Windfall E-Book

Rachel Caine

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Serie: Weather Warden
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 548

Beschreibung

Leaving Las Vegas seemed like a great idea to Joanne Baldwin. But there's no escaping her past - and there's no time to recharge. The former Weather Warden's powers are at an all-time low just as the clouds of war are gathering - and the biggest storm since Atlantis's destruction is heading for landfall. Joanne is exhausted. When not donning a rain mac and camping it up for the camera as a TV weather girl, she has to contend with a vengeful cop on her tail, her newly divorced sister moving in and getting caught in the middle of a supernatural civil war. Worst of all, her boyfriend in a bottle can't stop draining her powers and is fast morphing from the Djinn of her dreams to the Ifrit of her nightmares. As the agreement between the Wardens and the Djinn starts to self-destruct, Joanne finds herself forced to choose between saving her lover, saving her Warden abilities - and saving humanity.

Leseprobe

Praise for the Weather Warden series

‘Caine just keeps getting better and better … Like a good hurricane, she builds slowly offshore and, once ready, tears inland to wreak literary havoc in an unpredictable manner’ SF Site

‘The Weather Warden series is fun reading … more engaging than most TV’ Booklist

‘Caine has cleverly combined the wisecracks, sexiness, and fashion savvy of chick lit with gritty action-movie violence and the cutting-edge magic of urban fantasy’ Romantic Times

‘A neat, stylish, and very witty addition to the genre, all wrapped up in a narrative voice to die for. Hugely entertaining’ SF Crowsnest

‘Captivating...Caine is a top-notch writer and her skill in weaving a mesmerizing tale is easily seen’ Darque Reviews

‘With chick-lit dialogue and rocket-propelled pacing, Rachel Caine takes the Weather Wardens to places the Weather Channel never imagined!’ Mary Jo Putney

‘Fans of Laurell K Hamilton and The Dresden Files

Windfall

Book Four of the Weather Warden series

RACHEL CAINE

Contents

PraiseTitle PageAcknowledgementsPreviously…InterludeChapter OneInterludeChapter TwoInterludeChapter ThreeInterludeChapter FourInterludeChapter FiveInterludeChapter SixInterludeChapter SevenInterludeChapter EightInterludeChapter NineTrack ListAlso by Rachel CaineAvailable from ALLISON & BUSBYAbout the AuthorCopyright

The following brave writers made their National Novel Writing Month goal and wrote fifty thousand words towards a book in November 2004. I salute their incredible dedication, and I was proud to sponsor the NaNoNov community for 2004.

Jenny Griffee

Julie ‘GG’ Sade

Donna Beltz

Silver_Ink

Darice Moore

Leah Wilson

Jennifer Matarese

Crystal Sarakas

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank:

The Stormchasers, who encourage me in this madness. (Hi, guys!)

JoMadge, without whom neither this book nor ANY Weather Warden books would have been possible.

The Time Turners: Kel, Katy, Becky, Laurie, Claire (haka, baby!), and Marla.

Rachel Sheer and Ter Matthies. They know why, and it has to do with werewolves.

The greatest band in the world: Joe Bonamassa, Eric Czar and Kenny Kramme! www.jbonamassa.com (and everyone who supports them)

America’s Best Coffee in Arlington, and whatever brilliant barista invented Caramel Mochas

Previously…

My name is Joanne Baldwin. I used to control the weather, but I’ve given that up. See, I’ve discovered that the Wardens – who are supposed to be protecting all of you from horrible deaths from fires, floods, earthquakes, storms, and other fun rides cooked up by a hostile Mother Nature – haven’t been entirely on the up and up, and besides that, there’s the whole question of the Djinn they use to help them in their work. I used to think it was OK to keep a magical being locked up in a bottle and subject to your will.

Not anymore, not since I fell in love with one.

Having given up my day job, I’ve found it necessary to put the tattered remnants of my normal life back together again…no easy task for a girl without many marketable skills outside of the supernatural realm. Plus, there’s the whole issue of having been dead, once upon a time. Kind of makes going home difficult.

And that really fast car I love so much?

Could be getting me into trouble.

Or maybe that’s just my natural state of existence.

Interlude

It doesn’t take much to destroy the world as humans know it.

Unseasonably hot sunshine beating down on a small patch of ocean off the coast of Africa.

The water warms up a few degrees. As it burns off into gray ghosts, rising up into the air, it could be just another thing, another day, another balancing of wind and water.

But it’s not. The air is just a few degrees warmer than normal, and it rises faster, carrying the moisture as a hostage. Ghosts turn to shadows as mist condenses and takes on weight. It spirals up into the sky, where the air gets thin and cold. At this height, the water condenses from mist to drops, too heavy for the process to contain them, and start a plunge back for safety of the ocean.

But the air’s too warm, and as the drops fall they hit another, stronger updraft that sends them up again, dizzyingly high. Drops eat each other like cannibals and grow fatter. Heavier. Head for the ocean again.

But they aren’t going anywhere; the updraft keeps short-circuiting gravity. The cycle continues, driving moisture into the air and hoarding it, as thin white virga condense and form clouds. You can feel energy building as hot sun and warm sea continue a mating dance.

It’s no different than what happens every day in the Cradle of Storms.

But it is, if you know what you’re looking for.

If I’d been paying attention, none of this would have happened.

Chapter One

I kept trying to tell myself, You’ve survived worse than this, but it didn’t seem to be working. Any second now, I was going to scream and kill somebody, not necessarily in that order… You’ve been through worse. Yep. I had. It just didn’t feel like it, right at the moment.

I stared blankly at the back wall of the studio and held my place under the hot, merciless lights. The news anchors, seated at the desk about ten feet away from me, were still doing happy-chat. Morning happy-chat, which is a whole yak-level higher than the annoying evening forced camaraderie. I was sweating under a yellow rain slicker and matching hat and stupid-looking rain boots. I looked like the Morton’s Salt girl, only not as adorable.

The weather outside was clear, and there wasn’t even a hope in hell of rain from the nice, stable system out there, but Marvellous Marvin McLarty, meteorologist extraordinaire, was about to pronounce a seventy per cent chance of downpours in the next twenty-four hours. And this wasn’t the first out-of-the-blue (no pun intended) prediction Marvin had pulled out of his…Doppler. Two nights ago, he’d been the only one to accurately predict landfall of a tropical storm up the coast, while everyone else including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – NOAA to the weather buffs – had put it two hundred miles to the south.

This should have made him good. It only made him even more obnoxious. Unlikely as that seemed.

Dear God in heaven, I never thought I’d miss being a Warden quite so much, but right now – and for some time, actually – I wanted my old job back so bad that I’d have crawled on broken glass for it.

