Heat Stroke

Two

The next thing I knew was a rush of cool, sweet air. I convulsively wanted to breathe but I had no lungs, and no body to hold them. Still, part of me knew what to do. I followed the breeze up, out, into the light.

I came out of the perfume vial, which lay on its side on a Chee·tos-dusted coffee table, right next to a much-creased and sticky edition of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. I ghosted up slowly. It felt like I was drugged stupid, unable to will myself to do anything but wait, drifting, for meaning.

Shit. This was so not working out for the best.

“Uhhhh—”

An uncertain human voice. Soft and hesitant as it was, it still echoed through me like a church bell. Something in me went completely still, waiting. I was focused like a predator waiting to pounce.

This felt nothing at all like what had happened between me and Lewis. Nothing at all. It was perfectly horrible.

“Anybody there?” the voice asked. He sounded scared shitless. Good. Welcome to the club, jerk.

“Yes,” I said—not that I meant to say anything, I just was compelled to respond. My voice sounded odd, because it was coming from the very thin air I was at the moment. I filed that away for later investigation, when and if I got be scientific about such things. “I’m here.”

Oh, God, it was the little bastard who’d beaten Lewis. Lewis… God, I’d left him there. How much would he remember? Was he even still alive? Patrick, you bastard. I’d make damn sure somebody paid for this.

Seen close, Psycho Boy didn’t look nearly as threatening: a gawky, acne-pocked teenager, all long legs and stick-thin arms, wearing a Metallica T-shirt that had seen too many mosh pits. This pimply kid— she’d called him Kevin, oh God, was I supposed to call him Master? — sat on the edge of an unmade bed and tried to look everywhere at once, eyes darting like crazy but paying particular attention to the corners of the room. He had a lot to look at, and none of it was pretty. The place was like a Dumpster right before pickup day, piled with trash, discarded pizza boxes, old cartons smeared with dried Chinese food. A pile of filthy underwear moldered near the bed. A pinup of a collagen-enhanced, silicone-implanted beauty in a metal bra and thong was pinned crookedly on the ceiling, for maximum viewing in the lying-down position.

Oh, I could already tell this was not going to be pretty. Lewis. God, what happened to Lewis?

Kevin shifted nervously on the bed, which creaked like old joints. “Um… I command you to appear!” He tried to sound like some medieval wizard, but he came off like a self-conscious bad actor, and blotched bright red over his cheeks and forehead.

And even so, I responded instantly. My body built itself far quicker and better than it had before, all layers simultaneously, and I felt a certain weird cockeyed pride in that, until I looked down at myself.

Oh God.

You already know, right? Of course you do. High-heeled pumps of the come-fuck-me variety. Thigh-high hose fastened with garters. Lacy thong panties under a tiny little black frilly skirt with a white apron. Black corset top, and believe me, I was now filling it. Generously.

I shuddered, looked up and found my reflection staring back at me in the mirror.

Pale skin, fire engine red pouty lips, eyes of an unsettlingly bright shade of silver. I looked like the porn version of Magenta from Rocky Horror.

Kevin looked shocked. Genuinely shocked. Not as much as I felt, though. When I found David again, I was going to ask some very tough questions about the rules of this particular nasty game.

“Mom!” Kevin yelled, and then went pallid as he instantly thought better of that course of action. He dashed to the closed door of the room—decorated with more soft-porn posters—and clicked over two deadbolt locks in fast succession to lock her out. “Uh, never mind, sorry, mistake!”

He turned to face me, back firmly against the door, and I stared at him. Couldn’t say anything, really. Couldn’t do anything except seethe and wonder what in the hell was happening. She said she wanted David. David had been afraid of that, back at the funeral, I’d sensed it all over him.

Now she had me. Could I warn him away?

I reached for that warm silvery umbilical that stretched into the aetheric, and was relieved to find it still intact. David was still alive, at least, wherever he was and whatever Jonathan had him doing. I tried to send a whisper along the line, but it hit something, some kind of barrier, and died.

When I blinked, I saw a blue coldlight sparkle whirling around me. Oh God. It was not only still there, it was getting worse.

“Who are you?” Kevin asked me, drawing me back to the world. I didn’t feel any compulsion to answer, so I didn’t. I just stared at him. The silver eyes had to be unnerving—hell, they’d unnerved me in the mirror—so I kept them straight and level, boring a hole into him. He got nervously, self-consciously strident. “Hey. I asked you a question! You have to answer.”

No, I didn’t. This kid clearly didn’t have the rule book memorized, because he’d forgotten all about the Rule of Three, which even I had known before meeting my first Djinn. Ask three times, they answer. Anything they tell you before then, forget it.

We are consummate, conscienceless liars. And from the pure cold fury boiling inside of me, I was starting to think we had an extra helping of psychopath to go along with it.

The cold stare was getting to him, all right. I could see it in the nervous tic developing around his left eye, and the quick movements of his hands as he tried to figure out the best way to lounge and look cool under pressure. He finally settled for slouching with his hands in his pockets and going for a half-lidded, defiant stare back at me.

“Nice outfit,” he said. I didn’t smile. The little bastard had done this to me, whether he knew it or not; I had a new appreciation for how little I’d changed when Lewis had claimed me. Obviously, what Lewis wanted and what he saw in me were almost the same things—in retrospect, one hell of a compliment. Kevin wanted a living blow-up doll, apparently. The implications of that were not especially comforting.

He looked pouty when I didn’t respond. “Fine, be that way, I don’t give a crap.”

He did, of course. It only took about another thirty seconds to wait him out. I felt like a participant in Short Attention Span Theater.

“Well?” he snapped, and pushed away from the door. Not much, just a couple of inches, but I still didn’t like it. Better if I could keep him cowed and thoroughly unnerved, but unfortunately the shock was starting to leave him, and now his voice was taking on an unpleasant whiny overtone. “Don’t just stand there like some dumb slut, do something!”

“What would you like me to do?” I asked. I meant it to be sarcastic, but it came out in a sultry, smoky, seductive purr. Gee, wonderful. I had the 1-900 voice to go with the yard sale Frederick’s of Hollywood outfit.

Well, one good thing about the voice, it derailed him completely. He was too hornily captivated to realize that he actually could order me to do things. So far.

This was going to take some real juggling skill. Best thing to do was to take the initiative, and since I didn’t feel anything stopping me, I took a step toward him. I made sure my new stance had that Xena Warrior Princess bad-ass cachet to it.

“What’s your name?” I asked him. He backed up again, lips parted, brown eyes wide and riveted behind the glasses.

“Kevin—Kevin. Kevin Prentiss.” He cleared his throat and tried to make it go deeper than its current punk-kid range. “What’s yours?”

“What do you want it to be?” Because I wasn’t going to have this horny little bastard calling me by my real name. And the twenty questions was a way to waste time.

“Um… Honey?”

I lost my sense of humor. “You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“Really.”

He hadn’t expected resistance. “Um, no?”

“Okay, let me put it this way: You’d better be kidding.”

He blinked. “You’re arguing with me?”

“Of course not,” I purred. I really did. I wasn’t trying to purr, it was just the way things were going today. Apparently, my new voice had a built-in seduction filter. “Why would I argue with you?” Always answer a question with a question.

“I don’t know, but you shouldn’t be arguing with me, you should be—”

“What?” I interrupted, and crossed my arms. It was, not coincidentally, in the classic I Dream of Jeannie pose. Maybe I could change his subconscious wish. Even frothy pink and orange gauze and a blonde horsetail through an organ-grinder-monkey hat would be preferable to slinking around in this outfit.

He licked his lips, watching me. Uh-oh. Not having the desired effect. “You should be obeying me. Like, when I say do something, you should—”

“You haven’t told me to do anything yet,” I pointed out.

“Well, I would if you’d just—”

“Take your time.”

“Let me—”

“Really. Take your time. Think about it. Because you’ve only got three wishes.”

Which was bullshit, but I figured if he didn’t understand the Rule of Three, he probably got his entire Djinn education from Saturday morning cartoons anyway. Man, I really wished I had control of my appearance. Even aside from the currently occurring fashion disaster concerns, it would have been great to do that whole Arabian Nights shtick, half-misted. Plus, no teenage boy is going to assume he can screw a girl with mist for legs.

“Just… three?” He sounded breathless. Oh boy. Tell me he hadn’t worked these out in advance.

It was too late to switch it to one wish. Damn.

He opened his mouth to blurt out something that I just knew was going to involve hot oil and rubber sheets, so I jumped in with, “You really ought to think about it first. It’s like making a deal with the devil. There’s always some loophole that ends up turning things sour. Like, you say that you want a million dollars. I give you a million dollar life insurance policy and kill you. See?”

He stopped, mouth still open far enough that I could see some cavities forming on his back molars. Then he got a sly, shallow look in those brown eyes, and closed his mouth and smiled.

“You’re trying to stall,” he said. “You’re afraid of me.”

Well, yeah. I’d already seen the dark side of Kevin, as he kicked Lewis in the face with every evidence of sociopathic glee. “Am not.”

“Are too.”

“Not.”

“Too.”

We both jumped at a sudden rattle of the doorknob. It jiggled back and forth briskly, three times, and went still. An annoyed female voice said, “Kevin? What are you up to in there?”

“Nothing!” His voice went into the boy’s choir range and cracked. “Mom, a little privacy?”

It took me a minute, but I placed the voice with the wish-I-could-forget-it memory of Yvette Prentiss dry-humping Lewis just before all of the trouble began. Mom? Well, she’d certainly got started early, if she was old enough to have a son Kevin’s age; she didn’t look a minute over thirty. Sure, flawless makeup, Botox and lots of spa treatments could work wonders, but not that many.

I suspected she was the trophy stepmother, stuck with the unattractively teenaged son-by-marriage. The father was obviously out of the picture, no doubt dead, and the kid was one of those ugly iron candelabras you get as a Christmas present and don’t dare give away because, well, what would people think? Yvette sure hadn’t been dragging the anchor that was Kevin around at my funeral. Would have spoiled her perfect image, not to mention harshed her chances for scoring another bad, rich daddy.

Or maybe I was doing her a disservice. Maybe she’d been knocked up at age thirteen, courageously endured the pregnancy, overcome daunting odds to be a good mother to her obnoxious-going-on-creep of a kid. Maybe she was just looking out for the two of them the best way she knew how, using the natural advantages she’d been given.

Uh-huh. And I was Mother Teresa in a Magenta outfit. Riiiiiight. She’d used the kid to commit assault, at the very least. Homicide was certainly still a possibility. God, Lewis…

The doorknob rattled again. Loudly. Longly.

“Open up!” Yvette snapped. She didn’t sound like a courageous Madonna figure. She sounded like a bitch with a bad attitude. “Right now, Kevin, or I swear…!”

“Um, okay, okay, coming—” Kevin threw me a help me! look. I just stared back. He changed his tone to a scared, tense whisper. “Back in the bottle?”

I didn’t feel compelled. I just raised my eyebrows and cocked my head to stare harder. His anxiety level shot up another ten levels, and the whisper got even thinner. “Please? Back in the bottle?”

Yvette hit the door. Hard. It rattled on its hinges.

“You’re killing me, here, please! Get back in the bottle!”

Whoops. Command mode. I felt myself instantly dissolving into mist, felt that toilet-bowl swirl of the bottle dragging me in, and braced myself for the pain I knew was coming.

Yep, being squeezed like a baby in a birth canal was not my idea of fun, but there I went into the bottle, and I felt the world tilt as Kevin grabbed it up. Seen close through the glass, his fingers were huge and grimy and definitely nothing I ever wanted to have pawing my skin, substantial or insubstantial.

And then he twisted the stopper home.

Lights out.

I dreamed again. I guess that was what Djinn did in bottles… dreamed. Sure as hell wasn’t anything else to do. To make matters even more strange, this one wasn’t even my dream.

It was David’s.

He was pacing restlessly in a strange square glass room I didn’t recognize, coat swirling like smoke around him from the violence of his turns. His hands were clenched behind his back, and his whole body vibrated with tension. As I watched, his legs began to blur and become mist; he hissed out something in a language I didn’t know and exerted a pulse of will that I could feel even in my drifting, dreaming state.

His legs went solid again.

He threw himself violently against the glass, pressing hard, so hard I felt the effort like a distant earthquake. Outside of the glass, there was a giant-sized world, distorted into warped shapes and weird colors. People moving around out there, giant blobs of color and form. One of them caught my attention— neon yellow outfit. Rahel?

David was inside a bottle. Unlike me, he wasn’t sealed in, but for some reason he couldn’t get out, either.

Where David was pushing, the thick glass vibrated. I felt the energy building in waves as the thick surface began to whipsaw violently, rippling. David pushed harder. The glass bowed out in a bubble, went from clear to milk white, distorted…

David collapsed to his knees. The glass snapped back into shape with a ringing, singing pop of energy. Clear and perfect.

“Let me go,” he said hoarsely. He was exhausted. Reflected light glittered on his copper-brushed hair, pale gold skin, bright-penny eyes. “Please, let me go to her. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

No sense of arrival, but suddenly Jonathan was sitting in the far corner. He was still dressed in casual human-normal clothes, but there was nothing normal or human about the power behind his eyes, or the cell-deep weariness. He looked infinitely worse than last I’d seen him.

David climbed back to his feet and turned to face him. “I have to go, Jonathan, now.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Jonathan said. His voice was thin, tired, and hoarse. “This is the only safe place right now. Going out there is useless. And you know I’m right, so don’t give me that look.”

