Текст книги "Heat Stroke"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

Соавторы: Rachel Caine
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Up from the aetheric are other levels, but David had already warned me not to go exploring on my own without a guide; David, however, was nowhere to be seen. And I had a compulsion.

Three layers up was the highest possible level of the known universe, at least the highest we could reach. Its most primitive, primal form. The black-and-white template for the sixteen million colors used back on Earth. It was hard to focus on anything for long, because there were no familiar landmarks, nothing that conformed to human sensibilities. Just swirls, drifts, eddies. I couldn’t even get a sense of the rhythm of the place, although I was sure it had one. Either the heartbeat was so simple and subtle it defied detection, or so complex and multilayered I couldn’t hope to understand it. Either way, not helpful.

It took me a while, watching, to realize that there was a kind of order to the chaos.

Everything moved the same direction. It moved in circles, sometimes, but the circles were always counterclockwise, just like the flow of the wind-fluid-matter stream.

There was one area moving the other direction. Clockwise. I focused on it, stared hard, and felt a kind of absencethere, a kind of gray confusion. It didn’t want to be found, this thing. It was a trap door into our world, and it was designed to stay hidden. I drifted slowly over to it, moving against the current, and paused at the very edges of the spiral.

It felt like… nothing. In fact, I couldn’t even be sure that I’d touched it at all, except visually, where the fog phased into a bluish color as it came into contact with my presently-not-solid form. Was that good? I couldn’t tell. My senses weren’t helping me out at all on this one. As far as I could tell, this swirling eddy looked just like all the other swirling eddies, except that this one went right instead of left. Not a lot to go on, really. I would have preferred a nice big sign that said this way to the void, but I supposed I’d have to settle for what I could get.

I reached for the hot golden flow of Lewis’s power, and began the strange job of closing off the rift. Where I touched the moving pool of energy, I sampled the normal space around it and began replicating it over the tear. It was a little like darning– take good material, stretch it over bad stuff, tack it in place.

It was also hard. The stuff kept slipping under my touch, trying to writhe away. Definitely not just some hole in space. This thing was alive, and it didn’t like me. I persisted. It resisted. Little by little, I gained on it.

I was almost done when it gave one last, convulsive twist, turned, and jumped right out of the fabric of space and tore into me.

If it had been the normal world I’d have stumbled backwards, screamed, and tried to slap the thing off of me; it was definitely, horribly alive. What was worse, I couldn’t even really sense it. If I lost sight of it…

I wrapped both hands around it—or what passed for hand-equivalents here—and began to squeeze. All of Lewis’s potential flooded into me, concentrated into my grip and gave it world-crushing strength.

I felt the thing give with a hot little pop. It dissolved into a rain of silvery light, cold and glittering and totally undetectable as soon as it passed beyond my aura.

I’d seen that stuff before. Where?… with David. On the aetheric level. He’d thought it was odd then.

Now I knew where it had come from.

The rip tore open again and started whirling widdershins again. Oh man…that hadn’t gone well. As I brushed my hand over the surface I saw that sparkle again, saw the fireflies leaping out, away, into the primal essence of the universe.

This was really, really not good. And now I had ripple effects to deal with from the rip coming open again. That had sent shock waves of power throughout the planes—I’d felt it myself, like a sonic boom in my soul.

I left that plane and took the express down, and I didn’t like what I was seeing. Swirling clouds of silver fog on the next level. Hot invisible winds that stank of sulfur on the next.

In the aetheric, power was swirling like dust caught on the leading edge of a storm. I dropped back down next to Lewis, who was busy trying to get control of the thing—not a task for one Warden, no matter how powerful—and I quickly reached out to amplify what he was doing, pulling back waves of charged particles, changing the frequencies of vibrating and propagating wave forms. I started negative canceling waves to try to flatten out the effects, and felt Lewis’s burst of affirmation. Yes! We did it together, leveling, smoothing, pouring figurative oil on the literal waters.