I held onto my big, toothy smile as the red light lit up on the camera in front of me and Marvin, who was standing next to me. He was a big man, bulky, with implanted hair and big, over-whitened teeth, laser-corrected blue eyes, and a face made unnaturally smooth by dermabrasion and Botox. OK, the Botox was just a guess, but he was holding on to his fleeing, screaming youth with both fists.

Camera Two lit up. Marvin sauntered around, quipped with the anchors, Janie and Kurt, and then turned to the weather map. He started talking about a cold front approaching from the southeast… only there wasn’t one; there was a front stalled at the Georgia border that didn’t have nearly enough zippity doo dah to make it across the state line anytime in the next, oh, year. Behind him, the Chyron graphics did all kinds of cool zooms and swoops, showing animations and time-lapsed satellite cloud movements, which meant zero to about ninety-five per cent of the population tuning in.

Marvin was a certified professional meteorologist. A degreed climatologist.

Marvin knew dick about the weather, but he was damn lucky. At least so far as I could tell, and believe me, I could tell a lot.

He walked past the animated map, and the camera followed him and focused on me as he stopped in frame. I turned the smile on Marvin, wishing it was a really big cannon.

‘Good morning, Joanne!’ he boomed cheerfully. He’d snarled at me earlier, while pushing past me in the hallway on his way to make-up. ‘Ready to talk about what’s coming up?’

‘Sure, Marvin!’ I bubbled right back, perky as a cheerleader on speed. I used to have a real job. I used to protect people. Save lives. How the hell did I get here?

He wasn’t listening to my internal whining. ‘Great! Well, we know how rough the weather’s been the past few days, especially for our friends up the coast. We already know today’s going to be bright and sunny, but let’s tell our viewers out there in the Sunshine State what it’s going to be like for them outside tomorrow!’

The camera pulled focus. I was centre stage.

I held on to my smile like it was a life preserver. ‘Well, Marvin, I’m sure tomorrow’s going to be a beautiful day for going outside and soaking up some—’

Marvin had taken the required number of steps out of frame, and just as I said the word ‘soaking,’ the bored, cigar-chomping stagehand standing off-camera to my left yanked a rope.

About twenty gallons of water dumped from buckets directly over my head, right on target. It hurt. The bastards had chilled it, or else it was a lot colder up in those rafters than down here on the stage; the stuff felt ice-cold as it splashed off the plastic rain hat, straight down the back of my neck, to splash down into the stupid yellow rain boots.

I was standing in a kiddie pool with yellow rubber duckies on it. Most of the water made it in. I gasped and looked surprised, which wasn’t hard; even when you expect it, it’s tough not to be surprised by the idea that someone will actually do a thing like this to you.

Or that you will not kill them for it.

The anchors and Marvin laughed like lunatics. I kept smiling, took my rain hat off, and said, ‘Well, that’s the weather in Florida, folks, just when you least expect it…’

And they hit me with the last bucket. Which they hadn’t warned me about.

‘Oh, boy, sorry about that, Weather Girl!’ Marvin whooped, and came back into frame as I shoved my dripping hair back and tried to keep on smiling. ‘Guess we’re in for a few showers tomorrow, eh?’

‘Seventy per cent chance,’ I gritted out. It wasn’t quite so perky as I’d planned.

‘So, moms, pack those umbrellas and raincoats for the kids in the morning! Joanne, it’s time for our weather lesson of the day: Can you tell our viewers the difference between weather and climate?’

A climate is the weather in an area averaged over a long period of time, you moron. I thought it. I didn’t say it. I kept smiling blankly at him as I asked, ‘I don’t know, Marvin, what is the difference?’ Because I was, after all, the straight woman, and this was penance for some horrible crime I’d committed in a previous life. As Genghis Khan, apparently.

He looked straight into the camera with his most serious expression and said, ‘You can’t weather a tree, but you can climate.’

I stared at him for about two seconds too long for television etiquette, then turned my smile back on like a porch light and said to the camera, ‘We’ll be back tomorrow morning with more fun weather facts, kids!’

Marvin waved. I waved. The red light went out. Kurt and Janie started doing more happy-chat; they were about to interview a golden retriever, for some bizarre reason. I gave Marvin the kind of look that would have got me fired if I’d given it on the air, and threw my wet hair over my shoulder to wring it out like a mop into the ducky pool.

He leant over to me and, in a whisper, said, ‘Hey, do you know this one? How is snow white?… Pretty damn good, according to the seven dwarves. Ha!’

‘Your mike is on,’ I said, and watched him do the panic dance. His mike really wasn’t, but it was so nice to see him make that face. The golden retriever, confused, woofed at him and lunged; panic ensued, both on and off camera. I stepped out of the wading pool and squelched away, past the grinning stagehands who knew exactly what I’d done and wished they’d thought of it first. I stripped off the wet rain slicker, stuffed the hat in the pocket, and escaped from the set and out the sound-baffling door.

Free.

Hard to believe that less than a year ago I’d been a trusted agent of one of the most powerful organisations on Earth, entrusted with the lives and safety of a few million people on a daily basis. Even harder to believe that I’d thrown all that away without looking back, and actually thought that I wouldn’t miss it.

Normal life? Sucked. I’d become a Warden out of high school, been trained by the elite, spent years mastering the techniques of controlling the physics of wind, water, and weather. I’d been taken care of and coddled and had everything I’d ever wanted, and I hadn’t even known how good that was until I had to survive on a poverty-level income and figure out how to make a jar of peanut butter stretch from one payday to the next.

And then there was the magnificence that was my job.

I took a deep breath of recycled, refrigerated air, and went in search of a place to sit down. A couple of staffers were in the hall, chitchatting; they watched me with the kind of bemused expressions people get when they’re imagining themselves in your place and thinking, there but for the grace of God…

I ignored them as I squished by in my big, yellow clown boots.

In the make-up room, some kind soul handed me a fluffy white towel. I rubbed vigorously at my soaked hair and sighed when I saw it was starting to curl – nice, rich, black curls. Ringlets. Ugh.

That never used to happen before I died. I’d been a power. And then I’d had a brief, wildly strange few days as a wish-granting Djinn, which was both a hell of a lot more and less fun than you’d imagine. And then, I’d been bumped back down to mere mortal.

But in the process my hair had gone from glossy-straight to mega-curly. All my power, and I couldn’t even keep a decent hairstyle.

Maybe power was an overstatement these days, anyway. I’d turned in my proverbial badge and gun to the Wardens, quit and walked away; technically, that meant that even though I might have some raw ability – a lot of it – I was now a regular citizen. Granted, a regular citizen who could sense and manipulate weather. Not that I did, of course. But I could. For three months, I’d gone cold turkey, resisting the urge to meddle, and I was pretty proud of myself. Too bad they didn’t have a twelve-step program for this sort of thing, and some kind of cool little milestone keychain thing.

