Chill Factor (16 page)

Oh
. Glass. I blinked and looked out at the bright glare of a Las Vegas afternoon, which was nowhere near as gaudy as a Las Vegas evening. There was something vaguely weird about this elevator, which became clear when Quinn pushed buttons and it began to rise.

It didn’t go up. Well, not directly. It went at an
angle
.

‘It’s an inclinator, not an elevator,’ Quinn said. ‘Like the view?’

I had to admit, it was pretty. Our elevator –
inclinator
– crawled up the slope of the huge glass pyramid, each floor announcing itself with a muted whispered
ding
, and the world fell away. I amused myself by identifying hotels along the strip. Paris. New York, New York, with its roller coaster and the half-scale Statue of Liberty. The white lace of the Bellagio’s fountains shooting skyward in a silent, choreographed dance.

We stopped somewhere near the top.

Quinn tugged me out, walked me down the hall,
and opened up a room with the standard electronic card key.

‘Well,’ I said, startled. ‘This’ll do.’

My room had an entire wall of windows, sharply angled, and sunlight sparked from the muted gold of faux-Egyptian furniture. The bed looked sumptuous.

Through the bathroom door, I saw a huge Jacuzzi tub facing the windows. ‘I’ll give your side this: You know how to imprison a girl in style.’

‘You’re not a prisoner,’ Quinn said, and handed me the key. ‘And we’re not necessarily on the opposite side, either. Listen, feel free to go downstairs, hit the casinos, the spa, the pool…just don’t try to leave the building.’

I took the cool, smooth plastic. ‘If I do?’ Quinn raised a silent eyebrow. ‘Right. You know I can’t just hang around here, waiting for the Geezer Patrol to decide what to do with me. There’s a time limit. Jonathan and Kevin are going to come after me, and believe me, I don’t think anybody wants that. It’ll be one hell of a show.’

‘You don’t need to worry about the boy.’

‘The fact that you can say that just proves to me that you don’t know dick about that boy.’

Quinn reached under his coat. No change in expression. I remembered the gun, felt myself tense, wondered if it was even possible to stop a bullet with the powers I possessed…

…and he came out with another card, this one a different colour of plastic.

‘Have fun,’ he said, and handed it over. ‘That’s worth five thousand in chips. Go crazy. I’ve got to get back to work.’

‘Quinn!’ I caught his arm when he turned to go. ‘I can’t just stay here!’

He patted my hand, removed it, and walked to the door. ‘If you don’t,’ he said pleasantly as he opened it, ‘I’ll just have to break your ankles. That’d keep you from wandering.’

He shut the door with a quiet click. I chewed my lip, counted to thirty, then went to look out.

He was gone. When I raced to the window, I saw the inclinator crawling back down the face of the pyramid, and Quinn was facing out towards the view. He didn’t look in my direction.

I went to the telephone, got a dial tone, and called a number from memory. Long distance, but I wasn’t particularly worried about the charges at the moment. Let the Ma’at pay for it, the crusty old Republicans.

Three rings. Four.

‘Bearheart,’ a low female voice said. I let out a gasp; I hadn’t realised I’d been holding my breath.

‘Marion! Don’t talk, just listen. I’m inside, but there’s something wrong here. A whole different set of—’

Click
. The line was dead. I rattled the posts,
banged the receiver helpfully against the nightstand, then hung it up.

‘You know,’ I said to the empty air, ‘this would be a whole lot easier if I had some help from a friendly neighbourhood Djinn. Come on, I know you’re here. You’ve been hanging around for hours. And thanks for not saving me, by the way. I wouldn’t want to get rusty.’

There was a heat blur in the corner. I focused on it, and watched Rahel sculpt herself out of shadows into glittering hard angles and cutting edges. Not that the Ifrit was recognisable as Rahel, of course, but I didn’t really think that any other half-Djinn would be following me around like a lost puppy.

‘Can you help me?’ I asked her. No answer from the black, insectile statue in the corner. ‘Look, you went to big trouble to come here with me. I can only assume you had a reason. Can you tell me what it is?’

She stirred. That was unsettling, because she no longer moved like either a Djinn or a human. More like a bag of razors shifting. I took a step back, found the bed behind my knees, and sat.

