by Rachel Caine
It is now a full-fledged hurricane; and it is still growing.
Chapter Four
In retrospect, snarling, “Over my dead body!” probably wasn’t the smartest thing to say to a Djinn willing to take on Jonathan in a straight-up dogfight for control of the Djinn world.
I never said I was smart. But at least you can’t call me a coward.
Ashan reached out to grab me, but his hand never reached me; Rahel lunged past me in a flash of neon gold and flung herself on him like a tiger, ripping and snarling. Ashan, taken by surprise, fell back a few steps…
… off the balcony.
He didn’t fall. He floated, looking surprised and annoyed and a little bit pissed-off, and yanked a handful of Rahel’s cornrowed hair to get her off of him. His strength was incredible. I knew how tough Rahel was, and the ease with which he slung her around and threw her in a violent, swinging arc that ended in a crushing impact with the ground thirty feet below, and with at least four rows of cars on her way into the parking lot. Rahel hit the ground, rolled, and came up fluidly to her hands and knees, looking for all the world like one of those clawed raptors from the dinosaur movies.
She vaulted up to the roof of the white van, where Detective Rodriguez might have noticed a slight weight displacement but wouldn’t have seen a thing even if he’d looked out. She ran the length of it, then planted her feet and arced gracefully up into the air, heading straight for Ashan…
… who knocked her out of the air as easily as Babe Ruth swinging for the bleachers.
I could feel the disordered currents of energy in the air around me. The Djinn were causing instability, and dammit, there was nothing I could do about it.
Whatever damage had been done to my powers when I’d overextended and David had … changed… wasn’t fixing itself, and the energy Jonathan had thrust into me wasn’t made for weather work.
Rahel flew bonelessly through the air, crashed to the pavement of the parking lot, and rolled about fifteen feet, arms and legs flopping.
And then she vanished into mist.
Poof.
Ashan turned his attention back to me.
I gulped and stood up, backing away. Not a lot of escape opportunities on the balcony.
“You know what I want,” Ashan said, and held out his hand. His fingernails gleamed a kind of opal-silver in the twilight, and his eyes were as bright as moons. He might have been wearing a designer suit, but he was no kind of human. “Get the bottle.”
“You can’t even touch the bottle,” I said. I meant it to come out cool and logical, but it sounded shaky. “Djinn can’t—”
“Little girl, don’t presume to tell me what Djinn can or can’t do,” he interrupted in a voice so low and cold that I felt ice form along my backbone. “I said get it.”
“Or?”
“You don’t want to test me.” He took a measured step forward. I felt the ozone crackling in the air, felt the menace in the clouds overhead. Wispy things, but firming up as the disruptions in the aetheric mirrored themselves into the physical world… whipping, uncontrolled winds in the mesosphere; cold spots; a streak of heat from Ashan that cut through weather patterns like a spearhead.
I could feel the electricity in the air trying to find a way to ground itself.
He could fry me right here on the patio, and with my powers currently registering somewhere from zero to dead, I couldn’t even defend myself. “David is fond of humans. I’m not. I don’t care if I level this entire building to make my point.”
“Djinn,” I said, and forced a grin. “No sense of proportion.”
I didn’t see him move, but I felt the blow—hard enough to temporarily white out my nervous system and send me reeling to slam back against stucco and brick. I’d missed the plate-glass doors, at least. That was a relief. When sensation came flooding back, it brought with it a tide of stinging-hot ache along the side of my face. It had been an open-handed slap, but damn, he hadn’t pulled it. I put my hand to my cheek and felt heat. My eyes were watering.
Ashan took another step forward. “I’m not interested in how clever you imagine yourself to be, and if you think your human body interests me, you’re deluded,” he said. “I only find it interesting in how many creative ways I might be able to take it apart. Now, go and get the bottle.”
He couldn’t touch the bottle. He couldn’t take it away from me. Even Jonathan hadn’t been able to do that. Was it a bluff? Or did he just want to know where it was?
I slipped open the sliding glass door and backed inside, then slammed it shut.
