Windfall

She turned and scrambled away, graceless and angry.

“Hey!” I yelled.

“Fuck off!” she yelled back, and kept going. “Find it yourself!”

Fine. Whatever. My back hurt, my head ached, I was sweaty and exhausted and I could hear—and feel—a black ugly mutter of thunder out to sea. The vultures were coming home to roost.

And I had to find David’s bottle. I just had to. It couldn’t end this way.

I uncovered the shattered shell of my dresser. It was too big to move. I cried for a little while, tears soaking into the gauze mask, and then grabbed hold and kicked the damn thing with my hiking boots until it splintered into pieces small enough to drag out of the way.

As the last one came free, I saw the nightstand, and it was all in one piece.

I gave a wordless, breathless yell, and hauled it out of the heap of junk it was buried in, leaned it against a rusted-out harvest gold washing machine, and slowly opened the drawer.

It was full of stuff. Old lotion bottles with half a handful left in each one.

My out-of-date sale catalogs.

A zippered bag full of foam cushioning.

I grabbed it, hugged it like a little girl reunited with her favorite stuffed animal, and unzipped it with shaking gloved fingers.

There was nothing inside.

Nothing.

I screamed, bit my lip, and forced myself to do things slowly. One piece at a time, taken out, examined, and tossed aside. Foam padding last.

It wasn’t there.

David’s bottle wasn’t fucking there.

In the dark, under the glare of the floodlights, I saw the cold green gleam of eyes out in the dark. Rats? Cats? They winked on and off in the shadows, too cautious to come near me, but too close for comfort.

One of those legendary giant cockroaches crawled out of the heap and began trundling like a shiny brown bus over heaps of metal.

The bottle wasn’t in the drawer, and it wasn’t in the bag where it was supposed to be. Night was falling. I couldn’t do this once the floodlights shut off, and tomorrow another layer of junk would arrive and bury any chance I had…

I had to do it. “David,” I said, and closed my eyes. “David, come to me. David, come to me. David, come to me.” Rule of three. Even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t refuse to obey that, not even as an Ifrit, so long as he was bound to a bottle. I had to know if the bottle was intact, at least. If David was still bound.

Out in the shadows, something moved. It was unsettlingly like that giant cockroach, the way it caught the floodlights in shiny angles and sharp points.

Skin like coal. Nothing human about it.

“David?” I whispered.

The Ifrit stood there, motionless. I got nothing from it. No sense of co

If he’d come when I called, he was still bound to the bottle. Worst possible news. I felt tears burning in my eyes again. “God, no. David, I’m so sorry. I’m going to find you. There’s got to be a way to make this right, to make this—”

He moved. Quicker than a Dji

… into that golden reservoir of power that Lewis had given me.

Why? How? Ifrits couldn’t feed on humans, not even Wardens, they couldn’t…

He was. “No!” I screamed, and tried to back up. I tripped and went down, felt something slash my shoulder, took a sharp angle hard in the back. The impact stu

He didn’t let go. When I opened my eyes he was crouched on top of me; black edges and angles, hunger and an absence of everything I knew as human, a Dji

And then, he flickered and became flesh, bone, blood, heartbeat, real. Dji

“Oh, God,” he murmured, and staggered back from me, clothes forming around him—blue jeans, open fla

“Where are you?” It was all I could do to form the words; he’d taken so much energy from me that I felt oddly slow, as if there wasn’t enough current left in my cells to drive the process of life and thought again. “Tell me.”

He reached down and lifted me in his arms, buried his face in the curve of my neck. He felt blazing hot, powered by my stolen life. I felt his agonized scream shiver through me. I stilled him by clumsily putting a hand on his face. “David, tell me where you are.”

He was weeping. Weeping. Human tears from inhuman eyes, a kind of despair I’d never seen in him before, a trapped and hunted fury. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I told you to stop me, I told you—”

“Hey! Put her down!”

I blinked and saw the dump whirl around me as David turned, still holding me.

Sarah was standing about ten feet away, holding—what the hell was that? A frying pan? Yep, a huge iron skillet. It must have weighed twenty pounds. Her arms were trembling with the effort of keeping it held at threat level.

“I mean it!” she yelled, and took another step toward us. “Put my sister down right now or it’s batter up!”

“It’s okay,” I said, and felt the world start to gray out. I held on with an effort. “Sarah, no. This is David.”

She looked confused. Her knuckles whitened around the skillet.

“Boyfriend,” I managed.

“Oh.” She swallowed, dropped the skillet with a clang of metal, and scrubbed her fingers against her filthy blue jeans. “Um, sorry. But—Jo? Are you okay?”

“She fell,” David said. He sounded shaken. When I looked up at him I saw that he’d formed glasses, and his eyes were fading to human brown. He still looked way too gorgeous to be real, but maybe that was just my prejudice. “I’ll carry her out.”

“Sorry,” I whispered, and put my arms around his neck. His strength and warmth folded around me, sheltering and protecting. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

“I know.” He touched his lips to my hair, then my forehead. “I wish you didn’t. I wish I could make this—stop. If I didn’t love you, wasn’t part of you, I couldn’t do this to you…”

“David, tell me where you are!”

He tried to tell me. His mouth opened, but nothing came out. He shook his head in frustration and tightened his hold on me as he made his way over the mountains of sharp metal and broken furniture, heading for the metal steps back up to the parking lot.

“Please. No, wait—I need to get your bottle, we can’t just leave it here—David, I’m ordering you, tell me where it is!”

He brushed my lips with a kiss, something gentle and very sad. “It won’t work,” he said. “You’re not my master anymore.”

And that was when I realized that I didn’t feel the draw anymore—the co

Somebody else had his bottle.

“Who—”

Overhead, black clouds rumbled. I felt a breeze ruffle my hair. David moved faster, effortlessly graceful. No longer trying to look all that human. I remembered how he’d been on the overpass, all that u

Sarah was still struggling along in his wake.

David carried me to the minivan and put me in the passenger seat, one hand dragging warm down the curve of my cheek as he settled my head against the cushions. A flash of lightning lit him blue on one side while the floodlights washed him white on the other.

“Don’t look for me,” he said. “It’s better that you don’t. You’re not safe with me now.”

He kissed me. Baby-soft lips, damp and silken and hot. I tasted peaches and ci

When he tried to pull back, I held on, holding the kiss, deepening it, demanding. Drinking a little bit of my power back from him.