Chill Factor

NINE

First things first. I picked up the hotel phone, dialed a number from memory, and when Marion answered, I said, "Hello, pizza delivery? I'd like to order a large special."

I listened to the buzz of cell phone static for a few seconds, and then she said, "Are you in trouble?"

"Ain't I always? Just look for the biggest pile of crap; I'm usually neck-deep in it. You know that." I rolled my eyes, for Kevin and Siobhan's benefit. "You never answered me earlier. How'd you get into Las Vegas?"

"The same way you did," she said crisply. "I died. And, I might add, I'm not doing it again. It disagrees with me."

I smiled; there was something about her that I just couldn't help but like. "I'm in the Bellagio, and Kevin's ready to talk. Look for us downstairs in the casino, the far end near the restaurants. It's quieter there."

"Fifteen minutes," she promised, and hung up.

I replaced the phone in the cradle and looked over at Kevin. "Don't start anything," I warned him. "And give me the stopper."

"What?"

"The stopper for Jonathan's bottle." He looked wary, but there was nothing to be gained from holding it back. He fumbled in his pants pocket and found a little plastic thing. It hardly seemed big enough to hold in something like Jonathan.

"You're not gonna screw me, right?" he asked. I shook my head. He dropped the stopper into my hand. "Better not, or I'll go nuclear on your ass."

I walked out into the living area again, which was drenched in early-morning butterscotch sunlight. The place smelled faintly stale; they hadn't let the maids in for days, maybe weeks. I walked straight for the wet bar, picked up the bottle of Jim Beam, and poured myself a splash in a crystal tumbler. Kevin appeared in the doorway, and I saw him go pallid-more than usual-and then try to cover up.

"Pour me one, too," he said, and swaggered over.

I gave him a lovely, warm smile. "No." I screwed the cap back on the whiskey and put it aside, turned to the bar, and let my eyes sweep over the glittering array of crystal. "Your idea? It's not a bad one, kid, really. Purloined-letter stuff. Classic."

"Jonathan!" he yelled, and I hardened the air in a thick shell around him, creating a thick, opaque bubble that kept sound from penetrating. He'd break it, but it would take him a few seconds to figure out how; that was the advantage I still had over him. Training. I started pulling out decanters, one after another, and shaking them. No, no, no, no…

Yes.

The muffled rattle of glass on crystal. I put the decanter down, took a firm grip, and held my fingers over the mouth as a rough sieve as I poured the (no doubt expensive) booze down the stainless-steel sink.

A glass bottle hit my fingers with a wet, heavy impact.

Kevin snapped the bubble around him with a wild flare of power, wild enough shatter the mirror behind the bar and send heavy furniture tumbling. I ducked, almost fumbled the heavy, slick crystal, and heard him yelling Jonathan's name again.

Not that Jonathan could respond. Kevin had clearly told him, Don't come out until I say so, and he hadn't said so, not in so many words. It would require a direct command to counteract his previous instructions, and that gave me precious seconds.

So long as I didn't drop anything…

… which, of course, I did, as Siobhan tackled me from the side. We both tumbled. I fetched up against the hard edge of a cabinet, the crystal decanter thumped to the carpet, spraying the last amber drops, and a glass bottle about as big as a purse-sized perfume slid halfway out the round mouth.

Siobhan lunged for it. My turn to tackle. She pulled my hair, which hurt, and I rolled her over and reached for the crystal. It slid greasily under my fingers, scooting another four inches away. Kevin was still desperately yelling for Jonathan, not quite comprehending what was going on except that there was a girlfight on the floor and he was kind of liking it.

I kicked loose of Siobhan's grabbing hands, rolled, and took the decanter with me.

"Jonathan, come here!" Kevin yelled frantically, and jumped over Siobhan to come at me with a swinging fist. I upended the decanter.

My fingers closed around the slick, wet glass of Jonathan's bottle, and the world… changed.

He was now my Djinn.

Everything stopped, crystal-clear-Kevin, suspended in midswing; Siobhan, clawing her way across the carpet toward me; the discarded liquor decanter, heading for the floor.

Everything… just… stopped.

I sucked in a deep breath and held it, felt my muscles and tendons and blood and bone and tissue as if they were all new, brand-new, made in this second. Then the world formed around me. Air, in its complex and beautiful lattice of molecules, moving in waves and eddies, a life-form of its own. The stunning crystal perfection of the bottle in my hand. The world, God, the world, so huge, so astonishing, so wondrous in its clockwork precision.

The enormous, dreaming strength of the world living in every pulse beat, every breath.

And there was Jonathan, standing before me. Not in his normal human form, with its easy-to-underestimate casual grace; no, this was something else, something bright and unknowable and wild in its magic.

The seduction of it…

The next breath, Jonathan was back in human disguise, staring at Siobhan and Kevin, who were still frozen in time. Light gleamed in his brown-and-silver hair, and the darkness of his eyes was the darkness of the end of things.