I took hold of Lewis and pulled him down to the real-world level again. He thumped back into his body with a little plucked-string sound that was probably audible only on levels a Djinn could hear. I did the hi-I’m-naked-no-I’m-not thing again, wishing Patrick weren’t so intensely scoping me out, and realized I had my hand flat against Lewis’s chest. Mmm. The crisp, cool feel of his cotton shirt under my skin, the warm tingle of body underneath…

If I thought I’d been flying high after the decorating, I was definitely pulling g-forces now. My whole body was humming and vibrating, like it had just been through the best sex of its life.

“Wow,” I said involuntarily, and then blushed and dropped my hand and stepped back. “Um… did we…”

“Afraid not,” Lewis said. Was that a nice flush to his cheeks? Sure looked like it. “The rip’s still there, I can feel it. Now we’ve got other problems to take care of.”

“The waves?” I wasn’t talking about the ocean, but the aetheric; he got the reference.

“There’s a pretty severe widespread disturbance, and it’s running through all the manifestations. There’s stress under the tectonic plates in California. There’s a supercell forming out in the Atlantic. There’s a forest fire starting in Yellowstone.” That gave me a hot twitch of memory. Yellowstone was very sensitive to powerful forces, and once it got going, even the combined might of the Fire Wardens was only going to slow it down. Having emergencies manifest in three different ways would split the ability of the Wardens to act effectively—the Earth Wardens couldn’t get in to help the Fire Wardens contain any blaze; the Weather Wardens couldn’t help dump water to slow it down. If each of them had their own separate but equal crisis…

He gave me a very direct look. “I promised you it would be one favor. Not two.” He took the empty bottle out of his pocket and held it up. “I’ll keep my word.”

“I know.” I did. Lewis wasn’t a saint, thank God, but he was definitely a man of ethics and honor. “I’m releasing you from it. Not only did I not close the rip, I think I might have made it worse. Besides, you need me for this. There’s something majorly weird about this.”

He bent his head, an old-fashioned gesture of salute and gratitude. It occurred to me, late and strangely, that he had no alter ego presence in Oversight. Lewis was Lewis, whatever set of eyes I used to look at him. I was used to seeing humans as they thought of themselves—a plain girl as a ravishing beauty, a corporate-type guy as a knight in shining armor. But Lewis didn’t have any illusions, or any false fronts. He just was.

“Let’s get to work,” he said. His voice was husky, low, and full of an emotion he didn’t want me to hear.

Lewis took over where he was strongest—manipulating the earth itself, struggling to bleed off energy that was building up to a major break-California-off-into-the-ocean explosion. I went to the sea.

The Atlantic, on its best days, doesn’t have the peace of the Pacific—the light is different, out here. The waves seem glassier, more knife-edged, and the sense of something moving under the surface is very strong. I sped along on the aetheric and formed myself back into human flesh, but kept myself hovering about ten feet over the surface of the water, feeling the energy flow. This hadn’t changed. I still had the instincts of a Weather Warden, even if I no longer had the same physical channels.

The ocean was cool and edgy underneath me, muttering in the language of power; there was something unsettled here, but it wasn’t the usual evaporative cycle stirring up trouble in the troposphere or mesosphere. No, this was something else. Nothing I could sense, specifically, and that worried me. I traced the cooling and warming cycle. Sunlight on water, evaporating drops to mist… mist rising, cooling as it went… droplets drawing each other into close embrace, forming clouds… clouds growing denser as the drops crowded closer, and energy was released… warm air up, cold air sinking, pressing out the clouds into energy-storing layers.

Nothing unusual here. But there wassomething wrong.

Something in the clouds. Something that shouldn’t be there.

It was—what?

I rose up, feeling the mist chill on my skin, sliding like invisible rain… then the drops forming, soaking my denim shirt. I was heavy with dew. The air had the metallic taste of ozone, and it scraped the back of my throat when I pulled in a cool, thick breath.

