Total Eclipse

Chapter Two

The first thing I heard when I woke up was a distant, soft echo of screaming. With it came a jolt of adrenaline, a feeling of drowning, of being consumed by something . . . massive.

Then it receded, like a tide, and I was left shaking and cold despite the piles of warm blankets on top of me. Lewis was asleep in a chair next to my bed, leaning forward with his head resting on the covers next to me. One long-fingered hand was touching mine, very lightly.

He was snoring.

I smiled wearily and ruffled his hair. “Hey,” I said. “How can anybody sleep with that noise?”

Lewis sat up, blinking, wiping his mouth, and looking so cutely rumpled and abashed that I felt something in me wobble off its axis. Don’t look like that. Oh, and please don’t look at me like that while you’re doing it. He was tough enough to resist when he wasn’t being adorable.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, and scrubbed his stubbly face with both hands. “Bad night.” Some focus came back into his eyes, and I was able to get that wobbling part of me back in balance. “How are your ears?”

“I could hear you snoring like a chain saw. I must be healed.”

That got a grin from him, brief as it was. “Then I guess they’re intact.”

I looked around. David was lying in the next bed over, still asleep. He looked pale and tired and anxious, even resting.

Cherise was curled in on herself in the next bed after David.

“How are they?” I asked. I was afraid of the answer, but he just nodded briskly, and relief flooded in on me in a warm wave. “No lasting damage?”

“Worn-out,” he said. “David was able to talk a little before he drifted off. Cherise just needs sleep.”

“He told you—” My brain flashed back to the screaming Djinn, that sound, and I felt the panic race back, slamming into my body and jolting me into a sudden sitting position. It wasn’t as loud this time. Or I was getting used to hearing that awful, awful noise. I swallowed several times and concentrated hard, and the screaming died away.

I was holding Lewis’s hand in a death grip. I eased off, remembering to breathe, and saw the worry and fear in his face. “I’m okay,” I said. If I said it enough, maybe it would even be true. “David told you—”

“About the Djinn disappearing,” Lewis said. “We heard the—the sound out there, everywhere in the ship. According to radio communications, we weren’t the only ship that heard it. It blew out speakers on a tanker ten miles out. It came from the Djinn? You’re sure?”

I nodded, not sure I could trust my voice just then. I was controlling the effects of the experience, but my body was still reacting in flight-or-fight mode. Finally, I said, “They just screamed and vanished. I don’t know what happened.”

“I do,” Lewis said. “We reached the edge of the black corner.”

I stared at him. I hadn’t felt . . . anything. No change in my perception of the world. No connections snapping back in place.

I was still cut off.

That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. It felt as if all the props had just been knocked out from under me, as if some joker had pulled the handle on a trapdoor and I was going to fall forever. I’d said I understood what had happened to me, but deep down inside, I’d believed—I’d believed that I was better than that. That my power would come snapping back, and once we were beyond the borders of the black corner, I’d be . . . myself.

Lewis could tell. I hated to see the pity in his face, so I looked away, fighting back the tears. I couldn’t do much about the trembling, though. “So,” I said, and forced my voice to be something like normal. “The Wardens are back in business?”

“More or less,” he said, and broke up into a fit of wet coughing. Once he’d gotten that out of the way, he smiled ruefully. “Some are feeling better than others. Jo—”

“We knew this was going to happen,” I interrupted him. “David and I. We knew our powers were . . . gone. We just have to figure out how to get them back.”

“It’s possible that they’ll come back on their own, over time. That your body will be able to repair the damage.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Lewis. I’m not a child, and I don’t want false hope.”

“I’m not offering any,” he said. “Look, we just don’t know. Things are—nothing makes sense right now. The Djinn . . . the way things feel—”

“What about the way things feel?” I thought he was talking about the two of us, and that was dangerous, uncertain territory. But he wasn’t, as it turned out.

“The world isn’t right,” Lewis said. “Things are wrong out there. Badly wrong. Bad enough that it blew the Djinn out like candles once they came out into the storm.”

My breath caught in my throat, and I grabbed his hand again. “They’re not—”

“I don’t think they’re dead,” he said. “But they’re not visible to us, not anymore. I can’t reach any of them, even on the aetheric. It’s like they’ve been—taken.”

