He could feel the mourning in me, and the guilt, and the horrible weight of responsibility. His touch made it easier. Nothing could make it easy.
He was already moving again, rising, driven by the compulsion Lewis had placed on him to close the rift. So long as he was moving up, I knew Lewis was still alive. There was that, at least.
I went with him. The coldlight was almost solid now, energy made matter. The image came to me that it was antibodies, that we were the invaders here, and this excess of them meant the universe was sick, maybe dying.
Up. I don’t know if there were other Djinn there, because all I could see was coldlight, a continuous blizzard of sparks surrounding us like a hot blue shell. I kept bleeding them off of David. They rolled harmlessly off of me.
Up.
We slowed and stopped, and although I couldn’t see anything I knew we’d arrived. David’s compulsion would have delivered us to the right place. When I stretched out my senses I could feel the rift, turning slowly like a slow-motion whirlpool as it sucked the coldlight from the demon reality into ours.
Get back, David said, and gently tried to push me away. I clung harder. Jo, you have to get back now. I need to do this alone.
“No.” I didn’t even know if I could do it, or how stupid an idea it was, but I formed flesh. I was surprised it was even possible here, in this place, but I took on weight and dimension and artificial life. No air to breathe, but that didn’t matter, not for a short while; I could manufacture an atmosphere good enough to sustain me for a while, out of the same primal material I’d just formed my body from.
A hot sirocco of wind whipped through the nothingness, blowing back my straight black hair, whispering close over my skin.
Hands closed around my shoulders from behind. They slid up my neck and combed hair away from my skin, and I shivered at the kiss that burned right at the juncture of my neck and collarbone.
“Jo.” His whisper was as rough and unsteady as his fingers. “I thought I’d never see you again. Not in any way that mattered.”
I turned. David was back to my David, hair slightly too long for neatness, warm copper eyes, kissable lips. I wrapped my arms around him and held him. There was too much tension in his body, but it felt right. At last. The coldlight was a continuous white-noise hiss of blue against the bubble I’d formed around us, but it didn’t matter just now. I wanted to stay in his embrace forever.
And I couldn’t. I knew I couldn’t. Too high a price for that.
He kissed me, gentle and slow and warm, and the taste of him nearly made me weep. He cupped my face in both hands, and as he pulled back his eyes were luminous with peace.
“It’s okay,” he said, and drew his thumbs over my lips in a caress that was as intimate as anything I’d ever felt. “Jonathan knew. One of us has to go. I’ve had my time.”
“Wrong,” I corrected him, and put all my strength into a shove that sent him stumbling backwards. “I’m giving you mine.”
I dove straight at the whirlpool.
David’s scream followed me in, but it was too late, too late to even wonder what the hell I was thinking, because I felt the darkness on the other side of the rift and with it, a visceral surge of panic, and knew this was going to hurt, badly.
And then I hit the paper-thin cut between the worlds, and stuck there with an impact that shredded me back into mist. Pieces of me began to be sucked away, through that rift, and I had to fight to hold on against the intense black pressure.
Where the pieces of me went through, the rift sealed.
Oh God.
I understood now. I understood why Jonathan had been so reluctant to send David to do this, because he’d known what had to be done. The only thing that could seal this thing was my blood, or David’s, because we’d birthed this thing, like some distorted child.
I let go. Let go of everything—all the fear, the pain, the anguish, the guilt. I felt the cord back to David break with a high, thin singing sound like a snapped wire, and his presence vanished from my mind.
I was alone.
I let go and let the Void have me, as much of me as it needed to seal the hole between our two worlds. It was like bleeding to death—a slow, cold unraveling, a sense of being lost one drop at a time. There was pain, but the pain didn’t matter.
What mattered was that I sensed the rift drawing together, healing.
The flow of coldlight at the rift slowed, stopped. It drifted in a sparkling blue weightless dance around me.
What was left of me.
I felt the rift seal shut with a kind of vacuum seal thump, and instantly the coldlight glowed white-hot around me, bright and brilliant as a million stars exploding, and faded off into darkness. It couldn’t exist here without the rift, just as I couldn’t exist without the umbilical to David.