I saw a tinkle of blue at the corner of my eye.

And then I knew.

Shit!

I flamed out of there, fast, blew myself into mist and reformed and hoped I hadn’t taken in too much of it, and then I bugged out of there, arrowing for Lewis at top speed.

I almost ran into Patrick, who was still ambling around his house, staring morosely at the politically correct ceiling; I didn’t stop to apologize, just misted right through him and braked myself out into human form. Waybetter this time. Apparently, panic greatly enhanced my organizational skills.

“It’s the sparkly stuff!” I yelled. Lewis wasn’t there, at least he wasn’t in spirit; he was out of his body again, up in the aetheric. I shot up a level, followed the thread, found him doing whatever it is Earth Wardens do to control earthquakes. Not that I’m not sympathetic to the damage a big shake can cause, but once I spotted him I tackled him like a noseguard, snapped him right out of the aetheric and down into himself with a thud.

He staggered, braced himself with a hand on the back of the leather couch, and smacked the other onto his forehead. Owww. I’m guessing that I’d hurt him.

“What?” he yelled at me.

“It’s the goddamn blue stuff! Fairy dust! Sparklies!” I repeated, louder than him. “Listen, when I tried to seal this thing, it sent out this puff of– coldlight. Looks like glitter. I didn’t think it was anything, really. But it’s here!”

“What?” He was still dazed. I’d given him a hell of a shot.

“It’s here in the clouds. And this crap is weird, Lewis. I can’t really feel it, I can only see it when I touch it. It has a kind of—sparkle.”

“Sparkle?” His eyes had taken on a hard, opaque shine. “You slammed me out of there and disrupted me for a sparkle? Tell me you’re kidding—”

“Listen!” I yelled over him. “ It’s everywhere! It’s in everything! It shouldn’t behere!”

He was starting to get it. The opacity was fading out of his eyes, being replaced by a clear, deep look of alarm.

“I don’t know what the hell it’s doing, or how the hell to stop it. Tell me you know.”

His mouth opened, but there wasn’t an answer forthcoming. In fact, he looked downright speechless.

“Oh hell,” I supplied for both of us. “I’m glad you’re the boss, because as far as I can tell, we’re totally fucked.”

* * *

Next stop: panic city. Everybody out for the apocalypse.

Bigproblem. There was nothing wrong with the weather patterns over the Atlantic, anyone with an ounce of Weather sense could tell. And yet, the supercell shouldn’t have been there, according to physics. It made absolutely no sense. If I’d still been in the Wardens, I knew there would have been conference calls in progress, with people eyeing this thing from different sides and trying to figure out what the hell was going on. I wondered if they could see the sparklies, and I thought they probably couldn’t. Whatever the stuff was, it barely radiated in a wavelength Djinn could see, much less humans. No, I was pretty sure that they wouldn’t be able to figure it out.

Which left me, and Lewis, and maybe Patrick. And any other Djinn we could convince to take a look.

“Clearly,” I said as Lewis and Patrick and I compared notes, “this stuff’s not natural to our planes of existence. Can you see it?”

I’d directed the question to Lewis, and he indicated a no. “Everything looks normal up on the aetheric.”

“Yeah. That’s what bugs me. Because it doesn’t look at all normal to me.” I couldn’t sit still; I got up and paced, wished I had on something besides blue denim and work boots, because this was a situation that screamed for bitchen black leather and tight boots. These boots are made for walkin‘…“The stuff’s like evil pollen. Who knew it could sift through three planes of existence and end up here so fast?”

“Unless it’s been coming through the rift for a while,” Lewis said. “That’s possible. The fact that you just now saw it might have nothing to do with it, really. If it’s something subtle and largely undetectable, we could have a problem that’s been slowly getting worse.”

