Heat Stroke E-Book

Rachel Caine

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Serie: Weather Warden
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 450

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The Wardens Association continues to protect the human race from extermination by climatic extremes. That is, when they're not turning on their own...Joanne's survived one challenge - technically - but now she's got a whole new set of problems. After being accused of murder and chased across the county - and killed - by a team charged with hunting down rogue Wardens, Joanne's human life is over. Reborn into Djinnhood, she has to master her enhanced powers whilst trying to avoid being 'claimed' by a human. With the help of a hot supernatural lover, things are looking bright - until they go wrong. There's trouble brewing, and it's not confined to River City...or to the Wardens. No, this trouble could kill every Djinn on the planet - and unleash a storm that could send humanity to join them. Armed with keen fashion sense, lime-green Manolo Blahniks and a really fast car, Joanne prepares to do battle with the enemy. Just one problem...it may be herself.

Leseprobe

Bottled Hell

It had control of the air. I couldn’t tell what it meant to do, but something bad was a good bet. Air’s heavy – it weighs several pounds per square inch. Increasing density can crush anything in its path.

I blocked, drawing heavy oxygen out of the elevator cage and slamming it together in a tightly packed ball between my spread hands. Rahel backed away, looking down at the swirling grey-blue mass I was holding.

I set it on fire with a spark from the electricity still crackling around in the air, and wrapped the whole thing in a shell of carbon dioxide, and lifted that bowling-ball-sized inferno in one hand and held it there. Hell in a bottle.

‘Bring it on!’ I yelled to the empty air. Voices didn’t carry in the altered atmosphere, but it didn’t matter, I knew it was getting the point. ‘Get your ass out here, you coward! Show yourself!’

The elevator shuddered to a halt.

Something black manifested itself in the corner as a shadow, then a stain, then a liquid-soft presence.

It wasn’t a Djinn. I didn’t know what it was, but evidently Rahel did. She lifted her left hand and pointed it at the thing, and her fingers sprouted claws – long, wickedly pointed things that gleamed harsh crystal in the overhead lights.

‘Ifrit,’ she hissed.

Contents

Title PagePreviously…Chapter OneChapter TwoChapter Three EpilogueAbout the AuthorAvailable from ALLISON & BUSBYCopyright

Heat Stroke

Book Two of the Weather Warden series

RACHEL CAINE

Said the Lion to the Lioness – ‘When you are amber dust –

No more a raging fire like the heat of the Sun

(No liking but all lust) –

Remember still the flowering of the amber blood and bone,

The rippling of bright muscles like a sea,

Remember the rose-prickles of bright paws

Though we shall mate no more

Till the fire of that sun the heart and the moon-cold bone are one.’

Said the Skeleton lying upon the sands of Time –

‘The great gold planet that is the mourning heat of the Sun

Is greater than all gold, more powerful

Than the tawny body of a Lion that fire consumes

Like all that grows or leaps…so is the heart

More powerful than all dust. Once I was Hercules

Or Samson, strong as the pillars of the seas:

But the flames of the heart consumed me, and the mind

Is but a foolish wind.’

EDITH SITWELL, ‘HEART AND MIND’

Previously…

My name is Joanne Baldwin, and I used to control the weather.

No, really. I was a member of the Weather Wardens. You probably aren’t personally acquainted with them, but they keep you from getting fried by lightning (mostly), swept away by floods (sometimes), and killed by tornadoes (occasionally). We try to do all that stuff. Sometimes we even succeed.

But I ran into something bad – something that threatened to destroy me from the inside out – and when the Wardens turned against me too, I ran for my life. I spent a memorable week looking for a man named Lewis Levander Orwell, who I thought just might be able to save my life. I picked up a friend named David along the way, who turned out to be way more then he seemed.

I found Lewis. It didn’t help. I died.

Luckily for me, David didn’t let it end there. But now I’m still on the run – only now I’m one of them. A Djinn.

At least I still have a really fast car… 

Chapter One

There was a storm brewing over Church Falls, Oklahoma. Blue-black clouds, churning and boiling in lazy slow motion, stitched through with lightning the colour of butane flames. It had a certain instinctual menace, but it was really just a baby, all attitude and no experience. I watched it on the aetheric plane as the rain inside of it was tossed violently up into the mesosphere, frozen by the extreme cold, fell back down to gather more moisture on the way. Rinse and repeat. The classic recipe for hail.

Circular motion inside the thing. It was more of a feeling I had than anything I could see, but I didn’t doubt it for a second; after years of overseeing the weather, I vibrated on frequencies that didn’t require seeing to believe.

I gathered power around me like a glittering warm cloak, and reached out for—

‘Stop.’

My power slammed into an invisible wall and bounced off. I yelped, dropped back into human reality with a heavy thud and realised I’d almost driven Mona off the road. Mona was a 1997 Dodge Viper GTS, midnight blue, and I was driving her well the hell in excess of the speed limit, which was just the way I liked it. I controlled the swerve, glanced down at the speedometer and edged another five miles an hour out of the accelerator. Mona’s purr changed to an interested, low-throated growl.

‘Don’t ever do that when I’m breaking a century on the interstate,’ I snapped at the guy who’d put up that wall I’d just slammed into. ‘And jeez, sensitive much? I was just giving things a little push. For the better.’

The guy’s name was David. He settled himself more comfortably against the passenger side window, and said without opening his eyes, ‘You’re meddling. You got bored.’

‘Well, yeah.’ Because driving in Oklahoma is not exactly the world’s most exciting occupation. ‘And?’

‘And you can’t do that anymore.’ That meaning adjust the weather to suit myself, apparently.

‘Why not?’

His lips twitched and pressed a smile into submission. ‘Because you’ll attract attention.’

‘And the fact I’m barrelling down the freeway at over a hundred…?’

‘You know what I mean. And by the way, you should slow down.’

I sighed. ‘You’re kidding me. This is coasting. This is little old lady speed.’

‘NASCAR drivers would have heart attacks. Slow down before we get a ticket.’

‘Chicken.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed solemnly. ‘You frighten me.’