David’s eyebrows knitted together in an angry line. “What look?”

“That look. The you-don’t-understand look. Hell, I understand, I’ve been in love, too. But the survival of the Free Djinn comes first, it has to. We’re talking about losing everything. You want to end up dead, or worse?”

“Of course not.”

“Then quit fucking around and try to understand that everything doesn’t revolve around your heartaches.”

David took a step forward, fists clenched and face tense. “Oh, I understand, believe me. I’ve played chess with you too many times not to. But I’m not going to let you use her as a sacrifice pawn, Jonathan. Something’s happened to her. She’s been taken.”

“I know.” Jonathan propped his head against the glass wall with no evidence of comfort. “Patrick arranged it. Look, I know you don’t approve, but she needed to learn the ropes. It was the best thing.”

“Fuck!” David kicked the wall hard enough to draw a humming sound out of the hard surface. “You incredible bastard. You arrogant son of a—”

“—bitch,” Jonathan supplied, and closed his eyes. “You’ve called me that before, you know. And trust me, in this particular case, flattery will not get you a free pass out of here. She needs this if you want her to survive. Don’t be stupid. She’s perfectly safe with Lewis… magically speaking, anyway.”

“Stupid?” David repeated, and turned slowly to face him. Oh God. The look on his face… He lunged across the space, braced himself on stiff arms, face-to-face with Jonathan. “You think it’s Lewis that has her?”

Jonathan’s eyes flashed open. Just a second of doubt in those old, tired, very powerful eyes. He didn’t answer.

“It’s Yvette,” David whispered. “Don’t you understand? I don’t know how, but she’s got Joanne. You know what she’ll do.”

Jonathan might have flinched—barely—but whatever impulse he had toward concern shut down fast. “Better her than you.”

David pulled back a fist, cocked it, looked ready to slam it straight into Jonathan’s face.

He still didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink. David backed away, sank down in a crouch against the wall a few feet away, and buried his face in both hands for a few seconds.

“Does it ever occur to you that maybe she might be as important as I am? As you are?” he asked.

Jonathan cocked both eyebrows toward sarcasm. “Frankly? No. Never occurred to me. And wait… no, not occurring to me now.”

“Let me go. Yvette wants me,” David said. “Don’t pretend you don’t know that. She always has. She tried to talk Bad Bob into it half a dozen times. Give her an opening, she’ll jump at the chance. I know how to manipulate her. I can be free in a matter of hours and bring Joanne with me.”

Jonathan puffed his breath out impatiently. “And your point is…?”

“I can do this. Joanne has no idea what she’s up against. I do.”

A half-second of hesitation, which was probably more than the idea deserved, and then Jonathan said, quietly, “No. You’re staying here. Believe me, you’ll thank me later.”

“Will I?” David was doing something odd. He stood up, shrugged out of his olive drab coat and let it slide to the floor, then unbuttoned his white-and-blue shirt with jerky, nervous motions. He added it to the pile. Stripped off the soft gray T-shirt next, revealing gold-burnished skin. While I enjoyed the view, I wondered what the hell he was doing. “You’ve never been claimed, Jonathan. Never, in your entire history. You have no idea what it’s like.”

“I know what it’s like,” Jonathan said, in a tone that meant it was an old, boring argument. He was watching David with a frown that was getting deeper by the minute. “And what the hell are you doing?”

“It’s rape,” David continued. He unbuttoned his blue jeans, unzipped, slipped them down. “Having your will taken away from you, forced to do whatever they want you to do. Not even owning yourself. No matter how pure the intentions, how kind the master, how much good comes out of it, it’s still rape. Don’t you get that? You gave her to Patrick. Patrick gave her to Lewis, and maybe she submitted to that, but this… no. You have no idea. And I’m not leaving her in Yvette’s hands, not alone.”

No answer this time. Jonathan continued to stare up, no change in his expression. He might have been thinking about the merits of Guinness over Sam Adams, for all I knew. Or the secrets of the universe.

David stripped off underwear, dropped them on the pile, and turned back to the glass. Spread his arms wide. Naked, he gave off a halo like polished gold. I felt him drawing in energy, felt the gigantic swirl of power on the aetheric level. He extended his hand out to the glass on the window and touched it, pressed his palm flat against it.

“Are you going to let me go?” he asked.

“No, because you have no plan beyond throwing yourself blindly on the grenade and hoping somebody will mop up the mess.” Jonathan didn’t sound in the least worried. “Put something on before you catch a cold.”

David went very still, and I felt the lancing burn of power flash out of him. Straight into the glass, fine as a laser. It slammed into the barrier, bowed it outward, turned it opaque as milk, kept pushing.

“Never gonna happen, Davy,” Jonathan said. “Trust me. You’re bleeding off so much power to keep that girl alive that you couldn’t shatter a soap bubble right now. And hey, you want my opinion, I think the girl’s pretty tough. Maybe she’ll surprise you. Maybe the last thing she needs is for you to come galloping to the rescue, that ever occur to you?”

I felt David pulling hard on the umbilical that still bound us together, trying to access whatever power I had stored, but it was like a trickling stream trying to fill up a huge dry riverbed. God, was he really that drained? That weak?

Jonathan continued to stare, lips pressed tight, eyes dark with knowledge. “You’re going to kill yourself. Stop it.”

“No.” David was weak, draining fast, but he was still pouring everything he had into the effort to break the prison. “You stop holding me here.”

“Put your goddamn clothes back on, David. What kind of a point are you trying to make? That you’re leaving all of this behind for her? Being reborn? I got it, already! Symbolism ‘R’ Us!”

No answer. David was fiercely focused now, hands trembling. I could feel the intensity of his commitment. He wasn’t going to stop.

Jonathan must have known it too. It was in his raw plea. “David!”

The clothes lying on the ground ignited into white-hot flame. David was glowing like a gas flame, using himself ruthlessly. Destroying himself.

“Let… me… GO!” It was a deep-in-the-throat growl, furious and enraged. The glass was bubbling with the force of the attack.

Jonathan had gone sallow-pale under his tan. I could sense how deep this went between them, how much trust was being ripped apart in this moment.

How much love was being destroyed.

“Fine,” he finally whispered. “Go. Kill yourself, dammit.”

The glass exploded like a bomb. David misted and was gone before the first glittering shards fell.

Jonathan, left behind, closed his eyes and sank down against one wall of the prison—the refuge? — and braced his forehead against his hands.

The bottle sealed itself without a sound, walling him in.

The dream faded into a gray, sick, constant light, sparked with cold blue flashes.

Don’t, I murmured in my sleep. Don’t do this for me.

But I knew him better.

The next time I got poured out of the bottle, things were different. For one thing, I was in another room—clean, this one, scrupulously Martha Stewarted, from the stacked pyramid of oranges in a low green tray to the matching rug and throw pillows.

The place was so coordinated it could have joined the Ballet Russe. I felt claustrophobic. Patrick’s digs had been louche and tacky, but at least they’d been bursting with energy.

There was only one word for this room. Soulless.

When I put on flesh, I was standing on champagne-pale carpet in my spike-heeled pumps, looking like a hooker at a Suzy Homemaker convention. The expression on Yvette Prentiss’s face was almost worth the incredible embarrassment of the outfit.

“Kevin!” Yvette said sharply. She was sitting on a vanilla cream satin-striped sofa, looking gorgeously, deliberately casual, much like the room. Nothing casual about it—you don’t get that artless elegance by just tossing on some jeans and touching up the lipstick. Hours of prep had been involved.

Kevin, on the other hand, looked like he’d just been rousted out of bed. Wrinkled, unkempt, wearing a faded-out gray T-shirt with a tear in the sleeve and a pair of jeans so wide-legged they flared like gauchos. Naturally, the jeans were about three sizes too big, so they could ride fashionably low on his hips and display at least two inches of not-very-clean BVDs. I didn’t think his hair had ever been visited by either the Comb or Shampoo Fairy.

He had a three-second delay to her angry snap, probably because he was still in awe of the Magenta outfit he’d managed to stick me with. “Um, what?”

“Did you open the bottle before?”

“No!” Patently a lie. He was terrible at it. “I might’ve, ah, peeked. Just a little.”

She just gave him a scorching look of disgust, stood up and came to walk around me. I waited for her to kick the tires and ask how much mileage was on me. Oh, I so wanted to tell her to kiss my French-maid-costumed ass, but naturally, I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything but stand there, simmering. What did you do with Lewis, you incredible bitch?

“Get rid of that,” she said to Kevin.

“What?”

“The outfit. Obviously.”

“Oh.” Kevin seized the opportunity. “Take off your clothes,” he said to me. It was a direct, unequivocal order. I thought fast, and removed the apron with a flicker of consciousness. He waited, in vain, for me to do the rest. “All your clothes,” he amended. Crap. I shut my eyes and did it, shedding stockings, shoes, skirt, corset, thong—everything. Standing in bare feet on carpet, feeling air conditioning breathe its way across my skin.

Yvette groaned. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, put her in something decent. Conduct your perversions on your own time.”

Never thought I’d be grateful to her, but I opened my eyes and stared at Kevin again, waiting for the order. He was too busy drooling. Yvette reached over and smacked him on the back of the head, hard, and he winced and ducked and said, “Okay! Put something on. Something, you know, nice.”

I went for a severe black pantsuit in peachskin, a form-hugging pale silver shirt, and some discreet low-heeled Stuart Weitzman shoes, with tassels. I reached in the vest pocket of the jacket and fished out a nice pair of Ray·Ban sunglasses to finish it off.

“Better,” Yvette approved. “You have good taste.”

“Thank you,” I said. Pretty much meaning fuck you, but without the actual words.

“What’s your name?”

Since she wasn’t my master, and it wasn’t a Rule-of-Three question anyway, there was no reason for me to tell the truth. “Lilith,” I said. Sounded exotic and faintly evil. Hi, I’m Lilith, I’ll be your evil servant today. Yeah, I liked it.

“Lilith,” she repeated. She did the walking-around thing again, checking me out. “You’ll do.”

“For what, exactly?” I asked. She looked shocked. Apparently, Djinn were not quite so aggressive in her experience. “Who are you?”

She wasn’t going to answer questions from the help. She glared at Kevin, evidently blaming him for my bad attitude, and said, “You understand what to do?”

“Yeah,” he said, and looked as resentful as I felt. “I get it.”

“Don’t screw it up.”

“I won’t.”

“You know how important this is.” God, she was picking at him like a scab. She’d probably say that she was just reinforcing the point, but I saw the light in her eyes. She just plain enjoyed making him squirm. It was an uncomfortable sort of fascination.

Kevin, of course, got defensive. “I got it, already! Jeez, Mom! Take a pill!” I almost felt sorry for the kid. Messy, hormonally overloaded, unattractive, burdened with a stepmom from Hell…

And then I remembered him checking me out like some fifty-year-old drunk in a strip club, and the impulse toward sympathy went away.

“Okay.” Kevin took a deep breath, clenched his fists, and said, “Yo. I want you to do something.”

I was unimpressed by the buildup.

“I want you to cause a really big fire in—” He shot a look at mom, who was staring at him like a harpy ready to pounce. “—in a town called Seacasket, Maine.”

What the hell…? Didn’t matter. I could already feel the circuits kicking in, the Djinn hardwiring powering up. “Yeah, sure, okay.” I was already figuring all the ways I could stretch that one. A really big, pretty, contained fire that didn’t burn anything. Spectacular, not dangerous.

Yvette made a frustrated sound in the back of her throat that sounded like a purr, and addressed herself directly to him. “The whole town. Destroy everything and everyone in it.”

“Uh, yeah. What she said,” he said to me. He didn’t sound enthusiastic. “Big fire. Destroy the town and everybody in it. Now. Uh, and you can do that misty thing to get there.”

The part of me that couldn’t be controlled was already reaching out for power, tapping into Kevin’s potential, drawing it down into me in a rich blood-tide flood. God, it was so strong… I’d thought it was just Lewis that had this much power, but to find it in someone like Kevin… it was incredible. Immeasurable.

And I was about to use it to roast an entire town alive. Oh God, no.

“Go,” Kevin said, and waved his hand around awkwardly. “Do what I told you.”

To my utter horror, I found I couldn’t stop myself.

I was already misting out. Kevin, the Martha-Stewart-perfect room, Yvette… all fading into nothing.

He hadn’t told me to travel the aetheric, so I stayed in mist form, moving as slowly as real-world physics would allow. I was a hot storm rolling through clouds and sky, burning with purpose, out of control, and lives were going to be lost when I arrived, no question about it.

I had to think of a way to stop this. How? I wasn’t in control of it, not at all. It was controlling me, I was just the conduit through which the power would flow. Fine, if I was a circuit, maybe there was a way to insulate myself. Muffle the damage I was going to do. How? Think, dammit! All that training in weather, and none of it was any help at all now…

Or was it?

I reached out and grabbed a spangled net of storm energy from the sea and dragged it behind me like a train on a wedding dress as I arrowed past, heading for Seacasket, Maine.

I knew, without having to ask why, that there were 1,372 people in Seacasket. Not to mention pets, farm animals, birds, insects, plants, all the things that made up the ecosphere, that made life possible and desirable.

I had to find a way to save them.

It felt like a long time, but it could have only been a few hours at most between leaving the Prentiss house and landing at the corner of Davis and Cunningham, right next to a sign that said seacasket chamber of commerce welcomes you, decorated with the seal of the Rotary Club and logos for Hardee’s and McDonald’s. A smaller sign below read home of THE CRIMSON PIRATES, STATE CHAMPIONS LADIES BASKETBALL 1998.

