Chill Factor

THREE

I had a couple of choices-one, I could fight like hell and trash the hotel and probably kill a whole lot of people, or two, I could give up and see where it took me.

I didn't like option two, but I liked option one even less, and when Marion moved toward me, power at the ready, I just stood still for it.

"Easy," she whispered to me, and wrapped something around my wrists behind my back that felt thick and organic. At her touch it stirred, writhed, and tightened into something tough and flexible. It couldn't cut me, but I wasn't likely to be breaking loose from it, either. Wind and water don't do much against the power of living things. It was probably some sort of vine she'd cultivated for times like these. "Nobody's going to hurt you, Joanne. Please trust me."

I'd never been able to trust her. Ever. I liked her, but her agendas and mine just didn't match and never had. Her hand rested lightly on my shoulder for a second, then pressed harder, guiding me to a chair. She sat me down, took out another vine from her pocket, and bound my ankles.

"Done?" Paul asked. She nodded and stepped back. Paul-my friend-got down on one knee next to the chair and looked me right in the eyes. "Go ahead. Ask."

"Okay," I said. I kept my voice low and calm, even though I wanted to scream at him-it wouldn't do a damn bit of good, and I might need a good screaming voice later. Right now, they were in control. Wait for an opportunity. "Use your heads. I can help you; you know I can. You can't afford to ignore the opportunity here. C'mon, guys. Wise up."

He was sweating, I noticed. Paul, the iceman, was sweating bullets, and there were dark patches under the arms of his nice, neat golf shirt.

"This goes way beyond personal feelings. Sorry, babe, but we don't have a choice here. We thought we could contain the kid, but things are too serious now. We need to deal, and with Jonathan on his side, he'll know if we're not playing straight. So you go home. This gets done without you."

"Who had that brilliant idea?" I shot back.

"I did." A new voice, coming from the corner. Paul looked over his shoulder, and I saw someone step out of the shadows from beneath the stairs.

It was old-home week at the Holiday Inn. I looked up into the tired, drawn face of Lewis Levander Orwell, my friend, once upon a time my lover, and saw the bleak, black acknowledgment of just how fucked-up all this was. And then I really saw, because he wasn't walking on his own. He had a cane, a fancy carved affair that had dragons running up the sides. Extra long, because he was pretty damned tall.

He'd lost more weight, gone from lanky to thin and fragile. His skin had a translucent ivory cast to it, as if he were fading away like a Djinn.

It was an effort for him to walk the four short steps to the chair across from me. No one tried to help him, but I could feel the weight of their attention, their concern. He sank into the plush brown velour with a sigh, propped the cane against the arm, and folded his hands together as he looked at me.

"You look like shit," I said bluntly. I surprised a thin smile out of him.

"Right back at ya. How much have you slept?"

"Averaged out, a couple of hours a day."

"Can't survive that way, Jo."

"You're one to talk."

Silence ticked. Lewis's eyes flicked aside to Paul. "Sorry about the drama. I'd have done this on my own, but frankly, I think you could kick my ass right now."

"I could kick your ass anytime," I shot back reflexively, but I was a little appalled by the fragility I saw in him. He looked… breakable. I'd never seen him like this, not even when he'd been hurt.

Lewis was dying. Really dying.

"Don't blame Paul for this. It was my decision."

That got my attention. "Since when do the Wardens take orders from you?" Because even though, technically, he was a Warden-the most powerful one in the world-he'd been on the outside a lot longer than he'd been in. Lewis wasn't a conformist, and he hadn't exactly risen through the chain of command.

In true form, he blew past the question. "We can't defeat Kevin by frontal assault. You already understand that."

"I'm having a hard time seeing how keeping me tied the hell up is winning the battle!"

"We need to talk to him. Persuade him to give up. It's our only real choice."

"How the hell are you going to get him to talk at all? He's holding all the cards!"

"You let me worry about that part." Lewis shifted, as if something inside hurt him. "First things first. We have to get Jonathan out of his hands. You agree?"

I had to. I knew what Jonathan was, and how important he was to the Free Djinn-plus, Kevin wouldn't have the leverage and force multipliers necessary to destroy the world if we took his Djinn away. "Sure."

