Chill Factor

I was almost sorry I said it when I saw the devastation on his face. This really wasn't easy for him.



I looked at the rest of them. They avoided my gaze. "Gee, guys, none of you are coming with? That's too bad, 'cause you're just so darn much fun."



Paul put his hands over his face and leaned his elbows on the table. Behind him, the desert glittered in sunlight, fresh and dry and clean on the other side of plate glass. Inside, the bright yellow and retro-seventies rust decor looked desperate and grubby around the corners. The omelet I was eating needed salt. I added Tabasco sauce instead.



"We've got a lot to do," Paul said. I didn't stop dispensing Tabasco. "We're meeting a couple of guys; they'll see you all the way home."



"Fabulous." I capped the pepper sauce and began mushing up the omelet to my satisfaction. "I hope you have a plan B handy, because your plan A sucks, and it's going to fall apart faster than a Yugoslavian car. I don't care what Kevin says; he's playing you. He's not giving up his Djinn."



Paul didn't have the moral courage to meet my gaze. "We've got a plan B."



"And yet this stands as the best option?" Silence around the table. I tried a mouthful of coffee. It tasted like sludge. "Wow. We really are screwed."



"Jo, quit making this hard. I goddamn well just got over the shock of you not being dead. Can you quit mouthing off and let me be glad you're breathing for a while?"



"I'll quit being a bitch if you quit selling me and mine down the river." I didn't really want to keep on hurting him, but I couldn't stop. Facing things with fortitude wasn't really my strong suit. Since screaming and crying were out, insults were what I had left.



We tacitly agreed to a mutual cease-fire, to chew in peace.



I finished up and excused myself to the bathroom. Marion started to go with me. "Please," I said, and fixed her with a smile that didn't match what I was feeling. "You know I'm coming back. Where can I run? Jesus, let me pee one time in private. I give you my oath as a Warden that I'll come back." I held up my right hand, palm out, and the rune there glittered blue up on the aetheric. Truth, for anybody with the eyes to see it.



Marion nodded and sank back down in the leatherette chair. She folded her hands together and watched me gravely as I walked away, headed for the door marked with the skirt hieroglyphic. The plastic fake-wood finish had a tacky film on it, a consequence of being located too close to the fry baskets. I didn't actually have to pee, but I needed a minute alone. A minute to stare at myself in the harsh fluorescent light, at the curling, still-damp hair and pallid face, at the dark blue eyes that seemed too haunted to belong to me. When I'd been Djinn, they'd been silver, bright as dimes.



I looked tired. I tugged irritably at my hair, which was not supposed to curl like that, and seemed destined to be the bane of my existence for the rest of my... probably very short life.



"Snow White."



A cold, gravel-rough whisper. I froze and looked around. Saw nothing. Heard an almost silent laugh that sounded like sandpaper over stone.



I felt goose bumps breaking out all over my skin, and fought back a shiver. "Who's there?" I demanded. No feet under the two bathroom stalls. Nobody else in the room except my reflection.



You know. I didn't know if that voice was in my head, or put there from outside. Creepy, either way. I stared hard into the mirror, let myself float up into the aetheric, and finally spotted something that didn't quite belong. A flicker. Use your eyes. Except that my eyes were just plain human these days, not Djinn; I couldn't see in every spectrum, every level of the world. And what was talking to me didn't exist in this one.



Shall I lend you mine?



Something happened in my head, a sharp, tearing pain, and then I was seeing edges to things that weren't there, colors that had texture and depth and no name in the world I lived in.



In the corner, shadows flowed black into a shape that glittered like faceted coal. Spiderlike. Dangerous.



An Ifrit. A failed, twisted Djinn.



A vampire.



Sara? No, it couldn't be Sara; she'd died along with Patrick, both giving up their essences to create a human body to house me. It was someone else. Who...?



Who else called me Snow White? "Rahel?"



Lumps of coal have no expression. She didn't move. I took a step toward her, saw the edges of her start to fray as if she might disappear. "Rahel, wait. Please."



Can't stay.



"Why not?"



Hungry.