Seacasket, for all its rural sensibility, had a Starbucks directly across the street from me. There were five or six people in there, sitting at tiny uncomfortable tables sipping mochas or cappuccinos or half-caff skim deluxe grande lattes. There were a couple of kids running down the sidewalk chasing a runaway beagle puppy, and a few cars driving by, people talking, laughing, oblivious to the death I was bringing with me.

No. No no no no.

I tried. I tried with all my might to stop it, but my hands went out, and the power that I’d sucked out of Kevin, that rich textured power that filled me to bursting, it shot up into a hot dome over the town.

No!

I couldn’t stop it, but I could try to mitigate it. At the same time as that compulsive part of me started authoring destruction, the other part of me—the part that was still partially free, at least—started desperately weaving together the wind. Not enough time for this, not nearly enough; weatherworking required subtlety, delicacy, like neurosurgery. This was more like a battlefield amputation, with the patient alive and screaming. I increased the density of the air, heated it faster than a microwave oven, created a corresponding cold front and slammed the two together.

Instant chaos. Overhead, beyond the hot fury of fire that was gathering over the town, I saw clouds exploding in blue and black mushrooms. Silent, but incredibly powerful. I watched it in Oversight as the cotton white anvil cloud boiled up, and up, and up, hot air struggling to climb over cold, water molecules slamming together in so much violence that the energy generated exploded outward in waves. The collisions sparked even more motion, forced expansion against the unmoving wall of the low pressure system.

Go, go, go! I was begging it to move faster, even though it was the fastest I’d ever built anything like this—fifteen seconds, from clear sky to first pale pink flash of lightning.

I wasn’t looking for rain, though. Rain wouldn’t even begin to derail the firestorm I was about to unleash on this place. It would instantly evaporate into steam, and for all I knew, kill even more people. The kind of power I was carrying wasn’t something that could be put out with a fire hose, anyway.

The kids on the street stopped, looking up, open-mouthed with amazement. The dog started yapping.

Thunder boomed like cannon. It rattled glass in windows. Two car alarms shrieked in fright, and I felt the pressure of bad weather building, hot and still and green. Yes.

I couldn’t hold the fire. It was coming down, an acid rain of napalm from the sky. It hit the tallest building in sight—a bank, maybe—and draped it in orange-red streamers that exploded white-hot when it found something to feed on. Seven floors above the street, hell had descended. I could feel people screaming, feel the pulse of their terror, and I couldn’t stop it.

Fire crawled lazily over the building, dripping in hot strings from windows. Burning the place from the outside in, from the top down. Get out. Get the hell out, now! Because that place would be an inferno in minutes. Could I do something else, anything?

I looked down at myself and saw that I was surrounded by a thick, sparkling layer of blue. Cold-light, moving over me like a crawling blanket. Oh God. What in the hell was it doing to me? I couldn’t feel it. Couldn’t feel it at all.

I stared blindly up into the storm, willing it, begging it to do what I needed it to do.

And something answered. It was raw and primitive and barely more than an instinct, Mother Nature twitching in a nightmare. The blast of energy broke over me like a drowning wave, and I went to my knees, still staring up at the arching, strangely beautiful firefall that was going to destroy this place.

And then the tornado formed above it.

It started small, an indrawn breath of the storm, a tentative wisp of vapor like a tongue tasting the air. I fed it energy. Come on, baby. Live. Work for me. It pulled in strength, drove down in a black twisting rope toward the tasty, tempting energy buffet that was the firedome.

It connected, swelled, and took on a roaring, freight-train stability.

Nothing can resist that force when it gets going. Especially not fire, which is nothing but energy given plasmatic form; it’s just food for the process. A stream of fire broke free of the dome and spiraled up inside the tornado like a gas flame into a lantern.

The result was unholy. Beautiful, terrifying, like nothing that most human beings had ever seen or would ever want to… a storm shot through with crawling, vivid orange as the fire struggled to keep its cohesion. The tornado sucked up the thick, clinging plasma like Jell-O through a straw.

The firedome broke apart. Individual napalm-hot streams fell like ribbons on the town, but the majority of it was drawn into the tornado and spewed out in a fading glow above the anvil cloud, where the thin atmosphere of the mesosphere starved it of fuel. The rapid cooling would help feed the engine of the tornado, as air sank and was drawn back into the express-elevator rush of the spiral.

The compulsive part of me was still trying to fulfill my master’s command, which meant I kept forming fire up there in the sky, trying to put the dome back together. The tornado kept vacuuming it safely away. It occurred to me with a cold shock to wonder how long the compulsion would make me do this. I could feel my fuel tanks edging down toward empty. The energy output was enormous, and I couldn’t even draw strength from the sun, because I’d created an instant overcast.

Maybe I could draw power from the fire itself, sort of a cannibalistic loop? No—when I tried to grab hold and suck it back into me, I couldn’t find a grip. It thrashed away from me like a writhing snake.

I couldn’t keep this up forever. The storm was running on its own now, but I needed to keep control of it. Unchecked, the tornado could do as much damage as the fire, and that really would be my fault, in a whole new ugly way. The winds in the tornado wall were reaching speeds of about 250 miles per hour, a solidly terrifying F4. That wasn’t my doing, of course. Truth is, once you get the forces of nature going, they don’t need a lot of tender loving care. I had to conserve my strength to try to stop things, not keep them going.

Somebody was tugging at my black peachskin coat, trying to get my attention. I tumbled out of Oversight and felt my body starting to mist; I pulled myself together and turned to look over my shoulder.

Two kids and a dog. All equally scared. The little girl, red-faced, was crying big crystal tears and clinging to her brother; he was all of ten, struggling to be brave and hold on to both little sister and a wiggling, whining beagle.

“Lady?” he asked. His voice was high and trembling, pure as the tones of an angel. “Help?”

He was so damn polite about it, with death whirling a couple of hundred feet overhead, with the bank burning like a bonfire three blocks away. People in the Starbucks across the street were screaming and cowering behind the counter with the baristas.

I put my arms around the three of them and pulled them close, sheltered them with my body as the fire overhead fought the suction of the wind to come down like a burning blanket.

The compulsion wasn’t going to stop. It would go on until I couldn’t keep control of the tornado. I’d created twice the disaster instead of averting the one. The fire would come, and then the tornado would kill whatever survived.

The hair prickled on the back of my neck.

Something big… a white surge of power sweeping through, clearing out the fire, breaking the processes I’d set up inside the storm. It rolled like a glittering razor-edged sea.

It tasted familiar. No, it was as familiar as the power humming inside my own body because it was the same damn thing.

It was David.

I raised my head slowly as the silence fell, that hot green silence like the one before the tornado’s freight-train rush… the fire at the bank building flared once, blue-white, and vanished into a hiss of smoke. The streamers of flame winked out.

David was standing across the street in front of the Starbucks, copper-brushed hair catching light like silk. He was in his traveling clothes—blue shirt, blue jeans, olive drab wool coat that belled with the wind.

He looked so tired. So horribly tired. And there were crawling blue sparks all over him, too. Glittering in a barely visible umbilical between us.

“Joanne,” he whispered. I felt his voice, even from so far away, like breath on my skin.

I didn’t say anything out loud—couldn’t—but I felt the compulsion rising up again, felt the fire sucking energy and pouring it into a manifestation that glittered and grew above my head. A snowball on fire. A boulder. A sun. The light from it was so bright it bleached the town to gray-white shadow.

Stop me, I begged him. I knew he could hear me, vibating through the connection between us. Kill me if you have to. Cut the cord.

He looked up, at the growing ball of destruction flaming in the sky, and then back at me. I didn’t have to tell him I couldn’t stop. He knew. He understood.

I looked at him in Oversight and saw him outlined in pale, shimmering orange, a color that felt like suffering, weakness, approaching death. When I extended my hand toward him, I could see the same color drifting around me.

This was killing both of us. I was draining my master Kevin at the same time, three of us going down…

Stop me, I said again. The silver rope binding us together was pale now, pulsing in time with our shared heartbeats. God, David, please, I don’t know how…

I know, he said. She just wanted to get my attention.

I didn’t see him move, but he was suddenly there, tackling me violently backwards to the ground, away from the children and the wildly yapping beagle. Overhead, the sun exploded into a white-hot fury, but I didn’t see, couldn’t see, because we were falling through the ground and into the aetheric, racing back along the invisible path I’d taken to get here. No! I battered at him, tried to get free, tried to warn him that he was killing us both. He didn’t respond. Faster. Faster. The whole thing was a blur of lights, color, motion, whispers, screams…

… and the two of us fell with a hard thump onto the pale champagne carpet of Yvette Prentiss’s living room. Before I could even register where we were, David was already rolling away, reaching for the open perfume vial that lay on the table, but before he could reach it Kevin’s grubby hand snatched it up.

I felt the fury in David at the sight of her smug smile. He was going to rip her apart. There was no softness in him now, no consideration, no humanity. He was nothing but fire, ready to burn.

And then he shuddered, staggered, and collapsed to his knees. I could already feel it happening inside of him. Death. Coming fast. He’d poured so much out in stopping me that he had nothing left, nothing to draw on but me and he was refusing to do that…

I could feel it in myself, too. I turned and screamed at Kevin, “Order me to heal him! Now!”

I had no idea I could produce a voice like that, so utterly sure of obedience. Kevin instantly complied. “Heal him.”

“No!” Yvette shrieked, but it was too late, and I was already pulling on Kevin’s store to replenish the failing energy levels in myself. David collapsed over on his back, fading into mist and reforming with every breath, and I poured life back into him with everything I had.

Close. So very close.

David groaned and rolled over to hands and knees, then managed to get to his feet. Swayed like a three-day drunk. His eyes flared bright orange, and he looked straight at Yvette Prentiss.

And then he lunged for her.

“Don’t let him hurt my mother! Hold him still!” Kevin yelled. Direct command, no equivocation. I had no choice.

I turned, grabbed David and held on as he tried to throw me off. I wasn’t stronger than he was, not normally, but with Kevin’s power pouring into me there was no stopping me. And he was weak, and tired, and hurting.

I pinned him against the wall of her house, rested my head against his and whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, David—” I felt the hand trying to shove me away change to a caress. No words. We didn’t need any. “You shouldn’t have done this. Oh God, please, please go, I can’t stop you if you go…”

Yvette had another bottle ready. This one was dark blue, oblong, some kind of fancy kitchen bottle built more for display than actual containment, but it had a rubber stopper and it would do the job. She uncorked it and put it on the coffee table next to my tiny open perfume vial.

Where her hand moved, I saw a flicker of blue, falsely cheerful glitter. It had followed us here, too. I could see it shimmering around us, darting like fireflies.

David’s eyes met mine. Still flecks of copper swirling in his irises, but he’d never looked so human to me, so precious, so vulnerable.

“I can’t go,” he said. His voice was soft, sweet, forgiving.

This was my fault, all my fault, oh God…

He put his hand on my cheek. I turned blindly into the warmth, wanted to cry but no longer knew how.

“Be thou bound to my service.” Yvette’s voice was low, seductive, and charged with triumph.

“No matter what happens…” David whispered against my skin.

“Be thou bound to my service.”

“… I love you. Remember that.”

“Be thou bound to my service.”

He kissed me, one last time, our lips meeting and burning, our souls mingling through the touch, and then I felt him torn apart, ripped away.

I felt him die.

I turned and watched the mist stream across the room, coil into the bottle, and watched Yvette slam the cork down in place.

The sense of David’s presence vanished instantly. Gone.

I lunged at Yvette, forming steel-hard claws from the fingers of my right hand, and I was halfway to her throat when Kevin screamed, “Stop!”

I did. Instantly. Fighting with every twitching nerve, but losing against the overwhelming force of his command.

“You can’t hurt my mother.” He sounded spooked. “Or me.”

I felt the claws misting away from my hand. Yvette raised her chin and exposed that fragile, perfect throat to me, and I wanted more than anything to wipe that smug, was-it-good-for-you smirk off her face.

And I couldn’t. Son of a bitch!

She said, “Don’t be a fool. You won’t be the first Djinn that I’ve had to teach a lesson.”

I remembered David’s near-pathological hatred of her, and felt it burning hot as acid in my stomach, too. Oh, this wasn’t going to end well. Not if I had anything at all to say about it.

She turned to her son. Kevin was staring at me, mesmerized. He licked his lips nervously and said, “Did you really destroy that town?”

I didn’t feel compelled to answer—Rule of Three— so I just stared at him with my burning silver eyes. Had I? I hoped to hell not. But I wasn’t really sure.

My rescue came from an unexpected source. Yvette said, “David stopped her. But then, he had good enough reason. Seacasket has something in it he’d kill to protect.” She got up off the sofa and walked around to face me, insinuated sharp-nailed fingers through my hair and arranged it to her liking around my shoulders. “You’re very striking, did you know that? He must feel something incredible for you, to have done that. Believe me, David’s long ago learned the value of self-preservation. The fact that he’s so devoted to you is truly amazing.”

I gave her a smile. “He just wants me for the sex.”

She gave me a smile right back. “He could get that anywhere.” Her raised eyebrow strongly implied he could get it from her, at better rates, at higher quality. “I know who you are, you know.”

Of course she did. She’d been at my funeral, stood there looking at the enormous overblown photo of me wreathed by flowers. Her fingernail tapped my cheek, hard enough to sting.

“You killed a friend of mine,” she said. Her voice had dropped down into that throaty, seductive range again. I wondered if she always used that when she talked about killing. “He was a very special man.”