“It’s not pollen,” Patrick said. He was in the far corner of the living room now, straightening a Monet landscape under the recessed lights. “From your description, it’s more like radiation. You said that David tried to seal some in an energy bubble?”

“Yeah. Didn’t work.”

“That’s very interesting,” Patrick said, and stepped back to admire the Monet from a distance. “That means that the normal aetheric barriers can’t stop it, because they’re all energy-based. This… coldlight, for lack of a better word… seems very dangerous indeed.”

Lewis looked up from his contemplation of the carpet. “We don’t even know that it isdangerous.”

“It issues from a hole into the Void where demons lie,” Patrick pointed out. “It’s rare that something of that pedigree turns out to be happy fairy dust.”

“Not that I doubt you, but are you sure it’s not just that you’re not used to your new senses yet?” Lewis asked me. Which was, actually, not a stupid question at all.

“I don’t know,” I said, with a great deal less arrogance and a great deal more honesty than I usually had. “Ask him, he’s got a few centuries on me.”

Patrick was rambling the apartment again, looking lost and morose; he was milking it, of course. Not like he couldn’t have fixed everything back the way it was, if he’d wanted. Maybe he was adjusting to it. “What?” he asked, although I knew he’d been listening to every word. We’d been a lot more interesting than the stacked bowl of Chinese ornamental balls on the coffee table. “Bother. I can’t give an opinion until I’ve had a look.”

“Then come on.” I held out my hand. He ignored that, put his arm around me, and copped a feel. Which, thankfully, was a little insulated by the sensible denim that Lewis had chosen for me to wear. I moved his hand without more than a sidelong look, and up and away we went.

Well, Patrick said, in the way Djinn have of communicating up there in the aetheric, that’s different.

We hung there for a while, watching the storm rotating and building while the fragile milk-glass bursts of power came from all sides, like flashbulbs going off around a celebrity. Wardens at work. They looked weirdly anemic to me, now, but I could feel the hot blue pulse of other Djinn focusing and defining that force, putting it to precision work.

The only trouble was that there was nothing to fix here—nothing that couldbe fixed. The storm was slowly building. I’d already tried all the traditional stuff—disrupting the convection engine that was feeding the process; adding cooling layers underneath to isolate the updrafts; bringing in strong dry winds to shred the structure of the thing.

Nothing worked. And the Wardens who were trying it now were clearly singing from the same choir book, so we were going to be well into the second verse soon which would be, in the immortal words of Herman’s Hermits, the same as the first.

Look, I said to Patrick, braced for it, and trailed a very small part of myself through the mist.

A blue, sparkling pocket galaxy flared where I touched. I shook myself—how was it possible for my flesh to creep when I didn’t even have a body? – and watched the shining stuff float free like a festive, toxic cloud. Patrick’s low, pulsing aura backed hastily away from it.

What the hell is it? I asked him. I got a hot orange pulse of alarm in response. Okay, were there actual words with that?

Not ones I’d care to repeat in English, he sent back. I suppose the nearest equivalent would be, I haven’t the vaguest fucking idea. Nor do I have any desire to. And I’m leaving before I have a much closer acquaintance with it. I suggest you get your ass out of here as well. Now.

He vanished instantly. Talk about bugging out– he wasted no time at all. I’d never seen a Djinn have a panic attack, but that looked like one to me. And hell, I was kind of having one myself. Not feeling especially fine about my part in all this.

I bugged out right on his tail, and followed the contrail back home. We touched down into the newly renovated apartment at the same time, and this time I managed the reconstitution without any R rating. Once I thought of it as math—higher math, but still math—all I had to do was expand the equation of me to include the outfit. Better still, it was simple to vary it. Change a variable, here and there, and you get something suitable for wearing to a star-spangled party. Or a bag lady convention.

The one thing I could notseem to get right—still– was hair. Well, I’d never been a wizard at it in my mortal life, either. Maybe I was just destined to be curly.