Did I imagine it, or did Lewis's knuckles turn a little whiter? "That's our bargaining chip. To Kevin, one Djinn's pretty much like another. He doesn't know Jonathan. He doesn't know how much more powerful Jonathan is than any of the others. That's why we're going to offer a trade."

"A trade?"

He held my eyes. "Jonathan for David."

"What?" I jerked upright, tried to pull my hands apart. Marion 's vine compensated by wrapping tighter. The slick, living feeling of it moving on my skin made me want to run screaming, but I forced myself to relax. Deep breaths. "You're kidding. Tell me you're kidding." Nothing from him but that slow, steady stare. Come on, Lewis, lie to me at least. Make a damn joke. Something. "You can't give him David!"

"We'd be a hell of a lot better off," Paul rumbled. "That Djinn you've got ain't no small fry, but he's a quantum level of trouble down from the current situation. And he's been in bad situations before. He even knows the kid."

"David can take care of himself." Lewis's eyes were inhumanly gentle. "We can recover him later. It's a temporary situation."

"You can say that? What, like Yvette was a temporary situation? Like Bad Bob was a temporary situation? He's been through hell, Lewis. I'm not letting you put him through more just because it's convenient!"

"Jo, you need to remember that he's not a person; he's a tool." The compassion in Lewis's face was a cold, distant kind-the kind God might have when he looks down on all the unwashed billions. "Discussion's over. This wasn't easy, and none of us want it. But we're up against the facts now, and the facts are that people are about to die. Millions of them. And if we can trade one Djinn, don't you think it's a good equation?"

"In theory. Try standing on my side of the equal sign."

Paul spoke up. "Look, I was hoping I wouldn't have to say it, but if you screw this up for us and we all survive it, that bottle over there gets sunk in a concrete block and dumped in the deepest pit in the ocean. David goes into history, trapped in that bottle. My hand to God."

Lewis held up his hand without looking away from me. "Paul, she knows the score. No need for that."

"Screw you!" I spat back.

"I need you to do this. I need you to do this. Just… go home. Leave this to us."

Jesus in polka dots, he was playing me. Moving me around the board like a chess piece. I could see the calculation behind the earnestness… and he was right. It didn't fucking matter that I was being manipulated, or even that David was being put at risk. Again.

I swallowed a rush of bitter betrayal, and said, "Fine. I'll go, but you ought to know that Kevin's not going to keep his end of the bargain. He won't give up Jonathan. He's too scared to do that, and hell, maybe Jonathan doesn't even want to go. Ever thought of that?"

Lewis didn't look like he was listening. He was fixed on a spot somewhere beyond me, face blank.

"Lewis?"

He twitched. His eyes stayed fixed on the distance. I looked over at Marion, who took a step toward him.

Too late. His face went from pale to pallid, his eyes rolled up in their sockets, and his whole body went as rigid as that of a condemned man riding electric current. His face distorted, convulsed, and he slid out of the chair to thump down sideways on the area rug.

And then he began to convulse in the worst seizure I'd ever seen.

Everybody was eerily calm about it. Marion got down next to him and held his shoulders; Paul crouched at his feet. I watched Lewis's body spasm, fighting itself, tearing itself apart, and felt tears sting hot at my eyes. He was making choking sounds, and I could hear his muscles creaking.

Lewis was dying. Hell, the whole planet was tearing itself apart. This was just the small-scale representation of it.

The convulsions stopped after about two minutes. Marion sat where she was, stroking hair from his pallid, sweating forehead with gentle motions. Lewis stayed down, relaxed now, gasping in heavy breaths and blinking slowly up at the ceiling.

"Well," he finally whispered, "that was embarrassing."

I struggled for words. I wanted to hate him, but I couldn't. I just couldn't.

"I'll go quietly," I said. "That's what you want, right?"

He slowly focused on me, but I sensed he was too tired to lift his head. "Jo, this is so far from what I want…"

"I don't need your apology."

He nodded, sucked in a breath, and blew it gently out. His eyes drifted closed. "Then I'll take a nap, if that's okay."

West murmured something sotto voce, and his Djinn appeared-a cowboy kind of guy, wind-burned and tough-looking-and scooped up Lewis in his arms like a broken toy. He walked away, out into the sun. I was left staring down at the empty space on the rug, on the fallen cane that gleamed black and abandoned in the hotel lights, and in the silence the mad tinkle of that damn fountain sounded as loud as thunder.

