“Well, I’d rather go with you. Because, like you pointed out, it might not be safe.”
He shook his head and turned away from the window. I could almost see the glow radiating off of him, as if he’d stored it up from the touch of sunlight. The fierce glow of it warmed me across a small ocean of Berber carpet, through a white cotton duvet of goosedown.
I felt the surrender, but he didn’t say it in so many words. “You can’t go out like that,” he said, and walked over.
“Oh.” I blinked down at myself and realized I hadn’t the vaguest idea of how to put my own clothes on—magically speaking. “A little help…?”
David put his hands on my shoulders, and I felt fabric settling down over my skin. Clothes. Black peachskin pants, a tailored peachskin jacket, a discreet white satin shirt. Low-heeled pumps on my feet. He bent and placed a warm, slow kiss on my lips, and I nearly—literally—melted.
When I drew back, he was dressed, too. Black suit, blue shirt, dark tie. Very natty. The round glasses he wore for public consumption were in place to conceal the power of his eyes, even though he’d dialed the color down to something more human.
David was very, very good at playing mortal.
Me… well, there was a reason I hadn’t tried to dress myself. I wasn’t even good at playing Djinn yet.
He produced a pair of sunglasses and handed them over. I put them on. “How do I look?”
“Dangerous,” he said soberly. “Okay. Rules. You don’t talk to anyone, you don’t go off on your own. You do exactly what I tell you, when I tell you to do it. And most of all…”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t use any magic. Nothing. Understand?”
“Sure.”
He offered his hand. I took it and unfolded myself from the bed, setting the empty coffee cup aside on the mahogany nightstand.
“This is such a bad idea,” he said, and sighed, and then…
… then we were somewhere else.
Somewhere dark. It smelled of cleaning products.
“Um—” I began.
“Shhh.” Hot lips brushed mine, delicate as sunlight. “I’m keeping us out of their awareness, but you need to stay out of the way. People won’t see you. Make sure you don’t run into them.”
“Oh. Right.”
“And don’t talk. They can still hear you.”
“Right.”
“And don’t touch anything.”
I didn’t bother to acknowledge that one. He must have taken it as a given, because the next second there was a crack of warm lemon yellow light, and a door opened, and we stepped out of a janitor’s closet onto a mezzanine. Big, sweeping staircase to the right heading down to an echoing marble lobby—a vast expanse of patterned carpeting that cost more than the gross national product of most South American countries. Lots of rooms, discreetly nameplated in brass. Uniformed staff, both men and women, stood at attention. They had the brushed, polished, pressed gleam of being well paid in the service of the rich.
David walked me across a no-man’s-land of floral burgundy. Past the Rockefeller Plaza Room and the Wall Street Board Room and the Broadway Room. At the end of the lobby, a narrow hallway spilled into a larger anteroom. Burgundy-uniformed security guards to either side. The babble of voices rising up like smoke into lightly clove-scented air.
Suddenly, I had a desire to stop and reconsider this plan. Suddenly it was all very… real.
“Oh man,” I murmured. David’s hand on my arm tightened. “I know. No talking.”
“Shh,” he agreed, lips next to my ear. I swallowed, nodded, and put my chin up.
We strolled right in between the two guards, who stayed focused somewhere off into the distance. David had explained to me once how much easier it was to just redirect attention than to actually become invisible; he’d demonstrated it pretty vividly once, in a hot tub in Oklahoma City. I wished I knew how he did it. Just one of the thousands of things I still needed to learn about being a Djinn.
The anteroom was large enough to hold about a hundred people comfortably, and it was at capacity. At first glance it looked like an office party, only people wore more black and the noise level was two decibels lower than normal. Big floral display at the polished mahogany doors at the end of the room, chrysanthemums and lilies and roses. A guest book next to them. Lots of people standing in line to sign.
David steered me expertly out of the path of a tall, thin woman in black I barely recognized—Earth Warden, Maria something, from the West Coast. She was talking to Ravi Subranavan, the Fire Warden who controlled the territory around Chicago.
Everywhere I looked, people I knew. Not many were what I’d call friends, but they’d been coworkers, at least. The cynical part of me noted that they’d shown up for free booze, but the truth was most of them had needed to make arrangements to be here— naming replacements, handing over power, enduring long drives or longer plane rides. A lot of hassle for a free glass or two of champagne, even if it was offered at the Drake.