Chill Factor

The elevator glided to a smooth, elegant halt and deposited us back in the marble hallways, rows and rows of doors all opening and closing, people always moving. They say New York is the city that doesn't sleep; Las Vegas doesn't even nap. I wondered when they got the basic cleaning done. Even Disneyland closes long enough to empty the trash and polish the brass.



We joined the flow out into the main concourse, turned left, and went past the cashier stand, into the wilderness of gently chiming slots. To our right were trendy restaurants-the kind that didn't post prices- and somewhere at the back was a walkway that led to Caesar's Palace next door. Next door, in Las Vegas terms, meant about a ten-minute walk through a sky bridge that seemed to go on forever.



I halted us near a bar at the back corner, chose a table, and got everyone to sit. Everyone except Jonathan, who was examining slot machines and entertaining himself by making random ones spit coins. Kevin watched him raptly. I could tell by the greedy flare in his eyes that he'd figured out what the Djinn was doing.



"Don't even," I said. The security cameras wouldn't see Jonathan at all, most likely; they'd just see machines randomly vomiting tokens... but if Kevin started flouncing around making the bells ring, there'd be a fast, heavily muscled presence and a windowless office, followed by some harshly worded questions we couldn't afford to avoid just now. "Play later. Just sit."



Kevin, still watching Jonathan, said, "I know they're going to kill me." His expression didn't change. "You might as well just take him and go. Siobhan and I can hide on our own."



Surprisingly, that was probably true. He and Siobhan could blend in, get out of town, find some big city like Chicago or Detroit where two more teenagers wandering homeless wouldn't attract any notice. Providing Siobhan didn't just blow him off once she realized he wasn't the bankroll she'd thought. But I couldn't lose him now. I needed him, for Lewis's sake.



I caught a flicker out of the corner of my eye, and turned my head. Marion Bearheart was coming our way. She looked, as always, cool and composed. Her hands were in her coat pockets, and she didn't hurry; she stopped to admire some items in a shop window, checked out the menu at Le Cirque. She made a slow circuit of the area, checking the aetheric, I was sure.



Then she pulled up a chair next to me and said, "Nice to know you made it."



"Yeah, likewise." I shot a look at Kevin and Siobhan. "I guess you know Kevin."



She nodded politely to him, as if she weren't planning to get him behind closed doors at her facility and strip him clean of power and potential just as soon as the opportunity presented itself. Kevin didn't move. He was giving both of us his patented bad-boy glower.



Marion dismissed him, and focused her dark eyes on me. "You have it?"



I opened my fist to show her Jonathan's bottle. "I'd like to trade for something more valuable than your word. Not that I don't trust you, but... well, I don't trust you."



She removed a hand from her coat pocket and mutely displayed the blue glass bottle that Yvette Prentiss had used, not so very long ago, to trap a man willing to give up his life for me.



I reached out, slowly, and took the glass. No stopper in the bottle. It felt warm. "David," I whispered, and closed my eyes for a second in relief as the connection between us hummed tight between us.



"Right here." I heard a chair scrape, and saw that he'd joined us at the table.



He looked utterly unchanged-auburn-flecked hair worn a little untidily, brown eyes flashing behind round gold-rimmed spectacles. An old-fashioned olive-drab coat over a faded blue plaid shirt. Blue jeans.



I sucked in a startled breath and felt my eyes sting with tears; the vision of him turned into a colorful blur. A blur that reached across empty space and cupped my cheek in its hand, and yes, that was his touch, warm and sweet and gentle. I leaned against it, breathing in the smell of old wool and cinnamon, leaves and woodsmoke. "Oh, God," I whispered, and it sounded like the prayer it was.



He was leaning close; I could feel the aura of him against me, the barely-there touch of his lips against my ear as he whispered, "I've been watching you." The shimmer of heat that ran through me turned me into honey and butter, made me think thoughts that I shouldn't be having in public, much less in front of people who might want to kill me.



"Could've helped me out a little," I said.



"You did fine." He kissed me, and all the thoughts were refined into sheer, unadulterated longing. I wanted him to keep kissing me, forever if that was possible. I couldn't imagine it ending, but of course it did, a slow withdrawal of those soft, delicious lips from mine.



