Windfall

“You can’t want to follow Jonathan,” Ashan said. The other Dji

Thunder rolled overhead, and they both waited out the roar. “If you follow me, you can free others.”

“You mean kill,” the Dji

“Exactly.” A full, sharp-toothed wolf’s smile. “Come on, don’t tell me you don’t want to. You can start with this one, if you’re interested. Believe me, she’s got it coming.”

The Dji

The Dji

“So you’ll do what? Live as a rogue? An outcast?” Ashan sneered at the whole idea, and took a step forward. I felt tension snap tight between them. “Better off dead, I’d say.”

Behind him, the stairwell door swung open. Silently. Nobody was touching it. A flash of lightning revealed a man standing there, tall and lean, hands at his sides.

Lewis’s face was hard, expressionless, and very frightening.

“Leave him alone,” he said, and stepped out into the rain. Unlike the Dji

The water pounded over him, soaking his hair flat to his head, saturating his fla

He just didn’t care.

Ashan turned to face him. I felt the crackle of power notch up—not like lightning. This was something else. Something… bigger. A little like the resonance that occurred between me and Lewis when things got a little close, only this was dissonance, disharmony, a jagged and cutting chaos.

“He has a choice,” Lewis said. “He can join you, he can join Jonathan, or he can help the Ma’at put all this right again. Restore the balance of things. Stop the violence and the killing. Because this has to stop, Ashan, before everything goes to hell.”

“You mean, everything in the human world.”

“No. I mean everything. Dji

“Well, maybe you are,” Ashan said, and checked the line of his suit jacket with a casual flick of his fingers. “I have to tell you, I don’t intend to be subordinate to anything or anyone. Ever again.”

“That includes Jonathan, I suppose.”

“It definitely includes Jonathan.”

“Have you happened to mention that to him? Because I don’t see the scars. I think you’ve been avoiding him since you decided on this little rebellion of yours.”

Ashan’s smile was thin, bloodless, and unamused. “I didn’t come here to trade witty remarks with you, human. Go away.”

“Fine. All us humans will just—”

“Not this one. This one’s mine.” Ashan reached out and grabbed me by the shoulder, and boy, it hurt. First of all, his hands were like forged iron.

Second, they weren’t really flesh, not as I could understand it—not the kind of flesh that David always wore, or even Jonathan. Ashan was just an illusion, and what was underneath was sharp and hurtful and cold.

I wanted him to stop touching me, but when I tried to yank away, it was like trying to pull back from an industrial vise.

Lewis went very, very still. Oh, boy. This wasn’t going to end well, and I really didn’t want to be in the middle. Lewis had tons of power, rarely used;

Earth was his weakest, Weather his strongest. He hadn’t been able to work miracles against tons of sand and a dying boy, but here, on this playing field …

He just might be equal to a Dji

“Let go,” Lewis said.

Ashan actually gri

“Lewis—” I didn’t get the chance to finish the warning because Ashan, without the slightest hint he was going to act, tried to set Lewis on fire.

Lewis batted away the attack without effort. I’d been burning the last of my power to reach Oversight when it happened, so I’d seen it… a white-hot burst of power arrowing for him, encircling him in a bubble of energy, pressing inward… and dissolving at a single touch of his hand. The energy went chaotic, bouncing back at Ashan, vectoring away to slam into other things, like the swirling fury of the storm, which sucked it up and let loose with another fusillade of lightning bolts overhead.

Lewis had barely even moved. Because he was always so careful with his power, such a good steward of it, it was easy to forget that he was, without question, the most powerful Warden breathing. He rarely lost his temper or acted without thought for the consequences… unlike me. But when he did…

“Ashan,” he said, and his voice had gone into a velvet-deep growl range that made me shiver deep inside, “the next Warden you hurt gets you destroyed so completely that no one will remember you ever existed. And I mean that.”

Ashan stared at him. Lewis stared back, unmoving, dripping with rain and fiercely elemental.

As if he was made of the elements he controlled.

“You aren’t eternal,” Lewis said, and there was something in his words that sounded not quite human in its depth and power. “You were born into this world, and you can die in it. You’ve got no place to run.”

“A human can’t threaten…”

“I’m talking to you as someone who can hear the whisper of the Mother as she sleeps. Do you really think that makes me human?”

Ashan’s teal eyes flared gray for a second, then darkened again. Not quite under control.“The Mother doesn’t talk to meat.”

“She talks to Wardens like me. Wardens who hold all the keys to power. You should remember that. You were around when Jonathan died as a human.”

Ashan’s iron-cold grip on me suddenly relaxed, and I overbalanced pulling away from him. Lewis helped me up. I felt cold and shaky and unreasonably weak, as if the Dji

Strength. Independence. Hope.

Lewis’s touch brought all of that rushing back. Especially the independence part, which made me immediately pull away from his support. “I’m fine,” I said.

His dark eyes flicked to me and were momentarily just a man’s again, harassed and short-tempered. “I can take care of myself.”

“I know,” he said. “Go. Somebody will meet you downstairs.”

I couldn’t seem to make myself move. Raindrops were pattering and pooling in John Foster’s open eyes. “Ashan killed John. Why?”

“Because he could,” Lewis said grimly. “Because John had something he wanted.”

For a blind second I thought he meant me, but Lewis was looking past me, at the albino, opal-haired rock-’n’-roll Dji

“Recruits,” Lewis finished. “Right, Ashan? You need ca

The other Dji

“Go downstairs,” Lewis said to me.