For all the good it would do, of course. Outside, Ashan stood silhouetted against the failing twilight, gray as a dead man, with those eyes swirling cold and silver.
“Hey,” Sarah said. She was still deep in her culinary trance, doing something now involving bread and the oven. The kitchen smelled like rosemary and olive oil and roasting chicken. Heaven. I wished I could appreciate it; I was shaking, shaken, and scared. I watched her slide the tray into the slot and close the oven door, then strip off oven mitts and turn toward me with a smile. “It’s nice out there, isn’t it? Kind of peaceful. Maybe we can have dinner out there…”
“Yeah,” I said. “Great. Okay.” What a horrible idea. I started to move past her to the bedroom.
She reached out and grabbed my arms, pulling me to a stop. Her frown creased into faint lines. “Jo? What happened to your face?”
“Um…” I was drawing a blank. “I tripped.”
“Tripped?”
“It’s nothing, Sarah.” I tried to pull free. My sister was stronger than she looked.
“Bullshit, nothing. You look spooked, Jo. Is it that guy? That van guy?” Now she looked angry as well. “Dammit… I’m calling the police. Right now.”
“No! No, look, it’s nothing like that—” This was all getting way too complicated. I yanked free of her grip. She lunged for the phone. I grabbed it away from her and slammed it down hard on the table. “Sarah! It’s my business, all right? And the guy in the van is a cop!”
She stared at me, astonished. “He’s what?”
“A cop.” I had trouble controlling my breathing. Panic was getting the better of me. “I had some trouble in Las Vegas a couple of months ago. It’s temporary.”
“Jesus Christ, what did you do? Kill somebody?”
“Do I look like a murderer to you? You’re my sister! You’re supposed to believe in me!”
I hadn’t answered the question, but luckily I’d hit the right guilt buttons. “Jo …” Sarah flapped her manicured hands helplessly. “Fine. All right. I believe you. But why is he following you?”
“He thinks I know something about a crime that happened while I was—before you ask, no. I didn’t.” She opened her mouth to fire off another question, and I hastily searched for an excuse to escape. “Sorry. I have to use the bathroom.”
Even persistent people don’t want to argue with full bladders. She let me go. I hurried through the doorway into the living room, heading for my closed private space, and… the doorbell rang.
JESUS! “Get that!” I yelled over my shoulder, and kept moving. I ran into the bedroom, slid open the bedside table, and grabbed David’s blue glass bottle. My heart was hammering. I was about to take a huge gamble, and it was likely to get me hurt or killed in the process. I went back out into the living room, passing Sarah on her way to answer the doorbell, frowning at me; she’d taken the time to remove her apron and fluff her hair.
I slid the sliding glass door open and stepped out onto the patio. Ashan turned from contemplation of the ocean to stare at me. His eyes flicked toward the bottle in my hand.
“At least you take direction properly,” he said. “Call him.”
“You don’t want me to do that,” I said.
Ashan’s eyes went stormcloud-dark, tinged with lightning blue. “I won’t tell you again.”
“You want to kill him.”
Ashan smiled. Not nicely.
I closed my eyes, o
pened them, and said, “David, come out of the bottle.”
For a long second I was sure that I’d made a terrible mistake, that he’d never gone back in the bottle at all, and then a shadow detached itself from the corner and stood, swaying and angular, at my side. It wasn’t David. It wasn’t … anything I could recognize. But it answered to the name, and evidently I still had some control over it.
Ashan took a step back. That predatory smile went south, fast.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him, and this time, my voice stayed steady and cool. “You wanted David. Here he is.”
“Ifrit.”
“Oh, now that’s just mean. You shouldn’t judge a Djinn by the color of his …” Before I could finish what was admittedly a very weak joke, I lost whatever control of the situation I had, as the Ifrit formerly known as David lunged, fastened himself around Ashan, and began to feed.
Ashan screamed, backed up, hit the railing, and began raking the Ifrit—I couldn’t think of him as David—with silver claws. Ashan’s form changed, flowed, became something larger and only barely human in form. Gray and vague and shot through with vivid streaks of white.