“Bad Bob? Oh, yeah, I heard he was keeping you in condoms and rent money. Sorry for your loss.” Bad Bob had put a demon down my throat. I had no fond memories.

She slapped me. Well, tried to. I went to vapor and reformed immediately after her hand sailed through the space where I’d been. That was kind of fun. She stumbled into the coffee table from the force of the swing, and for a second the fury in her made her ugly. Uglier than anyone I’d ever seen. Whoa. There was the real Yvette Prentiss, the one who hid behind the pretty soft skin and silk-smooth hair and mouthwatering figure.

It was gone so fast I couldn’t be absolutely sure I’d even seen it, until I looked over at Kevin. The fear in his eyes told me everything.

“Bob Biringanine was a visionary!” she snapped at me. “You’re an ant crawling on the corpse of greatness. Kevin! Tell her not to do that again!”

“Do what?” he asked. She rounded on him, and I saw the flinch from ten feet away. “Tell her, uh, not to do that vanishing thing?”

“Yes.” She hissed it, like an angry snake. He swallowed twice, rapidly, and looked over at me.

“Uh, don’t do that vanishing thing anymore. Making yourself all misty. Unless I tell you to.” He didn’t look back at Yvette, stared at the carpet and his ragged tennis shoes instead. “Can I go now?”

She continued to stare at him, and I didn’t like the light in her eyes. Not good. Definitely not good.

“Yes.” She flipped him the perfume vial. He nearly fumbled it, and I felt the Djinn circuitry heating up with anticipation. Of course! Any chance there was that he might drop it… I couldn’t do much, but I could nudge it along once it was out of his hands, make sure it hit the sharp edge of the coffee table with enough force to smash it into oblivion…

He held on to it. Damn.

Yvette nodded toward me. “Take her with you.”

“Yeah, okay. You. Come with me.”

I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay here, guarding that blue bottle that held all that remained of David, but I couldn’t disobey a direct order. Kevin walked out of the living room, and I had to follow him.

The last sight I had was her sitting down on the sofa again, picking up the blue stoppered bottle and holding it between her hands.

The expression on her face—avid, delighted, anticipatory—made me go arctic cold inside.

Kevin walked through a door that read Kevin’s room do not enter or else! It was decorated with skull-and-crossbones decals, pentagrams, line drawings of naked girls grabbing their ankles.

Ah. Home rancid home. He shut the door behind me, stared at me for a couple of seconds, and put the perfume vial down in a nasty-looking ashtray filled with candy wrappers and what strongly resembled the butt ends of a few joints. I looked around. Kevin’s room wasn’t any more attractive on second viewing than on first There was no place to sit, other than the dingy rumpled bed, and I was not going there.

Kevin flung himself down full length, staring up at the pinup on the ceiling. Hands behind his head. “Did you really almost kill those people?”

“Did you want me to?” I countered, and crossed my arms. He shrugged, as much of a shrug as he could manage lying down.

“Probably would have been kind of a mercy, living in a podunk town like that and all.”

“Why Seacasket?” I asked. He continued to stare up at the centerfold, who pouted and simpered in a frozen second of humiliation. “Something special about that town?”

“Something about it being important to him. You know. Dauid.” He gave the name a contemptuous twist of his lips. “She’s had a hard-on for him for years. Tried to get him before, but Bad Bob wouldn’t let her have him for more than a couple of hours. Said she might break him.”

Too much information… I tried not to think about what it meant. “What now?” I asked.

Another horizontally muted shrug. “Don’t know. Not like she tells me shit.” Definitely more than a little resentment there. This kid was turning out to be interesting. Maybe there was a way to use him…

I stopped the thought train with a squeal of brakes when he suddenly shifted his gaze to stare directly at me. “I like the other outfit better.”

Crap. I tried not to let him see how much that alarmed me. “Which one?”

“The one you had on before. With the, you know—” He mimed breasts. “And the stockings. The one with the apron.”

He still hadn’t told me to put it on. “Wouldn’t you like something a little classier?” Dumb question. I was surrounded by glossy photos of women wearing stupid smiles and strips of cloth no bigger than Band-Aids. Classy didn’t enter into it.

His dark eyes went hard. “I don’t give a shit if you like it or not. Just put it on.”

Well, that was direct. I had no room to maneuver. The peachskin pantsuit vanished, replaced with the Frederick’s of Hollywood French Maid Nightmare. Truthfully, I kind of liked the shoes, in a trashy, over-the-top kind of way, and I might not have minded putting the thing on to see the look in David’s eyes, but to see it in this kid’s… worthy of a shudder. Or two.

The corset top definitely lifted and didn’t separate.

I looked down at my bulging décolletage and saw I’d been given something new. A classy-looking upside-down pentagram tattoo, just over my left breast Unsettlingly close to where there’d once been the black stain of a Demon Mark.

I looked up. Kevin was sitting up in bed, watching me. He licked his lips and said, “Turn around.”

I did. All the way, back to face him.

“I thought you said I only had three wishes?”

I kept quiet. He wasn’t stupid. He knew I’d lied.

“You got any idea what my mom’s doing out there to your friend? He is your friend, right?” Kevin studied me with too-intelligent eyes, looking for sore spots. “More than a friend? You fucking him?”

“You’re way too young to ask that question,” I said primly. The Julie Andrews tone didn’t go with the blow-up doll outfit.

“You’ll tell me. You have to.”

“Why do you want to know?” I asked. Which threw him, a bit. “And anyway, how do you know how many wishes you get? Maybe it’s ten. Maybe it’s twenty. Maybe the next one is your last, and then I get to rip you into little screaming shreds. Care to try your luck?”

I smiled when I said it. Friendly. Warm. Inviting.

He pressed himself back against the headboard, where Miss July of 2003 was squashing her bare breasts together for his inspection.

“What’s the use of having you if I can’t do anything with you?” he asked. Petulant little jerk. “I mean, maybe I’ll just do it anyway. Wish for what I want most.”

“And what’s that?”

He hadn’t really thought about it. I hoped he wasn’t going to pop off with something stupid, like world peace, but I needn’t have worried; Kevin would never think about anyone or anything larger than the confines of his little self-centered universe. He finally came out with, “I want never to have to work for a living.”

I blinked slowly, thinking that over. Teenage thought processes were so different from adults… An adult would have asked for truckloads of cash, under the assumption that truckloads of money meant no more work. Which wasn’t unreasonable, as assumptions go. But Kevin had asked for something completely different.

“So, hypothetically, if you asked for that, you wouldn’t be disappointed if I made you a quadriplegic breathing through a tube?” His turn to blink. His mouth opened, produced silence, and closed again. “I mean, you wouldn’t ever have to work for a living, would you? Or I could just kill you. You’d never have to work for a living that way, either. Or, let’s see, I could kill everyone else in the world. Never have to work for a living that way, either. Or I could turn you into a big slobbering dog that your mom can feed every day—”

“Stop it!” He looked appalled. “You’re making it all—”

“—complicated?” I finished. “It is. You want a Djinn, you got one. But we’re not fuck-toys, Kevin. We’re older than you—” Even me. “—we’re smarter than you, and we have absolutely no problem in finding the wrong interpretations of every single wish you are stupid enough to utter in our presence. We’re dangerous. Get that through your head. You can dress me up like a doll if you want to, but you’ll never control me. I’m going to control you. So the best thing you can do is take that bottle and smash it, right now, before I get the opportunity to really hurt you. Because I will, Kevin. I’ll hurt you so bad it’ll make your mom at her worst look like Mary Poppins.”

I had him. I so had him. It was all I could do not to gloat. He looked about to vomit with fright.

And then he calmed down, swallowed, and said, “I know what I want. It’s what you want, too. I want you to kill my mother.”

Not that I couldn’t understand it, but I felt like it was one of those cartoon moments, the one where you have to smack the side of your head to make sure there’s nothing stuck in your ear. I stood there in my ridiculously sexy French Maid outfit and said, “Excuse me?”

“Yvette,” he clarified hastily. “My real mom’s already dead. My dad, too. I guess what I mean is that I want you to kill my stepmom. Yvette Prentiss.”

I wanted to grin and say, “Done!” and rush out there and put the big Djinn smackdown on her, but truth is I wasn’t all that eager to be killing anybody. Not even a top-rated bitch like Yvette. I was all too aware of how much power there was, flowing from Kevin to me, and how awesomely easy it was to use it. The compulsion was clicking in, but not strongly; there were, I sensed, still gray areas to exploit. I went for them. “There are all kinds of meanings to kill, you know…”

“Dead,” he said. “Kill her dead. Slowly. Make her suffer.”

He was getting into it now. Which was not my intention. “Okay, let’s just—calm down.” Because the compulsion was getting stronger, the power flow cresting like the tide. “I will. I swear. But let’s talk about it first.” Because, luckily, he hadn’t specified now, the way he had when he’d sent me to Seacasket to commit arson and homicide. “Why?”

He gave me a dark look. “What do you care?”

I didn’t, really. I was too busy thinking about Yvette putting her hands all over the bottle that held David trapped, seducing Lewis so that innocent little Kevin could sneak up and hit him from behind. “Yeah, well, what do you care? I’m just curious.”

Long silence. He flopped back down on the bed, sounding depressed. “She’s a bitch.”

“You’re going to run into them. Get used to it. In fact, pretty much all of us can be bitchy from time to time. Goes with the double-X chromosomes.” Just like Kevin was never going to win any Y-chromosome personality contests, either. “You can’t go around having me snuff out every life that annoys you.”

“Why not?”

Ah, great, a sociopath in training. Again, not the conversational path I was eager to follow. “What’s she done to you, other than be a bitchy stepmom?”

He stared up at the pouting centerfold over his bed, put his hands under his head, and said, “She makes me do things.”

I had a bad feeling. “Like?” I was really, really hoping he’d say clean up the room, take out the trash…but one look around convinced me that couldn’t be true.

He sat up, grabbed the first thing that came to hand—a CD player—and threw it across the room hard enough to smash it to bits against the far wall. “What the fuck do you think I mean, say my prayers? Brush my teeth?” His flare of rage was sudden, violent, and totally untelegraphed. I had no reason to be afraid, but if I’d still been human I’d have felt utterly exposed. “She makes me do things, you stupid bimbo! Bad things!” He was blazing in Oversight, white-hot, as if some door had opened into hell. “I want it to stop!”

Oh, God. Not what I’d expected, not at all. Nor what I was even vaguely equipped to handle. I pitched my voice low. “Kevin, you can make that stop without killing her.”

“You don’t know shit about it.” Tears quivered in his eyes, jeweled his long, lush eyelashes. “God, you don’t understand… I can’t even tell you…”

“I know this. You have the power to make her stop, Kevin.” I edged over slowly, walking around the piles of wrinkled filthy clothes and discarded trash, to perch on the edge of the bed next to him. “You’re going to be a Warden. You have the power to control things around you. I don’t know if it’s weather, or fire, or earth—”

“Fire,” he said, and shut his eyes. “It’s fire.” Which explained the fury of the power that poured into me from him—it had the quality of fire to it. Out of nowhere, I remembered Rahel once telling me, Fire burns the hand it serves. Kevin was unstable, volatile, and he had way too much power at his disposal. I couldn’t believe the Wardens hadn’t already spotted him and started the process to neutralize or control him. If ever there was a reason for neutering someone, taking away their power… “I burned the house down. That’s how my dad died.”

I didn’t want to believe it, but I could sense the truth of it in him. God, such a burden for a sixteen-year-old boy. His father’s death, the crushing load of a developing talent of this magnitude, and if he was telling me the truth, some kind of sexual abuse… no wonder he was screwed up.

I wasn’t qualified for this. I wasn’t sure anybody was.

Kevin kept talking over my silence. “Bad Bob told me they’d come for me, take me away, but he said he’d protect me.” Yet another public service from Bad Bob Biringanine. Probably as a favor to Yvette, which meant he was banging Mrs. Prentiss before the late Mr. Prentiss had gone to smoke inhalation heaven. “Guess he won’t protect me now.”

Since I killed him. Right. I studied the frilly lace on my tiny, entirely useless apron. Prodded it with a fingernail, which was painted in hooker red. “So now you have me to protect you. Is that the general theory?”

“Sure. Nobody’s going to come after me if I have a kick-ass Djinn.” He favored me with a look. I didn’t have the heart to break it to him that if the Wardens found out some underage, untrained kid with a penchant for firestarting had a Djinn, they’d trash the continent looking for him. “You got me distracted. I said I want you to kill my mother.”

“And I think you should think about that a while.”

He rolled up on one elbow to stare at me. “Oh, I have. I’ve thought about it for years. I lay awake at night thinking about it. So you just go—”

“I should find out what she’s doing,” I blurted out. “You want me to kill her— What makes you think that she’s not ordering her new Djinn to do the same thing to you? I mean, that’s why she wanted you, right? To get me? And through me, to get him?”

He was listening. Not talking, but I could feel him hanging on every word.

“Wouldn’t you like to know what she’s doing? I could find out. It wouldn’t be that hard. She’d never even know I was looking.”

No teenager could resist an opening like that. And a kid who’d been deprived of control his whole life… I was faintly ashamed of myself for feeding his paranoia, but not enough to stop myself.

Kevin wavered, frowned, and said, “You can do that?”

“If you order me to. I can be invisible. I can go anywhere for you.” And do anything, but it was best not to bring that up. I looked at him from under my eyelashes, pitched my voice low, and said, “It would be easier if I didn’t look quite so—unique. May I change my clothes?”