The fact that I’d been told by my own former colleagues that if I so much as made one raindrop rub up against another they’d bring me in for a magical lobotomy might have had something to do with my amazing strength of will. Some people survived that process just fine, but with someone like me, who had such a high level of that kind of power, getting rid of it all was like radical surgery. There was a significant chance that things would go wrong, and instead of just coming out of it a normal, unmagical human being, I’d come out a drooling zombie, fed and diapered at the Wardens’ expense.

They weren’t likely to do that to me unless they had to, though. The Wardens needed people they could trust. The organisation had taken a lot of hits, from within and without, and they couldn’t afford to burn bridges, even as shaky and unreliable a bridge as I represented.

I sighed and rubbed moisture from my hair, eyes closed. There were days – more rather than fewer, now – when I really regretted giving in to the impulse to fling it in their faces and walk away. I was one speed-dial away from having my life back.

But there were reasons why that was a bad idea, principal among them that I would lose the one thing in my life that really meant something to me. I’d willingly live in a crappy apartment and wear second-hand clothes and knockoff shoes for David’s sake, for as long as it took.

That had to be true and eternal love.

‘Yo, Jo.’

I looked up from vigorous towelling and found a steaming cup of coffee in front of my nose. My benefactor and personal deity was a petite little blonde who went by the name of Cherise, impossibly young and pretty, with a beach tan and limpid blue eyes and a fine sense of the inappropriate. I liked her, even though she was just too damn cute to live. Not everybody in my new life was a burden. Cherise made the days just a little bit brighter.

‘Nice ‘do,’ she said, poker-faced. ‘Is poodle-hair coming back in style?’

‘Didn’t you get the latest Vogue? Next big thing. Poofy hair. And Earth Shoes are making a huge comeback.’

‘I don’t know, honey, you’ve got sort of a Bride of Frankenstein meets Shirley Temple look going on there. I’d page the emergency stylist on call.’

She, of course, looked perfect. She was wearing a midriff-baring mesh knit top with big yellow smiley faces, and a Day-Glo orange camisole underneath. I envied the outfit, but not the pierced belly button. Low-rise hip-huggers showed off smooth, sculpted curves. The shoes were designer flip-flops with little orange-and-yellow jewelled bees for decoration. She smiled as I took inventory, lifted her arms, and did a perfect runway twirl. ‘Well? What’s my fashion score of the day?’

I considered. ‘Nine,’ I said.

Cherise whipped back around, offended. ‘Nine? You’re kidding!’

‘I deducted for non-matching nail polish.’ I pointed at her toes. Sure enough, she was wearing yesterday’s Lime Glitter Surprise.

‘Damn.’ She frowned down at her shapely toes, one of which had a little silver ring. ‘But I got points for the new tat, right?’

I’d missed it during the twirl. ‘Let me see.’

She turned around and pointed at the small of her back. Just at the point where the hip-huggers met the curve, there was an indigo-fresh…

I blinked, because it was a big-eyed alien head. Space aliens.

‘Nice,’ I said, tilting my head to study it. The skin was still flushed. ‘Hurt much?’

She shrugged, eyeing a woman in a conservative black pantsuit who’d come in and given her one of those blankly disapproving looks, the kind reserved for girls in hip-huggers, tattoos, and belly button piercings. I saw the demon spark in Cherise’s eyes. She pitched her voice to carry. ‘Well, you know, those tattoos kind of sting. So I did a little coke to take the edge off.’

The woman, who was reaching for a coffee mug, froze. I watched her rigid, French-manicured hand slowly resume its forward motion.

‘Smoked or snorted?’ I asked. Still the straight woman. Apparently, it was my new karmic path.

‘Smoked,’ Cherise said blandly. ‘Best way to get my high on, but then I got all, you know, nervous. So I smoked a couple of spliffs to calm down.’

The woman left, coffee mug clenched in white knuckles.

‘HR?’ I guessed.

‘Yeah, drug testing. I’ll be peeing in a cup within the hour. So.’ Cherise dropped into the chair next to me as I applied the towel to my feet. ‘I hear you have an interview for the weekend forecast position.’

‘Yeah.’ I wiggled my damp toes and felt the drag of clinging hose. ‘Not that I have a chance in hell, but…’ But it was more money, and would get me out of the humiliation business, and I wouldn’t miss being Joanne Baldwin, Weather Warden quite so fiercely if I had something else I could be proud of doing.

‘Oh, bullshit, of course you have a chance. A good one, too. You’re credible on camera, honest, and the guys just love you. You’ve seen the website, right?’

I gave her a blank look.

‘Your page is going through the roof. Hits out the ass, Jo. Seriously. Not only that, but you should read the emails. Those guys out there think you’re damn hot.’

‘Really?’ Because I didn’t think there was anything hot about getting hit in the face with buckets of water. Or standing around in walking shorts, an I Love Florida! T-shirt, and oversized sunglasses with zinc oxide all over my nose. Too much to ask that I appear in a decently sexy bikini or anything. I had to look like a total dork, and do it on cheesy, cheap sets standing in rubber ducky pools or piles of play sand.

So not hot, I was.

‘No, see, you don’t get it. It’s the theory of the magic glasses,’ she explained. Cherise had a lot of theories, most of them having to do with secret cabals and aliens among us, which made her both cute and kind of scary. I picked up a brush from the make-up table and started working on my hair; Genevieve, a burly Minnesota woman with a perpetual scowl, bowl-cut hair, and no make-up, took the brush away and began working on me with the tender care of a prison-camp-trained beautician. I winced and bit the inside of my lip to keep from complaining.

Cherise continued. ‘See, you know in the movies how the really hot girl can slip on a pair of horn-rims, and all of a sudden there’s this entire silent agreement between all the people in the movie that she’s ugly? And then there’s the moment when she takes them off, and everybody gasps and says she’s gorgeous? Magic glasses.’

I stopped in the act of sipping coffee and braced myself as Genevieve tamed a tangle in my hair by the simple, brutally efficient method of yanking it out by the roots. I swallowed and repeated shakily, ‘Magic glasses.’

‘Like Clark Kent.’ Cherise beamed. ‘The outfits are your magic glasses, only instead of everybody being fooled, they’re in on the joke. It’s an open secret that you’re totally hot under all that geek disguise. It’s very meta.’

‘You’re not originally from here, are you?’ I asked.

‘Florida?’

‘The third planet from the sun.’

