Chill Factor (18 page)

‘You OK?’ he asked me. His voice sounded exactly the same, a warm tenor, slightly rough, like velvet stroked against the grain.

‘Oh, hell, yeah. Never better,’ I said, and tried to look as if I were leaning against the headboard for effect rather than support. ‘I should’ve known. This had your smell all over it. I was such an idiot, you know; here I thought all these years you’d spent avoiding the Wardens you’d been out doing good, spreading rainbows and happy horseshit. You were working for the opposition.’

‘No,’ Lewis said wearily. ‘I
started
the opposition. Not that it was totally my idea; there were a lot of us who saw what was happening with the Wardens. I was just the force that pulled it
together. The Ma’at started operation about seven years ago, officially. Since then, we’ve been doing our best to mitigate the worst of the Wardens’ excesses.’

‘Yeah, you’re the hero here. Modest as usual,’ I snapped back. ‘So what’s your excuse? The Wardens wouldn’t let you be king of the world, so you found a bunch of stodgy old farts who would?’

Quinn eyed me grimly. Evidently, he didn’t like me bad-mouthing his bosses. ‘Want me to get Lazlo?’

‘No.’ Lewis continued meeting my eyes solidly. ‘Jo, after I ran from the Wardens, I spent a lot of time trying to find out just why they were so afraid of me. I found out a lot more than I bargained for. I know you want to believe the Wardens are good…I did, too. We trusted them with everything we are… We let them mould us and train us and shape us. But they shaped us
wrong
. And what they’ve done to the Djinn…I know you saw what David endured. That’s not the exception, Jo. That’s the
rule
.’

One thing I could tell – he believed what he was saying. Lewis was speaking from the heart, speaking with unmistakable passion. He wanted me to understand. To become a true believer.

‘They’re corrupted,’ he said. ‘I’m not talking about individuals…there are still a lot of good Wardens, who believe in what they’re doing. But it
can’t last. Power corrupts. You know that better than most anyone; you faced down Bad Bob and Star. You
know
it’s rotten at its heart.’

‘You’re so full of shit.’ I wobbled up to bare feet and took up a belligerent stance that was only a little compromised by having to lean myself against the wall. My collarbone shrieked a protest at the move, but I ignored it. A shivering coat of sweat broke out on my forehead. ‘Listen to yourself, Lewis. You think you’re the
good guys
? You stood by while my heart stopped! Quinn kidnapped me at gunpoint! Your precious Ma’at
tortured
me!’

‘Yeah, but we gave you five grand after,’ Quinn put in. ‘And holy shit, can you shop or what?’ When I glared, he dropped the cute act. ‘They interrogated you because you’re a Warden. Don’t you get it? Half the Wardens Association is Demon Marked, and the other half might as well be. You’re the first one I’ve seen that isn’t a fuckin’ killer with a rune. They’re totally corrupt.’

‘You’re one to talk.’

Ooooh, wrong thing to say. Quinn gave me his dead-eyed cop stare. It was effective. ‘You’re gonna want to shut up now before you piss me off.’

No, but I was ready to adjust my sails to the prevailing wind. I turned back to Lewis. ‘What makes the Ma’at any better? They wear more expensive suits? They’re all bitter old men too moral to sin?’

‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘They don’t have enough power to be tempted. They’re all below the line that the Wardens consider as a material gift.’

He walked slowly over to me and put a hand under my elbow. I didn’t know why until I realised my knees had started to buckle. He guided me gently back down to the bed, lifted my legs, and got me prone again. My head throbbed so hard I saw flashes of red behind my eyes, and bit back a groan.

‘She needs a doctor,’ Lewis said somewhere beyond the strobe effect of my headache. Quinn grunted. ‘Got someone we can trust?’

‘We’ve got bigger problems. Look, just patch her up and let’s get moving. We don’t have time for this.’

‘I said that she needs a doctor.’ When Lewis got that particular tone, it wasn’t worth wasting the breath to argue. ‘See to it.’

I cracked open my eyelids to look through the lashes. Quinn was staring at me. Stone-faced was his natural expression, but I could see that he was deeply worried. Not
for
me.
About
me.

‘You don’t need to be getting sidetracked here,’ he said. Lewis didn’t answer. ‘We can’t get lost in the details. We’re in the game now, and you know the stakes. If she gets in the way—’

‘Quinn.’ Lewis’s voice was soft, but inflexible. ‘Get a doctor. Now.’