‘Do I have any allies here?’ I asked her. ‘Anybody I can trust?’

I wasn’t sure, but that kind of looked like a nod. Maybe.

‘Who?’ Useless question. She couldn’t speak; she
didn’t have enough power left from her gorging feast earlier.

An arm of hard right angles and coal-black glitter extended. Claws extruded pale as crystal from something that vaguely resembled a hand. I resisted the urge to crawl back across the bed; if she wanted me, she could get me.

I felt something tug deep inside. Panic spiked deep, and I tried to move but it was too late.

Her glittering diamond claws plunged into me. Not me, exactly. There was no damage to my human flesh, but as I flashed up to Oversight to view what was happening on the aetheric, I saw what she was doing.

She had hold of a glowing white-hot core centred in my abdomen, just above my pelvis. Cradling it in her claws, carefully.

I caught my breath, staring down through the crystal lattices of my aetheric body at this revelation, this glowing strange visitor inside me.

‘Oh, my God,’ I heard myself whisper.

I’d never seen anything like this before, and yet I knew exactly what it meant. I was pregnant.

I freaked.

First, I threw myself back across the bed, putting distance between me and Rahel’s claws, instincts screaming. She didn’t try to follow. I couldn’t seem to get my breath, couldn’t think, and as the world
did a Tilt-A-Whirl spin I put my back against the hotel room door and slid down to a sitting position, head in my hands.

Impossible. This is totally impossible. I
haven’t…I couldn’t…

I remembered Jonathan’s sharp reaction to me, in the room at the Bellagio. His cryptic words:
If he
told you it would guarantee I wouldn’t hurt you, he
lied
. Jonathan had assumed I knew about this spark of life inside me.

I gasped and looked up. Rahel was frozen across the room, still in a crouch, claws extended. Still as a black statue in the soft, filtered afternoon light. Alien as something out of HR Giger’s nightmares.

‘That bastard,’ I said. My voice sounded strange. ‘He knew, didn’t he? David knew he was doing this to me. You guys don’t do anything by accident.’

I knew that because I’d been Djinn, recently, and I knew how much control they had over the forms they chose. David had
chosen
to put life into me – Djinn life. One thing I’d been taught in school – Djinn
didn’t
reproduce. They
couldn’t
. So how the hell was this possible?… According to the Wardens, Djinn were sterile and eternal, and they controlled them all. Except, of course, the Wardens had been dead wrong or outright lying about controlling them all, anyway. There were free-range Djinn, a lot of them. So it stood to reason they’d be wrong – or lying – about the Djinn being sterile, as well.

I knew with an absolute and unexplainable certainty that the Djinn could reproduce when they felt like it, and for some unfathomable reason, David had felt like it with me.

Of course, he’d forgotten to
ask
me first. Or even
tell
me after the fact.

Memory flashed hot. David saying,
You have to
trust me
, his eyes flashing copper. And me saying, like an idiot,
Yes
.

Rahel made a move. I flinched back against the door, and she froze back into stillness, claws working as if they weren’t really connected to the rest of her. Creepy. They slowly melted back into the glittering angles of her hand. Gone.

‘You know what’s going on,’ I said. Nothing. ‘Guess we need to find you something to eat if I want any more help out of you.’

Something to eat, other than the glowing nucleus of energy inside of me. Which, to her credit, she hadn’t tried to consume. Maybe it wasn’t even the equivalent of an after-dinner mint yet.

‘Any Djinn in this building?’ I asked. Her head tilted slowly up, then down. ‘Let me guess. The Ma’at have some.’ Another slow, creaky, alien nod. ‘Perfect. So all I have to do is face down the opposition, steal a Djinn, let you snack on it, and I’m home free. Assuming that you don’t just walk away and let me twist in the wind.’

She didn’t confirm or deny, like Quinn.

I let my aching head fall back into my trembling hands.

Oh,
Jesus
, I was pregnant.

I was going to kill him
so
very dead.

To pass the time while I worked out a plan – because nothing was immediately jumping up and down, waving its little arms – I took a long, hot shower, washed my hair, dried it, applied skin moisturisers from the complimentary selection in the bathroom, then slipped into the Jacuzzi tub to bubble away my troubles for a while. I stared out at the horizon, remembering how it had looked to see a black roller crest on that flat sandy plain.