"I don't like you," he said, without even glancing my way. "You know that."

"I know." My mouth felt strange, my voice even stranger. "Sorry."

He shrugged. "Well, that's the way the world crumbles. Sometimes you get surprised."

And he turned and pulled me close to him. His touch was fire-not the soothing heat of David's skin, but the scalding burn of an open flame. I tried to pull away, but that wasn't possible here, now. He put one hand at the small of my back and moved the other to splay an open palm across my stomach.

Too close. Too intimate. Very personal.

Stars in those eyes, like an endless sky. Unknown and unknowable, to anything human. And there was passion in there, too, the passion of gods that insects would never know or understand.

"This saves you," he whispered, and put his lips very gently against mine. A closed-mouth kiss, but it set my blood on fire, made my knees weak and rubbery. "She saves you. Count your blessings, Jo. This could have had a different ending."

… and time snapped back together. Jonathan stepped back, smiling.

And Kevin's fist hit my chin, snapped my head back, and instead of visions of mountains and gods I saw stars, but I hung on grimly to what was in my hand, even as his fingers scrabbled at it to take it away.

I slid sideways to the carpet, worked my jaw experimentally, and said, "Jonathan, restrain them, please."

When I opened my eyes and blinked away the blurring, he was holding Kevin by the scruff of the neck and Siobhan by the arm. They were both struggling-

Kevin was screaming curses, mostly directed at me- but they weren't going anywhere.

Jonathan raised his eyebrows in my direction. "Nice bruise you're going to have."

I glared. "Let's get this over with," I said. "Take the powers Kevin stole from Lewis, and put them back where they belong." He just stared at me. We did several long seconds' worth of that. "I said, take the powers Kevin stole from Lewis, and-"

"Heard you," Jonathan interrupted me. "You don't want me to do that right now."

"You want to play Rule of Three with me?"

"Trust me, you really don't want me to do what you just said."

"I-" I shut up and looked at him, deeply, and changed my mind. "Okay, I'll play. Why not?"

He gave me a Djinn smile, all slyness and misinformation. "I thought you wanted to save the world."

"Meaning what?"

He shrugged. Siobhan was trying to bite his hand. He gave her one sidelong look, and she went limp and fell to the carpet.

"Hey!" I protested, and scrambled over next to her. She was still breathing. In fact, she had a sweet little smile, when she lost the 'tude. She was a natural redhead, with the soft pink skin to match, and the light was kinder to her than the world. "Watch it, buster. I'm the one with the-"

"You got nothing," Jonathan said. "We both know you can't make me do a damn thing I don't want to do. Yeah?"

"Yeah," I agreed glumly. "So why don't you want to return Lewis's powers? What's the point in that? He'll die!"

The smile continued on Jonathan's sharp, handsome face, but there wasn't any amusement in his eyes.

"Trust me," he replied. "It's better this way. Just for a while."

We could have played the game for hours, I knew that; I had Jonathan's bottle, but I didn't have Jonathan himself, not by any stretch of the imagination. He'd been newly under thrall when Yvette had him, and he hadn't figured out the boundaries properly in the heat of the moment; otherwise, he never would have carried out half the commands she'd given him.

Lucky me, I got him farther along the learning curve.

"Fine," I said. "Wake Siobhan up. We're all going downstairs."

He didn't so much as glance at her, but the girl came straight up, gasping, and immediately launched herself at me again. Jonathan rolled his eyes and, without my asking, stopped her in midlunge.

Freeze-frame.

He shook Kevin by the scruff of the neck and said, "Explain to your girlfriend how stupid that is."

Kevin licked his lips, darted glances from Jonathan to me and back again. "Can she hear me?"

"Sure."

"Siobhan… uh… cool it, okay? It's not like this is a bad thing. Maybe they'll all quit chasing us now."

Jonathan released her from the pause button. Siobhan, off balance, windmilled her arms and legs but stayed upright.

And a pout. "You don't want it back?"

"His bottle?" Kevin gave Jonathan another cautious look. "Uh, no."

"Loser," she muttered. She threw up her hands and scooted her butt up on a bar stool. "Coulda been rich, you know. Living in some big white mansion with servants and shit. Swimming pool."

I didn't dare leave her behind; she knew too much. "Okay, kids, let's go. Play nice and maybe I'll give you some good toys."

Siobhan, no fool, lowered her mascara-thick eyelashes. "Like a big white mansion?"

I reached out and shoved her off the bar stool. "Don't push your luck." I nodded at Jonathan. "Let him go."

"You're a bitch," Kevin said.

"And you say that like it's a bad thing." I grabbed Kevin by the shoulder and steered him and Siobhan in the direction of the door. "Move it."

I took Jonathan aside in the elevator, turned our backs to Kevin and Siobhan, and whispered, "The Ma'at have a sniper on call. He's under orders to take Kevin out. I need you to make sure that doesn't happen." No change in Jonathan's expression. No acknowledgment, either. I sighed. "Can we agree to a decent working rapport, here? Because I really don't have time for this, and I can always stuff you back in the bottle and shove a tampon in the top instead of a stopper, and all the other Djinn will point and laugh-"

"Fine," he said. "I'll make sure Kevin doesn't get shot."

