquerading as good for as long as might be convenient.
“I had a good feeling about you two right off,” Betty said. “Might be a little wild-looking, but you’ve got good hearts. That’s important.”
The very unlikely Betty had something in her, too. Power, of a kind, though nothing that I recalled meeting before. It was a core of something I could only call a fierce, persistent hope. The kind that drove her, despite the hardships she’d endured, to make food for strangers and strive to provide a measure of comfort.
She was, I realized, human. Deeply, helplessly human, with all the faults and foibles, shining courage and power of that heritage. Unlike the Djinn, she had little control over what was to come; she likely didn’t even expect to survive it. What she did, she did in the face of panic, terror, pain, and death.
She was beautiful. I caught my breath, staring at her, because it was as if my Djinn eyes had opened again, seen all the depth of her past and complex, intricate, unpredictable future. I had spent so much time with Wardens, who were at least somewhat like the Djinn; I thought I’d known humanity in its purest form.
But this woman—this one, hopeful woman—this was humanity, distilled and purified, and it humbled me.
I ate in silence while Luis and Betty chattered on—discussing pasts, comparing relatives, talking of nothing in particular, and certainly not the lives being lost, the cities burning, the horrific cost of what was to come. It might be called denial by some, but in that moment I thought it was the very strength that made humanity so successful… the ability to transcend reality, to create reality around them, even for a moment.
It was a gift the Djinn did not have, and until that moment, I had never imagined it to be so powerful.
“So,” Betty said, when we had finished and there was nothing left on our plates but a few scraps and scrapes. “How do you folks feel about dessert? I’ve got some pies I made up fresh this morning, apple and chocolate. Even got some fresh whipped cream.”
“Apple,” Luis said, just as I said, “Chocolate.” She looked from one of us to the other, and laughed.
“I’ll have one of each,” she said. “Might as well. Can’t let it go to waste.”
She stood up to go back to the kitchen, and stacked our empty plates; when Luis tried to help, she smacked the back of his hand in mock anger. I watched her go, and couldn’t help but smile.
“I like that,” Luis said. He was staring right at me. “Your smile. You’re different when you do that.”
“Am I?”
“Usually when you smile, it’s to make a point, but that was just”—he shrugged—“human, I guess. And sweet. You’re not often sweet, and it’s nice.”
I felt oddly uncomfortable with that, and shrugged, no longer smiling. “Perhaps it’s in anticipation of the pie,” I said.
“C’mon, you’ve gotta admit. Nice lady, overcoming the odds, making pies… Who doesn’t love that?”
“Perhaps she killed the former proprietor and stuck his dismembered body in his own freezer,” I shot back. “Not so heartwarming a story, then.”
He threw a wadded-up napkin at me, and I was starting to smile again, perhaps with a wicked edge, when I heard plates crash, and Betty screamed.
I don’t remember coming out of the chair, only the feel of the swinging door beneath my hand as I stiff-armed it open.
There was a Djinn in the kitchen. Tall, slender, human, and male in form; he had a long fall of blond hair and eyes that glowed an unearthly, livid white.
I didn’t know him, and it didn’t matter who he was, or had been; what he was now was rage and fury and pain given flesh.
And he was killing Betty.
His hand was locked around her throat. The broken fragments of the plates she had dropped were still bouncing and spinning across the floor, and time seemed to slow as I lunged forward.…
And the Djinn released Betty, spun away, and caught me instead.
She fell down, coughing and choking, but still breathing. He had never intended to kill her, I realized; she’d merely been a bell for him to ring to draw me to him. And that, I found, was all right. It was a choice I’d have gladly made.
Odd, how much I had changed.
Behind me, Luis shouted something that I failed to understand, but it didn’t matter; the floor beneath the Djinn suddenly rose upward in a geyser of tile, broken concrete, dirt, shattered pipes, and slammed him into the ceiling. He lost his grip on me, and I tumbled back down the instant mound of debris to crash breathlessly into the steel casing of the ovens.
Luis headed toward me, but I pointed urgently at Betty. He changed course, grabbed her, and towed her backward, pushing her out the swinging door.
“Wait!” she yelled. “What are you doing?”
“Getting my damn pie,” he said. “Stay down.”
The Djinn hadn’t been thrown off guard for long; he broke free of the pile of debris around him, but instantly met the flat side of a large skillet that Luis grabbed off the stove—still red-hot underneath, I realized. After he’d batted the Djinn across the face with it, Luis dropped the metal with a hiss of pain; the Djinn howled, evidently feeling the damage to its flesh as much as a human would have, but neither the crushed bones nor the badly burned skin bought us more than a few seconds.
Time enough for me to yank a natural gas connection loose from the wall. “Fire!” I shouted to Luis, who snapped his fingers.
The hissing gas line erupted in a blue-white jet of flame, engulfing the Djinn. It was a distraction, not a victory; we had little chance, it seemed, of destroying this one with the tools we had at hand. “Get Betty!” I yelled. “Get her out of here!” I was working hard to limit the natural tendency of the fire to eat its way back through the gas line, into a larger store; once that happened, the explosion would be spectacular, and there wouldn’t be anything left of the restaurant. I had to buy time for Luis and the woman to get clear before that happened.
The Djinn was managing to extinguish itself, so I grabbed a bottle of cooking oil, ripped the cap off, and threw it in his direction. The plastic bottle was easy enough to melt in midflight, and the oil coated his skin and gave the fire fresh life all over him.
He was no longer amused.
I felt the coming blow, and the whole building rocked around me, as if it had suddenly been struck by a tornado, but the weather outside was calm and clear. The Djinn was breaking the restaurant apart—and in the kitchen area, sharp metal was everywhere, lying loose, or just lightly secured. A block on the counter holding a succession of cutting knives tipped over, and the knives slid free and rotated in the air, each finding and focusing in on me with their sharp points.
Half of them flew directly at me in a rush, and I had just enough time to fling out my hand and create a strong magnetic field on the front of the stove. The knives, and most of the other metal pulling free in the room, veered course and clanged against the stove’s side in a near-unbreakable bond. The Djinn suddenly snuffed out all of the fire—even the flaming torch of the gas jet—and went very still. I felt the energy in the room change, as if something very large that had been casually swatting at me suddenly turned and focused its attention on me quite closely.
Another Djinn misted into existence next to the one who still smoldered with sparks in its blackened skin. Then another, and another.