About the time I heard the fourth person I barely knew use words like heroic and selfless I had to take a walk outside to clear my head. A few people were still milling around the reception area, gobbling up the rest of the shrimp and ladyfingers. One of them was the walking hormone factory who’d introduced herself as Yvette Prentiss. She wasn’t wasting her time listening to the fictional story of Joanne Baldwin; she was bending the ear of a middle-aged, very rich-looking gentleman with a London suit and an Eastern European accent.
David appeared next to me. Literally appeared. I almost knocked over a spindly-legged table holding a discreet black-bordered stand announcing that my memorial service was By Invitation Only.
I put my lips close to his ear and whispered, “So? How do you know her?”
He shook his head. “Later.”
“Uh-uh. Now.”
He gave me a resigned look and guided us to a small alcove near the back, where we’d be out of the way of foot traffic. Also well away from any potential eavesdroppers, who might have found a conversation coming out of empty space disturbing.
The fire had faded out of his eyes, but he was still wired; I could feel it coming off of him in waves of static. He said, “Her name is Yvette Prentiss.”
“Heard that the first time. Evidently there’s more to the you-and-her than introductions.”
“A little.” He looked past me, toward her, then quickly away. “She was a friend of Bad Bob’s.”
David’s former sick, demented master. Okay, I could believe that, and it didn’t raise her in my estimation. “How good a friend? The come-on-over-and-watch-a-movie kind of friend, or the come-on-over-and-sweat-up-the-sheets kind?”
David avoided my eyes. “Let’s just say they had appetites in common.”
“Let’s say a little more than that.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s creeping me out that she’s in mourning and I’ve never met her.”
He focused back on her with that scary intensity. “Oh, she’s not in mourning.” Which I could believe, seeing her flirt and tease at the other end of the room. She was currently sucking sauce off of a shrimp, to the delight of the middle-aged guy hovering near her like a bee on a flower. “She’s hunting. Bad Bob paid her bills. She’s looking for a new source of income.”
“David.” I drew his eyes back to me. “What’s with the two of you?”
“There are things I don’t want to remember about my time with him. She’s one.”
That sounded dry and uninformative, but he was shaking. Shaking. “David?”
He reached for me and captured my face between his hands, leaned his forehead against mine. Lips close enough to taste. “You’re an innocent,” he said. “I want you to stay that way. Don’t let her near you, and whatever you do, don’t let her know you’re Djinn. There are things—I can’t tell you. And I hope you’ll never know.”
Across the room, Yvette Prentiss laughed. She had a sweet little-girl laugh that no doubt charmed the pants off of rich old guys arrogant enough to believe she loved them for their personalities. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought there was a deep, midnight black thread of darkness in it.
I felt the laugh rip into David like a claw, and did the only thing I could.
I said, “Let’s blow this place and go home.”
Two days passed. Nice days. There’s nothing bad about lazing around a fancy hotel room with the sexiest guy in the world and unlimited pay-per-view movies.
Not that it was all fun and games. I was learning things, like the physics of being a Djinn. They were entirely different than the physics I’d learned as a human being, and believe me, I’d been a specialist. Handling the weather with any degree of skill requires an absolute knowledge of little rules like conservation of energy, and it was full of detail work. I can’t even count how many times disarming hurricane-force winds boiled down to something as simple as turning down the subatomic thermostat, changing the world one whirling atom at a time.
But operating as a Djinn was the difference between a two-dimensional game of tic-tac-toe, and a three-dimensional Rubik’s Cube of consequences. There were still scales, and they still had to balance— if I wanted to control the weather, I could still reach up into the aetheric and create a little warm air cushion moving counter to the cold-air mass streaming in from the sea, and voila, rain. In human terms, that would have cost me personal energy.
As a Djinn, I had to balance the physical world, the aetheric, and about ten other planes of existence to create that rain, all without pulling anything out of my own essence. Because, as a Djinn, I didn’t have any essence, really. I drew power from the earth, the sun, the life around me. It was surprisingly difficult to do.