“But what if they’re more than gone? What if they’re—”

“They’re not dead,” he repeated. “I’d know if they were. Hell, the whole world would know, I think.”

I shuddered, trying hard not to think about that. If the Djinn were gone, one of the key support structures in the delicate architecture of the planet had disappeared, sending us screaming off balance into the dark. We wouldn’t survive that. Any of us, including Mother Earth herself. The Djinn were like antibodies in her bloodstream, designed to attack and defend her against dangerous infections. She needed them.

“So what now?” I asked. Lewis yawned, tried to cover it up, and failed miserably. “Besides about a month of bed rest for you, and inhalation therapy, and a boatload of antibiotics?”

“Yeah, like that’s going to happen. We both know the reward for a good job is more work, only done faster and more difficult.”

He wasn’t wrong about that, but I didn’t know how much more Lewis could take. He’d been through as much as I had—more, maybe, depending on how you count such things. And he didn’t have a loved one’s strength to rely on. Lewis only had himself.

And whose fault is that? a little voice whispered nastily in my head. Who shoved him away? Who ran off and fell in love with somebody else?

It didn’t matter, I told that little voice as firmly as possible. Things were what they were. Lewis knew I cared for him, but David was my love, my lover, my husband. We all had come to accept that.

I thought.

Lewis was watching me, and I couldn’t fathom what was going on in his head. I hoped he couldn’t guess the argument going on inside mine, either.

“We’re two days from port,” he said. “Once we get there, we need to hit the ground running. There are reports of all kinds of problems breaking out.”

I shook my head. “Not exactly new.”

“Not exactly,” he agreed. “But we’re the mechanics of the world, Jo. And things need to be fixed. So most of the Wardens will get back to doing what they do best.”

“Most,” I repeated. “Meaning?”

“Meaning that I’m going to pull the top three Earth Wardens, and we’re going to do our best to analyze what happened to you and David, and make it right if we can. I’ve been on the phone to Marion Bearheart. She thinks that, in theory, it should be possible to open up the energy conduits within you again, if that’s what’s gone wrong.”

That sounded hopeful. It also, at second breath, sounded painful. I winced a little, and saw sympathy flash across Lewis’s face. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s going to hurt.”

“Used to that.”

“And David?”

Signing myself up for painful psychic surgery was one thing, but David . . .

“David can speak for himself,” said a voice from the next bed, and Lewis turned in that direction. Behind him, I saw that David had pulled himself up to a sitting position, chest bare, sheets wrapped tight around his waist. He looked tired and vulnerable, but the sight of him up and alert made my heart take a mad leap of joy. “What do humans take for headaches these days?”

“Depends on how bad it is,” Lewis said, already moving in the direction of the locked medicine cabinets. “On a scale of one to ten?”

David thought about it, then sighed and rubbed a distracted hand over his short brown hair. “Twenty-five.”

Luis didn’t seem surprised. He retrieved a preloaded syringe, came back, and unceremoniously delivered a jab to David’s biceps. David flinched, lips parting in shock, and said, incredulously, “Ow!” He sounded horribly betrayed by the pain. I wondered how long it had been since he’d really been subject to a human nervous system—one he couldn’t control, anyway. “What was that?”

“Wait for it,” Lewis said, as he disposed of the hypo in a medical waste container. “Should be about—now.”

David suddenly relaxed—not quite enough to collapse, but I saw the tension just bleed out of him. His eyes widened and went a little unfocused. “Oh,” he said. “Well, that’s better.”

“Welcome to modern medicine.”

“It’s nice,” David said, and raised his eyebrows. “It’s really nice.” He slid off the bed, landed on his bare feet, and padded over to claim the chair Lewis had been using. Before he sat, he bent over and kissed me, long and sweet and slow, and I savored every bit of it.

Lewis cleared his throat.

“Oh, bite me, big man,” I said, too full of relief to care. “You’re okay, honey?” David’s skin felt warm against my hand—human warm, not the banked fire of a Djinn. He gave me a small, reassuring smile. “Really?”

“I’ll be fine,” he said, and sat down. “As long as you are.” He turned his head toward Lewis, and his body language altered itself, just a little. Although I couldn’t get the subtleties, it seemed to me that he was making an effort to be friendly, but he wanted Lewis to be anywhere but here. “Lewis. What do you know?”