Marion said, "Lewis is the Earth. He's tied to it. We never understood that before, but there's something inside of him that can't be removed, and can't be stopped. He's dying, and it's manifesting itself around us. That's why we can't end this, even with all the power of the Djinn we have left. We need to get Lewis's powers back from Kevin, and we need to do it now. Jonathan took those powers away. If we get Jonathan, we can set things right. It's the only way."

I nodded and shoved away the screaming panic at the back of my mind. My voice was surprisingly steady.

"Right," I said. "I'll go home. I suppose you're going to see me to the border."

Marion let me loose from the vine, once they were sure I was in a cooperative mood. I was allowed a last meal-this one in the Denny's restaurant in the motel parking lot, accompanied by my grim-eyed Warden guards and their invisible but ever-so-menacing Djinn. Not that I was planning on a great escape; I thought Lewis had a crap plan, but it was still better than the nonplan I had. I'd tried it my way for three weeks, and I was no closer to getting the situation resolved than when I'd started. Time for somebody else to take a swing, even if it was a swing and a miss.

"So," I said around a mouthful of ham-and-cheese omelet, "which one of you lovely people is escorting me home? Because I don't think for a second you'll trust my word of honor."

Paul looked up, furious. His skin was splotched with red, his eyes bloodshot and raw. "Just stop it, will you?"

"Why?" I chewed another mouthful that tasted like ashes, and sucked coffee noisily just for the sake of annoying them. "Am I supposed to go like a lamb and say nice things about you? Screw you, Paul. You burned me."

I was almost sorry I said it when I saw the devastation on his face. This really wasn't easy for him.

I looked at the rest of them. They avoided my gaze. "Gee, guys, none of you are coming with? That's too bad, 'cause you're just so darn much fun."

Paul put his hands over his face and leaned his elbows on the table. Behind him, the desert glittered in sunlight, fresh and dry and clean on the other side of plate glass. Inside, the bright yellow and retro-seventies rust decor looked desperate and grubby around the corners. The omelet I was eating needed salt. I added Tabasco sauce instead.

"We've got a lot to do," Paul said. I didn't stop dispensing Tabasco. "We're meeting a couple of guys; they'll see you all the way home."

"Fabulous." I capped the pepper sauce and began mushing up the omelet to my satisfaction. "I hope you have a plan B handy, because your plan A sucks, and it's going to fall apart faster than a Yugoslavian car. I don't care what Kevin says; he's playing you. He's not giving up his Djinn."

Paul didn't have the moral courage to meet my gaze. "We've got a plan B."

"And yet this stands as the best option?" Silence around the table. I tried a mouthful of coffee. It tasted like sludge. "Wow. We really are screwed."

"Jo, quit making this hard. I goddamn well just got over the shock of you not being dead. Can you quit mouthing off and let me be glad you're breathing for a while?"

"I'll quit being a bitch if you quit selling me and mine down the river." I didn't really want to keep on hurting him, but I couldn't stop. Facing things with fortitude wasn't really my strong suit. Since screaming and crying were out, insults were what I had left.

We tacitly agreed to a mutual cease-fire, to chew in peace.

I finished up and excused myself to the bathroom. Marion started to go with me. "Please," I said, and fixed her with a smile that didn't match what I was feeling. "You know I'm coming back. Where can I run? Jesus, let me pee one time in private. I give you my oath as a Warden that I'll come back." I held up my right hand, palm out, and the rune there glittered blue up on the aetheric. Truth, for anybody with the eyes to see it.

Marion nodded and sank back down in the leatherette chair. She folded her hands together and watched me gravely as I walked away, headed for the door marked with the skirt hieroglyphic. The plastic fake-wood finish had a tacky film on it, a consequence of being located too close to the fry baskets. I didn't actually have to pee, but I needed a minute alone. A minute to stare at myself in the harsh fluorescent light, at the curling, still-damp hair and pallid face, at the dark blue eyes that seemed too haunted to belong to me. When I'd been Djinn, they'd been silver, bright as dimes.

