Windfall

Chapter Four

In retrospect, snarling, “Over my dead body!” probably wasn’t the smartest thing to say to a Djinn willing to take on Jonathan in a straight-up dogfight for control of the Djinn world.

I never said I was smart. But at least you can’t call me a coward.

Ashan reached out to grab me, but his hand never reached me; Rahel lunged past me in a flash of neon gold and flung herself on him like a tiger, ripping and snarling. Ashan, taken by surprise, fell back a few steps…

… off the balcony.

He didn’t fall. He floated, looking surprised and annoyed and a little bit pissed-off, and yanked a handful of Rahel’s cornrowed hair to get her off of him. His strength was incredible. I knew how tough Rahel was, and the ease with which he slung her around and threw her in a violent, swinging arc that ended in a crushing impact with the ground thirty feet below, and with at least four rows of cars on her way into the parking lot. Rahel hit the ground, rolled, and came up fluidly to her hands and knees, looking for all the world like one of those clawed raptors from the dinosaur movies.

She vaulted up to the roof of the white van, where Detective Rodriguez might have noticed a slight weight displacement but wouldn’t have seen a thing even if he’d looked out. She ran the length of it, then planted her feet and arced gracefully up into the air, heading straight for Ashan…

… who knocked her out of the air as easily as Babe Ruth swinging for the bleachers.

I could feel the disordered currents of energy in the air around me. The Djinn were causing instability, and dammit, there was nothing I could do about it.

Whatever damage had been done to my powers when I’d overextended and David had … changed… wasn’t fixing itself, and the energy Jonathan had thrust into me wasn’t made for weather work.

Rahel flew bonelessly through the air, crashed to the pavement of the parking lot, and rolled about fifteen feet, arms and legs flopping.

And then she vanished into mist.

Poof.

Ashan turned his attention back to me.

I gulped and stood up, backing away. Not a lot of escape opportunities on the balcony.

“You know what I want,” Ashan said, and held out his hand. His fingernails gleamed a kind of opal-silver in the twilight, and his eyes were as bright as moons. He might have been wearing a designer suit, but he was no kind of human. “Get the bottle.”

“You can’t even touch the bottle,” I said. I meant it to come out cool and logical, but it sounded shaky. “Djinn can’t—”

“Little girl, don’t presume to tell me what Djinn can or can’t do,” he interrupted in a voice so low and cold that I felt ice form along my backbone. “I said get it.”

“Or?”

“You don’t want to test me.” He took a measured step forward. I felt the ozone crackling in the air, felt the menace in the clouds overhead. Wispy things, but firming up as the disruptions in the aetheric mirrored themselves into the physical world… whipping, uncontrolled winds in the mesosphere; cold spots; a streak of heat from Ashan that cut through weather patterns like a spearhead.

I could feel the electricity in the air trying to find a way to ground itself.

He could fry me right here on the patio, and with my powers currently registering somewhere from zero to dead, I couldn’t even defend myself. “David is fond of humans. I’m not. I don’t care if I level this entire building to make my point.”

“Djinn,” I said, and forced a grin. “No sense of proportion.”

I didn’t see him move, but I felt the blow—hard enough to temporarily white out my nervous system and send me reeling to slam back against stucco and brick. I’d missed the plate-glass doors, at least. That was a relief. When sensation came flooding back, it brought with it a tide of stinging-hot ache along the side of my face. It had been an open-handed slap, but damn, he hadn’t pulled it. I put my hand to my cheek and felt heat. My eyes were watering.

Ashan took another step forward. “I’m not interested in how clever you imagine yourself to be, and if you think your human body interests me, you’re deluded,” he said. “I only find it interesting in how many creative ways I might be able to take it apart. Now, go and get the bottle.”

He couldn’t touch the bottle. He couldn’t take it away from me. Even Jonathan hadn’t been able to do that. Was it a bluff? Or did he just want to know where it was?

I slipped open the sliding glass door and backed inside, then slammed it shut.

For all the good it would do, of course. Outside, Ashan stood silhouetted against the failing twilight, gray as a dead man, with those eyes swirling cold and silver.

“Hey,” Sarah said. She was still deep in her culinary trance, doing something now involving bread and the oven. The kitchen smelled like rosemary and olive oil and roasting chicken. Heaven. I wished I could appreciate it; I was shaking, shaken, and scared. I watched her slide the tray into the slot and close the oven door, then strip off oven mitts and turn toward me with a smile. “It’s nice out there, isn’t it? Kind of peaceful. Maybe we can have dinner out there…”

“Yeah,” I said. “Great. Okay.” What a horrible idea. I started to move past her to the bedroom.

She reached out and grabbed my arms, pulling me to a stop. Her frown creased into faint lines. “Jo? What happened to your face?”

“Um…” I was drawing a blank. “I tripped.”

“Tripped?”

“It’s nothing, Sarah.” I tried to pull free. My sister was stronger than she looked.

“Bullshit, nothing. You look spooked, Jo. Is it that guy? That van guy?” Now she looked angry as well. “Dammit… I’m calling the police. Right now.”

“No! No, look, it’s nothing like that—” This was all getting way too complicated. I yanked free of her grip. She lunged for the phone. I grabbed it away from her and slammed it down hard on the table. “Sarah! It’s my business, all right? And the guy in the van is a cop!”

She stared at me, astonished. “He’s what?”

“A cop.” I had trouble controlling my breathing. Panic was getting the better of me. “I had some trouble in Las Vegas a couple of months ago. It’s temporary.”

