The Djinn had taken over the back half of the room, standing in two separate, distinct groups. One group held the New Djinn, like Rahel, Prada, and dozens of others I’d come into contact with over the past couple of years. Marion’s tall American Indian Djinn was among them, and he gave me a small nod of acknowledgment when my eyes met his.
The Old Ones, on the other hand, held Djinn like Venna and Ashan, and dozens of badass ancients I didn’t recognize at all. They didn’t mingle.
“Right,” I said, as chairs scraped on the floors and people settled back in their appropriate armed encampments, metaphorically speaking-or neutral corners, not that I believed for a second that there was such a thing as neutral. “Let’s just get through this with a minimum of bloodshed, if possible.”
Myron Lazlo took the microphone, frowned at the dent from my shoe, and cleared his throat. He was old enough to have been running a speak-easy during Prohibition, and he liked formality. He did not, therefore, like me all that much. He was wearing a blue suit, a crisp white shirt, and a nice brocade silk tie that looked a little too daring for a dyed-in-the-wool CPA type. Probably a gift from a great-grandchild.
“Before we begin,” he said, “the Ma’at want assurances that this effort is at all necessary.”
“Assurances from whom, exactly?” one of the Wardens on the floor asked in a plummy British accent. “And who the hell are you that we have to explain ourselves to you, mate?”
A growl of agreement swept through the Wardens’ side of the room. Lewis gestured for the mike, and Myron passed it back to me. Lewis had recovered from my evil twin’s attempt to take him over, but he was well aware that in defending himself, he’d precipitated, or at least hastened, this whole mess. He looked tired, his haircut was at least a month past its expiration date, and he had a wicked five-o’clock shadow thing going. Slumped down in his chair, he was still at least six inches taller than everybody else at the table, including me.
The room went still, waiting to hear Lewis fire back at Myron and defend the Wardens.
It didn’t come to me as any surprise when he didn’t.
“Myron’s right,” Lewis said. His slightly raspy voice was level and calm, and it took away at least half of the impact of what he was saying, so the uproar was mostly confused, shocked whispers rather than full-volume outrage. “Let’s ask ourselves first if this has to be done, not just how.”
The Wardens, in particular, exploded into protest. I used the shoe again, to good effect this time, and made an after-you gesture to Lewis when things had subsided to mutters again. He gave me an entirely insincere gee-thanks look in response. We knew each other so well we could be sarcastic without even speaking.
“I think we should ask the Djinn,” he said. “David? Ashan?”
Diplomatic of him to include them both. David looked across at Ashan and made a very polite nod that I was sure cost him some pride. Ashan lifted his chin to its maximum angle of arrogance.
“In normal course, this could be allowed to happen,” he said. “But it was not triggered by natural forces, and so it should be corrected before so much of the field is broken that the change is inevitable. It causes the Mother discomfort if the change happens too quickly.”
He hated talking to us. Hated the whole idea that we would have any part in this at all. Which, hey, I didn’t much like the thought of working side by side with him, either. I had no idea what it was really costing David to do it, but I knew it wasn’t easy.
“Why aren’t we sticking these freaks in bottles?” one of the less intelligent Wardens yelled from somewhere in the back. “Murdering bastards!”
Lewis didn’t let anger slip free very often-he was mostly of the “irony is the best policy” school of thought-but there was no mistaking the steel in his voice this time. “Shut up, or you’re dealing with me,” he snapped. The silence that fell afterward stretched for long enough to make his point before he continued. “Let me get something completely clear. The Djinn aren’t our slaves, and they aren’t our pets. They’re our partners in this, and they ought to be our partners in everything we do. If they struck out at us in a rage, they were acting in defense of themselves and the Earth.” Well, not quite. Ashan had also been conducting his own campaign against David for control of the Djinn, but Lewis was right, in the main. “We oppressed them for thousands of years. We forced them to do things that none of us wants to think about or acknowledge. We sealed them in bottles with Demons. Think about it. They came after us, and we damn well deserved it.”
Another uproar, this one composed of a whole lot of variations of oh-no-you-don’ts. Lewis waited it out, stone-faced, arms folded. Yeah, that had gone over well.
Two of the Wardens got up and tried to storm out of the room. I don’t think so, I thought furiously, and created an invisible shield of hardened air around the door. The first rebel hit it and bounced off…an Earth Warden, big and burly in a lumberjack kind of way. The second, however, was a Weather Warden. Sarah Crossman, from Iowa. Decent enough person, but hidebound. She lost her temper and tried to pry at the hold I had over it.
And the fragile, highly undependable hold I had over my own temper broke. It sounded like shattering glass, which made sense, because somehow the air pressure in the room had dropped, along with the temperature, and the cloudy windows way up at the top of the room (because the other, alternative use for this place was basketball) blew out in a spray of powdered glass. People screamed, and wind whipped in uncontrollable currents.
And then everything went very, very still as Lewis grabbed hold of the air and took control from me. The door that Sarah Crossman was pulling on suddenly opened, smacking her in the face and sending her reeling backward.
Lewis said, “If you want to go, go. But if you leave this room, you’re out of the Wardens. And I’ll see to it that your powers will be neutered.”
There was an audible gasp from the Warden side of the room, and both of the groups of Djinn smiled ever so slowly. The Ma’at exchanged uneasy glances.
“You can’t do that!” Ah, it was my old friend Emily, from Maine; I hadn’t seen her since Eamon had drugged her and abducted me out of the cab of her truck. Good times. She was a solid, blocky woman, prone to clunky shoes and flannel shirts and mulish expressions. “You can’t force us to agree with you!”
“It ain’t a democracy, Auntie Em,” Paul noted dryly. “I think he can. You don’t like it, just let me know what time’s good for that clinic appointment.”
“Don’t you threaten-”
I slammed the Manolo down hard on the table, “Emily! I will personally make sure you end up strapped to a gurney. And I won’t be nearly as nice about it as Lewis; you can bet your ass on that! Now sit down!”
Silence. Most people in the room knew pieces and hints of what had happened to me in the last week, and more than a few had heard some version of a story that I’d had a daughter, and lost her in a Djinn attack. It wasn’t wrong in the main, just fuzzy in the particulars.
The thing was, I wasn’t seen as entirely sane, so nobody really wanted to cross me. I could only imagine that I looked just as ragged-edged as the stories indicated. That, combined with such a spectacular loss of control, suggested that a certain amount of caution might be in order.
Things were very, very still. Lewis was looking at me. So was everyone else.
“Jo.” David’s very quiet voice next to me. I felt the pressure of his hand on my shoulder, then the friction of his fingertips stroking my hair. He wasn’t using magic of any kind, except the whisper that was always present between us. “Easy.”
He was right. There was emotion boiling up in me, and I couldn’t afford it, not here. Not now. I pulled myself sharply back with a flinch that I was sure was visible.