Heat Stroke ww-2 Read online

  “Just… three?” He sounded breathless. Oh boy. Tell me he hadn’t worked these out in advance.

  It was too late to switch it to one wish. Damn.

  He opened his mouth to blurt out something that I just knew was going to involve hot oil and rubber sheets, so I jumped in with, “You really ought to think about it first. It’s like making a deal with the devil. There’s always some loophole that ends up turning things sour. Like, you say that you want a million dollars. I give you a million dollar life insurance policy and kill you. See?”

  He stopped, mouth still open far enough that I could see some cavities forming on his back molars. Then he got a sly, shallow look in those brown eyes, and closed his mouth and smiled.

  “You’re trying to stall,” he said. “You’re afraid of me.”

  Well, yeah. I’d already seen the dark side of Kevin, as he kicked Lewis in the face with every evidence of sociopathic glee. “Am not.”

  “Are too.”

  “Not.”

  “Too.”

  We both jumped at a sudden rattle of the doorknob. It jiggled back and forth briskly, three times, and went still. An annoyed female voice said, “Kevin? What are you up to in there?”

  “Nothing!” His voice went into the boy’s choir range and cracked. “Mom, a little privacy?”

  It took me a minute, but I placed the voice with the wish-I-could-forget-it memory of Yvette Prentiss dry-humping Lewis just before all of the trouble began. Mom? Well, she’d certainly got started early, if she was old enough to have a son Kevin’s age; she didn’t look a minute over thirty. Sure, flawless makeup, Botox and lots of spa treatments could work wonders, but not that many.

  I suspected she was the trophy stepmother, stuck with the unattractively teenaged son-by-marriage. The father was obviously out of the picture, no doubt dead, and the kid was one of those ugly iron candelabras you get as a Christmas present and don’t dare give away because, well, what would people think? Yvette sure hadn’t been dragging the anchor that was Kevin around at my funeral. Would have spoiled her perfect image, not to mention harshed her chances for scoring another bad, rich daddy.

  Or maybe I was doing her a disservice. Maybe she’d been knocked up at age thirteen, courageously endured the pregnancy, overcome daunting odds to be a good mother to her obnoxious-going-on-creep of a kid. Maybe she was just looking out for the two of them the best way she knew how, using the natural advantages she’d been given.

  Uh-huh. And I was Mother Teresa in a Magenta outfit. Riiiiiight. She’d used the kid to commit assault, at the very least. Homicide was certainly still a possibility. God, Lewis…

  The doorknob rattled again. Loudly. Longly.

  “Open up!” Yvette snapped. She didn’t sound like a courageous Madonna figure. She sounded like a bitch with a bad attitude. “Right now, Kevin, or I swear…!”

  “Um, okay, okay, coming—” Kevin threw me a help me! look. I just stared back. He changed his tone to a scared, tense whisper. “Back in the bottle?”

  I didn’t feel compelled. I just raised my eyebrows and cocked my head to stare harder. His anxiety level shot up another ten levels, and the whisper got even thinner. “Please? Back in the bottle?”

  Yvette hit the door. Hard. It rattled on its hinges.

  “You’re killing me, here, please! Get back in the bottle!”

  Whoops. Command mode. I felt myself instantly dissolving into mist, felt that toilet-bowl swirl of the bottle dragging me in, and braced myself for the pain I knew was coming.

  Yep, being squeezed like a baby in a birth canal was not my idea of fun, but there I went into the bottle, and I felt the world tilt as Kevin grabbed it up. Seen close through the glass, his fingers were huge and grimy and definitely nothing I ever wanted to have pawing my skin, substantial or insubstantial.

  And then he twisted the stopper home.

  Lights out.

  I dreamed again. I guess that was what Djinn did in bottles… dreamed. Sure as hell wasn’t anything else to do. To make matters even more strange, this one wasn’t even my dream.

  It was David’s.

  He was pacing restlessly in a strange square glass room I didn’t recognize, coat swirling like smoke around him from the violence of his turns. His hands were clenched behind his back, and his whole body vibrated with tension. As I watched, his legs began to blur and become mist; he hissed out something in a language I didn’t know and exerted a pulse of will that I could feel even in my drifting, dreaming state.