I smelled a rat. "I'd rather not be shot, either."

Jonathan shrugged. I took it as a gift and saw that Kevin and his girlfriend had taken the opportunity to whisper together, too… probably not soft little nothings, from the glances they were tossing us. Great. Now I had to worry about treachery from Jonathan and the simpleminded scheming of the juvenile Bonnie and Clyde.

The elevator glided to a smooth, elegant halt and deposited us back in the marble hallways, rows and rows of doors all opening and closing, people always moving. They say New York is the city that doesn't sleep; Las Vegas doesn't even nap. I wondered when they got the basic cleaning done. Even Disneyland closes long enough to empty the trash and polish the brass.

We joined the flow out into the main concourse, turned left, and went past the cashier stand, into the wilderness of gently chiming slots. To our right were trendy restaurants-the kind that didn't post prices- and somewhere at the back was a walkway that led to Caesar's Palace next door. Next door, in Las Vegas terms, meant about a ten-minute walk through a sky bridge that seemed to go on forever.

I halted us near a bar at the back corner, chose a table, and got everyone to sit. Everyone except Jonathan, who was examining slot machines and entertaining himself by making random ones spit coins. Kevin watched him raptly. I could tell by the greedy flare in his eyes that he'd figured out what the Djinn was doing.

"Don't even," I said. The security cameras wouldn't see Jonathan at all, most likely; they'd just see machines randomly vomiting tokens… but if Kevin started flouncing around making the bells ring, there'd be a fast, heavily muscled presence and a windowless office, followed by some harshly worded questions we couldn't afford to avoid just now. "Play later. Just sit."

Kevin, still watching Jonathan, said, "I know they're going to kill me." His expression didn't change. "You might as well just take him and go. Siobhan and I can hide on our own."

Surprisingly, that was probably true. He and Siobhan could blend in, get out of town, find some big city like Chicago or Detroit where two more teenagers wandering homeless wouldn't attract any notice. Providing Siobhan didn't just blow him off once she realized he wasn't the bankroll she'd thought. But I couldn't lose him now. I needed him, for Lewis's sake.

I caught a flicker out of the corner of my eye, and turned my head. Marion Bearheart was coming our way. She looked, as always, cool and composed. Her hands were in her coat pockets, and she didn't hurry; she stopped to admire some items in a shop window, checked out the menu at Le Cirque. She made a slow circuit of the area, checking the aetheric, I was sure.

Then she pulled up a chair next to me and said, "Nice to know you made it."

"Yeah, likewise." I shot a look at Kevin and Siobhan. "I guess you know Kevin."

She nodded politely to him, as if she weren't planning to get him behind closed doors at her facility and strip him clean of power and potential just as soon as the opportunity presented itself. Kevin didn't move. He was giving both of us his patented bad-boy glower.

Marion dismissed him, and focused her dark eyes on me. "You have it?"

I opened my fist to show her Jonathan's bottle. "I'd like to trade for something more valuable than your word. Not that I don't trust you, but… well, I don't trust you."

She removed a hand from her coat pocket and mutely displayed the blue glass bottle that Yvette Prentiss had used, not so very long ago, to trap a man willing to give up his life for me.

I reached out, slowly, and took the glass. No stopper in the bottle. It felt warm. "David," I whispered, and closed my eyes for a second in relief as the connection between us hummed tight between us.

"Right here." I heard a chair scrape, and saw that he'd joined us at the table.

He looked utterly unchanged-auburn-flecked hair worn a little untidily, brown eyes flashing behind round gold-rimmed spectacles. An old-fashioned olive-drab coat over a faded blue plaid shirt. Blue jeans.

I sucked in a startled breath and felt my eyes sting with tears; the vision of him turned into a colorful blur. A blur that reached across empty space and cupped my cheek in its hand, and yes, that was his touch, warm and sweet and gentle. I leaned against it, breathing in the smell of old wool and cinnamon, leaves and woodsmoke. "Oh, God," I whispered, and it sounded like the prayer it was.

He was leaning close; I could feel the aura of him against me, the barely-there touch of his lips against my ear as he whispered, "I've been watching you." The shimmer of heat that ran through me turned me into honey and butter, made me think thoughts that I shouldn't be having in public, much less in front of people who might want to kill me.

"Could've helped me out a little," I said.

"You did fine." He kissed me, and all the thoughts were refined into sheer, unadulterated longing. I wanted him to keep kissing me, forever if that was possible. I couldn't imagine it ending, but of course it did, a slow withdrawal of those soft, delicious lips from mine.

I opened my eyes and looked straight into his, and saw them burning copper and gold, molten with love and longing and power.

This was what I'd been fighting for. What I'd fight for with every breath, every remaining day of my life.

