Windfall (24 page)

I rose faster. Faster.

I didn't dare look down because I knew my feet were burning now, dear God, it felt as if the flesh was already roasted off and now the muscles were cooking, but if that were true then I wouldn't feel anything once the nerves died. . . .

Hang on. Hang on. Hang on.

I clung to the vision of Kevin's parchment-pale face, of the blood pouring out of his side, and then, suddenly, my face was passing ground level and I was
out
.

I pitched forward, pushed with the last of my strength, rolled and kept on rolling until I splashed into a shockingly cold surf. A wave curled over me and I heard a hiss as my smoking shoes hit water.

I breathed liquid, coughed, choked, tasted salt and decay, and rested my face on cold, wet sand with a relief so intense it felt like orgasm.

“Son of a bitch!” A pair of hands rolled me over on my back, and I blinked and focused on the barely visible glimmer of Armando Rodriguez's face. For the first time, he had an easily readable expression: shocked. “What the hell was
that
?”

Like I could explain. I coughed salt, gagged water, and croaked, “Two people down there in the hole; one's hurt bad. Get help,
now
.”

He had a gun in his hand, which wasn't useful. He put it away and came up with a cell phone, dialed, and gave the rescue bulletin.

“Get an ambulance,” I added. He nodded and kept talking.

I squirmed up to a sitting position and peeled my melted jogging shoes off of my feet. They were pink and tender, but not Cajun-fried.

God, that was going to hurt tomorrow.

“We can't wait,” I said. “Find some rope, blankets we can tie together, anything. Run!”

He raced back the way we'd come, heading for the glow of headlights that marked the three kids tailgating on some unlucky parent's SUV. I squirmed back over to the hole. It was widening.

“Kevin!” I yelled. “Help's on the way!”

No answer. I scrambled back from the hole and looked around. Rodriguez was MIA. I couldn't see anybody else on the murky stretch of beach. Time was running out.

Call David,
my worst angels whispered in my ear.
Call him. You fixed him before. You can fix him again. Ashan wasn't even hurt all that badly.
Was this how it had started for Patrick and his Ifrit love? One little concession at a time, until he was killing his own kind to give her one more small slice of life? Until she was willing to settle for that kind of existence, just to stay with him?

No. No, no, no, never, and David wouldn't stand for it.

“Rahel!” I screamed it at the top of my lungs. “Rahel, where the hell are you? Get your ass back here, I need you
now
!”

A flash of lightning illuminated the beach, a long blue-white streak that raced across the sky and shattered into forks that stretched across half the horizon. Spectacular.

Those clouds hugging the ocean looked larger.

In the next hyperactinic flash, I saw someone coming out of the water. Tall, perfect carriage, dark skin glistening with water drops. Rahel was as magnificent as a sea goddess, and her eyes were burning so brightly they were like suns.

She came out of the curl of a wave and collapsed to her hands and knees on wet sand. Her body was solid to the knees, swirling fog below. Barely coherent. She looked like shit—beaten, exhausted, ripped, and bloodied. The blood was metaphorical for her. She hadn't become human; she'd just become unable to repair damage to a physical avatar.

Rahel hadn't flounced off in a fit of pique and stayed away deliberately; she'd probably meant to come back and help. But the dramatic gesture got interrupted along the way by a serious fight. The kind you came out of injured, or dead.

Rahel was as tough as any of the Djinn. She'd lose in a dogfight with Ashan, Jonathan, or David, but she should have held her own against anyone else. Unless . . . unless it
was
Ashan she'd gone up against.

Or Jonathan.

Either way, not good news right now.

I crawled toward her. She looked up, expression turning hard, and I stopped.

“They're coming,” she said. “I couldn't hold them back. Be ready.”

“Who?”

Too late to matter. I could sense it coming in the real world, in the aetheric, even blinded and weak as I was. A gigantic disturbance, headed this way.

Out in the darkness, I saw shapes moving. Indistinct, but definite.

“Joanne Baldwin,” one of them said. “Stand up.”

