Chill Factor

Too bad for me that nobody seemed to notice me, Kevin, or the way he was twisting my arm to get me to keep up with him. I wasn't sure if it was a standard don't-see-me glamour or just people minding their own damn business.



"Like it?" Kevin had noticed my look around. He sounded proud, as if he'd designed it. "I coulda stayed anywhere, but this was the best."



Like he was paying for it. "How do you know?" I asked him.



"Cabdriver said."



If there was anything that spoiled the elegance of the Bellagio's image, it was the constant musical chatter of slot machines. Beyond the lobby stretched the casino...and it stretched, filling a mall-like expanse with a sea of multicolored flashing slots and quiet harbors of blackjack tables, roulette. Dark paneling gave the place a quiet nineteenth-century elegance. Lack of windows made it eternal early evening. Bars-and there were three I could immediately spot-were doing a brisk business. The thought of a steadying drink made the back of my throat ache. C'mon, Lewis, help me out here. Throw me a bone. I had one faint hope: Lewis had some kind of clever, deeply ingenious plan for getting me out of this alive.



Yeah, right. You axe the bone that got thrown. My snarky superego was probably right; the Wardens- including Lewis-weren't interested in my troubles at the moment. I was a distraction, and I was on my own.



People everywhere, moving with a purpose. This was a very bad place to try a confrontation, which was probably Kevin's point in choosing it. Or Jonathan's. Sounded like Jonathan logic to me; Kevin would have probably crawled into some hole in the ground and pulled it in after him, like a kid hiding his head from the bogeyman. Jonathan was the one who'd think of all of the defensive possibilities of a very public, high-profile establishment.



Kevin steered me off into the casino area, and we strolled past one bar, heading past slots, more slots, keno, blackjack. We passed a room marked private, where, when the door opened and closed, I caught a glimpse of a poker table and some intensely silent men hunched around it. And you think you're playing for high stakes, pals. Try my game.



"Where are we going?" I asked. Kevin didn't answer. We turned left at the T intersection, away from the casino area and into what looked like (to my instant, back-brained delight) a shopping mall. A high-class shopping mall. Only he didn't lead me that direction; he steered me toward a massive bank of elevators, complete with polite and flinty-eyed security men who waved us through when I fumbled out my card key.



We stepped into the lift and enjoyed a silent, efficient ride up into the stratosphere.



"How'd you get in?" Kevin finally asked, as the lights flickered past the twenty-fifth floor. "Just curious."



"I was dead."



"Oh." He stared, waiting for the punch line. "Kind of extreme."



"You're telling me."



He couldn't decide whether or not I was lying, but it didn't much matter; the elevator topped out, and we exited one floor from the top.



It was a long walk down an elegant hallway big enough for the chariot race from Ben-Hur. The last door on the left was his.



It swung open for him at a touch, and I felt the dim, out-of-focus surge of power. Fire, this time; he'd just fooled the locking mechanism with an electric charge. Nice bit of control, that; he'd been largely untrained last time I'd seen him, mostly in the smash-and-grab phase of things.



I took a step in and realized that Kevin had appropriated the presidential suite, or at least the vice-presidential one. It was huge, sumptuous to the point of pastiche, but never over the edge. I was pretty sure the furniture was antique, for the most part; if it was reproduction, it was in the best of taste.



Kevin let go of me, shut the door, and shuffled over the wine-colored Aubusson to a fully appointed bar. He poured himself a straight glass of Jim Beam. I refrained from lecturing him about the evils of distilled spirits or reminding him of the legal drinking age.



I looked around. "Where's Jonathan?"



He rattled crystal. "Around." Which meant he had no idea, probably.



"You keep his bottle on you?"



"You smoking crack? I'm not telling you where I keep it."



"Not asking you to," I said. "Hey, would you mind..." I mimed pouring. Kevin splashed some JB in another glass and handed it over, and I took a sip. Wow. Liquid heat, turning into burning lava somewhere midthroat. Well, it was happy hour somewhere in the world.



I nearly spluttered my drink when a new voice said, "Enjoying your stay?" It came from the corner of the room, where a big leather armchair sat facing a broad plate-glass window overlooking the white spray of fountains. I set the glass down and took a couple of steps to my left to get a better look.



Not that it was any surprise, really, to see Jonathan sitting there. He looked relaxed. Fully at home. Head back, eyes half-shut, feet up on a virtually priceless Federal table that really shouldn't have been mistaken for a footstool under any circumstances. I let myself stare at him for a few long seconds. It wasn't a chore or anything; he appeared middle-aged, light brown hair liberally scattered with gray. The wiry, strong build of a habitual runner, dressed in faded blue jeans and a forest-green fleece pullover. Some kind of deck shoes on long feet. The kind of casual cool that the trend-driven shoppers downstairs could never hope to imitate.



He was the only Djinn I'd ever met who had humanlike eyes, at least at first glance. His were dark. I happened to know, because I'd looked pretty deeply into them at one point, that they weren't just dark; they were black, they were infinite, and they were dangerous.



Jonathan didn't have to work to impress anyone. All he had to do was show up.



"Well," he said without looking in my direction. "I leave you for a little while, and you go all human on me. You really know how to survive, I'll give you that. So. Life treating you okay?"



"Yeah, not too bad." I was shaking inside, vibrating on levels I didn't know I could still feel. Maybe there was some Djinn left in me, after all. "You?"



He quirked a funny little smile. "Fine. Hey, about all this, it's nothing personal. You know. And incidentally, way to work the angles. He said I couldn't let in any living Warden. Dying for the cause-strategically sweet." He tipped back a bottle and swallowed a mouthful of beer. "They give you some kind of performance bonus for that?"



"Gift certificates and a special parking space," I said. "Mind if I sit?"



He shrugged and indicated an elegant brocade chair a few feet away. I eased down on it, smoothing my skirt with sweaty palms. Over at the bar, Kevin was drinking his Jim Beam and looking defiant about it.



"So," Jonathan said, and smiled. I didn't like the smile; it was cold and hard as a glacier. "I guess they sent you here to make a deal. What've you got that I might want?"



As if his master-his nominal master-weren't even present. That gave me the shivers. I'd known the kid wasn't up to the task of owning and operating a border collie, much less a Djinn, but...



"Nothing," I said. "Except I can call off the Wardens and give Kevin a chance. A better one, anyway, because you and I both know that his days of surviving this are shorter than the shelf life of a loaf of bread."



Preaching to the choir. Nothing moved in Jonathan's pleasant expression, in the impenetrable depths of his eyes.



"You're assuming I care about that," he said. "Maybe there's something else we can talk about."



I could guess. "You still want David's bottle. I don't have it anymore."



It occurred to me, rather too late, that if I didn't have David, Jonathan had no reason to keep me breathing. In fact, he had a pretty nice incentive to make sure I stopped. David would grieve, he would get over it, things would-on the Djinn scale-go back to relative normalcy; eventually Jonathan would be able to rescue him, and without the distraction of me, David would willingly go.



"I know you didn't give him up on purpose," he said. "Who's got him? Where is he?" Jonathan asked. He looked relaxed, but I wasn't deceived; I also felt something weird in the air. Kevin was standing motionless, staring at the Djinn. Like he was waiting for some kind of direction. Yeah, the whole master-servant thing was topsy-turvy on this one.



"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, fueled 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 realize 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, okay, 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? Secondhand 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 leaned 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."



"Okay." 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.