Heat Stroke(44)

My attention was riveted on the two Djinn below. One was holding the other, staring numbly at the death around them.

Jonathan’s eyes were still dark, dark as space. Dark as the day that had birthed him.

David’s eyes were as copper as the dagger that had killed him.

He held Jonathan in his arms and wept in the rain, and I knew he was weeping for joy, for sorrow, for guilt because he hadn’t pulled his friend out of that fire soon enough to stop all this death.

“You wanted to know about Jonathan,” Patrick continued. “No one ever wakened the Mother before him. Pray no one ever does again.”

He touched me between the eyes, and took it all away.



It hadn’t been more than a minute. I huddled there on the couch feeling cold in a rain that didn’t exist, tingling from the memory of unbelievable power, and clutched the leopard throw in a death grip around my shoulders. Patrick still stood looking down at me, utterly unaffected by what I’d seen.

“How many?” I whispered. His eyebrows twitched. “How many died?”

“That day?” He shrugged. “Enough to create Jonathan. Enough left over to create David as well. We’re born of death, didn’t you know that? But so are humans. So is everything. Don’t let it get you down, sunshine.”

I just sat and shivered.

Lewis emerged from the back, hesitated over the sight of me all cold and shaken, and gave Patrick a look. Patrick shrugged again. “Jo? You okay?”

“Sure.” I closed my eyes and willed it all away. “Why the hell wouldn’t I be?”

Lewis took an uncomfortable perch on the shoe chair. Patrick himself picked a plastic thing in the shape of a hand, wished some kind of alcoholic beverage into his hand, and waited for the show with the genial half-interest of a golf fan at a tennis match.

“Go ahead,” he said. Lewis and I looked at each other. Lewis rolled the bottle between his fingers again, testing it for durability, apparently. “Just do it. It’s not that hard.”

I wasn’t sure I could do this. I wasn’t sure anymore I wanted to do it. God, if it took that much power to create a true Djinn, how was this going to help me? How could it help anyone? I squeezed my eyes tight shut again, fighting back tears.

Someone took my hand. Large, blunt, warm fingers. I looked into Patrick’s sea blue, tranquil eyes.

“Do you want to die?” he asked me, very softly.

“If you do, stop now, Joanne. Stop before you suffer any longer.”

I thought about David, running through the rain and mud, bleeding out his life, reaching out for something greater than himself. Stopping the greatest power in the world—of the world—from consuming life.

That was my heritage.

That was what had given me life.

Seemed pretty damn cowardly to give it up without a fight.

“No,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m good. Back off, Santa.”

Patrick smiled and resumed his seat.

Lewis took a deep breath, opened his palm and balanced the open bottle there. “Okay. Ready?”

“No. Just get it over with.”

“Be thou bound to my service,” he said. I was expecting something portentous in his tone, but this was an off-the-cuff style, so portent-free he could have been ordering pizza. I didn’t feel any different. I made a little come on gesture with my hand. “Be thou bound to my service.”

Patrick leaned forward on the arm—thumb? — of the plastic chair, and I wondered how it would feel to sit in a chair that was shaped like a hand. Like having your ass grabbed by a giant, maybe.

“Be thou bound to my service,” Lewis finished, and something changed.

It wasn’t immediately evident to me what it was. I mean, yes, I knew, but it started at some cellular level and worked its way up. Fast. I felt odd, then I felt weird, then I felt out-and-out funky.

And then I came apart in a silent explosion, mist swirling, and somehow I could still see, but not with human eyes, and not in the human wavelength… not on the aetheric level, but definitely accessing some of that plane to do what I was doing.

And then the wave crested, and I felt myself being turned inside out, torn apart, remade… reborn.

Into myself. Only… different. Better. Faster. Stronger.

Dissolving.

“Hey!” I yelped, but by that time my body had given up the flesh. I was a thin gray mist, moving faster, being sucked in by a gravitational force so huge I might as well have been a dust speck moving toward a black hole.

Which was the little perfume bottle in Lewis’s hand. I plunged into that tiny, tight container, squeezed like Concentrate of Djinn, and no matter how hard I tried to leak back out again, it wasn’t happening.