I needed a Djinn, but the Ma’at weren’t about to go trotting one out in public unless they had to. That meant trouble, big-ass trouble.
Public
trouble.

Something shivery crawled up my skin, and it wasn’t bubbles. Maybe the heat was getting to me, but I had an idea.

Not a good one, but any idea at all was an improvement. It had two chances of success, at least. If plan A failed, plan B was still perfectly viable. I liked that. Plan A rarely worked, anyway.

I soaked awhile longer, waiting for a better idea to saunter into my head, but nothing arrived. Night was still hours away, but the sun was burning its way down the western half of the sky. I slipped into a luxurious cotton robe embroidered with the
Luxor crest, wrapped my arms around my waist for comfort, and wished I could talk to David. Scream at him, preferably. What the
hell
was he thinking? Exactly when had the whole discussion about offspring happened? I’d been unconscious a few times. Maybe he’d mentioned it then. That would be guylike.

I couldn’t deal with it now. I had other things to do, and everything was risky. Too risky to be attempting with that fragile, brilliant spark of life inside me, but I didn’t have that much of a choice. David hadn’t damn well given me one. I didn’t know the first thing about baby Djinn, and I had no one to ask but Rahel, who couldn’t answer me and probably wouldn’t tell me the truth even if she could.

I put my clothes back on and went shopping.

There are two things you need to be successful as a hard-core Vegas über-slut: couture and attitude. I had the second. A trip downstairs to the Luxor bazaar would ensure that I had the first.

I toured the options and decided on a discreet place that reeked of high price tags – not that it was an indicator of class, but discount stores definitely were out. I needed the best, and I needed it now.

I came in, all wrinkled and lived-in, and showed the clerk the colour of my Luxor card. She was a beautiful little thing, Cleopatra-cut honey-blonde
hair, grey-green eyes, skin like pale spring roses. Wearing Donna Karan, which went perfectly with her body type. Good shoes, too, something from the Valentino family. I was still partial to Manolos, but I wasn’t monogamous.

‘Day or evening, miss?’ she asked, raising perfectly shaped eyebrows. She had a perfect, cultured, West-End-London accent.

‘Evening.’

‘Casual or—’

‘Tell you what, gorgeous, just show me what you think will make me absolutely irresistible.’

She grinned, and mischief danced in those grey-green eyes. ‘That won’t be difficult,’ she said, which made her my best friend ever. ‘Have a seat. We’ll sort something for you.’

Forty-five minutes later, I was standing in front of a trio of mirrors, wearing a knee-length midnight-blue raw-silk sheath dress. That wasn’t anything so special, until you considered the parts that were missing. I turned slowly, gauging the effect. Transparent blue mesh from a high neck to a band of raw silk over my breasts – the parts that get you arrested, anyway – that faded into transparency again over my waist, dipping into beaded splendour low around my hips. Gorgeous. Striking. Utterly impossible to wear without supreme self-confidence.

Twenty-four
hundred
dollars, plus change. I did
a slow turn again. The salesclerk draped a sapphire pendant around my neck, something large and real enough to make my heart skip a beat.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘They say accessories are everything.’

She gave me a knowing, conspiratorial smile and held up a pair of matching Manolo Blahnik pumps, midnight-blue raw silk, with pinpoint heels that raised me a good three and a half inches.

We high-fived. She gave me eight hundred in change from the chip card, bagged my old outfit, and promised to send it up to my room after cleaning. I tipped her generously, squared my shoulders, and called up my A-game.

Time to get to work.

I cut a swath through the bazaar, drawing stares from men and whispers from women; there were few who
didn’t
look, even if they frowned. The Manolos felt perfect on my feet, completely natural; the dress clung like an expertly tailored second skin. Security watched me just like the rest of the gawkers, with a touch of assessment. They knew who I was, of course, but still, the dress had its effect.

I headed for the highest-stakes tables and came up with a likely candidate. I didn’t recognise him, but he had designer clothes and two big, burly guys who were obviously bodyguards, and he had a stack of chips that could build a model of the
T
itanic
without losing too much in scale.

I eased up to the table, gave him my best smile, and put down a single chip. Ah, we were playing blackjack. Cool. I was good at blackjack.