Heat Stroke ww-2

by Rachel Caine

  My rescue came from an unexpected source. Yvette said, “David stopped her. But then, he had good enough reason. Seacasket has something in it he’d kill to protect.” She got up off the sofa and walked around to face me, insinuated sharp-nailed fingers through my hair and arranged it to her liking around my shoulders. “You’re very striking, did you know that? He must feel something incredible for you, to have done that. Believe me, David’s long ago learned the value of self-preservation. The fact that he’s so devoted to you is truly amazing.”

  I gave her a smile. “He just wants me for the sex.”

  She gave me a smile right back. “He could get that anywhere.” Her raised eyebrow strongly implied he could get it from her, at better rates, at higher quality. “I know who you are, you know.”

  Of course she did. She’d been at my funeral, stood there looking at the enormous overblown photo of me wreathed by flowers. Her fingernail tapped my cheek, hard enough to sting.

  “You killed a friend of mine,” she said. Her voice had dropped down into that throaty, seductive range again. I wondered if she always used that when she talked about killing. “He was a very special man.”

  “Bad Bob? Oh, yeah, I heard he was keeping you in condoms and rent money. Sorry for your loss.” Bad Bob had put a demon down my throat. I had no fond memories.

  She slapped me. Well, tried to. I went to vapor and reformed immediately after her hand sailed through the space where I’d been. That was kind of fun. She stumbled into the coffee table from the force of the swing, and for a second the fury in her made her ugly. Uglier than anyone I’d ever seen. Whoa. There was the real Yvette Prentiss, the one who hid behind the pretty soft skin and silk-smooth hair and mouthwatering figure.

  It was gone so fast I couldn’t be absolutely sure I’d even seen it, until I looked over at Kevin. The fear in his eyes told me everything.

  “Bob Biringanine was a visionary!” she snapped at me. “You’re an ant crawling on the corpse of greatness. Kevin! Tell her not to do that again!”

  “Do what?” he asked. She rounded on him, and I saw the flinch from ten feet away. “Tell her, uh, not to do that vanishing thing?”

  “Yes.” She hissed it, like an angry snake. He swallowed twice, rapidly, and looked over at me.

  “Uh, don’t do that vanishing thing anymore. Making yourself all misty. Unless I tell you to.” He didn’t look back at Yvette, stared at the carpet and his ragged tennis shoes instead. “Can I go now?”

  She continued to stare at him, and I didn’t like the light in her eyes. Not good. Definitely not good.

  “Yes.” She flipped him the perfume vial. He nearly fumbled it, and I felt the Djinn circuitry heating up with anticipation. Of course! Any chance there was that he might drop it… I couldn’t do much, but I could nudge it along once it was out of his hands, make sure it hit the sharp edge of the coffee table with enough force to smash it into oblivion…

  He held on to it. Damn.

  Yvette nodded toward me. “Take her with you.”

  “Yeah, okay. You. Come with me.”

  I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay here, guarding that blue bottle that held all that remained of David, but I couldn’t disobey a direct order. Kevin walked out of the living room, and I had to follow him.

  The last sight I had was her sitting down on the sofa again, picking up the blue stoppered bottle and holding it between her hands.

  The expression on her face—avid, delighted, anticipatory—made me go arctic cold inside.

  Kevin walked through a door that read Kevin’s room do not enter or else! It was decorated with skull-and-crossbones decals, pentagrams, line drawings of naked girls grabbing their ankles.

  Ah. Home rancid home. He shut the door behind me, stared at me for a couple of seconds, and put the perfume vial down in a nasty-looking ashtray filled with candy wrappers and what strongly resembled the butt ends of a few joints. I looked around. Kevin’s room wasn’t any more attractive on second viewing than on first There was no place to sit, other than the dingy rumpled bed, and I was not going there.

  Kevin flung himself down full length, staring up at the pinup on the ceiling. Hands behind his head. “Did you really almost kill those people?”

  “Did you want me to?” I countered, and crossed my arms. He shrugged, as much of a shrug as he could manage lying down.

  “Probably would have been kind of a mercy, living in a podunk town like that and all.”

