Windfall

And then he looked past me and I saw pain in his expression. He said something, but it wasn’t in human language; it was the bright and singing tongue of Dji

A prayer, a curse, a lament…

I sensed a black presence behind me in the air.

David was transforming into something terrible, something with cutting edges and hunger for a heart.

When I tried to turn around to see, Jonathan held me in place and shook his head. “Don’t look.”

It was bad enough seeing the devastation in his eyes. I was watching the end of a friendship that wasn’t supposed to have an ending… something time itself was supposed to respect. I did this. No, we did this, David and I, together.

Love, I was starting to realize, was beautiful, but it was also ruthlessly selfish.

I touched Jonathan and felt fire, not flesh; it burned me with wild and intimate fury, but I didn’t let go. “Jonathan…”

“I have to go,” he said, and I heard that edge of grief in his voice again, liquid and molten with pain. “He’ll kill me if I stay here. Or worse. I’ll kill him. He’s too hungry right now. Remember what I said. You don’t have much time—just get it done.”

He let go of my arm and stepped back. My hair obscured my vision again, and I reached up to shove it out of the way as I whirled to see what he was looking at.

David was gone. In his place was a black, twisted shadow of a thing, angles and glittering edges and nothing remotely human to it. An Ifrit.

It touched down on the bridge’s surface and stalked toward us, fixed on power.

Fixed on Jonathan.

“No!” I screamed, and threw myself in David’s path, but he went through me as if I were smoke, lunged with diamond-bright claws outstretched…

And Jonathan vanished before they could touch him.

David misted out a few seconds later. Chasing after that bright, shining ghost.

I was alone.

Well, except for the onlookers who were suddenly coming to realize that something weird had happened. But not exactly what, or who was responsible.

The cops arrived. I was hustled off to stand beside a police cruiser. Nobody knew what to ask, because no one understood what had just happened; all I had to do was be just as clueless. Pretty easy, actually. I wasn’t faking the shock and trauma. The questions they tried to frame were just as vague as my answers, so in the end the cops just gave it up and accepted the whole thing as a suicide.

I wished I could see it that way, but I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t help but replay the terror in the Warden’s eyes as he’d reached out to me, or the scream that had ripped out of him when David let him go.

My fault.

I’d never even found out his name.

Eventually, the cops remanded me to the custody of Cherise, who had been standing at the barricades looking anxious and dumbstruck and more than a little freaked out for some time. She didn’t say a word. She grabbed my hand and towed me off toward the Mustang, this time pulled over to the breakdown lane, and got me well out of the way before turning on me.

“What the fuck was that?” she yelled over the resumed din of traffic, honking horns, and the wind. “Joa

I couldn’t answer. I didn’t have the strength. I just looked at her, walked around to the passenger side and got in the car. Cherise continued to berate me and pepper me with questions, which made no more sense than the ones the cops had managed to put together. I ignored her.

David was gone. I couldn’t feel him anymore. I shut my eyes and remembered that back in Las Vegas, when I’d held the bottle of another Dji

Without opening my eyes, I whispered, “David. Get back in the bottle, now.”

I had no way of knowing if he had. Hopefully it would give Jonathan some space.

Maybe David would even recover a bit. Maybe, maybe, maybe… everything was so screwed up. I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes until I saw stars.

The warmth in me felt foreign, like artificial life support. Jonathan had warned me it wouldn’t last. How long did I have to find an answer, one that wouldn’t destroy David in the process?

Cherise was saying something about us being so fired; we were the better part of an hour overdue for the shoot, of course, not that I cared. I just wanted to go home. I felt the thrum of the engine as she started up the Mustang, but then she slammed it back into park and reached over and grabbed me by the shoulder.

I looked at her. She was the picture of astonishment, from her raised shaped eyebrows to the shiny, lip-glossed O of her mouth.

“What?” I asked.

For answer, she shoved me forward and put her hand on my naked back.

“Hey!”

“Joa

A parting gift from Jonathan. For completely different reasons than her subsequent declaration of a miracle, I found that more unbelievable than anything else.

I wanted to go home. Cherise flatly refused to turn the car around, since we were so close to our destination. “If I’m going to get my ass fired, I want them to do it to my face,” she said grimly, and hit the gas to power us around the fast-moving traffic and down the off-ramp.

The shoot was being staged in a used-car lot. Of course. Some sort of promo tie-in with the local junker dealership. Cherise shrieked the Mustang to a sliding stop in a convenient space and eyed the salespeople mistrustfully as they appeared like—well, like magic.

“Nobody touches my car,” she said to the Alpha Marketer, a big ex-football-type guy with a flattop haircut and that I’ll-make-you-a-great-deal gleam in his eye. He gri

“Absolutely,” he said, and handed her his card. “Anything you need, you come straight to me.”

She slipped it in her back pocket with a wink, and hustled me up to the cluster of people near the main building. I went, barely aware of moving. I just wanted to collapse in a heap and cry.

Marvelous Marvin was not in a good mood. He was pacing, face flushed under the pancake, snapping off orders to some poor intern who looked anemic, asexual, and on the verge of giving notice—or possibly expiring of an asthmatic fit. Marvin still had his makeup napkin tucked into his collar. It was not a humorous sight.

The camera crew was lolling around, looking happy as clams. As well they should be, at fifty bucks an hour or more each. One was catching a light nap in a portable chair with a sunshade.

“You!” Marvin bit off as he caught sight of us. “You are fired, get me? Fired! Both of you!”

I mustered up some sense of responsibility. “It’s not Cherise’s fault,” I said dully. No, it was my fault. I kept replaying the Warden’s fall, his impact on the concrete. He’d been young. Too young to die like that, caught in the middle of something he couldn’t understand.

“I wasn’t talking to her, and anyway, I don’t give a shit whose fault it was, you’re both fired! Look, I can get pretty girls twelve to a dollar out there on a beach; I don’t need you two with your prima do

“Hold up,” said the director, who was watching a portable TV in the shadow of a minivan with the cha

I came. Cherise came with.

The director—Rob—pointed at the screen as he took a bite of his cheese sandwich.

“Is that you?” He looked up at me as his finger touched a tiny, foreshortened figure on the screen.