Quinn turned and left. The door clicked shut
behind him. Lewis put his hand back on my forehead, and some of the sick throbbing eased.

‘A month ago, I could’ve fixed this in two seconds,’ he said.

‘A month ago, I wouldn’t have needed it,’ I whispered. ‘Lewis?’

‘Yeah.’

‘When did being the good guys include contracting murder?’

No answer. He was staring off towards the sunset, his face lit with gold and orange.

The saddest eyes I’ve ever seen.

‘Lewis?’

‘You don’t understand.’ He didn’t look at me. ‘Rest.’

I didn’t want to, but eventually, I slept.

With no sense of transition, I was somewhere else. I was limping, although pain was a distant, muffled sensation. My skin was red and abraded, my white T-shirt tattered and filthy, sweatpants ripped and stained.

I limped along a deserted road, one painful step at a time, and overhead the sun kept staring down. No wind. No birds. No sound at all. It was like being in a dead world, and I was dead too, I just didn’t know it yet.

Dust hung like talcum powder in the still, dry air, and everything tasted like burnt insulation.

I stopped, turned, and looked behind me. A ragged black ribbon of asphalt stretched towards the dim horizon. It was scoured grey in places by the wind, and there was a wreck of a car thrown off to the side. Paint gone. Nothing but junk.

I knew where this was. In the thin shade of that wreck was the body of Chaz Ashworth, and I couldn’t be here; this was past, this was long past…
Oh, God get me out of here, I don’t want to be
here
…

Panic surged along my nerves. It felt both overamped and slow, dream-terror moving like cold molasses but packing the same intensity as waking fear. I was thirsty, overwhelmingly thirsty, and I ached all over, and
I couldn’t be here
. I had to wake up, wake up, wake…

I turned and kept limping. There was shelter in the distance. A tumbled confusion of rocks that promised darkness and relief from the killing sun.

One agonising step at a time, whimpering. Crawling, by the time I reached it, my knees and forearms scraping raw on rock and burning on sand.

Time sped up, the way time does in dreams, and I was inside, huddled against the cool darkness, shuddering in relief.

In the dream, my mind didn’t know what was coming, but my body did, my nerves were screaming in panic, trying to drive me out of sleep
and into the light. Better to die out there, food for ants and vultures and at the end a clean return to the earth, than go into the dark…

But I couldn’t stop myself. The part of me that decided to move wasn’t the part that knew the future.

I heard the steady, whispering drip of water, and it pulled me on into the shadows. I was too weak to pull water from the dry air; badly injured, I needed to drink to survive.

I crawled for some period of time, don’t even know how long; all that mattered was finding the water. Finding
something
that didn’t hurt. I heard the tinkling sound getting closer, and crawled towards it in the darkness…

…and was blinded by a sudden hot flare of light.

Hands. Hands in the dark, dragging me down. The stranger slammed my head into the wall, and things went grey and soft, and in the white flare of his flashlight I saw my burnt, bleeding fingers scrabbling at the rock.

Digging for rescue, like the woman in the sand.

What are you doing here?

My throat was too dry to do more than croak.

Who do you work for?

I couldn’t see him. He was just a vague shadow behind the light, no particular height, no particular build. A baseball cap and stained blue jeans. The smell of leather and sweat and blood.
I knew him. I’d seen him before.

What do you know?

He dragged me over sharp-edged gravel and dumped me face-down in a pool of water so cold it shocked me back to consciousness. I gasped, breathed water, rolled over coughing, and then turned back to suck down greedy mouthfuls of the clean, pure taste.

He was pacing behind me, kicking rocks. The flashlight beam bounced wildly off of rock, off of boxes stacked against the far wall. Off of scuttling insects fleeing a false and unwelcome day.

The mouthful or two of water I had time to swallow wasn’t enough to cure me of thirst, and I was weak and exhausted and confused. I didn’t even realise he had me until I felt the cold bite of the knife, panicked as I realised it was slicing away the tough elastic of my jog bra.

Cold cave air on my bare breasts.

Tell me how much you know.

His name was Orry. I knew his name, because Chaz had told me in the car. I’d delivered myself to the same fate Chaz had intended for me; of course I had, I’d been less than a minute away from the rendezvous when I’d called the wind…

I fought. The second time he hit me, I fell into the darkness, screaming, weeping, mourning. Trying not to feel what was happening to me. I wanted to leave, to wake up, but it hurt too much, and pain
brought me back to the cave, to the darkness, to the knife.