I downshifted, slipped Mona in behind an eighteen-wheeler grinding hell-for-leather east toward Okmulgee and parts beyond, and watched the RPMs fall. Mona grumbled. She didn’t like speed limits. Neither did I. Hell, the truth is that I’d never met any kind of limit I liked. Back in the good old times before, well, yesterday, when my name was still Joanne Baldwin and I was human, I’d been a Weather Warden. A card-carrying member of the Wardens Association, the international brotherhood of people in charge of keeping Mother Nature from exterminating the human race. I’d been in the business of controlling wind, waves, and storms. Being an adrenalin junkie goes with the territory.

The fact that I was still an adrenalin junkie was surprising, because strictly speaking, I no longer had a real human body, or real human adrenalin to go with it. So how did it work that I still felt all the same human impulses as before? I didn’t want to think about it too much, but I kept coming back to the fact that I’d died. Last mortal thing I remembered, I’d been a battleground for two demons tearing me apart, and then I’d – metaphorically speaking – opened my eyes on a whole new world, with whole new rules. Because David had made me a Djinn. You know, Arabian Nights, lamp, granter of wishes? That kind. Only I wasn’t imprisoned in a lamp, or (more appropriately) a bottle; I was free-range. Masterless.

Cool, but scary. Masterless, I was vulnerable, and I knew it.

‘Hey,’ I said out loud, and glanced away from the road to look at my travelling companion. Dear God, he was gorgeous. When I’d first met him he’d been masquerading as a regular guy, but even then he’d been damn skippy fine. In what I’d come to realise was his natural Djinn form, he was damn skippy fine to the power of ten. Soft auburn hair worn just a little too long for the current military-short styles. Eyes like molten bronze. Warm golden skin that stretched velvet soft over a strong chest, perfectly sculpted biceps, a flat stomach… My hands had a Braille memory that made me warm and melty inside.

Without opening those magical eyes, he asked, ‘Hey, what?’ I’d forgotten I’d said anything. I scrambled to drag my brain back to more intellectual pursuits.

‘Still waiting for a plan, if it doesn’t disturb your beauty sleep.’ I kept the tone firmly in the bitchy range, because if I wasn’t careful I might start with a whole breathless I-don’t-deserve-you routine, and that would cost me cool points. ‘We’re still heading east, by the way.’

‘Fine,’ he said, and adjusted his leaning position slightly to get more comfortable against the window glass. ‘Just keep driving. Less than warp speed, if you can manage it.’

‘Warp speed? Great. A Trek fan.’ Not that I was surprised. Djinn seemed to delight in pop culture, so far as I could tell. ‘OK. Fine. I’ll drive boring.’

I glanced back at the road – good thing, I was seriously over the line and into head-on-collision territory – and steered back straight again before I checked the fuel gauge. Which brought up another point. ‘Can I stop for gas?’

‘You don’t need to.’

‘Um, this is a Viper, not a zillion-miles-to-the-gallon Earth Car. Believe me, we’ll need to. Soon.’

David extended one finger – still without cracking an eyelid – and pointed at the dial. I watched the needle climb, peg out at full, and quiver. ‘Won’t,’ he said.

‘O-K,’ I said. ‘East. Right. Until when?’

‘Until I think it’s safe to stop.’

‘You know, a little information in this partnership would really help make it, oh, say, a partnership.’

His lips twitched away from a smile, and his voice dipped down into octaves that resonated in deep, liquid areas of my body. ‘Are we partners?’

Dangerous territory. I wasn’t sure what we were, exactly, and I wasn’t sure I wanted him to tell me. He’d saved me; he’d taken the human part of me that had survived an attack by two demons, and transformed it into a Djinn. I hoped that didn’t make him my father. Talk about your Freudian issues. ‘OK, genius, I don’t know. You define it. What are we?’

He sighed. ‘I’d rather sleep than get into this right now.’

I sighed right back. ‘You know, I’m a little freaked out here. Dead, resurrected, got all these new sensations – talking would be good for me.’

‘What kind of new sensations?’ he asked. His voice was low, warm, gentle – ah, sensations. I was having them, all right. Loads of them.

I cleared my throat. ‘First of all, things don’t look right.’

‘Define right.’

‘The way they—’

‘—used to look,’ he finished for me. ‘You’ve got different eyes now, Joanne. You can choose how to look at things. It’s not just light on nerves anymore.’

‘Well, it’s too…bright.’ Understatement. The sun glared in through the polarised windows and shimmered like silk – it had a liquid quality to it, a real weight. ‘And I see way too much. Too far.’

Everything had…dimensions. Saturated colours, and a peculiar kind of history – I could sense where things had been, how long ago, where they’d come from, how they’d been made. A frightening blitz of knowledge. I was trying to shut it down, but it kept leaping up whenever I noticed something new. Like the gas gauge. Watching that quivering indicator, I knew it had been stamped out in a factory in Malaysia. I knew the hands of the person who’d last touched it. I had the queasy feeling that if I wanted to, I could follow his story all the way back through the line of his ancestors. Hell, I could trace the plastic back to the dinosaurs that had died in the tar pit to give petroleum its start.

David said, ‘All you have to do is focus.’

I controlled a flash of temper. ‘Focus? That’s your advice? News flash, Obi-Wan, you kinda suck at it.’

‘Do not.’ He opened his eyes, and they were autumn brown, human, and very tired. ‘Give me your hand.’

I took it off the gear shift and held it out. He wrapped warm fingers over mine, and something hot as sunlight flashed through me.

The horizon adjusted itself. Sunlight faded to normal brightness. The edges and dimensions and weight of things went back to human proportions.

‘There.’ He sounded even more tired this time. ‘Just keep driving.’

He let go of my hand. I wrapped it back around the gearshift for comfort and thought of a thousand questions, things like Why am I still breathing? and If I don’t have a heart, why is it pumping so hard? and Why me? Why save me?

I wasn’t sure I was ready for any of those answers, even if David had the energy to tell me. I wasn’t ready for anything more than the familiar, bone-deep throb of Mona’s tyres on the road, and the rush of the Viper running eagerly toward the horizon.

