Time delay before the dread set in. Two days? Two fucking days? I struggled to sit up, but drugs and Lewis and weakness kept me down. “Kevin—he took Jonathan—”
“I know.” Lewis’s voice had that silvery calm that Martin Oliver had been so famous for. “Jo, it’s okay. We’ve got teams on his trail. We’ll find him.”
“Not okay!” Lewis didn’t understand. Couldn’t understand. He didn’t know what Jonathan was. What Kevin had at his command. The powers of the strongest Warden in the world, plus the monstrous power of the single greatest Djinn… They’d sent teams? They might as well have sent packs of Girl Scouts. “Got to go. Get after him.”
His strong hands pushed me back. “You’re not going anywhere for a while.”
I clenched my fingers around David’s bottle and, before he could stop me, dragged the rubber stopper out of the mouth.
Zero to sixty. David was there instantly, fast as thought, staring down at me from the other side of the bed. Still trapped in that instant of panic and fury, thinking I was dying.
His hot-penny eyes flashed to Lewis, to me, and then he reached down and gathered me up into his arms.
I hadn’t known how cold I was until I fell into his warmth.
David was whispering words, but I didn’t know them—languages long dead, but the music was universal. Love, and fear, and sheer relief. He kissed me, kissed me hard, and I let myself melt into him.
When he pulled back, I realized that Lewis was talking. Urgently. “David, you can’t be here. They don’t know about you. You have to leave this to the Wardens now. She’s getting the best of care—”
“Quiet.” David hissed it, and when I looked up I saw the two of them exchanging a full-force stare. “Leave. You can’t do anything for her.”
Lewis’s eyes betrayed him with a flicker, and I remembered that he’d been stripped of power. Emptied. He was no more than any other mortal out there, walking around oblivious. David meant it literally. Lewis couldn’t heal me. Couldn’t do anything but hold my hand.
I couldn’t imagine how that felt, for someone like him who’d held the power of the world inside of him.
“Don’t say that,” I said, and drew David’s eyes back to me. “He’s my friend. Always.”
That eased some of the darkness in Lewis’s eyes, at least. He gave me a very small, pale smile.
“So… as a friend… how much trouble am I in, exactly?”
He started to answer, but in the next few seconds there were footsteps ringing on tile, and then the white curtain around my bed got whipped away in a shriek of metal rings, and an entire delegation was standing there. I was, I realized, in a familiar room. The same one where I’d done the French Maid lap dance for the doctor—who was standing in the corner with his arms folded across his chest, looking none too happy. Next to him was a weary, bleary Paul Giancarlo. Next to him was Marion Bearheart.
David let me go and stood up. Shield and protector. I took his hand and squeezed it lightly. “No,” I said. “Relax, David. Friends.”
I wasn’t sure of that, actually, but a battle wouldn’t do any of us any good. David settled—outwardly— but I felt the tension in his grip on my fingers.
“Friends,” Marion echoed softly. “I see. You assume a lot, Joanne.”
“I assume you wouldn’t have saved me if you didn’t think I was worth the trouble.” It was a long speech. I felt winded at the end of it.
Marion cut a look toward Paul, who slid his hands in his pants pockets and looked secretive. He didn’t volunteer a comment, so she continued. “The boy. Kevin. Do you contend that he was to blame for all of the… chaos?”
Boy, that was a loaded question. “Blame is kind of a broad term. If you’re asking, did he kill people, yes. He did. And he’s got a very powerful Djinn under his control, not to mention a couple of bottles of quarantined ones.” I had to pause for a couple of breaths. The dull ache in my back was blossoming into something hot and immediate. “He was on his way to Las Vegas. You know that?”
Marion nodded. “We know. What we need to know is how powerful is he, exactly? Can you tell us that?”
I could. I wasn’t actually sure if I should. My hesitation made Paul sigh and step forward.
“Jo, dammit, we’ve lost enough people. Not to mention a full fifteen Djinn. Don’t screw around, here. I don’t want a higher body count out of this.”
I felt a headache start pounding between my eyes. “You lost a team already, didn’t you?”