Текст книги "Heat Stroke"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He reached for my throat.

I felt another will impose itself over mine.

Right on cue, I vanished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David was here.

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

Game on.

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

Yvette was with him, of course. Still smiling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

… back to Patrick’s apartment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I won’t let her.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things would never be the same.

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

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

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

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

“You’re alive?”

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

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

“Did he remember what happened?”

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

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

“More than you with a Demon Mark?”

“Yeah.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silence, again. Long, crackling silence.

“Paul?” I prompted.

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

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

“Wait, tell me—”

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

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

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

“We’re going back,” I said.

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

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

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

“She’ll come after you.”

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

Indirect. I ignored it. “Kevin—”

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

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

“DVD.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Kevin…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I swear.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Kevin, no—”

“Back in the bottle. Sorry.”

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

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

I hate being right.

In my dream, the Djinn were dying.

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

… a hundred victims.

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

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

The rest pushed blindly ahead, focused on the objectives.

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

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

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

Yellowstone was going to burn. Again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me?

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

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

That I could close the rift?

That youare the rift.

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

What the hell…

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

It’s time to go. Remember. Remember.

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

Popgoes the perfume cork.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Feed,” she whispered.

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

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

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

“Order me,” I snapped.

“To do what?”

“Anything!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What about Patrick?

She seemed to flinch. Gone. Seeking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do it,” I said to Sara.

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

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

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

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