Thin Air

FOURTEEN

He was just a kid when his dad got married to the Evil Hag Bitch from Hell, just a kid, and she wouldn’t leave him alone; she was always touching him, coming on to him; he was a kid…

I tried to pull away from the memories, but Kevin’s mind was full of mines, booby traps, sinkholes of horrible things. He’d been a good kid once, or at least no worse than most boys his age, but throw in a stepmother who wasn’t above teasing him, then using him, then outright molesting him…

Kevin’s mind was a house of horrors. I was afraid to move; everything I did seemed to resonate through him, and there was no clear path, no direction. I tried viewing him in the map of lights that had become my guide, but his lights were gray, bloodred, almost nothing clean. Oh, Kevin. It broke my heart how much he’d suffered, and that the memories never left him. And no matter how careful I was, things shifted, bled, broke open as I moved.

And things oozed out, whether I wanted to know them or not.

The night she finally did it, the night she turned off the lights and crawled into bed and Did It, it all got confused; it all got mixed-up; he felt horrible and wrong and excited and sick and scared and worried, and there was something wrong with him, wrong, and what would Dad think? But Dad was asleep, drunk off his ass, and that was that, this was this, and even though he didn’t really want it he did; there was something sick about it he couldn’t control, and-

God, stop! I yanked myself away, but the memory was like tar-it wouldn’t come off. Wouldn’t go away.

– after it was over she went away and he tried to sleep but there was something wrong in his head, something he couldn’t start, couldn’t stop, couldn’t control, and it was this heat, this shimmer, and he could almost…

When he woke up, the house was on fire. His bed was on fire. And he could hear his father screaming.

And the fire didn’t burn him, it dripped out of him like sweat, and his stepmonster Yvette had shrieked at him to STOP, KEVIN, STOP, but he didn’t know how, and whatever she did didn’t help, and when he found his dad and tried to drag him out, the skin just-

I pulled free of Kevin’s horrors with a yank that I felt through my entire soul, and tried to touch as little as possible while I sped through those filthy, polluted halls of memory, avoiding the traps where things whispered and beckoned, looking…

Looking for a clean path.

And I was shocked to find that it was…me.

“She’s a bitch,” Kevin said to Cherise. They were sitting in the back of an airplane, rattling through turbulence, and he was staring at the back of my head a few rows farther up. “No offense.”

“None taken,” Cherise said cheerfully. Turbulence seemed to agree with her in some strange way, or maybe it was just the extra glow she seemed to have with Kevin. Resentment was just part of who he was, but in Cherise’s company it evaporated like ice in summer. “She can be, sure. But she’s a good person, Kev. Like you.”

He snorted. “You don’t know me.”

God, that was true. Kevin had done terrible things, but he’d also had even worse done to him. I couldn’t blame him. I couldn’t imagine the strength it had taken to get him through it in the first place.

“Besides,” he said, “she’s just looking for a reason to turn me in. She thinks I’m dangerous.”

I realized something important. Kevin honestly feared me, and he honestly respected me, too. He didn’t like me. He’d never like me, not in the way that Cherise did, but it mattered what I said to him. What I did.

I had become an authority figure in his eyes. Kevin hated authority figures, but he needed them, too. Same for Lewis…respect, contempt, and need, all rolled up in a toxic mixture together.

“You are dangerous,” Cherise said, and winked at him. She reached out and took his hand in hers. He loved the way her small fingers wrapped over his, loved the way she smelled, the way she sounded and looked and felt. Cherise was the one thing in his life that he loved without judgment.

Without resentment.

He’d do anything for her.

God, she was pretty. Not just pretty-beautiful. And she was so…bright. Yvette had been pretty, but in a cheap kind of way, a slutty way, but Cherise…when she smiled it was like the sunshine. What the hell she was doing hanging with that stone-cold bitch Joanne…

(whom he nevertheless respected…)

…Cherise was somebody he could help. Somebody warm and soft and someone who needed him, needed him. And when he got between her and trouble, she made him feel…He was too young for her, she’d teased him, but she hadn’t treated him that way, not really.

And she hadn’t used him. She’d just been…amazing. Sweet and kind and funny and normal, in ways that he’d never known before. She didn’t want anything except his company and his time. She wasn’t looking for an advantage-hell, she had guys crawling over broken glass to ask for dates. She didn’t need him.

And yet somehow she did, and that made this so much better.

