ONE

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

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

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

“Stop.”

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

“Don’tever do that when I’m breaking a century on the interstate,” I snapped at the guy who’d put up that wall I’d just slammed into. “And jeez, sensitive much? I was just giving things a little push. For the better.”

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

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

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

“Why not?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Chicken.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You don’t need to.”

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

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

“O-kay,” I said. “East. Right. Until when?”

“Until I think it’s safe to stop.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Define right.”

“The way they—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“People say I’m smart.”

“I hope they say you’re lucky, too.”

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

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

 

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

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

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

I watched a commercial jet embroider the clear blue sky, heading west, and stretched my senses out. There wasn’t any limit to what I could know, if I wanted . . . I could touch the plane, the cold silver skin, the people inside with all their annoyances and fears and boredom and secret delights. Two people who didn’t know each other were both thinking about joining the mile high club. I wished them luck in finding each other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re going to teach me?”

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not to me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

Then it got to be painful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know! Something!”

“I can’t meditate for you, Joanne.”

“Well, you can . . . encourage me!”

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

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

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

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

“Half an hour.”

“I can do that.”

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

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

“Joanne,” he said. “Quit hovering.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re stuck.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I can’t.” Literally.

“Maybe it’s that you don’t want to.”

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

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

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

“Try me.”

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

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

Intensity.

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

Oh, God.

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

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

It was a good start.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Excuse me?”

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

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

“Did.”

“—sleep with you. In fact.”

“Common usage. Did too.”

“Didn’t.”

“Did too.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And?”

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

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

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

“Jo?” David. He was staring at me with those rich orange-flecked brown eyes. Had he been talking? Yeah, probably. I’d spaced. “I’m not talking about physical danger. There’s little that can hurt you now, but just being strong isn’t everything. You have to learn how to use that strength. And until you do, it’s not a good idea for you to put yourself in situations where you might have to . . .”

“Act like a Djinn?”

He looked relieved. “Exactly.”

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

“Not a good idea.”

“Because?”

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

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

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

“Because I could get claimed.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah?”

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

“Sure.”

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

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

. . . then we were somewhere else.

Somewhere dark. It smelled of cleaning products.

“Um—” I began.

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

“Oh. Right.”

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

“Right.”

“And don’t touch anything.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Funny, considering his heritage was something straight out ofThe Godfather.

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

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

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

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

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

Unmistakably seeing me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wouldn’t?

“Given the circumstances,” he finished.

What circumstances?

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Go ahead.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can’t have it right now. Out.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lewis asked, “Who the hell was that?”

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

He shook his head. “Later.”

“Uh-uh. Now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Let’s say a little more than that.”

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

As a Djinn, I had to balance the physical world, the aetheric, and about ten other planes of existence to create that rain, all without pulling anything out of my own essence. Because, as a Djinn, I didn’thave any essence, really. I drew power from the earth, the sun, the life around me. It was surprisingly difficult to do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

I could still feel his hand warm on my skin.

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

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

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

How can I feel that without having—

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

Solid, liquid, gas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Would you stop that?

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

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

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

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

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

It was breathtaking. Humbling.

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

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

What the hell is that?he asked absently.

What?

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

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

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

Sure. What is it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are they still there?I asked.

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

What?

Any of that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ah. Not bad.

When I opened my eyes, David looked deeply unsettled.

“What?”

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

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

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

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

“With the sparklies. Yeah, they lookedreal dangerous.”

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

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

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

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

“Can’t I go with you?”

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

“Who are you going to see?”

“You don’t need to know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We froze. His copper eyes swirled darker.

“Wrong number?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

“We’ve got to go.”

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

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

“Who was on the phone?”

“Later.”

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

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

“Lewis?”

“He wants to meet you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No. Just dress me. Please.”

“And what if I don’t?”

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

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

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

They didn’t.

It wasn’tthat good a bluff, apparently. David raised the stakes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But still, it was so cool.

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

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

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

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

“Fashionable?”

“Not really the word I was thinking.”

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

“And that’s sort of my point.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Instead of . . . ?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” he agreed.

“And you’re not going to?”

“Right.”

“So much for the partnership.”

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

Rahel had always known how to accessorize.

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

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

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

“David.”

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

“Business,” she said crisply.

“Yours or mine?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She’s not ready.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David pushed away from the wall and stepped out of the elevator into the hallway. I followed, pulled even with him, and felt a bubble of panic threatening to rise somewhere in my not-entirely-solid throat. “We’re in trouble, right?” I asked. I glanced back. The elevator doors were sliding closed. Rahel was nowhere in sight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Eyes down. Mouth shut,” I confirmed.

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It might have been fear.

“Jonathan,” David said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, you’dso better hope.”

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

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

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

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

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

But the door swung both ways.

I knew him.

He knew me, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nothing.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m fine,” David said.

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

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

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

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

“Is he right?” I asked.

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

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

“Not your business.”

“David—”

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

Not that I ever listened to sensible advice anyway.

I rounded on David. “What cheap-ass archetype hero myth did you step out of? I didn’t ask you to kill yourself for me! I wouldnever ask for that! You can’t just make me a Djinn anddie , dammit! Hear me? You can’t!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’d die to give her life.”

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

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

Power I now understood was sustaining me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Notthem. She’s a person. One person.”

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

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

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

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

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

A god who didn’t dare leave his heaven.

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

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

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

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

“Not talking to you right now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He is the one true god of your new existence.

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

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

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

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

“Will you let her die?”

“No.”

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

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

“No,” he said. “Never.”

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

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

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

“Yeah. I know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I swallowed hard. “Yeah.”

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

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

“Good. Glad we’re in agreement.”

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

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

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

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

I didn’t, but I discovered that I couldn’t say a word, anyway. I threw a desperate look at David, and found him just as horrified, if not more. I could practically feel theno! vibrating the air between us.

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

“The issue, I think, isyour pants, not mine.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nothing. We’re only very different.”

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, speaking of that, why?”

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

“Why do you obey him?”

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

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

She pointed. I blinked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So I said to him . . .”

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

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

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

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

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

“You did that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Um, people in line—”

“Go around them.”

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

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

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

“O-kay.”

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

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

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

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