Текст книги "Firestorm"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

Соавторы: Rachel Caine
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When he lifted his head, still screaming, I saw the Demon Mark, flailing away on the surface of his molten skin. Trying to eat through and devour him. The Mark was turning restlessly, twisting. Where it touched him, I could see a hideous blackened patch. It seemed to be spreading. The thing was toxic to him.

If he was connected to the Mother—connected directly, in a way we mere humans weren't, and more than the average Djinn—how much more damage would this do once it got into her bloodstream? I had a sudden, sickening comprehension of just how good a deed I'd done earlier in evicting the Demon Mark from the geyser of power outside of New York.

Until I'd screwed it up here.

The Oracle was looking at me. There was a suggestion of eyes in that heat-blurred face. The scream continued, but there was even more of an edge to it now, as if he was trying to convince me.

Beg me.

I really wasn't the self-sacrificing type. If somebody had told me that I needed to voluntarily take a Demon Mark a year ago to save the world, I'd have burned rubber to get away from the idea. But things had changed. Ihad changed. I had a daughter out there, and people I loved.

I had too much to lose to walk away and save my own skin. And besides, this was my screwup, and I had to make it right.

I reached out and put my hand flat over the Demon Mark. This time, I did it deliberately.

I gagged at the squirming cold touch of it, but I didn't pull away. The flames beating hot against my skin didn't burn me—I hung on to enough of my limited Fire Warden ability to manage that—but I felt the Oracle's claws raking the tender skin of my left forearm. I focused on that pain, clear and pure, and let it flow through me to wall me off from the horrible sensation of the Demon Mark squirming under my fingers.

No way was I more powerful than the Oracle. The Demon Mark ignored me. It always, inevitably went with the bigger bonfire…

I was going to have to do this the hard way.

I gagged at the thought, but I closed my hand into a fist around the Demon Mark—in reality and in the aetheric—and began to pull it off.

It felt cold and slimy as a handful of thrashing worms, and it didn't want to let go. It stretched like rubbery elastic, and then it came loose with a sudden, wet smack in my hands. If I hadn't kept hold of it on the aetheric, it wouldn't have worked. If I hadn't been as strong a power as I was, it wouldn't have worked, either, but the Demon Mark decided to let go of the tough-shelled Oracle in favor of a softer target.

The Oracle collapsed facedown on the floor, and the saw-edged screaming came to a halt. I heard my sobbing breaths echoing in the room, and then fire exploded out around his body in a blinding white blaze, hot enough to singe my hair and drive me all the way back against the cool stone wall. I squeezed my eyes shut because it was getting brighter, and brighter, and I could still see the glow even through my tight-clenched lids. I closed my fist over the nauseatingly eager squirm of the Demon Mark. It was burrowing under my skin, sliding cold through my pores. It was happening faster this time, and the sensation was so horrible that I was weeping, sobbing, shaking with the urge to fling the thing away from me. It was like being stabbed with a wet, slimy knife in exquisitely slow motion.

I had to get rid of this thing, even if it meant losing my hand.

I banged through the door of the mausoleum and stumbled back out into the brilliant sunshine. It felt cold as ice to me, after the heat inside. I kept my fist clenched and staggered out, trying to think of something, anythingI could do.

Lightning. It's the visual signal of an energy shift between potential and actual energy, with light and heat as the by-products. Billions of electrons have to line up in a chain for lightning to actualize, and because like draws like, a chain forming out of the sky will be drawn to a chain building up out of the ground, and when that last electron snaps into place, and the energy transfers, it has so much power that it can vaporize steel, for a fraction of a second, at least.

It mightbe able to stun, or kill, a Demon Mark… if I could manage a direct hit:

I pushed at the artificial tension holding the sky together overhead. The power controlling it was vast and hard-edged, but fragile. I battered at it with the strength of desperation until I felt it crack, and saw energy flare up among the gathering clouds.

Enough. More than enough.

Oh God, this was going to hurt…

In one desperate wrench, I grabbed the Demon Mark, ripped it loose, and threw it on the ground. It seemed unnaturally heavy. It hit the grass and immediately began to scuttle back toward me, moving like a spider on PCP.

It was too close, but I triggered the lightning anyway as the thing leaped for me.

You don't see it, when that kind of power hits that close to you; you feel the overwhelming burn, and for a few seconds afterward, you really can't be sure that the lightning didn't actually hit you, because the coronal effect is so strong.