  His legs went solid again.

  He threw himself violently against the glass, pressing hard, so hard I felt the effort like a distant earthquake. Outside of the glass, there was a giant-sized world, distorted into warped shapes and weird colors. People moving around out there, giant blobs of color and form. One of them caught my attention— neon yellow outfit. Rahel?

  David was inside a bottle. Unlike me, he wasn’t sealed in, but for some reason he couldn’t get out, either.

  Where David was pushing, the thick glass vibrated. I felt the energy building in waves as the thick surface began to whipsaw violently, rippling. David pushed harder. The glass bowed out in a bubble, went from clear to milk white, distorted…

  David collapsed to his knees. The glass snapped back into shape with a ringing, singing pop of energy. Clear and perfect.

  “Let me go,” he said hoarsely. He was exhausted. Reflected light glittered on his copper-brushed hair, pale gold skin, bright-penny eyes. “Please, let me go to her. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  No sense of arrival, but suddenly Jonathan was sitting in the far corner. He was still dressed in casual human-normal clothes, but there was nothing normal or human about the power behind his eyes, or the cell-deep weariness. He looked infinitely worse than last I’d seen him.

  David climbed back to his feet and turned to face him. “I have to go, Jonathan, now.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Jonathan said. His voice was thin, tired, and hoarse. “This is the only safe place right now. Going out there is useless. And you know I’m right, so don’t give me that look.”

  David’s eyebrows knitted together in an angry line. “What look?”

  “That look. The you-don’t-understand look. Hell, I understand, I’ve been in love, too. But the survival of the Free Djinn comes first, it has to. We’re talking about losing everything. You want to end up dead, or worse?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then quit fucking around and try to understand that everything doesn’t revolve around your heartaches.”

  David took a step forward, fists clenched and face tense. “Oh, I understand, believe me. I’ve played chess with you too many times not to. But I’m not going to let you use her as a sacrifice pawn, Jonathan. Something’s happened to her. She’s been taken.”

  “I know.” Jonathan propped his head against the glass wall with no evidence of comfort. “Patrick arranged it. Look, I know you don’t approve, but she needed to learn the ropes. It was the best thing.”

  “Fuck!” David kicked the wall hard enough to draw a humming sound out of the hard surface. “You incredible bastard. You arrogant son of a—”

  “—bitch,” Jonathan supplied, and closed his eyes. “You’ve called me that before, you know. And trust me, in this particular case, flattery will not get you a free pass out of here. She needs this if you want her to survive. Don’t be stupid. She’s perfectly safe with Lewis… magically speaking, anyway.”

  “Stupid?” David repeated, and turned slowly to face him. Oh God. The look on his face… He lunged across the space, braced himself on stiff arms, face-to-face with Jonathan. “You think it’s Lewis that has her?”

  Jonathan’s eyes flashed open. Just a second of doubt in those old, tired, very powerful eyes. He didn’t answer.

  “It’s Yvette,” David whispered. “Don’t you understand? I don’t know how, but she’s got Joanne. You know what she’ll do.”

  Jonathan might have flinched—barely
—but whatever impulse he had toward concern shut down fast. “Better her than you.”

  David pulled back a fist, cocked it, looked ready to slam it straight into Jonathan’s face.

  He still didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink. David backed away, sank down in a crouch against the wall a few feet away, and buried his face in both hands for a few seconds.

  “Does it ever occur to you that maybe she might be as important as I am? As you are?” he asked.

  Jonathan cocked both eyebrows toward sarcasm. “Frankly? No. Never occurred to me. And wait… no, not occurring to me now.”

  “Let me go. Yvette wants me,” David said. “Don’t pretend you don’t know that. She always has. She tried to talk Bad Bob into it half a dozen times. Give her an opening, she’ll jump at the chance. I know how to manipulate her. I can be free in a matter of hours and bring Joanne with me.”

  Jonathan puffed his breath out impatiently. “And your point is…?”

  “I can do this. Joanne has no idea what she’s up against. I do.”

