Heat Stroke

One

There was a storm brewing over Church Falls, Oklahoma. Blue-black clouds, churning and boiling in lazy slow motion, stitched through with lightning the color of butane flames. It had a certain instinctual menace, but it was really just a baby, all attitude and no experience. I watched it on the aetheric plane as the rain inside of it was tossed violently up into the mesosphere, frozen by the extreme cold, fell back down to gather more moisture on the way. Rinse and repeat. The classic recipe for hail.

Circular motion inside the thing. It was more of a feeling I had than anything I could see, but I didn’t doubt it for a second; after years of overseeing the weather, I vibrated on frequencies that didn’t require seeing to believe.

I gathered power around me like a glittering warm cloak, and reached out for—

“Stop.”

My power slammed into an invisible wall and bounced off. I yelped, dropped back into human reality with a heavy thud and realized I’d almost driven Mona off the road. Mona was a 1997 Dodge Viper GTS, midnight blue, and I was driving her well the hell in excess of the speed limit, which was just the way I liked it. I controlled the swerve, glanced down at the speedometer and edged another five miles an hour out of the accelerator. Mona’s purr changed to an interested, low-throated growl.

“Don’t ever do that when I’m breaking a century on the interstate,” I snapped at the guy who’d put up that wall I’d just slammed into. “And jeez, sensitive much? I was just giving things a little push. For the better.”

The guy’s name was David. He settled himself more comfortably against the passenger side window, and said without opening his eyes, “You’re meddling. You got bored.”

“Well, yeah.” Because driving in Oklahoma is not exactly the world’s most exciting occupation. “And?”

“And you can’t do that anymore.” That meaning adjust the weather to suit myself, apparently.

“Why not?”

His lips twitched and pressed a smile into submission. “Because you’ll attract attention.”

“And the fact I’m barreling down the freeway at over a hundred…?”

“You know what I mean. And by the way, you should slow down.”

I sighed. “You’re kidding me. This is coasting. This is little old lady speed.”

“NASCAR drivers would have heart attacks. Slow down before we get a ticket.”

“Chicken.”

“Yes,” he agreed solemnly. “You frighten me.”

I downshifted, slipped Mona in behind an eighteen-wheeler grinding hell-for-leather east toward Okmulgee and parts beyond, and watched the RPMs fall. Mona grumbled. She didn’t like speed limits. Neither did I. Hell, the truth is that I’d never met any kind of limit I liked. Back in the good old times before, well, yesterday, when my name was still Joanne Baldwin and I was human, I’d been a Weather Warden. A card-carrying member of the Wardens Association, the international brotherhood of people in charge of keeping Mother Nature from exterminating the human race. I’d been in the business of controlling wind, waves, and storms. Being an adrenaline junkie goes with the territory.

The fact that I was still an adrenaline junkie was surprising, because strictly speaking, I no longer had a real human body, or real human adrenaline to go with it. So how did it work that I still felt all the same human impulses as before? I didn’t want to think about it too much, but I kept coining back to the fact that I’d died. Last mortal thing I remembered, I’d been a battleground for two demons tearing me apart, and then I’d—metaphorically speaking—opened my eyes on a whole new world, with whole new rules. Because David had made me a Djinn. You know, Arabian Nights, lamp, granter of wishes? That kind. Only I wasn’t imprisoned in a lamp, or (more appropriately) a bottle; I was free-range. Masterless.

Cool, but scary. Masterless, I was vulnerable, and I knew it.

“Hey,” I said out loud, and glanced away from the road to look at my traveling companion. Dear God, he was gorgeous. When I’d first met him he’d been masquerading as a regular guy, but even then he’d been damn skippy fine. In what I’d come to realize was his natural Djinn form, he was damn skippy fine to the power of ten. Soft auburn hair worn just a little too long for the current military-short styles. Eyes like molten bronze. Warm golden skin that stretched velvet soft over a strong chest, perfectly sculpted biceps, a flat stomach… My hands had a Braille memory that made me warm and melty inside.

Without opening those magical eyes, he asked, “Hey, what?” I’d forgotten I’d said anything. I scrambled to drag my brain back to more intellectual pursuits.

“Still waiting for a plan, if it doesn’t disturb your beauty sleep.” I kept the tone firmly in the bitchy range, because if I wasn’t careful I might start with a whole breathless I-don’t-deserve-you routine, and that would cost me cool points. “We’re still heading east, by the way.”

“Fine,” he said, and adjusted his leaning position slightly to get more comfortable against the window glass. “Just keep driving. Less than warp speed, if you can manage it.”

“Warp speed? Great. A Trek fan.” Not that I was surprised. Djinn seemed to delight in pop culture, so far as I could tell. “Okay. Fine. I’ll drive boring.”

I glanced back at the road—good thing, I was seriously over the line and into head-on-collision territory— and steered back straight again before I checked the fuel gauge. Which brought up another point. “Can I stop for gas?”

“You don’t need to.”

“Um, this is a Viper, not a zillion-miles-to-the-gallon Earth Car. Believe me, we’ll need to. Soon.”

David extended one finger—still without cracking an eyelid—and pointed at the dial. I watched the needle climb, peg out at full, and quiver. “Won’t,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “East. Right. Until when?”

“Until I think it’s safe to stop.”

“You know, a little information in this partnership would really help make it, oh, say, a partnership.”

His lips twitched away from a smile, and his voice dipped down into octaves that resonated in deep, liquid areas of my body. “Are we partners?”

Dangerous territory. I wasn’t sure what we were, exactly, and I wasn’t sure I wanted him to tell me. He’d saved me; he’d taken the human part of me that had survived an attack by two demons, and transformed it into a Djinn. I hoped that didn’t make him my father. Talk about your Freudian issues. “Okay, genius, I don’t know. You define it. What are we?”

He sighed. “I’d rather sleep than get into this right now.”

I sighed right back. “You know, I’m a little freaked out, here. Dead, resurrected, got all these new sensations—talking would be good for me.”

“What kind of new sensations?” he asked. His voice was low, warm, gentle—ah, sensations. I was having them, all right. Loads of them.

I cleared my throat. “First of all, things don’t look right.”

“Define right.”

“The way they—”

“—used to look,” he finished for me. “You’ve got different eyes now, Joanne. You can choose how to look at things. It’s not just light on nerves anymore.”

“Well, it’s too—bright.” Understatement. The sun glared in through the polarized windows and shimmered like silk—it had a liquid quality to it, a real weight. “And I see way too much. Too far.”

Everything had… dimensions. Saturated colors, and a peculiar kind of history—I could sense where things had been, how long ago, where they’d come from, how they’d been made. A frightening blitz of knowledge. I was trying to shut it down, but it kept leaping up whenever I noticed something new. Like the gas gauge. Watching that quivering indicator, I knew it had been stamped out in a factory in Malaysia. I knew the hands of the person who’d last touched it. I had the queasy feeling that if I wanted to, I could follow his story all the way back through the line of his ancestors. Hell, I could trace the plastic back to the dinosaurs that had died in the tar pit to give petroleum its start.

David said, “All you have to do is focus.”

I controlled a flash of temper. “Focus? That’s your advice? News flash, Obi-Wan, you kinda suck at it.”

“Do not.” He opened his eyes, and they were autumn brown, human, and very tired. “Give me your hand.”

I took it off the gear shift and held it out. He wrapped warm fingers over mine, and something hot as sunlight flashed through me.

The horizon adjusted itself. Sunlight faded to normal brightness. The edges and dimensions and weight of things went back to human proportions.

“There.” He sounded even more tired, this time. “Just keep driving.”

He let go of my hand. I wrapped it back around the gearshift for comfort and thought of a thousand questions, things like Why am I still breathing and If I don’t have a heart, why is it pumping so hard and Why me? Why save me?

I wasn’t sure I was ready for any of those answers, even if David had the energy to tell me. I wasn’t ready for anything more than the familiar, bone-deep throb of Mona’s tires on the road, and the rush of the Viper running eagerly toward the horizon.

I had another question I didn’t want to ask, but it slipped out anyway. “We’re in trouble, aren’t we?”

This time, he did smile. Full, dark, and dangerous. “Figured that out, did you?”

“People say I’m smart.”

“I hope they say you’re lucky, too.”

“Must be,” I murmured. “How else do I explain you?”

Brown eyes opened, studied me for a few seconds, then drifted shut again. He said, just as softly, “Let’s pray you never have to.”

The car didn’t need gas, and I discovered that I didn’t need sleep—at least not for more than twenty-four hours. We blew through Tulsa, hit I-70 toward Chicago, bypassed Columbus, and eventually ended up on a turnpike in New Jersey. David slept. I drove. I was a little worried about mortal things like cop cars and tollbooths, but David kept us out of sight and out of mind. We occupied space, but to all intents and purposes, we were invisible.

Which was not such an advantage, I discovered, when you get into heavy commuter traffic. After about a dozen near misses, I pulled Mona over to the side of the road, stretched, and clicked off the engine. Metal ticked and popped—Mona wasn’t any kind of magical construct, she was just a plain old production car. Okay, the fastest production car ever made, with a V10, 7990 cubic centimeters, 6000 RPM, top speed of over 260 miles per hour. But not magic. And I’d been pushing her hard.

I rolled down the window, sucked in a breath of New Jersey air laden with an oily taste of exhaust, and watched the sun come up over the trees. There was something magical about that, all right—the second morning of my new life. And the sun was beautiful. A vivid golden fire in the sky, trailing rays across an intense, empty blue. No clouds. I could feel the potential for clouds up there—dust particles and pollution hanging lazily in the air, positive and negative charges constantly shoving and jostling for position. Once the conditions came together, those dust particles would get similar charges and start attracting microscopic drops of moisture. Like calls to like. Moisture thickens, droplets form, clouds mass. Once the droplets get too heavy to stay airborne, they fall. Simple physics. And yet there was something seductive and magical about it, too, as magical as the idea that chemical compounds grow into human beings who walk and talk and dream.

I watched a commercial jet embroider the clear blue sky, heading west, and stretched my senses out.

There wasn’t any limit to what I could know, if I wanted… I could touch the plane, the cold silver skin, the people inside with all their annoyances and fears and boredom and secret delights. Two people who didn’t know each other were both thinking about joining the mile high club. I wished them luck in finding each other.

I sucked in another breath and stretched—my human-feeling body still liked the sensation, even though it wasn’t tired, wasn’t thirsty or hungry or in need of bathroom facilities—and turned to David…

Who was awake and watching me. His eyes weren’t brown now, they were sun-sparked copper, deep and gold-flecked, entirely inhuman. He was too beautiful to be possible in anything but dreams.

The car shuddered as three eighteen-wheelers blew past and slammed wind gusts into us—a rude reminder that it wasn’t a dream, after all. Not that reality was looking all that bad.

“What now?” I asked. I wasn’t just asking about driving directions, and David knew it. He reached out and captured my hand, looked down at it, rubbed a thumb light and warm as breath across my knuckles.

“There are some things I need to teach you.”

And there went the perv-cam again, showing me all the different things he probably didn’t mean…

“So we should get a room,” he finished, and when he met my eyes again, the heart I didn’t really have skipped a beat or two.

“Oh,” I breathed. “A room. Sure. Absolutely.”

He kept hold of my hand, and his index finger traced light whorls over my palm, teasing what I supposed wasn’t really a lifeline anymore. The finger moved slowly up over the translucent skin of my wrist, waking shivers. God. I didn’t even mean to, but somehow I was seeing him on the aetheric level, that altered plane of reality where certain people, like Wardens and Djinn, can read energy patterns and see things in an entirely different spectrum.

He was pure fire, shifting and flaring and burning with the intensity of a star.

“You’re feeling better,” I said. No way to read expressions, on the aetheric, but I could almost feel the shape of his smile.

“A little,” he agreed. “And you do have things to learn.”

“You’re going to teach me?”

His voice went deep and husky. “Absolutely. As soon as we have some privacy.”

I retrieved my hand, jammed Mona into first gear, and peeled rubber.

We picked an upper-class hotel in Manhattan, valeted Mona into a parking garage with rates so high it had to be run by the Mafia. I wondered how much ransom we were going to have to pay Guido to get her back. We strolled into the high-class marble and mahogany lobby brazenly unconcerned by our lack of luggage.

“Wow,” I said, and looked around appreciatively. “Sweet.” It had that old-rich ambiance that most places try to create with knockoff antiques and reproduction rugs, but as I trailed my fingers over a mahogany side table I could feel the depth of history in it, stretching back to the generations of maids who’d polished it, to the eighteenth-century worker who’d planed the wood, to the tree that stood tall in the forest.

Nothing fake about this place. Well, okay, the couches were modern, but you have to prefer comfort over authenticity in some things. The giant Persian rug was certainly real enough to make up the difference.

The place smelled of that best incense of all—old money.

David waited in line patiently at the long marble counter while the business travelers ahead of him presented American Express cards and listened to voice mail on cell phones. A thought occurred to me, and I tugged at the sleeve of his olive drab coat. “Hey. Why—”

“—check in?” he finished for me. “Two reasons. First, it’s easier, and you’ll find that the less power you use unnecessarily, the better off you are. Second, I don’t think you’re ready to be living my life quite yet. One step at a time.”

He reached into his pocket and came out with— an American Express card. I blinked at it. It said David L Prince in raised letters. “Cool. Is that real?” I said it too loudly.

His eyes widened behind concealing little round glasses. “Not a great question when we’re about to use it to pay for the room, is it?”

Oh. I’d been figuring we were still in some unnoticeable fog, but clearly not; the guy in line ahead of me was distracted enough from the cell phone glued to his ear to throw us a suspicious look. True, we didn’t have the glossy spa-treated look of the rich, or the unlimited-expense-account confidence of the corporate, but we weren’t exactly looking like homeless, either. I shot him a sarcastic smile. He turned back to his business.

“Sorry,” I said, more softly, to David. “Obviously, yes, it’s real, of course. I mean—hell, I don’t know what I mean. Sorry. Um… where do they send the bills?”

“Not to me.”

His smile made my train of thought derail and crash. Cell Phone Guy in front of us picked up his room key and got out of line; David and I moved up to the counter, where a highly polished young lady too nice for New York did all the check-in things, issued us plastic key cards, and fired off amenities too fast for me to follow. A uniformed bellman veered out of our path when he saw we were bag-free and gave us a look that meant he was no stranger to couples arriving for short, intense bursts of time.

David took my arm and walked me to the elevators, across the huge Persian rug, past a silent piano and a muted big-screen TV that was showing some morning show with perfect people interviewing more perfect people. We rode the elevator with Cell Phone Guy, who was still connected and chatting about market share and a corporate vice president’s affair with the wife of a global board member. The latter sounded interesting. As it happened, we were both on the same floor—twelve—and he looked at us like we might be after his wallet or his life, but before long he peeled away to a room and we continued on, down a long hallway and to a bright-polished wooden door with the number 1215 on it.

David didn’t bother with the key card. He touched the door with his finger, and it just swung open.

I looked at him. “What happened to ‘the less you use, the better’?”

He scooped me up in his arms and carried me over the threshold. Gravity slipped sideways, and I put my arms around his neck until he settled me down with my feet on the carpet.

“What was that for?” I asked. He felt fever-hot against me, and those eyes—God. Intense, focused, hungry.

“Luck,” he said, and kissed me. I felt instant heat slam through me, liquefying me in equal proportion to how incredibly real he felt against me, and I felt a feverish urge to be naked with this man, right now, to be sure that all of this wasn’t just a particularly lovely dream on the way to the grave and oh God his hands burned right through my clothes like they weren’t there.

And then, as his palms glided up my sides, wrinkling fabric, the cloth melted away and disappeared, and then it was just flesh, and fire, and the taste of David’s lips and tongue. I felt myself burn and go faint with heat stroke, revived with the cool relief of his skin.

And if it was a dream, it was the best I’d ever had.

In the morning, we got down to the work of teaching me to be a Djinn.

I’m not what you could call spiritual, so learning how to be spiritual—in the true spirit sense of the word—was a challenge. Sure, I’d been a Warden, but calling the wind and calming storms was all about science for me. I understood it in the way a child of the atomic age would, which meant subatomic particles and chaos theory and wave motion. Hell, I’d been a weather-controlling bureaucrat, when you came right down to it. Nothing that you might call preparation for being granted power on a legendary scale.

David started me out with that night of incredible, unbelievable sex, and the next morning when I woke up it felt like it was still going on. I mean, senses locked wide open. Chakras at full power. Every touch, every taste, every random sensation echoed through me like a struck bell. It was fun at first.

Then it got to be painful.

“Turn it off,” I groaned, and hid my head under a down pillow. David’s fingers traced the bumps of my spine, dragging down the sheet in slow, cool increments. “Oh, God, please, I can’t stand it!”

He made a sound, low in his throat, and let his touch glide down over my buttocks, down the backs of my thighs. “You’ll need to learn how to shut off your senses,” he said. “Can’t walk around like this all the time, can you?”

I knotted my fists in the pillow and screamed into the mattress. Not that he was particularly trying to drive me nuts, it was just part of the overload. Everything was sexual. The sheet, sliding over the backs of my legs. His fingertips firing nerves. The smell of him, the taste of him still tingling on my lips, the sound of his breath in my ear.

“I don’t know how,” I whispered, when I’d stopped shaking. “Tell me how.”

“You have to learn how to choose what level of sensation and perception to use,” he said. “To start with, I want you to meditate and block out what’s around you.”

“Meditate?” I took my head out from under the pillow, shook dark hair back from my face, and rolled over on my side to look at him. “Excuse me, but the closest I ever got to having a spiritual awakening was dating a yoga instructor. Once.”

David propped himself up on one elbow, looking down at me. No mistaking it; he was enjoying this a little too much. And I was enjoying the bird’s-wing graceful sweep of his pecs. “You’re underestimating yourself. You’re highly spiritual, Joanne. You just don’t know it. Just clear your mind and meditate.”

Meditate. Right. I took a deep breath and tried to relax muscles I no longer actually had. Which was more than a little confusing, even in the abstract.

“Focus,” David’s voice said next to my ear, and of course, it was instantly impossible to stay anything like on track. His voice got inside me in places that nice girls don’t mention. His breath stirred warm on my skin, and there went that potential orgasm thing again, a little earthquake of sheer pleasure that completely sabotaged any chance of achieving my center.

I didn’t open my eyes, but I said, “I could focus a lot better if you were somewhere else.”

“Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry. That velvet-smooth tenor sounded smug. “I’ll be quiet.”

He was. I concentrated on visualizing something calming—in my case, it was the ocean—but the whole wave-and-surf vibe fell apart when I heard him rustling pages. I sighed and opened my eyes, propped myself up on my elbows, and looked over at him.

He was lying next to me in bed, propped up, reading the newspaper.

“You’re kidding,” I said. He gave me one of those What? looks and went back to the Metro section. “I’m trying to meditate, here! Give me a break. At least help.”

“I am helping,” he said. “I’m distracting myself so I don’t distract you.”

I glared. It had absolutely no effect. He sighed, put the paper at half-staff, and looked at me gravely over newsprint. “Fine. What would you like me to do?”

“I don’t know! Something!”

“I can’t meditate for you, Joanne.”

“Well, you can… encourage me!”

He folded the New York Times and put it down on the side table. “Oh, I’d like to encourage you. I just don’t think it would help you focus. Unless…”

“What?” I asked. He turned on his side and reached out, trailed a single fingertip over the curve of my shoulder and down my arm. Little earthquakes, building to a major seismic event inside…

“Never mind.” It wasn’t nothing, I could tell. He wasn’t trying to distract me, he really was trying to distract himself. From me. “Meditate for another half hour, and I’ll tell you.”

My entire attention fixed on the square half-inch of skin his finger was touching. “Half an hour?”

“Half an hour.”

“I can do that.”

Sheer bravado, but now I was motivated. I flopped back flat on the pillow, closed my eyes, and concentrated hard on that ocean… blue-green waves rolling in from a misty horizon… churning to pale lace as they crashed on the shore… whispers of mist cool on my skin… a fine, endless white sand beach that glittered in sunlight…

I felt like I was actually achieving something— clearing my mind of the idea of him lying beside me, anyway—when he blew it for me by talking again.

“Joanne,” he said. “Quit hovering.”

I opened my eyes and realized I was looking at the motel room ceiling. White spackled moonscape broken up by a dusty ice sculpture of a light fixture two inches from my nose.

Oh. When he said hovering, he meant hovering. As in seven feet above the bed.

“Crap,” I said, and looked over my shoulder. “I went all Exorcist.”

“Actually, it wasn’t a bad try. I felt you go quiet for a few minutes.”

“How many minutes?” I rotated myself in midair to face him. Ha! Managed it gracefully, in a controlled weightless spin, which was nice; control had been kind of a problem. Obviously. My hair spoiled the effect by flopping forward, and I tried shoving it back over my shoulders. It repeated the flopping thing.

“Let’s call it… thirty.” David’s smile turned dangerously amused, and he reached down and pulled the sheet away from the rest of him. I stopped messing with my hair and lived for the moment, because like me, David hadn’t bothered with pajamas. He patted the Joanne-shaped hollow in the bed next to him.

I tried to get down. Really. But whatever switch I’d thrown to get up here, I couldn’t seem to find it again. I kept hovering. “Um, not that I’m not motivated, but…”

“You’re stuck.”

“Kind of a yes, bordering on an oh, crap.” I tried to make it funny, but truth was, it scared me. All this power, none of the control I so obviously needed just to get through what was for David nothing but an autonomic function. “You forgot to tell me about the gravity-being-optional part of this exercise.”

He levitated up, an inch at a time, and when he was still a foot away I felt the summer heat of his skin. He smelled like warm cinnamon and peaches, and it made my mouth water and my body go golden.

He stopped with a cool two-inch cushion of air between us.

“I didn’t forget,” he said. “I just didn’t think you’d be able to do this for a while. Don’t worry, it’s normal.”

“Normal? I’m halfway into the bed of the guy upstairs!”

“I’d rather you were more than halfway into the bed down here.” That look on his face—naked, powerful, proprietary—sent a pulse of sheer need through me.

“Tease,” I said. He made a sound in his throat that wasn’t quite a laugh.

“Come back to bed and we’ll see.” He lowered himself by a couple of inches. I tried to follow. Failed. He drifted back up. “Want me to help you?”

“No. Yes. Hell. I don’t know, what’s the right answer?”

His hand touched my face and drew a slow line of fire down my neck to my collarbone. “You have to learn to stay in the body, Jo. We can’t exactly do this out in public.”

“News flash. You do this out in public and you draw attention for more than defying gravity.” I tried to sound nonchalant, but it was tough with all the combustion inside me. God. I couldn’t seem to get used to the hypersensitive nature of being a Djinn. It was the little things that got me—the sharp-edged beauty of how things looked, the intensity of how they felt, tasted, smelled, sounded. The human world was so real. Sometimes it was so real it made me weep. I couldn’t decide if it was like living in a perpetual state of orgasm, or being perpetually stoned; maybe both.

The casual touch of David’s fingers on my skin was enough to start chain reactions of pleasure deep inside, and I caught my breath and closed my eyes as his touch moved down, glided over the curve of my breast.

“Come back to bed,” he murmured, and his lips brushed mine when he spoke.

“I can’t.” Literally.

“Maybe it’s that you don’t want to.”

“Oh believe me, that’s so very not the problem.”

His warm lips melted against mine like silk in the sun, and his hands did things that ought to be illegal, and mandatory for every woman in the world to experience daily. Suddenly we were skin to skin, and my mind whited out.

He slowly rotated us until gravity was cradling my back. “You need to learn to stay in the body, no matter what happens. Think you can do that?”

“Try me.”

Oh, that smile. It could melt titanium. “I intend to.”

He kissed me again, and this time there was nothing sweet and nice about it; this was dark and serious and intense, full of hunger and need. Oh, yeah, this was the difference between human and Djinn.

Intensity.

I felt my whole body catch fire, responding, and arched against him. It felt so right, so perfect, and he held me to him with one hand on the back of my head, one in the small of my back as he dropped burning kisses on my neck, my breasts, the aching points of my nipples.

Oh, God.

He whispered something to me in a language I didn’t know, but it didn’t matter; some languages are translated in the skin, not the mind. If living as a Djinn is like being in a perpetual state of orgasm, you can imagine how much better it gets when you approach the real thing.

I found the switch, and we fell back to the bed with a solid, vibrating thump that rattled the headboard.

It was a good start.

And on the fifth day of my new life, I had a lovely funeral.

Well, it wasn’t really a funeral—you need a body for a funeral, preferably an open casket, and the fire hadn’t left a whole lot for reconstructive purposes. The Wardens Association was too discreet to hold the service in the UN Building—the corporate offices—so they rented a nice big ballroom over at the Drake Hotel and sent out invitations to three or four hundred Wardens. I heard about it because David heard about it, through whatever arcane grapevine the Djinn had in place.

“—but you’re not going,” he finished, as we split a small pot of room service coffee. Some vices never go away, even after death. Coffee. Sex. Alcohol. Hell, if I was a smoker, I figure I would’ve still been lighting up and griping about the price of a carton.

I stirred cream into my coffee. David disapproved of cream; it was obvious from the concerned frown that formed between his eyebrows. “I’m not going?” I echoed it mildly, but his attention immediately shifted from my poor coffee etiquette to what I was saying.

“No,” he said. “And we’re not going to fight about that, right?” His eyebrows went up, then down.

“Of course not,” I said, and smiled as I blew gentle ripples on the au lait surface. We were sitting cross-legged on the bed, sheets draped over sensitive bits more because of hot coffee prudence than modesty. “That’s a classic guy mistake, by the way.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sleeping with me, then thinking you can tell me what to do.”

Those eyebrows, so expressive. They pulled together again, threatened to close ranks across his forehead. “I didn’t—”

“Did.”

“—sleep with you. In fact.”

“Common usage. Did too.”

“Didn’t.”

“Did too.”

He held up one hand, palm out. “Okay, I didn’t mean it that way. I just meant that it’s too dangerous for you to go out among humans right now. Especially Wardens.”

“And therefore, according to you, I’m not going. Because it’s too dangerous.”

“Therefore,” he agreed. We sipped coffee. There’s something oddly relaxing about the smell—rich, nutty, the very essence of the earth—and I breathed it in and just savored the moment. Another great advantage of being Djinn—I didn’t need a shower. No dead skin cells needing to be sloughed, no bacterial processes breaking them down and creating stink. Djinn are clean and whatever smells we have are something we choose, on some subconscious level. Mine, I figured, was a kind of jasmine. Something pale and fragrant, with an undertone of obsession.

David finally sighed and set down his cup with a well-bred tinkle of china. “So therefore you’re going to completely blow off the warning and go anyway, no matter what I say, right?”

I tried to be sober, but my mouth wouldn’t obey me; it curved into a provocative smile. “Figured that out all by yourself?”

He was frowning again. God, he was cute when he frowned. I wanted to lean over and kiss away that crease between his eyebrows. “Please listen to me. I’m serious. It’s too dangerous.”

“Yeah, I got that from the part where you said it was too dangerous.”

“And?”

“And… it’s still my choice, unless you’re planning on attempting to run my life for the rest of eternity, which I don’t think either of us would like. If you don’t want me to go, you’ll have to be a lot more specific than ‘It’s too dangerous.’ Everything I’ve done since I was born has been dangerous.”