Ifrits ate Djinn. I had a sudden, startling moment of gratitude that David was safely locked in the case at Marion 's feet, out there in the restaurant. Much as I liked Rahel-if this was Rahel-I didn't want her munching on my lover.



My relationship with her was complicated at best. As a Free Djinn, she'd been my friend, sometimes my enemy; she'd acted to save my life at least once. And I hadn't been able to stop her from being destroyed not so long ago. This wasn't really Rahel. It was the zombie shell of her, undead and undying.



I wanted strongly for her to go away.



"What do you want?" I asked She answered me silently. Give me food. Tell you things.



"What kind of things?"



Things to save you.



Her voice was getting fainter in my head, the edges of her looking misty. This was one hell of an effort for her, communicating on this plane of existence. Clearly she needed a recharge to continue. Too bad I didn't carry any handy snack-sized Djinn.



The bathroom door opened, and Marion came in. She ignored me and walked right to a stall, went in, and clicked the lock. The satchel with David's bottle went with her, which gave me the total willies; the Ifrit's head turned to follow her, but she didn't attack. I went to the sink and ran water, scrubbed my hands, and watched the black shadow in the corner. Rahel hadn't moved, but she was fainter now.



"Stay with me," I whispered. I saw nothing, heard nothing in my head, but somehow I knew she'd received the message and agreed. I watched her shadow dissolve completely.



"What?" Marion 's voice. I shut the water off and reached for a towel.



"Nothing."



That probably wasn't a lie.



When I came back out, there were two new faces at the table. Paul nodded at them. "Jo, this is Carl Cooper and Lel Miller. They'll be taking you home."



Carl was bland. His hair was dishwater blond and thinning fast; he had thin lips out of practice for smiling. His eyes were hidden by aviator sunglasses, but I had the strong impression that he wouldn't have been any more expressive if I'd been able to see his baby blues.



Lel Miller was a different story altogether. Tall, leggy, gorgeously tanned. She had quite the salon finish, right down to the well-kept gleam of her French manicure. I held up my palm in the traditional Warden hi-there; they each followed suit, and in the aetheric, our runes glittered.



"Charmed," Lel said. She had a sexy contralto purr. She extended a hand to me, palm down, as if she expected me to kiss it.



I took it and examined the bracelet chiming around her wrist. "Nice," I said. "Velada?"



She looked impressed. She reclaimed her hand to pet the silver chain and ornaments, which were small clouds and lightning bolts. "Yes. You know your jewelry."



Paul rolled his eyes. "If it gets worn, she knows about it," he said. "Go ahead. Show her your shoes."



Lel obligingly extended an elegant leg in denim. I glanced at the footwear for a second, looked back into her lovely hazel eyes, and said, "Kenneth Cole." She gave me a self-satisfied smirk. "Knockoffs," I finished. "Probably Taiwan."



The smile went wherever bad smiles go, and she yanked her leg back out of sight. "I wasn't dressing for the prom," she shot back. I thought about pointing out that Velada jewelry was hardly appropriate for breakfast at Denny's, but gave it up. Hell, my shoes were out of pedigree, too. It happens.



Paul was going to lengths to hide a smile. Marion wasn't even bothering. "Okay," Paul said. "Sounds like you guys are going to get along great. You know the route?"



Lel nodded. Carl contented himself with gobbling leftover buttered toast. Not her, I noticed; she wasn't wasting her perfect lipstick on anything so useless as breakfast.



I didn't like her, and it wasn't because of the shoes. Something about her raised my hackles. Carl was just a cipher, but Lel I really didn't want to be in a car with all the way to Florida.



Speaking of which, I had a bad, bad thought. "Um, Paul? Can I take my car?"



He nodded. "Yeah, fine. You drive. They'll just ride along."



"Both of them?"



"You got a backseat, right?"



Not much of one, but I wasn't going to be concerned about their comfort. "Sure." And the minute I could ditch my escort, I'd be heading back to pick up the pieces of this disaster. Because it was going to be a disaster. No doubt about it.



Carl finished the toast, swilled down half a cup of coffee with a noisy slurp, and stood. Lel followed suit more slowly.



"Jo." Paul reached out and took my hand, just for a second. "I'm sorry."