I had another question I didn’t want to ask, but it slipped out anyway. ‘We’re in trouble, aren’t we?’

This time, he did smile. Full, dark, and dangerous. ‘Figured that out, did you?’

‘People say I’m smart.’

‘I hope they say you’re lucky, too.’

‘Must be,’ I murmured. ‘How else do I explain you?’

Brown eyes opened, studied me for a few seconds, then drifted shut again. He said, just as softly, ‘Let’s pray you never have to.’

The car didn’t need gas, and I discovered that I didn’t need sleep – at least not for more than twenty-four hours. We blew through Tulsa, hit I-70 toward Chicago, bypassed Columbus, and eventually ended up on a turnpike in New Jersey. David slept. I drove. I was a little worried about mortal things like cop cars and tollbooths, but David kept us out of sight and out of mind. We occupied space, but to all intents and purposes, we were invisible.

Which was not such an advantage, I discovered, when you get into heavy commuter traffic. After about a dozen near misses, I pulled Mona over to the side of the road, stretched, and clicked off the engine. Metal ticked and popped – Mona wasn’t any kind of magical construct, she was just a plain old production car. OK, the fastest production car ever made, with a V10, 7990 cubic centimetres, 6000 RPM, and a top speed of over 260 miles per hour. But not magic.

And I’d been pushing her hard.

I rolled down the window, sucked in a breath of New Jersey air laden with an oily taste of exhaust, and watched the sun come up over the trees. There was something magical about that, all right – the second morning of my new life. And the sun was beautiful. A vivid golden fire in the sky, trailing rays across an intense, empty blue. No clouds. I could feel the potential for clouds up there – dust particles and pollution hanging lazily in the air, positive and negative charges constantly shoving and jostling for position. Once the conditions came together, those dust particles would get similar charges and start attracting microscopic drops of moisture. Like calls to like. Moisture thickens, droplets form, clouds mass. Once the droplets get too heavy to stay airborne, they fall. Simple physics. And yet there was something seductive and magical about it, too, as magical as the idea that chemical compounds grow into human beings who walk and talk and dream.

I watched a commercial jet embroider the clear blue sky, heading west, and stretched my senses out. There wasn’t any limit to what I could know, if I wanted… I could touch the plane, the cold silver skin, the people inside with all their annoyances and fears and boredom and secret delights. Two people who didn’t know each other were both thinking about joining the mile high club. I wished them luck in finding each other.

I sucked in another breath and stretched – my human-feeling body still liked the sensation, even though it wasn’t tired, wasn’t thirsty or hungry or in need of bathroom facilities – and turned to David…

Who was awake and watching me. His eyes weren’t brown now, they were sun-sparked copper, deep and gold-flecked, entirely inhuman. He was too beautiful to be possible in anything but dreams.

The car shuddered as three eighteen-wheelers blew past and slammed wind gusts into us – a rude reminder that it wasn’t a dream, after all. Not that reality was looking all that bad.

‘What now?’ I asked. I wasn’t just asking about driving directions, and David knew it. He reached out and captured my hand, looked down at it, rubbed a thumb light and warm as breath across my knuckles.

‘There are some things I need to teach you.’

And there went the perv-cam again, showing me all the different things he probably didn’t mean…

‘So we should get a room,’ he finished, and when he met my eyes again, the heart I didn’t really have skipped a beat or two.

‘Oh,’ I breathed. ‘A room. Sure. Absolutely.’

He kept hold of my hand, and his index finger traced light whorls over my palm, teasing what I supposed wasn’t really a lifeline anymore. The finger moved slowly up over the translucent skin of my wrist, waking shivers. God. I didn’t even mean to, but somehow I was seeing him on the aetheric level, that altered plane of reality where certain people, like Wardens and Djinn, can read energy patterns and see things in an entirely different spectrum.

He was pure fire, shifting and flaring and burning with the intensity of a star.

‘You’re feeling better,’ I said. No way to read expressions, on the aetheric, but I could almost feel the shape of his smile.

‘A little,’ he agreed. ‘And you do have things to learn.’

‘You’re going to teach me?’

His voice went deep and husky. ‘Absolutely. As soon as we have some privacy.’

I retrieved my hand, jammed Mona into first gear, and peeled rubber.

We picked an upper-class hotel in Manhattan, valeted Mona into a parking garage with rates so high it had to be run by the Mafia. I wondered how much ransom we were going to have to pay Guido to get her back. We strolled into the high-class marble and mahogany lobby brazenly unconcerned by our lack of luggage.

‘Wow,’ I said, and looked around appreciatively. ‘Sweet.’ It had that old-rich ambiance that most places try to create with knock-off antiques and reproduction rugs, but as I trailed my fingers over a mahogany side table I could feel the depth of history in it, stretching back to the generations of maids who’d polished it, to the eighteenth-century worker who’d planed the wood, to the tree that stood tall in the forest.

Nothing fake about this place. Well, OK, the couches were modern, but you have to prefer comfort over authenticity in some things. The giant Persian rug was certainly real enough to make up the difference.

The place smelt of that best incense of all – old money.

David waited in line patiently at the long marble counter while the business travellers ahead of him presented American Express cards and listened to voicemail on cell phones. A thought occurred to me, and I tugged at the sleeve of his olive drab coat. ‘Hey. Why—’

‘—check in?’ he finished for me. ‘Two reasons. First, it’s easier, and you’ll find that the less power you use unnecessarily, the better off you are. Second, I don’t think you’re ready to be living my life quite yet. One step at a time.’

He reached into his pocket and came out with an American Express card. I blinked at it. It said DAVID L PRINCE in raised letters. ‘Cool. Is that real?’

I said it too loudly.

His eyes widened behind concealing little round glasses. ‘Not a great question when we’re about to use it to pay for the room, is it?’