And that made it so much worse, when he failed in the forest.

I’d found it. The trail turned dark again, as if Cherise’s sunshine presence had gone behind a cloud, and all his internal demons had crawled out of their holes, never more than a heartbeat away.

I took a breath and sank deep into his memory.

At first it was good. Better than good. The Wardens had given him assignments, and he’d surprised himself with how good he’d been at it. Lewis had been an ass at times, but he’d shown him stuff, and Kevin had learned, although he hadn’t wanted to let on that he was paying attention. Wasn’t cool to be too eager.

So when the Wardens dropped him on the front lines of the California fire near Palm Springs, he’d taken Cherise with him. Wasn’t supposed to; he’d been told to leave her at the base camp, but she’d wanted to come, and he’d wanted an audience, right? Somebody to impress.

So it was all his fault.

At first it had worked just the way he’d wanted. He’d been taught how to set controlled fires to create firebreaks, and he could do it faster and better than the regular firefighters, without any risk of losing control no matter how long the fire line got. He’d done a good job, a really good job, and Cherise had kept him supplied with water and sometimes kisses of congratulations, which had been pretty great. Because she’d asked him to, he’d worked with some crotchety old bastard of an Earth Warden to save some horses who were trapped on the hills, and the light in her eyes as the small herd galloped past them, safe, had been better than any sex he’d ever had.

And then it had all gone bad right around dark. First he’d felt it as an ache in his chest, and he’d thought he’d caught some smoke, but he couldn’t cough it out. There was something wrong with him, and there was something wrong with Cherise, too, and he couldn’t stop it. Couldn’t help her. It was like the whole world was dying around him; he could feel it slipping away, and…then it came back, and things had returned to normal for a few minutes, and he’d held Cherise and told her it was all going to be okay, and that had been a lie.

The fire jumped one of the breaks he’d set, so he went closer to try to stop it before it could leap treetops. He told Cherise to stay back, so he didn’t see it happen, but when he extinguished the flames racing through the dry underbrush, he turned back and…

She was on the ground, and there was a thing, a thing with its hands buried in her chest.

Kevin screamed and threw himself at it, and it batted him away into a tree. He saw blood and stars and felt something wrong with his head, like he’d hit it too hard, and when he got up again Cherise was standing there like nothing had happened.

But it wasn’t Cherise, and that wasn’t her smile, because it wasn’t the sunshine.

It was something else.

“Kevin,” she said, and came toward him. “Honey, it’s okay. It’s all okay. I need you.”

Cherise had known to say that, not the thing inside, and that was what stopped him from backing away. That, and the bleak, black knowledge that nothing ever really worked right for him in the long run. Of course this had to happen.

It always did.

Oh, Kevin, I thought from that separate quiet place where I stood. It doesn’t have to. You have to have faith.

But he wasn’t listening, and anyway, this was already done, already past, and he was giving up because he just thought there wasn’t any real point in trying.

So he didn’t fight when Cherise reached out and put her hands on his head-exactly the way I’d done it when I’d entered his memories-and the Demon began to tunnel through his head like a huge tapeworm, digesting his memories, relishing the pain and the horror and the struggles in a way that nothing human should. It learned him, every part of him, and it learned his body down to the cellular level.

And from that point on I wasn’t in Kevin’s memories anymore.

I was in hers.

She was cold inside. Ice-cold, all clean logic and calculation, empty of kindness or compassion. She made Eamon, messy and awful as he was, seem like Father Christmas in comparison. She wanted only one thing, and it was the iron-hard central core of who she was: She wanted to go home.

And she would do anything, use anyone, destroy the world to get there.

Starting with Cherise, because she’d been close and vulnerable, but really starting with Kevin, because he was what she needed. Power. Strength. Energy.

She used him like a straw, an empty vessel good for nothing but as a conduit between her and what she craved…raw aetheric energy, the stuff that powered all Wardens. She would have preferred to consume a Djinn for the sheer force of the experience, but since the Djinn had slipped their bonds to humans, it was far riskier to her. No, a Warden would do to satisfy her hunger.

She had tried the girl first, but the pathetic meat hadn’t been able to deliver much of a meal; humans barely brushed the aetheric, and so were of little use. But she kept Cherise, aware of the emotions it roused in the boy; the angrier and more afraid he was, the more energy the Demon was able to draw.

It was horrible, and it was cruel, and it interested her for a long time. Too long.