He sighed and flopped back in a boneless heap of surrender. “Whatever.”

I put the peachskin suit back on again, covered my eyes with sunglasses, and stood up. “So I can go?” I asked.

“Whatever.” He sounded hurt, and stubbornly put-upon. “Just come back. Tell me what she’s doing.” He snorted. “Like I don’t already know. She’s playing with her new toy.”

I paused, stricken, with one hand on the doorknob. I couldn’t get the images out of my head. Kevin threw an arm over his eyes. “I’m gonna sleep,” he said, grunted, and turned over with his back to me. “I’ll call you when I want you.”

I escaped out into the hall, found my way back to the living room. Yvette was nowhere in sight. Neither was the blue bottle. Playing with her new toy… God, no. I had no idea what he meant, but it definitely didn’t sound good.

When I moved, I saw a definite fairy-dust afterglow. The coldlight infestation was growing in the real world, just like the aetheric. Of course, so far it didn’t seem to be doing anything inimical to me— just decorative. David didn’t seem to be suffering ill effects, either.

But then there was the storm, out in the Atlantic, powering up like some unstoppable juggernaut. It was still there, still growing, and it had to be the coldlight at the heart of it, didn’t it? Nothing else made sense.

One problem at a time. This second’s had to be Yvette, and getting David out of her well-manicured clutches.

First I had to make sure I couldn’t be noticed. I remembered the buzzing sensation that Rahel had used to conceal me at the Empire State Building… a certain frequency, a kind of invisible hum…

I felt it come into tune. When I opened my eyes again I could see a slight blur around me, like shimmer from hot pavement. Couldn’t be sure I had it right, but there was no test like the present.

I checked the kitchen. It was clean, modern, neatly organized. Even the salt and pepper shakers were in their places. I opened the refrigerator, just out of curiosity, and found regimental model-home organization. All the labels were turned outward. Vegetables in the lettuce crisper wouldn’t have dared to be less than perky.

Creepy.

The one interesting thing about it was that she had a secret stock of mint chocolate chip ice cream stuffed in the back of the freezer. Premium stuff, not the skim low-fat artificial sweetener crap. I took the carton out and weighed it. Half-empty. It wasn’t Kevin’s. He wouldn’t have cared whether or not anybody saw it, and I suspected the kid had never left an ice cream carton half-empty in his life.

I put everything back and proceeded down the hallway. An extra bedroom turned out to be an office. Everything was in files and folders, neat as an office supply store. No photos. In fact, she had no photos anywhere in the house that I’d seen. The art was all generic, carefully chosen to make absolutely no impression on anybody. I left the office. Three doors left—one was a bathroom, and as much as I’d hated Patrick’s trashy Wal-Mart happy faces in his loo, this one was worse. Ducks. Why did it have to be ducks?

The room it opened into was the master bedroom. I admit it, I was scared to go, but I couldn’t mist;

Kevin had specifically forbidden me to do it. I eased the door open slowly, one inch at a time, alert for giveaway creaks.

I needn’t have bothered. She wasn’t in there. The bedroom was clean and soulless as a hotel room. Didn’t look like a place to let loose unrestrained passion, or any passion at all, come to think of it.

That left the last room. I took hold of the doorknob and felt something. A kind of vibration, a warning…

I eased open the door and stepped inside.

The room had started life as a converted garage, then been gentrified with faux wood paneling and plush carpeting. Nothing much in it, but there was an aura to this place like nothing I’d ever felt before. Inanimate objects soak up energy, and that energy becomes visible in Oversight. The place looked dead normal, down here in the real world, but when I blinked and shifted into Oversight the real story came out. Red, rancid glows from the walls. Rotting greens. Pus-dull yellows. This place had seen suffering, and horror. It reminded me of Luminol, the stuff the police use to bring out old bloodstains… the ghost of evil, shining out of the darkness. Pain never dies completely, and this room was suffering.

David stood in the center of it, motionless, blank as a snowfield. He still retained his dark-copper hair, but it was shorter now, revealing the hard lines of his cheekbones, the strength of his face. The round glasses were gone. His eyes had gone dark. Very, very dark.

He was wearing black leather—pants, jacket, all of it looking butter soft and more than a little sexy. More than a little dangerous, too. Frightening. I wondered if she hadn’t actually expressed something essentially true about him that I’d never really quite grasped before… because David now looked like a predator.

Yvette walked a slow circle around him. There was something feline about the way she moved, both in the graceful sway of it and the predatory fascination.

Over the pulsing, thread-thin silver cord, I whispered his name. The dark eyes shifted and focused on me. I’d moved out of the doorway into a corner, shutting the door behind me; Yvette glanced toward me but saw nothing. David continued to stare.

Get out, he whispered to me over the silvery thread connecting us. I felt the warmth wrapping around me like an embrace. Please. You can’t help me.

I’m not going anywhere. An echo of the pledge he’d made to me. I said it even though I was terrified to watch this, terrified that I couldn’t do anything to help.

Yvette was holding the bottle in one hand, swinging it carelessly. Taunting him. Even if she dropped it, the carpet would break the fall; she’d have to throw it hard at the wall to even crack it. Still. If I could catch it on the upswing, it was possible I could help that along…

She froze in midstep. Her head snapped around, searching corners. She’d sensed something. How? I was sure I’d done it right…

“David?” she asked in that sweet, purring voice. “Someone here?” No answer. She understood why, unlike Kevin, and kept going without a pause. “Someone here? Someone here?”

I felt the compulsion click in, even across the room. David said, “Yes.”

“Show me where.”

He pointed. Right back at her. Yvette smiled. “Clever boy. Are we going to play these same tired games again? I thought you knew by now that I don’t tolerate that kind of thing.”

He lowered his hand to his side. She leaned forward and kissed him. Long, hard, hot. The same sultry, meaningless dance she’d done at Patrick’s apartment, with Lewis. She was professional at it, I had to give her that much. “I still think there’s somebody here,” she said when she pulled back for air. David remained still, blank-faced, unresponsive as a store mannequin. “Maybe that little silver-eyed friend of yours? Well. I’ve never minded an audience, I have to say, and you always seemed to perform better in front of one.”

Bitch.

There had to be something I could do.

She unzipped the black leather jacket, slowly, sliding her hands inside on the warm gold skin. I gritted my teeth. You can’t hurt my mother. Kevin had given me that command. Since he hadn’t been specific enough about his command to kill her, the two orders were floating around in limbo, the first one still applying. I wanted to wrap my hand around her throat and squeeze until she came apart, but I wasn’t sure I should even try it. And trying and failing would be far worse, just now.

“Take that off,” she told him. He stripped off the jacket and let it fall in a glistening heap to the floor. “You know what I want, David. What I always want.”

Oh, I had a pretty good idea, too. Or thought I did.

He proved me wrong.

I watched, sickened, as he reached out for her….. grabbed her by the hair, and slammed her face down on the carpet.

Still no change in him. Controlled, calm, utterly emotionless.

Oh God.

He rolled her over, and the flushed, breathless excitement on her face said it all. No wonder this place reeked of sickness. Yvette was one very sick lady.

I dropped the concealment. She spotted me instantly over David’s shoulder as I walked slowly forward, and the insane glee in her eyes was almost as nauseating as what she was about to force David to do. I remembered the dream, David’s desperate attempt to make Jonathan understand. It’s rape.

“I thought you were there,” she said. “Excellent. Maybe I’ll have you join us.”

“David,” I said calmly. “Would you like for me to do something about this?”

He couldn’t speak, of course. Couldn’t do anything. He was fixed on her, and I thought I read utter despair in those dark, alien eyes.

“What do you imagine you can do?” Yvette asked me, sugar sweet, looking ravishingly beautiful spread out on the floor. So very pretty. So very twisted. “Other than admire his technique.”

I crossed my arms and maintained my cool. “Well, I could do what your son suggested and kill you. What do you think?”

She froze, staring up at me, and her face was for a few seconds comically surprised. “You’re lying.”

“Well, yes, we Djinn do that. Believe me or not.”

I shrugged to show the depth of my not-caring. “Suit yourself.”

I looked at David, who was still frozen, waiting for her command. Leashed, but far from tame. She got up, still watching me, and put her hand on his shoulder to bring him up with her. Slid it in a proprietary way along the warm glory of his skin, up his neck, over a well-shaped ear, to dig her fingers luxuriously into his hair. No protest from him, and no flinch. I knew he had more latitude than that—didn’t he? — but he wasn’t refusing anything from her. Maybe she’d already given that command before I came on the scene. Or maybe he was drawing her in, making her careless.

I hoped.

“Did he used to be yours?” she asked me, and made the hand into a fist, jerking his head sideways toward her. Still no change of expression from him. I tried to listen, to see if he was sending me any whispers along the shared bond between us, but all I heard was silence. He’d gone deep, and far away from me. What was left might be something I didn’t know and couldn’t count on.

“I don’t own people,” I said. God, I sounded self-righteous. I decided that was okay, because I felt pretty self-righteous, too. “We freed the slaves in this country, or did you flunk history along with your sanity test?”

She turned and looked at David, pulled his head closer to hers and whispered something in his ear, then turned back to me, cheek pressed against his.

They both smiled. I felt a cold streak form along my spine, felt goosebumps rising under it, because those smiles were soulless, and dead, and dreaming of something awful. I remembered David smiling at me, the day I’d met him on the road after I’d spun the car out in a cloud of dust. I remembered the sharp, intelligent wit in those beautiful eyes. I remembered his skin, waking and shivering at my touch.

She couldn’t own any of that. What she did own was a shell. Skin. A ghost.

I kept telling myself that, but I couldn’t stop the sick, awful horror of this from threatening to choke me. Her hands were still moving on David. I wanted to rip them off at the wrists.

“My little Kevin finally grew some balls? You’re bluffing, sweetie pie. He couldn’t.”

I looked around the room. “He’s been in here, hasn’t he?” No answer. Yvette sat up. Her blouse had popped a couple of buttons, but the view didn’t impress me. “You and little Kevin, playing games. How heartwarming. And you think he wouldn’t want you dead? Honey, I just met you and I so want you dead.”

“So you come here and warn me?” She was regaining her composure. “Not likely.”

“I’m not all that eager to be Kevin’s little love slave, either,” I said. Everything I was saying had the ring of truth, because, well, it was. “I’m here to offer you a deal.”

She blinked. Deals were made from positions of power. We both knew I didn’t have any. “Don’t be ridiculous. You were entertaining for a few seconds, but you’re getting boring. I hurt things that bore me.”

When I smiled, I borrowed a trick from Rahel. Shark teeth. The flinch was well worth the discomfort. “There’s something you want more than David,” I said. I was guessing, of course, but with someone like her there was always something else. Toys got old the instant she had them in her hands, and besides, she’d had David before. No thrill of corruption there. “I can give it to you.”

She actually froze for a few seconds, considering me, and I saw the hot light of greed flicker in those green eyes. “And what exactly would that be?”

I shrugged. “You know well enough.” Ah, the Djinn talent for misdirection. Still serving me well, thank God. “If you want to waste me on a fool like your stepson, that’s your right. But think how much more you could accomplish, if you had me.”

She didn’t know. To her mind, I was already assuming legendary powers and proportions… a human reborn as a Djinn. She couldn’t have any idea of how much of a handicap that was. In fact, she probably thought that was what I was offering her. Life as a Djinn.

Over my dead body. Spirit. Whatever.

“Not very loyal to him, are you?” she asked. “Why should I think you’d be any more loyal to me?”

I shrugged. “The kid’s weak. You know that.” So was she, in a totally different way. Weak and greedy and sick. “You want to use David as some kind of cheap toy, that’s your prerogative. I just thought you should expand your horizons a little. The world’s a little wider than your bedroom.”

“You think I’m not ambitious?”

I didn’t have to fake the cynical smile. People like her were always ambitious.

“You made a mistake,” I said. “You could have had Lewis on your side. Now you’ve made a bad enemy. You’re going to need help to stay alive once he gets back on his feet.”

“Lewis?” she asked blankly, and let go of David. She’d completely forgotten about him.

“Lewis Levander Orwell? Yeah. That guy. The one you were rubbing like a magic charm to get your hands on me. You traded down, honey. Having Lewis would have been quite a feather in your cap. Talk about advancement… Only now, of course, you’re just the bimbo who bashed his head in, not the one who brought him back to the Wardens.”

That shook her. She’d had victory in her hands and walked away, and that had to hurt.

“You’re a lying, treacherous bitch,” she said, low in her throat, and wrapped her hand around David’s bare arm. “You really think you’re going to make a deal with me? I don’t deal with the likes of you. Ever. You serve me, or you suffer. Your choice.”

Kevin’s instructions to kill her were starting to look really, really tempting. Maybe if I just hurt her a lot… no, I’d seen the look on her face as David threw her down to the floor. She’d probably think it was foreplay.

“Serve me or suffer.”

“Already got a boss,” I said, and spread my hands. “Such as he is.”

She didn’t like being denied. “Take her,” she said, and released her hold on David.

He lunged for me, and God, he was strong. I yelped and tried to break free but his hands were crushing my arms, holding me still, shoving me back against that wall that, in Oversight, still dripped psychic blood. I wanted to mist away, but Kevin’s command earlier effectively prevented that. Trapped. Blue sparks zipped and swirled around me, thicker now, thick as a bag of glitter dropped from the ceiling. I blinked to clear my eyes. The things were swarming over David, too, clustering on his skin.