He had saved my life, and there was this very definite relationship forming between us, but I felt it was important to get the ground rules straight. I took a mouthful of rich hazelnut-flavored brew, softened with that creamy edge, and swished it around my tongue. Intense. I felt like if I concentrated, I could follow the beans all the way back to the rich Colombian ground that nurtured them—back to the plant that bore them—back through time, all the generations. Same with the hazelnuts, the water… Even the china cup had memories attached. Good, bad, happy, frightening. I didn’t have to concentrate to sense them swirling like the cream in the coffee.

So much history in the world. So many possibilities for the future. Why was it that as a human I’d never understood any of it?

“Jo?” David. He was staring at me with those rich orange-flecked brown eyes. Had he been talking?

Yeah, probably. I’d spaced. “I’m not talking about physical danger. There’s little that can hurt you now, but just being strong isn’t everything. You have to learn how to use that strength. And until you do, it’s not a good idea for you to put yourself in situations where you might have to…”

“Act like a Djinn?”

He looked relieved. “Exactly.”

“What if I just act like a normal person?”

“Not a good idea.”

“Because?”

He got up and walked over to the windows. As he eased aside the curtain, a shaft of sunlight speared in and glittered on his skin; he pulled in a deep breath that I heard all the way from the bed and stood there, staring out, for a long time.

My turn to give him a worried prompt. “David?”

He half turned and gave me a sweet, sad smile. “In case you haven’t noticed, you’re not a normal person. And if you get yourself into trouble, you could give away what you are. Once that happens, you’re no longer safe.”

“Because I could get claimed.”

The smile died and went somewhere bad. “Exactly.”

David had been claimed twice that I knew about. Neither had been pleasant experiences. His last owner and operator had been… well, a former friend of mine—and before that he’d been at the mercy of a sweetheart of a guy named Bad Bob Biringanine. I knew from personal experience that David had done things in Bad Bob’s name that would turn anyone’s stomach. He’d had no choice in that. No choice in anything.

It was the horror he was trying to warn me about.

“I’ll be careful,” I said softly. “Come on, if you had the chance to see your own funeral, wouldn’t you take it?”

“No,” he said, and turned back to whatever view there was outside of that window—being New York City, probably not a hell of a lot other than buildings. The sunlight loved him. It glided over planes and curves, over smooth skin, and glittered like gold dust on soft curls of hair. He reached out and leaned a hand against the window, reaching up toward the warmth. “Your human life’s over, Jo. Let it go. Focus on what’s next.”

There were so many people I’d left behind. My sister. Cousins. Family-by-choice from the Wardens, like Paul Giancarlo, my mentor. Like my friend Lewis Levander Orwell, the greatest Warden of all, whose life I’d saved at the cost of my own. We had a long and tangled history, me and Lewis—not so much love as longing. One of the great precepts of magic, that like calls to like. We’d gravitated together like opposite magnetic charges. Or possibly matter and antimatter. If not for David…

I realized, with a jolt of surprise, that I wanted to see Lewis again. Some part of me would always long for him. It wasn’t a part I ever wanted David to know about.

“What’s next is that I let go of that life,” I said aloud. “Which I can’t do without some kind of… good-bye. It’s as much a memorial for me as of me, right? So I should go.”

“You just want to eavesdrop on what people are saying about you.”

Duh, who wouldn’t? I tried bribery. “They’ll probably have cookies. And punch. Maybe a nice champagne fountain.”

It was tough to bribe a Djinn. He wasn’t impressed. He kept looking out, face turned up toward the sun, eyes closed. After a few moments he said, “You’re going with or without me, aren’t you?”

“Well, I’d rather go with you. Because, like you pointed out, it might not be safe.”

He shook his head and turned away from the window. I could almost see the glow radiating off of him, as if he’d stored it up from the touch of sunlight. The fierce glow of it warmed me across a small ocean of Berber carpet, through a white cotton duvet of goosedown.

I felt the surrender, but he didn’t say it in so many words. “You can’t go out like that,” he said, and walked over.

“Oh.” I blinked down at myself and realized I hadn’t the vaguest idea of how to put my own clothes on—magically speaking. “A little help…?”

David put his hands on my shoulders, and I felt fabric settling down over my skin. Clothes. Black peachskin pants, a tailored peachskin jacket, a discreet white satin shirt. Low-heeled pumps on my feet. He bent and placed a warm, slow kiss on my lips, and I nearly—literally—melted.

When I drew back, he was dressed, too. Black suit, blue shirt, dark tie. Very natty. The round glasses he wore for public consumption were in place to conceal the power of his eyes, even though he’d dialed the color down to something more human.

David was very, very good at playing mortal.

Me… well, there was a reason I hadn’t tried to dress myself. I wasn’t even good at playing Djinn yet.

He produced a pair of sunglasses and handed them over. I put them on. “How do I look?”

“Dangerous,” he said soberly. “Okay. Rules. You don’t talk to anyone, you don’t go off on your own. You do exactly what I tell you, when I tell you to do it. And most of all…”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t use any magic. Nothing. Understand?”

“Sure.”

He offered his hand. I took it and unfolded myself from the bed, setting the empty coffee cup aside on the mahogany nightstand.

“This is such a bad idea,” he said, and sighed, and then…

… then we were somewhere else.

Somewhere dark. It smelled of cleaning products.

“Um—” I began.

“Shhh.” Hot lips brushed mine, delicate as sunlight. “I’m keeping us out of their awareness, but you need to stay out of the way. People won’t see you. Make sure you don’t run into them.”

“Oh. Right.”

“And don’t talk. They can still hear you.”

“Right.”

“And don’t touch anything.”

I didn’t bother to acknowledge that one. He must have taken it as a given, because the next second there was a crack of warm lemon yellow light, and a door opened, and we stepped out of a janitor’s closet onto a mezzanine. Big, sweeping staircase to the right heading down to an echoing marble lobby—a vast expanse of patterned carpeting that cost more than the gross national product of most South American countries. Lots of rooms, discreetly nameplated in brass. Uniformed staff, both men and women, stood at attention. They had the brushed, polished, pressed gleam of being well paid in the service of the rich.

David walked me across a no-man’s-land of floral burgundy. Past the Rockefeller Plaza Room and the Wall Street Board Room and the Broadway Room. At the end of the lobby, a narrow hallway spilled into a larger anteroom. Burgundy-uniformed security guards to either side. The babble of voices rising up like smoke into lightly clove-scented air.

Suddenly, I had a desire to stop and reconsider this plan. Suddenly it was all very… real.

“Oh man,” I murmured. David’s hand on my arm tightened. “I know. No talking.”

“Shh,” he agreed, lips next to my ear. I swallowed, nodded, and put my chin up.

We strolled right in between the two guards, who stayed focused somewhere off into the distance. David had explained to me once how much easier it was to just redirect attention than to actually become invisible; he’d demonstrated it pretty vividly once, in a hot tub in Oklahoma City. I wished I knew how he did it. Just one of the thousands of things I still needed to learn about being a Djinn.

The anteroom was large enough to hold about a hundred people comfortably, and it was at capacity. At first glance it looked like an office party, only people wore more black and the noise level was two decibels lower than normal. Big floral display at the polished mahogany doors at the end of the room, chrysanthemums and lilies and roses. A guest book next to them. Lots of people standing in line to sign.

David steered me expertly out of the path of a tall, thin woman in black I barely recognized—Earth Warden, Maria something, from the West Coast. She was talking to Ravi Subranavan, the Fire Warden who controlled the territory around Chicago.

Everywhere I looked, people I knew. Not many were what I’d call friends, but they’d been coworkers, at least. The cynical part of me noted that they’d shown up for free booze, but the truth was most of them had needed to make arrangements to be here— naming replacements, handing over power, enduring long drives or longer plane rides. A lot of hassle for a free glass or two of champagne, even if it was offered at the Drake.

I kept looking for the people I was hoping to see, but there was no sign of Paul Giancarlo or Lewis Orwell. I spotted Marion Bearheart sipping champagne with Shirl, one of her enforcement agents. Marion was a warm, kind, incredibly dangerous woman with the mandate to hunt down and kill rogue Wardens. Well, killing was a last resort, but she was not only prepared to do it, she was pretty damn good at it. Hell, she’d almost gotten me. And even with that bad memory, I still felt a little lift of spirits seeing her. She just had that kind of aura.

She looked recovered—well rested, neatly turned out in a black leather suede jacket, fringed and beaded. Blue jeans, boots. A turquoise squash blossom necklace big enough to be traditional in design, small enough to be elegant. She’d gotten some of the burned ends trimmed off her long, straight, graying hair.

Shirl had cleaned up some of her punk makeup and gone for an almost sober outfit, but the piercings had stayed intact. Ah well. You can take the girl out of the mosh pit… No sign of Erik, the third member of the team who’d chased me halfway across the country. Maybe he wasn’t feeling overly respectful to my memory. I’d been a little hard on him, now that I thought about it.

David reversed course in time to avoid a collision with an elegantly suited gray-haired man, and I realized with a jolt that my little shindig had drawn the big guns. Martin Oliver, Weather Warden for all of the continental U.S. Not a minor player on the world stage. He was talking to a who’s who: the Earth Warden for Brazil, the Weather Warden for Africa, and a guy I vaguely recognized as being from somewhere in Russia.

My memorial had become the in place to be, if you were among the magical elite.

David tugged me to the right to avoid a gaggle of giggling young women eyeing a trying-to-be-cool group of young men—did I know these people? Weren’t they too young to have the fate of the world in their hands? — and we ended up walking through the mahogany doors into a larger room, set up with rows of burgundy chairs.

My knees threatened to go weak. All the place needed was my coffin to complete the scene, but instead they had a huge blown-up picture of me, something relatively flattering, thank God, on an expensive-looking gold easel. In the photo I looked… wistful. A little sad.

She’s dead, I thought. That person is dead. I’m not her anymore.

There were so many arrangements it looked like a flower shop had exploded—lilies were a theme, and roses, but it being spring I got the rainbow assortment. Purple irises, birds of paradise, daisies of every shape and size.

It hurt and healed me, thinking of all those people laying out time and money for this incredible display.

We weren’t alone in the room. Two people were sitting at the front, heads bowed, and I squeezed David’s hand and let go. I walked up the long aisle toward the eerie black and white photo of myself, and the two men I’d come to see who were seated in front of it.

Paul Giancarlo was sitting bent over with his head cradled in big, thick-fingered hands. Not crying—men like Paul didn’t cry, it was against the whole tough-guy code of ethics—but he was rocking back and forth, chair creaking, and I could feel his distress like heat from a stove. He wasn’t fat, but muscular, and he stressed the structural limits of the sharp hand-tailored suit he was wearing. I’d never seen him in a tie before. It was strangely sweet. I wanted to put my arms around as much of him as my embrace could reach. I wanted to sink into his bear-hug warmth and never come out again, because one thing about being with Paul, he made you feel safe.

Funny, considering his heritage was something straight out of The Godfather.

“Should’ve done something.” His words were muffled by his hands, but he was talking to the man who sat next to him. “You fucking well should have done something, Lew. What’s the use of being the biggest swinging dick around if you can’t save the people who matter? Answer me that!”

He slapped the question at Lewis Levander Orwell. Lewis might actually be the most powerful human on the planet, but next to Paul he looked like wallpaper. Tall, rangy, with puppy-dog brown eyes and a reasonably handsome face, he could have fit the part of an ad executive, or a lawyer, or any of a hundred normal white-collar jobs. He didn’t look like a guy who could command the weather, fire, and the very power of the earth itself. But the things I’d seen him do, the sheer force I’d felt him wield… incredible. Humbling.

“Being the biggest swinging dick around? It’s not much use at all,” Lewis said. He had a low, warm tenor voice, just a hint of roughness around the edges. He was staring down at his hands—long sensitive fingers, the hands of a pianist or a sculptor— as they pressed down on his thighs. His suit was not nearly as nice as Paul’s—serviceable, generic, forgettable. He never had been much of a fashion plate. “I tried to save her. You have to believe I tried. It was just… too much.”

“I guess I don’t have any choice but to believe you, right? No witnesses.” Paul sucked in a breath and sat up. His face hovered on the border between brutal and angelic. Gray salted his temples these days, which I hadn’t noticed before. He was ten years older than me, which put him close to forty, but the gray in his hair was the only indication he’d aged a day since I first saw him. I’d been eighteen, scared and irrationally arrogant; he’d been twenty-eight, and arrogant for damn good reason. He’d saved my ass then, when Bad Bob Biringanine had tried to stop me from becoming a Warden.

I couldn’t believe he was blaming himself for not saving my ass five days ago. I wanted to smack him one and tell him it was okay, I was right here, that the Joanne he’d known might be gone but most of her—maybe the best of her—lived on. I actually did reach out, or start to, but then Lewis’s eyes focused on me.

Unmistakably seeing me.

Oh. Well, of course he could, he’d seen me before, at Estrella’s house, when I was new-born into Djinnhood. Lewis could see, well, everything when he wanted to. Part of the legacy of who and what he was.

I shaped a silent hi. He half closed his eyes and smiled. Not surprised to find me here at all. Hi yourself, he mouthed, and the warmth in his expression made me tingle all over. Yeah, it’s like that between us. Always. Nothing either of us could control, no matter how much we wanted to.

Holding the stare, Lewis said, “She’s okay, Paul. Believe me. She’s in a better place.” About three feet to his left.

“Yeah? You got a fuckin‘ pipeline to heaven these days? I knew you were supposed to be some kind of god, but I didn’t know you had the all-access pass.” Paul’s bitterness was scorching. He wiped his face and sat back with another creak of the chair. “Whatever. Look, she never said so, but I know she had a thing for you.”

Lewis broke eye contact with me to blink at Paul. “She what?”

“Had a thing.” Paul shrugged. Only Italians could put so much into a shrug. “One night we got drunk and she told me… about college. That time.”

“Oh.” Lewis looked thrown, but not as thrown as I felt. I’d told Paul? About me and Lewis doing it on the floor of the Storm Lab one rainy afternoon when I was a freshman? I’d told Paul about Lewis being my first guy? No way. Although I dimly recalled a night four or five years ago, with blue agave tequila and strip poker… hmmm. Maybe I had. Wouldn’t be the first indiscreet thing to pass my lips.

Paul was still talking. “So she wouldn’t want you to be here.”

I wouldn’t?

“Given the circumstances,” he finished.

What circumstances?

Lewis glanced at me. I shrugged to indicate I had absolutely no idea what Paul was talking about. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to stay,” he said, as much to me as to Paul. “Seeing that the Wardens Council and I had that little disagreement about my Djinn. As in they wanted them back. So low profile seems to be the dress code.”

The Wardens Council, unhappy with Lewis? About Djinn? Oh. That. There had been a time a few years ago when Lewis had busted out of confinement by the Wardens, and stolen three bottles of Djinn on the way. Why three, I don’t know; I don’t even know if he had a particular reason to take the three he did. But whatever the case, it hadn’t made him popular with the Wardens. In fact, he’d kind of been on a most-wanted list ever since. I’d figured that they’d kissed and made up, since the last time I’d seen him he seemed pretty buddy-buddy with Martin Oliver, but maybe I’d overestimated the prodigal son factor. Evidently, they still wanted Lewis to return the Djinn he’d taken. Which I knew he couldn’t—and wouldn’t— since he’d set all three free.

Which made, what? A standoff? Lewis versus the entire Wardens organization? Not that it wasn’t even odds…

Paul grunted agreement. “Steer clear of Marion and her gang. They’re still under orders to bring you in for questioning.”

“Thanks. I will.” Lewis started to get up. Paul reached out and grabbed his arm, pinning him in place. Lewis looked pointedly at the offending hand, and continued, “… unless you want credit for bringing me in yourself…?”

“Don’t flatter yourself. I don’t give a damn whether you stay out in the cold or make yourself emperor of the world. I got something to say before you go.”

“Go ahead.”

It took him a few seconds to work his way up to it, and then he said, bluntly, “She loved you. I knew that even if she didn’t. And you were a fucking idiot not to realize it when you still had the chance.”

Lewis deliberately didn’t look my way. There was a bitter sadness in those dark-chocolate eyes. “Oh, I realized,” he said. “What do you want me to say? That I loved her back? What difference does it make now?”

Shit. Djinn or not, that hit me in undefended places. If he’d said that even two weeks ago, things would be different now. Far different…

I felt David react, even across the room, and shifted my attention away from Lewis and Paul back toward the entrance, where David was standing. Still in human disguise, still gorgeous, but with the flaring powerful aura of a Djinn spreading around him like wings of fire. At first I thought it was a response to what Lewis had said, but no… There was somebody walking in front of him, drawing the full fury of his stare.

Not a Djinn, a woman. I didn’t know her. She was tall, leggy, wearing a dress that met only the most lax funeral style conventions—it was at least black— but I was pretty sure that not even I would have worn a low-cut, high-slit lace dress to somebody’s memorial service. I seriously envied the stiletto heels, though. They looked lethal.

Apart from that, she had cinnamon hair worn long and in loose waves, the kind of satiny sheen to it that you only get in commercials and very expensive salons. A face that blew past pretty on the expressway to beautiful. Wide-set eyes and a full-lipped, pouty mouth outlined in pearl pink shine. Her only jewelry was a diamond pendant that flashed to the power of at least a carat.

David looked ready to kill. In fact, I thought for a second he wasn’t going to drift out of her way as she walked forward—that would have been quite a shock for her, running into something that wasn’t there—but he moved at the last second and pivoted to follow her with eyes so bright and focused they should have set her hair on fire.

I didn’t need to make any pantomime to Lewis; he’d already seen the newcomer, and his face had gone… still. Expressionless. Paul turned to look, too.

“Gentlemen,” she said, and she had a soft Southern accent, made the word into a complicated, caressing drawl. “I was hoping to catch up to you, Paul.”

“Having a private moment here,” Paul said. His voice was flat, cold, not at all the warm purr he usually reserved for beautiful women. “Wait outside, will you?”

She was tough, I had to give her that. The warm, inviting smile didn’t waver. The big doe eyes—up close, they were a particularly interesting shade of moss green—took on a brighter shine. “All I want is a minute, Paul.”

“Can’t have it right now. Out.”

Lewis said, “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

“And you’re not going to be,” Paul said flatly. “Yvette. Out.”

She held out a delicate, perfectly manicured hand to Lewis and notched the smile up another few degrees on the seduction scale. “Yvette Prentiss,” she said. “I work with Paul.”

“No, she works for Paul, and she’s not going to be working for Paul much longer if she doesn’t turn her ass around and march out of here.” Paul’s tone had gone dangerously dark, with a hard New York edge. “Get the point?”

“Sure.” She let her eyebrows form, a comment, lowered her hand and held the smile—and eye contact with Lewis—ten seconds too long for my comfort. “I’ll be outside, then.”

The two men watched her walk away, hips swaying, graceful and sleek and sexy. Paul’s expression was murderous. Lewis’s was still blank, like he’d been hit by a very large truck.

She passed within two inches of David, and I could see the effort it took him not to reach out and do something fatal to her.

Lewis asked, “Who the hell was that?”

Paul sighed. “Trust me. You really don’t want to know. And you really need to get the fuck out of here before somebody who knows your face takes a look in here. You’re just lucky she hasn’t got a frickin‘ clue who you are. Believe me, there are black widow spiders, and then there’s Yvette. She might be totally fuckable, but you probably wouldn’t survive the night.”

Guy talk. Jeez. What I’d missed when I’d been corporeal.

Lewis nodded, stuck his hands in his pants pockets, and walked toward me. I stayed in his way, willing him to say something, anything. He adjusted course to miss me by an inch or so.

As he passed, he whispered, “Find me. We need to talk.”

I could tell you about the memorial service, but really, you know how it went. People got up, in varying degrees of discomfort, and said nice things about me. Some of them were actually heartfelt, like Paul’s; some were political correctness gone wild. I mean, to hear some of these people talk, I made Mother Teresa look self-centered. Truth was, I’d never been what you could call a saint—mouthy, attitude-challenged, headstrong, and with a love of the bad-girl side of life. Give me a choice between serving at the soup kitchen and a night slamming down tequila shots with hard-bodied guys, and I’d be reaching for the salt and lime every time.

About the time I heard the fourth person I barely knew use words like heroic and selfless I had to take a walk outside to clear my head. A few people were still milling around the reception area, gobbling up the rest of the shrimp and ladyfingers. One of them was the walking hormone factory who’d introduced herself as Yvette Prentiss. She wasn’t wasting her time listening to the fictional story of Joanne Baldwin; she was bending the ear of a middle-aged, very rich-looking gentleman with a London suit and an Eastern European accent.

David appeared next to me. Literally appeared. I almost knocked over a spindly-legged table holding a discreet black-bordered stand announcing that my memorial service was By Invitation Only.

I put my lips close to his ear and whispered, “So? How do you know her?”

He shook his head. “Later.”

“Uh-uh. Now.”

He gave me a resigned look and guided us to a small alcove near the back, where we’d be out of the way of foot traffic. Also well away from any potential eavesdroppers, who might have found a conversation coming out of empty space disturbing.

The fire had faded out of his eyes, but he was still wired; I could feel it coming off of him in waves of static. He said, “Her name is Yvette Prentiss.”

“Heard that the first time. Evidently there’s more to the you-and-her than introductions.”

“A little.” He looked past me, toward her, then quickly away. “She was a friend of Bad Bob’s.”

David’s former sick, demented master. Okay, I could believe that, and it didn’t raise her in my estimation. “How good a friend? The come-on-over-and-watch-a-movie kind of friend, or the come-on-over-and-sweat-up-the-sheets kind?”

David avoided my eyes. “Let’s just say they had appetites in common.”

“Let’s say a little more than that.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s creeping me out that she’s in mourning and I’ve never met her.”

He focused back on her with that scary intensity. “Oh, she’s not in mourning.” Which I could believe, seeing her flirt and tease at the other end of the room. She was currently sucking sauce off of a shrimp, to the delight of the middle-aged guy hovering near her like a bee on a flower. “She’s hunting. Bad Bob paid her bills. She’s looking for a new source of income.”

“David.” I drew his eyes back to me. “What’s with the two of you?”

“There are things I don’t want to remember about my time with him. She’s one.”

That sounded dry and uninformative, but he was shaking. Shaking. “David?”

He reached for me and captured my face between his hands, leaned his forehead against mine. Lips close enough to taste. “You’re an innocent,” he said. “I want you to stay that way. Don’t let her near you, and whatever you do, don’t let her know you’re Djinn. There are things—I can’t tell you. And I hope you’ll never know.”

Across the room, Yvette Prentiss laughed. She had a sweet little-girl laugh that no doubt charmed the pants off of rich old guys arrogant enough to believe she loved them for their personalities. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought there was a deep, midnight black thread of darkness in it.

I felt the laugh rip into David like a claw, and did the only thing I could.

I said, “Let’s blow this place and go home.”

Two days passed. Nice days. There’s nothing bad about lazing around a fancy hotel room with the sexiest guy in the world and unlimited pay-per-view movies.

Not that it was all fun and games. I was learning things, like the physics of being a Djinn. They were entirely different than the physics I’d learned as a human being, and believe me, I’d been a specialist. Handling the weather with any degree of skill requires an absolute knowledge of little rules like conservation of energy, and it was full of detail work. I can’t even count how many times disarming hurricane-force winds boiled down to something as simple as turning down the subatomic thermostat, changing the world one whirling atom at a time.

But operating as a Djinn was the difference between a two-dimensional game of tic-tac-toe, and a three-dimensional Rubik’s Cube of consequences. There were still scales, and they still had to balance— if I wanted to control the weather, I could still reach up into the aetheric and create a little warm air cushion moving counter to the cold-air mass streaming in from the sea, and voila, rain. In human terms, that would have cost me personal energy.

As a Djinn, I had to balance the physical world, the aetheric, and about ten other planes of existence to create that rain, all without pulling anything out of my own essence. Because, as a Djinn, I didn’t have any essence, really. I drew power from the earth, the sun, the life around me. It was surprisingly difficult to do.

And, I discovered, I was pulling power from David. Lots of it. A big silvery conduit of it, flowing from him into me up on the aetheric plane, like a sleek, barely visible umbilical cord.

“It’s nothing,” he said, when I brought it up. “Training wheels. Once you start feeding yourself from other sources, it’ll stop.”

It was a lot of power. I wondered how hard he was having to work to keep himself strong. The image of a transfusion kept occurring to me—blood flowing out faster than the body could replenish it. Juice and cookies probably wouldn’t be enough, not when he kept bleeding like that.

All this learning was tiring. And Djinn, I found, really did need sleep—not as much of it as humans, or in the same physical ways, but the pull still existed, and on the seventh evening I fell asleep in David’s arms to the comforting flicker of Jay Leno telling political jokes. It was the first time I’d slept since I’d died.

I woke up with a shock, jerking myself out of a dream. Nightmare. A burning house, pain, screaming, my soul being shredded and consumed…

“Shhhhh.” David turned on his side and raised up on an elbow to look down on me. It was dark in the room, although I could see gray fingers of light curling around the edges of the blackout curtains. Dawn, it looked like. How long had I been asleep? “You’re dreaming.”

I blinked and focused on him, wondering how he knew. I had a heartbeat—or at least, I did because I believed that I did—and maybe that was it, maybe he could feel the fast, panicked tap of my pulse in my skin. Or maybe he knew because he just knew. I had no idea really how powerful David was; I was barely starting to realize how powerful I was, come to think of it. Or, to be more accurate, how helpless, at my level of development.

“Dreaming,” I repeated, and had a surprising thought. “Djinn dream?”

“Sure.” His eyebrows arched, thick and expressive. “Why wouldn’t we?”

“Oh, I don’t know… You don’t really have brains?”

“We,” he corrected. Yeah, I kept forgetting that Djinn included me, now. “Dreaming isn’t a function of an organ—or of the body. It’s a function of the soul. Like…” He moved the sheet and put his palm flat over my heart, but he never looked away from my eyes. “Like this,” he finished. “Understand?”

“No.”

“Let go.” I wasn’t holding anything. I opened my hands anyway. He shook his head. “No, let go of your body.”

“Um… okay…” I’d just spent the last seven days learning how to stay in my body. “Hang on a second…”

He dissolved into mist before I got the last word out of my mouth.

I could still feel his hand warm on my skin.

I slowly relaxed my grip on the world and let it blur around me, let myself slide up into the aetheric, where the world took on different spectra and realities and possibilities. I was real here, too, but different.

David was still with me, still holding his hand on my chest, but neither of us were flesh.

Understand? he asked again. Not a physical voice, not a mental one—kind of a vibration that translated itself into words somewhere in my head. It was dim and distant, but I could still understand it. Oddly, it felt like it was vibrating through that silver power connection between us.

How can I feel that without having—

A body? I couldn’t see him, but I could still sense him, and what I sensed translated to me as a smile. You always have a body. Come on, Jo, you know physics. Matter into energy. Matter exists in three states…

Solid, liquid, gas.

At least in the physical world. And does the form of the matter make matter less real?

That doesn’t explain how I can feel you touching me.

You think touch is a sense that’s hardwired into nerve endings? He did highly inappropriate things to areas of my body that didn’t exist in any corporeal way. I still felt heat inside, felt parts of myself that no longer strictly existed start to ache and need. You think any of this has anything to do with bodies?

Well, I don’t think I’m ready for making love with you as a gas.

Too bad. His voice—or my interpretation of it— vibrated inside me, intimately. What about liquid? Want to get wet?

You’re a very bad influence, did you know that?

I felt his smile like lips against my skin. It’s been said.

Would you stop that?

Stop what? If you don’t have nerve endings…

All right, I get the… the point… How can you gasp for breath when you aren’t breathing? Can we go back now?

