by Rachel Caine
I felt it come into tune. When I opened my eyes again I could see a slight blur around me, like shimmer from hot pavement. Couldn’t be sure I had it right, but there was no test like the present.
I checked the kitchen. It was clean, modern, neatly organized. Even the salt and pepper shakers were in their places. I opened the refrigerator, just out of curiosity, and found regimental model-home organization. All the labels were turned outward. Vegetables in the lettuce crisper wouldn’t have dared to be less than perky.
Creepy.
The one interesting thing about it was that she had a secret stock of mint chocolate chip ice cream stuffed in the back of the freezer. Premium stuff, not the skim low-fat artificial sweetener crap. I took the carton out and weighed it. Half-empty. It wasn’t Kevin’s. He wouldn’t have cared whether or not anybody saw it, and I suspected the kid had never left an ice cream carton half-empty in his life.
I put everything back and proceeded down the hallway. An extra bedroom turned out to be an office. Everything was in files and folders, neat as an office supply store. No photos. In fact, she had no photos anywhere in the house that I’d seen. The art was all generic, carefully chosen to make absolutely no impression on anybody. I left the office. Three doors left—one was a bathroom, and as much as I’d hated Patrick’s trashy Wal-Mart happy faces in his loo, this one was worse. Ducks. Why did it have to be ducks?
The room it opened into was the master bedroom. I admit it, I was scared to go, but I couldn’t mist;
Kevin had specifically forbidden me to do it. I eased the door open slowly, one inch at a time, alert for giveaway creaks.
I needn’t have bothered. She wasn’t in there. The bedroom was clean and soulless as a hotel room. Didn’t look like a place to let loose unrestrained passion, or any passion at all, come to think of it.
That left the last room. I took hold of the doorknob and felt something. A kind of vibration, a warning…
I eased open the door and stepped inside.
The room had started life as a converted garage, then been gentrified with faux wood paneling and plush carpeting. Nothing much in it, but there was an aura to this place like nothing I’d ever felt before. Inanimate objects soak up energy, and that energy becomes visible in Oversight. The place looked dead normal, down here in the real world, but when I blinked and shifted into Oversight the real story came out. Red, rancid glows from the walls. Rotting greens. Pus-dull yellows. This place had seen suffering, and horror. It reminded me of Luminol, the stuff the police use to bring out old bloodstains… the ghost of evil, shining out of the darkness. Pain never dies completely, and this room was suffering.
David stood in the center of it, motionless, blank as a snowfield. He still retained his dark-copper hair, but it was shorter now, revealing the hard lines of his cheekbones, the strength of his face. The round glasses were gone. His eyes had gone dark. Very, very dark.
He was wearing black leather—pants, jacket, all of it looking butter soft and more than a little sexy. More than a little dangerous, too. Frightening. I wondered if she hadn’t actually expressed something essentially true about him that I’d never really quite grasped before… because David now looked like a predator.
Yvette walked a slow circle around him. There was something feline about the way she moved, both in the graceful sway of it and the predatory fascination.
Over the pulsing, thread-thin silver cord, I whispered his name. The dark eyes shifted and focused on me. I’d moved out of the doorway into a corner, shutting the door behind me; Yvette glanced toward me but saw nothing. David continued to stare.
Get out, he whispered to me over the silvery thread connecting us. I felt the warmth wrapping around me like an embrace. Please. You can’t help me.
I’m not going anywhere. An echo of the pledge he’d made to me. I said it even though I was terrified to watch this, terrified that I couldn’t do anything to help.
Yvette was holding the bottle in one hand, swinging it carelessly. Taunting him. Even if she dropped it, the carpet would break the fall; she’d have to throw it hard at the wall to even crack it. Still. If I could catch it on the upswing, it was possible I could help that along…
She froze in midstep. Her head snapped around, searching corners. She’d sensed something. How? I was sure I’d done it right…
“David?” she asked in that sweet, purring voice. “Someone here?” No answer. She understood why, unlike Kevin, and kept going without a pause. “Someone here? Someone here?”