  A half-second of hesitation, which was probably more than the idea deserved, and then Jonathan said, quietly, “No. You’re staying here. Believe me, you’ll thank me later.”

  “Will I?” David was doing something odd. He stood up, shrugged out of his olive drab coat and let it slide to the floor, then unbuttoned his white-and-blue shirt with jerky, nervous motions. He added it to the pile. Stripped off the soft gray T-shirt next, revealing gold-burnished skin. While I enjoyed the view, I wondered what the hell he was doing. “You’ve never been claimed, Jonathan. Never, in your entire history. You have no idea what it’s like.”

  “I know what it’s like,” Jonathan said, in a tone that meant it was an old, boring argument. He was watching David with a frown that was getting deeper by the minute. “And what the hell are you doing?”

  “It’s rape,” David continued. He unbuttoned his blue jeans, unzipped, slipped them down. “Having your will taken away from you, forced to do whatever they want you to do. Not even owning yourself. No matter how pure the intentions, how kind the master, how much good comes out of it, it’s still rape. Don’t you get that? You gave her to Patrick. Patrick gave her to Lewis, and maybe she submitted to that, but this… no. You have no idea. And I’m not leaving her in Yvette’s hands, not alone.”

  No answer this time. Jonathan continued to stare up, no change in his expression. He might have been thinking about the merits of Guinness over Sam Adams, for all I knew. Or the secrets of the universe.

  David stripped off underwear, dropped them on the pile, and turned back to the glass. Spread his arms wide. Naked, he gave off a halo like polished gold. I felt him drawing in energy, felt the gigantic swirl of power on the aetheric level. He extended his hand out to the glass on the window and touched it, pressed his palm flat against it.

  “Are you going to let me go?” he asked.

  “No, because you have no plan beyond throwing yourself blindly on the grenade and hoping somebody will mop up the mess.” Jonathan didn’t sound in the least worried. “Put something on before you catch a cold.”

  David went very still, and I felt the lancing burn of power flash out of him. Straight into the glass, fine as a laser. It slammed into the barrier, bowed it outward, turned it opaque as milk, kept pushing.

  “Never gonna happen, Davy,” Jonathan said. “Trust me. You’re bleeding off so much power to keep that girl alive that you couldn’t shatter a soap bubble right now. And hey, you want my opinion, I think the girl’s pretty tough. Maybe she’ll surprise you. Maybe the last thing she needs is for you to come galloping to the rescue, that ever occur to you?”

  I felt David pulling hard on the umbilical that still bound us together, trying to access whatever power I had stored, but it was like a trickling stream trying to fill up a huge dry riverbed. God, was he really that drained? That weak?

  Jonathan continued to stare, lips pressed tight, eyes dark with knowledge. “You’re going to kill yourself. Stop it.”

  “No.” David was weak, draining fast, but he was still pouring everything he had into the effort to break the prison. “You stop holding me here.”

  “Put your goddamn clothes back on, David. What kind of a point are you trying to make? That you’re leaving all of this behind for her? Being reborn? I got it, already! Symbolism ‘R’ Us!”

  No answer. David was fiercely focused now, hands trembling. I could feel the intensity of his commitment. He wasn’t going to stop.

  Jonathan must have known it too. It was in his raw plea. “David!”

  The clothes lying on the ground ignited into white-hot flame. David was glowing like a gas flame, using himself ruthlessly. Destroying himself.

  “Let… me… GO!” It was a deep-in-the-throat growl, furious and enraged. The glass was bubbling with the force of the attack.

  Jonathan had gone sallow-pale under his tan. I could sense how deep this went between them, how much trust was being ripped apart in this moment.

  How much love was being destroyed.

  “Fine,” he finally whispered. “Go. Kill yourself, dammit.”

  The glass exploded like a bomb. David misted and was gone before the first glittering shards fell.

  Jonathan, left behind, closed his eyes and sank down against one wall of the prison—the refuge? — and braced his forehead against his hands.

  The bottle sealed itself without a sound, walling him in.

  The dream faded into a gray, sick, constant light, sparked with cold blue flashes.

  Don’t, I murmured in my sleep. Don’t do this for me.

  But I knew him better.