The two of them misted through the railing and plunged down, twisting, falling.
The Ifrit had two misshapen, angular limbs plunged deep into the Djinn’s chest, and the silver essence flowed in spirals up coal black, glittering arms, disappearing into the black hole—mouth?—in the center of that twisting shadow.
He’s in pain. Not Ashan, David… I could feel it. I could feel his agony, and it made me stagger and grab for the railing and bite back a scream. The connection between us was coming back, and oh God it hurt. Like a gallon of bleach poured into my guts. I held onto the railing in a death grip, staring down at the two battling figures as they hit the parking lot—like Rahel before them—and rolled, ripping at each other like wild tigers.
And then, suddenly, just when the pain was about to drive me to my knees, it stopped. There was a floating sensation, an overwhelming burst of peace, and I saw the Ifrit change.
Twist.
Take on color and shape and form.
David was crouched on top of a prone Ashan, hands sunk to the wrist into the other Djinn’s chest. He was dressed in jeans and nothing else—bare-chested, gleaming and bronze and shimmering with what looked like sweat. His shoulders heaved, although he didn’t need to breathe, unless he’d really taken on human form.
He yanked his hands free of Ashan’s chest. They were smeared with silvery residue. Ashan, for his part, lay there motionless, staring up at the darkening, cloud-littered sky.
Lightning jumped from one cloud to another, a hot, white flare that I felt along my nerve endings. Thunder slammed through the air and buffeted my chest, such a physical presence that it set off car alarms.
David looked up at me, and his eyes glowed hot bronze. Alien. Familiar. Haunted.
He pulled himself away from Ashan, staggered to his feet, and braced himself against a convenient Volkswagen Bug. The car’s alarm went off. He absently shushed it with a tap of his fingers against the fender, got control of himself with a visible effort, and formed a blue checked shirt out of thin air. He put it on, but didn’t bother with buttoning it. I don’t think he had the strength.
He looked so weak.
“David,” I whispered. I was gripping the rail so hard I thought I might have to have it surgically removed from my fingers.
He looked up again, and I got a faint, ghostly smile.
And he misted out.
I gasped and leaned over, looking for him, but he was gone, gone…
Warm hands slid over me. I bit my lip, tasted tears I didn’t know I’d shed, and leaned back into his embrace.
“Shhh,” David whispered against my ear. His breath stirred my hair. “Not much time. I couldn’t take enough from him to stay in this form, and I won’t kill him. Not even him.”
“I know,” I said, and turned to face him. He looked normal. Healthy and sane and perfectly all right, and that was the torture of it, that it was temporary. That he’d have to feed again and again to maintain this illusion of normality.
I kissed him breathlessly. Hard. He returned it with interest, trying to pour emotion into the briefest span of time possible, and reached up to cup my head in his large hands, holding me in place while his warm, silk-smooth lips devoured mine.
When we parted, it was like losing a limb. I could feel him again, inside—the connection was strong, humming with potential. But I could already feel the drain. I had little energy left, and something in him was siphoning it off. It was like trying to fill up a black hole.
“Put me back in the bottle,” David said. “You have to. Do it now.”
I nodded. He stroked hands through my hair, smoothing curls, making it silky straight the way he knew I liked it.
“I love you,” he said. And that hurt, oh God. Because I knew he meant it, despite everything.
I said the words, and he was gone, back into the blue glass bottle I’d dropped, forgotten, on the wrought-iron table. I hadn’t even remembered putting it down.
I picked it up again, shocked by the several-degrees-too-cold chill of the container, and remembered to look back down at Ashan.
He wasn’t dead. In fact, he was moving. Rolling up to his knees, with one hand bracing himself on the pavement. He looked like he’d had the shit kicked out of him, but I had absolutely no doubt that he was completely, utterly pissed off, and looking for payback and something more than a pound of flesh.
I couldn’t use David to protect me. Not when he was barely clinging to his sanity and identity.