I felt the compulsion click in, even across the room. David said, “Yes.”
“Show me where.”
He pointed. Right back at her. Yvette smiled. “Clever boy. Are we going to play these same tired games again? I thought you knew by now that I don’t tolerate that kind of thing.”
He lowered his hand to his side. She leaned forward and kissed him. Long, hard, hot. The same sultry, meaningless dance she’d done at Patrick’s apartment, with Lewis. She was professional at it, I had to give her that much. “I still think there’s somebody here,” she said when she pulled back for air. David remained still, blank-faced, unresponsive as a store mannequin. “Maybe that little silver-eyed friend of yours? Well. I’ve never minded an audience, I have to say, and you always seemed to perform better in front of one.”
Bitch.
There had to be something I could do.
She unzipped the black leather jacket, slowly, sliding her hands inside on the warm gold skin. I gritted my teeth. You can’t hurt my mother. Kevin had given me that command. Since he hadn’t been specific enough about his command to kill her, the two orders were floating around in limbo, the first one still applying. I wanted to wrap my hand around her throat and squeeze until she came apart, but I wasn’t sure I should even try it. And trying and failing would be far worse, just now.
“Take that off,” she told him. He stripped off the jacket and let it fall in a glistening heap to the floor. “You know what I want, David. What I always want.”
Oh, I had a pretty good idea, too. Or thought I did.
He proved me wrong.
I watched, sickened, as he reached out for her….. grabbed her by the hair, and slammed her face down on the carpet.
Still no change in him. Controlled, calm, utterly emotionless.
Oh God.
He rolled her over, and the flushed, breathless excitement on her face said it all. No wonder this place reeked of sickness. Yvette was one very sick lady.
I dropped the concealment. She spotted me instantly over David’s shoulder as I walked slowly forward, and the insane glee in her eyes was almost as nauseating as what she was about to force David to do. I remembered the dream, David’s desperate attempt to make Jonathan understand. It’s rape.
“I thought you were there,” she said. “Excellent. Maybe I’ll have you join us.”
“David,” I said calmly. “Would you like for me to do something about this?”
He couldn’t speak, of course. Couldn’t do anything. He was fixed on her, and I thought I read utter despair in those dark, alien eyes.
“What do you imagine you can do?” Yvette asked me, sugar sweet, looking ravishingly beautiful spread out on the floor. So very pretty. So very twisted. “Other than admire his technique.”
I crossed my arms and maintained my cool. “Well, I could do what your son suggested and kill you. What do you think?”
She froze, staring up at me, and her face was for a few seconds comically surprised. “You’re lying.”
“Well, yes, we Djinn do that. Believe me or not.”
I shrugged to show the depth of my not-caring. “Suit yourself.”
I looked at David, who was still frozen, waiting for her command. Leashed, but far from tame. She got up, still watching me, and put her hand on his shoulder to bring him up with her. Slid it in a proprietary way along the warm glory of his skin, up his neck, over a well-shaped ear, to dig her fingers luxuriously into his hair. No protest from him, and no fl
inch. I knew he had more latitude than that—didn’t he? — but he wasn’t refusing anything from her. Maybe she’d already given that command before I came on the scene. Or maybe he was drawing her in, making her careless.
I hoped.
“Did he used to be yours?” she asked me, and made the hand into a fist, jerking his head sideways toward her. Still no change of expression from him. I tried to listen, to see if he was sending me any whispers along the shared bond between us, but all I heard was silence. He’d gone deep, and far away from me. What was left might be something I didn’t know and couldn’t count on.
“I don’t own people,” I said. God, I sounded self-righteous. I decided that was okay, because I felt pretty self-righteous, too. “We freed the slaves in this country, or did you flunk history along with your sanity test?”
She turned and looked at David, pulled his head closer to hers and whispered something in his ear, then turned back to me, cheek pressed against his.
They both smiled. I felt a cold streak form along my spine, felt goosebumps rising under it, because those smiles were soulless, and dead, and dreaming of something awful. I remembered David smiling at me, the day I’d met him on the road after I’d spun the car out in a cloud of dust. I remembered the sharp, intelligent wit in those beautiful eyes. I remembered his skin, waking and shivering at my touch.
