David’s voice was warm, intimate, almost compassionate. “Jonathan, I don’t have to explain a damn thing. You already know everything I’m going to say. You always have.”
“Not true. You were always full of surprises.”
“Good ones, occasionally. Maybe this will be one of them.”
“Oh, you’d so better hope.”
It was a very heavy silence that followed. I listened to the crack and pop of logs on the fire and focused on the smooth pebbled leather of my skirt. Eyes down. Mouth shut. I could do that.
Jonathan sighed and stirred. “You gonna drink that beer or what?”
“No. You know I hate the stuff.” David held out the untouched bottle.
Jonathan leaned across the empty space and took it. “How about you, Snow White? You drinking?” He was talking to me. I’d almost forgotten about the sweating cold Killian’s in my hand, except as something to hold on to; I took a fast, mute sip and glanced up.
Mistake. He was staring at me. I fell into those eyes, like Jonathan had his own dark gravity, and for a few seconds I knew him. Old. Wise. Limitlessly powerful. Funny. Sarcastic. Cold. Merciless. Sentimental. Sad. Lonely. I could see history stretching back to a dizzying distance, just a blur of days…
But the door swung both ways.
I knew him.
He knew me, too.
There was nothing, nothing he didn’t touch inside of me, and yet it wasn’t like the raping intrusion you’d think. I had the sense of compassion, of amusement, and a kind of strange gentleness as he gathered me in, learned me, lived in me.
“Jonathan! Dammit, stop!” I heard David’s shout, but it was too far, too far to travel to answer. Was it possible to be consumed like that, and still be whole? I felt like I was unraveling, spreading thinner, thinner… there was no pain, but a vast sense of becoming…
Something sliced across that connection like the blade of a knife, and I felt the bottle in my fingers sliding free, out of control, heading in frozen ticks of time for the floor.
David caught me as I fell. I heard the bottle hit the floor. Every nerve in my body fired as if a bolt of lightning hissed up from the ground, down from the clouds, caught me in its current and burned me into nothing.
The bottle shouldn’t have broken, but it did, it shattered into a million glittering pieces. I felt myself breaking, too.
I heard Jonathan say, “You should know better, David.” He was still sitting on the couch at ease, watching the two of us. “They’re too fragile. You’re working with flawed material. Talk about your lost causes—”
“Leave her alone!” David yelled. He lifted me in his arms, and I felt the solid weight of him, the flaring pale beauty of fire reaching out to wrap me close. “Jonathan, please stop!”
“No. You stop me.” Jonathan wasn’t just a guy on a couch now, he was more than that, he was a vast power moving through the aetheric, a shadow on the wind, a storm on the air. “C’mon, David. Stop me. It’s easy, you’ve done it a thousand times. No big deal.”
I was… unraveling. Breaking apart. Being subsumed into something vast and unknown and deep as space, sweet as pure cold mountain air…
I felt David grabbing for me on the aetheric, struggling to hang on, but it was like trying to hold sand in the wind.
Stop me, Jonathan said, in the aetheric, in the world, in that other place I couldn’t even name yet. Come on, David. Just do it.
“I can’t!” David’s raw scream of rage sounded torn out of him with pliers. “Jonathan, I’m begging you, please stop!”
And Jonathan let go. I fell back into flesh, into David’s arms, into pain. Oh, God, that hurt. Everything too bright, too sharp, too cold, too hot. For a few aching seconds I wanted to go back to that place where Jonathan had taken me, the place on the edge of nothing. I wanted oblivion with an intensity that scared me.
Jonathan picked up a beer bottle and took a long, throat-working gulp, put the empty down, and sat back with his arms crossed. Looking at the two of us. I couldn’t tell anything at all from his expression. Had all of that, all of me meant anything to him at all?
“So, did you tell her?” he asked. No answer from David, but I could feel the trembling of his muscles. “Of course you didn’t. Look—what’s your name? Joanne? — Djinn live by rules, and one of the rules is that humans die while we go on. Like it or not, there’s nothing we can do about that.” His dark, dark eyes moved to David’s face. “We can’t create energy, all we can do is translate it from one form to another. The demons that killed you ate the energy that kept you alive, and you died. So David stole life energy from another source to bring you back.”