Sounded human. With a gigantic effort—and I wasn't sure how many more of those I could even stand to attempt—I went up into Oversight and saw at least ten flares of power gathering around me and Rahel. Wardens. Holy shit. How many had Paul sent to put me into custody? How hard did he really think I could fight?

“They don't want you,” Rahel said. “They're after
him
. Lewis.”

On the grand, sliding scale of things, that wasn't the best news I'd ever heard. “Who am I talking to?” I asked hoarsely, and managed to get to my feet. Ow. Ow ow ow. I wanted to dance around in pain, but stillness was required right now. Stillness, and a really good poker face.

Someone summoned fire, a brilliant orange bonfire that hovered over her palm. In its reflected light I saw Shirl. Goth black, sloppily cut hair, too many piercings in awkward places. Tattoos crawling her bare arms. She didn't look any happier to see me now than she had driving along the coast to accuse me of weather-related murder.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked her.

“None of your business,” Shirl snapped back. “You're not even a Warden anymore. Stay out of it.”

Rahel wasn't getting up to her feet, but she pulled into a crouch next to me. Intimidating. I approved. From the uneasy glance Shirl gave her, it worked.

“By order of the Wardens, I'm here to take Lewis Levander Orwell into custody,” Shirl said. “And you need to get the hell out of the way, Joanne. You're on shaky enough ground as it is. You really don't want to give us more reason to come after you, too.”

Which might have been meant to be funny, considering the sandpit I'd been trapped in. If so, Shirl's sense of humor needed work. “I have no idea what you're talking about,” I said. “Lewis isn't here. You're going to want to move along, guys. I'm here with a cop, and he's kind of grumpy, if you know what I mean. So, unless you want to do your intimidating from the inside of a jail—”

She threw the fire at me. I mean, fastball-speed. It hissed past my face and out into the ocean, where it impacted a building wave and instantly vaporized the top half into superheated steam. “I'm not playing with you, bitch,” Shirl said. “That's where everybody else goes wrong. They let you talk. You have one chance to tell me where he is, or I swear the next one burns right through your stomach.”

My plan to scare her into leaving wasn't going quite as well as I'd hoped.

“I want to talk to Marion,” I said, and was surprised my voice stayed steady.

“Denied. Marion's busy.” Shirl sounded way too smug about that. Marion was probably under house arrest after protesting too much, or flat-out refusing the order. “Last chance. Produce Lewis, or we'll go through you.”

“Then let me talk to Paul!”

Her smile was utterly sinister. “Talk all you want. Paul's irrelevant. We're on the front lines out here, and we're going to defend ourselves, with or without permission.”

“Defend yourselves against what?”

She must have remembered that she didn't want to talk, because her arm drew back, and plasma burned toward me. I dodged. It followed. Not as fast as the previous pitch, but then, I didn't think she meant it to be; she was playing with me. The plasma moved in mirror jerks with me, tagging me and cutting me off at every turn. I was tired and weak and clumsy with pain, and when I finally overbalanced on the soft sand and fell backward, the burning, incandescent globe dipped toward me and hovered just inches above my heaving chest. Hot enough to give me third-degree burns and make my jog bra start to char.

I dug my fingers into the sand and grabbed handfuls, trying to resist the sick urge to destroy David to save my own life.

Rahel lunged forward with a snarl, reached out with one taloned hand, and batted the fireball away. Right back at Shirl, who ducked. It hit someone else, who screamed in high-voiced agony, and Shirl turned to put out the resulting fiery chaos. Rahel grabbed my arm.

“Run,” she ordered roughly. “They'll kill you. They've already killed others.”

She launched herself up in a graceful, feline leap and landed on Shirl, who screamed. Fire erupted. I saw Rahel's neon yellow clothes burst into flame.

I flipped over and crawled to the hole. I felt the sand under my knees shift.
Oh God.
Lewis was losing it. The tunnel was collapsing. Sand was falling in on them.

There was nothing I could do.

Another flash of lightning streaked overhead, reflecting white on waves, showing a freeze-frame of the other Wardens converging around Shirl and Rahel. Rahel was going to lose. She didn't have the wattage necessary to stop all of them, not alone, not as a Free-range Djinn.