“Jesus Christ, what did you do? Kill somebody?”

“Do I look like a murderer to you? You’re my sister! You’re supposed to believe in me!”

I hadn’t answered the question, but luckily I’d hit the right guilt buttons. “Jo …” Sarah flapped her manicured hands helplessly. “Fine. All right. I believe you. But why is he following you?”

“He thinks I know something about a crime that happened while I was—before you ask, no. I didn’t.” She opened her mouth to fire off another question, and I hastily searched for an excuse to escape. “Sorry. I have to use the bathroom.”

Even persistent people don’t want to argue with full bladders. She let me go. I hurried through the doorway into the living room, heading for my closed private space, and… the doorbell rang.

JESUS! “Get that!” I yelled over my shoulder, and kept moving. I ran into the bedroom, slid open the bedside table, and grabbed David’s blue glass bottle. My heart was hammering. I was about to take a huge gamble, and it was likely to get me hurt or killed in the process. I went back out into the living room, passing Sarah on her way to answer the doorbell, frowning at me; she’d taken the time to remove her apron and fluff her hair.

I slid the sliding glass door open and stepped out onto the patio. Ashan turned from contemplation of the ocean to stare at me. His eyes flicked toward the bottle in my hand.

“At least you take direction properly,” he said. “Call him.”

“You don’t want me to do that,” I said.

Ashan’s eyes went stormcloud-dark, tinged with lightning blue. “I won’t tell you again.”

“You want to kill him.”

Ashan smiled. Not nicely.

I closed my eyes, opened them, and said, “David, come out of the bottle.”

For a long second I was sure that I’d made a terrible mistake, that he’d never gone back in the bottle at all, and then a shadow detached itself from the corner and stood, swaying and angular, at my side. It wasn’t David. It wasn’t … anything I could recognize. But it answered to the name, and evidently I still had some control over it.

Ashan took a step back. That predatory smile went south, fast.

“What’s wrong?” I asked him, and this time, my voice stayed steady and cool. “You wanted David. Here he is.”

“Ifrit.”

“Oh, now that’s just mean. You shouldn’t judge a Djinn by the color of his …” Before I could finish what was admittedly a very weak joke, I lost whatever control of the situation I had, as the Ifrit formerly known as David lunged, fastened himself around Ashan, and began to feed.

Ashan screamed, backed up, hit the railing, and began raking the Ifrit—I couldn’t think of him as David—with silver claws. Ashan’s form changed, flowed, became something larger and only barely human in form. Gray and vague and shot through with vivid streaks of white.

The two of them misted through the railing and plunged down, twisting, falling.

The Ifrit had two misshapen, angular limbs plunged deep into the Djinn’s chest, and the silver essence flowed in spirals up coal black, glittering arms, disappearing into the black hole—mouth?—in the center of that twisting shadow.

He’s in pain. Not Ashan, David… I could feel it. I could feel his agony, and it made me stagger and grab for the railing and bite back a scream. The connection between us was coming back, and oh God it hurt. Like a gallon of bleach poured into my guts. I held onto the railing in a death grip, staring down at the two battling figures as they hit the parking lot—like Rahel before them—and rolled, ripping at each other like wild tigers.

And then, suddenly, just when the pain was about to drive me to my knees, it stopped. There was a floating sensation, an overwhelming burst of peace, and I saw the Ifrit change.

Twist.

Take on color and shape and form.

David was crouched on top of a prone Ashan, hands sunk to the wrist into the other Djinn’s chest. He was dressed in jeans and nothing else—bare-chested, gleaming and bronze and shimmering with what looked like sweat. His shoulders heaved, although he didn’t need to breathe, unless he’d really taken on human form.

He yanked his hands free of Ashan’s chest. They were smeared with silvery residue. Ashan, for his part, lay there motionless, staring up at the darkening, cloud-littered sky.

Lightning jumped from one cloud to another, a hot, white flare that I felt along my nerve endings. Thunder slammed through the air and buffeted my chest, such a physical presence that it set off car alarms.

David looked up at me, and his eyes glowed hot bronze. Alien. Familiar. Haunted.

He pulled himself away from Ashan, staggered to his feet, and braced himself against a convenient Volkswagen Bug. The car’s alarm went off. He absently shushed it with a tap of his fingers against the fender, got control of himself with a visible effort, and formed a blue checked shirt out of thin air. He put it on, but didn’t bother with buttoning it. I don’t think he had the strength.

He looked so weak.

“David,” I whispered. I was gripping the rail so hard I thought I might have to have it surgically removed from my fingers.

He looked up again, and I got a faint, ghostly smile.

And he misted out.

I gasped and leaned over, looking for him, but he was gone, gone…

Warm hands slid over me. I bit my lip, tasted tears I didn’t know I’d shed, and leaned back into his embrace.

“Shhh,” David whispered against my ear. His breath stirred my hair. “Not much time. I couldn’t take enough from him to stay in this form, and I won’t kill him. Not even him.”

“I know,” I said, and turned to face him. He looked normal. Healthy and sane and perfectly all right, and that was the torture of it, that it was temporary. That he’d have to feed again and again to maintain this illusion of normality.

I kissed him breathlessly. Hard. He returned it with interest, trying to pour emotion into the briefest span of time possible, and reached up to cup my head in his large hands, holding me in place while his warm, silk-smooth lips devoured mine.

When we parted, it was like losing a limb. I could feel him again, inside—the connection was strong, humming with potential. But I could already feel the drain. I had little energy left, and something in him was siphoning it off. It was like trying to fill up a black hole.

