Instead, there were more bodies.
I skidded to a stop next to a crumpled form in rain-soaked brown suede. Marion’s hair looked dark and thin, pounded by the storm’s violence; she was still and quiet and pale. I checked her pulse and found her heart beating, though slowly. Martin Oliver was down, too, all his grace and fearless strength stripped away. His shirt was soaked through pink, and underneath there was a raw, four-inch-long tear through his sternum. Glass. He’d been skewered.
He didn’t have a pulse at all. Just a vast, echoing silence.
I looked up as lightning flashed white, smelled hot ozone and cooling blood, and realized that someone was missing, someone I’d left behind.
Kevin.
I misted and felt that gravitational tug, down and to the left—he was still in the UN Building, but somewhere at least a level below. I sank through concrete, steel, cold empty space, more concrete and steel…
… to a hallway that lit up in Oversight like Broadway. Lots of power rattling around in here, wild and barely contained; the place was a blizzard of sparkles. The barely felt tug of Kevin’s presence led me down through the deserted corridor, around a corner, and I saw a sudden flare of auras ahead, so bright they even punched through the curtain of glitter. I pulled back, still in mist form, and tried to get a sense of where I was and what was going on.
Kevin was definitely up ahead. So was Lewis. I couldn’t tell if Jonathan was there or not, Djinn auras were all over the place, like wildfire…
Where the hell was I? I slowly misted forward again, found a convenient recessed doorway, and came down into skin to take a look.
At the end of the hall was a huge shiny door, like the kind you see in the movies when there’s something really cool to steal. It was standing half-open.
There was a body lying a couple of feet away, human, bleeding hideously into the carpet from what looked like a fatal slash to the throat. The security guard was still breathing, but just barely… As I watched, his eyes glazed over, and the last whisper rattled out of his throat.
I heard voices, and carefully moved out of the cover of the doorway, hugging the wall. Whoever was there, they were inside the vault.
Lewis’s voice. “—don’t have to do this. Let him go.” Lewis sounded calm, but I felt the effort underneath it. Something bad was going on, something worse than the head injuries I knew he’d already sustained. I could feel the pulse of his distress, mental and physical, across the empty space separating us.
I advanced slowly, one step at a time, wondering where the hell Jonathan was, where David was, what had gone so wrong about all of this. I couldn’t believe Kevin had killed the people upstairs, or taken out the dead guard on the carpet. Then again, maybe I was underestimating his capacity for desperation, or fury…
By moving all the way to the right side of the hall, I could see a slice of the interior, beyond the open door.
There were more unmoving figures in there, down on the ground. One wore a UN Security blazer. I extended my senses and found they were both dead.
Lewis was standing, utterly still, with his hand wrapped around a blue glass bottle. It was still stoppered. David… Across from him, Kevin was on his knees, being held there by a hand around his throat. He looked unconscious. At the very least, he was too scared to fight.
The hand that held him was big, square, and covered with blood.
I moved forward, trying to get in, and came right up against a barrier, like a thick pane of glass. A Djinn barrier. I’d have to be in a bottle to pass through it, and once inside… shit. My bottle must be on the other side, with Kevin. Probably stuffed in his pants pockets, along with his condoms.
“Please,” Lewis said, and worked the glass bottle nervously against his pants leg. He looked awful. Bruises covered half his face like an elaborate tribal tattoo—courtesy of Kevin’s kicks in the head—and where he wasn’t bruised he was pale, with a sick oatmeal tinge. “You have a choice. Don’t choose to do this. There’s no going back.”
“There never is.” The hand holding Kevin was a man’s, right down to the hair on the wrist and the big, blunt fingers, but the voice was a woman’s, and it issued from somewhere on the other side, where I couldn’t see. I didn’t need to. I knew who she was, that voice was never going to leave my nightmares. Yvette. Of course… if Lewis had been there, they would have confiscated David’s bottle and taken Yvette in for interrogation, too. Which meant that somewhere in the confusion upstairs, she’d escaped and come down here to rifle the vault for her favorite slave.
Over my not-quite-dead body, bitch. I tried the barrier again, searching for a weakness, but it was slick and perfect. I didn’t think any of them had noticed me. I was staying just out of sight, misting where I had to in order to stay unnoticed. Mist, solid, didn’t matter. I wasn’t getting through to the other side. I’d have to wait for them to come out.