He never made a sound, except for grunts and the pistonlike sound of his breath. I knew he was going to kill me; I knew every second because I’d seen what he’d done to the woman in the desert. When he was done, he would kill me.

Tell me what you know!

I lost hope.

I lost myself.

And then, when he had what he wanted, he shoved my head into the ice-cold water, and held me down to die.

I woke up screaming, or thought I did, but when my head was clear enough to register sound I realised it was just a thin, desperate moan vibrating in the back of my throat. I curled up on my side, drawing my knees to my chest, and realised that I wasn’t wearing my new heavy silk sheath dress anymore. I wasn’t wearing anything. The sheets clung cool to my damp skin, and I grabbed for them and wrapped them closer.

Someone in the room. My heartbeat hammered fast. I licked my lips and whispered, ‘David?’ but I already knew that it wasn’t, it couldn’t be. David was far, far away, and he couldn’t help me. Couldn’t be with me, any more than he’d been there in the darkness of that cave while hope died.

Without meaning to, I slid my palm down from my chest to my abdomen, where a flicker of light remained.
I am with you
, something whispered, and some of the panic in me eased.

A light flicked on across the room, and revealed a sleepy-looking Quinn. He was reclining in a chair, feet up on a rich damask hassock, book folded open on his chest, a pair of reading glasses on the table next to the lamp.

Gun beside the glasses.

‘Hey.’ His voice sounded rusty. He sat up, blinked at the book as it slid down to flop shut on his lap, and readjusted on me again. ‘How’s the head?’

One big bruise. ‘Fine.’

‘The doc said you had a mild concussion, so somebody should stay with you. Lewis needed rest. You sleep OK?’

‘Fine.’ Not. But I wasn’t going to admit it to him.

He grunted and ran a hand over his face. Quinn was the kind of man who got more attractive from a day’s growth of beard stubble, not less. ‘Yeah. You always whimper like that in your sleep when you’re fine?’

‘Mostly.’ I kept it cool and distant. ‘Clothes?’

‘Sorry, I didn’t figure you’d want to sleep in the three-grand dress. It’s hanging in the closet.’ He was looking at me oddly. I wondered what my body language was saying. ‘Lewis took it off you, in case you’re wondering.’

‘Thanks. You can go now.’

‘And you think I take your orders?’ He sat up, kicked away the hassock, and holstered the gun. The glasses went into a pocket of his jacket, the book onto the table. ‘Coffee?’

‘I want you to go.’ The panic was coming back, speeding up my nerves like a slow electric shock. ‘Go now.’

‘Sweetheart, I’m not going—’

‘Go!’ I screamed. It had the raw edge of panic. He froze. Watched me. I struggled to get my breath under control. ‘Just get out, OK? I want to dress.’

He reached into the closet and retrieved three hangers draped with fabric, tossed them on the end of the bed, along with a sealed bag tied with a white ribbon. ‘You’ve got a selection,’ he said. ‘They cleaned your old stuff. I think they even threw in some new underwear and shit.’

His eyes were dark and far too knowledgeable. ‘Get the fuck out, Quinn.’

‘I’ll be in the bathroom. Oh, by the way, there’s somebody outside the door, so don’t bother. You won’t get far.’

He went in and shut the door. I crawled out from under the sheets and ripped the ribbon off the bag, shook out clean underwear, and stepped into them with a deep sense of relief. The skirt had been laundered and pressed; even the knit top looked like shiny and new. I slid my feet into the designer
knock-offs, carefully bagged the midnight-blue Manolos, and draped the bag over the hanger with the silk dress.

‘OK?’ Quinn’s voice came through the door. I sat down on the edge of the bed, aware of a thousand pinpoint aches, of exhaustion, of an unsettling trembling in my hands. Of a headache that would kill me on other, less eventful days.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Fine.’

He opened the door and stood there for a few seconds, watching me. I didn’t look up as I focused on combing tangles out of my hair with my fingers. It was futile; the curls were back with a vengeance. Quinn wordlessly ducked back into the bathroom.

A sleek faux-ivory brush appeared under my nose. I looked up to see that he was holding it out. I took it and began dragging it through my curly hair, wishing I could make it straight again, wishing I could make everything straight again.