I looked tired. I tugged irritably at my hair, which was not supposed to curl like that, and seemed destined to be the bane of my existence for the rest of my… probably very short life.

"Snow White."

A cold, gravel-rough whisper. I froze and looked around. Saw nothing. Heard an almost silent laugh that sounded like sandpaper over stone.

I felt goose bumps breaking out all over my skin, and fought back a shiver. "Who's there?" I demanded. No feet under the two bathroom stalls. Nobody else in the room except my reflection.

You know. I didn't know if that voice was in my head, or put there from outside. Creepy, either way. I stared hard into the mirror, let myself float up into the aetheric, and finally spotted something that didn't quite belong. A flicker. Use your eyes. Except that my eyes were just plain human these days, not Djinn; I couldn't see in every spectrum, every level of the world. And what was talking to me didn't exist in this one.

Shall I lend you mine?

Something happened in my head, a sharp, tearing pain, and then I was seeing edges to things that weren't there, colors that had texture and depth and no name in the world I lived in.

In the corner, shadows flowed black into a shape that glittered like faceted coal. Spiderlike. Dangerous.

An Ifrit. A failed, twisted Djinn.

A vampire.

Sara? No, it couldn't be Sara; she'd died along with Patrick, both giving up their essences to create a human body to house me. It was someone else. Who…?

Who else called me Snow White? "Rahel?"

Lumps of coal have no expression. She didn't move. I took a step toward her, saw the edges of her start to fray as if she might disappear. "Rahel, wait. Please."

Can't stay.

"Why not?"

Hungry.

Ifrits ate Djinn. I had a sudden, startling moment of gratitude that David was safely locked in the case at Marion 's feet, out there in the restaurant. Much as I liked Rahel-if this was Rahel-I didn't want her munching on my lover.

My relationship with her was complicated at best. As a Free Djinn, she'd been my friend, sometimes my enemy; she'd acted to save my life at least once. And I hadn't been able to stop her from being destroyed not so long ago. This wasn't really Rahel. It was the zombie shell of her, undead and undying.

I wanted strongly for her to go away.

"What do you want?" I asked She answered me silently. Give me food. Tell you things.

"What kind of things?"

Things to save you.

Her voice was getting fainter in my head, the edges of her looking misty. This was one hell of an effort for her, communicating on this plane of existence. Clearly she needed a recharge to continue. Too bad I didn't carry any handy snack-sized Djinn.

The bathroom door opened, and Marion came in. She ignored me and walked right to a stall, went in, and clicked the lock. The satchel with David's bottle went with her, which gave me the total willies; the Ifrit's head turned to follow her, but she didn't attack. I went to the sink and ran water, scrubbed my hands, and watched the black shadow in the corner. Rahel hadn't moved, but she was fainter now.

"Stay with me," I whispered. I saw nothing, heard nothing in my head, but somehow I knew she'd received the message and agreed. I watched her shadow dissolve completely.

"What?" Marion 's voice. I shut the water off and reached for a towel.

"Nothing."

That probably wasn't a lie.

When I came back out, there were two new faces at the table. Paul nodded at them. "Jo, this is Carl Cooper and Lel Miller. They'll be taking you home."

Carl was bland. His hair was dishwater blond and thinning fast; he had thin lips out of practice for smiling. His eyes were hidden by aviator sunglasses, but I had the strong impression that he wouldn't have been any more expressive if I'd been able to see his baby blues.

Lel Miller was a different story altogether. Tall, leggy, gorgeously tanned. She had quite the salon finish, right down to the well-kept gleam of her French manicure. I held up my palm in the traditional Warden hi-there; they each followed suit, and in the aetheric, our runes glittered.

"Charmed," Lel said. She had a sexy contralto purr. She extended a hand to me, palm down, as if she expected me to kiss it.

I took it and examined the bracelet chiming around her wrist. "Nice," I said. "Velada?"

She looked impressed. She reclaimed her hand to pet the silver chain and ornaments, which were small clouds and lightning bolts. "Yes. You know your jewelry."

Paul rolled his eyes. "If it gets worn, she knows about it," he said. "Go ahead. Show her your shoes."

Lel obligingly extended an elegant leg in denim. I glanced at the footwear for a second, looked back into her lovely hazel eyes, and said, "Kenneth Cole." She gave me a self-satisfied smirk. "Knockoffs," I finished. "Probably Taiwan."