So it took a few seconds for my mind to fight off the sound, light, and pressure, of the near-miss and reconstruct from the evidence what had happened. There was a tree on fire, five feet away. The top half of it was charred black, and part of it had been blown clean off. Limbs had been blown off and were still flaming on the green, green graves.

There was a smoking black hole in the grass where the Demon Mark had been. Either I'd killed it, or I'd convinced it to find an easier snack elsewhere.

My knees buckled, and I went hard to the gravel. Ouch. When I pitched forward, the heels of my hands dug into sharp-edged rock, and I saw blood spattering the pristine white stones, dripping from my nose and mouth.

I swallowed hard, and then Imara was in front of me, eyes wide, grabbing for my elbow. She looked a little worse for wear—clothes torn, a few cuts and bruises. Her eyes were terrified.

"I'm fine," I said. My voice seemed to come faint and from a long distance out. "Are you okay?"

"We have to go, now. The Djinn are angry—"

Except that apparently the Djinn were so angry that they'd… left. No sign of the two that Imara had been going toe-to-toe with, which was odd. Just us, the mausoleum, the trees, the headstones.

"Not yet," I said. "I'm not finished."

"Mom, no!"

"Stay here." I climbed back to my feet, swaying, bracing myself on her shoulder for a long moment before turning back to the mausoleum.

There was a Djinn standing in front of it. Not really a Djinn, though—more. Other. He was… beautiful. All Djinn are made of fire, at some level, but he was fire personified, fire eternal. His body could barely contain the heat and the fury, and it rippled in patterns right under his translucent skin.

His eyes were flame. His hair was smoldering red.

He was the most gorgeously wild thing I'd ever seen. Terrifying and utterly sensual. He didn't say a word to me, just stared, and after a moment, he extended his burning hand toward me. I stayed still, aware that my heart was beating like a gong, that I was dripping with sweat and terror. Aware that if he touched me, I'd probably burn like oil left on a hot engine.

I'd healed the Oracle, or at least freed him from his prison. There was still a discolored black stain on his chest, just where his heart would have been in a human, but he seemed… better.

He didn't touch me. He just cocked his head to one side, watching.

I heard a rustle of clothing. Imara was down on the ground, abased, hiding her face. I suspected that the Oracle wasn't someone who got out much, and when he did, he caused quite a stir.

I was too giddy to be impressed.

"Favor for a favor," I said. "I need to get a message to the Mother. Can you help me?"

He didn't make a sound. If I hadn't heard that tremendously awful shrieking earlier, I'd have thought he was mute.

He continued to hold out his hand. It shimmered and flickered with heat, like the surface of the sun.

"Don't," Imara whispered. She'd raised her head, watching, but flinched again and hid her eyes when the Oracle turned his attention toward her. "Please, don't!"

I slowly extended my hand and touched his.

Glory rolled through me, and I exploded into flame.

I heard Imara scream, and I wanted to tell her it was all right, but words were useless. Meaningless. What I became in that moment was… transcendent, and for an instant, an instant, I could feel everything. Everyone. I could feel the long, slow, sleeping pulse of the Mother. I could taste the metallic chill of her nightmares.

It flooded into me in images rather than words. Forests burning. Rivers contaminated with greasy pollution. Skies roiling with black filth. Oil-covered birds. Dead, floating fish. Butchered whales. Clubbed dolphins. Death, and death, and death. Cows screaming in slaughterhouses. Pesticides poisoning everything for miles, from the smallest insect to the largest predatory birds.

Humans, a stinking flood on the Earth, unregulated by her natural defenses. Arrogant. Untouchable as a species by any but the greatest of predators… Earth herself.

A furious desire to bring us to heel.

No. No, we're not like that!

I tried sending a countermessage, but the poison had filtered into me, too; what could I say about that? It was true. All true. We were a plague upon the Earth, and we deserved what we got…

No!

I struggled to fight it back. Images of people working together. Of groups on beaches, pouring salt water over stranded whales, struggling to keep them alive until tides could come to the rescue. Environmental specialists restoring oceans and waters, reclaiming them from pollution. We care. We know. We try. Laws to protect endangered species. Jane Goodall, living with her primates. National parks, carefully tended. Children nursing injured animals back to health. We're not monsters. We're not your enemy.

It wasn't enough. I felt it swept away in the black tide of fury coming from the other side, and then something batted at me, vast and languid, and sent me flying.

