Chill Factor (11 page)

‘The Wardens have him,’ I said. ‘It’s out of my hands. You’ll have to provoke a full-out war to get him back now.’

‘You say that like it’s a bad thing.’ Jonathan took his feet off of the antique table and stood up. He had a kind of energy to him that made me shiver – restless, intense, fuelled by something I didn’t fully understand. ‘You think we can’t win a war like that.’

‘I
know
you can’t win a war like that. But more important, a whole lot of people would die in the middle of it, and neither one of us wants that to happen.’ I hoped.

He walked up to me, hands in his jeans pockets, and stood there looking down at me. Lightless eyes. Something cold moving in their depths, like dying stars.

‘Don’t assume you understand what I want,’ he said. ‘Human life is cheap. There’s only one race I have a vested interest in protecting – the one you use and degrade and throw away.
My
people. If a war with the Wardens is what needs to happen to
get my point across, well, that’s just very sad for you. I’m not letting you trade us like trinkets any longer.’

‘Hey,’ Kevin said. He’d moved in behind me while my attention was focused on Jonathan; it creeped me to realise that I hadn’t noticed. ‘Wait a minute.’

‘Quiet,’ Jonathan hissed. ‘The lady and I are having a
conversation
.’

I yelped as my chair suddenly began to slide, as if shoved hard from behind. Heading for Jonathan, who stepped out of the way…

…and then heading straight for the plate-glass window.

I felt panic grab my throat, because the chair kept accelerating and I
knew
I was going to hit the glass, crash through, tilt out over that sickening drop, and fall. And scrabbling my feet on the carpet wasn’t slowing me down.

Jonathan brought the chair cleanly to a stop right at the window. I grabbed the arms so tightly I felt something crack, either wood or my fingers, and panted out the shock and fear.

‘See that guy down there?’ Jonathan asked, and tilted my chair up on its front legs to give me a better view. I
meeped
and clutched the chair arms harder. ‘No? Well, OK, granted, they all look alike from up here. Here, I’ll help.’ My forehead touched the glass.

It rippled like water, and I melted right through the slick, cold surface, head and shoulders. I felt fresh, hot air blast over me, fast as the jet stream, and my hair whipped back in a tattered black flag over the back of the chair. I was afraid to breathe. The glass felt molten at the edges, thickly liquid around my body. It wasn’t holding me in place. There was nothing now between my tilted chair and thin air but Jonathan’s goodwill, which I wasn’t sure I actually had. I kept trying to push backward, but I wasn’t going anywhere.

‘That man down there is some kind of Warden,’ Jonathan said. ‘A leftover from before I put up the wards. Granted, he’s not very good, but hey, he’s what you guys are known for, right? Second-hand crappy work? That’s why people die night and day from your negligence. Can’t blame me for that.’

‘I don’t,’ I managed to choke out between clenched teeth. ‘We do the best we can. And if you’d work
with
us instead of
against
us, we’d be able to help more people. But you’re not about helping anyone, are you? You’re about freedom at any cost. Jesus, if we free the Djinn, we can’t touch the big storms, the major disasters. The ones that kill a hundred thousand at a whack. Who will? You?’

The chair thumped back down to the carpet, and the glass re-formed in front of me with a thick sucking sound. Waves rippled through it, then stilled. I looked up into Jonathan’s dark, endless
eyes, and remembered falling into them as a Djinn, remembered the age and seduction and limitless
power
of him.

‘Nobody ever asked us,’ he said, and sank down to a crouch next to me. That smile was beautiful, cynical, and utterly chilling. ‘Not that we’d say yes, but it’d be nice to be
asked
. But never mind all that. Who sent you here?’

‘Nobody.’

‘Let me put it another way…somebody made sure that you were dead enough to get by the wards and dropped you right in our laps. Who?’

‘Bite me.’ The chair tilted again. Glass against my forehead, fluid and warm, flowing around me. I whined somewhere deep in my throat and closed my eyes. ‘No, really, I mean that. Bite me. Just don’t throw me out the window, ’kay?’

‘Scared?’

‘Oh, yeah.’ I managed a pallid, sweaty smile. ‘You?’

He leant over to study me, upside down. ‘You’re so expendable they practically fired you out of a circus cannon. You do know that, right? I think you’re a diversion. Something for me to play with while they bring in the big guns.’

Kevin, in the background, cleared his throat. ‘Don’t you think—’

‘No,’ Jonathan cut him off. ‘Let me take care of this.’