“About what happened to the Djinn? Nothing. We came out of the black corner, they screamed, they disappeared.”

David’s eyes went briefly blank, and I knew that, like me, he was struggling not to relive that awful sound. There was something about it that just wouldn’t die; it was like an endless recorded loop, playing in the back of my mind. The best you could do was keep the sound turned low. “No,” he said. “That’s not what happened. Jo understands.”

I did? I didn’t. I shook my head.

“You saw it before,” he said. “At the coast. You saw it take me.”

I had no idea what he meant, and I was about to say so. . . . And then it came to me, like a physical slap. I sat up, staring at him. “No.”

“Yes,” he said. “Exactly that.”

“But—the Wardens would know.”

“Not if she didn’t wish them to.”

“Excuse me,” Lewis said, a little too loudly. “Somebody want to clue me in?”

David was the one to say it, which was good, because I wasn’t sure I had it in me. “It’s the Mother,” he said. “It was her scream, echoing through the Djinn. She’s been hurt, and she’s angry. She gathered the Djinn to her. They’re in her power now.”

I watched Lewis’s face go very quickly pale. He put out a hand to steady himself. “You’re saying—”

“I’m saying that the Earth is awake,” David said. “At least, I believe she is coming awake. The Djinn serve her, and when she calls, they must come.”

This was, beyond any doubt, the worst thing that could happen. The Earth slept. We liked it that way. Even in sleep she was difficult, but once that vast, slow consciousness was roused . . . we had no idea what she would do, except that it almost certainly would end in extinction for a great many species, and the end of human civilization, at the very least. The Earth could not be reasoned with, or even directly communicated with. Not even the Djinn could do that. The only ones that had a chance, even a whisper of a chance, were the three Djinn Oracles.

Thinking of the Oracles made me think about my daughter, Imara, and I felt a leap of terrible fear. Had she screamed, like the others? Had she lost herself, too?

“No,” David said, and his fingers tightened on mine. “She’s all right, Imara is all right. We’d know—” His voice trailed off, and I saw a flash of panic in his eyes. We wouldn’t know. We were only human now, and our daughter, our child who’d been born half Djinn and raised to become an Oracle . . . she was beyond our grasp now. David normally would have been able to reach out to her, over any distance, but now he was just as trapped in flesh and as clueless as I felt.

We both turned immediately to Lewis.

“I don’t know about the Oracles. I haven’t heard anything,” he said. He knew immediately what we were thinking about, and the frown on his face said that he was worried about it, too. “I’ll get somebody on it. David, do you know why she summoned the Djinn?”

“Pain,” David said softly. “You heard the scream. That was her pain.”

It rolled over me in a fresh, overwhelming wave of memory, and I had to concentrate hard to keep myself from shaking with the intensity of the experience. “The black corner,” I said. “She’s been hurt. That’s why she’s waking up. We did this.”

David visibly swallowed, then nodded. Our hands tightened together, the only real comfort we could offer each other. It had been bad enough when we’d been responsible for the pain and death of Djinn. Now we might be responsible for a whole lot more.

“We’ll find a way to get back to ourselves,” he said. “We have to find a way.”

I wished I could believe him. Lewis wasn’t looking at me, and I could tell that he was trying not to reveal his own doubts. He pushed away from the bulkhead wall and said, “You asked what we were going to do. I don’t see that there’s any reason to change the plan. We hit land, the Wardens scatter to handle crisis events. I’d like you two at Warden HQ for the time being. It’ll be easier to work with you there, and you can help us with coordination.”

Coordination.

If the Earth was really waking up, really angry, really hurt—we’d be coordinating firefighting during a nuclear war. And it was a waste. He was sidelining us, and I didn’t like it.

“We have something more important to do, Lewis. I know you’re trying to keep us out of the way, but we have to try to find a way to get our powers back,” I said. “David can’t live like this. You know that. We have to see the Oracles. If anybody knows, they do.”

“I can’t give you help.”

“We don’t need any,” David said. “This will work, or it won’t. But isn’t it worth a shot?”

Lewis thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It’s worth a shot. But if it doesn’t work, I need you at Warden HQ. Understand?”

“Understood,” I said.

No way in hell.

I got used to feeling sealed inside myself over the next two days; if David didn’t, he hid it well. We didn’t need confinement in hospital beds, so we checked ourselves out while Lewis wasn’t looking. It wasn’t really our fault, though. Cherise instigated it.

