if you're going to. Don't keep me in suspense."
He stared at me for a second, eyes wild and dark, and then smiled.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Smiled.
He reached out, pulled a fingertip slowly down the line of my cheek, and walked away. Hands in his pockets. Raindrops shattering in his wake.
And then time slammed back in a fevered rush, and the world moved.
He was gone.
And something was very, very, very wrong with me.
I cried out, wrapped my hands over my stomach, and felt the sudden emptiness inside. The spark was gone, the potential, the child that David had put inside of me.
I felt the last of the energy Jonathan had given me leak out. My vision went gray and blurry, and I felt my knees give way.
Falling.
Too much effort to breathe. Nothing left inside to live on. I was a black hole, empty and alone and dying in the rain.
David. I couldn't even call him. And if he came, it would only be more death, faster death, no comfort and no love in it.
Warm arms scooped me up. Fingers slid from my arm down to clasp my limp hand, and as the world telescoped to a black pinpoint I felt a warm pulse of power go through my skin, my bones, my body. Hot as the sun, liquid and silky and rich.
It wasn't enough.
My eyes were still open, and a little color swam out of the gray, but I couldn't focus, couldn't blink. Lewis was bent over me. He looked pale and desperate. He cupped my face in his hands, watching my eyes, and then ripped open my shirt and put his hands on my stomach, right where the worst of the emptiness hid itself.
That sensation came again, a slow and deliberate wave rippling through me to pool like hot molten gold somewhere just below my navel.
It drained away.
I was going, just... going.
"Oh no you don't," Lewis grated, and I felt him breathing into my open mouth, his life pouring into mine with such power and fury that the emptiness couldn't keep up with it. That was David, that emptiness. That was how I would die, sucked into that darkness, and he'd still be trapped and alone, forever a creature driven by hunger and unable to stop feeding...
I didn't want this to end in nightmare.
I couldn't let it end that way.
I breathed.
Lewis was still bent over me, panting, shaking, and I saw the golden light still spilling out of his fingers into my stomach. A thick stream of life.
I knocked his hand away, and he leaned back and braced himself unsteadily on wet pavement. Head down. Gasping for air as if he'd been drowning.
I was almost sure he had been. I'd nearly taken him down with me.
"Dammit," he said furiously. "What is it with you and dying, anyway? Can't you get a new hobby?"
"Shut up." I meant it to be defiant, but it came out a bare, shaken whisper. I curled on my side, pummeled by rain, chilled to the bone, but with a rich, golden warmth somewhere deep inside to sustain me. His gift, like Jonathan's, but unlike Jonathan's it was a human sort of power, and my body was already accepting it. Renewing itself.
I let my breath slide out in a sigh, staring at him, and saw Lewis's narrow pupils expand into huge, black rings.
Felt the feedback begin to build between us.
The pulse beat faster, pulling me like the tide.
I closed my eyes and drifted up to the aetheric. It felt effortless and elegant and perfectly controlled.
"What happened?" Lewis asked.
"Jonathan," I murmured. He kidnapped my child. I couldn't say it out loud, couldn't begin to explain all of what I'd realized while lying here in the rain, and certainly not to Lewis. "He's not going to fight. Ashan's going to win."
Lewis sucked in a very sharp breath, as if he knew implications to that I couldn't imagine. "That can't happen."
"Well, it's going to happen, so you'd better make a plan."
"Joanne, there is no plan for that." He looked miserable, suddenly-tired, soaked to the bone, chilled. "If we lose Jonathan, we lose everything. He's like the keystone in the arch. Take him away-"
"Everything collapses," I finished, and slowly found the strength to sit up, then mutely extended my hand to him. He brought me to my