Heat Stroke ww-2 Read online

  We picked an upper-class hotel in Manhattan, valeted Mona into a parking garage with rates so high it had to be run by the Mafia. I wondered how much ransom we were going to have to pay Guido to get her back. We strolled into the high-class marble and mahogany lobby brazenly unconcerned by our lack of luggage.

  “Wow,” I said, and looked around appreciatively. “Sweet.” It had that old-rich ambiance that most places try to create with knockoff antiques and reproduction rugs, but as I trailed my fingers over a mahogany side table I could feel the depth of history in it, stretching back to the generations of maids who’d polished it, to the eighteenth-century worker who’d planed the wood, to the tree that stood tall in the forest.

  Nothing fake about this place. Well, okay, the couches were modern, but you have to prefer comfort over authenticity in some things. The giant Persian rug was certainly real enough to make up the difference.

  The place smelled of that best incense of all—old money.

  David waited in line patiently at the long marble counter while the business travelers ahead of him presented American Express cards and listened to voice mail on cell phones. A thought occurred to me, and I tugged at the sleeve of his olive drab coat. “Hey. Why—”

  “—check in?” he finished for me. “Two reasons. First, it’s easier, and you’ll find that the less power you use unnecessarily, the better off you are. Second, I don’t think you’re ready to be living my life quite yet. One step at a time.”

  He reached into his pocket and came out with— an American Express card. I blinked at it. It said David L Prince in raised letters. “Cool. Is that real?” I said it too loudly.

  His eyes widened behind concealing little round glasses. “Not a great question when we’re about to use it to pay for the room, is it?”

  Oh. I’d been figuring we were still in some unnoticeable fog, but clearly not; the guy in line ahead of me was distracted enough from the cell phone glued to his ear to throw us a suspicious look. True, we didn’t have the glossy spa-treated look of the rich, or the unlimited-expense-account confidence of the corporate, but we weren’t exactly looking like homeless, either. I shot him a sarcastic smile. He turned back to his business.

  “Sorry,” I said, more softly, to David. “Obviously, yes, it’s real, of course. I mean—hell, I don’t know what I mean. Sorry. Um… where do they send the bills?”

  “Not to me.”

  His smile made my train of thought derail and crash. Cell Phone Guy in front of us picked up his room key and got out of line; David and I moved up to the counter, where a highly polished young lady too nice for New York did all the check-in things, issued us plastic key cards, and fired off amenities too fast for me to follow. A uniformed bellman veered out of our path when he saw we were bag-free and gave us a look that meant he was no stranger to couples arriving for short, intense bursts of time.

  David took my arm and walked me to the elevators, across the huge Persian rug, past a silent piano and a muted big-screen TV that was showing some morning show with perfect people interviewing more perfect people. We rode the elevator with Cell Phone Guy, who was still connected and chatting about market share and a corporate vice president’s affair with the wife of a global board member. The latter sounded interesting. As it happened, we were both on the same floor—twelve—and he looked at us like we might be after his wallet or his life, but before long he peeled away to a room and we continued on, down a long hallway and to a bright-polished wooden door with the number 1215 on it.

  David didn’t bother with the key card. He touched the door with his finger, and it just swung open.

  I looked at him. “What happened to ‘the less you use, the better’?”

  He scooped me up in his arms and carried me over the threshold. Gravity slipped sideways, and I put my arms around his neck until he settled me down with my feet on the carpet.

  “What was that for?” I asked. He felt fever-hot against me, and those eyes—God. Intense, focused, hungry.

  “Luck,” he said, and kissed me. I felt instant heat slam through me, liquefying me in equal proportion to how incredibly real he felt against me, and I felt a feverish urge to be naked with this man, right now, to be sure that all of this wasn’t just a particularly lovely dream on the way to the grave and oh God his hands burned right through my clothes like they weren’t there.

  And then, as his palms glided up my sides, wrinkling fabric, the cloth melted away and disappeared, and then it was just flesh, and fire, and the taste of David’s lips and tongue. I felt myself burn and go faint with heat stroke, revived with the cool relief of his skin.