"Anything I can do for you, master?" he whispered to me. "Or to you, anyway?"

I sucked in a superheated breath, trembling, and managed to be practical. "A purse to put this bottle in would be great, actually."

He reached under the table and pulled out a black leather bag, nothing designer-my bad for not specifying properly, really-and he'd thoughtfully included padding material. I slid the bottle inside and zipped it shut, then looped it bandolier-fashion over my head. I was not losing him. Not again. I'd break his bottle when we were out of this mess; I didn't like keeping him prisoner, but right now having David's power amplifying mine might keep us alive.

"Joanne?" Marion's distant voice. I blinked and pulled my attention away from David; it was like ripping off a limb, but I managed. Absence didn't make the heart grow fonder; it created a kind of magnetic lock that didn't seem humanly possible to break. "Jonathan's bottle, if you please."

Oh. Right.

Jonathan had given up on slot machines and had wandered back. He was standing behind my chair, and without turning around I knew that he was watching David. I could feel the crackle of power in the air. They weren't speaking, but there was conversation going on. Levels of power, emotion, give and take.

"Glad to get rid of it," I said sincerely, and held it out for Marion to accept.

Kevin had been waiting, and he took advantage of the chance. He slapped my hand, and the bottle went spinning out of control across the tabletop, skittering and bouncing, straight toward David-who, being Djinn, couldn't physically or aetherically touch it. He reached out for it, but his hand went right through it as if it didn't exist, or he didn't, or some combination of the two; the bottle slid through him and disappeared. I heard the muffled thud of it hitting carpet.

"Jump ball," Jonathan murmured, and then turned serious again. "Crap."

I felt the surge at almost exactly the same time, and so did David, who threw himself over me. Something was coming. Something big. I could see it blowing up in the aetheric, big as a dragon and twice as fiery-no idea what it was, but it was huge and very, very scary.

"Get down!" Jonathan's voice roared through the casino, supernaturally loud, like an enraged drill instructor on the world's largest loudspeaker, and it wasn't surprising that every single person in sight who wasn't Jonathan dropped to the carpet like they'd been chopped off at the knees. There was some muffled screaming, but surprisingly little. I started worming my way across the floor toward where Jonathan's bottle had fallen, but David was in the way, and Kevin was elbow-walking that way, too. I lunged across David at the faint sparkle of glass in shadow, but I was too late; a hand was there before me.

Siobhan. She grabbed it and stuffed the bottle into the pocket of her jeans.

Jonathan had turned, watching her with narrow, dark eyes, like a predator about to eat something. I grabbed the girl's wrist. "Siobhan. He'll kill you. Give it to me!"

She went very pale. She hesitated, then pulled it out of her pocket and handed it over just as Kevin got into position to try to snatch it away. We had an undignified little wrestling match, which consisted of me yanking my hands away from his and him trying to pry my fingers open, muttering things about my mother that weren't very complimentary. Siobhan crab-walked backward, away from the fray.

"Quiet!" Jonathan snapped at us. We all froze. Then there was a surprisingly weighty, profound silence. And then there was the faintest tinkle of glasses on tables, going on for a few delicate seconds.

And then an earthquake hit like a bomb.

Maybe people screamed, I don't know; the first tremor rippled through the floor like a wave through a stormy ocean, and I was tossed sideways, rolled, fetched up against a railing that I grabbed onto for dear life as the building continued to pitch and roll. It was too loud to hear screaming over the jangling of alarms and bells and dying slot machines and breaking glass and shattering steel.

I had a lot of power. It was all useless. Weather was an ephemeral power; this was something deep, strong, relentless. I caught a flash of someone moving faster, coat flying, and saw David leaping over the rolling, rippling floor to land hard beside me. He threw himself on top of me, smothering my scream-I had been screaming, I realized from the raw ache in my throat-and I felt impacts against his body. Things hitting him. Things that would have crushed me.

Even a minor earthquake has a deeply unsettling effect, but a major one, like this, robs you of the ability to do anything but hang on and pray. I prayed, my hand locked a vise around the wrought-iron railing, and I heard David whispering in that liquid language of the Djinn. It might have been a prayer, too, for all I knew.

And then I realized that I had the power to stop it. My left hand, the one not holding on in a death grip, was clutching Jonathan's bottle-which was, thankfully, still intact.

"Get off!" I yelled in David's ear. "Off!"

He rolled away into a fluid, inhuman crouch-the first time I'd really seen him betray his Djinn nature in body language. He was moving like Rahel now, like something built out of alien parts into the semblance of a human body. His eyes were blazing so brightly it was like they'd caught fire.

I held up Jonathan's bottle, coughed against a choking cloud of crumbling dry wall, and yelled, "Jonathan! I command you to stop this earthquake, now!"

He was the only one still upright. Tall, slim, untouched by the shattering concrete and flying debris as the hotel ripped itself apart. Marion was motionless at his feet. Kevin. Siobhan.