  The next time I got poured out of the bottle, things were different. For one thing, I was in another room—clean, this one, scrupulously Martha Stewarted, from the stacked pyramid of oranges in a low green tray to the matching rug and throw pillows.

  The place was so coordinated it could have joined the Ballet Russe. I felt claustrophobic. Patrick’s digs had been louche and tacky, but at least they’d been bursting with energy.

  There was only one word for this room. Soulless.

  When I put on flesh, I was standing on champagne-pale carpet in my spike-heeled pumps, looking like a hooker at a Suzy Homemaker convention. The expression on Yvette Prentiss’s face was almost worth the incredible embarrassment of the outfit.

  “Kevin!” Yvette said sharply. She was sitting on a vanilla cream satin-striped sofa, looking gorgeously, deliberately casual, much like the room. Nothing casual about it—you don’t get that artless elegance by just tossing on some jeans and touching up the lipstick. Hours of prep had been involved.

  Kevin, on the other hand, looked like he’d just been rousted out of bed. Wrinkled, unkempt, wearing a faded-out gray T-shirt with a tear in the sleeve and a pair of jeans so wide-legged they flared like gauchos. Naturally, the jeans were about three sizes too big, so they could ride fashionably low on his hips and display at least two inches of not-very-clean BVDs. I didn’t think his hair had ever been visited by either the Comb or Shampoo Fairy.

  He had a three-second delay to her angry snap, probably because he was still in awe of the Magenta outfit he’d managed to stick me with. “Um, what?”

  “Did you open the bottle before?”

  “No!” Patently a lie. He was terrible at it. “I might’ve, ah, peeked. Just a little.”

  She just gave him a scorching look of disgust, stood up and came to walk around me. I waited for her to kick the tires and ask how much mileage was on me. Oh, I so wanted to tell her to kiss my French-maid-costumed ass, but naturally, I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything but stand there, simmering. What did you do with Lewis, you incredible bitch?

  “Get rid of that,” she said to Kevin.

  “What?”

  “The outfit. Obviously.”

  “Oh.” Kevin seized the opportunity. “Take off your clothes,” he said to me. It was a direct, unequivocal order. I thought fast, and removed the apron with a flicker of consciousnes
s. He waited, in vain, for me to do the rest. “All your clothes,” he amended. Crap. I shut my eyes and did it, shedding stockings, shoes, skirt, corset, thong—everything. Standing in bare feet on carpet, feeling air conditioning breathe its way across my skin.

  Yvette groaned. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, put her in something decent. Conduct your perversions on your own time.”

  Never thought I’d be grateful to her, but I opened my eyes and stared at Kevin again, waiting for the order. He was too busy drooling. Yvette reached over and smacked him on the back of the head, hard, and he winced and ducked and said, “Okay! Put something on. Something, you know, nice.”

  I went for a severe black pantsuit in peachskin, a form-hugging pale silver shirt, and some discreet low-heeled Stuart Weitzman shoes, with tassels. I reached in the vest pocket of the jacket and fished out a nice pair of Ray·Ban sunglasses to finish it off.

  “Better,” Yvette approved. “You have good taste.”

  “Thank you,” I said. Pretty much meaning fuck you, but without the actual words.

  “What’s your name?”

  Since she wasn’t my master, and it wasn’t a Rule-of-Three question anyway, there was no reason for me to tell the truth. “Lilith,” I said. Sounded exotic and faintly evil. Hi, I’m Lilith, I’ll be your evil servant today. Yeah, I liked it.

  “Lilith,” she repeated. She did the walking-around thing again, checking me out. “You’ll do.”

  “For what, exactly?” I asked. She looked shocked. Apparently, Djinn were not quite so aggressive in her experience. “Who are you?”

  She wasn’t going to answer questions from the help. She glared at Kevin, evidently blaming him for my bad attitude, and said, “You understand what to do?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and looked as resentful as I felt. “I get it.”

  “Don’t screw it up.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You know how important this is.” God, she was picking at him like a scab. She’d probably say that she was just reinforcing the point, but I saw the light in her eyes. She just plain enjoyed making him squirm. It was an uncomfortable sort of fascination.