She used Cherise and Kevin to stalk other Wardens. Those she did not bother to control, only to drain and slaughter, but Cherise and Kevin provided her with a self-sustaining well of anguish that she would not easily give up.

And then something happened. Something startling.

There was a shift of energy on the aetheric, titanic in its intensity. It was like some soundless explosion, and everything rippled. The Demon felt it and chased after, not even sure what she was chasing, but there was something floating there in the emptiness, something free and powerful…

She battened on to it and consumed it, mindless in her raging hunger. Back in the forest, Cherise and Kevin fell like abandoned puppets, and the Demon…changed.

She took on form and weight as what she’d eaten took hold of her.

She’d taken my memories, along with a substantial jolt of my power. She’d found the pieces Ashan had ripped away from me in the chapel in Sedona. The Demon didn’t know what had happened to her, didn’t have a sense of self in the same way that a human did. The change was painful for her, startling and-a new emotion-frightening. She no longer wanted only one thing. Memories confused her, made her want more things, made her ache for what she did not understand, had never had, and she couldn’t put it out of her mind because the problem was in her mind.

Never to be corrected, because it had been made part of her, imprinted deep.

My memories had damaged her.

I’d woken up afraid, alone, cold and naked, without any memory of who or what I was; she knew, and she was still afraid, still cold, still naked in her own mind.

Demons could not become human, but now she craved the rest of what I’d once had, and she understood something that, as a Demon, she never could: The Wardens were a force, not individually, but as a group. They could be used. Directed.

Made to do her bidding.

She woke up Cherise and Kevin and sent them in pursuit of the remnants of Joanne Baldwin-the sole threat to her existence. She could sense me, not in an aetheric sense but in some other, primitive way that I didn’t fully understand; now that I felt it, though, I knew I’d never mistake it.

I stood silently by as the Demon piloted Cherise and Kevin through the forest, hunting Lewis, hunting me, finding us, pursuing. She used them ruthlessly, but all the while she was learning.

Learning a terrifying amount about how to bend people, how to find their buttons, how to get what she wanted.

Because she knew what she wanted now, and it wasn’t just being me.

She wanted to open a door between worlds and bring other Demons here to nest, feed, and grow into what she had become.

She wasn’t going home.

She was bringing home here.

It was a memory, and I’d seen some shocking things, but a chill still zipped up my back as I saw the Demon step out from behind a tree to face Cherise and Kevin. She was me, or partly me, anyway. Her eyes were black and empty, and she was a cheap plastic doll made in my image.

She had no further use for her toys. They were a liability now, not a help, and she knew they were on the verge of failure. Their deaths didn’t bother her, but she couldn’t take the risk of a tool breaking at a critical moment.

She ripped her awareness out of them as brutally as she’d put it in, and Kevin had fallen, stunned, as Cherise staggered away crying into the dark, cold world…

And Kevin hadn’t been able to follow.

He’d been afraid. Too afraid.

It’s useless anyway. I always lose. I lose everything.

The Demon stood over him with her cheap doll eyes and cheap doll skin and cheap doll hair, and smiled.

And then she looked up and smiled directly at me.

I took a step back. Easy, I told myself. It’s just a memory. It’s the past. It can’t hurt you.

“Yes it can,” she said. “I knew you’d come. I knew you’d try.”

Oh, shit.

I backed up. It felt as if I were backing into mud, into tar, into sticky spiderwebs.

“This isn’t the past,” she said, and stepped through Kevin to come toward me. “This isn’t safety. There’s no safety for you.”

I stopped. Not because I couldn’t back up, but because I knew she wanted me to be afraid. To run. And I was tired of running.

“You know what?” I said. “Works both ways, bitch. No safety for you, either. So if you want to do it, go on. I’m here.”

She stood there. The doll persona of the Demon didn’t move like a human, didn’t act like one; it was just a shape, not even as lifelike as a Disney animatronic.

“Yo! Fembot! I’m talking to you!” I taunted, and took a step forward.

It took a step back. Around us, Kevin’s memories continued to unspool like a broken movie reel, steeped in hopelessness and fury. Cherise was dying, and he was doing nothing because he knew he couldn’t win.

My doppelgänger had helped create that world for him.

And I was going to fix it if it was the last thing I did.

“I’m coming,” I told her. “I know what you’re trying to do. You won’t get the Wardens now. You won’t be able to use them to open the rift. So what are you going to do instead?”

“Do you really think I’ll tell you?”