The contact between my fingers and the Oracle's broke, and I staggered backward, moaning. My clothes were smoking.

The Oracle was gone. The conduit was closed.

I had no idea what to do now. For the first time I could remember, I'd completely, utterly failed. Flat busted. I wanted to sit down against the cool marble and weep, because I felt like I'd fought so hard, and come to the end of things with nothing but exhaustion and despair to show for it.

But I wasn't much for giving up. Not for more than a few cold, lightless seconds. There had to be something else I could do, and I'd have to think of it. Figure it out.

Maybe I actually would have, if I'd had the time. The fact was that I didn't. Imara, helping steady me with an arm around my shoulders, froze. "Oh, no."

A man in a natty gray suit turned the corner on the street and entered the cemetery. Tall, strong, perfect posture.

Ashan. Jonathan's third-in-command, after David. Heir apparent to the throne, who hadn't gotten what he thought he deserved.

Things were definitely worse.

Chapter Five

Ashan was intimidating as hell, and he knew it; his predominant color scheme was gray, with a little silver for highlights. As always, he looked elegantly tailored. A double-breasted suit, the color of mourning doves. A pale gray shirt. A teal-blue tie, with eyes to match. Ashan, of all the Djinn, struck me as less than human; he gave the impression that he just wore a bipedal shape with opposable thumbs for convenience, but he gave it no more importance than that. His movements had that liquid grace that all the Djinn seemed to possess but which they didn't usually flaunt quite so openly. Even Rahel seemed more part of my world.

He walked steadily toward us down that gravel path. There were dark spots marring it. Bloodstains, all of them mine. A flaming branch was blocking his path, and he kicked it casually out of the way with so much power that it hit one of the quaint weathered tombstones and snapped it off like a broken tooth.

Imara made a low sound of terror. I pushed her behind me.

"Ashan," I said. "Thanks for your concern, but really, we're fine. No need to be worried."

"Freak," he said. "Filthy groveling worm. You defile the ground you touch." Voice like nothing at all. Gray, monotone, flat. No anger, but that didn't make me feel any better. Ashan didn't need to be angry. He just needed to be awake. "You defiled the Oracle with your stench."

"I saved the Oracle from a Demon Mark," I said, and watched his expression. No surprise there. "You knew. You knew he was infected. Why didn't youcome running to save him?"

"You have no right to be here." His empty eyes flashed toward Imara. "Either of you."

"Leave the kid out of it. If you want to smack somebody around—"

He moved too fast for me to see, and suddenly there was a stinging agony on the side of my face, and I was on my hands and knees. He'd slapped me. A leisurely, open-handed slap. If he'd used his fist, he'd have snapped my neck. "Do not speak to me again."

Imara threw herself in his path. "You're not hurting my—"

Ashan didn't even break stride. He backhanded her so hard, she left the ground, twisted in midair, and flew twenty feet to slam into a massive gray headstone. I watched her, horrified. She didn't move after landing.

When I looked back at Ashan, it was too late. He grabbed my throat and dragged me kissing-close. I scrabbled and scratched at his hand, but it was like trying to pry steel with your fingernails. Overhead, dark clouds scudded in from the sea, moving fast and high, as if they wanted a ringside seat for the action. I could sense a certain eagerness up there. Storms always loved to see Weather Wardens getting their comeuppance.

"You," Ashan said with gentle precision, his lips to my ear, "should have stayed far, far away from here. You're too late, in any case. I've told the Mother the whole filthy history of humanity. None of Jonathan's benevolent, willful ignorance. None of David's foolish sentiment. The truth."

"Truth?" I croaked. "Or just your version?"

He was right. I should have headed the other way, fast, the minute I'd seen him turn the corner, but with Ashan, as with any major predator who has you at his mercy, it's best not to run unless you have an even shot at getting away. Bravado's the only real defense.

"You know the thing I like best about human beings?" he asked, and took hold of my right arm with his big, cold left hand. "You break so easily."

He pressed with his pale, white thumb. That was all. Just his thumb, and I felt the hot electric snap of a bone breaking, followed by a wet cascade of agony. I couldn't even scream. Couldn't get it past his choking hand.

His thumb moved. There were two bones in the arm, and he found the second with unerring precision.

Snap.

My shriek came out a strangled whimper. I saw red, and stars, and I wanted to heave but I'd just choke faster. And Ashan wasn't finished with me, that much was obvious.