“Put me back in the bottle,” David said. “You have to. Do it now.”

I nodded. He stroked hands through my hair, smoothing curls, making it silky straight the way he knew I liked it.

“I love you,” he said. And that hurt, oh God. Because I knew he meant it, despite everything.

I said the words, and he was gone, back into the blue glass bottle I’d dropped, forgotten, on the wrought-iron table. I hadn’t even remembered putting it down.

I picked it up again, shocked by the several-degrees-too-cold chill of the container, and remembered to look back down at Ashan.

He wasn’t dead. In fact, he was moving. Rolling up to his knees, with one hand bracing himself on the pavement. He looked like he’d had the shit kicked out of him, but I had absolutely no doubt that he was completely, utterly pissed off, and looking for payback and something more than a pound of flesh.

I couldn’t use David to protect me. Not when he was barely clinging to his sanity and identity.

I stood there, looking down at him, as Ashan made it to his feet. He passed an absentminded hand over his suit, and the rips and dirt disappeared. He was once again a Brooks Brothers ad, except that his expression wouldn’t effectively sell anything but firearms or funeral arrangements.

He didn’t move, just stared at me with that burning threat in his eyes, and waited.

I said, “If you come back at me, I’m going to make you an all-you-can-eat Ifrit buffet.”

He said something in that liquid-silver Djinn language, the one I could almost understand. I doubted it was complimentary.

“I mean it,” I said. “Get out. If you come back, I won’t be the one getting bitch-slapped.”

Behind me, the sliding glass door rumbled open, and I heard Sarah say, “Jo? Eamon’s here. I’m getting ready to serve the pasta. And I’m serious about the police. You really should call them. I don’t care if that man is a cop; he still can’t do this to you. It’s not legal.”

I didn’t move. Down on the pavement, Ashan didn’t, either. We stared for a good thirty seconds. Wind whipped at my clothes, my hair, going west, then south.

Random winds, confused by the boiling disturbances in the aetheric. God, the weather was so screwed up. The Wardens were going to go insane.

Which reminded me of what had happened on the bridge. I had no idea of how much all this was affecting the Wardens, but I knew for certain there’d already been one human casualty. I needed to report it.

“Jo?” Sarah sounded concerned. “Are you all right?” The patio door slid farther open, and she stepped out next to me, enveloping me in an ever-so-slightly overdone cloud of Bulgari’s Omnia, which was—she’d assured me—a bargain at $75 for two ounces. The wind ruffled her highlighted hair, and she frowned out at the parking lot, focusing on the white van. Her breath exploded in an exasperated sigh. “That’s it. I’m calling the cops. At the very least, they can make him stop parking down there and staring at us all the time.”

Down in the parking lot, Ashan’s intense eyes—swirling from silver back toward teal blue—suddenly shifted away from me to focus on my sister. And he smiled. It was a dark prince’s smile, something chill and amused and terrifying. I felt an answering righteous surge of fury. Don’t you dare, you bastard. Don’t you dare look at my sister like that.

Whether he sensed that or not, he misted away without another sound or word.

Gone, except for that lingering, unspecified threat.

I sucked in a deep breath, turned, and laid a hand on Sarah’s bare shoulder. Her skin felt creamy-soft under my cold, shaking fingers.

“It’s okay,” I said, and smiled. “Everything’s okay now. Let’s just have a nice, peaceful dinner.”

Yeah. That was likely.

While I’d been playing Juliet to Ashan’s homicidal Romeo out on the balcony, Sarah had transformed my dining room table—another secondhand special—from its usual distressed state into something that might have made an interior designer reach for a camera. I recognized the tablecloth, which was something of Mom’s that she’d left me—a gigantic crocheted ecru thing, big enough to use as a car cover—but Sarah had dressed it up with an accenting silk-tasseled runner, candles, a bowl of fresh flowers floating in water. The dishes—all matching—looked suspiciously new. Also mod and oddly shaped and matte black, which I knew had not been in my meal-serving arsenal last night. In fact, my china collection mostly consisted of secondhand Melmac, with the occasional chipped Corningware.

The kitchen looked spotless. There were three glasses of chilled white wine sitting next to the plates, glimmering delicately in candlelight.

Eamon was standing next to the table, his back to us, watching something playing silently on our (still crappy) television set. Financial news, apparently. At the sound of the closing patio door he turned, and I have to admit, he looked good. Like Sarah, he’d gotten the “let’s dress to impress” memo I’d missed. His pants were some kind of dark, rough-textured silk, his shirt a deliciously pet-table peachskin, open just enough to demonstrate how casual he was, yet nowhere approaching the sleazy post-modern disco look so currently in vogue. He looked hand-tailored, and still just the slightest bit forgetful about it.

Class without effort.

He extended his hand to me. I reflexively accepted and watched his smile go dim, a frown of concern take its place.

“Joanne,” he said. “You’re cold. Everything all right?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thanks. I’m fine.”

His long fingers—long enough to span my wrist and wrap over by at least three inches—slid up to touch a bruise on my arm left over from this morning. “You’re sure?” He sounded doubtful. “You don’t want to see a doctor? No problem with the arm?”

“I’m fine.” I tried to put some conviction into it. “Glad you could make it. Sarah’s been cooking for—hours.” Which might have been true. I had no idea.

Eamon let go and accepted the conversational detour. “Yes, it smells delicious. And your apartment looks lovely, by the way.”