“David!” I whispered. Nothing sparked in the dark, dead eyes. I wondered what she’d told him to do to me. Wondered if it was anything I’d be able to stop. The things that had happened in this room… they crowded like phantoms, brushing at the edges of awareness, given strength by my fear and David’s aggression. I could almost see some of them, and just the hints made me feel weak and ill. What had David told me? She and Bad Bob had tastes in common.

Like Kevin, he’d been made to do things, probably here in this room. Things I couldn’t begin to understand, even with the ugly hints I’d already been given.

He twisted sharply at my arm, and I felt bone shatter with a dull cracking sound. Pain screamed through me, and in the next second it took on another horrible dimension as more bones in my body began to break. David’s doing. Destroying my physical form.

Instinct made me rebuild, but I couldn’t do it fast enough. His power ripped at me like a wild thing, shredding muscle, pulverizing bone, exploding vital organs.

I couldn’t even scream. My mouth opened, but all that came out of it was a hot bitter trickle of blood. I collapsed against him. Something in me kept struggling to reassert the template of my natural form, but he was stronger at this, better. He knew exactly how to hurt me.

He eased me down to the carpet. I lay struggling to move, feeling life energy leaking out of my broken body, and begged him silently to stop.

Yvette had moved closer. She leaned over him now, staring down at me, a blank-faced goddess with unclean eyes. “You know what I want,” she told him, and caressed his hair again, running the short auburn strands through her fingers. Petting him, the way she’d pet a particularly glorious and dangerous animal. “Make it last.”

He reached for my throat.

I felt another will impose itself over mine.

Right on cue, I vanished.

I collapsed in a heap, blind with shock and pain, and knew I was somewhere else. Where?

Ground-in, Day-Glo orange spots in the rug just inches from my face, and a few more feet away, a grease-stained pizza box with its top partly open. A fat brown-shelled roach was scuttling along the top of it. It stopped to waggle its antennae inquiringly, then decided I was no threat to its conquest.

I couldn’t breathe. My lungs had been ruptured. My body—human, not human, whatever it was—was shutting down. That wouldn’t kill me, I sensed, but it would trap me inside of a dead shell. Not the way I wanted to escape, especially since it meant I wouldn’t be going anywhere.

“Yo!” Kevin’s pimply, pallid face appeared in my field of vision, pointed at a weird horizontal angle. He was bending over, staring at me. He waved a hand in front of my eyes, snapped his black-fingernailed, blunt-cut fingers. “You okay?”

I couldn’t answer. I slowly blinked my eyes, which was about all that my body was capable of doing for me at the moment.

“Oh,” he said, and straightened up. He prodded me with the toe of a particularly crappy-looking sneaker. This close, the smell of his feet was rancid, like mold-ridden buttermilk. “She got to you, huh? Yeah. Thought so. So, can you fix yourself?”

I blinked again. If ever I needed the kid to catch a clue…

“You can’t, can you? You need me for that.” He crouched down, staring down at me. “You need me. How about that? Not so high and mighty now, are we?” A thick finger prodded at my flaccid arm, and broken bones grated together. “What if I just leave you here, huh? What’s your game plan then, bitch? Lay there and bleed on me? Some fucking guardian you are.”

He sounded surly, but there was a tremor deep down. He was scared, all right. Not of me. He knew what she was capable of, and he wanted a friend. Protection. Something.

I tried to move my lips, but it was useless. I couldn’t even blink anymore. My eyes were fixed and staring. I heard my heart murmur one last, regretful beat, and then the blood in my veins slowed and stopped.

Death was anticlimactic, as a Djinn. I kept waiting for something, anything. I still had senses—I could hear the rustle of Kevin’s baggy jeans as he paced back and forth, could smell the unwashed aroma that eddied off of him through the room. Under the bed, the cockroach emerged from the pizza box with a couple of its friends, paused, and tried to figure me out. I must not have looked tasty. They went the other way.

Kevin’s bedroom door suddenly blew open. Locks tore off of the frame and hit the far wall with enough force to put holes in the Sheetrock. I didn’t have a good view, but I heard Kevin’s pacing stop and stagger backward. He stumbled right into me, lost his balance, and fell. I felt him roll across me, hot and sweaty and tense with panic.

The swirl of power that went through the room was unmistakable.

David was here.

Kevin grabbed my limp, broken hand and yelled, “Fix yourself, dammit! Stop him! Don’t let him hurt me!”

Game on.

I felt my body instantly begin to heal, drinking in power from him to rebuild itself, and before I was anywhere near better I rolled away from him, away from his grip, and came fluidly to my feet to stand between him and David. Blue sparkles flashed all over me with false Vegas cheer.

Yvette was with him, of course. Still smiling.

“You left.” She pouted. “It was just getting interesting. We’re going to have lots of fun, sweetie, aren’t we?” The butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth tone turned cold and cutting as she focused past me, on her stepson. “Tell her to submit.”

“Yeah?” His voice wavered, but didn’t break. “Maybe I won’t.”

Why the hell had she ever taken a chance and given him a Djinn? No, I knew why… because she thought he was completely under her control, and she knew that having two Djinn under her direct control could be dangerous. Well, arrogance was part of her pathology.

David moved a step closer. I matched him like a mirror image. Kevin’s order had me, of course. If David made any aggressive moves at all, I was free to stop him, and to use every ounce of power Kevin possessed to do it.

“News flash,” I said aloud, straight to her. “Not the submitting type. You want to take me, you can try, but it’s going to be one hell of a fight, and believe me, the damage won’t be anything you can patch up with base makeup and a couple of Band-Aids. I will hurt you.”

“Yeah,” Kevin agreed. “And I’ll let her. No, I’ll order her to do it.”

Her green eyes flicked to him, and the look on her face… If I’d had any doubt that she’d played her sick little games with him, that put them to rest. The pure, nauseating hatred made me feel filthy to see it.

“You stupid little bastard. I give you a toy, and you try to threaten me with it? You’re pathetic. David, I want you to—”

“Kevin, I want to take you out of here,” I interrupted her, and looked straight at the kid. “I’ll take you out of here if you want me to.”

He was no fool, even with the obvious social handicaps. He smiled, showing me crappy dental hygiene, and said, “Yeah. Take me somewhere. Somewhere else.”

It meant leaving David, oh God, I didn’t want to do that, but I didn’t have a choice. I had to do what I could. Patrick had said it. First, preserve your life. I didn’t think I could die here, but I’d damn sure wish I could.

I grabbed Kevin, wrapped him in my arms, and pulled on that vast pool of energy stored inside of him to take him…

… back to Patrick’s apartment.

Not a smooth ride through the aetheric. I tried to avoid the worst of the blue flares, but it was worse now, burning everywhere. A cheery fairy-dust snowstorm.

Patrick’s apartment place was empty. Bloodstains on the carpet, already dried. No sign of Lewis, or Patrick, or Sara. No sign that Rahel had ever returned.

I let Kevin go, shook off another thick moving layer of sparklies, and knelt down to touch the stiff brown-soaked fibers on the floor. Lewis’s essence. Through it, I could trace him. Find him…

“What now?” Kevin asked me. He avoided the bloodstains and went around to the other side of the couch, where he wouldn’t have to look at what he’d done. “She’ll come after us, you know. She’s not going to let us go. All she has to do is tell him to find us.”

He had the perfume vial in his pocket, stuffed in among a pack of condoms that at this rate he probably would never need. Nothing hard enough for me to shatter the glass against. Pure luck, probably. He wasn’t clever enough to protect it on purpose.

I stayed where I was, in a crouch, touching the evidence of his guilt. “Yeah, well, if you still want me to kill her, I’m up for it.”

“Really?” Hope and dread, all packed into one word. “Holy shit.”

Lewis, where the hell are you? I really didn’t feel well. Maybe it was the cost of David’s deconstruction of my body. Dying had to come with a price. I needed Lewis, not just because I was worried, but because as a human he could physically take the bottle away from Kevin and shatter it. Lewis was my only real hope of freedom, unless Kevin made a monumental error. Which was not beyond the realm of possibility, if I stayed alert.

Speaking of being alert… my brain finally caught up with the fact that Kevin wasn’t giving me orders, he was listening to me. And my clothing had stayed the way I’d chosen.

He wasn’t seeing me as a slave just now. He was seeing me as a friend.

“I need some help,” I said aloud. “Your stepmother’s got power, and now that she has David, she can do a lot more. We need to talk to the Wardens. They can help neutralize her without too much of a fight.”

All true, again. I was trying not to lie to him, because I knew it would come back to haunt me later.

The blood told me that Lewis had lain here unconscious for a long time—hours, maybe—before he’d finally come to his senses and left. Things were vague, from then on. He might not have been thinking clearly. Still alive, though. That came through with a clarity that eased a knot deep inside of me. I’d really feared that we’d left him here to die.

“The Wardens would never take my side,” Kevin said. He flopped down on the leather couch, folded his hands on his chest and stared up at the mullioned ceiling that had previously been far too X-rated for a kid his age. “They’d kill me. The old guy said so.”

“Bad Bob wasn’t exactly a paragon of truth and virtue,” I told him. “He lied to me, too, lots of times. Look, you can trust me, Kevin. I promise that I won’t try to hurt you.”

I came around to the other side and sat down on the edge of the couch, looking down at him. He kept staring at the ceiling, but there was a suspiciously bright shine in his eyes.

“I can’t go home,” he said. “She’ll kill me now. She really will.”

“I won’t let her.”

“Yeah?” A hot, burning flick of those miserable eyes. “Like you could stop her. At least while she has that guy of yours.”

“I’ll fight if you will,” I said. “Come on, Kevin. You told me you wanted her dead. How about just removed? Taken away? Unable to hurt you again? What about that?”

He thought about it, fiddled with the loose riveted button of his jeans, and finally nodded. “Yeah. Okay. Just so long as I never have to see her again.”

I sucked in a deep breath, closed my eyes, and let it out. I propped myself in a chair and dialed a number from memory. As my fingers moved, I saw them picking up blue sparks, and shook them to get the crap off—not that I could feel it, but it creeped me out. I’d seen for myself how the stuff was drawn to the use of power, back in Seacasket—we’d been swarming with sparks.

Paul Giancarlo’s rough, Jersey-flavored voice said, “Yes?” The tone was sharp and impatient. Maybe he’d been dealing with telemarketers all day.

I opened my mouth, started to speak, and suddenly hesitated. This was a step I hadn’t expected to take, and I sensed that it was a big one. Maybe the kind you couldn’t take back later.

Things would never be the same.

“Hello?” He sounded pissed, and two seconds from slamming down a hangup.

“Paul?” I said. My voice shook a little. “It’s Jo.”

Silence. I couldn’t tell what was happening on the other end. Then, very quietly, “Jesus.”

“No, just Joanne, although I can see how you might make the mistake, coming back from the dead and all.” I sounded too maniacally cheerful. “It’s a long story, and I don’t think we have time right now.”

“You’re alive?”

“Again, yes, and we don’t have time. I need to find Lewis—”

“Lewis?” Paul had recovered fast. His tone was back to crisp and businesslike, at least so far as I could tell. “Yeah. He came here. Had one hell of a head wound. I tried to get him to let an Earth Warden take a look at him, but no way would he do it. He took off about an hour ago, maybe less.”

“Did he remember what happened?”

“Do you?” Paul countered. “He said your name, but I figured… you know…”

“Head injury, yeah.” I rubbed numbed fingertips together. “Things have gotten complicated.”

“More than you with a Demon Mark?”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck me running… okay. How much trouble are you in right now?”

“About all there is.” I closed my eyes, went up briefly into the aetheric, then back down, fast. “Not just me, though. All of us.”

He grunted. “I don’t have time for coming-back-from-the-dead riddle hour. You got some ghostly warning to deliver, just do it—there’s a storm off the Atlantic seaboard that’s going nuts—”

“And a fire in Yellowstone, and tectonic pressure in California,” I said. “I know. And it’s worse than you think. Way worse.”

That got a moment of silence. Paul was a pessimist. If it was worse than he thought, it was pretty damn bad, and he knew it.

“Jesus, Jo, what the hell are you into now?” he asked.

“Favor for a favor. You do for me, I’ll tell you. You’ve got a Warden working for you named Yvette Prentiss?”

He made a sour noise. “Nominally. I’ve got an allhands call out right now, and she ain’t even picking up the phone. She’s fired, soon as I get the time to sign the paper. Not that I shouldn’t have fired the crazy bitch years ago, but she had some friends—”

“Yeah, Bad Bob, I know. Listen, I need you to get Miriam and the Power Rangers over to her place. Now. She’s broken just about every Warden’s code there is, and what’s left won’t last the night.”

“Look, I don’t have a lot of time for disciplinary—”

“She’s stolen a Djinn,” I said flatly. “She’s torturing him. Paul. She’s going to destroy him.”

Silence, again. Long, crackling silence.

“Paul?” I prompted.

“Lewis already asked me for her address. Shit, Jo, I can’t do this right now. We’ve got all hell breaking loose around here. I’m sorry about Yvette, and yeah, we’ll take care of her as soon as we can, but right now we’ve got innocent lives to save, and three fronts to fight on. So it’ll just have to wait.” He sounded grim, but determined. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.” I tasted ashes. “I understand. Thanks.”

“Wait, tell me—”

I hung up on him. Immediately, the phone began to ring. Caller ID, auto callback, something like that. I let it clamor for attention and sat, thinking hard.