  “Why Seacasket?” I asked. He continued to stare up at the centerfold, who pouted and simpered in a frozen second of humiliation. “Something special about that town?”

  “Something about it being important to him. You know. Dauid.” He gave the name a contemptuous twist of his lips. “She’s had a hard-on for him for years. Tried to get him before, but Bad Bob wouldn’t let her have him for more than a couple of hours. Said she might break him.”

  Too much information… I tried not to think about what it meant. “What now?” I asked.

  Another horizontally muted shrug. “Don’t know. Not like she tells me shit.” Definitely more than a little resentment there. This kid was turning out to be interesting. Maybe there was a way to use him…

  I stopped the thought train with a squeal of brakes when he suddenly shifted his gaze to stare directly at me. “I like the other outfit better.”

  Crap. I tried not to let him see how much that alarmed me. “Which one?”

  “The one you had on before. With the, you know—” He mimed breasts. “And the stockings. The one with the apron.”

  He still hadn’t told me to put it on. “Wouldn’t you like something a little classier?” Dumb question. I was surrounded by glossy photos of women wearing stupid smiles and strips of cloth no bigger than Band-Aids. Classy didn’t enter into it.

  His dark eyes went hard. “I don’t give a shit if you like it or not. Just put it on.”

  Well, that was direct. I had no room to maneuver. The peachskin pantsuit vanished, replaced with the Frederick’s of Hollywood French Maid Nightmare. Truthfully, I kind of liked the shoes, in a trashy, over-the-top kind of way, and I might not have minded putting the thing on to see the look in David’s eyes, but to see it in this kid’s… worthy of a shudder. Or two.

  The corset top definitely lifted and didn’t separate.

  I looked down at my bulging décolletage and saw I’d been given something new. A classy-looking upside-down pentagram tattoo, just over my left breast Unsettlingly close to where there’d once been the black stain of a Demon Mark.

  I looked up. Kevin was sitting up in bed, watching me. He licked his lips and said, “Turn around.”

  I did. All the way, back to face him.

  “I thought you said I only had three wishes?”

  I kept quiet. He wasn’t stupid. He knew I’d lied.

  “You got any idea what my mom’s doing out there to your friend? He is your friend, right?” Kevin studied me with too-intelligent eyes, looking for sore spots. “More than a friend? You fucking him?”

  “You’re way too young to ask that question,” I said primly. The Julie Andrews tone didn’t go with the blow-up doll outfit.

  “You’ll tell me. You have to.”

  “Why do you want to know?” I asked. Which threw him, a bit. “And anyway, how do you know how many wishes you get? Maybe it’s ten. Maybe it’s twenty. Maybe the next one is your last, and then I get to rip you into little screaming shreds. Care to try your luck?”

  I smiled when I said it. Friendly. Warm. Inviting.

  He pressed himself back against the headboard, where Miss July of 2003 was squashing her bare breasts together for his inspection.

  “What’s the use of having you if I can’t do anything with you?” he asked. Petulant little jerk. “I mean, maybe I’ll just do it anyway. Wish for what I want most.”

  “And what’s that?”

  He hadn’t really thought about it. I hoped he wasn’t going to pop off with something stupid, like world peace,
but I needn’t have worried; Kevin would never think about anyone or anything larger than the confines of his little self-centered universe. He finally came out with, “I want never to have to work for a living.”

  I blinked slowly, thinking that over. Teenage thought processes were so different from adults… An adult would have asked for truckloads of cash, under the assumption that truckloads of money meant no more work. Which wasn’t unreasonable, as assumptions go. But Kevin had asked for something completely different.

  “So, hypothetically, if you asked for that, you wouldn’t be disappointed if I made you a quadriplegic breathing through a tube?” His turn to blink. His mouth opened, produced silence, and closed again. “I mean, you wouldn’t ever have to work for a living, would you? Or I could just kill you. You’d never have to work for a living that way, either. Or, let’s see, I could kill everyone else in the world. Never have to work for a living that way, either. Or I could turn you into a big slobbering dog that your mom can feed every day—”

  “Stop it!” He looked appalled. “You’re making it all—”

  “—complicated?” I finished. “It is. You want a Djinn, you got one. But we’re not fuck-toys, Kevin. We’re older than you—” Even me. “—we’re smarter than you, and we have absolutely no problem in finding the wrong interpretations of every single wish you are stupid enough to utter in our presence. We’re dangerous. Get that through your head. You can dress me up like a doll if you want to, but you’ll never control me. I’m going to control you. So the best thing you can do is take that bottle and smash it, right now, before I get the opportunity to really hurt you. Because I will, Kevin. I’ll hurt you so bad it’ll make your mom at her worst look like Mary Poppins.”