I was starting to adjust my senses to the aetheric; it wasn’t that I could see him exactly, but I still sensed him. It was a little like night vision—an outline that glimmered in a there-not-there kind of fog, in silvery shifting layers. Beautiful. Ghostly. I’d spent a lot of time on the aetheric level as a human, and I’d never seen anything like him up here. But then maybe my eyes—even my eyes in Oversight— hadn’t been equipped to view the spectra on which the Djinn radiated.

Speaking of which, the plane stretched on, unbroken to the limits of perception, and it was… beautiful. Even more beautiful than before. Where, as a living breathing girl, I’d seen things in Kirlian outlines of reds and greens and blues and golds, in Djinn-sight the aetheric was deeper, richer, and more complex. Layers of colors, swirling together like oil on water. Outlines were both more and less distinct—still familiar, but more difficult to recognize because of their depth. I wasn’t seeing the skin of things anymore. I was seeing the skin, the muscles, the bones, the organs. The very heart of life.

Humans displayed as flickering ghosts, pale and transparent; some glowed hotter than others, and those, I understood, were probably Wardens. People with power over the various elements. Hundreds of thousands of them crowded the place in confusing eddies, drifting and pulsing, combining, melting into each other, giving and taking. I was watching the entire flow of life on the spiritual plane.

It was breathtaking. Humbling.

Circling in and around them were the multilayered fogs of Djinn. I couldn’t really focus on them—they tended to disappear when I tried to zoom in—but I had the unnerving sensation of them being everywhere. Jeez, I breathed, virtually speaking. How many of them—us—are there?

He didn’t answer me, which was odd; I couldn’t see his face, of course, but I had the sense somehow that his attention had shifted away from me. Watching… focused somewhere else.

What the hell is that? he asked absently.

What?

He stretched out a—hand? — and brushed it through empty air. I didn’t see anything. No, wait, I did… just the faintest glimmer of light. You know that cold phosphorescence that fish have, in the deepest black of the ocean? A kind of cold light, in tiny little blue specks.

It was like that. An insubstantial fairy glitter of blue, few and far between.

And I felt a sudden rush of tension from him. Can you see that?

Sure. What is it?

I don’t know. From the tone behind that, he obviously hadn’t run across anything like it before, and it was worrying him. I can’t feel it.

I reached out and experimentally tried it, too. Where I touched, there was a phantom coldlight sparkle, just a few tiny lights firing. Huh. I don’t feel anything.

Exactly. Energy is being expended, or it wouldn’t show up as light. Yet we don’t feel it.

That’s… I tried a half dozen thoughts on for size and discarded most… interesting?

Yes. Interesting-bad, I presumed, from his tone. He did something I didn’t quite see, created a clear bubble of energy. Inside of it, some of those coldlight sparkles twinkled like fireflies. He studied it, moving closer. Shit!

The fireflies had flown through the globe like it didn’t even exist. David pulled back, took me with him, to a healthy distance. The sparkles faded into darkness.

Are they still there? I asked.

Don’t know. He didn’t seem inclined to check, either. That shouldn’t happen.

What?

Any of that.

Oh. I waited for inspiration. Nothing arrived. What now?

We leave, he said, and I felt a sudden hard tug that, if I’d still been flesh, would have tipped me off balance. As it was, it felt like the fog that made me up flew apart and settled back together.

Had I thought we were moving fast before? No. We dropped out of the sky, heading straight back down at supersonic jet speeds, and I couldn’t control a squeak of alarm. Not that impact with anything would hurt me, in my present state, but instincts are hard to overcome.

David braked us with professional ease, and we drifted the last two feet down to the bed.

This was where being a Djinn really differed from my experience as a human. I’d walked the aetheric before—lots—as a Warden, but I’d always had a body to anchor myself to. The Djinn didn’t have that. Their—our—bodies are made of potential energy, so it required a state change to enter the real world again.

It took me a couple of minutes to figure out how to do that. I understood how; that was knowledge that seemed to come as standard equipment with entering the Djinn lifestyle. What I didn’t quite have yet was the muscle memory, the instinctive control. Like a baby learning to walk.

I built myself from the inside out. Cell by cell. Bones, complete to the delicate honeycombed structure of the marrow; then a complex interweaving of nerves and muscles and blood vessels, organs, tissue; then, finally, I wrapped it all in skin and stretched.

Ah. Not bad.

When I opened my eyes, David looked deeply unsettled.

“What?”

“You have… no idea how that looks,” he said.

“Yeah, well, it’s pretty damn weird from this side, too—Crap!” I dragged a handful of my hair closer to look at it. “That’s not right.”

My hair had always been straight. Dark, straight, worn long. For some bizarro reason, I was now blessed with curls.

“No, I like it.” He wrapped a curl around his finger and brushed it with his thumb. “Think of it as an unexpected appointment at the salon. Look, we’ll get into the finer points of personal grooming later. I need to find out more about what’s going on up there.”

“With the sparklies. Yeah, they looked real dangerous.”

He frowned at me. “They shouldn’t even exist. That’s dangerous enough for me.”

“So? What’s the plan, Sherlock? We stick them in a test tube and start experimenting?”

He stepped away from me and turned to pace the room restlessly. He was no longer entirely comfortable, I could see that; in addition to the change in body language, he’d put on a pair of blue jeans and a loose, worn gray T-shirt with the logo of some university faded almost to invisibility. As I watched, he formed a blue-and-white checked shirt, buttoned halfway.

No shoes, yet. He wasn’t quite ready to go. “I have to talk to someone,” he said. “Can I trust you to stay here for a while?”

“Can’t I go with you?”

He focused on me for a second, then moved his gaze away. “No. That wouldn’t be—a good idea.”

“Who are you going to see?”

“You don’t need to know.”

Okay, this was starting to piss me off. “Sorry, is my new Djinn name Mushroom? Because I don’t like being kept in the dark and fed bullshit, David. Just so you know.”

I expected him to snap a comeback, but instead he smiled and paused in his pacing. “Are we having our first quarrel?”

“No, I recall a hotel room back in Oklahoma where you tried to make me claim you as a Djinn slave. That was our first quarrel.” It had been a doozy. The apology sex had been even better.

“Right.” He locked his hands behind his back and wandered to the windows to look out. “Something’s wrong up there. I don’t know what it is, or what caused it. I don’t even know if it’s dangerous, but… it doesn’t feel right. And that’s as much as I know, Jo. I need to ask around, see if anybody else has noticed anything. This could be very important.”

“Or it could be leftovers from the big New Year’s Eve party up on the aetheric.”

He shrugged and folded his arms across his chest as he stared out. “As party favors go, those are pretty persistent.”

He really was worried. I sat down on the bed and pulled a sheet over myself, kind of a wrinkled toga, nothing elegant but at least a covering. “So go, then,” I said. “If it’s that important.”

He turned to look at me, and I read a flash of gratitude, just before the phone rang.

We froze. His copper eyes swirled darker.

“Wrong number?” I asked.

“Let’s find out.” He crossed to it, picked up the elegant little handset, and angled to watch me. “Hello?”

Not a wrong number. His expression went blank and stiff.

“Not over the phone,” he said. “We need to do this in person. Where do you want to meet?” Another pause. “Yes,” he said. Pause. “I know where it is. Yes.”

He hung up. In the same motion, his favorite olive drab wool coat formed around him, long and deceptively elegant. When he turned to look down at me, he’d also added the round disguising glasses that I remembered so well from the first time we’d met. They made his angular face look gentle, and behind them his eyes had gone a warm brown instead of Djinn copper.

“We’ve got to go.”

I didn’t like the way he said it. I didn’t like the sudden tension in his shoulders, either. “Trouble?” I asked.

He smiled slightly. “It’s still your middle name, isn’t it?”

“Who was on the phone?”

“Later.”

“Come on, remember the whole mushroom thing? Who called?”

He gave me a long, unhappy look, but he must have known he couldn’t just drag me around like a suitcase. “Lewis.”

“Lewis?”

“He wants to meet you.”

“Oh. Right. He… mentioned that, back there—you know, at the funeral.” I gestured vaguely over my shoulder in a direction that probably didn’t indicate the Drake Hotel. “Something on his mind.”

He didn’t look any happier at that revelation. “Joanne, you have to—”

“—leave my mortal life behind, yeah, I know, but it’s Lewis. You know?”

He did. And once again, no spikes on the happiness meter. I let the sheet fall away, looked down at myself, and frowned. Oh, the skin looked okay; evidently, I had the knack, just not the expertise yet to do it fast. No, I was thinking about clothes. As in the lack thereof.

“Um…” I pointed at my breasts. “Don’t think they let me go out in public like this.”

David crossed his arms across his chest and looked, well, obstinate. Cute, but obstinate. “You expect me to do everything for you?”

“No. Just dress me. Please.”

“And what if I don’t?”

Ah, he’d figured out a way to keep me out of trouble. Or so he thought. I gave him a warm, evil smile. “Then you’d better hope I can master that not-being-noticed thing really quickly, because otherwise me and the NYPD are going to have a beautiful friendship.” I swung my legs out and stood up, and started walking for the door. He stepped back, looked down at his crossed arms, then up and over the top of his glasses. Effective. He must have known how gorgeous he looked doing that.

“Seriously,” I said, and clicked back the privacy lock. The hotel air-conditioning whispered cold over my skin in places that didn’t normally get to experience a breeze; I shivered and felt goosebumps texturing me all over. “Going outside now. Clothes would be a plus, but whatever…”

Okay, I was bluffing, but it was a really, really good bluff. I swung the door open, hoping there wouldn’t be some society matron with her poodle-dog in the hall, and stepped out with my naked feet on the plush carpet. Expecting clothes to materialize around me.

They didn’t.

It wasn’t that good a bluff, apparently. David raised the stakes.

The door slammed shut behind me, slapping me like a barely friendly smack on my bare butt. I yelped, crossed my arms over my breasts, then dropped one hand down to make a totally inadequate privacy panel. Shifted from one foot to another and pressed my back against the wood and said, “Funny, David! Come on, help me out here.”

He didn’t sound amused. “You need to learn how to dress yourself.”

“I will. I swear. Just—not right now, okay?”

“Not okay. Either you admit you’re not ready and come back inside, or put your own clothes on. Out there.” Not a drop of sympathy in David’s disembodied voice. I pulled in a breath, leaned against the door, and struggled to concentrate. Clothes are tricky, when you have to create them out of air and energy and make them look, well, good. Although frankly at the moment, I figured I’d better settle for fast and ugly. Wal-Mart was okay by me.

I squeezed my eyes shut and focused. Seconds ticked away. I started to feel the burn of panic because my mind was completely, utterly—

“Any time,” David advised. His voice didn’t come from behind the door, it was in front of me. I peeked and saw him leaning against the opposite hall wall. No way to classify that particular smile except as sadistic—cute, but sadistic. He checked his watch. “It’s a high-traffic area. I give you… two, maybe three minutes, if you’re lucky, before someone comes along.”

“Bastard,” I muttered, and went back to concentrating. When I had the image in my head, I opened my eyes wide and stared at him as I started building my new wardrobe. And yeah, okay, I was trying to get back at him.

But still, it was so cool.

I added pieces the same way I’d constructed my body, from the inside out: boy-cut panties first (lacy), bra (sheer), stockings (thigh high), knee-length leather skirt (black), lime green midriff-baring shirt (polyester). David leaned against the wall and watched this striptease-in-reverse with fabulously expressive eyebrows slowly climbing toward heaven. I finished it off with a pair of strappy lime green three-inch heels, something from the Manolo Blahnik spring collection that I’d seen two months ago in Vogue.

He looked me over, blinked behind the glasses, and asked, “You’re done?”

I took offense. “Yeah. You with the fashion police?”

“I don’t think I’d pass the entrance exam.” The eyebrows didn’t come down. “I never knew you were so…”

“Fashionable?”

“Not really the word I was thinking.”

I struck a pose and looked at him from under my supernaturally lustrous eyelashes. “Come on, you know it’s sexy.”

“And that’s sort of my point.”

Oh yeah. We were going to see Lewis. I chose not to think too much on what that revealed about my motives. Too late now. I walked past him, head high, heading for the elevators.

“Coming?” I asked. He fell in step with me.

“Considering I’m the only one of us who knows where he said to meet him, you’d better hope.”

“I’m surprised you’re so eager.” Not that he and Lewis didn’t get along, or hadn’t, anyway… “Oh. You’re hoping he’s got some idea about your little sparkly things.”

I got another frown for that one. “I hope that’s what they are.”

“Instead of…?”

“Something else. I just get nervous when the universe doesn’t obey its own laws.”

“Welcome to my world,” I said. “Having kind of a weird life experience these days.”

I hadn’t been out of the room except to travel the aetheric—and that somewhat queasy trip to the Drake Hotel—since we’d checked in; the elegance came as a shock. First, the carpet—a blue-and-gold riot of French Provincialism. Next, the genuine Louis-the-whatever gilt tables with chunky glass vases of silk flowers.

No, I definitely hadn’t dressed to fit the room.

I stopped in the full force of a patch of sunlight in the lobby window and let my skin soak up the energy. I hadn’t realized I needed it until it reached inside and stilled me in a way that only David’s touch had been able to achieve.

David didn’t speak for a moment, just stood with me in that hot golden patch of warmth. When I looked over at him, his eyes were closed, his face rapt in a kind of worship. I took his hand. He looked over at me, smiled, and pushed the down button on the panel for the elevator.

“Why does that feel so good?” I asked. “And don’t tell me it’s because we’ve been shut in a room for days.”

“Like calls to like,” he said. “You’re made of fire now.”

“So I’m going to feel like this every time I pass an open flame? Great. Firegasm.”

“Remember that focus thing we were talking about? Learn to practice it.”

The elevator dinged and yawned open. Nobody inside. We entered and David touched the button for l.

“You haven’t told me where we’re heading.”

“No,” he agreed.

“And you’re not going to?”

“Right.”

“So much for the partnership.”

He was still facing the control panel, deliberating not looking at me. “I’m responsible for your safety, Jo. You have to let me make the decisions about what’s too dangerous.”

“What’s dangerous about letting me know where we’re going?”

“Nothing. But you need to keep in mind that whatever Lewis is going to talk about, it’s to do with the mortal world. You need to be very, very careful right now about keeping separate from it.”

“So whatever Lewis wants, we’re going to say no, unless it has to do with the Djinn.”

“Yes.”

“Does he know about that? Because if he does, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t bother wasting the—”

The elevator hadn’t stopped, and I was sure it had been empty when we’d gotten inside, but all of a sudden a third voice behind me said, “Ah, there you are.”

I yelped and went south until I collided with an elevator wall; my body threatened to break up into mist, but I held it together. There was another Djinn in the elevator with us, leaning casually against the back wall. I knew her instantly, if nothing else for her neon-bright wardrobe. Today’s was a kind of electric eye-popping blue: flared pants, low-cut vest with no shirt beneath, beautifully tailored jacket. Blue was a good color on her. It accented the rich dark-chocolate shade of her skin. Her elegantly tiny shoulder-length braids were plaited with matching neon blue beads, which clicked like dry bones when she tilted her head.

Rahel had always known how to accessorize.

Djinn, I was coming to understand, had a flare for the dramatic, so popping in unannounced wasn’t necessarily threatening. Rahel had done this to me before, in the days when I still had a pulse and a human lifespan. The first time I’d met her, she’d blipped into existence in the passenger seat of my car, which had been doing seventy at the time. I’d barely kept it on the road.

She’d enjoyed the joke then, and she was clearly enjoying it now. She crossed her arms, leaned back against the elevator wall, and took in the reaction with a smile.

Unlike me, David didn’t seem surprised at her sudden appearance. He slowly turned to face her, and his expression was a closed book. “Rahel.”

“David.”

“Not that I’m not happy to see you, but…”

“Business,” she said crisply.

“Yours or mine?”

“Both. Neither.” Not really an answer. “You know whose business it is. Don’t you?”

No answer from David. Rahel hadn’t paid the slightest attention to me, but now her vivid gold-shimmering eyes wandered my direction and narrowed with something that might have been amusement, or annoyance, or disgust. “Snow White,” she said. “Love the perm.”

Defending my hairstyle was the least of my worries. “Rahel, what the hell is going on?” Because there was no question that trouble was brewing. No coincidence that Lewis was trying to get me, and then Rahel popped in with urgent business. I could feel the gravity, and we were right in its center.

She didn’t answer, not directly. She turned her attention back to David and shrugged. “Tell her.”

David shoved his hands in his coat pockets and leaned against the wall, considering her. “Oh, I don’t think so. If Jonathan wants to see me, let him come find me. I don’t come running to him like a kid to the principal’s office.”

“Do you imagine I’m giving you a choice?” she asked, silky as the finish on a knife. The tension already swirling in the air between them turned thick and ugly. “This is a bad place for you to fight me, David. And a very bad time, don’t you agree? He wants to see you. It’s not an invitation you refuse, you know that.”

The elevator dinged to a stop on the third floor. Doors rumbled open. Outside, a middle-aged couple waited with impatient ‘tudes. Anybody with a grain of sense would have known not to get in that elevator, given the body language of the three of us already inside, but these two were clearly self-absorbed to the point of impairment. The woman—fat, fifties, fabulously well kept—was complaining about the quality of the preserves on the breakfast tray as she petted a white rat of a dog. She crowded in. Hubby rumbled across the threshold after her.

“Excuse me,” the matron said to me, clearly expecting me to move back and give her royal personage more breathing room. She raked me with a comprehensive fashion-police inspection from head to toe, then Rahel. “Are you guests here?” With the strong implication that we were working the hotel by the hour. Rahel shot me a glance out of eyes that had moderated themselves to merely amber. Still striking, but in a human fashion-model kind of way. She showed perfect teeth when the woman glared at her, but it wasn’t a smile.

“No, ma’am,” Rahel said equably. “Hotel security. May I see your room keys?”

The matron huffed and fluffed like a winter sparrow. Hubby dug a key card from his pocket. Rahel took it in inch-and-a-half-blue-taloned hands, studied it intently, and handed it back. “Very good. Have a nice day.” For some reason, I had the strong impression that key card wouldn’t be working the next time they tried it.

Another musical ding, and the elevator doors parted like the Red Sea. The couple stalked haughtily out into the arched marble foyer. I started to get out, too, but the doors snapped shut in front of me—fast and hard, like the serrated jaws of an animal trap.

David’s eyes flared back to copper. Rahel’s flashed back to bitter, glowing yellow. There was so much power crackling in the air it stung my skin.

“Okay, can’t we just talk this over?” I asked, and then the elevator dropped. I mean, dropped. Fell straight down. I yelped and grabbed for a handhold, but there was no need; my feet stayed firmly on the carpeted floor. Neither David nor Rahel flinched, of course. I hated not being the coolest one in the room.

“Don’t make me do this,” David said, as steadily as if we weren’t in free fall. “I don’t want to fight you.”

“Wouldn’t be much of a fight,” Rahel replied, and at her sides, her fingernails clicked together in a dry, bony rhythm. They were changing color, from neon blue to neon yellow. The pantsuit morphed to match. I knew, without quite knowing why, that these were Rahel’s natural colors, that she was pulling power away from fripperies like outward manifestations to focus it inside. She was gathering her strength. “We both know it, and I have no wish to hurt you worse than you’ve already hurt yourself.”

The downward drop of the elevator slowed, but there was no way any of this was natural. Even if we’d been headed for the basement, I didn’t really believe that it was fifteen floors down from the lobby. No, we were well into Djinn geography now. Human rules applied only as a matter of politeness and convenience. The elevator was a metaphor, and we were arriving at another plane of existence. Danger land, next stop. Ladies’ lingerie and life-threatening surprises.

“I’m not taking her to him. Not yet.” David again, this time very soft, deceptively even.

Rahel grinned. “Who are you afraid for, David? Snow White, or yourself?”

“She’s not ready.”

“Then sistah girl better get her ass ready. You broke the law, David. Sooner or later, you knew you’d have to explain yourself.”

Broke the law? I blinked and dragged my eyes away from Rahel’s glittering, neon-bright menace, and saw that David had gone very still. I’d seen that look before, when he’d been faced with slavery and death—it wasn’t acceptance, it was a kind of insanely peaceful courage. “Then I’ll see him alone. There’s no reason to involve her in this.”

Rahel clicked her talons dismissively. “You know better. She is the corpse at the murder scene, David. The crime, in the flesh. She comes.” This time, when she bared her teeth, they took on a needle-sharp ferocity. “Unless you want to leave her orphaned in this cold, cruel world. How long would she last, do you think?”

“Hey! Don’t talk around me, okay?” I barked, and stepped in between them. Rahel actually looked surprised at my outburst. “One of you had better start explaining to me what’s going on. Now.”

For a second, neither of them looked ready to spill the beans, but then the elevator came to a smooth gliding halt, and the bell rang.

David finally said, “We’re going to see Jonathan.”

“And I’m supposed to know who he is because…”

“Because he is the one true god of your new existence, little butterfly,” Rahel said. She wasn’t smiling anymore. “He is the Elder who was born at the first turning of the world. He is fire made flesh. And you really don’t want to piss that man off.”

The elevator doors cranked open. I don’t know what I was expecting—some cheesy B-movie interpretation of Hell, maybe—but what I saw was nothing but a clean white hallway stretching off into the distance.

Rahel said, “You will do as Jonathan requests. Your choice, David. If you do force me to fight, you know the outcome.”

“Do I?” His intensity was scary. So was the little half-smile on his lips. “Maybe I could surprise you.”

She tilted her head to one side. The beads in her dreadlocks clicked and whispered. No other answer.

David pushed away from the wall and stepped out of the elevator into the hallway. I followed, pulled even with him, and felt a bubble of panic threatening to rise somewhere in my not-entirely-solid throat.

“We’re in trouble, right?” I asked. I glanced back. The elevator doors were sliding closed. Rahel was nowhere in sight.

“Not—exactly.” He stopped, put his hands on my shoulders and turned me to face him. “Jo, you have to listen to me now. It’s important. When we get in there, don’t say anything. Not even if he asks you directly. Keep your eyes down, and your mouth shut, no matter what happens. Got it?”

“Sure.” He didn’t look convinced. I searched his face for clues. “So how bad is this for you?”

Instead of answering, he ran his fingers slowly through my hair. Weirdest sensation: I could literally feel it relax, the curls falling out of it into soft waves. His touch moved down, an inch at a time, teasing it straight. It felt so warmly intimate it made me feel weak inside.

“David—” I whispered. He put a finger on my lips to hush me.

“Your eyes,” he said, leaning closer. “They’re too bright. Dim them down.”

“I don’t know how.” His lips were about three inches from mine, close enough that I could taste them. “What color are they now?”

“Silver. They’ll always be silver unless you change them.” He had autumn brown firmly in place, looking human and mild as could be. “Try gray.”

I thought of it in my head, a kind of smoky soft gray, gentle as doves. “Now?”

“Better. Focus on that color. Hold it there.” His hands moved out of my hair and caressed my face, thumbs gently skimming my cheekbones. “Remember what I said.”

“Eyes down. Mouth shut,” I confirmed.

His lips quirked. “Why am I not convinced?”

“Because you know me.” I put my hands over his, felt the burning power coursing under his skin. Light like blood, pumping inside him. “Seriously. How bad is this?”

He pulled in a deep breath and let go of me. “Just do what I told you, and we’ll both be fine.”

There was a door at the end of the hall marked with a red exit sign. David stiff-armed it without slowing down, and I followed him into a sudden feeling of pressure, motion, intense cold, disorientation…

… and somebody’s house. A nice house, actually, lots of wood, high ceilings, a kind of cabinish feel while still maintaining that urban cachet. Big, soaring raw stone fireplace, complete with wrought iron tools and a big stack of logs that looked fresh-chopped. The living room—which was where we were—was spacious, comfortable, full of overstuffed furniture in masculine shades. Paintings on the walls—astronomy, stars, planets. I caught my breath and braced myself with my hand on the back of a sofa.

The place smelled of a strange combination of gun oil and aftershave, a peculiarly masculine kind of odor that comforted me in places that I hadn’t known were nervous.

There was a clatter from what must have been the kitchen, down the hall and to the left, and a man came around the corner carrying three dark brown bottles of Killian’s Irish Red.

“Hey,” he said, and tossed one to David. David caught it out of the air. “Sit your ass down. We’re gonna be here a while.”

I stared. Couldn’t quite help it. I mean, with all the buildup, I’d been expecting a three-headed Satan breathing fire and picking his teeth with a human rib. This was just—a guy. Tall, lean, with a built-in grace that reminded me of animals that run for a living. He looked older—forty-five? fifty? — and his short hair was a kind of sandy brown, thickly salted with gray. An angular face, one that bypassed handsome for something far more interesting. Lived-in. Strong. Utterly self-assured.

He was wearing a black T-shirt, khaki cargo pants, some kind of efficient-looking boots, maybe Doc Martens. He settled himself down in a sprawl on the couch, all arms and legs and attitude, and finally held out the other beer toward me. I leaned forward to take it, and his eyes flicked over and fixed on mine.

I froze. Just… whited out. I thought nothing, felt nothing until the cold sweating bottle slapped my palm, and then I looked down and focused on it, blinking. I couldn’t have said what color his eyes were, but they were incredible. Dark. Intense. And very dangerous.

David had eased himself down to a sitting position on the edge of a brown sofa with worn spots on the arms. He held the beer between his palms, rolling the bottle slowly back and forth, and now he glanced at me and I saw something unsettling in his eyes.

It might have been fear.

“Jonathan,” David said.

“David. Glad we’re still on a first-name basis,” Jonathan replied, with a half-inch nod that conveyed nothing. His eyes flicked to me, then away, so brief you couldn’t even call it a look. “You. Sit your ass down.”

I did, feeling gawkish and stupid and so much like an intruder it stung. There was something between these two; it was so powerful that it warped space around them, tingled in my skin like electric shock. Love? Hate? Bitterness? Maybe it was all that. Certainly it wasn’t a passing acquaintance. It had the ancient feel of something long-term and deep as the ocean.

Jonathan took a swig of beer. “Well, she’s pretty,” he said to David, and jerked his head at me. “You always did like the dark-haired ones.”

David raised his eyebrows. “Is this the part where you try to embarrass me in front of her?”

“Enjoy it. This is as fun as it’s likely to get.”

The fire popped like a gunshot. Neither of them flinched. They were locked into a staring contest. David finally said, “Okay. I’m only here as a courtesy. Tell me what was important enough to send Rahel around after me like your personal sheepdog.”

“Well, you don’t call, you don’t write… and you’re offended on Rahel’s behalf? That’s new.” Jonathan waved it away, tipped his bottle again and swallowed. “You know what’s so important. I’ve never seen you do anything so… incredibly, brainlessly stupid. And hey. That’s saying something.”

God, it all looked so real. I knew that the room around me had to be stage dressing, built out of Jonathan’s power, but it felt utterly right. The pop and shimmer of the fire in the hearth. The woodsy smell of smoke and aftershave. The texture of the slightly rough couch fabric under my fingers. There was even frost on the windowpanes, and a localized chill from that direction—it was winter here, deep winter. I wondered if that was any indication of his mood.

David said lightly, “You’re keeping score of my screwups? Must get boring for you down here, all by yourself. But then that’s your choice, isn’t it? Being alone.”

A flash came and went fast in Jonathan’s eyes, and sparked something in response in David. Silent communication, and very powerful. Ah. Whatever was between these two wasn’t hate. It looked a lot— uncomfortably—like love.

