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wanted them to or not." He leaned very close to me, lips lover-close, and whispered, "That's why I need you, Joanne. Be thou bound to my service."

That made no sense. I was no Djinn. The Rule of Three didn't work on me, and in any case the agreement between the Warden and the Djinn had ended; it was just words. It meant nothing.

It had to be a bluff.

And I couldn't help a surge of pure fear, because there was so much visceral delight in his face.

"Be thou bound to my service." His eyes were blood-shot, not entirely human anymore. His breath smelled foul and ancient, something ages in the ground.

Stop, I wanted to say. I couldn't. He wasn't even letting me breathe, and my lungs were crying out for air. I couldn't even wield the power necessary to supply a trickle of oxygen. Stop this.

"Be . . . thou . . . bound . . . to . . . my . . ." He whispered each word separately, eyes drifting half closed in pleasure, and then smiled. "Service. Ahhhh."

I felt the white-hot force of the united Wardens and Djinn break apart into a million spinning pieces. The thread between me and David held, but only barely. Things were changing, terribly changing, and I couldn't see the edges of the wave that was rippling out from this moment. I didn't know what he'd done, or how, but it was flooding the world, drowning everything.

And when the flood receded, there was an ominous silence. The aetheric felt clean and very empty.

I drew in a whooping, gasping breath and sobbed it out, then breathed in again. Some of the black spots dancing in front of my eyes started to recede . . . not all, by any means. I felt one half step from unconscious, but I kept myself on my feet, facing Bad Bob.

"There," he said. "That's better." He chucked me under the chin, as if I were his favorite niece who'd just performed a cute trick. Or a puppy. "Oh, you have questions, don't you?"

I managed to get enough breath to gasp, "What - did - you - "

"You had a Demon Mark, once upon a time," he said. "You may have gotten rid of the Mark, but it left you stained. Vulnerable. Mine."

The Wardens burned through the shield and launched their assault, with or without the Djinn, and the doors of the penthouse blew off the hinges. Lewis strode in, surrounded by a barely visible nimbus of red light, and behind him came a grim-faced phalanx of my friends: Marion Bearheart, walking with a cane; Kevin, scared but determined; Luis Rocha, the Earth Warden I'd first met during the original Fort Lauderdale event. Dozens more, people I knew and liked, people I hadn't even known would put themselves at risk for me.

David stepped out of the center of the group.

"Whoops, Daddy's home," Bob said. "Time for me to be leaving. You will come see me, won't you? I'll expect you around sunset. Love that bloody color on the water."

My muscles were working again. I shakily reached for power and pulled it down, pulled it from all around me, every surface. The room lit up with miniature lightning strikes, all bleeding toward me.

"Bride of Frankenstein," Bad Bob said. "All right, all right, I'm going. Don't set your hair on fire."

He crooked his little finger and vanished with an audible pop of air. I stared at the spot in the aetheric; the writhing black tentacles took longer to leave, finally slipping through a raw wound in the world.

I didn't drop, though I'm sure everybody expected me to. Instead, I turned to David and asked in what seemed like a very normal tone of voice, "How badly are we screwed?"

He should have rushed to me, taken me in his arms. It was what he always did - what I expected him to do.

But he stayed where he was, watching me, and I no longer understood what I saw in his bright, burning-penny eyes.

He said, "Ashan was right. The vow we exchanged has made the New Djinn vulnerable again to the Rule of Three. My people are at risk now. From yours. We did this, the two of us."

He sounded . . . distant. Almost cold. I couldn't control a shiver. Go to him, I told myself, but I couldn't seem to move. If I moved, I'd fall down.

"He's already turned Rahel to his cause," he continued. "She belongs to him. You