by Rachel Caine
I hadn’t thought of Bad Bob in a long time, but it seemed like his ghost walked over my grave at that moment; I almost felt his presence, strong and astringent, charming and bad tempered. Corrupt, but hiding it well. Of all the things I couldn’t forgive Bad Bob for—and one of them had led to massive damages, once upon a time—I thought the worst was that he’d known what Kevin’s stepmother was, what kind of perversions she enjoyed, and he’d allowed her to continue.
Worst of all, he’d given her David to play with as her own personal sex toy.
David sat in silence, looking at the beach house. If I hadn’t known him so well, I’d have thought he had no reaction at all. I reached over and took his hand, and his gaze shifted toward mine.
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry, it’s the best place.
All right?”
“I’m fine,” he said. He wasn’t, but he also wasn’t ready to let me see that wound. He was all courtesy, opening my car door for me, handing me out, walking me up the steps to the front door. “Keys?”
It didn’t need one. I extended my hand, the one with the Warden symbol invisibly etched into the skin, and heard the lock click over. I opened the door, and the smell of the place washed over me, bringing with it another rush of memories as I stepped inside. Bad Bob hadn’t been gone long enough for his imprint to completely fade from this place; I swore I smelled the ghost of his cigar smoke, before the more powerful odor of musty carpeting and furniture took over. The house needed a full-scale cleaning. Something to keep me busy, I supposed.
David hadn’t followed me inside. I turned toward him and saw that he’d put out a palm, which was spread flat against an invisible barrier. As I watched, he moved his hand from side to side. I could see his skin flattening as it came into contact with . . . something.
“What is it?” I moved back to the threshold and waved my hand through the air. No barrier. I could even make contact with David’s hands, but I couldn’t pull him through. “What the hell . . . ?”
“Wards,” he said. “Set to keep Djinn out. You’ll have to take them down before I can come inside.”
Wards—magical boundaries—were an exclusive specialty of Earth Wardens, and they were usually fiendishly difficult to unravel. They could be set to exclude anything the Warden designed it to exclude— Djinn, in this case, but I’d seen them engineered to hold out humans, and even specific individuals.
I was, theoretically, an Earth Warden, but I hadn’t exactly been trained in the finer points. It was on the to-do list, but from all that I understood, breaking wards was definitely a graduate-level course. Maybe even postdoctoral. “Any idea who put this up?” I asked. Not Bad Bob, at least; he was purely and completely a Weather Warden. But he’d had a lot of friends, and most of them had been . . . questionable.
“Yes, but it won’t do you any good. He’s dead. Bad Bob had me kill him.”
The matter-of-fact way that David said it made me freeze for a second, and not just in the not-moving sense. “You . . . killed for him.”
“I had no choice at the time.”
“I know that. I just didn’t know—” I shook my head. “I’m so sorry, David. He had no right.”
David said nothing to that; he clearly wanted to drop the subject, and I obliged by focusing on the structure of the wards holding him outside the door. They were strongly made, and if they’d survived the death of their maker, they were independently fueled by some source. If I could locate the source, I could disable the wards—like pulling the battery. Problem was, a good Earth Warden (and this one had been very, very good) could imbue nearly anything with aetheric energy and set it on a slow, steady discharge. It could be something as innocuous as a teacup hidden in the back of the pantry, or as obvious as a big switch labeled TURN OFF WARDS HERE.
I systematically examined the house and its contents on the aetheric, looking for any telltale sparks, but nothing became obvious. David was unable to give me any pointers; the Earth Warden who’d created the wards had also done a damn fine job of erasing any tracks the Djinn could use to identify the control mechanism.
This left us at a standstill, ultimately. I couldn’t break the wards. David couldn’t enter.
“Okay, bad idea,” I sighed, then shut the front door and sat down with David on the steps. A cool breeze was blowing in off the ocean, and we sat for a while watching the surf roll in. “Maybe it’s a good thing we couldn’t get you inside. I know there must be— echoes.”
