Windfall

Enough to make me a Warden again, even though not much of one.

He faded and cooled as I did it, but not quite enough to slide back into Ifrit-state. But he would. As the power faded, he’d revert.

But for now, at least, we were balanced. The co

“You didn’t have to answer when I called,” I said, and touched the side of his face, then tangled my hands in the soft strands of his hair. “If I’m not your master—”

“I’ll always be yours,” he interrupted. “Always. The bottle doesn’t matter.” His forehead pressed against mine, and his breath pulsed warm on my skin. “Don’t you understand that yet?”

Another flash of lightning blinded me. When I opened my eyes, my hands were empty, and David was gone. I didn’t cry. I felt too numbed and empty to cry.

Sarah lunged over the top of the metal steps from the junkpile, panting, flushed, thoroughly filthy. She grabbed the open door and looked inside, then met my eyes. Hers were anime-wide.

“Where’d he come from? Wait… where’d he go?”

I just shook my head. Sarah stared at me for a long, considered second, and then shut the door and climbed into the driver’s seat. The engine started with a roar, and she began piloting the Good Ship Minivan out of the dump.

“He’s a Dji

Silence. Sarah hit the brakes hard enough to jerk, and for a few long seconds we just sat there, idling, until the first fat drops of rain began pelting the van with hard, resonant thumps.

“Well,” she finally said, “at least he’s cute. Are you insane?”

I sighed. “Oh, I so wish I was.”

We drove home. I felt exhausted and sick and sore, and refused Sarah’s multiple offers of visits to the local emergency room or mental health center, no matter how rich, cute, and single the doctors might be. I showered away the dump under the new high-pressure massaging bath nozzle—not all of Sarah’s upgrades were objectionable—and crawled into my brand-new bed, too tired to wonder what I was going to do in the morning about all my various enemies, crises, and wars.

David was, at least, not buried under half a ton of garbage at the dump, or at least I didn’t think he was. That was about as much of a victory as I could aspire to for one day.

In retrospect, if I’d had half a brain in my head, I’d have never shut my eyes.

Interlude

As the storm destroys the island that men called Atlantis, as it strips it bare and devours every fragment of life before sinking the bare rocks under the waves—something strange happens. The explosion of death-energy from the destruction is so huge that, to balance the scales, five hundred Dji

Powerful, and afraid.

The storm doesn’t see them as fuel for its fires, and turns north, toward a rich, green land full of energy, full of life, full of fragile things that it can grind apart in its fury.

And this is when it becomes my story, and my mistake. I can’t stop it. The Dji

The end of the world is on us. We argue, the Dji

I realize there is no way for Dji

So I pull from the Mother and give power to humans to make them Wardens. And I give them the means to enslave the Dji

The moment when we join together, humans and Dji

Should have seen that coming.

Ashan and the others are breaking the deal I made, all those mille

They’re doing what I never had the courage to do: They’re taking back their freedom.

And I don’t blame them. I blame myself.

It’s time for things to be clean again. Scrubbed raw, like the rocks of Atlantis. Maybe what comes out of this will be better. I’ve wanted freedom for the Dji

But it’s the right choice.

If David were here, he’d tell me I’m crazy.

But he’s not here. For the first time in my life, human or Dji

Only choices.

So I think I’ll sit here on the beach, with the waves spraying the sky, watching as that long-ago storm swirls itself back into life again, finishing what it started. The Wardens have been fighting this same storm for thousands of years, whether they know it or not. I always feel something about it, something familiar, when it manages to put on its cloak of clouds and come back for another round.

I can’t stop it alone. Neither can the Wardens. And the Dji

I watch as the storm’s heart turns black and furious, and I wish it didn’t have to end this way.

But I don’t know of any other way for it to happen.

Chapter Eight

No surprise: I woke up feeling like I’d had the hell beaten out of me by the Jolly Green Giant. Definitely not one of my better mornings. I tried to get out of bed, ended up more or less leaning on the wall, staring down at my naked body. I’d washed away the dump stains, but the bruises were pretty spectacular.

Couldn’t see the really painful one, which was in the small of my back; I shuffled into the bathroom, dragged messy hair out of my eyes, and used an awkwardly angled hand mirror to take an appraisal of the damage. It didn’t look as bad as it felt, but then, it felt awful. The bruise was black and blue, the size of a fist. Swollen, too. Ow.

I took another shower, because what the hell… massaging showerhead… and dried my hair into a more or less glorious shower of curls that didn’t frizz too much, and put on makeup. Why? Hell if I know, except that the worse I feel, the better I want to look. After applying all the disguise, I put on a light bra and a kickin’ peau de soie blouse, and contemplated my choices for things that wouldn’t press agonizingly against the bruise on my back. The low-rise panties and blue jeans seemed the only possible choice, other than walking around half-naked…

I flipped on the sleek little flat-screen TV that had come with my new bedroom suite, a luxury I’d never even considered before, and tuned to WXTV. Just to see.

They were finishing up the news portion of the morning show and moving to the weather. They had a new Weather Girl, I saw immediately, and hey, I felt just a little bit bitter about it for a second, because she was stu

The anchors were laughing. She was forecasting a storm for later today.

The camera pulled back, and back…

… and there was Marvin. Squeezed into a foam rubber cloud suit, with little silver drops hanging off of him, sweating like a pig and glaring like a pit bull. Red with fury.