Oh. I’d been figuring we were still in some unnoticeable fog, but clearly not; the guy in line ahead of me was distracted enough from the cell phone glued to his ear to throw us a suspicious look. True, we didn’t have the glossy spa-treated look of the rich, or the unlimited-expense-account confidence of the corporate, but we weren’t exactly looking homeless, either. I shot him a sarcastic smile. He turned back to his business.

‘Sorry,’ I said, more softly, to David. ‘Obviously, yes, it’s real, of course. I mean – hell, I don’t know what I mean. Sorry. Um…where do they send the bills?’

‘Not to me.’

His smile made my train of thought derail and crash. Cell Phone Guy in front of us picked up his room key and got out of line; David and I moved up to the counter, where a highly polished young lady too nice for New York did all the check-in things, issued us plastic key cards, and fired off amenities too fast for me to follow. A uniformed bellman veered out of our path when he saw we were bag-free and gave us a look that meant he was no stranger to couples arriving for short, intense bursts of time.

David took my arm and walked me to the elevators, across the huge Persian rug, past a silent piano and a muted big-screen TV that was showing some morning show with perfect people interviewing more perfect people. We rode the elevator with Cell Phone Guy, who was still connected and chatting about market share and a corporate vice president’s affair with the wife of a global board member. The latter sounded interesting. As it happened, we were both on the same floor – twelve – and he looked at us like we might be after his wallet or his life, but before long he peeled away to a room and we continued on, down a long hallway and to a bright-polished wooden door with the number 1215 on it.

David didn’t bother with the key card. He touched the door with his finger, and it just swung open.

I looked at him. ‘What happened to “the less you use, the better”?’

He scooped me up in his arms and carried me over the threshold. Gravity slipped sideways, and I put my arms around his neck until he settled me down with my feet on the carpet.

‘What was that for?’ I asked. He felt fever-hot against me, and those eyes – God. Intense, focused, hungry.

‘Luck,’ he said, and kissed me. I felt instant heat slam through me, liquefying me in equal proportion to how incredibly real he felt against me, and I felt a feverish urge to be naked with this man, right now, to be sure that all of this wasn’t just a particularly lovely dream on the way to the grave and oh God his hands burnt right through my clothes like they weren’t there.

And then, as his palms glided up my sides, wrinkling fabric, the cloth melted away and disappeared, and then it was just flesh, and fire, and the taste of David’s lips and tongue. I felt myself burn and go faint with heat stroke, revived with the cool relief of his skin.

And if it was a dream, it was the best I’d ever had.

In the morning, we got down to the work of teaching me to be a Djinn.

I’m not what you could call spiritual, so learning how to be spiritual – in the true spirit sense of the word – was a challenge. Sure, I’d been a Warden, but calling the wind and calming storms was all about science for me. I understood it in the way a child of the atomic age would, which meant subatomic particles and chaos theory and wave motion. Hell, I’d been a weather-controlling bureaucrat, when you came right down to it. Nothing that you might call preparation for being granted power on a legendary scale.

David started me out with that night of incredible, unbelievable sex, and the next morning when I woke up it felt like it was still going on. I mean, senses locked wide open. Chakras at full power. Every touch, every taste, every random sensation echoed through me like a struck bell. It was fun at first.

Then it got to be painful.

‘Turn it off,’ I groaned, and hid my head under a down pillow. David’s fingers traced the bumps of my spine, dragging down the sheet in slow, cool increments. ‘Oh, God, please, I can’t stand it!’

He made a sound, low in his throat, and let his touch glide down over my buttocks, down the backs of my thighs. ‘You’ll need to learn how to shut off your senses,’ he said. ‘Can’t walk around like this all the time, can you?’

I knotted my fists in the pillow and screamed into the mattress. Not that he was particularly trying to drive me nuts, it was just part of the overload. Everything was sexual. The sheet, sliding over the backs of my legs. His fingertips firing nerves. The smell of him, the taste of him still tingling on my lips, the sound of his breath in my ear.

‘I don’t know how,’ I whispered, when I’d stopped shaking. ‘Tell me how.’

‘You have to learn how to choose what level of sensation and perception to use,’ he said. ‘To start with, I want you to meditate and block out what’s around you.’

‘Meditate?’ I took my head out from under the pillow, shook dark hair back from my face, and rolled over on my side to look at him. ‘Excuse me, but the closest I ever got to having a spiritual awakening was dating a yoga instructor. Once.’

David propped himself up on one elbow, looking down at me. No mistaking it; he was enjoying this a little too much. And I was enjoying the bird’s-wing graceful sweep of his pecs. ‘You’re underestimating yourself. You’re highly spiritual, Joanne. You just don’t know it. Just clear your mind and meditate.’

Meditate. Right. I took a deep breath and tried to relax muscles I no longer actually had. Which was more than a little confusing, even in the abstract.

‘Focus,’ David’s voice said next to my ear, and of course, it was instantly impossible to stay anything like on track. His voice got inside me in places that nice girls don’t mention. His breath stirred warm on my skin, and there went that potential orgasm thing again, a little earthquake of sheer pleasure that completely sabotaged any chance of achieving my centre.

I didn’t open my eyes, but I said, ‘I could focus a lot better if you were somewhere else.’

‘Sorry.’ He didn’t sound sorry. That velvet-smooth tenor sounded smug. ‘I’ll be quiet.’

He was. I concentrated on visualising something calming – in my case, it was the ocean – but the whole wave-and-surf vibe fell apart when I heard him rustling pages. I sighed and opened my eyes, propped myself up on my elbows, and looked over at him.

He was lying next to me in bed, propped up, reading the newspaper.

‘You’re kidding,’ I said. He gave me one of those What? looks and went back to the Metro section. ‘I’m trying to meditate here! Give me a break. At least help.’

‘I am helping,’ he said. ‘I’m distracting myself so I don’t distract you.’

I glared. It had absolutely no effect. He sighed, put the paper at half-staff, and looked at me gravely over newsprint. ‘Fine. What would you like me to do?’

‘I don’t know! Something!’

‘I can’t meditate for you, Joanne.’

‘Well, you can…encourage me!’