"Call him," Ashan murmured in my ear. He hadn't so much as raised his voice a single degree in temperature. "Call your pet for me. He'll save you if you call him. He won't let me kill you."

I wanted to. Badly. But I knew all too well what Ashan was doing; he wanted David here, alone, with a lover and a daughter to try to protect. David had power—boatloads of it, inherited from Jonathan—but Ashan wasn't far behind. And he wanted David's place as the hub at the center of the Djinn universe. He wanted to remove the only real threat to his power.

But mostly, he just wanted to do to David what he was doing to me. Terrorize, humiliate, torment.

"No." I managed to mouth the word. I could protect David, if nothing else. His right hand flexed, and I felt my throat flex with it. It would be easy for him to kill me. Too easy.

"We'll see." He still had hold of my arm, and now he deliberately, slowly, twisted it. I screamed again, but he'd trapped the sound in my throat where it frantically beat inside, like a bird in a trap. Red-hot wires of agony ran through me. It was like low-budget electrocution. I could feel tears streaming down my face and over his hand, and I was staring pleadingly at his blank teal-blue eyes. Looking for mercy. Looking for anything I could recognize as remotely human.

He smiled. It was the coldest expression I could imagine seeing on a face that pretended to be flesh and blood.

Somehow, I knew that the serene little town of Sea-casket hadn't noticed a thing, and wouldn't. Ashan could stand here in broad daylight and pull me apart like a rag doll, and nobody would notice a thing.

Just when I thought that he was really going to do it, he dropped me. I fell painfully hard to my knees, hugged my broken arm to my chest, and swayed on the verge of passing out. My wandering eyes focused on the crumpled form near the tombstones. Imara was still down. Not moving. I felt something go still inside me. The swirling darkness that had threatened to drag me down blew away, leaving me cold and utterly clear.

I gulped back the tears and the terror, and shifted my gaze up, to Ashan.

"You know what?" I croaked. It sounded ragged, and not quite sane. "You and me, we have an understanding. Fair game. But I don't care how badass you think you are, you shouldn't have hurt my daughter."

The artificially calm weather of Seacasket had been shattered by the tinkering I'd done to produce my lightning bolt; I reached out, grabbed the air, and started shaking. The world was going to hell anyway, and I wasn't about to let Ashan do this. Not to Imara. Not to me.

Not without a fight.

"You can't," he said flatly.

Bullshit, I couldn't. I was a Warden. I had the power, and the lack of conscience to go with it. I'd had a Demon Mark, once upon a time. Maybe it had rotted something inside me that should have been thinking of the big picture, I don't know, but right at that moment, I was all about the world within fifty feet, and my child lying unconscious and at Ashan's nonexistent mercy.

Fifty feet happened to include the mausoleum that held the Oracle, too.

"You started it," I said. I continued to shake up the system. It wasn't easy, especially with agony throbbing through my body in waves, but I was making progress. There was serious instability in the atmosphere. And offshore, the storm that had been hanging back saw its shot, and started rolling in with the wind at its back. Huge black sails of clouds, belling tight in the wind. Lightning was a scimitar in its teeth, and yo ho, mateys, the pirates were coming ashore.

"Stop," Ashan said, and grabbed me by the hair. I grinned at him. Must have been gruesome, bloody teeth, bloodshot eyes.

"Make me." I flipped electron polarities in the air, turning and turning and turning. Locking the chain in place with a sudden furious surge of energy, grounding energy from the storm clouds. "I don't need David to whip your punk ass."

Lightning hissed up from the ground, down from the clouds, and he was caught in the middle.

Flesh and blood vaporized instantly, along with all of Ashan's nice couture. I was too close. I caught the corona, was blown backward into the mausoleum wall, and ended up on the ground, screaming into a mouthful of grass because my broken arm had just gone up five steps on the ten-point agony scale, to fourteen. Man, I was trashed.

But Ashan was vapor.

That didn't mean he was dead, not at all, just not manifesting properly in human form. Didn't matter much to him, in terms of hurting him in any lasting way, but I was willing to bet that it had stung. He wasn't exactly roaring right back for a rematch. I lifted my head and saw him trying to coalesce out of the mist, and focused the wind into a hard, narrow channel, straight for him. It hit him like a cannon, blasted the mist apart, and this time, he came together more slowly. Hanging back.

I didn't bother to get up as his face formed in the fog. Not flesh and bone, more of a ghost-image. Spooky. I sounded a hell of a lot more confident than I felt. "Turn around and leave, Ashan, because I swear, the next thing I hit will mean a lot more to you than your skin."