“No way am I sleeping in this horrible bed the rest of the trip,” she declared within a couple of hours of waking up. For Cherise, she looked ragged. For anyone else, she looked magazine-cover ready, but I could spot the subtleties—a smudge under her eyes, a slight pallor under her tan, hair that wasn’t quite as bouncy as usual. “And the shower in here sucks. What is this shampoo stuff, anyway? Medical soap? Ugh. No. I am not doing without product. There’s a limit.”

With that, and without anybody giving her permission to vacate the bed, she was up and moving, wrapped in a sheet and searching for her clothes. David helped—more afraid that she’d end up dropping the sheet and he’d see more of Cherise than he intended, I think—and once she’d laid her hands on her shorts, shirt, and shoes, there was no stopping her.

Which was all fine with me, actually. I was heartily sick of this room. I dressed quickly. David was hilariously slow; I wondered how often he’d actually had to pull on his own pants in the last few thousand years. Probably zero times.

“Sunshine,” Cherise declared as we followed her out of the medical area and into the more spacious public area of the ship. The utilitarian carpet and walls were replaced by lusher stuff the higher we went, and by the time we could see daylight streaming through windows, we were in posh territory, with fancy sitting rooms and dark wood paneling. And bars. A lot of bars. A few were even serving.

Cherise stopped at one and ordered us all margaritas.

“I don’t think this is the time—,” I said, but she pressed the glass into my hands firmly.

“Sweetie, this is exactly the time to drink,” she said. “We survived, right? We’re heading home? Definitely happy hour, from now until, oh, ever after.” She clinked glasses with me, then David, and led us out a side door onto the deck of the ship. We didn’t much feel like celebrating, but it was tough to resist Cher when she was in a mood like this.

And she was right about taking us outside. It was beautiful.

Hard to believe that we’d spent the last few weeks—no, months? years?—under such strain, facing such dire circumstances. When we’d sailed out of Miami, we’d done it in the teeth of a monstrous storm.

Today the sun was warm and kind, the sky a rich, clean-scrubbed blue. The breeze that blew in off the waves was gentle as it glided over my bare arms. The sea was calm; it glittered in diamond-bright swells, a sparkling fabric unrolled as far as the eye could see.

So beautiful.

David put his arm around me, and we stood there for a moment in silence, staring out at the vista. Cherise leaned on her forearms on the rail, smiling, turning her face up to the sun with an expression of pure delight.

“Cher?”

She turned at the sound of her name, and I glanced back to see Kevin coming at a run from a lower deck, taking the stairs two at a time. My relationship with Kevin—the youngest Warden we had, I believed—was complicated. He was complicated, more than most people I knew: damaged, and dangerous, and unpredictable, but still struggling to find and hold on to that core of goodness that against all odds survived within him. He’d been through a lot, in his—what was it now, nineteen years? He was three years younger than Cherise, which seemed like a lot at their ages. But that didn’t stop him from being head over heels in love with her.

“Hey, Kev,” she said, turning from the rail as he jumped to the top of the steps and lunged to grab her in a hug. She was a very small girl, and he was tall and lanky, putting on more muscle all the time. An odd couple, but also oddly appropriate for each other. Cherise’s unending optimism was something Kevin needed in his life, which had seen way too much darkness. She was laughing in bright, silvery peals as he spun her around in his arms. “Whoa, whoa, easy, don’t make me yak!”

He stopped and let her go, but she didn’t go far—just far enough to kiss him, with authority. David raised his eyebrows a little but said nothing. I wondered what he thought about it. I suspected he was just as wary as I was of Kevin, generally.

“You’re okay?” Kevin asked. “Lewis said—”

“Yeah, look, the Djinn kind of freaked out and there was a thing, but I’m all good now. See?” Cherise did a runway twirl for him. “I’m fine.”

“Yes, you are.”

She made a purring sound low in her throat and arched against him like a cat. “Don’t tease unless you mean it.”

“Oh, I—” Kevin suddenly stopped in midflirt, blinked, and looked at her with a baffled expression. David and I both turned to look at him. Cherise was just as baffled as Kevin, it seemed.

“What?” I asked, because it didn’t seem like Cherise could even remember the word.

