He vanished instantly. Talk about bugging out— he wasted no time at all. I’d never seen a Djinn have a panic attack, but that looked like one to me. And hell, I was kind of having one myself. Not feeling especially fine about my part in all this.
I bugged out right on his tail, and followed the contrail back home. We touched down into the newly renovated apartment at the same time, and this time I managed the reconstitution without any R rating. Once I thought of it as math—higher math, but still math—all I had to do was expand the equation of me to include the outfit. Better still, it was simple to vary it. Change a variable, here and there, and you get something suitable for wearing to a star-spangled party. Or a bag lady convention.
The one thing I could not seem to get right—still— was hair. Well, I’d never been a wizard at it in my mortal life, either. Maybe I was just destined to be curly.
Patrick wasn’t thinking about my hair; he was thinking about what he’d seen and backed hastily away from. He pointed a shaking finger at me, couldn’t think of anything to say, and swung around on Lewis, who had arrested a restless pacing to stare at the two of us.
“You!” Patrick snapped. “If you’d just left well enough alone…”
Lewis made no reply. He just resumed pacing.
“How did this get to be Lewis’s fault?” I blurted, and then wished I hadn’t. I mean, obviously, it got to be his fault because he’d ordered me to meddle. Dammit. “Cancel that. What I meant was, what do we do now?”
“Yell for help. Loudly. Repeatedly.” Patrick walked over to the telephone—a tasteful cream-colored unobtrusive one, to replace the Harley-Davidson model he’d been using before—and started dialing. “And then take a very long vacation, someplace else.”
Which I didn’t think would do a damn bit of good, because if this stuff had seeped down this far, it had probably contaminated the higher levels, too. Unless he meant Aruba, which was probably not glitter-free either, but still very nice this time of year.
“I’ll tell the Wardens,” Lewis said. “But I’d like to do it in person. Jo—?”
“Who are you calling?” I asked Patrick, since Lewis hadn’t phrased it in the form of an order and was probably too polite to do it for at least another five minutes. Patrick finished dialing a number that was too long to be to any country on Earth. He didn’t speak, just hung up the phone. I understood instinctively what he’d been doing—not dialing a phone, in any real way, but using the metaphorical human device to send a message through the aetheric, a kind of sympathetic magic. I even knew who he was calling. “Oh, God, you’re calling Jonathan.”
“Who won’t show his face,” Patrick said, with a bitter-lemon twist of his lips that made me wonder just how comfortable that relationship was. “He doesn’t leave his house.”
“Why?”
“Because it doesn’t exist on any of the planes. It’s a kind of…” Patrick paused for thought. “Bubble, I suppose you’d say. It’s for all of our protection. If Jonathan was ever claimed, the consequences… Let’s say they wouldn’t be good. Not good at all.”
So maybe Jonathan’s plush little refuge wasn’t by his choice. Which made me wonder just who really was in charge, among my new friends and family. Politics. Still hate ‘em. Djinn politics just made my head hurt worse than human ones.
Ten seconds or less later, I felt a kind of shift in the room, like some balance of energy had tipped. It was subtle, but it made me wonder…
… and then Rahel walked out of the master bedroom, examining her talons with a critical, casual grace. She looked up, acknowledged Patrick with a fast, white glint of teeth in her dark-skinned face, and then slowly took stock of the room.
“Love the makeover,” she said. “Since I doubt you grew any taste since last I saw you, I imagine Sistah Snow was behind it. Yes?”
Her smile faded fast when we started talking. A quick trip to the aetheric to show her the contamination, and back down to reality to see Rahel’s completely unnerving frown. Her eyes were glowing, hot and gold, and she just looked, well, strong. Strong enough to dissolve me into a sticky pool on the carpet just with the force of that stare.
“I’m sorry,” I said. It was totally inadequate.
She didn’t blink. “Not your fault,” she said, which was not at all what I expected to hear. “This is something I have never seen, either. I would have done the same, if I had been given the same order. With perhaps exactly the same result.”