Patrick wasn’t thinking about my hair; he was thinking about what he’d seen and backed hastily away from. He pointed a shaking finger at me, couldn’t think of anything to say, and swung around on Lewis, who had arrested a restless pacing to stare at the two of us.

“You!” Patrick snapped. “If you’d just left well enough alone…”

Lewis made no reply. He just resumed pacing.

“How did this get to be Lewis’s fault?” I blurted, and then wished I hadn’t. I mean, obviously, it got to be his fault because he’d ordered me to meddle. Dammit. “Cancel that. What I meant was, what do we do now?”

“Yell for help. Loudly. Repeatedly.” Patrick walked over to the telephone—a tasteful cream-colored unobtrusive one, to replace the Harley-Davidson model he’d been using before—and started dialing. “And then take a very long vacation, someplace else.”

Which I didn’t think would do a damn bit of good, because if this stuff had seeped down this far, it had probably contaminated the higher levels, too. Unless he meant Aruba, which was probably not glitter-free either, but still very nice this time of year.

“I’ll tell the Wardens,” Lewis said. “But I’d like to do it in person. Jo—?”

“Who are you calling?” I asked Patrick, since Lewis hadn’t phrased it in the form of an order and was probably too polite to do it for at least another five minutes. Patrick finished dialing a number that was too long to be to any country on Earth. He didn’t speak, just hung up the phone. I understood instinctively what he’d been doing—not dialing a phone, in any real way, but using the metaphorical human device to send a message through the aetheric, a kind of sympathetic magic. I even knew who he was calling. “Oh, God, you’re calling Jonathan.”

“Who won’t show his face,” Patrick said, with a bitter-lemon twist of his lips that made me wonder just how comfortable thatrelationship was. “He doesn’t leave his house.”

“Why?”

“Because it doesn’t exist on any of the planes. It’s a kind of…” Patrick paused for thought. “Bubble, I suppose you’d say. It’s for all of our protection. If Jonathan was ever claimed, the consequences… Let’s say they wouldn’t be good. Not good at all.”

So maybe Jonathan’s plush little refuge wasn’t by his choice. Which made me wonder just who really wasin charge, among my new friends and family. Politics. Still hate ‘em. Djinn politics just made my head hurt worse than human ones.

Ten seconds or less later, I felt a kind of shift in the room, like some balance of energy had tipped. It was subtle, but it made me wonder…

… and then Rahel walked out of the master bedroom, examining her talons with a critical, casual grace. She looked up, acknowledged Patrick with a fast, white glint of teeth in her dark-skinned face, and then slowly took stock of the room.

“Love the makeover,” she said. “Since I doubt you grew any taste since last I saw you, I imagine Sistah Snow was behind it. Yes?”

Her smile faded fast when we started talking. A quick trip to the aetheric to show her the contamination, and back down to reality to see Rahel’s completely unnerving frown. Her eyes were glowing, hot and gold, and she just looked, well, strong. Strong enough to dissolve me into a sticky pool on the carpet just with the force of that stare.

“I’m sorry,” I said. It was totally inadequate.

She didn’t blink. “Not your fault,” she said, which was not at all what I expected to hear. “This is something I have never seen, either. I would have done the same, if I had been given the same order. With perhaps exactly the same result.”

“So what do we do?” Lewis asked.

A short, pregnant silence. Her stare didn’t seem quite so menacing, but it was still as intense as a laser.

“I think,” she said slowly, and transferred the gaze to Lewis, “that perhaps I should consult with Jonathan and find a way to make this right. You stay here. The fewer who travel the aetheric, the better, until we know what the consequences might be.”

“I’ll go,” I said.

Rahel looked at me sharply, and unpleasant recognition dawned in cat-bright eyes. “Ah,” she said. “I did not see it at first, because it changed you very little. But still you’re claimed, aren’t you? And chained.”

“It’s not so bad,” I said. “All the buildup, I was expecting something a lot worse.”

