by Rachel Caine
A housekeeper was just coming out of one of the cabins, and I tapped her on the shoulder. She turned, smiling. She was a cinnamon-skinned young woman with black hair pulled back in a sleek, lacquered bun, and warm chocolate eyes. Not very tall, but graceful. I could see her as a dancer, somehow, moonlighting as a maid.
“Miss?” she asked. “Can I be of assistance?” She spoke excellent English, though I could tell it wasn’t her mother tongue.
I held out my hand. “My name is Joanne Baldwin. I’m one of your—ah—special guests. You’re on staff, right?”
She looked at my outstretched hand, at my face, and slowly took my fingers to shake. “Hello, Miss Baldwin. But I’m not staff. I’m crew.”
“There’s a difference? Call me Joanne.”
“We’re not allowed to use the first names of guests, miss,” she said. “Yes, staff would be the people who work in guest relations areas. I’m a cabin stewardess. We’re crew, not staff.” She read the expression on my face, and smiled. “Ships are very tightly regimented, miss. We all know our duties and where we fit.”
“Trust me, the rules are going to be shredded on this trip. So I’m Joanne, and you are . . . ?”
“Aldonza Araujo,” she said, and her handshake grew a little more firm. We were about the same age, I thought. “Aldonza, miss.”
I gave up temporarily on forcing informality on her. “I’m looking for my cabin. I know I’m close, but—”
She got my cabin number and showed me the route by tracing a French-manicured fingernail on the map. I’d mirror-imaged my route, and I’d somehow ended up on the opposite side of where I should have been. Port, not starboard, in nautical terms. “I’m afraid you’ll have to go around this way,” she said.
I frowned down at the map. “What about this way?” It was marked in featureless gray.
“Those are service areas, miss. You can’t go that way.”
“I’m pretty sure that for us there is no such thing as off-limits. We’re not regular guests. You know what I mean?”
She did, but her smile instantly froze solid. “I—I am sorry, but I can’t—we’re not allowed—”
“Aldonza.” I interrupted her gently enough, but firmly, and took her hand in both of mine. “You signed the waivers, right? The Wardens explained to you what kind of risk was involved in staying on this ship?”
She nodded mutely. I could sense that she wanted to pull away from me, but also that her curiosity was burning a hole in her head. Instead of asking, she just waited.
“The fact is, we’re not going to be regular passengers,” I said. “Think of us as policemen, or military personnel. We don’t need coddling, but we do need to know everything about this ship we can, from the technical stuff to the most insignificant details. It could mean the difference between life and death for everybody on board if things get worse.”
I watched that sink in, but Aldonza still shook her head in refusal. “I can’t let you in, not without someone telling me I can. It’s strictly against regulations.”
“Okay, you can tell me how to get there, and if I happen to stumble accidentally into the crew areas, then it’s not your fault, right?” She hesitated. “Please, Aldonza. It could be important. I promise, I’ll talk to Security and to the Chief Engineer too, but in my experience, the bosses don’t know everything.They think they know everything. You are the guys who really understand the ship.”
She actually laughed, covering her mouth with her hand, as if too loud a sound was definitely Not Done in the posh areas, at least not when wearing a uniform. “That’s true,” she agreed, but she sobered from her brief burst of laughter far too quickly. “It’s not possible for you to go through the crew area without being seen and stopped. The ship has lots of surveillance. Cameras everywhere. We all know each other. We have to, living in such close quarters. If they don’t know you and you’re in off-limits areas, they’ll call security and escort you out.” She was shaking her head again, clearly talking herself out of even trying it. “We have very good security people. It’s not worth the risk. Talk to the captain or the Executive Officer.”
I tried to imagine any of the security people being prepared to deal with even a middle-grade Warden, much less somebody like me or Lewis or the Djinn. I failed. “Okay,” I said, because Aldonza clearly was feeling more and more uncomfortable. “I suppose it’s a bad idea anyway. I’ll take the long way around.—But, just for future reference, what do the crew-area doors look like?”
