through the rubble toward us.
Draped in his arms was Kevin’s lank, limp body.
Cherise let out a sound—not a scream, not a cry, but some awful mixture of the two. It was raw and un- thought, and scraped at me like fingernails on a burn.
We never really understood until it came down to this.
The Djinn knelt down and put Kevin on the carpet next to Cherise. There wasn’t a mark on Kevin, nothing at all.
He was just . . . gone. The life had been taken right out of him. All the working pieces were still there, in a body that could have still lived on, but some great, overwhelming force had commanded it to be still.
And I knew, as I touched his hand, that there was no way I could bring him back. Kevin—all that had made up the complicated, fragile, angry, vindictive, sometimes brave boy I’d known—all that was gone, blown away like a puffball on the wind.
His eyes were open wide, pupils expanded to drink in the light. He looked very, very young. His hair still gleamed in the dim, cloudy light—wet from his shower, or from the rain I’d brought down. He’d been strong, and sometimes he’d been good, and losing him shouldn’t have hurt so very badly.
I put my hand on his forehead, one last and gentle benediction from someone who should have liked him more, helped him more, done better for him. He’d been torn apart as a child, made into a monster, and he’d
He would have been a good man eventually. I knew it.
I wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come. They choked me deep inside but refused to rise. Maybe I needed them. Maybe it wasn’t time to mourn.
“Jo.” It was David’s voice, coming from the Djinn’s mouth. “There’s nothing—”
“I know!” I snarled at him, suddenly and irrationally furious with
He rose to his feet, staring down at me, and then nodded. “I’ll get the car,” he said. “Let me know if you want to bury him before we go.”
Now Cherise was screaming at him. I didn’t think David minded. He was staying quietly neutral, aware that we had to deal with this in our own ways. He moved the Djinn back, out of our view.
Cherise finally stopped spitting out accusations, and gathered up the wailing, frightened toddler in her arms, hugging him close. I’d never pegged her as the motherly type, but watching her, I could see it. She put on a smile for the boy, soothed him, and when that was done, I could see that she’d reached some fragile acceptance inside.
“We’re not just leaving him here like this, like road-kill,” she told me. “Promise me.”
“I promise,” I said. “I’ll make sure he’s taken care of.”
I meant it, of course, and she could tell that. She didn’t make any objection as I gestured for the Djinn to come back and scoop Kevin up in his arms. I knew it was David on the inside of the avatar, but somehow I couldn’t make myself reach out for him. It wasn’t
I pulled myself up to my feet without any help from him, looked down at myself, and said, “I need to find my clothes.” It was a measure of how insane things were that nobody else seemed to have noticed I was naked. Cherise, in fact, looked surprised. “I left them in the bathroom.”
For answer, the Djinn nodded toward a spot on the carpet—a relatively clean one. A pile of clothing materialized there—white shirt, sturdy pants that looked suspiciously like I remembered the drapes to be. My own shoes, recovered and cleaned. Plain white bra and panties and socks.
Djinn couldn’t create out of thin air, but they could recycle. He’d used the raw material of extra sheets, the curtains, towels, whatever textile was around, and he’d managed to produce a decent attempt at a wardrobe. Clean and dry, if not stylish.
I struggled into it fast. It fit, of course. Djinn tailoring always fit. I tied my hair back with a stray scrap of fabric blowing in the dirt and started to follow the Djinn out of the rubble.
“Jo?” Cherise called. I looked back. She was sitting up, cradling the fretful boy in her lap. She looked huge- eyed and emotionally shattered, but at least she was physically okay. For now. “I want to go with you.”
“No. If you put any weight on those legs right now, they could break again. They need at least an hour to finish building the seal in the break. That’s as fast as I can do it.”
“Okay.” She swallowed, but didn’t look away. “I want to see him buried. Please. Take me with you.”
I hesitated, then nodded. “I’ll send the Djinn back for you,” I said. “Wait here, okay? I promise, it’ll only be a few minutes.”
She didn’t like it, but I think she saw that there was no way I could carry her myself, physically or with any kind of magical power. If I pulled power from the world around me again, it’d be a case of diminishing returns and a harder crash once it was over. I couldn’t afford it.
Not knowing that this was far from the end.
I found the Djinn easily enough; he’d left a lighted trail of orange light through the trees. He hadn’t gone too far in, but far enough that I lost sight of the road and the wrecked motel. In here, among the pines, things were hushed. The air smelled sweet and heavy, crisp with the smell of the needles.
Untouched.
The Djinn had dug a grave—six feet deep, wider than needed—beneath a particularly impressive branching tree. Kevin’s body lay wrapped in a simple white sheet from the motel, and he no longer looked like the boy I’d known, or the man I’d wished he’d had a chance to become. He looked . . . empty, rendered pale and sexless by the shroud. I wasn’t sure I wanted Cherise to see him like this, but I’d promised.
“I’ll get him in,” I said. “Go get Cherise and the kid. Don’t let her walk yet.”
The Djinn nodded and misted away. I stood there looking at Kevin for a moment, then hopped down into the damp hole in the earth, reached up, and rippled the ground to move him toward me and onto a hardened cushion of air. I floated him down into my arms, and lowered him the last bit on my own. He still felt heavy. Somehow, I’d expected him to be lighter now.
I leaned over and kissed his lips gently. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Find peace, Kevin. I’ve never known anybody who needed it more, and deserved it more.”
That didn’t seem to be enough, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
I levitated myself up on a heated column of rising air and stepped off at ground level, just in time to see the Djinn arrive back at a run with Cherise and the boy in his arms. They looked like toys, the casual way he balanced them, but I knew he wouldn’t drop them. No chance.
He looked around, then formed a plain wooden chair that was the same color and texture as the trees around us. Fallen wood, probably, reshaped for the purpose. He lowered her into it and came to stand next to me.
“He did a lot of things he probably regretted,” David said. “But he tried to do good. That counts.”
“He died trying to save us,” I said. “That counts for everything.”
We linked hands. It didn’t feel like David, but that didn’t matter right now. I just wanted to feel a touch, anyone’s touch, to remind me I wasn’t all alone in this. I felt a breath of relief pass over me that made me feel a little weak.
And I heard his whisper back, along that golden cord that bound us on the aetheric plane.
Together, we filled in the hole. Apart from the singing of birds in the trees, the busy rustle of animals carrying on their lives, there wasn’t any sound. When I looked at Cherise, she was silently crying. The boy was staring at us in confusion, about to break into wails of disapproval for all this craziness, but not sure if he should.
We smoothed the dirt on top of Kevin’s grave, and I sent a pulse through the Earth, bidding the seeds to grow. Grass and flowers, pushing up green and fresh.
“You deserved better, Kevin,” I said. “You always deserved better than what you got, and I’m sorry.”
The Djinn said something, after that—something in warm, liquid syllables, lyrical and lovely that rose and fell in emotional arcs of poetry. When he was done, he bowed his head.