She couldn’t own any of that. What she did own was a shell. Skin. A ghost.
I kept telling myself that, but I couldn’t stop the sick, awful horror of this from threatening to choke me. Her hands were still moving on David. I wanted to rip them off at the wrists.
“My little Kevin finally grew some balls? You’re bluffing, sweetie pie. He couldn’t.”
I looked around the room. “He’s been in here, hasn’t he?” No answer. Yvette sat up. Her blouse had popped a couple of buttons, but the view didn’t impress me. “You and little Kevin, playing games. How heartwarming. And you think he wouldn’t want you dead? Honey, I just met you and I so want you dead.”
“So you come here and warn me?” She was regaining her composure. “Not likely.”
“I’m not all that eager to be Kevin’s little love slave, either,” I said. Everything I was saying had the ring of truth, because, well, it was. “I’m here to offer you a deal.”
She blinked. Deals were made from positions of power. We both knew I didn’t have any. “Don’t be ridiculous. You were entertaining for a few seconds, but you’re getting boring. I hurt things that bore me.”
When I smiled, I borrowed a trick from Rahel. Shark teeth. The flinch was well worth the discomfort. “There’s something you want more than David,” I said. I was guessing, of course, but with someone like her there was always something else. Toys got old the instant she had them in her hands, and besides, she’d had David before. No thrill of corruption there. “I can give it to you.”
She actually froze for a few seconds, considering me, and I saw the hot light of greed flicker in those green eyes. “And what exactly would that be?”
I shrugged. “You know well enough.” Ah, the Djinn talent for misdirection. Still serving me well, thank God. “If you want to waste me on a fool like your stepson, that’s your right. But think how much more you could accomplish, if you had me.”
She didn’t know. To her mind, I was already assuming legendary powers and proportions… a human reborn as a Djinn. She couldn’t have any idea of how much of a handicap that was. In fact, she probably thought that was what I was offering her. Life as a Djinn.
Over my dead body. Spirit. Whatever.
“Not very loyal to him, are you?” she asked. “Why should I think you’d be any more loyal to me?”
I shrugged. “The kid’s weak. You know that.” So was she, in a totally different way. Weak and greedy and sick. “You want to use David as some kind of cheap toy, that’s your prerogative. I just thought you should expand your horizons a little. The world’s a little wider than your bedroom.”
“You think I’m not ambitious?”
I didn’t have to fake the cynical smile. People like her were always ambitious.
“You made a mistake,” I said. “You could have had Lewis on your side. Now you’ve made a bad enemy. You’re going to need help to stay alive once he gets back on his feet.”
“Lewis?” she asked blankly, and let go of David. She’d completely forgotten about him.
“Lewis Levander Orwell? Yeah. That guy. The one you were rubbing like a magic charm to get your hands on me. You traded down, honey. Having Lewis would have been quite a feather in your cap. Talk about advancement… Only now, of course, you’re just the bimbo who bashed his head in, not the one who brought him back to the Wardens.”
That shook her. She’d had victory in her hands and walked away, and that had to hurt.
“You’re a lying, treacherous bitch,” she said, low in her throat, and wrapped her hand around David’s bare arm. “You really think you’re going to make a deal with me? I don’t deal with the likes of you. Ever. You serve me, or you suffer. Your choice.”
Kevin’s instructions to kill her were starting to look really, really tempting. Maybe if I just hurt her a lot… no, I’d seen the look on her face as David threw her down to the floor. She’d probably think it was foreplay.
“Serve me or suffer.”
“Already got a boss,” I said, and spread my hands. “Such as he is.”
She didn’t like being denied. “Take her,” she said, and released her hold on David.
He lunged for me, and God, he was strong. I yelped and tried to break free but his hands were crushing my arms, holding me still, shoving me back against that wall that, in Oversight, still dripped psychic blood. I wanted to mist away, but Kevin’s command earlier effectively prevented that. Trapped. Blue sparks zipped and swirled around me, thicker now, thick as a bag of glitter dropped from the ceiling. I blinked to clear my eyes. The things were swarming over David, too, clustering on his skin.