I shot Sarah a look that she accepted with raised eyebrows. “Yeah, apparently. Much to my surprise.” I looked significantly at the new plates. Eamon’s eyes darted from me to Sarah, then back again.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “She said you were short on a few of the essentials, so I took her shopping. We got a few things.”

In my world, fancy black foo-foo plates and new wine glasses and silk table runners didn’t really constitute essentials, but I was willing to go with it. “I don’t mind, but really, if you bought them, I’ll pay you back.” Then again, those plates looked like they might be worth more than my entire shoe collection.

“No need.” He shrugged it off. “As it happens, a freelance payment came through today. I don’t mind contributing a bit, since you’re being so kind as to invite me as your guest.”

“Most dinner guests just provide a bottle of wine, not the whole place setting. Well, anyway, it’s nice to hear good news for a change.”

He smiled slowly. “I don’t know if it’s good news for everyone; money that comes to me does have to come out of someone else’s pocket, at someone else’s expense … ah, well. Life does turn in interesting ways.” His eyes flicked toward David’s bottle. I was still holding it in my left hand. “May I put that in the kitchen for you?”

I immediately flinched backward. “This? No, it’s—skin cream.” Which might have been the dumbest explanation I’d ever come up with, but I was rattled. Too much, happening too fast. And I obviously couldn’t let Eamon touch the bottle, or he’d have ownership of David. At least temporarily. “It’s empty.” I turned it upside down to demonstrate. “I’m just putting it back. To refill it.”

I slipped past him and went to my room. Stood there in the dark for a few moments, sliding my fingertips slowly over the glass, thinking about David, about how good he’d looked. Could he have been… cured? Maybe he was fine now. Maybe…

Yeah, I told myself. Maybe you could call up your Djinn boyfriend and bring him out to dinner and explain how your musician boyfriend was living in your closet when you said he was on the road. Now was not the time to experiment. I slid the drawer open, kissed the glass, and slipped the bottle into its padded case.

After a hesitation, I zipped the case shut. If I needed to grab things in a hurry, seconds might count, and with Ashan on the warpath, flight might be the best defense.

Since Sarah and Eamon looked so nice, I threw on a blue dress—nothing too suggestive, since he wasn’t supposed to be looking at me, after all—and stepped into a decent pair of secondhand Jimmy Choo kitten-heeled pumps. Lipstick, some mascara—it was a fast makeover, but at the end I looked decent. The mirror showed a brightness in my eyes that hadn’t been there before, and a flush in my cheeks.

My hair was glossy and straight from the touch of David’s stroking hands.

I thought about the Djinn, fighting among themselves. I thought about Wardens taking killing falls from bridges.

I thought all that for about thirty seconds, then sat down on the bed and picked up the telephone. Dialed a number from memory.

“Yo,” said a rough, Italian-spiced voice on the other end; I could tell he hadn’t yet looked at Caller ID. There was a short, fumbling pause, and then a much warmer, “Jo! Nice to know you still remember the number.”

“Paul, how could I forget?” I sat back and crossed my legs, and smiled; I knew he could hear it in my tone. “I just thought I’d better let you know that there’s something going on with the Djinn. It’s bad, Paul. Really bad.”

Sometimes, being proactive with your ex-boss is a good idea, especially when said ex-boss has the power to haul your ass into a special clinic and give you a lobotomy. Forcibly. For not much of any reason at all, actually. And I wanted Paul to hear things from me before he started getting the reports in from Florida of wacky things happening around me up on the aetheric.

He sighed. “What’s going on?”

“I personally witnessed a Warden get killed.” I wrapped a hand slowly in the bedsheets. “Paul… the Djinn meant for it to happen. It was deliberate.”

Silence, for a long moment, and then I heard his chair creak as he readjusted his weight. “He’s not the first.”

I’d been afraid of it. “How many?”

“I can’t tell you that. But if I didn’t know better, I’d go join some cult and start preaching about the Apocalypse, because all this is… it’s bad, Jo. And it’s making no sense to me. You got any information I can use?”

I chewed my lip for a few seconds. “It looks like the Djinn are splitting into sides. It’s a power struggle of some kind. We’re just… caught in the middle.”

“Great.”

“Look, I know it’s probably nothing at this point, considering everything that’s going on, but… I got taken for a ride by three Wardens the other day. They seemed to think I was still in the weather manipulation business. Is that coming from you?”

Silence.

“Paul?”

“I can’t discuss this, Jo.”

Dammit. It was coming from him. “I need to know. Look, I’m not running, I just … there’s so much happening. I can’t afford to be caught off guard by Wardens right now.”

“Cards on the table?” he asked. “I’ve got a dozen senior Wardens yelling for your blood. Their point is that whatever’s going on, you’re in the middle of it, and besides, you haven’t been straight with us, not about much of anything. And I know that part’s true. So. Where does that leave us?”

“Standoff, I guess. Because if you send them back to take me in, there’s going to be a fight. And it won’t be pretty. You can’t afford the losses.”

“That I know. But babe, make no mistake. It can be done. There’ll be some collateral damage, and that would be on you, right? You can’t win. Too many of us, and even if we’re not at full strength, you’re all alone. So don’t start the fight. I got too many other fucking problems. If they want to take you in, you let them take you in.”

That was about what I’d expected. And from Paul Giancarlo, who really didn’t have a lot of latitude to work with, that was a gift.

“So where am I?” I asked. “In? Out? Under house arrest?”

A long, long silence, and then Paul said, “Don’t fuck up. That’s all I’m sayin’.”

