by Rachel Caine
“That’s it?” Shirl asked loudly. “Just like that? You buy it just because she says it?”
“No,” Maria the French Ghost said, and turned her head slightly toward me. She had odd eyes, not quite any color, and they looked a little empty. “Not just because she says it.”
Shirl opened her mouth, sensibly shut it, and scowled out the window. Maria started the car and reversed us back out to the highway.
It was a long, silent drive back, and I had a lot to think about.
I got home too late for any shopping, and way out of the mood anyway. I went home to my grubby little apartment, made chili from a can with some shredded cheese, and curled up on my secondhand couch with a warm blanket and a rented movie. The movie was one of those warmed-over schmaltzy romantic comedies with too much romance and not nearly enough comedy, but it didn’t matter; I was too distracted to watch it anyway.
If somebody had been messing with Tropical Storm Walter, I should have known it.
I’ve always been sensitive to those kinds of things. Of course, I could excuse it with the fact that John Foster’s spider sense hadn’t tingled, either, nor—apparently—had those of any of the eight other Wardens stationed in the state. So maybe I could forgive myself a little.
I couldn’t shake the image of that father bringing his kids to work on a boring, safe job, and facing the nightmare of his life. Struggling to save his family in the face of someone else’s malice.
Wardens screw up, that’s a fact of life. Weather is difficult and tricky and it doesn’t like to be tamed. It has a violence and vengeance all its own.
But this wasn’t a screwup, didn’t feel like a screwup, or a random event. It felt targeted, and it felt cold. No wonder the Wardens were sending out hit squads looking for an answer.
I did have to wonder why John Foster had accepted my word for my innocence. In his place, I’d have wanted proof. I wasn’t sure that the fact he let me off so lightly was a good sign.
I did some internet research, made some phone calls to neutral parties—i.e., not Wardens—and put together a rough picture of what had happened. Tropical Storm Walter had turned vicious at the last second, gathering strength as it roared up on the coastline. It made a last-minute turn to the north instead of the south, and waded ashore with near-hurricane-force winds and a complement of tornados.
So far as I knew, the only one that had touched down had leveled the hotel.
It might have been selfish, but I had to wonder why the investigation had focused on me. If they’d instantly focused suspicion on me, the obvious answer was that they didn’t trust me—which, hey, they didn’t—but there must have been some connection I wasn’t seeing. And not the hole in the ground that had once been Bad Bob Biringanine’s house on the beach, either. Even the Wardens weren’t shallow enough to buy the fact that I’d throw a meaningless tantrum and beat up a helpless coastline, unless they suspected me of going completely wacko.
Then again, I was dressing up like the Morton’s Salt Girl on TV and getting water dumped on my head for money.
Maybe they had a point.
I felt alone. More alone than I had in quite some time, actually. I missed my friends. I missed the Wardens.
Boy kissed girl, and the music came up and tried to tell me that love would make everything all right with the world.
I missed David, oh God I missed David.
I curled up with my warm blanket and watched the rest of the movie, and fell asleep to the cold blue flicker.
The next morning’s show went just about as badly as you might expect. No dumping of rain today; apparently Marvin was forecasting a good day for outside activities, so I got to pose in my stupid-looking walking shorts, oversized T-shirt, boonie hat, and zinc smeared white down my nose, while Cherise wore the cute little bikini and cheesecaked for the camera. One of us was happy. I got sand in my penny loafers, so it probably wasn’t me.
But the worst was yet to come.
Cherise slipped into a thick terrycloth robe as soon as she stepped off camera—her usual habit on the set—and we were talking about doing the mall when I felt a thick, sweaty hand slide around my waist. A little too high to qualify as waist territory, actually—we were getting into oh-I-don’t-think-so range.
Cherise looked startled, then grim, as Marvin’s other arm went around her.
Luckily, her robe was belted the wrong way for him to slide his fingers inside.
“Girls,” he said, and grinned, and squeezed. He’d definitely had his teeth whitened recently. They looked so white I was afraid they might glow in the dark. “Feel like a little breakfast? I’m buying!”
