“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. “Okay. 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.
“Okay,” 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. “Okay, 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 polarized 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 colors, 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 tires on the road, and the rush of the Viper running eagerly toward the horizon.