by Rachel Caine
“Yes,” I said. “Thanks. I’m fine.”
His long fingers—long enough to span my wrist and wrap over by at least three inches—slid up to touch a bruise on my arm left over from this morning. “You’re sure?” He sounded doubtful. “You don’t want to see a doctor? No problem with the arm?”
“I’m fine.” I tried to put some conviction into it. “Glad you could make it. Sarah’s been cooking for—hours.” Which might have been true. I had no idea.
Eamon let go and accepted the conversational detour. “Yes, it smells delicious. And your apartment looks lovely, by the way.”
I shot Sarah a look that she accepted with raised eyebrows. “Yeah, apparently. Much to my surprise.” I looked significantly at the new plates. Eamon’s eyes darted from me to Sarah, then back again.
“I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “She said you were short on a few of the essentials, so I took her shopping. We got a few things.”
In my world, fancy black foo-foo plates and new wine glasses and silk table runners didn’t really constitute essentials, but I was willing to go with it. “I don’t mind, but really, if you bought them, I’ll pay you back.” Then again, those plates looked like they might be worth more than my entire shoe collection.
“No need.” He shrugged it off. “As it happens, a freelance payment came through today. I don’t mind contributing a bit, since you’re being so kind as to invite me as your guest.”
“Most dinner guests just provide a bottle of wine, not the whole place setting. Well, anyway, it’s nice to hear good news for a change.”
He smiled slowly. “I don’t know if it’s good news for everyone; money that comes to me does have to come out of someone else’s pocket, at someone else’s expense … ah, well. Life does turn in interesting ways.” His eyes flicked toward David’s bottle. I was still holding it in my left hand. “May I put that in the kitchen for you?”
I immediately flinched backward. “This? No, it’s—skin cream.” Which might have been the dumbest explanation I’d ever come up with, but I was rattled. Too much, happening too fast. And I obviously couldn’t let Eamon touch the bottle, or he’d have ownership of David. At least temporarily. “It’s empty.” I turned it upside down to demonstrate. “I’m just putting it back. To refill it.”
I slipped past him and went to my room. Stood there in the dark for a few moments, sliding my fingertips slowly over the glass, thinking about David, about how good he’d looked. Could he have been… cured? Maybe he was fine now. Maybe…
Yeah, I told myself. Maybe you could call up your Djinn boyfriend and bring him out to dinner and explain how your musician boyfriend was living in your closet when you said he was on the road. Now was not the time to experiment. I slid the drawer open, kissed the glass, and slipped the bottle into its padded case.
After a hesitation, I zipped the case shut. If I needed to grab things in a hurry, seconds might count, and with Ashan on the warpath, flight might be the best defense.
Since Sarah and Eamon looked so nice, I threw on a blue dress—nothing too suggestive, since he wasn’t supposed to be looking at me, after all—and stepped into a decent pair of secondhand Jimmy Choo kitten-heeled pumps. Lipstick, some mascara—it was a fast makeover, but at the end I looked decent. The mirror showed a brightness in my eyes that hadn’t been there before, and a flush in my cheeks.
My hair was glossy and straight from the touch of David’s stroking hands.
I thought about the Djinn, fighting among themselves. I thought about Wardens taking killing falls from bridges.
I thought all that for about thirty seconds, then sat down on the bed and picked up the telephone. Dialed a number from memory.
“Yo,” said a rough, Italian-spiced voice on the other end; I could tell he hadn’t yet looked at Caller ID. There was a short, fumbling pause, and then a much warmer, “Jo! Nice to know you still remember the number.”
“Paul, how could I forget?” I sat back and crossed my legs, and smiled; I knew he could hear it in my tone. “I just thought I’d better let you know that there’s something going on with the Djinn. It’s bad, Paul. Really bad.”
Sometimes, being proactive with your ex-boss is a good idea, especially when said ex-boss has the power to haul your ass into a special clinic and give you a lobotomy. Forcibly. For not much of any reason at all, actually. And I wanted Paul to hear things from me before he started getting the reports in from Florida of wacky things happening around me up on the aetheric.
He sighed. “What’s going on?”