She had a cute smile, one side lifting higher than the other and waking a dimple. I saw one of the office guys leaning in the door, mooning at her – not mooning her, mooning at her – but then there was always somebody doing that, and Cherise never seemed to notice, much less mind. Oddly, none of her admirers seemed capable of asking her out. Then again, maybe they knew something I didn’t.

‘How many hits?’ I asked.

‘Are we doing the drug talk again?’

I eye-rolled. ‘To the web page, geek.’

‘Couple hundred thousand so far.’

‘You’re kidding!’

‘Urn, not! The IT guys told me all about it.’ This was not surprising, because I was sure the IT guys tried to chat her up all the time. What was surprising was that Cherise had actually listened.

‘What were you doing listening to IT guys?’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘We were talking about The X-Files. You know? Remember? The show with Mulder and Scully and…’

Oh, right. Alien invasions. Weird occurrences. This was, strangely, right up Cherise’s alley. Hence the tattoo.

The coffee was decent, which was a surprise; generally it was rancid stuff, even early in the morning, because the station wasn’t exactly upmarket. Maybe somebody had got disgusted and popped for Starbucks again. I consoled myself with sips as Genevieve continued to torture my hair. She was backcombing, or possibly weeding.

‘So? You got the rest of the day off?’ Cherise asked. I was unable to move my head to nod, so I flapped my hand in a vague yes. ‘Cool. I have to do some voice promo stuff tomorrow, but I’m outta here for the day. Want to go shopping? I figure we can hit the mall around ten.’

It was seven a.m., but that was Cherise. She knew the opening schedule of every store in a tri-state area, and she planned ahead.

Genevieve picked up the hair dryer. My scalp cringed, anticipating third-degree burns. I’d have stopped her, but the weird thing was that at the end of all of this torture, I’d look great. That was Genevieve’s special gift.

‘I absolutely need to shop,’ I said. Shopping has a deeply therapeutic effect when you’re trapped in a less-than-ideal life situation.

Shopping with money would have been even better, but hell. Can’t have everything.

Fort Lauderdale mornings are beautiful. Soft cerulean skies, layered with pink and gold. Smog is kept to a minimum by the fresh ocean breezes. When I stepped outside of the big concrete box of WXTV-38, I had to stop and appreciate it as only a Warden can.

I closed my eyes, lifted my face to the sun, and left my body to drift up to the aetheric level. It was a little hard to do, these days; I was tired, and out of practice, and it felt sometimes like I had more than my share of worries. Hard to get metaphysical when you’re tied so closely to the real world.

Up there on the aetheric, once I’d achieve it, things were serene, too; glowing bands of brilliant colour, swirling and moving together, everything lazy and calm. Out towards the sea there was energy, but it was carefully balanced, sea and sun and sky. No storms on the way at the moment, and no rain, regardless of Marvellous Marvin’s bogus predictions. Poor Marv. Statistically, he should have been right about eighty-six per cent of the time just by predicting sunny and warm in Florida, but no, he had to try to be dramatic about it…

Speaking of which, how exactly did he beat the odds? He shouldn’t. I’d looked at him a dozen times up on the aetheric, though, and he was nothing but what he appeared: an obnoxious normal guy. Blessed with the luck of the entire nation of Ireland, apparently, but a regular human being, not a Warden, no matter how deep-cover. And certainly not a Djinn.

As I floated there, basking in the beauty, I felt something coming around to mess it up. Not weather. People. I blinked and focused and saw three bright centres of energy approaching me on foot across the parking lot. In aetheric-sight, you learn a lot about a person. The one in the centre was male, tall, stooped, and comfortable with himself – he wasn’t trying to make himself look bigger or better or scarier than anyone else. The other two, though…different story. One of the women saw herself as a warrior, all steel and armour that was designed more from a book cover than actual practical necessity – steel push-up bra and an impractical metal bikini bottom to match, a sword too big for someone her size to draw, much less swing.

The third was also a woman…elegant, wispy, a little unsettling.

I knew two out of three of them. Ghost-woman was a mystery.

I dropped down into my physical form as footsteps approached, and turned with a smile firmly in place. ‘John,’ I said. ‘It’s really good to see you again.’

‘You, too,’ John Foster said. It was a friendly beginning, but really, there was no reason for my former Warden boss to show up this early wanting a word, especially flanked by muscle. In no way could this not be a bad sign.

John wasn’t much different in the real world than he looked in the aetheric – tall, well dressed, a little professorial if such a thing could be considered a downside. He liked tweed. I regretted the tweed, but at least he’d got past the sweater vests of earlier years.

My eyes drifted over to the shorter, darker, punker woman standing next to him. Knew her, too, and the welcome wasn’t so welcome-y. She was glaring at me through dark-rimmed eyes. Shirl was a Fire Warden, powerful, and the last I’d run into her she’d been assigned to Marion’s Power Ranger squad, rounding up renegade Wardens for that ever-looming magical lobotomy. She wasn’t exactly top of the list of people I’d wished would drop in. We hadn’t bonded, back when she had been chasing me across the country.

She’d added some additional facial piercings since the last time I’d seen her, her dyed-black hair was tipped with magenta, and she’d taken up a close, personal friendship with leather. Not an improvement.

The third woman remained a mystery. We’d never met, and I couldn’t tell what her speciality was; but if Shirl was here to cover fire, she was likely an Earth Warden.

‘A little early for a social call,’ I said, trying to keep it pleasant.

John nodded and stuck his hands in his jacket pockets. Awkward with conflict, John. I wondered why they’d stuck him with the job. Maybe the more senior Wardens were busy. Or maybe they knew I had a soft spot for him and wouldn’t be quite so difficult.

‘You already know Shirl,’ he said, and gestured to her with an elbow, offhandedly, with a flat tone to his normally warm voice. Ah. He didn’t like her either. Nice to know. ‘This is Maria Moore, she’s come over from France to help us out.’

Maria, the ghost-girl, was a wispy little thing in the real world, too. Older than she’d looked, up a level, but still a twig. I hoped she wasn’t a Weather Warden; a good strong breeze might blow her out to sea. She looked more like a Djinn than most Djinn I’d ever met.

‘Takes three of you to say good morning?’ I asked.

‘I need you to take a ride with me, Joanne,’ John said. He had an interesting voice, blurred with a North Carolina drawl; it always made him sound like he was in no particular hurry or distress. So I couldn’t tell if this was a big deal, a little deal, or a consultation he thought I could help out with…or whether I was taking a ride that would end up with me dead or permanently disabled.

I decided I didn’t really want to find out.

‘Sorry,’ I said, not as if I in any way meant it. ‘I really need to get home. I have some appointments—’

‘You’re coming with us,’ Shirl said flatly. ‘Whether you like it or not. Get used to the idea.’