  I had him. I so had him. It was all I could do not to gloat. He looked about to vomit with fright.

  And then he calmed down, swallowed, and said, “I know what I want. It’s what you want, too. I want you to kill my mother.”

  Not that I couldn’t understand it, but I felt like it was one of those cartoon moments, the one where you have to smack the side of your head to make sure there’s nothing stuck in your ear. I stood there in my ridiculously sexy French Maid outfit and said, “Excuse me?”

  “Yvette,” he clarified hastily. “My real mom’s already dead. My dad, too. I guess what I mean is that I want you to kill my stepmom. Yvette Prentiss.”

  I wanted to grin and say, “Done!” and rush out there and put the big Djinn smackdown on her, but truth is I wasn’t all that eager to be killing anybody. Not even a top-rated bitch like Yvette. I was all too aware of how much power there was, flowing from Kevin to me, and how awesomely easy it was to use it. The compulsion was clicking in, but not strongly; there were, I sensed, still gray areas to exploit. I went for them. “There are all kinds of meanings to kill, you know…”

  “Dead,” he said. “Kill her dead. Slowly. Make her suffer.”

  He was getting into it now. Which was not my intention. “Okay, let’s just—calm down.” Because the compulsion was getting stronger, the power flow cresting like the tide. “I will. I swear. But let’s talk about it first.” Because, luckily, he hadn’t specified now, the way he had when he’d sent me to Seacasket to commit arson and homicide. “Why?”

  He gave me a dark look. “What do you care?”

  I didn’t, really. I was too busy thinking about Yvette putting her hands all over the bottle that held David trapped, seducing Lewis so that innocent little Kevin could sneak up and hit him from behind. “Yeah, well, what do you care? I’m just curious.”

  Long silence. He flopped back down on the bed, sounding depressed. “She’s a bitch.”

  “You’re going to run into them. Get used to it. In fact, pretty much all of us can be bitchy from time to time. Goes with the double-X chromosomes.” Just like Kevin was never going to win any Y-chromosome personality contests, either. “You can’t go around having me snuff out every life that annoys you.”

  “Why not?”

  Ah, great, a sociopath in training. Again, not the conversational path I was eager to follow. “What’s she done to you, other than be a bitchy stepmom?”

  He stared up at the pouting centerfold over his bed, put his hands under his head, and said, “She makes me do things.”

  I had a bad feeling. “Like?” I was really, really hoping he’d say clean up the room, take out the trash…but one look around convinced me that couldn’t be true.

  He sat up, grabbed the first thing that came to hand—a CD player—and threw it across the room hard enough to smash it to bits against the far wall. “What the fuck do you think I mean, say my prayers? Brush my teeth?” His flare of rage was sudden, violent, and totally untelegraphed. I had no reason to be afraid, but if I’d still been human I’d have felt utterly exposed. “She makes me do things, you stupid bimbo! Bad things!” He was blazing in Oversight, white-hot, as if some door had opened into hell. “I want it to stop!”

  Oh, God. Not what I’d expected, not at all. Nor what I was even vaguely equipped to handle. I pitched my voice low. “Kevin, you can make that stop without killing her.”

  “You don’t know shit about it.” Tears quivered in his eyes, jeweled his long, lush eyelashes. “God, you don’t understand… I can’t even tell you…”

  “I know this. You have the power to make her stop, Kevin.” I edged over slowly, walking around the piles of wrinkled filthy clothes and discarded trash, to perch on the edge of the bed next to him. “You’re going to be a Warden. You have the power to control things around you. I don’t know if it’s weather, or fire, or earth—”

  “Fire,” he said, and shut his eyes. “It’s fire.” Which explained the fury of the power that poured into me from him—it had the quality of fire to it. Out of nowhere, I remembered Rahel once telling me, Fire burns the hand it serves. Kevin was unstable, volatile, and he had way too much power at his disposal. I couldn’t believe the Wardens hadn’t already spotted him and started the process to neutralize or control him. If ever there was a reason for neutering someone, taking away their power… “I burned the house down. That’s how my dad died.”