Jonathan let that flash of emotion fade into a still, empty silence, set his beer aside, and leaned forward with his hands clasped. “Don’t try to change the subject. What you did wasn’t just selfish, it was nuts. You put us in danger.” Jonathan’s eyes were changing color, and I looked down, fast. I knew, without anybody telling me, that it wasn’t safe to be facing that particular stare. His voice went quiet and iron hard. “Do I really have to tell you how serious this is?”

“No,” David said. “Let’s just get on with it.”

“You want to at least explain to me why you did it?”

David’s voice was warm, intimate, almost compassionate. “Jonathan, I don’t have to explain a damn thing. You already know everything I’m going to say. You always have.”

“Not true. You were always full of surprises.”

“Good ones, occasionally. Maybe this will be one of them.”

“Oh, you’d so better hope.”

It was a very heavy silence that followed. I listened to the crack and pop of logs on the fire and focused on the smooth pebbled leather of my skirt. Eyes down. Mouth shut. I could do that.

Jonathan sighed and stirred. “You gonna drink that beer or what?”

“No. You know I hate the stuff.” David held out the untouched bottle.

Jonathan leaned across the empty space and took it. “How about you, Snow White? You drinking?” He was talking to me. I’d almost forgotten about the sweating cold Killian’s in my hand, except as something to hold on to; I took a fast, mute sip and glanced up.

Mistake. He was staring at me. I fell into those eyes, like Jonathan had his own dark gravity, and for a few seconds I knew him. Old. Wise. Limitlessly powerful. Funny. Sarcastic. Cold. Merciless. Sentimental. Sad. Lonely. I could see history stretching back to a dizzying distance, just a blur of days…

But the door swung both ways.

I knew him.

He knew me, too.

There was nothing, nothing he didn’t touch inside of me, and yet it wasn’t like the raping intrusion you’d think. I had the sense of compassion, of amusement, and a kind of strange gentleness as he gathered me in, learned me, lived in me.

“Jonathan! Dammit, stop!” I heard David’s shout, but it was too far, too far to travel to answer. Was it possible to be consumed like that, and still be whole? I felt like I was unraveling, spreading thinner, thinner… there was no pain, but a vast sense of becoming…

Something sliced across that connection like the blade of a knife, and I felt the bottle in my fingers sliding free, out of control, heading in frozen ticks of time for the floor.

David caught me as I fell. I heard the bottle hit the floor. Every nerve in my body fired as if a bolt of lightning hissed up from the ground, down from the clouds, caught me in its current and burned me into nothing.

The bottle shouldn’t have broken, but it did, it shattered into a million glittering pieces. I felt myself breaking, too.

I heard Jonathan say, “You should know better, David.” He was still sitting on the couch at ease, watching the two of us. “They’re too fragile. You’re working with flawed material. Talk about your lost causes—”

“Leave her alone!” David yelled. He lifted me in his arms, and I felt the solid weight of him, the flaring pale beauty of fire reaching out to wrap me close. “Jonathan, please stop!”

“No. You stop me.” Jonathan wasn’t just a guy on a couch now, he was more than that, he was a vast power moving through the aetheric, a shadow on the wind, a storm on the air. “C’mon, David. Stop me. It’s easy, you’ve done it a thousand times. No big deal.”

I was… unraveling. Breaking apart. Being subsumed into something vast and unknown and deep as space, sweet as pure cold mountain air…

I felt David grabbing for me on the aetheric, struggling to hang on, but it was like trying to hold sand in the wind.

Stop me, Jonathan said, in the aetheric, in the world, in that other place I couldn’t even name yet. Come on, David. Just do it.

“I can’t!” David’s raw scream of rage sounded torn out of him with pliers. “Jonathan, I’m begging you, please stop!”

And Jonathan let go. I fell back into flesh, into David’s arms, into pain. Oh, God, that hurt. Everything too bright, too sharp, too cold, too hot. For a few aching seconds I wanted to go back to that place where Jonathan had taken me, the place on the edge of nothing. I wanted oblivion with an intensity that scared me.

Jonathan picked up a beer bottle and took a long, throat-working gulp, put the empty down, and sat back with his arms crossed. Looking at the two of us. I couldn’t tell anything at all from his expression. Had all of that, all of me meant anything to him at all?

“So, did you tell her?” he asked. No answer from David, but I could feel the trembling of his muscles. “Of course you didn’t. Look—what’s your name? Joanne? — Djinn live by rules, and one of the rules is that humans die while we go on. Like it or not, there’s nothing we can do about that.” His dark, dark eyes moved to David’s face. “We can’t create energy, all we can do is translate it from one form to another. The demons that killed you ate the energy that kept you alive, and you died. So David stole life energy from another source to bring you back.”

David let me slide down to stand on my feet, but he kept a hand on my arm, steadying me. I felt sick, lightheaded. “What?” I whispered.

Jonathan sighed. “He stole life energy and gave it to you.”

“Stole it?” Oh, God, don’t tell me he killed someone else. Don’t tell me that.

Jonathan’s eyes flicked past me to David, who said, “I didn’t steal it. I took it. From myself.”

Jonathan nodded. “Yeah. David ripped out half of his life and gave it to you. Which means… what exactly does that mean, David? Enlighten us.”

“Nothing.”

Jonathan rolled his eyes, reached for David’s untouched beer, and took a swig. “You know, you’ve got one hell of a martyr thing going, maybe you ought to drop by and try it out on the pope. Nothing. Bullshit. You’re committing suicide by girl.”

David cut in, sounding very reasonable. Too reasonable; I could feel the wire-fine tension still singing in his muscles. “You’re overstating things, Jonathan. I’m not committing suicide. So I went from the second most powerful free Djinn to a middle-ranked spear-carrier. So what?”

“Oh, for crying out loud… so what?” Jonathan squinted, rubbed his forehead, and stood up to pace. Back and forth, restless energy crackling like the fire that wasn’t really burning in the fireplace, on creaky floorboards that didn’t really exist in any way that humans could understand. “That’s like saying giving Albert Einstein a lobotomy wouldn’t matter because he still had a pulse. We need you. And we need you full strength. We’re at war, David! I have to remind you of that?”

David didn’t answer. His hand on my arm was tight enough to hurt.

Jonathan stopped pacing to stand right in front of me, glaring. “What David did was about as smart as ripping his heart out with his bare hands and calling it organ donation. It’s possible to do what he did. It’s just pathetically stupid.”

“I’m fine,” David said.

“You’re not!” He rounded on him and leveled a finger at David’s face. “Don’t even start with me. You’re bleeding energy all the hell over the place. You tell me… can you stop it? Or are you just going to bleed yourself dry to keep her alive? It’s like trying to fill a dry lake with a teaspoon, David. You can’t do it. You can’t make a human into a Djinn because they don’t goddamn well work that way!”

David didn’t answer. Jonathan’s face tightened up.

“And you don’t give a crap what I say,” he said, resigned. “Well, that’s kind of what I thought.”

He turned away, walked to the fireplace and picked up a vicious-looking black poker that he used to jab at inoffensive logs. Flames crackled, popped, and swirled. I looked back over my shoulder at David, who was quiet, steady, focused.

“Is he right?” I asked.

“No,” David said. “I’ve been losing some energy, the same way a human might lose blood from an injury before it heals. It’s nothing.”

Jonathan whirled and tossed the poker back in the wrought-iron holder with a sharp clang of metal. “It’s been seven days.” Jonathan’s dark eyes were fierce with emotion. “I’ve sat here and watched you bleed into the aetheric for seven damn days! I’m not sitting on my all-powerful ass while you die.”

“Not your business.”

“David—”

“Not your business, Jonathan!” David’s copper eyes were blazing, furious, molten. Jonathan’s were as black and cold as space. Neither one of them moved, but I felt defenses snapping into place, and my whole essence screamed at me to get the hell out of the middle.

Not that I ever listened to sensible advice anyway.

I rounded on David. “What cheap-ass archetype hero myth did you step out of? I didn’t ask you to kill yourself for me! I would never ask for that! You can’t just make me a Djinn and die, dammit! Hear me? You can’t!”

Jonathan laughed. “Please. He didn’t make you a Djinn, don’t you get it? He made both of you half a Djinn.”

I felt my hair start to curl again as my concentration slipped. I lost that dove gray focus David had tried to get me to keep, and felt my eyes change— flare—go silver. “Half?”

“Half. As in, two halves make a whole.” Jonathan’s mouth twisted into bitterness. “A whole what, I have no idea. Probably an idiot.”

“Fine. Then fix it,” I said. “Undo it.”

“No!” David again, and this time he moved, took me by the shoulders and physically moved me out of the way. Sat me down on the couch with a decisive shove. “You don’t understand. I told you to keep quiet.”

“Hey, she asked nicely,” Jonathan said, and pointed at me.

“No!” David flung out a hand, palm out, pushing Jonathan away even though Jonathan hadn’t taken a step in our direction. He stepped forward, sank down on one knee in a puddle of olive drab wool coat, and took my hand in his. Warm skin on skin, truth shining in his eyes. “Joanne, this is between me and him. Let us solve it.”

Jonathan upended his beer, drained it, and tossed the bottle into the fireplace. The crash of glass was lost in the roar of flames as the fire leaped up, eager as a pet. “Fuck. Heartwarming as this is, David, it’s totally screwed. You can’t make her one of us. You can keep her alive, you can give her power, but the price is too damn high. You really think I’m going to stand by and let you do this?”

David smiled, but I could tell he wasn’t smiling at me. This was bitter, private, and painful. “ ‘Behold, thou art fair, my love, behold, thou art fair…’”

“Hey! Don’t quote that to me. You know I hate that.” Jonathan stalked back over, stared down at the two of us. After a long, silent moment, something melted out of him. The anger, maybe. Or the determination. “You’d really do this.”

David’s fingers tightened around mine. “It’s already done.”

“You’d die to give her life.”

“I don’t think I’ll have to, but if it comes to that, yes, I’m not afraid.”

Something inside me went still. Very, very still. Focused on him, on his eyes, on the power pouring out of him into me.

Power I now understood was sustaining me.

“Please.” David’s voice had gone soft, low, resonant in the back of his throat. “Jonathan. Please. It’s my choice.”

He put emphasis on the last word, and I saw it hit home in the other Djinn, who folded his arms across his chest and looked away. Covering up pain.

So much between these two I didn’t understand, and knew I never could. I hadn’t even known him a week; they’d had half of eternity together. No wonder Jonathan had that hard, hurting edge to him. And no wonder he wanted me dead. I’d have the same impulse, if somebody showed up to rip apart a friendship that had that kind of history.

“Your choice,” Jonathan repeated. “Oh, you’re good. If I take away your choices, I’m no better than the last asshole who held your soul in a bottle. Is that what you’re getting at?”

He was staring out the windows of his house. Before, it had showed a frosted white landscape, a washed blue sky. Now it looked out on a city street, masses of humanity moving like corpuscles in a concrete artery, every one of them alone. Gray sky, gray buildings, gray exhaust belching from the tailpipes of passing taxicabs.

He said, “You know how I feel about them. They’re like a plague of locusts out there, consuming everything. And now you want to open up our world to them, too.”

“Not them. She’s a person. One person.”

“One mortal,” Jonathan corrected. “And there are days when every single one of them deserves to be wiped off the face of the earth.”

It didn’t sound like idle conversation. Jonathan turned back to face us, looking at the two of us. “But you’re not going to listen to me. You never do. Even if this works, one of them will find you, just like last time, stick you in some damn bottle and make you a slave. You won your freedom, David. It’s a precious gift. Don’t waste it like this.”

“I’m not wasting it,” David said. “I’m spending it on what really matters.”

Jonathan took that like a knife, with a soft grunt of breath and a flinch. He went back to the window, staring out, and suddenly I had a sense of something I’d missed before. All this power, all this massive ability—and he was trapped. Trapped here, in this house, in whatever reality he’d created for himself. Staring out at the world through those safe, distancing panes of glass.

And maybe, being what he was, being as powerful as he was, he didn’t have a choice, either. He is the one true god of your new existence, little butterfly, Rahel had said.

A god who didn’t dare leave his heaven.

“What if I die?” I asked. I must have surprised both of them; I felt David’s reaction, saw Jonathan’s as his shoulders bunched up, then relaxed.

“You’re Djinn,” David said. “You won’t.”

“According to him, I’m only half. So I can, what, half die?” I cleared my throat. “If something happens to me, does David get his energy back?”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” David murmured.

“Not talking to you right now.”

“Yeah, well, you shouldn’t be talking to him.”

Jonathan answered my question. “Depends on whether or not he’s stupid enough to die with you, or let you go. But yeah, if he let go… he’d be himself again.”

“So what you’re talking about, when you say you want to fix him, is that you want to kill me.”

Silence, from both quarters. Jonathan didn’t deny it.

“Wouldn’t advise you to try. I may not look it, but I’m pretty tough to kill,” I said. “You can ask around. How many people you know survived having two Demon Marks?”

Jonathan half turned and gave me a sarcastic, onesided smile. “Half a Djinn, and she’s already giving me grief. Must be your influence.”

“Not my fault. Like this when I met her.” David’s smile was delighted, warm, proud. “You’ll like her, Jonathan. Trust me.”

The flickering response—so close to being love— died in Jonathan’s eyes. “I did trust you,” he said. “Look what it’s gotten me.” He turned back to face the window. “You broke the law, David. You brought a human into our world. That means you have to pay the price. If the price isn’t giving her up, then it has to be something else.”

The fire suddenly flared and died to dead, black ashes. Light faded outside to a cold gray. When Jonathan turned around, he was no longer masquerading as a regular guy. The house morphed around me. Couches disappeared. The homey wooden walls changed to unyielding marble.

And Jonathan became something so bright, so powerful that I turned away, eyes squeezed shut, and struggled to control a surge of pure fear.

He is the one true god of your new existence.

I didn’t realize that Rahel had meant it literally.

I felt David go down on his knees, and I followed, kept my head down and my mouth shut. This was what David had been warning me about. This was the Jonathan you didn’t argue with. I felt power surge through the room, as bright and vivid as lightning, and wanted to make myself very small. I couldn’t. Whatever powers I had were frozen in place, helpless. I couldn’t even get myself up off my knees.

“David, will you let this woman die?” It wasn’t a voice, not really. It was thunder, it was a dark, silky wind wrapping around us. Too big to be sound, to have ever come from anything like a human body.

“No.” David’s voice was just a raw rasp, barely audible. I couldn’t imagine how he was able to talk at all, given the pressure on us.

“Will you let her die?”

“No.”

“I ask a third time: Will you let this woman die?” He was asking it in the traditional Djinn way. The answer David gave now would be the truest one, the reflection of his heart and soul. He wouldn’t be able to lie, not even to himself.

From David, a hesitation. I couldn’t help it; I forced my eyes open and saw him struggling back to his feet. Standing tall, lonely, defiant.

“No,” he said. “Never.”

The light sighed. “Yeah,” it said. “Figures. Well, I had to ask.”

The incredible brilliance died and left me blind. I heard footsteps. As I blinked away darkness, I saw the temple morphing again, turning back to cabin walls, tapestries, overstuffed comfortable couches. No pressure now. I forced myself shakily back upright, holding on to the back of the couch for support. Fabric dragged at my fingers, real, so damn real. All of it, so real.

Jonathan stood in front of me, back to merely human again, shoulders strong and tensed under the black shirt, eyes as dark as space. He glared at us, locked his arms across his chest, and said, “If you won’t let go of her, the only way to get rid of her is to kill you, too. But you already know that.”

“Yeah. I know.”

The glare continued full force. “Crazy son of a bitch.”

David’s luminous smile warmed the air around all of us. “And you already knew that.”

Jonathan’s fierce look softened. “So I did.” They looked at each other for a few long seconds, and then Jonathan dragged himself back to dad mode with a visible effort. “Here’s what I’ve decided. I’ll give her a week to learn to live on her own. One week, counting from now. Then I cut the cord. If she can’t draw power on her own, she’ll go the way of the dinosaurs. Maybe you’ll die with her, maybe you won’t. I’m not making that decision for you. I’m making one about her. Got it?”

He did, and he didn’t like it. David frowned. “Jonathan, a week’s not long enough—”

“It’s what she’s got,” he interrupted. “Be grateful. I don’t even have to do that much.” He turned to me, and I found myself standing straighter. “You. You understand what I just said?”

“I have a week to figure this out or I die. Got it.”

“No, you don’t,” Jonathan corrected. Those dark, cold eyes weighed me and found me wanting, again. “David’s just said that he won’t let go. If I cut the cord and he doesn’t release the hold, you both bleed to death up there on the aetheric, and nobody can help you. Not me, not anybody. Get it?”

I swallowed hard. “Yeah.”

“This is on you now. You fix this, or you might take him with you.”

David, dying for me because I dropped the ball? No way in hell. “I will,” I said. “I promise.”

“Good. Glad we’re in agreement.”

I wasn’t prepared for it, so when hands closed around me from behind and yanked me into an iron-hard embrace, I squeaked like a field mouse instead of fighting back. The hands that held me were feminine, perfectly groomed, with fingernails glossed in bright neon yellow.

“Don’t fight me,” Rahel’s voice whispered in my ear. “Neither one of us has a choice in this.”

David whirled to face us, but Jonathan held out a hand and instantly David was frozen, unable to move. His face was chalky and strained, his eyes molten, but he was helpless.

“Here’s the deal,” Jonathan continued. “I need David with me right now, Djinn business that can’t wait. So you’re going to have to go to boarding school. No boyfriends to coddle you, no special favors, you get to earn your place with us the hard way. Understand?”

I didn’t, but I discovered that I couldn’t say a word, anyway. I threw a desperate look at David, and found him just as horrified, if not more. I could practically feel the no! vibrating the air between us.

“Master,” Rahel said. “Where do I take her?”

Jonathan’s narrow dark eyes swept over me one last time. Judging me like a drill sergeant assessing a particularly scrawny new recruit.

“Patrick,” he said. “Take her to Patrick.”

David let out a strangled cry of protest, but it was too late. The world—Jonathan, David, the cabin— disappeared around me as Rahel took me out of the world.

And then, with no sense of transition at all, we were standing in an alley in Manhattan. Well, Rahel was standing in an alley in Manhattan; I was drifting around like Pigpen’s dirt cloud trying to figure out how to put my skin on again. Crap. I’d never get the lime green Manolos right.

Rahel crossed her arms and stared at the not-space where I was. Amused. She inspected her flawless fingernails and evidently decided that neon yellow was no longer the color of the day; her pantsuit morphed to a hot tangerine, and her nails took on a rich sunset blend of orange, gold, and blue. Even the beads in her hair changed to amber and carnelian.

“Still waiting,” she said, and wiggled her fingers to inspect the effect. Evidently it wasn’t impressive enough; she added some rings, nothing too flashy, then turned her attention back to me. “Come on, Snow White, we don’t have all week.”

Keep your pants on, I thought at her. She must have heard it, because she raised one eyebrow in a very Spock-like gesture of amusement.

“The issue, I think, is your pants, not mine.”

I slowly formed myself, inside out. Faster than before. By the time the skin came on, I was already moving on to the clothing, adding it rapidly from the templates I’d created earlier. Zip, zoom. Maybe five seconds. Not so bad.

The shoes looked good. I leaned over and admired them, decided I really needed toenail polish, and went for matching lime green.

When I looked back up, Rahel was smiling. The friendly expression disappeared as soon as I noticed it. “What?” I asked.

She shook her head, beads tinkling in her braids. “Nothing. It’s just that your personal style might even be more untraditional than mine. Quite a feat, little one.”

“We going to stand in a stinky alley all day talking fashion?”

“Not that we couldn’t, but perhaps it isn’t the best plan.” She started walking toward the mouth of the long brick tunnel, where a bright New York morning flowed past in the form of anxious-looking pedestrians, none of whom looked our way. “Do try to keep up.”

I clumped along after her—if one could be said to clump in shoes this fabulous. I picked my footing carefully, avoiding the puddles of God-knew-what and the shapeless heaps of God-didn’t-even-want-to-know-what. Rahel reached the end of the alley, took a sharp right and fell into the traffic flow. I hurried to keep up with her long-legged strides. It really was a beautiful day; the sun caressed my skin, covered me in a sweet warm blanket of energy that I sucked in greedily. Around us, a constant symphony of honking cars, sirens, loud voices—energy to spare. You gotta love New York City. Kick the crap out of it, and it just rolls over and comes back for more. Me and the Big Apple had that in common. That and a certain brash, trashy style.

“So who’s Patrick?” I asked, eventually. “Friend of yours?”

Rahel’s snort was rich with disgust. “No. We don’t travel in the same circles.”

Wow, even in the world of the Djinn, you could be unpopular. Who knew? “So what’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing. We’re only very different.”

“Yeah? How? He into the business casual look?”

I earned a narrow, amused look from beast gold eyes. “He thinks the best way to learn to be a Djinn is to learn to be a slave.”

I missed a step. Rahel kept on walking, but slowed enough to let me catch up. “And this is the guy you’re taking me to?”

“Neither of us has a choice,” she pointed out. “I am bound to obey Jonathan’s orders. So are you.”

“Yeah, speaking of that, why?”

She shot me a wide-eyed look, and her hot amber eyes were nearly human in their surprise. “Why what?”

“Why do you obey him?”

She shook her head gently. “I do not have the time or energy to teach you all of Djinn history in a day, but Jonathan commands our loyalty for a reason. If Patrick is the place you’ve been directed to go, I will deliver you, and there you will stay. That ends it.”

Maybe for her, but I wasn’t used to taking orders without the chance to argue about it first. Still, no point in arguing with Rahel. I knew from experience that she could crush me like an ant. “So where is this guy?”

She pointed. I blinked.

“You’re kidding,” I said. Straight ahead, at the end of her pointing finger like she’d conjured it up out of the ground, stood the huge stone and steel tower of the Empire State Building. Well, the blurry outlines of it. We were a long walk away. “Do these look in any way like L.L. Bean hiking boots to you?”

Rahel flashed me a blinding, sharp-toothed smile. “Then put on comfortable shoes.”

I sighed and fell into step with her. Some days, it just doesn’t pay to have fashion sense.

New York is interesting on every level, but especially on the aetheric. In the physical world it’s layered like a wedding cake, history on history; dig far enough down in those sandhog runnels and you’d find graffiti left by the original Dutch settlers, and by the long-ago-evicted Indians before them. In Oversight, New York isn’t about bricks, cement, and streetlights— it’s all about perceptions and energy. One enormous storage battery, stuffed with good, evil, rage, peace, fury, love, hate, and ambition. It shoots up into the aetheric for miles, a fantasyland of constantly changing illusions.

It was brighter today than it had been the last time I’d seen it, a kind of fierce pride spiking from every structure, even the tenements tainted by anger and despair.

The Twin Towers still existed, on the aetheric plane. When we came into a space where the buildings would have once been visible, I stood and gaped, feeling cold prickles all over my not-quite-human skin. The ghosts of the two buildings rose like glittering ice into the gray sky.

“How?” I stuttered, but I already knew. It was there because it lived in the hearts and minds of millions, maybe billions of people, and until that faded, it would remain in the aetheric. “Because we remember.”

Rahel nodded soberly and said, “Humans have power. Creating, destroying, remembering… all acts of great power. Greater than any of them know.”

There was something humbling about it. I could sense the incredible force of power even from where I stood. “Can we go there? Take a closer look?”

“Not you,” she said. “Too young. Too much power. For you, it would be like standing in the heart of a sun.”

She shooed me on. We moved at the fast pace of foot traffic. This time of day, rush hour was in full swing—people striding to work, women in business suits and Air Jordans, bike messengers weaving in and out of the honking, stinking, creaking flow of traffic next to the sidewalk. Every other car was yellow, with rates on the side. Everybody seemed to have a big purse, a backpack, or a briefcase. Half of them were on cell phones.

“So I said to him…”

“… bitch, back up off of that before I slap you stupider than you look…”

“… I mean, how dumb can you be? Obviously, it’s a chicken!”

I wondered if any of them realized how their personal lives sounded to the rest of the world. Or cared. I wondered if anybody had been listening to us. If they had, nobody cared. Just another day in New York, apparently.

We weren’t moving as invisible, but that didn’t stop people from barreling ahead into our space at frightening rates. Rahel dodged to avoid a particularly focused blond woman in an Ann Taylor jacket and a Kmart skirt. She had a cell phone headset over her bleached hair, smart-girl glasses perched at the end of her nose, and wasn’t taking crap from anybody. I recognized the type. Black belt in shopping, no kids, no dogs, no husband, money market account diversified into international growth and mutual funds. Probably lived in a pricey but tiny closet on the Upper West Side and worked at Citibank or Chase.

She noticed us, and even for New York we were clearly not the usual sight. For just a second her gray eyes touched Rahel and locked on like missiles, and then she swerved and blasted past us, back to talking tensely about the latest slide of the Dow Jones. Rahel smiled. “Sometime tonight, she’ll have a dream. A dream about flying, or falling, or monsters. And she won’t know why.”

“You did that?”

“No,” she said. “They do it to themselves. We are not safe to look on for long, you know. Not for them.” She glanced over at me, and frowned. “Or perhaps she’ll just have a nightmare about your hair.”

“What about my—” I caught sight of it, reached up and dragged a tight curl down to focus on it. “Dammit. I’m Shirley Temple again.”

Rahel pulled me to a stop and over to the side, under the shelter of a red-and-white striped awning in front of a dusty shoe store. The pavement was spotted with pigeon poo and ages of tobacco stains. She stood in front of me, blocking me from bystanders, and brushed her long-nailed fingers gently over my head. I felt the curls relaxing. “There,” she said. “Remember that feeling. Just reach for it when you need it.” She studied me more closely. “Your eyes.”

I neutralized them to the serene dove gray that I’d managed earlier. She nodded.

We waded back into foot traffic again, and had a nice twenty-minute walk. I don’t recommend that in cool shoes.

At the end of what I was coming to think of as the Manhattan Death March, the big foursquare bulk of the Empire State Building loomed over us, cool shadows rich and deep with history. “Aren’t we taking the tourist thing a little far?” I asked, staring up. The building was awe-inspiring in its achievement; I wanted to take a look in Oversight, but I knew that if I did I’d never get my hair and eyes straight again. Better to stick to the simple things, for now.

“Inside,” Rahel said, and pushed me to the big revolving glass doors. I pushed, shuffled, and emerged into the big genteel lobby, under the steely gaze of a phalanx of security guys in snappy blue sport coats. The place smelled of fresh paint and old wood, and there was so much to see, even without resorting to Oversight or rising into the aetheric. Gorgeous deco touches, a sense of weight and history to the place that made me want to sit down and soak it in. So many people had come through here, over the years, bringing with them their fears, their loves, their hopes and dreams.

I could feel the echoes of them trapped in every tile on the floor, in every steel beam of the structure. It felt… deliriously weighty.

Visitors were queuing up behind a maroon velvet rope next to a sign that said tours. There was a metal detector involved, and I was sure the German shepherd sitting pretty in the corner wasn’t there for his health.

“Walk through the detector,” Rahel said. “Don’t touch anything.”

“Um, people in line—”

“Go around them.”

I did. Nobody glanced my way. Now that I concentrated, I could feel something hanging around me— a kind of gray veil, a don’t-see-me that wasn’t quite invisibility. Rahel’s doing. I was getting better at figuring that out, anyway; I couldn’t even sense it before. I waited until there was a pause in people going through the detector and darted in, zipped through, and felt the weirdest sensation, a kind of burn deep inside. Whoa. Weird.