Aldonza blinked. “I thought you knew.”
Huh? My confusion must have registered, because she looked behind me at a simple door with a swipe card lock labeled PRIVATE.
“Oh,” I said. “Right. Thanks.”
She clearly thought I was crazy, and she wasn’t about to get fired over it. From the glances she threw back at me as she moved down the hallway, she was trying to make sure I wouldn’t do anything wrong—at least not before she was safely away from the scene of the crime.
Couldn’t really blame her.
I pretended to read my map, waiting until she’d had plenty of escape time. I marked the location of the crew door on it and noted the locations of the surveillance cameras, too.
I could pop the door right open, with a relatively minor pulse of power. I could fritz out the cameras, too.
But the truth was, I could do that anytime I needed to, and right now it wasn’t my first choice. I just wanted to reach my soft, expensively appointed bed.
I looked up at the surveillance eyes focused on where I stood, sighed, and took the long way around.
I still got lost. This huge floating palace was like some creepily deserted amusement park—all the lights were on, but there seemed to be a faintly sinister edge to everything. It was made to be inhabited, to be full of life and fun and conversation, and instead there was just fear. The few people I spotted were staff (crew?) going about their business.
I somehow ended up on the Grand Promenade, or at least that was what I read on the map. It was the big railed expanse looking out over the ocean. Overhead, the sky was nail gray, and the water looked just as hard and unfriendly, with sharp-edged waves. The Grand Paradise was big and heavy enough to cleave its way through like a knife, even at the labored speed we were moving.
The promenade was deserted, too. I stood in the clammy wind for a while, watching the endless rolling of the waves, and then I yawned and felt my eyelids growing even heavier.
So tired.
At least, I was tired until I felt a hot, seductive tingle on my back, just over the shoulder blade. That jerked me back to full alert like a jab from a cattle prod.
I didn’t make any more stops on my way.
Safely in the bedroom—no sign of Cherise downstairs—I sat down, closed my eyes, and focused on David. I can’t really describe the connection between the two of us; the ceremony and the vows—even though our wedding had been interrupted by Bad Bob’s attack, and technically not really finished—had pulled us together, bound us in ways that even now I couldn’t understand, except that it made it easier to call him when I needed him.
When I opened my eyes, David was forming out of the air in a swirl of gray and gold. There was something blank in his eyes this time, as if I’d taken him away from something both terrible and important. He’d been with Lewis. I wondered how bad it was.
Then he took a deep breath and willed it away, whatever it was.
“The mark is burning,” I said, without any preamble at all. He took on human form and flesh and sat down next to me. He felt warm as summer, and he smelled faintly of spices and real, human sweat, deliciously male. His fingers unbuttoned my cotton camisole and pushed it down my arms, and then he unhooked my bra and slid it off. There was no seduction in it, or at least not as much as I’d have liked; he was very focused on the job at hand.
When his fingertips pressed on the black torch mark on my back, we both gasped. He spread his whole left hand over it, and the heat spread, increased to an agonizing burn
that felt as if it should come with the sound of sizzling. His right arm went around me, holding me up, keeping me from fighting him to get away from the pain.
With shocking suddenness, the fire turned to ice, a chill that ripped all the way through me, and I shuddered. When I exhaled, my breath frosted the air in delicate feathers that vanished in seconds.
I couldn’t feel the mark on my back anymore, and that was a huge relief. But, as David trailed his fingers over it, I realized that I could feel less of the area around it, too. The numb spot was growing.
I turned to look at him, and caught the unguarded pain in his face before he could hide it from me. He was tired, and he was anguished. Worse, he was despairing.
“Stop that,” I said. “What’s happening?”
“It’s getting larger,” he said. “I had to expand the containment to keep it within the boundaries. You can’t push yourself this hard.”
“I know that, and yet I’m not seeing I have much of a choice. How’s Lewis?”
He didn’t want to tell me, but I think he knew I wasn’t about to let him slip away without an explanation.“Fighting his guilt,” David finally said. “He blames himself for the deaths. He feels he made a tactical error.”