  And if it was a dream, it was the best I’d ever had.

  In the morning, we got down to the work of teaching me to be a Djinn.

  I’m not what you could call spiritual, so learning how to be spiritual—in the true spirit sense of the word—was a challenge. Sure, I’d been a Warden, but calling the wind and calming storms was all about science for me. I understood it in the way a child of the atomic age would, which meant subatomic particles and chaos theory and wave motion. Hell, I’d been a weather-controlling bureaucrat, when you came right down to it. Nothing that you might call preparation for being granted power on a legendary scale.

  David started me out with that night of incredible, unbelievable sex, and the next morning when I woke up it felt like it was still going on. I mean, senses locked wide open. Chakras at full power. Every touch, every taste, every random sensation echoed through me like a struck bell. It was fun at first.

  Then it got to be painful.

  “Turn it off,” I groaned, and hid my head under a down pillow. David’s fingers traced the bumps of my spine, dragging down the sheet in slow, cool increments. “Oh, God, please, I can’t stand it!”

  He made a sound, low in his throat, and let his touch glide down over my buttocks, down the backs of my thighs. “You’ll need to learn how to shut off your senses,” he said. “Can’t walk around like this all the time, can you?”

  I knotted my fists in the pillow and screamed into the mattress. Not that he was particularly trying to drive me nuts, it was just part of the overload. Everything was sexual. The sheet, sliding over the backs of my legs. His fingertips firing nerves. The smell of him, the taste of him still tingling on my lips, the sound of his breath in my ear.

  “I don’t know how,” I whispered, when I’d stopped shaking. “Tell me how.”

  “You have to learn how to choose what level of sensation and perception to use,” he said. “To start with, I want you to meditate and block out what’s around you.”

  “Meditate?” I took my head out from under the pillow, shook dark hair back from my face, and rolled over on my side to look at him. “Excuse me, but the closest I ever got to having a spiritual awakening was dating a yoga instructor. Once.”

  David propped himself up on one elbow, looking down at me. No mistaking it; he was enjoying this a little too much. And I was enjoying the bird’s-wing graceful sweep of his pecs. “You’re underestimating yourself. You’re highly spiritual, Joanne. You just don’t know it. Just clear your mind and meditate.”

  Meditate. Right. I took a deep breath and tried to relax muscles I no longer actually had. Which was more than a little confusing, even in the abstract.

  “Focus,” David’s voice said next to my ear, and of course, it was instantly impossible to stay anything like on track. His voice got inside me in places that nice girls don’t mention. His breath stirred warm on my skin, and there went that potential orgasm thing again, a little earthquake of sheer pleasure that completely sabotaged any chance of achieving my center.

  I didn’t open my eyes, but I said, “I could focus a lot better if you were somewhere else.”

  “Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry. That velvet-smooth tenor sounded smug. “I’ll be quiet.”

  He was. I concentrated on visualizing something calming—in my case, it was the ocean—but the whole wave-and-surf vibe fell apart when I heard him rus
tling pages. I sighed and opened my eyes, propped myself up on my elbows, and looked over at him.

  He was lying next to me in bed, propped up, reading the newspaper.

  “You’re kidding,” I said. He gave me one of those What? looks and went back to the Metro section. “I’m trying to meditate, here! Give me a break. At least help.”

  “I am helping,” he said. “I’m distracting myself so I don’t distract you.”

  I glared. It had absolutely no effect. He sighed, put the paper at half-staff, and looked at me gravely over newsprint. “Fine. What would you like me to do?”

  “I don’t know! Something!”

  “I can’t meditate for you, Joanne.”

  “Well, you can… encourage me!”

  He folded the New York Times and put it down on the side table. “Oh, I’d like to encourage you. I just don’t think it would help you focus. Unless…”

  “What?” I asked. He turned on his side and reached out, trailed a single fingertip over the curve of my shoulder and down my arm. Little earthquakes, building to a major seismic event inside…

  “Never mind.” It wasn’t nothing, I could tell. He wasn’t trying to distract me, he really was trying to distract himself. From me. “Meditate for another half hour, and I’ll tell you.”