The dog was looking at me. At first I thought he was just staring in my direction, but he watched me as I walked across the lobby, and as Rahel joined me I nudged her and jerked my chin in the direction of our furry friend.

She nodded. “Animals see us as we are,” she said. “Dogs don’t feel threatened, but beware of cats. They can be unpleasant.”

“O-kay.”

She pressed the button. We waited. Eventually a likely candidate arrived, and we crowded in fast, cutting off the flow of tourists with a fast-closing door. Rahel pressed a button—which floor, I didn’t see— and then turned and stared into the empty corner of the metal box.

“Um…” I was at a loss for words, for once. “Is there something…”

“Quiet,” Rahel snapped. “I’m thinking.”

I was quiet. I listened to the creak of the elevator, the hiss of cables as they hauled us up toward heaven. Distant voices dopplered past one floor at a time, snippets of conversation that wove in and out too fast to catch.

I became aware of something else. A low-level hum somewhere in the far corner of the elevator, a sound where there should be no sound. No presence.

“What’s that?” I asked, but before I got more than the first word out, Rahel was moving. Spinning away from me, slamming into the empty space of the corner, grappling with something that was shadow and darkness and then…

And then I saw it. Definitely not human. Black, fluid, like an spilled shadow, a stain on the world. Rahel was trying to hold it, but it slid away from her like oil, oozing past her, flowing toward me.

“Go up!” she shouted to me, and her talons changed colors from neon orange-yellow-blue to diamond, and she slashed at the thing between us, tearing deeply. I heard it scream in a high, metallic, screeching voice. “Idiot! Go up!”

She meant up to the aetheric. I let go of my human form and went instantly into fog, vapor, mist… into nothing that could be gotten hold of. But that meant I went up into the next plane of existence, and there, the battle was really going on.

Rahel—fog and fire in the aetheric, a bright glowing ghost—was inside of a black, crackling cage of fire. As I watched, she howled and slashed at it, but the wounds she made faded within seconds.

It was… it was eating her. Consuming her, bleeding off power, feeding it through that cage of fire and into something else, something that I couldn’t even see for the darkness. God. The thing was looking at me, not at her. I could feel its hunger vibrating the world between us.

I didn’t think. I just reached out and grabbed hold of that black cage of fire. I guess I intended to rip a hole in it big enough for Rahel to escape, but that wasn’t what happened. The second I touched it, it bonded to me, made me a circuit in that huge flow of current. I was locked in place.

“Joanne!” Rahel shouted, and I felt her reach through the bars that separated us and touch me. “Draw on David! Fight!”

I didn’t have a choice. The sensation of being sucked dry was so overwhelmingly revolting that I would have used anything, anybody to pull away. I grabbed hold of that silvery cord that connected me to David and felt power cascade into me, heady, brilliant, hot, pure. It was like introducing a circuit breaker into the flow. The cage around Rahel fell apart into writhing black spikes of energy, and I reached to pull her free. When I touched her, I left silvery contrails of power behind. She grabbed hold and dragged me down, through aetheric, rocketing back into the real world. We slammed back into the elevator cage with enough force to rock it on its cables, and Rahel didn’t waste any time with niceties; she took over for me, creating flesh and form in less than a flicker of a second, and when I opened my eyes her neon yellow ones were staring into mine from less than a foot away.

“What the hell was—”

“Hold on!” she shouted, interrupting me, and I felt the power surge around us. Not from her, not from me, from that thing.

I didn’t think, I reacted. I reached out and slapped it down, hard. The resulting concussion of force erupted in sparks and blue-white flashes as energy turned to electricity, seeking the ground.

Ah, this was something I could handle. I reached out on the subatomic level and quickly dispersed the field, bleeding it off into a million tiny jolts through the steel frame of the building. All over the place, people would be picking up static charges from carpet, shocking themselves on doorknobs, feeling prickles on the backs of their necks.

“No!” Rahel said, and grabbed me by the shoulders. “We can’t fight here! Too close!”

Not that we had any choice. The thing was still coming at us, hard and fast, and I ignored her to reach out through the aetheric and read what was going on.

It had control of the air. I couldn’t tell what it meant to do, but something bad was a good bet. Air’s heavy—it weighs several pounds per square inch. Increasing density can crush a human—or even a humanoid—body like an empty beer can.

I blocked, drawing heavy oxygen out of the elevator cage and slamming it together in a tightly packed ball between my spread hands. Rahel backed away, looking down at the swirling gray-blue mass I was holding. Her eyes went wide.

I set it on fire with a spark from the electricity still crackling around in the air, and wrapped the whole thing in a shell of carbon dioxide, and lifted that bowling-ball-sized inferno in one hand and held it there. Hell in a bottle.

“Bring it on!” I yelled to the empty air. Voices didn’t carry in the altered atmosphere, but it didn’t matter, I knew it was getting the point. “Get your ass out here, you coward! Show yourself!”

The elevator shuddered to a halt.

Something black manifested itself in the corner as a shadow, then a stain, then an oil-slick presence.

It wasn’t a Djinn. I didn’t know what it was, but evidently Rahel did. She lifted her left hand and pointed it at the thing, and her fingers sprouted claws again—long, wickedly pointed things that gleamed harsh crystal in the overhead lights.

“Ifrit,” she hissed. She looked savage. “Leave this place.”

There were eyes in the shadows; I could feel them even if I couldn’t see them. Dark eyes. And a darker amusement. The ball of fire I’d made was starting to get hot, even through the layering I’d put around it. I tossed it from one hand to the other, looking casual and—I hoped—deadly.

The Ifrit purred, “Peace to you, my sisters.”

“War, my sister,” Rahel answered softly. “Who lets you hunt here?”

“Sweetmeat, I hunt where I choose,” the thing said. It had a voice like darkest velvet, and even though the air was too thin to hold a smell I could taste it, like rotting meat in the back of my throat.

“Not here. Not now.”

I don’t know how it did it, but it smiled. Grinned, actually. Maybe it was just that my eyes were getting accustomed to the lack of features in its face, and added some imaginary ones, but I thought I saw a flash of teeth. “This creature cannot survive,” it said, and pointed toward me. “Think you I will allow its energy to be wasted?”

The Ifrit was talking about me. “Who you calling a creature?” I shot back.

“Hush,” Rahel said absently. She was staring at the Ifrit with a frown now, no longer afraid. “Get rid of that fireball before you hurt someone.”

Oh. The fireball. I killed it by the simple expedient of cracking the carbon dioxide shell and instantly supercooling the molecules as they tried to hurtle out and fry us alive. By the time the snapping sound echoed through the elevator car, all that was left was a faint smell of ozone and a wisp of smoke that I left, just for effect.

“Now,” Rahel said, and slowly lowered her hand. “Who sent you, my poor sister?” I wondered what had made the attitude change. My poor sister? The thing didn’t look either poor or related. Or even vaguely female.

Right on cue, the elevator dinged and the cage shuddered to a stop. The doors slowly creaked open on a spacious but faded hallway, an expanse of not very new business-class carpet… and Santa Claus.

Really. Big, burly, tall, with thick bushy white-blond hair, twinkling Caribbean blue eyes… He was wearing a blue velour jogging suit, Nike cross-trainers, and little narrow Claus-friendly glasses perched on the end of his nose.

“Actually, she’s mine. Sorry for the inconvenience,” he said. He stuck his hand out sideways for me to shake. I stared at it, at him, at Rahel, at the Ifrit who was now lounging against the elevator wall as if it didn’t have a care in the world. The air still smelled of fear and ozone.

“Joanne Baldwin, I presume,” he said, with that same devil-in-the-details smile.

“Who the hell are you?” I blurted. Rahel sighed, shook her hands and inspected her restored nail polish critically.

“His name is Patrick,” she said. “And I regret to say that he’s your new instructor.”

The Ifrit vanished while I wasn’t looking, but I had the strong impression that it hadn’t gone far. Patrick and Rahel exchanged long looks. On Patrick’s side it was cute and twinkly and frankly lecherous; on Rahel’s it was pained, long-suffering, and repulsed.

“Don’t,” she said when Patrick opened his mouth. He looked hurt. “I have no need for intercourse with you, social or otherwise. Now. You’re expecting her, I presume.”

Patrick nodded and slapped a hand out to stop the elevator doors from closing between us. He gave us a grand, sweeping gesture that included a comic-opera bow. Rahel ignored him and pushed past. I followed, and I had the strong impression that while he was down there bowing and scraping, he was checking out my ass.

Patrick let go of the doors and offered me his arm, which I didn’t take. Rahel watched the pantomime impatiently. “Let’s get on with this,” she snapped. “I do not appreciate your little joke.”

“What, my Ifrit? Please. As if you could possibly have been hurt by her, Rahel. Nice theater, though, very nice, I very much liked your screaming. I presume Jonathan told you there might be some excitement along the way?”

“He neglected to mention it. I assume you were testing our new friend?”

“Of course.” He offered Rahel his elbow this time; she looked at it like something fished out of a sewer line and kept walking. Patrick darted ahead down the hallway, presumably leading us somewhere as he talked over his shoulder. “No offense, my dear, but I do like to know that she won’t curl up and die before I even work up a good sweat. I thought with you here, she might expect you to save her, but that was quite a nice surprise. Got backbone, this one. No brains, but backbone.”

“Hey!” I snapped, and walked faster to catch up. They had pulled ahead of me by at least ten feet, taking long strides that my high heels, no matter how kicky, weren’t appropriate for matching. “So that was some kind of test?”

Patrick threw Rahel a bushy-eyebrows-raised look. “Oh, she’s quick, isn’t she?”

“Very.” For the first time, they were on the same wavelength.

We came to a halt in front of a narrow office door, unmarked except for a number and a weathered sign that read please knock. Patrick twisted the knob, swung the door wide, and stood aside to let me precede him. I took a tentative step in and found a not-very-comfortable waiting room, the standard for HMO doctors and low-cost dentists—industrial furniture, magazines that looked vintage, a crappy, out-of-register TV playing silently in one corner. No receptionist visible, nothing but another door, this one unmarked.

“That way.” He nodded toward the other door. I crossed the empty waiting room and reached to open it… and it silently drifted open before I touched it. “Don’t mind that. My Ifrit’s a little bored, and really, you are remarkably beautiful, my dear. She’s drawn to that sort of thing.”

I’d never been leered at by Santa before. It was unsettling.

“Patrick,” Rahel said reprovingly. “Behave.”

Santa—Patrick—put on an injured, kicked-puppy expression. He had a smooth tenor voice, buttery soft, with an accent I couldn’t quite pin down hovering around the edges—not American, maybe antique European. “I’m extremely well mannered,” he huffed. “I’m also very well qualified, in case you’re wondering, my sweet little peach. You see, I’m the only living example of what David’s trying to do with you. I’m the only human ever to survive being made into a Djinn by another Djinn.”

I needed to sit down, suddenly. There was a lot implied in that simple statement—one, this had been tried before, and two, it had only happened once successfully. Not the news I was hoping to hear.

Patrick must have sensed it, because he waved a hand and suddenly there was a guest chair behind me, of the same industrial discomfort as the waiting room furniture. I sat. Rahel put a hand on my shoulder, and between that and the friendly, heavy weight of Patrick’s stare, I felt somewhat anchored again.

“When I was forty-two, I contracted a fatal disease,” Patrick said, and settled back behind his desk with a protesting creak of chair springs. He steepled his fingers on the curve of his stomach. “I had been, to that point, what you would call a Fire Warden. When I died, my Djinn—”

“Sara,” Rahel said quietly. They exchanged an impenetrable look.

“—my Djinn, Sara, made me into the man I am today.” He smiled brightly. “Which isn’t a man at all, of course. So therefore Jonathan feels that I am well qualified to teach you how to become a Djinn. You do understand you’re not one now?”

“Jonathan was pretty clear on that,” I said.

“You should believe it.” Patrick’s smile disappeared like he’d pulled the plug on it. “You’ll die, and take David with you, unless you learn how to survive without the life support he’s providing you. Do you understand that?”

I swallowed. “Yes.”

“Then forget everything David has taught you already. We’re starting over. The problem is that natural-born Djinn have no idea what you need to learn to survive—and it is completely different from what they think you need to know.”

“That’s what the thing in the elevator was about?”

“Not at all. That was just a bit of fun.” Patrick had a naughty grin. “Rahel and I have quite a history, don’t we, my sweet? And I’m sure she enjoyed a little challenge.”

Rahel didn’t look as if she’d enjoyed any of it, and this little conversation still less. “If you’re done with me…” she began.

Patrick’s turquoise eyes flicked toward her, and there was power there, all right, power as great or greater than Rahel’s. “Yes, love, I’m done. Why don’t you get on about your master’s business like a good little doggie?”

The chill in the air between them deepened to an arctic storm front. Rahel’s smile wasn’t at all friendly. Neither was Patrick’s.

Rahel said softly, “I release her in your care, Patrick. One warning. Jonathan will not take it well if you allow anything to happen to her.”

“You’re so sure of your master’s voice in this matter? Because I wasn’t under the impression that Jonathan had formed any special attachment to this girl. None at all.”

Her eyes narrowed to burning gold slits. “Very well. I won’t take it well if you allow anything to happen to her.”

“I thought she was David’s bit of mischief. Or is she yours? I do so love a girl who’s flexible, you know. Perhaps I might join the fun…?” He held onto an annoyingly bright smile as she hissed and stalked away. The door silently swung open as she approached, and shut when she departed.

I listened for any sense that she was going to hang around, watch out for me. All I sensed was that vast, quiet weight of Patrick’s power, and the dark shadow of his Ifrit sliding around the edges of my consciousness.

“Alone at last,” said Santa Claus, and gave me a particularly unsettling smile. “Mind if we go to my place?”

Patrick had a loft apartment on West Seventy-third, big and horribly expensive and decorated with as much abandon as a Djinn’s imagination and apparently limitless budget could provide.

It was a disaster.

His “office” had been impersonal, deliberately bland, but his home didn’t share the same flaws. Carpet in a color that even Rahel wouldn’t have worn— aggressive, eye-hurting blue—competed with neon yellow leather couches and shiny green occasional tables. Those damned Warhol Marilyn prints on the wall. Tasteless plaster copies of naked Greek statues, the lewder the better. He liked smiley faces, too. The bathroom was decorated in them, complete to see-through toilet seat with little yellow happy faces floating inside.

There was, demonstrably, no Mrs. Claus.

Patrick handed me off to the care of the banana yellow leather sofa, which was a lot more uncomfortable than it looked, and disappeared into the kitchen. He came back with two tumblers of something that looked alcoholic but in far too generous a portion for safety. He handed me one. I put mine down on the table, and he hastily dealt me a round coaster that featured an underwear-clad Bettie Page being spanked with a hairbrush.

“So.” He beamed at me, and dragged a chair closer to plump himself down. “You’re wondering how this works.”

“A little.”

“Very simple,” he said, and steepled his fingers under his chin. Those eyes—warm and deep as a tropical ocean. Deceptively peaceful. “Do you know what an Ifrit is?”

“Met one. Didn’t like her.”

“So you did.” Patrick looked past me, and I sensed something dark and shadowy lurking over my shoulder. I didn’t turn. “She is what you could become, if you don’t do this right. She is a fallen Djinn. She can’t reach the power of the universe itself, she can only consume it through others.”

“I thought that was what Djinn did. Consumed it through others.”

“No, no, I told you to forget everything David told you.” He waggled a finger at me. “I grew up in an age of alchemy, so I will put it to you in alchemical terms. We transmute the essence of a thing. We have power of our own, that we draw from the world around us, but to do the great things, the miracles the Djinn are famous for, we draw from the life energy of humans. We can only do that if we’re claimed.”

“You mean slaves.”

Patrick shrugged. “I prefer to think of it as being in public service. In any case, you’re not ready for such a step just yet. First, you have to learn how to live without a power source, such as a human or another Djinn.”

“That’s why I’m here.” I chanced a sip of the drink he’d poured me. Yowza. The good stuff. Apparently, Patrick’s bad taste didn’t extend to his palate.

“Exactly. You must learn to feed from what’s all around you, change its form and consume the excess energy produced. My poor Ifrit there exists as a kind of vampire, stealing the souls of others because she cannot touch the forces of life herself. Yes?”

I wanted to shudder, but I didn’t want him to see me do it. I just raised my chin and stared. Patrick smiled.

“Tell me something about yourself.”

“I’d rather save the small talk.”

“There’s no need to be rude, child, and believe me, I’m asking for a reason. Tell me something about yourself. Anything.”

“I’m twenty-eight…”

He rejected that one out of hand. “Something personal. Something… interior. Tell me something you love.”

I thought about it for a long few seconds, then said, “Ralph Lauren’s summer line this year. Not the spring collection, which was way too pastel, and the winter was really crappy, all bland browns and grays. But he’s got some good fabrics this summer, kind of a hot tangerine matched with dull red. Only the skirts, though. His capri pants are for shit. Pockets? Who wants pockets on capri pants? What woman in her right mind puts extra fabric on her hips?”

There was a long and ringing silence. Patrick’s eyes were wide and rather frightened. He finally cleared his throat and said, “Anything else apart from fashion?”

“What do you want me to say? Puppies? Fluffy kittens? Babies?”

“Let’s try something simple. Your favorite food.”

I rolled my eyes. “Chocolate.” Duh.

Patrick went to the kitchen and came back with… a cup of sugar. He set it down in front of me. I eyed the white crystals. “Um… not really that hungry. Or that desperate.”

He settled in a bright red armchair with a creak of leather. “No. Make it chocolate.”

I gave him a blank stare.

“Alchemy,” he reminded me. He reached into a candy dish and took out a silver-wrapped Hershey’s Kiss, shelled it and set it down next to the sugar. “There’s your exemplar. Transmutation. You alter the chemical formula of the sugar and take the resulting energy into yourself. Also, if you’d like, the chocolate, of course.”

He reached into the sugar and dipped out a handful of granular white, put it in the palm of his hand, and waggled his eyebrows theatrically. The sugar thickened, darkened, and morphed into a small, perfect Hershey’s Kiss. He popped it into his mouth and sucked with lascivious delight.

“It’s not necessarily proportional,” he said, smacking on the chocolate. “It depends on how much power you want to pour into it. But you will need at least something to work from. That’s not usually difficult—most things you need are all around you. Once you get proficient enough, you’ll be able to draw the raw material without it being necessarily in a similar form, but we’ll start with the easy steps.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, really. I mean, I got the theory, but there was a big-ass step between sugar and a tasty silver-wrapped treat. I thought about a lot of things, but mostly I thought about the power still flowing out of David into me, sustaining me. I needed to learn how to break that life support. Had to. Both our lives depended on it.

I reached out for the sugar, took a pinch, and contemplated the white granules as they glistened against my palm. Hmmm. Chemistry. I’d always been good at chemistry. It was no more than floating up into Oversight, then driving down through the atomic structure until you were at the most basic levels and rearranging things.

Okay, it sounded simpler than it really was, but doesn’t everything? I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and focused on the chemical structure. Crystals first, until the edges were clear and sharp in my mind. Then down a level to the thickly nested lattices that made up the crystals. Then into the interstitial spaces that made up the layers…

I was reaching out for the glittering, blue-white beauty of the sugar’s basic blocks when I felt something tear across my mind like a set of white-hot claws. I yelped, grabbed for my head, and felt myself caught. Impaled on something that felt like a knife through my chest.

We weren’t starting with sugar into chocolate after all, it seemed, because Patrick just sat there looking benign and friendly and interested while I screamed and fell to the floor. On the aetheric level, his Ifrit was kneeling on top of me, ripping and tearing at me. I felt the swirling colored layers of my aetheric form go dark with shock, and struggled to break free, but it was on me, crushing me, and there was no way I could get free. I screamed, both in sound and the aetheric plane. Screamed David’s name. Reached for that thick, lifegiving stream of silver that pointed the way to where he’d gone, but I couldn’t find him, couldn’t see him, couldn’t see anything for the agony that rippled over me in waves.

The thing on top of me was laughing soundlessly. It reached for the silver cord that bound me to David, and to life, and it took hold of it in black-shadow claws…

I lashed out. I didn’t know how to fight like a Djinn, so I fought like a Warden, reaching for power from the aetheric, drawing it up through myself like a spring through a well—hot, pulsing power, blood in invisible veins. I put my hands flat against the thing’s chest and screamed as I slammed power into it, through it, out the back of it in a splash of fury so hot I wondered why I didn’t burn with it.

The thing howled, slashed at the umbilical, and I pulled more power, spending it recklessly to keep the Ifrit from getting a good grip.

“Help me!” I screamed at Patrick, who was watching with great, bright-eyed interest. “You bastard!”

“Sugar into chocolate,” he said smugly. “Transmutation. You know this one.”

And somehow, somewhere, I did know. I grabbed hold of that power I’d been slinging so violently and focused it to laser-beam intensity, and allowed my Djinn senses to come back online again. Instantly, the aetheric bloomed into shades and shapes and dimensions, too much, too bright, too confusing, but in the center of the spotlight was the Ifrit. No nicely concealing shadows this time, just ugly angular darkness, all sharp teeth and overdriven muscles. Not a demon, which I’d fought before (and died in the process). An Ifrit was to a demon what a housecat is to a lion—but to a mouse like me, more than enough to do the job.

“Back off!” I snarled at it. It smirked and whirled away in a blur too fast to follow. Circled around behind me. Ripped at me before I could focus the energy properly. “Patrick! Call it off!”

“Now why would I do that?” he asked mildly, and ate another piece of chocolate. “You can’t expect others to defend you, Joanne. It’s the first responsibility of any Djinn. Preserve your life. Then preserve your freedom.”

I didn’t have the energy to spare for a reply. I was looking for a vulnerability, and trying to keep its teeth and claws away from my vulnerability—that silver cord stretching off to the horizon. So fragile, my God, no wonder Jonathan was afraid of leaving David tethered to me—David was vulnerable, too, through me…

Behind the coal black skin and shifting aura like an rainbow oil slick, there was something even darker inside the Ifrit, but soft. Fragile.

On the aetheric, I extended my hand and felt metal claws slide free. They were bright and sharp as starlight, translucent as crystal.

I slapped aside the Ifrit’s tearing attack and plunged those knifelike claws home into its body, not to rip or savage, but to deliver something else.

Light.

Darkness into light.

One thing into another.

Transmutation.

The Ifrit turned pale, translucent, insubstantial, and for a second I heard its cry of joy echo through the aetheric, high and beautiful and strange, and then— pop—it was gone.

And I was lying on the floor of Patrick’s ugly, overdone living room, staring up at a ceiling painted with pornographic renderings in the style of the Sistine Chapel. My Djinn senses were still locked on full, and every damn thing in the place had a history, sweaty and heavy in my head. I wanted to laugh, but I was too tired.

Patrick looked no more like Santa Claus than I did, when I examined him with those senses. No, he was big, tough, cold, and more than a little puzzled.

“Interesting,” he said, and took up another palmful of sugar. This time he made an Andes mint, complete with wrapper. He offered it to me. “How did you know to do that?”

“Transmutation,” I said, still lying flat on the over-colored carpet. I lifted my hands and looked at them, flexed a muscle that existed only in the aetheric. Silver-tipped claws, as delicate as frost, slid from my fingertips. “You said she was hungry. I fed her.”

“Yes,” he agreed softly, with a doubting undertone of wonder. “So you did.”

I took the mint, unwrapped it, and let it dissolve into a sweet edge of mint in my mouth. Taste was different now. Brighter. Sharper. The shiny green paper of the wrapper had a texture to it like nothing I’d ever felt before.

“So,” he said as I savored the taste. “Round Two?”

I’d just almost died, and for some reason I couldn’t stop a giggle that worked its way all the way up from my guts.

“Sure,” I said in between helpless bursts of laughter. “Bring it on.”

Round Two was a disaster. I got my ass kicked. Painfully. This time I ended up lying full length on the banana yellow couch, sobbing for breath, too exhausted to even begin to count the ways I hurt.

Patrick bustled around providing fresh drinks. Unless he wanted to use mine as a topical ninety proof antiseptic, I wasn’t interested.

“Now,” he said briskly, and sat back in the red velvet chair. It was shaped like a platform shoe. Looked like something out of JCPenney’s Nightmare Collection. “Let’s talk about what you did wrong. Ifrits are an expression of energy, just as we are, and therefore your first instinct was correct, you must appease them, not fight them, until you have enough power to—” He stopped the lecture to frown at me. “You’re bleeding all over my couch.”

I groaned. “Excuse the hell out of me.”

“For heaven’s sake, child, just fix it.”

I looked at him blankly. He reached over, took my wrist, and smoothed a finger gently over one of the gaping cuts. It zipped shut, faded, and disappeared. Blood along with it.

“There,” he said. “You do the rest.”

Not, of course, as simple as it sounded. I managed, knitting back flesh and muscle, blood vessels and nerves. The outfit repairs were easy, by comparison. I finally managed to sit up, kick off the shoes, and put my bare feet up on the tacky chrome and glass coffee table.

“Better,” Patrick murmured. “Now. Ifrits. They can be formed two ways. One is a human failing to make the transition to life as a Djinn—which you are in grave danger of doing, my dear. They are also what’s left of Djinn when we—well, I suppose the word is die.”

I froze in the act of wiggling my toes. “I thought Djinn couldn’t die.”

“True, in much the same way that energy is never lost. But we can be transmuted, like anything else. Humans never die either, in the strictest sense of the word; they’re transmuted into base materials. Recycled.”

Ashes to ashes, I thought. Great. Nobody had bothered to mention this in the recruitment brochure.

“If a Djinn is injured badly enough, his or her energy can be broken apart, in which case an Ifrit is formed—they only want to eat, devour other Djinn, and recover their lost energy.” Patrick shrugged. “If they devour enough, theoretically they could become Djinn again, but nobody is inclined to make that sacrifice, I’m afraid.”

“How often—”

“—do Djinn die? Not often. I can only remember it happening three times in the last, oh, four hundred years.” Patrick’s sparkling blue eyes stared off into the distance. “And truthfully, I don’t lose any sleep knowing two of those particular Djinn are gone. Not the best of people.”

“Not people,” I corrected, and got another shrug.

“Potato, potahto. You need to get over your human limits, my sweet.” He was one to talk. Busy checking out the line of my leg all the way up to the leather skirt.

“How long do I have to do this?”

“What?”

“Fight your Ifrit?”

He smiled, tinkled ice in a tumbler full of gold liquor that hadn’t been in his hand two seconds ago, and those ocean-deep eyes looked terminally amused. “Is that what you’ve been doing?”

I let my head drop back against the yellow leather of the couch and stared at the pornographic Michelangelo ceiling. In this version, God was a very naughty fellow. “God,” I said to Him. “Why did You have to make me a Djinn? You couldn’t just make me a stinkbug instead? I’d have been happy as a stinkbug.”

Patrick sighed. “I’ve been teaching you a great many things, and you’re too smart not to know it. Using your senses effectively, thinking like a Djinn, drawing power from the world around you, knowing your form and your energies on an instinctual level. The Ifrit is a means to an end. You didn’t hurt her any more than she actually hurt you.”

In which case, the Ifrit was feeling pretty beat to hell, too. That was nice.

Patrick took a deep gulp of his whisky—if that’s what it was—and said, “Now I think it’s time for something a little different.”

“Yeah?” I was no longer giving him the benefit of the doubt. “Is it going to hurt?”

“Unquestionably.”

“Do I get chocolate when it’s over?”

