“He tried to get some of you to help,” I shot back. “But I understand you had a gut shortage around here that day.”

Yeah, that wasn’t smart, but I was tired and cranky and Jonathan was pissing me off, what with all the sarcasm. The room seemed to shudder with disapproval.

Surprisingly, Jonathan didn’t seem to take offense. He swept me from head to toe, giving me a new appraisal.

“That the new you?” he asked.

“Old me,” I said. “Getting sick of being politically correct.”

“I like it. Now shut up.” He turned back to the assembled Djinn, who were agitated enough that I was surprised we didn’t have spontaneous firestarting. “The ones who are trapped out on the aetheric are in trouble. The ones who can’t hold themselves together anymore may be dead. We need to do this fast, do it well, and then make sure the Wardens don’t screw it up even worse than they usually do.”

“Which means what, exactly?” Gray Suit again.

“That we clean up after them, as we always do? Let the humans stand responsible for their crimes. Let them clear the aetheric.”

He wasn’t much impressed by Jonathan, which I thought was interesting, given the extreme respect the rest of them seemed to accord him. Gray Suit had a pale complexion, sharp hatchet-faced bones, and gave off a sense of ruthless energy. I’d still put my money on Jonathan, if it came to a showdown, but I wouldn’t have given generous odds, either.

“Yeah. We’ll just hang out here, watching our own people die. That’s a hell of a plan, Ashan. Right up there with your best.” He punctuated it with a friendly I have an idea! gesture. “Tell you what. You go out and tell them we’re going to let them die.”

“More of us die if we go out there,” Ashan said without blinking. He had the no-blinking thing down. “But then you seem not to worry about that. Since you, of course, never leave the safety of your nest.”

Silence. Most of the Djinn were studying Jonathan. Jonathan stared at Ashan.

“Um…” I tried to make it sound deferential, but I wasn’t sure I succeeded. “Shouldn’t we find out who opened the rip in the first place?” Jonathan fixed me with a look dire enough to qualify as neurosur-gery without anesthetic. Naturally, it didn’t stop me. “Well, isn’t it a good question? I mean, somebody ripped it open. Somebody with a lot of power and not enough conscience. Was it a Djinn?”

“What part of shut up was unclear to you?”

I returned the stare, full force. Since last he’d intimidated me, I’d had the hard-core lesson in How To Be A Djinn, and the whole god-of-your-new-existence routine wasn’t going to cut it anymore. “Answer the question. Was it a Djinn who did it?”

“Oh, we are so going to talk about this later,” he said.

“I’ll take that as a yes. I’m just going on magical theory, here…” Because unlike the Djinn, I’d actually had class time learning about all of the physics of the stuff, the rules, and the various consequences. “… but it seems to me that whoever ripped it open would have a pretty good idea of how to close it. Since he must have known what he was doing. I mean, the thing was pretty well camouflaged when I got there. Discreet, you know?”

I had him. He blinked.

“Or was that stating the obvious?” I asked, and tilted my head to the side.

Neurosurgery. Without anesthetic. With a dull butter knife.

“We can’t ask the one who opened it,” he said.

“Because?”

The argument had taken on a tennis-match quality. The room full of Djinn was just watching us, shifting from one to the other, eyes avid. Rooting against me, no doubt. I didn’t care. There was only one opponent who mattered.

“Because he’s not here.” Jonathan’s fierce eyes were absolutely fiery. “Drop it already.”

I might have been slow on the uptake, but I finally got it. David. I know it registered on my face, because I felt it like an earthquake inside. David opened the rift…

“Why?” I whispered. “Why in God’s name would he…”

Jonathan gave me a pitying look, like I was the stupidest creature in the universe. Which, at that moment, I supposed I was. “For love,” he said. “Why else?”

David had opened the rift when he’d made me a Djinn. You’ve broken laws. Rahel had said that, and I hadn’t listened. Jonathan himself had tried to tell me how serious it was, what we’d done.

David had opened the rift, and drawn on something on the other side when he brought me back to life.

It was our fault the Djinn were dying.

Three

Nobody had much to say, after Jonathan made it clear the tennis match was over and the subject was closed. Neither of us had come right out and said what we were thinking, which was good; I wasn’t sure I wanted all of these extremely powerful and extremely arrogant creatures to take offense at me. Especially not Ashan, who looked like he could bore a hole in titanium with a sideways glance. There was already an overload of mumbling and fiercely predatory looks toward me. I wished Rahel would show up; she was at least marginally congenial to me. Even Patrick would be welcome right about now, and not because I wanted to body-slam him into the wall; he’d been through this process before me, and survived it. The world had survived. The Djinn had survived. I needed to find out how, and I was pretty sure I couldn’t.

My fault. This is my fault. I couldn’t keep it from running through my head. Why hadn’t David told me? Why had he never even let on? Had he even known?

Of course he knew. It occurred to me, late and cruelly, that the reason Jonathan had kept him here had been to try to find a way to close the rift without killing him, or me. I’d thought it was a punishment, but it had been Jonathan’s way of trying save us both. He and David had been working on a way to stop it.

Oh, God. I’d misunderstood so much.

Something changed in the room, a kind of stillness. Jonathan waved people away from the center space, turned, and glanced at me. Apparently, I was the only one who didn’t get it. “Incoming,” he said.

Rahel materialized in the space left open.

She was covered in roiling blue specks. Djinn shouted and stampeded backwards as the sparks began to fly up and out, looking for other hosts; Jonathan moved forward.

Before he got there, Rahel’s yellow eyes went blank, and she collapsed in slow motion down to the rug. She was closest to me; I didn’t think, I just reached down for her.

My hands sank into her, wrist deep. Not that she was misted—that would have been better, oh God, far better. No, what I sunk into was flesh the consistency of warm butter, bathed in blood and melting muscle. I hit the relative hardness of bone but it was melting, too, dissolving like wax in the sun.

She was trying to say something to me. Her lips were whispering, anyway. I yanked my hands back, trembling, and stared at the smeared warm mess clinging to my skin. Her open eyes flared from a violent storm-black to a pallid blue, shifting colors like a wildly spinning prism.

“Joanne!” Jonathan snapped. He dropped to his knees next to her, extended one hand over her body, and reached out to me with the other. “Get your ass back. She’s contaminated.”

I could see the energy spilling out of his outstretched hand, golden white and so intense that it seemed to warp space around it. Pure life energy, keyed to the magic of the earth. Healing energy. David had said that Jonathan was the strongest of the Djinn; I hadn’t quite believed it, until now. He was doing this even here, cut off from everything… That was the legacy of his birth, his connection to the Mother. Of all the Djinn, he was the only one with power of his own.

And it didn’t matter. The damage just kept getting worse—flesh slipping from muscle, muscle dissolving to mush. The soft-focus gleam of bone beneath.