Windfall tww-4 Page 4

  The bed was the only thing that mattered right now.

  I must have parked, but that part was a blur. Then stairs, and then we were in the hall and I was hunting for my key. It was after morning commute time for most of my neighbors, and the place was nearly silent, except for the distant, muted hum of a TV somewhere down near the corner. Probably Mrs. Appel; she worked nights and liked to wind down to a little HBO before nap time.

  David came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders, then let them drift down my sides, stroking. Gentle, slow moves. Anyone watching wouldn’t have found it terrifically sexual—we weren’t exactly humping in the hall—but I had to brace my hands on the door and close my eyes. There was something magic about his hands, about the slow, deliberate way he used them. They followed the line of my shoulders, circled my arms, and moved all the way down to my wrists.

  He moved closer until he pressed against me like a second skin. I tried to fit the key into the lock again. Missed. My hands were shaking.

  “Jo?” His voice was velvet, with a slightly frayed edge that rasped like a purr.

  “Maybe you’d better let me do it.”

  I held the ring up. He took it from my fingers and leaned around me to fit the key in the lock and turn it.

  Which shouldn’t have seemed so suggestive, but maybe that was a combination of my boiling hormones and the heat of his body pressed against my back. Solid summer-warm flesh, hard in all the right places.

  The door clicked open. I moved inside, flicked on soft, diffuse overhead lighting, and kicked off my shoes and dropped my purse.

  He was behind me again, and this time there wasn’t any holding back for the neighbors. His hands went right around my waist and pulled me against him, and I turned my head to look back at him.

  Depthless black in his pupils, and the irises of his eyes were smoking-hot copper.

  “I need you,” he said, and moved my hair out of the way. His mouth found the side of my neck, licking and sucking, so fierce that it was right on the skin-thin border between pain and pleasure. His hands slid up to skim lightly over my breasts. “I need you.”

  “I—wait, David, I don’t—are you sure you’re—” Feeling up to this was a straight line waiting to happen. “—strong enough for—”

  “You give me strength.” His mouth was doing absurd things to my self-control.

  “You give me life.” He murmured it against that incredibly sensitive spot just at the base of my ear. “You give me peace.”

  Which might have been the sexiest thing any man—or male Djinn—had ever said to me in my life.

  “We going to talk all day?” I asked breathlessly, and felt him laugh. Not a nice laugh, and there wasn’t much amusement in it, either. It was the kind of deep, rippling chuckle you might hear from the devil right before he let you see the fine print of your contract on that condo in Aruba, and dear God, it made my spine turn to water.

  “That all depends on you,” he said, and the hands reversed course, moved in and down. Demanding. Skimming up the thin fabric of my skirt in handfuls while he pulled me back hard against him in the same motion. “Are you in the mood to have a nice, long chat? Have some tea and cookies?”

  It was not what I wanted to do with my mouth.

  We fell onto the bed with a bouncing jolt. I didn’t need to undress him; where my hands landed, his clothes just misted away to reveal an incredibly beautiful expanse of flawless golden skin. His eyes turned vague, half-lidded, as I stroked my fingers over his chest and down. His muscles tensed underneath them, corded cable.

  He rolled us over, his weight balanced on top of me. I couldn’t stop an involuntary arch in my back, and once I saw the answering glitter in his eyes I kept moving my hips. He moved back. Long, slow, hot torture.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  He kissed me. Not romantic, this time. Demanding. Driven by something I didn’t fully understand. I’d never seen him like this before, full of a kind of frantic hunger, as if he wanted to consume me, possess me.

  Own me.

  This wasn’t equal. It couldn’t be equal, because I still held his bottle, and I’d claimed him. It was a master-slave relationship, no matter how nice the master, how willing the slave. It bothered me.

  Just at this moment, I wondered if it bothered him, too.

  He was too weak. If I set him free, he’d fade into smoke and hunger. Lose himself.

  I couldn’t let that happen. Right or wrong, I couldn’t let it happen.

