Total Eclipse

Chapter One

Black corner.

It was the name Wardens—and Djinn—gave to a section of the world that had been scorched by something unnatural; a place where the basic energy that coursed through the world, the pulsebeat of the Earth, no longer existed.

A black corner looked fine, but to anyone with sensitivity to power, it was desolate and sterile. Wardens—those who controlled the basic powers of nature—suffered when they were trapped inside one of these dead zones. Still, we got off better than the Djinn.

Djinn died.

We’d been trapped in the massive black corner, sailing hard for the horizon, for days, and it was taking its toll at an increasingly horrible rate.

It was so hard, watching them suffer. It was slow, and painful, and terrifying to watch, and as our cruise ship sailed ever so slowly through the dark, empty seas, trying to get outside the supernatural blast radius, I began to wonder whether we would make it at all. The New Djinn—the Djinn who’d been born human and had become Djinn during some large-scale disasters—were in a lot of pain, and slipping away.

Still, they fared better than the Old Djinn. Original, eternal, with no real ties to humanity at all—they declined far faster. In a very real sense, they couldn’t exist on their own, without a direct connection to power—a connection that was nowhere to be found now, even though we were many miles out from the site of the disastrous ending to our fight with my old enemy. He’d opened a gateway to another dimension, and what had come through had almost destroyed me and David; it had definitely blasted the entire area for hundreds of miles in all directions.

I couldn’t imagine what the consequences of that were going to be. It was a terrible disaster, and I felt responsible. Hell, who was I kidding? I was responsible, beyond any shadow of a doubt. I was recovering from the aftereffects of the long battle and the injuries I’d gathered along the way, but that was secondary to the guilt I felt about how I’d handled things.

I should have been better. If I’d been better, none of this would have happened. I wouldn’t be watching my friends and allies suffer. I wouldn’t be watching helplessly as the best of them, the ones who’d given the most, lost pieces of themselves.

Dying in slow motion.

Lewis Orwell, the head of the Wardens, my old friend, the strongest human being I’d ever met . . . Lewis had developed a perpetual, deep-chested cough that sounded wet and thick. Pneumonia, maybe. He looked as if he hadn’t rested in weeks, and he probably hadn’t. His reserves were used up, his body beginning to shut down in protest.

And still he was up in the middle of the night, sitting with the Djinn. Offering them what little comfort he could. There weren’t so many of them . . . not now. We’d seen three of them die in the past twenty-four hours. The ones who were left were sinking fast.

Djinn were exotic and beautiful and unbelievably powerful. Seeing them laid so low was heart- wrenching. I didn’t know how Lewis could stand it, really. The misery hit me in a thick, sticky wave as I limped into the small infirmary, and I had to stop in the doorway and breathe in and out slowly to calm myself. No sense in going overwrought into this mess. It wouldn’t help anyone.

Lewis was sitting in a chair next to a bed that held a small, still human form the size of a child. Venna—who’d always borne an uncanny resemblance to the famous Alice, of Lewis Carroll renown—was still a pretty thing, with fine blond hair and big blue eyes. The supernatural shine that usually seemed a few shades too vivid for human eyes was missing now. She looked sick and afraid, and it hurt me deeply.

I sank down on the other side of her bed and took her hand. Her gaze, which had been fixed on the ceiling, slowly moved to rest on me. She felt cold. Her fingers flexed just a little on mine, and I felt rather than saw the faintest ghost of a smile.

“Hey, kid,” I said, and smoothed her hair back from her face. “How are you?”

It was self-evident how she was doing, but I didn’t know what else to say. Nothing I could do was going to help. Like Lewis, I was utterly helpless. Useless.

“Okay,” she whispered. It seemed to be a great effort for her to form the word, and I saw a shudder go through her small body. I tucked the blanket closer around her, although I knew it wasn’t going to help. The chill that had sunk into her couldn’t be banished by warm covers and hugs and hot toddies.

We’d tried putting the Djinn on the deck of the ship, hoping the sunlight would help revive them, but it had seemed to make things worse. Venna—who had been alive as long as the Earth, as far as I could tell—had cried from the sheer, desperate agony of being in the sun and not being able to absorb its energy.

It had been awful, and here, inside, she didn’t seem as distressed. That was something, at least.

We were no longer trying to save them. We were just managing their decline.

Venna’s china blue eyes drifted shut, though it wasn’t exactly a natural sleep; she was conserving what energy remained to her. The Old Djinn burned it faster than the New Djinn, it seemed. We’d already lost the only other Old Djinn on board—a closemouthed sort I’d never gotten to know by name.

And, in truth, I loved Venna. I cared about her deeply—in the way you’d care for a beautiful, exotic, very dangerous animal who’d allowed you to become its friend. I’d never thought of her as fragile; I’d seen her slam tanker trucks aside with a wave, and fight monsters without getting so much as a hangnail.