He looked utterly composed as he turned toward me and said, "I can't."

The wave of disbelief almost drowned me. I hadn't left him any room for equivocation; I was holding his damn bottle. …

He nodded toward it.

"That's not my bottle, kiddo," he said. "Sorry. Nice wording, though. Eight out of ten for style."

I stupidly shook the bottle in my hand-why, I have no idea; trying to make it work?-and before I could get my head around it, the moment was past. Jonathan was doing something. Not what I'd wanted him to do, of course, but something, which was more than the rest of us were capable of trying.

He grabbed Kevin by the scruff of the neck, yanked him to his feet, and yelled something in his ear. Then he grabbed Marion, got her standing, and yelled something to her, too.

Then he steadied the ground under them. I could see it, even in this reality-a golden shimmer, spreading out around him in concentric, growing circles, and inside the gold, a small island of calm. Marion and Kevin were talking, or rather yelling; I couldn't hear a thing. I couldn't even hear David now, who was wrapped around me-he shoved me back into a thick recessed doorway and braced himself there, holding me in. I peered over his shoulder at what was happening.

Marion had taken Kevin's hand. The two of them were facing each other now, and as I watched she went into a trance state, eyes slowly closing. She took the kid with her. As his face went smooth and calm, he looked ten years older and, at the same time, amazingly childlike.

Alight with power.

This was a shallow quake, I knew that much; deeper-seated disturbances usually do less damage, because the energy gets absorbed by the bedrock on the way. Shallow ones are much more dangerous to the surface, and this one was a doozy. No way to objectively measure it by Richter scale standards, but I'd been taught the Mercalli intensity scale, and this was damn sure an IX. The damage was being caused by exactly the same things that happen when you drop a stone into a pool of water-waves bouncing back from harder objects, then from other waves of greater intensity. Energy in dissonance, deflected constantly back against itself. It ripped things apart in its madness.

I felt the shaking and rolling subside to a mere sickening tilt and jerk and shudder. As it did, sounds became clearer again-screaming, crashing, slot machines tipping, walls collapsing.

And in the circle of gold, Marion and Kevin opened their eyes and smiled at each other. Pure smiles of delight and pride.

The shaking stopped. One last sifting of dust from above, and then it was over. What emergency lighting there was flickered on, bathing everything in a sickly halogen glow, but the shadows stayed deep and secret.

Marion let go of Kevin's hands and reached up to put her palms on his cheeks. She leaned him closer and kissed his forehead gently as she stroked his oily, tangled hair.

"That was lovely," she said. "Very fine work. I commend you."

Kevin looked rapt. His face was shining and, for once, the light in his eyes wasn't one of greed or fury.

It was something close to love.

"Now we need to help," Marion said. "There are a lot of injured. Come with me."

She stepped over a chunk of fallen concrete and held out her hand to him.

"Kevin!"

Siobhan's shrill voice. She was getting to her feet- Jonathan not helping-and brushing dust off her shorts. There were bloody cuts and scrapes on her, but nothing serious, I thought.

She looked royally pissed off.

Kevin hesitated, looking back. His fingers were just a couple of inches from Marion's beckoning hand. Go, I begged him. Learn what the real Wardens do. See what a difference you can be in the world.

I wished I'd duct-taped the girl to a chair. Hindsight.

"Kevin," Marion said, in a much more adult tone. Not commanding, not wheedling, just reminding him of what was important.

The light faded out of his face, and he took a step back. "Why should I help them? What'd they ever do for me?"

Marion dropped her hand back to her side, turned, and walked away to kneel by the side of the first person she saw. Marion was an Earth Warden. Healing was so much a part of her that she couldn't deny it, and I could see from the torment in Kevin's face that he was feeling that part of the heritage he'd stolen from Lewis, as well. Earth powers had a hell of a lot of strength, but also a carried a great load of compassion and responsibility.

I watched as Kevin turned back to Siobhan, and I felt myself mourn inside for the lost opportunity.

"Joanne." David's voice drew me back to the here and now, to his body pressed against me in the narrow space. "Are you hurt?"

I shook my head and saw dust sift off my hair. Sneezed. "Just my image. Go help Marion. Save whoever you can."

He kissed my forehead without comment, and left me. I picked my way across rubble and almost slipped on a wide round plastic tray piled with glasses; I looked around for the waiter, but he was gone. At least it didn't look like there were too many casualties. Amazing.

Jonathan had righted one of the unsplintered chairs and seated himself, staring out at the mess. I stopped next to him. Siobhan and Kevin were hovering nearby, Siobhan whispering, Kevin listening.

"Not your bottle?" I produced the one I'd been clutching. He shook his head mutely. I took a closer look-not that I'd memorized the one I'd taken from the decanter, but this one did seem different. And I no longer had the sense of Jonathan's presence in me, either. "Then who's got it?"

Jonathan gave me a bleak smile. "You already know who-" He stopped short. Someone was approaching through the rubble, walking with the fluid ease of a tiger. Even through the dust-choked haze, her clothes blazed with color.