I met her eyes. ‘Or what, Shirl? You’ll get all skinhead on me?’

She’d been kind of hoping that would be my attitude, I could tell. Her hand cupped at her side, and a fireball ignited in her palm. ‘Or this is going to start loud and end badly.’

I didn’t want to fight. Really. Especially with John Foster in the middle, not to mention the French Ghost, who might or might not be someone I needed to piss off.

I glanced at John, who was stone-faced, and said, ‘Whoa, there, Sparky, I’m not picking a fight. I just would like a little warning if you’re going to drop in and disrupt my day.’

‘Get in the car.’

She wasn’t taking any crap from me. That might have been because I’d kind of kicked her ass the first time around, and she was worried about a repeat; she needn’t have been, as I’d been running on Demon-Mark Power then, and now it was just plain ol’ me, and plain ol’ me was tired and drained and really not up to a big, magical, hand-to-hand battle to the death.

Plus, I wasn’t dressed for it. Stains would never come out of this top.

Maria Moore silently gestured me to a smoky silver Lexus, which I knew for a fact wasn’t John’s; Lexus wasn’t his style. Must have been Maria’s, and come with the ghostly self-image. She was probably aspiring to a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. After just enough hesitation to let them know that I wasn’t always going to be so easily handled, I turned and walked to it, opened the back door and got inside. It was cramped, but then I had longer legs than most women. Maria got in the driver’s seat. I got Shirl as my companion in the back. Joy.

‘You want to tell me where we’re going?’ I asked.

Maria and John exchanged a glance. ‘It’ll take us a while to get there,’ he said. ‘I’d suggest you call and cancel your appointments. You’re going to be out most of the day.’

It was a little late to bitch about it, now that the car was moving. I pulled out my cell phone and postponed Mall Day by twenty-four hours, much to Cherise’s disappointment, and settled in for the long haul.

Which, in a Lexus, wasn’t a bad thing.

It was a quiet drive. I dozed, part of the way, because I’d been up since four a.m. and besides, talking to Shirl the Human Pincushion didn’t make for entertaining conversation. She had all the power of someone like Marion Bearheart, and absolutely none of the charm. I missed Marion and all her cantered, Native American, Earth Mother attitude. At least she’d threatened me with style and class, and she had a clear moral centre. Shirl…well, I wasn’t so sure about any of that. Especially the style and class.

Maria the Ghost sporadically nattered on with John in bright, liquid French. John was multilingual, which surprised me for some reason. They seemed easy together. Old friends? Current lovers? Couldn’t get a read. I made up dramatic scripts in my head, in which John flew over the Atlantic to sweep Maria off her feet in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower and the two of them ran around Europe getting into wacky, farcical mistaken-identity bedroom adventures.

Hey, I was bored.

Three and a half hours later, the Lexus made a right turn off the highway, and I started seeing signs of damage. We were entering the area where Tropical Storm Walter had blown in two nights ago. It had been a really bad hurricane season, and even though we were winding down, nobody felt very secure about it. The damage was mostly superficial, it looked like – shredded palm fronds, blown-down fences, the occasional busted sign or toppled billboard. Cleanup crews were out. Power had already been restored, for the most part. The beach looked clean and fresh, and the surf curled its toes in calm little foaming wavelets over the sand.

We drove about another fifteen minutes, and then John pointed off to the left. Maria slowed the Lexus, and we passed a partially downed sign with construction information on it. PARADISE COVE, it proclaimed, presented by Paradise Kingdom LLP. With a whole bunch of subcontractors, like the special effects cast of a big-budget movie. The artist’s rendering on the sign was of a hotel about fifteen stories tall, avant-garde in shape.

It was a hell of a lot more avant-garde now, because what lay behind the sign was a mass of twisted metal and slumping lumber. Looked like a war zone. Construction materials had been scattered around like Legos after playtime for the emotionally disturbed.

Maria put the Lexus in park.

All three of them looked at me.

‘What?’ I asked. I was honestly puzzled.

‘Tell us what you know about this,’ John said.

‘Well, I’m no expert, but I’d have to say that between this and the Motel 6 down the road, I’d have to choose the Motel 6…’

‘I’m serious.’

‘Hell, John, so am I! What do you want me to say? It looks trashed.’ I suddenly had a flash. It wasn’t a pleasant one. ‘This is what they were talking about on the news. The freak damage from Tropical Storm Walter.’

‘This is it.’

‘OK…and you think I know about it because…?’ They all exchanged looks, this time. Nobody spoke. I rolled my eyes and said it for them. ‘Because you think I did this. Grow up, guys. Why would I? The Wardens have made it really clear that if I screw around with the weather, somebody like good old Shirl here will come around and put me on Drool Patrol. I mean, I don’t really like the architectural styling, but I don’t feel that passionate about buildings.’

Predictably, it was John who jumped in. ‘Right at the present time, there are fewer than ten Wardens in Florida,’ he said. ‘Somebody directed the storm. We recorded the shift.’

‘Well, talk to the hand, because it wasn’t me.’

Another significant look that didn’t include me. John said, ‘Are you sure that’s your answer, Jo?’

‘Hell yes, I’m sure. And you’re starting to piss me off with this crap, John. Why would I do a thing like this? Why would I risk it, first of all, and why would I pick on this particular section of coast?’

‘It’s close to where Bob Biringanine’s home once stood,’ Maria the French Ghost observed.

‘So, what, I have a grudge against a dead man? Don’t be ridiculous.’

I was starting to sweat. I mean, this wasn’t usual behaviour from Wardens. Suspected offenders got questioned, but usually by auditors, and rarely triple-teamed like this. I was starting to feel a little bit like some poor Mafioso taking a tour of the New Jersey dump, right before he joins the great cycle of composting.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘What can I do to convince you? I had nothing to do with this.’ After a few seconds of silence, I asked, ‘Was anybody hurt?’

‘Three people were killed,’ John said. ‘The night watchman had brought his two kids with him to work. The kids were asleep in the front when the tornado hit. He tried to get to them, but he’d lost a lot of blood. He died on the way to the hospital.’

Silence. Outside, the insects were droning, and the sky was that clear, scrubbed blue you only get after a vicious storm. The few palm fronds surviving nodded in a fresh ocean breeze.

Storms were natural. We – the Wardens – didn’t stop the cycle of nature, we just moderated it. Buffered it for the safety of the vulnerable people who lived in its path. But for a storm like this, we wouldn’t have bothered. It wasn’t that bad, and it was necessary to correct the ever-wobbling scales of Mother Earth. If somebody had messed with it, it was criminal, and intentional.

