“ David!” I whispered. Nothing sparked in the dark, dead eyes. I wondered what she’d told him to do to me. Wondered if it was anything I’d be able to stop. The things that had happened in this room… they crowded like phantoms, brushing at the edges of awareness, given strength by my fear and David’s aggression. I could almost see some of them, and just the hints made me feel weak and ill. What had David told me? She and Bad Bob had tastes in common.
Like Kevin, he’d been made to do things, probably here in this room. Things I couldn’t begin to understand, even with the ugly hints I’d already been given.
He twisted sharply at my arm, and I felt bone shatter with a dull cracking sound. Pain screamed through me, and in the next second it took on another horrible dimension as more bones in my body began to break. David’s doing. Destroying my physical form.
Instinct made me rebuild, but I couldn’t do it fast enough. His power ripped at me like a wild thing, shredding muscle, pulverizing bone, exploding vital organs.
I couldn’t even scream. My mouth opened, but all that came out of it was a hot bitter trickle of blood. I collapsed against him. Something in me kept struggling to reassert the template of my natural form, but he was stronger at this, better. He knew exactly how to hurt me.
He eased me down to the carpet. I lay struggling to move, feeling life energy leaking out of my broken body, and begged him silently to stop.
Yvette had moved closer. She leaned over him now, staring down at me, a blank-faced goddess with unclean eyes. “You know what I want,” she told him, and caressed his hair again, running the short auburn strands through her fingers. Petting him, the way she’d pet a particularly glorious and dangerous animal. “Make it last.”
He reached for my throat.
I felt another will impose itself over mine.
Right on cue, I vanished.
I collapsed in a heap, blind with shock and pain, and knew I was somewhere else. Where?
Ground-in, Day-Glo orange spots in the rug just inches from my face, and a few more feet away, a grease-stained pizza box with its top partly open. A fat brown-shelled roach was scuttling along the top of it. It stopped to waggle its antennae inquiringly, then decided I was no threat to its conquest.
I couldn’t breathe. My lungs had been ruptured. My body—human, not human, whatever it was—was shutting down. That wouldn’t kill me, I sensed, but it would trap me inside of a dead shell. Not the way I wanted to escape, especially since it meant I wouldn’t be going anywhere.
“Yo!” Kevin’s pimply, pallid face appeared in my field of vision, pointed at a weird horizontal angle. He was bending over, staring at me. He waved a hand in front of my eyes, snapped his black-fingernailed, blunt-cut fingers. “You okay?”
I couldn’t answer. I slowly blinked my eyes, which was about all that my body was capable of doing for me at the moment.
“Oh,” he said, and straightened up. He prodded me with the toe of a particularly crappy-looking sneaker. This close, the smell of his feet was rancid, like mold-ridden buttermilk. “She got to you, huh? Yeah. Thought so. So, can you fix yourself?”
I blinked again. If ever I needed the kid to catch a clue…
“You can’t, can you? You need me for that.” He crouched down, staring down at me. “You needme. How about that? Not so high and mighty now, are we?” A thick finger prodded at my flaccid arm, and broken bones grated together. “What if I just leave you here, huh? What’s your game plan then, bitch? Lay there and bleed on me? Some fucking guardian you are.”
He sounded surly, but there was a tremor deep down. He was scared, all right. Not of me. He knew what she was capable of, and he wanted a friend. Protection. Something.
I tried to move my lips, but it was useless. I couldn’t even blink anymore. My eyes were fixed and staring. I heard my heart murmur one last, regretful beat, and then the blood in my veins slowed and stopped.
Death was anticlimactic, as a Djinn. I kept waiting for something, anything. I still had senses—I could hear the rustle of Kevin’s baggy jeans as he paced back and forth, could smell the unwashed aroma that eddied off of him through the room. Under the bed, the cockroach emerged from the pizza box with a couple of its friends, paused, and tried to figure me out. I must not have looked tasty. They went the other way.
Kevin’s bedroom door suddenly blew open. Locks tore off of the frame and hit the far wall with enough force to put holes in the Sheetrock. I didn’t have a good view, but I heard Kevin’s pacing stop and stagger backward. He stumbled right into me, lost his balance, and fell. I felt him roll across me, hot and sweaty and tense with panic.
The swirl of power that went through the room was unmistakable.
David was here.
Kevin grabbed my limp, broken hand and yelled, “Fix yourself, dammit! Stop him! Don’t let him hurt me!”
Game on.
I felt my body instantly begin to heal, drinking in power from him to rebuild itself, and before I was anywhere near better I rolled away from him, away from his grip, and came fluidly to my feet to stand between him and David. Blue sparkles flashed all over me with false Vegas cheer.
Yvette was with him, of course. Still smiling.
“You left.” She pouted. “It was just getting interesting. We’re going to have lotsof fun, sweetie, aren’t we?” The butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth tone turned cold and cutting as she focused past me, on her stepson. “Tell her to submit.”
“Yeah?” His voice wavered, but didn’t break. “Maybe I won’t.”
Why the hell had she ever taken a chance and given him a Djinn? No, I knew why… because she thought he was completely under her control, and she knew that having two Djinn under her direct control could be dangerous. Well, arrogance was part of her pathology.
David moved a step closer. I matched him like a mirror image. Kevin’s order had me, of course. If David made any aggressive moves at all, I was free to stop him, and to use every ounce of power Kevin possessed to do it.
“News flash,” I said aloud, straight to her. “Not the submitting type. You want to take me, you can try, but it’s going to be one hell of a fight, and believe me, the damage won’t be anything you can patch up with base makeup and a couple of Band-Aids. I willhurt you.”
“Yeah,” Kevin agreed. “And I’ll let her. No, I’ll orderher to do it.”
Her green eyes flicked to him, and the look on her face… If I’d had any doubt that she’d played her sick little games with him, that put them to rest. The pure, nauseating hatred made me feel filthy to see it.
“You stupid little bastard. I give you a toy, and you try to threatenme with it? You’re pathetic. David, I want you to—”
“Kevin, I want to take you out of here,” I interrupted her, and looked straight at the kid. “I’ll take you out of here if you want me to.”
He was no fool, even with the obvious social handicaps. He smiled, showing me crappy dental hygiene, and said, “Yeah. Take me somewhere. Somewhere else.”
It meant leaving David, oh God, I didn’t want to do that, but I didn’t have a choice. I had to do what I could. Patrick had said it. First, preserve your life. I didn’t think I could die here, but I’d damn sure wish I could.
I grabbed Kevin, wrapped him in my arms, and pulled on that vast pool of energy stored inside of him to take him…
… back to Patrick’s apartment.
Not a smooth ride through the aetheric. I tried to avoid the worst of the blue flares, but it was worse now, burning everywhere. A cheery fairy-dust snowstorm.
Patrick’s apartment place was empty. Bloodstains on the carpet, already dried. No sign of Lewis, or Patrick, or Sara. No sign that Rahel had ever returned.
I let Kevin go, shook off another thick moving layer of sparklies, and knelt down to touch the stiff brown-soaked fibers on the floor. Lewis’s essence. Through it, I could trace him. Find him…