“Not as many as there were at Yvette’s house, but yes, the history’s very close to the surface here,” David said. He sounded remote and cool, as if he’d withdrawn into himself for protection. “I’d rather not stay, if we can find somewhere else to go.”
I’d always liked the beach house; it had been my favorite of the Warden properties in this part of the country. But that had been before I’d known the truth, and the depth of all the cruelty that the people I’d trusted were capable of inflicting on others. “That Earth Warden. Was he the only one Bad Bob made you . . . ?”
“No,” David said, and got up. He looked down at me with dark, impenetrable eyes, and offered me his hand. “Still trust me?”
I took it and let him pull me to my feet. “I will always trust you,” I said. “Thank you for trusting me.”
He kissed me, just a gentle brush of lips. Something about this place turned him cautious, opened old wounds, and I could tell that even if I’d found a way to break the wards, it would have been hard for him to stay inside these walls. “Do you mind if I choose the next stop?” he asked.
“Hey, you’re the guy with the black AmEx and unlimited credit line,” I said. “Speaking of which, you know that humans pay their debts, right?”
He didn’t look at me. He was staring at the beach house, with a shadow in his eyes that I’d never seen before. “So do Djinn,” he said. “When they can.”
Chapter Ten
David’s choice for our temporary refuge was just outside of Miami: another beach house, but if the Warden retreat was one that would comfortably fit a B-movie lead actor, this was A-list all the way. A Mediterranean-style villa, probably large enough to hold twenty people in comfort on a long stay, it had a gracious, sweeping stretch of grounds, a sculptural waterscaped pool, and its own white-sand private beach, a near-impossibility in Miami. I shuddered to think what the place would cost to maintain, much less buy.
“You’re kidding,” I said. David came around to the driver’s side and opened my door. “David, really. You’ve got to be kidding. Rich people don’t find this kind of thing very amusing when they come home to find us performing Goldilocks and the Three Bears in their bajillion-dollar mansion.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “It belongs to a friend.”
“A friend?”
“A very good friend,” he clarified, and flashed me a smile. “We’ll stay in the guesthouse, if it makes you feel any better.”
We made it only about three steps from the car when two huge, evil-looking Rottweilers came bounding out of the darkness, silent and intent on ripping our limbs off one at a time, but both dogs came to a fast, skidding halt when they came within five feet of us, or, more accurately, of David.
“Hello, boys,” David said, went down on one knee, and petted the two ferocious attack beasts. They licked his face and rolled over to have their tummies patted. “See? It’s fine.”
“It would be fine if you’d let me know when you were going to show up. By the way, you’re ruining my guard dogs,” said a voice from the grand marble sweep of the stairs leading up to the house. Lights blazed on, bright enough to land aircraft, and I squinted against the glare. A man came down the steps, moving lightly despite the fact he was past his athletic days. In his fifties, with a pleasant, interesting face and secretive dark eyes, he was dressed in blue jeans and a comfortable old T-shirt that had DON’T PANIC, along with the little green guy from Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker series as a graphic.
The jeans were expensive. So wer
e the deck shoes. I couldn’t decide if he was a well-paid caretaker or a slumming owner.
“Good to see you, too, Ortega,” David said, and gestured toward me. “Joanne Baldwin.”
There was something about Ortega that felt just slightly off to me . . . not the clothes, not the way he looked, not the smile he gave me. I couldn’t define it, not immediately, and then I realized that the feeling was familiar. It was the indefinable sense that I’d had around David, when I’d first met him—a vibration that I’d grown used to now.
I nodded to Ortega. “How exactly does a Djinn come to own a place like this?” I asked. He laughed, and his eyes flashed lime green, then faded back to plain brown.
“Very good,” he said. “But then, I expected no less. So, this is the one causing all the trouble? The one you intend to marry?”
David nodded. Ortega gave me a benevolent sort of smile.
