And she had said she loved him.
He stared into her eyes. Not so clear and still as before; there were shadows and secrets shifting below the icy blue.
Did she love him now? Did he want her to? And when had he stopped knowing his own mind?
He shook his head. “I don’t need anything else.”
She turned on her heel and left him standing there.
Hard to believe, but the Bowl Me Over looked worse in the light of day.
Thorne supposed the same could be said of him. The birnenston explosion had left him shaking and sick as no fortified wine ever had. The scrawny maple tree at the edge of the parking lot was the only thing holding him upright.
When the silver limousine rolled into the lot, the reflected glare of sunlight stabbed his eyes. He sucked down a few quick breaths, trying to force his djinni higher. Instead, he gagged on the lingering taste of sulfur and crumpled to his knees. His palm skidded across the pavement. The cracked asphalt peeled up divots of skin before he caught himself.
The limo eased to a gentle stop just beyond his tight-clenched knuckles. The door, when it swung open, barely missed his bowed head.
Pride—or panic—coursed down his spine, urging him to straighten, but the sudden demonic presence was an unrelenting heavy hand on the back of his neck.
He kept his gaze fixed on the high heels that emerged, one, two, in front of his nose. The satiny pumps were the same color as night storm clouds over the city that swallowed all the multicolored light and reflected back only gray.
“What reverence you show me, Mr. Halfmoon, but please, get up.” The feminine voice was as satin-smooth as the gray heels, though the sharp point was hidden—for the moment.
Thorne’s stomach clenched, somewhere between a dry heave and a futile attempt to right himself. Only a hard grip on his biceps got him to his feet.
Still swaying, he stared into Carlo’s squinting sneer. “I take it you gave Magdalena my message?”
The wise guy’s lip curled up another mocking notch. “Was a shame that fireplace on your boat was so squeaky clean. Well, I guess you got one fire out of it anyway.”
Thorne wrenched his arm from Carlo’s grip, tearing the office drone dress shirt he’d taken from the dry cleaner to replace his birnenston-stained pajamas. He continued the quick upward thrust with a crack into the wise guy’s septum.
Carlo howled and staggered back, clutching his face. Thorne steadied himself in the ratty sneakers that had been the only shoes at the dry cleaner—taken off the dry cleaner. That had been just a casual bit of obligatory violence, reviving his djinni not at all. Bloodying Carlo, though, felt good. The demon in Thorne finally settled into wary stillness.
This left him facing Magdalena, without the other djinn-man in the way.
The djinn-men, like most apex predators, were not overly numerous and stayed out of one another’s territory whenever possible. In his decades possessed, he’d met fewer than a dozen of his brethren face-to-face. But even he knew of Magdalena.
Not that anyone knew much. She was as beautiful as they’d said, sloe-eyed and naturally red lipped, with rich dark hair and sun-kissed skin despite the lateness of the season. And now he knew the rumors of her powerful djinni were not exaggerated either.
“Carlo,” she said, raising that satin voice to be heard over the wise guy’s muffled cursing, “stay with the car, will you? Mr. Halfmoon, walk with me a moment.”
Did he have a choice? His feet started moving without his conscious thought. Apparently not.
“‘Walk with me,’” he growled. “You learned that line from your pet mobster.”
She met his narrowed gaze directly and inclined her head, dark waves of her hair shifting around the shoulders of her slim dove-gray suit. All the drab tones should have sucked the life from her; instead, her coloring seemed even more alluring. “Carlo has been telling me about gathering like-minded souls, about creating a family, if you will.”
“No doubt he has,” Thorne said. “He likes to talk.”
“And I am a good listener.” She guided him out of the parking lot, following the chain-link fence. Though the slabs of sidewalk concrete had buckled in places, she glided forward as if those high heels never touched the ground. “So, Mr. Halfmoon, what do you want to tell me?”
His throat worked, choking on his djinni’s wordless disturbance. What would it say if it had a tongue of its own? “I suppose ‘Go to hell’ won’t help my cause.”
Her laugh was like industrial smoke, darker and grittier than her smooth voice. “Some might say, by joining my cause, that’s exactly where you’d be going.”
Curiosity forced him to ask, “You’d say otherwise?”
“While I appreciated his verve, Corvus Valerius wanted to pit hell against heaven with this realm as the battlefield. But I’ve found war to be … intrusive. The tenebraeternum can stay locked tight. I just want to borrow a bit of it, as needed.”
Already the force of her demon, even idle, horrified him. If she had access to the eternal well of evil … “Hell isn’t a bank,” he said.
She laughed again and leaned toward him to rest her hand on his arm where Carlo had torn the shirt. “More like a stock market. You ran a casino; you should understand. No one gets rich playing the bank.”
Standing so close, her perfume teased him; something lush and exotic, but applied with a restrained hand so that even his djinni strained to capture the essence of the fragrance … and recoiled at the nearly imperceptible stink of cordite. Though her fingers were warm, almost uncomfortably so, his skin crawled at her touch. Before he could pull away, she released him. She turned to the chain-link fence and curled her fingers through the steel wire.
“No,” she murmured. “I’m not trying to make this earth a living hell.” Her gaze fixed on the scene on the other side of the fence. “It’s already that. I just want it to be my hell.”
Focused as he’d been on Magdalena, Thorne had dismissed the background shrieking as his freaked-out djinni. But the ruckus actually rose from the half-pint fiends confined behind the fence.
The daycare center playground was decorated with pumpkins and hay bales that the children tumbled over with raucous glee. Since most were in costume—and empty candy cellophanes gusted in the whirlwinds of their capering—he guessed they’d been celebrating the coming of Halloween.
He slanted a glance at Magdalena and swallowed hard at the dark void in her stare. “Thanks for the invitation, but I have my own hell.”
She watched the children another long heartbeat, then trailed her fingers down the chain-link fence. Her white-tipped nails strummed the metal strands with a discordant rattle. When she finally turned to him and smiled, against her white teeth, her lips looked almost bloodred. “Of course you do. And you are alone there. Wouldn’t you rather be with us? Isn’t that why you came here today? Because you have nowhere else to go?”
Only because the djinni bastards had burned his Princess. Thorne made himself smirk, disguising the rage of his loss with a flippant one-shoulder shrug. “I’m here because I knew Carlo would come eventually. And I planned to kill him.”
She turned back the way they had come and raised one hand in a negligent wave. “Ah, you are brothers under the skin, and brothers will fight.”
“Are you giving me permission to skin Carlo?”
She gave him a reproving look as the limo sharked toward them on the wrong side of the street, wise guy at the wheel. “In the end, you are the same, and you will fight together.”