I opened my eyes and looked straight into his, and saw them burning copper and gold, molten with love and longing and power.



This was what I'd been fighting for. What I'd fight for with every breath, every remaining day of my life.



"Anything I can do for you, master?" he whispered to me. "Or to you, anyway?"



I sucked in a superheated breath, trembling, and managed to be practical. "A purse to put this bottle in would be great, actually."



He reached under the table and pulled out a black leather bag, nothing designer-my bad for not specifying properly, really-and he'd thoughtfully included padding material. I slid the bottle inside and zipped it shut, then looped it bandolier-fashion over my head. I was not losing him. Not again. I'd break his bottle when we were out of this mess; I didn't like keeping him prisoner, but right now having David's power amplifying mine might keep us alive.



"Joanne?" Marion's distant voice. I blinked and pulled my attention away from David; it was like ripping off a limb, but I managed. Absence didn't make the heart grow fonder; it created a kind of magnetic lock that didn't seem humanly possible to break. "Jonathan's bottle, if you please."



Oh. Right.



Jonathan had given up on slot machines and had wandered back. He was standing behind my chair, and without turning around I knew that he was watching David. I could feel the crackle of power in the air. They weren't speaking, but there was conversation going on. Levels of power, emotion, give and take.



"Glad to get rid of it," I said sincerely, and held it out for Marion to accept.



Kevin had been waiting, and he took advantage of the chance. He slapped my hand, and the bottle went spinning out of control across the tabletop, skittering and bouncing, straight toward David-who, being Djinn, couldn't physically or aetherically touch it. He reached out for it, but his hand went right through it as if it didn't exist, or he didn't, or some combination of the two; the bottle slid through him and disappeared. I heard the muffled thud of it hitting carpet.



"Jump ball," Jonathan murmured, and then turned serious again. "Crap."



I felt the surge at almost exactly the same time, and so did David, who threw himself over me. Something was coming. Something big. I could see it blowing up in the aetheric, big as a dragon and twice as fiery-no idea what it was, but it was huge and very, very scary.



"Get down!" Jonathan's voice roared through the casino, supernaturally loud, like an enraged drill instructor on the world's largest loudspeaker, and it wasn't surprising that every single person in sight who wasn't Jonathan dropped to the carpet like they'd been chopped off at the knees. There was some muffled screaming, but surprisingly little. I started worming my way across the floor toward where Jonathan's bottle had fallen, but David was in the way, and Kevin was elbow-walking that way, too. I lunged across David at the faint sparkle of glass in shadow, but I was too late; a hand was there before me.



Siobhan. She grabbed it and stuffed the bottle into the pocket of her jeans.



Jonathan had turned, watching her with narrow, dark eyes, like a predator about to eat something. I grabbed the girl's wrist. "Siobhan. He'll kill you. Give it to me!"



She went very pale. She hesitated, then pulled it out of her pocket and handed it over just as Kevin got into position to try to snatch it away. We had an undignified little wrestling match, which consisted of me yanking my hands away from his and him trying to pry my fingers open, muttering things about my mother that weren't very complimentary. Siobhan crab-walked backward, away from the fray.



"Quiet!" Jonathan snapped at us. We all froze. Then there was a surprisingly weighty, profound silence. And then there was the faintest tinkle of glasses on tables, going on for a few delicate seconds.



And then an earthquake hit like a bomb.



Maybe people screamed, I don't know; the first tremor rippled through the floor like a wave through a stormy ocean, and I was tossed sideways, rolled, fetched up against a railing that I grabbed onto for dear life as the building continued to pitch and roll. It was too loud to hear screaming over the jangling of alarms and bells and dying slot machines and breaking glass and shattering steel.



I had a lot of power. It was all useless. Weather was an ephemeral power; this was something deep, strong, relentless. I caught a flash of someone moving faster, coat flying, and saw David leaping over the rolling, rippling floor to land hard beside me. He threw himself on top of me, smothering my scream-I had been screaming, I realized from the raw ache in my throat-and I felt impacts against his body. Things hitting him. Things that would have crushed me.



