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.
“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.