  I didn’t want to believe it, but I could sense the truth of it in him. God, such a burden for a sixteen-year-old boy. His father’s death, the crushing load of a developing talent of this magnitude, and if he was telling me the truth, some kind of sexual abuse… no wonder he was screwed up.

  I wasn’t qualified for this. I wasn’t sure anybody was.

  Kevin kept talking over my silence. “Bad Bob told me they’d come for me, take me away, but he said he’d protect me.” Yet another public service from Bad Bob Biringanine. Probably as a favor to Yvette, which meant he was banging Mrs. Prentiss before the late Mr. Prentiss had gone to smoke inhalation heaven. “Guess he won’t protect me now.”

  Since I killed him. Right. I studied the frilly lace on my tiny, entirely useless apron. Prodded it with a fingernail, which was painted in hooker red. “So now you have me to protect you. Is that the general theory?”

  “Sure. Nobody’s going to come after me if I have a kick-ass Djinn.” He favored me with a look. I didn’t have the heart to break it to him that if the Wardens found out some underage, untrained kid with a penchant for firestarting had a Djinn, they’d trash the continent looking for him. “You got me distracted. I said I want you to kill my mother.”

  “And I think you should think about that a while.”

  He rolled up on one elbow to stare at me. “Oh, I have. I’ve thought about it for years. I lay awake at night thinking about it. So you just go—”

  “I should find out what she’s doing,” I blurted out. “You want me to kill her— What makes you think that she’s not ordering her new Djinn to do the same thing to you? I mean, that’s why she wanted you, right? To get me? And through me, to get him?”

  He was listening. Not talking, but I could feel him hanging on every word.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know what she’s doing? I could find out. It wou
ldn’t be that hard. She’d never even know I was looking.”

  No teenager could resist an opening like that. And a kid who’d been deprived of control his whole life… I was faintly ashamed of myself for feeding his paranoia, but not enough to stop myself.

  Kevin wavered, frowned, and said, “You can do that?”

  “If you order me to. I can be invisible. I can go anywhere for you.” And do anything, but it was best not to bring that up. I looked at him from under my eyelashes, pitched my voice low, and said, “It would be easier if I didn’t look quite so—unique. May I change my clothes?”

  He sighed and flopped back in a boneless heap of surrender. “Whatever.”

  I put the peachskin suit back on again, covered my eyes with sunglasses, and stood up. “So I can go?” I asked.

  “Whatever.” He sounded hurt, and stubbornly put-upon. “Just come back. Tell me what she’s doing.” He snorted. “Like I don’t already know. She’s playing with her new toy.”

  I paused, stricken, with one hand on the doorknob. I couldn’t get the images out of my head. Kevin threw an arm over his eyes. “I’m gonna sleep,” he said, grunted, and turned over with his back to me. “I’ll call you when I want you.”

  I escaped out into the hall, found my way back to the living room. Yvette was nowhere in sight. Neither was the blue bottle. Playing with her new toy… God, no. I had no idea what he meant, but it definitely didn’t sound good.

  When I moved, I saw a definite fairy-dust afterglow. The coldlight infestation was growing in the real world, just like the aetheric. Of course, so far it didn’t seem to be doing anything inimical to me— just decorative. David didn’t seem to be suffering ill effects, either.

  But then there was the storm, out in the Atlantic, powering up like some unstoppable juggernaut. It was still there, still growing, and it had to be the coldlight at the heart of it, didn’t it? Nothing else made sense.

  One problem at a time. This second’s had to be Yvette, and getting David out of her well-manicured clutches.

  First I had to make sure I couldn’t be noticed. I remembered the buzzing sensation that Rahel had used to conceal me at the Empire State Building… a certain frequency, a kind of invisible hum…