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. Okay, the fastest production car ever made, with a V10, 7990 cubic centimeters, 6000 RPM, 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.”