Firestorm

My free hand was in a fist, clenched tight. I didn't remember doing it, and deliberately relaxed until the white knuckles loosened up. "You won't get anything by threatening her. There are other things happening, in case you're not aware. Bad things. I can't just—"

"Yeah," he interrupted. "Dead Wardens littering the landscape, very sad, I'm devastated, et cetera. But in short, bugger your problems, darling, because my problems are the priority. I'll give you exactly two days to settle your little difficulties and make arrangements to get me what I want, and no tricks, or I swear to you, your sister will not leave a pretty corpse, are we understood?"

"Yes," I said. "Yes, we're understood."

"Then it's been a slice, love, and you watch yourself. Wouldn't want anything to happen to you before I get what I want. Now, if you'll excuse me, I hear the water shutting off in the bath. I have to go do your sister."

He hung up before I could fire off anything I'd regret later. The number was blocked, of course. I sank down on the bed again, exhausted and aching and angry as hell, with nowhere to put all that nervous dread. Not like my sister's life could count for any more than the hundreds of thousands of people who were in danger, or the millions—billions—in the balance if we didn't figure out how to make things right again.

Bones and dust, corpses turning to petroleum. Sunflowers nodding placidly over a graveyard. Had I just been dreaming? Or was Jonathan—the spirit of Jonathan, anyway—trying to tell me something important?

Two days. Not enough time. Not enough time for anything.

I felt tears coming, and choked them back furiously. I was not going to let that bastard make me cry, and I was not going to think about him standing in that steam-fogged bathroom, wiping beads of water from my sister's naked back while she smiled i

No, I wasn't going to think about that at all.

Okay, maybe I was.

I curled up on the bed, hurled the alarm clock across the room in a satisfying crunch of plastic, and put my pillow over my head to sob out my fury and pain. That was supposed to be cathartic, but mostly it seemed to result in aching muscles, sinuses packed with fluid, and raw, abused eyeballs.

I needed to blow my nose. When I reached for a tissue from the bedside box, my fumbling fingers met warm flesh, helpfully handing one over.

I lifted my head slowly from the smothering embrace of the pillow, and gasped.

"Aren't you going to take that?" David asked. I looked down. My fingers were clenched on the tissue in his hand, but I hadn't made any move to claim it. I slowly pulled it toward me.

David was sitting in a chair a couple of feet away, watching me with his head tilted a little to one side. His eyes were more brown than bronze, just now, lazy behind the concealing round glasses. Relaxed. He was wearing a familiar outfit of a blue checked shirt and faded jeans and battered hiking boots, and God, he looked good enough to eat. Relief flashed through me like a concentrated burst of lightning, and then recent history caught up to me like the following thunder. I sat up in a hurry, heart thumping so hard, I saw red spots, because my brain finally saw fit to remind me that David, about thirty hours ago, had been intent on killing me.

"Easy," he said, and reached out to draw a fingertip over the tender, sensitive skin on the interior of my right arm. Heat and friction, real as it could get. "It's all right. I'm myself, at least for now. Blow your nose."

He wasn't a dream; he was here. Really here, physically.

I really did need to blow my nose. I did so, in as ladylike a fashion as I could, wishing all the while—mostly stupidly—that I'd had some kind of warning, that I'd been able to shower or to brush my hair or change my clothes or… hell. Anything.

I tossed the tissue at the trash can nearby. He gave my underhanded girly throw an assist with a wave of his finger, not even looking. Two points.

"I didn't know if you were alive," he said softly. "Not at first. I remembered coming after you, on the beach, and then—nothing. I thought I'd hurt you. Killed you."

The look in his eyes—God, it made my heart break. I swung my legs over the side of the bed. We were close enough that our knees brushed.

David leaned forward, moving slowly, the way animal trainers do with skittish creatures, and he slowly extended his hand toward me. Traced the line of my cheek. "I can't stay long," he said quietly. "But I want to try to protect you, as much as I can. Help you. Will you let me?"

I couldn't say no to him, not when he sounded like that. Soft and a little desperate. I stayed where I was. I didn't reach back to him, though every cell in my body screamed for me to do it; I just watched him, until he drew his hand back. He put his elbows on his knees and focused on my face with an intensity I remembered from the first time I'd met him. Had I fallen in love with him right then, at first sight? I'd fallen in lust, for sure. Lust had been no problem at all. Still wasn't. But more than that—and I only realized it now, looking back on it—I'd lost my soul to him somewhere along the way.

And I couldn't regret it. Even now.

His fingers moved together restlessly, as though fighting an urge to reach out to me again. "You're all right?" he asked. "Not hurt?"

"No. I'm all right." Minus a few dozen cuts and bruises and minor aches. Nothing to speak of, really. "What the hell happened?"

His face went still. Masklike, the way Jonathan's had been in the dream. His eyes turned dark and filled with secrets. "Jonathan decided to play god," he said. "He's dead."

I had a sudden, aching suspicion. "Did you kill him?"

The flash of anguish, before he locked it down again, was answer enough. David had been an Ifrit for a time, half alive, preying on Dji

Just the way his best friend intended, the coldhearted, calculating, manipulative bastard.

"David, don't," I said. "You know he wanted to die. He just—used you. Suicide by Ifrit."

"No, it was more than that." He swallowed and looked aside, keeping his thoughts to himself for a few seconds before he continued, "What Jonathan was, is—necessary. Someone needs to stand where he stood. Nature abhors a vacuum." He attempted a smile, but it looked painful. "I was the closest Dji

"Jonathan," I supplied.

He looked agonized about that. Guilty. Horrified. "No. Jonathan was… special. I don't think any of us could really take his place and do the things he did. But I've become the conduit, the pipeline from the Mother to the Dji