  My entire attention fixed on the square half-inch of skin his finger was touching. “Half an hour?”

  “Half an hour.”

  “I can do that.”

  Sheer bravado, but now I was motivated. I flopped back flat on the pillow, closed my eyes, and concentrated hard on that ocean… blue-green waves rolling in from a misty horizon… churning to pale lace as they crashed on the shore… whispers of mist cool on my skin… a fine, endless white sand beach that glittered in sunlight…

  I felt like I was actually achieving something— clearing my mind of the idea of him lying beside me, anyway—when he blew it for me by talking again.

  “Joanne,” he said. “Quit hovering.”

  I opened my eyes and realized I was looking at the motel room ceiling. White spackled moonscape broken up by a dusty ice sculpture of a light fixture two inches from my nose.

  Oh. When he said hovering, he meant hovering. As in seven feet above the bed.

  “Crap,” I said, and looked over my shoulder. “I went all Exorcist.”

  “Actually, it wasn’t a bad try. I felt you go quiet for a few minutes.”

  “How many minutes?” I rotated myself in midair to face him. Ha! Managed it gracefully, in a controlled weightless spin, which was nice; control had been kind of a problem. Obviously. My hair spoiled the effect by flopping forward, and I tried shoving it back over my shoulders. It repeated the flopping thing.

  “Let’s call it… thirty.” David’s smile turned dangerously amused, and he reached down and pulled the sheet away from the rest of him. I stopped messing with my hair and lived for the moment, because like me, David hadn’t bothered with pajamas. He patted the Joanne-shaped hollow in the bed next to him.

  I tried to get down. Really. But whatever switch I’d thrown to get up here, I couldn’t seem to find it again. I kept hovering. “Um, not that I’m not motivated, but…”

  “You’re stuck.”

  “Kind of a yes, bordering on an oh, crap.” I tried to make it funny, but truth was, it scared me. All this power, none of the control I so obviously needed just to get through what was for David nothing but an autonomic function. “You forgot to tell me about the gravity-being-optional part of this exercise.”

  He levitated up, an inch at a time, and when he was still a foot away I felt the summer heat of his skin. He smelled like warm cinnamon and peaches, and it made my mouth water and my body go golden.

  He stopped with a cool two-inch cushion of air between us.

  “I didn’t forget,” he said. “I just didn’t think you’d be able to do this for a while. Don’t worry, it’s normal.”

  “Normal? I’m halfway into the bed of the guy upstairs!”

  “I’d rather you were more than halfway into the bed down here.” That look on his face—naked, powerful, proprietary—sent a pulse of sheer need through me.

  “Tease,” I said. He made a sound in his throat that wasn’t quite a laugh.

  “Come back to bed and we’ll see.” He lowered himself by a couple of inches. I tried to follow. Failed. He drifted back up. “Want me to help you?”

  “No. Yes. Hell. I don’t know, what’s the right answer?”

  His hand touched my face and drew a slow line of fire down my neck to my collarbone. “You have to learn to stay in the body, Jo. We can’t exactly do this out in public.”

  “News flash. You do this out in public and you draw attention for more than defying gravity.” I tried to sound nonchalant, but it was tough with all the combustion inside me. God. I couldn’t seem to get used to the hypersensitive nature of being a Djinn. It was the little things that got me—the sharp-edged beauty of how things looked, the intensity of how they felt, tasted, smelled, sounded. The human world was so real. Sometimes it was so real it made me weep. I couldn’t decide if it was like living in a perpetual state of orgasm, or being perpetually stoned; maybe both.

  The casual touch of David’s fingers on my skin was enough to start chain reactions of pleasure deep inside, and I caught my breath and closed my eyes as his touch moved down, glided over the curve of my breast.

  “Come back to bed,” he murmured, and his lips brushed mine when he spoke.

  “I can’t.” Literally.

