by Rachel Caine
And she had a cute, infectious smile. The bitch. Honestly, that was just taking it too far.
And she winked at me as we walked toward her; then she swigged some bottled water, and shooed away the two walking-shorts-wearing prettifiers who were hovering around her touching her up. “Well,” she said, with a distinct, low-pitched Southern drawl that made the trooper’s sound like he came from Nebraska. “If it isn’t Mr. Boss himself. Excuse me if I don’t kneel. I think this bikini might leave scars.”
David snorted, but he looked amused. “Whitney, what the hell is this?”
“Fun.” She shrugged a little, which woke a blinding flash of diamonds that must have been a menace to low-flying aircraft. “I get bored just being all-powerful. Can’t a girl have a little fun sometimes?” She must have learned the accent, I decided, from Gone with the Wind. “You’re just jealous ’cause you know this little thing wouldn’t fit you.”
She was saying it to David, but her eyes changed focus, shifting over to me on the last word. Ooooh. I felt the burn, and the shock of getting a Djinn stare at full strength. Whitney’s eyes were brilliant lavender blue, Liz Taylor’s eyes on crack, and there was a lazy mischief in them that reminded me of cats and mice and unfortunate endings for the rodent in the equation.
I put on my best shove-it smile and held out my hand. “Joanne Baldwin,” I said. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
“Only by rumor,” Whitney agreed languidly, without accepting my handshake. She held up her own and blew on the long, beautifully shaped nails. “Sorry. Polish is still wet.”
That was so lame an excuse that even David lost his smile. “Whit,” he said. “Play nice.”
“Or what, big daddy? You’ll spank me? Mmmmm.” Her tongue glided over her lower lip. Pure suggestion.
His eyes kindled in a hot bronze glow, trapping hers. “Whitney.”
She looked away, and for the first time, I saw a flicker of fear. “Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t mean to be rude.”
“Let’s try this again. What are you doing here?”
She trailed a fingertip over the diamond-set strap of her bikini top, and tapped one of the stones as she lifted her eyebrow. David let out an impatient breath and said, “You can make one. Don’t be stupid!”
“I can’t make one like this one. This one is perfect. You know how I feel about having something that’s perfect.” She licked her lips and glanced over at the car. “That’s perfect, too.”
David growled, low in his throat, in total frustration. “You will not steal anything, Whitney. I’ve told you before. You’re attracting attention with all this, and I won’t have it. Have your fun. Do your photos, and go quietly. I’m warning you.”
Whitney’s purple eyes narrowed, and she tossed her liquidly dark hair back over her shoulders. Its shine and bounce were perfection itself. She didn’t have to battle frizzy hair and uncontrollable curling. “You may be the big dog, David, but don’t you bite too hard. We both know I can give you a street fight if you want it.”
I had never heard anybody–except maybe Ashan, the leader of the other, older half of the Djinn, a right cold bastard–speak to David that way. When he talked, the New Djinn generally listened, and certainly obeyed when push came to shove.
But not this one.
David, though, wasn’t having any nonsense. He smiled. It wasn’t a pretty smile, and it reminded me that as much as I adored him, as much as he was all the good things that a Djinn could be, he had a dark streak. They all did. And his wasn’t small, just deeply buried and tightly leashed. “Don’t push me,” he said. “Or I’ll break you. For good.”
Whitney flipped him off, drained the rest of her bottled water, and tossed the empty to a distantly hovering staffer, who fielded it with long practice. “I’m bored,” she announced. “Let’s get this show on the road, folks!”
She was the talent, which would normally make her pretty low on the order-giving totem pole–but it seemed like Whitney had already established a brand-new paradigm here in the middle of nowhere. The director–a bulky young man who seemed to prefer wearing his baseball cap backward, which was an asinine thing to do in the Florida sun–straightened up from where he was huddled with a group of people, and clapped his hands. “All right, all right, let’s get busy!” he yelled. “Somebody get Whitney in position! And you two, out of the way!”