“Perhaps.” His round Santa face expressed his delight. “Let’s take a trip.”

“I’d like to rest first, if you don’t—”

He did, apparently, because whoosh, I was no longer on the couch, I was being dragged up into the aetheric at a rate equaled only by spacecraft leaving orbit. I yelped—incorporeally—and grabbed a tighter hold of Patrick’s essence as we shot up, up, watching his building miniaturize, then New York City shrink into a colorful little candyland, then the world curve off into a beautiful blue-green marble below us. Space was a vast black presence around us, cold and crushing, shot through with the icy sheen of stars. We were hanging at the very edge of where we could go, where the bonds of earth were weakest. Escape velocity.

Do you know what happens if Wardens go farther? Patrick asked. I almost forgot to answer. The world was so beautiful, edged in blues and greens, reds and golds, sparkling with power and life energy. She was magnificent. Alive. Sentient. I could sense her from here, a vast and slow consciousness that was only now beginning to wonder whether the presence of human beings was a Bad Thing. The storms, earthquakes, fires that had plagued human society in evergrowing ferocity since the Stone Age, those were nothing more than the earth shifting in her sleep, waving away a buzzing fly without ever really coming awake. Trembles of the skin. Involuntary sneezes to expel the intruders.

And still, they required every ounce of strength the Wardens Association possessed to keep the human race alive and kicking—and unaware of the danger.

Do you know what happens if Wardens go farther? Patrick asked again. I scrambled to remember. It wasn’t a Djinn lesson, it was a human one, specific to the Wardens. I’d learned it in class, way back when, on a day when the sky muttered gray and gave Princeton one of those nice spring showers that humans think is the normal course of business for weather. It wasn’t, of course. Spring showers are manufactured. Some guy colliding two fronts, carefully controlling the reactions to get just the right mix of wind, rain, and temperature.

We die, I said. In general, human beings could strap on a spacesuit and ride rockets to the stars. Wardens were too tightly bound to the planet. The farther we got from the nurturing heartbeat of our world, the weaker we became. It worked that way on the aetheric plane, too. This was the outer limit of our survival.

You are no longer a Warden, my little blossom.

He yanked me on, past the point of no return, out into the cold black blanket of space.

And I didn’t die.

We floated in the sharp emptiness, part of a darkness so profound it was like death, and below the earth pulsed and whispered and murmured in its sleep. All that life, so bright. The stars were hard enough to cut.

Now you know what it’s like, Patrick said.

I had no words to describe it, but I tried to put some context around it. How far can I go?

As far as you care to. But be careful. Falling down is not quite as simple as jumping up, you’ll find.

It was still a test. What’s the catch?

Nothing much. Get yourself back where you started.

And he was gone. Just like that. Blip. I was alone, floating in a void so empty that not even satellites raced by. The moon was a cold, lonely dot of white just rounding the far side of the planet. The sun’s rays were so piercingly bright and intense that I felt them vibrate inside me even in my insubstantial state. In human form they’d fry me like an egg.

Get back? How the hell was I supposed to get back? I wasn’t even sure how to move. There was nothing to push against, no forces to work with, nothing but emptiness…

… and the light of the sun, hot and fierce. It flowed like molten gold in the aetheric.

Could I use the sun? Use fire itself to move me?

I reached out, spread myself thin as a whisper, and dropped down into the real world just enough to give myself weight. Still invisible, to the naked eye, but able to trap that energy.

It moved me. Just a little.

It also hurt like that damn Ifrit had gotten hold of me again.

I summoned up my courage and sank further down, one careful level at a time. The more sun I captured, the more I was able to propel myself; the more sun I captured, the more I burned.

I finally let go of the pain and opened myself to it, and the force of fire hit me like wind in a sail, and I flew. Agony turned white-hot, burned itself out, became something else. I became something else.

I hurtled through the thickening fog of the earth’s atmosphere, streaking like a falling star, trailing fire.

I fell back into human form, settled myself like a feather down on lime green spike heels, facing Patrick, and put my hands on my hips.

“Well?” I asked.

He looked down at the carpet.

It had melted into a circle about four feet across. Noxious chemical stew. He fixed it.

“Not bad,” he said, and handed me a cold scotch on the rocks. “Not bad at all, little one.” The ice instantly melted in the glass from the heat of my skin. The scotch boiled.

I took one step, felt my knees give way, and collapsed face down on the yellow sofa.

And slept.

And this is what I dreamed.

A cold stone room, softened here and there by rough-woven rugs, a few grace notes like a silver candlestick and a red wool blanket thrown over the bed. By the standards of its time, a comfortable enough home.

Under the red wool blanket, a man lay dying.

He was skeletally thin, faded, his blue eyes almost colorless now in the flicker of candlelight. I floated in the corner and watched him. I felt I should know him, but his face was just a skull with skin, like an Auschwitz survivor. He still had a few tufts of thin blond hair spilling out over the hard bundle of cloth that served as his pillow.

There was a woman sitting at his side. She was beautiful, so beautiful, but it wasn’t really her face that made her that way. She was actually almost plain—an unremarkable evenness to her features— but the love that spilled out of her was so intense, the grace of her body so informing, that she couldn’t be anything else but lovely. She was wearing a long white robe, something that looked vaguely angelic and glowed like satin in the wavering light.

The man on the bed made a tortured sound. His clawlike hand reached out to her, and she captured it in both of hers. Bent her head. I saw a crystal rain of tears falling, but when she looked up again she was at peace.

“Forgive me,” she said, and bent over to press her lips to his parchment-pale forehead.

Someone else was in the room now, walking right out of the walls. Someone I knew. David. But not the David I knew now… This one was wearing a medieval cotte and woolen hose, all in shades of rust and russet, and his hair was worn long.

He didn’t sense me. His attention stayed on the woman in the chair.

“Sara,” he said. She didn’t turn to look at him. “Sara, it’s time to go.”

“No.” Her voice was soft, uninflected, but I could tell there was no moving her. “I will not let him be lost like this. I can’t.”

“There’s no choice,” David whispered. “Please, Sara. Come with me now. Jonathan’s waiting.”

“Will Jonathan give me peace?” she asked. “Will he give me love?”

“Yes.”

“Not like this.” She reached out to ease a strand of pale hair back from the dying man’s face. “Never like this, and David, I cannot bear to lose it.”

“You can’t keep it. Humans die. It’s the law.”

She looked away from him, and I had the strange, creepy impression she was looking somewhere else.

At me. But that wasn’t possible, because I knew I wasn’t here, really. Not in this time. Not in this place.

Sara’s eyes were the color of amethysts, a beautiful, peaceful color. She stared at the corner where I floated, and then she smiled.

“The law of my heart is different,” she said, and let go of the man’s hand. She stood up, and the white gown fell away, sliding to the floor in a puddle of cloth; under it her skin glowed a soft, perfect ivory. No sculptor had ever captured a form like that, so perfect, so graceful.

“Don’t,” David said, and took a step toward her. I know he could have stopped her, but something— maybe just the heartbreaking longing in her eyes— made him hesitate.

She folded back the sheets and climbed into the narrow bed. The dying man seemed to see her, and those pale eyes widened; the word he shaped might have been No… and then she wrapped her arms around him. Her pale, white hair flowed over the two of them like a cloak, wrapping them together.

“No, Sara,” David whispered. It sounded like a good-bye.

There was a flare of light on the bed, something so bright it was like the heart of a bonfire, and in it I heard screams. Terrible, wrenching screams. They were dying, both of them, dying horribly.

David didn’t move. Maybe he couldn’t. I wanted to, but it was still a dream, only a dream for me, and I just floated, waiting, as the fire burned and the screams faded, until the light faded, too.

Two bodies, lying senseless on the bed.

One of them opened its mouth to scream, but nothing came out. Dry, voiceless, horror-stricken. He had turquoise blue eyes now, and the hair that had been thin and fragile was reborn in a white-gold flame around his head.

Restored to life, health, as she must have known him.

Sara lay unmoving beside him, amethyst eyes still open. He reached out to touch her face…

… and that ivory skin cracked, turned to powder, and began to flake away.

A sloughing of skin, for what was underneath.

The soft black shadow of an Ifrit rose out of the pale ruin of the Djinn known as Sara, and the man reached out to it, but it flinched away. Hissing.

He filled his hands with dust and looked at David with tears streaming down his face. No words for it. No help for it.

David said, in a voice gone rough and strange with grief, “I pray you are worth this gift, Patrick.”

This time, Patrick found his voice.

He screamed.

I woke up the next day to the smell of bacon and orange juice, and fresh-ground coffee. There was still a bowl of sugar sitting on the coffee table next to me. I felt hungover from the dream… memory?… nightmare?… and looking around me, I kept seeing that spare stone room, that skull-thin face breathing its last, the unearthly beauty and grace turned to something ugly and twisted.

He’d kept her with him all this time—or she’d haunted him. Impossible to tell how the feelings ran without asking, and I doubted Patrick would have anything revealing to say. He’d left that devastated, screaming moment behind centuries ago. The Patrick of today was cold, savvy, and controlled.

And yet, the sliding, everpresent shadow of the Ifrit who’d been Sara had another story to tell, didn’t it? A story of love, longing, honor, sacrifice, tragedy? Did she still love him so much? Rahel said that Ifrit survived by eating other Djinn. And yet Sara remained here, and hadn’t done Patrick too much damage.

I refused to think too long about that relationship, especially before food.

Patrick had been kind enough to take off my shoes and put a tacky leopard-spotted cotton throw rug over me. I kept it draped over my shoulders and shuffled barefoot toward the kitchen; I was seriously thinking about changing my clothes to something that would be easier to fight in, since Patrick’s coaching style evidently owed a lot to the world of professional wrestling. Maybe Spandex and a cute little domino mask. They could call me The Nutcracker.

Breakfast was sitting on the table, perfectly displayed like a cereal commercial. Serving suggestion. There were even fresh daisies in a vase in the center of the table. Of course, the kitschy Elvis plates and Hello Kitty mugs weren’t quite what Better Homes and Gardens had in mind, but still, he’d made an effort.

“Patrick?”

No answer. I sat myself down and took a bite of bacon and eggs. They were wonderfully fresh, warm, just right. The bacon was crisp without being burned. The orange juice was pulpy and tart. Coffee—in the Hello! Kitty mug—was as black as sin and twice as sweet.

The condemned woman ate a hearty breakfast.

I was just polishing off the last bite of English muffin when I felt the unmistakable gust of power that accompanies major mojo being worked, and Patrick walked in dressed in an utterly unmentionable bathrobe. I was pretty sure that Disney wouldn’t have approved of what their cartoon characters were doing on that dark blue satin background.

On the other hand, I was really glad he had on the bathrobe.

He walked over to the table, took a seat, unfolded a morning paper, and peered at me over the tops of his glasses. “Sleep well?”

“Fine line between unconscious and resting,” I said. “I think it was on the wrong side of unconscious.”

“Ah.” He rattled the paper. “Have you seen the headlines?”

He turned the page to face me.

There was a picture of storm surge on the Florida coastline wiping out houses wholesale. The headline read STORM OF THE NEW CENTURY? I sucked in my breath hard, then let it out slowly.

“My doing?” I asked.

He gave me an impish smile. “Hardly.” He rustled the paper back around again. “As usual, your friends in the Weather Wardens seem to have everything turned around back asswards. How is it you have all that power and still manage to let thousands die every year from these storms?”

I wasn’t about to get drawn into the traditional branch-of-service argument that almost always erupted between Weather Wardens, Fire Wardens, and Earth Wardens. Patrick had once been a Fire Warden, I remembered. I took a thoughtful bite of bacon. “Um, same way Team Smokey Bear let forest fires eat up half of California last year? That was special.”

He grunted agreement. “Do you think that with a Djinn at your command you could have done better?”

“Sure.” I shrugged and added a little more pepper to my last bite of eggs. “More power. More control.”

“Control comes from Djinn?”

I had to think about that one. “Um, no. Control comes from… the Warden. Power comes from the Djinn.”

“Actually, you’re wrong on both answers. Control and power both come from the Warden. The only thing that a Djinn brings is potential.” He took a sip of coffee, added cream, and stirred. “That’s all we are, you know. Potential energy. Humans are kinetic. They create action and reaction. We are just the medium through which they move.”

Which sounded way Zen to me. “I have no idea what you just said.”

“I know.” He gave me a tiny little quirk of his eyebrows, reached into the pocket of his bathrobe, and brought out a tiny little bottle, about the size of a perfume sample, complete with a plastic capper on the end. He toyed with it between his fingers, tapped it on the table, and thumbed the cap off. I half expected a fellow Djinn to pop out of it.

None did.

“I’d like to explain something to you,” he said. “It may not make much sense to you now, but I think it will later.”

I was feeling generous, what with a nice comforting load of cholesterol and fat making a home in my system… which reminded me, what exactly happened to food, inside a Djinn body? Was it the usual system, or something totally different? Maybe it just vanished into energy, no chemical breakdown necessary. Huh. Good question.

“Shoot,” I said, and took in a mouthful of Florida sunshine in the form of orange juice that tasted fresh squeezed. Energy into fruit into energy. I loved physics.

“I’m not a bad person,” he said. Not looking at me now, just studying the small perfume vial in his thick, perfectly manicured fingers. “Tragically selfish as a man, but I suppose that’s far from unusual. I lived a good life. And I loved one woman more than life itself. More than my own honor.”

I remembered the dream. “Sara,” I said. I caught a quick flash of ocean-rich eyes, quickly turned away again.

“She was… astonishing. There are Warden laws, you know, that forbid Djinn from serving their masters… in that way.” For a guy with a living room that would have made Bob Guccione blanch, he was charmingly indirect when it came to words. “And an honorable master should never require it. But we—it wasn’t a command, or obedience. It was…” He shook his head. “It was a long time ago.”

I sensed the cold shadow in the corner of the kitchen. Yes, there she was, the blackened ghost of Sara, the Ifrit that roamed eternity looking for a way to heal its damage. It wasn’t moving. I could feel its attention fixed on Patrick, and remembered the dream-Sara’s intense, powerful love.

“You loved her,” I said. “She loved you.”

“It’s why the laws exist. So that it won’t happen again.” Patrick shook his head and peered up at me again, eyes pellucid and untroubled behind the half-glasses. “I want her back, you see. She’s half my soul. I want Sara to live.”

He was trying to tell me something, I just couldn’t figure out what it was. But the orange juice was curdling in my stomach. “Patrick…”

“I don’t think you’re going to make it,” he said, almost kindly. “I wish there was a way I could help you, Joanne, but the truth is that like me, you should have died as a human. There’s no way for him to save you except the way Sara saved me, and the cost is too high.”

I felt myself frowning. “Hey, nice pep talk. Aren’t you supposed to teach me how to get through this? Preferably alive?”

“Yes. I know.” The perfume vial clinked as he put it down on the table between us. I watched it roll unevenly back and forth. It fetched up against my Hello Kitty mug with a musical little chime. “I wish I had some magic answer. Truth is, the only answer I know is going to hurt you. Maybe kill you. Are you prepared for that?”

I sucked in a deep breath. “Probably not, but what choice do I have?”

“Too true. Well then. On with the show. A friend of yours is here to see you.”

“I don’t have any friends.” Depressing, but it had the iron ring of truth.

“Look behind you.” I put my fork down and swiveled in the wooden kitchen chair, thinking, Crap, here we go with the fighting again, but I was dead wrong.

It was Lewis Levander Orwell, who was pretty much the last person I’d expected to see. He looked a lot more casual now than he’d been at my funeral, dressed in faded jeans the color of a storm-ready sky, a loose untucked yellow shirt, and that trademark ironic half-smile that felt as familiar to me as a hug. Funny, because although our relationship had always been intense, it had never been what you might call close, in terms of frequency of sharing personal space. He still never really left my mind for long, and never had.

“Hey,” he said. His low, slightly rough voice had a gentleness to it that I hadn’t heard before. “How are you?”

I stood up and walked into his embrace. A full-body hug, lots of male upper body strength carefully controlled. He smelled of leather and wood smoke, and I wondered if he’d been camping somewhere. Lewis is the outdoorsy type. His hiking boots certainly had the chapped, bunged-up look of having tramped through half the real estate of the world.

I’m not a short woman, and he still had some height on me. Lean, tall, with gorgeous dark-cinnamon eyes… yeah, he could make women’s hearts skip and dance, if they came close enough to actually notice him. Lewis tended to camouflage himself. Always had. Probably a good thing, considering the kind of power he wielded.

I remembered he’d asked me something. “Mmmm. I’m doing good, for a dead chick.”

He kissed the top of my head and didn’t let me go. I was okay with that. I had the total hots for David, was more than 80 percent of the way to total head-over-heels in love, but I could still enjoy a strong man pressed against me, yes lawdy.

“You scared me,” he said. “I didn’t expect you to drop off the edge of the planet like that. Don’t do it again.”

He loosened his grip and stepped away, and I felt noticeably colder outside and warmer in. Which maybe made me fickle, and more than maybe a complete slut. But I was prepared to accept that.

“You were supposed to come find me,” he said. He had a small frown engraved between his brows, and I noticed that he had acquired some fine lines at the corners of his eyes. He had one of those faces that lines made look distinguished, not run-down.

“Yeah, sorry… got busy.” I flipped a hand around to indicate Patrick’s incredibly tasteless pad. “Um, Djinn stuff. You know.”

“Not really, but I’ll take your word for it.” His gaze moved to Patrick, and they exchanged guy nods, the ones that indicated acquaintance but no actual fondness, because that would be less than manly. “Thanks for letting me talk to her.”

Patrick shrugged, which made the things that Mickey and Minnie—and Mickey and Pluto—were doing on the fabric look even more unmentionable. “No problem. As it happens, it fits with what I’m trying to teach her.”

“Which is?” Lewis wanted to know.

“Survival.”

Nice to know that it was possible to surprise Lewis, once in a while, although I wished it could be for a less urgent and personal cause; he looked as blank as if somebody had taken an eraser to his face. “Survival? Jo, anything wrong?”

I fielded that one, since it was an easy ground ball. “You could say.” I pulled out the third chair at the table for him; he folded himself down, long legs bumping into obstructions that hadn’t bothered me, and looked at my coffee cup with such pitiful longing that I picked it up and started for the steaming pot.

“Ah!” Patrick wasn’t looking at me, but he held up a finger like some offended schoolmaster. “Break that habit.”

Right, I’d been through this painful lecture before. Stop being human. Start acting like a Djinn. I stared down at the coffee cup, dived down into the structure and felt it from the inside out, the cool heavy reality of the ceramic, the earth-rich scent of ground beans and water. I couldn’t remember if Lewis liked cream, so I subtracted that from the equation, held out my left hand, and materialized a steaming cup of black java in it.

And felt damn proud of myself, too. You betcha.

Lewis was even more impressed. He didn’t say anything, but by damn he looked respectful as he took the mug, lifted it to his lips, and sipped.

And it was a bad time to wonder if I’d fucked up the recipe and created something lethal, but then he was an Earth Warden, he’d be able to tell anyway, and fix it if I had. The perfect guinea pig.

“It’s good,” he said, and took another, longer sip. “Colombian?”

“Guatemalan Antigua,” Patrick answered. “If she did it right.”

He held up his cup for a refill. I did it without moving a muscle. Same routine—sip, surprise, cautious approval.

Lewis put the coffee aside and didn’t let himself get distracted by the fine imitation of a barista I was doing. “You said something was wrong.”

No sense in beating around the bush, not with him; I laid it out just the way it had been spelled out for me. David’s power constantly bleeding off into me, David getting weaker, me the sucking leech that was going to kill him. Yeah, what a happy story it was, just the kind to make the heart warm and cozy. Lewis’s dark eyes got darker as it went along, and even though he always had a kind of inner stillness, he went statuelike and stayed that way. Even after I’d finished.

I finally said, into the ringing and too-loud silence, “So. You wanted…?”

He looked away. Patrick had put the little glass bottle back on the table, unstoppered; Lewis picked it up and rubbed it thoughtfully between his thumb and forefinger. I wondered if he was thinking about food. I could try whipping him up a nice bagel or something, but I wasn’t sure that my culinary skills as a Djinn would be any better than they had in my normal walking-around-as-human days, in which I’d been commonly known as the Lucrezia Borgia of spaghetti sauce.

“I wanted to ask you a favor,” he finally said. “But given what you’ve just told me, I’m not sure it’s such a good idea right now.”

Patrick glanced over the top of the paper at both of us. “I’m pretty sure it is.”

“Well, no offense, but you’re not the one who’ll end up with the nightmares if it turns out to be a rotten idea.” Lewis wasn’t usually so snappish, in my experience. He was clearly rattled. “No. Forget it. It’s okay. You have enough to worry about already.”

“Wait a minute, you haven’t even told me anything yet!” I said. Why do guys always try to make the decision before they even state the problem? “Come on, Lewis, spill it. What do you need?”

He was still rolling the bottle around in his fingers, focused on it with such precision that I wondered if he was about to try to Copperfield it out of existence. Hey, I wouldn’t put it past him. Glass was a pure, if nonorganic, manifestation of earth. He could reconstitute it into a pile of sand, if he wanted. How many degrees of heat did it take to melt sand into glass? I’d slept through most of my basic Earth Sciences classes, since it had all been about the weather for me. I remembered something about trillions of dust particles being used to make a single drinking glass, but apart from the fact that the instructor in the class had been a skinny, obnoxious woman with tortoise-shell glasses and the fashion sense of a lamp shade…

“There’s something up there,” Lewis said. “In the aetheric. I think it’s a rip into the Void.”

“Come again?”

“The Void.” He finally lifted his gaze and met mine. “The place where demons come from. Where they reach through to leave the Mark.”

Oh yeah, I know all about the Mark. Had one, didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as you’d think. Something about demons trying to claw their way out from inside me, incubating like baby spiders in the helpless stunned body of an insect… ugh. Not a pleasant memory. The thought of a repeat engagement filled me with a sharp-edged sense of anxiety. “There’s a demon trying to get through?”

“Not at the moment.” Lewis let the bottle roll out of his fingers onto the tabletop, and prodded it gently around in a circle. “Doesn’t mean one won’t. We need to shut the door and seal it.”

“And when you say we, that’s a royal I’m-the-biggest-bad-ass-Warden-there-is-and-I-don’t-need-any-help sort of we, right?” Because I really didn’t much like where this conversational trail of breadcrumbs was leading. There was a witch at the end of it, and an oven, and a really unpleasant fairy tale.

“I mean that I can’t do it alone,” he said. He sucked in a deep breath and came out with it. “I need a Djinn.”

“Hey, fine, just pull one out of backstock and fire it up, there, buddy.”

“I freed them. All the ones I had.” He shrugged. “Seemed like a good idea at the time. I agree with David about the slavery issue, and besides, I wasn’t planning on needing one any time soon.”

“And yet here you are.”

“Yes.” He stopped playing with the bottle, folded his hands together, and just looked at me.

“Oh, no, don’t even,” I said. “I’m nowhere near ready for that kind of thing. Ask Patrick.”

“I did.”

I shot a hot, disbelieving, wide-eyed look at my so-called mentor in his porn Disney getup. He’d manifested some kind of breakfast while I wasn’t looking, but it didn’t look anything like a traditional bacon-and-eggs kind of thing; some kind of lumpy-looking yogurt stuff, thin little flaps of something that looked like unfolded blintzes, and a weirdly colored fruit mishmash. Whatever country it was from wasn’t anyplace I ever wanted to visit, or at least eat breakfast in.

“Patrick?” I demanded.

He took a bite of fruit surprise with no evidence of discomfort. “Joanne?” He put an entire argument into my name, and I lost. He turned his attention back to Lewis. “She’s made progress, but she needs to understand the flows of power. Over time, she could learn, but she doesn’t have time. If she’s going to make it through this, she has to have a jump start. Such as the one you propose.”

“Hey, pardon me, but nobody’s jumping me, okay?” I sucked in a couple of deep cleansing breaths, and tried to be reasonable. “Just to be clear, you want me to agree to be your Djinn? Your slave?”

Lewis had the grace to look appalled at the idea. “No! Employee. And only for a short time, maybe an hour or so. When the job’s done, I smash the bottle, you’re free again.”

“And even if I believe you, what makes you think I can do this thing you want done? ‘Cause I’m not exactly the most competent Djinn on the block, in case you haven’t heard. In fact, most of these guys barely consider me half of one.”

Patrick grunted and shoveled in pale gray yogurt with lime green chunks floating in it. “Less than half,” he said. “I’m afraid that to them, you’re a parasite. Better off dead.”

“Yeah, see? Parasite. I’m a parasite. You need somebody reliable. Like David.”

Lewis’s face had become a still life. How anybody could sit that quietly… “I can’t find David. Rahel turned me down. Patrick recommended you.”

“And that’s your entire list? What about the three you freed?” Because I was thinking hey, talk about owing favors… but his tense expression didn’t relax. I wasn’t breaking any new ground.

“They’re gone,” he said. “No longer on this plane of existence.”

I tossed that one to Patrick for an explanation. He gave another insouciant shrug. “They don’t want to be imprisoned again. You can understand their point of view. I myself am not willing to risk it, either. And while I trust that Lewis wouldn’t even consider it unless it was an emergency, I’m afraid that an emergency to the Wardens doesn’t necessarily constitute an emergency to me. There are plenty of Wardens equipped with Djinn. Let one of them handle it.”

Lewis’s chin set in that stubborn line. A muscle flickered in his jaw. “They can’t see it. I think the only ones who can are the Djinn and humans with all three forms of Warden powers.”

“Meaning, only you.”

Lewis nodded.

Patrick slurped through another spoonful of slimy crap. “My, doesn’t that just make you indispensable, my friend? Fate of the world, depending on you? Whatever did we do before you came along?”

And the award for most cutting sarcasm goes to… Even I flinched. Lewis, not accustomed to having people accuse him of megalomania, just blinked and looked a little lost. “I’m just giving you the facts.”

“The fact is that you want it to be you.” Patrick leveled a spoon at Lewis like a nun with a ruler, ready to slap hands. “You need to be the hero, boy. A common human failing.”

Lewis opened his mouth, shut it with a snap, and pushed his chair back. “Fine. Sorry to have bothered you. I’ll just see myself out then. Oh, and I love what you’ve done with the place, Patrick. Kind of a whole Christopher-Lowell-goes-over-to-the-dark-side thing.”

Another shovelful of crap into Patrick’s mouth, this time the weird otherworldly-looking flat blintzes. “Oh, don’t be so sensitive. I didn’t say you were necessarily wrong. Occasionally you should be the hero. I’m just saying that it’s not a good habit to acquire. No long-term prospects. Cowards live longer.”

Lewis, already standing, wavered indecisively between staying and going. I put my coffee down and stood up, too. “I understand what you’re trying to do,” I said. “I just don’t think I’m ready.”

“Yeah. I get it. Thanks anyway.”

He turned to go. I grabbed him by the arm. “I didn’t say no. Convince me.”

“Of what?”

“Why I’m ready.”

He moved closer, or maybe it just felt that way; he had that kind of aura. Once it grabbed hold, it sucked you in. I felt weightless, drawn in by the intensity of his power and conviction.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re ready,” he said. “Nothing ever stops you, Jo. Nothing ever has. I need you because you’re the only person I’ve ever known who’s completely incapable of losing a fight.”

I felt a blush burn hot up through me—not a human blush, not really, this was more happening on the aetheric level than traveling through capillaries—and I said, with more humility than I probably ever had in my life, “Yeah, well, you don’t know very many people, Lewis. Your communication skills kinda suck.”