‘But—’

‘Son, this is out of your league,’ Jonathan said. Not unkindly. ‘She played you before; she’ll play you again. Just let me handle it.’

‘OK.’ Kevin sounded lost and uncomfortable and very much a kid. He’d been a lot more difficult when I’d been his Djinn, but then, the dynamics of that relationship had been a whole lot different. He’d looked on me mostly as a supernatural blow-up doll. Jonathan was, in a very real sense, the father he’d never had, and a very kick-ass dad he’d make.

Except I didn’t think he had Kevin’s best interests at heart.

I turned my head and looked straight up into Jonathan’s eyes. ‘Don’t use him. He deserves better than that. If you want to kill me, just do it; don’t drag the kid into it. It’s cheap and it’s cruel.’

I got a quirk of ash-grey eyebrows, a flash of surprise across the ageless face. ‘I thought he was a murderer. A rabid dog that needed killing. That’s what the last Warden had to say before he took the express elevator down. You can still see the splash on the sidewalk if you look closer.’ He tilted my chair again. I yelped and tried to push myself through the back of the cushions. Hung on for dear life and tried to swallow the urge to beg for my life.

Twice in one day. ‘You really think the kid deserves a chance?’

‘I think he needs to be stopped,’ I said breathlessly. ‘I don’t think that necessarily means he has to be killed. And since I may be the only one who thinks that, you really ought to think twice about giving me the vertical tour.’

This time the glass just disappeared.
Poof
. The legs of the chair were one inch from the window. Tilted forward as I was, my knees were already exposed to the bright Las Vegas sun. Below, the Bellagio’s fountains roared like Niagara, and I could taste the metallic humidity of them evaporating under the desert’s constant fixed stare.

I started to slide out, and the sunlight slid hot over my thighs, illuminated my stomach…I was going over, screaming.

That was when Jonathan pulled in a breath so sharp and hard it was audible over the tearing wind, and reached out to yank me back, into the seat. He let the chair thump safely back to the carpet.

Stared down at me with wide, dark, surprised eyes.

‘
No
,’ he said. ‘He couldn’t possibly be that stupid.’

He, who? Lewis?
Au contraire, mon ami
. I was feeling like everybody was acting fairly stupidly, including me with the bravado. I struggled to breathe without sobbing.
God
, I didn’t like heights, particularly heights from which I would drop to my death and do a fast, ugly survey of thirty-five floors
on the way down. I looked up through my wind-tangled hair and saw Jonathan still staring. He looked honestly spooked. It lasted for two or three heartbeats, and then he got control of his face and went back to his habitual I-don’t-give-a-crap expression.

‘It won’t work,’ he said, and leant over to get right in my face. ‘I don’t care what he told you, it won’t work. If he told you it would guarantee I wouldn’t hurt you, he lied. Understand?’

I didn’t. Before I could say so, Kevin said, ‘Don’t throw her out the window. Bring her over here to me.’

A straight-out order. Kevin’s voice shook when he gave it, but Jonathan didn’t object or try to screw with him; he towed my chair across the room and delivered it in front of the kid, then stood back, hands in his pockets. Watching me through half-closed, expressionless eyes. I could feel fury pulsing behind it, though. He was mad, all right. I had no idea why. Wasn’t like I’d done anything but try not to get myself launched, and I hadn’t even done that effectively.

Kevin looked fragile next to him.

‘Close it,’ he said to Jonathan. The roaring hot wind coming in the open window suddenly cut off. Shiny, flawless glass back in place. Some tense, panic-stricken part of me kept on screaming, but I forced it to shut up.

‘What happened to the other Wardens who were sent?’ I asked. Kevin slumped those narrow, sharp-edged shoulders and studied the carpet.

‘They came before I told him to keep them out.’

‘You had him kill them?’

‘I didn’t tell him to.’

‘Did you tell him
not
to?’

Shrug. I closed my eyes briefly to block out the sight of Yvette dying, screaming. ‘How can you possibly think you’re going to get out of this alive, the way you keep screwing up? You can’t
kill
these people; they’ll never let go of you!’

‘I know.’ Kevin looked forlorn. A little boy again. ‘It was just the one; I just scared the rest and they said they’d stay away. I just wanted them to leave me the fuck alone. Why can’t they do that?’