“Gee, boss, I have to fit into this bikini later,” Cherise said. She wriggled free of his hold. “Thanks for the offer.”
He didn’t let go of me quite so easily. “Whaddaya say, Jo? Few pancakes might do you good! Sweeten you up a little! Come on, my dime!”
I blinked, torn between indignation that he didn’t think I was sweet enough, and relief that he’d at least noticed my sour attitude. “Previous engagement,” I said. “Thanks, though. Some other time.” At least he wasn’t trying to drag us out for drinks, although I was pretty sure that if it had been a little later in the day—like, say, noon—it would have been Mojitos all around at the Cuban bar, and an expectation of a three-way at his fabulous bachelor pad later.
Marvin managed to look both crushed and lecherous at the same time. “Okay, doll. You girls go get your beauty sleep. Not that you need it!”
He was up to something. I gave him the flinty eye as he walked away, whistling a jaunty tune. Cherise shook her head, and preceded me off the set and into the changing room. She had to shower off body makeup; I just had to scrub off the zinc oxide and try to get my hair to do something that didn’t look as if I was trying to take Best of Breed at the Purina Cup.
I finished first, and yelled into the showers, “Meet you outside!”
“Fifteen minutes!” Cherise was deep into conditioning territory. I navigated the tunnel-like hallways of the television station, avoiding harried interns and squinty-eyed techs, hid from the news director, and managed to get through the back door without being stopped to help out with anything that wasn’t my job.
I walked over to the tiny lunch area, complete with palm trees, bolted-down picnic table, and overflowing trash container nobody seemed to remember to empty. Not exactly paradise, but it served, at times. I sat down on the cool metal bench, rested my elbows on the table, and watched the morning arrive.
Another lovely sunrise. Wispy clouds out to sea that glowed orange and gold; the ocean glittered dark blue, flecked with white foam. The sky shaded from turquoise in the east to indigo in the west, and a few brave stars were still glimmering through the dawn. A warm ocean breeze that slid over my exposed skin like silk.
It was a lovely way to pass a few minutes. I didn’t do this nearly enough, just sitting, waiting, listening to the whispers of the world.
As I drifted up there I began to feel something inside me start to resonate.
Liquid light. A cell-deep hum. A deeply intimate feeling of coming home.
I had company again. The good kind, this time.
Down in the real world, warm fingers stroked my hair, and up on the aetheric I saw a white, sparkling flare of power, like a ghost.
The tense curls of my hair relaxed, and David’s fingers dragged slowly through it, straightening it into a glossy black sheet of silk that fell heavily around my shoulders.
I turned. David was worth the resulting skipped heartbeat and raised pulse level on a visual level alone—smooth golden skin, dark auburn hair that glittered with red highlights in the sun, lickable lips, and eyes of an impossible bronze color behind a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. He was back in his usual uniform: blue jeans, a comfortably faded cotton shirt, an antique ankle-length olive coat.
David didn’t look like a Djinn, most of the time. At least, not most people’s idea of one, since that included pantaloons, loopy earr
ings, and bare, rippling chests. Not that his chest, when bare, didn’t ripple satisfactorily. Far from it …
“I thought you were resting,” I said, to get my mind off of the image of him, shirtless. I tried to make it sound stern, but he made it difficult when he leaned into my space. He slipped his fingers through my magically straightened hair, tilted my head back, and came very close to kissing me.
And, teasingly, didn’t. Warm, soft lips just barely brushing mine.
“It’s been too long,” he said. “I want to stay with you for a while.”
My pulse jumped into high gear. I knew he could hear it. Feel it through the brush of our mouths. I’d left him alone in the bottle for more than a month, hoping he’d be stronger for it, although I hadn’t capped the bottle and sealed him inside. I just… couldn’t bear to do that. It was too much like prison.
“You’re sure?” I asked. My voice didn’t sound too steady. It sounded breathless with excitement, actually.
“Just say the word.”
“Which one?”