The smile went wherever bad smiles go, and she yanked her leg back out of sight. "I wasn't dressing for the prom," she shot back. I thought about pointing out that Velada jewelry was hardly appropriate for breakfast at Denny's, but gave it up. Hell, my shoes were out of pedigree, too. It happens.

Paul was going to lengths to hide a smile. Marion wasn't even bothering. "Okay," Paul said. "Sounds like you guys are going to get along great. You know the route?"

Lel nodded. Carl contented himself with gobbling leftover buttered toast. Not her, I noticed; she wasn't wasting her perfect lipstick on anything so useless as breakfast.

I didn't like her, and it wasn't because of the shoes. Something about her raised my hackles. Carl was just a cipher, but Lel I really didn't want to be in a car with all the way to Florida.

Speaking of which, I had a bad, bad thought. "Um, Paul? Can I take my car?"

He nodded. "Yeah, fine. You drive. They'll just ride along."

"Both of them?"

"You got a backseat, right?"

Not much of one, but I wasn't going to be concerned about their comfort. "Sure." And the minute I could ditch my escort, I'd be heading back to pick up the pieces of this disaster. Because it was going to be a disaster. No doubt about it.

Carl finished the toast, swilled down half a cup of coffee with a noisy slurp, and stood. Lel followed suit more slowly.

"Jo." Paul reached out and took my hand, just for a second. "I'm sorry."

"Oh, you're not nearly sorry yet," I said. "Get back to me later, though."

It was the hardest thing I'd ever done, to walk away and leave David behind.

I'll find you. I promised it to him with a grim, burning fury. I will. No matter what.

My Viper started up with a roar.

Lel had called shotgun, leaving a disgrunted Carl in the cramped backseat. She seemed completely uninterested about why they were babysitting me on a drive back to Florida; in fact, she slipped on headphones and flipped a switch on an iPod, and ignored me completely. Which was fine with me. I backed my midnight-blue Mona out of her parking space and eased her into gear. The freeway beckoned ahead.

"So that was your Djinn, right?" Carl asked, just as we hit merging speed. Nobody on the road in either direction. I opened Mona up to eighty and kept an eye on the horizon for cops or storms. "Your Djinn they're trading over to the kid? Must suck, right?"

"Sucks," I agreed tightly. "We're not going to chat, right?"

"Long damn trip if we don't."

"Longer if we do."

He sighed and settled back. Lel bobbed her head in time with a beat I couldn't hear, and I watched the miles start to spin away.

There was a huge, gaping empty space inside me. I couldn't feel David anymore, and that was the worst part. Not knowing where he was, what they were doing with him. How could they believe Kevin? Were they really that stupid, or just that desperate? Kevin wasn't exactly a brilliant strategist, but he had a certain criminal cunning… and you could count on the fact that if he had the chance to double cross you, he would. He was greedy, he was selfish, and he'd never been treated fairly in his life. He'd believe you were going to screw him anyway, so why wait?

As a survival strategy, not half-bad. As a way to live, it was a tragedy.

I kept half my attention up on the aetheric as I drove, looking for trouble and hoping for a sign. There was a huge roiling disturbance centered behind me, in the direction of Las Vegas, but it was like an impenetrable wall of confusion.

David had told me that this had to happen. I didn't understand why, but all I could do was trust him, trust Lewis, trust in the goodwill of the universe.

Not really in my nature.

We'd gone about fifteen miles out into the big nowhere when Lel took the headphones off, looked over the backseat at Carl, and said, "This about right?"

"Yeah," he said. "Looks right."

"For what?" I asked, and that was when Carl took a gun out from under his tan windbreaker and pointed it to my head.

"Pull over," he said.

I felt a cold-hot bolt of shock. "You're kidding."

I heard a metallic snap, cold and harsh, right next to my ear. "The next sound you hear kills you. Pull the car over."

Lel was watching me with a little half smile, satisfied as a cat in a cream factory.

I drifted the car to a stop at the side of the road and stood on the brakes unnecessarily hard. My legs were shaking. I've been on the wrong end of a lot of situations, but the wrong end of a gun was a different story. God, I hadn't seen this coming…

"Out," Carl said, and handed the gun to Lel. "Cover her."