“They’re not gonna help,” Kevin said. He was sitting up, draped over the back of the couch, acne-spotted chin propped on thin arms. “I knew it. Nobody ever helps. Well, fuck her anyway. We can go anywhere, right? Do anything? I don’t need her. She can just do whatever.”

Lewis had asked for the address. He knew that Yvette was involved. But he was going over there hurt, disadvantaged, and she had David to use as a weapon…

“We’re going back,” I said.

Even from across the room, I saw Kevin’s morose expression turn mulish. “In your dreams.”

“Kevin, we have to go back. It’s up to us to stop her—”

“From screwing your boyfriend?” He blew a raspberry and flopped back down on the couch, out of sight. His voice stayed annoyingly stubborn. “No. Not gonna happen.”

“She’ll come after you.”

“No she won’t. She’s got what she wanted. Me, she’s just as happy to be rid of.” Leather creaked as he stretched. “You know what this place needs? A bitchen big-screen TV. With adult channels.”

Indirect. I ignored it. “Kevin—”

“I want a big-screen TV. With adult channels.”

I screamed inside with frustration. I could have wasted time optioning him to death—Standard or widescreen? Brand name? Model number? — but time was something I no longer had. I just used the power he poured inside of me to find the biggest, most ostentatious TV I could find and transport it to an empty wall in the apartment. Plugged it into main power. Created an invisible satellite hookup. Materialized a remote control on the coffee table. “Anything else?”

“DVD.”

I gave him that. I also skipped the intermediate steps and gave him a cutting-edge sound system, big honkin‘ speakers, a full CD rack based on the most recent Billboard charts, headphones, amplifiers, every movie in the last twenty years (at his age, he wouldn’t care about anything else).

“Bitchen,” Kevin said, awestruck. He got up to fiddle with the remote. “Whoa.”

“Let me go,” I said. He froze, hands still twisting knobs. “Kevin, please. I’m asking you as a friend. Let me go and do something.”

“Friend?” he echoed. There was something lost and little-boy in that word, something fragile. “I don’t even know your real name.”

“Joanne,” I said quietly. “My name is Joanne.”

“Huh.” He pulled out a CD and examined it. “I liked Lilith better.”

“Kevin…”

I watched his shoulders hunch together under the threadbare, ripped T-shirt, remembered his stepmother’s love of S&M… S, probably, in his case. He’d never had a friend, at least not since Yvette came into his life. Alone. Scared. In pain.

I could bully him into anything I wanted. I would, if I had to, for David. But it would haunt me worse than anything else I’d ever done.

“If you’re really my friend, you won’t go,” he said. “You’d stay here. Take care of me.”

How young had he been, the first time she’d hurt him? The quaver I heard in his voice was the cry of a child too small to understand why it was happening. Bitch. I ached with the need to do something to her, anything, to even the score. I understood David’s black fury now, when he’d seen her at the funeral. He’d had a close, unclean relationship with her for too long not to hate her.

I walked around the couch to where Kevin was randomly picking up CDs and sliding them back into the rack, hands shaking.

I put my arms around him. For a frozen second it was like embracing a corpse—no response at all— and then I felt his muscles relax and huddle into me, accepting the comfort. He smelled bad, but I didn’t have to breathe if I didn’t want to. I wondered how much of his slovenly approach to hygiene and housekeeping was designed to keep the perfectly coifed, house-proud Yvette at a distance.

I caressed his oily, lank hair and whispered, “Kevin, I am your friend. And I’ll come back to you. Just please, let me save him. You don’t want to leave him there. You know what’ll happen to him. You’ve seen it. You’ve felt it. You have the power to save somebody, Kevin. Use it.”

He slipped a hand into the pocket that I knew held my bottle, but he didn’t bring it out. It was almost like he was clutching a rabbit’s foot… his own personal lucky charm.

“You’ll come back?” he asked. “Promise?”

“I swear.”

I held him for another few seconds, which ended when I felt a palm slide down to my butt. “Hey! Hands!”

“Sorry,” he mumbled, and moved back. “Don’t— don’t let her hurt you. And come back.”

I reached out and kissed him. One chaste, gentle kiss. When I pulled away he was staring at me with wide, stunned eyes.

Never been kissed. Nothing sweet about the sixteen he was living.

I spread my arms, ready to rise into the aetheric.

“Stop!” Kevin cried. I looked at him and saw that he’d taken the perfume vial out of his pocket. His knuckles were white around it. “Wait. I can’t. You’re all I have.” A deep, chest-heaving breath, like a sob.

“Kevin, no—”

“Back in the bottle. Sorry.”

I screamed out my frustration, but the gray swirl was already sucking me down, helpless, into oblivion.

I didn’t want to dream, because I knew what it would be. Something bad. I’d come to the conclusion that the only things Djinn ever dreamed, trapped in oblivion, were really nightmares.

I hate being right.

In my dream, the Djinn were dying.

Each of the three sentient events out there—the forming earthquake, the strengthening fire in Yellowstone, the storm cell gathering in the Atlantic— had drawn Wardens in response. Of those, the top masters of each area had Djinn to focus and amplify their powers. Perhaps a hundred, all total…

… a hundred victims.

I watched, helpless, as the sparklies saturated in a slow, graceful rain through the aetheric, bathing the Djinn like radiation; the more power each Djinn sourced, the greater the concentration of cold blue rain around them. They knew. They knew it was killing them, and they couldn’t prevent it.

Some of the Wardens understood what was happening. They pulled their Djinn back, sealed them in bottles, hoped that the damage could be contained.

The rest pushed blindly ahead, focused on the objectives.

In California, tectonic plates rippled, shifted, slid. Earth Wardens were pushed aside by the forces at work, their weakened Djinn useless. The first shudders began, working deep in the earth.

In Yellowstone, fire flowed unchecked, like a river; it crested a hill and raced down, leaping from treetop to treetop, lapping the trunks in a molten river of flame. Trees cracked and exploded with sounds like gunshots as sap boiled inside. There were no animals running ahead of it; the superheated air had raced ahead, killing everything in its path.

Fire Wardens were struggling to build containments, but it was useless. Their Djinn were failing.

Yellowstone was going to burn. Again.

I couldn’t even bear to look at the raging fury that was forming out to sea. Please. Tell me how I can stop this.

The combined might of the Wardens couldn’t stop it. The idea that I could do anything, anything at all, was sheer lunacy.

I felt a presence with me. Something cool and peaceful.

Next to me sat a tall woman with unearthly beautiful features, hair white as snow, eyes pure amethyst.

Sara, I said. She gave me a sad, gentle smile.

Am I? She looked out at the devastation below. So much pain, for so little. I wish this would end. I wish I could stop it.

Can anyone? I asked. Rhetorical question. I rested my chin on raised knees like a little girl, and watched the end of the world in fire and flood and the slow rolling of the earth.

Oh, yes. Sara seemed surprised I didn’t know. Of course. You can.

I straightened up and met her eyes. Such cool, deep eyes, all the flecks and facets of a jewel. No wonder Patrick loved her. No wonder he’d do anything, no matter how horrible, to ensure her survival.

Me?

She nodded slightly. Tears formed in her eyes, ran down her smooth, perfectly pale cheeks.

Patrick knew, she said. From the first moment he saw you.

That I could close the rift?

That you are the rift.

I didn’t have time to feel the shock of that, because just then the pain started. Sara winced too, laid her hands over her chest and bent forward. It felt like we were being pulled by a fishhook, right through our bodies… tugged somewhere.

What the hell…

Sara looked up. Her eyes were flat black now, the jewel color lost, and her hair was twisting and blackening into a burned and petrified ruin.

It’s time to go. Remember. Remember.

And then it was lost, all a gray dream, floating in oblivion.

Pop goes the perfume cork.

I was ready, this time—I came boiling out, took form as soon as I was free of the bottle, was already moving to grab Kevin’s T-shirt and back him up against the wall.

“You!” I yelled. “You treacherous, shallow little—”

He was paler than usual, babbling something that I wasn’t listening to, because there were Wardens and Djinn dying out there. I’d felt it like the death of a thousand cuts inside that bottle. With every life slipping away there’d been another slice, another piece gone from the world. From me.

And there was this summons. Dragging at me like an anchor, pulling me apart.

It was still there, throbbing come home like a heartbeat inside me.

Kevin was holding my bottle in a death grip. I grabbed his wrist and squeezed. “Drop it!” I snarled. “Drop it or I take your hand off.”

“Don’t hurt me.” He managed to blurt that out, and I was trapped, another barrier in the road. Dammit. I let go—no choice—and backed away.

We were still in Patrick’s remodeled apartment. The TV was showing something that involved a lot of ships in space blowing up, but the sound was on mute. I spun away from Kevin and stretched out my senses, such as were left, trying to find someone, anyone to help, because I absolutely had to go. The summons wasn’t something that could be denied. The connection to David was still there—faint, but present—and I felt it twisting and vibrating with stress. God, what was she doing… no. David couldn’t be my first priority. Not now.

“Sara!” I yelled. “Sara! Please! I don’t understand what to do! Help me!”

The shadow of the Ifrit glided past me, drifting, barely visible. I grabbed for it, but it slipped away.

“Feed,” she whispered.

I couldn’t feed her. I had nothing in reserve, and so little coming from David that I was afraid to try to pull more; it might snap the connection altogether, leave him bleeding to death out there.

I turned to Kevin. He was still up against the wall where I’d left him, looking spooked and more than a little angry; I didn’t have time for that, or for his adolescent angst, or even for his pain.

There was too much pain, now. His—and mine, and David’s—was barely a drop in the bucket.

“Order me,” I snapped.

“To do what?”

“Anything!”

He looked blank for a second, then a sly, oily light came into his eyes. “Take your clothes off and put on the ones I like. The—” He made the corset gesture.

“Sure. Whatever.” I started stripping, using my hands to slow down the process, as the gate opened to his power. I started siphoning for all I was worth, filling myself with that thick dark-syrup flood, and looked for Sara.

She was hovering like a ghost in the shadow next to the massive television. I locked eyes with the black void where I thought her face should be, and began sending Kevin’s power into her. Force-feeding. By the time I’d stripped off my pants I’d already formed the lacy undergarments for the Frederick’s outfit, so there was no actual nudity involved, but Kevin was looking just as stunned as if I’d done a Full Monty for him. Good. Stunned would keep him out of my way.

I templated on the French Maid outfit and walked forward, to where the Ifrit had gained dark, smooth substance. Can you hear me? I asked her. Somewhere under the shadows, I thought I saw a flash of purple eyes.

I hear. It was barely a whisper, but it was there. And it sounded like the Sara of my dreams.

Can you take me where I’m supposed to go?

Jonathan. Such a wealth of sadness in that single word. Yes. Can.

What about Patrick?

She seemed to flinch. Gone. Seeking.

I sucked in a deep breath that creaked the corset and strained the engineering of its lacings. Take me to Jonathan.

Barrier. The sparklies? No, that wasn’t meant to be a barrier. It was far too porous. Hard to pass.

We had to. I held up a finger to put her on hold as Kevin walked up behind me.

He put his arms around me and pulled me close, and I nearly gagged when I realized how turned on he was. God, how had I gotten myself into this…

“I want you to—” Tactical error. I hadn’t finished dressing yet, which meant I still had access to his power. He couldn’t give me simultaneous commands.

“Sleep,” I said, spun around in his arms and used some of the power that was still flowing through me to turn back on him. “Dream about me.”

For a second I thought it wasn’t going to work, but then his eyes rolled back in his head, his mouth fell open, and he dropped like a bag of bricks to the carpet. The bottle stayed in his hand, clenched tight. Dammit. If it had rolled free…

I tried working on his fingers, but I couldn’t get them to relax. Probably some Djinn rule against it anyway. Couldn’t break them, since he’d ordered me not to hurt him. Couldn’t kill him—okay, not that I would have, but…

I dragged him feet first over to the leather couch, got him comfortably situated, and tried not to listen to the moaning. Oh, yeah, he was dreaming about me. I hoped I’d remembered to Scotchgard the couch.

“Do it,” I said to Sara.

The Ifrit leaped on me, dug talons deep into my chest, and started to feed. After the first few seconds of agony…

… we were falling through the aetheric. Fast. Balled up together, inseparable, feeding on one another like an ouroboros. Falling like a meteor through the aetheric, up through higher levels, the weirdest sensation of gliding in a direction that wasn’t up or down or sideways, here or there. I remembered the weirdness of the journey to Jonathan’s house, even in the relatively familiar analog of the elevator. The Ifrit wasn’t even trying to cloak this in familiar terms.

The aetheric was a minefield of disasters in progress. To the east, the furious storm was consuming power at a frightening rate; it was a towering whirlwind of coldlight and pure energy, and the few Wardens still fighting it were flickering, weak, and near to breaking. I didn’t sense any other Djinn. The fires in Yellowstone lit up the plane like a supernova—consuming everything in all the realms of our reality, nearly obscured by a shell of the swirling blue sparks. No Wardens at all near that, now. And no Djinn.

We hurtled toward the center of the inferno. I tried to scream, but the Ifrit was drawing everything out of me, every ounce of power and will, and I was deadweight by the time we hit the fires. The pain was so intense I thought that it was over, I was gone, but then there was a sense of pushing through something viscous and thick, of being squeezed, and then a sudden unexpected release.

We tumbled down, fast, still locked together. She was still feeding off of me.

We slammed down onto something hard and unyielding, and I realized I’d been made flesh again, sans tacky French Maid getup; I was wearing a long pale robe instead, something soft and cool and with a texture like silk.

