Windfall

“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 di

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 Dji

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 Dji

“I need the Ma’at,” I said. “I need them to fix David.”

Rahel was regarding me with those steady, predatory eyes. In the dying daylight, they looked surreally brilliant, powered by something other than reflected energy. She drummed her long, sharp fingernails on iron, and the chime woke a shiver up and down my spine.

“The Ma’at won’t come. The Free Dji

“Jonathan wants me to—”

She held up her hand. “I don’t care what Jonathan wants.”

This was new. And unsettling. Rahel had always been fanatically in the Jonathan camp; I understood there were cults of personality within the Dji

She continued, “If you let David free now, he will hunt, and he will destroy. I was dangerous, when I was an Ifrit. He will be deadly, and if he goes after Jonathan, Jonathan will not act to stop him as he should. Do you understand?”

I did, I thought. I’d felt the voracious hunger in David, the need to survive. I knew he’d have died rather than even consider feeding on Jonathan, in saner days, but what was happening to him had no relation to sanity. Not as I understood it.

“If you keep him in the bottle, he’ll drain you dry,” Rahel whispered softly. “But it will end there. He will be trapped in the glass.”

“But he’s not draining me now!”

She merely looked at me for so long I felt a sick gravitational shift inside my stomach.

“He is?”

“Ifrits can feed on humans,” she said. “But only on Wardens. And there is something within you that is not human that attracts him as well.”

The baby. Oh, God, the baby.

“You want me to voluntarily let him kill me,” I said. “Me and the baby. To save Jonathan.”