The woman was good at it; I never felt there was a split second to take advantage of, and besides, there were two Wardens on me, and it wasn't like I could overpower them, not without David. Not without a huge, costly fight. The memory of being shot in the back overwhelmed me. I'd survived it, but not without cost, and not without pain; I didn't have any wish to try a rematch of me versus Smith amp; Wesson. I opened the car door and stepped out, keeping my hands up and in a helpless position.

"You understand that if I feel so much as a light breeze, you're dead," Lel said conversationally. I nodded. Strange feeling, to be so cold when the sun was so hot; my hands were clammy. I wanted to wipe them on my skirt and didn't dare.

"Look," I said, "if you want the car-"

"Shut up. Walk," Lel said, and jerked her chin out in the direction of the desert. It looked pretty much like every other part of the desert. Nothing out here but sand, cactus, and the occasional vulture. Somebody had used the road sign for target practice. The aged buckshot dings were rusted rich orange.

As we struggled through hot sand, heading over the nearest hill, I wished for some more sensible shoes to die in-crazy, the things that go through your head. I wished desperately for David's warm, comforting presence, not to mention his ability to kill these two roaches really, really dead. I wished for a lot of things that I couldn't have. Stupid! Should've seen this coming. Except the idea that someone might have ordered me killed had never so much as entered my mind. Who the hell were these guys working for?

The sun beat down like a yellow hammer on the top of my head. I remembered what sunlight had felt like as a Djinn-that incredible sense of pure power soaking into me. As a human, it just made me feel overheated and exhausted.

"Okay, hold it," Lel said.

"I can keep walking; I'm not really tired," I offered; my voice sounded squeaky, full of bravado. Hiking was not my fave, but it was better than… well, a hole in the head.

Lel ignored me. She glanced over at Carl, who was on his cell phone, turned away from us, talking softly. The wind was staying still, thankfully; I didn't doubt that she was paying attention to that. Or that she'd shoot me if she suspected I was trying something tricky.

We waited. I shifted nervously from one foot to the other, watching the clear skies, feeling exposed and all too defenseless. "Look," I said. "I don't know what's going on, but if it's a matter of money…" Not that I had it, but I'd figure something out.

She gave me a beatific smile, waking dimples in her cheeks, and smoothed her perfectly behaved hair as a very slight breeze drifted by us, trailing the sharp, hot smell of mesquite. Carl finished his phone call and turned back to us. Lel handed him the gun. No words between them; they were obviously a tightly rehearsed act.

"Um… what now?" I asked.

"Now we wait."

"For…?"

No answer. The sun got hotter. Despite the chill that continued to pebble my skin into gooseflesh, I was sweating buckets, and I didn't dare wipe my face. My arms were getting tired from their half-mast position of surrender.

We heard the faint growl of an engine. Lel's eyes turned toward the direction of the highway as it revved and died away.

It appeared the criminal mastermind had arrived. I waited, sweating and worrying, until a tall, lanky form limped slowly toward us from the maze of dunes and spiked thornbushes.

"Lewis!" I blurted, and felt a spurt of relief like ice water… just as I realized that neither Lel nor Carl looked surprised to see him.

Oh, fuck.

"You look bad," Lel said to him-clinical analysis, not concern. "You sure you're up for this?"

"Yes," Lewis said. He had his cane again, and he was gripping it in a white-knuckled hand as he leaned his weight on it. His color was an unhealthy yellow-gray, and there were hard lines of pain around his eyes and mouth. Pale lips that nearly vanished, they were so colorless. "Just don't take long."

My hands had come down. A jerk from the gun made them go back up again, grabbing sky. "Lewis?" I asked it very softly, watching his face. He looked at me for a few long seconds, then down at the sand.

"It's the way it has to be, Jo."

"Wait-"

He nodded to the Terror Twins. Lel removed a test tube-shaped bottle from her coat pocket. Now there was a bottle I wouldn't have put a Djinn into, under any circumstances. One roll off of a table, and poof… unfortunately, I was all out of tables, and Carl was holding the gun like he seriously meant to use it.

