I felt myself frowning. “Hey, nice pep talk. Aren’t you supposed to teach me how to get through this? Preferably alive?”
“Yes. I know.” The perfume vial clinked as he put it down on the table between us. I watched it roll unevenly back and forth. It fetched up against my Hello Kitty mug with a musical little chime. “I wish I had some magic answer. Truth is, the only answer I know is going to hurt you. Maybe kill you. Are you prepared for that?”
I sucked in a deep breath. “Probably not, but what choice do I have?”
“Too true. Well then. On with the show. A friend of yours is here to see you.”
“I don’t have any friends.” Depressing, but it had the iron ring of truth.
“Look behind you.” I put my fork down and swiveled in the wooden kitchen chair, thinking, Crap, here we go with the fighting again, but I was dead wrong.
It was Lewis Levander Orwell, who was pretty much the last person I’d expected to see. He looked a lot more casual now than he’d been at my funeral, dressed in faded jeans the color of a storm-ready sky, a loose untucked yellow shirt, and that trademark ironic half-smile that felt as familiar to me as a hug. Funny, because although our relationship had always been intense, it had never been what you might call close, in terms of frequency of sharing personal space. He still never really left my mind for long, and never had.
“Hey,” he said. His low, slightly rough voice had a gentleness to it that I hadn’t heard before. “How are you?”
I stood up and walked into his embrace. A full-body hug, lots of male upper body strength carefully controlled. He smelled of leather and wood smoke, and I wondered if he’d been camping somewhere. Lewis is the outdoorsy type. His hiking boots certainly had the chapped, bunged-up look of having tramped through half the real estate of the world.
I’m not a short woman, and he still had some height on me. Lean, tall, with gorgeous dark-cinnamon eyes… yeah, he could make women’s hearts skip and dance, if they came close enough to actually noticehim. Lewis tended to camouflage himself. Always had. Probably a good thing, considering the kind of power he wielded.
I remembered he’d asked me something. “Mmmm. I’m doing good, for a dead chick.”
He kissed the top of my head and didn’t let me go. I was okay with that. I had the total hots for David, was more than 80 percent of the way to total head-over-heels in love, but I could still enjoy a strong man pressed against me, yes lawdy.
“You scared me,” he said. “I didn’t expect you to drop off the edge of the planet like that. Don’t do it again.”
He loosened his grip and stepped away, and I felt noticeably colder outside and warmer in. Which maybe made me fickle, and more than maybe a complete slut. But I was prepared to accept that.
“You were supposed to come find me,” he said. He had a small frown engraved between his brows, and I noticed that he had acquired some fine lines at the corners of his eyes. He had one of those faces that lines made look distinguished, not run-down.
“Yeah, sorry… got busy.” I flipped a hand around to indicate Patrick’s incredibly tasteless pad. “Um, Djinn stuff. You know.”
“Not really, but I’ll take your word for it.” His gaze moved to Patrick, and they exchanged guy nods, the ones that indicated acquaintance but no actual fondness, because that would be less than manly. “Thanks for letting me talk to her.”
Patrick shrugged, which made the things that Mickey and Minnie—and Mickey and Pluto—were doing on the fabric look even more unmentionable. “No problem. As it happens, it fits with what I’m trying to teach her.”
“Which is?” Lewis wanted to know.
“Survival.”
Nice to know that it was possible to surprise Lewis, once in a while, although I wished it could be for a less urgent and personal cause; he looked as blank as if somebody had taken an eraser to his face. “Survival? Jo, anything wrong?”
I fielded that one, since it was an easy ground ball. “You could say.” I pulled out the third chair at the table for him; he folded himself down, long legs bumping into obstructions that hadn’t bothered me, and looked at my coffee cup with such pitiful longing that I picked it up and started for the steaming pot.
“Ah!” Patrick wasn’t looking at me, but he held up a finger like some offended schoolmaster. “Break that habit.”
Right, I’d been through this painful lecture before. Stop being human. Start acting like a Djinn. I stared down at the coffee cup, dived down into the structure and felt it from the inside out, the cool heavy reality of the ceramic, the earth-rich scent of ground beans and water. I couldn’t remember if Lewis liked cream, so I subtracted that from the equation, held out my left hand, and materialized a steaming cup of black java in it.
And felt damn proud of myself, too. You betcha.
Lewis was even more impressed. He didn’t say anything, but by damn he looked respectful as he took the mug, lifted it to his lips, and sipped.
And it was a bad time to wonder if I’d fucked up the recipe and created something lethal, but then he was an Earth Warden, he’d be able to tell anyway, and fix it if I had. The perfect guinea pig.
“It’s good,” he said, and took another, longer sip. “Colombian?”
“Guatemalan Antigua,” Patrick answered. “If she did it right.”
He held up his cup for a refill. I did it without moving a muscle. Same routine—sip, surprise, cautious approval.
Lewis put the coffee aside and didn’t let himself get distracted by the fine imitation of a barista I was doing. “You said something was wrong.”
No sense in beating around the bush, not with him; I laid it out just the way it had been spelled out for me. David’s power constantly bleeding off into me, David getting weaker, me the sucking leech that was going to kill him. Yeah, what a happy story it was, just the kind to make the heart warm and cozy. Lewis’s dark eyes got darker as it went along, and even though he always had a kind of inner stillness, he went statuelike and stayed that way. Even after I’d finished.
I finally said, into the ringing and too-loud silence, “So. You wanted…?”
He looked away. Patrick had put the little glass bottle back on the table, unstoppered; Lewis picked it up and rubbed it thoughtfully between his thumb and forefinger. I wondered if he was thinking about food. I could try whipping him up a nice bagel or something, but I wasn’t sure that my culinary skills as a Djinn would be any better than they had in my normal walking-around-as-human days, in which I’d been commonly known as the Lucrezia Borgia of spaghetti sauce.
“I wanted to ask you a favor,” he finally said. “But given what you’ve just told me, I’m not sure it’s such a good idea right now.”
Patrick glanced over the top of the paper at both of us. “I’m pretty sure it is.”
“Well, no offense, but you’re not the one who’ll end up with the nightmares if it turns out to be a rottenidea.” Lewis wasn’t usually so snappish, in my experience. He was clearly rattled. “No. Forget it. It’s okay. You have enough to worry about already.”
“Wait a minute, you haven’t even told me anything yet!” I said. Why do guys always try to make the decision before they even state the problem? “Come on, Lewis, spill it. What do you need?”
He was still rolling the bottle around in his fingers, focused on it with such precision that I wondered if he was about to try to Copperfield it out of existence. Hey, I wouldn’t put it past him. Glass was a pure, if nonorganic, manifestation of earth. He could reconstitute it into a pile of sand, if he wanted. How many degrees of heat did it take to melt sand into glass? I’d slept through most of my basic Earth Sciences classes, since it had all been about the weather for me. I remembered something about trillions of dust particles being used to make a single drinking glass, but apart from the fact that the instructor in the class had been a skinny, obnoxious woman with tortoise-shell glasses and the fashion sense of a lamp shade…
“There’s something up there,” Lewis said. “In the aetheric. I think it’s a rip into the Void.”