Kevin closed his eyes for a second, rubbed them, and opened them again. Relief spread across his face, and he shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “Jesus, I’m tired. I thought—it’s nothing. I’m okay.”

Cherise stepped forward and put her hand against his cheek, one of those loving gestures that I find myself doing to David so often. Kevin relaxed and bent toward her, covering her hand with his. “Well,” I said to David, “they’ve gotten cozy. Not really sure how I feel about that.”

He acknowledged it with a nod, but I could tell his mind was elsewhere. Shadows in his eyes, weariness in his face. For the first time, it struck me that every minute he spent in a human body—a real human body, cut off from the Djinn—he was growing older, just as I was. I tried to imagine how it felt for him to have lost so much, to be so alone. I knew how I felt. Surely for him it was millions times worse.

“David.” I put a hand on his arm, and got his full focus. “Are you okay? Do you need Lewis to—”

No mistaking the weary twist of his mouth. He hated being dependent on anyone, but he’d have to face facts—he couldn’t draw enough power from me to fuel his life well, and Lewis was the best bet. But David didn’t like being beholden to the first man I’d ever loved. At all. “I’m fine,” he said, voice unnervingly soft and even. “If I have to see him for help, I will.”

I didn’t believe him, but he wasn’t asking me to, in so many words. It was the big lie, and he was asking me not to push it. David wasn’t the kind to be reasonable about his limits; after spending millennia without many at all, he was going to crash into human borders pretty hard, and it was going to hurt.

It wasn’t the kind of thing he’d thank me for pointing out, either.

“Coordinating,” I said, bringing us back to the dark center of things around which our lives revolved now. “He really wanted to stick us with coordinating at headquarters.”

That got a smile from him, if a brief one. “It’s not going to suit you if we have to do it.”

“Speak for yourself, Master of”—I was about to say Djinn but caught myself in time . . . ouch—“the obvious. I’m not giving up yet. We’ll find a way to get our mojo back. See if we don’t.”

David drained the rest of his glass and dangled it from his fingers, staring down now into the sparkling waves. “You sure you want it back?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“No,” he said, and his voice had that odd, flat, soft inflection again, as if he were pressing all the emotion out of it with great care. “Jo, think about it. We both want to be together, but we’ve always been of two worlds. I tried to make you part of mine, but that didn’t work. This—this is a chance to make me part of yours.”

I forgot all about the drink in my hand, the beautiful day, the laughter of Cherise and Kevin standing a few feet away, and fixed him with a disbelieving stare. “David, you’re dying.”

“Everyone’s dying,” he said. “Mortal life is short to someone like me even in the best case. If I don’t—resume my life as a Djinn, I can be a true husband to you. Living a human life.” His eyes finally moved to meet mine. “Giving you human children.”

We didn’t talk about Imara very often; our Djinn child was a beautiful, complicated gift, but she had never been a baby, never rested in my arms, never taken her first steps. The mothering instinct in me craved more, and he knew that. I’d never said it, but of course he knew.

“David—”

“It’s not a good time,” he finished for me, and he was right on, even though we no longer shared that deep supernatural bond that had made it so easy for him to read me. “I know. But there’s so little good about all this, Jo. We should take what we can, when we can, for as long as we can.”

“I’m not having children just to watch them die, if this turns bad,” I said, and somehow managed not to add, again. Imara’s death, before she’d been made an Oracle, was something that would haunt me forever. “We’re in trouble. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

“You know what I’ve learned from thousands of years of watching humanity? It’s always a bad time.” He put his arms around me and held me, and the simple warmth of it made me want to weep. I didn’t. It wouldn’t do for me to get all girly and soft on him now. “But all the bad times end, too.”

“Thus sayeth the dude with a long view.”

“Dude?”

“Sorry, it was my bad eighties teen years coming back to haunt me.”

He kissed me, as if he couldn’t think of any more words. That was okay. It got the point across just fine.

It was very strange to be on the outskirts of the whirl-wind of activity inside the Wardens—a bystander, like Cherise. Someone included me in some of the meetings, out of courtesy, but being outside of the direct flow of crisis information made me feel like I was just holding down a chair at the table. It was, in fact, a literal table, the biggest one on the ship, and it seated about twenty; I supposed they used it for swank corporate meetings on the high seas. Or really large families, with equally large checkbooks. Lewis sat at one end, looking down the long expanse of wood; around it, every chair was filled with some powerful Warden or other.