"Lewis! Just tell me what the hell's going on! Look, I can help-"

"You are helping," he said without looking up. "Lel. Do it."

She popped the cork, and a Djinn misted into being next to her. Tall, dark-haired, kind of a business-class version of Raquel Welch. The Djinn's eyes had a distinct reddish tinge to them, which was unsettlingly demonic, and the red-painted nails on her flawless hands had definite talon potential. She was wearing a suit that damn sure looked like Prada to me, sleek and dark and elegant.

No shoes, disappointingly. Her legs misted down around calf level, in the traditional Djinn way. She didn't waste her energy on anything as human as feet.

I waited for Lewis to say something. Anything. To goddamn well look at me.

He moved the cane in front of him and braced himself with both hands, staring down. Absolving himself of responsibility.

"I swear to God, Lewis, I won't forget this," I said. "Whatever you're doing-"

Lel cut me off with a simple, direct command to her Djinn. "Stop her heart."

I sucked in a fast, hard breath, not really expecting to finish it, but then my lungs were full and I was holding my breath and still nothing was happening. The Djinn in Prada and Lel were exchanging looks like nuclear weapons.

"Did you hear me?" Lel asked through gritted teeth.

"Clarification is required," Prada said. Ah, it was like that. Apparently, Lel had done something to get on the wrong side of this Djinn. Bad timing: Djinn liked to toy with people, especially ones they didn't like. And they really didn't like to be used as cheap executioners.

Lel's fingers tightened around the test tube, then relaxed; she couldn't risk even a hairline crack in it. Her dimples started looking hollow instead of cute, and her eyes took on a hard, sharp shine. "Stop her heart from beating. How much more clarification can you need?" Lel's eyes cut to Lewis, but he didn't comment or move. His head was still down, his shoulders tensed.

Prada had a cruel tilt of a smile. "Specify," she purred. Carl muttered a soft, exasperated "Fuck me!" and the Djinn's smile gathered force, as if she were really very amused. I glanced frantically from Prada to Lel to Lewis, and felt a scream building somewhere like fizzy soda at the back of my throat.

"Lewis, help me," I whispered. I got an involuntary look from him, a flash of dark eyes that betrayed how much this was costing him, this stillness and silence.

And he looked away again, leaving me to my fate. My heart was hammering so fast and hard I thought it was shaking me apart; I was trembling all over, and my knees had gone the consistency of rubber bands. There was some panicked screaming going on in the back of my head, along the lines of I don't want to die! and if this went on any longer, I wasn't going to be able to keep my cool.

"If you're going to do it," I said in a surprisingly steady voice, "don't screw around. I'm not going to beg." Unless it went on another thirty seconds.

For the first time, Prada's reddish eyes flicked toward me. Read me like a book. I saw her face go still and blank, and then those flawlessly made-up eyelids went to half-mast and she held out a hand toward me. An open hand.

I felt her power reach out and fold around me, sink deep into my skin, my muscles, my bones. It kept moving, tightening, focusing around the panicked thick drumming of my heart.

"No," I whispered, and tried to back up.

No use. There was a second's pain, and then my heart just… stopped.

So much silence. I never knew how quiet it could be. The wind whispered over me, brushed black hair over my shoulders, and I knew I should breathe but breathing didn't seem that important now. Listening was important. There was so much to hear…

I fell to my knees. I know that because I heard it happen, heard the heavy, fleshy thump and each individual grain of sand rolling and scraping.

Lel bent over me. The sun gave her a completely inappropriate and undeserved halo. "By the way, they're not knockoffs, bitch."

Prada kept squeezing the life out of me. I wanted to say something, but I had no idea what, and anyway, there was nothing left now, nothing but the vast silence and a burning desire to see David, one more time…

It all happened so fast.

The cold black glitter of an Ifrit launched itself over me and battened on Prada like a glittering black second skin. It began to feed. Prada reflexively did the only thing that would save her… she translocated. Because she was still sunk elbow deep in me, stopping my heart, I felt the drag as she towed me with her.

"No!" That was Lewis, yelling. "No, not yet, not yet-"

I felt Lel reaching out, but it was too late; we were already moving, already in that not there space between worlds.

My last thought was, Oh shit, my heart isn't beating…

And then I hit something, hard, and that all stopped mattering.