Windfall (5 page)

I felt a tiny little tremor inside. Sometimes, David could be like a pet tiger—glorious and terrible. He wasn't just a sweet-natured, nice, agreeable guy, although he was certainly capable of being that. It was just that he was capable of anything. Everything. Djinn weren't fluffy little bunnies you kept as pets, they were
dangerous
. David was gentle with me, I knew that. But sometimes, occasionally, I would see the vast, dark depths underneath, and I'd get dizzy and breathless.

And hot. Dear God. Spontaneous-combustion hot.

He knew, of course. I saw it flash in his eyes.

I said, “I'm not afraid, you know.”

His hands—everything about him—went still. Wind brushed over us with curious hands, ruffling my hair, belling his coat. It tasted of ocean. Palm trees rustled and shook out their fronds over our heads.

“Maybe you should be. You don't know enough about me.”

Well, he was right. He'd live for eons. He'd seen human civilizations rise and fall. I barely knew a fraction of who David was, and what he was.

Sometimes I just forgot.

“Try me,” I said. Cherise's glitter-bright flirting had reminded me, with a chill, that I wasn't some sweet young girl anymore, and next thing I knew I'd be buying in the Women's World section where dowdy clothes go to die. Reading
Modern Maturity
. Learning to tat lace and make scrapple. I wanted to
know
David. I wanted this to be something bigger and deeper and forever, or as far as my forever could go. “If we're going to stay together, then you can't just show me your good side, you know. And I mean it. I'm not afraid.”

He looked uncommonly solemn, and he didn't blink. There was a hint of the tiger in those eyes again. “I don't think you understand what you're saying.”

I heaved out a sigh. “Of
course
I don't understand. Everything about the Djinn is one big, dark, booga-booga secret, and just because I've
been
one doesn't mean I got the operating manual—”

He stilled my lips with his, in a damp, slow, breathless kiss. His hands slid up into my hair, stroking those achingly sensitive places behind my ears, at the nape of my neck . . . I lost my train of thought.

Which made me jump tracks to another one when he let me up for breath. “We need to get you home.” What that really meant was, to put him back in his bottle—yes, Djinn really had bottles, glass ones; they had to be glass and they had to come with stoppers or a way to seal them, no exceptions. The worst case I'd ever seen had been a soap-bubble thin ornamental glass perfume bottle; it was stored in the Wardens Association vault in the U.N. Building in New York, because that thing would shatter if you so much as gave it a hard look.

David's was a somewhat sturdy ornamental kitchen bottle, the blue-glass fancy kind that store flavored oils and decorative grains. I kept it in a very safe place, right in my nightstand drawer next to oils, lotions, and other things I wouldn't want casual visitors to inventory.

Which inevitably led to thoughts of my bed, soft sheets, cool soft ocean breezes sighing over my skin . . .

“Yes. Let's go home.” His hands slid over my shoulders, stroked down my arms, and lingered on my hands before letting me go. The heat from him stayed on my skin. Afterimages of light.

My car was parked over in the far corner of the lot, away from casual door dings. She was a midnight blue Dodge Viper, and I loved her dearly enough for her to qualify as my second-favorite-ever ride. The first-place winner had been a Mustang, also midnight blue, named Delilah, who had gotten scrapped around the time I met David, as if I had to give up one really lovely thing for another.

David took the shotgun seat, and I prowled Mona through the morning traffic toward my apartment. I'd been really, really lucky when I moved—had to move, thanks to the overzealous actions of some real estate people, who thought that just because I'd had a funeral I'd broken my lease—and I'd ended up with a beachfront second-floor sea view. All of my furniture was secondhand, and nothing matched, but the bed was comfortable and the balcony was to die for.

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 yourself. 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.