Firestorm Read Online Free PDF Page B

down the table into shadows, alarmed. I’d seen Marion…Yes, there she was, half-hidden near the end. Marion was an Earth Warden, and her skill was healing, but self-healing was a chancy undertaking at the best of times. She looked terrible. I exchanged another nod with her.
    â€œMarion, I’m so sorry. Your Djinn—?” I didn’t know how to finish that question, because Marion and I knew things about each other that really weren’t suited to sharing with a table full of strangers. Such as, I knew that Marion had taken enormous risks to recover her lost Djinn, not so very long ago, and it hadn’t been out of selfless duty; she and her Djinn were lovers. That fell under the “forbidden tragic love” section of the Warden code, even under normal circumstances; I just didn’t know for certain how tragic it had turned out this time.
    She took me off the hook. “My Djinn helped me take out the two who came to—to free him. Then he asked me to put him back into his bottle. I did, and sealed it.”
    â€œFirst good advice we had,” Paul said. “We’ve been getting hold of every Warden we can find and telling them the same thing. Get your Djinn safe and seal the bottles until we know what the hell’s going on. You got anything, Jo?”
    I stretched my hands flat on the scarred wood surface. “Afraid so. Here’s the deal. The Djinn were serving us only because of an agreement made a few thousand years ago between the first Wardens and the most powerful Djinn in the world. His name is—was—Jonathan.”
    Silence, and then…“Kind of a modern name, isn’t it?” Cherise asked. “Jonathan, I mean. Wouldn’t he have an Egyptian name or—”
    â€œCherise. This is my story. You talk later. The thing is, once Jonathan made the agreement, which was supposed to be temporary, the Wardens didn’t keep their end of the bargain. They didn’t let the Djinn go once the emergency was past all those thousands of years ago. There was always some disaster or another to serve as an extension on the contract, and then they didn’t even bother making up excuses. Some of the Djinn have had enough of waiting for the Wardens to grow a conscience, and the Wardens forgot that any such agreement ever existed. So the Free Djinn—”
    That term caused a rustle of throat-clearing and shifting in chairs, and the inevitable interruption. “There aren’t any such thing as—” someone began to declare, in much the same way people once insisted the world was flat.
    â€œYes there are, Rosa.” That was Marion, and her tone was surprisingly sharp, coming from a woman who was normally so level and soothing in manner. But then, we’d all had a damn hard few days. I could see that it might be difficult to suffer fools with the same level of grace she usually displayed.
    â€œContinue,” Paul said, watching me.
    I swallowed, wished in vain for a drink of water, and got on with it. “So some of the Free Djinn started killing Wardens, trying to free their brethren, as well. But some didn’t agree with that tactic, so there was fighting in the Djinn ranks. Jonathan—” What the hell had happened to Jonathan? Something catastrophic. “Jonathan died. And when he died, the agreement between the Djinn and the Wardens, the one that kept them under our command, that went sideways. We don’t own the Djinn anymore. Not as of the moment he stopped existing.”
    Paul’s face went a paler shade of scared. “You mean, they’re no longer under our control at all ?”
    â€œYes, that’s what I mean.”
    â€œWell, that’s just great. You drove all the way from Florida to tell me we’re dead?”
    â€œYou want me to go on, or what?” I glared back. He finally closed his drug-glazed eyes and nodded. “Right. Well, we’ve always thought we were