“I think you already have. See, you think you’re being original, but remember, you’re just my memories pasted onto a phony doll, run by a smart but cold eating machine. You’re predictable.”

It blinked slowly. It probably couldn’t do expressions, or didn’t want to, but the net effect was scary as hell. I tried not to let it get to me.

“What?” I demanded. “No threats? No I’m-gonna-get-you-sucka? Come on, get your big-girl panties on already.”

“You’re trying to trick me,” it said.

“Not really. I don’t have to trick you. You’re going to trick yourself right out of existence; you can count on that.”

“I’m going to destroy you.”

“News flash: You made me. When you consumed my memory you created an imbalance of energy, and we know that energy has to go somewhere. Right? It’s all balance. And what you gave me back was a chance to survive.” I’d figured that out a while ago, but it still hurt to say it; the last thing I wanted to do was owe my existence to this creature. This land shark. “If you want to get rid of me, you’re going to have to work a hell of a lot harder.”

That pushed a button. A big, red, nuclear launch button. “I will!” it screamed, and there was nothing human about that sound, or about the raw will behind it.

I rolled my eyes. “Whatever. Is that why you keep using people to do your dirty work? Kevin? Cherise? David? And believe me, you’re going to pay for putting your dirty little hands on David. Big-time.” I made a show of checking a watch I didn’t actually have on my wrist. “You know what? Drama period’s over. See you around the schoolyard, E.T.”

It was a risk, but I thought I could do it, and I did… I turned around and zipped along the path of lights, through the dilapidated, sad halls of Kevin’s mind, all the way to the light at the end of the tunnel.

Out.

When I opened my eyes, I was standing right where I’d been, and Kevin had his head down on the table. He was breathing, but unconscious.

I put my hand on his head again, this time just to gently stroke his greasy, matted hair. “Not everything is a tragedy, Kev,” I said. “Come on. Wake up now. Nightmare’s over.”

He did, lifting his head and blinking like a kid coming out of a long, difficult sleep. He stared blankly for a few seconds, then focused on my face.

“Did you get it?” he asked. He didn’t seem bothered by the fact that I was stroking his hair. I didn’t stop.

“Got it,” I said. “Good job, man. Thank you.”

He ducked his head, and I saw a dull flush build in his sallow cheeks.

“Kevin,” I said. “What happened to Cherise wasn’t your fault.”

Cherise looked startled, and mouthed, Me?

She didn’t remember.

Ah, the beauty of the human mind; I wasn’t sure if that was her own doing or Lewis’s; maybe he’d taken the bad memories away. Either way, I was glad.

“You know what I remember?” I asked. “I remember you going after the first enemy you found back in the forest. I remember you risking your life to even the score when you thought Cherise was dead, and Lewis and I had killed her. I remember the look on your face when you realized she was still alive.” I looked straight at Cherise, who was a little flushed now, too. “He needs you,” I said. “And you need him, too, right?” She nodded. “Better tell him, then,” I said. “And Kevin? In case you’re wondering, that’s the reason you’re going to want to live through this.”

I pushed through the kitchen door and went through the empty library, back into the large common room where the fire blazed. My own reasons for living were gathered near the warmth. David looked up, smiling. Lewis raised the coffee cup to his lips without comment. The rest of them, including Paul, waited for me to speak.

“The Demon wants to go home, or at least reach home,” I said. “Lewis. If I were going to choose a place where the veil that separates our world from hers is the thinnest, where would I go?”

He put his coffee down, leaned forward, and thought about it for a second. He exchanged a look with David, who frowned, and together they both said, “Seacasket.”

I blinked. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

If I’d hated the helicopter flight, I loathed the plane ride cross-country. But, given the time ticking away, not to mention the stakes, I thought I’d better suck it up, take the Dramamine, and try to avoid wincing every time the plane hit a wind shear, which was about, oh, every thirty seconds, give or take.

The Wardens had a corporate jet. Who knew? Apparently I now had the authority to commandeer it, or so Lewis told me once we were strapped in. “Shouldn’t there be, like, paperwork?” I asked, and snugged my seat belt tight. “At least a signature card for that sort of thing? For security?”

Lewis had his eyes shut even before takeoff. “Trust me. If we live through this, you’ll have enough paperwork to keep you in ink stains for the rest of your life.” He paused for a few seconds, then said, “How sure are you about this?”

