Thin Air

by Rachel Caine

Page 36

  "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.

  Chapter Sixteen

  FIFTEEN

  It felt like too short a flight, since we spent it horizontal, naked, and blissful under silken covers, protected and secluded by a swirling bubble of opal energy. David's body fit perfectly under my hands, as though it had been made to match me. In theory I was a virgin, but in practice, memory wasn't a barrier to this at all. There wasn't any pain, there wasn't any hesitation, and there was certainly no trace of shame, no matter what I felt moved to do with him, or for him. It felt like the world had opened up to me for the first time, channeled through his lips, his hands, his firm, warm skin, the urgent and careful strength he used in every touch. There was a kind of fever-dream delirium to it, because surely real life wasn't like this. Couldn't be like this. If it was, how had I ever gotten out of his bed?

  If he was using any kind of Djinn magic, I was all for the practice. Practice, practice, practice.

  As we lay in a dreamy, disheveled state of paradise, twisted together in the sheets, I traced letters on his chest like a lovesick kid. "Do you know what I'm writing?" I asked, and had a sudden dizzying idea that he'd seen lovers play that game back when writing was still in hieroglyphics. Or cuneiform.

  "Tell me," he whispered, and pressed his lips to a particularly sensitive spot at my temple. I shivered.

  "I. . . L. . . O. . . V. . . E. . . "

  "Chocolate," he said. "Fast cars. Dangerously expensive shoes. "

  I drew a single letter-U.

  He didn't speak. He traced with one warm finger the spot on my temple he'd kissed, drawing something that was more abstract than letters, more direct. />
  "You don't have to stay with me," he said. "It's true that once Djinn let ourselves. . . feel things like this, we can't turn it off. But we can turn away. And I would. If you asked. "

  I put my head down on his chest. He might not have been human, but his body felt that way. His heart thumped gently under my hand, and I felt the elastic movement of his lungs. His arms went around me and cradled me there.

  "Venna said this makes you weak," I said. "Does it?"

  "Don't worry about me. "

  "I do. I will. Does it?"

  I felt his sigh stir the damp hair around my forehead. "I think the more connection the Djinn have to the human world, the better off we all are," he said. "Personally. Politically. In every way. So, no. It's a different kind of strength; that's all. I just have to make them believe it. "

  "But the Old Ones won't. Like Venna. "

  "Not your problem," he said in a gentle but subject-is-closed kind of way. "Life over on the Djinn side of things isn't any more predictable than it is on the human side. We only seem stable because we don't let the kids see the grown-ups fight. "

  I laughed, then fell silent. I never wanted to move. Never wanted to arrive. I wanted this breathlessly perfect time to simply freeze.

  But I heard the engines change pitch, and David's hand stroked gently down my spine. "We're descending," he said.

  "If you mean we're going down, I could make some jokes. "

  "Stop. " There was a bright edge of laughter in the word, though. I'd made a Djinn laugh. That was. . . an accomplishment. "Time to get serious. "

  "This isn't serious? Because I kind of thought-"

  "Stop," he said again, this time more soberly. "You need to know what's going to happen when we land. "

  I acknowledged that with a single nod, not raising my head.

  "We'll be met by another Djinn. Rahel. She's already waiting. She'll meet you there and guide you to Seacasket. She's been watching, but she says there's no sign of the Demon yet. We may have guessed wrong. "

  I closed my eyes and reached for that strange vibration I'd felt when I'd been in Kevin's mind. It was still there, and getting stronger. "No, I don't think so. I think she's there, or she's close. David-what the hell is in Seacasket?"

  And he told me about the Fire Oracle. Like Imara, in Sedona, it was a higher order of Djinn, a kind of living embodiment of one of the three major powers. The Djinn revered it, though few of them could actually communicate with it.

  By the time he was finished, he'd silently urged me to sit up, and he'd handed me my clothes. They felt wrong, awkward against my skin. It occurred to me, as I fastened the last button on my shirt, that dressing must be a lot faster as a Djinn. I hadn't even seen him put on his pants, but he was fully clothed.

  "You expecting trouble with the Oracle?" I asked.

  "No. "

  "Well, you sent for Rahel as backup. . . "

  "About that. " He took in a breath and let it out slowly. "I'm not going with you. "

  That set up a cold, liquid sensation in my stomach. "You're. . . what?"

  "There's something I have to do," he said. "It's important. I'll join you when I can. Rahel won't abandon you. "

  "Venna did. And you're about to. " That was blunt, but I was feeling a little bit peeved. You didn't do the things we'd done together and just split up, did you? I wanted him with me.

  Always.

  "Jo. " He squeezed my hand. "Trust me. "

  Couldn't argue with that, although I wanted to.

  The pilot's cheerful voice came on to tell us to put our tray tables and flight attendants in the upright position, and the opal shield faded around us. The bed became seats, and we were back to reality. It hadn't been a dream. My whole body was relaxed, languorous with warmth, deliciously sore.

  "I love you," David said. He said it quietly, without any drama, as if it were part of normal conversation. Which maybe it was, for us. Or could be. "No matter how this goes, that doesn't change. "

  I closed my eyes as the plane began a terrifying, jerky descent toward New Jersey.

  He stayed with me until we touched down on the tarmac, but by the time I opened my eyes again, my hand was empty of his, and David's seat was vacant.

  He was gone. We were on our own.

  The Demon was in Seacasket. Somewhere. I could feel that noise in my head, like subtle static on a channel I'd never known my radio had received before.

  The process of shuttling my little raiding party from planeside to Seacasket wasn't short, but it was fairly efficient; the Wardens, it seemed, excelled in logistics. That meant a passenger van, complete with communications gear and a hotline that Lewis immediately used to chat with somebody in an office. He hadn't commented on David's disappearance, which seemed odd to me until I realized that he probably knew where David had gone, and why.

  Or maybe he was just distracted by Rahel, who'd shown up in the van without preamble or introduction, scaring the holy crap out of at least some of the Wardens, including Paul, who'd nearly jumped out of his seat. "Post-traumatic fucking stress," he'd growled at me, and thumped down hard. "Last time a Djinn popped in on me like that, she was trying to rip my head off. "

  Rahel raised one sharp eyebrow, elegant and amused. "I can't imagine why," she said coolly. She was in neon orange today, a beautifully tailored pantsuit with a tangerine sheer top layered over neon yellow. Matching fingernails that looked sharp enough to slice paper. She'd jazzed up her multitude of black braids with tiny gold bells and glowing orange beads, and she gave off a very faint chime when she moved. "You've treated the Djinn so well during your partnership with us, Warden. "