Total Eclipse

It sounded brave. I didn’t feel brave, not at all. I felt sick, weak, and dying, and more than anything, I didn’t want to hurt anymore.

Venna was joined by more figures, moving out of the aetheric shadows and into the real world. Some of them I recognized—there was Rahel, glowering at me with real hatred. Ashan, the leader of the Old Djinn—he, at least, didn’t need any incentive to loathe me. He’d gotten a jump-start, early on. I saw plenty of Djinn I’d clashed with before, only a handful of whose names I’d ever learned.

So many Djinn, all with those eerie pearl-white eyes. All stalking me like tigers. Talk about overkill.

I floated in my blood-soaked bubble, waiting for the end.

Venna was the one to make the first move. She reached through the force bubble and ripped a hole in it, gutting it from within. It made a sighing sound, and disappeared, and my blood fell in a sudden rain to the smashed concrete and steel. Followed by my body. I screamed as I hit, although I’d sort of promised myself I’d keep my dignity and not give them the satisfaction. Yeah, that hadn’t even lasted until they actually touched me.

Venna leaned over me as I struggled to right myself. She reached out with her little-girl hand and touched my cheek in a curiously gentle way, cocked her head to one side, and then—with no warning at all—she walloped me so hard that I flew ten feet into a broken wedge of folded steel. It had once been a door, I supposed. If I could have bled more, I would have. It didn’t seem at all fair that I could hang here in this state, on the edge of death, and that my nerves hadn’t shut themselves off yet. It would be okay if I couldn’t feel this. But that was the whole point: they wanted me to feel it.

Every last bloody second of it.

I coughed and clawed my way out of the rubble. I got to my feet and stood there, trembling but erect. I lifted my chin and said, “That’s all you’ve got? You hit like a girl, Venna.”

She bared her teeth and became a feral animal, rushing at me with clawed fingers and snapping teeth, and I knew this wasn’t going to go well, not at all.

But I’d signed up for the whole ride, hadn’t I? I’d known what I was getting into, and in that split second before Venna actually reached me, I gave up all hope of living through any of it. That was a black kind of peace, perversely comforting.

Something hit Venna before she reached me—a pale blur, something big and muscular. Venna was knocked off course, into a pile of rubble. Her screams of rage pulverized a few of the concrete blocks into beach sand, and I blinked, amazed that I was still standing.

There was another Djinn standing in front of me—facing away from me, toward the others.

Oh.

It was the nameless Djinn who’d been chauffeuring us around the country. The vessel. The avatar.

And now, it said, with my own voice, “Stay away from my mother, you bastards!”

Imara. My daughter, the Earth Oracle. Like David, she couldn’t leave her own personal stronghold, where she was holding out against the madness of the Djinn . . . but she’d found a way to remote-pilot the avatar, the same way David and Whitney had done.

“Imara?” I blurted. “What are you doing?”

“Saving your life, I think. Honestly, do you ever stop doing insane things? What were you thinking?” The Djinn glanced over his shoulder, and in his expression I saw my daughter’s harassed shadow. “You shouldn’t be here. I can’t believe you walked into this with your eyes open.”

“Would you feel better if I’d blundered into it stupidly?”

“Maybe I would.” Imara snapped the Djinn’s head back around as Ashan walked forward, and I felt the energy change, grow darker. Ashan had killed my daughter, in her original Djinn form. She hadn’t forgotten that, not at all. “Back off.”

He didn’t seem to even hear her, or care that there was any kind of obstacle standing in his way. When he got within reach of the Djinn, Ashan simply reached out and pushed, and the Djinn went flying, off balance and overmatched. The only comfort I took was that Imara herself wasn’t being hurt. She was safe, somewhere else.

Ashan was looking every bit the vicious, smooth businessman he’d always appeared to me. He’d always been partial to well-tailored suits, and this one was gray, matched to an off-white shirt and sky-blue tie. His physical form had no more personality to it than a store mannequin.

He reached me, not seeming to hurry at all, and grabbed me around the throat. He did that alien head-tilt thing, just like Venna, as if trying to decide exactly what type of pond scum I might be, and—still holding my throat—turned and dragged me toward the others. Venna had gotten up and was engaged in mortal combat with the Djinn avatar, who was doing his—her?—level best to keep the kid away from my back.

But my dangers were also right in front of me, and there were a lot of them.

Ashan pulled me into the middle of the Djinn, then turned and stared right into my eyes.

“Tell us why,” he said. “Why you did this.”

“I needed to get your attention,” I wheezed, around his iron grip. “I think I have it now.”

“You do.” Ashan’s smile was as artificial and cold as the rest of him, and just as assured. “You will regret it.”

“Oh, sweetie, so ahead of you on that one. Let me go or I’ll bleed all over you.”

“Promise?” His smile widened. “Maybe soon we’ll let you die. Would you like that?”

I had my hands free, so I shot him a finger. “Not as much as I’d like to watch you try it.” It was getting harder to talk around his kung- fu grip, and I wasn’t sure that last smart-ass remark came out as anything but garbled chokes. Ashan liked to play with his food. I thought that as long as I was giving back, he wouldn’t move on to the next phase of agony.

Maybe.

The avatar had lost his battle with Venna. That didn’t surprise me much, but it did alarm me. It meant that Imara was playing hurt, or handicapped. Normally, she could have wiped the floor with any Djinn who got in her way, but now the avatar was down, battered and hurt, and Venna was stepping calmly over the body to get to me.

The beaten Djinn avatar rolled over and up to its feet, but it wasn’t in any shape to come at Venna again on my behalf.

The Djinn looked past Venna, at me, and I saw my daughter’s torment in those strange eyes. “Mom,” she said softly. “Get ready. He’s coming.”

Ashan’s hand gripped tighter, bending cartilage in my throat, and what little air I was gasping in cut off. I flailed at him, and it made no difference. None at all.

It never occurred to me to wonder who he was, until a shadow formed in the corner of my eye, and David walked out of it, carrying a . . . box?

I was clearly hallucinating. Oxygen deprivation.

David put the box down, lunged forward, and grabbed Ashan’s arm.

And broke it.

Ashan yelled in surprise and let go of me as he stared down at the dangling odd angle of his forearm, then caught hold of it with his left and snapped it back into a straight line, reconstructing the damage—but it gave David time to grab me and pull me away from Ashan.

David’s eyes were molten bronze, blazing so hot I could feel the feverish intensity behind them. He glanced at me once, a frantic, horrified look, and then put his attention on Venna, who was shrieking toward us like something out of a first-rate horror movie.

He slammed her back, into the Djinn avatar, who in turn slung her hard into a wall and pinned her there.

“No time,” David gasped. He was trembling now, and I could feel the fear in him. “Jo, in the box. You know what to do. I—”

He cried out, fell to his knees, and I watched the David I knew disappear. He fought it, oh God he fought it with everything in him, but he was a Djinn, and a Conduit, and he couldn’t hold back.

I watched his eyes turn pale, then white.