He meant me and David, of course. Whitney winked at us, and blew David a mocking kiss as one of her makeup staff swooped in to swirl a brush over her face. David and I withdrew to a point outside of the cameras, behind the crew, and he stood there with his feet planted and arms crossed, looking stubborn and worried as he watched them pose Whitney like a life-sized doll, adjusting her for just the right sparkly angle against the Bugatti.
“Who the hell is she, David?” That probably sounded just a little insecure, but Whitney had rattled me. More than any other female (or female-appearing) Djinn I’d ever met, she seemed interested in direct, sexual competition for the attention of my lover, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t think he particularly did, either, which was a relief, but still.
“I told you, she’s very young,” he said. “She’s–unusual.”
“Yeah, I get that.”
“No, you don’t,” he said. “She became Djinn in a way nobody else we’ve seen has been able to accomplish. Whitney died alone. Not with others, not in some mass disaster or slaughter. She died alone, and she became a Djinn.”
That was not the way it worked for the New Djinn (or the Old Djinn, for that matter). Djinn could make the leap from human to superhuman only when there had been enough lives lost to trigger some kind of energy exchange … people dying alone, or even in small groups, wouldn’t do it. David had made me a Djinn once, but he’d cheated, using his own power to sustain me. That hadn’t gone over well, and it hadn’t been sustainable, for either of us.
“She didn’t have another Djinn helping her?”
“Nothing. She just … died, under traumatic circumstances, and then transformed. Jonathan was studying her to find out why, but she’s difficult to control, and I don’t think he got very far with it before–” He didn’t need to continue. We both knew that Jonathan had given his life so that David could live, after our disastrous attempt to keep me Djinn. “She’s extremely powerful. More than any other New Djinn, except me, and that’s only because I’m the Conduit.” David was the direct plug-in for the New Djinn to the powers of the Earth–the center of the spiral. Whatever his normal power level might be, he could draw on the strength of the Mother, and that trumped Whitney or any other New Djinn.
It didn’t look to me like Whitney was the type to accept that without pushing the issue, though.
“She’s–not like the other Djinn I’ve met.”
“More human? She is that. In human life, she was savagely ambitious, and she’s carried that over to life as a Djinn. Whitney’s never seen a challenge she didn’t want to take, or believed she couldn’t win.” He sounded as if he almost admired that–from a distance. “She was a thief and a con artist as a human. She’s carried that over as well. No matter how many times I tell her being Djinn isn’t a license to cause chaos…”
The primping apparently had concluded, and now the still photographer was having his day, having Whitney pout, pose, and lounge with the backdrop of the sports car. She was, I had to admit, good at it. I wished my best friend, Cherise, was at my side; surely she would have had some good, snarky asides to make me feel better.
Especially since Whitney kept glancing at David between shots, as if all her pouting, sexy posing was personal.
If it affected him, he wasn’t showing it. He watched her with a cool, intense stare, arms folded, clear warning in his body language.
The photos went on for a while, but they were finally done, and a round of applause sounded around the crew.
“Get her set for the video,” the director ordered, and ran over to check focus on his two high-definition rigs, much to the bored chagr
in of the camera operators. “Come on, people, the light’s going to go soon!”
“Well, this is exciting,” I said. “And our champagne is getting warm in the car, you know.”
“I know,” David said. “But she’s not here for the chance to look pretty.”
“Then why is she here?”
“She’s a sociopath and a thief, and as far as I know it could be anything. The thing is, if I leave, there’s nothing to stop her.”
Whitney must have heard him, because she straightened from a casual lounging position against the shiny Bugatti, smiled with blinding intensity, and said, “Oh, honey, please. There’s nothing to stop me now!”
In between one breath and the next, she opened the Bugatti’s door, slipped inside, and fired up the engine, which caught with a full-throated, intimidating roar. The director jerked upright, staring, utterly astonished, and dug in his pockets. He came out with a set of keys–the car keys, presumably–and stared from that to Whitney, who was playfully gunning the engine. “How–”
Whitney held up a finger. Her middle one. White bolts of electricity sizzled around it and reflected in her purple eyes. “Greed is bad,” she said. “I’m just helping save all those people who’d see this ad and feel all inadequate about the size of their cars, that’s all.”