I stood there, looking down at him, as Ashan made it to his feet. He passed an absentminded hand over his suit, and the rips and dirt disappeared. He was once again a Brooks Brothers ad, except that his expression wouldn’t effectively sell anything but firearms or funeral arrangements.
He didn’t move, just stared at me with that burning threat in his eyes, and waited.
I said, “If you come back at me, I’m going to make you an all-you-can-eat Ifrit buffet.”
He said something in that liquid-silver Djinn language, the one I could almost understand. I doubted it was complimentary.
“I mean it,” I said. “Get out. If you come back, I won’t be the one getting bitch-slapped.”
Behind me, the sliding glass door rumbled open, and I heard Sarah say, “Jo? Eamon’s here. I’m getting ready to serve the pasta. And I’m serious about the police. You really should call them. I don’t care if that man is a cop; he still can’t do this to you. It’s not legal.”
I didn’t move. Down on the pavement, Ashan didn’t, either. We stared for a good thirty seconds. Wind whipped at my clothes, my hair, going west, then south.
Random winds, confused by the boiling disturbances in the aetheric. God, the weather was so screwed up. The Wardens were going to go insane.
Which reminded me of what had happened on the bridge. I had no idea of how much all this was affecting the Wardens, but I knew for certain there’d already been one human casualty. I needed to report it.
“Jo?” Sarah sounded concerned. “Are you all right?” The patio door slid farther open, and she stepped out next to me, enveloping me in an ever-so-slightly overdone cloud of Bulgari’s Omnia, which was—she’d assured me—a bargain at $75 for two ounces. The wind ruffled her highlighted hair, and she frowned out at the parking lot, focusing on the white van. Her breath exploded in an exasperated sigh. “That’s it. I’m calling the cops. At the very least, they can make him stop parking down there and staring at us all the time.”
Down in the parking lot, Ashan’s intense eyes—swirling from silver back toward teal blue—suddenly shifted away from me to focus on my sister. And he smiled. It was a dark prince’s smile, something chill and amused and terrifying. I felt an answering righteous surge of fury. Don’t you dare, you bastard. Don’t you dare look at my sister like that.
Whether he sensed that or not, he misted away
without another sound or word.
Gone, except for that lingering, unspecified threat.
I sucked in a deep breath, turned, and laid a hand on Sarah’s bare shoulder. Her skin felt creamy-soft under my cold, shaking fingers.
“It’s okay,” I said, and smiled. “Everything’s okay now. Let’s just have a nice, peaceful dinner.”
Yeah. That was likely.
While I’d been playing Juliet to Ashan’s homicidal Romeo out on the balcony, Sarah had transformed my dining room table—another secondhand special—from its usual distressed state into something that might have made an interior designer reach for a camera. I recognized the tablecloth, which was something of Mom’s that she’d left me—a gigantic crocheted ecru thing, big enough to use as a car cover—but Sarah had dressed it up with an accenting silk-tasseled runner, candles, a bowl of fresh flowers floating in water. The dishes—all matching—looked suspiciously new. Also mod and oddly shaped and matte black, which I knew had not been in my meal-serving arsenal last night. In fact, my china collection mostly consisted of secondhand Melmac, with the occasional chipped Corningware.
The kitchen looked spotless. There were three glasses of chilled white wine sitting next to the plates, glimmering delicately in candlelight.
Eamon was standing next to the table, his back to us, watching something playing silently on our (still crappy) television set. Financial news, apparently. At the sound of the closing patio door he turned, and I have to admit, he looked good. Like Sarah, he’d gotten the “let’s dress to impress” memo I’d missed. His pants were some kind of dark, rough-textured silk, his shirt a deliciously pet-table peachskin, open just enough to demonstrate how casual he was, yet nowhere approaching the sleazy post-modern disco look so currently in vogue. He looked hand-tailored, and still just the slightest bit forgetful about it.
Class without effort.
He extended his hand to me. I reflexively accepted and watched his smile go dim, a frown of concern take its place.
“Joanne,” he said. “You’re cold. Everything all right?”