I sensed his smug disbelief. So I hit the mausoleum with a lightning bolt.

The world went nuts. Reallynuts. Winds howling, lightning stabbing all over the sky in an insane display of fury, ground rumbling… hailstones pelted out of the clouds, the size of golf balls. A couple hit me, and if my arm hadn't already been overwhelming me with agony, that would have been serious pain.

Ashan managed to form himself into pseudoflesh—not quite human, for certain, because he was misting out just below the hips into a gray swirl of fog. He still clung to the business suit for the top half.

But he had something to say. His eyes had gone completely dark. Lightless as space.

"You'll die for that. No matter how many friends you have among the Djinn. This is a sacred place."

"Bring 'em on," I said grimly. "Maybe you'd like to explain why you let the Oracle suffer like that. Unless you were just blaming it on poor old humanity. Again." I struggled up to my knees, then somehow to my feet. It was more of a stagger than a graceful rise, but the fact I was standing was pretty much a victory. "Guess what? I talked to her. And now she knows that you've been lying to her, you bastard."

Which was a blatant lie, because I'd gotten zero sense she'd paid the slightest attention to me, but hopefully Ashan couldn't know that. The air was full of threat, his and mine and something else, something vast. I was guessing that Mom was telling us kids to quit, she didn't care who'd started it. Of course, thismom was capable of administering a smack to the bottom that would flatten half the eastern seaboard.

Maybe I'd been a little hasty, using the last lightning strike. But it had been that, or roll over and die, not something I was very good at doing.

Not with my child at stake.

Ashan just… vanished. Not so much a puff of smoke as a wasting away, tatters on the gusting wind. I put my unbroken hand against the wall of the mausoleum and leaned for a few minutes, breathing hard, trying not to faint; my knees buckled a couple of times, but somehow I got upright. The storm was growling overhead, but when I read its pedigree, it was still a punk, not that much of a threat. I'd unsettled it, for certain, and upped it a few degrees on the dangerometer. I needed to smooth it down.

And I'd get around to it. But first, I stumbled across grass, around tilting old headstones, and collapsed next to my daughter, who was lying motionless on the ground.

"Imara?" I reached out and touched her.

My hand went through her. Not in the way that it would have if she'd been, say, consumed by little blue sparklies that seeped in from an alien dimension, but as if she was mostly vapor, held together by memory and will. She didn't move. I withdrew my hand hastily, and used it to cradle my broken arm across my chest. Damn, that hurt. I saw stars and jagged red streaks, and managed somehow to breathe through the pain. "Imara, can you hear me?"

If she could, she wasn't giving any sign. She was in a kind of there and not-there state, lying facedown on the grass. I couldn't grab her to move her, or turn her over. All I could do was call her name.

Rain pattered down, cold and hard on my exposed skin. I sat on the grass and shivered, next to my unconscious Djinn child, and fought the urge to call for David. He'd come, I knew that. But I wasn't entirely sure that it would be safe for him; if Ashan was still hanging out there, watching, this could still turn wrong.

Not that it was in any way right to begin with.

After I while, I noticed that Imara's clothes began to absorb water. I reached down and lightly touched the fabric. It had texture and weight.

At my touch, she exploded into movement, like a startled deer—up and on her feet, white-faced and wild-eyed. Scanning the skies, then the land, then focusing on me.

I wasn't sure she even remembered who I was. One thing was certain—there was so much menace coming off her that I didn't dare move. She'd have whacked me halfway across the cemetery, just the way she'd been hit, and without a doubt, it would have snapped more than my arm.

The panic cleared from her eyes. "Mom?" She was across the intervening space in seconds, crouched next to me, reaching out. I was cold, wet, and shaking, and I was probably going into shock, if I hadn't already booked a full vacation package there.

She was speaking a liquid language, words that sounded fast and golden in my ears, and I didn't know what she was saying, but I knew it was in the language of the Djinn. I recognized it, from moments with David.

"Hey," I said weakly. "English, kiddo."

She felt warm. So warm. I vaguely remembered leaning on her support as I staggered out of the cemetery and onto the street. The Camaro was sitting right where we'd parked it, looking bold and sassy through the downpour. Imara got me in the passenger seat.

It was all over. I'd failed. I'd just… failed.

"Mom?" Imara sounded worried as she put the car in gear and scratched gears getting us out of town. "Mom, where do we go?"

