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that rippled Sara's dress touched my face, combed cool fingers through my hair. It was gentle and beautiful and peaceful, and I knew it wanted to take me with it, into the dark.

"I did this for Patrick. I started the rift. What David did for you only accelerated it. Do you understand?"

I didn't. It was all falling away, sliding into the shadows.

"We do the worst things for love," she whispered. "So Jonathan was created. So David created you. So I created Patrick. And none of us should exist. The balance is gone."

If balance was required, I was restoring it. Going away . . .

"Stay," she said, and touched my face with those cool silver lips. "There is a gift only Patrick and I can give. One last gift, in return for what you have given us."

Words drifted up from the darkness inside of me. "What have I given you?"

Her smile was beautiful, and sad, and perfect. "A way to be together. And now I offer you the same, my love. Take it."

She opened her arms. I looked at Patrick. There were tears shining in his eyes, and he backed away. Afraid, after all.

I stepped into Sara's embrace.

"No," Patrick gulped, and turned back. He flung his arms around us both and hid his face in the pale lace of Sara's hair. "Both of us or nothing. As it always was."

Something wrapped hot around me, like clinging tar, and I thought, I should have said no, but then the pain dug deep and I screamed.

And screamed and screamed and screamed, until the universe exploded in a silent dark pop like a shattering of glass.

It didn't feel like a gift.

It felt like a betrayal.

* * *

Chapter Twenty-eight

When I woke up, someone was holding me in strong, warm arms. I tried to burrow closer and felt the embrace tighten. "Jo?"

I lifted my head and saw that it was David. We were sitting against a wall in a hallway, next to a giant brushed-steel vault door. I felt . . . empty. Clean, but empty. Exhausted and powerless.

I felt wrong.

He was stroking my hair gently, letting it curl around his fingers. Crap. Curly hair again. Something hadn't gone right . . .

"Easy," he murmured when I tried to get up. He rose to his feet, still holding me, and set me down on shaky legs. "Oh God, Jo. My God. You're alive."

Sara. Patrick. It had seemed so real, hurt so much ... I drew breath. It felt . . . wrong. Clumsy. Mechanical. "Maybe." Memory slammed back with a vengeance and flooded me with alarm. I turned to look inside the vault.

It couldn't have been the hours it had seemed, up there at the top of the world. It had been seconds, minutes at most.

The confrontation was still going on.

Lewis was still standing, but even as I watched he swayed and collapsed to his knees. The white burn of energy I'd seen him giving to the motionless, broken body of Kevin Prentiss was almost spent, just flickers now, pulsing in time with Lewis's labored heartbeat.

God, he was dying. I couldn't believe he'd held on so long, or that Yvette had let him . . . but then I saw the look on her face as she watched him, and I knew why she'd waited. He was suffering.

She liked that kind of thing too much to stop it prematurely.

Jonathan was more of an absence than a presence in the room-blank, stiff as a statue, no sense of the restless energy and power that had been as much a part of him as the sarcastic half-smile. Yvette could not be allowed to keep him. The damage she could do ...

"We have to do something," I said to David. He reached out, encountered the barrier, and slid his hand along it.

"I can't." His voice was rough and low in his throat; he hated being helpless, hated seeing Jonathan reduced to this.

I reached out, and my hand slid past his, into the barrier, through it without pause. I heard his intake of breath, but then I was committed, and I had to move. No time to think about things.

I threw myself forward, onto Yvette.

She was stronger than she looked, and softer. I'd caught her by surprise; she really hadn't believed any Djinn could get past that