“A good master makes a good servant.” She leaned on the word servantwith a heavy weight of disdain. “I don’t think this is at all wise. Lewis, you should know better.”

“I wouldn’t have claimed her if you’d given me a choice.”

Ouch, the look that swept between them was like two master fencers, lunge and parry and riposte faster than thought. Lewis certainly felt comfortable around Djinn. I wondered when familiarity had happened to breed that particular contempt.

“I am notyour slave,” Rahel said.

“Apparently, you don’t believe in working for a living, either.”

“ Sssst!” It was less a sound than a burst of electricity from her, snapping like a whip. It didn’t touch Lewis. I don’t think he even flinched. “Djinn did not make this portal, did not create this pollutionyou speak of. Humans meddled in things they didn’t understand, and this is the result. Chaos.”

“Djinn being perfect.”

“More perfect than…”

“Excuse me,” I said loudly, “can we please focus on the problem? Because I for one don’t really feel this is getting us anywhere.”

Rahel looked murderous. Junior half-Djinn were not supposed to get uppity, apparently.

“Where’s David?” I asked.

She favored me with something that looked dangerously close to a sneer.

“Running to your savior?” she asked, sweet as a batch of overcooked fudge. “Jonathan has a use for him. You’re to learn to fly for yourself, little bird.”

“Fine. Then let’s go see Jonathan,” I said.

She stopped me with an outstretched hand. Did the fingernails look longer and sharper? Yeah. Definitely. “Slaves do not go there.”

“Excuse me?”

She flicked her eyes toward Lewis. “Nor do humans. I will go. Notyou.”

“She’s nota slave,” Lewis said, and stepped into Rahel’s space. He was taller, broader, but I couldn’t be sure he was stronger. In fact, the chances of him even holding his own against her were thin. “She’s an ally. I don’t suppose you get the concept.”

“An ally who accepts any order you choose to issue, no matter how degrading? Who has no choice but to comply?” Rahel swept me with a hard look. “Do not fool yourself, little Snow. A slave with a kind master is still a slave.” The look ripped Lewis, too. “And a slave’s master has no honor.”

“Maybe I’m crazy, but I have the strong feeling that if we don’t get this straightened out, it may not matter whether I’m free or not. Everybody gets the same crappy deal.”

“Likely you’re correct.” She quirked her head to the side, an alien-looking catlike movement that made me jump a little. “And yet I will not take you.”

Fine. I plopped down on the comfortable brown leather sofa and put my work-booted feet up on the coffee table. “I’ll just sit and watch the world get eaten, then. Hey, be sure to call me if the apocalypse comes. I need to get some 400-speed film, make sure I get good pictures.”

She gave me a snarl, and vanished. Whoosh. There was a breeze—displacement of air—and I transferred my stare to Patrick. He looked blank and angelic. Put a red suit on him, and he could be handing out candy in a mall and asking kids what they wanted Santa to bring them.

“You’re not going?” I asked.

He cleared his throat. “Let’s say that I’m not welcome in those particular circles.”

“Because of the way you were made Djinn?”

“Among other things.” He shrugged. “I’ve learned to live with disappointment.” He stretched out his arms and manifested a light camel-colored coat, something appropriate for a spring day. “I have not, however, learned to live with this… redecorating. I believe I’ll go for a walk. Call me if the world ends, there’s a dear.”

He blipped out. I stared at the spot where he’d been, frowning and wishing I still lived in a world where people used doors.

Lewis ambled around and settled down next to me.

“So,” he said.

“So,” I agreed. “Son of a bitch.”

“Who, me?”

“The situation.”

“Ah.” He rubbed his hands lightly together. “Guess I’d better get back to work. I’ve got the pressure mostly relieved in the plates around the San Andreas, but I need to get a team of Earth Wardens on it. And the Fire Wardens need the tip-off about the Yellowstone fire, too.”

