He blipped out. I stared at the spot where he’d been, frowning and wishing I still lived in a world where people used doors.
Lewis ambled around and settled down next to me.
“So,” he said.
“So,” I agreed. “Son of a bitch.”
“Who, me?”
“The situation.”
“Ah.” He rubbed his hands lightly together. “Guess I’d better get back to work. I’ve got the pressure mostly relieved in the plates around the San Andreas, but I need to get a team of Earth Wardens on it. And the Fire Wardens need the tip-off about the Yellowstone fire, too.”
He glanced over at me, eyebrows up.
“What?” I asked.
“That was a codependent way of asking you to do it for me.”
“You want me to run your errands? Bite me, Lewis.” After Rahel’s rather rabble-rousing speeches about slavery, I wasn’t feeling any too subservient. “How’d the rip form in the first place?”
“I don’t know,” Lewis said. “Like Rahel said, this is new. I’ve never heard of this stuff coming through before. It’s almost always a demon, reaching through to put the Mark on a human; once the Mark matures, they can make the crossing to the human plane directly, without going through the aetheric levels. Safer for them. But this stuff…”
“Maybe it can be destroyed.”
“We don’t even know what it does.”
“Yeah, but even so I think we’d better work from Patrick’s theory: Nothing good ever comes out of the Void…”
I stopped, hesitated. There was something…
“Jo?” He was staring at me, wide-eyed. I wondered how bright my eyes had just flared.
“Stay here,” I said, and got up to take a look around.
The first thing I spotted after passing into the kitchen was the almost-there shadow of Patrick’s Ifrit, hiding in the gloom behind. Watching me. That predatory interest made hair stand up on my neck.
“Hey,” I said to it, and took a step closer. She shrank farther into shadow—not aggressive today, certainly not the ripping, shrieking fiend that Patrick had set on me just yesterday in training sessions. “Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“It’s not you I’m afraid of,” it said. “Don’t blame him for this. He doesn’t understand.”
“Understand what?”
“It will kill all of you.”
For some reason, I didn’t have any doubt about what it was. “You can see it? This light? You know, the glitter?” She nodded, or at least I thought she did. “Do you know what it is?”
“Yes.” A bare, sighing breath. I felt myself tense up. “Knowing will not help you.”
“Why?”
“It does not help me.”
Great, Ifrit were just as evasive as Djinn when it came to the important stuff. “Look, just tell me, if you know. What is this stuff? How do we stop it?”
“It is life,” she whispered. “It is love. It is death.”
Point taken—Ifrit were more evasive. “How about in more, you know, technical terms…?”
She seemed to be trying to tell me, struggling to describe something that she didn’t have a language to cover. “It has happened before.”
“But Rahel said…”
“She was not told.”
“Sara…”
“Do not say my name!” It was a cry of mortal pain. “You don’t understand. Love consumes. Love must consume.”
I heard Lewis say something from the other room, his voice rising into a question.
“Lewis?” I called.
The Ifrit said, “He is a man. Men are weak. They don’t always see…” Was she talking about Lewis? Patrick? I had no idea, but she wasn’t making any sense that existed in my reality. Ifrits were crazy, I knew that much already. “You must choose. I could not.”
“Okay,” I said, and held up my hands in surrender. “I’ll choose. No problem. Ah… Lewis?”
I backed away—not quite confident enough to give her my undefended back—and came out into the living room again.
Patrick was back, and he’d brought friends. Two of them, to be precise. He was in the process of taking his coat off and hanging it on a tacky-looking gold rack—had I put that there? Ack! — while the other two looked around, evidently checking out my interior decorating skills. I didn’t know the kid— sixteen, seventeen at most—who stood looking pale and mutinous and typically disaffected; he pushed hands into his pants pockets and slumped in a don’t-notice-me attitude. He needed a haircut, but that was probably just the generation gap talking.