Windfall

Oh, crap.

He broke free and hit the door release. An alarm added its shriek to the general confusion—the fire alarms were going off, too, and I wondered if the fire had spread somehow from the parking lot to the building—and as the door opened out onto the roof, rain and wind shouldered through the opening to hit us like linebackers. I staggered, but John reached back and grabbed my wrist and dragged me outside into the chaos of the downpour.

“John!” I screamed, over the continuing roll of thunder. “It’s not safe out here! The lightning—”

“Shut up; I’ll take care of the lightning!” And he could. John was a highly competent Weather Warden in his own right. Even as he finished saying it, I felt a ripple over my skin, and my blunted Warden senses registered something whipping through the aetheric at us like a striking snake…

John let go of me, turned, and focused his attention on a thick silver stanchion fixed to a corner of the roof.

Lightning hissed down. I could feel it struggling to reach us, fighting…

And then turning to hit the stanchion. The building’s lightning protection system bled it off into the ground through a network of inlaid wiring. I could feel the heat of it blast over me from where I stood.

But I also felt how close it had been. Something was directing that lightning.

Controlling it. Something a great deal stronger than John Foster.

He knew it, too; I saw it in the fixed, desperate set of his expression. “Come on!” John was tugging me onward, to a second concrete bunker on top of the roof.

The door was propped open. He grabbed it just as another flash of lightning came out of nowhere, streaking for us. John wasn’t ready, I knew it—he’d just spent a tremendous amount of energy redirecting that first bolt, and this one was just as big, if not bigger. And it was obviously bent on getting us.

What I had to throw into the pot barely qualified as power at all, but I did it, reaching out and trying to grab hold of the enormous burst of energy that was coming toward us. Electrons were shifting, jittering, realigning into polarities to create a path. All I had to do was snap a few… and I couldn’t do it. As fast as I broke the chain, it whipped back at us, those tiny molecular polarities spi

I dived one way, knowing it wouldn’t do any good; John dived the other.

I hit and rolled, and saw the lightning spear straight into John’s chest.

“No!” Maybe I screamed it, maybe I didn’t; whatever sound I made was lost in the massive rush of energy that slammed into his flesh. In its burst of brilliant light, I saw John’s diamond-eyed Dji

He didn’t move to help.

John, cut off from the Wardens network, had never heard the instructions to give his Dji

John dropped without a sound the second the lightning crackled and sizzled out.

I couldn’t see for long, agonizing seconds, so I fumbled my way over gravel and tar to take him in my arms. He was burning hot. As my vision cleared I saw that there were black burns at the top of his head, on the palms of his hands, and that his pants were riddled with sizzling, smoking holes. His shoes were melted to his feet.

I burned my fingers trying to check his pulse, but it was silent. His heart had taken a full jolt, and his nervous system was fried beyond repair.

The Dji

“You could have done something,” I said numbly. “Why didn’t you do something? He was your friend!”

He looked down at me. Rain didn’t touch him, just misted away an inch from his form. He was changing already, shifting from that quiet, unassuming young man John’s will had imposed on him to a larger, stronger body. His hair lightened from brown to white, rippling with subtle undertones of color like an opal.

Albino-pale skin. The down-home shirt and blue jeans transformed to rich, pale silk and velvet. He looked elegant and merciless and slightly barbaric.

“He wasn’t my friend,” the Dji

I choked on the taste of cold rain and burned flesh in my mouth. I wanted to weep, because the Dji

What had I done when I’d taken David as my servant? Had it destroyed the trust we’d had? How long would it take for that betrayal to soak into him, to erode his love for me, to turn it toxic?

Maybe the flaws that made him an Ifrit had started here, in me.

“You’re free now,” said a voice from behind me. I gasped and turned, blinking rain out of my eyes. It sounded like Ashan, and yes, it was Ashan, natty and businessman-perfect in his gray suit and chilly tie. His eyes had gone the color of the storm. Not a drop was touching him, of course. He walked forward, and where he walked, the rain just… vanished. He came to a halt a few feet from me, but he wasn’t paying the least attention to me, or the dead man in my arms.

His focus was all on the other Dji

“You bastard,” I said, and his eyes cut to me and shut me up. Instantly. With the unmistakable impression that I was one single heartbeat away from joining John in the heavenly choir.

“I’m not talking to you,” he said. “Shut up, meat.”

“Are you addressing me?” the other Dji

“Of course. I came to give you the opportunity to join us.”

“Fortuitous timing.”

Ashan’s smile was cold and heartless. “Isn’t it just?”

The other Dji

Ashan nudged John’s body carefully with the toe of his elegantly polished shoe.

No giveaway misting at the knees for Ashan. He was the Dress For Success poster child of the new age.

“Well, first, I’m the one who granted you freedom by killing this,” he said.

“It’s not freedom if I exchange one form of slavery for another.” The Dji

“Jonathan?” Ashan put all his contempt into it. “Do you really want to be on the side of the one who made us slaves in the first place?”

I was shivering, cold, drenched, and numbed, but that still made me blink.

“What?” I didn’t meant to say it out loud, but when you hear something like that, well, the question naturally blurts itself out.

This time, Ashan decided I was worthy of an answer. “You didn’t think this master-slave relationship was the natural order, did you? Did you really believe that humans rank higher than Dji

“When—how long—”

“Yesterday,” the other Dji

I wasn’t going to get an answer to that one, I could tell; Ashan had made his point, and I was no longer relevant except as something to nod toward when he wanted to drive home contempt.