And then she put the Bugatti in gear, and arrowed it straight for the cameras.
Somehow, the people managed to scramble out of the way–David probably helped propel them, actually, from the way they were tossed around–and one of the cameras was blown into junk by a leading wave of invisible force before the car’s bumper could touch it. The other was just knocked over like a big, ungainly insect. There was screaming. Some of it, I realized, was coming from a suited man who’d been sitting off to the side. From the horror on his face, he was the owner of either the Bugatti or the diamond bikini, and his insurance had just lapsed.
“Crap,” David sighed, and turned to me. “Would you mind…?”
“Do you really have to ask? Of course I’ll do it.”
I raced for the car, and David took the faster route, blipping directly through the aetheric from where he stood into the passenger seat. Fast as I was getting settled and the engine started, I knew that seconds were ticking. I didn’t think the car I was driving, sweet as it was, had a hope in hell of chasing down a Bugatti with a Djinn driver, but what the hell.
I like a challenge too, Whitney. Let’s play.
* * *
I wasn’t the only one on the trail of the fleeing Bugatti. Behind me, the state troopers had finally gotten their act together and were blaring a siren in the distance, trying to make up distance. They’d never make it. Even their fastest car wasn’t going to catch me, much less Whitney.
“They’ll block her in,” I said as I shifted, pushing the car faster around the next turn. The curves would get worse, and I knew I’d have to shed speed soon, but for now I had to try to make up as much road as I could. “She’ll never make it past the first crossroads.”
“That’s a long way, and she can do a lot of damage before she gets there.”
“Can’t you just–you know–blip over and stop her?”
“Not without destroying the car,” he said. “I thought you wouldn’t want me to do that. I’m trying to disable the engine, but she’s already put a shield around everything I’ve tried.”
He was frowning, and I could see something was bothering him. “What?”
“Whitney’s crazy, but she’s not stupid. She knows this is a no-win chase. The police will block her in, or I’ll find a way to stop her without hurting anyone.”
“Maybe it’s just a joyride.”
“She’s a thief. Not a joyrider. She has a reason for doing this–watch out!”
I saw it just as he did–an alligator, charging out of the swamp and onto the road. A gigantic one, ancient, and definitely nothing to be messed with under the best of circumstances. I didn’t think for a second that the poor gator was doing this of his own accord, though–she’d thrown him in front of us as a living speed bump, with armor and teeth. We’d kill him if we hit him. We’d also damage the car, probably so badly that we’d have to abandon the chase.
“Hang on,” I said, and reached out with Earth powers to literally drag the gator off the road to the other side. Earth powers are not my strong suit, and it felt like picking up a safe with one hand–painful, and all but impossible, but I’m not one to let a little thing like pain and impossibility stop me, and the confused reptile waddled/slid safely out of our path just in time, with his scaly tail flicking to boom against David’s door as we whizzed past. I’d gone as far over to the left as I’d dared to leave plenty of room, and even then, it had been close. Very close.
I looked back. The gator was already disappearing into the muddy swampland, grateful to be out of our affairs, I suspected.
I caught a flash of metal up ahead. The Bugatti was still just barely in sight, which meant that even Whitney couldn’t–or didn’t want to–violate the laws of physics. We still had a chance.
Behind us, I heard a crunch of metal. The police car had come to a bad end, presumably, from the disappointed wail of its siren that quickly tailed off into silence. “See if they’re okay, honey,” I said to David. He nodded and blipped out, and I was left alone, steering my roaring Viper at its absolute limit along the narrow, curving road. I was taking turns race-car wide, and I hoped nobody would come bumbling along in a pickup truck for me to sideswipe, but I figured if the Bugatti had managed, I would, too.
The radio in the Viper suddenly let out a loud burst of white noise, and then Whitney’s honey-dipped voice said, “You’re just full of spice, little bit. I can see why David thinks you hung the moon. But just between you and me, I think you’re a little bit out of your depth, sugar.”