He folded the New York Times and put it down on the side table. ‘Oh, I’d like to encourage you. I just don’t think it would help you focus. Unless…’

‘What?’ I asked. He turned on his side and reached out, trailed a single fingertip over the curve of my shoulder and down my arm. Little earthquakes, building to a major seismic event inside…

‘Never mind.’ It wasn’t nothing, I could tell. He wasn’t trying to distract me, he really was trying to distract himself. From me. ‘Meditate for another half hour, and I’ll tell you.

My entire attention fixed on the square half-inch of skin his finger was touching. ‘Half an hour?’

‘Half an hour.’

‘I can do that.’

Sheer bravado, but now I was motivated. I flopped back flat on the pillow, closed my eyes, and concentrated hard on that ocean…blue-green waves rolling in from a misty horizon…churning to pale lace as they crashed on the shore…whispers of mist cool on my skin…a fine, endless white sand beach that glittered in sunlight…

I felt like I was actually achieving something – clearing my mind of the idea of him lying beside me, anyway – when he blew it for me by talking again.

‘Joanne,’ he said. ‘Quit hovering.’

I opened my eyes and realised I was looking at the motel room ceiling. White spackled moonscape broken up by a dusty ice sculpture of a light fixture two inches from my nose.

Oh. When he said hovering, he meant hovering. As in seven feet above the bed.

‘Crap,’ I said, and looked over my shoulder. ‘I went all Exorcist.’

‘Actually, it wasn’t a bad try. I felt you go quiet for a few minutes.’

‘How many minutes?’ I rotated myself in mid-air to face him. Ha! Managed it gracefully, in a controlled weightless spin, which was nice; control had been kind of a problem. Obviously. My hair spoilt the effect by flopping forward, and I tried shoving it back over my shoulders. It repeated the flopping thing.

‘Let’s call it…thirty.’ David’s smile turned dangerously amused, and he reached down and pulled the sheet away from the rest of him. I stopped messing with my hair and lived for the moment, because like me, David hadn’t bothered with pyjamas. He patted the Joanne-shaped hollow in the bed next to him.

I tried to get down. Really. But whatever switch I’d thrown to get up here, I couldn’t seem to find it again. I kept hovering. ‘Um, not that I’m not motivated, but…’

‘You’re stuck.’

‘Kind of a yes, bordering on an oh, crap.’ I tried to make it funny, but truth was, it scared me. All this power, none of the control I so obviously needed just to get through what was for David nothing but an autonomic function. ‘You forgot to tell me about the gravity-being-optional part of this exercise.’

He levitated up, an inch at a time, and when he was still a foot away I felt the summer heat of his skin. He smelt like warm cinnamon and peaches, and it made my mouth water and my body go golden.

He stopped with a cool two-inch cushion of air between us.

‘I didn’t forget,’ he said. ‘I just didn’t think you’d be able to do this for a while. Don’t worry, it’s normal.’

‘Normal? I’m halfway into the bed of the guy upstairs!’

‘I’d rather you were more than halfway into the bed down here.’ That look on his face – naked, powerful, proprietary – sent a pulse of sheer need through me.

‘Tease,’ I said. He made a sound in his throat that wasn’t quite a laugh.

‘Come back to bed and we’ll see.’ He lowered himself by a couple of inches. I tried to follow. Failed. He drifted back up. ‘Want me to help you?’

‘No. Yes. Hell. I don’t know, what’s the right answer?’

His hand touched my face and drew a slow line of fire down my neck to my collarbone. ‘You have to learn to stay in the body, Jo. We can’t exactly do this out in public.’

‘News flash. You do this out in public and you draw attention for more than defying gravity.’ I tried to sound nonchalant, but it was tough with all the combustion inside me. God. I couldn’t seem to get used to the hypersensitive nature of being a Djinn. It was the little things that got me – the sharp-edged beauty of how things looked, the intensity of how they felt, tasted, smelt, sounded. The human world was so real. Sometimes it was so real it made me weep. I couldn’t decide if it was like living in a perpetual state of orgasm, or being perpetually stoned; maybe both.

The casual touch of David’s fingers on my skin was enough to start chain reactions of pleasure deep inside, and I caught my breath and closed my eyes as his touch moved down, glided over the curve of my breast.

‘Come back to bed,’ he murmured, and his lips brushed mine when he spoke.

‘I can’t.’ Literally.

‘Maybe it’s that you don’t want to.’

‘Oh, believe me, that’s so very not the problem.’

His warm lips melted against mine like silk in the sun, and his hands did things that ought to be illegal, and mandatory for every woman in the world to experience daily. Suddenly we were skin to skin, and my mind whited out.

He slowly rotated us until gravity was cradling my back. ‘You need to learn to stay in the body, no matter what happens. Think you can do that?’

‘Try me.’

Oh, that smile. It could melt titanium. ‘I intend to.’

He kissed me again, and this time there was nothing sweet and nice about it; this was dark and serious and intense, full of hunger and need. Oh yeah, this was the difference between human and Djinn.

Intensity.

I felt my whole body catch fire, responding, and arched against him. It felt so right, so perfect, and he held me to him with one hand on the back of my head, one in the small of my back as he dropped burning kisses on my neck, my breasts, the aching points of my nipples.

Oh, God.

He whispered something to me in a language I didn’t know, but it didn’t matter; some languages are translated in the skin, not the mind. If living as a Djinn is like being in a perpetual state of orgasm, you can imagine how much better it gets when you approach the real thing.

I found the switch, and we fell back to the bed with a solid, vibrating thump that rattled the headboard.

It was a good start.

And on the fifth day of my new life, I had a lovely funeral.

Well, it wasn’t really a funeral – you need a body for a funeral, preferably an open casket, and the fire hadn’t left a whole lot for reconstructive purposes. The Wardens Association was too discreet to hold the service in the UN Building – the corporate offices – so they rented a nice big ballroom over at the Drake Hotel and sent out invitations to three or four hundred Wardens. I heard about it because David heard about it, through whatever arcane grapevine the Djinn had in place.