It was hard to see her look so helpless.

Lewis looked almost as bad—worn down and fighting to keep himself together. I met his eyes, which were bloodshot and fever bright. “Go to bed,” I told him. “I’ll stay with them for a while.”

“And do what?” he snapped, which hurt; I saw the flare of panic in his face, quickly tamped down. He hadn’t meant to say it, though of course he’d been thinking it. They were all thinking it. “Sorry, Jo. I mean—”

“I know what you mean,” I said softly. “But the fact is that you’re just as handicapped as I am right now, and you’re punishing yourself by wearing yourself down to nothing. Lewis, you can’t. You can’t. When we get out of this, the Wardens will need you more than ever. You can’t be running on fumes when the rest of them need you. This is going to get a lot worse. We both know it.”

I could see that he wanted to tell me not to preach to him, but he bit his tongue this time. He knew I was right (not that it would stop him from arguing), and on some level, he was aware that he was hurting himself as punishment. Like me, he felt that he deserved it.

He looked down at Venna. I saw it in his face, all that weariness, that guilt, and a fair amount of bitter self-loathing.

“Lewis.” I drew his gaze and held it again. “Go to bed. Go.”

He finally nodded, rose—had to steady himself against the wall—and left. I looked around the room, with its sterile high-tech beds and medical facilities that could do nothing about the problem we were facing. Every bed was filled by a Djinn.

And every Djinn was, to a greater or lesser extent, dying.

The Djinn Rahel—a New Djinn, and one of the oldest friends I had among their kind—turned her head slightly to look toward me. Rahel had always seemed invincible, like Venna—polished, wildly beautiful, with her elaborately cornrowed ebony hair and lustrous dark skin, and eyes that glowed as if backlit by amber.

Now she seemed so diminished. So fragile. Her eyes were still amber, but pale, faded, and . . . frightened. She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to. I patted Venna’s hand, then got up and went to Rahel’s side. I put the back of my hand against her forehead. She felt hot and dry, consumed by some bonfire inside.

“Well,” she whispered with a shadow of her old, cocky charm, “isn’t this peculiar? The lamb caring for the wolf.”

“You’ve never been the wolf, Rahel.”

“Ah, sistah, you don’t know me at all.” She heaved a slow, whispering sigh. “I have played at being a friend to you, but I’m nothing but a wolf. We all are, even your sweet David. Djinn are born because we are too ruthless to accept our own deaths as humans do. It suits us ill to face such an end as this.”

“It’s not the end.”

“I think it could be,” she said, and closed her eyes. “I think it will be. And so I will tell you something I’ve never told you, Joanne Baldwin.”

I swallowed hard. “What?”

Her lips took on the ghost of a smile. “I am glad that we have been friends. You remind me of someone I knew long ago. My cousin, in breathing days. You have her soul. And I am glad to have looked on that brightness again.”

“Stop it,” I said, my voice unsteady. “Just stop it. You’re not going to die, Rahel. You can’t.”

“All things can. All things should, in the end.” She didn’t sound angry about it, or sad, or afraid. She just sounded resigned. “The world is changing. That is not a bad thing, you know. Just different.”

Maybe she had the perspective of millennia, but I didn’t, and I was sick and tired of things being changed. I wanted it all to go back to the way it was.

I wanted peace.

But I didn’t say anything else to her, and she lapsed into a quiet, waiting stillness, conserving her energy. The room was eerily silent, all those immortal creatures counting the minutes until they ceased.

And it was my fault.

I put my head down on the crisp, clean sheets next to Rahel’s hand, and silently wept.

I felt a hand touch my hair, and thought at first that it was Rahel. But no; her hand was still exactly where it had been, limp and unmoving on the covers. I took in a deep breath and sat up, swiping at my eyes and sniffling.

David looked down at me, and for a moment we didn’t say anything at all. He looked almost as bad as the Djinn lying in the beds, although he’d been spared that particular fate; his decline was slower, more insidious.

There was still a connection between us despite the hit we’d taken when Bad Bob had done his worst at the end. Our powers were gone, and David was trapped in mortal flesh, but on some level he was able to bleed off just a little power from me. Enough to survive, at least temporarily.

The difference was that when we sailed out of the black corner, the Djinn would get better. David wouldn’t get his powers back that way. Neither of us would. And if he couldn’t reconnect to the aetheric, he would get weaker.

I read the misery and concern in his eyes, and took his hand in mine. Touching flesh would have to do; we couldn’t touch in all those familiar supernatural ways. It felt oddly remote and clumsy.

“You okay?” he asked me.

I nodded. “As long as you’re here. You?”