Except mine and David’s, of course. We were just keeping the cushions warm.

We were an hour into the meeting, and what had started out as a grim list of problems had only gotten worse.

“Reports coming in from South America,” said Kyril Valotte, an exotic- looking young man who missed being handsome by the narrow set of his eyes. “Earthquakes and lava flows in Venezuela. We’ve got teams heading there now, but we’ve also got reports of odd animal attacks in Panama, some kind of disease outbreak in Guatemala. . . . It’s a lot for the Earth team to handle at once.”

“I can send four Wardens out of Texas,” said the head of the Southwest U.S. region, and made some notes on his map. “Earth Wardens I got. Weather Wardens I need.”

“I’ll send as many as I can,” Kyril said with a nod. “We’ll need ground transportation.”

I held up my hand. “I’ll take it. I can still make phone calls.”

They looked up, and I saw the frank confusion in their faces for a second before memory caught up. Then they both just looked uncomfortable. Kyril nodded and murmured something meaninglessly kind. The U.S. Warden—Jerry something?—didn’t bother. He just went back to his maps.

There was a lot of that going on. Lower- ranked Wardens came in and out, delivering notes and whispered messages to their bosses, and with each note, the deployments ended up revised. Thankfully, Cherise had come to my rescue with a genuine computer and network uplink, so I was dispatching travel authorizations and setting up rental cars at the speed of—well, not light, but at the speed of whatever satellite I was bouncing my signal from. It was something useful to do, at least.

I was glad, because listening to the trouble was somehow worse than not knowing about it at all.

Lewis looked at his watch and said, “Hour update,” which was the trigger for us to go around the table, one by one, and list off the emerging issues, the ones being handled, and estimated numbers of casualties. I tallied it up in a spreadsheet. Nice and clean and neat.

By the time silence fell again, and my fingers stopped typing, I was shaking. The pause was deep and profound. I stared at the list of things I’d recorded.

“Jo?” Lewis’s voice was gentle. He already knew.

I cleared my throat. “We’re up to more than a thousand reported anomalies and severe issues,” I said. “Estimated casualties worldwide are climbing steadily. Right now, from what we have reported, the worst case scenario puts human lives lost at about half a million people.”

People who were bad at math took in sharp breaths around the table.

“It’s going to get worse,” David said, in the silence. “The Djinn aren’t intervening. I believe they could be causing some of these events.”

“Why? Why would they do that?” It was an emotional question, not a rational one, and it came from Kelley, down near the end of the table. She was upset, clearly.

“Because they don’t have a choice,” David said. “The Djinn aren’t operating under their own control anymore. At least, I don’t believe they are. Otherwise, at least one of them would be here now. You can’t count on any assistance from the Djinn, and where you meet them, you have to consider them as hostile.”

We all knew what that meant; hostile Djinn were pretty much worst-case scenario all by themselves, and they were now only a part of our problems. I felt sick and light-headed, and I was pretty sure from the faces around the table that I wasn’t the only one.

“Focus on what we can control,” Lewis said. “We’re dispatching Wardens to cover the hot spots, but that’s reacting. We need to get ahead of this.”

Someone let out a hollow laugh. “How?”

“We need to get to the source of the problem,” Lewis said. “We need to get to the Mother herself.”

This time, I felt David take a breath. A sharp one, which he let out slowly before saying, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“I realize that we’re just humans,” Lewis said, “but sooner or later, she needs to understand what she’s killing.”

“You think she doesn’t?” David asked, very mildly. That brought another few seconds of silence around the table. “Humanity has done stupid things in the name of its own blind survival, worse in the name of its own comfort. She’s not concerned with individuals, Lewis. She’s concerned with balance. If you put all of humanity on one side of the scales, and all of the other life on Earth on the other side . . .”

“You know what? I’m not here to debate humanity’s crappy conservation record,” Lewis snapped, and then he rubbed his face and sat back in his chair. “Sorry. I get your point, but this has been brewing for a long time. If we can’t establish direct contact with the Mother, we have to rely on the Djinn to influence her. Frankly, I’m not feeling good about that plan, since the Djinn are already on her side. Are you?”