“Okay.” I sucked in a breath and brought out the question I’d really called to ask. “Do you know how to get hold of Lewis these days?”

“Lewis? Yeah. Why?” He sounded guarded.

I tried for casual. “I wanted to tell him something, that’s all. Got a cell number?”

He did, and he read it off. I scribbled it down and committed it to memory at the same time. We chatted on some neutral topics, lied to each other some more, and hung up two minutes later.

I called Lewis, who answered on the first ring.

“I need you,” I said. “Where are you?”

“Up the coast.”

“Doing… ?”

“Disney World,” he said. Which might have been the truth. With Lewis you could never really tell. “What’s wrong?”

“Apart from the Djinn fighting in the streets and Ashan himself coming to kick my ass? Well, I have a time clock running on my life, and Jonathan wants me to break the bottle and free David, but if I do that we’ll never be able to heal him, and besides, he’ll probably kill Jonathan and win the war for Ashan. I got sunburned and my boss tries to feel me up every day. Also, my sister asked a date over for dinner, and David’s an Ifrit.”

Stunned silence. And then he said, carefully, “Have you been drinking?”

“Not yet, and not nearly enough, believe me. I need you. Get your ass down here as soon as you can. Get Rahel to fly you in express if you can.”

“No, I’ll drive. I’ll send Rahel to you. At least she can keep you out of trouble until I can get there.”

Curious, that Rahel evidently hadn’t informed Lewis about her conversation with me, and the ass-kicking she’d received from Ashan. But then he was a mere mortal, and she was a Djinn, and hey, even the nicest of them didn’t exactly regard us as equals. He wasn’t her master, and she wasn’t anyone’s slave.

“Jo?” he asked. I felt a rush of power and heard a quiet pop of noise, like a champagne cork letting go. When I looked up, Rahel was standing on the other side of the bed. Unsmiling. Watching me with lambent gold-flaring eyes, and the kind of clinical interest you might see in your better class of death row guards.

“How long will it take you to get here?” I asked.

“Two hours,” he said. “Watch your ass. It hasn’t been all happy puppies around here, either.” Click. He was gone.

I hung up and let the phone slide down to the bedspread, cautiously stood up, and faced the Djinn, who crossed her arms and stood hipshot and elegantly neon, looking me over. Her head tilted to one side, cornrows rustling like silk.

“Huh,” she said. “Ashan is slipping. I thought he’d hurt you much worse than this.”

I glared at her. “If he shows up again, are you going to defend me?”

“No.”

“How about Jonathan? Would you keep him off of me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Right. So you’re just here to observe while they beat the crap out of me. Hey, thanks for your help.”

“I am doing a favor for Lewis. That doesn’t mean that I am doing you a favor.”

She inspected her nails, and must have decided they weren’t sharp enough; the tips glinted knife-bright. Her eyes, flicking to me, were almost as unsettling.

“For someone in your position, you show remarkably little gratitude.”

“Gratitude for what? For provoking a fight and then bugging out and leaving me to face Ashan?” I felt a late-breaking surge of panic and my old friend, anger. “Here’s a tip: Help me less. It’s better for everybody.”

“I don’t come here at your request,” she pointed out, and made herself at home on my bed, testing the mattress. “Go on about your business, Snow White. I need no watching. You’re the one who requires nursemaids. However, I will tell you that if Lewis needs me, I will drop you without hesitation. Do you understand?”

I understood, all right. There really wasn’t much I could do to stop her if she decided to hang around in my bedroom trying on my clothes and generally making a pest of herself, or if she decided to bug out in the middle of a fight. She was not the most supportive support I’d ever had.

I gathered the tattered shreds of my dignity closer around me, and decided that I really was kind of hungry, after all, and staring at Eamon and Sarah would be better than enduring the sardonic, unearthly stare of a Djinn for a couple of hours.

“Don’t let anything happen to David,” I warned her, and glanced toward the nightstand.

Her face went very still. “Oh, believe me,” she said, “I will not.”

I went out to eat some dinner off the new plates.

Sarah hadn’t waited for me; she and Eamon were already sitting at the table, facing each other, with candles glowing between them. She’d switched off the overhead lights, and it was like a little island of romance in a sea of darkness. Very sweet.

I bumped into a corner of the couch, cursed, and ruined the mood. Sarah gave me a long-suffering look and paused, fork halfway to her perfectly rouged lips, as I sank into a chair next to Eamon and unfolded my napkin. It was in some origamilike complication of a swan. Another Martha Stewart-esque thing that few working mortals had the time to learn how to do.

The wine was pleasantly cool and tart, and the salad crisp, and she’d whipped up some kind of vinaigrette that for the life of me I hadn’t realized could come out of a noncommercial kitchen. Sarah should have become a chef, not a trophy wife.

“Were you talking to David?” Sarah asked. I nearly fumbled my fork. “On the phone.”

“Oh.” I stabbed a tomato wedge. The silverware felt strange and heavy, and when I looked it over, it was as unfamiliar as the plates. My total of debts to repay, whether karmic or Mastercard, was getting pretty hefty. “Yes. He was a little sick, but he’s feeling better.”

“Sarah told me that he’s a musician?” Eamon asked, and applied a little black pepper to his salad. Which was not at all a bad idea. I followed suit.

“A singer,” I said. Which would explain, should it ever come up, the lack of gear to haul around. “He’s with a band.”

“Have I heard of them?”

“Probably not.”