Even a minor earthquake has a deeply unsettling effect, but a major one, like this, robs you of the ability to do anything but hang on and pray. I prayed, my hand locked a vise around the wrought-iron railing, and I heard David whispering in that liquid language of the Djinn. It might have been a prayer, too, for all I knew.



And then I realized that I had the power to stop it. My left hand, the one not holding on in a death grip, was clutching Jonathan's bottle-which was, thankfully, still intact.



"Get off!" I yelled in David's ear. "Off!"



He rolled away into a fluid, inhuman crouch-the first time I'd really seen him betray his Djinn nature in body language. He was moving like Rahel now, like something built out of alien parts into the semblance of a human body. His eyes were blazing so brightly it was like they'd caught fire.



I held up Jonathan's bottle, coughed against a choking cloud of crumbling dry wall, and yelled, "Jonathan! I command you to stop this earthquake, now!"



He was the only one still upright. Tall, slim, untouched by the shattering concrete and flying debris as the hotel ripped itself apart. Marion was motionless at his feet. Kevin. Siobhan.



He looked utterly composed as he turned toward me and said, "I can't."



The wave of disbelief almost drowned me. I hadn't left him any room for equivocation; I was holding his damn bottle. ...



He nodded toward it.



"That's not my bottle, kiddo," he said. "Sorry. Nice wording, though. Eight out of ten for style."



I stupidly shook the bottle in my hand-why, I have no idea; trying to make it work?-and before I could get my head around it, the moment was past. Jonathan was doing something. Not what I'd wanted him to do, of course, but something, which was more than the rest of us were capable of trying.



He grabbed Kevin by the scruff of the neck, yanked him to his feet, and yelled something in his ear. Then he grabbed Marion, got her standing, and yelled something to her, too.



Then he steadied the ground under them. I could see it, even in this reality-a golden shimmer, spreading out around him in concentric, growing circles, and inside the gold, a small island of calm. Marion and Kevin were talking, or rather yelling; I couldn't hear a thing. I couldn't even hear David now, who was wrapped around me-he shoved me back into a thick recessed doorway and braced himself there, holding me in. I peered over his shoulder at what was happening.



Marion had taken Kevin's hand. The two of them were facing each other now, and as I watched she went into a trance state, eyes slowly closing. She took the kid with her. As his face went smooth and calm, he looked ten years older and, at the same time, amazingly childlike.



Alight with power.



This was a shallow quake, I knew that much; deeper-seated disturbances usually do less damage, because the energy gets absorbed by the bedrock on the way. Shallow ones are much more dangerous to the surface, and this one was a doozy. No way to objectively measure it by Richter scale standards, but I'd been taught the Mercalli intensity scale, and this was damn sure an IX. The damage was being caused by exactly the same things that happen when you drop a stone into a pool of water-waves bouncing back from harder objects, then from other waves of greater intensity. Energy in dissonance, deflected constantly back against itself. It ripped things apart in its madness.



I felt the shaking and rolling subside to a mere sickening tilt and jerk and shudder. As it did, sounds became clearer again-screaming, crashing, slot machines tipping, walls collapsing.



And in the circle of gold, Marion and Kevin opened their eyes and smiled at each other. Pure smiles of delight and pride.



The shaking stopped. One last sifting of dust from above, and then it was over. What emergency lighting there was flickered on, bathing everything in a sickly halogen glow, but the shadows stayed deep and secret.



Marion let go of Kevin's hands and reached up to put her palms on his cheeks. She leaned him closer and kissed his forehead gently as she stroked his oily, tangled hair.



"That was lovely," she said. "Very fine work. I commend you."



Kevin looked rapt. His face was shining and, for once, the light in his eyes wasn't one of greed or fury.



It was something close to love.



"Now we need to help," Marion said. "There are a lot of injured. Come with me."



She stepped over a chunk of fallen concrete and held out her hand to him.



"Kevin!"



Siobhan's shrill voice. She was getting to her feet- Jonathan not helping-and brushing dust off her shorts. There were bloody cuts and scrapes on her, but nothing serious, I thought.