“I personally witnessed a Warden get killed.” I wrapped a hand slowly in the bedsheets. “Paul… the Djinn meant for it to happen. It was deliberate.”
Silence, for a long moment, and then I heard his chair creak as he readjusted his weight. “He’s not the first.”
I’d been afraid of it. “How many?”
“I can’t tell you that. But if I didn’t know better, I’d go join some cult and start preaching about the Apocalypse, because all this is… it’s bad, Jo. And it’s making no sense to me. You got any information I can use?”
I chewed my lip for a few seconds. “It looks like the Djinn are splitting into sides. It’s a power struggle of some kind. We’re just… caught in the middle.”
“Great.”
“Look, I know it’s probably nothing at this point, considering everything that’s going on, but… I got taken for a ride by three Wardens the other day. They seemed to think I was still in the weather manipulation business. Is that coming from you?”
Silence.
“Paul?”
“I can’t discuss this, Jo.”
Dammit. It was coming from him. “I need to know. Look, I’m not running, I just … there’s so much happening. I can’t afford to be caught off guard by Wardens right now.”
“Cards on the table?” he asked. “I’ve got a dozen senior Wardens yelling for your blood. Their point is that whatever’s going on, you’re in the middle of it, and besides, you haven’t been straight with us, not about much of anything. And I know that part’s true. So. Where does that leave us?”
“Standoff, I guess. Because if you send them back to take me in, there’s going to be a fight. And it won’t be pretty. You can’t afford the losses.”
“That I know. But babe, make no mistake. It can be done. There’ll be some collateral damage, and that would be on you, right? You can’t win. Too many of us, and even if we’re not at full strength, you’re all alone. So don’t start the fight. I got too many other fucking problems. If they want to take you in, you let them take you in.”
That was about what I’d expected. And from Paul Giancarlo, who really didn’t have a lot of latitude to work with, that was a gift.
“So where am I?” I asked. “In? Out? Under house arrest?”
A long, long silence, and then Paul said, “Don’t fuck up. That’s all I’m sayin’.”
“Okay.” I sucked in a breath and brought out the question I’d really called to ask. “Do you know how to get hold of Lewis these days?”
“Lewis? Yeah. Why?” He sounded guarded.
I tried for casual. “I wanted to tell him something, that’s all. Got a cell number?”
He did, and he read it off. I scribbled it down and committed it to memory at the same time. We chatted on some neutral topics, lied to each other some more, and hung up two minutes later.
I called Lewis, who answered on the first ring.
“I need you,” I said. “Where are you?”
“Up the coast.”
“Doing… ?”
“Disney World,” he said. Which might have been the truth. With Lewis you could never really tell. “What’s wrong?”
“Apart from the Djinn fighting in the streets and Ashan himself coming to kick my ass? Well, I have a time clock running on my life, and Jonathan wants me to break the bottle and free David, but if I do that we’ll never be able to heal him, and besides, he’ll probably kill Jonathan and win the war for Ashan. I got sun
burned and my boss tries to feel me up every day. Also, my sister asked a date over for dinner, and David’s an Ifrit.”
Stunned silence. And then he said, carefully, “Have you been drinking?”
“Not yet, and not nearly enough, believe me. I need you. Get your ass down here as soon as you can. Get Rahel to fly you in express if you can.”
“No, I’ll drive. I’ll send Rahel to you. At least she can keep you out of trouble until I can get there.”
Curious, that Rahel evidently hadn’t informed Lewis about her conversation with me, and the ass-kicking she’d received from Ashan. But then he was a mere mortal, and she was a Djinn, and hey, even the nicest of them didn’t exactly regard us as equals. He wasn’t her master, and she wasn’t anyone’s slave.
“Jo?” he asked. I felt a rush of power and heard a quiet pop of noise, like a champagne cork letting go. When I looked up, Rahel was standing on the other side of the bed. Unsmiling. Watching me with lambent gold-flaring eyes, and the kind of clinical interest you might see in your better class of death row guards.
“How long will it take you to get here?” I asked.
“Two hours,” he said. “Watch your ass. It hasn’t been all happy puppies around here, either.” Click. He was gone.
