“So, hypothetically, if you asked for that, you wouldn’t be disappointed if I made you a quadriplegic breathing through a tube?” His turn to blink. His mouth opened, produced silence, and closed again. “I mean, you wouldn’t ever have to work for a living, would you? Or I could just kill you. You’d never have to work for a living that way, either. Or, let’s see, I could kill everyone else in the world. Never have to work for a living that way, either. Or I could turn you into a big slobbering dog that your mom can feed every day—”
“Stop it!” He looked appalled. “You’re making it all—”
“—complicated?” I finished. “It is. You want a Djinn, you got one. But we’re not fuck-toys, Kevin. We’re older than you—” Even me. “—we’re smarter than you, and we have absolutely no problem in finding the wrong interpretations of every single wish you are stupid enough to utter in our presence. We’re dangerous. Get that through your head. You can dress me up like a doll if you want to, but you’ll never control me. I’m going to control you. So the best thing you can do is take that bottle and smash it, right now, before I get the opportunity to really hurt you. Because I will, Kevin. I’ll hurt you so bad it’ll make your mom at her worst look like Mary Poppins.”
I had him. I sohad him. It was all I could do not to gloat. He looked about to vomit with fright.
And then he calmed down, swallowed, and said, “I know what I want. It’s what you want, too. I want you to kill my mother.”
Not that I couldn’t understand it, but I felt like it was one of those cartoon moments, the one where you have to smack the side of your head to make sure there’s nothing stuck in your ear. I stood there in my ridiculously sexy French Maid outfit and said, “Excuse me?”
“Yvette,” he clarified hastily. “My real mom’s already dead. My dad, too. I guess what I mean is that I want you to kill my stepmom. Yvette Prentiss.”
I wanted to grin and say, “Done!” and rush out there and put the big Djinn smackdown on her, but truth is I wasn’t all that eager to be killing anybody. Not even a top-rated bitch like Yvette. I was all too aware of how much power there was, flowing from Kevin to me, and how awesomely easy it was to use it. The compulsion was clicking in, but not strongly; there were, I sensed, still gray areas to exploit. I went for them. “There are all kinds of meanings to kill, you know…”
“Dead,” he said. “Kill her dead. Slowly. Make her suffer.”
He was getting into it now. Which was not my intention. “Okay, let’s just—calm down.” Because the compulsion was getting stronger, the power flow cresting like the tide. “I will. I swear. But let’s talk about it first.” Because, luckily, he hadn’t specified now, the way he had when he’d sent me to Seacasket to commit arson and homicide. “Why?”
He gave me a dark look. “What do you care?”
I didn’t, really. I was too busy thinking about Yvette putting her hands all over the bottle that held David trapped, seducing Lewis so that innocent little Kevin could sneak up and hit him from behind. “Yeah, well, what do youcare? I’m just curious.”
Long silence. He flopped back down on the bed, sounding depressed. “She’s a bitch.”
“You’re going to run into them. Get used to it. In fact, pretty much all of us can be bitchy from time to time. Goes with the double-X chromosomes.” Just like Kevin was never going to win any Y-chromosome personality contests, either. “You can’t go around having me snuff out every life that annoys you.”
“Why not?”
Ah, great, a sociopath in training. Again, not the conversational path I was eager to follow. “What’s she done to you, other than be a bitchy stepmom?”
He stared up at the pouting centerfold over his bed, put his hands under his head, and said, “She makes me do things.”
I had a bad feeling. “Like?” I was really, really hoping he’d say clean up the room, take out the trash…but one look around convinced me that couldn’t be true.
He sat up, grabbed the first thing that came to hand—a CD player—and threw it across the room hard enough to smash it to bits against the far wall. “What the fuck do you think I mean, say my prayers? Brush my teeth?” His flare of rage was sudden, violent, and totally untelegraphed. I had no reason to be afraid, but if I’d still been human I’d have felt utterly exposed. “She makes me do things, you stupid bimbo! Bad things!” He was blazing in Oversight, white-hot, as if some door had opened into hell. “I want it to stop!”
Oh, God. Not what I’d expected, not at all. Nor what I was even vaguely equipped to handle. I pitched my voice low. “Kevin, you can make that stop without killing her.”
“You don’t know shit about it.” Tears quivered in his eyes, jeweled his long, lush eyelashes. “God, you don’t understand… I can’t even tell you…”
“I know this. You have the power to make her stop, Kevin.” I edged over slowly, walking around the piles of wrinkled filthy clothes and discarded trash, to perch on the edge of the bed next to him. “You’re going to be a Warden. You have the power to control things around you. I don’t know if it’s weather, or fire, or earth—”
“Fire,” he said, and shut his eyes. “It’s fire.” Which explained the fury of the power that poured into me from him—it had the quality of fire to it. Out of nowhere, I remembered Rahel once telling me, Fire burns the hand it serves. Kevin was unstable, volatile, and he had way too much power at his disposal. I couldn’t believe the Wardens hadn’t already spotted him and started the process to neutralize or control him. If ever there was a reason for neutering someone, taking away their power… “I burned the house down. That’s how my dad died.”
I didn’t want to believe it, but I could sense the truth of it in him. God, such a burden for a sixteen-year-old boy. His father’s death, the crushing load of a developing talent of this magnitude, and if he was telling me the truth, some kind of sexual abuse… no wonder he was screwed up.
I wasn’t qualified for this. I wasn’t sure anybody was.
Kevin kept talking over my silence. “Bad Bob told me they’d come for me, take me away, but he said he’d protect me.” Yet another public service from Bad Bob Biringanine. Probably as a favor to Yvette, which meant he was banging Mrs. Prentiss before the late Mr. Prentiss had gone to smoke inhalation heaven. “Guess he won’t protect me now.”
Since I killed him. Right. I studied the frilly lace on my tiny, entirely useless apron. Prodded it with a fingernail, which was painted in hooker red. “So now you have me to protect you. Is that the general theory?”
“Sure. Nobody’s going to come after me if I have a kick-ass Djinn.” He favored me with a look. I didn’t have the heart to break it to him that if the Wardens found out some underage, untrained kid with a penchant for firestarting had a Djinn, they’d trash the continent looking for him. “You got me distracted. I said I want you to kill my mother.”
“And I think you should think about that a while.”
He rolled up on one elbow to stare at me. “Oh, I have. I’ve thought about it for years. I lay awake at night thinking about it. So you just go—”
“I should find out what she’s doing,” I blurted out. “You want me to kill her— What makes you think that she’s not ordering her new Djinn to do the same thing to you? I mean, that’s why she wanted you, right? To get me? And through me, to get him?”
He was listening. Not talking, but I could feel him hanging on every word.
“Wouldn’t you like to know what she’s doing? I could find out. It wouldn’t be that hard. She’d never even know I was looking.”
No teenager could resist an opening like that. And a kid who’d been deprived of control his whole life… I was faintly ashamed of myself for feeding his paranoia, but not enough to stop myself.