That wasn’t unexpected. “He made the right choices at the time. We had to give it a try.”
“I know. He’s afraid that he rushed into it. He’s afraid that he allowed personal issues to color the decision.”
“That’ll be the day,” I said, and then wondered what that meant. “Personal, how?” Please, let it not be about me.
“Rahel,” David said softly. “He can feel her suffering, just as I can. Bad Bob is making sure we can feel it.”
Bad Bob had a Djinn named Rahel in his clutches—one of David’s New Djinn, and someone I could almost call a friend. He could do whatever he wanted to her—the curse of a Djinn being bound to a bottle, of having her will taken away. And she couldn’t fight back. The nightmare dimensions of that stretched on and on into the darkness, because I knew how sick Bad Bob’s imagination had been even years back. God only knew how much worse he was these days, with so much Demon in his body that I wasn’t even sure the old Bad Bob was still around in any form I would recognize.
Rahel had done me some very kind favors in the past. She was never to be trifled with, or underestimated, but unlike a lot of the Djinn, she did care, however remotely, about the fate of individual humans—and the fate of the human race.
David, as her connection to the power source of Mother Earth, would feel every injury done to her. I wasn’t sure, but I thought that her connection to Lewis was more about personal feelings than old-fashioned lines of fealty. She liked him. He liked her. Maybe it went deeper than that. He’d never felt the need to tell me, and I didn’t ask. I had thought their relationship was more of a hookup than love, but I could have been wrong.
I put my hand on David’s cheek and looked him full in the face for a long, long moment. “How bad is it with her?” I asked him. I didn’t want a kind evasion. I didn’t want anything but the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, and he could sense that from me. “Is he going to destroy her?”
“Eventually,” he said, and gently took my wrist. “There’s nothing more I can do for Rahel just now. She would want me to focus on those I can help.”
“You’ve done all you can for me, too.”
“Yes,” he said, and I could see he hated to admit that. “I’m slowing it down, but that’s all I can do. It’s deep, and it’s still growing. But I intend to keep trying. I’m not giving up, not on either of you.”
He wasn’t saying anything we didn’t both know, but I could hear the frustration in his voice, and the anguish. I slipped my arms around his neck and the two of us cuddled close for a moment. His lips found mine, long and lingering.
“You’re tired,” he murmured. Like the gentleman he was at heart, David slipped the bra back up my arms, turned me around, and fastened it for me. He even buttoned up my camisole. “I want you to rest.”
I was more used to him undressing me. This felt . . . warm. Intimate in a way that seemed more personal than unbridled passion. It was the kind of thing a husband did for a wife—an everyday kind of gentleness.
It made me crave him so badly.
“David?” My voice came out very small. “I can’t sleep. Will you stay with me? Just for now?”
His arms wrapped around me and his head rested on my shoulder. I felt a shudder go through him, some emotion I couldn’t name. When he looked up, the intensity of it was enough to shatter my heart.
“I’ll stay,” he said, and eased me down onto the bed. “I’ll stay as long as you’re awake.”
“Big promises, Mister Big Shot,” I said. “What if a cat gets stuck up a tree in Peoria? I bet you’d go running off to the rescue.”
“You know how seriously I take a vow. Unless I made one to the cat, you’re my priority.” He tapped me gently on the nose, and there was humor in his face now. “Clothes off or on?”
“Oh God, off. Off off off.”
We were naked before our backs hit the mattress, thanks to David’s wondrous Djinn fabric-vanishing powers. The duvet settled over us like snowfall, but it was warm beneath it, so warm, and when his lips touched mine it was a dreamlike kiss, damp and gentle and sweet. I rested my head on the pillow of his arm and moved in closer, drawn without a word being spoken. His fingers brushed hair from my face and feathered it back, then lingered on my cheek, drawing heat down to my chin.
“Please,” I whispered. “Please make all this go away. Just for a while. Can you do that?”