Neon yellow.

Rahel sidestepped the wreckage of a slot machine bleeding tokens, and walked toward us. Beautiful as ever, confident and easy.

Smiling.

Her eyes were black. Jet-black, lid to lid.

"Crap, I don't have time for this. Rahel, dammit-" Jonathan said, and that was all there was time for, because she threw herself on him, turning into angles and glittering coal, a thing made of cutting edges and teeth.

The Ifrit had just found the meal of her life.

I screamed and tried to grab her, but I wasn't a Djinn any longer, even if I still had some kind of Djinn second sight; my hands went through her like a ghost. And through Jonathan, too. He'd become ghostly, trapped in her embrace. They fell and rolled over rubble, fighting and clawing. Jonathan lost his human state and turned to something brilliant and hotly dangerous as a star, but the darkness engulfed that heat.

"David!" I screamed, but I didn't really need to; he was already on the move, leaping over obstacles and landing on the back of the Ifrit. Taking her sharp-edged head-was that her head?-in his hands and twisting with vicious strength.

She didn't so much turn as just… reverse. What he was holding grew teeth, the back of her grew claws and spikes and arms. They pierced him and held him, and I felt the sharp vibration of agony go through me, too. It made me stumble and fall to my knees.

"Rahel, no!" I cried. "Stop! God, stop!"

She couldn't. She was totally out of control.

There was a sudden odd sense of pressure changing, and my ears responded with a painfully abrupt pop. I lurched forward, falling, and caught myself as I felt David scream. It rang through the aetheric like a shattering bell, and I knew there was no time, no time, he was being torn apart by her hunger…

I had no idea if it would work, could work, but I had to try.

I held out the empty bottle-the decoy bottle-in one shaking fist and yelled out the first iteration of the ritual. "Rahel! Be thou bound to my service!"

The Ifrit turned on me with a roar. David was bleeding. That wasn't real blood, any more than his was a real body; it was a physical representation of an aethereal energy; he could heal himself from anything so long as he had enough power left to form flesh…

But it looked so real. He was pallid, shattered, broken. The copper of his eyes was dying.

"Be thou bound to my service!" I shouted, and crawled backward as the diamond-sharp claws raked at me.

Through me. She couldn't touch me. I felt a hot spark of triumph.

"Be thou bound to-"

She lunged at me and the claws plunged deep, deeper… snagged on something.

No! No no no no no…

Not my baby.

She could destroy the life inside me, I knew that. I felt that, just as I felt David trying to get to me, determined to protect me or die in the attempt.

Rahel hesitated. Her claws were caged around Imara, holding that fragile spark. One instant's pressure would be enough.

As she hesitated, torn by whatever remnant of reason was left to her, I gasped it out. "Be thou bound to my service!"

She went entirely still. Ice and angles, coal and glass. A three-dimensional sculpture visible only to Djinn eyes. Living? Breathing? I didn't know, couldn't tell. There was no sensation of power from the bottle I held, and no sense of connection to her. Had anybody ever tried to bind an Ifrit before? Probably not… humans couldn't see them, and Djinn wouldn't be able to do it.

I was the only one who could see them, and bind them.

"Let go of my baby," I whispered.

The hand inside of me unclenched. Claws withdrew. It was the only part of her that moved at all.

"Rahel," I said. "Can you hear me?"

No answer. I shuddered and opened the black leather purse still slung around my body; there was enough padding in there for two bottles. I shoved Rahel's in, careful that it wouldn't knock against David's, and left her frozen there to fumble my way to where David was lying.

His torso was a mess of shredded meat. Blood, so much blood. His eyes had gone as brown as dying leaves, and his lips were a light shade of lilac.

She'd almost consumed him whole. I couldn't get my breath as I knelt next to him. He felt so cold to the touch-David, who was always burning warm. Like a fire going out.

I whispered his name, over and over, like a chant. I ordered him to heal himself. He didn't respond, although his eyes fastened on me like I was the only thing in the world.

His hand found mine and held it. There was no strength in him. His fingernails were the same pallid shade as his lips.

He whispered, "Leave me."

"Like hell!" I snapped. "God, please, don't do this-David, I order you to heal-"

Kevin was standing next to me. "He's dying," he said. "Whoa. I didn't know they did that."

"Shut up, you little bastard." I looked up, and for a second I thought the dancing red dot on his chest had something to do with the tears distorting my vision, but then I realized late and cold what exactly it was.

I'd forgotten all about Quinn and his sniper rifle.

The red dot was a laser sight, focused on Kevin's heart.

"No!" I screamed, and shoved Kevin with one hand flat against his chest. He tripped, fell on his ass. I stood up, waving my arms. "No, Quinn, stop, it's over, it's over-"

Kevin leaped up, the idiot. A clear target.

The red dot settled over my heart. Steady as a rock.

It was focused on me. Not Kevin, me.

What the hell…?!