“Charming,” he said. “And dangerous. But I suppose you know we’re attracted to that. Well, then, how may I be of service to my lord and master?”
Ortega was New Djinn, thank God, but then again, that had pretty much been a given; I couldn’t picture any of the Old Djinn reading Douglas Adams, much less wearing any kind of a T-shirt with a graphic. Well, maybe Venna, but it’d be a unicorn or a rainbow.
“Need a place to stay,” David said. “Guesthouse?” Ortega bowed his head slightly, and in the gesture I got a sense of antique gentility. It went oddly with the jeans and T-shirt. “As always, what I have is yours. Just let me move the cartons. I haven’t gotten around to sorting through things quite yet.”
“Thank you.” David gave the adoring Rottweilers one last pat and stood up to take my arm. “We’re not here, by the way.”
Ortega smiled. “You never are.” My Mustang faded out. “I put your car in the garage. Slot five, next to the Harley. Seemed appropriate.”
I looked at David, baffled. He shrugged. “Ortega collects things,” he said. “You’ll see.”
I knew that some of the Djinn lived among humans, but I hadn’t known it could be so public. . . . Ortega owned some of the biggest, splashiest real estate in a big, splashy, highly visible community. Granted, the rich were different, but I was willing to bet his neighbors had never guessed just how different. It worked in his favor that the exceptionally well-off tended to isolate themselves in these luxurious fortresses, and only moved in their own particular social circles.
David took my arm and walked me down the wide, flawless drive toward what I could only assume was the guesthouse—big enough to qualify as multifamily housing, and fancy enough to satisfy even the pickiest of pampered Hollywood stars looking to slum it. He must have seen from the bemusement of my expression what I was thinking, because he laughed softly. “We’re safe here,” he said. “Ortega’s known as a recluse—it’s not just as a disguise for humans; it’s true among his fellow Djinn as well. The few of us he allows to visit here are carefully chosen.”
“He’s . . . not what I would have expected.” The Djinn had always had a touch of the eldritch about them, but Ortega seemed . . . normal. His eccentricities were more like what you’d expect from a dot-com genius who’d cashed out of the Internet game early and sailed away on his golden parachute.
The door to the guesthouse swung silently open for us as we walked up the steps. Night-blooming flowers poured perfume out into the air, and I stopped to drink it all in. The cool ocean breeze. The clear night air. Rolling surf.
David, gilded silver by the moonlight.
“What are you thinking?” he asked me, and stepped close. Our hands entwined, and I crossed the small, aching distance between us. Our bodies fit together, curves and planes. He let out a slow breath and closed his eyes. “Oh. That’s what you’re thinking.”
I put my arms around his neck. “I’d be crazy if I wasn’t,” I said. “Look, it’s been driven home to me today that we’re living in a bubble. If it’s not the damn reporters sneaking hidden-camera footage, it’s the Sentinels trying to wipe us out. If we have even a second of safety and solitude, I don’t think we should waste it.”
“I’ve been wanting to get you out of that dress all day.” His voice dropped low and quiet, barely a murmur in my ear. I felt my pulse jump and my skin heat in response. “Jo, I don’t want to go on like this. I can’t stand knowing that at any moment they could come for you again. If I lose you—” His hands moved through my hair, urgent and possessive. “If I lose you—” He couldn’t finish the sentence.
We both knew that he was going to lose me, in the end. But it was the fullness of time, the richness of time, from now until then that would make that pain of parting something worth bearing.
“I love you,” I said, and his mouth found mine. He tasted of tears, but I saw no trace of them in his eyes or on his face. “No more mourning. I’m here. While I’m here, we’re together.”
“Yes.” Another soul-deep kiss that left my knees weak and every nerve tingling. “We’d better go inside. Security cameras. Wouldn’t want to shock the guards.”
“Mmmmmm.” He’d destroyed my ability to form words that didn’t include adjectives, such as faster and more.