He gave me a long, slow smile. “You didn’t always think so.”

Which led me to memories that were neither situation-appropriate nor really germane, but were damn nice to recall. Storm energy flaring all around us, two bodies naked and moving in that sweet, hot rhythm, lubricated by sweat and lust and the awesome power of the moment…

Not a bad way to lose your virginity, all things considered.

“So,” he said, and raised his eyebrows. There was that cute little line between his eyebrows again, the one I wanted to smooth away with my thumb. “In or out, Jo?”

Patrick, still sitting at the table, rustled his paper as he turned pages to check out the funnies. “She’s in.”

Lewis didn’t glance at him. “Is she?”

I reached out and scooped the perfume vial off the table. I held it out and dropped it into his open palm, then folded his fingers closed over it. “Guess so.”

There was a surprising lack of ceremony to the whole thing. First we waited for Patrick to finish his breakfast, which looked more revolting by the moment, and then for him to shuffle off to another room with his paper and unmentionable bathrobe. Lewis and I played my-God-how-tacky-is-that? with Patrick’s collection of objets d’crap, finally coming to the conclusion that only a going-out-of-business sale at a whorehouse could really explain a lot of it. When my own personal Obi-Wannabe reappeared, he looked sober and dressed for action in khaki slacks, a black silk shirt, and around his neck some kind of silvery chain that had a bit of the disco period to it.

Lewis excused himself. I watched him go, then turned my attention back to Patrick.

“Does this have the Jonathan seal of approval?” I asked. It was kind of a joke. And kind of not. Patrick shot me a nakedly assessing look.

“Jonathan doesn’t concern himself with the details of the manufacturing process,” he said. His lips twitched into a strange little smile. “Not anymore. Although he once was—how would you say it? A great deal more hands-on in his management style.”

I settled down on the banana couch and drew my legs up more comfortably, hugging the tacky leopard throw close around my shoulders. There was a chill in the air—or, more likely, in me. “You know, nobody’s been overly forthcoming about the guy. What’s his deal?”

“Jonathan?” Patrick’s thick white eyebrows climbed heavenward. “You realize you’re asking a foolish question?”

“An obvious no.”

The eyebrows compressed again, this time into a frown. “You can know the history of anything and anyone you wish, Joanne. All it takes is a bit of concentration. You should know this.” He looked woefully disappointed in me. “You tell me about Jonathan.”

He reached out and touched me with one blunt finger, right in the center of my forehead.

It was like being hit by a cement truck at eighty miles an hour, head on.

My head exploded into color, light, chaos, pain, heat, cold, fury. I gasped and struggled to hang on to something, flailed around, found a memory. I grabbed it and held to it with iron strength.

Jonathan, handing me the cold, sweating beer bottle.

Jonathan’s eyes, dark and endless as space, meeting mine for the first time.

There. Patrick’s silent whisper in my head. Go there.

He shoved me, hard, from behind, and I tumbled out of control into chaos.

When I got my footing again—whatever footing consisted of, in this place—I was standing on a raw piece of rock, dizzyingly high up, and an ice-sharp wind blew through me. It caught my long black hair and snapped it back like a battle flag. I was different, here. Snow-pale, dressed in filmy black robes that rose on the wind like a cloud.

I faltered when I realized that I was inches from the drop, that gravity was singing at me like a siren. I dropped down into a crouch and put both hands on the cold stone. Lightning flashed in a hot pastel curtain overhead, and far down below, far down in the mud, men were dying.

I could feel that. Feel every wound, hear every scream, taste every drop of blood being shed.

“ ‘And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul,’ ” Patrick whispered. He was next to me, solid and flaring white-hot. Beside him, behind him, a black ice-edged shadow. “Although this is not that Jonathan, or that David, the verse is still true. If you want to know about Jonathan, you will know it here.”

Here. That was the Ifrit’s silent whisper. I looked down, trembling, wanting desperately to go because there was so much death here, so much pain.

So many dying.

There was one who shone. Glittered with power. Warden. He was tall, spare, moving with grace and speed as he turned and fought against the ones coming at him. The lightning kept calling to him, but he wouldn’t answer. The Earth was calling to him, her voice like thunder, like rivers flowing, like the slow rising cry of mountains.

He wouldn’t answer her.

“Oh God,” I whispered. “He’s like Lewis.”

No, he was more than Lewis. The world itself was wrapped around him, through him, like a lover holding him. Not just a man who controlled the elements, but was loved by them.

Fiercely defended.

Rain sheeted down, silver as tears.

He was rejecting her love, there on the battlefield. He was fighting as a man, not a Warden. Sword in his hand, solid blows of metal on metal, his leather and metal armor taking cut after cut. Blood…

I felt it coming. The world around me felt it coming.

A lunge. A spear angling up, punching past hardened leather and too-soft bronze, ripping…

I cried out. It didn’t matter, the whole world was crying out, the Mother crying out for her dying child, and even though I was at the mountain’s peak, looking down on a struggle of ants, I could see Jonathan, see him struggling to pull the spear out of his chest with both hands, face fierce and bloody with determination.

No no no…

Lightning hit him, burned the spear to ash, melted metal.

Transforming him in a crucible of pure fire. That wasn’t just lightning, not just energy and plasma and science. That was something else.

Pure, implacable magic.

Someone else on the battlefield crying out, too, crawling through thick bloody mud, a man, just a man—dying already, with a dagger buried in his chest.

Crawling into the fires of life in a useless attempt to save his friend.

There was a feeling of an indrawn breath.

Every creature left in that valley died—sucked instantly dry of life, of breath, of soul. Gone. Empty bodies fell as one, thousands of them, gone. It spread in a ripple of falling corpses and armor in concentric circles from the place that lightning still danced and raged.

It kept spreading. Farther. Shepherds and sheep dying on hills miles away. A village, twenty miles farther. A city of thousands falling limp.

“Stop!” I screamed. But it wasn’t going to stop. The raving grief of the world was pouring out, like blood from a heart wound, and it was going to take everything in its madness.

Patrick’s hand pressed my shoulder, hard. I heard his deep intake of breath…

… and saw one man drag another out of the white flare of lightning, far below.

Whole. Unharmed.

No longer men at all.

Djinn.

“ ‘And Jonathan told him, and said, I did but taste a little honey with the end of the rod that was in mine hand, and, lo, I must die,’ ” Patrick said softly. “Now you know what it takes to make a Djinn, little bird. The wrath of the world.”

My attention was riveted on the two Djinn below. One was holding the other, staring numbly at the death around them.

Jonathan’s eyes were still dark, dark as space. Dark as the day that had birthed him.

David’s eyes were as copper as the dagger that had killed him.

He held Jonathan in his arms and wept in the rain, and I knew he was weeping for joy, for sorrow, for guilt because he hadn’t pulled his friend out of that fire soon enough to stop all this death.

“You wanted to know about Jonathan,” Patrick continued. “No one ever wakened the Mother before him. Pray no one ever does again.”

He touched me between the eyes, and took it all away.

It hadn’t been more than a minute. I huddled there on the couch feeling cold in a rain that didn’t exist, tingling from the memory of unbelievable power, and clutched the leopard throw in a death grip around my shoulders. Patrick still stood looking down at me, utterly unaffected by what I’d seen.

“How many?” I whispered. His eyebrows twitched. “How many died?”

“That day?” He shrugged. “Enough to create Jonathan. Enough left over to create David as well. We’re born of death, didn’t you know that? But so are humans. So is everything. Don’t let it get you down, sunshine.”

I just sat and shivered.

Lewis emerged from the back, hesitated over the sight of me all cold and shaken, and gave Patrick a look. Patrick shrugged again. “Jo? You okay?”

“Sure.” I closed my eyes and willed it all away. “Why the hell wouldn’t I be?”

Lewis took an uncomfortable perch on the shoe chair. Patrick himself picked a plastic thing in the shape of a hand, wished some kind of alcoholic beverage into his hand, and waited for the show with the genial half-interest of a golf fan at a tennis match.

“Go ahead,” he said. Lewis and I looked at each other. Lewis rolled the bottle between his fingers again, testing it for durability, apparently. “Just do it. It’s not that hard.”

I wasn’t sure I could do this. I wasn’t sure anymore I wanted to do it. God, if it took that much power to create a true Djinn, how was this going to help me? How could it help anyone? I squeezed my eyes tight shut again, fighting back tears.

Someone took my hand. Large, blunt, warm fingers. I looked into Patrick’s sea blue, tranquil eyes.

“Do you want to die?” he asked me, very softly.

“If you do, stop now, Joanne. Stop before you suffer any longer.”

I thought about David, running through the rain and mud, bleeding out his life, reaching out for something greater than himself. Stopping the greatest power in the world—of the world—from consuming life.

That was my heritage.

That was what had given me life.

Seemed pretty damn cowardly to give it up without a fight.

“No,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m good. Back off, Santa.”

Patrick smiled and resumed his seat.

Lewis took a deep breath, opened his palm and balanced the open bottle there. “Okay. Ready?”

“No. Just get it over with.”

“Be thou bound to my service,” he said. I was expecting something portentous in his tone, but this was an off-the-cuff style, so portent-free he could have been ordering pizza. I didn’t feel any different. I made a little come on gesture with my hand. “Be thou bound to my service.”

Patrick leaned forward on the arm—thumb? — of the plastic chair, and I wondered how it would feel to sit in a chair that was shaped like a hand. Like having your ass grabbed by a giant, maybe.

“Be thou bound to my service,” Lewis finished, and something changed.

It wasn’t immediately evident to me what it was. I mean, yes, I knew, but it started at some cellular level and worked its way up. Fast. I felt odd, then I felt weird, then I felt out-and-out funky.

And then I came apart in a silent explosion, mist swirling, and somehow I could still see, but not with human eyes, and not in the human wavelength… not on the aetheric level, but definitely accessing some of that plane to do what I was doing.

And then the wave crested, and I felt myself being turned inside out, torn apart, remade… reborn.

Into myself. Only… different. Better. Faster. Stronger.

Dissolving.

“Hey!” I yelped, but by that time my body had given up the flesh. I was a thin gray mist, moving faster, being sucked in by a gravitational force so huge I might as well have been a dust speck moving toward a black hole.

Which was the little perfume bottle in Lewis’s hand. I plunged into that tiny, tight container, squeezed like Concentrate of Djinn, and no matter how hard I tried to leak back out again, it wasn’t happening.

Shock was being replaced by an all-over warm feeling of fury. Man, I didn’t like this. I so didn’t like this.

Lewis said, after what seemed like half a millennia, “Come out, Jo.”

And the negative pressure holding me in the bottle eased. Bam, just like that. I blew out of there fast, swirled around him like a cloud of angry bees, and folded myself back down into flesh again.

It took some concentration, but this time I managed to do it pretty fast—just a fraction of a second between skin and clothes. Kind of like one of those tip-the-pen-the-clothes-come-off sort of things. Lewis looked a little surprised, and then he looked a little smirky, and then a second later he remembered he was a gentleman and pretended he hadn’t seen a thing.

“You okay?” he asked. I looked down at myself and was relieved to find I was still pretty much the same person, only I’d acquired a more down-home wardrobe of blue jeans, sturdy shoes and a denim shirt. Work Djinn. I was ready to fetch and haul out on the construction site.

“I’m good,” I said absently. I was busy trying to reset the outfit to something less—literally—blue collar, but unfortunately that now seemed to be outside of my control. Lewis’s doing, whether he knew it or not. Great. At least I knew what turned him on, now. Sturdy women in sensible shoes.

“You okay?”

“You just asked me that.” I looked up at him, puzzled.

He gave me a little tilted half-smile. “Exactly. You okay?”

Oh. Rule of three. I felt the compulsion kick in, and heard my mouth say, “Hell no, you idiot, I’m not all right! I died less than a week ago, David’s being held prisoner by some bad-ass Djinn with delusions of godhood, and I just got my butt stuffed into a bottle! By you! With crappy clothes!”

He heaved a big sigh of relief. “You’re okay.”

“Sure. Fine. Whatever. Let’s do this thing.” I was more than a little unnerved, because I damn sure hadn’t meant to say any of that. Well, okay, maybe the part about crappy clothes, but the rest of it was dealing-with-it stuff. So the compulsion thing actually worked. Interesting. “Give me an order. Something small.”

“What’s the use of that?” Patrick asked. I’d forgotten all about him, but there he was, still sitting on the hand, arms folded, watching me with those crystal blue eyes and bad-Santa leer. He’d seen the same flash-peek-show that Lewis had, he just in no way imagined himself a gentleman. “If you’re going to do it, do something productive. Let her really get her feet wet.”

Lewis considered that for a few seconds, then waved a hand around vaguely at Patrick’s porno theater-circus tent apartment. “Okay. Redecorate this place.”

Patrick came up off the hand like he’d been goosed, but it was too late.

Talk about something happening.

Power slammed into me—rich, thick, golden, unstoppable. Lewis’s potential. I now had access to everything Lewis had, everything he was, everything he could be. The amount of energy stored in him was unbelievable—enough to destroy cities, level mountains, reshape the face of the earth.

It was more than enough to do a Trading Spaces on Patrick’s apartment.

I started at one end and swept through it like a color-coordinating storm. The carpet morphed into a neat champagne beige. The walls turned light cream. The statues disappeared altogether in a swirl of mingled body parts, gone to bad-plaster heaven.

The porn tribute to Michelangelo was replaced by a nice mullioned ceiling, with gold accents. I added a wine red accent wall and replaced a black velvet painting of a pneumatic-breasted naked girl with a Mondrian. I didn’t think I’d just stolen an original, but hey, I was new at it.

Furniture. The banana couch turned to dark leather, butter soft, with manly little brass studs on the legs. Lewis’s platform shoe chair became a matching armchair.

I made Patrick’s plastic hand chair disappear completely, along with the tacky chrome coffee table.

“Stop!” Patrick sounded absolutely horrified. “What are you doing?”

“Public service,” I said, and added a nice brick fireplace with an art-deco brass screen. And a little china vase holding matches next to it. I turned to Lewis. “Any special requests?”

He was squinty-eyed with glee. Truthfully, so was I. Damn, this was fun… unlimited power crackling at my fingertips. I could do anything. Anything.

“I think she’s got the hang of it,” Lewis said to Patrick.

Patrick walked helplessly in circles, not knowing which way to stare; every new revelation brought an additional flinch of despair. I fought the urge to spitefully add a copy of Great Homes to the new deco-styled cherry wood table because no, that would just be rubbing it in. “Yes. I think… she might have.”

Lewis retrieved the plastic stopper on the little perfume bottle and dumped both bottle and stopper into the pocket of his blue jeans. “Are you ready?” he asked me.

I was still on a redecorating high. “Are you kidding?” I couldn’t control the laugh that bubbled up out of me, fierce and hot with delight. “Show me the problem. Damn, this is good!”

I felt him rise up. Since he was human, he didn’t disappear in the real world; his body just stayed there, temporarily vacant. I rose with him, noting with interest the silvery cord that connected him back to his flesh, and emerged into the negative-space glittering fairyland that was the aetheric plane. It got more beautiful every time I visited, I discovered. Maybe my Djinn eyes were still adjusting, but whatever caused it, the colors were stronger this time, the glitter and shimmer and depth of them more intense. Lewis had an aura like milk glass, cool at the moment but far stronger than anything I’d seen on a human before. Not like a Djinn aura, either. Something… unique.

Human voices didn’t carry well up here, so he touched me and pointed. I grabbed on to him—he was still solid here, and more or less the same in form—and we began to move across the landscape, heading up and at an angle to the right.

Way up. Way, way up. The earth curved away beneath us at the edges, pearl-bright and beautiful, misted in clouds. He kept pulling me. I felt what little resistance there was to aetheric travel—and there had to be some, for reasons of not-so-simple physics— begin to lessen. We were reaching the edges of where it was safe for a Warden to go.

I let go of him and hovered next to him. He lifted his hand again and pointed. This time I could feel the force of will that went with it, the compulsion that would guide me to the destination.

Way the hell out there. Farther than even Patrick had taken me.

Into someplace that, in this reality, wasn’t even really space.

I had no choice, I found; I was already moving. I felt Lewis’s hand touch me one last time, gently, as I darted away, swimming like a fast, elegant mermaid through that sea of increasingly thin resistance.

I set myself to glide the rest of the way, and before long I saw it. Not so much a presence as an absence; space out here was big and empty and a kind of neutral gray, shot here and there with fleeting speckles of power being transferred from one place to another. I braked myself, spreading thin against the barely felt touch of the sun, and hovered, considering the problem. The Void didn’t manifest itself here, on this plane. I’d have to go up to see it.

Up from the aetheric are other levels, but David had already warned me not to go exploring on my own without a guide; David, however, was nowhere to be seen. And I had a compulsion.

Three layers up was the highest possible level of the known universe, at least the highest we could reach. Its most primitive, primal form. The black-and-white template for the sixteen million colors used back on Earth. It was hard to focus on anything for long, because there were no familiar landmarks, nothing that conformed to human sensibilities. Just swirls, drifts, eddies. I couldn’t even get a sense of the rhythm of the place, although I was sure it had one. Either the heartbeat was so simple and subtle it defied detection, or so complex and multilayered I couldn’t hope to understand it. Either way, not helpful.

It took me a while, watching, to realize that there was a kind of order to the chaos.

Everything moved the same direction. It moved in circles, sometimes, but the circles were always counterclockwise, just like the flow of the wind-fluid-matter stream.

There was one area moving the other direction. Clockwise. I focused on it, stared hard, and felt a kind of absence there, a kind of gray confusion. It didn’t want to be found, this thing. It was a trap door into our world, and it was designed to stay hidden. I drifted slowly over to it, moving against the current, and paused at the very edges of the spiral.

It felt like… nothing. In fact, I couldn’t even be sure that I’d touched it at all, except visually, where the fog phased into a bluish color as it came into contact with my presently-not-solid form. Was that good? I couldn’t tell. My senses weren’t helping me out at all on this one. As far as I could tell, this swirling eddy looked just like all the other swirling eddies, except that this one went right instead of left. Not a lot to go on, really. I would have preferred a nice big sign that said this way to the void, but I supposed I’d have to settle for what I could get.

I reached for the hot golden flow of Lewis’s power, and began the strange job of closing off the rift. Where I touched the moving pool of energy, I sampled the normal space around it and began replicating it over the tear. It was a little like darning— take good material, stretch it over bad stuff, tack it in place.

It was also hard. The stuff kept slipping under my touch, trying to writhe away. Definitely not just some hole in space. This thing was alive, and it didn’t like me. I persisted. It resisted. Little by little, I gained on it.

I was almost done when it gave one last, convulsive twist, turned, and jumped right out of the fabric of space and tore into me.

If it had been the normal world I’d have stumbled backwards, screamed, and tried to slap the thing off of me; it was definitely, horribly alive. What was worse, I couldn’t even really sense it. If I lost sight of it…

I wrapped both hands around it—or what passed for hand-equivalents here—and began to squeeze. All of Lewis’s potential flooded into me, concentrated into my grip and gave it world-crushing strength.

I felt the thing give with a hot little pop. It dissolved into a rain of silvery light, cold and glittering and totally undetectable as soon as it passed beyond my aura.

I’d seen that stuff before. Where?… with David. On the aetheric level. He’d thought it was odd then.

Now I knew where it had come from.

The rip tore open again and started whirling widdershins again. Oh man… that hadn’t gone well. As I brushed my hand over the surface I saw that sparkle again, saw the fireflies leaping out, away, into the primal essence of the universe.

This was really, really not good. And now I had ripple effects to deal with from the rip coming open again. That had sent shock waves of power throughout the planes—I’d felt it myself, like a sonic boom in my soul.

I left that plane and took the express down, and I didn’t like what I was seeing. Swirling clouds of silver fog on the next level. Hot invisible winds that stank of sulfur on the next.

In the aetheric, power was swirling like dust caught on the leading edge of a storm. I dropped back down next to Lewis, who was busy trying to get control of the thing—not a task for one Warden, no matter how powerful—and I quickly reached out to amplify what he was doing, pulling back waves of charged particles, changing the frequencies of vibrating and propagating wave forms. I started negative canceling waves to try to flatten out the effects, and felt Lewis’s burst of affirmation. Yes! We did it together, leveling, smoothing, pouring figurative oil on the literal waters.

I took hold of Lewis and pulled him down to the real-world level again. He thumped back into his body with a little plucked-string sound that was probably audible only on levels a Djinn could hear. I did the hi-I’m-naked-no-I’m-not thing again, wishing Patrick weren’t so intensely scoping me out, and realized I had my hand flat against Lewis’s chest. Mmm. The crisp, cool feel of his cotton shirt under my skin, the warm tingle of body underneath…

If I thought I’d been flying high after the decorating, I was definitely pulling g-forces now. My whole body was humming and vibrating, like it had just been through the best sex of its life.

“Wow,” I said involuntarily, and then blushed and dropped my hand and stepped back. “Um… did we…”

“Afraid not,” Lewis said. Was that a nice flush to his cheeks? Sure looked like it. “The rip’s still there, I can feel it. Now we’ve got other problems to take care of.”

“The waves?” I wasn’t talking about the ocean, but the aetheric; he got the reference.

“There’s a pretty severe widespread disturbance, and it’s running through all the manifestations. There’s stress under the tectonic plates in California. There’s a supercell forming out in the Atlantic. There’s a forest fire starting in Yellowstone.” That gave me a hot twitch of memory. Yellowstone was very sensitive to powerful forces, and once it got going, even the combined might of the Fire Wardens was only going to slow it down. Having emergencies manifest in three different ways would split the ability of the Wardens to act effectively—the Earth Wardens couldn’t get in to help the Fire Wardens contain any blaze; the Weather Wardens couldn’t help dump water to slow it down. If each of them had their own separate but equal crisis…

He gave me a very direct look. “I promised you it would be one favor. Not two.” He took the empty bottle out of his pocket and held it up. “I’ll keep my word.”

“I know.” I did. Lewis wasn’t a saint, thank God, but he was definitely a man of ethics and honor. “I’m releasing you from it. Not only did I not close the rip, I think I might have made it worse. Besides, you need me for this. There’s something majorly weird about this.”

He bent his head, an old-fashioned gesture of salute and gratitude. It occurred to me, late and strangely, that he had no alter ego presence in Oversight. Lewis was Lewis, whatever set of eyes I used to look at him. I was used to seeing humans as they thought of themselves—a plain girl as a ravishing beauty, a corporate-type guy as a knight in shining armor. But Lewis didn’t have any illusions, or any false fronts. He just was.

“Let’s get to work,” he said. His voice was husky, low, and full of an emotion he didn’t want me to hear.

Lewis took over where he was strongest—manipulating the earth itself, struggling to bleed off energy that was building up to a major break-California-off-into-the-ocean explosion. I went to the sea.

The Atlantic, on its best days, doesn’t have the peace of the Pacific—the light is different, out here. The waves seem glassier, more knife-edged, and the sense of something moving under the surface is very strong. I sped along on the aetheric and formed myself back into human flesh, but kept myself hovering about ten feet over the surface of the water, feeling the energy flow. This hadn’t changed. I still had the instincts of a Weather Warden, even if I no longer had the same physical channels.

The ocean was cool and edgy underneath me, muttering in the language of power; there was something unsettled here, but it wasn’t the usual evaporative cycle stirring up trouble in the troposphere or mesosphere. No, this was something else. Nothing I could sense, specifically, and that worried me. I traced the cooling and warming cycle. Sunlight on water, evaporating drops to mist… mist rising, cooling as it went… droplets drawing each other into close embrace, forming clouds… clouds growing denser as the drops crowded closer, and energy was released… warm air up, cold air sinking, pressing out the clouds into energy-storing layers.

Nothing unusual here. But there was something wrong.

Something in the clouds. Something that shouldn’t be there.

It was—what?

I rose up, feeling the mist chill on my skin, sliding like invisible rain… then the drops forming, soaking my denim shirt. I was heavy with dew. The air had the metallic taste of ozone, and it scraped the back of my throat when I pulled in a cool, thick breath.

I saw a tinkle of blue at the corner of my eye.

And then I knew.

Shit!

I flamed out of there, fast, blew myself into mist and reformed and hoped I hadn’t taken in too much of it, and then I bugged out of there, arrowing for Lewis at top speed.

I almost ran into Patrick, who was still ambling around his house, staring morosely at the politically correct ceiling; I didn’t stop to apologize, just misted right through him and braked myself out into human form. Way better this time. Apparently, panic greatly enhanced my organizational skills.

“It’s the sparkly stuff!” I yelled. Lewis wasn’t there, at least he wasn’t in spirit; he was out of his body again, up in the aetheric. I shot up a level, followed the thread, found him doing whatever it is Earth Wardens do to control earthquakes. Not that I’m not sympathetic to the damage a big shake can cause, but once I spotted him I tackled him like a noseguard, snapped him right out of the aetheric and down into himself with a thud.

He staggered, braced himself with a hand on the back of the leather couch, and smacked the other onto his forehead. Owww. I’m guessing that I’d hurt him.

“What?” he yelled at me.

“It’s the goddamn blue stuff! Fairy dust! Sparklies!” I repeated, louder than him. “Listen, when I tried to seal this thing, it sent out this puff of— coldlight. Looks like glitter. I didn’t think it was anything, really. But it’s here!”

“What?” He was still dazed. I’d given him a hell of a shot.

“It’s here in the clouds. And this crap is weird, Lewis. I can’t really feel it, I can only see it when I touch it. It has a kind of—sparkle.”

“Sparkle?” His eyes had taken on a hard, opaque shine. “You slammed me out of there and disrupted me for a sparkle? Tell me you’re kidding—”

“Listen!” I yelled over him. “It’s everywhere! It’s in everything! It shouldn’t be here!”

He was starting to get it. The opacity was fading out of his eyes, being replaced by a clear, deep look of alarm.

“I don’t know what the hell it’s doing, or how the hell to stop it. Tell me you know.”

His mouth opened, but there wasn’t an answer forthcoming. In fact, he looked downright speechless.

“Oh hell,” I supplied for both of us. “I’m glad you’re the boss, because as far as I can tell, we’re totally fucked.”

Next stop: panic city. Everybody out for the apocalypse.

Big problem. There was nothing wrong with the weather patterns over the Atlantic, anyone with an ounce of Weather sense could tell. And yet, the supercell shouldn’t have been there, according to physics. It made absolutely no sense. If I’d still been in the Wardens, I knew there would have been conference calls in progress, with people eyeing this thing from different sides and trying to figure out what the hell was going on. I wondered if they could see the sparklies, and I thought they probably couldn’t. Whatever the stuff was, it barely radiated in a wavelength Djinn could see, much less humans. No, I was pretty sure that they wouldn’t be able to figure it out.

Which left me, and Lewis, and maybe Patrick. And any other Djinn we could convince to take a look.

“Clearly,” I said as Lewis and Patrick and I compared notes, “this stuff’s not natural to our planes of existence. Can you see it?”

I’d directed the question to Lewis, and he indicated a no. “Everything looks normal up on the aetheric.”

“Yeah. That’s what bugs me. Because it doesn’t look at all normal to me.” I couldn’t sit still; I got up and paced, wished I had on something besides blue denim and work boots, because this was a situation that screamed for bitchen black leather and tight boots. These boots are made for walkin‘… “The stuff’s like evil pollen. Who knew it could sift through three planes of existence and end up here so fast?”

