Текст книги "Heat Stroke"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

Соавторы: Rachel Caine
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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How much love was being destroyed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I knew him better.

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

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

There was only one word for this room. Soulless.

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

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

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

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

“Did you open the bottle before?”

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

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

“Get rid of that,” she said to Kevin.

“What?”

“The outfit. Obviously.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s your name?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t screw it up.”

“I won’t.”

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

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

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

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

I was unimpressed by the buildup.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or was it?

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

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

I had to find a way to save them.

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

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

No. No no no no.

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

No!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then the tornado formed above it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The hair prickled on the back of my neck.

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

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

It was David.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Close. So very close.

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

And then he lunged for her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Be thou bound to my service.”

“… I love you. Remember that.”

“Be thou bound to my service.”

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

I felt him die.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I couldn’t. Son of a bitch!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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