“I’m only a Djinn,” he said. “Not God Himself. But I’ll do what I can.”
His lips brushed their heat down, taking all the time in the world, pausing in unexpected and vulnerable places. The inner aspect of my forearms. My wrists. The delicate skin just beneath my breasts. He began to suck, drawing my blood to the skin with slow deliberation. He left a map of visible kisses down my body, a slow and thorough awakening of my entire body that made me writhe silently, sheets fisted in my hands.
Oh, I forgot. I forgot everything.
Gradually, his mouth became demanding. Challenging. Nips of his teeth, strokes of his tongue. My control slipped, and I made a tortured sound in the back of my throat, rising up to meet him. I didn’t want seduction right now. I wanted to be ravished, and he could feel it echoing out of me like a ringing bell.
I could tell the exact second that his control slipped gears. His body language shifted, tensed, and he raised his head and looked at me. My already quickened pulse jumped, because the look in those Djinn-bronze eyes was feral. Wanting. I sat up and met him halfway through the space and devoured his mouth, hungry and desperate, full of feverish need and frantic energy. It fed back through the link between us, striking like lightning through a grounded circuit, shorting out whatever defenses we’d kept built between us.
When I pulled back, David’s eyes were no longer bronze. They were fire, with pupils of absolute darkness. Mine, I thought incoherently. Mine. I didn’t know if that came from me or from him. It had the force of a Djinn emotion, something vastly more complex than simple human possessiveness.
David growled and put a hand on my chest and pushed me all the way back full length on the bed. He followed, not quite putting his weight on me. Brushes of his hot skin teased and tortured us both. He ran his palm lightly over the rising tilt of my left nipple and flicked his tongue over the right, and the difference in sensations made me gasp. His hand was light, delicate, and burning hot; his mouth was heavy, demanding, and deliciously wet. I bit my lip and felt my whole body shudder in response. I heard an answering sound from David—need, lust, love, wordless reassurance.
We were both on the knife-edge of control. David had never fully let his Djinn instincts out to play before, not like this. I think he’d been too afraid—afraid of hurting me, afraid that I’d be shocked by the depths of his needs and desires.
I knew better. I put my hands around his face and held him still for a moment, staring deep into those inhuman eyes.
And then I nodded. No words, and none necessary.
His skin took on a dusting of gold, and then darker shades, until he seemed more metal than flesh—but it was flesh to the touch, warm and soft and firm. He tasted like exotic spices—cardamom, saffron, wild honey from the rocks. Everything about him was different, and yet everything was exactly the same.
His hand slipped lower down my body, into the slick folds between my thighs. The sensation was overwhelming—burning and cooling at the same time. His thumb pressed and stroked while his long, lovely fingers slipped within. His mouth closed over mine, cinnamon-hot, and I sucked his tongue and tasted fire.
Ecstasy to the power of infinity.
The old, wild magic spiraled up inside of me, exultant, slow pulses that built on each other. Yes, God, yes . . . When I came I did it silently, rigidly, holding the awesome force of it inside and giving it to David through the link between us.
It drove him beyond human disguises, and light exploded in the room. I heard him gasping, struggling to stay with me in flesh, because flesh was what we both needed just now.
He solidified again into skin, hot and firm against me. I rolled over and up to my hands and knees, and felt the fiery stroke of his hands over my back, down my hips, between my thighs . . .
I gasped and dropped my head to the pillow as the relentless pleasure of him filled me. Nothing mattered in that moment—only the need, the all-encompassing need to feel. Every thrust traveled through my body in shattering waves, as intense as any sensation I’d ever known. I heard David whispering in that liquid, sibilant language that I knew must have been his native tongue, the language of fire, of Djinn. I didn’t know the words, but I heard the music—dark, delicious, and utterly abandoned.
He knew just the right spot to hit to shatter me completely. I screamed as another orgasm flooded me like boiling light. It spilled into him, triggering a matching explosion that rocked us both to the core.
The room was full of light.
