Total Eclipse Page 0,1

go through her small body. I tucked the blanket closer around her, although I knew it wasn't going to help. The chill that had sunk into her couldn't be banished by warm covers and hugs and hot toddies.

We'd tried putting the Djinn on the deck of the ship, hoping the sunlight would help revive them, but it had seemed to make things worse. Venna--who had been alive as long as the Earth, as far as I could tell--had cried from the sheer, desperate agony of being in the sun and not being able to absorb its energy.

It had been awful, and here, inside, she didn't seem as distressed. That was something, at least.

We were no longer trying to save them. We were just managing their decline.

Venna's china blue eyes drifted shut, though it wasn't exactly a natural sleep; she was conserving what energy remained to her. The Old Djinn burned it faster than the New Djinn, it seemed. We'd already lost the only other Old Djinn on board--a closemouthed sort I'd never gotten to know by name.

And, in truth, I loved Venna. I cared about her deeply--in the way you'd care for a beautiful, exotic, very dangerous animal who'd allowed you to become its friend. I'd never thought of her as fragile; I'd seen her slam tanker trucks aside with a wave, and fight monsters without getting so much as a hangnail.

It was hard to see her look so helpless.

Lewis looked almost as bad--worn down and fighting to keep himself together. I met his eyes, which were bloodshot and fever bright. "Go to bed," I told him. "I'll stay with them for a while."

"And do what?" he snapped, which hurt; I saw the flare of panic in his face, quickly tamped down. He hadn't meant to say it, though of course he'd been thinking it. They were all thinking it. "Sorry, Jo. I mean--"

"I know what you mean," I said softly. "But the fact is that you're just as handicapped as I am right now, and you're punishing yourself by wearing yourself down to nothing. Lewis, you can't. You can't.

When we get out of this, the Wardens will need you more than ever. You can't be running on fumes when the rest of them need you. This is going to get a lot worse. We both know it."

I could see that he wanted to tell me not to preach to him, but he bit his tongue this time.

He knew I was right (not that it would stop him from arguing), and on some level, he was aware that he was hurting himself as punishment. Like me, he felt that he deserved it.

He looked down at Venna. I saw it in his face, all that weariness, that guilt, and a fair amount of bitter self-loathing.

"Lewis." I drew his gaze and held it again. "Go to bed. Go."

He finally nodded, rose--had to steady himself against the wall--and left. I looked around the room, with its sterile high-tech beds and medical facilities that could do nothing about the problem we were facing. Every bed was filled by a Djinn.

And every Djinn was, to a greater or lesser extent, dying.

The Djinn Rahel--a New Djinn, and one of the oldest friends I had among their kind--turned her head slightly to look toward me. Rahel had always seemed invincible, like Venna--polished, wildly beautiful, with her elaborately cornrowed ebony hair and lustrous dark skin, and eyes that glowed as if backlit by amber.

Now she seemed so diminished. So fragile. Her eyes were still amber, but pale, faded, and ... frightened. She didn't speak. She didn't have to. I patted Venna's hand, then got up and went to Rahel's side. I put the back of my hand against her forehead. She felt hot and dry, consumed by some bonfire inside.

"Well," she whispered with a shadow of her old, cocky charm, "isn't this peculiar? The lamb caring for the wolf."

"You've never been the wolf, Rahel."

"Ah, sistah, you don't know me at all." She heaved a slow, whispering sigh. "I have played at being a friend to you, but I'm nothing but a wolf. We all are, even your sweet David. Djinn are born because we are too ruthless to accept our own deaths as humans do. It suits us ill to face such an end as this."

"It's not the end."

"I think it could be," she said, and closed her eyes. "I think it will be. And so I will tell you something I've never told you, Joanne Baldwin."

I swallowed