Windfall

“No I don’t!” I yelled back. “I’ve got an Ifrit, dammit, and I’m not fucking calling him, so you need to get your head together! Tell me what I can do!”

“Nothing,” Lewis snapped. “Thanks for dropping in.”

“Guess I’m fucked, then,” Kevin whispered, and opened his eyes. Not by much.

They were vague and unfocused; I guessed that Lewis was also doing some kind of pain blocking. I crouched down next to the kid, feeling a strain in my knees.

Nothing like landing flat-footed after a ten-foot fall to really limber up the joints.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“Like you’d care,” Kevin shot back. It was half reflex, I could see that. His heart really wasn’t in the whole dystopian thing today, and he looked scared.

Really, really scared. “You dropped me like a bag of trash when you got what you wanted. Went back to your nice life. Hey, Jo, how’s that going for you?”

I didn’t want to debate how playing Stupid Weather Girl on an off-brand TV station could constitute nice life. “If you were trying to get attention, there were easier ways of doing it,” I said. He flipped me off. Clumsily. It was actually kind of cute. He had funky shadows on his cheeks, and I realized two things: one, he was wearing black liner—definitely gone to the goth side—and two, it had smeared down his face.

Kevin had been crying.

I felt my heart, which had started to take a clue to ease up on the pounding, start thumping faster again. Kevin was short of breath, and his lips looked slightly blue. “Damn, Lewis, I’m all screwed up inside. It feels—”

“Easy,” Lewis murmured, and got down on one knee beside him to move up the hem of his none-too-clean long-sleeved T-shirt. It advertised some undead band with an umlaut in its name and a zombie graphic, but the real horror was underneath—a long, deep slice in his side, gaping wide and welling a constant, slow pulse of blood. He’d lost a lot of the stuff, and most of it was smeared and spotted on his skin in damp, tie-dyed patterns.

Lewis put his fingers around the wound in a rough circle, bent his head, and concentrated. Kevin shuddered and grabbed convulsively for my hand; I let him have it without protest. He was strong, but not as strong as he should have been.

The bleeding slowed to a trickle again. Kevin choked, coughed, and swallowed convulsively. Trying not to throw up, I guessed.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” Kevin’s hand was shaking, and so was his voice. “We were asking around about the Dji

“Kevin, what happened?”

“Somebody tried to kill us.”

“You and Lewis?”

“Yeah.” He wiped his face with his free hand, smearing his eyeliner into a sad-clown mask. On his other side, Lewis was a frozen statue, unmoving, doing whatever it was that Earth Wardens do when they fight for a life in jeopardy. I had no doubt it was a terrible strain on both of them; Kevin would rather have died than let me see him weak like this. “Fucking assholes. We weren’t hurting anybody.”

I had a really bad feeling. “Was it the Wardens?”

He nodded.

“Anybody I know?”

He tried to shrug, one of those liquid up-and-down expressions of boredom that teenagers must have invented in the dawn of evolution. He only managed a weak imitation, though. He became even more pale from the effort, and glanced down at the exposed mess of the wound in his side.

It was bleeding again. Not much, but a steady trickle. As I watched, the trickle ran a little bit faster.

“Kevin,” I said to distract him. Kevin’s panic couldn’t do anything but make Lewis’s job harder. “You said it was the Wardens. Tell me what they looked like.”

“You know some bitch with punk piercings and some guy looks like a lumberjack?”

“Maybe.” I thought fast. It could be Shirl and Erik, who had come after me during my first hellride across the country, when I’d been heading for what I thought was a safe haven, and Star. They were on Marion Bearheart’s staff, but I couldn’t see Marion authorizing a hit squad for Kevin, not now. Not after what had happened in Las Vegas. “Where did this happen? Vegas?”

“No, here. Me and Lewis were up the coast, checking out some ruined hotel where we heard some Dji

I wanted to reach over and put my arms around him. It was manifestly a bad idea for so, so many reasons.

“You’re not going to die,” I promised him. I risked a look down at the wound, and Jesus, was I wrong? Was it bleeding more, not less? Lewis was locked in silence, concentrating. Trying to heal, or at least keep things at a rough status quo.

He wasn’t going to be able to lift me out of here, and he couldn’t do this alone. The wound was too deep, and he was having to split too much of his power off to keep the cave intact.

None of which I could help with.

“Oh, damn,” Kevin whispered. His breath hissed in, caught, and I saw his face grow paler. “You know, this is actually a lot worse than it looks.” He was trying to joke about it. That broke my heart. He was too young for this. Too young for a lot of the things that had been done to him during his short life, and way too young for some of what he’d done to others. Kevin was a freak and a killer and a surly little bastard, but he hadn’t exactly been born lucky.

“I’m not glad to hear that, because it looks pretty damn bad,” I said. “But you’ve got Lewis. And nobody can do this better.”

It occurred to me that there actually was something I could do, albeit not on a mystical level. I took a look at what I was wearing—nothing I could use to wad up without revealing a hell of a lot more than was really PC. “Lewis. Lewis! I need your shirt.”

I tugged on his shoulder, dragging the fabric half off; he shifted to accommodate me, letting me pull the blood-spattered fla

“Dear Penthouse,” Kevin whispered. “I never thought this would happen to me …”

“Shut up, already.” I folded Lewis’s shirt up into a clumsy pad, and pressed it hard against the open wound, or as much of it as I could reach around Lewis’s hand. That got a gasp and a shudder, and a parchment pallor I didn’t like very much.

Kevin slipped into unconsciousness.

“Lewis. Lewis! How bad is it? Really?”

His tired brown eyes opened and focused slowly on me. “Fatal if I don’t keep on it. There’s a major artery severed. I’m doing what I can to keep it clamped, but …”

But he couldn’t keep it up forever. That kind of thing took a hell of a lot of concentration. “Can you heal him?”

“No. Too much damage.”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked, as calmly as possible.

He didn’t answer. His eyes drifted closed.

“Lewis?”

No response. I reached over and tapped his face lightly, got a flicker of his eyelids and then a slow return. I repeated the question.

“Get help,” he said. “Find a way. If you don’t…”

He didn’t go on. He wasn’t unconscious—if he’d passed out, Kevin would have bled out in thick, pumping bursts. Instead, the bleeding slowed to a warm trickle against my hands and the already-soaked pad of the shirt. Lewis had gone deeper into trance to try to keep things locked down.

I took Lewis’s hand and moved it to press down on the bandage. He took over the pressure.

“Hey,” Kevin whispered. Awake again. He stared at me with wide, bloodshot eyes. He smelled strongly of stale, unwashed clothes, and faintly of the green, earthy aroma of pot. Lewis, I thought, you suck as a guardian. Not that I’d have been any better. “What are you going to do?”