I had just enough time to throw myself backward, and I swear, I felt the supersonic hiss of the bullet's friction burning the air as it passed over me.

Missed, I thought, and then I saw that there had been someone standing behind me. Like her boyfriend, Siobhan had been stupid enough to bounce up like a pop target on a shooting gallery.

Her mouth was open in amazement. She stared down at the red hole-about the size of my thumb-through her chest. She didn't really make any noise. Just a quiet coughing sound, like someone trying to clear their throat, and then there was a sudden shocking flood of red out of her mouth.

She pitched forward over me. I raised my head and saw the hole in her back, the size of a clenched fist, full of blood like a deep well that spilled over in gouts and splashes. She was shaking all over. I yelled something-it might have been Marion's name. Kevin was already there, reaching for her, but I felt her going.

We both felt her die.

Her body collapsed against me, limp and empty, and for the first time I saw that her eyes weren't hazel at all; they were a beautiful spider's-web pattern of moss and brown, flecked with gold.

Her body felt heavy as sin, draped over me.

I don't know how many seconds that was-it felt like an eternity-and then Kevin was there, screaming. He rolled her limply into his arms. I felt the surge of power as he tried to force her body to live; the flesh jumped as nerves conducted electricity, but that was nothing but reflex.

"She's gone," I whispered. There was blood all over me, splattered; I wiped at the mess with shaking fingers. "Kevin, stop. She's gone."

He kept trying. Breathing into her mouth. Flooding dead flesh with jolt after jolt of raw power as he tried to change the immutable.

"Do something!" he shouted at me. His face had gone zombie-white, but his eyes were furious, his lips smeared with her blood from the mouth-to-mouth. "You've got a Djinn! Save her!"

"No," I said.

"I'll kill you, I swear I will!" I could feel the fury coming off of him, but the words were little-boy words, broken and afraid. The power he had was nothing like little-boy power, though; it was Lewis's power, and it could crush me, burn me, rip me apart.

There are three things you aren't supposed to ever ask your Djinn to do. Give you eternal life. Give you unlimited power. Raise the dead. That's the one that gets most people, if they live long enough. In that first chill of grief, too many turn to their Djinn and blurt out an order they shouldn't. The consequences were tragic and legendary.

Because when you do those particular things, the Djinn act under a totally different set of imperatives. The magic that drives them to obey you also drives them to turn on you.

I bit my tongue, hard, and swallowed a scream.

"No," I finally whispered. "She's gone, Kevin. I'm so sorry."

I thought for a second he really would kill me, kill me with his bare bloodstained hands, but then tears spilled over and he was sobbing hopelessly.

"Stay down," I said, and crawled to where David was still lying on the floor. He wasn't any better. In fact, he looked worse. Breathing in shallow gasps. His eyes weren't brown anymore; they were turning darker.

"Trying to kill you," he murmured. "You. Not them."

"Yeah," I agreed shakily. "I saw. Why would Quinn try to kill me?"

He reached up to touch my face. I felt no warmth, only a faint, insubstantial ghost of contact.

"Don't leave me," I whispered. "You can't leave me, David. I won't let you."

His pale lips parted to shape my name, silently. I felt the love in it.

"I need you," I said. "I need you with me. Stay." My breath was doing something funny in my chest, turning sour and thick. I couldn't seem to gasp in enough air. "God, David, don't do this to me. Don't you dare."

He tried to answer me, but then his back arched and he cried out. His open eyes shifted from a violent storm-black to a bright orange, running through the spectrum. I remembered that. I'd seen it before.

Flesh corrupted and melted away, revealing wet stripes of muscle. Bone. Layer by layer, he died.

What was left turned hard and cold and black.

Frozen.

Ifrit.

Soft human hands were on me, pulling me back into a sheltering embrace, and I was being rocked against someone as I whimpered. Unable to weep now. Unable to scream and let out the fury and horror.

Cold, cold, everything was cold.

David was a thing of ice and shadow, burned by darkness. Lying on the floor and motionless.

Marion had me. She was saying something to me, but I couldn't understand her; she unzipped the purse at my side and took my strengthless hand and wrapped it around David's blue glass bottle.

She was telling me to do something. It didn't matter anymore, but I numbly echoed the words. "Back in the bottle," I said. The words sounded odd in my head and tasted flat on my tongue.

The Ifrit that lay like some twisted sculpture in David's place misted into an oily whisper and disappeared. Marion fumbled the stopper in place.

Rahel. No one else could see her, but I couldn't just… leave her here. I took the second, empty bottle. I whispered the words. Rahel's frozen body disappeared, too.

There were rescuers coming. Flashlights dancing wildly in the dust-filled air. Marion zipped the purse shut and held me close as the first of them got to us. Paramedics and firefighters. One of them forced Kevin to put down Siobhan's body, and the three of us-the three survivors-were wrapped in blankets and led out through the tangle of steel and broken glass and darkness.

