Windfall

I choked on the taste of cold rain and burned flesh in my mouth. I wanted to weep, because the Djinn was right. No equality. Just because we were fond of the Djinn didn’t make them friends. Just because we loved them…

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 Djinn.

“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 Djinn asked. He still had a British accent, clipped and precise and very old-school, which went very oddly with the barbaric splendor of his albino rock-star look.

“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 Djinn smiled in return. Not a comforting sight. “I find myself free for the first time in memory. Why should I give up that freedom to another master, even one so… important as you?”

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 Djinn shrugged. “Not very appealing, I must say. And what would Jonathan think about it?”

“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 Djinn? Things are perverted in this world, little girl, and they have been ever since Jonathan gave the Wardens power over us.”

“When—how long—”

“Yesterday,” the other Djinn said quietly. “To us, it was yesterday.”

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.

“You can’t want to follow Jonathan,” Ashan said. The other Djinn met his eyes.

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

“You mean kill,” the Djinn said calmly. “Kill Wardens.”

“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 Djinn turned diamond-white eyes to stare at me. I gulped air and frantically rummaged the cupboards of my bare inner storehouse for power, any power, that might be strong enough to defend me against him. What Jonathan had gifted me with was definitely burning down to its embers. I’d used up everything I had, except for what I was living on, and that couldn’t last.

The Djinn shook his head, smiled a little, and said, “I won’t fight for Jonathan. But I won’t kill for you, Ashan; like us, the Wardens exist for a reason.”

“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 Djinn, he didn’t try to hide from it, and he didn’t do any flashy redirection of energy.

The water pounded over him, soaking his hair flat to his head, saturating his flannel shirt, T-shirt, and jeans in seconds.

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. Djinn live here, too. And up there.” Lewis indicated the aetheric, somehow, with a jerk of his chin. “If you’re in this world, you’re part of it. There’s no escaping it. Maybe you think you’re here to be gods, but you’re not, no more than we are. We’re all subordinate to something else.”

“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 Djinn.

“Let go,” Lewis said.

Ashan actually grinned. It wasn’t his best expression, but it was certainly one of the most human I’d ever seen on him. Not to mention one of the scariest. The rain hitting me turned from ice-cold to blood-warm to scalding-hot in seconds, thanks to the sudden ramp-up of power igniting the air around us.

“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