“Hey!” A deep-voiced yell from a couple of sand dunes over. “What's going on over there? You kids stop that!”

“Help!” I screamed. “Get help!”

The pompous jerk—and I was never so happy to hear one in my life—sounded even more self-righteous. And a little alarmed. “I tell you, I'm calling the cops! You clear out of here while you've still got the chance!”

“Yes, you idiot,
call the cops
! And the paramedics!
Help!
”

I was dimly aware of Detective Rodriguez racing back along the beach, some kind of rope slung over his shoulder, but I felt it in my bones, it was too late. All too late.

Rahel and Shirl were a bonfire rolling on the sand. Fire and blood and fury.

The sand heaved and collapsed in on itself, dropping me suddenly a good five feet. I slid down an instantly made dune.

The cave had collapsed.

Lewis was dying down there. “No!” I screamed, and started digging. It was useless. It'd take hours to move all this sand; no way they could survive down there.

I only had one option. Just one.

“David!” I yelled. “David, I need you!”

I felt the connection snap taut between us. Waiting for the command. One precious heartbeat went by. Two.

“David—”

Rodriguez skidded to a stop next to me and slapped the rope down on the sand. “Where's the hole?”

“Collapsed,” I gasped. “Oh, God—David, get them out, get Lewis and Kevin out of there—”

I felt the draw of power dig deep into me, sucking out what little I had left, and the pull was agonizing. I moaned and wrapped my arms around my stomach. It felt as if my guts might literally be ripped out and dragged through the sand like some biological lifeline.

Rodriguez abandoned the effort at rescue and turned toward the Wardens, and the struggle. His gun came out of its holster under his hooded jacket.

“Police,” he yelled. “Everybody freeze
now
.”

Most of them did, realizing that they weren't exactly operating undercover; Rahel vanished in a wisp of smoke, and Shirl was left lying on the sand, whimpering. Alive, but battered and scorched. One of the other Wardens knelt down next to her and put a hand on her arm to still her—Earth Warden, I had no doubt. I felt the surge go through the aetheric as he pumped healing power into her body.

The connection between me and David stretched thinner, thinner, cutting like razor wire. I held back a cry, squeezed my eyes shut and ratcheted in wet, painful breaths.

“Did you get them?” I whispered.

I felt something hum along the connection, something powerful and intense. Affirmation and love, condensed emotion that was too deep and powerful to grasp all at once. As if he'd sent me everything he felt in a frantic, desperate burst, like a submarine going down and transmitting one last, despairing SOS as it went into the dark.

A hand broke out of the sand on the beach, clawed and flailing. I yelled wordlessly and grabbed for it, dragged until my muscles popped.

Lewis slid free of the clinging sand. His face broke the surface with a gasp, and he started coughing, choking, spitting.

He was holding on to Kevin. As soon as he was free I let go of him and lunged forward to grab Kevin's wrist as Lewis hauled. The boy's arm slowly slid free, then the curve of his shoulder. Sand fell in a thick cascade from his bent head.

He didn't gasp for breath, because he wasn't breathing.

I choked back a curse and got behind him, grabbed him under the armpits, and pulled like a stevedore, every muscle in my body straining. He finally pulled free. Sand clotted thickly around the open wound on his side, but it wasn't gushing blood anymore. I wasn't sure if that was good news, or just the worst possible news. Because you don't bleed when you're dead; you leak.

In the white-hot light of another lightning strike I saw that Kevin's eyes were shut, his face still.

He definitely wasn't breathing.

Lewis joined me in pulling, and we put the boy down on his back. I bent over him and put my ear to his mouth and nose, listening.

Nothing. Not a single whisper.

“You're not dying on me, you jerk,” I told him, and pulled down on his chin to open his mouth. When I fitted my lips over his, I tasted grit and fear. I breathed into him. I didn't have anything left in the way of power, or I'd have superoxygenated his lungs, but simple human methods were all I had left.

I pressed my ear to his chest and heard a faint, fluttering heartbeat.

Breathed for him again. Waited. Breathed. Waited. Saw stars and felt like I might pass out from the exertion.

I felt his chest suddenly convulse under my hand and grab in a breath on its own.