Windfall Page 0,54

"Broken inside. I see that Jonathan has given you time, but you'd best not waste it, sistah. Things are happening too quickly."

"David's an Ifrit," I said suddenly. I remembered seeing it happen to Rahel-who, so far as I knew, was the first Djinn to ever recover from it. And she'd done it by sapping the power of the second-most-powerful Djinn in the world... David ... and by a unique confluence of events that included human death and intervention by the Ma'at in an extraordinary cooperation of human and Djinn.

"I need the Ma'at," I said. "I need them to fix David."

Rahel was regarding me with those steady, predatory eyes. In the dying daylight, they looked surreally brilliant, powered by something other than reflected energy. She drummed her long, sharp fingernails on iron, and the chime woke a shiver up and down my spine.

"The Ma'at won't come. The Free Djinn have affairs of their own to attend to, and even if we did come, we would not be enough. David is too powerful. He'd drain the life from all of us, and it would accomplish nothing."

"Jonathan wants me to-"

She held up her hand. "I don't care what Jonathan wants."

This was new. And unsettling. Rahel had always been fanatically in the Jonathan camp; I understood there were cults of personality within the Djinn world, if not outright political parties, but I'd never thought of her as changeable in her allegiances. She was for Jonathan. Period.

She continued, "If you let David free now, he will hunt, and he will destroy. I was dangerous, when I was an Ifrit. He will be deadly, and if he goes after Jonathan, Jonathan will not act to stop him as he should. Do you understand?"

I did, I thought. I'd felt the voracious hunger in David, the need to survive. I knew he'd have died rather than even consider feeding on Jonathan, in saner days, but what was happening to him had no relation to sanity. Not as I understood it.

"If you keep him in the bottle, he'll drain you dry," Rahel whispered softly. "But it will end there. He will be trapped in the glass."

"But he's not draining me now!"

She merely looked at me for so long I felt a sick gravitational shift inside my stomach.

"He is?"

"Ifrits can feed on humans," she said. "But only on Wardens. And there is something within you that is not human that attracts him as well."

The baby. Oh, God, the baby.

"You want me to voluntarily let him kill me," I said. "Me and the baby. To save Jonathan."

"You must," Rahel said. "You know what's happening; you feel it already. Djinn are fighting. Killing. Dying. Madness is taking us, and there will be no safety without Jonathan. No sanity in anything, including the human world. Do you understand this?"

I shook my head. Not so much from ignorance as exhaustion. "You're asking me to sacrifice my life and my child. Don't you understand what that does to him if he's left standing after that?"

"Yes. Even so, even if it destroys him forever, it must be so. There has not been a war among the Djinn for thousands of years, but this-it's coming. We can't stop it. Some want to pull away from humans, from the world. Some want to stay. Some feel it is our duty, however distasteful, to save humanity from itself."

"Gee," I said. "Don't put yourselves out."

She gave me a cool look. "There have been blows exchanged that cannot be taken back. I fear for us. And you. This is darkness, my friend. And I never thought I would see it again."

"Jonathan knows that if I don't break the bottle, there's no bringing David back."

Rahel didn't answer, exactly. She etched sharp lines into the metal of the table, eyes hooded and unreadable. "He thinks he knows the outcome of things," she said. "I think he sees what he wishes to see. He believes he can master David, even as an Ifrit. I don't believe he can. But as much as he wishes to save David, he is thinking of your child, as well. He wishes to save all of you, if he can."

"And you don't. You want us to die for the sake of damage control. What am I supposed to say to that, Rahel?"

Rahel opened her elegantly glossed lips to reply, but before she could I