“Any of it? On a scale of one to ten? About a three.” That was probably more honesty than he was looking for, I was guessing, from the pained expression that flickered over his face. “Look, when I was taking on Kevin’s memories, I took on some of hers, too. More than that, I felt her…well, I can’t really call them emotions. But there’s a sense to it I really can’t describe. I know that in the beginning her only goal was to go home-it’s almost like a spawning thing for them. Even though her motivations have gotten more complicated, she still has that instinct.”

“Then why do you think she was wasting her time with trying to take over your life?” he asked, and then looked instantly sorry he’d said that. “Not that your life isn’t important or valuable…”

“Yeah, nice save. The thing is, I don’t think becoming me was an end in itself. It was all about the Wardens. Think about it: Get enough Wardens together, set them to one common task, and you can get a massive buildup of power. Something she could use to rip a hole from this world into her own.”

He looked ill, and I didn’t think it was airsickness. “I would have helped her do it,” he said. “We were talking about ways to reorganize the Wardens, concentrate their power. Nobody would have questioned her.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Sure it is,” Lewis said, and closed his eyes. “I’m going to take a nap while I still can.”

“How can you possibly sleep while…”

He switched himself off, pretty much just like that. I stayed put through the teeth-rattling jounces, and tried to pretend that I didn’t hate flying at a cellular level. Lewis really was asleep. I hated him.

Now that we were safely in the air-if that was the right term-we were free to take our lives in our hands and move about the cabin. I unbuckled and made my way through the small, cramped area toward the back. Kevin and Cherise were sitting together, heads close, whispering; they looked up at me, and Cherise winked and offered a thumbs-up. I weakly returned it, crushing the back of Paul’s seat in a death grip as the plane dipped and dropped unexpectedly, and he broke off his conversation with Marion to ask me if I was all right. I decided it was better not to lie, so I just smiled palely and kept going.

David was sitting alone at the back of the plane. He hadn’t bothered with anything so superfluous as a seat belt, of course. He, like Lewis, seemed perfectly calm, and he was reading a paperback novel, one that looked vaguely familiar to me. Lonesome Dove. Larry McMurtry.

I dropped into the seat beside him and whimpered under my breath as our fragile flying machine sledded from one punishing draft to another. He closed his book and took my hand.

“Have we done this before?” I asked.

“Flown in a plane together? No. Mostly we drive.”

“Mostly I understand why.” I gulped and tried to relax. “So, you want to tell me about Seacasket?”

“Is that why you came back here?” He was staring at the cover of his book. He was wearing round little spectacles, and they softened the lines of his face and made him seem gentle and bookish. And hot, though the hot part was pretty much a given. “Information?”

“Thought it would be important.”

“Information won’t take up much time. It’s a long flight.”

Not a pleasant thought at all. It was already too long, as far as I was concerned. I wanted my feet on the ground-or at least, my butt in the driver’s seat of a car. Now that was transportation.

“I need to keep my mind off of this,” I said, and gestured a little wildly at the clanking, shuddering aircraft we were trapped in for the next eternity.

“Be careful,” David murmured. His voice had drifted lower in tone as well as volume, and his eyes were half-closed, still focused on the book cover. “There are all kinds of ways to take your mind off of it.”

Even in the midst of ongoing panic, that sounded…interesting. More than a little. “Mmmmm?” That was noncommittal, yet expressed…

David put the book aside, flipped up the armrest that separated us, and shifted to face me. “I want to try to give you some of my memories.”

Whoa, that was not where I’d thought we were going. I’d been in a warm, happy place for a second, and now I was falling right back into Anxiety Alley. “Um…Venna said it wasn’t possible for a Djinn to-”

“You might have noticed that we all have…specialties,” he said. “Venna’s the only Djinn I’ve ever met who can-sometimes-transport humans through the aetheric without damaging them, and she’s got other skills that the rest of us have to only a lesser degree. Doesn’t make her more powerful, necessarily, because she’s deficient in other areas. Like controlling what you’d term Earth powers.”

“Which you’re stronger in.”

He nodded slowly. Light flickered across the surface of his glasses. I wondered why the hell he was wearing them; was there such a thing as a physically imperfect Djinn? Was it just a comfort thing, like a favorite shirt or pair of shoes for a human being? Like his coat…“What’s the deal with the coat?” I asked. I knew it was a non sequitur, but it gave me a chance to consider what he was saying, and how scary it could be to let David in my head. Or me in his, as might be the case.