“The one you didn’t learn from your mother.” He made a low humming sound at the back of his throat, not quite a growl, not quite a laugh. I could almost forget how fragile he was at the moment. My body wanted to forget, but then, it had Attention Deficit Disorder, big-time.
“Are you—” I hated to ask it—it was like asking someone with cancer how the treatments were going. “David, be straight with me. Really. Are you feeling better? Are you strong enough to—to do this?”
Because David had, since I’d met him, been through even more than I had. He’d fought demons and split himself in two to give me life when I died, and he’d allowed an Ifrit—a kind of Djinn vampire—to drain him nearly dry. He wasn’t really healed from any of that.
Worse, I wasn’t sure he could really heal. Jonathan, high muckety-muck of the Djinn world, hadn’t been all that clear.
But today, he looked almost… normal. Maybe I’d been right. Maybe time healed all Djinn wounds.
He smiled. At close range, that was a deadly weapon. “Don’t worry. I’m strong enough to spend a little time with you,” he said. His eyebrows—fabulously expressive, those eyebrows—canted upward. “Unless, of course, you have a date?”
Right on cue, the back dock door banged open, and Cherise began flip-flopping down the steps to the parking lot. I looked over David’s shoulder and expected him to mist away—like Djinn usually did—but he just turned to take a look as well. Which meant that he’d decided not to leave, but just to disguise himself with a minor use of his powers, a don’t-see-me kind of magic that would direct Cherise’s attention away from him…
“Whoa! Who’s the hottie, Jo?” Cherise asked, focused directly on David. She came to a hard stop, wiggling her tanned toes in the designer flip-flops. Those bright blue eyes swept him head to toe, narrowed, and sparkled. “My, my, my. Holding out on me. Bad friend. No biscuit.”
It was possible that David was just in the mood to be part of the human world for a while. He did that, sometimes; that was how I’d met him. It had taken me days to figure out that he wasn’t entirely human, but in my defense, I was just a little distracted at the time with people trying to kill me.
What I was afraid of, though, was that David was visible to Cherise because he was too weak to magic himself out of being seen.
If that was the case, I couldn’t see any sign of it in his body language. He looked relaxed, open, and friendly.
“Hi. My name’s David,” he said, and held out his hand. Cherise took it and made the handshake look way too intimate.
“I can be a friend. A really, really close friend.” She pursed shiny, Maybelline-enhanced lips, and sent me a pleading look as she leaned into his personal space. “So, when you get tired of him, can I have him?”
“No.”
“Trade you a date with Johnny Depp.”
“Cherise, you don’t have a date with Johnny Depp.”
She sniffed. “Well, I could. If I wanted. So I suppose the arrival of Mr. Hottie means we’re not going shopping.”
“Would you go shopping if he showed up for you?”
“You’re kidding, right? I would have shopping surgically removed from my system. And you know how much of a commitment that is for me.” Cherise gave me a preoccupied kind of smile, tearing her attention away from David for about point oh two seconds, and finally heaved a theatrical sigh. “I suppose I’ll just have to go abuse my credit rating all by myself. Although I plan to shop heavily, and it would be handy to have some nice, strong man to carry my—”
“Go,” I said. She lifted an elegantly sculpted shoulder and flip-flopped off toward her red convertible, hips swaying, alien tattoo doing a funky hula to the motion. Yeah. She’d be carrying her own bags, sure. When hell opened a hockey rink.
“Did I interrupt something?” David asked, and moved back into kissing distance again. “I know how seriously you take a mall visit. Wouldn’t want to stand in your way.”
He was teasing me. I leaned in, too, brushed his lips with mine, and stared deep into his burning bronze eyes. Teasing could go both ways.
His pupils widened and drank me in.
“The mall doesn’t open until ten,” I whispered into his parted lips. “Plenty of time.”
His kiss took control and dissolved me into sparkles and tingles and a massive surge of heat. Damp, urgent, passionate lips, demanding my full attention. I felt myself collapsing against him, wanting badly to be horizontal somewhere with a lockable door. Jesus, he made my whole body shake.
“I missed you,” he said, and his voice had gone low and rough, hiding in the back of his throat. His thumbs caressed my cheekbones, drawing lines of heat like tattoos.