  I lay awake, later, curled against his warmth as he drew lazy magical patterns on my back. They must have been magical. Every place his hand traveled left pools of pulsing silver light inside of me. Parts of my body ached. Other parts tingled and burned. There was a bright, sun-hot throb on my neck, and another several on the insides of my thighs, and I felt as if I’d been completely, breathtakingly destroyed. If that wasn’t being totally possessed, I couldn’t imagine how much more I could take without shattering.

  His hand glided down to the small of my back and stayed there for a couple of beats, and I felt a very, very small stirring inside.

  I turned my head and looked at him. He didn’t meet my eyes.

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “I don’t understand how this is supposed to work.” I rolled over, took his hand, and placed it over my womb.

  And we both felt the stirring inside. His eyes flared, then went dark.

  “It’s been three months,” I said. “Nothing’s changed.”

  “You’re not—” He stopped, shook his head, and those long, gorgeous fingers stroked gently over my skin. Caressing me, but caressing inside me, too. “It’s hard to explain.”

  “But I’m pregnant. Right?”

  “That’s what’s hard to explain. She won’t—grow like a human child. She’s like a seed, waiting for the sun. Just… waiting.”

  “For how long?”

  He didn’t answer that one. “I should have asked you first,” he said, and his hand moved again, drawing silver.

  “It would have been polite, yeah.”

  “I did it to protect you.”

  “I know.” At the time, it had been the only way he had known to ensure I’d survive a trip to Las Vegas; and facing down the one Djinn he couldn’t protect me from—his best friend, Jonathan. And it had worked, too. Jonathan hadn’t killed me. He’d even shown some signs of thinking I was a little better than pond scum, which was a huge improvement. “Tell me how this is supposed to happen, then.”

  He shook his head again, David-speak for I don’t want to talk about it. I waited him out, watching his face. He finally said, “It may not happen at all. Djinn children are rare. Even then, they’re only born to two Djinn. A Djinn and a mortal… it’s not… She exists inside you as a potential, but—she may never survive.”

  “Jonathan said she could only be born if you die.”

  His eyes slowly came up to meet mine. “That’s… probably true. We come from death, not life.”

  Djinn were very hard to kill, but David was fragile. When he made me a Djinn, he’d fractured something vital inside of him into two pieces, one of which he’d given me to keep me alive. Even when I’d been granted the gift of humanity again, that root-deep fracture had remained. And then he’d gotten in the way of an Ifrit, who drained him nearly to death.

  And now he was hanging onto the fragile thread between life and that kind of living death, of losing himself. If he stayed outside of his bottle for too long, or used too much power, he’d become an Ifrit, a thing of ice and shadow. A thing bent only on feeding on others.

  As if he’d followed my thought, his hand on my back went still. I felt a shudder run through him, and his eyes dimmed just a little.

  “David?” I sat up. He eased back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

  “I shouldn’t have done this to you,” he said. “I should never have done any of this to you. You deserve—”

  “Don’t do this to y
ourself. None of it is your fault.”

  He closed his eyes. He looked suddenly very, very tired. Human. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

  “No! God, no.” I put my hand on his chest, then my head. My hair spilled dark over his skin. “Well, not any more than I wanted you to, anyway.”

  “I’m afraid I will,” he said. His voice sounded distant, worn smooth by exhaustion. “No, I know I will; I can sense it.” His eyes opened, and the last embers of copper flared in orange swirls. “You can’t let me. I mean it, Jo. You have to have defenses against me. You have to learn…”

  The fire was cooling under his skin, the light in him going out. “I have to go now,” he said. “I love you.”

  I kissed him, quickly, lovingly, and said, “I love you, too. Go back in the bottle now.”

  I felt the sudden indrawn breath of his passing, sank suddenly down in the welter of disordered sheets, and when I opened my eyes again he was gone.

  Nothing left but an indentation in the pillows.

  I turned over, slid open the nightstand drawer, and took his bottle out of its protective zippered case lined with gray foam.