‘Because you have something that doesn’t belong to you.’
And you’re using it incredibly badly…or it’s
using you
. ‘The Wardens don’t know what’s going on in here. They’ve sent people; they haven’t heard back. They’re afraid you’re killing people in here. Kevin, if you’ll just tell me what you’ve done—’

‘Nothing!’ He still had the crystal tumbler in his hand, half-full of Jim Beam; he launched it across the room to take out an elegant table lamp with a crunch of porcelain. ‘Jesus! I’m just trying to have some fun, that’s all…don’t I deserve that? Not like my life hasn’t sucked hard enough…’

‘Baby?’

We all came to a complete halt at the new voice…female, soft, high-pitched. Blurry with sleep. I twisted my head and saw that the door to the bedroom had opened, and there was a girl standing there. There was a lot of her on display, since the sheet she was covering herself with didn’t exactly drape properly – lots of pale skin, some of it tattooed in dark blue Celtic patterns along the left arm and thigh. She had light hazel eyes, and her red hair was cut short in a straight-out-of-bed tangle that salons would work for hours to achieve. Not pretty, really. A wide jaw, narrow eyes, prominent cheekbones – and then she turned her attention away from me towards Kevin, and the light caught her face just right. Beautiful. Beautiful in a narrow, starved kind of way, a heroin-hungry elegance.

‘Oh,’ Kevin blurted, and blushed. ‘Uh…nothing you need to worry about. Business.’ He pulled himself up straighter. ‘Just go back to bed, OK? I’ll be there soon.’

The hot hazel eyes wandered back towards me. ‘Who’s she?’

‘Nobody.’

‘Looks like somebody.’ She pouted, and shuffled towards the door dragging the Egyptian cotton sheet along with her. ‘Come back to bed, OK?’

‘In a minute.’

‘Now?’

‘In a minute!’ His temper flared, and I saw the
hurt explode in her eyes in response as she looked back. ‘Jesus, Siobhan, just go back to bed, OK? I’ll be there in a minute!’

She turned and went back into the other room, the door closing quietly behind her. I looked up at Kevin, who was staring after her, and said, ‘Siobhan?’

His cheeks flushed dark red. ‘Never mind.’

‘You pick her up out on the strip? Or did you get Jonathan to conjure her up for you?’

‘Shut up, OK?’

‘She’s real. Not Djinn.’ I kept staring at him, forcing him to meet my gaze. ‘Kevin, tell me you didn’t kidnap this girl. And how old is she? Sixteen? God!’

‘I didn’t kidnap her! She was on the street.’ The red flare in his cheeks was turning purple. ‘You know. There were these cards. Dropped on the sidewalk.’

Hooker cards. Of course. ‘You’re paying her?’

Jonathan, who’d resumed his comfy chair with his feet up, snorted and said, ‘No, she’s with him for his witty personality.’

‘Shut up!’ Kevin yelled. Jonathan picked up his half-empty beer and took a long pull. It must have warmed up while he was tormenting me; mist floated off of the bottle as he chilled it down again. ‘Look, she’s…she’s just company. Never mind her. She doesn’t matter.’

I wondered if she knew that. I thought about the hurt I’d seen flash in her eyes. ‘All right. Let’s talk about you. You want to get out of this alive?’

‘Depends.’ He settled into a mulish, utterly teenage expression. ‘Don’t mind dying. I’m not afraid.’

Unbelievable. I looked from him to Jonathan, who raised his eyebrows and gave me a lime-bitter slice of a smile. ‘Don’t look at me,’ he said. ‘I’m just the help.’

Right, I was the Church Lady. ‘If you want me to make a deal with the Wardens, you’ve got to give to get. What are you offering?’

Kevin cut his eyes towards Jonathan. ‘I’ll turn him over if they let me go.’ He threw it out like a challenge.

Jonathan had no apparent reaction as he took a swig of beer. ‘Don’t do it,’ he said mildly. ‘They’ll screw you. It’s what they do.’

‘Yeah, well,
you
don’t listen to me!’ Kevin looked even more stubborn, and turned his attention back on me. ‘You want him? Fine. Just let me go.’

I felt the words wash over me like an ice-water shower, and tried to keep the expression out of my face. ‘So you’d just…turn him over. Give me his bottle.’

‘I don’t need him.’ Like hell, but maybe he really believed it.

‘Fine. You hand me the bottle; I’ll find a way to
get it to them.’ I kept it casual. Hopefully, he wouldn’t realise that once I held Jonathan’s bottle, I’d be in control of him…and that would be the end of Kevin’s little joyride. I’d put Lewis’s powers back where they belonged, set things right, smash the bottle, and be out of this whole damn affair. Then they’d
have
to give me David’s bottle back.

Or maybe I’d keep Jonathan’s bottle until he
made
them give David back. Yeah. That could work.