‘—but you’re not going,’ he finished, as we split a small pot of room service coffee. Some vices never go away, even after death. Coffee. Sex. Alcohol. Hell, if I was a smoker, I figure I would’ve still been lighting up and griping about the price of a carton.

I stirred cream into my coffee. David disapproved of cream; it was obvious from the concerned frown that formed between his eyebrows. ‘I’m not going?’ I echoed it mildly, but his attention immediately shifted from my poor coffee etiquette to what I was saying.

‘No,’ he said. ‘And we’re not going to fight about that, right?’ His eyebrows went up, then down.

‘Of course not,’ I said, and smiled as I blew gentle ripples on the au lait surface. We were sitting cross-legged on the bed, sheets draped over sensitive bits more because of hot coffee prudence than modesty. ‘That’s a classic guy mistake, by the way.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Sleeping with me, then thinking you can tell me what to do.’

Those eyebrows, so expressive. They pulled together again, threatened to close ranks across his forehead. ‘I didn’t—’

‘Did.’

‘—sleep with you. In fact.’

‘Common usage. Did too.’

‘Didn’t.’

‘Did too.’

He held up one hand, palm out. ‘OK, I didn’t mean it that way. I just meant that it’s too dangerous for you to go out among humans right now. Especially Wardens.’

‘And therefore, according to you, I’m not going. Because it’s too dangerous.’

‘Therefore,’ he agreed. We sipped coffee. There’s something oddly relaxing about the smell – rich, nutty, the very essence of the earth – and I breathed it in and just savoured the moment. Another great advantage of being Djinn – I didn’t need a shower. No dead skin cells needing to be sloughed, no bacterial processes breaking them down and creating stink. Djinn are clean and whatever smells we have are something we choose, on some subconscious level. Mine, I figured, was a kind of jasmine. Something pale and fragrant, with an undertone of obsession.

David finally sighed and set down his cup with a well-bred tinkle of china. ‘So therefore you’re going to completely blow off the warning and go anyway, no matter what I say, right?’

I tried to be sober, but my mouth wouldn’t obey me; it curved into a provocative smile. ‘Figured that out all by yourself?’

He was frowning again. God, he was cute when he frowned. I wanted to lean over and kiss away that crease between his eyebrows. ‘Please listen to me. I’m serious. It’s too dangerous.’

‘Yeah, I got that from the part where you said it was too dangerous.’

‘And?’

‘And…it’s still my choice, unless you’re planning on attempting to run my life for the rest of eternity, which I don’t think either of us would like. If you don’t want me to go, you’ll have to be a lot more specific than “It’s too dangerous.” Everything I’ve done since I was born has been dangerous.’

He had saved my life, and there was this very definite relationship forming between us, but I felt it was important to get the ground rules straight. I took a mouthful of rich hazelnut-flavoured brew, softened with that creamy edge, and swished it around my tongue. Intense. I felt like if I concentrated, I could follow the beans all the way back to the rich Colombian ground that nurtured them – back to the plant that bore them – back through time, all the generations. Same with the hazelnuts, the water… Even the china cup had memories attached. Good, bad, happy, frightening. I didn’t have to concentrate to sense them swirling like the cream in the coffee.

So much history in the world. So many possibilities for the future. Why was it that as a human I’d never understood any of it?

‘Jo?’ David. He was staring at me with those rich orange-flecked brown eyes. Had he been talking? Yeah, probably. I’d spaced. ‘I’m not talking about physical danger. There’s little that can hurt you now, but just being strong isn’t everything. You have to learn how to use that strength. And until you do, it’s not a good idea for you to put yourself in situations where you might have to…’

‘Act like a Djinn?’

He looked relieved. ‘Exactly.’

‘What if I just act like a normal person?’

‘Not a good idea.’

‘Because?’

He got up and walked over to the windows. As he eased aside the curtain, a shaft of sunlight speared in and glittered on his skin; he pulled in a deep breath that I heard all the way from the bed and stood there, staring out, for a long time.

My turn to give him a worried prompt. ‘David?’

He half turned and gave me a sweet, sad smile. ‘In case you haven’t noticed, you’re not a normal person. And if you get yourself into trouble, you could give away what you are. Once that happens, you’re no longer safe.’

‘Because I could get claimed.’

The smile died and went somewhere bad. ‘Exactly.’

David had been claimed twice that I knew about. Neither had been pleasant experiences. His last owner and operator had been…well, a former friend of mine – and before that he’d been at the mercy of a sweetheart of a guy named Bad Bob Biringanine. I knew from personal experience that David had done things in Bad Bob’s name that would turn anyone’s stomach. He’d had no choice in that. No choice in anything.

It was the horror he was trying to warn me about.

‘I’ll be careful,’ I said softly. ‘Come on, if you had the chance to see your own funeral, wouldn’t you take it?’

‘No,’ he said, and turned back to whatever view there was outside of that window – being New York City, probably not a hell of a lot other than buildings. The sunlight loved him. It glided over planes and curves, over smooth skin, and glittered like gold dust on soft curls of hair. He reached out and leant a hand against the window, reaching up toward the warmth. ‘Your human life’s over, Jo. Let it go. Focus on what’s next.’

There were so many people I’d left behind. My sister. Cousins. Family-by-choice from the Wardens, like Paul Giancarlo, my mentor. Like my friend Lewis Levander Orwell, the greatest Warden of all, whose life I’d saved at the cost of my own. We had a long and tangled history, me and Lewis – not so much love as longing. One of the great precepts of magic, that like calls to like. We’d gravitated together like opposite magnetic charges. Or possibly matter and antimatter. If not for David…

I realised, with a jolt of surprise, that I wanted to see Lewis again. Some part of me would always long for him. It wasn’t a part I ever wanted David to know about.

‘What’s next is that I let go of that life,’ I said aloud. ‘Which I can’t do without some kind of…goodbye. It’s as much a memorial for me as of me, right? So I should go.’

‘You just want to eavesdrop on what people are saying about you.’

Duh, who wouldn’t? I tried bribery. ‘They’ll probably have cookies. And punch. Maybe a nice champagne fountain.’

