Rachel Caine: Total Eclipse

The next thing I knew, I felt a small, hot pain in my arm, and then the sound was fading, drifting away along with the light and the pain and everything in the world.

Darkness.

Silence.

The first thing I heard when I woke up was a distant, soft echo of screaming. With it came a jolt of adrenaline, a feeling of drowning, of being consumed by something . . . massive.

Then it receded, like a tide, and I was left shaking and cold despite the piles of warm blankets on top of me. Lewis was asleep in a chair next to my bed, leaning forward with his head resting on the covers next to me. One long-fingered hand was touching mine, very lightly.

He was snoring.

I smiled wearily and ruffled his hair. “Hey,” I said. “How can anybody sleep with that noise?”

Lewis sat up, blinking, wiping his mouth, and looking so cutely rumpled and abashed that I felt something in me wobble off its axis. Don’t look like that. Oh, and please don’t look at me like that while you’re doing it. He was tough enough to resist when he wasn’t being adorable.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, and scrubbed his stubbly face with both hands. “Bad night.” Some focus came back into his eyes, and I was able to get that wobbling part of me back in balance. “How are your ears?”

“I could hear you snoring like a chain saw. I must be healed.”

That got a grin from him, brief as it was. “Then I guess they’re intact.”

I looked around. David was lying in the next bed over, still asleep. He looked pale and tired and anxious, even resting.

Cherise was curled in on herself in the next bed after David.

“How are they?” I asked. I was afraid of the answer, but he just nodded briskly, and relief flooded in on me in a warm wave. “No lasting damage?”

“Worn-out,” he said. “David was able to talk a little before he drifted off. Cherise just needs sleep.”

“He told you—” My brain flashed back to the screaming Djinn, that sound , and I felt the panic race back, slamming into my body and jolting me into a sudden sitting position. It wasn’t as loud this time. Or I was getting used to hearing that awful, awful noise. I swallowed several times and concentrated hard, and the screaming died away.

I was holding Lewis’s hand in a death grip. I eased off, remembering to breathe, and saw the worry and fear in his face. “I’m okay,” I said. If I said it enough, maybe it would even be true. “David told you—”

“About the Djinn disappearing,” Lewis said. “We heard the—the sound out there, everywhere in the ship. According to radio communications, we weren’t the only ship that heard it. It blew out speakers on a tanker ten miles out. It came from the Djinn? You’re sure?”

I nodded, not sure I could trust my voice just then. I was controlling the effects of the experience, but my body was still reacting in flight-or-fight mode. Finally, I said, “They just screamed and vanished. I don’t know what happened.”

“I do,” Lewis said. “We reached the edge of the black corner.”

I stared at him. I hadn’t felt . . . anything. No change in my perception of the world. No connections snapping back in place.

I was still cut off.

That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. It felt as if all the props had just been knocked out from under me, as if some joker had pulled the handle on a trapdoor and I was going to fall forever. I’d said I understood what had happened to me, but deep down inside, I’d believed—I’d believed that I was better than that. That my power would come snapping back, and once we were beyond the borders of the black corner, I’d be . . . myself.

Lewis could tell. I hated to see the pity in his face, so I looked away, fighting back the tears. I couldn’t do much about the trembling, though. “So,” I said, and forced my voice to be something like normal. “The Wardens are back in business?”

“More or less,” he said, and broke up into a fit of wet coughing. Once he’d gotten that out of the way, he smiled ruefully. “Some are feeling better than others. Jo—”

“We knew this was going to happen,” I interrupted him. “David and I. We knew our powers were . . . gone. We just have to figure out how to get them back.”

“It’s possible that they’ll come back on their own, over time. That your body will be able to repair the damage.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Lewis. I’m not a child, and I don’t want false hope.”

“I’m not offering any,” he said. “Look, we just don’t know. Things are—nothing makes sense right now. The Djinn . . . the way things feel—”

“What about the way things feel?” I thought he was talking about the two of us, and that was dangerous, uncertain territory. But he wasn’t, as it turned out.

“The world isn’t right,” Lewis said. “Things are wrong out there. Badly wrong. Bad enough that it blew the Djinn out like candles once they came out into the storm.”

My breath caught in my throat, and I grabbed his hand again. “They’re not—”

“I don’t think they’re dead,” he said. “But they’re not visible to us, not anymore. I can’t reach any of them, even on the aetheric. It’s like they’ve been—taken.”

“But what if they’re more than gone? What if they’re—”

“They’re not dead,” he repeated. “I’d know if they were. Hell, the whole world would know, I think.”

I shuddered, trying hard not to think about that. If the Djinn were gone, one of the key support structures in the delicate architecture of the planet had disappeared, sending us screaming off balance into the dark. We wouldn’t survive that. Any of us, including Mother Earth herself. The Djinn were like antibodies in her bloodstream, designed to attack and defend her against dangerous infections. She needed them.

“So what now?” I asked. Lewis yawned, tried to cover it up, and failed miserably. “Besides about a month of bed rest for you, and inhalation therapy, and a boatload of antibiotics?”

“Yeah, like that’s going to happen. We both know the reward for a good job is more work, only done faster and more difficult.”

He wasn’t wrong about that, but I didn’t know how much more Lewis could take. He’d been through as much as I had—more, maybe, depending on how you count such things. And he didn’t have a loved one’s strength to rely on. Lewis only had himself.

And whose fault is that? a little voice whispered nastily in my head. Who shoved him away? Who ran off and fell in love with somebody else?

It didn’t matter, I told that little voice as firmly as possible. Things were what they were. Lewis knew I cared for him, but David was my love, my lover, my husband. We all had come to accept that.

I thought.

Lewis was watching me, and I couldn’t fathom what was going on in his head. I hoped he couldn’t guess the argument going on inside mine, either.

“We’re two days from port,” he said. “Once we get there, we need to hit the ground running. There are reports of all kinds of problems breaking out.”

I shook my head. “Not exactly new.”

“Not exactly,” he agreed. “But we’re the mechanics of the world, Jo. And things need to be fixed. So most of the Wardens will get back to doing what they do best.”

“Most,” I repeated. “Meaning?”

“Meaning that I’m going to pull the top three Earth Wardens, and we’re going to do our best to analyze what happened to you and David, and make it right if we can. I’ve been on the phone to Marion Bearheart. She thinks that, in theory, it should be possible to open up the energy conduits within you again, if that’s what’s gone wrong.”