I hung up and let the phone slide down to the bedspread, cautiously stood up, and faced the Djinn, who crossed her arms and stood hipshot and elegantly neon, looking me over. Her head tilted to one side, cornrows rustling like silk.
“Huh,” she said. “Ashan is slipping. I thought he’d hurt you much worse than this.”
I glared at her. “If he shows up again, are you going to defend me?”
“No.”
“How about Jonathan? Would you keep him off of me?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Right. So you’re just here to observe while they beat the crap out of me. Hey, thanks for your help.”
“I am doing a favor for Lewis. That doesn’t mean that I am doing you a favor.”
She inspected her nails, and must have decided they weren’t sharp enough; the tips glinted knife-bright. Her eyes, flicking to me, were almost as unsettling.
“For someone in your position, you show remarkably little gratitude.”
“Gratitude for what? For provoking a fight and then bugging out and leaving me to face Ashan?” I felt a late-breaking surge of panic and my old friend, anger. “Here’s a tip: Help me less. It’s better for everybody.”
“I don’t come here at your request,” she pointed out, and made herself at home on my bed, testing the mattress. “Go on about your business, Snow White. I need no watching. You’re the one who requires nursemaids. However, I will tell you that if Lewis needs me, I will drop you without hesitation. Do you understand?”
I understood, all right. There really wasn’t much I could do to stop her if she decided to hang around in my bedroom trying on my clothes and generally making a pest of herself, or if she decided to bug out in the middle of a fight. She was not the most supportive support I’d ever had.
I gathered the tattered shreds of my dignity closer around me, and decided that I really was kind of hungry, after all, and staring at Eamon and Sarah would be better than enduring the sardonic, unearthly stare of a Djinn for a couple of hours.
“Don’t let anything happen to David,” I warned her, and glanced toward the nightstand.
Her face went very still. “Oh, believe me,” she said, “I will not.”
I went out to eat some dinner off the new plates.
Sarah hadn’t waited for me; she and Eamon were already sitting at the table, facing each other, with candles glowing between them. She’d switched off the overhead lights, and it was like a little island of romance in a sea of darkness. Very sweet.
I bumped into a corner of the couch, cursed, and ruined the mood. Sarah gave me a long-suffering look and paused, fork halfway to her perfectly rouged lips, as I sank into a chair next to Eamon and unfolded my napkin. It was in some origamilike complication of a swan. Another Martha Stewart-esque thing that few working mortals had the time to learn how to do.
The wine was pleasantly cool and tart, and the salad crisp, and she’d whipped up some kind of vinaigrette that for the life of me I hadn’t realized could come out of a noncommercial kitchen. Sarah should have become a chef, not a trophy wife.
“Were you talking to David?” Sarah asked. I nearly fumbled my fork. “On the phone.”
“Oh.” I stabbed a tomato wedge. The silverware felt strange and heavy, and when I looked it over, it was as unfamiliar as the plates. My total of debts to repay, whether karmic or Mastercard, was getting pretty hefty. “Yes. He was a little sick, but he’s feeling better.”
“Sarah told me that he’s a musician?” Eamon asked, and applied a little black pepper to his salad. Which was not at all a bad idea. I followed suit.
“A singer,” I said. Which would explain, should it ever come up, the lack of gear to haul around. “He’s with a band.”
“Have I heard of them?”
“Probably not.”
Eamon was too polite to try to work around that roadblock; he turned his attention back to Sarah, who practically combusted under the force of it. He did have a lovely smile, I had to admit. “I did enjoy the day, Sarah. I had no idea Fort Lauderdale had so much to offer.”
“It was educational,” she said, but there was color high in her cheeks, and a sparkle in her eyes, and I wondered if the wonders of Fort Lauderdale had been the standard tourist attractions or something a good deal less family-friendly that featured a tour of the backseat of Eamon’s rental car. “Thank you for everything. It was lovely, really. Dinner was the least I could do.”
“Careful,” Eamon said, and his voice had dropped into a range I could really only classify as a purr. “You feed me like this, I might never leave.” His eyes were luminous, watching her. As if she were the only thing in the world.