David picked me up and carried me across the threshold . . . and stopped. He had no choice. The entire room was filled with cartons, floor to ceiling, rows and rows and rows of them.
And each one was neatly labeled MISC.
“Ortega!” he bellowed, and let me down. “Dammit—”
The other Djinn popped in with an audible displacement of air, standing outside the door. He looked past us, at the makeshift warehouse, and seemed a little embarrassed. Just a little. “Well,” he said, “I did warn you that I needed to clean up.”
That wasn’t messy; it was obsessive-compulsive. I’d met a Djinn with a behavioral disorder. Now that was new.
Ortega did something I couldn’t quite follow, and two columns of boxes disappeared—probably moved into the mansion, I guessed. He gave David a questioninglook, then sighed and repeated the maneuver with all the boxes in view.
“Any other rooms?” he asked.
“Bedroom,” David and I said together. Ortega’s eyebrows rose. “Please,” I added. “Umm—bathroom. And kitchen.”
“Done.”
And it was. The areas I could see, at least; I had no doubt that if I opened up a closet (or for that matter, a drawer) I’d see more of Ortega’s collecting fetish, but right now, the only things that mattered to me were open space and privacy.
Ortega was waiting for something, watching David, and once again I caught a hint of something otherworldly in him, something not quite in sync with the harmless human exterior he projected. “I have what you asked me to find,” he said. “When you’re ready to see it.”
David had been looking at me, but now his gaze cut sharply toward the other Djinn. “You have it? Here?”
“In the main house. It’s warded. I can’t open it myself.”
“What is it?” I asked. If I’d only left it alone, we might have been able to ignore the tempting, dangling bait and go on to a fevered night of fulfilling every delicious, decadent fantasy, but noooooo. I just had to ask.
Ortega’s face brightened. “The Ancestor Scriptures. ”
David went very still. I sensed whatever chance we had to forget all this and hit the sheets vanishing like mist in sunlight. “You persuaded the Air Oracle to give it up?”
“No.” The Djinn’s smile widened, inviting us to join him, but David didn’t, and I had no idea what we were smiling about. “I persuaded the Air Oracle to let me make a copy. You have no idea what I had to give up for that.”
I’d met the Air Oracle once; it wasn’t one of my most treasured memories. I’d had lots of scary encounters, but the Air Oracle had been one of the strangest, most remote, most malevolent creatures I’d ever met.
The fact that Ortega had charmed something out of him/her was fairly damn impressive.
David glanced at me, and I saw the frustrated apology in his exp
ression before he said, “I have to take a look. This could be important.”
My hormones were not understanding, but my brain tried to be. “I know. Mind if I look, too?”
“I want you with me,” David said, and he meant it on a whole lot of levels. I smiled, and he turned his attention back to Ortega, who was waiting with a polite, attentive smile. “Main house, you said?”
Ortega nodded and blipped out, then almost immediately blipped back, looking chagrined. “You can’t travel so quickly, can you?” he said to me. “I do apologize. We’ll walk.”
The stroll back to the main house was just as lovely as the first time, only with less anticipation of fun to come. Still, the destination was certainly interesting; when Ortega led us through the front door, I was struck once again by the incredible scale of the place. The massive chandelier overhead, loaded down with an entire year’s production of Swarovski crystals, glittered like a captured galaxy. The ceiling was as tall as any respectable opera house lobby, and the foyer was just about big enough to stage a road-show production of Aida, complete with elephants. There was a sweeping grand staircase, of course, with all the usual marble and mahogany features.
What didn’t quite fit in this oh-so-upscale setting was the clutter. Boxes piled randomly against walls, paintings (nice ones, at that, to my relatively untutoredeye) leaning against the boxes, knickknacks, and gadgets strewn over every flat surface. It was like walking into one of those clutter stores, crammed with bargains and cool finds, if only you can contain your sense of claustrophobia long enough to find them. My eyes couldn’t focus for long on any one thing.