Eamon was too polite to try to work around that roadblock; he turned his attention back to Sarah, who practically combusted under the force of it. He did have a lovely smile, I had to admit. “I did enjoy the day, Sarah. I had no idea Fort Lauderdale had so much to offer.”

“It was educational,” she said, but there was color high in her cheeks, and a sparkle in her eyes, and I wondered if the wonders of Fort Lauderdale had been the standard tourist attractions or something a good deal less family-friendly that featured a tour of the backseat of Eamon’s rental car. “Thank you for everything. It was lovely, really. Dinner was the least I could do.”

“Careful,” Eamon said, and his voice had dropped into a range I could really only classify as a purr. “You feed me like this, I might never leave.” His eyes were luminous, watching her. As if she were the only thing in the world.

She winked at him.

I began to remember how I’d felt back in high school, watching my accomplished, polished older sister devastate the boys with a flick of her perfectly manicured fingers. Oh, yeah, this was that feeling. Like being the dumpy training wheels on the bicycle of love. I wondered if I should take my salad and go eat it in my room, with Rahel, who would make me feel like a particularly nasty insect but at least wasn’t going to be beating me on social graces.

“Get a room,” I said, and shoveled in a mouthful of greens. Sarah sent me a shocked look. Yep, we were right back to high school. Sarah the martyr, Jo the brat, poor Eamon caught in the middle.

Except Eamon was no hormonally overbalanced teenager, and he just smiled and reached across the table to pour my sister another half glass of wine.

“Actually,” he said, “I like this room perfectly well.”

The salad course mercifully ended before I could make more of an ass out of myself, and Sarah served pasta. She and Eamon flirted. I tried to look as if I didn’t notice. It was uncomfortable. My sister’s chicken primavera was unbelievably delicious, but I shoveled it in with reckless disregard for either manners or culinary appreciation. Sarah, naturally, ate about a third of her plate and pronounced herself full. Eamon came around to help her clear the table, shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal elegantly long-boned forearms, and brushed past her close enough to qualify as courtship in quite a few parts of the world. As they were standing at the sink together, I watched their body language. His was… comfortable. Proprietary. In her space, drawn to her by gravity. Over the rushing water, I caught snatches of their conversation. I sipped wine and watched him lean closer, put his face close to her neck, and draw in a deep breath. It was amazingly sensuous.

“Bulgari’s Omnia,” he said, in that lovely voice, so precise and warm.

“You know perfumes?” Sarah asked, startled, and turned her head to look at him.

He was over her shoulder, close enough to kiss. Neither of them moved away.

“A bit,” he said. “I had some training in chemistry; perfumes were always interesting to me. Omnia has a black pepper base, you know.”

“Really?” She dried her hands on a towel and turned to face him. “What else?”

“Is there any dessert?”

She blinked at the change of subject, but moved aside and uncovered a pan of perfect little tarts, pale with a browned crust on top. Crème brûlée. Dear God.

I didn’t even own one of those fancy little blowtorches, did I? Well, apparently, I did now. Along with a double boiler.

Eamon made a sound in the back of his throat that I swear I’d only heard during particularly intimate moments, took one of the tarts, and bit into it, watching my sister. “Delicious,” he mumbled.

“No talking with your mouth full.”

Which looked like a private joke, from the intensity of their smiles at one another. He offered her the tart. She bit a neat piece out of it, never taking her eyes from his.

“What do you know about that perfume?” he asked her.

“Tell me.”

His smile widened into something that was both angelic and liable to melt women into butter. “Perfumes have a base, heart notes, and bottom notes. Omnia’s base is black pepper. Its heart notes are tea, cinnamon, nutmeg, and Indian almond. Very exotic. It suits you.”

Sarah looked fascinated. “And there are bottom notes?”

He took another bite of tart. “Indian wood, sandalwood, and chocolate.” He made chocolate sound indecent. “Practically edible, that scent.”

“And how do you know it isn’t edible?”

“Is that an invitation… ?”

I rolled my eyes, got up, and said, “I’ll be in my room.”

They didn’t even notice. I closed and locked my door, flumped down on the bed, and realized my heart was racing. Contact high from the flirting. Those two were Olympic champions at foreplay.

Although I suspected they might have blown past it earlier and gone right to the main event. Probably more than once. The hormones were definitely running at high tide.

I looked around the room. No sign of Rahel. I wasn’t surprised. She was probably in a don’t-see-me mode, or else she’d already decided to check in on Lewis again. I ignored her—or her absence—and stripped off my dinner clothes, threw on sloppy sweat pants that rode low on my hips and a crop top, and slid open my window to get a taste of fresh ocean breeze. It felt cool and dark on my face. I wanted to get out of here, suddenly; I felt trapped. I checked the clock. Thirty minutes until I was supposed to meet Lewis.

I figured I’d better not wait too long, and it would save time if I met him outside; we couldn’t exactly have a heart-to-heart with my sister and Eamon getting to know each other better, in the Biblical sense, in the next room. I slipped running shoes on my feet, laced them tight, and unlocked the bedroom door to take a cautious peek outside.

Eamon was kissing Sarah in the kitchen. They were backed up against the refrigerator; his hands were cupping her head and combing through her hair, her arms were around his neck, and damn, they looked good together.

I blinked, thought about announcing that I was going for a run, then decided it might be a mood-killer and besides, they couldn’t possibly have cared less. I grabbed keys, ID, and cell phone, stuffed them into the zip pocket on my sweats, and headed out.

