Black, twisted Ifrit hands. Angles and claws and hunger.
“Please,” he whispered against my skin, and he sounded so desperate, so lost.
“Please, Jo. Let me go.”
“I can’t,” I said numbly.
“Let me go or let me have what I need! I can’t—I can’t—” He exploded into a black, oily mist, howling, and was gone.
I collapsed forward, the white gauze drifting over me in the relentless, murmuring wind, and screamed out loud, until I woke up.
My sister was home. I could hear her moving around out there in the living room, humming something bright and happy. Probably something classical; Sarah always had been more cultured than I was, from the early days when she’d looked forward to piano lessons and I’d cut them to go chase baseballs out on the corner lot. I didn’t hear Eamon’s voice. I realized I was still holding David’s bottle in a death grip, in both hands, and put it back in the padded case in the nightstand.
You promised, a little voice whispered in the back of my mind.
I had. But I wasn’t ready.
I closed the nightstand drawer, shuffled into the bathroom, and winced at the glare of the bright, unflattering Hollywood lighting. I looked like crap… swollen eyes and bedhead. I struggled through combing the tangles out, got my hair more or less straight, and decided to leave the eyes as is, except for a quick application of Visine. I tossed on a crop top and tight low-rise jeans (artfully, though not intentionally, bleached in a random pattern, thanks to an accident with the Clorox Fairy) and walked out barefooted into the rest of my world.
Which was in surprisingly good order.
Sarah was cooking. She had fresh, bright vegetables laid out on the kitchen counter and was whaling away with a gleaming oversized knife. Behind her, a pan simmered with a pool of oil. She looked up at me and froze in midaria, then forced a smile and went on with her chopping.
“Hey,” I said, and sat at the kitchen table, staring at my hands.
“Hey, yourself.” She did something in my peripheral vision, and then a glass of wine appeared on the table in front of me. White wine, silvering the outside of the glass with chill. “Will that help?”
“Help what?” I sipped the wine. It was good, light and fruity with a kick at the end. Dry finish.
“Whatever the problem is.”
I sighed. “It’s more of a rotgut-whiskey-out-of-a-paper-bag problem than a fine pinot grigio problem.”
“Oh.” She retreated to her vegetables again. “You’ve been dead to the world all day, you know. Eamon’s coming over for dinner; I hope that’s all right. I was hoping your, ah, friend could join us. David. The musician.”
Oh, God, it hurt. I took another gulp of wine to dull the knife-sharp pain.
“He’s touring.”
“Oh. Too bad.” She shrugged and kept on with food prep. “Well, there’s plenty. I’m making chicken primavera. I hope you like it.”
As I had no opinion, I didn’t answer, just sipped wine and stared out the patio doors. The ocean rolled in from the horizon, and it was a beautiful twilight out there. We didn’t face the sunset, but the faint orange tinge was in the air and reflected off the sheer, glassy points of the waves. The sky had turned a rich, endless blue, edging toward black.
I’d been asleep a while, but it felt as if I hadn’t rested in days. Everything felt sharp and fragile and not quite right.
I let it fade into white noise as Sarah scraped meticulously dismembered vegetables from cutting board to bowl. She left the veggies and checked a stock pot on the stove, which sent out an aroma of chicken and herbs when she lifted the lid. I didn’t remember owning a stock pot. It looked new. Like the gleaming chef-quality knives. I couldn’t remember if I’d gotten my credit card back. That worried me, in a distant sort of otherworldly way.
She kept talking about my neighbors, whom I guess she’d spent the morning chatting up. I failed to follow, but it didn’t really matter; she was babbling with an edge of nervousness, the standard Sarah tactic when she was trying not to think about something else. I remembered her doing this in high school, getting ready for dates with Really Cute Boys. She was nervous about Eamon.
“… don’t you think?” she finished, and began draining the chicken. She saved the stock, I noticed. The better to boil the pasta.
“Absolutely,” I said. I had no idea what the question was, but she beamed happily at the answer.
“I thought so. Hey, give me a hand with this, would you?” She was struggling with the weight of the stock pot. I got up and grabbed one of the side handles, and a hot pad—those were new, too—and helped out. She flashed me a grin that faded when I didn’t grin back. We drained the chicken in silence. The stock pot, refurnished with broth, went back on the burner and got a new load of pasta.
Sarah dumped chicken and veggies into the oil-prepped pan to sauté.
“Is it David?” she asked as she expertly stirred and adjusted the heat. I blinked and looked at her. “Did you have a fight?”
“No.” There was no easy answer. She took it for the avoidance it was and concentrated on her cooking.
I’d turned off the phone before collapsing on the bed this afternoon; I wandered over to the wireless base and saw that there were messages. I picked up the cordless and punched buttons.
“Would you like to own your own home? Rates today are…” Erase.
“Hot singles are looking for you!” Erase.
A brief moment of silence, and then the recording said, “Be on your balcony in thirty seconds. I’ll be waiting.”
I knew the rich, ever-so-slightly inhuman female voice. And that wasn’t a recording. Not exactly.
I put the phone down, walked over to the plate-glass window and looked out. No one out there. But I knew better than to think I could avoid this, even if I wanted to; the Djinn Rahel wasn’t the kind of girl you could avoid for long. I opened the sliding glass door and stepped out into the cooling breeze. As I rumbled the door shut again, I felt… something. A little stirring inside, a slight chill on the back of my neck.
When I turned around, Rahel was seated at my wrought-iron café table, legs crossed, inspecting her taloned fingernails. They were bright gold. The pantsuit she was wearing matched, and under it she wore a purple shirt the color of old royalty. Her skin gleamed dark and sleek in the failing light, and as she turned her head to look at me I saw the hawk-bright flash of her golden eyes.
“Snow White,” she greeted me, and clicked her fingernails together lightly. They made a metallic chime. “Miss me?”
I sat down in the other delicate little café chair and folded my hands on the warm wrought iron table. “Like the bubonic plague.”
She folded a graceful, deadly hand over where her heart would be if she’d actually had one. “I’m devastated. My happiness is shattered.”
“To what do I owe this pleasure?”
“Ah, is it one?”
“Just say whatever you’ve come to say.” I said it in a flat tone, tired of the banter already and just wanting to crawl back in bed and avoid reality for another few hours. Avoid the choice I knew I had to make. Which wasn’t even really a choice.
Rahel leaned forward and rested her elbows on the wrought iron. Those alien, bird-bright eyes studied me without any trace of mercy or humor.
“You’re dying,” she said. “Broken inside. I see that Jonathan has given you time, but you’d best not waste it, sistah. Things are happening too quickly.”
“David’s an Ifrit,” I said suddenly. I remembered seeing it happen to Rahel—who, so far as I knew, was the first Djinn to ever recover from it. And she’d done it by sapping the power of the second-most-powerful Djinn in the world… David … and by a unique confluence of events that included human death and intervention by the Ma’at in an extraordinary cooperation of human and Djinn.
“I need the Ma’at,” I said. “I need them to fix David.”