  I started to put the stopper in, but then hesitated. At some very deep level, he was still part of me, drawing on the magic I possessed; putting the stopper in the bottle meant cutting that connection, and although he hadn’t said so, I suspected that the more I could give him, the better. I’d have opened my magical veins if it could have made him better. Hell, I wasn’t in the Wardens anymore; I wasn’t directing the weather or saving lives. I was just a poverty-level member of the vast, unwashed paid labor force.

  I needed him for completely different reasons these days than making miracles happen for other people.

  I sank back on the pillows with a sigh. I didn’t actually know if he was recovering, or, if he was, how quickly; I’d need the opinion of another Djinn to find out, but then, none of the Djinn had been around to visit since I’d left the Wardens. They were staying clear. I figured Jonathan had something to do with it. The last thing he’d said to me, in a flat, angry monotone, had been, You broke him, you fix him. The unspoken or else had been daunting.

  Jonathan hadn’t dropped by since I’d returned to Florida, but with the kinds of powers he possessed, he hardly needed to. He was probably back in his house, watching me through his big plate-glass picture window and sipping magically imported beer.

  Probably watching me right now.

  I rolled over on my back, flipped the bird at the ceiling.

  “Hope you enjoyed the show,” I said. “No encores.”

  No reaction. Which was no doubt for the best.

  I fell asleep with the bottle beside me, to the steady, pounding whisper of the surf down on the beach.

  I catapulted out of bed two hours later to a banging on the apartment door. I was halfway to the door before I realized I was stark naked. Back to the bedroom to throw on a floor-length silk robe, belted in front, and jam my feet into slippers.

  “Coming!” I yelled, and hustled back as the knocking continued to thunder. I started to rip the door open, then hesitated and used the peephole.

  It took me about ten seconds—long, full ones—to realize who I was looking at, because she didn’t look like herself at all.

  Oh. My. God.

  I unlocked the dead bolt and flung the door wide. “Sarah?”

  My sister was standing there. My sister from California, my married, nonmagical sister who, the last time I’d seen her, had been wearing the best of Rodeo Drive and sporting a designer haircut with fabulous highlights. Sarah had been one of those annoying girls who’d spent all her time scheming to catch a rich man, and … amazingly… had actually done it. I hadn’t expected her to be happy, but I had expected her to hang on to her French millionaire husband with both hands and emotional superglue.

  Lots had obviously changed. Sarah was wearing baggy, wrinkled khaki shorts and an oversized Sunshine State T-shirt; the haircut had grown into an unkempt shag, and the remaining, faded highlights looked cheap as tinsel. No makeup. And no socks with her battered running shoes.

  “Let me in,” she said. She sounded tired. With no will of my own I stepped back, and she came in, dragging a suitcase behind her.

  The suitcase—battered, ugly, and bargain-basement—gave me a bad, bad feeling.

  “I thought you were in LA,” I said slowly. The door was still open, and I reluctantly shut and locked it. There went my last chance for a decent escape. I tried for a pleasant interpretation. “Missed me, huh?”

  She plumped down on my secondhand couch in an uncoordinated sprawl, staring down at her limp hands, which hadn’t seen a manicure in weeks. My sister was a good-looking woman—walnut brown hair, blue eyes, fine, soft skin she’d worked hard to keep supple—but just now she looked her age. Wrinkles. My God. Sarah had wrinkles. And she hadn’t been to a plastic surgeon and Botoxed them out of existence? Who are you and what have you done with my evil sibling?

  “Chrêtien left me,” she said. “He left me for a personal trainer!”

  I felt behind me, found a chair, and sank into it, staring at her.

  “He divorced me,” she said. Her already-tense voice was rising like a flood tide. “And he enforced the prenup. Jo, he took the Jag!”

  That came out as a true, raw wail of grief.

  My sister—who’d always made me look like a piker when it came to composure, style, and taking care of herself—blubbered like a little girl. I jumped up and found some Kleenex, which she promptly used with enthusiasm, and fetched a trash can from the bathroom to catch the soggy remains. I was not picking those up.