I remembered the sniper only then. It no longer seemed to matter, but there were no merciful red laser dots coming to dance on my chest. Quinn had missed his chance, and he'd given up the field of battle. I didn't care. If he wanted to shoot me, shoot and be damned.

We walked out a twisted side door into hot sunlight, and I blinked and shaded my eyes.

Oh, God. I don't know what I expected to see, but not this.

The rest of Las Vegas was untouched. Literally untouched. Windows intact, buildings still standing. The Eiffel Tower still climbed toward the sky, and the half-scale Statue of Liberty raised her torch.

The Bellagio was barely damaged, overall. Just the casino area, and just our casino area.

The Ma'at had targeted us. They'd done all this just to get us. Or worse… maybe, considering who Quinn was shooting at, to get me.

I felt the comforting ice of shock start to break up around me, dumping me in the cold water of reality.

Sink or swim, now. Give up and die, or make it mean something.

"Marion?" I licked my lips and tasted blood, swallowed grit and bitterness. "How many people-"

She looked exhausted under the paling layer of dust. Her hair was coming loose from its meticulous braid, and her leather jacket was ripped and shredded in places. When she wiped her forehead, she left streaks of still-wet blood.

"No fatalities. We were able to minimize it," she said. "Me and the kid." She cut her eyes toward Kevin, who was wrapped in silence and his own blanket, sitting on the curb while a paramedic tried to get information out of him. Miraculous. There'd be news coverage twenty-four/seven for the next few months, going over and over the freak earthquake, the survivors. Pundits would come on the airwaves to talk about all kinds of crackpot theories, everything from international terrorists to James Bond superweapons. None of them would get it right.

Please God, nobody would get it right.

"He could be great, you know. If anyone cared enough to show him how."

Marion was still watching Kevin. I nodded. "If nobody kills him first."

"See that they don't."

The paramedics were working their way around to us. "We need to get out of here," I said. "Before they get our names."

Marion nodded. She understood the need for secrecy now, as I did.

"Better use your Djinn," I finished. She looked down at the ground. "Marion?"

"He's gone," she said. "He was taken from me five years ago."

No wonder I'd never seen him. "Why? What happened?"

She heaved in a silent breath. "He was stolen from me."

"And you never told…" No, of course she hadn't. Losing a Djinn was practically a hanging offense in the upper ranks of the Wardens. It was something you kept quiet while you got your bottle back, and your life with it. You were supposed to die before losing your Djinn. Oh, it happened-bottles broke, bottles were lost in catastrophes-but there were penalties, and very few replacements.

"I was told," Marion said softly, "that if I reported it, they'd torture him. I believed it."

I wanted to ask a million questions, but this wasn't the time or the place. Too exposed. My skin kept crawling, trying to feel the nonexistent pressure of a laser sight.

I felt a hand on my arm, and turned.

Jonathan. God! I'd forgotten all about him…

He had on his most rigid, focused expression. "Not much time," he said. "He found the bottle. Listen, I'll delay him as much as I can. You know where to find him-"

"What the hell are you talking about? I don't understand!" I grabbed for Jonathan's shoulder, made a fist out of the black fabric of his shirt, and tried to pull him closer. It was like trying to pull a pile of lead. He had the specific gravity of a mountain. "Tell me what's happening, dammit, and no goddamn Djinn evasion!"

His dark eyes glittered and went to narrow slits. "I've been claimed. You know this guy! We're going to fant-"

Blip. He was gone, instantly gone in midsyllable. I caught a flicker of something in his eyes-impotent rage, maybe a tiny flash of fear-and I sucked in a startled breath. I spun around, hard, and plunged back toward the casino, where emergency workers were swarming like hornets. Marion wrapped her arms around me and dragged me to a stop.

"No!" she said sharply. "You can't go back."

"I left him! Jonathan's bottle… have to get it back!"

"It's too late." She was too strong, and her voice was too compassionate. "Someone just commanded him. You can't get it back."

"Son of a bitch!" I sucked in a wet, trembling breath. "Let go. Let go!"

I wrenched free, but she'd convinced me; when she released me, I stopped trying to bull my way back inside. I'd left Jonathan's bottle, somehow, some way… how the hell…

I remembered in a blinding flash.

Siobhan, slipping the fallen bottle into her pocket. Me demanding it back.

She'd switched bottles. And now someone- probably Quinn-had taken it off her corpse. Siobhan had been working for him. Son of a bitch, I couldn't believe that I'd let it slip past me.

Marion raised her head to look, and her face went blank and grim. Eyes like flint, ready to spark.

"Don't look now," she said, "but the cavalry's arrived."

I turned my head.

A group of maybe twenty, pushing through the crowd of looky-loos; the one in front was a distinguished-looking older man in a spotless blue suit, with a silk tie in tasteful gray.

Myron Lazlo. Next to him, Charles Ashworth II flourished his ebony cane. No sign of Quinn at all in that pack of grim-faced men (and a few women).

The Ma'at had come to restore the balance.