She winked at him.
I began to remember how I’d felt back in high school, watching my accomplished, polished older sister devastate the boys with a flick of her perfectly manicured fingers. Oh, yeah, this was that feeling. Like being the dumpy training wheels on the bicycle of love. I wondered if I should take my salad and go eat it in my room, with Rahel, who would make me feel like a particularly nasty insect but at least wasn’t going to be beating me on social graces.
“Get a room,” I said, and shoveled in a mouthful of greens. Sarah sent me a shocked look. Yep, we were right back to high school. Sarah the martyr, Jo the brat, poor Eamon caught in the middle.
Except Eamon was no hormonally overbalanced teenager, and he just smiled and reached across the table to pour my sister another half glass of wine.
“Actually,” he said, “I like this room perfectly well.”
The salad course mercifully ended before I could make more of an ass out of myself, and Sarah served pasta. She and Eamon flirted. I tried to look as if I didn’t notice. It was uncomfortable. My sister’s chicken primavera was unbelievably delicious, but I shoveled it in with reckless disregard for either manners or culinary appreciation. Sarah, naturally, ate about a third of her plate and pronounced herself full. Eamon came around to help her clear the table, shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal elegantly long-boned forearms, and brushed past her close enough to qualify as courtship in quite a few parts of the world. As they were standing at the sink together, I watched their body language. His was… comfortable. Proprietary. In her space, drawn to her by gravity. Over the rushing water, I caught snatches of their conversation. I sipped wine and watched him lean closer, put his face close to her neck, and draw in a deep breath. It was amazingly sensuous.
“Bulgari’s Omnia,” he said, in that lovely voice, so precise and warm.
“You know perfumes?” Sarah asked, startled, and turned her head to look at him.
He was over her shoulder, close enough to kiss. Neither of them moved away.
“A bit,” he said. “I had some training
in chemistry; perfumes were always interesting to me. Omnia has a black pepper base, you know.”
“Really?” She dried her hands on a towel and turned to face him. “What else?”
“Is there any dessert?”
She blinked at the change of subject, but moved aside and uncovered a pan of perfect little tarts, pale with a browned crust on top. Crème brûlée. Dear God.
I didn’t even own one of those fancy little blowtorches, did I? Well, apparently, I did now. Along with a double boiler.
Eamon made a sound in the back of his throat that I swear I’d only heard during particularly intimate moments, took one of the tarts, and bit into it, watching my sister. “Delicious,” he mumbled.
“No talking with your mouth full.”
Which looked like a private joke, from the intensity of their smiles at one another. He offered her the tart. She bit a neat piece out of it, never taking her eyes from his.
“What do you know about that perfume?” he asked her.
“Tell me.”
His smile widened into something that was both angelic and liable to melt women into butter. “Perfumes have a base, heart notes, and bottom notes. Omnia’s base is black pepper. Its heart notes are tea, cinnamon, nutmeg, and Indian almond. Very exotic. It suits you.”
Sarah looked fascinated. “And there are bottom notes?”
He took another bite of tart. “Indian wood, sandalwood, and chocolate.” He made chocolate sound indecent. “Practically edible, that scent.”
“And how do you know it isn’t edible?”
“Is that an invitation… ?”
I rolled my eyes, got up, and said, “I’ll be in my room.”
They didn’t even notice. I closed and locked my door, flumped down on the bed, and realized my heart was racing. Contact high from the flirting. Those two were Olympic champions at foreplay.
Although I suspected they might have blown past it earlier and gone right to the main event. Probably more than once. The hormones were definitely running at high tide.
I looked around the room. No sign of Rahel. I wasn’t surprised. She was probably in a don’t-see-me mode, or else she’d already decided to check in on Lewis again. I ignored her—or her absence—and stripped off my dinner clothes, threw on sloppy sweat pants that rode low on my hips and a crop top, and slid open my window to get a taste of fresh ocean breeze. It felt cool and dark on my face. I wanted to get out of here, suddenly; I felt trapped. I checked the clock. Thirty minutes until I was supposed to meet Lewis.