And murderous.

‘It wasn’t me,’ I said. ‘I’ll take whatever oath you want, John. But I’m innocent.’

He nodded slowly, and turned back to face front. ‘Let’s get you back home,’ he said.

‘That’s it?’ Shirl asked loudly. ‘Just like that? You buy it just because she says it?’

‘No,’ Maria the French Ghost said, and turned her head slightly towards me. She had odd eyes, not quite any colour, and they looked a little empty. ‘Not just because she says it.’

Shirl opened her mouth, sensibly shut it, and scowled out the window. Maria started the car and reversed us back out to the highway.

It was a long, silent drive back, and I had a lot to think about.

I got home too late for any shopping, and way out of the mood anyway. I went home to my grubby little apartment, made chili from a can with some shredded cheese, and curled up on my second-hand couch with a warm blanket and a rented movie. The movie was one of those warmed-over schmaltzy romantic comedies with too much romance and not nearly enough comedy, but it didn’t matter; I was too distracted to watch it anyway.

If somebody had been messing with Tropical Storm Walter, I should have known it. I’ve always been sensitive to those kinds of things. Of course, I could excuse it with the fact that John Foster’s spider sense hadn’t tingled, either, nor – apparently – had those of any of the eight other Wardens stationed in the state. So maybe I could forgive myself a little.

I couldn’t shake the image of that father bringing his kids to work on a boring, safe job, and facing the nightmare of his life. Struggling to save his family in the face of someone else’s malice.

Wardens screw up, that’s a fact of life. Weather is difficult and tricky and it doesn’t like to be tamed. It has a violence and vengeance all its own.

But this wasn’t a screw-up, didn’t feel like a screw-up, or a random event. It felt targeted, and it felt cold. No wonder the Wardens were sending out hit squads looking for an answer.

I did have to wonder why John Foster had accepted my word for my innocence. In his place, I’d have wanted proof. I wasn’t sure that the fact he let me off so lightly was a good sign.

I did some internet research, made some phone calls to neutral parties – i.e., not Wardens – and put together a rough picture of what had happened. Tropical Storm Walter had turned vicious at the last second, gathering strength as it roared up on the coastline. It made a last-minute turn to the north instead of the south, and waded ashore with near-hurricane-force winds and a complement of tornados. So far as I knew, the only one that had touched down had levelled the hotel.

It might have been selfish, but I had to wonder why the investigation had focused on me. If they’d instantly focused suspicion on me, the obvious answer was that they didn’t trust me – which, hey, they didn’t – but there must have been some connection I wasn’t seeing. And not the hole in the ground that had once been Bad Bob Biringanine’s house on the beach, either. Even the Wardens weren’t shallow enough to buy the fact that I’d throw a meaningless tantrum and beat up a helpless coastline, unless they suspected me of going completely wacko.

Then again, I was dressing up like the Morton’s Salt Girl on TV and getting water dumped on my head for money.

Maybe they had a point.

I felt alone. More alone than I had in quite some time, actually. I missed my friends. I missed the Wardens.

Boy kissed girl, and the music came up and tried to tell me that love would make everything all right with the world.

I missed David, oh God I missed David.

I curled up with my warm blanket and watched the rest of the movie, and fell asleep to the cold blue flicker.

The next morning’s show went just about as badly as you might expect. No dumping of rain today; apparently Marvin was forecasting a good day for outside activities, so I got to pose in my stupid-looking walking shorts, oversized T-shirt, boonie hat, and zinc smeared white down my nose, while Cherise wore the cute little bikini and cheesecaked for the camera. One of us was happy. I got sand in my penny loafers, so it probably wasn’t me.

But the worst was yet to come.

Cherise slipped into a thick terrycloth robe as soon as she stepped off camera – her usual habit on the set – and we were talking about doing the mall when I felt a thick, sweaty hand slide around my waist. A little too high to qualify as waist territory, actually – we were getting into oh-I-don’t-think-so range. Cherise looked startled, then grim, as Marvin’s other arm went around her. Luckily, her robe was belted the wrong way for him to slide his fingers inside.

‘Girls,’ he said, and grinned, and squeezed. He’d definitely had his teeth whitened recently. They looked so white I was afraid they might glow in the dark. ‘Feel like a little breakfast? I’m buying!’

‘Gee, boss, I have to fit into this bikini later,’ Cherise said. She wriggled free of his hold. ‘Thanks for the offer.’

He didn’t let go of me quite so easily. ‘Whaddaya say, Jo? Few pancakes might do you good! Sweeten you up a little! Come on, my dime!’

I blinked, torn between indignation that he didn’t think I was sweet enough, and relief that he’d at least noticed my sour attitude. ‘Previous engagement,’ I said. ‘Thanks, though. Some other time.’ At least he wasn’t trying to drag us out for drinks, although I was pretty sure that if it had been a little later in the day – like, say, noon – it would have been Mojitos all around at the Cuban bar, and an expectation of a three-way at his fabulous bachelor pad later.

Marvin managed to look both crushed and lecherous at the same time. ‘OK, doll. You girls go get your beauty sleep. Not that you need it!’

He was up to something. I gave him the flinty eye as he walked away, whistling a jaunty tune. Cherise shook her head, and preceded me off the set and into the changing room. She had to shower off body make-up; I just had to scrub off the zinc oxide and try to get my hair to do something that didn’t look as if I was trying to take Best of Breed at the Purina Cup.

I finished first, and yelled into the showers, ‘Meet you outside!’

‘Fifteen minutes!’ Cherise was deep into conditioning territory. I navigated the tunnel-like hallways of the television station, avoiding harried interns and squinty-eyed techs, hid from the news director, and managed to get through the back door without being stopped to help out with anything that wasn’t my job.

I walked over to the tiny lunch area, complete with palm trees, bolted-down picnic table, and overflowing trash container nobody seemed to remember to empty. Not exactly paradise, but it served, at times. I sat down on the cool metal bench, rested my elbows on the table, and watched the morning arrive.

Another lovely sunrise. Wispy clouds out to sea that glowed orange and gold; the ocean glittered dark blue, flecked with white foam. The sky shaded from turquoise in the east to indigo in the west, and a few brave stars were still glimmering through the dawn. A warm ocean breeze that slid over my exposed skin like silk.

It was a lovely way to pass a few minutes. I didn’t do this nearly enough, just sitting, waiting, listening to the whispers of the world.

As I drifted up there I began to feel something inside me start to resonate. Liquid light. A cell-deep hum. A deeply intimate feeling of coming home.

I had company again. The good kind, this time.

Down in the real world, warm fingers stroked my hair, and up on the aetheric I saw a white, sparkling flare of power, like a ghost.