It was the mirror image of what the woman kneeling astride me was wearing, only hers was a blinding white where mine was a soft cream.

Sara had regained her form. At least for the moment. She was breathing hard, eyes wide and a little wild, and the dull flush in her cheeks could have been exhilaration or post-traumatic stress. Her claws were still sunk deep into my chest, and I could see the pale steady fire of my lifeforce running up through them, into her.

“Get off!” I managed to say, and batted at her weakly. She pulled the claws out, looking stunned and still maniacally excited, and stood up as I rolled over on my side. Oh God. I felt a wave of pure nausea and spat out blue sparks. They were sparkling all over Sara, too, but she didn’t seem to feel any ill effects from them. In fact, the sparks were going into her, not being rejected.

I’d never felt so frail and sick in my life—human or Djinn. I lay full length on the cool, silky wood floor, struggling to keep myself together, and heard footsteps from the other room.

Ah, perfect. Jonathan. She’d brought me to Jonathan.

He looked down at me with those cool, dark, judging eyes, then bent over and picked me up. Paused when he saw Sara standing there, looking unearthly and beautiful and unhealthily stuffed with energy.

“You,” he said. Not welcoming, not unwelcoming, and not surprised. “Stay here.”

I liked being held in a man’s arms again, feeling the strength against me. It made me feel safe, for the first time in what seemed like an eternity. I tried to pay attention, but it was all just flashes and impressions—a hallway, a glimpse of a kitchen, what looked like photos on the wall, an open darkened doorway. Lights flipped on as he carried me in. The softness of a bed sucked me down.

Jonathan looked down at me, and I was surprised to see something in his eyes that might have been respect. “You made it,” he said. “How’d you know where to go?”

“Didn’t,” I murmured. “Ifrit.”

He nodded. “Yeah, she would.” He took hold of my arm and ran both hands down it, like a coach giving a therapeutic massage; warmth cascaded back into me, silent and luminous. Life, coursing through me.

His hands moved on to my left arm, squeezed in energy. Then my legs, right, then left. The steady warm pressure of his hands lulled me into a half-dream.

Over on my back. Somehow my clothes were gone. Hands on my back, working down the muscles, healing.

“What are you?” I whispered. I felt Jonathan’s presence like the sun behind me. His fingers were no longer pressing my skin, then were inside of me, touching deep.

He never answered.

I woke up warm and comfortable, with a soft feather pillow under my head and no memory at all of going to sleep. No dreams, either. The sheets smelled faintly of sandalwood, and they were crisp and cool on my bare skin. The room didn’t look familiar. It featured a honey-warm wooden chest of drawers, massively carved, and a couple of paintings of space and the stars that looked vivid enough to be windows into infinity. A bookcase, loaded with hardbacks of all shapes, sizes, and colors. A bedside table with another lamp, currently off.

Lying on the rug next to the side of the bed, like a dog curled up for the night, was an Ifrit. It gleamed black in the shadows, and as I stared down at it, it raised its head and grinned at me with black needle teeth. I felt a wave of horror, a flash of dream come to life. Sara?

If it was, what I’d given her hadn’t been enough to keep her in Djinn form for long. And I’d given her so much—almost everything I had. The Ifrit put its head back down again, curled its long, vaguely human form into a tighter coil, and relaxed. Guard dog? If so, I had no idea how to call her off. Or even if I should.

“Hello?” I tried a tentative whisper, and slid up to a sitting position in the bed. The Ifrit didn’t twitch. I kept an eye on it and cranked the volume up a notch. “Anybody?”

The bedroom door framed a moving shadow. Light silhouetted a tall male figure, and for a frozen, relieved second I thought David! but then he moved into the warm glow of the table lamp and it was Jonathan. He had his hands thrust into the pockets of his jeans, looking casual in pose but not in body language. His dark eyes were too bright and too focused.

He didn’t so much as glance at the Ifrit. I found that interesting. The Ifrit raised its head and sniffed at him, climbed to its feet and stalked around him in a circle.

Jonathan kept watching me, though he reached over and patted the Ifrit on the head. It flopped down, elegance etched in darkness, and I felt it watching him with something like adoration.

“So?” he asked me. I rubbed one bare arm and found gooseflesh popping up, courtesy of a slight chill in the air, or maybe his presence.

“Well, I’m not coming apart,” I said. “Gotta be an improvement.”

He nodded. “Came close, though.”

“I figured.” I cleared my throat. “Um… how many others made it here?” He just looked at me for a long few seconds, and I asked the question I dreaded. “Rahel? Did she make it?”

He dropped into a crouch next to the bed. I held the sheet up as a modesty cover, but didn’t particularly worry about it if he decided to check the side view. He didn’t. Quite. “No. How much do you know?”

“Not too damn much.”

“Okay.” He put his bare hand on my bare shoulder, drawing a fresh shiver out of me, but once again I got the therapeutic touch, nothing personal. “You’re clear. You can get up now.”

He turned his back, not as if he was intent on giving me some kind of personal space, more as if he deeply didn’t care whether or not I was naked; I formed clothes as I got up, anyway. Blue denim jeans, work shirt, sturdy boots. They seemed appropriate, here.

“What about David?” I asked.

“You tell me.” His back was still turned; he was pulling things out of the bookcase, restlessly flipping pages. Something to do with his hands. There was so much repressed energy in him, I wondered how he survived here, stuck in this house, unable to leave. He didn’t seem to be someone with a peaceful interior life. “He enjoying himself? Having a good old time with the Widder Prentiss?”

Sarcasm thick enough to spread like manure. I heard the pain underneath, though. And remembered the dream. “I didn’t want him to do that. I would have stopped it if I could have.”

“Yeah, well, not always about what you want. Or any of us, for that matter.” He shoved the book back in place with unnecessary violence and turned to face me, arms folded across his chest. Forbidding, that was the word for the expression on his face. Flint-hard eyes. Lips in a straight, unsympathetic line. Anything I said would sound whiny and self-pitying, so I said nothing. Just looked at him. He finally transferred the stare down to his black Doc Martens. “I notice you managed to get away. Maybe you’ll be of some use. We can always use some good solid cannon fodder.”

“No wonder humans don’t become Djinn very often,” I replied. “What with your incredible recruitment efforts.”

Jonathan’s lips twitched. It might have been a smile, but he didn’t let me see it to be sure. “Yeah, well, you get set in your ways after the first couple of millennia or so. Sorry if we haven’t made you feel like one of the boys.”

I elected not to get into the gender-specific arguments. “Does she still have him?”

“Madame de Sade? Oh yeah.” He rocked back and forth on his heels, arms still folded.

“And…”

He looked up. “You want details?” The tone could have frozen mercury. “Should’ve stuck around. Could’ve been part of the whole experience. I’m sure he would’ve loved for you to see it.”

Oh, he was so angry… showing none of it in his blank expression, but the raw cutting edges of it came through.

“Rahel is on her way,” he said. “She went to run an errand for me.”

“But you know how dangerous—”

He held up a cautioning finger. “Don’t. Don’t do that. You want to stay on my good side, Jo, let’s get something straight. Never remind me of the obvious. And never assume I didn’t notice it.”

He turned and started for the door. I called a question after him. “How bad is it? Out there in the aetheric?”

“Come with me,” he said, and disappeared down the hall. I followed. “While you were sleeping, you’ve missed the party.”

I was unprepared for a living room full of people. There were at least thirty or forty crowded in. Djinn of every size, shape, description, color, and dressed in every conceivable style. Some evidently had a whole god complex going; the silks and satins were way over the top, not to mention the jewelry. It made Rahel’s traditionally neon color scheme look positively corporate.

Jonathan carved an easy path through the crowd and stood next to the fireplace, watching the jockeying for position; when he caught sight of me standing at the back, he jerked his head in a come here gesture that had nothing to do with concern. More like he wanted to keep his enemies close. I grabbed wall space at his shoulder and tried to look insignificant, which turned out to be difficult, since I was drawing stares and whispers. Jonathan held up his hands for quiet. Instant obedience.

“This is Joanne,” he said, and pointed a thumb in my direction.

A tanned, fit-looking guy in what looked like a hand-tailored suit and iron gray tie looked me over with eyes of a pure, unsettling teal color. “She doesn’t belong here.”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” Jonathan said, but in a tone that didn’t invite anyone to actually try. “Right. Here’s the thing. We’re what’s left.”

A short, pregnant silence. “What?” someone in the back ventured, looking around. Adding up numbers. “So few?”

“So many lost?” An alarmed, high-pitched voice from up front, I didn’t see who. “Impossible!”

“I didn’t say they were lost. I know right where they are,” Jonathan said. “Just can’t get to them right now. Most are in their bottles, waiting it out. Some… some got trapped on the aetheric. Some can’t hold themselves together anymore because of the—what’d you call it?” He turned to me.

“Coldlight. Sparklies. Fairy dust.”

“Right. That stuff.” He looked back at the audience, face bland and notably free of panic. “Which is coming out of the rift.”

Gray Suit said, “Then someone must go up and close the rift.”

If the previous silence had been pregnant, this one was stillborn. They all looked at each other. Jonathan waited. I finally raised my hand, very slowly. “Um… can I say something?”

He looked over his shoulder at me, did a double take, and half turned my way. “I don’t know, can you?”

Great. A grammar teacher, on top of everything else. “Sorry. May I?”

“Sure.”

“Lewis sent me to seal the rift. I tried, but it didn’t hold.”

Nobody spoke, but a ripple went through the room, like an electric charge rolling between contact points. Polarizing. Jonathan broke the silence in a deliberately soft voice. “You tried? Great. Amateur hour. Lewis should have known better. Probably made things a hundred times worse.”

“He tried to get some of you to help,” I shot back. “But I understand you had a gut shortage around here that day.”

Yeah, that wasn’t smart, but I was tired and cranky and Jonathan was pissing me off, what with all the sarcasm. The room seemed to shudder with disapproval.

Surprisingly, Jonathan didn’t seem to take offense. He swept me from head to toe, giving me a new appraisal.

“That the new you?” he asked.

“Old me,” I said. “Getting sick of being politically correct.”

“I like it. Now shut up.” He turned back to the assembled Djinn, who were agitated enough that I was surprised we didn’t have spontaneous firestarting. “The ones who are trapped out on the aetheric are in trouble. The ones who can’t hold themselves together anymore may be dead. We need to do this fast, do it well, and then make sure the Wardens don’t screw it up even worse than they usually do.”

“Which means what, exactly?” Gray Suit again.

“That we clean up after them, as we always do? Let the humans stand responsible for their crimes. Let them clear the aetheric.”

He wasn’t much impressed by Jonathan, which I thought was interesting, given the extreme respect the rest of them seemed to accord him. Gray Suit had a pale complexion, sharp hatchet-faced bones, and gave off a sense of ruthless energy. I’d still put my money on Jonathan, if it came to a showdown, but I wouldn’t have given generous odds, either.

“Yeah. We’ll just hang out here, watching our own people die. That’s a hell of a plan, Ashan. Right up there with your best.” He punctuated it with a friendly I have an idea! gesture. “Tell you what. You go out and tell them we’re going to let them die.”

“More of us die if we go out there,” Ashan said without blinking. He had the no-blinking thing down. “But then you seem not to worry about that. Since you, of course, never leave the safety of your nest.”

Silence. Most of the Djinn were studying Jonathan. Jonathan stared at Ashan.

“Um…” I tried to make it sound deferential, but I wasn’t sure I succeeded. “Shouldn’t we find out who opened the rip in the first place?” Jonathan fixed me with a look dire enough to qualify as neurosur-gery without anesthetic. Naturally, it didn’t stop me. “Well, isn’t it a good question? I mean, somebody ripped it open. Somebody with a lot of power and not enough conscience. Was it a Djinn?”

“What part of shut up was unclear to you?”

I returned the stare, full force. Since last he’d intimidated me, I’d had the hard-core lesson in How To Be A Djinn, and the whole god-of-your-new-existence routine wasn’t going to cut it anymore. “Answer the question. Was it a Djinn who did it?”

“Oh, we are so going to talk about this later,” he said.

“I’ll take that as a yes. I’m just going on magical theory, here…” Because unlike the Djinn, I’d actually had class time learning about all of the physics of the stuff, the rules, and the various consequences. “… but it seems to me that whoever ripped it open would have a pretty good idea of how to close it. Since he must have known what he was doing. I mean, the thing was pretty well camouflaged when I got there. Discreet, you know?”

I had him. He blinked.

“Or was that stating the obvious?” I asked, and tilted my head to the side.

Neurosurgery. Without anesthetic. With a dull butter knife.

“We can’t ask the one who opened it,” he said.

“Because?”

The argument had taken on a tennis-match quality. The room full of Djinn was just watching us, shifting from one to the other, eyes avid. Rooting against me, no doubt. I didn’t care. There was only one opponent who mattered.

“Because he’s not here.” Jonathan’s fierce eyes were absolutely fiery. “Drop it already.”

I might have been slow on the uptake, but I finally got it. David. I know it registered on my face, because I felt it like an earthquake inside. David opened the rift…

“Why?” I whispered. “Why in God’s name would he…”

Jonathan gave me a pitying look, like I was the stupidest creature in the universe. Which, at that moment, I supposed I was. “For love,” he said. “Why else?”

David had opened the rift when he’d made me a Djinn. You’ve broken laws. Rahel had said that, and I hadn’t listened. Jonathan himself had tried to tell me how serious it was, what we’d done.

David had opened the rift, and drawn on something on the other side when he brought me back to life.

It was our fault the Djinn were dying.