I was halfway down the steps when my pants rang. I dug my cell phone out and flipped it open; before I could answer, I got a blistering burst of static that made me stumble on the stairs and yank the phone back from my ear.

But I clearly heard somebody yell my name on the other end.

I pressed the phone back to my ear and said, “Who is this?”

“Lewis!” His voice sounded raw, almost drowned by static, and then the noise evened out to a dull roar. Traffic, maybe? Only if he was driving in the Indy 500. “Change of plans. Meet me on the beach across from your apartment.”

“Any particular place?”

“We’ll find you.”

He hung up. I tried redial, got no answer, and decided it was a good thing I’d decided to wear jogging clothes. Gave me a chance to do covert meetings and get some exercise in.

I bounced down the last set of steps and stretched a little, and as I did, I saw that Detective Rodriguez’s white van was still parked facing my apartment, watching the show. No lights. Well, screw him. If he wanted to come after me, he was going to get hurt. I wasn’t in a mood to pull punches.

I put my right foot up on the steps and began stretches. I touched my toe, bent the foot back toward me, and while I was about it sneaked a look up at my apartment window. All I could see was shadows, but that was enough. I was pretty sure Eamon was taking off Sarah’s dress.

“Draw the curtains, idiots,” I said under my breath, but hey, who was I to judge? I was the one who’d had my first really great sexual experience with a Djinn in a hot tub in the middle of a hotel lobby. Maybe exhibitionism ran in the family.

I concentrated on stretches. The rubber-band burn in my muscles had a nice focusing effect.

Once I was decently warmed up, I picked my way through the parking lot, dodging cars, watching for tail lights, jogged in place at the street light as passing motorists whizzed by.

I stiffened up when I felt a presence arrive next to me. Detective Rodriguez wasn’t jogging in place, just standing. He didn’t believe in keeping the heart rate up, I gathered. I could respect that.

“Going somewhere?” he asked.

“Yeah. I’m planning to swim to England, steal the crown jewels, hide them in the Titanic, and hire James Cameron to pick them up for me. Do you mind? I’m on a timetable.” I kept jogging. Anger pulsed with my heartbeat. Damn him. I really, really didn’t need this right now. “Look, I’ll be back, okay? I’m just going for a run. People do it. Well, people who don’t live in a van and stalk other people do it, anyway.”

He smiled slightly. He’d changed clothes, or he’d been dressed for exercise anyway; he was wearing dark blue cop-colored sweat pants with official-looking white reflective stripes, and a hooded sweatshirt that had LVPD in big yellow letters on the back. “I wouldn’t dream of interrupting your workout,” he said blandly. “I need the exercise.”

I kept moving, ready for the green, and when it clicked on I hurried across the street and onto the beach proper. Rodriguez, of course, followed.

“You should have stayed back there!” I said over my shoulder. “I’m not slowing down for you!” And I put on the speed. Sand, soft and uncertain under my feet.

There was a fresh, warm breeze blowing in from the ocean, smelling of twilight and the sea. Always people out, even at this time of day—couples taking romantic walks near the surf, posing for pictures. Kids sneaking beers, or if they weren’t that brave, sipping on Coca-Cola cans liberally jazzed up with booze.

The night shift would come in soon—the older kids, the harder ones, the ones looking for sandy sex and mischief. The night surfers, who always baffled me.

Why take a dangerous sport and make it even more dangerous?

I looked behind me. I didn’t have to look far. Detective Rodriguez, though older and burdened with all that stakeout food, was keeping up just fine. He moved with a loose, easy stride, shortened to match mine. I hadn’t noticed it before, but he was kind of pumped. Not obviously, not like the muscle hunks and steroid addicts you saw every day at the beach, but he was strong and agile.

I knew about the strong. I had the bruises to prove it. Oddly, I found I didn’t hold it against him.

“Nice form,” he said.

“Bite me,” I replied.

And that was about the extent of our conversation, for a while. I pushed it. He kept up. I got tired of pushing it and settled into a comfortable, loping rhythm, racking my brains for a way to get rid of him.

About ten minutes in, we passed an SUV pulled up illegally, three teens sitting on the open tailgate and looking like young, rabid wolves. Rodriguez gave them a coplike stare. They straightened up and pretended not to have noticed us.

“Storm’s coming in,” Rodriguez said.

Well, the Djinn fights had screwed up the aetheric, but I could feel—distantly and muffled—that they had put the patterns back together again. Humpty Dumpty wasn’t quite broken beyond repair, not yet. “No, I think it’s clearing.”

For answer, he nodded out at the sea. I glanced in that direction and saw a dark layer of cloud, way out near the water, almost invisible in the growing night. I reflexively went up into the aetheric, or tried to, and immediately felt the drag that meant I wasn’t strong enough to do this. I managed to make it and took a look around in Oversight while my body continued to do the simple, repetitive work of putting one foot in front of the other.

Not that I could make much sense out of it. For one thing, my aetheric vision was clouded, indistinct. Like I needed a laser corrective procedure for my inner eye. For another, my range of perception had gone from nearly infinite to something frustratingly human. I could barely see the horizon, much less make out what was happening there. Energy, yeah, but what kind? A naturally occurring storm? One cooked up inadvertently by the Djinn Smackdown that had occurred back at my apartment, and that the Wardens had failed to fix? All too possible, unfortunately. I couldn’t even get a sense of whether or not it was dangerous.

Maybe it was just a squall, bringing nothing but a quick rain shower and some disappointed tourists.