He glanced over at me, eyebrows up.

“What?” I asked.

“That was a codependent way of asking you to do it for me.”

“You want me to run your errands? Bite me, Lewis.” After Rahel’s rather rabble-rousing speeches about slavery, I wasn’t feeling any too subservient. “How’d the rip form in the first place?”

“I don’t know,” Lewis said. “Like Rahel said, this is new. I’ve never heard of this stuff coming through before. It’s almost always a demon, reaching through to put the Mark on a human; once the Mark matures, they can make the crossing to the human plane directly, without going through the aetheric levels. Safer for them. But this stuff…”

“Maybe it can be destroyed.”

“We don’t even know what it does.”

“Yeah, but even so I think we’d better work from Patrick’s theory: Nothing good ever comes out of the Void…”

I stopped, hesitated. There was something…

“Jo?” He was staring at me, wide-eyed. I wondered how bright my eyes had just flared.

“Stay here,” I said, and got up to take a look around.

The first thing I spotted after passing into the kitchen was the almost-there shadow of Patrick’s Ifrit, hiding in the gloom behind. Watching me. That predatory interest made hair stand up on my neck.

“Hey,” I said to it, and took a step closer. She shrank farther into shadow—not aggressive today, certainly not the ripping, shrieking fiend that Patrick had set on me just yesterday in training sessions. “Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you.”

“It’s not you I’m afraid of,” it said. “Don’t blame him for this. He doesn’t understand.”

“Understand what?”

“It will kill all of you.”

For some reason, I didn’t have any doubt about what itwas. “You can see it? This light? You know, the glitter?” She nodded, or at least I thought she did. “Do you know what it is?”

“Yes.” A bare, sighing breath. I felt myself tense up. “Knowing will not help you.”

“Why?”

“It does not help me.”

Great, Ifrit were just as evasive as Djinn when it came to the important stuff. “Look, just tell me, if you know. What is this stuff? How do we stop it?”

“It is life,” she whispered. “It is love. It is death.”

Point taken—Ifrit were moreevasive. “How about in more, you know, technical terms…?”

She seemed to be trying to tell me, struggling to describe something that she didn’t have a language to cover. “It has happened before.”

“But Rahel said…”

“She was not told.”

“Sara…”

“ Do not say my name!” It was a cry of mortal pain. “You don’t understand. Love consumes. Love mustconsume.”

I heard Lewis say something from the other room, his voice rising into a question.

“Lewis?” I called.

The Ifrit said, “He is a man. Men are weak. They don’t always see…” Was she talking about Lewis? Patrick? I had no idea, but she wasn’t making any sense that existed in my reality. Ifrits were crazy, I knew that much already. “You must choose. I could not.”

“Okay,” I said, and held up my hands in surrender. “I’ll choose. No problem. Ah… Lewis?”

I backed away—not quite confident enough to give her my undefended back—and came out into the living room again.

Patrick was back, and he’d brought friends. Two of them, to be precise. He was in the process of taking his coat off and hanging it on a tacky-looking gold rack—had I put that there? Ack! – while the other two looked around, evidently checking out my interior decorating skills. I didn’t know the kid– sixteen, seventeen at most—who stood looking pale and mutinous and typically disaffected; he pushed hands into his pants pockets and slumped in a don’t-notice-me attitude. He needed a haircut, but that was probably just the generation gap talking.

The woman had her back to me, but those curves looked familiar.

“Patrick?” I asked. His too-blue eyes flashed to me, and then away. He looked uncomfortably guilty. “What’s up?”

Lewis was up off the couch, now, too, clearly wary. He didn’t like drop-in visitors any more than I did, especially not right now, when things were so… weird.

“I’m sorry,” Patrick said. “You see, I had a preexisting commitment.”

“Sorry…?”

“A business partner,” he said, and indicated the woman, who was still studying the Mondrian with her back to me. “We have something of a barter arrangement. I owe her something.”