It was tough to bribe a Djinn. He wasn’t impressed. He kept looking out, face turned up toward the sun, eyes closed. After a few moments he said, ‘You’re going with or without me, aren’t you?’

‘Well, I’d rather go with you. Because, like you pointed out, it might not be safe.’

He shook his head and turned away from the window. I could almost see the glow radiating off of him, as if he’d stored it up from the touch of sunlight. The fierce glow of it warmed me across a small ocean of Berber carpet, through a white cotton duvet of goosedown.

I felt the surrender, but he didn’t say it in so many words. ‘You can’t go out like that,’ he said, and walked over.

‘Oh.’ I blinked down at myself and realised I hadn’t the vaguest idea of how to put my own clothes on – magically speaking. ‘A little help…?’

David put his hands on my shoulders, and I felt fabric settling down over my skin. Clothes. Black peachskin pants, a tailored peachskin jacket, a discreet white satin shirt. Low-heeled pumps on my feet. He bent and placed a warm, slow kiss on my lips, and I nearly – literally – melted.

When I drew back, he was dressed, too. Black suit, blue shirt, dark tie. Very natty. The round glasses he wore for public consumption were in place to conceal the power of his eyes, even though he’d dialled the colour down to something more human.

David was very, very good at playing mortal. Me…well, there was a reason I hadn’t tried to dress myself. I wasn’t even good at playing Djinn yet.

He produced a pair of sunglasses and handed them over. I put them on. ‘How do I look?’

‘Dangerous,’ he said soberly. ‘OK. Rules. You don’t talk to anyone, you don’t go off on your own. You do exactly what I tell you, when I tell you to do it. And most of all…’

‘Yeah?’

‘Don’t use any magic. Nothing. Understand?’

‘Sure.’

He offered his hand. I took it and unfolded myself from the bed, setting the empty coffee cup aside on the mahogany nightstand.

‘This is such a bad idea,’ he said, and sighed, and then…

…then we were somewhere else.

Somewhere dark. It smelt of cleaning products.

‘Um—’ I began.

‘Shhh.’ Hot lips brushed mine, delicate as sunlight. ‘I’m keeping us out of their awareness, but you need to stay out of the way. People won’t see you. Make sure you don’t run into them.’

‘Oh. Right.’

‘And don’t talk. They can still hear you.’

‘Right.’

‘And don’t touch anything.’

I didn’t bother to acknowledge that one. He must have taken it as a given, because the next second there was a crack of warm lemon yellow light, and a door opened, and we stepped out of a janitor’s closet onto a mezzanine. Big, sweeping staircase to the right heading down to an echoing marble lobby – a vast expanse of patterned carpeting that cost more than the gross national product of most South American countries. Lots of rooms, discreetly nameplated in brass. Uniformed staff, both men and women, stood at attention. They had the brushed, polished, pressed gleam of being well paid in the service of the rich.

David walked me across a no-man’s-land of floral burgundy. Past the Rockefeller Plaza Room and the Wall Street Board Room and the Broadway Room. At the end of the lobby, a narrow hallway spilt into a larger ante-room. Burgundy-uniformed security guards to either side. The babble of voices rising up like smoke into lightly clove-scented air.

Suddenly, I had a desire to stop and reconsider this plan. Suddenly it was all very…real.

‘Oh man,’ I murmured. David’s hand on my arm tightened. ‘I know. No talking.’

‘Shh,’ he agreed, lips next to my ear. I swallowed, nodded, and put my chin up.

We strolled right in between the two guards, who stayed focused somewhere off into the distance. David had explained to me once how much easier it was to just redirect attention than to actually become invisible; he’d demonstrated it pretty vividly once, in a hot tub in Oklahoma City. I wished I knew how he did it. Just one of the thousands of things I still needed to learn about being a Djinn.

The ante-room was large enough to hold about a hundred people comfortably, and it was at capacity. At first glance it looked like an office party, only people wore more black and the noise level was two decibels lower than normal. Big floral display at the polished mahogany doors at the end of the room, chrysanthemums and lilies and roses. A guest book next to them. Lots of people standing in line to sign.

David steered me expertly out of the path of a tall, thin woman in black I barely recognised – Earth Warden, Maria something, from the West Coast. She was talking to Ravi Subranavan, the Fire Warden who controlled the territory around Chicago.

Everywhere I looked, people I knew. Not many were what I’d call friends, but they’d been coworkers, at least. The cynical part of me noted that they’d shown up for free booze, but the truth was most of them had needed to make arrangements to be here – naming replacements, handing over power, enduring long drives or longer plane rides. A lot of hassle for a free glass or two of champagne, even if it was offered at the Drake.

I kept looking for the people I was hoping to see, but there was no sign of Paul Giancarlo or Lewis Orwell. I spotted Marion Bearheart sipping champagne with Shirl, one of her enforcement agents. Marion was a warm, kind, incredibly dangerous woman with the mandate to hunt down and kill rogue Wardens. Well, killing was a last resort, but she was not only prepared to do it, she was pretty damn good at it. Hell, she’d almost gotten me. And even with that bad memory, I still felt a little lift of spirits seeing her. She just had that kind of aura.

She looked recovered – well rested, neatly turned out in a black leather suede jacket, fringed and beaded. Blue jeans, boots. A turquoise squash blossom necklace big enough to be traditional in design, small enough to be elegant. She’d gotten some of the burnt ends trimmed off her long, straight, greying hair.

Shirl had cleaned up some of her punk make-up and gone for an almost sober outfit, but the piercings had stayed intact. Ah well. You can take the girl out of the mosh pit… No sign of Erik, the third member of the team who’d chased me halfway across the country. Maybe he wasn’t feeling overly respectful to my memory. I’d been a little hard on him, now that I thought about it.

David reversed course in time to avoid a collision with an elegantly suited grey-haired man, and I realised with a jolt that my little shindig had drawn the big guns. Martin Oliver, Weather Warden for all of the continental US. Not a minor player on the world stage. He was talking to a who’s who: the Earth Warden for Brazil, the Weather Warden for Africa, and a guy I vaguely recognised as being from somewhere in Russia.