“David!” I whispered. Nothing sparked in the dark, dead eyes. I wondered what she’d told him to do to me. Wondered if it was anything I’d be able to stop. The things that had happened in this room… they crowded like phantoms, brushing at the edges of awareness, given strength by my fear and David’s aggression. I could almost see some of them, and just the hints made me feel weak and ill. What had David told me? She and Bad Bob had tastes in common.
Like Kevin, he’d been made to do things, probably here in this room. Things I couldn’t begin to understand, even with the ugly hints I’d already been given.
He twisted sharply at my arm, and I felt bone shatter with a dull cracking sound. Pain screamed through me, and in the next second it took on another horrible dimension as more bones in my body began to break. David’s doing. Destroying my physical form.
Instinct made me rebuild, but I couldn’t do it fast enough. His power ripped at me like a wild thing, shredding muscle, pulverizing bone, exploding vital organs.
I couldn’t even scream. My mouth opened, but all that came out of it was a hot bitter trickle of blood. I collapsed against him. Something in me kept struggling to reassert the template of my natural form, but he was stronger at this, better. He knew exactly how to hurt me.
He eased me down to the carpet. I lay struggling to move, feeling life energy leaking out of my broken body, and begged him silently to stop.
Yvette had moved closer. She leaned over him now, staring down at me, a blank-faced goddess with unclean eyes. “You know what I want,” she told him, and caressed his hair again, running the short auburn strands through her fingers. Petting him, the way she’d pet a particularly glorious and dangerous animal. “Make it last.”
He reached for my throat.
I felt another will impose itself over mine.
Right on cue, I vanished.
I collapsed in a heap, blind with shock and pain, and knew I was somewhere else. Where?
Ground-in, Day-Glo orange spots in the rug just inches from my face,
and a few more feet away, a grease-stained pizza box with its top partly open. A fat brown-shelled roach was scuttling along the top of it. It stopped to waggle its antennae inquiringly, then decided I was no threat to its conquest.
I couldn’t breathe. My lungs had been ruptured. My body—human, not human, whatever it was—was shutting down. That wouldn’t kill me, I sensed, but it would trap me inside of a dead shell. Not the way I wanted to escape, especially since it meant I wouldn’t be going anywhere.
“Yo!” Kevin’s pimply, pallid face appeared in my field of vision, pointed at a weird horizontal angle. He was bending over, staring at me. He waved a hand in front of my eyes, snapped his black-fingernailed, blunt-cut fingers. “You okay?”
I couldn’t answer. I slowly blinked my eyes, which was about all that my body was capable of doing for me at the moment.
“Oh,” he said, and straightened up. He prodded me with the toe of a particularly crappy-looking sneaker. This close, the smell of his feet was rancid, like mold-ridden buttermilk. “She got to you, huh? Yeah. Thought so. So, can you fix yourself?”
I blinked again. If ever I needed the kid to catch a clue…
“You can’t, can you? You need me for that.” He crouched down, staring down at me. “You need me. How about that? Not so high and mighty now, are we?” A thick finger prodded at my flaccid arm, and broken bones grated together. “What if I just leave you here, huh? What’s your game plan then, bitch? Lay there and bleed on me? Some fucking guardian you are.”
He sounded surly, but there was a tremor deep down. He was scared, all right. Not of me. He knew what she was capable of, and he wanted a friend. Protection. Something.
I tried to move my lips, but it was useless. I couldn’t even blink anymore. My eyes were fixed and staring. I heard my heart murmur one last, regretful beat, and then the blood in my veins slowed and stopped.
Death was anticlimactic, as a Djinn. I kept waiting for something, anything. I still had senses—I could hear the rustle of Kevin’s baggy jeans as he paced back and forth, could smell the unwashed aroma that eddied off of him through the room. Under the bed, the cockroach emerged from the pizza box with a couple of its friends, paused, and tried to figure me out. I must not have looked tasty. They went the other way.