"Oh, you're not nearly sorry yet," I said. "Get back to me later, though."



It was the hardest thing I'd ever done, to walk away and leave David behind.



I'll find you. I promised it to him with a grim, burning fury. I will. No matter what.



My Viper started up with a roar.



Lel had called shotgun, leaving a disgrunted Carl in the cramped backseat. She seemed completely uninterested about why they were babysitting me on a drive back to Florida; in fact, she slipped on headphones and flipped a switch on an iPod, and ignored me completely. Which was fine with me. I backed my midnight-blue Mona out of her parking space and eased her into gear. The freeway beckoned ahead.



"So that was your Djinn, right?" Carl asked, just as we hit merging speed. Nobody on the road in either direction. I opened Mona up to eighty and kept an eye on the horizon for cops or storms. "Your Djinn they're trading over to the kid? Must suck, right?"



"Sucks," I agreed tightly. "We're not going to chat, right?"



"Long damn trip if we don't."



"Longer if we do."



He sighed and settled back. Lel bobbed her head in time with a beat I couldn't hear, and I watched the miles start to spin away.



There was a huge, gaping empty space inside me. I couldn't feel David anymore, and that was the worst part. Not knowing where he was, what they were doing with him. How could they believe Kevin? Were they really that stupid, or just that desperate? Kevin wasn't exactly a brilliant strategist, but he had a certain criminal cunning... and you could count on the fact that if he had the chance to double cross you, he would. He was greedy, he was selfish, and he'd never been treated fairly in his life. He'd believe you were going to screw him anyway, so why wait?



As a survival strategy, not half-bad. As a way to live, it was a tragedy.



I kept half my attention up on the aetheric as I drove, looking for trouble and hoping for a sign. There was a huge roiling disturbance centered behind me, in the direction of Las Vegas, but it was like an impenetrable wall of confusion.



David had told me that this had to happen. I didn't understand why, but all I could do was trust him, trust Lewis, trust in the goodwill of the universe.



Not really in my nature.



We'd gone about fifteen miles out into the big nowhere when Lel took the headphones off, looked over the backseat at Carl, and said, "This about right?"



"Yeah," he said. "Looks right."



"For what?" I asked, and that was when Carl took a gun out from under his tan windbreaker and pointed it to my head.



"Pull over," he said.



I felt a cold-hot bolt of shock. "You're kidding."



I heard a metallic snap, cold and harsh, right next to my ear. "The next sound you hear kills you. Pull the car over."



Lel was watching me with a little half smile, satisfied as a cat in a cream factory.



I drifted the car to a stop at the side of the road and stood on the brakes unnecessarily hard. My legs were shaking. I've been on the wrong end of a lot of situations, but the wrong end of a gun was a different story. God, I hadn't seen this coming...



"Out," Carl said, and handed the gun to Lel. "Cover her."



The woman was good at it; I never felt there was a split second to take advantage of, and besides, there were two Wardens on me, and it wasn't like I could overpower them, not without David. Not without a huge, costly fight. The memory of being shot in the back overwhelmed me. I'd survived it, but not without cost, and not without pain; I didn't have any wish to try a rematch of me versus Smith amp; Wesson. I opened the car door and stepped out, keeping my hands up and in a helpless position.



"You understand that if I feel so much as a light breeze, you're dead," Lel said conversationally. I nodded. Strange feeling, to be so cold when the sun was so hot; my hands were clammy. I wanted to wipe them on my skirt and didn't dare.



"Look," I said, "if you want the car-"



"Shut up. Walk," Lel said, and jerked her chin out in the direction of the desert. It looked pretty much like every other part of the desert. Nothing out here but sand, cactus, and the occasional vulture. Somebody had used the road sign for target practice. The aged buckshot dings were rusted rich orange.



As we struggled through hot sand, heading over the nearest hill, I wished for some more sensible shoes to die in-crazy, the things that go through your head. I wished desperately for David's warm, comforting presence, not to mention his ability to kill these two roaches really, really dead. I wished for a lot of things that I couldn't have. Stupid! Should've seen this coming. Except the idea that someone might have ordered me killed had never so much as entered my mind. Who the hell were these guys working for?