We were about halfway to the cabin, according to the map, when I felt a flutter at the edges of my awareness, like a psychic breeze. It felt cool as a mint balm to my irritated soul, and I sighed in sudden relief.
David was back.
I turned my head to see him striding down the broad hallway, heading our way. He glimmered like a hot penny, even under artificial light—silky auburn hair, worn long enough to curl at the ends, perfect bronze skin that would make a self-tanning addict weep in envy. Behind round John Lennon glasses, his eyes sparked brilliant orange, like miniature suns. His eyes were the only thing that gave him away right now as being more than human. He was dressed in well-worn, faded jeans, a white Miami-weight shirt that fluttered in the air-conditioned breeze, and a ball cap advertising a local crab shack. He’d forgone his long vintage military coat, mainly because I’d lectured him enough about the unlikelihood of anyone except terrorists and flashers wearing coats in the Miami heat. Although the idea of David as a flasher—a private-performance-only one, of course—still lingered in my mind.
His gaze was fixed on me, and he crossed the distance fast, although he didn’t appear to be in a hurry. Even so, it still seemed to take forever before his hands touched me—a gentle stroke from my shoulders down my bare arms, to my wrists, then back up to cup my face. My whole body hummed and relaxed into the sensation. At close range, David’s eyes were both less and more human—less human in color and more human in content. He was worried.
He had good reason to be.
“How are you holding up?” he asked me. His voice was low and intimate, like the warmth of his body near mine. “Any pain?”
“Nope,” I said. “Nothing I can’t handle.”
His gaze held mine, searching. Waiting. I was dimly conscious of Cherise standing a few feet away, doing the awkward dance of exclusion from an intimate moment. With no key card of her own, she’d have to wait.
“I promise, if I feel anything change, you’re the first to know,” I told him, and put my hands on him, because I couldn’t not put my hands on him. I stepped forward and folded myself against his chest, and his arms closed over me, holding me close. I felt his lips brush my hair, a butterfly touch that made my heart skip.
“Let me check the mark,” he said. I shook my head. “Jo. Let me see it.”
“It’s fine.”
“Jo.”
I sighed and backed up a step, then turned so my back was facing him. His fingers touched my shoulder and moved down and in, pushing back the fabric and moving the strap of my bra aside to look at the thing on my shoulder blade.
It looked like a black torch tattoo. I knew that, because I’d spent enough time staring at it in pocket mirror reflections. It was the parting gift of my old boss, Bad Bob Biringanine—or what was left of him, anyway. He’d once been one of the most powerful Wardens in the world, but he’d gotten it illegally, the way some athletes abuse steroids. His particular poison was a Demon Mark—he’d volunteered himself as a host for a gestating Demon, and in return it had given him all the power he needed.
Until it was done with him, at least. I wasn’t sure that what was currently walking around in his skin had much in common with the original Bad Bob.
Bad Bob had also given me a Demon Mark—unwillingly—and eventually I’d gotten rid of it. I never wanted to feel Bad Bob’s sticky, foul fingers pulling my strings again; the very thought of it made my skin crawl and made me long for a shower and a steel scrub brush.
David’s gentle touch slid over the black torch mark, and it was as if his fingers disappeared as they passed across the dead space of it. I couldn’t feel the pressure at all. Then his touch was back, real and warm, on the other side of the numbed spot.
“It’s still contained,” he said. His voice was very quiet, meant only for my ears. “If you start to feel anything—”
I already had felt something—that sickening longing for destruction as I’d watched the storm. I knew it was bleed-over from the black tattoo . . . but I couldn’t make myself tell him, either.
“Yeah, I know, yell for help.” I hated being helpless. Hated it. But somehow, Bad Bob had found a way to strip away my defenses, and I couldn’t fight this thing. Not on my own. David could help, at least for now. He wasn’t making any guarantees long-term, though. We needed to get to Bad Bob and make the evil old son of a bitch take the thing off of me.
Or kill him. That’d work, too. I hoped. Though I had to admit, it hadn’t worked too well the last time I’d thought I put him in the ground.
I tugged my bra strap back in place and turned to face my lover. No—husband. I had to get used to that. Husband. We’d had the wedding ceremony, kind of. It had been interrupted by various attacks, but I thought we were married, anyway. I just didn’t feel married. “So, you’ve been AWOL most of the morning.”
“Busy,” he said, which was uninformative, as explanations go. His shoulders lifted and fell, as if he knew what I was thinking. “Djinn business.”
Which meant none of mine. “So what’s the plan? You guys coming with?”
“Some are,” David said. “This is obviously our fight as well as yours. He has Rahel prisoner. Even Ashan agrees that we can’t let this go without an answer.”
Just as David was in charge of the New Djinn, the ones who traced their origins to human ancestry, Ashan was the Mack Daddy of the Old Djinn . . . who liked to refer to themselves as the True Djinn. You see where this is going, because if half the Djinn are “true,” then the other half must be, well, “false.” It’s the equivalent of racial prejudice, among supernatural beings.
Most Djinn I’ve ever met are about seventy percent arrogance, twenty-eight percent altruism, and two percent compassion. David blew the curve; he was the least arrogant Djinn I’d ever met, and he maxed out on compassion. That made him incredibly hot to me, but it also made him vulnerable. Ashan buried the needle on the other end; he didn’t know the meaning of altruism, and he couldn’t care less about compassion. All arrogance, all the time.
He and David got along about as well as you’d expect, when they were actually talking at all.
“And is the great Ashan going to grace us with his presence?” I asked. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it.
“He’ll be around,” David answered, which was a typically Djinn sort of evasion. Around could mean anything, and nothing. “He’s sending a delegation of four of his own, though.”
“Four? He did get the memo, right? World ending, danger, et cetera?”
“Four of his most powerful,” David clarified. “One of them is Venna.”
Oh. Well, that was all right, then; Venna, I trusted. For an Old Djinn, she was a-okay; she even displayed an interest in regular folks, in the way a kid develops a fascination with an ant farm. She didn’t consider us equals, but she thought we were kind of cool in a science-lab sort of way.
She liked to walk around in the guise of a child, but in no way could you classify Venna as vulnerable. Terrifying, yes. Frail, no.
David looked over my shoulder, and I followed his gaze. There at the other end of the hallway stood Venna, with three other, much taller Djinn. The expressions on the faces of the other three Djinn, whom I didn’t know, were identicaclass="underline" pricelessly annoyed. Not here by choice, I gathered. Their smelling-something-bad scowls could have shattered titanium.
Venna, however, waved cheerfully. She was dressed in child-sized pants and a cute little pink top with a sparkly rainbow. She’d largely given up her predilection for dressing as Alice from Alice in Wonderland, but she’d kept the long blond hair and innocent blue eyes.
I waved back. Venna said something to her fellow Old Djinn, and the four of them promptly vanished, misted away on the air like a mirage. Heading for their own quarters, I assumed, if they cared about such things.