He blinked. “My coat?” He wasn’t wearing it at the moment, but it was draped over the back of his seat. Olive-drab, vaguely military from an era about a hundred years ago.

“Yeah. You don’t even need a coat, right? You don’t get cold. And it’s very…specific.”

His eyes widened this time. “Let me understand. We’re on our way to stop a Demon wearing your skin from ripping a hole through this world to hers, possibly allowing other Demons to pour through, and you want to talk about my fashion choices?” He paused for a second. “Wait, coming from you, that actually might make sense.”

I didn’t answer. The plane rattled its way through another set of bounces, and I didn’t have enough breath in my lungs to curse, because my diaphragm didn’t want to function. Maybe, if I held my breath long enough, I’d just pass out. That would get my mind off of the flight.

“The coat was given to me,” he said. “By someone I cared about.”

“Yeah? What was her name?” Shot in the dark, but not much of one, and I had a fifty-fifty chance of being right, even at the Djinn level.

“Helen,” he said. “The coat belonged to her son. She lost him in the war.” Oh. I searched for a way to get him to tell me the rest, but he shook his head. “Wardrobe choices aside, Jo, while Venna might not have thought it was possible to share a Djinn’s memories with you, I think it might be, if I’m careful and limit the scope of what we’re doing. But you have to promise to let me lead.”

Which took me down another path altogether. “You dance?”

That got a definitely odd look. “Of course I dance.”

“Have we ever danced?”

He braced himself against the bulkhead, turned sideways in the seat toward me, and extended both his hands. “Find out,” he said.

I didn’t move. “I’m not sure if this is a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“Because…it just feels-it feels wrong. I don’t want an info-dump of how I feel about you.”

He lowered his hands to rest on his thighs as he considered that. “You’re not sure how you feel.”

“Yes-no. No, I am, I just-look, I want to build memories, not just stuff myself full of how other people see me. It’s confusing. And it’s kind of painful.” I met his eyes directly. “And it would be cheating for you to show me how deep this goes for you right now. It could scare me off. I don’t want to be scared off.”

I bit my lip in agitation as the plane’s engines shifted to a deeper thrum. We hit a patch of slick-as-glass air, then steadied out. For the moment.

He didn’t seem to have a response to any of that. I pulled in a deep breath and said, in a rush, “Did you sleep with her?”

“Who?” His expression went from blank to shocked. “You mean Helen?”

“No! No, I-wait, did you?”

He ignored that, finally getting my point. “You mean, did I sleep with the other you. The Demon.”

I nodded. For a few long seconds, there was nothing but the sound of the aircraft, the distant buzz of what other people were saying, and the pounding of my heart.

“Even if I did,” he said carefully, “it was because I thought she was you.”

“And you didn’t know the difference?”

He had the grace to look ashamed, and a little sick. “I didn’t have a lot of time to think it through. And to be honest, I don’t think I wanted to question it. Not when…”

“Not when you’d been bracing yourself to lose me forever,” I said. “Right?”

“Right.”

I felt my lips curve into a smile I couldn’t control. “You sure you’ve got the right one now?”

His eyebrows slowly rose. “Fairly sure.”

“Maybe soon we can upgrade that to completely sure.”

“Maybe?”

“Well,” I said, “privacy’s an issue.”

He gave me a slow, wicked smile. “It really isn’t,” he said, “if that’s all that’s stopping you. I’m fully capable of giving us all the privacy we want. Right here. Right now.”

I had to admit that kick-started my heart into a whole different speed. I looked around at the cabin mutely. “They’re Wardens,” I pointed out. “Well, except for Cherise.”

“So they are.” He didn’t seem much concerned. “Trust me. They wouldn’t notice a thing.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

He looked very seductive all of a sudden-it was indefinable, how he shifted from business to pleasure, but it was a definite and unmistakable change in his body language. All of a sudden I was hyperaware of the clean, cool lines of him, the way his black T-shirt hugged his chest…the full, rich softness of his mouth.

“You’re doing this,” I murmured. “No fair.”

“Doing what?”

My attention fixed on his lips. I wetted my own lips with my tongue, suddenly remembering a ghostly echo of how he tasted. Half-remembering, anyway. I definitely needed a reminder. “Djinn charisma,” I said. “You’d better have a good excuse.”

“Oh, I promise you, it’ll be good,” he said. Bastard. I caught myself leaning forward and thought about stopping myself, but there didn’t seem to be all that much reason, and deep down, I didn’t want to even try.