“Not at all,” David said. “But then, I’m not feeling good about putting a human face to face with a being so vast and powerful that the Djinn themselves won’t go there.”

“Oracles do,” I said. “Imara does.”

“And Imara’s done all she can to make humanity’s case. She’s young, she’s new, and the Mother may not listen.”

“I could do it.”

“No, Jo, you can’t. You had a lot of advantages the last time you tried something like this; you were a Warden, you had access through Imara and through me. It’s not a good idea.”

“Because mere humans shouldn’t be front and center?” I shot back to David. “Come on, this is about mere humans. Not Wardens. Not Djinn. It’s about millions of regular people who are going to die, and their voice needs to be heard. They’re not invisible. They’re real.”

“I know they’re real,” he said. “But they have no voice—not that she can hear and understand. You have no voice, Jo. Not as you are.”

“Bullshit!”

He smiled. “Yelling isn’t going to solve the problem, you know.”

“But it makes me feel tons better, sweetie.” I wasn’t about to let his charm veer me off course. Well, not far off course, anyway. “We needed to go to the Oracles anyway. They’re our one real hope of getting our powers back, fast. I’m the logical one to do it. Lewis, if I get burned out, you’re not losing much at this point.”

He was looking at me, and I saw the expression that flickered over his face. We both knew that in personal terms, that absolutely was a lie, but on pure, coldly logical ground I was correct. I was human. Not a triple-powered Warden any longer. Not consort to the leader of half of the Djinn anymore.

Just Joanne Baldwin, snappy dresser and fast-car fan, mother and daughter and sister. Just another human being spending my short time on the face of the Earth, unnoticed.

And Lewis nodded, face gone utterly still and controlled. “Yeah,” he agreed. “It makes sense. You’ve got the technical knowledge, we can help you get where you need to be, and if it doesn’t work—then we haven’t lost a vital Warden.”

David stood up. “Are you insane? You can’t encourage her. You know how she is.”

“I know exactly how she is, and who she is, and what she can do if I give her the chance. Don’t underestimate her just because you love her and you want to protect her.” Lewis’s eyes were bleak and full of things that I didn’t want to see, didn’t want to know. “Jo, we’re fourteen hours out from port. Get ready. Once we make landfall we’re going to be very busy.”

“You know me, I love a good crisis,” I said. “I’ll be ready.”

Lewis nodded, and the meeting broke up for the next four hours so most could get some much- needed downtime. Not that they would get it, considering the pace at which things were happening.

I felt oddly . . . disconnected. Again. I kept waiting for some sense of the world around me to return, but all I had to work with now were what my limited human senses chose to give me. Not much, and not enough.

Then again, I’d made the case that being just plain human was an asset. Inconsistency, thy name is Joanne.

I saved the spreadsheet and left everything up and running for the next shift of Wardens, who were already shuffling into the room, yawning and gulping coffee and looking as shell-shocked as I felt. David waited silently for me. He took my hand as we exited the room, and waited for a whole three steps before he said, “Are you insane?”

“Clinically, or in general? I’m pretty sure there’s a ‘yes’ in there somewhere no matter what I do.”

“Jo.” He pulled me to a halt and turned me to face him. “I’m not kidding.” His hand was tight around my arm, and his face was drawn and very serious. “You can’t do this. I can’t let you do this. I’m not going to lose you, and there’s no part of this plan—if you want to call it that—that doesn’t end up with you dead. It’s bad enough you want to go to the Oracles. Going to the Mother is suicide.”

“We’re all dying,” I said, and saw him flinch as I threw his words back at him. There wasn’t any satisfaction in it. “I have to try. You know I have to try. You’d do the same, in my place.”

He let go of my arm and put his hands on my face, and for a breathtaking minute we stared into each other’s eyes, all barriers swept away. Two people poised on the edge of something awful, afraid and alone even with each other for comfort.

He hugged me close, stroking his fingers through my hair. When he’d been Djinn, he’d straightened my curls—a private sort of joke between us, a memory of a time when I hadn’t battled that problem. Now, he couldn’t wield that power, but it didn’t matter. It soothed me in deep, primal ways, and I relaxed against him, feeling the deep rush of his breath in his chest, his heartbeat, his strength and love and commitment.

“Then we go together,” he murmured in my ear. “The two of us. Together.”