The tense curls of my hair relaxed, and David’s fingers dragged slowly through it, straightening it into a glossy black sheet of silk that fell heavily around my shoulders.

I turned. David was worth the resulting skipped heartbeat and raised pulse level on a visual level alone – smooth golden skin, dark auburn hair that glittered with red highlights in the sun, lickable lips, and eyes of an impossible bronze colour behind a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. He was back in his usual uniform: blue jeans, a comfortably faded cotton shirt, an antique ankle-length olive coat.

David didn’t look like a Djinn, most of the time. At least, not most people’s idea of one, since that included pantaloons, loopy earrings, and bare, rippling chests. Not that his chest, when bare, didn’t ripple satisfactorily. Far from it…

‘I thought you were resting,’ I said, to get my mind off of the image of him, shirtless. I tried to make it sound stern, but he made it difficult when he leant into my space. He slipped his fingers through my magically straightened hair, tilted my head back, and came very close to kissing me.

And, teasingly, didn’t. Warm, soft lips just barely brushing mine.

‘It’s been too long,’ he said. ‘I want to stay with you for a while.’

My pulse jumped into high gear. I knew he could hear it. Feel it through the brush of our mouths. I’d left him alone in the bottle for more than a month, hoping he’d be stronger for it, although I hadn’t capped the bottle and sealed him inside. I just…couldn’t bear to do that. It was too much like prison.

‘You’re sure?’ I asked. My voice didn’t sound too steady. It sounded breathless with excitement, actually.

‘Just say the word.’

‘Which one?’

‘The one you didn’t learn from your mother.’ He made a low humming sound at the back of his throat, not quite a growl, not quite a laugh. I could almost forget how fragile he was at the moment. My body wanted to forget, but then, it had Attention Deficit Disorder, big-time.

‘Are you—’ I hated to ask it – it was like asking someone with cancer how the treatments were going.

‘David, be straight with me. Really. Are you feeling better? Are you strong enough to – to do this?’

Because David had, since I’d met him, been through even more than I had. He’d fought demons and split himself in two to give me life when I died, and he’d allowed an Ifrit – a kind of Djinn vampire – to drain him nearly dry. He wasn’t really healed from any of that.

Worse, I wasn’t sure he could really heal. Jonathan, high muckety-muck of the Djinn world, hadn’t been all that clear.

But today, he looked almost…normal. Maybe I’d been right. Maybe time healed all Djinn wounds.

He smiled. At close range, that was a deadly weapon. ‘Don’t worry. I’m strong enough to spend a little time with you,’ he said. His eyebrows – fabulously expressive, those eyebrows – canted upward. ‘Unless, of course, you have a date?’

Right on cue, the back dock door banged open, and Cherise began flip-flopping down the steps to the parking lot. I looked over David’s shoulder and expected him to mist away – like Djinn usually did – but he just turned to take a look as well. Which meant that he’d decided not to leave, but just to disguise himself with a minor use of his powers, a don’t-see-me kind of magic that would direct Cherise’s attention away from him…

‘Whoa! Who’s the hottie, Jo?’ Cherise asked, focused directly on David. She came to a hard stop, wiggling her tanned toes in the designer flip-flops. Those bright blue eyes swept him head to toe, narrowed, and sparkled. ‘My, my, my. Holding out on me. Bad friend. No biscuit.’

It was possible that David was just in the mood to be part of the human world for a while. He did that, sometimes; that was how I’d met him. It had taken me days to figure out that he wasn’t entirely human, but in my defence, I was just a little distracted at the time with people trying to kill me.

What I was afraid of, though, was that David was visible to Cherise because he was too weak to magic himself out of being seen.

If that was the case, I couldn’t see any sign of it in his body language. He looked relaxed, open, and friendly.

‘Hi. My name’s David,’ he said, and held out his hand. Cherise took it and made the handshake look way too intimate.

‘I can be a friend. A really, really close friend.’ She pursed shiny, Maybelline-enhanced lips, and sent me a pleading look as she leant into his personal space. ‘So, when you get tired of him, can I have him?’

‘No.’

‘Trade you a date with Johnny Depp.’

‘Cherise, you don’t have a date with Johnny Depp.’

She sniffed. ‘Well, I could. If I wanted. So I suppose the arrival of Mr Hottie means we’re not going shopping.’

‘Would you go shopping if he showed up for you?’

‘You’re kidding, right? I would have shopping surgically removed from my system. And you know how much of a commitment that is for me.’ Cherise gave me a preoccupied kind of smile, tearing her attention away from David for about point oh two seconds, and finally heaved a theatrical sigh. ‘I suppose I’ll just have to go abuse my credit rating all by myself. Although I plan to shop heavily, and it would be handy to have some nice, strong man to carry my—’

‘Go,’ I said. She lifted an elegantly sculpted shoulder and flip-flopped off towards her red convertible, hips swaying, alien tattoo doing a funky hula to the motion. Yeah. She’d be carrying her own bags, sure. When hell opened a hockey rink.

‘Did I interrupt something?’ David asked, and moved back into kissing distance again. ‘I know how seriously you take a mall visit. Wouldn’t want to stand in your way.’

He was teasing me. I leant in, too, brushed his lips with mine, and stared deep into his burning bronze eyes. Teasing could go both ways.

His pupils widened and drank me in.

‘The mall doesn’t open until ten,’ I whispered into his parted lips. ‘Plenty of time.’

His kiss took control and dissolved me into sparkles and tingles and a massive surge of heat. Damp, urgent, passionate lips, demanding my full attention. I felt myself collapsing against him, wanting badly to be horizontal somewhere with a lockable door. Jesus, he made my whole body shake.

‘I missed you,’ he said, and his voice had gone low and rough, hiding in the back of his throat. His thumbs caressed my cheekbones, drawing lines of heat like tattoos.

‘Show me.’

‘Right here?’ He looked pointedly down at the gravel, asphalt, and thin grass. ‘Looks uncomfortable. Then again, I remember how much you like public displays of affection.’

‘Beast.’

Those eyebrows went up again, dangerously high. His smile turned dark. ‘Oh, you really don’t want to know how true that is.’

I felt a tiny little tremor inside. Sometimes, David could be like a pet tiger – glorious and terrible. He wasn’t just a sweet-natured, nice, agreeable guy, although he was certainly capable of being that. It was just that he was capable of anything. Everything. Djinn weren’t fluffy little bunnies you kept as pets, they were dangerous. David was gentle with me, I knew that. But sometimes, occasionally, I would see the vast, dark depths underneath, and I’d get dizzy and breathless.

And hot. Dear God. Spontaneous-combustion hot.