So, I kissed him.

He tasted rich and warm and real. His lips were damp and firm, smooth as silk, warm as sunlight, and I sank against him with a moan. I’d missed this. My body had missed it, not just my mind, and my body stuck my mind in the backseat, bound and gagged it, and took the wheel.

David’s kiss filled me with an exhilaration and heat that my skin could only barely contain, and when I opened my mouth to the gentle stroke of his tongue on my lips, he bent me back, cupped my head in his large hand, and got down to business. The boy knew what he was doing, and French was definitely something in which he was fluent. The warmth in me coalesced into specific aching places.

I don’t know exactly how it happened, but I was on his lap by that time, feeling thoroughly and satisfyingly ravished, and his hands started to roam. Innocently at first, fingers dragging down the line of my throat to my collarbone, tracing curves and lines. Then down. As he felt the resistance of each button on my shirt, it gave without a whimper of friction.

Had I ever been magically undressed before? If I had, it was a memory worth keeping. There was a breathtaking sense of being out of control, but utterly safe in his hands. By the time he’d worked his way down to my waist, the shirt was open and loose, and my bra underneath seemed more like a display case than a cover.

Because he’d made it transparent.

“Um…” I pulled back, cheeks flaming. I could still hear the other Wardens talking, moving around, coughing. Somebody was playing a personal stereo at high volume to be heard over the turbulence and engine noise.

Surely someone-probably Lewis, with my luck-was going to look back and get the topless show. Not that I minded making extra money, but it seemed excessive. Not to mention unprofessional, if I had to work with these people later.

“They can’t see or hear us,” David said. “What they’ll see, if they actually do look, is the two of us talking. It’s what they expect to see.”

Maybe, but still…I found myself gathering up the gaping halves of my shirt and pulling it together. “Sorry,” I said. “But this is just too strange. It’s not that they might see me; it’s that I can see them. It’s distracting.”

“Oh.” David looked briefly chagrined. “Sorry. I didn’t think about it. You always-” He broke off before uttering whatever sordid bit of my personality he was about to disclose, and instead vaguely nodded toward the rest of the plane.

Which disappeared behind a milky white wall. I reached out and touched it, and my fingers registered a cool surface, not quite solid.

“Soundproofed,” he said. “But if you want out, all you have to do is push.”

I took my hand away and looked at him. “I don’t want out,” I said. I meant that in so many ways. “Any chance these seats fold out into a bed?”

“There is now,” he said, and his eyes sparked to a hot, swirling bronze.

He put his hands behind my back and lowered me. Slowly. The seats dissolved into a soft, firm expanse of what felt like a real bed. My head encountered the airy softness of a feather pillow, and I couldn’t help but sigh in true happiness.

David was watching me, his eyes half-closed. Braced above me on stiffened arms.

Not touching me in any way. Not yet.

My breath caught helplessly in my throat as his elbows bent, as his shoulders flexed and the muscles slid under that smooth, matte-velvet skin. I bit my lip as I felt his lips touch my trembling midsection. A burst of warmth zipped up my spine from down low, then exploded outward and inward like an echo. Oh.

His lips traveled down, and his tongue trailed gently over the inward slope of my belly button. My bitten lip started to hurt, but when I let go, I moaned. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help my body from lifting toward him, either.

He put one large, warm hand just under my breasts and pushed me back down. “Not yet,” he murmured, with his lips brushing my skin. His gaze was dark and wicked and intensely sexual. “We have a long, long way to go. Can’t have you going off just yet.”

“Then you’d better stop touching me,” I said breathlessly. “Because if you don’t, I’m going to go off like a Roman candle any second.”

His eyebrows canted upward. He dragged his fingertips over the center of the thin fabric of my bra, and it just…dissolved. Then he folded the two halves back from my body, along with my shirt. “Then I’d better make it worth your while,” he said, and moved up to trail his tongue over my right nipple.

His hair was warm and silky under my fingers, and for a while I just whited out, flying on sensation. When he touched the waistband of my pants, and I felt the button and zippers giving up to him, I knew I was lost. Deliriously, deliciously, wonderfully lost.

I didn’t lie to him. I did come like a Roman candle, bursting into waves of light and shuddering pleasure, striving against his hands and his lips, long before we got to the main course.

That didn’t mean I was finished, though.

And he’d known that all along.