Tears suddenly welled up in my eyes. I’d been prepared to go it alone, resigned to it; and yet, knowing he was with me . . . it made all the difference. I didn’t know how to feel; relief and horror struggled for dominance. The horror was because I was dragging him with me into the mouth of the lion.

But I wasn’t alone. And that mattered, in this moment, more than I could say.

“We have fourteen hours,” I said, and pulled back to wipe my eyes with the heel of one hand. “Let’s spend them doing something productive.”

That put him back on firmer emotional ground. “I’m trying to think what that is, in your world. Shopping?”

“Jerk. No. Although not a bad idea—I could use a couple of outfits.”

“Interesting.” His arms tightened around me, and the heat between us changed from comfort to something else. Something with its roots in a wilder place. “So what would you consider productive?”

“I need to do laundry.”

“And?”

“That means I should take my clothes off. You know, to be sure I have everything clean.”

I loved the smile he gave me, slow and sweet and hot. It wasn’t a Djinn smile, not with the kind of hidden power that it had just a few days ago, but it was more purely him. The core of David that I loved so very much.

“I can help with that,” he said.

“You mean, with the laundry.”

“Absolutely.”

We walked back to the cabin with our arms around each other, savoring the hours, minutes, seconds together. If other people spoke to us, I’m not sure either of us really paid attention.

As he was locking the cabin door behind us, David said, “Be gentle, it’s my first time.” I laughed, and then I understood. It was his first time with me—and my first with him, in a very deep-seated way. We’d been together as Djinn and Warden, both of us bringing power into the relationship even if that hadn’t been a deliberate plan.

This was different. Very different. This was just skin, and human emotion, and the kind of love shared by so many others. Which made it oddly precious and special, I realized.

We came together slowly, in a long and leisurely kiss. After the first few seconds I stopped thinking about what this wouldn’t be, and began thinking of what it was. It felt sweet and intimate and passionate, and his mouth tasted different now. Human. Hard as it had been to see it, even his best imitation of mortality hadn’t quite been completely honest. He’d unconsciously skewed it toward making it perfect.

And this was honest, and imperfect, and wonderful.

He broke the kiss and pulled in a deep breath, looking shaken. I had to laugh a little. “What?”

“It’s been a long time since I had reactions I couldn’t fully control,” he admitted.

“Yeah? Scared?”

“A little.”

I took pity on him, and kissed him lightly again on the lips. “Me, too. You’re doing fine.”

He was, indeed, doing fine already, gently undoing the buttons on my shirt and moving it aside, brushing his fingers over my bared skin, trailing them down to the waistband of my jeans in a suggestively delicious manner. “I usually can tell if I’m doing this right,” he said in my ear. His warm breath made me shiver. “Am I? Doing this right?”

“Oh yes.” I caught my breath and arched against him as he slipped his fingers beneath the waistband. “Hell yes.”

He seemed completely fascinated from that moment on, forgetting his own odd awkwardness. Every action had a reaction, and for the first time, he was engaging every sense to understand me, read me, feel me. For two people who’d been so closely, inextricably linked by our nerves, this was like making love blind—deliciously different, sweetly erotic, utterly human in ways that neither of us had anticipated. Mapping each other’s imperfect bodies, communicating in whispers and sighs and moans and thrusts that built to something brilliant and explosive for us both.

David collapsed against me, gasping for breath, shaking. “It’s the aetheric,” he finally managed to say. “That’s what it is. That’s what you feel. You touch the aetheric. I never knew. . . .” He gulped in more air, eyes blind and bright, and then looked at me. “Let’s do that again.”

“Easy, tiger,” I said, and cuddled up next to him. “Take a breath. It’ll still be there.”

He put his arms around me, and I listened to the frenzied pounding of his heart slow down, his respiration subside. I felt warm and complete and deliciously relaxed. “You’ll still be here,” he said, and kissed my forehead, my eyelids, my nose. Silly, sweet little kisses. He was just as giddy as I felt. “That’s all that matters.”

I was trying not to think about it, but the thought darkened my mind, just for a second: Tell that to the half a million people about to die.

But I’d face that soon enough, and more.

And for now, I just wanted to be this, here, with him.

Sometime, hours later, I murmured sleepily, “Oh crap, I forgot to do the laundry.”

And he laughed.

And somehow, it was all okay, just for now.