I dropped back into my body. Not by my choice, more as if my aetheric strength had just failed. Wham, and I was falling back down so fast I might have been a missile fired from on high. I hit flesh so hard I staggered, tripped, and went down. I came up spitting sand, disoriented, and angry.

Detective Rodriguez, who’d drawn to a stop, didn’t offer me a hand.

“Dammit,” I muttered, and dusted myself off. He didn’t say anything, just waited until I moved on. The beach glimmered white, sparks of quartz reflecting the last light of day. Surf pounded the sand in muscular, flexing rolls, broke into foam and retreated. I felt my frustration erupt in a white burst of fury, and rounded on him, fists clenched. “Look, would you leave me alone? I just want to be alone, okay? I’m not running away!”

“You don’t leave my sight,” he said flatly. “Not until you tell me what I want to know about Quinn.”

Just run, I told myself. Just run and forget everything. Nice advice. I wished I could follow it, but my brain wouldn’t shut down, and it was seriously compromising my endorphin rush. I wanted Lewis to show up. And now I was starting to think that seriously hurting Detective Nosy might not be a bad idea, because he was really starting to piss me the hell off.

Can I take him? I looked over at Rodriguez, who was continuing to jog effortlessly at my side. He had that kind of mechanical, thoughtless motion that meant he probably trained a hell of a lot harder than me, and could run me into the ground without breaking a sweat. He glanced over at me, dead-eyed, and I was honest enough to answer my question with a solid No. At least, not without using Warden powers, and I didn’t have those. Not enough to matter, and not enough to burn gratuitously.

“Why didn’t you call the cops?” he asked. “After what happened at the TV station?”

“Oh, you mean the unprovoked assault?”

He had the grace to look grim about it. “You made me angry.”

“Don’t sweat it, you’re not the first guy who’s gotten physical with me.” I grinned when I said it, but it didn’t hold a lot of humor. “Your partner got there long before you did.”

“All I want is the truth.”

“No, you don’t. You want to believe that Quinn was some kind of fallen hero, and buddy, I can’t help you.”

Silence. We ran, wind tossing my hair in its neat ponytail, surf crashing like the heartbeat of the world. Sweat was forming along my back and under my breasts, trickling and wicking up into the jog bra. My Achilles tendons were already screaming. Way out of practice. I told them to shut the hell up and pressed harder. Night was falling like a thick, humid blanket, and it would have felt suffocating if not for the continuing ocean breeze. By my inner alarm clock, it had been over thirty minutes. No sign of Lewis, but it had sounded like he was in trouble, and maybe he was running late. He’ll call. If he was conscious. If he wasn’t fighting for his life.

“What did Quinn do to you?” Rodriguez asked.

I took a ragged breath. “I told you.”

“You said he was a rapist and a murderer.”

“There you go.”

“You’re still alive. So the murder part, that didn’t happen to you.”

That didn’t require an answer. I kept going in silence until Rodriguez suddenly reached over, grabbed my wrist, and dragged me to a stumbling halt in the sand.

Surf roared and crashed, stinging us with spray.

I couldn’t see his expression. I pulled myself up into the aetheric again, feeling like I was pulling the weight of the world, and saw him as a dim orange smudge. Whatever he was feeling, I no longer had the capacity to read it, but then the auras and patterns of regular humans had never been all that clear, even on my best days.

I could only trust my gut, which said that Detective Rodriguez might be a hard bastard, but that he wasn’t a killer, and he wasn’t blind to the truth.

“Tom hurt you,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Got any proof to back this up?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then why should I believe you?”

I studied what I could see of him in the dark. “Because you already know something that you didn’t want to believe. Right? You know he wasn’t the sunshine-and-light guy you thought he was all these years. You say you just want the truth from me, Detective. Well, I’m giving you the truth. Right here, right now. And you can take it or leave it. Do you want to listen?”

“It’s why I came out here,” he said. “I’ll listen.”

So I told him. Not about the Ma’at, not about the Djinn, which was a bit of a problem, narrative-wise, but the high points. I’d gone to Las Vegas to help a friend, run into Quinn, and fallen into a nightmare out of my past. And Quinn had tried to stop me from revealing the truth.

When I was done, Rodriguez cocked his head, unblinking, and asked, “Is he really dead?”

“Yes. I was there, and I saw it. But you’ll never bring anyone to trial for this, and if you keep trying, you can only hurt the very people you want to help. I don’t know anything about Quinn’s wife, but if she’s a good person, it can’t help her to know that her husband wasn’t. Just let it go.”

Rodriguez looked impassive. Unreadable. “I can haul you in as an accessory to the murder of a police officer.”

“So you’ve said. I don’t see any hauling on the horizon, Detective.” I backed off a step. “I’m sorry about Quinn. I liked him, too, and you have no idea how profoundly that bothers me, all things considered.”

He let me go. I turned back the way we’d come and kicked it up a notch, running from my memories, legs pumping, heart pounding. The red pulse of effort dissolved the anxiety inside me, washed away doubt and fear and anguish. I was healthy, I was alive, and just for this moment, I was in control.

If Rodriguez had been straight about what he wanted from me, he’d go back to his van. Think over what I’d told him. Probably get on a laptop and match up dates and times from his own records, find out if Quinn had alibis for anything.

He’d find I was being straight. And then he’d go away and leave me with the humpty-dozen other life-threatening crises I had going on.

I was feeling cautiously good about that when the sand suddenly went soft and liquid under my feet, and I disappeared under the surface so fast that I might as well have vanished in a puff of smoke.