  “Maybe it’s that you don’t want to.”

  “Oh believe me, that’s so very not the problem.”

  His warm lips melted against mine like silk in the sun, and his hands did things that ought to be illegal, and mandatory for every woman in the world to experience daily. Suddenly we were skin to skin, and my mind whited out.

  He slowly rotated us until gravity was cradling my back. “You need to learn to stay in the body, no matter what happens. Think you can do that?”

  “Try me.”

  Oh, that smile. It could melt titanium. “I intend to.”

  He kissed me again, and this time there was nothing sweet and nice about it; this was dark and serious and intense, full of hunger and need. Oh, yeah, this was the difference between human and Djinn.

  Intensity.

  I felt my whole body catch fire, responding, and arched against him. It felt so right, so perfect, and he held me to him with one hand on the back of my head, one in the small of my back as he dropped burning kisses on my neck, my breasts, the aching points of my nipples.

  Oh, God.

  He whispered something to me in a language I didn’t know, but it didn’t matter; some languages are translated in the skin, not the mind. If living as a Djinn is like being in a perpetual state of orgasm, you can imagine how much better it gets when you approach the real thing.

  I found the switch, and we fell back to the bed with a solid, vibrating thump that rattled the headboard.

  It was a good start.

  * * *

  And on the fifth day of my new life, I had a lovely funeral.

  Well, it wasn’t really a funeral—you need a body for a funeral, preferably an open casket, and the fire hadn’t left a whole lot for reconstructive purposes. The Wardens Association was too discreet to hold the service in the UN Building—the corporate offices—so they rented a nice big ballroom over at the Drake Hotel and sent out invitations to three or four hundred Wardens. I heard about it because David heard about it, through whatever arcane grapevine the Djinn had in place.

  “—but you’re not going,” he finished, as we split a small pot of room service coffee. Some vices never go away, even after death. Coffee. Sex. Alcohol. Hell, if I was a smoker, I figure I would’ve still been lighting up and griping about the price of a carton.

  I stirred cream into my coffee. David disapproved of cream; it was obvious from the concerned frown that formed between his eyebrows. “I’m not going?” I echoed it mi
ldly, but his attention immediately shifted from my poor coffee etiquette to what I was saying.

  “No,” he said. “And we’re not going to fight about that, right?” His eyebrows went up, then down.

  “Of course not,” I said, and smiled as I blew gentle ripples on the au lait surface. We were sitting cross-legged on the bed, sheets draped over sensitive bits more because of hot coffee prudence than modesty. “That’s a classic guy mistake, by the way.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sleeping with me, then thinking you can tell me what to do.”

  Those eyebrows, so expressive. They pulled together again, threatened to close ranks across his forehead. “I didn’t—”

  “Did.”

  “—sleep with you. In fact.”

  “Common usage. Did too.”

  “Didn’t.”

  “Did too.”

  He held up one hand, palm out. “Okay, I didn’t mean it that way. I just meant that it’s too dangerous for you to go out among humans right now. Especially Wardens.”

  “And therefore, according to you, I’m not going. Because it’s too dangerous.”

  “Therefore,” he agreed. We sipped coffee. There’s something oddly relaxing about the smell—rich, nutty, the very essence of the earth—and I breathed it in and just savored the moment. Another great advantage of being Djinn—I didn’t need a shower. No dead skin cells needing to be sloughed, no bacterial processes breaking them down and creating stink. Djinn are clean and whatever smells we have are something we choose, on some subconscious level. Mine, I figured, was a kind of jasmine. Something pale and fragrant, with an undertone of obsession.

  David finally sighed and set down his cup with a well-bred tinkle of china. “So therefore you’re going to completely blow off the warning and go anyway, no matter what I say, right?”

  I tried to be sober, but my mouth wouldn’t obey me; it curved into a provocative smile. “Figured that out all by yourself?”

  He was frowning again. God, he was cute when he frowned. I wanted to lean over and kiss away that crease between his eyebrows. “Please listen to me. I’m serious. It’s too dangerous.”