“Show me.”
“Right here?” He looked pointedly down at the gravel, asphalt, and thin grass.
“Looks uncomfortable. Then again, I remember how much you like public displays of affection.”
“Beast.”
Those eyebrows went up again, dangerously high. His smile turned dark. “Oh, you really don’t want to know how true that is.”
I felt a tiny little tremor inside. Sometimes, David could be like a pet tiger—glorious and terrible. He wasn’t just a sweet-natured, nice, agreeable guy, although he was certainly capable of being that. It was just that he was capable of anything. Everything. Djinn weren’t fluffy little bunnies you kept as pets, they were dangerous. David was gentle with me, I knew that. But sometimes, occasionally, I would see the vast, dark depths underneath, and I’d get dizzy and breathless.
And hot. Dear God. Spontaneous-combustion hot.
He knew, of course. I saw it flash in his eyes.
I said, “I’m not afraid, you know.”
His hands—everything about him—went still. Wind brushed over us with curious hands, ruffling my hair, belling his coat. It tasted of ocean. Palm trees rustled and shook out their fronds over our heads.
“Maybe you should be. You don’t know enough about me.”
Well, he was right. He’d live for eons. He’d seen human civilizations rise and fall. I barely knew a fraction of who David was, and what he was.
Sometimes I just forgot.
“Try me,” I said. Cherise’s glitter-bright flirting had reminded me, with a chill, that I wasn’t some sweet young girl anymore, and next thing I knew I’d be buying in the Women’s World section where dowdy clothes go to die. Reading Modern Maturity. Learning to tat lace and make scrapple. I wanted to know David.
I wanted this to be something bigger and deeper and forever, or as far as my forever could go. “If we’re going to stay together, then you can’t just show me your good side, you know. And I mean it. I’m not afraid.”
He looked uncommonly solemn, and he didn’t blink. There was a hint of the tiger in those eyes again. “I don’t think you understand what you’re saying.”
I heaved out a sigh. “Of course I don’t understand. Everything about the Djinn is one big, dark, booga-booga secret, an
d just because I’ve been one doesn’t mean I got the operating manual—”
He stilled my lips with his, in a damp, slow, breathless kiss. His hands slid up into my hair, stroking those achingly sensitive places behind my ears, at the nape of my neck… I lost my train of thought.
Which made me jump tracks to another one when he let me up for breath. “We need to get you home.” What that really meant was, to put him back in his bottle—yes, Djinn really had bottles, glass ones; they had to be glass and they had to come with stoppers or a way to seal them, no exceptions. The worst case I’d ever seen had been a soap-bubble thin ornamental glass perfume bottle; it was stored in the Wardens Association vault in the U.N. Building in New York, because that thing would shatter if you so much as gave it a hard look.
David’s was a somewhat sturdy ornamental kitchen bottle, the blue-glass fancy kind that store flavored oils and decorative grains. I kept it in a very safe place, right in my nightstand drawer next to oils, lotions, and other things I wouldn’t want casual visitors to inventory.
Which inevitably led to thoughts of my bed, soft sheets, cool soft ocean breezes sighing over my skin…
“Yes. Let’s go home.” His hands slid over my shoulders, stroked down my arms, and lingered on my hands before letting me go. The heat from him stayed on my skin. Afterimages of light.
My car was parked over in the far corner of the lot, away from casual door dings. She was a midnight blue Dodge Viper, and I loved her dearly enough for her to qualify as my second-favorite-ever ride. The first-place winner had been a Mustang, also midnight blue, named Delilah, who had gotten scrapped around the time I met David, as if I had to give up one really lovely thing for another.
David took the shotgun seat, and I prowled Mona through the morning traffic toward my apartment. I’d been really, really lucky when I moved—had to move, thanks to the overzealous actions of some real estate people, who thought that just because I’d had a funeral I’d broken my lease—and I’d ended up with a beachfront second-floor sea view. All of my furniture was secondhand, and nothing matched, but the bed was comfortable and the balcony was to die for.