“Unless it’s been coming through the rift for a while,” Lewis said. “That’s possible. The fact that you just now saw it might have nothing to do with it, really. If it’s something subtle and largely undetectable, we could have a problem that’s been slowly getting worse.”

“It’s not pollen,” Patrick said. He was in the far corner of the living room now, straightening a Monet landscape under the recessed lights. “From your description, it’s more like radiation. You said that David tried to seal some in an energy bubble?”

“Yeah. Didn’t work.”

“That’s very interesting,” Patrick said, and stepped back to admire the Monet from a distance. “That means that the normal aetheric barriers can’t stop it, because they’re all energy-based. This… coldlight, for lack of a better word… seems very dangerous indeed.”

Lewis looked up from his contemplation of the carpet. “We don’t even know that it is dangerous.”

“It issues from a hole into the Void where demons lie,” Patrick pointed out. “It’s rare that something of that pedigree turns out to be happy fairy dust.”

“Not that I doubt you, but are you sure it’s not just that you’re not used to your new senses yet?” Lewis asked me. Which was, actually, not a stupid question at all.

“I don’t know,” I said, with a great deal less arrogance and a great deal more honesty than I usually had. “Ask him, he’s got a few centuries on me.”

Patrick was rambling the apartment again, looking lost and morose; he was milking it, of course. Not like he couldn’t have fixed everything back the way it was, if he’d wanted. Maybe he was adjusting to it. “What?” he asked, although I knew he’d been listening to every word. We’d been a lot more interesting than the stacked bowl of Chinese ornamental balls on the coffee table. “Bother. I can’t give an opinion until I’ve had a look.”

“Then come on.” I held out my hand. He ignored that, put his arm around me, and copped a feel. Which, thankfully, was a little insulated by the sensible denim that Lewis had chosen for me to wear. I moved his hand without more than a sidelong look, and up and away we went.

Well, Patrick said, in the way Djinn have of communicating up there in the aetheric, that’s different.

We hung there for a while, watching the storm rotating and building while the fragile milk-glass bursts of power came from all sides, like flashbulbs going off around a celebrity. Wardens at work. They looked weirdly anemic to me, now, but I could feel the hot blue pulse of other Djinn focusing and defining that force, putting it to precision work.

The only trouble was that there was nothing to fix here—nothing that could be fixed. The storm was slowly building. I’d already tried all the traditional stuff—disrupting the convection engine that was feeding the process; adding cooling layers underneath to isolate the updrafts; bringing in strong dry winds to shred the structure of the thing.

Nothing worked. And the Wardens who were trying it now were clearly singing from the same choir book, so we were going to be well into the second verse soon which would be, in the immortal words of Herman’s Hermits, the same as the first.

Look, I said to Patrick, braced for it, and trailed a very small part of myself through the mist.

A blue, sparkling pocket galaxy flared where I touched. I shook myself—how was it possible for my flesh to creep when I didn’t even have a body? — and watched the shining stuff float free like a festive, toxic cloud. Patrick’s low, pulsing aura backed hastily away from it.

What the hell is it? I asked him. I got a hot orange pulse of alarm in response. Okay, were there actual words with that?

Not ones I’d care to repeat in English, he sent back. I suppose the nearest equivalent would be, I haven’t the vaguest fucking idea. Nor do I have any desire to. And I’m leaving before I have a much closer acquaintance with it. I suggest you get your ass out of here as well. Now.

He vanished instantly. Talk about bugging out— he wasted no time at all. I’d never seen a Djinn have a panic attack, but that looked like one to me. And hell, I was kind of having one myself. Not feeling especially fine about my part in all this.

I bugged out right on his tail, and followed the contrail back home. We touched down into the newly renovated apartment at the same time, and this time I managed the reconstitution without any R rating. Once I thought of it as math—higher math, but still math—all I had to do was expand the equation of me to include the outfit. Better still, it was simple to vary it. Change a variable, here and there, and you get something suitable for wearing to a star-spangled party. Or a bag lady convention.

The one thing I could not seem to get right—still— was hair. Well, I’d never been a wizard at it in my mortal life, either. Maybe I was just destined to be curly.

Patrick wasn’t thinking about my hair; he was thinking about what he’d seen and backed hastily away from. He pointed a shaking finger at me, couldn’t think of anything to say, and swung around on Lewis, who had arrested a restless pacing to stare at the two of us.

“You!” Patrick snapped. “If you’d just left well enough alone…”

Lewis made no reply. He just resumed pacing.

“How did this get to be Lewis’s fault?” I blurted, and then wished I hadn’t. I mean, obviously, it got to be his fault because he’d ordered me to meddle. Dammit. “Cancel that. What I meant was, what do we do now?”

“Yell for help. Loudly. Repeatedly.” Patrick walked over to the telephone—a tasteful cream-colored unobtrusive one, to replace the Harley-Davidson model he’d been using before—and started dialing. “And then take a very long vacation, someplace else.”

Which I didn’t think would do a damn bit of good, because if this stuff had seeped down this far, it had probably contaminated the higher levels, too. Unless he meant Aruba, which was probably not glitter-free either, but still very nice this time of year.

“I’ll tell the Wardens,” Lewis said. “But I’d like to do it in person. Jo—?”

“Who are you calling?” I asked Patrick, since Lewis hadn’t phrased it in the form of an order and was probably too polite to do it for at least another five minutes. Patrick finished dialing a number that was too long to be to any country on Earth. He didn’t speak, just hung up the phone. I understood instinctively what he’d been doing—not dialing a phone, in any real way, but using the metaphorical human device to send a message through the aetheric, a kind of sympathetic magic. I even knew who he was calling. “Oh, God, you’re calling Jonathan.”

“Who won’t show his face,” Patrick said, with a bitter-lemon twist of his lips that made me wonder just how comfortable that relationship was. “He doesn’t leave his house.”

“Why?”

“Because it doesn’t exist on any of the planes. It’s a kind of…” Patrick paused for thought. “Bubble, I suppose you’d say. It’s for all of our protection. If Jonathan was ever claimed, the consequences… Let’s say they wouldn’t be good. Not good at all.”

So maybe Jonathan’s plush little refuge wasn’t by his choice. Which made me wonder just who really was in charge, among my new friends and family. Politics. Still hate ‘em. Djinn politics just made my head hurt worse than human ones.

Ten seconds or less later, I felt a kind of shift in the room, like some balance of energy had tipped. It was subtle, but it made me wonder…

… and then Rahel walked out of the master bedroom, examining her talons with a critical, casual grace. She looked up, acknowledged Patrick with a fast, white glint of teeth in her dark-skinned face, and then slowly took stock of the room.

“Love the makeover,” she said. “Since I doubt you grew any taste since last I saw you, I imagine Sistah Snow was behind it. Yes?”

Her smile faded fast when we started talking. A quick trip to the aetheric to show her the contamination, and back down to reality to see Rahel’s completely unnerving frown. Her eyes were glowing, hot and gold, and she just looked, well, strong. Strong enough to dissolve me into a sticky pool on the carpet just with the force of that stare.

“I’m sorry,” I said. It was totally inadequate.

She didn’t blink. “Not your fault,” she said, which was not at all what I expected to hear. “This is something I have never seen, either. I would have done the same, if I had been given the same order. With perhaps exactly the same result.”

“So what do we do?” Lewis asked.

A short, pregnant silence. Her stare didn’t seem quite so menacing, but it was still as intense as a laser.

“I think,” she said slowly, and transferred the gaze to Lewis, “that perhaps I should consult with Jonathan and find a way to make this right. You stay here. The fewer who travel the aetheric, the better, until we know what the consequences might be.”

“I’ll go,” I said.

Rahel looked at me sharply, and unpleasant recognition dawned in cat-bright eyes. “Ah,” she said. “I did not see it at first, because it changed you very little. But still you’re claimed, aren’t you? And chained.”

“It’s not so bad,” I said. “All the buildup, I was expecting something a lot worse.”

“A good master makes a good servant.” She leaned on the word servant with a heavy weight of disdain. “I don’t think this is at all wise. Lewis, you should know better.”

“I wouldn’t have claimed her if you’d given me a choice.”

Ouch, the look that swept between them was like two master fencers, lunge and parry and riposte faster than thought. Lewis certainly felt comfortable around Djinn. I wondered when familiarity had happened to breed that particular contempt.

“I am not your slave,” Rahel said.

“Apparently, you don’t believe in working for a living, either.”

“Sssst!” It was less a sound than a burst of electricity from her, snapping like a whip. It didn’t touch Lewis. I don’t think he even flinched. “Djinn did not make this portal, did not create this pollution you speak of. Humans meddled in things they didn’t understand, and this is the result. Chaos.”

“Djinn being perfect.”

“More perfect than…”

“Excuse me,” I said loudly, “can we please focus on the problem? Because I for one don’t really feel this is getting us anywhere.”

Rahel looked murderous. Junior half-Djinn were not supposed to get uppity, apparently.

“Where’s David?” I asked.

She favored me with something that looked dangerously close to a sneer.

“Running to your savior?” she asked, sweet as a batch of overcooked fudge. “Jonathan has a use for him. You’re to learn to fly for yourself, little bird.”

“Fine. Then let’s go see Jonathan,” I said.

She stopped me with an outstretched hand. Did the fingernails look longer and sharper? Yeah. Definitely. “Slaves do not go there.”

“Excuse me?”

She flicked her eyes toward Lewis. “Nor do humans. I will go. Not you.”

“She’s not a slave,” Lewis said, and stepped into Rahel’s space. He was taller, broader, but I couldn’t be sure he was stronger. In fact, the chances of him even holding his own against her were thin. “She’s an ally. I don’t suppose you get the concept.”

“An ally who accepts any order you choose to issue, no matter how degrading? Who has no choice but to comply?” Rahel swept me with a hard look. “Do not fool yourself, little Snow. A slave with a kind master is still a slave.” The look ripped Lewis, too. “And a slave’s master has no honor.”

“Maybe I’m crazy, but I have the strong feeling that if we don’t get this straightened out, it may not matter whether I’m free or not. Everybody gets the same crappy deal.”

“Likely you’re correct.” She quirked her head to the side, an alien-looking catlike movement that made me jump a little. “And yet I will not take you.”

Fine. I plopped down on the comfortable brown leather sofa and put my work-booted feet up on the coffee table. “I’ll just sit and watch the world get eaten, then. Hey, be sure to call me if the apocalypse comes. I need to get some 400-speed film, make sure I get good pictures.”

She gave me a snarl, and vanished. Whoosh. There was a breeze—displacement of air—and I transferred my stare to Patrick. He looked blank and angelic. Put a red suit on him, and he could be handing out candy in a mall and asking kids what they wanted Santa to bring them.

“You’re not going?” I asked.

He cleared his throat. “Let’s say that I’m not welcome in those particular circles.”

“Because of the way you were made Djinn?”

“Among other things.” He shrugged. “I’ve learned to live with disappointment.” He stretched out his arms and manifested a light camel-colored coat, something appropriate for a spring day. “I have not, however, learned to live with this… redecorating. I believe I’ll go for a walk. Call me if the world ends, there’s a dear.”

He blipped out. I stared at the spot where he’d been, frowning and wishing I still lived in a world where people used doors.

Lewis ambled around and settled down next to me.

“So,” he said.

“So,” I agreed. “Son of a bitch.”

“Who, me?”

“The situation.”

“Ah.” He rubbed his hands lightly together. “Guess I’d better get back to work. I’ve got the pressure mostly relieved in the plates around the San Andreas, but I need to get a team of Earth Wardens on it. And the Fire Wardens need the tip-off about the Yellowstone fire, too.”

He glanced over at me, eyebrows up.

“What?” I asked.

“That was a codependent way of asking you to do it for me.”

“You want me to run your errands? Bite me, Lewis.” After Rahel’s rather rabble-rousing speeches about slavery, I wasn’t feeling any too subservient. “How’d the rip form in the first place?”

“I don’t know,” Lewis said. “Like Rahel said, this is new. I’ve never heard of this stuff coming through before. It’s almost always a demon, reaching through to put the Mark on a human; once the Mark matures, they can make the crossing to the human plane directly, without going through the aetheric levels. Safer for them. But this stuff…”

“Maybe it can be destroyed.”

“We don’t even know what it does.”

“Yeah, but even so I think we’d better work from Patrick’s theory: Nothing good ever comes out of the Void…”

I stopped, hesitated. There was something…

“Jo?” He was staring at me, wide-eyed. I wondered how bright my eyes had just flared.

“Stay here,” I said, and got up to take a look around.

The first thing I spotted after passing into the kitchen was the almost-there shadow of Patrick’s Ifrit, hiding in the gloom behind. Watching me. That predatory interest made hair stand up on my neck.

“Hey,” I said to it, and took a step closer. She shrank farther into shadow—not aggressive today, certainly not the ripping, shrieking fiend that Patrick had set on me just yesterday in training sessions. “Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you.”

“It’s not you I’m afraid of,” it said. “Don’t blame him for this. He doesn’t understand.”

“Understand what?”

“It will kill all of you.”

For some reason, I didn’t have any doubt about what it was. “You can see it? This light? You know, the glitter?” She nodded, or at least I thought she did. “Do you know what it is?”

“Yes.” A bare, sighing breath. I felt myself tense up. “Knowing will not help you.”

“Why?”

“It does not help me.”

Great, Ifrit were just as evasive as Djinn when it came to the important stuff. “Look, just tell me, if you know. What is this stuff? How do we stop it?”

“It is life,” she whispered. “It is love. It is death.”

Point taken—Ifrit were more evasive. “How about in more, you know, technical terms…?”

She seemed to be trying to tell me, struggling to describe something that she didn’t have a language to cover. “It has happened before.”

“But Rahel said…”

“She was not told.”

“Sara…”

“Do not say my name!” It was a cry of mortal pain. “You don’t understand. Love consumes. Love must consume.”

I heard Lewis say something from the other room, his voice rising into a question.

“Lewis?” I called.

The Ifrit said, “He is a man. Men are weak. They don’t always see…” Was she talking about Lewis? Patrick? I had no idea, but she wasn’t making any sense that existed in my reality. Ifrits were crazy, I knew that much already. “You must choose. I could not.”

“Okay,” I said, and held up my hands in surrender. “I’ll choose. No problem. Ah… Lewis?”

I backed away—not quite confident enough to give her my undefended back—and came out into the living room again.

Patrick was back, and he’d brought friends. Two of them, to be precise. He was in the process of taking his coat off and hanging it on a tacky-looking gold rack—had I put that there? Ack! — while the other two looked around, evidently checking out my interior decorating skills. I didn’t know the kid— sixteen, seventeen at most—who stood looking pale and mutinous and typically disaffected; he pushed hands into his pants pockets and slumped in a don’t-notice-me attitude. He needed a haircut, but that was probably just the generation gap talking.

The woman had her back to me, but those curves looked familiar.

“Patrick?” I asked. His too-blue eyes flashed to me, and then away. He looked uncomfortably guilty. “What’s up?”

Lewis was up off the couch, now, too, clearly wary. He didn’t like drop-in visitors any more than I did, especially not right now, when things were so… weird.

“I’m sorry,” Patrick said. “You see, I had a preexisting commitment.”

“Sorry…?”

“A business partner,” he said, and indicated the woman, who was still studying the Mondrian with her back to me. “We have something of a barter arrangement. I owe her something.”

She turned, finally, and it took me a few seconds before the memory ball dropped. Yvette Prentiss, from my funeral. She was out of uniform—no lace dress—but the skintight jeans with lace insets on the sides and the tight lace shirt, no bra in evidence, made a definite fashion statement. The statement said, Hi, I’m a total slut, climb aboard and ride me like a rented pony. Bear in mind, this is coming from a girl with a finely honed appreciation for trashy outfits. I once spent two hundred bucks on a pair of thigh-high patent leather boots, just to say I owned them. But there are limits.

Her eyes widened, and kept on widening. On her, that looked sexy. Her pouty, collagen-enhanced lips parted. “Oh,” she whispered, low in her throat. “I know you.”

“Yvette?” Lewis had stepped into the conversational gap. He took a couple of steps closer, and extended his hand. “We met at the—”

“Memorial service,” she supplied, looking past him at me. “For her.”

Lewis turned and looked, too, as if he’d forgotten all about that. “Well… yes. She’s—”

“—Djinn.” How sweet, they were finishing each other’s sentences. Lewis still had hold of her hand. I didn’t care for that at all, but I could see from the warm, oh-so-sexy smile she favored him with that she liked it just fine. “Thank you, Patrick. But you know she’s not exactly what I was looking for.”

Patrick cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Yes. Well, another small problem… she’s already been claimed.”

Yvette’s smile died a fast, ugly death. Her prettiness had a hard edge to it, I found, like a razor blade under velvet. “This isn’t what we agreed.”

“I know.” He helplessly indicated Lewis. “There were… considerations.”

Her green eyes locked onto Lewis’s face and held there. The smile came back, but I didn’t trust it. I couldn’t tell from Lewis’s bemused expression if he was even paying attention to anything but the generously revealed swell of her chest.

“Of course,” she said. “Well, I’m flattered to meet you again… sorry, I didn’t catch your name…?”

“Call me Lewis,” he said. She was pretty much the last person I’d pick to know who he was, but I could tell he didn’t feel the same way. “You were looking for a Djinn?”

“Well, yes.” She looked sad-clown distressed, but not enough that it made her look less than stunningly attractive. “I’m afraid mine—well, a friend of mine needed his services. I’m currently without support. I was hoping to persuade your friend to work for me. Temporarily. It’s important.”

Lot of that going around. I folded my arms and tried to look threatening. Neither of them paid the least bit of attention. Patrick wouldn’t meet my gaze, either. The kid was roaming the room, checking out the stuff. He looked back over at Yvette, who nodded slightly, and went back to messing with movables, picking them up and putting them down. Checking for price tags? Jeez.

“I’m afraid she’s booked up,” he said. “But maybe there’s something I can do for you.”

Her eyes raked him up and down. Blatantly. “I’m sure that’s perfectly true.” She giggled.

He laughed. I hadn’t heard Lewis laugh in—well, I don’t think I’d ever heard him laugh. Not a yuk-it-up kind of guy, generally. His humor was quiet, his sexuality—well, until now, I would have thought it was kind of subdued.

“Nothing I can do to change your mind?” she asked, and looked up at him from under thick lashes. Moved closer. “You look like you’d drive a hard… bargain.”

I rolled my eyes, thought about picking up the phone. Hello, Central Casting? Are you missing your Seducto-Bitch stereotype? Surely he could see it was an act.

“I’ve been known to… bargain,” he said, and smiled at her. Was that a leer? Was he actually flirting with Miss Artificial Intelligence of 2003? “Maybe later we could—”

She arched against him like he was a pole and she was the stripper. “How about a little negotiating session now?”

This time, I did find my voice. “Ah, excuse me?”

She put her hands in his pockets, pulling him groin to groin for a vertical lapdance. He was trying to step away, but not really putting any effort into it. More of the token I’m-a-nice-guy-but-I-can-be-persuaded sort of resistance. I knew, because I’d done the female version of it often enough. And hey, once with Lewis.

David hadn’t liked her. Not at all. And I was more than willing to go with David’s instincts, especially when mine were screaming bloody murder.

“Not now,” Lewis said absently to me. Which was not quite an order, but had the definite aroma of one. And I didn’t like that at all.

“Hey!” This time I put some lung power into it. “Lewis! Use the big brain. What the hell does she want? And if you think that for one minute I’m going to work for this cut-rate road show temptress…”

Her hand came out of Lewis’s pocket.

She was holding the small perfume vial in her hand, and a small plastic stopper. My bottle. I felt a lurch, as if gravity was shifting, and felt a sickening sense of despair close over me. Oh God…

Lewis pulled free and shoved her back. His eyes went wide. He reached out for the perfume bottle, grabbed hold of her wrist…

… and the kid, who’d been examining a heavy glass bowl, lunged forward and hit him in the head with it. Lewis staggered and went to his hands and knees. The kid—tall, gawky, pale, his knuckles white around the edges of the leaded glass—raised it for another blow.

“Stop!” I yelled, and reached out to give him the most powerful whammy that I still had at my command.

“No, you stop. Right there.” Yvette’s cool, southern-smoothed voice. I jerked to a halt. Utterly, completely out of control. No, in her control. She was holding my bottle, and that meant she was holding me, too. Body and soul.

“Now, is that really necessary?” Patrick asked weakly, and waved at the boy and Lewis. “You have what you want. There’s no need for all this violence—”

“Shut up, Patrick,” Yvette snapped. Patrick winced and turned away, shoulders hunched. He raised his hands in surrender.

Lewis was still trying to get to her, crawling slowly now, blood dripping out of his hairline to spatter the flesh-pale carpet. His voice was weak and deep in his throat. “Jo, go, get out—”

“You. Do not move,” Yvette said, precisely. Nailing me in place as the boy with the glass bowl advanced again, skittishly, aiming for another swing at Lewis’s head. “Kevin. Do it.”

“No!” She hadn’t made me stop talking, just moving. I screamed it as the boy lifted the heavy bowl. I reached desperately for power…

But Lewis got there first.

The bowl shattered into sharp-edged, spinning pieces in the kid’s hands. He cursed and dropped it, shaking cuts; more blood flew out at velocity to spray the walls.

He kicked Lewis in the head, taking his anger out on the nearest and most helpless target. Lewis went down. Stayed down. I couldn’t see him from where I was, pinned in place by Yvette’s merciless command.

Patrick rounded on them, shouting, “That’s enough! No more!”

The boy stopped, panting. His face was corpse-pale, shining with sweat.

“You planning on getting righteous on me now?” Yvette asked. If she was perturbed that Patrick had just ordered her teen psycho around, she didn’t let it show. “Where are you planning to get your next meal for your beloved Sara? You going to ask him for it?”

“Just—stop.” Patrick swallowed hard, fists clenched. “Not in my house. I’ll not allow this.”

“But you’d allow this.” Yvette pulled a frosted glass bottle from a purse she’d dropped in the corner. Rattled it suggestively. Popped the rubber cap on the top.

A Djinn formed. A man, gorgeous, a study in gold and bronze. He looked utterly delicious, except for the stark terror in his eyes. He started to back away, but she froze him in place with a whispered command, and walked all around him, trailing her fingers over his gleaming skin.

I remembered something David had said. They had appetites in common. Well, I knew Bad Bob Biringanine’s appetites well enough to be sickened by that.

Patrick went sickly pale and protested, “Don’t—” but it was too late.

The black shadow of the Ifrit slid around the kitchen door, flowed over carpet.

“I see she’s hungry,” Yvette said, and moved out of the way. “Want to lecture me about morality now, Patrick?”

He hung his head.

The Ifrit leaped like a hunting cat. Ripped into the Djinn with flashing claws, digging deep. The Djinn’s mouth was open, but no sound was coming out. He wasn’t fighting. He was just… dying. Dying horribly. Disintegrating into wisps of bloodred, pain-heavy mist.

She sucked him in through that black gaping maw of a mouth and swallowed him whole. Nothing left. Not even a scream. I was frozen by Yvette’s command, but I wouldn’t have had the courage to run even if I were free. There was something so predatory, so cold in the air…

The Ifrit turned her non-face toward me, sniffing, and I went utterly cold. To stand here and be devoured without a fight was the worst fate I could imagine.

But then she changed. Frosted black skin going pale, smooth, glorious. A glowing waterfall of white hair. Her eyes were the last thing to change, flickering from dead black to a deep dark amethyst.

Sara, as I’d seen her in the dream. She stretched out her arms mutely to Patrick, and collapsed. He rushed to her, picked her up and cradled her in his embrace, lips pressed to the soft waves of her hair.

He was whispering something to her, over and over. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. When he looked up at me, the misery in his eyes hit like a blow. “It’s the only way,” he said. “She has to eat…”

And she ate other Djinn. I couldn’t imagine how lucky I’d been the other night, when he’d put me in a cage match with her, or even when I’d been chatting with her in the kitchen. What had she said in the kitchen? Don’t blame him. She’d known what he was going to do. They’d done it before.

Yvette’s cool green eyes were all over me like sticky hands. She’d forgotten all about Lewis, unconscious on the floor. “You’re like Patrick, then. Human, changed by a Djinn.”

I don’t think I’d ever been so ashamed of my origins. I gave her a burning glare back. “So what does Patrick do for you, to get your castoffs? Besides pimp out whoever he can get his hands on?”

She had the sweetest, most revolting smile. “Why, I don’t think the business details of our arrangement are going to be your concern, pretty girl. No, I think you’d just better concentrate on making my son Kevin very happy.”

Yvette tossed the kid the bottle. He almost fumbled it. I had that one second to move while the bottle was out of her control and passing into his; I used it to race to Lewis’s side and pour what healing energy I had into him.

He was hurt. Badly. I couldn’t do enough, wasn’t good enough.

“What are you doing?” Patrick protested, clearly thrown—not talking to me, but to Yvette.

She rounded on him with clenched fists. “Getting rid of the trash. You think I wanted her? You told me you had a way to get to David.”

“I do!” He nodded at me. “He’ll come for her. As soon as he knows you have her, he’ll come running.”

“He’d better,” she said, and gave him a full smile, with teeth. “If he doesn’t, there’s no place you can hide from me. You know that.” She shot a look at me, and I was struck by the sheer callous indifference in her eyes. “Put your toy away, Kevin. I want to go home.”

The kid clutching the bottle pointed at me and said, “You. In the bottle. Now.”

I had no choice, none at all. I felt myself breaking apart, looked up to see Yvette watching me with dreaming sea green eyes. “Don’t you worry, sweetie,” she said as I was sucked away into gray oblivion. “I’m sure we’ll think of something interesting to do with you.”

You wouldn’t think you could dream in oblivion, but well, there you go. I dreamed I was a child again. Very small, too small to understand the world around me—a toddler, teetering around on stubby uncertain legs and grabbing for anything pretty, shiny, interesting, dangerous.

I dreamed of being held in someone’s arms, maybe my mother’s, with my head pillowed on her shoulder. I remembered rain, falling like perfect diamonds from the soft gray sky. I remembered wind licking cool over my skin. I remembered thunder vibrating through me like the voice of God.

Dreams and memories are so very close to the same thing.

In the dream, in the memory, I fell down on the cool, damp grass and wailed in fright, and there was somebody there, gathering me up, holding me, stroking away the pain and fear and tears.

Shhhh. It was my mother’s voice, warm and blurred the way things are in dreams. They’ll hear you.

I was too young to talk, but somehow I was talking anyway. Who?

Her hands smoothed my hair in gentle, careful strokes. You know.

I did. I cuddled in closer to her warmth. Overhead, the clouds muttered to each other in a language I could almost understand, and I reached out to them and felt them draw closer, all soft edges and cold alien intensity.

They wanted me. I wanted them. In my simple child logic, I thought that meant there was no danger; anything that was interested in me had to be my friend, didn’t it?

I didn’t understand that interest could also be hunger. That there were parts of me that were tender and juicy and oh so delicious, and that the world was full of predators who wanted to scoop out those tasty tidbits. No, I didn’t understand that.

But my mother did. Be careful, she whispered in my ear. Something’s coming. You need to be ready, sweetheart. You need to understand how to see behind the smiles.

What’s behind the smiles? I asked her, in my little-child voice. She showed me teeth. Long, sharp, needle-thin teeth, the better to eat you with, my dear.

Don’t trust anyone, she hissed. And then she let go, and I fell up into the clouds, and felt myself being stripped raw, pulled apart, burned, broken, destroyed.

See, it was just a dream. Or a memory. Or a nightmare.

Except the parts that actually happened.