That won me a faint smile from him, and a widening of those honey brown eyes. He was still beautiful, even contained in human form. He’d lost that glowing, powerful edge, but what was left was pure David. As time went on, I had the sense that I was seeing the David he’d once been—a friend, a lover, a warrior in days that had come and gone well before any history we knew.

Not a good Djinn, but a good man.

Still, he hadn’t been just a man in so, so long. And I wondered whether he could go back to being just that, just human, without dying inside of regrets.

David’s smile faded as he looked at Rahel, replaced by that intense focus I knew so well. He didn’t speak, but I knew how deeply he was feeling his own helplessness. I was feeling exactly the same thing. I leaned my cheek against his warm, strong hand, and his thumb gently stroked my cheekbone.

Small comforts.

“Lewis left you alone here?”

Yeah, there was no part of that that didn’t sound accusatory toward Lewis. “I made him leave. He was exhausted,” I said. “And there’s nothing he can do except what I’m doing. What you’re doing.”

“Stand here and watch my brothers and sisters die?” He paused, shut his eyes for a second, and then said, “That sounded bitter, didn’t it?” I measured off an inch of air between my thumb and forefinger. He sighed. “I feel that there ought to be something. Something we can think of, do, try.”

“We have, we did, and we will. But we’re not exactly at the top of our game, honey.”

“I don’t know what this game is,” David said softly. “I don’t like the rules. And I don’t like the stakes.”

“Well, at least you have a good partner,” I said. “Later, we can kick ass at table tennis, too.”

He bent and kissed me—not a long kiss, not a passionate one, but one of those sweet and lingering sorts of promises that comes from deep, deep down. Passion we had, but we also had something else. Something more.

Something that mattered to me more than my own life. I’m not going to lose him, too, I told myself. I wondered whether that panic and determination showed in my face. I hoped not.

Just as David was pulling up a chair next to me at Rahel’s bedside, the door to the ship’s hospital opened, and Cherise staggered in, burdened by a tray so huge that it should have come with wheels and its own parade clowns. She was a tiny little thing, drop-dead gorgeous even under the ridiculously stressful conditions. Somehow she’d found the time to shower, make her hair shampoo-commercial shiny and full of body, and scrounge up clean, attractive sexy-girl clothes, which today included shorts and a striped shirt—a look I was sure I couldn’t have pulled off without looking like a very sad Old Navy reject. She had no makeup on, but then again, Cherise didn’t really need any. She had that kind of skin.

I got to my feet to help, but David was already there, taking the tray and setting it on a side table. Cherise let out a long sigh and shook her hands and arms to release the stress. “Man,” she said. “I forgot how hard it is to be a waitress. Remind me not to work for tips again, unless it involves a pole.” She looked up at David and flashed him an infectious smile. “You get what that means, right?”

“Do pole vaulters get tips?” he asked innocently, and lifted the silver cover on one of the large platters on the tray. He reached in and snagged a piece of bacon, which made my mouth water suddenly; I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. Ever.

Cherise stared at him with a wounded expression. “That’s a joke, right? Please tell me you are joking, because if you’re not joking, that is just tragic, and I’m going to have to stage an intervention.”

David munched bacon and explored the rest of the buffet she’d delivered as I got up from my chair. “Strippers. Poles. I understand.”

“Thank God. Because if a hottie like you had never seen a stripper, my faith in God was going to . . .” Cherise suddenly clammed up, which wasn’t like her at all. She looked down, then around at the silent, still Djinn. “Yeah,” she finished very quietly. “Guess that ship has sailed. And, oh look, we’re on it.”

It wasn’t like Cherise to fail to find the sunny side of the cloud, but then again, we’d been under clouds for what seemed like years at this point. I guessed that even the eternal optimist had to reevaluate, given the circumstances.

“How is everyone else?” David asked. I reached over him to take a slice of bacon as he poured coffee from the small thermal pot.

“The Wardens are all freaking out because they’re Joe Normals,” Cherise said. “For me, it’s just another sunny day in paradise, really. Not that I’m in the mood to tan or anything.”

She really was depressed. Well, I could see why. . . . She was probably the only person on the entire ship, other than the hired crew, who couldn’t feel anything odd about the area through which we sailed. The Wardens were reduced to shakes and panic, feeling suffocated by their isolation, and they probably resented her for her lack of suffering.

I was starting to actually get used to it. A little.

The food helped steady me, and I could see David’s body language easing a little as well. He hadn’t needed to pay careful attention to his metabolism in, oh, about five thousand years or so, and since he’d originally been killed and reborn as a Djinn at the tender age of what was probably his early twenties, if that, it wasn’t too likely he’d ever experienced the kind of human trials I was already starting to put up with.