  Finally, she was blotched, swollen, red-nosed, and done crying—for a while—and gave me the rest of the tired, familiar story. Chrêtien and personal trainer Heather (Heather? Really?), meeting every Tuesday for a really intense private session. Sarah getting suspicious because his workout clothes never seemed overly worked out. Hiring a private eye to follow them. Dirty pictures.

  Screaming confrontation. Chrêtien invoking the dire terms of the prenup, which had taken her house, her car, her bank account, and left her with her second car, an old Chrysler she’d let the maid use for errands.

  And no place to live.

  My once-rich sister was homeless.

  And she was sitting on my couch with a suitcase, blubbering, looking at me with pleading, swollen eyes.

  I silently returned the look, remembering all those childhood grievances. Sarah, yanking my hair when Mom wasn’t looking. Sarah, telling all my friends and enemies about my crush on Jimmy Paglisi. Sarah, stealing my first steady boyfriend out from under my nose. We weren’t close. We’d never been close. For one thing, we weren’t anything like the same. Sarah had been a professional woman… emphasis on the woman, not the professional. She’d set out to snare herself a millionaire, which she’d done, and to live the life she’d always wanted, and damn whoever had to suffer to get her there. She’d signed the prenup because, at the time, she’d thought she had Chrêtien completely beguiled and could get him to tear it up with enough honeyed compliments and blow jobs.

  I could have told her—hell, I had told her—that Chrêtien was way too French for that to work.

  Sarah was stranded on my couch: sniffling, humiliated, practically penniless. No marketable skills to speak of. No friends, because the kinds of country club friends Sarah had made all her life didn’t stick around after the platinum American Express got revoked.

  She had nobody else. Nowhere to go.

  There was nothing else I could say but, “Don’t worry. You can stay with me.”

  Later, I would remember that and pound my head against the wall. It was the flickering warning light on a road where the bridge was out and, like an idiot, I just kept on driving.

  Right into the storm.

  I set about getting Sarah settled in my tiny spare room. She’d been weeping with gratitude right up until I heaved her suitcase onto the twin bed, but she stopped when she took a look
around.

  “Yes?” I asked sweetly, because I could see the words Where’s the rest of it? on the tip of her tongue.

  She swallowed them—it must have choked her—and forced a trembling smile. “It’s great. Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.” I looked around, seeing it through her eyes. Her utility closet in California hadn’t been this small, I was certain. The furniture wasn’t exactly au courant—a rickety ’50s nightstand in grubby off-white French Provincial with a cockeyed drawer, a campus castoff bed too hard and lumpy for even college students. A scarred, ugly dresser of no particular pedigree, with missing drawer pulls and a cracked mirror, salvaged out of a Dumpster with the help of two semipro football players.

  A real do-it-yourself nightmare.

  I sighed. “Sorry about this. I had to move when—”

  “—when we thought you were dead,” she said. “By the time they’d tracked me down to give me the news, your friends already knew you were all right and let me know, thank God, or I’d have just gone crazy.”

  Which gave me a little bit of a warm, sisterly glow, until she continued.

  “After all, I’d just found out about Chrêtien and Heather. I swear, if I’d had one more thing to think about, I don’t think even the therapy would have helped.”

  I stopped feeling bad about the furniture. “Glad I didn’t set you back on the road to recovery.”

  “Oh! No, I didn’t mean—”

  I sat down on the bed next to her suitcase. The frame creaked and groaned like an exasperated geezer. “Look, Sarah, let’s not kid each other, okay? We’re not best buddies; we never were. I’m not judging you, I’m just saying you’re here because I’m all you’ve got. Right? So you don’t have to pretend to like me.”

  She looked just like me, in that second—wide-eyed with surprise, and a little frown crinkling her forehead. Except for the hair. Even my current poodle-hair curls were better than the badly grown-out shag she was sporting.

  She said, slowly, “All right, I admit it. I didn’t like you when you were younger. You were a bratty kid, and then you grew up into somebody I barely even know. And you’re weird, you know. And Mom liked you best.”