The radio wasn’t a two-way, but I told her where she could shove it. It made me feel better. “Language,” she said reprovingly, which meant she could hear me. Or could guess how I’d reply, anyway. “I’m shocked, Joanne. You should slow that pretty little car down before you get hurt. Honestly, why do you care what I get up to? I can see why he cares, and he’s a funny old thing, isn’t he? But you shouldn’t. You and me, we’re a lot alike. We both like fast cars, right? And shiny things.”
“Oh, are we sorority sisters now?” I shot back. “Bite me, Bayou Barbie. What are you doing? Where do you think you can go? That car doesn’t exactly blend in!”
“Doesn’t have to,” she said. “You know, if we were sorority sisters, that would be one kick-ass ball of fun, don’t you think?”
“Whitney, what are you doing?”
“Having fun,” she said, and there was a second of silence. When her voice came back, it sounded different. “Until it’s time not to have fun. And that’s coming up quick.”
“You know, Bikini Spice, you might try being a little less vague and a little more informative, if there’s something important going on.”
“Where’s the fun in that? Oh, by the way, heads up. Incoming!” She giggled, and then the static washed over it, and she was gone.
In the next instant, I saw something hurtling out of the sky into the path of my car, rolling out limply and lying flat on the pavement.
This one was no gator.
This was a man.
Instinct took over, and I slammed the brake and clutch, screaming rubber and pulling the emergency brake for added force. I didn’t want to drag the guy out of the way–for one thing, I wasn’t sure what kind of injuries he had, but they had to be pretty grievous, considering the height from which he’d fallen. “You bitch!” I panted, and managed to skid to a sideways stop with the smoking tires about three inches from the fallen body.
I scrambled out, legs shaking from the adrenaline rush, and fell on my knees next to him. The pavement was scorching hot, and the humid air felt suffocating; a swarm of mosquitoes instantly found me and started in on the bonanza. I blew them away with a pulse of Earth power and carefully pu
t a hand on the man’s forehead. I didn’t know him. He was, as best I could tell, some stranger who’d just gotten caught up in things. I had no idea what he had to do with any of it.
David had described Whitney as a sociopath. This was real evidence that he was right.
The guy was alive, but he was unconscious and pretty badly hurt–internal injuries, a couple of broken bones. I was no expert at healing, but I did what I could, and as I did, I reached deep inside and tugged on the connection that existed between me and David–a kind of permanent cord binding us together. It didn’t take long for him to blip back in, landing at a run on the pavement and kneeling next to me.
“The officers are okay,” he said. “Shaken up and bruised, but no significant injuries.” His face set like stone as he put his hand over mine on the stranger’s forehead. “This one’s different.”
“You noticed,” I said. I had already expended a lot of energy, and now I felt waves of warm, thick, golden power flooding into me, through me, speeding relief to the injured areas of the man’s body. It burned, but I took it without complaint. If Whitney hadn’t felt compelled to stop me, this wouldn’t have happened. A little discomfort was the least I could do. “Okay, I think he’s stable now. Thanks.”
David nodded and eased off the flow of power, which stopped being a painful burn and settled into a gentle mist that soaked into every fiber of my body. It felt glorious, and I took in a deep breath as I savored it. He knew how much power I’d already spent, and this was his way of evening the scales.
“I need you to go back,” I said. “Get him help. I can’t take him with me–there’s no telling what else Whitney will try to pull, and he could get hurt or killed if I put him in the car. Would you?”
He kissed me lightly and faded away in a golden blur on the hot, still air. I crouched down and grabbed the man–whose name I still didn’t know–under the arms and dragged him across the road to a narrow strip of shade, as far out of the way as I could get him without moving him into the swamp. Then I put down a layer of protections around him that soaked into the ground, a kind of keep-away perimeter for all of the biting insects and bigger, more predatory killers that lurked out here, including the snakes. It wasn’t perfect, but it would keep him safe and comfortable for a while.