He knew, of course. I saw it flash in his eyes.

I said, ‘I’m not afraid, you know.’

His hands – everything about him – went still. Wind brushed over us with curious hands, ruffling my hair, belling his coat. It tasted of ocean. Palm trees rustled and shook out their fronds over our heads.

‘Maybe you should be. You don’t know enough about me.’

Well, he was right. He’d live for eons. He’d seen human civilisations rise and fall. I barely knew a fraction of who David was, and what he was.

Sometimes I just forgot.

‘Try me,’ I said. Cherise’s glitter-bright flirting had reminded me, with a chill, that I wasn’t some sweet young girl anymore, and next thing I knew I’d be buying in the Women’s World section where dowdy clothes go to die. Reading Modern Maturity. Learning to tat lace and make scrapple. I wanted to know David. I wanted this to be something bigger and deeper and forever, or as far as my forever could go. ‘If we’re going to stay together, then you can’t just show me your good side, you know. And I mean it. I’m not afraid.’

He looked uncommonly solemn, and he didn’t blink. There was a hint of the tiger in those eyes again. ‘I don’t think you understand what you’re saying.’

I heaved out a sigh. ‘Of course I don’t understand. Everything about the Djinn is one big, dark, booga-booga secret, and just because I’ve been one doesn’t mean I got the operating manual—’

He stilled my lips with his, in a damp, slow, breathless kiss. His hands slid up into my hair, stroking those achingly sensitive places behind my ears, at the nape of my neck… I lost my train of thought.

Which made me jump tracks to another one when he let me up for breath. ‘We need to get you home.’ What that really meant was, to put him back in his bottle – yes, Djinn really had bottles, glass ones; they had to be glass and they had to come with stoppers or a way to seal them, no exceptions. The worst case I’d ever seen had been a soap-bubble thin ornamental glass perfume bottle; it was stored in the Wardens Association vault in the U.N. Building in New York, because that thing would shatter if you so much as gave it a hard look.

David’s was a somewhat sturdy ornamental kitchen bottle, the blue-glass fancy kind that store flavoured oils and decorative grains. I kept it in a very safe place, right in my nightstand drawer next to oils, lotions, and other things I wouldn’t want casual visitors to inventory.

Which inevitably led to thoughts of my bed, soft sheets, cool soft ocean breezes sighing over my skin…

‘Yes. Let’s go home.’ His hands slid over my shoulders, stroked down my arms, and lingered on my hands before letting me go. The heat from him stayed on my skin. Afterimages of light.

My car was parked over in the far corner of the lot, away from casual door dings. She was a midnight blue Dodge Viper, and I loved her dearly enough for her to qualify as my second-favourite-ever ride. The first-place winner had been a Mustang, also midnight blue, named Delilah, who had been scrapped around the time I met David, as if I had to give up one really lovely thing for another.

David took the shotgun seat, and I prowled Mona through the morning traffic towards my apartment. I’d been really, really lucky when I moved – had to move, thanks to the overzealous actions of some real estate people, who thought that just because I’d had a funeral I’d broken my lease – and I’d ended up with a beachfront second-floor sea view. All of my furniture was second-hand, and nothing matched, but the bed was comfortable and the balcony was to die for.

The bed was the only thing that mattered right now.

I must have parked, but that part was a blur. Then stairs, and then we were in the hall and I was hunting for my key. It was after morning commute time for most of my neighbours, and the place was nearly silent, except for the distant, muted hum of a TV somewhere down near the corner. Probably Mrs Appel; she worked nights and liked to wind down to a little HBO before nap time.

David came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders, then let them drift down my sides, stroking. Gentle, slow moves. Anyone watching wouldn’t have found it terrifically sexual – we weren’t exactly humping in the hall – but I had to brace my hands on the door and close my eyes. There was something magic about his hands, about the slow, deliberate way he used them. They followed the line of my shoulders, circled my arms, and moved all the way down to my wrists.

He moved closer until he pressed against me like a second skin. I tried to fit the key into the lock again. Missed. My hands were shaking.

‘Jo?’ His voice was velvet, with a slightly frayed edge that rasped like a purr. ‘Maybe you’d better let me do it.’

I held the ring up. He took it from my fingers and leant around me to fit the key in the lock and turn it.

Which shouldn’t have seemed so suggestive, but maybe that was a combination of my boiling hormones and the heat of his body pressed against my back. Solid summer-warm flesh, hard in all the right places.

The door clicked open. I moved inside, flicked on soft, diffuse overhead lighting, and kicked off my shoes and dropped my purse.

He was behind me again, and this time there wasn’t any holding back for the neighbours. His hands went right around my waist and pulled me against him, and I turned my head to look back at him.

Depthless black in his pupils, and the irises of his eyes were smoking-hot copper.

‘I need you,’ he said, and moved my hair out of the way. His mouth found the side of my neck, licking and sucking, so fierce that it was right on the skin-thin border between pain and pleasure. His hands slid up to skim lightly over my breasts. ‘I need you.’

‘I – wait, David, I don’t – are you sure you’re—’ Feeling up to this was a straight line waiting to happen. ‘—strong enough for—’

‘You give me strength.’ His mouth was doing absurd things to my self-control. ‘You give me life.’ He murmured it against that incredibly sensitive spot just at the base of my ear. ‘You give me peace.’

Which might have been the sexiest thing any man – or male Djinn – had ever said to me in my life.

‘We going to talk all day?’ I asked breathlessly, and felt him laugh. Not a nice laugh, and there wasn’t much amusement in it, either. It was the kind of deep, rippling chuckle you might hear from the devil right before he let you see the fine print of your contract on that condo in Aruba, and dear God, it made my spine turn to water.

‘That all depends on you,’ he said, and the hands reversed course, moved in and down. Demanding. Skimming up the thin fabric of my skirt in handfuls while he pulled me back hard against him in the same motion. ‘Are you in the mood to have a nice, long chat? Have some tea and cookies?’

It was not what I wanted to do with my mouth.

We fell onto the bed with a bouncing jolt. I didn’t need to undress him; where my hands landed, his clothes just misted away to reveal an incredibly beautiful expanse of flawless golden skin. His eyes turned vague, half-lidded, as I stroked my fingers over his chest and down. His muscles tensed underneath them, corded cable.

He rolled us over, his weight balanced on top of me. I couldn’t stop an involuntary arch in my back, and once I saw the answering glitter in his eyes I kept moving my hips. He moved back. Long, slow, hot torture.

‘Yes,’ I whispered.

He kissed me. Not romantic, this time. Demanding. Driven by something I didn’t fully understand. I’d never seen him like this before, full of a kind of frantic hunger, as if he wanted to consume me, possess me.