“Since I’m the boss, I can take vacation whenever I want,” he said, and took off his glasses to needlessly polish them. It was so cute that Djinn had poker tells, just like humans; I knew instantly that he was fibbing. “I can take the time.”
David’s job wasn’t exactly low-key. He served as the Conduit for half of the Djinn, a link between them and the raw power of Mother Earth. Without that link, the Djinn were reliant on Wardens and their relatively feeble draw of power from the aetheric. His job was different from that of the Oracles, but even more crucial, and it didn’t have time off.
The Djinn didn’t like being reliant on humans. Ever. I supposed that if I’d been one of them, ancient beings who’d been forced into the worst kind of slavery imaginable for centuries at a time, I wouldn’t be all that fond of relying on others, either.
What else David did besides managing that power flow for his people, though, was a mystery to me. I knew he had to leave me on a fairly frequent basis to attend to business; I knew some of that business had to do with Djinn stepping out of line and needing correction. In a sense, David had become the court of last supernatural resort, a role I instinctively knew he didn’t want and wasn’t comfortable in playing. His friend Jonathan had been a great leader, one who’d held the Djinn together despite all the infighting for thousands of years; he’d had a certain ruthless wisdom that everyone respected.
David, however, was crippled by two things: One, he wasn’t Jonathan; two, he had me to worry about. I was his Achilles’ heel, at least when it came to his fellow elementals. Most of them didn’t understand why he spent so much time in human form, and they’d never understand why he had offered marriage to a mere bug like me. They’d forgive him for it, those who liked him; after all, pledging to stay at my side would only last a human lifetime, barely a blink to the Djinn.
But it was a worry. He’d become kind of a Crazy Cat Lady among the elementals, far too attached to humanity for his own good. It was a sign, faint but definite, that he wasn’t destined for the same long-term status that Jonathan had held.
It made David vulnerable in ways I could only dimly imagine.
“What are you thinking about?” David asked. His eyes were closed, and his head was back against the cushion.
“Whether I want purple roses or yellow ones. I think purple might be a nice touch for the wedding bouquet.”
“That’s not what you were thinking about.”
“How do you know?”
He smiled, but didn’t open his eyes. “Because I know when you’re happy, and you’re not. Thinking about wedding bouquets is something you do when you’re happy.”
“You make me happy,” I said, and that wasn’t at all a lie. I took his hand in mine. “And that’s all that counts.”
He lifted my fingers to his lips and pressed a warm kiss against them. “Yes,” he said. “It is.”
Chapter Seven
The rest of the drive was full of the normal annoyances of traffic, construction, and generally idiotic behavior by other motor vehicle operators. David didn’t have to ward off any supernatural assaults, and all that the day required of me was moderately offensive driving to avoid the unexpected lane changes and people failing to check their blind spots.
We rolled into the Warden parking garage, checked through the extensive security procedures, and got our passes for the headquarters floor. It had been remodeled, again; somebody had kindly seen to taking my name off the Memorial Wall, where they’d hastily had it added when I’d been thought to be dead. That was what I thought, anyway, but then I looked closer. They’d really just put some kind of filler into the engraving, a clear indication that they expected me to get clobbered at any time. This way, they could rinse it out and voilà, I’d be memorialized all over again. At a bargain.
I cannot even begin to say how much that bugged me, but I bit my lip and smiled when I noticed, and ignored David’s slightly alarmed look. He was picking up vibrations, all right, and I tried hard to keep myself under better control.
Lewis was waiting for us in the big round conferenceroom, the main one, and there was a crowd with him. Most of them I knew by sight, and some I counted as closer friends. There wasn’t a single unfriendly face, which was something of a relief.
Unless you counted Kevin.
Kevin Prentiss was seated at the table like an equal member of the war council, and next to him sat Cherise. My best friend wasn’t a Warden; she was way cool of course, but controlling the elements wasn’t her bag. So I had to wonder what she was doing in such a high-powered inner circle.
She caught my look, raised her eyebrows, and shrugged. “Don’t ask me,” she said. “Lewis wanted everybody here. Kevin was with me, and he said I could come along.” The subtext was that nobody had wanted to piss Kevin off by demanding his ride-along girlfriend step outside. He was maturing, but I suspected he’d always have more than a little of that sullen, aggressive attitude he was known for. He was at that startling age when the changes come fast and furious; his weedy physique was filling out, developing into a fairly impressive chest under that battered black T-shirt. He avoided my eyes, but then, he always did. We had shared some very unpleasant, even embarrassing moments, and neither of us wanted to get too cozy. It had been a big step for him to spend time with Cherise (and coincidentally with me) on the roof of the hospital; he’d made up for it by ignoring me the rest of the day. I’d returned the favor.
Kevin was here because he was a seriously talented young man. Not trained, not restrained, but . . . talented.
And maybe he cared about me. A little.
I was surprised to recognize that there was a Djinn in the room as well. She sat in the far corner of the room, long, elegant legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, displaying lethally gorgeous shoes. I hadn’t seen Rahel since the earthquake in Fort Lauderdale, so it struck me how much better she was looking these days. She’d taken a beating at the hands of a Demon, not too long ago; for a while, we’d been worried she wouldn’t recover.
When she turned her head slightly, I could see the scars on the right side of her sharp-featured face— etched grooves, as if she’d been clawed. I nodded to her. She inclined her head, and her thousands of tiny black braids slithered over her shoulders with a dark rustling sound like old paper on stone.
She was sticking with purple again for her outfit. It looked good on her.
Lewis got me and David seated at the table, and didn’t waste any more time. He hit a control inset in the table, and a projector beamed a picture onto a screen at the far end of the room. It was grainy surveillance video, and it took me a few seconds to recognize that it was my parking lot, in front of my apartment. I started to ask what was going on, but then I got my answer . . . a delivery person got out of a dark-colored panel van and jogged up the steps toward the second floor. Lewis froze the picture. “Ring any bells?” he asked me. I studied the face of the man on the screen, but it was an awful picture. I shook my head. Lewis released the freeze frame, and I watched the deliveryman disappear into the hallway with a familiar-looking box in his hands. When he came back ten seconds later, no box. Surveillance showed him getting into his van and driving away. It was the kind of thing that happened a dozen times a day at any apartment complex, nothing that would alert anyone to potential trouble. “License plates?” I asked.
“Covered with mud,” said one of the Power Rangers down the table—Sasha, his name was, a nice-looking guy with a ready smile. I called him a Power Ranger because he worked with Marion Bearheart, and was part of the unofficial police force of the Wardens. When someone broke the codes, Sasha and those like him took it on. I didn’t much care for the system—it bothered me to have so much power in the hands of so few—but most of them were honest. More of them were honest than the rank and file of the Wardens, to be fair. “We’ve been in contact with every delivery service. None of them had drop-offs at your apartment that day.”