I had no fucking idea. I turned my face away, toward the world outside. The world that was going to die because I'd been inadequate to the task of saving it.

"Find the nearest Warden," I said. "Maybe there's something we can do to help."

"With what?"

I shrugged, one-shouldered. The other one felt like ground glass had been driven into the joint. "Whatever." I wasn't very interested.

Imara kept casting anxious looks my way, but I didn't say another word.

I had no idea how long the drive was, but it wasn't long enough for me to come up with a decent bright idea. So Imara just followed instructions and drove me to the nearest Warden.

That turned out to be Emily, the Earth and Fire Warden who'd given me crap back at the Headquarters building. She lived in a one-dog town in the middle of Nowhere County, Maine, and when Imara coasted the Camaro to a stop on the gravel driveway, she parked it next to a mud-spattered Jeep.

The Warden was home. She came to the door when Imara knocked, stared at my kid as if she was the Second Coming, then at me like the devil incarnate.

"Oh," she said flatly. "They sent you. Great."

She turned and walked into the house, not bothering to show us in. I was too sick and in too much pain, not to mention despair, to care about that. I followed her to a homey-looking living room, with one wall painted a somewhat unfortunate shade of cinnamon; Indian blankets and southwestern art lined the walls. The furniture was chunky wood, deliberately primitive. Knickknacks ran to kachina dolls and dreamcatchers.

I knew Emily vaguely. We'd never been friends, or even what I'd call acquaintances, but we'd worked on a couple of projects together, and shared a desk at the national Warden call center before, the one Wardens use to yell for help when things turn really bad. Emily hadn't exactly been a people person then, and I doubted she'd mended her ways. Earth Wardens in general tended to be either hippies or hermits; she definitely fell into the hermit category. Apparently, the Fire Warden tendencies hadn't done much to influence her basic character.

She was wearing what she'd had on the last time I'd seen her—baggy blue jeans and a nondescript tunic top, one that stretched. Bare feet, that was the only real change. Her short-cropped hair feathered around her blunt-featured face, and the scowl looked at home on her face, worn in deep.

I sank down in a chair and cradled my broken arm closer, trying not to scream.

"Huh," Emily said, and jerked her chin at it. "Looks bad."

"Thanks."

"Wasn't a compliment. You want some help?"

"If it wouldn't put you out."

Imara was standing indecisively a few feet away, clearly trying to get a signal from me as to what, if anything, to do. I didn't have time. Emily bent down, took my arm in her big, strong hands, and did a twist-yank thing that hurt so bad, I teetered on the edge of darkness.

"There," she said in satisfaction. "Hold still."

She put her hand around the break, and I tried to obey her order. Not easy. The throbbing agony was hard to ignore, and then the sense of burning, and then the deep itching. The burning just got worse, until it felt as if I were holding my arm over a Bunsen burner. I wanted to snatch it back, but I knew better.

I'd felt this before.

It took about fifteen minutes. Emily wasn't the world's most powerful Earth Warden, though she was competent enough; when she let go, the arm felt hot and sensitive, but more or less healed.

"You're going to want to go easy on it," she said. "The mend's still green. Let it cure."

"Sure," I croaked. My throat felt horribly dry. "Water?"

Without a word, she went into the kitchen and came back with a glass, which I drained without stopping for breath. She refilled it. I managed another half a glass before I decided that too much might make me gag.

"We don't have time for this," Emily said. "The fire's burning hot out there."

"Fire?" I asked.

"You didn't come to fight the fire?"

"Not—exactly."

Emily leaned back in her big leather chair, frowning at me. It was covered in what looked like the hide of a Holstein. A little too identifiable for me to be comfortable with it. I didn't like knowing the genetic heritage of my furniture.

"Then what the hell do you want, a meeting?" She made it sound like the filthiest curse she could imagine. It probably was, for her. Come to think of it, I didn't much approve of them, either.

"No," I said, and sighed. "I just… You need help. I was in the area. Let's leave it at that."

Her frown grooved deeper, and she tilted her head to one side, considering the problem of me. "Yeah, you're going to be real useful, the shape you're in." She shook her head. "Not that beggars can be choosers. How do you feel?" She didn't sound like she much cared, but she was forced to ask the question.

"Better," I said. It wasn't a lie, really. I'd been at rock-bottom earlier, now I was a quarter-inch above the ground. Everything's relative. "Thanks for this."