My memorial had become the in place to be, if you were among the magical elite.

David tugged me to the right to avoid a gaggle of giggling young women eyeing a trying-to-be-cool group of young men – did I know these people? Weren’t they too young to have the fate of the world in their hands? – and we ended up walking through the mahogany doors into a larger room, set up with rows of burgundy chairs.

My knees threatened to go weak. All the place needed was my coffin to complete the scene, but instead they had a huge blown-up picture of me, something relatively flattering, thank God, on an expensive-looking gold easel. In the photo I looked…wistful. A little sad.

She’s dead, I thought. That person is dead. I’m not her anymore.

There were so many arrangements it looked like a flower shop had exploded – lilies were a theme, and roses, but it being spring I got the rainbow assortment. Purple irises, birds of paradise, daisies of every shape and size.

It hurt and healed me, thinking of all those people laying out time and money for this incredible display.

We weren’t alone in the room. Two people were sitting at the front, heads bowed, and I squeezed David’s hand and let go. I walked up the long aisle toward the eerie black and white photo of myself, and the two men I’d come to see who were seated in front of it.

Paul Giancarlo was sitting bent over with his head cradled in big, thick-fingered hands. Not crying – men like Paul didn’t cry, it was against the whole tough-guy code of ethics – but he was rocking back and forth, chair creaking, and I could feel his distress like heat from a stove. He wasn’t fat, but muscular, and he stressed the structural limits of the sharp hand-tailored suit he was wearing. I’d never seen him in a tie before. It was strangely sweet. I wanted to put my arms around as much of him as my embrace could reach. I wanted to sink into his bear-hug warmth and never come out again, because one thing about being with Paul, he made you feel safe.

Funny, considering his heritage was something straight out of The Godfather.

‘Should’ve done something.’ His words were muffled by his hands, but he was talking to the man who sat next to him. ‘You fucking well should have done something, Lew. What’s the use of being the biggest swinging dick around if you can’t save the people who matter? Answer me that!’

He slapped the question at Lewis Levander Orwell. Lewis might actually be the most powerful human on the planet, but next to Paul he looked like wallpaper. Tall, rangy, with puppy-dog brown eyes and a reasonably handsome face, he could have fit the part of an ad executive, or a lawyer, or any of a hundred normal white-collar jobs. He didn’t look like a guy who could command the weather, fire, and the very power of the earth itself. But the things I’d seen him do, the sheer force I’d felt him wield…incredible. Humbling.

‘Being the biggest swinging dick around? It’s not much use at all,’ Lewis said. He had a low, warm tenor voice, just a hint of roughness around the edges. He was staring down at his hands – long sensitive fingers, the hands of a pianist or a sculptor – as they pressed down on his thighs. His suit was not nearly as nice as Paul’s – serviceable, generic, forgettable. He never had been much of a fashion plate. ‘I tried to save her. You have to believe I tried. It was just…too much.’

‘I guess I don’t have any choice but to believe you, right? No witnesses.’ Paul sucked in a breath and sat up. His face hovered on the border between brutal and angelic. Grey salted his temples these days, which I hadn’t noticed before. He was ten years older than me, which put him close to forty, but the grey in his hair was the only indication he’d aged a day since I first saw him. I’d been eighteen, scared and irrationally arrogant; he’d been twenty-eight, and arrogant for damn good reason. He’d saved my ass then, when Bad Bob Biringanine had tried to stop me from becoming a Warden.

I couldn’t believe he was blaming himself for not saving my ass five days ago. I wanted to smack him one and tell him it was OK, I was right here, that the Joanne he’d known might be gone but most of her – maybe the best of her – lived on. I actually did reach out, or start to, but then Lewis’s eyes focused on me.

Unmistakably seeing me.

Oh. Well, of course he could, he’d seen me before, at Estrella’s house, when I was new-born into Djinn-hood. Lewis could see, well, everything when he wanted to. Part of the legacy of who and what he was.

I shaped a silent hi. He half closed his eyes and smiled. Not surprised to find me here at all. Hi yourself, he mouthed, and the warmth in his expression made me tingle all over. Yeah, it’s like that between us. Always. Nothing either of us could control, no matter how much we wanted to.

Holding the stare, Lewis said, ‘She’s OK, Paul. Believe me. She’s in a better place.’ About three feet to his left.

‘Yeah? You got a fuckin’ pipeline to heaven these days? I knew you were supposed to be some kind of god, but I didn’t know you had the all-access pass.’ Paul’s bitterness was scorching. He wiped his face and sat back with another creak of the chair. ‘Whatever. Look, she never said so, but I know she had a thing for you.’

Lewis broke eye contact with me to blink at Paul. ‘She what?’

‘Had a thing.’ Paul shrugged. Only Italians could put so much into a shrug. ‘One night we got drunk and she told me…about college. That time.’

‘Oh.’ Lewis looked thrown, but not as thrown as I felt. I’d told Paul? About me and Lewis doing it on the floor of the Storm Lab one rainy afternoon when I was a freshman? I’d told Paul about Lewis being my first guy? No way. Although I dimly recalled a night four or five years ago, with blue agave tequila and strip poker…hmmm. Maybe I had. Wouldn’t be the first indiscreet thing to pass my lips.

Paul was still talking. ‘So she wouldn’t want you to be here.’

I wouldn’t?

‘Given the circumstances,’ he finished.

What circumstances?

Lewis glanced at me. I shrugged to indicate I had absolutely no idea what Paul was talking about. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to stay,’ he said, as much to me as to Paul. ‘Seeing that the Wardens Council and I had that little disagreement about my Djinn. As in they wanted them back. So low profile seems to be the dress code.’

The Wardens Council, unhappy with Lewis? About Djinn? Oh. That. There had been a time a few years ago when Lewis had busted out of confinement by the Wardens, and stolen three bottles of Djinn on the way. Why three, I don’t know; I don’t even know if he had a particular reason to take the three he did. But whatever the