My mother used to say that getting old isn’t for sissies. Neither is being human, for that matter. And the fact that David had managed to pull himself together so fast, and so gracefully, was humbling. I hadn’t functioned nearly so well when I’d, in turn, been pulled over to the Djinn side. That should have been a lot more fun than it turned out to be.

The ship’s motion had increased a little—difficult to tell, in a ship this big, but I could feel the pitch and yaw deep in my guts. If I’d still been a Weather Warden, I’d have been able to tell a whole lot more—how the air was moving, the tides, the deep and complex breathing between the water and the air above. Two kinds of fluids, moving as one. Symbiotic.

Now all I could tell was that my stomach was rolling with the motion. Great.

“The captain says we should be able to dock in a couple of days,” Cherise said. “I don’t know about you guys, but I could dig my toes in some sand. I’m starting to feel like I’m lost on Gilligan’s Island. And I can’t even be Ginger, because I don’t have any evening gowns.”

David stopped in the act of lifting a grape to his mouth. Just . . . froze. And I thought maybe he was confused about the pop culture reference, but that wasn’t like him, and anyway, he didn’t usually just . . .

Every Djinn lying in the beds suddenly sat straight up and screamed.

It was an eerie, tormented, unearthly wailing sound, and shockingly loud. I staggered, dropping my glass, pressing both hands to my ears, and setting my back against the wall for primal protection. There was something wrong with that sound, deeply and horribly wrong. Cherise crouched, covering her head; if she was screaming I couldn’t hear her over the incredible, deafening sound of raw pain coming from every one of the Djinn.

Every one of them but David, who was pale, standing frozen in place, and unable to make a sound or movement. His eyes, though—his eyes were screaming.

It seemed to go on forever, the needle-sharp sound piercing the fragile barrier of skin and bone I’d put over my ears. It shattered into my brain, filling it with a horror I’d never experienced and wasn’t sure I could survive. I felt my heart racing, thudding in panic against my ribs, and my knees failed me. I slid down the bulkhead wall.

I was weeping hysterically, struggling to catch any hint of a breath. It felt as if the sound itself were a weight on me, driving the air from my body. . . .

And then, as suddenly as it had started, it cut off. Not because the Djinn stopped screaming.

Because the Djinn, every single one of them except David, had vanished in a flicker of cold blue light.

Gone.

David fell hard, eyes still wide and locked in a terrible, panicked stare. I peeled my hands away from my ears, gathered strength, and managed to crawl on shaking hands to where he lay. I sat and pulled his head and shoulders into my lap as I stroked his hair and face. His skin felt ice-cold and clammy. His color was awful.

I couldn’t hear anything, just the ringing echo of that awful, eternal scream. I wondered whether I’d gone deaf. I thought I’d hear that sound for the rest of my life, or until I went mad, but I realized it was slowly fading. I could hear Cherise gasping and crying a few feet away. She’d collapsed on her side, curled into a ball. Her hands were still pressed to her ears.

“Baby,” I whispered to David. “Baby, talk to me. Talk to me.”

He tried. His lips parted. Nothing came out, or if it did my damaged ears couldn’t separate it from the still-ringing echoes of the screams.

He was shuddering. As I watched, he curled himself on his side, like Cherise, and pulled his knees up.

What just happened?

In seconds the sick bay door slammed open, and at least a dozen Wardens pelted into the room, with Lewis in the lead. He looked as shell-shocked as I felt, but at least he was on his feet and moving. He took it in at a single glance—Cherise, me, David, the empty beds where the Djinn had been.

The breath went out of him, and he went pale. Lewis took a slow, deliberate second, then turned to face the other Wardens. “Kevin, see to Cherise,” he said. “Bree, Xavier—get David into a bed. Warm blankets.” He crouched down to put our eyes level, and whatever he was seeing in my face, it obviously didn’t comfort him. “Jo?”

I tried to speak, then wetted my lips and tried again. The two Wardens he’d delegated were taking hold of David’s arms and helping him rise. He wasn’t able to offer much in the way of assistance. “I don’t know,” I finally managed to say. “Something—happened.”

“Where did the Djinn go?”

I just shook my head. My eyes blurred with tears. I felt lost, alone, cut off, horribly frightened. Lewis reached out and gripped my hands in his.

“Jo,” he said. “Jo, listen to me. I need you to focus. You need to tell me what you saw. Tell me what you heard.”

I tried to remember, but the instant I did, that sound filled my head again, as fresh and hot and painful as before. Shatteringly loud. I clapped my hands over my ears again, and dimly heard myself screaming, begging him to make it stop.

The next thing I knew, I felt a small, hot pain in my arm, and then the sound was fading, drifting away along with the light and the pain and everything in the world.

Darkness.

Silence.